Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.AI
Adversarial Arena: Crowdsourcing Data Generation through Interactive Competition
Prasoon Goyal, Sattvik Sahai, Michael Johnston et al. (+14 more)
Post-training Large
Language Models requires diverse, high-quality data which is rare and costly to obtain, especially in low resource domains and for multi-turn conversations. Common solutions are crowdsourcing or synthetic generation, but both often yield low-quality or low-diversity data. We introduce
Adversarial Arena for building high quality conversational
datasets by framing data generation as an
adversarial task: attackers create
prompts, and defenders generate responses. This interactive competition between multiple teams naturally produces diverse and complex data. We validated this approach by conducting a competition with 10 academic teams from top US and European universities, each building attacker or defender bots. The competition, focused on safety
alignment of LLMs in cybersecurity, generated 19,683 multi-turn conversations. Fine-tuning an open-source model on this
dataset produced an 18.47% improvement in secure code generation on CyberSecEval-Instruct and 29.42% improvement on CyberSecEval-MITRE.
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All authors Prasoon Goyal, Sattvik Sahai, Michael Johnston, Hangjie Shi, Yao Lu, Shaohua Liu, Anna Rumshisky, Rahul Gupta, Anna Gottardi, Desheng Zhang, Lavina Vaz, Leslie Ball, Lucy Hu, Luke Dai, Samyuth Sagi, Maureen Murray, Sankaranarayanan Ananthakrishnan
Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.CL
Forget What Matters, Keep the Rest: Selective Unlearning of Informative Tokens
Seunghee Koh, Sunghyun Baek, Youngdong Kim et al. (+1 more)
Unlearning in large
language models (LLMs) has emerged as a promising safeguard against
adversarial behaviors. When the forgetting loss is applied uniformly without considering
token-level semantic importance, model utility can be unnecessarily degraded. Recent studies have explored
token-wise loss regularizers that prioritize informative
tokens, but largely rely on ground-truth confidence or external linguistic parsers, which limits their ability to capture contextual information or the model's overall predictive state. Intuitively, function words like "the" primarily serve syntactic roles and are highly predictable with little ambiguity, but informative words admit multiple plausible alternatives with greater uncertainty. Based on this intuition, we propose
Entropy-guided
Token Weighting (ETW), a
token-level unlearning regularizer that uses
entropy of the predictive distribution as a proxy for
token informativeness. We demonstrate that informative
tokens tend to have higher
entropy, whereas structural
tokens tend to have lower
entropy. This behavior enables ETW to achieve more effective unlearning while better preserving model utility than existing
token-level approaches.
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All authors Seunghee Koh, Sunghyun Baek, Youngdong Kim, Junmo Kim
Machine Learning
TeleEmbedBench: A Multi-Corpus Embedding Benchmark for RAG in Telecommunications
Pranshav Gajjar and Vijay K Shah
Large
language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in the telecommunications domain for critical tasks, relying heavily on
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to adapt general-purpose models to continuously evolving standards. However, a significant gap exists in evaluating the
embedding models that power these RAG pipelines, as general-purpose
benchmarks fail to capture the dense, acronym-heavy, and highly cross-referential nature of telecommunications corpora. To address this, we introduce TeleEmbedBench, the first large-scale, multi-corpus
embedding benchmark designed specifically for telecommunications. The
benchmark spans three heterogeneous corpora: O-RAN Alliance specifications, 3GPP release documents, and the srsRAN open-source codebase, comprising 9,000 question-chunk pairs across three standard chunk sizes (512, 1024, and 2048
tokens). To construct this
dataset at scale without manual annotation bottlenecks, we employ a novel automated pipeline where one LLM generates specific queries from text chunks and a secondary LLM validates them across strict criteria. We comprehensively evaluate eight
embedding models, spanning standard sentence-
transformers and LLM-based embedders. Our results demonstrate that LLM-based embedders, such as Qwen3 and EmbeddingGemma, consistently and significantly outperform traditional sentence-
transformers in both
retrieval accuracy and robustness against cross-domain interference. Additionally, we introduce TeleEmbedBench-Clean to evaluate model robustness against noisy, incomplete user queries. Finally, our analysis reveals that while domain-specific task instructions improve embedder performance for raw source code, they paradoxically degrade
retrieval performance for natural
language telecommunications specifications.
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Machine Learning
LLM-AUG: Robust Wireless Data Augmentation with In-Context Learning in Large Language Models
Pranshav Gajjar, Manan Tiwari, Sayanta Seth et al. (+1 more)
Data scarcity remains a fundamental bottleneck in applying deep learning to wireless communication problems, particularly in scenarios where collecting labeled
Radio Frequency (RF) data is expensive, time-consuming, or operationally constrained. This paper proposes LLM-AUG, a data augmentation framework that leverages in-context learning in large
language models (LLMs) to generate synthetic training samples directly in a learned
embedding space. Unlike conventional generative approaches that require training task-specific models, LLM-AUG performs data generation through structured prompting, enabling rapid adaptation in low-shot regimes. We evaluate LLM-AUG on two representative tasks: modulation classification and interference classification using the RadioML 2016.10A
dataset, and the Interference Classification (IC)
dataset respectively. Results show that LLM-AUG consistently outperforms traditional augmentation and deep generative baselines across low-shot settings and reaches near oracle performance using only 15% labeled data. LLM-AUG further demonstrates improved robustness under distribution shifts, yielding a 29.4% relative gain over
diffusion-based augmentation at a lower SNR value. On the RadioML and IC
datasets, LLM-AUG yields a relative gain of 67.6% and 35.7% over the
diffusion-based baseline. The t-SNE visualizations further validate that synthetic samples generated by better preserve class structure in the
embedding space, leading to more consistent and informative augmentations. These results demonstrate that LLMs can serve as effective and practical data augmenters for wireless machine learning, enabling robust and data-efficient learning in evolving wireless environments.
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All authors Pranshav Gajjar, Manan Tiwari, Sayanta Seth, Vijay K. Shah
Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.CR
A Quasi-Experimental Developer Study of Security Training in LLM-Assisted Web Application Development
Mohammed Kharma, Ahmed Sabbah, Radi Jarrar et al. (+3 more)
This paper presents a controlled quasi-experimental developer study examining whether a layer-based security training package is associated with improved security quality in LLM-assisted implementation of an identity-centric Java Spring Boot backend. The study uses a mixed design with a within-subject pre-training versus post-training comparison and an exploratory between-subject expertise factor. Twelve developers completed matched runs under a common interface, fixed model configuration, counterbalanced task sets, and a shared starter project. Security outcomes were assessed via independent manual validation of submitted repositories by the first and second authors. The primary participant-level endpoint was a severity-weighted validated-weakness score. The post-training condition showed a significant paired reduction under an exact Wilcoxon signed-rank test ($p = 0.0059$). In aggregate, validated weaknesses decreased from 162 to 111 (31.5%), the severity-weighted burden decreased from 432 to 267 (38.2%), and critical findings decreased from 24 to 5 (79.2%). The largest reductions were in authorization and object access (53.3%) and in authentication, credential policy, and recovery weaknesses (44.7%). Session and browser trust-boundary issues showed minimal change, while sensitive-data and cryptographic weaknesses showed only marginal improvement. These results suggest that, under the tested conditions, post-training runs reduce validated security burden in LLM-assisted backend development without modifying the model. They do not support replacing secure defaults, static analysis, expert review, or operational hardening.
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All authors Mohammed Kharma, Ahmed Sabbah, Radi Jarrar, Samer Zain, Mohammad Alkhanafseh, David Mohaisen
Machine Learning
HiP-LoRA: Budgeted Spectral Plasticity for Robust Low-Rank Adaptation
Lixian Chen and Jianhong Tan
Adapting foundation models under resource budgets relies heavily on Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT), with LoRA being a standard modular solution. However, LoRA suffers from spectral interference. Low-rank updates often concentrate energy on the leading singular directions of pretrained weights, perturbing general capabilities and causing catastrophic forgetting and fragile multi-adapter merging. To resolve this, we propose HiP-LoRA, a spectrum-aware adaptation framework. Utilizing the cached singular value decomposition (SVD) of pretrained layers, HiP-LoRA decomposes updates into two channels: a principal channel within the dominant singular subspace, and a residual low-rank channel in the orthogonal complement. A singular-value-weighted stability budget on the principal channel continuously balances pretrained behavior preservation with task-specific plasticity. Experiments on Llama-3.1-8B demonstrate that under matched budgets, HiP-LoRA drastically reduces pretraining degradation and multi-adapter MergeFail, robustly outperforming baselines in interference-sensitive tasks like continual tuning and knowledge editing.
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Machine Learning
Efficient Federated RLHF via Zeroth-Order Policy Optimization
Deyi Wang, Qining Zhang and Lei Ying
This paper considers reinforcement learning from human feedback in a
federated learning setting with resource-constrained
agents, such as edge devices. We propose an efficient
federated RLHF
algorithm, named Partitioned, Sign-based
Stochastic Zeroth-order Policy Optimization (Par-S$^2$ZPO). The
algorithm is built on zeroth-order optimization with binary perturbation, resulting in low communication, computation, and
memory complexity by design. Our theoretical analysis establishes an upper bound on the convergence rate of Par-S$^2$ZPO, revealing that it is as efficient as its centralized counterpart in terms of sample complexity but converges faster in terms of policy update iterations. Our experimental results show that it outperforms a FedAvg-based RLHF on four MuJoCo RL tasks.
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Machine Learning
Democratizing Tool Learning with Environments Fully Simulated by a Free 8B Language Model
Chenming Tang, Hsiu-Yuan Huang, Weijie Liu et al. (+3 more)
Reinforcement learning has become a prevalent paradigm for training tool calling
agents, which typically requires online interactive environments. Existing approaches either rely on training data with ground truth annotations or require advanced proprietary
language models (LMs) to synthesize environments that remain fixed once created. In this work, we propose TRUSTEE, a cost-friendly method for training tool calling
agents with dynamic environments fully simulated by open-source LMs that can be as small as 8B, including task generation, user simulation, tool simulation, and trajectory evaluation, paired with an adaptive curriculum learning mechanism that controls task difficulty dynamically. Our empirical results show that TRUSTEE outperforms baselines which require extra external resources in most cases. These confirm that, with a sufficiently sophisticated design, even simulated environments with a local 8B LM as the backbone could set a strong baseline for tool learning. We hope our proposed paradigm could democratize tool learning and inspire future research on environment scaling with limited resources.
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All authors Chenming Tang, Hsiu-Yuan Huang, Weijie Liu, Junqiang Zheng, Saiyong Yang, Yunfang Wu
Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.CL
Mira-Embeddings-V1: Domain-Adapted Semantic Reranking for Recruitment via LLM-Synthesized Data
Zhaohua Liang, Zhilin Wang, Renjie Cao et al. (+1 more)
Candidate sourcing for recruiters is best viewed as a two-stage
retrieval and reranking pipeline with recall as the primary objective under a limited review budget. An upstream production retriever first returns a candidate shortlist for each job description (JD), and our goal is to rerank that shortlist so that qualified candidates appear as high as possible. We present mira-
embeddings-v1, a semantic reranking system for the recruitment domain that reshapes the
embedding space with LLM-synthesized training data and corrects boundary confusions with a lightweight reranking head. Starting from real JDs, we build a five-stage
prompt pipeline to generate diverse positive and hard negative samples that sculpt the semantic space from multiple angles. We then apply a two-round LoRA adaptation: JD–JD contrastive training followed by JD–CV triplet
alignment on a heterogeneous text
dataset. Importantly, these gains require no large-scale manually labeled industrial training pairs: a modest set of real JDs is expanded into supervision through LLM synthesis. Finally, a BoundaryHead MLP reranks the Top-K results to distinguish between roles that share the same title but differ in scope. On a local pool of 300 real JDs with candidates from an upstream production retriever, mira-
embeddings-v1 improves Recall@50 from 68.89% (baseline) to 77.55% while lifting Precision@10 from 35.77% to 39.62%. On a supportive global pool over 44,138 candidates judged by a Qwen3-32B rubric, it achieves Recall@200 of 0.7047 versus 0.5969 for the baseline. These results show that LLM-synthesized supervision with boundary-aware reranking yields robust gains without a heavy cross-encoder.
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All authors Zhaohua Liang, Zhilin Wang, Renjie Cao, Yining Zhang
Machine Learning
FlashFPS: Efficient Farthest Point Sampling for Large-Scale Point Clouds via Pruning and Caching
Yuzhe Fu, Hancheng Ye, Cong Guo et al. (+6 more)
Point-based Neural Networks (PNNs) have become a key approach for point cloud processing. However, a core operation in these models, Farthest Point Sampling (FPS), often introduces significant inference latency, especially for large-scale processing. Despite existing CUDA- and hardware-level optimizations, FPS remains a major bottleneck due to exhaustive computations across multiple network layers in PNNs, which hinders scalability. Through systematic analysis, we identify three substantial redundancies in FPS, including unnecessary full-cloud computations, redundant late-stage iterations, and predictable inter-layer outputs that make later FPS computations avoidable. To address these, we propose \textbf{FlashFPS}, a hardware-agnostic, plug-and-play framework for FPS acceleration, composed of FPS-Prune and FPS-Cache. FPS-Prune introduces candidate
pruning and iteration
pruning to reduce redundant computations in FPS while preserving sampling quality, and FPS-Cache eliminates layer-wise redundancy via cache-and-reuse. Integrated into existing CUDA libraries and state-of-the-art PNN accelerators, FlashFPS achieves 5.16$\times$ speedup over the standard CUDA baseline on GPU and 2.69$\times$ on PNN accelerators, with negligible accuracy loss, enabling efficient and scalable PNN inference. Codes are released at https://github.com/Yuzhe-Fu/FlashFPS.
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All authors Yuzhe Fu, Hancheng Ye, Cong Guo, Junyao Zhang, Qinsi Wang, Yueqian Lin, Changchun Zhou, Hai Li, Yiran Chen
Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.CL
Concurrent Criterion Validation of a Validity Screen for LLM Confidence Signals via Selective Prediction
Jon-Paul Cacioli
The validity screen (Cacioli, 2026d, 2026e) classifies LLM confidence signals as Valid, Indeterminate, or Invalid. We test whether these classifications predict selective prediction performance. Twenty frontier LLMs from seven families were evaluated on 524 items across six cognitive tracks. Valid models show mean Type 2 AUROC = .624 (SD = .048). Invalid models show mean AUROC = .357 (SD = .231). Cohen's d = 2.81, p = .002. The tiers order monotonically: Invalid (.357) < Indeterminate (.554) < Valid (.624). Split-half cross-validation yields median d = 1.77, P(d > 0) = 1.0 across 1,000 splits. The three-tier classification accounts for 47% of the variance in AUROC. DeepSeek-R1 drops from 85.3% accuracy at full coverage to 11.3% at 10% coverage. The screen predicts the criterion. For selective prediction, the screen matters.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.SE
Program Structure-aware Language Models: Targeted Software Testing beyond Textual Semantics
Khang Tran, Khoa Nguyen, Cristian Borcea et al. (+1 more)
Recent advances in large
language models for test case generation have improved branch coverage via
prompt-engineered mutations. However, they still lack principled mechanisms for steering models toward specific high-risk execution branches, limiting their effectiveness for discovering subtle bugs and security vulnerabilities. We propose GLMTest, the first program structure-aware LLM framework for targeted test case generation that seamlessly integrates code property graphs and code semantics using a graph neural network and a
language model to condition test case generation on execution branches. This structured conditioning enables controllable and branch-targeted test case generation, thereby potentially enhancing bug and security risk discovery. Experiments on real-world projects show that GLMTest built on a Qwen2.5-Coder-7B-Instruct model improves branch accuracy from 27.4% to 50.2% on TestGenEval
benchmark compared with state-of-the-art LLMs, i.e., Claude-Sonnet-4.5 and GPT-4o-mini.
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All authors Khang Tran, Khoa Nguyen, Cristian Borcea, NhatHai Phan
Machine Learning
Modeling Higher-Order Brain Interactions via a Multi-View Information Bottleneck Framework for fMRI-based Psychiatric Diagnosis
Kunyu Zhang, Qiang Li, Vince D. Calhoun et al. (+1 more)
Resting-state functional
magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has emerged as a cornerstone for psychiatric diagnosis, yet most approaches rely on pairwise
brain cortical or sub-cortical connectivities that overlooks higher-order interactions (HOIs) central to complex
brain dynamics. While hypergraph methods encode HOIs through predefined hyperedges, their construction typically relies on heuristic similarity metrics and does not explicitly characterize whether interactions are synergy- or redundancy-dominated. In this paper, we introduce $O$-information, a signed measure that characterizes the informational nature of HOIs, and integrate third- and fourth-order $O$-information into a unified multi-view information bottleneck framework for fMRI-based psychiatric diagnosis. To enable scalable $O$-information estimation, we further develop two independent acceleration strategies: a Gaussian analytical approximation and a randomized
matrix-based Rényi
entropy estimator, achieving over a 30-fold computational speedup compared with conventional
estimators. Our tri-view architecture systematically fuses pairwise, triadic, and tetradic
brain interactions, capturing comprehensive
brain connectivity while explicitly penalizing redundancy. Extensive evaluation across four
benchmark datasets (REST-meta-MDD, ABIDE, UCLA, ADNI) demonstrates consistent improvements, outperforming 11 baseline methods including state-of-the-art graph neural network (GNN) and hypergraph based approaches. Moreover, our method reveals interpretable region-level synergy-redundancy patterns which are not explicitly characterized by conventional hypergraph formulations.
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All authors Kunyu Zhang, Qiang Li, Vince D. Calhoun, Shujian Yu
Machine Learning
The Geometric Canary: Predicting Steerability and Detecting Drift via Representational Stability
Prashant C. Raju
Reliable deployment of
language models requires two capabilities that appear distinct but share a common
geometric foundation: predicting whether a model will accept targeted behavioral control, and detecting when its internal structure degrades. We show that
geometric stability, the consistency of a representation's pairwise distance structure, addresses both. Supervised Shesha variants that measure task-aligned
geometric stability predict linear steerability with near-perfect accuracy ($\rho = 0.89$-$0.97$) across 35-69
embedding models and three NLP tasks, capturing unique variance beyond class separability (partial $\rho = 0.62$-$0.76$). A critical dissociation emerges: unsupervised stability fails entirely for steering on real-world tasks ($\rho \approx 0.10$), revealing that task
alignment is essential for controllability prediction. However, unsupervised stability excels at drift detection, measuring nearly $2\times$ greater
geometric change than CKA during post-training
alignment (up to $5.23\times$ in Llama) while providing earlier warning in 73% of models and maintaining a $6\times$ lower false alarm rate than Procrustes. Together, supervised and unsupervised stability form complementary diagnostics for the LLM deployment lifecycle: one for pre-deployment controllability assessment, the other for post-deployment monitoring.
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Machine Learning
MoE-nD: Per-Layer Mixture-of-Experts Routing for Multi-Axis KV Cache Compression
Libo Sun, Peixiong He, Po-Wei Harn et al. (+1 more)
KV cache
memory is the dominant bottleneck for long-context LLM inference. Existing compression methods each act on a single axis of the four-dimensional KV tensor –
token eviction (sequence), quantization (precision), low-rank projection (head dimension), or cross-layer sharing – but apply the same recipe to every layer. We show that this homogeneity leaves accuracy on the table: different layers respond very differently to each compression operation, and the optimal per-layer mix of eviction and quantization is far from uniform. We propose MoE-nD, a mixture-of-experts framework that routes each layer to its own (eviction-ratio, K-bits, V-bits) tuple under a global
memory budget. An offline-calibrated greedy solver chooses the routing that minimizes predicted quality loss; at inference time, per-layer heterogeneous eviction and quantization are applied jointly through a single
attention patch. On a 4-task subset of LongBench-v1 (16k inputs, n=50 per task, adapted
reasoning-model protocol; see section Experiments), MoE-nD's hetero variant matches our uncompressed 1.9~GB baseline at 14x compression (136~MB) while every other compressed baseline we tested (1d, 2d_uniform, 2d) at comparable or smaller
memory stays under 8/100. The gains hold on AIME
reasoning benchmarks (+6 to +27 pts over the strongest per-layer-quantization baseline across eight configurations). Two null results – MATH-500 and LongBench's TREC – share a principled cause (short inputs, solver picks keep=1.0 on most layers), cleanly characterizing when per-layer eviction routing has headroom to help.
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All authors Libo Sun, Peixiong He, Po-Wei Harn, Xiao Qin
Machine Learning · Cross-listed from stat.ME
Improving reproducibility by controlling random seed stability in machine learning based estimation via bagging
Nicholas Williams and Alejandro Schuler
Predictions from machine learning
algorithms can vary across random seeds, inducing instability in downstream debiased machine learning
estimators. We formalize random seed stability via a concentration condition and prove that subbagging guarantees stability for any bounded-outcome regression
algorithm. We introduce a new cross-fitting procedure, adaptive cross-bagging, which simultaneously eliminates seed dependence from both nuisance estimation and sample splitting in debiased machine learning. Numerical experiments confirm that the method achieves the targeted level of stability whereas alternatives do not. Our method incurs a small computational penalty relative to standard practice whereas alternative methods incur large penalties.
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Machine Learning
COSAC: Counterfactual Credit Assignment in Sequential Cooperative Teams
Shripad V. Deshmukh, Jayakumar Subramanian, Raghavendra Addanki et al. (+1 more)
In cooperative teams where
agents act in a fixed order and share a single team-level reward (multi-
agent language systems, sequential robotic tasks), per-
agent credit assignment is under-determined. Critic-based approaches scale poorly as the number of
agents grows owing to the costly maintenance of joint/factored critic(s), whereas the existing critic-free alternatives have other issues: common credit across
agents that couples every
agent's signal to teammate noise, importance-sampling corrections for upstream-update staleness that incur variance exponential in team size, or per-
agent counterfactual replay that isolates each
agent's effect at the price of extra environment or reward calls. We propose COSAC, a critic-free policy gradient framework for sequential cooperative teams. COSAC fits an additive per-
agent decomposition of the team reward by a single ridge regression on the rollout batch (giving each
agent a learning signal decoupled from teammate noise), and computes each
agent's counterfactual advantage from fictitious continuations of the current policy (policy forward passes that replace both importance-sampling reweighting and per-
agent environment replay, at no extra environment or reward cost). The
estimator instantiates the Sequential Aristocrat Utility (SeqAU), our extension of Wolpert and Tumer's (2001) aristocrat utility to sequential teams. We derive bias and conditional variance bounds for SeqAU credits: the direct-effect bound has no explicit team-size factor, while the indirect effect's reward-noise bound scales with the number of downstream
agents. Sequential bandits test the analysis across team sizes up to K=16. In sequential multi-
agent LLM fine-tuning, COSAC reduces training regret by 17% on consensus-based science
reasoning relative to the best critic-free multi-
agent baseline and by 61% on Python coding relative to MA-GRPO.
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All authors Shripad V. Deshmukh, Jayakumar Subramanian, Raghavendra Addanki, Nikos Vlassis
Machine Learning
SafeAnchor: Preventing Cumulative Safety Erosion in Continual Domain Adaptation of Large Language Models
Dongxin Guo, Jikun Wu and Siu Ming Yiu
Safety
alignment in large
language models is remarkably shallow: it is concentrated in the first few output
tokens and reversible by fine-tuning on as few as 100
adversarial examples. This fragility becomes critical in real-world deployment, where models undergo sequential adaptation across domains such as medicine, law, and code, causing safety guardrails to erode cumulatively. Yet all existing safety-preserving methods target only single-task fine-tuning, leaving the multi-domain sequential setting entirely unaddressed. We introduce SafeAnchor, a framework that anchors safety in place throughout continual adaptation. SafeAnchor first identifies low-rank safety subspaces in LoRA parameter space via Fisher Information eigendecomposition, then constrains domain-specific gradient updates to the orthogonal complement of these subspaces, and finally monitors for residual safety drift with threshold-triggered corrective replay. Evaluated on Llama-2-7B-Chat and Mistral-7B-Instruct across a three-domain pipeline and eight
benchmarks, SafeAnchor retains 93.2% of original safety
alignment, outperforming all baselines by 18-42 points, while matching unconstrained fine-tuning to within 1.5 points on domain tasks.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from eess.SY
Path-Based Quantum Meta-Learning for Adaptive Optimization of Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces
Noha Hassan, Xavier Fernando and Halim Yanikomeroglu
Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) modify signal reflections to enhance wireless communication capabilities. Classical RIS phase optimization is highly non convex and challenging in dynamic environments due to high interference and user mobility. Here we propose a hierarchical multi-objective
quantum metalearning
algorithm that switches among specific
quantum paths based on historical success, energy cost, and current data rate. Candidate RIS control directions are arranged as switch paths between
quantum neural network layers to minimize inference, and a scoring mechanism selects the top performing paths per layer. Instead of merely storing past successful settings of the RIS and picking the closest match when a new problem is encountered, the
algorithm learns how to select and recombine the best parts of different solutions to solve new scenarios. In our model, high-dimensional RIS scenario features are compressed into a
quantum state using the tensor product, then superimposed during
quantum path selection, significantly improving
quantum computational advantage. Results demonstrate efficient performance with enhanced spectral efficiency, convergence rate, and adaptability.
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Machine Learning
A Mechanistic Study of Algorithmic Generalization in Diffusion Models on Modular Arithmetic
Joon Hyeok Kim, Yong-Hyun Park, Mattis Dalsætra Østby et al. (+1 more)
Despite their empirical success, how
diffusion models generalize remains poorly understood from a mechanistic perspective. In this work, we provide a controlled mechanistic account of algorithmic learning in
diffusion models. By utilizing the grokking phenomenon on an image-based modular addition task as a tractable testbed, we dissect the model's internal dynamics across two distinct visual regimes. In a single-image regime, mechanistic dissection reveals that the model implements modular addition by encoding operands as periodic representations and composing them at the self-
attention–feedforward interface in a way that recovers the trigonometric addition identities. In a diverse-image regime with high intraclass variability, we find that the iterative sampling process partitions the task into an arithmetic computation phase and a subsequent visual refinement phase, with their transition precisely captured by an internal frequency-
entropy signal. Together, our analysis clarifies the mechanics of algorithmic generalization of
diffusion models in a controlled setting, while leaving open how broadly these mechanisms transfer beyond modular addition.
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All authors Joon Hyeok Kim, Yong-Hyun Park, Mattis Dalsætra Østby, Jiatao Gu