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Monday 20 April

Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.CR

ExAI5G: A Logic-Based Explainable AI Framework for Intrusion Detection in 5G Networks

Intrusion detection systems (IDSs) for 5G networks must handle complex, high-volume traffic. Although opaque "black-box" models can achieve high accuracy, their lack of transparency hinders trust and effective operational response. We propose ExAI5G, a framework that prioritizes interpretability by integrating a Transformer-based deep learning IDS with logic-based explainable AI (XAI) techniques. The framework uses Integrated Gradients to attribute feature importance and extracts a surrogate decision tree to derive logical rules. We introduce a novel evaluation methodology for LLM-generated explanations, using a powerful evaluator LLM to assess actionability and measuring their semantic similarity and faithfulness. On a 5G IoT intrusion dataset, our system achieves 99.9% accuracy and a 0.854 macro F1-score, demonstrating strong performance. More importantly, we extract 16 logical rules with 99.7% fidelity, making the model's reasoning transparent. The evaluation demonstrates that modern LLMs can generate explanations that are both faithful and actionable, indicating that it is possible to build a trustworthy and effective IDS without compromising performance for the sake of marginal gains from an opaque model.
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Machine Learning

Variational Autoencoder Domain Adaptation for Cross-System Generalization in ML-Based SOP Monitoring

Machine learning (ML) models trained to detect physical-layer threats on one optical fiber system often fail catastrophically when applied to a different system, due to variations in operating wavelength, fiber properties, and network architecture. To overcome this, we propose a Domain Adaptation (DA) framework based on a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) that learns a shared representation capturing event signatures common to both systems while suppressing system-specific differences. The shared encoder is first trained on the combined data from two distinct optical systems: a 21 km O-band dark-fiber testbed (System 1) and a 63.4 km C-band live metro ring (System 2). The encoder is then frozen, and a classifier is trained using labels from an individual system. The proposed approach achieves 95.3% and 73.5% cross-system accuracy when moving from System 1 to System 2 and vice versa, respectively. This corresponds to gains of 83.4% and 51% over a fully supervised Deep Neural Network (DNN) baseline trained on a single system, while preserving intra-system performance.
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All authors Leyla Sadighi, Stefan Karlsson, Carlos Natalino, Mojtaba Eshghie, Fehmida Usmani, Eoin Kenny, Lena Wosinska, Paolo Monti, Marija Furdek, Marco Ruffini

Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.CL

How Creative Are Large Language Models in Generating Molecules?

Molecule generation requires satisfying multiple chemical and biological constraints while searching a large and structured chemical space. This makes it a non-binary problem, where effective models must identify non-obvious solutions under constraints while maintaining exploration to improve success by escaping local optima. From this perspective, creativity is a functional requirement in molecular generation rather than an aesthetic notion. Large language models (LLMs) can generate molecular representations directly from natural language prompts, but it remains unclear what type of creativity they exhibit in this setting and how it should be evaluated. In this work, we study the creative behavior of LLMs in molecular generation through a systematic empirical evaluation across physicochemical, ADMET, and biological activity tasks. We characterize creativity along two complementary dimensions, convergent creativity and divergent creativity, and analyze how different factors shape these behaviors. Our results indicate that LLMs exhibit distinct patterns of creative behavior in molecule generation, such as an increase in constraint satisfaction when additional constraints are imposed. Overall, our work is the first to reframe the abilities required for molecule generation as creativity, providing a systematic understanding of creativity in LLM-based molecular generation and clarifying the appropriate use of LLMs in molecular discovery pipelines.
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All authors Wen Tao, Yiwei Wang, Peng Zhou, Bryan Hooi, Wanlong Fang, Tianle Zhang, Xiao Luo, Yuansheng Liu, Alvin Chan

Machine Learning

RASP-Tuner: Retrieval-Augmented Soft Prompts for Context-Aware Black-Box Optimization in Non-Stationary Environments

Many deployed systems expose black-box objectives whose minimizing configuration shifts with an externally observed context. When contexts revisit a small set of latent regimes, an optimizer that discards history pays repeated adaptation cost; when each step must remain inexpensive, full Gaussian-process (GP) refits at high observation counts are difficult to sustain. We cast online tuning as context-conditioned regret minimization and present RASP-Tuner, which instantiates a decomposition motivated by first principles: (i) identify a regime proxy by retrieving similar past contexts; (ii) predict short-horizon loss with a mixture-of-experts surrogate whose input concatenates parameters, context, and a retrieved soft prompt; (iii) adapt chiefly in a low-dimensional prompt subspace, invoking full surrogate updates only when scalarized error or disagreement spikes. A RealErrorComposer maps heterogeneous streaming metrics to [0,1] via EMA-stabilized logistic scores, supplying a single differentiable training target. On nine synthetic non-stationary benchmarks, an adversarial-context sanity check, and three tabular real-world streams (Section on real-world experiments), RASP-Tuner improves or matches cumulative regret relative to our GP-UCB and CMA-ES implementations on seven of nine synthetic tasks under paired tests at horizon T=100, while recording 8-12 times lower wall-clock per step than sliding-window GP-UCB on identical hardware. Idealized analysis in a cluster-separated, strongly convex regime model (RA-GD) supplies sufficient conditions for bounded dynamic regret; the deployed pipeline violates several of these premises, and we articulate which gaps remain open.
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Machine Learning

Clusterability-Based Assessment of Potentially Noisy Views for Multi-View Clustering

In multi-view clustering, the quality of different views may vary substantially, and low-quality or degraded views can impair overall clustering performance. However, existing studies mainly address this issue within the clustering process through view weighting or noise-robust optimization, while paying limited attention to data-level assessment before clustering. In this paper, we study the problem of pre-clustering noisy-view analysis in multi-view data from a clusterability perspective. To this end, we propose a Multi-View Clusterability Score (MVCS), which quantifies the strength of latent cluster-related structures in multi-view data through three complementary components: per-view structural clusterability, joint-space clusterability, and cross-view neighborhood consistency. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first clusterability score specifically designed for multi-view data. We further use it to perform potentially noisy view analysis and noisy-view detection before clustering. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that noisy views can significantly degrade clustering performance, and that, compared with existing clusterability measures designed for single-view data, the proposed method more effectively supports noisy-view analysis and detection.
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All authors Mudi Jiang, Jiahui Zhou, Xinying Liu, Zengyou He, Zhikui Chen

Machine Learning · Cross-listed from q-bio.BM

Boltzmann Machine Learning with a Parallel, Persistent Markov chain Monte Carlo method for Estimating Evolutionary Fields and Couplings from a Protein Multiple Sequence Alignment

The inverse Potts problem for estimating evolutionary single-site fields and pairwise couplings in homologous protein sequences from their single-site and pairwise amino acid frequencies observed in their multiple sequence alignment would be still one of useful methods in the studies of protein structure and evolution. Since the reproducibility of fields and couplings are the most important, the Boltzmann machine method is employed here, although it is computationally intensive. In order to reduce computational time required for the Boltzmann machine, parallel, persistent Markov chain Monte Carlo method is employed to estimate the single-site and pairwise marginal distributions in each learning step. Also, stochastic gradient descent methods are used to reduce computational time for each learning. Another problem is how to adjust the values of hyperparameters; there are two regularization parameters for evolutionary fields and couplings. The precision of contact residue pair prediction is often used to adjust the hyperparameters. However, it is not sensitive to these regularization parameters. Here, they are adjusted for the fields and couplings to satisfy a specific condition that is appropriate for protein conformations. This method has been applied to eight protein families.
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Machine Learning

Neural Shape Operator Surrogates – Expression Rate Bounds

We prove error bounds for operator surrogates of solution operators for partial differential and boundary integral equations on families of domains which are diffeomorphic to one common reference (or latent) domain $D_{ref}$. The pullback of the PDE to $D_{ref}$ via affine-parametric shape encoding produces a collection of holomorphic parametric PDEs on $D_{ref}$. Sufficient conditions for (uniformly with respect to the parameter) well-posedness are given, implying existence, uniqueness and stability of parametric solution families on $D_{ref}$. We illustrate the abstract hypotheses by reviewing recent holomorphy results for a suite of elliptic and parabolic PDEs. Quantified parametric holomorphy implies existence of finite-parametric, discrete approximations of the parametric solution families with convergence rates in terms of the number $N$ of parameters. We obtain constructive proofs of existence of Neural and Spectral Operator surrogates for the shape-to-solution maps with error bounds and convergence rate guarantees uniform on the collection of admissible shapes. We admit principal-component shape encoders and frame decoders. Our results support in particular the (empirically reported) ability of neural operators to realize data-to-solution maps for elliptic and parabolic PDEs and BIEs that generalize across parametric families of shapes.
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Machine Learning

Neural Garbage Collection: Learning to Forget while Learning to Reason

Chain-of-thought reasoning has driven striking advances in language model capability, yet every reasoning step grows the KV cache, creating a bottleneck to scaling this paradigm further. Current approaches manage these constraints on the model's behalf using hand-designed criteria. A more scalable approach would let end-to-end learning subsume this design choice entirely, following a broader pattern in deep learning. After all, if a model can learn to reason, why can't it learn to forget? We introduce Neural Garbage Collection (NGC), in which a language model learns to forget while learning to reason, trained end-to-end from outcome-based task reward alone. As the model reasons, it periodically pauses, decides which KV cache entries to evict, and continues to reason conditioned on the remaining cache. By treating tokens in a chain-of-thought and cache-eviction decisions as discrete actions sampled from the language model, we can use reinforcement learning to jointly optimize how the model reasons and how it manages its own memory: what the model evicts shapes what it remembers, what it remembers shapes its reasoning, and the correctness of that reasoning determines its reward. Crucially, the model learns this behavior entirely from a single learning signal - the outcome-based task reward - without supervised fine-tuning or proxy objectives. On Countdown, AMC, and AIME tasks, NGC maintains strong accuracy relative to the full-cache upper bound at 2-3x peak KV cache size compression and substantially outperforms eviction baselines. Our results are a first step towards a broader vision where end-to-end optimization drives both capability and efficiency in language models.
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All authors Michael Y. Li, Jubayer Ibn Hamid, Emily B. Fox, Noah D. Goodman

Machine Learning

Causally-Constrained Probabilistic Forecasting for Time-Series Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection in multivariate time series is a central challenge in industrial monitoring, as failures frequently arise from complex temporal dynamics and cross-sensor interactions. While recent deep learning models, including graph neural networks and Transformers, have demonstrated strong empirical performance, most approaches remain primarily correlational and offer limited support for causal interpretation and root-cause localization. This study introduces a causally-constrained probabilistic forecasting framework which is a Causally Guided Transformer (CGT) model for multivariate time-series anomaly detection, integrating an explicit time-lagged causal graph prior with deep sequence modeling. For each target variable, a dedicated forecasting block employs a hard parent mask derived from causal discovery to restrict the main prediction pathway to graph-supported causes, while a latent Gaussian head captures predictive uncertainty. To leverage residual correlational information without compromising the causal representation, a shadow auxiliary path with stop-gradient isolation and a safety-gated blending mechanism is incorporated to suppress non-causal contributions when reliability is low. Anomalies are identified using negative log-likelihood scores with adaptive streaming thresholding, and root-cause variables are determined through per-dimension probabilistic attribution and counterfactual clamping. Experiments on the ASD and SMD benchmarks indicate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art detection performance, with F1-scores of 96.19% on ASD and 95.32% on SMD, and enhances variable-level attribution quality. These findings suggest that causal structural priors can improve both robustness and interpretability in detecting deep anomalies in multivariate sensor systems.
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Machine Learning

Online Conformal Prediction with Adversarial Semi-bandit Feedback via Regret Minimization

Uncertainty quantification is crucial in safety-critical systems, where decisions must be made under uncertainty. In particular, we consider the problem of online uncertainty quantification, where data points arrive sequentially. Online conformal prediction is a principled online uncertainty quantification method that dynamically constructs a prediction set at each time step. While existing methods for online conformal prediction provide long-run coverage guarantees without any distributional assumptions, they typically assume a full feedback setting in which the true label is always observed. In this paper, we propose a novel learning method for online conformal prediction with partial feedback from an adaptive adversary-a more challenging setup where the true label is revealed only when it lies inside the constructed prediction set. Specifically, we formulate online conformal prediction as an adversarial bandit problem by treating each candidate prediction set as an arm. Building on an existing algorithm for adversarial bandits, our method achieves a long-run coverage guarantee by explicitly establishing its connection to the regret of the learner. Finally, we empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in both independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) and non-i.i.d. settings, showing that it successfully controls the miscoverage rate while maintaining a reasonable size of the prediction set.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.AI

A Sugeno Integral View of Binarized Neural Network Inference

In this article, we establish a precise connection between binarized neural networks (BNNs) and Sugeno integrals. The advantage of the Sugeno integral is that it provides a framework for representing the importance of inputs and their interactions, while being equivalent to a set of if-then rules. For a hidden BNN neuron at inference time, we show that the activation threshold test can be written as a Sugeno integral on binary inputs. This yields an explicit set-function representation of each neuron decision, and an associated rule-based representation. We also provide a Sugeno-integral expression for the last-layer score. Finally, we discuss how the same framework can be adapted to support richer input interactions and how it can be extended beyond the binary case induced by binarized neural networks.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from q-bio.NC

The Umwelt Representation Hypothesis: Rethinking Universality

Recent studies reveal striking representational alignment between artificial neural networks (ANNs) and biological brains, leading to proposals that all sufficiently capable systems converge on universal representations of reality. Here, we argue that this claim of Universality is premature. We introduce the Umwelt Representation Hypothesis (URH), proposing that alignment arises not from convergence toward a single global optimum, but from overlap in ecological constraints under which systems develop. We review empirical evidence showing that representational differences between species, individuals, and ANNs are systematic and adaptive, which is difficult to reconcile with Universality. Finally, we reframe ANN model comparison as a method for mapping clusters of alignment in ecological constraint space rather than searching for a single optimal world model.
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All authors Victoria Bosch, Rowan Sommers, Adrien Doerig, Tim C Kietzmann

Machine Learning

Federated Rule Ensemble Method in Medical Data

Machine learning has become integral to medical research and is increasingly applied in clinical settings to support diagnosis and decision-making; however, its effectiveness depends on access to large, diverse datasets, which are limited within single institutions. Although integrating data across institutions can address this limitation, privacy regulations and data ownership constraints hinder these efforts. Federated learning enables collaborative model training without sharing raw data; however, most methods rely on complex architectures that lack interpretability, limiting clinical applicability. Therefore, we proposed a federated RuleFit framework to construct a unified and interpretable global model for distributed environments. It integrates three components: preprocessing based on differentially private histograms to estimate shared cutoff values, enabling consistent rule definitions and reducing heterogeneity across clients; local rule generation using gradient boosting decision trees with shared cutoffs; and coefficient estimation via $\ell_1$-regularized optimization using a Federated Dual Averaging algorithm for sparse and consistent variable selection. In simulation studies, the proposed method achieved a performance comparable to that of centralized RuleFit while outperforming existing federated approaches. Real-world analysis demonstrated its ability to provide interpretable insights with competitive predictive accuracy. Therefore, the proposed framework offers a practical and effective solution for interpretable and reliable modeling in federated learning environments.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from math.DG

Complex normalizing flows can almost be information Kähler-Ricci flows

We develop interconnections between the complex normalizing flow for data drawn from Borel probability measures on the twofold realification of the complex manifold and a nonlinear flow nearly Kähler-Ricci. The complex normalizing flow relates the initial and target realified densities under the complex change of variables, necessitating the log determinant of the ensemble of Wirtinger Jacobians. The Ricci curvature of a Kähler manifold is the second order mixed Wirtinger partial derivative of the log of the local density of the volume form. Therefore, we reconcile these two facts by drawing forth the connection that the log determinant used in the complex normalizing flow matches a Ricci curvature term under differentiation and conditions. The log density under the normalizing flow is kindred to a spatial information metric under an augmented Jacobian and a Bayesian perspective to the parameter, thus under the continuum limit the log likelihood matches a Fisher metric, or more closely a Kähler cross-entropy Hessian. This recovers a Kähler-Ricci flow variation up to a time derivative and expectation, or an average-valued Kähler-Einstein flow. Using this framework, we establish other relevant results, attempting to bridge the statistical and ordinary behaviors of the complex normalizing flow to the geometric features of our derived Kähler flow.
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Machine Learning

How Much Cache Does Reasoning Need? Depth-Cache Tradeoffs in KV-Compressed Transformers

The key-value (KV) cache is the dominant memory bottleneck during Transformer inference, yet little is known theoretically about how aggressively it can be compressed before multi-step reasoning degrades. We study this through $k$-hop pointer chasing on $n$ tokens under a shared KV cache of size $s$, attention dimension $m$, $H$ heads, $p$-bit precision, and a locality-respecting cache controller (satisfied by all standard KV-compression methods). We give three results. (1) Product depth lower bound (conjectured). We conjecture that any such Transformer ($n \geq 4k$, $s \leq \sqrt{n}/4$) requires depth $L = \Omega(\lceil k/s \rceil \cdot \lceil \log_2 n/(Hmp) \rceil)$, and isolate the sole remaining gap as a probabilistic step on the joint distribution of cache trace and pointer chain. Unconditionally, we prove a matching upper bound $L = O(\min(k, \lceil k/s \rceil \log s) \cdot \log n/(mp))$ via windowed pointer doubling, and a max-bound $L = \Omega(\max(\lceil k/s \rceil, \log n/(Hmp)))$. Closing the conjecture amounts to upgrading max to product. (2) Bandwidth barrier. The product bound binds only when $Hmp \lesssim \log n$. Any lower bound provable via per-window distinguishability counting – including reachability, bandwidth, and combinations – cannot exceed $\lceil k/s \rceil$ once $Hmp \geq \log_2 n$. Breaking this requires lifting unconditional communication-complexity bounds for pointer chasing to Cache-Transformer depth. (3) Adaptive vs oblivious error scaling. Under random cache over $T = \lceil \log_2 k \rceil$ doubling stages, oblivious caches give $\Pr[\mathcal{E}] \leq (s/(n-T))^T + 2T^3/n$ (exponential in $T$), while adaptive locality-respecting caches achieve $\Pr[\mathcal{E}] = s/n$ exactly, independent of $T$. The $\Omega((n/s)^{T-1})$ separation explains why heavy-hitter eviction empirically dominates random eviction for multi-hop reasoning.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.CL

Heterogeneity in Formal Linguistic Competence of Language Models: Is Data the Real Bottleneck?

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit a puzzling disparity in their formal linguistic competence: while they learn some linguistic phenomena with near-perfect mastery, they often perform below chance on others, even after training on trillions of tokens. In this work, we investigate whether these failures stem from inherent architectural limitations or simply the scarcity of these specific grammatical constructions in web-scale corpora. We pre-train simple GPT-2 Small (124M) models on a 100M-token random sample of the FineWeb corpus and intervene by injecting a minimal amount (1%) of synthetic data targeting specific linguistic phenomena. We find that this targeted intervention substantially improves model performance in 8 out of the 9 worst-performing BLiMP paradigms - notably the accuracy on a specific paradigm, only_npi_scope, surges from 20.9% to 69.4%. Furthermore, we observe that these interventions generally preserve or slightly improve aggregate performance. However, while we also identify a resistant phenomenon, principle_A_c_command, whose performance remains below chance even after our data augmentation, our findings do serve as an optimistic existence proof that even small language models can substantially improve on those linguistic phenomena on which models typically perform poorly, provided the pre-training data contains sufficient exposure to them. This suggests that efforts towards human-scale language modeling may benefit greatly by focusing on data composition. The code to reproduce our results is open-sourced at https://github.com/kowndinya-renduchintala/heterogeneity-in-formal-linguistic-competence.
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Machine Learning

HEALing Entropy Collapse: Enhancing Exploration in Few-Shot RLVR via Hybrid-Domain Entropy Dynamics Alignment

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) has proven effective for training reasoning-oriented large language models, but existing methods largely assume high-resource settings with abundant training data. In low-resource scenarios, RLVR is prone to more severe entropy collapse, which substantially limits exploration and degrades reasoning performance. To address this issue, we propose Hybrid-domain Entropy dynamics ALignment (HEAL), a framework tailored for few-shot RLVR. HEAL first selectively incorporates high-value general-domain data to promote more diverse exploration. Then, we introduce Entropy Dynamics Alignment (EDA), a reward mechanism that aligns trajectory-level entropy dynamics between the target and general domains, capturing both entropy magnitude and fine-grained variation. Through this alignment, EDA not only further mitigates entropy collapse but also encourages the policy to acquire more diverse exploration behaviors from the general domain. Experiments across multiple domains show that HEAL consistently improves few-shot RLVR performance. Notably, using only 32 target-domain samples, HEAL matches or even surpasses full-shot RLVR trained with 1K target-domain samples.
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All authors Zhanyu Liu, Qingguo Hu, Ante Wang, Chenqing Liu, Zhishang Xiang, Hui Li, Delai Qiu, Jinsong Su

Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.CV

Prompting Foundation Models for Zero-Shot Ship Instance Segmentation in SAR Imagery

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) plays a critical role in maritime surveillance, yet deep learning for SAR analysis is limited by the lack of pixel-level annotations. This paper explores how general-purpose vision foundation models can enable zero-shot ship instance segmentation in SAR imagery, eliminating the need for pixel-level supervision. A YOLOv11-based detector trained on open SAR datasets localizes ships via bounding boxes, which then prompt the Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) to produce instance masks without any mask annotations. Unlike prior SAM-based SAR approaches that rely on fine tuning or adapters, our method demonstrates that spatial constraints from a SAR-trained detector alone can effectively regularize foundation model predictions. This design partially mitigates the optical-SAR domain gap and enables downstream applications such as vessel classification, size estimation, and wake analysis. Experiments on the SSDD benchmark achieve a mean IoU of 0.637 (89% of a fully supervised baseline) with an overall ship detection rate of 89.2%, confirming a scalable, annotation-efficient pathway toward foundation-model-driven SAR image understanding.
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Machine Learning

Fisher Decorator: Refining Flow Policy via a Local Transport Map

Recent advances in flow-based offline reinforcement learning (RL) have achieved strong performance by parameterizing policies via flow matching. However, they still face critical trade-offs among expressiveness, optimality, and efficiency. In particular, existing flow policies interpret the $L_2$ regularization as an upper bound of the 2-Wasserstein distance ($W_2$), which can be problematic in offline settings. This issue stems from a fundamental geometric mismatch: the behavioral policy manifold is inherently anisotropic, whereas the $L_2$ (or upper bound of $W_2$) regularization is isotropic and density-insensitive, leading to systematically misaligned optimization directions. To address this, we revisit offline RL from a geometric perspective and show that policy refinement can be formulated as a local transport map: an initial flow policy augmented by a residual displacement. By analyzing the induced density transformation, we derive a local quadratic approximation of the KL-constrained objective governed by the Fisher information matrix, enabling a tractable anisotropic optimization formulation. By leveraging the score function embedded in the flow velocity, we obtain a corresponding quadratic constraint for efficient optimization. Our results reveal that the optimality gap in prior methods arises from their isotropic approximation. In contrast, our framework achieves a controllable approximation error within a provable neighborhood of the optimal solution. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across diverse offline RL benchmarks. See project page: https://github.com/ARC0127/Fisher-Decorator.
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All authors Xiaoyuan Cheng, Haoyu Wang, Wenxuan Yuan, Ziyan Wang, Zonghao Chen, Li Zeng, Zhuo Sun

Machine Learning

Learning to Correct: Calibrated Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Attempt Chain-of-Thought

State-of-the-art reasoning models utilize long chain-of-thought (CoT) to solve increasingly complex problems using more test-time computation. In this work, we explore a long CoT setting where the model makes up to K successive attempts at solving a problem, in which each attempt is allowed to build on earlier ones after the model receives a hard verifier feedback. This motivates RL methods that can harness per-attempt rewards by carefully weighting individual attempts. We study optimizing the Verification@K reward (the model succeeds by the K-th attempt) and show that naively weighing the attempts by their pass/fail results in biased gradients. We introduce Calibrated Attempt-Level (CAL) GRPO by devising a weighing strategy to obtain unbiased gradients while maintaining small variance. Our theory reveals how incorporating per-attempt rewards influence the training and the eventual Verification@K performance. Experiments, baselines, and ablations on synthetic and real data corroborate our theory and the benefits of CAL-GRPO over vanilla GRPO as well as naive weighting.
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All authors Muhammed Emrullah Ildiz, Halil Alperen Gozeten, Ege Onur Taga, Samet Oymak

Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.AI

Physics-Informed Causal MDPs for Sequential Constraint Repair in Engineering Simulation Pipelines

Off-policy learning in constrained MDPs with large binary state spaces faces a fundamental tension: causal identification of transition dynamics requires structural assumptions, while sample-efficient policy learning requires state-space compression. We introduce PI-CMDP, a framework for CMDPs whose constraint dependencies form a layered DAG under a Lifecycle Ordering Assumption (LOA). We propose an Identify-Compress-Estimate pipeline: (i) Identify: LOA enables backdoor identification of causal edge weights for cross-layer pairs, with formal partial-identification bounds when LOA is violated; (ii) Compress: a Markov abstraction compresses state cardinality from 2^(WL) to (W+1)^L under layer-priority regularity and exchangeability; and (iii) Estimate: a physics-guided doubly-robust estimator remains unbiased and reduces the variance constant when the physics prior outperforms a learned model. We instantiate PI-CMDP on constraint repair in engineering simulation pipelines. On the TPS benchmark (4,206 episodes), PI-CMDP achieves 76.2% repair success rate with only 300 training episodes versus 70.8% for the strongest baseline (+5.4 pp), narrowing to +2.8 pp (83.4% vs. 80.6%) in the full-data regime, while substantially reducing cascade failure rates. All improvements are consistent across 5 independent seeds (paired t-test p < 0.02).
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Machine Learning

LoReC: Rethinking Large Language Models for Graph Data Analysis

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has fundamentally reshaped the way we interact with graphs, giving rise to a new paradigm called GraphLLM. As revealed in recent studies, graph learning can benefit from LLMs. However, we observe limited benefits when we directly utilize LLMs to make predictions for graph-related tasks within GraphLLM paradigm, which even yields suboptimal results compared to conventional GNN-based approaches. Through in-depth analysis, we find this failure can be attributed to LLMs' limited capability for processing graph data and their tendency to overlook graph information. To address this issue, we propose LoReC (Look, Remember, and Contrast), a novel plug-and-play method for GraphLLM paradigm, which enhances LLM's understanding of graph data through three stages: (1) Look: redistributing attention to graph; (2) Remember: re-injecting graph information into the Feed-Forward Network (FFN); (3) Contrast: rectifying the vanilla logits produced in the decoding process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LoReC brings notable improvements over current GraphLLM methods and outperforms GNN-based approaches across diverse datasets. The implementation is available at https://github.com/Git-King-Zhan/LoReC.
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All authors Hongyu Zhan, Qixin Wang, Yusen Tan, Haitao Yu, Jingbo Zhou, Shuai Chen, Jia Li, Xiao Tan, Jun Xia

Machine Learning

Can Explicit Physical Feasibility Benefit VLA Learning? An Empirical Study

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models map multimodal inputs directly to robot actions and are typically trained through large-scale imitation learning. While this paradigm has shown strong performance, prevailing VLA training procedures do not explicitly supervise hard physical constraints such as obstacle avoidance or kinematic feasibility. As a result, the geometric structure underlying physically feasible behavior must be inferred only implicitly from demonstrations. In this paper, we study whether introducing explicit feasibility supervision can provide effective structured guidance for VLA policies. We formulate a simple geometry-grounded feasibility objective and integrate it into the training stage of a diffusion-based VLA policy. To evaluate this idea systematically, we use obstacle-aware manipulation as a controlled probe of geometry-dependent physical feasibility. Empirical results show that augmenting VLA training with feasibility supervision improves both physical reliability and overall task performance, while also enhancing learning efficiency in the low-data regime. These findings indicate that explicit feasibility signals can effectively complement imitation-based VLA learning, highlighting their potential for developing more reliable VLA policies.
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Machine Learning

LEPO: Latent Reasoning Policy Optimization for Large Language Models

Recently, latent reasoning has been introduced into large language models (LLMs) to leverage rich information within a continuous space. However, without stochastic sampling, these methods inevitably collapse to deterministic inference, failing to discover diverse reasoning paths. To bridge the gap, we inject controllable stochasticity into latent reasoning via Gumbel-Softmax, restoring LLMs' exploratory capacity and enhancing their compatibility with Reinforcement Learning (RL). Building on this, we propose \textbf{\underline{L}}atent R\textbf{\underline{e}}asoning \textbf{\underline{P}}olicy \textbf{\underline{O}}ptimization~(LEPO), a novel framework that applies RL directly to continuous latent representations. Specifically, in rollout stage, LEPO maintains stochasticity to enable diverse trajectory sampling, while in optimization stage, LEPO constructs a unified gradient estimation for both latent representations and discrete tokens. Extensive experiments show that LEPO significantly outperforms existing RL methods for discrete and latent reasoning.
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All authors Yuyan Zhou, Jiarui Yu, Hande Dong, Zhezheng Hao, Hong Wang, Jianqing Zhang, Qiang Lin

Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.SE

Scaling Human-AI Coding Collaboration Requires a Governable Consensus Layer

Vibe coding turns natural-language intent into working software, but code generation alone does not give humans and agents a shared account of what they are building. As collaboration spans participants, components, and releases, design choices must remain understandable and open to revision. We argue that scaling human and AI coding collaboration requires a governable consensus layer. Agentic Consensus organizes collaboration around a versioned project-state model linking selected intent, structural commitments, executable artifacts, and evidence. Participants can clarify intent before implementation and coordinate proposed changes against commitments that humans can inspect and revise. Bidirectional synchronization connects intended changes to implementation and exposes conflicts or stale evidence as artifacts evolve. We implemented its review workflow in Consensus Control. In a small exploratory human study, 10 participants used the system on projects from their everyday work and reported clearer, faster understanding of agent-submitted changes. A three-condition comparison with the same participants collected 60 responses, with near-ceiling decision scores and measured representation and pipeline costs. Our research agenda asks how shared project state can preserve human understanding and control as agent contributions accumulate.
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All authors Tianfu Wang, Zhezheng Hao, Yin Wu, Wei Wu, Haowen Yang, Linxiao Gong, Qiang Lin, Hande Dong, Nicholas Jing Yuan, Hui Xiong

Machine Learning

M100: An Orchestrated Dataflow Architecture Powering General AI Computing

As deep learning-based AI technologies gain momentum, the demand for general-purpose AI computing architectures continues to grow. While GPGPU-based architectures offer versatility for diverse AI workloads, they often fall short in efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Various Domain-Specific Architectures (DSAs) excel at particular AI tasks but struggle to extend across broader applications or adapt to the rapidly evolving AI landscape. M100 is Li Auto's response: a performant, cost-effective architecture for AI inference in Autonomous Driving (AD), Large Language Models (LLMs), and intelligent human interactions, domains crucial to today's most competitive automobile platforms. M100 employs a dataflow parallel architecture, where compiler-architecture co-design orchestrates not only computation but, more critically, data movement across time and space. Leveraging dataflow computing efficiency, our hardware-software co-design improves system performance while reducing hardware complexity and cost. M100 largely eliminates caching: tensor computations are driven by compiler- and runtime-managed data streams flowing between computing elements and on/off-chip memories, yielding greater efficiency and scalability than cache-based systems. Another key principle was selecting the right operational granularity for scheduling, issuing, and execution across compiler, firmware, and hardware. Recognizing commonalities in AI workloads, we chose the tensor as the fundamental data element. M100 demonstrates general AI computing capability across diverse inference applications, including UniAD (for AD) and LLaMA (for LLMs). Benchmarks show M100 outperforms GPGPU architectures in AD applications with higher utilization, representing a promising direction for future general AI computing.
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All authors Yan Xie, Changkui Mao, Changsong Wu, Chao Lu, Chao Suo, Cheng Qian, Chun Yang, Danyang Zhu, Hengchang Xiong, Hongzhan Lu, Hongzhen Liu, Jiafu Liu, Jie Chen, Jie Dai, Junfeng Tang, Kai Liu, Kun Li, Lipeng Ge, Meng Sun, Min Luo, Peng Chen, Peng Wang, Shaodong Yang, Shibin Tang, Shibo Chen, Weikang Zhang, Xiao Ling, Xiaobo Du, Xin Wu, Yang Liu, Yi Jiang, Yihua Jin, Yin Huang, Yuli Zhang, Zhen Yuan, Zhiyuan Man, Zhongxiao Yao

Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.CL

On the Emergence of Syntax by Means of Local Interaction

Can syntactic processing emerge spontaneously from purely local interaction? We present a concrete instance on a minimal system: an 18,658-parameter two-dimensional neural cellular automaton (NCA), supervised by nothing more than a 1-bit boundary signal, is trained on the membership problem of an arithmetic-expression grammar. After training, its internal $L \times L$ grid spontaneously self-organizes into an ordered, spatially extended representation that we name Proto-CKY. This representation satisfies three operational criteria for syntactic processing: expressive power beyond the regular languages, structural generalization beyond the training distribution, and an internal organization quantitatively aligned with grammatical structure (Pearson $r \approx 0.71$). It emerges independently on four context-free grammars and regenerates spontaneously after perturbation. Proto-CKY is functionally aligned with the CKY algorithm but formally distinct from it: it is a physical prototype, a concrete instantiation of a mathematical ideal on a physical substrate, and the systematic distance between the two carries information about the substrate itself.
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Machine Learning

Efficient Diffusion Models under Nonconvex Equality and Inequality constraints via Landing

Generative modeling within constrained sets is essential for scientific and engineering applications involving physical, geometric, or safety requirements (e.g., molecular generation, robotics). We present a unified framework for constrained diffusion models on generic nonconvex feasible sets $\Sigma$ that simultaneously enforces equality and inequality constraints throughout the diffusion process. Our framework incorporates both overdamped and underdamped dynamics for forward and backward sampling. A key algorithmic innovation is a computationally efficient landing mechanism that replaces costly and often ill-defined projections onto $\Sigma$, ensuring feasibility without iterative Newton solves or projection failures. By leveraging underdamped dynamics, we accelerate mixing toward the prior distribution, effectively alleviating the high simulation costs typically associated with constrained diffusion. Empirically, this approach reduces function evaluations and memory usage during both training and inference while preserving sample quality. On benchmarks featuring equality and mixed constraints, our method achieves comparable sample quality to state-of-the-art baselines while significantly reducing computational cost, providing a practical and scalable solution for diffusion on nonconvex feasible sets.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.AI

Polysemantic Experts, Monosemantic Paths: Routing as Control in MoEs

An LLM's residual stream is both state and instruction: it encodes the current context and determines the next transformation. We introduce a parameter-free decomposition for Mixture-of-Experts models that splits each layer's hidden state into a control signal that causally drives routing and an orthogonal content channel invisible to the router. Across six MoE architectures, we find that models preserve surface-level features (language, token identity, position) in the content channel, while the control signal encodes an abstract function that rotates from layer to layer. Because each routing decision is low-bandwidth, this hand-off forces compositional specialization across layers. While individual experts remain polysemantic, expert paths become monosemantic, clustering tokens by semantic function across languages and surface forms. The same token (e.g., ":") follows distinct trajectories depending on whether it serves as a type annotation, an introductory colon, or a time separator. Our decomposition identifies the source of this structure: clusters in the control subspace are substantially more monosemantic than those in the full representation. As a result, the natural unit of interpretability in MoEs is not the expert but the trajectory.
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Machine Learning

Perturbation Sensitivity of Maximum-Likelihood Pairwise Ranking in Computational Decision Systems

Maximum-likelihood pairwise ranking is a com- mon computational mechanism for prioritization, reputation estimation, and comparison-driven decision support. Despite its broad use, the perturbation sensitivity of this estimator under structured changes in comparison data remains insufficiently characterized. We study this question as an applied-mathematics and computational-science problem in stability analysis. We for- mulate coordinated perturbation as a budgeted subset-selection problem over pairwise observations and introduce an Adaptive Subset Selection Attack (ASSA) as a scalable search heuristic for probing high-impact perturbation sets. Through experiments on synthetic and observed preference datasets, we show that MLE-based ranking can exhibit pronounced regime-dependent sensitivity: relatively small but coordinated perturbations may in- duce meaningful changes in output orderings, while the response profile varies across budgets and data conditions. By comparing ASSA with random, greedy, and randomized subset baselines under repeated trials, we characterize both the magnitude and the variability of perturbation-induced ranking shifts. These results position pairwise ranking sensitivity as a problem in computational reliability, numerical stability, and robustness auditing for engineering systems built on comparison-driven inference.
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