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Computer Science Machine Learning

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Monday 27 April

Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.CV

Selective Correlation Based Knowledge Distillation for Ground Reaction Force Estimation

Eun Som Jeon, Jisoo Lee, Huisu Lim et al. (+3 more)

Wearable sensor-based human gait analysis holds great promise in healthcare, rehabilitation, clinical diagnosis and monitoring, and sports activities. Specifically, ground reaction force (GRF) provides essential insights into the body's interaction with the ground during movement and is typically measured using instrumented treadmills equipped with force plates. However, such equipment is expensive and restricted to laboratory environments. To enable a more portable solution, wearable insole sensors have been used to measure GRF. These sensors, however, are prone to noise and external interference, which reduces measurement accuracy. Deep learning methodologies could be adopted to address these issues, but they often require significant computing resources to achieve high accuracy, limiting their applicability for real-time analysis on portable devices. To overcome these limitations, we propose Selective Correlation Based Knowledge Distillation (SCKD) for estimating GRF from data collected by insole sensors. Our proposed method utilizes selected features considering temporal characteristics in the process of extracting correlation maps for knowledge transfer, enhancing interpretability and mitigating issues in high dimensional data processing. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the compact models generated by our distillation framework through comparison with existing methods. Various configurations of teacher-student architectures and training approaches are examined based on multiple evaluation criteria, utilizing data collected at different walking speeds and with different window sizes. Experimental results confirm that our approach outperforms existing methods in estimating GRF from wearable insole sensor data. Therefore, our approach offers a reliable and resource-efficient solution for human gait analysis.
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All authors Eun Som Jeon, Jisoo Lee, Huisu Lim, Omik M. Save, Hyunglae Lee, Pavan Turaga

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

Sure About That Line? Approaching Confidence-Based, Real-Time Line Assignment in Reading Gaze Data

Franziska Kaltenberger, Wei-Ling Chen, Enkeleda Thaqi et al. (+1 more)

Remote and webcam-based eye tracking in multi-line reading suffers from various noise factors and layout ambiguity, precisely where real-time reading support needs reliable, per-fixation line assignment. Prior work largely addresses this challenge post hoc or by restricting behavior (e.g., disallowing re-reading), undermining interactive use. We propose CONF-LA (Confidence-score-based Online Fixation-to-Line Assignment), a principled, low-latency approach that integrates knowledge about reading behavior and Gaussian line likelihoods over fixations to compute a posterior-line-score and defers assignments when uncertainty is high. Evaluated on existing open-source data, CONF-LA demonstrates stable performance in post hoc analysis and closes the online-offline gap (1-2 %) with a mean per-fixation latency of 0.348 ms. Our approach exhibits particular invariance toward regressions, yielding significant improvement in ad hoc median accuracies on children data (approx. 95 %) over all tested algorithms. We encourage further research in this direction and discuss possibilities for future development.
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All authors Franziska Kaltenberger, Wei-Ling Chen, Enkeleda Thaqi, Enkelejda Kasneci

Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.SE

Large Language Models for Multilingual Code Intelligence: A Survey

Chao Jiang, Dugang Liu, Cheng Wen et al. (+6 more)

Large language models have transformed AI-assisted software engineering, but current research remains biased toward high-resource languages such as Python, with weaker performance in languages like Rust and OCaml. Since real-world systems are inherently polyglot, robust multilingual code intelligence is crucial. This survey focuses on two key tasks: multilingual code generation from shared natural-language requirements, and multilingual code translation that preserves semantics across languages. It reviews representative methods, benchmarks, and evaluation metrics, and highlights challenges and opportunities for trustworthy cross-language generalization.
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All authors Chao Jiang, Dugang Liu, Cheng Wen, Zhiwu Xu, Hua Zheng, Muhammad Sadiq, Jawwad Ahmed Shamsi, Shengchao Qin, Zhong Ming

Machine Learning

Feasible-First Exploration for Constrained ML Deployment Optimization in Crash-Prone Hierarchical Search Spaces

Christian Lysenstøen

Deploying machine learning models under production constraints requires joint optimization over model family, quantization scheme, runtime backend, and serving configuration. This induces a hierarchical mixed-variable search space in which many configurations are invalid: evaluations may crash, exceed memory limits, or violate latency constraints. Standard black-box optimizers such as Tree-structured Parzen Estimators (TPE) and constrained Bayesian optimization are effective when valid configurations are common, but they can spend a large fraction of a small evaluation budget on invalid or uninformative trials in hostile deployment spaces. This paper studies that regime and asks whether optimization should be decomposed into an explicit exploration stage followed by model-guided exploitation. We propose Thermal Budget Annealing (TBA), a feasible-first exploration procedure that maps valid and feasible regions before warm-starting TPE. The method includes two robustness mechanisms for hostile hardware: trial timeouts that abort clearly infeasible evaluations early, and subspace blacklisting that temporarily suppresses categorical subspaces after repeated failures. We also introduce DeployBench, a benchmark suite for deployment optimization with hierarchical structure, hidden crash zones, hard constraints, and unequal evaluation costs. On synthetic benchmarks and real GPU deployment with five pre-trained vision models across five GPU targets (NVIDIA H100, A100, RTX 5080, L4, and T4), the proposed hybrid improves model-family discovery under tight constraints while reducing wasted budget relative to cold-start TPE.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.CR

Scalable Secure Biometric Authentication without Auxiliary Identifiers

Alexander Bienstock, Daniel Escudero, Antigoni Polychroniadou et al. (+5 more)

The prevalence of biometric authentication has been on the rise due to its ease of use and elimination of weak passwords. To date, most biometric authentication systems have been designed for on-device authentication of the device owner (e.g., smartphones and laptops). Recently, biometric authentication systems have started to emerge that are designed to authenticate users against cloud databases storing representations of biometrics for large numbers of users (potentially millions), such as those facilitating biometric payments. However, the use of a large cloud database introduces a significant attack vector, as a breach of the database could lead to the compromise of all enrolled users' sensitive biometric data. Indeed, all such existing systems either do not adequately protect against such a breach, or are impractical to deploy and use due to their high computational overhead. In this work, we present a new biometric authentication system that provides provable security guarantees against data breaches, while remaining scalable and performant. To do so, we marry artificial intelligence with advanced cryptographic techniques in a novel fashion, providing several optimizations along the way. Our work is the first to show that real-world scalable privacy-preserving biometric authentication without auxiliary identifiers is feasible, and we believe that it will spur widespread industrial adoption and further research in this area.
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All authors Alexander Bienstock, Daniel Escudero, Antigoni Polychroniadou, Zhen Zeng, Pranav Bhat, Ashok Singal, Prashant Sharma, Manuela Veloso

Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.MA

Frontier Coding Agents Can Now Implement an AlphaZero Self-Play Machine Learning Pipeline For Connect Four That Performs Comparably to an External Solver

Joshua Sherwood, Ben Aybar and Benjamin Kaplan

Forecasting when AI systems will become capable of meaningfully accelerating AI research is a central challenge for AI safety. Existing benchmarks measure broad capability growth, but may not provide ample early warning signals for recursive self-improvement. We propose measuring AI's capability to autonomously implement end-to-end machine learning pipelines from past AI research breakthroughs, given a minimal task description. By providing a concise task description instead of the full prior work as reference, we hope to better elicit emerging AI research taste. We introduce a proof-of-concept benchmark in which frontier coding agents autonomously implement an AlphaZero-style machine learning pipeline for Connect Four on consumer hardware within a three-hour budget, and we evaluate the resulting game AIs in a round-robin tournament anchored to the Pascal Pons Connect Four solver. Across four agents with eight trials each, we find substantial differentiation: Claude Opus 4.7 won as first-mover against Pons in seven of eight trials, statistically significantly better than the other agents tested, none of which exceeded two of eight. The task, which no frontier agent could reliably complete when we began development in January of 2026, is now near-saturation. Our evaluation also surfaced anomalous behavior in GPT-5.4, which consistently used far less of its allocated time budget than other agents. A follow-up 16-trial probe using shorter, less evaluation-coded prompts substantially increased GPT-5.4's time-budget usage, consistent with but not diagnostic of sandbagging; Bradley-Terry ratings across probe conditions showed only directional differences, despite significant differences in time-budget usage. We release our data, code, and prompts to support reproduction and extension.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from q-bio.MN

Learning biophysical models of gene regulation with probability flow matching

Suryanarayana Maddu, Victor Chardès and Michael J. Shelley

Cellular differentiation is governed by gene regulatory networks, the high-dimensional stochastic biochemical systems that determine the transcriptional landscape and mediate cellular responses to signals and perturbations. Although single-cell RNA sequencing provides quantitative snapshots of the transcriptome, current methods for inferring gene-regulatory dynamics often lack mechanistic interpretability and fail to generalize to unseen conditions. Here we introduce Probability Flow Matching (PFM), a scalable framework for learning biophysically consistent stochastic processes directly from time-resolved single-cell measurements. Applying PFM to three hematopoiesis datasets, we show that models with similar interpolation accuracy can encode fundamentally different dynamics, with only biophysically consistent formulations accurately capturing mechanisms of lineage transitions, fate specification, and gene perturbation responses. We further demonstrate that PFM accommodates unbalanced populations, enabling simultaneous inference of cellular proliferation and death dynamics. Together, these results establish PFM as a flexible, scalable framework for integrating mechanistic modeling with single-cell omics.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.DC

Spark Policy Toolkit: Semantic Contracts and Scalable Execution for Policy Learning in Spark

Zeyu Bai

Custom policy-learning pipelines in Spark fail for two coupled systems reasons: rowwise Python execution makes inference impractical, and driver-side candidate materialization makes split search fragile at feature scale. We present Spark Policy Toolkit, a semantics-governed systems toolkit for scalable policy learning in Spark. The toolkit provides two Spark-native primitives: partition-initialized vectorized inference through mapInPandas and mapInArrow, and collect-less split search that scores candidates on executors. Both primitives are governed by one fixed-input semantic contract: the same rows, feature order, treatment vocabulary, preprocessing manifest, and split boundaries must preserve per-row score vectors, best-split decisions, and end-to-end learned policy outputs. The evaluation combines practical baseline ladders, backend parity checks, measured split-search scale results, synthetic and Hillstrom end-to-end policy preservation, missingness stress, partition and order perturbation tests, quantile-boundary sensitivity, and a concrete adversarial failure catalog. On a 40-worker Databricks cluster, mapInArrow reaches 4.72M rows/s at 10M matched rows and 7.23M rows/s at 50M rows, while collect-less split search remains valid from F = 10 through F = 1000 with 124000 candidate rows, where the driver-collect baseline is intentionally skipped. Across 24 backend-ablation settings, mapInArrow wins 18 while mapInPandas wins 6, so the paper treats backend choice as workload-dependent rather than universal. Once the fixed-input lock is enforced, all six tested repartition/coalesce/shuffle perturbations preserve identical signatures; before lock, all six drift. The central result is not speed alone: throughput and collect-less execution are the mechanisms that let policy semantics survive at Spark scale.
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Machine Learning

CiteRadar: A Citation Intelligence Platform for Researcher Profiling and Geographic Visualization

Chenxu Niu and Yiming Sun

Understanding the geographic reach and community structure of one's scholarly citations is increasingly valuable for career development, grant applications, and collaboration discovery – yet accessible tools for answering these questions remain scarce. Existing bibliometric platforms either require costly institutional subscriptions or expose only aggregate citation counts without granular per-author metadata. We present CiteRadar, an open-source system that accepts a single Google Scholar user identifier and automatically produces a structured output folder containing: the author's complete publication list, all retrieved citing papers with enriched author metadata, two ranked author tables (by citation frequency and by h-index), a plain-text statistical summary, and a self-contained interactive HTML world map – all from a single command-line invocation. CiteRadar integrates five heterogeneous data sources – Google Scholar, OpenAlex, CrossRef, Semantic Scholar, and OpenStreetMap Nominatim – through a carefully engineered five-stage pipeline. Key technical contributions include: (1) a Scholar meta-string parser resilient to Unicode non-breaking-space separators, a pervasive but undocumented quirk in Scholar's HTML that silently corrupts venue and year fields when unhandled; (2) a two-stage author disambiguation system using stop-word-filtered institution name similarity to guard against the well-known same-name entity-merging failure mode in bibliometric databases, demonstrated to eliminate h-index attribution errors of up to 9x the correct value; (3) an OpenAlex web-URL to API-URL conversion fix that raises the fraction of author records with city-level location data from 0% to ~60%; and (4) a logarithmically-scaled interactive Folium world map with per-city researcher popups, rendered as a fully self-contained HTML file.
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Machine Learning

Null Measurability at the Symmetrization Interface in VC Learning

Dhruv Gupta

Recent work revisiting measurability in the fundamental theorem of statistical learning imposes Borel measurability of ghost-gap suprema. We show that, at the one-sided ghost-gap interface actually used by the standard symmetrization proof, this requirement is stronger than necessary. For any Borel-parameterized concept class on a Polish domain, the bad event "there exists a hypothesis whose ghost empirical error exceeds its training empirical error by at least {\epsilon}/2" is analytic. By Choquet capacitability, it is therefore measurable in the completion of every finite Borel measure. We then construct a concept class whose bad event is null-measurable but not Borel, giving a strict separation from the Borel supremum condition. Finally, we prove closure under patching, fixed and countable interpolation, and fiber-product amalgamation, showing that the weaker regularity level is stable under natural concept-class constructors. In the realizable setting, where targets belong to the class and are measurable, these results weaken the measurability hypothesis needed by the symmetrization route from finite VC dimension to PAC learnability. The main results and the descriptive-set-theoretic infrastructure used by them are formalized in Lean 4.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from stat.ML

A Finite Time Analysis of Thompson Sampling for Bayesian Optimization with Preferential Feedback

Joseph Lazzaro, Davide Buffelli, Da-shan Shiu et al. (+1 more)

Preference feedback, in the form of pairwise comparisons rather than scalar scores, has seen increasing use in applications such as human-, laboratory-, and expert-in-the-loop design, as well as scientific discovery. We propose a Thompson Sampling (TS) approach to Bayesian optimization with preferential feedback that models comparisons using a monotone link on latent utility differences and leverages the dueling kernel induced by a base kernel. We provide a finite-time analysis showing that the performance of the proposed method matches that of standard TS for conventional Bayesian optimization with scalar feedback. The analysis exploits the anchor invariance of TS for challenger selection and introduces a double-TS pairing variant. We also demonstrate the performance of the method on both synthetic and real-world examples.
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All authors Joseph Lazzaro, Davide Buffelli, Da-shan Shiu, Sattar Vakili

Machine Learning

Dynamic Regret for Online Regression in RKHS via Discounted VAW and Subspace Approximation

Dmitry B. Rokhlin and Georgiy A. Karapetyants

We study online regression with the square loss in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space under a dynamic regret criterion. The learner is compared with a time-varying comparator sequence, and the bounds depend on its path length in the RKHS norm. The proposed method transfers the finite-dimensional discounted Vovk–Azoury–Warmuth approach of Jacobsen & Cutkosky (2024) to the RKHS setting by means of finite-dimensional subspace approximations. For a fixed subspace, we run a VAW-based ensemble of discounted VAW forecasters over a geometric grid of discount factors. The additional approximation error is controlled by the uniform projection error of kernel sections. We then introduce a general orthogonal truncation method: starting from a feature expansion of the kernel, we construct the associated RKHS by introducing an inner product that makes the feature functions orthonormal, and then use the spans of the first basis functions as finite-dimensional approximation spaces. The resulting subspace reduction is applied to several approximation schemes. Explicit feature expansions yield fast-regime bounds for Gaussian and analytic dot-product kernels. Mercer truncations provide a spectral approximation method and lead to dynamic regret bounds in fast and slow regimes, depending on the eigenvalue decay. Finally, we study subspaces spanned by kernel sections and apply this construction to Matérn kernels.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from math.DG

PINNs in More General Geometry

Edward Hirst

Neural architectures trained with losses inspired by differential conditions are the basis for PINN models. Since many constructions in differential geometry may be framed as minimisation of a differential functional, these functionals can be coded as loss functions to align the AI loss-minimisation goal with that of solving the geometric problem. This contribution to the Recent Progress in Computational String Geometry workshop proceedings introduces the PINN architecture defining principles, motivates how they are well suited for problems in differential geometry, and demonstrates their use via summaries of three works at this intersection.
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Machine Learning

Why Search When You Can Transfer? Amortized Agentic Workflow Design from Structural Priors

Shiyi Du, Jiayuan Liu, Weihua Du et al. (+6 more)

Automated agentic workflow design currently relies on per-task iterative search, which is computationally prohibitive and fails to reuse structural knowledge across tasks. We observe that optimized workflows converge to a small family of domain-specific topologies, suggesting that this combinatorial search is largely redundant. Building on this insight, we propose SWIFT (Synthesizing Workflows via Few-shot Transfer), a framework that amortizes workflow design into reusable structural priors. SWIFT first distills compositional heuristics and output-interface contracts from contrastive analysis of prior search trajectories across source tasks. At inference time, it conditions a single LLM generation pass on these priors together with cross-task workflow demonstrations to synthesize a complete, executable workflow for an unseen target task, bypassing iterative search entirely. On five benchmarks, SWIFT outperforms the state-of-the-art search-based method while reducing marginal per-task optimization cost by three orders of magnitude. It further generalizes to four additional unseen benchmarks and transfers successfully from GPT-4o-mini to three additional foundation models (Grok, Qwen, Gemma). Controlled ablations reveal that workflow demonstrations primarily transfer topological structure rather than surface semantics: replacing all operator names with random strings still retains over 93% of the full system's average performance.
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All authors Shiyi Du, Jiayuan Liu, Weihua Du, Yue Huang, Jiayi Li, Yingtao Luo, Xiangliang Zhang, Vincent Conitzer, Carl Kingsford

Machine Learning

Laplace-Bridged Randomized Smoothing for Fast Certified Robustness

Miao Lin, MD Saifur Rahman Mazumder, Feng Yu et al. (+2 more)

Randomized Smoothing (RS) offers formal $\ell_2$ guarantees for arbitrary base classifiers but faces two key practical bottlenecks: (i) it often relies on noise-augmented training to achieve nontrivial certificates, which increases training cost, can reduce clean accuracy, and weakens RS as a genuinely post-hoc defense; and (ii) certification is computationally expensive, typically requiring tens of thousands of noisy forward passes per input, which hinders deployment, especially on resource-constrained edge devices. To address both limitations, we propose Laplace-Bridged Smoothing (LBS), an analytic reformulation of RS that replaces high-dimensional input-space Monte Carlo (MC) sampling with efficient computations in a low-dimensional probability space. LBS preserves formal robustness guarantees without requiring noise-augmented training while substantially reducing certification burden. On CIFAR-10 and ImageNet, LBS attains stronger certified robustness than RS and reduces per-sample certification cost by nearly an order of magnitude. Notably, on NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano and Raspberry Pi 4, LBS achieves speedups of up to $494\times$, enabling practical certified deployment on real-world edge devices. Finally, we provide theoretical justification for the analytic formulation and certificate validity of LBS.
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All authors Miao Lin, MD Saifur Rahman Mazumder, Feng Yu, Daniel Takabi, Rui Ning

Machine Learning

PolyKV: A Shared Asymmetrically-Compressed KV Cache Pool for Multi-Agent LLM Inference

Ishan Patel and Ishan Joshi

We present PolyKV, a system in which multiple concurrent inference agents share a single, asymmetrically compressed KV cache pool. Rather than allocating a separate KV cache per agent – the standard paradigm – PolyKV writes a compressed cache once and injects it into N independent agent contexts via HuggingFace DynamicCache objects. Compression is asymmetric: Keys are quantized at int8 (q8_0) to preserve softmax stability, while Values are compressed using TurboQuant MSE – a Fast Walsh-Hadamard Transform (FWHT) rotation followed by 3-bit Lloyd-Max quantization with centroids tuned to N(0,1). We evaluate across two model scales (SmolLM2-1.7B-Instruct and Llama-3-8B-Instruct), three context lengths (600-7,194 tokens), and up to 15 concurrent agents. PolyKV achieves a stable 2.91x compression ratio across all configurations. On Llama-3-8B with 15 agents sharing a 4K-token context, PolyKV reduces KV cache memory from 19.8 GB to 0.45 GB – a 97.7% reduction – while maintaining only +0.57% perplexity degradation and a mean BERTScore F1 of 0.928. PPL delta does not grow with agent count and improves as context length increases, inverting to -0.26% at 1,851 coherent tokens. To our knowledge, no prior work combines a single shared, lossy-compressed KV pool with multi-reader concurrent agent access.
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Machine Learning

Odysseys: Benchmarking Web Agents on Realistic Long Horizon Tasks

Lawrence Keunho Jang, Jing Yu Koh, Daniel Fried et al. (+1 more)

Existing web agent benchmarks have largely converged on short, single-site tasks that frontier models are approaching saturation on. However, real world web use consists of long-horizon, multi-site workflows. Common web navigation tasks, such as comparing products across different domains, planning trips across multiple services, or summarizing information from multiple search queries, require sustained context and cross-site reasoning over potentially hours of browsing. To capture and evaluate such behaviors, we introduce Odysseys: a benchmark of 200 long-horizon web tasks derived from real world browsing sessions evaluated on the live Internet. We find that binary pass/fail evaluation is inadequate for long-horizon settings and introduce a rubric-based evaluation, annotating each Odysseys task with an average of 6.1 graded rubrics. We demonstrate that this yields higher agreement with humans and provides a more fine-grained signal than commonly used trajectory-level LLM-as-a-judge evaluation metrics. We tested several leading frontier models and find that the strongest models achieve a success rate of 44.5%, which leaves substantial room for future improvements. Beyond task success, we argue that efficiency is a first-class concern for long-horizon agents. We introduce a Trajectory Efficiency metric (rubric score per step) and find that even frontier agents achieve only 1.15%, marking an evident need for agents that can succeed efficiently and not simply eventually. Odysseys isolates the critical evaluation of long-horizon proficiency in open-web environments, providing a realistic benchmark to measure progress towards computer-use agents that can potentially productively operate for hours. We release our tasks, evaluation scripts, and other results at https://odysseys-website.pages.dev
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All authors Lawrence Keunho Jang, Jing Yu Koh, Daniel Fried, Ruslan Salakhutdinov

Machine Learning

CoreFlow: Low-Rank Matrix Generative Models

Dongze Wu, Linglingzhi Zhu and Yao Xie

Learning matrix-valued distributions from high-dimensional and possibly incomplete training data is challenging: ambient-space generative modeling is computationally expensive and statistically fragile when the matrix dimension is large but the sample size is limited. We propose CoreFlow, a geometry-preserving low-rank flow model that learns shared row/column subspaces across the matrix distribution, and then trains a continuous normalizing flow only on the induced low-dimensional core. CoreFlow is designed for settings where shared low-rank matrix geometry is present, especially in high-dimensional limited-sample regimes. This separates shared matrix geometry from sample-specific variation, preserves matrix structure, and substantially improves training efficiency. The same framework also handles incomplete training matrices through masked Riemannian updates and iterative completion. Across real and synthetic benchmarks, CoreFlow substantially improves spectral and moment-level generation quality in few-sample regimes while remaining competitive in data-rich settings, even under compression to 9% of the ambient dimension and with up to 40% missing training entries.
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Machine Learning

Compute Aligned Training: Optimizing for Test Time Inference

Adam Ousherovitch and Ambuj Tewari

Scaling test-time compute has emerged as a powerful mechanism for enhancing Large Language Model (LLM) performance. However, standard post-training paradigms, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL), optimize the likelihood of individual samples under a base policy, creating a misalignment with test time procedures that rely on aggregated or filtered outputs. In this work, we propose Compute Aligned Training, which aligns training objectives with test-time strategies. By conceptualizing inference strategies as operators on the base policy, we derive new loss functions that maximize performance when said strategies are applied. We instantiate such loss functions for SFT and RL across common test time strategies. Finally, we provide empirical evidence that this training method substantially improves test time scaling over standard training.
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Machine Learning

Nemotron 3 Nano Omni: Efficient and Open Multimodal Intelligence

NVIDIA: Amala Sanjay Deshmukh, Kateryna Chumachenko, Tuomas Rintamaki et al. (+214 more)

We introduce Nemotron 3 Nano Omni, the latest model in the Nemotron multimodal series and the first to natively support audio inputs alongside text, images, and video. Nemotron 3 Nano Omni delivers consistent accuracy improvements over its predecessor, Nemotron Nano V2 VL, across all modalities, enabled by advances in architecture, training data and recipes. In particular, Nemotron 3 delivers leading results in real-world document understanding, long audio-video comprehension, and agentic computer use. Built on the highly efficient Nemotron 3 Nano 30B-A3B backbone, Nemotron 3 Nano Omni further incorporates innovative multimodal token-reduction techniques to deliver substantially lower inference latency and higher throughput than other models of similar size. We are releasing model checkpoints in BF16, FP8, and FP4 formats, along with portions of the training data and codebase to facilitate further research and development.
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All authors NVIDIA: Amala Sanjay Deshmukh, Kateryna Chumachenko, Tuomas Rintamaki, Matthieu Le, Tyler Poon, Danial Mohseni Taheri, Ilia Karmanov, Guilin Liu, Jarno Seppanen, Arushi Goel, Mike Ranzinger, Greg Heinrich, Guo Chen, Lukas Voegtle, Philipp Fischer, Timo Roman, Karan Sapra, Collin McCarthy, Shaokun Zhang, Fuxiao Liu, Hanrong Ye, Yi Dong, Mingjie Liu, Yifan Peng, Piotr Zelasko, Zhehuai Chen, Nithin Rao Koluguri, Nune Tadevosyan, Lilit Grigoryan, Ehsan Hosseini Asl, Pritam Biswas, Leili Tavabi, Yuanhang Su, Zhiding Yu, Peter Jin, Alexandre Milesi, Netanel Haber, Yao Xu, Sarah Amiraslani, Nabin Mulepati, Eric Tramel, Jaehun Jung, Ximing Lu, Brandon Cui, Jin Xu, Zhiqi Li, Shihao Wang, Yuanguo Kuang, Shaokun Zhang, Huck Yang, Boyi Li, Hongxu Yin, Song Han, Bilal Kartal, Pavlo Molchanov, Adi Renduchintala, Charles Wang, David Mosallanezhad, Soumye Singhal, Luis Vega, Katherine Cheung, Sreyan Ghosh, Yian Zhang, Alexander Bukharin, Venkat Srinivasan, Johnny Greco, Andre Manoel, Maarten Van Segbroeck, Suseella Panguliri, Rohit Watve, Divyanshu Kakwani, Shubham Pachori, Jeffrey Glick, Radha Sri-Tharan, Aileen Zaman, Khanh Nguyen, Shi Chen, Jiaheng Fang, Qing Miao, Wenfei Zhou, Yu Wang, Zaid Pervaiz Bhat, Varun Praveen, Arihant Jain, Ramanathan Arunachalam, Tomasz Kornuta, Ashton Sharabiani, Amy Shen, Wei Huang, Yi-Fu Wu, Ali Roshan Ghias, Huiying Li, Brian Yu, Nima Tajbakhsh, Chen Cui, Wenwen Gao, Li Ding, Terry Kong, Manoj Kilaru, Anahita Bhiwandiwalla, Marek Wawrzos, Daniel Korzekwa, Pablo Ribalta, Grzegorz Chlebus, Besmira Nushi, Ewa Dobrowolska, Maciej Jakub Mikulski, Kunal Dhawan, Steve Huang, Jagadeesh Balam, Yongqiang Wang, Nikolay Karpov, Valentin Mendelev, George Zelenfroynd, Meline Mkrtchyan, Qing Miao, Omri Almog, Bhavesh Pawar, Rameshwar Shivbhakta, Sudeep Sabnis, Ashrton Sharabiani, Negar Habibi, Geethapriya Venkataramani, Pamela Peng, Prerit Rodney, Serge Panev, Richard Mazzarese, Nicky Liu, Michael Fukuyama, Andrii Skliar, Roger Waleffe, Duncan Riach, Yunheng Zou, Jian Hu, Hao Zhang, Binfeng Xu, Yuhao Yang, Zuhair Ahmed, Alexandre Milesi, Carlo del Mundo, Chad Voegele, Zhiyu Cheng, Nave Assaf, Andrii Skliar, Daniel Afrimi, Natan Bagrov, Ran Zilberstein, Ofri Masad, Eugene Khvedchenia, Natan Bagrov, Borys Tymchenko, Tomer Asida, Daniel Afrimi, Parth Mannan, Victor Cui, Michael Evans, Katherine Luna, Jie Lou, Pinky Xu, Guyue Huang, Negar Habibi, Michael Boone, Pradeep Thalasta, Adeola Adesoba, Dina Yared, Christopher Parisien, Leon Derczynski, Shaona Ghosh, Wes Feely, Micah Schaffer, Radha Sri-Tharan, Jeffrey Glick, Barnaby Simkin, George Zelenfroynd, Tomasz Grzegorzek, Rishabh Garg, Aastha Jhunjhunwala, Sergei Kolchenko, Farzan Memarian, Haran Kumar, Shiv Kumar, Isabel Hulseman, Anjali Shah, Kari Briski, Padmavathy Subramanian, Joey Conway, Udi Karpas, Jane Polak Scowcroft, Annie Surla, Shilpa Ammireddy, Ellie Evans, Jesse Oliver, Tom Balough, Chia-Chih Chen, Sandip Bhaskar, Alejandra Rico, Bardiya Sadeghi, Seph Mard, Katherine Cheung, Meredith Price, Laya Sleiman, Saori Kaji, Wesley Helmholz, Wendy Quan, Michael Lightstone, Jonathan Cohen, Jian Zhang, Oleksii Kuchaiev, Boris Ginsburg, Jan Kautz, Eileen Long, Mohammad Shoeybi, Mostofa Patwary, Oluwatobi Olabiyi, Andrew Tao, Bryan Catanzaro, Udi Karpas

Machine Learning

Rethinking Layer Redundancy: Calibration Matters More Than Search in LLM Depth Pruning

Minkyu Kim, Vincent-Daniel Yun, Youngrae Kim et al. (+3 more)

Depth pruning improves the inference efficiency of large language models by removing Transformer blocks. Prior work typically treats layer redundancy as an inherent structural property of pretrained networks, emphasizing importance criteria and search algorithms to identify removable layers. In this study, we empirically investigate depth pruning from a functional perspective. Evaluating representative LLM families across diverse calibration configurations and multiple search algorithms, we show that different configurations produce different pruning patterns. Furthermore, under a fixed calibration configuration, complex search algorithms yield marginal performance improvements over simple one-shot methods, converging to similar pruned subsets. Overall, our results suggest that the calibration configuration plays a substantially larger role than the choice of search algorithm in shaping pruning patterns and calibration perplexity, while contributing comparably to variance in downstream reasoning accuracy. This indicates that future pruning efforts may benefit from prioritizing the calibration configuration over search complexity.
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All authors Minkyu Kim, Vincent-Daniel Yun, Youngrae Kim, Suin Cho, Woosang Lim, Sunwoo Lee

Machine Learning

A Unifying Framework for Unsupervised Concept Extraction

Chandler Squires and Pradeep Ravikumar

Techniques for concept extraction, such as sparse autoencoders and transcoders, aim to extract high-level symbolic concepts from low-level nonsymbolic representations. When these extracted concepts are used for downstream tasks such as model steering and unlearning, it is essential to understand their guarantees, or lack thereof. In this work, we present a unified theoretical framework for unsupervised concept extraction, in which we frame the task of concept extraction as identifying a generative model. We present a general meta-theorem for identifiability, which reduces the problem of establishing identifiability guarantees to the problem of characterizing the intersection of two sets. As we demonstrate on a range of widely-used approaches, this meta-theorem substantially simplifies the task of proving such guarantees, thus paving the way for the development of new, principled approaches for concept extraction.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.CR

CAN-QA: A Question-Answering Benchmark for Reasoning over In-Vehicle CAN Traffic

Jing Chen, Abhijay Deevi, Onat Gungor et al. (+1 more)

The Controller Area Network (CAN) is a safety-critical in-vehicle communication protocol that lacks built-in security mechanisms, making intrusion detection essential. Existing approaches predominantly formulate CAN intrusion detection as a classification task, mapping complex traffic patterns to attack labels. However, this formulation abstracts away the temporal and relational structure of CAN traffic and misaligns with real-world forensic workflows, which require systematic reasoning about traffic behavior. To address this gap, we introduce CAN-QA, the first benchmark that reformulates CAN traffic analysis as a question-answering (QA) task. CAN-QA converts raw CAN logs into temporally segmented windows and applies deterministic rule-based templates to generate natural-language questions paired with automatically derived ground-truth answers. The resulting dataset comprises 33,128 QA pairs across 10 categories, each targeting distinct semantic and temporal properties of CAN traffic. Using CAN-QA, we evaluate large language models across both True/False and multiple-choice formats. Our results indicate that, although these models capture superficial statistical regularities, they struggle with temporal reasoning, multi-condition inference, and higher-level behavioral interpretation. Our code is available at https://github.com/Kriiiiss/CAN-QA.
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All authors Jing Chen, Abhijay Deevi, Onat Gungor, Tajana Rosing

Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.CL

Large Language Models Explore by Latent Distilling

Yuanhao Zeng, Ao Lu, Lufei Li et al. (+3 more)

Generating diverse responses is crucial for test-time scaling of large language models (LLMs), yet standard stochastic sampling mostly yields surface-level lexical variation, limiting semantic exploration. In this paper, we propose Exploratory Sampling (ESamp), a decoding approach that explicitly encourages semantic diversity during generation. ESamp is motivated by the well-known observation that neural networks tend to make lower-error predictions on inputs similar to those encountered before, and incur higher prediction error on novel ones. Building on this property, we train a lightweight Distiller at test time to predict deep-layer hidden representations of the LLM from its shallow-layer representations to model the LLM's depth-wise representation transitions. During decoding, the Distiller continuously adapts to the mappings induced by the current generation context. ESamp uses the prediction error as a novelty signal to reweight candidate token extensions conditioned on the current prefix, thereby biasing decoding toward less-explored semantic patterns. ESamp is implemented with an asynchronous training–inference pipeline, with less than 5% worst case overhead (1.2% in the optimized release). Empirical results show that ESamp significantly boosts the Pass@k efficiency of reasoning models, showing superior or comparable performance to strong stochastic and heuristic baselines. Notably, ESamp achieves robust generalization across mathematics, science, and code generation benchmarks and breaks the trade-off between diversity and coherence in creative writing. Our code has released at: https://github.com/LinesHogan/tLLM.
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All authors Yuanhao Zeng, Ao Lu, Lufei Li, Zheng Zhang, Yexin Li, Kan Ren

Machine Learning

Generative diffusion models for spatiotemporal influenza forecasting

Joseph Lemaitre and Justin Lessler

Forecasting infectious disease incidence can provide important information to guide public health planning, yet it is difficult because epidemic dynamics are complex. Current mechanistic and statistical approaches often struggle to capture multimodal uncertainty or emergent trends. Influpaint adapts denoising diffusion probabilistic models to epidemic forecasting. By encoding influenza seasons as spatiotemporal images in which pixel intensity represents incidence, Influpaint learns a rich distribution of disease dynamics from a hybrid dataset of surveillance and simulated trajectories. Forecasting is formulated as a conditional generation (inpainting) task from partial observations. We show that Influpaint generates realistic, diverse epidemic trajectories and achieves forecast accuracy that is competitive with leading ensemble methods in retrospective evaluation. In real-time evaluation during the 2023–2025 U.S. CDC FluSight challenges, performance improved substantially across seasons, with highly accurate but somewhat overconfident projections in 2023–2025. The best performance was achieved with a training dataset containing 30% surveillance and 70% simulated trajectories. These results show that diffusion models can capture important spatiotemporal structure in influenza dynamics and provide a flexible framework for probabilistic infectious disease forecasting.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from quant-ph

Data-Driven Hamiltonian Reduction for Superconducting Qubits via Meta-Learning

Arielle Sanford, Andrew T. Kamen, Frederic T. Chong et al. (+1 more)

We introduce HAML (Hamiltonian Adaptation via Meta-Learning), a framework for fast online adaptation of effective Hamiltonian models of superconducting quantum processors. HAML proceeds in two phases. A supervised training phase uses an ensemble of simulated devices to learn an offline map from control inputs and device parameters to effective Hamiltonian coefficients. An online adaptation phase then uses a small number of hardware-accessible measurements to identify the unknown parameters of a new device. By training directly against effective two-qubit coefficients extracted from full multi-mode simulations, HAML implicitly learns the reduction from full multi-mode Hamiltonians to effective qubit descriptions without invoking perturbation theory. We further show that a variance-maximizing greedy selection of measurement configurations boosts online adaptation efficiency. We demonstrate HAML on a transmon-coupler-transmon system, recovering effective two-qubit coefficients across a wide range of operating regimes, including parameter regions where Schrieffer-Wolff perturbation theory (SWPT) breaks down. This establishes a scalable, sample-efficient approach to Hamiltonian reduction and characterization for near-term quantum processors, with direct implications for calibration, control, and error mitigation.
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All authors Arielle Sanford, Andrew T. Kamen, Frederic T. Chong, Andy J. Goldschmidt

Machine Learning

Learning with Embedded Linear Equality Constraints via Variational Bayesian Inference

Matthew Marsh, Benoît Chachuat and Antonio del Rio Chanona

Machine Learning is becoming more prevalent in science and engineering, but many approaches do not provide meaningful uncertainty estimates and predictions may also violate known physical knowledge. We propose a Bayesian framework to embed linear relationships across inputs and outputs into the learning process, whilst characterizing full predictive uncertainty over both the model parameters and the domain knowledge. We evaluated our method on learning the single particle battery model subject to voltage and energy balances, showing its ability to provide reduced credible intervals and constraint violations compared to standard Bayesian neural networks based on variational inference.
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Machine Learning

Contrastive Image-Metadata Pre-Training for Materials Transmission Electron Microscopy

Georgia Channing, Debora Keller, Marta D. Rossell et al. (+3 more)

The transmission electron microscope facilitates the highest-resolution imaging of any instrument ever created, and its limiting factor is no longer spatial resolution but dose efficiency. Low electron doses avoid sample damage but produce noisy images for which, unlike in classical computer vision, there is no ground truth. Autonomous materials experimentation poses a related problem, since closed-loop instruments need representations grounded in the microscope state at acquisition. Both demand representations grounded in how an image was acquired. We release 7,330 paired high-angle annular dark-field scanning-TEM (HAADF-STEM) images and their seven-dimensional acquisition metadata, and propose Contrastive Image-Metadata Pre-training (CIMP), a CLIP-style encoder that aligns the two modalities and reaches 84.4% Top-1 cross-modal retrieval on a held-out split. All seven parameters are individually recoverable from the frozen visual embedding through a linear probe, and we use the embedding to condition a metadata-conditioned style-transfer model that re-renders experimental images under different acquisition parameters. Virtually scaling dwell time and beam current of low-dose images turns this model into a physics-informed denoiser; in a blind user study, experimental microscopists prefer it over the current state-of-the-art denoiser for STEM imagery on 70.2% of trials.
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All authors Georgia Channing, Debora Keller, Marta D. Rossell, Philip Torr, Stig Helveg, Henrik Eliasson

Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.RO

An analysis of sensor selection for fruit picking with suction-based grippers

Eva Krueger, Marcus Rosette and Joseph R. Davidson

Robotic fruit harvesting often fails to reliably detect whether a fruit has been successfully picked, limiting efficiency and increasing crop damage. This problem is difficult due to compliant fruit and grippers, variable stem attachment, and occlusions in orchard environments. Prior work has explored vision-based perception and multi-sensor learning approaches for pick state estimation. However, minimal sensor sets and phase-dependent sensing strategies for accurate pick and slip detection remain largely unexplored. In this work, we design and evaluate a multimodal sensing suite integrated into a compliant suction-based apple gripper. Our approach is unique because it identifies which sensors are most informative at different phases of the pick, enabling predictive detection of failures before they occur. The contributions of this paper are a phase-dependent evaluation of multimodal sensors and the identification of minimal sensor sets for reliable pick state classification. Experiments in a real apple orchard show that Random Forest and Multilayer Perceptron classifiers detect successful picks and impending failures with over 90% accuracy, and Random Forest predicts pick/slip events within 0.09 s of human-annotated ground truth.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.RO

VISION-SLS: Safe Perception-Based Control from Learned Visual Representations via System Level Synthesis

Antoine P. Leeman, Shuyu Zhan, Melanie N. Zeilinger et al. (+1 more)

We propose VISION-SLS, a method for nonlinear output-feedback control from high-resolution RGB images which provides robust constraint satisfaction guarantees under calibrated uncertainty bounds despite partial observability, sensor noise, and nonlinear dynamics. To enable scalability while retaining guarantees, we propose: (i) a learned low-dimensional observation map from pretrained visual features with state-dependent error bounds, and (ii) a causal affine time-varying output-feedback policy optimized via System Level Synthesis (SLS). We develop a scalable, novel solver for the resulting nonconvex program that leverages sequential convex programming coupled with efficient Riccati recursions. On two simulated visuomotor tasks (a 4D car and a 10D quadrotor) with >= 512 x 512 pixels and a 59D humanoid task with partial observability, our method enables safe, information-gathering behavior that reduces uncertainty while guaranteeing constraint satisfaction with empirically-calibrated error bounds. We also validate our method on hardware, safely controlling a ground vehicle from onboard images, outperforming baselines in safety rate and solve times. Together, these results show that learned visual abstractions coupled with an efficient solver make SLS-based safe visuomotor output-feedback practical at scale. The code implementation of our method is available at https://github.com/trustworthyrobotics/VISION-SLS.
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All authors Antoine P. Leeman, Shuyu Zhan, Melanie N. Zeilinger, Glen Chou