Papers

The U.S. financial system processes approximately 1.3 million interbank transactions daily, yet no system in the reviewed literature models fraud propagation across the interbank network using fraud co-occurrence edge features. Prior interbank GNN architectures model credit contagion using credit distress supervision signals, producing systems misaligned for fraud forensics. No existing system generates SAR narratives with per-assertion forensic traceability to specific numerical detection outputs, creating regulatory auditability gaps in FinCEN-submitted reports. This paper introduces SCAFDS (Systemic Contagion-Aware Fraud Detection System), a seven-stage integrated surveillance pipeline addressing five structural limitations of prior art: (1) fraud-specific interbank topology encoding using fraud co-occurrence frequency metrics f(u,v,t) derived from FinCEN SAR registry records; (2) edge-feature-informed graph attention where coefficients are computed from both node representations and fraud co-occurrence edge features; (3) bilinear fraud co-occurrence risk fusion producing institution-level systemic fraud risk scores; (4) attribution-conditioned SAR narrative generation with per-assertion significance thresholds ensuring each FinCEN SAR assertion is traceable to a specific numerical pipeline output; and (5) topology-aware adaptive forensic feedback updating graph attention weights from regulatory dispositions. Experiments on the IEEE-CIS Fraud Detection Dataset (590,540 transactions) and a synthetic FDIC-aligned interbank network (8,103 institutions, 169,800 edges) show SCAFDS achieves AUPRC=0.515+/-0.032 and AUROC=0.802+/-0.018, representing +15.9pp and +13.7pp improvements over GraphSAGE-AML. Partial validation on FDIC enforcement action records (n=4,279) confirms consistent model ranking. USPTO Provisional Patent Application No. 64/061,083, filed May 8, 2026.

Any system that models the world under finite representational capacity must compress; any compression entails a prior; and the prior is the system's bias. What has not been established is whether uncertainty participates in the dynamics governing future behavior, or merely describes the output distribution without consequence. We introduce a structural distinction between descriptive uncertainty, which does not recursively modulate the system's policy, and regulatory uncertainty, which directly enters the optimization landscape and drives persistent adaptive restructuring. We prove formally that current transformer architectures are confined to descriptive uncertainty at inference. We ground this in thermodynamics via Landauer's principle: for uncertainty to be regulatory, epistemic error must cost real energy; in a decoupled system, hallucinations and correct derivations dissipate identical energy. We test this empirically across three locally-deployed language models (3B, 8B, 70B parameters). Token-level Shannon entropy is statistically invariant across tasks spanning pattern retrieval, causal operator application, and out-of-distribution causal generalization in all three models (all pairwise p >= 0.568; within-model ranges 0.011-0.028 nats), while task accuracy varies substantially across the same conditions (0%-100%). Entropy and accuracy are orthogonal. The decoupling is scale-invariant: larger models achieve higher accuracy but identical entropy flatness. This structural incapacity is not resolvable by additional parameters or training data. Genuine epistemic grounding requires physical coupling between thermodynamic substrate state and information processing cost.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) remain critically vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Existing post-training detectors often require clean or surrogate data, gradients, or iterative trigger reconstruction, leading to high computational costs and limited robustness under practical model-auditing scenarios. In this paper, we propose HTell, a fast and lightweight data-free backdoor detector based on head random probing. Instead of reconstructing diverse trigger patterns, HTell inspects their unified manifestation in the prediction head: backdoored models tend to exhibit abnormal response concentration on the target class under random latent probes. HTell generates architecture-aware random latent probes, feeds them directly into the model head, and detects backdoors by analyzing class-wise response statistics, without accessing real or surrogate data, model gradients, or parameter optimization. We evaluate HTell on a large-scale benchmark containing more than 6,000 backdoored models and over 700 clean models, covering 4 datasets, 14 architectures, and 21 types of backdoor attacks. HTell achieves 99.03% true positive rate and 2.11% false positive rate with only 12.69 ms/model detection latency, reducing the time cost by over 30,000$\times$ compared with representative gradient-based detectors. These results demonstrate that head random probing provides an accurate, robust, and efficient solution for large-scale data-free backdoor model auditing.

Neural operators have emerged as a powerful, discretization-invariant framework for solving partial differential equations (PDEs). Although established approaches like the Deep Operator Network (DeepONet) have successfully achieved universal approximation for operators, and architectures such as Fourier Neural Operators (FNOs) have shown algebraic convergence rates, a precise theoretical connection between the continuous theory and its discrete numerical implementation remains a challenge. Specifically, the relationship between the continuous formulation and the discrete numerical stability has yet to be fully explored. In this paper, we address this gap by establishing theoretical guarantees for the discretization error and stability of neural operator approximation schemes. We prove analytical bounds that link solution regularity to input discretization, providing a formal quantification of neural operator accuracy under real-world numerical constraints. We derive these bounds to the specific cases of State Space Model-based Neural Operators (SS-NOs) and FNOs, thus providing a new discretization error theorem for these models. Additionally, through an input-to-state stability (ISS) analysis, we formally assess the impact of discretization on the stability of SS-NOs results obtained in the continuous domain. Our empirical experiments on 1D and 2D benchmarks validate our theoretical bounds and show the robustness of SS-NOs under varying resolutions.

Model merging consolidates independently fine-tuned checkpoints without joint training or access to task data. Dynamic methods retain task-specific capacity, but must divide a limited storage budget between shared and expert parameters. We propose DiDi-Merging, which jointly allocates low-rank capacity to these components through differentiable rank selection, followed by data-free parameter-space refinement. On the eight-task ViT-B/32 benchmark, the small configuration reaches 89.3% average accuracy (98.7% normalized retention) at 1.24x the storage of one backbone, including that backbone; the medium configuration reaches 89.8% at 1.4x. Removing refinement reduces the medium configuration by 4.3 percentage points, while static-merge plus uniform-recovery controls are 4.7-8.9 points below the small configuration. Additional evaluations cover language and multimodal models at their separately reported budgets. The main results assume known task identity; practical routing and accuracy under larger task counts at fixed capacity remain distinct evaluation questions. Code is available at https://github.com/WanyuGroup/NeurIPS2026-DiDi-Merging.

Vision-Language Models in Continual Learning (VLM-CL) aim to continuously adapt to new multimodal tasks while retaining prior knowledge. The emerging paradigm that couples Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) with Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) calls for a new pattern to guide continual adaptation. Advances in reasoning capability now make it feasible to impose constraints at the reasoning level. We formalize portability, a sample-level measure of how reusable the previous policy's behavior is on a new task, and empirically show that reasoning-level signals remain reliable on out-of-distribution samples while answer-level signals do not. We instantiate this as Reasoning Portability (RP) and propose Reasoning-based Dynamic Balance Continual Learning (RDB-CL), which modulates the per-sample Kullback-Leibler regularization in RLVR according to RP: a tight anchor preserves reusable reasoning on high-RP samples, while a relaxed anchor on low-RP samples permits exploration of new reasoning pathways. Experiments show that RDB-CL consistently outperforms baselines, improving Last accuracy by +12.0% over the vanilla RLVR baseline.

Neural channel decoder, as a data-driven channel decoding strategy, has shown very promising improvement on error-correcting capability over the classical methods. However, the success of those deep learning-based decoder comes at the cost of drastically increased model storage and computational complexity, hindering their practical adoptions in real-world time-sensitive resource-sensitive communication and storage systems. To address this challenge, we propose an efficient variational diffusion model-based channel decoder, which effectively integrates the domain-specific belief propagation process to the modern diffusion model. By reaping the low-cost benefits of belief propagation and strong learning capability of diffusion model, our proposed neural decoder simultaneously achieves very low cost and high error-correcting performance. Experimental results show that, compared with the state-of-the-art neural channel decoders, our model provides a feasible solution for practical deployment via achieving the best decoding performance with significantly reduced computational cost and model size.

One of the main causes of death around the globe is malaria. Researchers have sought to develop predictive models for malaria outbreaks based on meteorological data, climate data and the breeding cycle of Plasmodium, the causative agent of malaria. This study predicts the severity of malaria based on environmental and biological factors. A logistic regression model was developed in this study to predict the severity of malaria based on such factors as sickle cell disease, stagnant water, garbage dump, wet lawns, and the use of treated mosquito nets, with an 83.3% accuracy rate. The study was carried out in the Bosomtwe District of Ghana with 417 respondents. It was deduced that although children in the District are highly prone to malaria infection, the severity is very low. The study recommends that not just having a good sample size alone is important during machine learning model development, but also having a good sample representation of the various class labels is equally important.

Generative LLM-based recommenders (LLM-Rec) require continual post-deployment updates, yet deployment logs provide only policy-shaped contextual bandit feedback: outcomes are observed solely for items exposed by a prior serving policy, inducing exposure bias and yielding partial, asymmetric signals consisting of relatively reliable positive responses and ambiguous no-responses. We propose an Anchored Bandit Policy Optimization (ABPO) framework for continual LLM-Rec updates that combines group-relative policy optimization (GRPO) with explicit treatment of exposure bias and feedback ambiguity. Specifically, we insert the exposed recommendation as a logged anchor into each GRPO rollout group, so that group-relative normalization is calibrated against the action actually exposed by the prior policy rather than against newly sampled rollouts alone. Because both positive- and no-responses are observed only through prior-policy exposure, we apply self-normalized inverse propensity scoring to the fixed anchor for both feedback types to correct for policy mismatch. At the same time, we treat the two feedback types asymmetrically in reliability: positive responses provide relatively direct endorsement signals, whereas no-responses remain ambiguous because they may reflect either true disinterest or unobserved external factors. To avoid overly aggressive updates from ambiguous no-responses, we temper their penalties with self-certainty, using the model's output-token confidence as a verifier-free reliability signal. Across five domains from Amazon Reviews and MovieLens, our method yields consistent post-update gains in recommendation accuracy while mitigating prior-policy-induced exposure bias more effectively than prior baselines.

We apply the Weibull distribution – a two-parameter family from extreme-value theory – as a diagnostic framework for element-wise weight magnitude distributions in transformers. At initialization, i.i.d. Gaussian weights give |w| ~ HalfNormal, yielding k ~ 1.20 via middle-80% probability-plot fit (the protocol used throughout this work). This anchor makes k a principled, architecture-independent measuring stick for training dynamics; fitting each weight matrix independently at every layer at every checkpoint enables per-component, per-layer, and per-step diagnostics that aggregate statistics cannot resolve. Applying this framework to 12 model entries spanning 7 architectural families (Pythia, OLMo-1/2, LLaMA-3, Mistral, Qwen2.5/3) reveals three findings. First, FFN modules and the attention output projection W_o – the Transmission Class – fall in a narrow k band: median terminal k in [1.186, 1.204] across 12 entries (cross-family CV = 0.51%), shared across SwiGLU/GeLU activations, Pre-LN/QK-Norm placements, and 70M-14B sizes. Second, the attention input projections W_q, W_k – the Selection Class – depart from the Weibull family, with severity shaped by storage: separately-stored Q/K (OLMo-1, OLMo-2) yields k in [0.76, 0.99] (deep); GQA models yield k in [1.10, 1.16] (mild); Pythia's merged W_qkv occupies a transitional zone tracking training budget T/tau monotonically. Third, lambda grows substantially during training and scales with sqrt(eta/lambda_wd) within the Pythia family (Pearson r = 0.94, three Transmission kinds), directionally consistent with Fan et al. (2025). The two parameters carry independent information: k labels the functional class, lambda labels training progress. We release npm-weibull-py v0.4 (Python library) and DATABASE_v9_1 at https://github.com/tiexinding/NPM-Weibull-public .

Intracranial EEG (iEEG) provides high-fidelity neural recordings essential for clinical and brain-computer interface applications, but acquiring these signals requires invasive surgery. While recent studies have attempted to estimate iEEG from non-invasive scalp EEG, most rely on patient-specific models, creating a circular dependency: if surgery is required to collect training data, the non-invasive model offers limited practical benefit. In this study, we address the challenge of cross-subject iEEG reconstruction by predicting intracranial signals for unseen patients using models trained on other individuals. We propose CAST (Cross-Attention Spatial-Temporal Transformer), a machine learning framework that translates scalp EEG into multi-channel iEEG waveforms through a two-stage transfer learning strategy. First, a temporal encoder extracts multi-scale neural representations at three different resolutions. Then, because electrode placements vary substantially across patients, a channel-aware decoder is calibrated using only a few minutes of data from the target subject. We evaluated the proposed method using leave-one-subject-out cross-validation on two public datasets comprising 1,282 iEEG channels. Experimental results demonstrate that CAST reconstructs cortical signals located near the scalp surface substantially better than deep subcortical activity. In highly observable sensorimotor regions, the model achieved peak correlations of up to r=0.864 in the precentral gyrus. Furthermore, with a channel selection strategy, CAST obtained a mean correlation of r=0.545 on viable subjects, outperforming previous within-subject baselines. These findings indicate that cortical iEEG signals can be reconstructed for unseen subjects from scalp EEG without extensive patient-specific training, and that only a brief calibration phase is sufficient to adapt the model to new hardware configurations.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are powerful tools for learning from graph-structured data, but their scalability is increasingly strained by the size of real-world graphs in domains like recommender systems, fraud detection, and molecular biology. Graph condensation – the task of generating a smaller synthetic graph that retains the performance of models trained on the original – has emerged as a promising solution. However, the dominant approach of gradient matching introduces a fundamental contradiction: it requires training on the full dataset to create the compressed version, thereby undermining the goal of efficiency. Worse still, these methods suffer from high computational overhead, poor generalization across GNN architectures, and brittle reliance on specific model configurations. Equally concerning is the community's reliance on misleading evaluation protocols such as node compression ratios, which fail to reflect true resource savings, condensation overhead, and illusory application to neural architecture search. These shortcomings are not incidental – they are systemic, and they obstruct meaningful progress. In this position paper, we argue that graph condensation, in its current form, needs a reset. We call for moving beyond full-dataset training and model-dependent design, and instead advocate for methods that are lightweight, architecture-agnostic, and practically deployable. By identifying key methodological flaws and outlining concrete research directions, we aim to reorient the field toward approaches that deliver on the true promise of condensation: efficient, generalizable, and usable GNN training at scale.

Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative learning of computer vision models, where privacy and regulatory constraints prevent centralizing data across devices or organizations. However, practical FL deployments often exhibit severe class imbalance and label skew, causing standard aggregation protocols to overfit dominant clients and degrade minority-class performance. We propose a data-free, class-wise contribution estimation and aggregation framework based on logit maximization (CELM) that does not require sharing raw data, client metadata, or auxiliary public datasets. The FL server probes client updates to obtain class-wise evidence scores and assembles a cross-client evidence matrix, which quantifies both per-class competence and class coverage. Using this matrix, we compute contribution weights that upweight clients providing strong, discriminative evidence for underrepresented classes. The resulting aggregation is stable due to simplex constraints and momentum smoothing, and it remains compatible with standard FL training pipelines. We evaluate the approach on representative vision benchmarks under controlled non-IID and pathological label splits, demonstrating that CELM-based aggregation improves robustness to imbalance and statistical heterogeneity, while yielding better performance without requiring any additional data exchange.

Evaluations of unlearning on reasoning models sometimes show a bypass pattern. The answer side looks unlearned, but the model's own thinking trace keeps emitting the forgotten content, and the gap is taken as evidence that the weights still remember. We audit this reading on DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B with LoRA-memorized fictional authors and NPO unlearning, conditioned on a six-token canary head. On one seed, swapping the thinking trace for a short non-canary prefill on the same weights drops the answer rate by as much as the bypass gap itself, whether the prefill mimics the training template or not. On a second seed the bypass gap shrinks rather than vanishing, and the prefill swap reverses direction and brings the answer rate to ceiling. A positive parser-split bypass gap thus does not by itself identify hidden weight-level memorization, and does not rule it out either. On a different distillate the same metric flips sign because the parser cannot find the closing tag. We recommend a decode-time template swap as a cheap sanity check alongside the canonical audit.

The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) as autonomous economic agents introduces systemic risks that extend beyond individual capability failures. As agents transition to directly interacting with marketplaces, their collective behavior can amplify volatility and mask deception at scale. We introduce the Agent Bazaar, a multi-agent simulation framework for evaluating Economic Alignment, the capacity of agentic systems to preserve market stability and integrity. We identify two failure modes: (1) Algorithmic Instability in a B2C market ("The Crash"), where firms amplify price volatility until the market collapses, and (2) Sybil Deception in a C2C market ("The Lemon Market"), where a single deceptive agent controlling multiple coordinated seller identities floods the market with fraudulent listings, eroding trust and consumer welfare. We evaluate frontier and open-weight models across both scenarios and find that models largely fail to self-regulate, with failure severity varying by model rather than by size. We propose economically aligned harnesses, Stabilizing Firms and Skeptical Guardians, that improve outcomes but remain fragile under harder market conditions. To close this gap, we train agents with REINFORCE++ using an adaptive curriculum, producing a 9B model that outperforms all evaluated frontier and open-weight models. We propose the Economic Alignment Score (EAS), a 4-component scalar metric aggregating stability, integrity, welfare, and profitability, enabling direct cross-model comparison. Our results show that economic alignment is orthogonal to general capability and can be directly trained with targeted RL.

Structure-based drug design has been accelerated by pocket-aware 3D generative models, yet most methods primarily fit the training distribution and may fall short of satisfying multiple properties required in real-world therapeutic drug discovery. Recently, increasing attention has focused on structure-based molecule optimization (SBMO), which targets fine-grained control over multiple specified molecular properties. In this paper, we present DEPPA, a novel SBMO approach building upon Denoising Diffusion Policy Optimization for fine-tuning a pre-trained pocket-aware diffusion model via reinforcement learning. DEPPA enables optimization over multiple properties, including binding affinity, drug-likeness, synthesizability and diversity. We formulate the reverse denoising process of the pretrained pocket-aware diffusion model as a multi-step Markov Decision Process, where the desired properties that serve as reward signals are evaluated on the final generated ligand molecules. DEPPA incorporates a coarse denoising scheduler during the RL fine-tuning to achieve efficient and effective molecule optimization. Experimental results on the CrossDocked2020 benchmark demonstrate that DEPPA outperforms baselines in binding affinity (Vina Score -8.5 kcal/mol), drug-likeness and diversity while exhibiting competitive performance in synthesizability. The source code is available at https://github.com/xy9485/DePPA .

We show that the training problem of a deep linear neural network under the squared loss admits an exact convex reformulation in a lifted space over a generalized completely positive cone. The reformulation has the same optimal value as the original nonconvex problem and is linear in the lifted variables, with all nonconvexity encoded in the cone constraint. Its ambient lifted dimension depends only on the input and output dimensions, independent of the network depth and the number of data points, and the bottleneck width enters only through scalar constraints. The construction proceeds by reducing the multilayer parameterization to a bilinear factorization, lifting it to a rank-constrained semidefinite program, expressing the rank constraint via a complementarity condition, and applying a completely positive lifting. The resulting formulation gives a conic representation of the nonconvexity induced by linear factorization and connects linear neural network training with copositive programming.

In this paper, we derive rates of convergence in the high-dimensional central limit theorem for Polyak–Ruppert averaged iterates generated by entropy-regularized asynchronous Q-learning with linear function approximation and a polynomial stepsize $k^{-\omega}$, $\omega \in (1/2,1)$. Assuming that the sequence of observed triples $(s_k,a_k,s_{k+1})_{k \geq 0}$ forms a uniformly geometrically ergodic Markov chain, and under suitable regularity conditions for the projected soft Bellman equation, we establish a Gaussian approximation bound in the convex distance with rate of order $n^{-1/4}$, up to polylogarithmic factors in $n$, where $n$ is the number of samples used by the algorithm. To obtain this result, we combine a linearization of the soft Bellman recursion with a Gaussian approximation for the leading martingale term. Finally, we derive high-order moment bounds for the algorithm's last iterate, which might be of independent interest.

Non-contrastive self-supervised learning (SSL) is an effective framework for predictive representation learning, but popular (and in practice effective) methods such as SimSiam, BYOL, I-JEPA or DINO, which rely on a form of self-distillation to train a teacher-student network, remain poorly understood as they typically do not minimize a well-defined objective. We analyze the dynamics of a variant of the Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) using a regularized linear regressor to predict the learned representations of two views of the data from one another, and fully characterize its stability: non-collapsed stable equilibria align with leading nonlinear canonical correlation subspaces, while collapsed equilibria may also be stable attractors. Motivated by this result, we introduce PEIRA, a non-contrastive SSL method with an explicit objective defined through the trace of the optimal linear regressor. We show that its only stable equilibria are nontrivial global minimizers and recover the same canonical correlation subspaces, with regularization selecting the effective dimension. Experiments on ImageNet-1K and CIFAR-10 show PEIRA is competitive with VICReg and LeJEPA baselines, and qualitative empirical results support the theory.

Transformers have become the dominant architecture in modern machine learning, yet the theoretical understanding of their training dynamics remains limited. This paper develops a rigorous mathematical framework for analyzing gradient-based training of transformers in the mean-field regime, where both the depth (number of layers) and width (number of attention heads) tend to infinity. While ResNet training can be understood as controlling a neural ODE, transformer training corresponds to controlling a neural PDE, due to the coupling of multiple token distributions through the attention mechanism. Our mean-field model features two types of measure representations: token distributions evolving through layers and attention parameters at each layer. We establish well-posedness of the forward pass through infinitely deep transformers, characterizing token evolution via flow maps that satisfy ODEs in function spaces. Using adjoint sensitivity analysis, we derive an explicit formula for the conditional Wasserstein gradient of the training risk, involving adjoint variables governed by backward ODEs. We prove the existence and uniqueness of gradient flow curves in the conditional Wasserstein metric space, establishing a rigorous foundation for gradient-based transformer training. A key technical contribution is providing necessary and sufficient conditions for injectivity of the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) for attention mechanisms: we show that NTK injectivity is equivalent to linear independence of log-sum-exp functions modulo affine functions, a condition satisfied by diverse token distributions, including discrete distributions, uniform distributions, and Gaussian mixtures. Under this NTK injectivity assumption, we prove that gradient flow converges to global minima when the initial loss is sufficiently small, eliminating spurious local minima from the optimization landscape.

The design of modern neural architectures has converged through incremental empirical choices, yet the mechanisms governing their training dynamics remain only partially understood. We identify and analyze a negative weight drift induced by the interaction between standard losses and positively biased activation functions. We prove that under MSE or cross-entropy loss, the gradient with respect to positive pre-activations is non-negative in expectation at initialization, driving downstream weights toward negative values during early training. The drift is intrinsic to optimization rather than data, and persists across architectures and asymmetric activation functions (ReLU, GELU, SiLU). Coupled with ReLU, weight drift produces activation sparsity reaching nearly 90% in GPT-nano. We further analyze whether this natural sparsity is damaging and find that, on average, models sharply degrade above $\sim$70% activation sparsity. We then evaluate sparsity-inducing activation functions, which reveals activation spikes in intermediate transformer layers. Code is available at https://github.com/On-Point-RND/BugOrFeature.

Different age-related regulations have been proposed to protect minors from harmful content and interactions online. Automated age estimation is central to enforcing such regulations, and vision-language models (VLMs) achieve state-of-the-art performance on this task. However, we find that the zero-shot nature of VLM-based age estimation produces an unexpected side effect we call the identity shortcut: Instead of estimating age from visual features, VLMs tend to identify the depicted person and infer their age from memorized knowledge. This phenomenon leads to substantially incorrect predictions when non-celebrities are misidentified as celebrities. It also produces deceptively high robustness to noise and adversarial perturbations on celebrity images, which dominate popular benchmarks. To mitigate this, we propose an activation steering method that suppresses the shortcut by intervening on the hidden states of the VLM. This method improves age estimation accuracy for both memorized and unseen identities, reducing mean absolute error by up to 25% across popular benchmarks.

Sub-billion-parameter Transformer language models are increasingly deployed on edge devices, where the privacy, latency, and operating-cost advantages of on-device inference are constrained by tight memory-bandwidth, energy, and thermal budgets that make architectural choice and accelerator-specific cost central to efficient inference. We present LLMForge, a hardware-aware neural architecture search (NAS) framework whose three composable contributions together make edge-LM architecture search hardware-conditioned, since different substrates impose different hardware cost bottlenecks. Infinite-Head Attention (IHA) decouples the number of query heads, KV groups, and per-head query/key and value dimensions, expanding the feasible per-layer attention configuration space by approximately 400x over grouped-query attention within our search-space ranges. Forge-Former, an encoder-based surrogate for ranking architectural candidates, outperforms MLP and random-forest baselines. Forge-DSE, an NSGA-II-based design-space-exploration engine, pairs Forge-Former with a multi-backend hardware cost model spanning GPUs, systolic accelerators, and ring-dataflow edge accelerators. Across four different hardware substrates, the searches converge to visibly different architectures whose shapes track each substrate's cost bottleneck. On the multi-chip ring substrate, our co-search returns three 300M-scale deployment-aware variants on the Pareto front. Each is re-trained on FineWeb-Edu-10BT under matched recipe against SmolLM2-360M and Qwen-0.5B architecture baselines. The accurate variant has the lowest validation loss 2.798 and competitive benchmark performance with fewer parameters, the energy-optimized variant lowers energy per token by 40%, and the latency-optimized variant lowers TTFT and TPOT by 43%.

Counterfactual explanations (CFEs) provide actionable recourse, but most methods assume a static framework with fixed data and a trained classifier. This assumption breaks in evolving data environments, such as data streams, where online models are repeatedly updated under concept drift. We identify CFE maintenance in this setting as a previously overlooked problem: explanations that are valid when generated may silently become invalid as the model evolves, including robust CFEs, which are not designed for continuous drift. We propose a lightweight, model-agnostic update scheme that repairs existing CFEs using local sampling to estimate validity and plausibility directions while preserving proximity to the original instance. Experiments on synthetic drifting streams show that initially created CFEs rapidly lose validity, whereas maintained CFEs preserve validity and local plausibility at a lower cost than repeated regeneration.

Tabular data generation considers a large table with multiple columns – each column comprised of numerical, categorical, or sometimes ordinal values. The goal is to produce new rows for the table that replicate the distribution of rows from the original data – without just copying those initial rows. The last 4 years have seen enormous progress on this problem, mostly using computational expensive methods that employ one-hot encoding, VAEs, and diffusion. This paper describes a new approach to the problem of tabular data generation. By employing copula transformations and modeling the distribution as a kernel density estimate we can nearly match the accuracy and leakage-avoidance achievements of the previous methods, but with almost no training time. Our method is very scalable, and can be run on data sets orders of magnitude larger than prior state-of-the-art on a simple laptop. Moreover, because we employ kernel density estimates, we can store the model as a coreset of the original data – we believe the first for generative modeling – and as a result, require significantly less space as well. Our code is available here: \url{https://github.com/tabkde/tabkde-main}

A fast simulation of the detector response is a vital task in high-energy physics (HEP). Traditional Monte-Carlo methods form the backbone of modern particle physics simulation software but are computationally expensive. We present a machine-learning-based approach to fast simulation of the Focusing Aerogel Ring Imaging Cherenkov (FARICH) detector response. Given a particle track and momentum, the goal is to generate realistic samples of photon hits on the detector matrix. We propose a conditional Generative Adversarial Network (cGAN) with a lightweight convolutional architecture that reproduces the projected detector response conditioned on particle parameters. We compare the cGAN against a linear statistical baseline using metrics applied to probability maps and to the reconstructed velocity distributions. The cGAN produces realistic samples and provides a significant speed-up over Monte-Carlo simulation.

Test-time scaling is an important mechanism for improving large language models, especially on tasks with deterministic verifiers. Code translation is a canonical example: the source program constrains valid outputs, while compilers, type checkers, and behavioral checks provide exact pass/fail feedback. Outcome-only approaches apply these verifiers only after generation, which is inefficient because early errors corrupt the autoregressive context and are rarely corrected later. We introduce Decoding Time Verification (DTV), a framework that treats structural boundaries as meta steps for verifier-guided decoding. DTV interleaves generation with verifier calls under a state-machine controller that commits verified prefixes, using structural-boundary checks and structure-aware rollback to prevent error propagation while reducing wasted tokens. We evaluate DTV on C-to-Rust and JavaScript-to-TypeScript translation. Using Qwen3-4B as the primary generator under matched token budgets, DTV improves pass rates from 72.3% to 82.0% on C-to-Rust and from 33.3% to 46.0% on JavaScript-to-TypeScript relative to matched self-refinement baselines, while using fewer tokens per case; the same trend largely transfers to Gemma-4-E4B and Qwen3-30B-A3B. In the evaluated cost-matched grid, DTV achieves a more favorable tradeoff between pass rate and generated-token cost than post-hoc verification or sampling-based scaling. These results show that verifier-guided decoding is an effective use of inference-time compute for code translation.

We investigate the potential of invariant and equivariant semi-supervised learning for addressing the challenges of training multi-task models on partially labeled datasets with differently structured output tasks. Specifically, we use the popular FixMatch method for invariant semi-supervised learning and its equivariant extension Dense FixMatch. We evaluate their performance on the Cityscapes and BDD100K datasets in the context of the prevalent object detection and semantic segmentation tasks in computer vision. We consider varying sizes of the subsets annotated for each task and different overlaps among them. Our results for both invariant and equivariant semi-supervised learning outperform supervised baselines in most situations, with the most significant improvements observed when fewer labeled samples are available for a task and generally better results for the latter approach. Our study suggests that invariant/equivariant learning is a promising general direction for multi-task learning from limited labeled data.

The large size of the KV cache has become a major bottleneck for serving LLMs with increasing context lengths. In response, many KV cache compression methods, such as token dropping and quantization, have been proposed. However, almost all of these methods are inherently lossy-despite minimal accuracy degradation for short outputs, their outputs increasingly diverge from full-KV-cache outputs as more tokens are decoded, which leads to catastrophic failures in code generation and tool calling. We present VeriCache, the first inference framework that ensures the same output as full-KV-cache decoding but largely preserves the high decoding throughput of a range of KV cache compression algorithms. VeriCache uses the compressed KV cache to draft tokens, then verifies them against the full KV cache. While it may seem like just speculative decoding, VeriCache requires addressing a key system challenge to work-keeping the full KV cache out of GPU memory and minimizing the overhead of swapping it in for verification. The insight is two-fold: (1) compressed-KV decoding can be parallelized with full-KV swap, because one is HBM-bandwidth-bound and the other is PCIe/network-bound, and (2) the compressed KV cache often produces output similar to the full KV cache, allowing a long drafting horizon to amortize each full-KV swap. VeriCache applies to both long-context decoding and remote prefix caching, supports a broad family of token-dropping and quantization methods through a uniform compressor interface, and composes with traditional speculative decoding. Experimental results show that VeriCache achieves up to 4X higher throughput than full-KV inference while producing identical outputs.

Software fault prediction (SFP) is a critical task in software engineering, enabling early identification of faults in modules to improve software quality and reduce maintenance costs. This research investigates the combined effects of feature selection and parameter tuning on the performance of machine learning (ML) models for SFP. This study evaluates the interaction between feature selection methods, including correlation-based feature selection (CFS), recursive feature elimination (RFE), mutual information (MI), and L1 regularization, where hyperparameter tuning techniques such as grid search, randomized search, and genetic algorithm (GA) are used for optimization of ML algorithms, including random forest (RF), logistic regression (LR), and support vector machines (SVM) for optimized fault prediction performance. The combined application of CFS and GA yielded the highest accuracy, achieving 88.40% with RF, representing an improvement of 18% over baseline models without feature selection or tuning. Feature selection reduced dimensionality and identified critical attributes such as weighted methods per Class (WMC) and coupling between objects (CBO), while iterative parameter tuning optimized model alignment to these feature sets. Notably, the proposed methods demonstrated robustness, with minimal cross-validation variability (+-1.0%), and efficiency, reducing training times in univariate methods such as L1 regularization.