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Computer Science Machine Learning

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Friday 12 June

Machine Learning

From Meta Idea to Advanced Mathematical Discovery – Human-AI Co-Discovery of Sign-Embedding Quantum Algorithms

Yanqiao Wang, Jin-Peng Liu, Peng Li et al. (+1 more)

AI-assisted mathematics is often evaluated on solving predefined problems. In practice, however, many important advances begin earlier, when a vague research intuition is transformed into a concrete problem, a promising route, and a theorem family worth proving. This report studies that stage through a case study that led to sign-embedding quantum algorithms for matrix equations and matrix functions, foundational primitives in quantum linear algebra and operator-output quantum algorithms. The project began with a human-originated intuition that rational approximation is especially effective for jump-type functions such as the sign function, and might therefore serve as a design principle for quantum algorithms. Rather than merely assisting after the problem was fixed, AI-assisted exploration, including workflows later integrated into the agentic AI-mathematician system AIM, played a key role in expanding this intuition into a route map, comparing candidate formulations, and converging toward sign embedding as the central framework. AIM then helped connect a known matrix-sign identity to wider classes of matrix equations and matrix functions, and drafted proof and complexity calculations. The decisive scientific judgments remained human: selecting which human-AI-expanded routes were worth pursuing, rejecting a Cayley-trapezoidal approximation when its validity required a hidden condition, and refining the Sylvester implementation from a coarse quadratic-gap query route to the final factorized and scaled analysis. The report argues that human-AI co-discovery workflows, with systems such as AIM as important components, are most valuable not as standalone theorem provers, but as research partners for problem formation, connection discovery, derivation, and skeptical review inside a human-gated research loop.
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All authors Yanqiao Wang, Jin-Peng Liu, Peng Li, Yang Liu

Machine Learning

Dense Supervision Is Not Enough: The Readout Blind Spot in Looped Language Models

Rituraj Sharma and Tu Vu

Looped language models turn hidden states into runtime state: each state is decoded for prediction and fed back into future computation. This creates a basic supervision question: which state variables does cross-entropy actually control? We show that dense per-loop cross-entropy controls the variables exposed by the readout, not every variable active in the recurrent transition. Hidden-state scale gives a concrete failure mode. Scale-invariant readouts such as RMSNorm and LayerNorm hide radial scale from the immediate cross-entropy loss, while pre-norm residual recurrence continues to carry and update that same scale. Thus per-loop loss can make early exits usable without controlling recurrent scale. In 44M and 129M looped transformers without inter-loop normalization, per-loop cross-entropy through RMSNorm readouts still drives final hidden-state norms into the thousands or tens of thousands. Scale-visible readouts and explicit norm penalties keep norms in the tens, and scale-removing recurrence is the complementary architectural fix. The resulting design rule is simple: dense supervision trains exits; recurrent scale control requires either making scale visible to a loss or removing it from the loop. Consistent with this rule, scale-controlled variants achieve lower perplexity at matched inference-depth operating points in our variable-depth benchmarks.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from eess.SP

Coordinate-Queryable Neural Field Reconstruction for EEG Spatial Super-Resolution with Unseen-Electrode Generation

Hongjun Liu, Leyu Zhou, Zijianghao Yang et al. (+1 more)

EEG spatial super-resolution (EEGSR) in real deployments is challenged by random channel missingness, unstable electrode quality, and changing visible-channel patterns caused by bad contacts or device variability. Most existing EEGSR methods learn a fixed low-to-high channel mapping under pre-defined input-output layouts, which makes them brittle when missing channels vary at test time. In this paper, we reformulate EEGSR as learning a shared conditional scalp field from partially observed support channels. Specifically, a position-guided encoder summarizes the observed EEG channels and their coordinates into a latent condition, and a conditional implicit neural representation decoder reconstructs target EEG signals by querying this condition at desired electrode coordinates. During inference, the model directly reconstructs unseen electrode signals from the available EEG support and the queried coordinates. To strengthen the constraint of the encoded latent representation on the decoder and thereby construct a more stable scalp field consistent with the observed channels, we further introduce a fidelity-preserving channel corruption training strategy under mixed electrode states. Extensive experiments across multiple EEG datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework for both random missing-channel reconstruction and strict unseen-electrode signal generation. Notably, under the strict held-out-electrode setting on AAD, our method reduces NMSE by 37.5% and improves SNR by 2.12 dB over the strongest baseline, showing its ability to synthesize signals at electrode locations never exposed during training.
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All authors Hongjun Liu, Leyu Zhou, Zijianghao Yang, Chao Yao

Machine Learning · Cross-listed from eess.SP

Zero-Shot Neural Priors for Generalizable Cross-Subject and Cross-Task EEG Decoding

Baimam Boukar Jean Jacques, Brandone Fonya, Nchofon Tagha Ghogomu et al. (+2 more)

The development of generalizable electroencephalography (EEG) decoding models is essential for robust brain-computer interfaces (BCI) and objective neural biomarkers in mental health. Conventional approaches have been hindered by poor cross-subject and cross-task generalization, owing to high inter-subject variability and non-stationary neural signals. We address this challenge with a zero-shot cross-subject decoding framework on the large-scale Healthy Brain Network dataset, benchmarking a convolutional neural network baseline, a hybrid LSTM, and a Transformer-based foundation model. To adapt the Transformer for regression while averting catastrophic forgetting, we propose a novel progressive unfreezing strategy. The baseline yielded an nRMSE of 0.9991, whereas our fine-tuned Transformer achieved 0.9799 on unseen subjects. This work advances scalable, calibration-free EEG decoding for computational psychiatry and behavioral prediction.
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All authors Baimam Boukar Jean Jacques, Brandone Fonya, Nchofon Tagha Ghogomu, Pauline Nyaboe, Kipngeno Koech

Machine Learning · Cross-listed from stat.ML

Beyond Importance: Interchange-Sobol Sensitivity Reveals Task-Specific Content Channels in Transformer Components

Yifeng Guo, Jin-Hong Du and Xiang Chen

Mechanistic interpretability methods summarize a transformer component by a single importance score, conflating two distinct roles: a component may matter because it transports task-relevant content, or because the forward computation degrades when its contribution is removed. We introduce Interchange-Group Sobol Decomposition (IGSD), a paired-intervention framework that compares matched activation replacement with zero ablation on the same component, estimates two Sobol-style variance indices, and uses their signed difference to separate the two roles, with intervention validity monitored by a symmetric off-manifold diagnostic $\widehat{\mathrm{ST}}>1$. In factual recall, IGSD identifies an early-layer content channel in both GPT-2 small and Qwen2.5-1.5B that standard importance methods underestimate. A controlled subject and relation donor design shows that the early channel transports relation-frame content while late attention transports subject-retrieval content, refining at head granularity to the known $\mathrm{Attn}_{L9H8}$ head. Late-layer clamping confirms that the early signal is expressed through downstream transformations rather than residual pass-through. These results show that replacement and deletion are not interchangeable controls and their divergence provides a practical statistical diagnostic for content transport in transformer components.
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Machine Learning

NeuroShield: A Device-Agnostic Foundation Model for EEG Authentication

Matin Fallahi, Patricia Arias-Cabarcos and Thorsten Strufe

A central challenge in EEG authentication is that models are typically tied to the acquisition settings in which they are trained. In particular, variations in headset hardware, channel layout, and signal duration create heterogeneous recordings that existing models are not designed to handle, causing each new headset or dataset to be treated as a separate model-development problem. This fragmentation limits multi-dataset learning, hinders knowledge transfer, and reduces model reusability. To address this limitation, we present NeuroShield, a reusable foundation model for EEG authentication that learns identity-discriminative embeddings from variable-channel and variable-length EEG recordings through a dual-stage transformer architecture. We pretrain NeuroShield on three public EEG datasets comprising 15{,}762 subjects and 28{,}116 sessions, and evaluate transfer on two unseen downstream datasets. Our evaluations show that, after fine-tuning, NeuroShield reduces equal error rate by 0.44–8.06 percentage points relative to the state of the art. NeuroShield further generalizes to segments longer than those seen during training and operates across channel layouts not encountered during pretraining. These results establish NeuroShield as a reusable and adaptable EEG identity encoder across heterogeneous recording settings. We release NeuroShield as open source to support reproducibility and community adoption.
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Machine Learning

Towards CSI-Native Foundation Models: A Channel-Adaptive Roadmap for 6G

Chenyu Zhang, Xinchen Lyu, Chenshan Ren et al. (+2 more)

Wireless foundation models offer a path toward reusable channel state information (CSI) intelligence for sixth-generation (6G) systems. However, existing generic-backbone adaptation and CSI pretraining methods often treat CSI as task tensors rather than propagation-conditioned channel responses, thereby failing to capture the intrinsic time-frequency-spatial geometry of wireless environments. This paper presents a channel-adaptive roadmap toward CSI-native foundation models, proposing a unified framework that aligns pretraining, positional modeling, and attention control with three channel requirements: scale-aware heterogeneous exposure, physical time-frequency-antenna coordinates, and correlation-bounded token interaction. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed framework across three dimensions: zero-shot generalization, reducing NMSE by more than 4 dB across spatial-temporal-frequency tasks; scale extrapolation, yielding up to a 5.4 dB gain under 8 times unseen antenna scaling; and inference efficiency, accelerating mobility-aware processing by up to 18.8%. A system-level evaluation with Sionna SYS further shows that the proposed framework uses only 7.01% of dense-pilot overhead, reaches -18.64 dB average NMSE, and improves average net spectral efficiency by 36.6% over dense LMMSE and 15.5% over WiFo, indicating that CSI-native representation learning can support pilot-efficient radio access.
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All authors Chenyu Zhang, Xinchen Lyu, Chenshan Ren, Shuhan Liu, Qimei Cui

Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.CR

BELLS-O: Evaluating the Operational Trade-offs of LLM Supervision Systems

Leonhard Waibl, Felix Michalak and Hadrien Mariaccia

LLM supervision systems, namely input/output moderation filters and jailbreak detectors, are the primary safeguard against misuse in deployed AI applications, yet existing benchmarks are often vendor-biased, omit cost and latency, and rarely compare specialized guardrails against repurposed generalist LLMs. We present BELLS-O (Benchmark for the Evaluation of LLM Supervision Systems, Operational), the first independent operational benchmark of LLM supervision systems. BELLS-O evaluates 28 systems from 17 providers: every major specialized guardrail (e.g., LlamaGuard-4, ShieldGemma-2, Lakera Guard) and frontier generalists repurposed as supervisors (e.g., GPT-5.4, Claude Sonnet 4.6, Grok-4.1), jointly on detection rate, false-positive rate, latency, and monetary cost. We cover input/output moderation across 11 harm categories and jailbreak detection across 13 attack techniques, using in-house datasets built from handcrafted prompts, expert-curated samples, and quality-controlled synthetic generation. To suppress latent generator fingerprints in synthetic data, every generated sample is paraphrased. Mapping the Pareto frontier reveals use-case-dependent tradeoffs. On content moderation, specialized supervisors are operationally dominant: top systems match frontier LLMs on detection (~95% vs. 94%) at comparably low false-positive rates (<=2%), while running 5-10x faster and ~10x cheaper. On jailbreak detection, the tradeoff shifts: frontier LLMs achieve higher detection and lower false-positive rates but at 10-50x higher cost and 5-10x higher latency. We release the benchmark, framework, leaderboard, and datasets as the first vendor-neutral basis for selecting safeguards under real deployment constraints.
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Machine Learning

How Linear Is a Transformer Feed-Forward Block? Per-Block Linear Recoverability Is Learned, Not Architectural

Stuart Whipp

Transformer feed-forward networks (FFNs) are often treated as nonlinear stores of computation, yet how nonlinear a trained FFN block actually is has rarely been measured. We treat each FFN as a position-wise input-to-output map and split it into the exact least-squares linear approximation plus a residual. The held-out variance the closed-form linear map explains defines a block's linear recoverability (R^2_lin), an optimiser-free measure of its linearity. Across all twelve blocks of GPT-2, Pythia-160m, and llama-160m, R^2_lin is highly heterogeneous and non-monotone with depth, ranging from near-linear (>0.99) to strongly nonlinear (<0.3) between adjacent blocks, and is not set by the activation function: same-width GELU models GPT-2 and Pythia-160m have sharply different profiles, so recoverability is a learned property of individual trained blocks, not an architectural one. A low-rank bilinear probe of the residual recovers only a few points of R^2, with gain uncorrelated with residual nonlinearity: the unrecovered computation is not a single position-wise product but higher-order or distributed structure. The measurement also serves as a targeted compression signal: recoverable blocks admit large single-layer replacements (GPT-2's early FFN at 8x fewer parameters for +0.77 perplexity), while low-recoverability blocks flag where this is unsafe. It further exposes a methodological pitfall: trained linear baselines can badly under-converge on ill-conditioned transformer activations, so we report the exact closed-form least-squares ceiling throughout.
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Machine Learning

A Hybrid GNN-FEM Framework for Phase-Field Fracture Simulation. Physics-Preserving Hybridization for Generalizable Surrogate Modeling

Hyeonbin Moon, Yongjin Choi and Seunghwa Ryu

Scientific machine learning (SciML) has emerged as a promising approach for accelerating simulations of complex physical systems, yet achieving physically consistent and generalizable predictions for nonlinear, history-dependent problems remains a central challenge. In this study, we propose a hybrid GNN–FEM framework for efficient and generalizable phase-field fracture modeling. While phase-field approaches provide a robust variational framework for simulating complex crack evolution, their high computational cost limits practical applications because they require solving coupled, nonlinear, and history-dependent systems within an incremental finite element procedure. To address this challenge, a graph neural network surrogate is integrated into the conventional staggered scheme, replacing the phase-field update at each load increment while retaining the FEM-based displacement solver to enforce mechanical equilibrium and boundary conditions. By preserving the incremental solution structure, the framework remains consistent with history-dependent fracture evolution without requiring the surrogate to approximate the full solution trajectory. This selective surrogate strategy emphasizes the identification of a physically meaningful and incrementally structured learning target, rather than relying on brute-force data generation to learn the full fracture process. The proposed framework achieves strong generalization across varying geometries, loading conditions, material properties, and discretizations through dimensionless feature design, a graph-based formulation on mesh-based domains, and a physics-informed loss derived from the governing phase-field equation. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the hybrid approach reduces computational cost while maintaining accuracy compared with conventional FEM, and exhibits robust predictive performance across diverse problem settings.
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Machine Learning

Emyx: Fast and efficient all-atom protein generation

Nicholas J. Williams, Ward Haddadin, Matteo P. Ferla et al. (+7 more)

Computational enzyme design requires generating proteins that scaffold catalytic residues and ligands, a task that demands both geometric accuracy and structural diversity from the underlying generative model. Current all-atom generators inherit expensive architectures from structure prediction, leading to high training costs and limited sample diversity. We argue that much of this complexity is unnecessary for generators, which condition on sparse geometric constraints rather than rich co-evolutionary signals. Emyx is a 140M-parameter conditional flow matching model that concentrates capacity within standard transformer blocks, replacing heavy embedding stacks with lightweight conditional representations and sparse connectivity. We additionally derive an exact reparametrisation of the flow matching interpolant into the EDM noise-level framework, bridging flow matching training efficiency with state-of-the-art sampling methods designed for diffusion models without retraining. Despite being the smallest model, Emyx outperforms both Proteína-Complexa and RFdiffusion3 against the AME enzyme design benchmark across success rate under strict evaluation requiring both global fold recovery and catalytic geometry accuracy, structural novelty, scaffold diversity, and geometric validity, while training in just $682$ GPU-hours, roughly $4\times$ less than RFdiffusion3.
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All authors Nicholas J. Williams, Ward Haddadin, Matteo P. Ferla, Constantin Schneider, Nicholas B. Woodall, Ruby Sedgwick, Christian D. Madsen, Andrew L. Hopkins, Douglas E. V. Pires, Edward O. Pyzer-Knapp

Machine Learning

Cost-Optimal LLM Routing with Limited User Feedback under User Satisfaction Guarantees

Herbert Woisetschläger, Arastun Mammadli, Ryan Zhang et al. (+1 more)

Inference costs for large language model (LLM) applications are rapidly growing, driven by surging demand and rising infrastructure cost. Users expect high-quality responses, and in commercial settings this is formally codified in Service Level Agreements (SLAs), creating a fundamental tension between cost and quality. Recent progress on cost-aware LLM request routing has shown potential to resolve this tension, but existing approaches rely on complete feedback signals, offline training, extensive per-workload tuning, and most lack SLA guarantees or inference-time adaptivity. We introduce SLARouter, an online routing algorithm that learns a cost-optimal policy from the sparse, one-sided user feedback available in production systems. SLARouter provides theoretical guarantees for both cost optimality and strict SLA compliance. Experiments across a wide range of LLM benchmarks show that SLARouter satisfies SLA constraints without the need for per-benchmark tuning, reducing operating cost by up to 2.2x over existing baselines.
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All authors Herbert Woisetschläger, Arastun Mammadli, Ryan Zhang, Shiqiang Wang

Machine Learning

Physics-Informed Discovery of Yield Functions in Plasticity via Convex Neural Representations

Hyeonbin Moon, Donghyuk Cho, Jecheon Yu et al. (+2 more)

Identifying anisotropic yield functions remains challenging since yielding is not directly observed in full-field mechanical measurements, directional calibration can require many loading directions, and selecting an appropriate analytical form is nontrivial. This study proposes a physics-informed framework for discovering yield functions from full-field displacement data and reaction force data, without stress observations, plastic strain measurements, direct yield surface data, or a prescribed parametric yield function. The framework identifies the yield function as a mechanically constrained constitutive component inside elastoplastic stress integration, rather than through direct stress-space supervision. The yield function is represented by a convex neural network that enforces convexity and positive homogeneity of degree one while imposing the assumed tension-compression symmetry, and this neural yield function is trained with a differentiable stress update and a physics-informed force equilibrium loss across multiple loading cases. The proposed framework is validated using finite element (FE) benchmark studies with von Mises, Hill 1948, and Yld2000-2d yield functions, assessing yield contour agreement, displacement-noise sensitivity, identifiability through plastically active stress states, epistemic uncertainty, and polynomial-surrogate deployment. This study provides a mechanics-constrained pathway for discovering anisotropic yield functions from displacement and force data while keeping the identified component within the structure of elastoplastic stress integration.
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All authors Hyeonbin Moon, Donghyuk Cho, Jecheon Yu, Jeong Whan Yoon, Seunghwa Ryu

Machine Learning

Protein Representation Learning with Secondary-Structure and Energy-Filtered Hydrogen-Bond Graphs

Mohamed Mouhajir, Limei Wang, El Houcine Bergou et al. (+3 more)

Graph-based representations are widely used in protein modeling, yet many existing approaches rely primarily on sequence adjacency or geometric proximity, which only partially reflect the principles governing protein folding. Proteins instead adopt complex three-dimensional conformations organized around secondary structure elements, such as $\alpha$-helices and $\beta$-sheets, which encode recurring local motifs and stabilizing hydrogen-bond interactions. In this work, we introduce a secondary-structure-aware graph neural network for protein representation learning. Residue-level node representations are augmented with secondary structure assignments, and graph edges are constructed from hydrogen-bond interactions filtered by their energetic strength. This design enables the model to capture both local structural context and long-range couplings that are central to protein stability and function. We evaluate the proposed approach on commonly used protein benchmarks and observe consistent improvements over existing graph-based methods. In addition, the resulting graph representations offer enhanced biological interpretability, as the learned connectivity aligns with established structural motifs. These findings suggest that incorporating secondary structure and energy-filtered hydrogen-bond topology provides an effective inductive bias for protein representation learning. The code is released at https://github.com/mohamedmohamed2021/SSProNet
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All authors Mohamed Mouhajir, Limei Wang, El Houcine Bergou, Hajar El Hammouti, Lamiae Azizi, Dongqi Fu

Machine Learning · Cross-listed from physics.flu-dyn

Multiscale Hypersonic Boundary Layer Reconstruction via Spectral Binning and Subdomain-wise Conditional Diffusion

Hojin Kim, Dibyajyoti Chakraborty, Takahiko Toki et al. (+2 more)

We propose a multiscale probabilistic reconstruction framework for hypersonic Couette flow, where near-wall states are inferred from limited top-wall observations using conditional diffusion model. The boundary layer is divided into overlapping wall-normal subdomains, and a single height- and Mach-conditioned Elucidating Diffusion Model (EDM) is trained jointly for M=6,7,8 to sample velocity, density, pressure, and temperature fields conditioned on a top-wall boundary slice. A soft overlap inpainting strategy assembles subdomain predictions into full-volume reconstructions while maintaining inter-subdomain continuity and small-scale variability. To improve the spectral fidelity of the generated fields, we introduce a novel bounded binned spectral power (BSP) loss that preserves high-wavenumber content while remaining numerically stable across the diffusion noise schedule. Validation against direct numerical simulation data shows that the model recovers instantaneous structures, spectra, statistical profiles, correlations, and wall quantities across all training Mach numbers, while providing spatially structured uncertainty estimates. The reconstructed Mach-conditioned profiles also collapse under the Trettel-Larsson transformation, indicating consistency with compressibility scaling. These results establish the domain decomposed conditional diffusion model with a bounded binned spectral loss as an effective probabilistic surrogate for near-wall reconstruction in hypersonic wall-bounded turbulence.
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All authors Hojin Kim, Dibyajyoti Chakraborty, Takahiko Toki, Carlo Scalo, Romit Maulik

Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.CL

Nemotron 3 Ultra: Open, Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Model for Agentic Reasoning

NVIDIA: Aaron Blakeman, Aaron Thomas, Aastha Jhunjhunwala et al. (+568 more)

We introduce Nemotron 3 Ultra, a 550 billion total and 55 billion active parameter Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Attention language model. We pre-trained Nemotron 3 Ultra on 20 trillion text tokens, then extended the context length to 1M tokens, and post-trained using Supervised Fine Tuning (SFT), Reinforcement Learning (RL), and Multi-teacher On-Policy Distillation (MOPD). Nemotron 3 Ultra is our most capable model yet, employing multiple key technologies - LatentMoE, Multi Token Prediction (MTP), NVFP4 pre-training, multi-environment RLVR, MOPD, and reasoning budget control. Nemotron 3 Ultra achieves up to ~6x higher inference throughput as compared to state-of-the-art publicly available LLMs while attaining on-par accuracy. The state-of-the-art accuracy, high inference throughput, and 1M token context length make Nemotron 3 Ultra ideal for long-running autonomous agentic tasks. We open-source the base, post-trained, and quantized checkpoints, along with the training data and recipe on HuggingFace.
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All authors NVIDIA: Aaron Blakeman, Aaron Thomas, Aastha Jhunjhunwala, Abhibha Gupta, Abhinav Khattar, Adam Rajfer, Adi Renduchintala, Adil Asif, Aditya Vavre, Adriana Flores Miranda, Ahmad Bilal, Aileen Zaman, Ajay Hotchandani, Akanksha Shukla, Akhiad Bercovich, Aleksander Ficek, Alex Gronskiy, Alex Kondratenko, Alex Steiner, Alex Ye, Alexander Bukharin, Alexandre Milesi, Ali Taghibakhshi, Alice Gatti, Alisa Liu, Alok Kumar, Amar Phanishayee, Ameya Sunil Mahabaleshwarkar, Amir Klein, Amit Zuker, Amnon Geifman, Anahita Bhiwandiwalla, Ananth Subramaniam, Andrea Santilli, Andrew Fulks, Andrew McHarg, Andrew Tao, Andrii Skliar, Anjulie Agrusa, Ankur Srivastava, Ankur Verma, Anna Shors, Anna Warno, Antoni-Joan Solergibert I Llaquet, Arham Mehta, Arkadiusz Nowaczynski, Arti Jain, Ashwath Aithal, Ashwin Poojary, Asif Ahamed, Asit Mishra, Asma Kuriparambil Thekkumpate, Atefeh Sohrabizadeh, Avinash Kaur, Avinash Vem, Ayush Dattagupta, Barath Subramaniam Anandan, Bardiya Sadeghi, Ben Lanir, Benedikt Schifferer, Besmira Nushi, Bilal Kartal, Bill Thiede, Bita Darvish Rouhani, Bo Deng, Bob Schatz, Boris Ginsburg, Boxin Wang, Brad Nemire, Brandon Norick, Brian Dang, Brian Westphal, Brian Yu, Brucek Khailany, Bryan Catanzaro, Carlo del Mundo, Caryln Aarish, Chankyu Lee, Chantal Hwang, Charbel Sakr, Charles Wang, Charlie Truong, Chen Cui, Cheng Cheng, Cheng-Ping Hsieh, Chenghao Zhang, Chenhui Deng, Chintan Patel, Chris Alexiuk, Christian Cosgrove, Christian Munley, Christine Harvey, Christopher Parisien, Chunyang Shen, Coco Li, Collin Neale, Cynthia Gao, Cyril Meurillon, Dan Gil, Dan Su, Dan Zhao, Dane Corneil, Daniel Afrimi, Daniel Egert, Daniel Korzekwa, Daniel Lo, Daniel Machlab, Daniel Serebrenik, Daniil Sorokin, Daria Gitman, Daria Levy, Darko Stosic, David Mosallanezhad, David Yu, Davit Karamyan, Deena Donia, Deep Debroy, Deepak Narayanan, Devin O'Kelly, Dheeraj Peri, Dhruv Nathawani, Di Wu, Dima Rekesh, Divyanshu Kakwani, Donald Plummer, Dong Anh, Dongfeng Yu, Dongfu Jiang, Donnie Kim, Dorrin Poorkay, Duncan Riach, Dusan Stosic, Dustin VanStee, Eavan Meng, Edgar Minasyan, Edward Lin, Eileen Margaret Peters Long, Elad Sarafin, Elad Segal, Elena Lantz, Ellie Evans, Elliott Ning, Eric Chung, Eric Harper, Eric Pham-Hung, Eric Tramel, Eric Yang, Erick Galinkin, Erik Pounds, Erika Goncalves Goncalves, Evan Briones, Evan Wu, Evelina Bakhturina, Evgeny Tsykunov, Ewa Dobrowolska, Faisal Ladhak, Farzan Memarian, Fay Wang, Fei Jia, Felipe Soares, Felipe Vieira Frujeri, Feng Chen, Fengguang Lin, Ferenc Galko, Frank Sun, Frankie Siino, Frida Hou, Gal Hubara Agam, Gal Kaplun, Gantavya Bhatt, Gargi Prasad, Garvit Kulshreshtha, George Armstrong, Gerald Shen, Giulio Borghesi, Gordana Neskovic, Gorkem Batmaz, Grace Lam, Greg Mason, Greg Pauloski, Grigor Nalbandyan, Grzegorz Chlebus, Grzegorz Karch, Guan-Ting Liu, Guoming Zhang, Guyue Huang, Haggai Maron, Haifeng Qian, Haim Elisha, Haoxing Ren, Haran Kumar Shiv Kumar, Haribhau Hud, Harris Nover, Harrison Saturley Hall, Hayate Iso, Helen Ngo, Herbert Hum, Herman Sahota, Hexin Wang, Himanshu Soni, Hovhannes Tamoyan, Hua Li, Huanhuan Chen, Hui Li, Hui Wang, Huy Nguyen, Ian Chiles, Ido Galil, Ido Shahaf, Igor Gitman, Igor Shovkun, Ilya Loshchilov, Ingo Guehring, Itamar Schen, Itay Levy, Itay Neeman, Ivan Moshkov, Izik Golan, Izzy Putterman, Jaemin Choi, Jakub Slowikowski, Jan Kautz, Jane Polak Scowcroft, Jared Casper, Jatin Mitra, Jeffrey Glick, Jenny Chen, Jesse Oliver, Jiacheng Xu, Jiafan Zhu, Jialin Song, Jian Zhang, Jiantao Jiao, Jiaqi Zeng, Jie Lou, Jim King, Jimmy Zhang, Jingquan Wang, Jinhang Choi, Jinju Chu, Joey Conway, Joey Guman, Johan Jatko, Johannes Rausch, John Kamalu, John Roberts, Johnny Greco, Johnny Mensel, Jonah Alben, Jonas Yang, Jonathan Cohen, Jonathan Raiman, Joseph Jennings, Joshua Mabry, Joshua Pierce, Joyjit Daw, Julien Veron Vialard, Junkeun Yi, Jupinder Parmar, Kajal Jain, Kan Zhu, Kari Briski, Katherine Cheung, Katherine Luna, Keith Willowhawk, Keith Wyss, Keshav Santhanam, Kevin Shih, Kezhi Kong, Khanh Nguyen, Khushi Bhardwaj, Kirthi Shankar Sivamani, Konstantinos Krommydas, Krishna C. Puvvada, Krzysztof Pawelec, Kumar Anik, Kyle Keprios, Kylie Day, Lawrence McAfee, Leo Du, Leon Derczynski, Li Ding, Linda Liu, Lingjie Wu, Lior Kadoch, Lizzie Wei, Luis Vega, Luke Robison, Lun Su, Maarten Van Segbroeck, Maciej Jakub Mikulski, Maer Rodrigues de Melo, Magda Sypula, Mahan Fathi, Makesh Narsimhan Sreedhar, Makesh Tarun Chandran, Manoj Kilaru, Maor Ashkenazi, Marc Cuevas, Marc Romeijn, Marcin Chochowski, Mark Cai, Mark Mozolewski, Markus Kliegl, Marta Stepniewska-Dziubinska, Martyna Patelka, Mattei Machczynski, Matvei Novikov, Mauricio Ferrato, Maximilian Golub, Mehrzad Samadi, Melissa Corpuz, Mengru Wang, Mengxi Wu, Meredith Price, Meriem Boubdir, Micah Schaffer, Michael Andersch, Michael Boone, Michael Gschwind, Michael Lightstone, Michael Loh, Michal Bien, Michal Zawalski, Michelle Gill, Miguel Martinez, Mikail Khona, Mike Chrzanowski, Mike Houston, Mingyuan Ma, Minseok Lee, Mohamed Fawzy, Mohammad Dabbah, Mohammad Shoeybi, Mostofa Patwary, Nabin Mulepati, Najeeb Nabwani, Namit Dhameja, Narimane Hennouni, Natalie Hereth, Nathaniel Pinckney, Nave Algarici, Nave Assaf, Netanel Haber, Nicholas Knight, Nick Reamaroon, Nickson Quak, Nidhi Bhatia, Nikhil Desai, Nikolai Ludwig, Nima Tajbakhsh, Ning Xu, Nir Ailon, Nirmal Juluru, Nitin Nitin, Ofri Masad, Oleg Rybakov, Oleksii Hrinchuk, Oleksii Kuchaiev, Olivia Viessmann, Olivier Delalleau, Oluwatobi Olabiyi, Omer Ullman Argov, Omri Puny, Oren Tropp, Pablo Ribalta, Pallab Bhattacharya, Panos Lampropoulos, Parth Mannan, Pasha Shamis, Patrick Legresley, Paul Gibbons, Pavlo Molchanov, Pawel Morkisz, Peter Dykas, Peter Jin, Pierre-Yves Aquilanti, Pinky Xu, Piotr Januszewski, Piotr Laskiewicz, Pooya Jannaty, Prakash Gurumurthy, Pranav Prashant Thombre, Prasoon Varshney, Pritam Gundecha, Przemek Tredak, Puhui Meng, Qiyu Wan, Rabeeh Karimi Mahabadi, Rachel Oberman, Rachit Garg, Radha Sri-Tharan, Rahul Kandu, Rakshit Sanadhya, Ran El-Yaniv, Ran Zilberstein, Rasoul Shafipour, Ray Macalisang, Rayen Tian, Reka Kovacs, Renjie Pi, Rick Izzo, Rima Shahbazyan, Rishabh Garg, Rishi Puri, Rita Fernandes Neves, Ritchie Zhao, Ritika Borkar, Ritu Gala, Riyad Islam, Robert Clark, Robert Hesse, Robert Kirby, Roger Waleffe, Rohit Watve, Roi Koren, Ron Banner, Ruoxi Zhang, Russell J. Hewett, Ryan Prenger, Ryan Stewart, Ryota Egashira, Sadegh Mahdavi, Saee Paliwal, Sagar Singh, Sahil Modi, Salika Dave, Samantha Shinagawa, Samuel Kriman, Sandip Bhaskar, Sangkug Lym, Sanjay Kariyappa, Sanjeev Satheesh, Saran Vikas Murari, Satish Pasumarthi, Saurabh Mishra, Saurav Muralidharan, Scott Hara, Sean Narentharen, Selvaraj Anandaraj, Seonjin Na, Seonmeyong Bak, Seonmyeong Bak, Sepehr Sameni, Seph Mard, Serge Panev, Seth Henneman, Seth Poulos, Shahar Mor, Shantanu Acharya, Shaona Ghosh, Sharath Turuvekere Sreenivas, Sharon Mendelson, Shaun Kotek, Shawn Wang, Shay Aharon, Shaya Gharghabi, Sheng-Chieh Lin, Shi Chen, Shiqing Fan, Shirish Baskaran, Shreya Gopa, Shrimai Prabhumoye, Shubham Pachori, Shubham Toshniwal, Shuoyang Ding, Shwetha Krishnamurthy, Siddharth Singh, Simeng Sun, Sirshak Das, Sivakumar Arayandi Thottakara, Smita Ithape, Somshubra Majumdar, Soumye Singhal, Sri Harsha Singudasu, Sridhar Bhuvanapalli, Srimukh Veccham, Stas Sergienko, Stefania Alborghetti, Stephen Ge, Su Rong, Sugam Dipak Devare, Sukrit Rao, Sumeet Kumar Barua, Sungsoo Ha, Sunny Gai, Suriya Gunasekar, Suseella Panguluri, Suyog Gupta, Sviataslau Hinzburh, Sweta Priyadarshi, Syeda Nahida Akter, Talor Abramovich, Tan Bui, Tanay Varshney, Tatevik Ter-Hovhannisyan, Teodor-Dumitru Ene, Terry Kong, Thanh Do, Tianhe Zhang, Tiffany Moore, Tijmen Blankevoort, Tim Moon, Tiyasa Mitra, Tom Balough, Tomasz Grzegorzek, Tomasz Hliwiak, Tomer Asida, Tomer Bar Natan, Tomer Keren, Tomer Ronen, Tony Salim, Tony Wang, Traian Rebedea, Tugrul Konuk, Twinkle Vashishth, Udi Karpas, Ushnish De, Vahid Noorozi, Venkat Srinivasan, Venmugil Elango, Vibhor Agrawal, Victor Cui, Vijay Korthikanti, Vikas Mehta, Vinay Rao, Virginia Wu, Vitaly Kurin, Vitaly Lavrukhin, Vladimir Anisimov, Vu Pham, Wanli Jiang, Wasi Uddin Ahmad, Wataru Ishihara, Wei Du, Wei Ping, Weiheng Chai, Wenliang Dai, Wesley Helmholz, Will Jennings, Will Zhu, Wojciech Prazuch, Xiaowei Ren, Xiwen Yu, Yan Breek, Yang Chen, Yang Yu, Yangyi Chen, Yaniv Galron, Yashaswi Karnati, Yejin Choi, Yev Meyer, Yi-Fu Wu, Yian Zhang, Ying Lin, Yonatan Geifman, Yonggan Fu, Youngeun Kwon, Yu Yao, Yugi Guvvala, Yuki Huang, Yunsheng Liu, Zach Moshe, Zachary Newell, Zhilin Wang, Zhiyu Li, Zhongbo Zhu, Zhuolin Yang, Zihan Liu, Zijie Yan, Zsolt-Alon Wertheimer

Machine Learning · Cross-listed from eess.SY

CREST: Deployment-Realistic Hardware-in-the-Loop NAS for Embedded Sensing Systems

Joseph Q. Zales, Pragya Sharma and Mani Srivastava

Deploying neural networks on low-power microcontrollers (MCUs) requires selecting model architectures under tight memory, latency, and energy constraints. Existing workflows often simplify this process along one or more axes: static proxy costs such as FLOPs or parameters, treating one MCU as representative, and continuous-inference tests instead of deployed sensing schedules. These assumptions can mis-rank Pareto-front candidates, miss infeasible deployments, and obscure schedule-dependent energy. We present CREST (Cross-platform Runtime Evaluation and Search Tool), a deployment-realistic hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) neural architecture search (NAS) framework for MCU sensing systems. CREST keeps the optimizer, HIL measurement boundary, logging, and replay workflow fixed while exposing workload, model family, target backend, schedule, quantization, and scoring policy as configurable axes. This makes deployment effects experimentally separable within one reusable workflow. We evaluate CREST on inertial odometry and audio classification across three Arm Cortex-M targets. For inertial odometry, measured-energy HIL search reduces median per-inference energy by 41.7% versus FLOPs-based selection and 40.8% versus memory-traffic-based selection at similar error. FLOPs-based selection also chooses infeasible deployments on memory-constrained targets. On the STM32 N657 target, continuous-inference and duty-cycled searches produce different Pareto frontiers. For audio classification, the same application-level policy selects different DS-CNN architectures on different boards, and cross-board replay changes deployment cost substantially. Overall, CREST shows that deployment-realistic MCU NAS must jointly optimize model architecture, target platform, runtime schedule, and deployment policy rather than relying only on static proxy costs or continuous-inference measurements.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from physics.comp-ph

Distilling latent electrostatics from foundation machine learning interatomic potentials

Xiaoyu Wang and Bingqing Cheng

Foundation machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) have enabled atomistic simulations across broad regions of chemical and materials space, but many remain computationally expensive and lack explicit electrostatics, limiting their use for systems governed by long-range interactions and electrical response. Previously, we introduced Latent Ewald Summation (LES), which learns latent atomic charges and long-range electrostatics from density functional theory (DFT) energy and force labels alone. Here, we use LES to extract electrostatics that are latent in foundation models: energies and forces predicted by a teacher model are used to train a lightweight LES-augmented student MLIP, with optional fine-tuning on additional DFT data. The resulting models reduce computational cost while providing access to Born effective charge tensors, and infrared spectra. We benchmark student models distilled from a broad set of foundation MLIPs, including UMA, MACE, Orb, eSEN, GemNet-OC, PET, and EquiformerV2-based models, against experimental infrared spectra for liquid water, concentrated hydrochloric acid, and the anatase TiO2(101)-water interface. Across these systems, electrostatic response can be extracted from most foundation MLIPs. The benchmark further shows that the underlying DFT level and dataset used to train the teacher model play a larger role than architecture in determining electrostatic and spectroscopic accuracy. For the TiO2-water interface, fine-tuning with a modest amount of higher-level DFT data improves structural and infrared predictions. LES-based distillation therefore provides a practical route for converting foundation MLIPs into efficient, electrically responsive models, while also testing the physical fidelity encoded in foundation models.
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Machine Learning

Unlocking Latent Dimensions: Exploring Representations of Large-Scale X-ray Scattering Data using Variational Autoencoders

Monika Choudhary, Xiaoya Chong, Runbo Jiang et al. (+25 more)

Scientific user facilities generate X-ray scattering data faster than traditional workflows can process them. We address this challenge across two settings, offline dataset exploration and live on-the-fly analysis. We train a domain-specific attention-based Convolutional Variational Autoencoder (C-VAE) on 1.5 million X-ray scattering images to learn low-dimensional representations capturing structural variation across diverse experimental conditions. The learned latent space reveals well-organized clusters and smooth trajectories reflecting experimental progression. It further supports controlled synthetic scattering image generation across diverse structural states. When deployed without retraining, the model organizes time-resolved film formation experiments at two synchrotron facilities into interpretable latent structures. Benchmarking against DINOv3 (ViT-7B), a general-purpose vision foundation model, demonstrates that domain-specific training yields more interpretable latent organization for scattering data. Both workflows are integrated within Latent Space Explorer, a component of the MLExchange platform, supporting interactive structural exploration across archived datasets and live experiments.
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All authors Monika Choudhary, Xiaoya Chong, Runbo Jiang, Wiebke Koepp, Petrus H. Zwart, Damon English, Gregory M. Su, Eric Schaible, Chenhui Zhu, Mostafa Nassr, Noah P. Wamble, Kelvin Kam-Yun Li, Jonathan M. Chan, Jose Carlos Diaz, Cameron McKay, Lynn Katz, Benny Freeman, Guillaume Freychet, Yevgen Matviychuk, Eliot Gann, Daniel B. Allan, Benedikt Sochor, Frank Schluenzen, Stephan V. Roth, Ethan J. Crumlin, Dylan McReynolds, Tanny Chavez, Alexander Hexemer

Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.AI

AI Engram: In Search of Memory Traces in Artificial Intelligence

Jea Kwon, Dong-Kyum Kim, Jiwon Kim et al. (+3 more)

Memory formation is fundamental to intelligence, yet whether deep neural networks preserve identifiable memory traces analogous to biological memory units remains an open question. This work introduces a geometric framework to identify such "AI engrams" by formalizing the neuroscientific criteria of specificity, reactivation, sufficiency, and necessity into a constrained inverse problem. We derive a closed-form estimator that isolates individual memory traces from globally entangled parameters, and show that this biologically-derived solution corresponds to a natural gradient update on the parameter manifold. AI engrams enable surgical manipulation of learned knowledge: any subset of memories can be composed or erased through linear arithmetic, without iterative optimization. Experiments ranging from simple MLPs to LLMs demonstrate the causal validity and substantial scalability of AI engrams. Together, these results bridge theories of biological memory and artificial representation learning and offer geometric insight into how deep networks simultaneously support functional specificity within distributed storage.
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All authors Jea Kwon, Dong-Kyum Kim, Jiwon Kim, Yonghyun Kim, Woong Kook, Meeyoung Cha

Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.AR

KATANA: A Fast, Low-Power Mapping of Kalman Filters onto Edge NPUs for Real-Time Tracking

Bodhisatwa Kundu, Anish Rooj, Sumit Saha et al. (+4 more)

State estimation is the closed-loop core of every real-time tracking system, from radar surveillance and counter-UAV defense to autonomous driving and robotics. These deployments run on edge platforms, where defense systems mount on vehicles and drones, and civilian pipelines live on cars and handheld devices. Here, every additional watt of compute erodes mission duration or operational range. Two hard constraints follow: each new measurement must be fused before the next control cycle, and the total compute must fit within a strict battery and thermal power envelope. The Linear and Extended Kalman Filters (LKF, EKF) are dominant estimators on these systems, but today they execute almost exclusively on CPUs, which serialize multi-object tracking (MOT) updates, or on custom FPGA/ASIC accelerators that lengthen design cycles. Contemporary AI-PC SoCs, like the Intel Core Ultra Series 1 and 2, integrate a low-power, data-parallel Neural Processing Unit (NPU). We therefore ask whether the Kalman filter can be mapped onto this existing matrix engine to meet real-time and low-power budgets simultaneously, avoiding a dedicated accelerator and keeping the CPU and GPU free for primary workloads. We present KATANA, an NPU-aware optimization framework delivering the first end-to-end mapping of the LKF and EKF onto a commercial NPU, alongside a cross-platform characterization on shipping AI-PC silicon. KATANA applies three algebraic graph rewrites: subtract-to-add reformulation via a precomputed negative-projection matrix H_neg, static-shape tensor fusion, and block-diagonal batched parallelization, ensuring 100% of operations execute on the DPU matrix engine. On the Series 2, the optimized batched EKF reaches 223.35 FPS at 13.43 W active power, and the LKF reaches 408.73 FPS at 14.05 W, delivering up to a 97.9% reduction in dynamic energy versus the CPU implementation.
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All authors Bodhisatwa Kundu, Anish Rooj, Sumit Saha, Abhradeep Sarkar, Arghadip Das, Arnab Raha, Mrinal K. Naskar

Machine Learning

Rational Sparse Autoencoder

Naiyu Yin and Yue Yu

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are standard tools for mechanistic interpretability, but current SAE families are constrained by fixed encoder nonlinearities such as ReLU, JumpReLU, and TopK. This hard-codes a particular sparsity mechanism into the model and can distort the reconstruction-versus-sparsity trade-off. We introduce the Rational Sparse Autoencoder (RSAE), which replaces the fixed encoder activation with a trainable rational function. Rational activations are flexible enough to uniformly approximate the activation primitives used by existing SAE families on compact domains (for TopK, the thresholded gate obtained after a separating top-k threshold is supplied), while also providing a richer function class for adapting to the observed pre-activation geometry. We realise this idea through a two-stage pipeline: an initialisation procedure that copies the pre-trained baseline SAE weights, plugs in rational coefficients obtained by the relaxed Remez exchange on synthetic data, and calibrates the scale parameters along with the rational coefficients; followed by a fine-tuning step under the standard sparsity-regularised reconstruction objective. Empirically, on residual-stream activations of three open-weight language models and across all three baseline activation families, the RSAE strictly improves on it after the fine-tuning step, both on reconstruction-side metrics and on downstream-behaviour metrics, without sacrificing feature-level interpretability under sparse probing. These gains are consistent across host language models, across baseline activation families, and across the full range of baseline sparsity we tested, while the upgrade itself adds only a handful of scalar parameters per autoencoder and runs in minutes on a single consumer GPU.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.CR

Continual Backdoor Training in IoT/CPS

Oxana Salish and Kuniyilh S

Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-physical systems (CPS) increasingly rely on continual learning (CL) to adapt to evolving environments, device heterogeneity, and concept drift, thereby improving overall utility. While continual adaptation is essential for long-lived IoT deployments where data patterns evolve, it also introduces new security vulnerabilities. In particular, backdoor attacks can exploit incremental updates, replay buffers, and representation reuse to implant persistent malicious behaviors that remain dormant during normal operation but activate upon specific triggers. In this paper, we present a backdoor attack in continual learning used in IoT/CPS systems. To this end, we formalize an IoT/CPS-specific threat model, analyze why continual learning amplifies backdoor persistence in IoT pipelines, and evaluate our technique under varying conditions. Our analysis highlights critical open challenges in securing lifelong learning in IoT/CPS and industrial IoT (IIoT) environments, as well as the need for heightened security controls.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.RO

Inference-time Policy Steering via Vision and Touch

Yilin Wu, Zilin Si, Zeynep Temel et al. (+2 more)

Inference-time steering adapts pre-trained generative robot policies during deployment by verifying candidate actions before execution. While prior methods typically perform this verification only with visual observations, vision alone is often insufficient for contact-rich manipulation, where success depends on both global task progress and subtle local interactions such as contact force. We introduce ViTaL, a visuo-tactile inference-time steering framework that formulates multimodal guidance as a bi-level optimization problem. At the high level, visual sampling-and-verification performs long-horizon mode selection, deciding what behavior the robot should execute. At the low level, tactile-guided diffusion editing refines the selected action sequence over a shorter horizon to satisfy local contact requirements. To support outcome-based steering, ViTaL learns a visuo-tactile latent world model and employs semantically aligned visual and tactile verifiers, including a novel text-conditioned tactile reward that scores predicted tactile futures directly in latent space. Across three real-world contact-rich manipulation tasks, ViTaL improves overall success by 51% over the base policy, outperforms unimodal steering by at least 33%, and exceeds naive multimodal fusion by at least 20%. Website: https://yilin-wu98.github.io/vital_website.
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All authors Yilin Wu, Zilin Si, Zeynep Temel, Oliver Kroemer, Andrea Bajcsy

Machine Learning · Cross-listed from econ.EM

Identification and Inference for Algorithmic Frontiers with Selective Labels

Yiqi Liu, Francesca Molinari and Amilcar Velez

This paper provides identification results to characterize a fairness-accuracy (FA) frontier, and statistical inference tools to test hypotheses and build a confidence set for the FA-frontier, when outcomes are observed only for selected individuals. When the selection process is unrestricted but loss is measured in specific ways, we provide a characterization of the sharp identification region of the FA-frontier. When the observed distribution rules out frontier membership for a binary status quo algorithm, we construct a single alternative algorithm that improves both groups' accuracy without worsening fairness, uniformly over all admissible distributions of missing labels. For any loss functions, under selection on observables and strict overlap assumptions, we obtain point identification and propose a debiased machine learning estimator, derive its asymptotic distribution, and show how this can be used to carry out inference for the FA-frontier.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.NE

Harnessing cortical geometry, wiring, and function as inductive biases for recurrent neural networks

Mo Shakiba, Rana Rokni, Mohammad Mohammadi et al. (+1 more)

How the wiring and functional organization of cortex shape recurrent computation remains a central question in both neuroscience and machine learning. Here, we leverage data released through the Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks (MICrONS) program–a functional connectomics resource spanning multiple areas of mouse visual cortex, in which dense calcium imaging is co-registered with high-resolution electron microscopy reconstruction from the same animal–to build biologically grounded recurrent neural networks. Using neuronal spatial coordinates, anatomical connectivity, and function-derived relationships from nearly 12,000 coregistered excitatory neurons, we initialize recurrent weights and impose communication-aware spatial constraints during learning. Across three cognitive decision-making tasks, networks constrained by cortical structure and function consistently outperform baseline and partially constrained models. Functional weight initialization provides the largest gain, while real spatial embedding yields robust additional improvements across conditions. These biologically grounded networks also develop low-entropy, modular, and small-world organization, and retain strong performance even when recurrence is restricted to positive weights. Together, our results show that the machinery of cortex–its geometry, wiring, and functional structure–can be harnessed as a powerful inductive basis for building recurrent networks that learn more effectively while converging toward key organizational principles of biological computation.
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All authors Mo Shakiba, Rana Rokni, Mohammad Mohammadi, Nima Dehghani

Machine Learning

FastMix: Fast Data Mixture Optimization via Gradient Descent

Haoru Tan, Sitong Wu, Yanfeng Chen et al. (+5 more)

While large and diverse datasets have driven recent advances in large models, identifying the optimal data mixture for pre-training and post-training remains a significant open problem. We address this challenge with FASTMIX, a novel framework that automates data mixture discovery while training only a single proxy model. Instead of relying on predefined heuristics or resource-intensive simulations, FASTMIX jointly optimizes mixture coefficients and model parameters, substantially improving efficiency and scalability over prior approaches. At the core of FASTMIX is a reformulation of mixture selection as a bilevel optimization problem. Under this reformulation, we show that optimizing mixture ratios is mathematically equivalent to assigning per-source loss weights under uniform source sampling. This embeds the mixture coefficients directly into the differentiable iterative optimization objective, enabling efficient, gradient-based optimization of both mixture and model. To solve the optimization problem, FASTMIX implements an approximate iterative optimization procedure, alternating between (i) updating model parameters on data sampled according to current mixture ratios (inner loop) and (ii) updating mixture ratios based on validation feedback (outer loop). Across pre- and post-training, FASTMIX outperforms baselines while drastically reducing search cost. Code (https://github.com/hrtan/fastmix)
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All authors Haoru Tan, Sitong Wu, Yanfeng Chen, Jun Xia, Ruobing Xie, Bin Xia, Xingwu Sun, Xiaojuan Qi

Machine Learning

Zero-order Parameter-free Optimization for LMO-based Methods: Novel Approach for Efficient Fine-tuning

Dmitriy Bystrov, Daniil Medyakov, Dmitry Bylinkin et al. (+1 more)

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) has become a central application of modern optimization, enabling pretrained models to adapt to diverse downstream tasks and domain-specific data. A major obstacle in large-scale fine-tuning is the memory overhead of backpropagation, which requires storing activations, gradients, and optimizer states. Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization offers a memory-efficient alternative, but its performance is highly sensitive to the stepsize and smoothing parameter, often requiring costly task-specific tuning. Parameter-free (PF) optimization addresses this issue by adapting algorithmic parameters without prior knowledge of problem-dependent constants. Moreover, large-scale fine-tuning can benefit from geometry-aware updates that account for the heterogeneous structure of parameter blocks, which can be modeled through methods that exploit linear minimization oracle (LMO). In this work, we study PF adaptation for LMO-based ZO optimization and introduce $\texttt{AdaNAGED}$, a method that unifies gradient-free training, adaptive tuning, and non-Euclidean update geometry. We establish convergence guarantees and validate the method on large-scale LLM fine-tuning task with $\texttt{OPT}-1.3\mathrm{B}$ model.
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All authors Dmitriy Bystrov, Daniil Medyakov, Dmitry Bylinkin, Aleksandr Beznosikov

Machine Learning

Benchmarking Instance-Dependent Label Noise with Controlled Corruptions

Shadman Islam, Agustinus Kristiadi and Mostafa Milani

Synthetic instance-dependent label noise (IDN) benchmarks are widely used to evaluate noisy-label learning methods, yet existing approaches typically generate noise through imperfect annotators or classifier raters, leaving the source of ambiguity implicit. We introduce CILN, a benchmark generation framework that creates IDN through controlled input corruptions. A diverse voter pool labels corrupted instances, producing benchmark datasets in which both the source and severity of ambiguity are explicit and controllable. Using CIFAR10, MNIST, and Adult, we construct 90 benchmark settings spanning multiple corruption families and severity levels. Our experiments show that the resulting benchmarks exhibit genuine instance-dependent noise, provide diverse confusion structures, and, on CIFAR-10, can produce label distributions that are closer to human uncertainty than an existing synthetic IDN benchmark. We further demonstrate that corruption-mediated IDN can expose failure modes of popular noisy-label learning methods, including Co-Teaching and DivideMix, that are not observed under comparable levels of rater-fallibility noise. These findings suggest that noise structure, not only noise rate, plays an important role in benchmark difficulty and algorithm behavior. By making ambiguity generation explicit and controllable, CILN provides a complementary benchmarking framework for studying noisy-label learning under diverse sources of instance difficulty.
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Machine Learning

Leveraging Physiological Signals to Predict Exam Outcomes with Machine Learning

Lala Yamazaki and Ramchandra Rimal

This study investigates the application of machine learning models to predict exam outcomes using physiological data collected during examination sessions. Physiological stress indicators, including electrodermal activity, heart rate, and skin temperature, were analyzed to uncover their association with academic performance. A variety of machine learning approaches were employed, ranging from standard models like logistic regression, random forest, and support vector machines to more advanced architectures, including transformers, long short-term memory (LSTM), and gated recurrent unit (GRU) models. This diversity aimed to capture the complex interactions within the data effectively. A key focus was assessing the adaptability of transformers in processing numerical data and evaluating their performance in this novel context. Standard performance metrics, such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score, were used to compare model efficacy. The experimental results demonstrate that while deep learning models generally excel at capturing complex relationships in physiological data, simpler models like random forests can sometimes achieve superior performance while offering computational efficiency and interpretability. Furthermore, transformers demonstrated notable versatility, showcasing performances comparable to those of the LSTM and GRU models. This research underscores the importance of experimenting with a broad class of models that align with the objectives of the problem at hand, balancing precision, efficiency, and interpretability. By elucidating the relationships between physiological signals and academic performance, this study contributes to understanding stressors affecting students' mental health. It further promotes leveraging physiological data to enhance student well-being and academic outcomes.
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