Papers

Residential battery energy storage systems (BESS) are increasingly deployed alongside photovoltaic (PV) generation to reduce household energy costs under volatile time-of-use (TOU) tariffs. Model predictive control (MPC) is a widely adopted optimisation strategy for home energy management systems (HEMS), typically formulated to minimise net energy cost, subject to physical and operational constraints. However, battery degradation is rarely embedded in the optimisation objective, meaning its cost is unquantified and aggressive; high-cycle-count strategies could incur significant losses once deployed to physical systems. This paper presents a receding-horizon mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) baseline for a UK residential HEMS, using demand data from the REFIT dataset. A 3 by 3 sensitivity study is conducted across three battery sizes and three PV array sizes, with post-hoc degradation cost estimated using the Naumann stress model and rainflow cycle counting. Results show that degradation remains constant for each battery size and can exceed energy cost savings by up to 1,060 %. These results demonstrate that energy-cost-only optimisation systematically underestimates the true system cost, motivating a degradation-aware control formulation.

Robust deep learning under heavy-tailed and impulsive noise remains challenging because conventional losses such as mean squared error (MSE) exhibit unbounded sensitivity to outliers. Although correntropy-based objectives improve robustness, many conventional formulations rely on fixed kernel parameters that must be empirically tuned and remain static during training. To address these limitations, we propose an Adaptive Log-Correntropy Loss (ALCL), a heavy-tailed loss formulation that adaptively learns its robustness geometry during optimization. ALCL introduces a logarithmic residual model whose shape and scale parameters are learned jointly with network weights through differentiable reparameterization. This yields a heavy-tailed robust optimization objective whose psi-function is formally bounded and redescending, allowing the loss geometry to adapt dynamically to evolving residual statistics while suppressing extreme outliers. Comparative experiments on four widely used benchmark datasets spanning grayscale and red-green-blue (RGB) image data under mixed heavy-tailed and impulsive noise demonstrate that ALCL consistently outperforms MSE and optimally tuned generalized correntropy losses in both reconstruction fidelity and downstream classification accuracy. While performance differences remain small under low-noise conditions, under high-noise regimes ALCL improves median accuracy by up to 4.75% on grayscale benchmarks and 4.51% on RGB datasets, with reduced variance across runs. These results demonstrate that adaptive robustness through joint learning of loss parameters provides a computationally efficient alternative to static correntropy-based losses for deep learning in non-Gaussian environments.

In the data selection problem, the objective is to choose a small, representative subset of data that can be used to efficiently train a machine learning model. Sener and Savarese [ICLR 2018] showed that, given an embedding representation of the data and suitable geometric assumptions, heuristics based on $k$-center clustering can be used to perform data selection. This perspective was further explored by Axiotis et. al. [ICML 2024], who proposed a data selection approach based on $k$-means clustering and sensitivity sampling. However, these methods rely on the assumption that the dataset exhibits intrinsic geometric structure that can be effectively captured by clustering, whereas many modern datasets instead possess global algebraic structure that is better exploited by low-rank approximation or principal component analysis. In this paper, we introduce a new data selection framework based on low-rank approximation and residual-based sampling, formulated through the lens of row subset selection and loss-preserving coreset construction. Given an embedding representation of the data satisfying mild regularity conditions, which can be interpreted as algebraic or angular notions of Lipschitz continuity, we show that it is possible to select a weighted subset of $\tilde{O}\left(k + \frac{1}{\varepsilon^2}\right)$ data points whose average loss approximates the average loss over the full dataset within a $(1+\varepsilon)$ relative error, up to an additive $\varepsilon \Phi_k$ term, where $\Phi_k$ denotes the optimal rank-$k$ approximation cost of the embedding matrix. We complement these theoretical guarantees with empirical evaluations, demonstrating that on a range of real-world datasets, our data selection approach achieves improved performance over prior strategies based on uniform sampling or clustering-based sensitivity sampling.

Protein language models (pLMs) can generate novel protein sequences with properties beyond those observed in nature, yet the mechanisms underlying protein generation remain poorly understood. Existing mechanistic interpretability methods based on sparse autoencoders and transcoders primarily focus on protein representation learning models and do not capture the computation required for autoregressive generation. Here, we introduce ProGenMech, a mechanistic interpretability framework for generative protein language models that extends cross-layer transcoders (CLTs) to ProGen3, a sparse Mixture-of-Experts model trained for both causal generation and span infilling. Unlike per-layer approaches, CLTs reconstruct each layer using sparse latent variables from all preceding layers, enabling faithful recovery of inter-layer generative computation. We further develop a zero-shot circuit discovery framework to identify sparse latent circuits responsible for protein generation and fitness prediction. In causal generation and zero-shot fitness estimation tasks, ProGenMech outperforms local transcoder baselines in recovering ProGen3's probability distribution and functional scoring behavior, while matching the original model's generative distribution in span infilling tasks. Moreover, the recovered circuits reveal biologically meaningful motifs and functional regions associated with conserved sequence patterns and protein fitness landscapes, establishing a foundation for interpretable and steerable protein generation.

Modern particles physics experiments have demonstrated an increasing need for fast, high-fidelity detector simulation as detector components have improved and subsequent computational requirements approach the limits of available resources. Recently, deep generative models have emerged as a promising alternative to traditional Monte-Carlo methods, with recent works drawing inspiration from large language models (LLMs) and self-supervised next-token prediction methods. In this work, we present an application of a GPT-style autoregressive transformer as a fast surrogate model for the calorimeter inside the CLAS12 experiment at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. The model is conditioned on incident momentum and generates realistic detector hits autoregressively across all nine calorimeter layers as sequences of strip, ADC, and TDC tokens. We demonstrate that the model faithfully reproduces hit multiplicity, spatial distributions, energy deposits, and the energy-momentum response of the electromagnetic calorimeter. The generator achieves inference rates exceeding 700 events per second on a single GPU, providing a substantial speedup over traditional Geant4-based simulations while maintaining physics fidelity essential for high-luminosity experimental programs.

Temporal classification errors are often treated as representation failures, but they can also arise from how available evidence is converted into decisions. This paper proposes a representation–calibration decomposition for temporal classification. We keep a trained native classifier frozen and separate two inference-time interventions: a conservative residual multi-scale branch that adds auxiliary logits to the native prediction, and a post-hoc branch-aware calibrator that recombines native and residual evidence at decision time. This design distinguishes missing temporal evidence from underused decision-level evidence without retraining the backbone. Across FI-2010, PTB-XL, UCI-HAR, MHEALTH, and HARTH, we find that gains are strongly regime-dependent. Residual multi-scale evidence is most useful in noisy or representation-limited settings, especially short-horizon FI-2010 and weaker recurrent backbones, while branch-aware calibration helps when native and auxiliary logits contain complementary evidence not fully exploited by the raw decision rule. Near-saturated settings show limited gains from either intervention. These results suggest that temporal classification should be understood not only as representation learning, but also as the problem of trusting, combining, and calibrating evidence from multiple views.

Interest in applying data-driven approaches in manufacturing has grown significantly, particularly for mapping complex, high-dimensional relationships. The milling process is one area where predictive models can link influential parameters to surface roughness metrics prior to in situ operations. While this approach offers clear advantages, it faces challenges due to limited datasets and robustness issues in inverse design paradigms. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a machine learning (ML)-based framework for the inverse design of the surface milling process, with a focus on surface roughness as the design objective. The framework employs forward training of two ML models, a deep neural network (DNN) and a random forest (RF) ensemble, both developed using a high-fidelity synthetic dataset generated from a computational simulation framework. These trained models are integrated into a Bayesian optimization (BO) procedure to overcome the multiplicity problem arising from the many-to-one mapping inherent in the dataset. The approach identifies top-performing milling process configurations, considering both process and tool parameters, and presents them from the full solution space. The models achieve average relative errors below 5% when compared to reference results, thereby demonstrating the robustness and reliability of the proposed methodology.

Modern deep learning architectures are increasingly multi-task and multi-modal, using a pretrained foundation model combined with task-specific, fine-tuned models. Empirically, exploiting similarity across different problems, instead of solving them individually, can significantly improve overall performance. While the generalization and sample complexity properties of multitask learning have been widely studied, the parametric complexity of joint approximation in comparison to separate approximation remains less well understood. The question is particularly relevant in modern deep learning, where models are increasingly required to satisfy structural constraints such as equivariance, conservation laws, or orthogonality. We prove lower and upper bounds on the description-length for separate and joint approximation classes, respectively, in uniform norm. We build a class of orthogonal functions by composing a shared hard feature, realized by a Rademacher-Haar wavelet series, with Sawtooth-Walsh readouts to enforce orthogonality of output coordinates. The dyadic tree structure of the Rademacher-Haar wavelet concentrates the approximation hardness in the common feature component, while the readouts act as task-specific heads. Using an information-theoretic framework, we obtain a sharp gap between the optimal approximation rates achievable by joint and separate coding. Finally, we realize this separation in a neural network model using Heaviside activations via reduction to triangle-wave approximation. Our results show that even under an orthogonality constraint joint approximation requires strictly fewer bits in compositional architectures, provided the tasks share a latent hard feature. This provides theoretical insight into the description-length-efficiency of compositional multi-output architectures and clarifies how neural networks can retain expressivity under geometric constraints.

Human mobility appears highly diverse, yet much of a person's daily mobility can be explained by a small set of recurring behavioral templates, such as commuting, school-centered activities, caregiving, nightlife, or errand patterns. We present IBAD (\underline{I}nterpretable \underline{B}ehavioral \underline{A}nomaly \underline{D}etection), a framework that learns interpretable daily mobility templates and represents each individual as a distribution over mixtures of these templates. Rather than focusing on specific locations, IBAD characterizes activities that individuals perform across locations. This approach first discovers global behavioral templates using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), then employs a hierarchical self-supervised model to learn normal behavior of individuals from their soft behavioral templates. We also introduce a splicing benchmark that creates controlled behavioral mismatches between an individual's historical profile and injected mobility patterns. Experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets show that daily behavior can be effectively decomposed into a small number of interpretable templates. Crucially, we show that the learned behavioral archetypes transfer across distinct geographic and demographic contexts. Furthermore, IBAD maintains a robust competitive performance across all settings. For reproducibility purposes, the code is accessible at ~\href{https://github.com/USC-InfoLab/IBAD}{https://github.com/USC-InfoLab/IBAD}.

Expert phonetic annotation is costly, especially for non-standard dialects and atypical speech. A common alternative is using Grapheme-to-Phoneme (G2P) models to auto-generate phonetic labels from text transcripts at scale. We study how automatic phonetic transcription performance scales with human and G2P supervision in English. Using a curated 80-hour benchmark spanning native, non-native and post-stroke speech, we identify a supervision quality threshold: G2P supervision helps only when fewer than 20-30 hours of human annotation are available. Beyond this threshold, it provides no significant benefit and can reduce cross-dialect robustness. What is effective after this threshold is ASR pretraining which we use to achieve a 2.3x reduction in weighted phone feature error rate over prior systems, with strong gains on non-native and aphasic speech. These results suggest that quantity-driven G2P scaling may yield diminishing returns for robust generalization.

Interpreting machine-learning models has attracted increasing attention, particularly in the physical sciences, where one often seeks to understand the underlying mechanisms rather than merely make predictions. Multiple linear regression is often regarded as an interpretable alternative to more complex models, such as deep neural networks, because its predictions are expressed as explicit weighted sums of input features. However, when input features are strongly correlated, namely in the presence of multicollinearity, the learned weights can exhibit large dataset-to-dataset fluctuations and oscillatory behavior across physically similar features, making their interpretation difficult or even impossible. Although the instability of the weights under multicollinearity is well known in statistics, its consequences for physical interpretation, in particular its connection to oscillatory weights across physically similar features, have not been systematically clarified. Here, we theoretically discuss the mechanism behind this loss of interpretability by analyzing the eigenmodes of the feature correlation matrix. We show that small-eigenvalue modes associated with multicollinearity amplify fluctuations in the weights and generate oscillatory patterns that do not necessarily reflect meaningful contributions. We test this theoretical picture numerically on physics datasets and show that Ridge regularization suppresses these unstable modes, although the resulting weights must still be interpreted with caution. We further confirm the generality of our findings beyond physics by analyzing a diverse collection of publicly available datasets. Our results clarify why, in the presence of multicollinearity, physical interpretation can remain difficult even for linear regression models.

One-class Support Vector Machine(OCSVM) is a variant of support vector machine(SVM) for one-class classification (OCC). However, OCSVM has scalability issues with large datasets. This paper proposes an acceleration strategy for OCSVM. The idea is to decompose the dataset into samples and train OCSVM models for single data points. Subsequently, ensemble learning is applied to combine all models to compute the OCSVM model for the dataset. In addition, further acceleration is achieved through a support vector selection strategy with an OCSVM model trained on the average of the training samples. The experiment compared the proposal and traditional OCSVM using the Python package. The proposed strategy is faster than traditional OCSVM, while achieving similar classification results. Moreover, the proposed strategy can create a one-to-one correspondence between samples and models. Source code is uploaded at https://github.com/ToshiHayashi/ODSVM.

We introduce GRACE-DS, a Guarded Reward-guided Agent Correction Environment in Data Science for pre-deployment evaluation of LLM-powered AutoML agents. GRACE-DS is a set of evaluation metrics in an isolated environment that can be applied to tabular ML tasks specific to a particular organization. It exposes agents to realistic workflow stages, from planning and data inspection through feature engineering, model development, validation, and code repair to final submission, while hidden executable validators measure not only final predictive performance but also leakage avoidance, reproducibility, protocol validity, correction behavior, and reward alignment. The strongest structured regime, flexible iterative interaction (our approach), achieves higher end-to-end normalized hidden-test quality than single-shot generation, unstructured interaction, and restart-based baselines, while also improving protocol-valid completion. Validated across more than 7,000 episodes, these results establish GRACE-DS as a robust platform for assessing the capacity of LLM-based AutoML agents to execute machine learning workflows under production-like conditions and in accordance with organization-specific requirements.

Entity-aware document retrieval uses query-associated entities as ranking signals, assuming that semantically relevant entities are also useful retrieval signals. We show this assumption is insufficient- and explain why. Unlike terms, which are ground-truth observations, entity links are hypotheses produced by an imperfect linker: an entity can be topically central yet provide no discriminative signal if the linker fires indiscriminately across relevant and non-relevant documents. We formalize this as a distinction between Conceptual Entity Relevance (CER)- whether an entity is topically related to a query- and Observable Entity Relevance (OER)- whether its observed presence in a collection discriminates relevant from non-relevant documents. Across four collections and annotation sources including human entity judgments, CER and OER exhibit near-chance agreement ($\kappa \approx 0$), while OER operationalizations agree substantially ($\kappa \approx 0.5$), confirming CER as the systematic outlier. CER-based supervision selects topically plausible but weakly discriminative entities, pruning fewer than 4% of non-relevant documents on some collections. Aligning supervision with OER improves non-relevant pruning by up to 10x and open-world MAP by 0.051 over BM25. Our findings motivate a shift from conceptual to observable notions of entity relevance in entity-aware retrieval.

Translating deep learning models from PyTorch's flexible, object-oriented design to JAX's functional, stateless setup is usually a manual and error-prone task. Automated migration is challenging because Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with strict and dynamic API alignment and are prone to mistakes for exacting operations. We propose a fully autonomous system that combines In-Context Learning (ICL) with oracle-driven self-debugging. First, we curated an ICL context that serves as a strict reference for idiomatic JAX styling and test case generation. Second, instead of depending on the LLM to deduce mathematical outputs, we run the source PyTorch modules to get their actual dynamic tensor states. This creates an unchangeable execution oracle. We then use an autonomous agentic loop to synthesize tests based on the oracle data. The test cases are executed repeatedly, and the traceback is sent back to the LLM for self-correction. Ablations show that combining ICL references with oracle grounding and self-debugging greatly outperforms pure instructional and basic agentic baselines. This improvement does not add an excessive computational overhead. Our lightweight pipeline achieves 91% numerical equivalence (compared to baseline: 9%, instruction + self-debugging: 27%) on neural modules, providing a highly reliable, scalable blueprint for cross-framework migration. This has been validated across several state-of-the-art models including SAM (segment anything), T5, Code Whisper amongst others showing high numerical equivalency. Code: https://github.com/AI-Hypercomputer/accelerator-agents/tree/main/MaxCode

The generating functional in quantum field theory provides the natural framework for constructing correlation functions as derivatives with respect to source operators. We present a methodology that leverages machine-learned normalizing flows to reduce the variance of arbitrary $N$-point correlation functions of bosonic operators in lattice gauge field theory calculations by encoding a representation of the generating functional. We show that it is possible to systematically approach noiseless estimators of correlation functions in this framework. We demonstrate this methodology with applications to calculations of glueball correlation functions and Wilson loops in Quantum Chromodynamics and Yang-Mills theory. The results show up to three orders of magnitude variance reduction.

Recent theoretical progress has established conditions under which machine learning models can efficiently predict ground-state properties of gapped local Hamiltonians when trained on quantum-generated data. Previous experimental demonstrations in this paradigm, however, have largely been limited to small systems or highly structured states, due to the difficulty of preparing many-body ground states on quantum processors. In this work, we demonstrate learning from experimental quantum data generated from approximate ground states of the two-dimensional Heisenberg XXZ model with system sizes up to 115 qubits. We construct a dataset of single-site expectation values, two-point correlations, and 12-body loop correlations across the antiferromagnetic phase. We then train neural networks on this data and show that they can accurately predict spatially resolved observables for previously unseen Hamiltonian parameters, both within the training distribution and in an out-of-distribution regime approaching the phase boundary. Our results demonstrate the practical realization of learning from quantum data for an interacting two-dimensional many-body system at scale, motivating a path toward regimes where quantum processors could provide training data beyond the reach of classical approximation methods.

Activation monitors – lightweight probes trained on a language model's internal representations – are an increasingly common layer in deployment safety stacks. Deployed models however are rarely static: they are quantized, fine-tuned, adapted with LoRA, or served with merged adapters while the monitor remains frozen. We present the first systematic test of whether this implicit contract holds: whether activation monitors trained on a base model remain reliable after these routine model updates. Across multiple safety-relevant monitors, model depths, update families, and open-weight models, we find a sharp split: quantization-style updates largely preserve frozen probe performance, while fine-tuning-style updates frequently make probes stale. Fragility is highly monitor-dependent, with privacy/PII probes most affected and refusal-compliance probes comparatively stable, showing that retraining a behavior need not stale its corresponding monitor. QLoRA is especially damaging despite NF4 quantization alone being relatively benign, suggesting that quantization becomes riskier when combined with adaptation. We further show that degradation is predictable from pre-deployment features, enabling revalidation budgets to be triaged toward the monitors most likely to fail. Finally, we test repair strategies and find that cheap label-free activation realignment repairs every repair-relevant stale cell, with none requiring score calibration, few-label heads, or labeled retraining. These results suggest that fine-tuning should trigger activation-monitor revalidation by default, with prediction triaging which monitors to check first and label-free realignment as the default repair.

Tsitsiklis proved convergence of Monte Carlo optimistic policy iteration under a uniform update structure and identified nonuniform update frequencies as a delicate obstruction. We give a certified negative answer for the natural scalar-stepsize, unnormalized asynchronous state-value recursion with fixed nonuniform state-selection probabilities. In a three-state, two-action discounted MDP, the nonuniform update frequencies induce a diagonally scaled greedy-policy mean field with a certified nonconstant attracting hybrid periodic orbit. With a bounded unbiased geometric-horizon estimator and Robbins–Monro stepsizes, the original stochastic recursion remains trapped near the cycle with positive probability and therefore fails to converge. The example pinpoints a geometric obstruction: uniform sampling gives radial residual contraction, whereas scalar nonuniform sampling anisotropically distorts the residual dynamics and can generate switched attracting cycles.

With large language models (LLMs) increasingly applied to mathematical reasoning, formal proof assistants such as Lean can be leveraged to verify reasoning outputs with machine-checkable rigor, enabling use cases such as answer selection in test-time scaling with K sampled candidate answers. However, employing Lean requires that LLM outputs, originally in natural language, first be formalized. Existing Lean-based answer-selection work uses an autoformalization model to generate a formal statement in Lean for each candidate answer independently, incurring a significant computational cost. We propose BASE, a base-and-edit pipeline that formalizes a single base candidate per problem and derives the remaining K-1 statements by editing the answer expression in place. To facilitate this, we train a rewriter model LEANSCRIBE to localize the answer in the base formalization and generate a reusable edit function for the other K-1 candidates. BASE simultaneously improves selection accuracy and reduces formalization cost - a Pareto improvement that holds on all 12 (dataset, solver) configurations across four benchmarks and three solvers, cutting autoformalizer calls by about 5x at K=8, with the reduction expected to become larger as K grows. Code is available at https://github.com/ucr-rai/base-and-edit.

Foundation models are now used in settings where the prompts they receive can change quickly. Users change, topics change, policies change, and the model may suddenly face a kind of request that was rare in the calibration data. This makes fixed calibration risky. Conformal prediction and conformal risk control give model-agnostic ways to control error, but they work best when the calibration data still look like the future data. This paper develops PromptShift CRC, a drift-aware conformal risk control method for foundation-model outputs under prompt and domain shift. The method embeds prompts and responses, measures how far the current prompt stream has moved from the calibration pool, gives more weight to relevant or recent calibration examples, and updates the risk level online after observed violations. It reports three practical diagnostics: realized risk error, prompt drift, and effective calibration size. We give conditions under which the method controls risk up to terms for distribution mismatch and weighted quantile uncertainty. In a synthetic prompt-shift benchmark, static conformal risk control fails sharply after drift, while PromptShift-CRC gives the best coverage among the adaptive baselines considered. We then evaluate the same calibration layer on public benchmark derived streams for question answering, toxicity, summarization factuality, and long-context hallucination risk

Federated fine-tuning of large language models using parameter-efficient methods such as LoRA enables privacy-preserving adaptation of foundation models. Heterogeneous hardware resources introduce challenges, as clients with different adapter ranks cannot be directly aggregated. While existing methods enable aggregation under heterogeneous ranks, they fail to control how information is distributed across rank dimensions, leading to suboptimal use of shared low-rank representations. Instead, we propose PreLort: a nested low-rank formulation for federated LoRA that organizes adapter dimensions into a prefix hierarchy. Our approach ensures that lower-rank dimensions encode task-relevant information, while higher-rank dimensions capture additional capacity. Building on this, we introduce (i) a segment-wise aggregation rule that averages only over clients contributing to each rank segment, avoiding dilution from zero-padded lower-rank clients, and (ii) a prefix-nested training strategy that optimizes each adapter under multiple rank truncations, encouraging useful signal to concentrate in low-rank prefix dimensions. Together, these components encourage a consistent low-rank prefix capturing the most task-relevant information, while higher-rank dimensions learn additional capacity. This allows low-rank clients to benefit from richer information contributed by higher-rank clients, as prefix dimensions are consistently learned and aggregated. Experiments demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms prior heterogeneous federated LoRA methods in accuracy and ROUGE-L, while achieving lower or comparable perplexity across multiple base models.

Finding D-optimal designs for generalized linear models (GLMs) is challenging due to the dependence of the Fisher information matrix on unknown parameters and the lack of closed-form solutions, particularly when input factors include both discrete and continuous variables. Although classical algorithms and recent metaheuristic approaches have offered partial solutions, there remains a need for robust and computationally efficient methods. In this paper, we propose a penalized Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) approach, named $p$-PSO. Here we introduce a new, general-purpose penalty formulation for constrained optimization and demonstrate its effectiveness in optimal design problems. The formulation is algorithm-agnostic and applicable to a broad class of black-box optimization methods. Results show that the method is highly efficient, with its primary contribution being a penalty formulation that enables the direct use of an off-the-shelf PSO algorithm and extends naturally to more general constrained optimization tasks.

Neural networks are used as generative surrogate models for scientific discovery, which are trainable approximations of scientific simulations. These models enable users to replace time-consuming numerical simulations with learned alternatives, providing quick solutions. However, high-fidelity generative surrogate models require massive training datasets, which can create storage and I/O challenges. Lossy compression is a promising way to reduce this burden, but compression errors may affect the model quality in subtle ways, making it challenging to quantify their impact. In this work, we examine how lossy compression of training data impacts the quality of generative surrogate models. We begin by characterizing the uncertainty inherent in training neural networks, showing that identical training configurations can produce different models. By exploiting this variability, we propose a method to estimate how much compression-induced error a surrogate model can tolerate without affecting its accuracy. Evaluation of two application simulations demonstrates that our approach significantly reduces memory/storage requirements and speeds up training while producing high-quality surrogate models. These results show that lossy compression saves data storage up to 23.7x and 39x with negligible impact on the quality of the surrogate model. Meanwhile, reducing the size of the training data set also enhances the data loading speed and reduces the training time by up to 3x.

Progress in AI has largely been driven by methods that assume less. As compute and data increase, approaches with weaker inductive biases generally outperform those with stronger assumptions. This is particularly characteristic of the field of Visual Representation Learning, where approaches have gone from being dominated by Supervised Learning, to Weakly Supervised Learning, to the now widespread success of Self-Supervised Learning without human labels. Yet, even modern Self-Supervised Learning approaches still depend on strong inductive biases such as augmentations, masking, or cropping. If this trend holds, even these remaining biases should become bottlenecks at scale – and our experiments confirm this: the optimal strength of inductive biases decreases as data grows. This motivates the search for approaches that rely on fewer assumptions. To this end, we introduce Temporal Difference in Vision (TDV), a new paradigm for self-supervised learning from video that avoids existing inductive biases, relying instead on a causal assumption that the past causes the future. TDV functions by jointly training an image encoder and a motion encoder so that the current frame's representation plus the encoded motion equals the next frame's representation. Despite not leveraging any strong inductive biases, TDV matches state-of-the-art recipes on dense spatial tasks, laying the foundation for representation learning without strong assumptions.

Agentic AI systems act through tools and sub-agents, yet the controls meant to bound their financial and environmental cost still sit on dashboards evaluated beside or after execution. Green SARC applies the SARC governance-by-architecture framework – four enforcement sites in the agent loop – to FinOps and GreenOps, contributing the theory of what to enforce and how to predict it. We report four policy-independent results. (i) The unconstrained "State Snowball" is $\Theta(n^2)$ in loop depth; on 3,000 real multi-step plans (SWE-rebench) it holds on 100%, with median curvature $\hat{c}_2=216$ exceeding the linear-accretion prediction $p/2=134$ – real plans accrete faster than the model. (ii) On real residuals the Normal-$\sigma$ gate under-covers (92% at nominal 95%); split-conformal calibration holds (95.2%). (iii) A soft Lagrangian penalty tuned to the budget in expectation breaches it on 91.5% of seeds; the architectural gate breaches 0%. (iv) Under binding budgets the gate's over-budget incidence is 0% on synthetic and real (BurstGPT) arrivals. End-to-end token/USD/carbon savings (47–55%) are real but policy-dependent in magnitude – set by a scope-cap knob, not by gate rejections. The library is open-source, dependency-free, and ships a regeneration script for every cited number.

Conformal prediction gives prediction intervals with finite-sample coverage when the data are exchangeable. Many time-indexed datasets are not exchangeable: they have seasons, recurring regimes, changing frequencies, or other forms of structured dependence. This paper studies a simple way to use that structure. We propose spectral adaptive conformal prediction, a method that forms weighted conformal quantiles using local spectral similarity and then updates the target miscoverage level online. The spectral weights choose calibration residuals that look relevant to the current test point. The adaptive update corrects the long-run miss rate when uncertainty changes over time. The theory makes both parts controllable. We give an approximate coverage bound that splits the error into a spectral mismatch term and an effective-sample-size term, prove that kernel spectral weighting never increases the mismatch term relative to uniform weighting, show that a bandwidth of order N^(-1/(d+2)) balances the two terms, and establish an unconditional long-run calibration bound for the adaptive update that holds for every sample path without independence or stationarity. Simulations with recurring regimes and slowly changing frequencies, together with four real-data examples spanning monthly, weekly, and daily U.S. and European series, show when the hybrid method improves on strong adaptive baselines and when it does not, and an effective-sample-size safeguard, computable at prediction time without outcomes, detects and repairs the one observed failure.

Synthetic and distilled student data are increasingly used to enable privacy-conscious learning analytics, yet their suitability for decision-facing institutional support remains uncertain. In dropout support, generated data must preserve not only predictive utility or distributional resemblance, but also the financial-status evidence used to guide advising, payment-plan assistance, and scholarship-related decisions. Method: This study introduces CaP-Eval, a decision-facing causal-privacy audit workflow for evaluating generated student data under a fixed estimand, timing-aware adjustment design, estimator set, and empirical privacy-governance screen. The workflow compares original, distilled, adversarial synthetic, statistical synthetic, and DPGNet privacy-oriented generated data on predictive utility, treatment-effect fidelity, robustness to alternative estimators, and local training-record proximity. Results: DPGNet and distilled data preserved the original financial-status treatment-effect structure more reliably than the adversarial and Gaussian Copula baselines. DPGNet preserved full direction and rank agreement across epsilon levels; epsilon = 10 produced the smallest non-original IPW and DML deviations, while epsilon = 1 and epsilon = 5 amplified several financial-status contrasts. Distilled data remained highly faithful but retained the strongest local training-record proximity signal. TabularGNet preserved qualitative directions with moderate attenuation, and Gaussian Copula compressed effect magnitudes. Conclusions: Predictive utility, privacy orientation, empirical disclosure signals, and causal fidelity diverged; generated student data require joint audits of direction, magnitude, overlap, and release-governance risk before decision use.

Diabetes and extreme blood sugar levels are some of the major health problems faced by humans today across the world. While Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) has emerged as an effective technology for management of diabetes as well as for monitoring blood sugar levels, this technology has traditionally been invasive (that is, requiring the piercing of the skin) and carries the risk of irritation, induration, etc. This highlights the need for accurate and non-invasive CGM methods that can be deployed at scale. With the emergence of various sensing technologies and their integration in wearables like the smart-watch, we now have the capability to continuously monitor body signals like the Photoplethysmogram (PPG) in a non-invasive manner. Having the ability to continuously monitor blood glucose through CGMs and continuously monitor PPG signals through a smart-watch offers an opportunity to get dense data on these two, opening the possibility of building machine learning and deep learning based models to estimate blood glucose level from PPG signals. In this work, we first present a paired dataset comprising continuous PPG signals from a smartwatch along with glucose values recorded using a CGM device. We also present the results of some preliminary experimental explorations performed on our dataset. These preliminary results suggest that some predictive signals may exist, though more exploration is needed with more data from a larger number of individuals. The dataset can be accessed at https://zenodo.org/records/20577959

Cartesian Genetic Programming (CGP) is among the practical and popular forms of Genetic Programming as it uses a graph-based representation of programs. This paper presents a first runtime analysis of CGP in evolving Boolean functions using complete training sets. We prove an asymptotic bound $O(n D^5)$ for the expected number of fitness evaluations of CGP to construct a conjunction of $n$ inputs using at most $D \geq n-1$ binary gates, a minimal function set, and even with a strict survival selection. When the non-strict selection is used, the bound is improved to $O(n D^4)$. Our analysis reveals interesting characteristics of CGP induced search, which have been only observed empirically. In particular, enabling the acceptance of equally good solutions, including those with connected gates non-contributing to fitness, can lead to a speedup, and consequently a better asymptotic time bound. In contrast to conjunctions, we also prove a negative result which shows that CGP requires exponential time to evolve an exclusive disjunction. Experiments evolving conjunctions complement our theoretical findings. The use of incomplete training sets is found to further reduce the average number of fitness evaluations while maintaining a good level of generalisation.