Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.CV
Curvature-Guided Mixing for MLLM Adaptation
Jinglong Yang, Jiaxuan He, Wenjian Huang et al. (+2 more)
Fine-tuning
Multimodal Large
Language Models (MLLMs) on specialized tasks often leads to catastrophic forgetting of their general capabilities. Existing model merging methods to combat this are often heuristic or use sub-optimal objectives. We propose CurvatureGuided Mixing (CGM), a theoretically grounded framework that merges pre-trained and fine-tuned models. CGM formulates a joint optimization objective and uses a second-order (Hessian) approximation of the loss landscapes to analytically derive an optimal, closed-form "soft mixing" ratio. This ratio intelligently blends parameters based on their relative task-specific
curvatures. We also introduce CGM$\dagger$, a robust "hard mixing" variant that performs sparse parameter selection guided by a novel,
curvature-aware score. Experiments on LLaVA-1.5 and Qwen2.5VL across multiple downstream tasks show that CGM and CGM$\dagger$ consistently improve the trade-off between task specialization and general knowledge retention over existing methods. Code is available at github.com/zzsyjl/CGM-ECCV-2026.
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All authors Jinglong Yang, Jiaxuan He, Wenjian Huang, Zhan Zhuang, Jianguo Zhang
Machine Learning
Towards Scalable Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning with Large Decision Models
Thibaut Kulak
Recent progress in large-scale sequence modeling has shown that a single model can learn useful representations across highly diverse data distributions. Inspired by these advances, we investigate whether a unified
transformer policy can be trained across large collections of heterogeneous reinforcement learning environments. We introduce LDM-v0, a Large Decision Model trained offline on trajectories collected from thousands of environments spanning multiple domains and modalities. LDM-v0 is a multi-task, multi-modal
transformer policy conditioned on histories of observations, actions, rewards, and termination signals, and trained through supervised next-action prediction over offline trajectories. We describe the environment infrastructure, automated data generation pipeline, model architecture, and training methodology used to build LDM-v0, and evaluate its performance across diverse environments. We show that a single pretrained model matches the performance of independently trained task-specific reference policies on approximately 1,000 environments including robotics, autonomous driving, inventory management, cybersecurity, trading, and
video games. These results demonstrate the feasibility of large-scale offline pretraining across heterogeneous reinforcement learning environments using a single
transformer policy.
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Machine Learning
Enhancing Clinician Decision-Making via Uncertainty-Aware Multi-Expert Fusion for Stroke Rehabilitation
Tamim Ahmed and Thanassis Rikakis
Tailoring stroke rehabilitation requires assessing how movements are organized, not merely if they succeed. Currently, this assessment is a rate-limiting bottleneck. Instruments like the Action Research Arm Test (ARAT) compress rich behavioral observations into single ordinal endpoints, discarding the movement-quality details that distinguish recovery from compensation. Automated alternatives typically chase accuracy on noisy, single-observer labels to output opaque scores - a technology-centric approach that rarely reaches clinical practice. To address this, we present xAARA: an engine designed to augment rather than replace clinical judgment. From multi-view
video, xAARA returns ARAT assessments with calibrated uncertainty and explanations across task, movement-phase, and movement-quality levels. Treating clinical scoring as an ill-posed inference problem, xAARA composes 692 calibrated
multimodal models via a Dynamic
Bayesian Network with
entropy-based gating. It qualifies results against clinical validity rules and defers low-confidence cases. In 105 stroke survivors (788 exercises), xAARA achieved 94.2% task accuracy (Cohen's kappa=0.934) and 81.3% movement-phase accuracy (kappa=0.727), reducing predictive uncertainty by 96.1% compared to single-clinician scoring. For subjective cases, it matched at least one rater 100% of the time and never returned out-of-range scores. Four independent clinicians validated the assessments and indicated willingness to adopt the system. We argue that principled uncertainty quantification and clinician-aligned explainability are the critical bridges moving automated assessment from technical demonstration to a deployable clinical tool.
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Machine Learning
Reliable Conformal Prediction for Ordinal Classification Using the Ranked Probability Score
Stefan Haas, Luca Killmaier, Alireza Javanmardi et al. (+1 more)
Ordinal classification (OC) arises in high-stakes domains such as medicine and finance, where uncertainty quantification must account for the severity of ordinal errors. Conformal prediction (CP) provides distribution-free prediction sets with marginal coverage guarantees; however, its practical effectiveness depends critically on the choice of nonconformity function. We introduce a CP method for ordinal classification based on the ranked probability score (RPS), a proper scoring rule defined over cumulative predictive distributions. Although it reflects ordinal risk quite naturally, it has largely been neglected in conformal ordinal prediction (COP). When used as a measure of nonconformity, RPS yields median-centered contiguous prediction sets by construction. The method is model-agnostic, supports both assessed and grouped ordered categorical outcomes, and permits efficient implementation compared to greedy interval selection procedures. Across multiple ordinal image and tabular
datasets, RPS-based CP produces contiguous prediction sets and strikes a favorable balance between prediction set width and the magnitude of ordinal miscoverage relative to existing CP methods.
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All authors Stefan Haas, Luca Killmaier, Alireza Javanmardi, Eyke Hüllermeier
Machine Learning
Swarm-Inspired Generation of Collective Behaviors in Graph Dynamical Systems
Ji Chen, Song Chen, Chengzhang Gong et al. (+2 more)
Collective behavior arises when locally interacting units produce coordinated global organization, from synchronization in dynamical systems to task-relevant information flow on graphs. The central challenge is not only to explain how collective behavior emerges, but to design local interaction rules that can produce desired global organization and generalize across graphs, dynamics and tasks.To address this challenge, we introduce the Swarm-Inspired Emergent Synchronizer (SIES), a graph-dynamical framework that learns generalizable local-interaction laws for controllable collective organization. Each node is an
agent-like dynamical unit with a state and task cue, and signed source-target-conditioned
attention acts as an adaptive coupling term inside an explicit
evolution model. Therefore, SIES combines an explicit dynamical engine with local
agent intelligence, similar to biological swarms. For synchronization control, SIES learns a generalizable coupling operator that produces prescribed synchronization patterns for CDSs across untrained network scales, target phase relations, and intrinsic node dynamics without retraining. The learned operator also reaches gait-related modes faster than three oscillator baselines and generalizes synchronization-driven locomotion to simulated multi-legged
robots of different scales and a physical hexapod after leg disablement. For graph representation learning, SIES applies the same signed interaction principle to message passing and achieves the highest performance among the compared methods on heterophilous node-classification
benchmarks. Together, these results position SIES as a generalizable and learnable graph-dynamical interaction framework with promise for synchronization control, adaptive
robot coordination, and heterophilous graph representation learning.
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All authors Ji Chen, Song Chen, Chengzhang Gong, Li Fan, Chao Xu
Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.CL
Dustin: Draft-Augmented Sparse Verification for Efficient Long-Context Generation with Speculative Decoding
WenHung Lee, Jian-Jia Chen, Xiaolin Lin et al. (+6 more)
While speculative decoding improves inference throughput for multi-batch long-context Large
Language Models (LLMs), its efficiency is often limited by a verification bottleneck where Key-Value (KV) cache loading dominates latency. Existing compression methods fail in this regime: static eviction incurs accuracy loss due to saliency shift, while dynamic selection introduces prohibitive computational overhead during the verification path. We propose Dustin, a sparse verification framework designed for long-context speculative decoding. Dustin integrates lookahead signals from the draft model with historical
attention from the target model to identify critical
tokens with high fidelity across multi-step verification windows. To reduce recomputation latency, this approach further employs a sparse estimation scheme that restricts importance scoring to a minimal subset of
attention heads. Evaluations on PG-19 and LongBench with Qwen2.5-72B demonstrate that Dustin achieves a 27.85x speedup in self-
attention and a 9.17x end-to-end decoding speedup at a 32k sequence length, all with negligible accuracy degradation.
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All authors WenHung Lee, Jian-Jia Chen, Xiaolin Lin, Pei-Shuo Wang, Chi-Chih Chang, Chun-Che Yang, Ning-Chi Huang, Grace Li Zhang, Kai-Chiang Wu
Machine Learning
Convex–Concave Quadratic Spectral Filtering for Graph Neural Networks
Ranhui Yan, Jia Cai, Mengzhu Chen et al. (+1 more)
Spectral graph neural networks (GNNs) interpret message passing as frequency-selective filtering. While low-order spectral filters are efficient, their limited selectivity often leads to weak attenuation outside the passband, whereas high-order alternatives introduce optimization challenges. We propose DCQ-GNN, a spectral GNN based on a compact bank of adaptive convex–concave quadratic filters. By restricting the filter order to two while explicitly exploiting complementary
curvature, DCQ-GNN improves spectral selectivity as quantified by Dirichlet energy and
entropy measures without resorting to high-order
polynomial expansions. The model fuses filter outputs through a node-adaptive gating mechanism to enable node-wise structure-aware spectral selection. We provide a formal spectral analysis grounded in Dirichlet energy attenuation, von Neumann
entropy, and
curvature polarity, and derive explicit characterizations of filter behavior across varying levels of homophily and structural perturbations. Extensive
benchmarks on 10
datasets show that DCQ-GNN ties for the top average rank (3.0) on heterophilic graphs and obtains the second-best rank (4.2) on homophilic graphs, remaining competitive with representative high-order
polynomial spectral filters. Furthermore, under strong structural perturbations, DCQ-GNN exhibits substantially smaller performance degradation compared to both first-order and high-order baselines. These results demonstrate that
curvature-aware quadratic banks provide a robust and efficient alternative to high-order spectral models while preserving optimization stability and computational efficiency.
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All authors Ranhui Yan, Jia Cai, Mengzhu Chen, Haodong Yang
Machine Learning
Towards Continuous Power Forecasting: Practical Continual Learning for Real-World Energy Systems in Nonstationary Time Series
Yujiang He, Frederic Uhrweiller and Bernhard Sick
Power
forecasting models deployed in real-world energy
markets must operate under nonstationary conditions, where data distributions continually evolve due to weather variability, infrastructure upgrades, and changing consumption behaviors. In practice, these models face strict operational constraints: historical data may be limited or unavailable for repeated retraining, and uninterrupted long-term service is often required. This paper addresses these challenges by proposing the paradigm of Continuous Power
Forecasting, which views power
forecasting as a continual learning problem rather than a static offline task. Based on an adaptive continual learning framework for regression, we systematically investigate the practical effectiveness of six representative continual learning approaches from three methodological categories. These approaches are evaluated under different realistic assumptions regarding data accessibility and update policies. Experimental validation on real-world power
datasets demonstrates that continual learning enables
forecasting models to self-adapt to distributional drift, accumulate knowledge over time, and mitigate catastrophic forgetting without relying on large-scale historical data storage. Beyond performance gains, our study provides practical insights into the stability and adaptation behaviors of different continual learning approaches under realistic operational constraints. Overall, this work illustrates how continual learning can be pragmatically integrated into industrial power
forecasting pipelines, offering a scalable and sustainable solution for long-term deployment in dynamic environments.
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Machine Learning
Digital Twin-Driven Adaptive Sim-to-Real Alignment via Reinforcement Learning for Vibration-Based Bearing Health Monitoring Under Data Scarcity
Jinghan Wang, Yanjun Chen, Wei Zhang et al. (+3 more)
Vibration-based health monitoring of rotating machinery requires reliable fault diagnosis under operational data constraints, yet condition assessment remains challenged by structural scarcity of fault events and heterogeneous sim-to-real gaps in digital twin-generated signals. Each fault type generates impulses with distinct periodicity, amplitude modulation, and spectral character, making feature-space discrepancies fundamentally heterogeneous across fault classes. Existing domain adaptation methods apply a class-agnostic global transformation that cannot close all fault-specific gaps without distorting inter-class separability, while uniform source-target mixing introduces distributional noise into the data-abundant Normal class. These limitations stem from treating a sequential, state-dependent
alignment problem as a one-shot optimization. Each corrective transformation simultaneously reshapes all class distributions, creating state dependencies that static gradient descent cannot resolve. We formulate feature
alignment as a continuous-action Markov decision process solved via Proximal Policy Optimization, where the learned policy issues fault-type-specific affine corrections responsive to the current feature-space configuration, with a dual-objective reward balancing gap minimization against separability preservation. An asymmetry-aware strategy reserves real data for the Normal class while augmenting fault classes with policy-aligned simulated samples. Validation across XJTU-SY, CWRU, and a self-built slewing bearing testbed confirms the dominant gain from reinforcement learning-driven
alignment, and cross-equipment linear probing achieves 92.8% without encoder retraining, demonstrating transferable monitoring capability.
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All authors Jinghan Wang, Yanjun Chen, Wei Zhang, Wentao Wu, Tianchen Liu, Gaoliang Peng
Machine Learning
How Complexity Contributes to Learning Opacity in Machine Learning
Joachim Stein and Eric Raidl
Machine learning (ML)
algorithms are known to be opaque. We do not know the reasons for their predictions. The learning process leading to the prediction function is also opaque. We do not fully understand the time
evolution of the weight values of neural nets (NN) and related dynamical phenomena. While prediction opacity is widely studied, learning opacity remains largely underexplored. This article studies learning opacity trough the lens of complex dynamical systems. We argue that NN learning is essentially a complex system and that learning opacity is due to dynamical complexity and the epistemological challenges that arise from it. We identify three key properties of training complexity – sensitivity to weight initialization, feedback in gradient based optimization, and sensitivity to the training data – and show how each contributes to learning opacity. As these properties are fundamental to the learning process damping or eliminating them would fundamentally alter how ML systems learn. Some sources of opacity in ML may hence be irreducible.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.CL
Perfect Detection, Failed Control: The Geometry of Knowing vs. Steering in Language Models
Cosimo Galeone, Anna Ettorre, Minsu Park et al. (+2 more)
A central aspiration of mechanistic interpretability is controllability: if we know where a behavior is represented in a model's activations, we should be able to modify it. This rests on a hidden premise – that the direction which detects a behavior and the direction which controls it are the same, or close. We test this geometrically: what is the angle between the direction that best detects a behavior and the one that best causes it? If detection implies control the cosine is near 1; otherwise it quantifies a detection-intervention gap. On Gemma 2-2B-it, output format (clean JSON vs markdown fencing) collapses both roles onto one axis.
Hallucination does not: the model detects fake entities with perfect linear separability (AUC = 1.000 from layer 5), yet that direction sits at cos = 0.12 (about 83 degrees) from the direction producing a refusal – a small, reproducible
alignment, far from the cos = 1 that "detection is control" would require. A detector built from activations, with no chosen
tokens, likewise fails to align (cos = -0.06). The gap generalizes: across four models from three families and two scales (1B-9B), cos stays in [0.12, 0.20], identical before and after instruction tuning (0.1197 vs 0.1200), placing its origin in pretraining. A 15-degree rotation toward the refusal direction partially bridges it – 73% and 60% refusal on two held-out fake-entity categories at 1.8% false positives. We then ask whether this cosine predicts steerability, and it does not: detection is a high-dimensional class, not a single direction, and what separates the steerable case is functional, not readable from a static angle. The cosine is a weight-computable signature of the dissociation between knowing and steering, not a predictor of it.
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All authors Cosimo Galeone, Anna Ettorre, Minsu Park, Giuseppe Ettorre, Daniele Ligorio
Machine Learning
MacroLens: A Multi-Task Benchmark for Contextual Financial Reasoning under Macroeconomic Scenarios
Patara Trirat, Jin Myung Kwak, Jay Heo et al. (+2 more)
Financial decision-making is contextual:
forecasting prices, valuing companies, and assessing event exposure weigh price history, accounting fundamentals, macroeconomic regime, and contemporaneous text. A
benchmark over these four signals is hard to build because finance violates four assumptions of time-series evaluation: text must be gated by its publication date to prevent look-ahead, quarterly fundamentals are reported with a one- to ninety-day lag, filing text is partly redundant with the numerical statement fields it accompanies, and macroeconomic regimes leak across calendar splits. No public
benchmark addresses all four signals jointly. MacroLens covers 4,416 U.S. small- and micro-cap equities over 2021-2026. Seven tasks share one point-in-time panel of prices, 46.8M XBRL accounting facts, 53 macroeconomic series, 295,860 SEC filings, and 215,882 news articles, plus a scenario layer of 1,130 macroeconomic events across 49 types automatically detected and rendered as natural
language. Tasks span contextual
forecasting, public and private valuation, statement generation from fundamentals and descriptions, scenario-conditioned returns, and real-estate valuation. We evaluate 19 methods across six families spanning naive heuristics through time-series foundation models, fine-tuned LLM-based time-series models, and zero-shot large
language models (LLMs), plus a five-step feature-context ablation on two frontier LLMs and a gradient-boosted baseline. MacroLens is released at https://huggingface.co/
datasets/DeepAuto-AI/MacroLens.
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All authors Patara Trirat, Jin Myung Kwak, Jay Heo, Heejun Lee, Sung Ju Hwang
Machine Learning
Holographic Memory for Zero-Shot Compositional Reasoning in Knowledge Graphs: A Mechanistic Study of Where and Why It Fails
Randhir Kumar
Knowledge graph
embedding (KGE) models predict single-hop links well but have no mechanism for zero-shot compositional queries: multi-hop questions whose relation chains never appeared during training.
Holographic Reduced Representations (HRR), which bind and unbind symbols via circular convolution, are a theoretically attractive candidate, since binding is approximately invertible and associative. We test whether this promise holds. We study two
holographic memory variants, real-valued HRR and phase-only
Fourier HRR (FHRR), each with a modern Hopfield cleanup, on FB15k-237 over five seeds. Four findings follow. First, both are competitive single-hop retrievers (filtered MRR 0.358 +/- 0.002 for HRR, 0.350 +/- 0.021 for FHRR). Second, neither composes zero-shot: accuracy stays at chance across all cleanup temperatures. Third, the main contribution, we localise the failure mechanistically. A hop-1 probe shows the
memory recovers the correct intermediate entity with high fidelity (MRR 0.896 +/- 0.002 for HRR), yet composition still fails even with a verified-correct intermediate. A second probe shows why: posing the ground-truth second-hop fact as a standalone atomic query, bypassing composition entirely, already recovers it at only 0.26 to 0.48x average atomic accuracy, uniformly across relation fan-out. The bottleneck is not the bind-unbind
algebra or the cleanup; it is that facts compositional chains pass through are intrinsically harder for the superposed
memory to retrieve, a capacity and interference effect present already at a single hop. Fourth, we prove (Lemma 4.1) that FHRR's softmax cleanup is not phase-equivariant, compounding the primary failure on the minority of chains where hop-1 itself errs. Fixing zero-shot composition requires improving
retrieval capacity under superposition, not just redesigning the cleanup.
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Machine Learning
Supervised Reinforcement Learning for the Coordination of Distributed Energy Resources
Haoyuan Deng, Yihong Zhou, Thomas Morstyn et al. (+1 more)
The increasing integration of distributed energy resources (DERs) is crucial for power system decarbonization, yet unlocking DERs' flexibility is challenged by their inherent uncertainties and modelling complexity. As traditional optimization methods struggle with such uncertainty and complexity of DERs, reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising alternative for DER management. However, standard RL methods suffer from sample inefficiency and sub-optimality when trained from scratch. Inspired by the training paradigms in large
language models, this paper proposes a Supervised Reinforcement Learning (SRL) framework for learning DER coordination policies. This framework first pre-trains a policy on demonstration data in a supervised-learning fashion, which is then further fine-tuned using RL. Furthermore, we propose a two-step fine-tuning process: offline fine-tuning for enhancing policy performance and online fine-tuning for adapting it to the real-world dynamics. Experiments demonstrate that RL implementations based on the proposed framework significantly outperform all
benchmarks, achieving high cost efficiency even under low-quality demonstration data.
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All authors Haoyuan Deng, Yihong Zhou, Thomas Morstyn, Yi Wang
Machine Learning
Conformal Orbit-Valid Trust Horizons for Equivariant World Models
Hongbo Wang
Learned world models are useful only over horizons on which their rollout error remains controlled. We study trust-horizon certification for latent world models with known group
symmetries. Given a one-step latent residual and a finite-time expansion estimate, we form a raw horizon curve and calibrate it with a split-conformal multiplicative factor. On the reproducible audit set, the conformal factor is $\gamma_\alpha=1.0$: the raw certificate is already conservative under the audit protocol. Across 50 stable audits, we observe zero anti-conservative violations, corresponding to an exact-binomial 95% upper bound of 5.8% on the violation rate. Our main structural result is that exact equivariance transports a calibrated trust-horizon curve over the group orbit: when the environment dynamics, encoder, predictor, action transform, and latent metric satisfy the stated equivariance/invariance conditions, rollout errors and trust horizons are orbit-constant. Empirically, the implemented models exhibit small orbit-transport residuals, with median 1.1% and maximum 4.1% over 14 orbit audits. The certificate is also non-vacuous (median certified-to-measured horizon ratio 0.67). A certificate-level calibration-cost study shows two complementary regimes. On a symmetric 2D substrate, equivariant, plain, and augmented models are all orbit-valid from a single calibration sector – no separation, because the substrate already makes non-equivariant baselines approximately orbit-robust. A 3D yaw audit shows the other regime: the equivariant model obtains a one-sector safe and non-vacuous orbit-valid certificate, while healthy non-equivariant baselines pay violation, slack, sharpness, or additional-sector cost. The certificate is a conservative, distributional audit rather than a global reachability guarantee, and certificate-guided subgoal spacing is not confirmed in the current 3D CEM-MPC behavior layer.
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Machine Learning
When Do Conservation Laws Survive Learned Representations? Certified Horizons for Latent World Models
Hongbo Wang
We ask a representation-learning question about physical world models: when does a conservation law remain certifiable after a model learns a latent representation? A certified horizon bounds – in advance, from measurable model defects – how many steps a rollout provably stays on a physical invariant's level set. The key design choice is what is certified: not a learned latent
Hamiltonian or a learned scalar witness (a model can conserve either while drifting in true energy), but the decoded physical invariant obtained by decoding the latent state and evaluating the known invariant. Around this object we derive shell-horizon certificates whose budget decomposes into representation, readout, and latent-dynamics defects, with a monotone
alignment bridge through which a soft learned witness yields a certified horizon for the decoded invariant, and test them across state, learned-lift, and pixel observations on conservative systems. Conservation certificates can survive learned representation, but not all
geometric priors survive equally. Hard canonical
symplectic structure yields the longest horizons in known phase coordinates yet does not cross a learned chart, whereas a controlled-Lipschitz-aligned soft invariant survives in the nonlinear learned-representation settings we test – two lift systems, with the gain growing with nonlinearity, and pixels. Pixel certification is recovered on a readout-stable sub-tube, and the Kepler problem exposes a
geometric boundary. The central object is therefore not a latent
Hamiltonian, but a decoded physical invariant whose robustness to representation learning can be measured, certified, and falsified.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.RO
InSight: Self-Guided Skill Acquisition via Steerable VLAs
Maggie Wang, Lars Osterberg, Stephen Tian et al. (+5 more)
Vision-
language-action (VLA) models excel at
robot manipulation via imitation learning, but adapting them to new tasks often requires additional human demonstrations, which can be costly or infeasible. Meanwhile,
vision-
language models (VLMs) offer semantic task understanding but lack the physical grounding required for execution. To bridge this gap, we present InSight, a framework for self-guided skill acquisition that uses a VLM to identify primitives missing from a VLA's repertoire, grounds the VLM's proposals through
robot execution, and distills new primitives from successful rollouts into the VLA. Primitive steerability, the ability to execute and terminate primitives on command, enables the
robot to reuse known primitives while collecting training data for missing primitives without requiring full-task human demonstrations for each new task. InSight has two stages: (1) a VLM automatically segments existing demonstrations into primitive-labeled trajectories to fine-tune a primitive-steerable VLA, and (2) the VLM plans a sequence of known primitives executed by the VLA and new primitives attempted by VLM-parameterized low-level controllers. New-primitive segments from successful task rollouts are added to the training data, and the VLA is retrained. The adapted VLA can then reliably execute new skills using the acquired primitives, without per-primitive VLM calls. We evaluate InSight on six simulated and real-world tasks with no human demonstrations of target skills, including block flipping, drawer closing, sweeping, twisting, and pouring. On hardware, acquired twisting and pouring skills achieve 92% and 96% success, versus 32% and 16% for a zero-shot CaP-X baseline. Composing both skills into a 14-primitive task achieves 80% success with no combined-task demonstrations. Project website: https://insight-vla.github.io/ .
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All authors Maggie Wang, Lars Osterberg, Stephen Tian, Ola Shorinwa, Joseph Bowkett, Daniel Pastor, Jiajun Wu, Mac Schwager
Machine Learning · Cross-listed from math.OC
New Bounds for the Last Iterate of the Stochastic subGradient Method
Guglielmo Beretta, Tommaso Cesari, Roberto Colomboni et al. (+1 more)
We study the last iterate of the
stochastic subgradient method for one-dimensional convex Lipschitz objectives. For a fixed horizon $n$, we consider the standard fixed stepsizes $\eta =\Theta(1/\sqrt n)$. We prove that, for such stepsize policies, under additive i.i.d. subgradient noise with uniformly bounded variance, the last iterate features an optimization error of order $1/\sqrt n$, thereby removing the extra $(\log n)$ factor present in existing generic bounds. On the other hand, we show that without the i.i.d. assumption, the optimization error can be of order $(\log n)/\sqrt n$. Thus, under the uniformly bounded variance assumption alone, the last iterate of SsGM is suboptimal even in dimension one, resolving negatively an open problem posed in Koren and Segal, COLT, 2020.
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All authors Guglielmo Beretta, Tommaso Cesari, Roberto Colomboni, Andrea Paudice
Machine Learning
Real vs. Complex Spectral Bases for Neural Operators: The Role of Green's Function Alignment
Jason Sulskis and Sathya Ravi
Fourier Neural Operators (FNO) learn solution operators of partial differential equations by parameterizing global convolutions in the complex
Fourier domain. For real-valued PDE solutions, the complex FFT carries representational redundancy through conjugate
symmetry. We introduce the Hartley Neural Operator (HNO), the exact real-valued mirror of FNO: it replaces the FFT with the purely real Discrete Hartley Transform and learns a single real multiplier per retained spectral mode, with no complex arithmetic. Because the real Hartley spectrum is not halved by conjugate
symmetry, HNO retains twice as many frequency corners as FNO but one real weight where FNO carries a complex pair, so the two operators are iso-parametric at equal width and differ only in spectral basis. Our central thesis is that the best basis is a property of the operator. Self-adjoint
elliptic operators (Poisson, biharmonic) have real, symmetric Green's functions that the real Hartley multiplier diagonalizes exactly, and HNO is favored there. Time-dependent operators carry phase, from oscillation in the wave equation to transport in advection, Burgers, and Navier-Stokes, which a real diagonal multiplier cannot represent, so FNO is favored there, and increasingly so with the operator's phase content, leaving the phaseless heat equation as the borderline case. Training both operators identically and benchmarking across PDE classes, initial-condition families, and boundary conditions, we find an
elliptic-versus-time-dependent split that is monotone in operator phase content and matches the Green's-function theory we develop. Rather than a universal winner, our findings give a predictive rule: match the spectral basis to the
symmetry of the solution operator.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.CL
L3Cube-MahaPOS: A Marathi Part-of-Speech Tagging Dataset and BERT Models
Hariom Ingle, Ronit Ghode, Ishwari Gondkar et al. (+2 more)
Part-of-
Speech (POS) tagging is a foundational NLP task underpinning machine translation, information extraction, and syntactic parsing. Despite Marathi being spoken by over 83 million people and ranking among the top twenty most spoken
languages worldwide, it remains severely under-resourced in annotated corpora and standardised evaluation
benchmarks. Marathi presents unique challenges for computational modelling owing to its rich morphology, relatively free word order, lack of capitalisation conventions, and pervasive code-mixing with Hindi and English. We introduce L3Cube-MahaPOS, a gold-standard POS tagging
dataset for Marathi comprising 32,354 manually annotated sentences drawn from news text. Annotation was performed entirely manually by a team of Marathi-proficient annotators following a 16-tag Universal Dependencies-aligned scheme. A structured preprocessing pipeline covering Unicode normalisation, Devanagari-aware tokenisation, and noise filtering ensures label consistency across all splits. We
benchmark the
dataset across six model families spanning HMM, CRF, BiLSTM, BiLSTM+CharCNN, MuRIL, and the Marathi-specific
transformer MahaBERT-v2. The best system achieves 88.67%
token-level accuracy and a macro-F1 of 81.67% over 15 evaluated tag classes. We release the
dataset, annotation guidelines, and trained model checkpoints to foster further research in Marathi NLP.
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All authors Hariom Ingle, Ronit Ghode, Ishwari Gondkar, Jidnyasa Harad, Raviraj Joshi
Machine Learning
Grad Detect: Gradient-Based Hallucination Detection in LLMs
Anand Kamat, Daniel Blake and Brent M. Werness
Large
Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across diverse tasks, yet they remain prone to generating
hallucinations. Detecting these
hallucinations is critical for deploying LLMs reliably in high-stakes applications. We present Grad Detect, a gradient-based approach for predicting
hallucinations by analyzing layer-wise gradient patterns from a single forward-backward pass during inference. Our method shows that the internal gradient structure of a model carries rich information about the correctness of its output. This information is not accessible through output-level signals alone. We evaluate Grad Detect on several Q&A
benchmarks across both
hallucination detection and model abstention prediction, where it consistently outperforms confidence-based and sampling-based baselines. Through comprehensive layer ablation studies across all eleven models from four architectural families, we find that the final five layers concentrate over 97% of the discriminative gradient signal, enabling efficient deployment with minimal performance loss. Grad Detect provides a unified framework for predicting multiple dimensions of LLM reliability, offering strong predictive performance alongside interpretable insights into where and how model failures originate.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.AI
BluTrain: A C++/CUDA Framework for AI Systems
Adhitya Charan, Adwaid Suresh, Anuj Kumar et al. (+19 more)
Progress in deep learning is, at scale, more a matter of systems engineering than of modelling: the behaviour of a model in training (its throughput, its
memory footprint, and the numerical fidelity of the result) is determined less by the architecture itself than by how that architecture is expressed on the hardware. To achieve absolute control over this hardware expression while abstracting away systems complexity to make modelling seamless and eliminating the need for repetitive orchestration logic, BluTrain was architected from first principles as a robust, lightweight, and architecture-general training framework in standard C++ and the core CUDA programming model. Every layer is implemented natively: a typed tensor module with reverse-mode autograd, a linear-
algebra library, a caching allocator, a multi-mode distributed-execution module, and an MLIR-based deep-learning compiler. In formal evaluations training a 124M-parameter GPT-2 baseline in FP32 on an 8-GPU 6000 Ada system, BluTrain outperforms industry-standard baselines in both throughput (sustaining an average of 407K
tokens/s versus PyTorch's 395K
tokens/s) and
memory efficiency (achieving up to a 22% footprint reduction), while strictly preserving numerical fidelity and converging to a marginally lower final validation loss. With every layer explicitly open to native tuning, the performance ceiling is the framework's own to raise.
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All authors Adhitya Charan, Adwaid Suresh, Anuj Kumar, Aparna A, Dhanakumar K, Dharun M S, Dinesh G, Goutham Kumar Reddy K, Harshini V M, Jenifa D, Jona Delcy C A, Kathirvel S, Killi Uma Maheswara Rao, Kiruthik Kanna M, Kurra Vishnu Sai, Madhumithaa G K, Navin Kumar V, Ram Charan Golla, Revathi T, Rishikkanth R, Sanjay Krishna M V, Surendra Vendra
Machine Learning · Cross-listed from math.NA
Dirac-Frenkel dynamics with inertia for nonlinearly parametrized solutions of evolution problems
Matteo Raviola and Benjamin Peherstorfer
Even when Dirac-Frenkel dynamics determine a well-defined
evolution in function space, the corresponding parameter dynamics can be non-unique or ill-conditioned for redundant nonlinear parametrizations, such as typical neural networks or mixture models. We propose to add inertia to the Dirac-Frenkel dynamics and show that this allows useful parameter velocity information to persist from the past trajectory in directions that are weakly informed, while well-informed parameter velocity directions continue to follow the Dirac-Frenkel dynamics. We prove that the inertial formulation yields well-posed parameter dynamics and provide a posteriori error bounds. After time discretization, the method requires the solution of the same type of regularized linear least-squares problem as standard Dirac-Frenkel dynamics, but with the previous velocity appearing as an anchor. Numerical experiments demonstrate the increased robustness obtained with inertia.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from stat.ML
Model selection with proper scoring rules on data sets of time series: prefer the mean scaled score
Giorgio Corani, Stefano Damato, Dario Azzimonti et al. (+1 more)
We study the problem of model selection among probabilistic
forecasting models evaluated on
datasets of multiple time series. The performance of a model on a single time series is quantified by the average value (score) of a proper scoring rule over a test set, but extending model selection to data sets of time series requires aggregating these scores. Common approaches either rely on scaling scores and averaging them (mean scaled score) or avoid scaling by using alternative statistics such as mean ranks or win rates. However, these approaches can yield conflicting conclusions. We show that such discrepancies arise from the skewness of the distribution of the scores, which is particularly pronounced when test sets are short. The skewness can cause non-mean criteria (e.g., mean rank, median, win rate) to select misspecified models. In contrast, the mean score is immune from this problem. We further show that, as the size of the test sets increases, all aggregation criteria converge to the same model selection decision, mitigating these discrepancies. Our experiments on intermittent demand time series, including data from the M5 competition, highlight the importance of sufficiently large test sets; the mean scaled score appears to be the more reliable approach, also because empirically we found its decision to remain consistent when different scaling factors are adopted.
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All authors Giorgio Corani, Stefano Damato, Dario Azzimonti, Lorenzo Zambon
Machine Learning · Cross-listed from physics.flu-dyn
A Physics-Informed Fourier-Wavelet Transformer for Multiscale Computational Fluid Dynamics Surrogate Modeling
Somyajit Chakraborty, Ming Pan and Xizhong Chen
Physics-informed surrogate models can accelerate computational fluid dynamics simulations. However, many existing methods reproduce global flow patterns more reliably than localized multiscale structures. This study presents a physics-informed
Fourier-wavelet
transformer for next-step velocity-field reconstruction in real-world flow
benchmarks. The proposed formulation combines hybrid
Fourier-wavelet spectral encoding with physics-biased self-
attention based on partial differential equation residual diagnostics. It also uses self-supervised pretraining through Masked Physics Prediction and Equation Consistency Prediction. The experiments are conducted on two real
benchmark cases: cylinder-wake flow and fluid-structure interaction. All approaches are evaluated under a shared local protocol and compared with spectral,
transformer-based, operator-learning, and physics-informed neural-network baselines. On the cylinder-wake
benchmark, the proposed model achieves the best aggregate accuracy, with an all-channel normalized mean-squared error of 0.05875 and an all-channel Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.97019. On the fluid-structure-interaction
benchmark, it gives the lowest all-channel normalized mean-squared error of $2.70 \times 10^{-4}$, compared with $4.02 \times 10^{-4}$ for the strongest baseline. Component-wise field comparisons and scale-separated diagnostics further show stronger recovery of localized wake structures, including near-body, wake-core, and far-wake features. The results demonstrate improved real-world flow reconstruction while maintaining a practical accuracy-cost tradeoff.
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Machine Learning
FlowPipe: LLM-Enhanced Conditional Generative Flow Networks for Data Preparation Pipeline Construction
Kunyu Ni, Lei Cao, Jie He et al. (+4 more)
Data preparation pipelines improve data quality in machine learning by transforming raw tables into learning-ready data through sequential cleaning and feature transformation operators. However, automatically constructing such pipelines is computationally difficult because operator sequences are combinatorial and end-to-end evaluation is expensive. Existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) Multi-DQN methods still face three key limitations: decoupled value
estimators weaken long-horizon credit assignment,
dataset context is only weakly injected into the policy, and exploration is inefficient in a sparse search space with many invalid states. To address these issues, we propose FlowPipe, a unified framework that formulates pipeline synthesis as conditional probabilistic flow generation over a directed acyclic graph. FlowPipe uses Conditional Generative Flow Networks (C-GFlowNets) with a Trajectory Balance objective to connect terminal validation rewards with early pipeline decisions. It further introduces Deep Semantic Modulation through Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM), allowing LLM-derived logical priors to condition the policy's internal activations according to
dataset semantics. In addition, FlowPipe incorporates failure awareness into the flow objective to avoid invalid states and concentrate search on high-potential regions. Experiments on two
benchmark suites with 74 real-world
datasets show that FlowPipe outperforms SOTA baselines, improving accuracy by 11.96% on average and achieving 12.5x faster training convergence. Source code is available at https://github.com/KunyuNi/FlowPipe.
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All authors Kunyu Ni, Lei Cao, Jie He, Xiaotong Zhang, Jianfeng Jin, Junyu Dong, Yanwei Yu
Machine Learning · Cross-listed from q-bio.QM
Extended pseudo-spectral physics-informed neural networks for phase-field models
Callum Marsh, Radek Erban and Andreas Munch
Phase-field models play a central role in the continuum description of phase separation, in which the bulk free-energy density and the interfacial thickness parameter determine pattern formation and microstructural
evolution. In practice, these constitutive quantities are rarely known a priori and must be inferred from limited dynamical observations. In this work, an extended pseudo-spectral physics-informed neural network (ESPINN) framework is developed for the inverse identification of phase-field models from transient snapshot data. It enables the simultaneous recovery of both the bulk chemical potential and unknown gradient coefficients. Numerical experiments on the one-dimensional Cahn-Hilliard equation demonstrate accurate and statistically stable reconstruction in the noiseless regime, with substantial constitutive information recoverable from even a single snapshot pair. In the presence of noise, reconstruction accuracy degrades gracefully, and increasing the number of snapshots improves robustness by reducing variance across runs. These results establish ESPINN as a data-efficient and physically consistent approach for learning free-energy structure in continuum models of phase separation.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.CL
AI-PAVE-Br: Leveraging Large Language Models for Enhanced Product Attribute Value Extraction through a Golden Set Approach
Murilo Gazzola, Hugo Gobato Souto, Samuel Silva et al. (+4 more)
The explosive growth and complexity of product data within the dynamic Brazilian e-commerce landscape demand robust and specialized methods for structured information extraction. Traditional approaches to Product Attribute Value Extraction (PAVE) often struggle with the linguistic nuances and sheer diversity of product descriptions in Portuguese. To address this critical gap, this paper introduces two major contributions. First, we present AI-PAVEBr, a specialized system engineered with Large
Language Models (LLMs) to perform high-accuracy PAVE specifically for Brazilian e-commerce catalogs. Second, to facilitate reproducible research and provide a definitive
benchmark, we introduce and share the Golden Set, a new, meticulously curated, and manually annotated
dataset for PAVE in Portuguese. We detail the creation process and structure (Entity, Category, Subcategories) of this high-quality reference set. Our experiments conclusively show that AI-PAVE-Br, leveraging targeted
prompt engineering, dramatically outperforms conventional Named Entity Recognition (NER) baselines. This work not only delivers a superior, scalable solution for a major non-English
market but also enriches the NLP community with a valuable, publicly available resource for future PAVE research.
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All authors Murilo Gazzola, Hugo Gobato Souto, Samuel Silva, Júlia Schubert Peixoto, Felipe Siqueira, André Luis Pedroso de Morais, Caio Gomes
Machine Learning
QC-SMOTE: Quality-Controlled SMOTE for Imbalanced Classification
Parth Upman and Shreyank N Gowda
Class imbalance poses a significant challenge in classification, where existing methods such as SMOTE often generate low-quality synthetic samples in regions with noise or class overlap. We propose QC-SMOTE, a quality-controlled oversampling framework that estimates minority sample reliability using a composite neighbourhood trustworthiness score combining local density, safe-level, and isolation from the majority class. Synthetic candidates are generated using an IPQ-guided best-of-K strategy that evaluates midpoint purity and, when required, majority clearance, with allocation guided by sample reliability and boundary informativeness. Generation behaviour adapts across overlap–imbalance regimes, adjusting interpolation range and selection criteria to match local data geometry. Low-quality synthetic samples are replaced with original minority duplicates when neighbourhood purity falls below an adaptive threshold, providing graceful degradation by reverting to duplication in severely noisy regions. Experiments on 30 imbalanced
datasets using repeated stratified cross-validation show that QC-SMOTE achieves the strongest average AUC-ROC and Macro F1 among the compared oversampling methods, with particularly clear gains under moderate and severe imbalance. These results demonstrate the importance of quality-aware, geometry-adaptive synthetic sampling for robust imbalanced classification.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.AI
ASALT: Adaptive State Alignment for Lateral Transfer in Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning
Anurag Akula, Satheesh K. Perepu, Abhishek Sarkar et al. (+1 more)
Multi-
agent reinforcement learning (MARL) addresses the problem of training multiple
agents that pursue collaborative, competitive, or mixed objectives. Prior work has investigated transfer learning between source and target domains in MARL; however, the majority of existing approaches impose the constraint that the dimensionalities of the observation space and the global state space must be identical across domains. In this paper, we introduce a method that explicitly accommodates mismatched state-space dimensionalities between source and target domains. The proposed approach, ASALT, incorporates both observation-level and state-level adapters that map the target-domain observations and global states into a shared
embedding space, thereby enabling more effective transfer of knowledge across both actors and critics. These adapters can generate
embeddings that support efficient strategy transfer across heterogeneous domains. Experimental results on multiple configurations in standard
benchmark environments demonstrate that ASALT surpasses existing baselines in terms of sample efficiency and global return in cooperative settings, but its effectiveness depends on the degree of mismatch between source and target domains. Furthermore, our findings indicate that ASALT mitigates negative transfer, which frequently constitutes a major obstacle when transferring policies between domains with differing observation and action spaces.
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All authors Anurag Akula, Satheesh K. Perepu, Abhishek Sarkar, Kaushik Dey