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Friday 10 July

Machine Learning

Codec-Gauge: Learning Compression-Friendly Gauges for Transformer KV Caches

Long-context Transformer inference increasingly relies on KV-cache compression or quantization. Prior rotation and transform-coding results suggest that the channel basis of each key/value vector affects how faithfully a fixed backend preserves model behavior. We introduce Codec-Gauge, a post-training cache-coordinate layer that learns small orthogonal channel transforms around existing compression and quantization backends. Its frequency-distribution objective combines a token-channel DCT spectral-centroid loss with a smooth rate proxy to concentrate KV energy in low-frequency codec-facing layouts. We evaluate actual compression and decompression using measured bytes and rolling compressed-history scoring. Across six models at $3$, $4$, and $6$ bits/value, learned gauges reduce zfp KL divergence by $44.0\%$ on average relative to raw coordinates and outperform random, Hadamard, DCT, and PCA/KLT controls. The same gauges improve quality preservation for block-uniform and KIVI-style quantization. Experiments on a 27B model and long-context task prompts reproduce the quality trend, while serial storage and timing measurements validate the implemented compressed-cache paths. These results establish cache-coordinate geometry as a practical post-training variable for improving compression fidelity without changing model weights, attention semantics, or backend coding rules.
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All authors Yitao Jiang, Yaoqing Yang, Luyang Zhao, Muhao Chen, Devin Balkcom

Machine Learning

ReliableTableQA:How Much Supervision Does Reliability Annotation Need?

We introduce ReliableTableQA, a framework for training an LLM to annotate the statistical reliability of tabular QA results, not whether the query is answerable, but whether the computed answer is statistically meaningful. In real enterprise analytics, a syntactically correct SQL query can return a value that is based on too small a sample, has an excessively wide confidence interval, or is too confounded to support action. Existing systems answer confidently in all such cases, a failure we quantify as the Unreliable Confident Answer Rate (UCAR). We contribute (1) a ten-category reliability taxonomy (R1-R10) covering hazards such as small-sample aggregates, multiple-comparison inflation, and distribution-tail mismatch; (2) a program-first data pipeline that generates 50,000 reliability-labeled training examples from a context-free grammar over public retail schemas, with schema-stratified SFT/GRPO splits; and (3) a controlled study of how much supervision calibrated reliability annotation actually requires. We find that a small, schema-stratified SFT set is remarkably sufficient: 200 examples raise reliability-flag F1 from 0.61 to 0.98 and parse rate from 0.52 to 1.00, drive UCAR to zero, and yield a model that generalizes to an unseen retail domain (Rel-F1 0.997 on held-out H&M). Against this strong SFT baseline, GRPO, commonly assumed to be essential, helps only when SFT is under-trained (+0.06-0.16 exact-flag-set match at 100 examples, in- and out-of-distribution) and provides no measurable benefit once SFT is adequate, a null result we confirm across a hard compound-flag slice, a strict exact-match metric, and out-of-distribution evaluation. Our findings reframe reliability annotation as a data-efficiency problem and delineate precisely when reinforcement fine-tuning does and does not pay off.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.AI

AppWorld-UL: Benchmarking Diverse Agent-User Interactions for Tool-Use

Tool-use agents that address day-to-day digital tasks such as ordering groceries must not only operate applications, but also interact with the user, e.g., to ask clarification questions, prompt for confirmation, and inform the user when the instruction is infeasible. However, current benchmarks for evaluating agent-user interactions do not capture the diversity of such interactions. Further, they operate in small environments with few, often non-state-changing, APIs. To address this gap, we introduce AppWorld-UL, a “user-in-the-loop” benchmark of 516 challenging tasks requiring diverse agent-user interactions. Building upon the AppWorld framework with 9 popular simulated apps like Amazon and Spotify, we systematically modify original tasks to introduce ambiguities and constraints that necessitate various types of agent-user interaction. User behavior is simulated by an LLM prompted to respond with carefully designed knowledge boundaries, offering more reliable simulation than the unconstrained or overly rigid alternatives used in prior work. Our evaluation reveals that a state-of-the-art LLM, Claude Opus 4.7, achieves only 48.6% success on AppWorld-UL, and only 35.7% on the harder, compositional subset. On the stricter, scenario-level metric, compositional task performance drops to only 21.3%. Our analysis reveals that correct user-interaction is crucial for success. This demonstrates the benchmark's difficulty and its potential to advance research on user-in-the-loop tool-use agents.
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All authors Junzhi Chen, Harsh Trivedi, Jane Pan, Michael JQ Zhang, Tejas Srinivasan, Niranjan Balasubramanian, Ashish Sabharwal

Machine Learning

A Graph Neural Network approach to zero-shot Digital Twins

Traditional Predictive Digital Twins often remain geometrically rigid, requiring extensive retraining or fine-tuning whenever the underlying physical domain or boundary conditions change. To overcome this limitation, we present a novel framework for Zero-Shot Digital Twins that seamlessly couples real-time visual perception with a geometry-agnostic, physics-informed reasoning engine. At the core of our architecture is the Thermodynamics-Informed Graph Neural Network architecture, a Geometric Deep Learning solver grounded in a metriplectic thermodynamic formalism that enforces energy conservation and non-negative entropy production locally through graph message passing. The framework integrates an auxiliary Graph Neural Network to infer unobservable fields (such as stress tensors or velocity and energy distributions) directly from sparse initial visual boundaries, mitigating numerical start-up transients. To bridge the sim-to-real gap, we implement a continuous closed-loop data assimilation mechanism; the pipeline tracks macroscopic deformations and free-surface fluid boundaries in real-time using deep segmentation networks combined with sparse optical flow, dynamically correcting the autoregressive simulation rollout and eliminating numerical drift. To test the validity of our approach, we demonstrate the extreme generalization capabilities of our approach across two disparate physical regimes: the large deformations of a viscoelastic beam and the non-linear sloshing of a viscous fluid. In both scenarios, the unified framework instantiates physically accurate simulations on novel, unseen geometries without case-specific retraining, operating well within real-time latency budgets (approximately 25 ms per frame) and enabling the direct projection of latent mechanical variables via Augmented Reality.
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All authors Alicia Tierz, Icíar Alfaro, David González, Elías Cueto

Machine Learning

Grounding Investor Views: Neural Predicates in the Black-Litterman Model

Portfolio construction under the Black-Litterman model requires investors to specify views on asset returns alongside explicit uncertainty estimates – a process that remains largely subjective and difficult to scale. We propose a formal approach in which neural predicates serve as a structured, probabilistic mechanism for view generation. In our formulation, structured financial analysis data is processed through a compositional hierarchy of neural predicates whose outputs – probability distributions over market stances – are mapped to the pick matrix $\mathbf{P}$, the view return vector $\mathbf{q}$, and the view uncertainty matrix $\boldsymbol{\Omega}$ of the Black-Litterman model. View confidence is derived from predicate output distributions, providing a data-driven alternative to subjective uncertainty elicitation. The resulting approach is interpretable, in the sense that any portfolio weight can be traced back through the predicate's logical chain to the underlying data, and fully differentiable, enabling end-to-end learning.
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Machine Learning

Position: Stop Reactively Patching Your Model Every Time and Start Proactive Test-Driven AI Development

Many modern AI systems are designed to operate under diverse, open-ended, use-cases. To help generalize deployed systems, many deployed-system maintenance pipelines use a reactive AI flywheel that observes emerging feedback from user behavior (errors) and patches the model accordingly. However, when used as the primary maintenance mechanism, these flywheels often ignore the broader context of these errors within the system's objectives, failing to preempt potential future edge cases, which leads to more unnecessary flywheel iterations. Also, it is statistically increasingly difficult to collect remaining errors due to the long-tail nature of open-world use-cases. This position paper argues that a proactive test-driven flywheel is required to address reactive flywheel's limitations and to approach a generalizable system. We advocate for creating a "test space" to technically map feedback data to task objectives, evolving the flywheel from reactive to proactive. We augment our position by mathematically proving a proactive one achieves better long-term scaling with fewer iterations than the reactive flywheel.
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All authors Nadine Chang, Maying Shen, Jialiang Wang, Rafid Mahmood, Jose M. Alvarez

Machine Learning

CLOE: Christoffel Loss Autoencoder for Anomaly Detection

Semi-supervised anomaly detection plays a key role in diverse fields such as process monitoring, healthcare, and finance. However, lightweight methods often struggle with high-dimensional data and typically require careful tuning of multiple hyperparameters. Among existing approaches, Christoffel Function–based methods are attractive due to their simplicity, requiring at most a single hyperparameter. They also benefit from a well-established theoretical foundation that yields several interesting results for data science. However, their main limitation is poor scalability to high-dimensional settings. In this paper, we introduce CLOE, a new method that combines an autoencoder for dimensionality reduction with a Christoffel Function–based detector applied in the latent space. To better align representation learning with anomaly detection, we design a novel loss function that leverages the Christoffel Function to guide the autoencoder toward representations that better capture the support of the normal data distribution. We further propose a principled procedure to set the detection threshold and an efficient strategy to tune the single remaining hyperparameter. Experiments on multiple high-dimensional tabular anomaly detection benchmarks demonstrate that CLOE achieves superior performance compared to existing methods, while preserving the lightweight and low-tuning advantages of Christoffel Function–based approaches.
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All authors Léa Billet, Louise Travé-Massuyès, Elodie Chanthery, Alexandre Gaffet

Machine Learning

Uncertainty-Aware Trust Estimation for Multi-LLM Systems via Structured Expert Judgement

Large Language Model (LLM) ensembles are increasingly used to improve reliability by combining predictions from multiple LLMs. However, existing aggregation methods typically assume that all models are equally trustworthy, overlooking differences in uncertainty quality. This assumption is poorly suited to heterogeneous LLMs, whose reliability and capability vary significantly, making naive aggregation vulnerable to unreliable or adversarial experts. In this work, we formulate multi-LLM aggregation as a problem of uncertainty-aware trust estimation. We adapt structured expert judgment from decision theory, using context-aware calibration questions to estimate expert reliability based on the quality of its probabilistic predictions. Specifically, we employ Cooke-style log weighting, which penalises overconfident incorrect predictions and favours well-calibrated experts. We evaluate our approach on MMLU and MMLU-Pro across homogeneous, heterogeneous, and contaminated expert panels. Results show that while aggregation methods perform similarly in homogeneous settings, Cooke weighting becomes critical under heterogeneity and contamination. It achieves a superior accuracy-reliability balance and remains robust when unreliable experts are introduced. These findings suggest that Multi-LLM aggregation requires not just combining predictions, but calibrating trust under uncertainty.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.AI

ConfidenceBench: Evaluating Confidence Calibration in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in settings where fluent but incorrect answers can be costly. In these settings, accuracy alone is insufficient: models must also know when they are likely to be wrong. We present ConfidenceBench, a calibration benchmark that evaluates verbalized confidence estimates in 15 frontier LLMs using the Brier score, a proper scoring rule that incentivises truthful probability reporting. Confidence is elicited via prompting, requiring no access to model logits and making the framework applicable to both closed-source and open-source systems. The benchmark comprises 200 private multiple-choice questions across four categories: spatial reasoning, high-precision mathematics, word lookup, and unknowable questions. Across three independent runs, Claude Opus 4.6 and Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview achieve the lowest Brier scores, both reported as 0.103. Both substantially outperform the calibrated-random baseline of 0.1875, while Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite scores 0.367, indicating severe miscalibration. Accuracy and calibration diverge substantially across model families: the most accurate model is not the best-calibrated, and several models perform worse than the calibrated-random Brier baseline despite reasonable accuracy. These results show that verbalized confidence calibration is a distinct and practically important axis of LLM reliability, complementary to standard accuracy-based evaluation.
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All authors Matthew ffrench-Constant, Daniel Yang, Xinmeng Huang, Sanyam Kapoor

Machine Learning

Repairing Shape-Prior Shortcuts in Long-Range Single-Shot Fringe Projection Profilometry

Single-shot fringe projection profilometry (FPP) networks that regress depth directly can exploit a shape-prior shortcut, recovering depth from object boundaries rather than from fringe phase. On a photorealistic synthetic benchmark (15,600 fringe images, 50 objects at 1.5-2.1 m standoff), the best such UNet baseline plateaus at 14.54 mm object mean absolute error (MAE), and neither more data nor more capacity removes the shortcut, because neither changes the hypothesis space the optimizer searches. We introduce PhiCalNet, which outputs a wrapped-phase representation $(\sin\phi, \cos\phi)$ and maps it to depth through a fixed differentiable calibration layer, removing the shape-prior solution architecturally rather than by a loss penalty. Because the single-shot mapping is non-injective without fringe order, PhiCalNet takes the fringe order as auxiliary input, an assumption a sensitivity analysis shows tolerates realistic decoding error; a physics-informed (PINN) baseline with the same physics as a soft penalty yields no gain, isolating the architectural choice as the operative factor. PhiCalNet reduces object MAE 3.3x to 4.46 mm, its residual confined to 0.103% of pixels at the $\pm\pi$ wrap discontinuity, and a three-frame extension reaches 1.16 mm. Two checks agree: interpretability makes phase the most decodable internal feature, and pixel-wise conformal uncertainty quantification, to our knowledge the first for FPP, localizes error at the same discontinuity, where rejecting the top 5% of pixels by snapshot disagreement cuts root-mean-square error by 64% versus 3.5% for the baseline.
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Machine Learning

FlashTrie: A GPU-Accelerated Constrained Beam Search for Generative Retrieval

Constrained decoding is essential in generative retrieval, where document identifiers generated directly from a query must exactly match a predefined library of valid IDs. At scale, decoding is often constrained using a trie with beam search but most implementations run on CPU. Limited parallelism then makes trie traversal and candidate validation a serving bottleneck as beam width grows. We present FlashTrie, which addresses this limitation by optimizing constrained beam search on GPUs. It introduces an integer-aware succinct trie layout that uses bit compression to reduce memory footprint while keeping the full index in GPU high-bandwidth memory reducing memory stalls, and a cooperative CUDA kernel that performs beam expansion, validation, and pruning entirely on-device without per-step host orchestration. It further replaces CPU-style irregular lookup and heap maintenance with GPU-aware parallel primitives, improving warp utilization and reducing divergence. Together, these designs significantly reduce decoding latency and increase throughput while preserving retrieval quality. On a library of 800M keywords with beam widths up to 1000, FlashTrie reduces trie-search latency to under 3 ms, achieving up to 24x speedup over a highly optimized multi-threaded CPU baseline. These improvements enable FlashTrie to scale beam sizes by up to 5x in latency-critical applications such as sponsored search. In a large-scale online A/B experiment on a popular commercial search engine, it delivers a statistically significant +0.71% revenue lift, enabling real-time constrained decoding at a scale previously feasible only offline. The FlashTrie code will be publicly released after the review process.
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All authors Dakshitha Anandakumar, Anurag Mukkara, Wenxiang Hu, Jiusheng Chen, M Akash Kumar, Ting Ye, Qiang Lou, Jian Jiao

Machine Learning · Cross-listed from physics.data-an

Are We Ready for AI-Driven Discovery? AI Verification Before the Next Fundamental Physics Breakthrough

Machine learning (ML) has become integral to fundamental physics, accelerating statistical workflows from data acquisition through inference and hypothesis testing. As ML systems grow increasingly autonomous, ensuring their reliability for discovery claims becomes critical. This review synthesizes the VERaiPHY (Validation & Evaluation for Robust AI in PHYsics) initiative's frameworks for rigorous ML assessment across particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology. We establish when verification is essential by contextualizing ML within the statistical discovery workflow. We emphasize fundamental limitations: inductive bias is unavoidable, sample complexity bounds learning, and experimental constraints limit discovery. We reflect on physicists' evolving role as both experimental designers and evaluators whose judgments encode scientific rigor into AI systems. Responsible integration requires understanding ML's transformative potential alongside its intrinsic boundaries.
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Machine Learning

MLPs are Hebbians: Constructing Efficient Fact-Storing MLPs for Transformers

Large language models (LLMs) store factual knowledge in their parameters. While recent work has shown that this knowledge resides in MLP layers, existing constructive and mechanistic interpretability models of fact-storage in LLMs fail to explain the surprising empirical phenomenon that they store facts at an information-theoretically optimal rate. In this work, we develop a theoretical account of this phenomenon. We develop the first Transformer-compatible fact-storing MLP closed-form construction that satisfies the following three properties empirically observed in LLMs: it (i) attains optimal fact storage scaling, (ii) handles arbitrary input/output geometries, and (iii) works inside Transformers. Key to our work is to analyze the decoding margin of MLPs, whereas prior work only studies MLP fact storage. Under isotropic embeddings, our construction achieves information-theoretically optimal storage capacity scaling and requires $10$-$104\times$ fewer parameters at matched fact count than prior constructions. For arbitrary key and value embeddings, we show that our construction attains the same storage capacity scaling, up to penalization factors depending on the embedding geometries. Moreover, we demonstrate that our constructed MLPs can be used within Transformer blocks for factual recall tasks at optimal capacity scaling, requiring $15$-$63\times$ fewer parameters at matched fact count than prior constructions. Finally, as a proof-of-concept, we show that fact-storing MLPs enable modular fact editing by swapping a Transformer's MLP with a new one.
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All authors Roberto Garcia, Jerry Liu, Ronny Junkins, Sabri Eyuboglu, Atri Rudra, Christopher Ré

Machine Learning · Cross-listed from eess.SY

Robustly Invertible Nonlinear Dynamics and the BiLipREN: From Inversion-Based Control to Generative Trajectory Modelling

This paper proposes a new notion of robust invertibility for nonlinear dynamical systems, and introduces constructive parameterizations of recurrent neural network which are robustly invertible by design. We define robust invertibility as the existence of a causal inverse system such that both the forward and inverse systems are contracting and have bounded incremental input-output gains (the system is bi-Lipschitz), implying that both forward prediction and input reconstruction are robust to signal perturbations and initial-state mismatch. We construct robustly invertible recurrent models via series composition of static orthogonal layers and dynamic layers satisfying a strong input-output monotonicity property, and provide a differentiable neural network parameterizations in the form of the bi-Lipschitz recurrent equilibrium network (BiLipREN). Additionally, composition with dynamic orthogonal layers yields a nonlinear minimum-phase/all-pass (a.k.a. inner–outer) factorization. We illustrate the utility of the framework through a series of application examples in data-driven internal model control, dynamic surrogate loss learning, and signal-space normalizing flows, illustrating its utility for robust control, trajectory optimization, and generative modeling of complex trajectory distributions.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.SD

Local Multimodal Music Alignment from Global Supervision

Understanding music requires understanding localized relationships across data modalities, e.g., how time in performance audio maps onto position in a score image. Yet supervision for such local correspondences is difficult to obtain-in practice, we often only have access to coarser global supervision like paired segments of audio and images. To address this gap, we propose FuSiLi (Fused Sinkhorn-Localized Similarity), a similarity score for multimodal contrastive learning operating directly on local image patch and audio frame features via Sinkhorn-based soft alignment. We show that FuSiLi (i) effectively learns local relationships, (ii) requires only global supervision, and (iii) retains the global alignment capabilities of conventional contrastive approaches. We fine-tune pretrained CLIP and CLAP encoders on pairs of raw sheet music images and audio using a hybrid contrastive objective combining FuSiLi with conventional global similarity. We evaluate on cross-modal retrieval and frame-level alignment tasks against a range of global and local baselines, showing that our approach outperforms them on local alignment while remaining competitive on retrieval.
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All authors Irmak Bukey, Zachary Novack, Jongmin Jung, Dasaem Jeong, Chris Donahue

Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.AI

A Symbolic Neural CPU for Quantization-Simulated Writeback and Interpretable Program Execution

Neural networks can learn algorithmic input-output mappings, but trusting a learned executor requires more than a correct final answer because the state transitions that produce it are usually hidden. To make those transitions visible, we introduce a trace-supervised symbolic neural CPU, a factorized learned execution architecture that combines recurrent control, an explicit operation router over a fixed differentiable arithmetic-logic unit bank, destination-masked register writeback, complete trajectory supervision and matched fixed-point replay. The model exposes the selected operation, source and destination registers, register trajectory, memory signals and writeback semantics at every step. On the principal 16-wide benchmark, the non-quantized executor reproduces reference execution exactly, while the eight-bit quantization-simulated executor preserves the symbolic operation path through programs of 1,000 instructions. When the same execution is evaluated against a matched fixed-point replay, the residual numerical drift disappears, showing that it comes from a mismatch between continuous and low-precision reference semantics rather than from execution failure. We compare recurrent, Transformer, temporal-convolution, temporal graph-inspired and state-space controllers, and the ablations show that operation-gate supervision is necessary for an inspectable execution path. Hidden-opcode memory-pressure tasks expose the remaining limits in delayed state use and temporal binding. We also extend the interface with ValueMemory, hybrid adaptive leaky integrate-and-fire controllers, candidate-constrained symbolic control trained through behaviour cloning and actor-critic reinforcement learning, and an RV32I base-integer semantic bridge. Together, these results establish a trace-verifiable framework for interpretable, low-precision and controllable neural execution.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.IR

Tokenizing Numerical and Embedding Features for LLM RecSys

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as backbone architectures for recommender systems because of their strong sequence modeling and representation learning capabilities. However, most LLM-based recommenders operate primarily on discrete textual tokens, whereas practical recommendation pipelines also rely on continuous numerical features and dense embedding features produced by upstream feature engineering or pretrained encoders. This mismatch limits the ability of LLM-based models to exploit fine-grained non-textual signals. We propose a soft-token fusion framework that maps numerical and embedding features into the LLM embedding space, allowing heterogeneous recommendation signals to be consumed through the standard token interface. We instantiate the framework in a shared-parameter LLM-based two-tower retrieval model and introduce an interaction-based fusion module that refines embedding and numerical soft tokens before they are inserted into the final LLM input. Experiments on three Amazon recommendation benchmarks show that soft-token fusion improves retrieval performance over LLM-based baselines, and that interaction-based fusion is more effective than direct concatenation of heterogeneous soft tokens.
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All authors Zhe Xu, Ankit Peshin, Chiyu Zhang, Feng Qi, Johnson Lui, Anil Ramakrishna, Justin Johnson, Carl Hu, Kaushik Rangadurai, Luke Simon

Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.RO

Runtime Safety Filtering for Learned Small UAS Separation Policies under GNSS Degradation

Learning-based separation assurance for small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUAS) achieves near-zero collision rates in simulation, but assumes accurate position and velocity information from Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS). This assumption fails in urban environments, where multipath propagation, signal blockage, and intentional interference degrade navigation integrity. This raises a fundamental architectural question for deploying learned separation policies under GNSS degradation: should runtime safety mechanisms filter the policy's actions or its observations? This work evaluates both approaches for multi-agent sUAS separation under adversarial GNSS degradation. Both architectures first estimate a worst-case traffic state consistent with bounded observation uncertainty, then diverge: action filtering constrains policy outputs via discrete-time control barrier functions evaluated at the worst-case state, while observation filtering presents the worst-case state directly to the policy as corrected input. Experimental results show that action filtering provides negligible safety improvement, while observation filtering reduces near mid-air collisions by 90% and remains robust to the barrier function's tradeoff between separation distance and closing rate. These results suggest that, for policies with learned safety behaviors, preserving the policy's decision authority outperforms overriding its actions with hand-designed constraints.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from stat.ML

Manifold Constrained Conformal Prediction for Spatial Events

We introduce a new conformal prediction method that constructs calibrated prediction sets over collections of spatial events, such as tropical cyclone genesis and earthquake locations. Forecasting natural hazards has become increasingly important, due to their significant economic impact, and quantifying the uncertainty of predictions is critical for accurate risk assessment. Our approach works by representing spatial point clouds as empirical measures so that we can score them using (sliced) Wasserstein distance, then constraining the resulting distribution-valued prediction set to be supported only near the training data manifold. We derive a coverage lower bound for the intersected sets and show that, in practice, this gap can be made small through a simple data-adaptive selection criterion. Because the resulting set is not analytically tractable, we introduce a modified flow-based sampling procedure, which allows us to represent and apply these prediction sets in practice as ensembles. Numerical experiments on synthetic data, tropical cyclone genesis, and earthquake occurrences show that our method achieves near-nominal coverage, with significantly lower energy distance and manifold distance than highest predictive density region (HDR) baselines along with generative model baselines.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.CL

Silent Failures in Quantized LLM Reasoning: A Taxonomy-Based Analysis of Hollow Convergence and Failure Mode Shifts

We show that post-training quantization can silently alter how large language models reason even when task accuracy is preserved. Using a six-category failure taxonomy validated by two independent human annotators (Cohen's $\kappa$ = 0.906), we classify 30,000 chain-of-thought outputs from five instruction-tuned LLMs (3B–14B parameters) across three quantization precisions (FP32, FP16, NF4) and four reasoning benchmarks. We find that while accuracy is robust across precisions (maximum 3.1 pp drop), Hollow Convergence (correct answers reached through incomplete or unverifiable reasoning) shows a significant size-dependent shift under NF4, dropping sharply for the two smallest models tested but remaining invariant for models at 12B parameters and above. This effect is also benchmark-specific: GSM8K is categorically immune while LogiQA and ARC-Challenge show the largest shifts. Furthermore, under NF4, Shortcut Collapse rises from 44% to 78% of wrong-answer failures in LLaMA 3.2-3B while Confidence Snowballing collapses from 15.8% to near zero, a qualitative shift invisible to accuracy metrics. Finally, we show Hollow Convergence cannot be reliably detected from surface-level text features (best F1 = 0.53), establishing it as a deployment-relevant failure mode that standard evaluation pipelines cannot catch.
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Machine Learning

Vilya-1: An all-atom foundation model for macrocycle structure prediction and design

Macrocyclic peptides are an increasingly important therapeutic modality, but existing computational methods for modeling their structures and properties are limited in scope and do not generalize well across the synthetically accessible chemical space. In this work, we introduce Vilya-1, a deep learning model that addresses two central challenges in macrocycle design: sampling biologically relevant conformations across arbitrary chemistries and predicting key developability properties such as membrane permeability. Vilya-1 operates on a uniform all-atom representation and is trained on heterogeneous structural datasets spanning diverse topologies and chemical classes. Across a broad set of macrocycles composed of canonical and non-canonical residues, Vilya-1 substantially improves geometric accuracy relative to physics-based methods, co-folding networks, and deep-learning conformer generators, while maintaining broad chemical coverage that extends to small molecules. Vilya-1 also supports generative applications, enabling the design of novel macrocycles with tailored chemical, structural, and property profiles. Together, these capabilities establish Vilya-1 as a foundation model for accelerating the development of next-generation macrocycle therapeutics.
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All authors Vilya Research: Pascal Sturmfels, Milad Salem, Naozumi Hiranuma, Stephen Rettie, Xiaoliang Pan, Benjamin D. Sellers, Adam P. Moyer, Patrick J. Salveson, Ivan Anishchanka

Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.GT

Beyond Bayesian Nash: Learning Minimax-Regret Equilibria for Adversarial Team Games under Asymmetric Information

Adversarial team games (ATGs) with asymmetric information, such as adversarial path-finding, goal search, and reachability games on graphs, require strategies that are robust to hidden opponent types, such as a hidden goal flag, and to deception. Under asymmetric information, deception is seen as strategic shifts in the type distribution such that the omniscient opponent can collude with Nature and condition its play on the observed type. Existing risk-neutral solution concepts, such as Bayesian Nash equilibrium (BNE), are sensitive to distribution shifts, while distributionally robust approaches provide guarantees only within a prescribed ambiguity set. To address these limitations, we introduce Probabilistically Robust Minimax-Regret Equilibrium (PR-MRE), a novel equilibrium concept that combines the distribution-free robustness of minimax-regret reasoning with probabilistic information from a nominal type distribution. PR-MRE minimizes worst-case regret over a high-confidence subset of the type space, providing protection against strategic redistribution of probability mass while avoiding the conservatism of fully distribution-free approaches. We show that, for normal-form Bayesian games, PR-MRE can be formulated as a robust bilinear program and derive a tractable semidefinite relaxation. We then adapt this relaxation into a novel meta-solver within a robust double-oracle framework, PRMRE-PSRO, enabling population-based learning of approximate PR-MRE strategies via deep reinforcement learning best responses. Experiments on graph-structured adversarial team games demonstrate that PR-MRE discovers strategies with substantially improved worst-case performance across hidden types compared to risk-neutral equilibrium solutions, resulting in more robust behavior under strategic distribution shifts.
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Machine Learning

Multimodal Routing for Interpretable, Robust, and Auditable Clinical Prediction

Electronic health record (EHR) data are inherently multimodal, and leveraging multiple modalities can improve predictive performance. However, most existing approaches rely on deep fusion, which obscures how individual modalities contribute to predictions and limits the interpretability of multimodal reasoning. We propose an explicit multimodal routing framework for clinical prediction that enables interpretable, robust, and auditable reasoning across three EHR modalities: structured longitudinal variables (L), clinical notes (N), and chest X-rays (I). Our model constructs discrete unimodal, directional bimodal, and trimodal routes to capture both individual modality signals and asymmetric cross-modal interactions. To audit multimodal reasoning and assess robustness, we introduce inference-time route masking, which simulates missing modalities and reweights the remaining routes without retraining. We analyze changes in performance and routing weights under these scenarios to understand model decision-making. We evaluate our framework on multi-label phenotype prediction (K = 25) and binary ICU mortality prediction using trimodal patient stays from MIMIC-IV, revealing systematic differences in modality reliance across clinical condition groups. Overall, our framework offers a transparent, auditable, and practical approach to multimodal clinical prediction, providing interpretability, robustness, and insights into how different data sources drive model decisions.
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All authors Nikkie Hooman, Zhongjie Wu, Eric C. Larson, Mehak Gupta

Machine Learning · Cross-listed from physics.chem-ph

Inverse-IMPRESSION: A Graph-based Platform for Molecular Structure Elucidation from Experimental NMR Spectroscopic Properties

Here, we present a platform built on our inverted Graph Transformer Network, IMPRESSION-G2, which can accurately and rapidly reconstruct molecular bonding directly from experimental nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopic information. It comprises three interconnected stages: a one-shot model that predicts bond connectivity between atoms; a structure-correction stage that corrects the predicted structures by removing uncertain bonds and iteratively reassigning them; noise-augmented multi-shot prediction, generating an ensemble of candidate structures, which are ranked to identify the best-fit structure. By integrating a range of $^{1}$H and $^{13}$C NMR data, including two-dimensional (2D) experiments such as COSY, HSQC, and HMBC, the inverse-IMPRESSION platform correctly identifies the structures of 77.8% of molecules with up to 30 heavy atoms (H, C, N, O and F) using simulated NMR data, and 10 of 19 (53%) molecules using experimental NMR data. The experimental structures solved have molecular weights of up to 480 Da and are representative of the complex structures in synthetic and natural products that routinely challenge chemists. The inverse-IMPRESSION framework thus provides the first effective approach for automated molecular structure elucidation using graph-based machine learning on experimental data.
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All authors Zheqi Jin, Grace Armitage, Richard Cox, Ben Honoré, Mohammad Golbabaee, Craig Butts

Machine Learning

Learning in Curved Weight Space:Exponential-Linear Weight Reparameterization for Improved Optimization

Many neural networks operations have a multiplicative nature rather than additive: halving or doubling a norm are analogous relatively but require unequal optimization distances when taking linear steps. Adaptive optimizers such as Adam normalize updates per coordinate, but update steps remain additive; weights with very different magnitudes receive similarly sized absolute changes, producing very different relative perturbations. We introduce \method (\methodshort), a weight reparameterization for neural networks that combines a sign-aware symmetric-exponential pathway with an identity-like linear pathway. The symmetric-exponential pathway is near-linear for small raw weights but increasingly curved at larger magnitudes. Additive updates in logarithmic space map to magnitude-proportional changes in effective weight space. The linear pathway provides a direct route through the transform that we hypothesize stabilizes optimization, while learnable scale, curvature, and offset parameters control balance between pathways and the curvature of the exponential pathway. These components create a curved parameter-space geometry that empirically improves speed of loss descent over standard linear parameterization. We also identify a useful mismatched initialization: raw weights are chosen so a symmetric version of the transform matches Xavier statistics, but training uses an asymmetric forward transform that leaves positive weights at full strength while making negative weights smaller in magnitude; in small-model ablations, this improves early optimization and may act as a form of symmetry breaking. We train transformers on OpenWebText over nine width$\times$depth configurations, \methodshort reaches matched validation loss in 1.32–1.49$\times$ fewer training steps, with the largest widths seeing the biggest gains.
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Machine Learning

Optimizing ARDL Models for Retail Sales Forecasting and Fair Pricing

Pricing food products to balance profitability with consumer welfare is a central challenge for retailers. Dynamic pricing is widely used to maximize revenue, yet most pricing models optimize business objectives while overlooking consumer fairness. This paper studies the risk of consumer exploitation under dynamic food pricing in Canada and proposes a methodology that embeds fairness constraints directly into retail sales forecasting. We model total retail trade sales with a log–log Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) specification, in which the coefficient on a product price is a sales elasticity, and pose the pricing problem as maximizing forecast sales subject to price bounds anchored to the Consumer Price Index (CPI). We solve this problem with both Linear Programming (LP) and Simulated Annealing (SA), under single-product and multi-product configurations. A key finding is that the fitted nominal elasticities are positive. As a result, an unconstrained sales-maximizer would push every price to its upper bound, and the CPI ceiling is the safeguard that prevents this. Simulated Annealing instead settles on conservative, interior prices that lower consumer cost while still meeting the sales target. We benchmark forecast accuracy against naive, seasonal-naive, ARIMA, and SARIMA baselines, and a CPI-deflated re-specification shows that the positive nominal elasticities are largely an inflation-driven artifact. The result is a transparent, fairness-aware pricing framework.
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Machine Learning

A Foundation Model for Multimodal Event Sequences in Financial Applications

Predictive modeling is a core component of modern financial services, where a wide range of tasks are traditionally addressed using separate models trained on manually engineered tabular features. This task-specific approach limits reuse and makes it difficult to fully exploit heterogeneous data sources such as transaction histories and digital interaction signals. In this paper, we present an approach based on pretraining a foundation transformer model on multimodal sequences of user events. Events from multiple data sources are unified into a single chronological sequence, enabling early fusion of heterogeneous modalities and learning of general-purpose representations via a next-event prediction objective. These representations are combined with existing engineered user features, on top of which lightweight neural models are trained for multiple downstream tasks. The proposed system outperforms traditional task-specific models while reducing development overhead. The approach was deployed in production at one of the biggest banks in Eastern Europe, resulting in measurable improvements in business metrics.
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All authors Nikita Rusakov, Vladislav Meshkov, Konstantin Zorin, Gleb Zaripov, Alexander Uglov, Alexey Vasilev, Anton Klenitskiy

Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.GT

A Knowledge-Based Multi-Agent Framework for Security Control Recommendation

Hardening IT on-premises environments can be a daunting task for teams without access to adequate cybersecurity expertise. In this regard, Decision Support Systems (DSS) with embedded expert knowledge can assist users by guiding them with security recommendations to meet their objectives. This work proposes a Security DSS that recommends security control sub-families given minimal user requirements indicating coverage of different security dimensions. It leverages a curated, unified dataset from both well-known Information Security (InfoSec) and academic sources. This DSS is defined as a non-zero-sum, simultaneous game that is grounded in a Multi-Agent Influence Diagram (MAID) model and explores the decision space over 7 security dimensions or agents, using no-regret online learning to ultimately find the security control sub-families that best fit the requirements while incurring minimal under- and over-provisioning of security resources. This work was validated in terms of performance and accuracy, among others, for varying dataset sizes. It shows exceptional satisfaction coverage results of 99% when using as little as ~65% of the SW-implementable security controls, running in 1.2-35.7 seconds; and more moderate coverage results of 73%-77% when using ~29% of the controls, resolving in 0.8-13.8 seconds.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from physics.med-ph

Artificial Intelligence Across the Cardiac Amyloidosis Diagnostic and Management Pathway: From Single-Modality Detection to Multimodal Clinical Integration

Cardiac amyloidosis (CA) is increasingly recognized but remains substantially underdiagnosed because its clinical and imaging phenotype overlaps with more common cardiomyopathies. Definitive subtype assignment and management further require integration of multimodal evidence to distinguish transthyretin from light-chain disease. Machine learning and deep learning have been applied across the diagnostic and management pathway. These applications span electrocardiography (ECG), echocardiography, and health record-based case finding, as well as cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) and nuclear interpretation, including single-photon emission computed tomography/computed tomography (SPECT/CT) biomarker quantification, prognostic modeling, and treatment response assessment. This narrative review synthesizes these studies by clinical tasks, namely screening, detection, quantification, prognosis, and longitudinal assessment after treatment initiation, rather than by input modality. This task-based organization clarifies why apparently similar AI models require different cohorts, reference standards, evaluation metrics, and implementation thresholds. The evidence reveals a maturity gradient. Binary detection and AI-assisted interpretation of cardiac scintigraphy with bone-avid tracers and SPECT/CT currently represent one of the more mature AI applications in cardiac amyloidosis, supporting standardized image interpretation and quantitative biomarker extraction. However, patient-level diagnosis still requires integration with monoclonal protein testing, SPECT/CT localization, clinical context, and biopsy or tissue typing when indicated.
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All authors Diana Shadibaeva, Rochak Dhakal, Kui Zhang, Diana Paez, Xiaofeng Yang, Saurabh Malhotra, Weihua Zhou

Machine Learning

SMETA-ZSL:Semantic Meta-Alignment for Zero-Shot Threat Classification

Cybersecurity systems must adapt rapidly to emerging threats. However, labeled data for new threat categories is unavailable when those threats first appear. Generalized zero-shot learning offers a natural solution by enabling recognition of unseen classes through auxiliary semantic knowledge rather than labeled examples. Large language models are particularly promising in this setting because they can convert unstructured CTI reports into semantic prototypes for emerging threats. However, applying language-driven zero-shot learning to cybersecurity is difficult due to strong semantic overlap between threat descriptions, heterogeneity between behavioral attributes and text, severe class imbalance, and open-set conditions where unseen threats are unknown during training. We propose SMETA-ZSL, that learns semantic prototypes from overlapping language descriptions through contrastive finetuning, aligns behavioral features through episodic meta-learning and knowledge distillation, and performs adaptive routing for generalization across seen-unseen classes. Across 7 benchmarks, SMETA-ZSL delivers the strongest overall generalized zero-shot performance under the strictest inductive setting, surpassing prior methods by 10.8 points on average, with gains up to 18.1 points. Github:https://github.com/Security-And-Intelligence-Lab-UTEP/SMETA-ZSL
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