Papers

Generative models for matter are often evaluated as samplers over output representations, and their latent spaces are commonly used as proxies for navigating chemical space. Much less is known about how these models internally arrange discrete chemical identities within those representations. We study this arrangement by making molecular identity explicit and pulling it back through the generative process. Through these pullbacks we probe the regions that generate the same object, exposing the trained model's internal repertoire: a fixed partition that determines which objects (novel or not) the model can produce. Across three molecular generative architectures, we find that this repertoire is arranged into piecewise-constant regions separated by recurring coarse-to-fine boundaries. Its organization depends on the representation probed, the identity convention, decoder stochasticity, and the metric used to compare coordinates. During training, local chemical organization stabilizes while the number of distinct molecular identities represented within each neighborhood continues to change. Internal organization must therefore be characterized, rather than assumed, before a generative space can be treated as chemically navigable.

Agent memory systems compress what they store, and compression is built to drop qualifiers, so a claim's epistemic standing tends not to survive being written to memory. We ask what governs whether it does. Matched notes carry the identical claim and identical stance and differ only in where that stance sits; one model compresses both under the same budget among the same filler notes, and a blind reader that never sees the condition scores the result. Across 60 claims in seven registers, writing the stance as a labelled field rather than a bracketed aside raises retention by about 15 points on two models (37 claims to 2 on one, 30 to 8 on the other; permutation p=0.00005), and a pre-registered replication on Haiku, its prediction and decision rule committed before the run, gives +15.6 points, 38 claims to 1. Ablating the format on both models gives the same net effect from different parts: labels help on both (+9.7 and +12.8) and length helps on neither, but wording the stance as a full sentence is the largest component on one model (+12.5) and worth nothing on the other (+0.6). Either model alone would have licensed a confident and different mechanism, so we claim only the intersection: make the stance explicit, not merely longer, and expect the best way of being explicit to depend on the model. A deterministic readout with no model reproduces the two-cell direction and five of seven ablation contrasts, but not length or labels, which we therefore do not claim on one instrument. Fifty hand labels (kappa=0.75) agree on direction; we print their seven disagreements in full. We also report nine withdrawn claims, three of them former title claims of this paper.

Hanneke, Moran, and Waknine \cite{HannekeMoranWaknine2024} asked how the agnostic PAC learning curve of the direct sum $C^r$ depends on the single-instance learning curve $\epsagn(n\mid C)$ and on $r$. We show that the single-instance learning rate does not determine the direct-sum rate. Let $\F$ be the class of the two constant binary functions and let $\G$ consist of the zero function and the identity function. Both classes have agnostic learning curve of order $n^{-1/2}$.

In gossip learning, a network of nodes trains a shared model collaboratively, without a central coordinator, by repeatedly exchanging parts of their local models. The state-of-the-art protocol, Partitioned Token Gossip Learning (PTGL) of Hegedüs et al., splits the weight matrix into S fixed partitions and disseminates them using a token-based fairness mechanism coupled with per-neighbor metadata exchange. We revisit partition scheduling by analogy with peer-to-peer live streaming, where model partitions act as video chunks and partition age acts as chunk scarcity. The analogy yields a design space of two-stage selection strategies (partition first, or neighbor first), from which we instantiate ten concrete protocols collectively called Stream Learning. Our main finding is that the simplest of these protocols, which transmits the locally least-trained partition to a uniformly random neighbor (Ri), matches PTGL on fault-free workloads while requiring neither token counters nor metadata exchange. Under an adversarial 30% permanent crash of the best-performing nodes, Ri matches or outperforms PTGL across all complete-graph configurations tested, with the gap reaching 5.53% on HAR and 5.41% on MNIST in the most heterogeneous regime (Dirichlet $\beta$ = 0.1). In our experiments, partition fairness, captured by a single local rule on partition age, accounts for the gap; token-based rate control and utility maximization do not improve over this rule and, under heterogeneity, sit below it.

The acquisition of multispectral imagery via small satellites (e.g., CubeSats) presents significant data downlink challenges due to high data volumes and restricted communication windows. While onboard image compression is critical to address this bottleneck, traditional methods often struggle to adapt to the nonlinear statistics of multi-band, multi-resolution data. To overcome these limitations, we propose ELMZip, a novel framework based on Extreme Learning Machines (ELM) and domain decomposition strategies for efficient, resolution-free onboard neural representation. ELMZip formulates the fitting process as a convex least-squares problem using random-feature single-layer networks, thereby eliminating the need for computationally expensive backpropagation. By adopting an asymmetric transmission protocol that sends only the compact output weights, the proposed method significantly reduces the downlink payload. Unlike previous neural representation approaches that rely on iterative optimization and require transmitting full network parameters, ELMZip achieves significant compression efficiency while maintaining high reconstruction fidelity. This capability enables immediate image reconstruction for analysis, allowing resource-constrained platforms to maximize data return and advancing real-time AI-powered Earth observation.

Visual perception of walkability varies substantially across individuals, reflecting differences in personal characteristics, experiences, and preferences. Existing studies, however, often reduce these diverse judgements to aggregated scores, implicitly assuming uniform perception, and commonly rely on vehicle-mounted street-view imagery that does not reflect the pedestrian's visual experience. This paper introduces a dataset of 29,870 walkability ratings from 1,196 respondents, linking sidewalk-view imagery across urban, suburban, and regional Australian environments with individual rater attributes, and proposes the first user-conditioned multimodal deep learning framework for walkability perception, fusing visual features with respondent-level representations. A viewpoint-comparison study shows that sidewalk-view images receive significantly higher walkability ratings than matched street-view images, indicating that imagery source is a substantive design decision in perception surveys. The user-conditioned model improves rank agreement with observed ratings by 65% over an image-only baseline (quadratic weighted kappa 0.47 vs. 0.29), demonstrating that who is evaluating an environment carries predictive indication beyond image content alone. These findings support moving from aggregated, observer-independent walkability scores toward models that represent diverse users, enabling more inclusive assessment of pedestrian environments.

Quantized Neural Networks~(QNN) with low-bitwidth data have proven promising in efficient storage and computation on edge devices. To mitigate accuracy degradation while maximizing speedup, layer-wise mixed-precision quantization~(MPQ) becomes a popular solution. However, existing algorithms for exploring MPQ schemes are limited in flexibility and efficiency. Comprehending the complex impacts of different MPQ schemes on post-training quantization and quantization-aware training results is a challenge for conventional methods. Furthermore, an end-to-end framework for the optimization and deployment of MPQ models is missing in existing work. To address these challenges, we propose the MiCo framework, a holistic MPQ exploration and deployment framework for edge AI applications. The framework adopts a novel optimization algorithm to search for accuracy-optimal quantization configurations under strict latency constraints. We further extended the framework to MiCoPro, which introduces a robust Hardware-Aware Proxy (HAP) model to enhance prediction accuracy and hardware versatility. By leveraging target-specific latency modeling, MiCoPro enables rapid exploration and direct deployment from PyTorch models to bare-metal C code. We demonstrate the versatility of our framework on both the BitFusion accelerator and SIMD-extended RISC-V processors, achieving up to 40% of latency reduction with less than 3% of accuracy drop.

We propose Zero-phase Component Analysis (ZCA) whitening as a geometric pre-processing step for the Word Embedding Association Test (WEAT). WEAT is a bias measurement method widely used in both computational social science and AI fairness research. It relies on cosine similarity as a measure of semantic association, which assumes that the embedding space is approximately isotropic. However, prior work has reported that many widely used language models do not satisfy this assumption, raising concerns about the reliability of bias measurements. ZCA whitening transforms the covariance of the embedding space into the identity matrix while minimizing perturbation to the original vectors. This transformation restores the isotropy condition on which WEAT relies. We evaluate our approach on ten standard WEAT test suites and seven models spanning three architectural families, yielding 70 model-task combinations. The results show that ZCA whitening substantially reduces the anisotropy of the embedding spaces across all models. Particularly for highly anisotropic models, we further observe improvements on standard semantic similarity benchmarks, indicating that the calibrated space better captures semantic associations. After calibration, over 30% of WEAT results change significance status, and effect sizes shift in both directions depending on bias category. These shifts suggest that uncalibrated measurements may both overestimate and underestimate the associations encoded in the embedding space. These findings indicate that previously reported bias measurements in anisotropic embedding spaces should be interpreted with caution and may benefit from re-evaluation with calibrated methods. Our approach contributes to restoring the measurement foundation of WEAT across both computational social science and AI fairness research.

Vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable generalization across diverse multimodal tasks through large-scale pre-training, yet their rapidly increasing computational and memory requirements pose significant challenges for deployment in constrained environments. Existing pruning strategies often depend on task-specific criteria or LLM-oriented importance measures, making them unsuitable for task-agnostic pruning, where no task-specific samples are available at pruning time and the pruned model remains broadly applicable. We introduce a retraining-free VLM pruning framework called PORTA that derives a task- and modality-agnostic importance formulation based on activation variation, estimated from generic calibration data, which reliably captures feature-level representation utility across modalities. PORTA further incorporates an adaptive sparsity allocation mechanism that assigns layer-wise pruning ratios based on output feature variability, avoiding the limitations of uniform sparsity and reducing performance degradation at high compression levels. Extensive experiments across VLM architectures, such as CLIP, BLIP, and Qwen2-VL, demonstrate that PORTA achieves competitive downstream performance under high sparsity without requiring any retraining, supporting efficient VLM compression. Code is available at https://github.com/cau-hai-lab/PORTA.git.

Deep learning has achieved great success in recent years thanks to the availability of high-quality, well-annotated training data. However, this requirement is often not met in real-world applications. Weakly supervised learning aims to train an accurate model with incomplete, inexact, or inaccurate supervision. In this chapter, we will discuss recent advances in this field, including new supervision paradigms, relaxed assumptions, and practical solutions. First, we introduce a new weakly supervised binary classification problem called confidence-difference classification and propose consistent approaches to solve it. Next, we investigate complementary-label learning, a weakly supervised multi-class classification problem. Our proposed approaches are based on more relaxed assumptions about the data generation process than existing consistent approaches. Lastly, we present an evaluation framework for partial-label learning, another popular multi-class weakly supervised learning problem, in order to promote fair and realistic evaluation of algorithms in this field.

Schrödinger bridge models restore a clean signal from a degraded observation by following the conditional bridges of a reference process, yet this reference is chosen heuristically, typically white noise with a hand-tuned schedule. We develop PRISM, a theory of bridge reference design. We characterize the time-varying Gaussian references that remain exactly tractable with per-mode schedules: precisely those whose instantaneous covariances commute. We then prove an invisibility principle: with the exact drift and unlimited solver steps, every admissible reference recovers the true posterior. The choice of reference therefore matters only under finite computational resources. For a fixed step budget, we derive the finite-step objective in closed form and prove that every optimal noise spectrum is proportional to Pk, the spectrum of information destroyed by the sensor, with a mode-independent constant x*(T) = (2 ln T)^-1/2 (1 + o(1)). The analysis shows that noise color and temporal scheduling are interchangeable, and regularization provably shifts the optimal reference toward white noise. Experiments in Gaussian settings confirm the predicted orderings and the closed-form loss floors. On FFHQ, the distortion– perception trade-off and spectral localization transfer, but white noise outperforms the matched reference; a pre-registered study that changes the training regime refutes ridge whitening as the explanation. A 2x2 mechanism study then traces the inversion to the non-Gaussian per-mode statistics of real images. PRISM turns reference design from a hyperparameter sweep into a calculation in the Gaussian regime, and locates exactly where real images break it.

General-purpose skills promise reusable procedural knowledge for language agents, yet semantic relevance does not guarantee execution utility: a retrieved skill may encode assumptions that conflict with the current task, execution environment, or other retrieved skills. We formalize this problem as the skill–execution misfit. To address it, we propose SkillAligner, a training-free execution-time skill adaptation framework that treats retrieved skills as adaptable drafts rather than fixed instructions. Before execution, SkillAligner performs a one-time joint adaptation that specializes useful skill fragments to task requirements, aligns their procedural assumptions with the available execution interface, and composes the resulting guidance by resolving dependencies, conflicts, and redundancy across skills. The adapted content is consolidated into a compact execution guide and reused throughout the subsequent trajectory. Extensive experiments across diverse agent benchmarks and model backbones show that SkillAligner substantially improves task performance over existing skill-use baselines, reduces skill-induced regressions at the instance level, and lowers total inference cost.

In the era of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), Federated Learning (FL) offers a promising decentralized intelligence paradigm for Video Anomaly Recognition (VAR). This task is vital for maintaining high-fidelity Digital Twins and ensuring safety in mission-critical environments. However, the inherent data heterogeneity across distributed edge clients leads to a fundamental challenge known as semantic misalignment, where clients learn divergent feature representations of "normal" and "abnormal" events. The problem becomes particularly pronounced in VAR, where the presence of diverse and fine-grained anomaly categories leads each client to develop distinct semantic interpretations of abnormality. Existing federated methods primarily focus on binary anomaly detection and fail to address this misalignment, preventing effective fine-grained recognition. In this paper, we introduce FedVAR, a weakly-supervised FL framework explicitly designed for VAR. Leveraging the rich representations of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), FedVAR employs a prototype-based alignment mechanism that creates a shared semantic anchor for all clients to re-center and align their visual and textual feature spaces. This process enforces a consistent representation of "normality" across the decentralized network, directly mitigating semantic misalignment and enabling robust prompt-learning of anomaly direction vectors with minimal communication overhead. We conduct extensive experiments on challenging benchmarks under various non-IID data partitioning schemes, unseen domains, and novel anomaly classes. The results demonstrate that FedVAR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art federated baselines, establishing a robust framework for distributed intelligence in video-based CPS.

Hyperdimensional computing (HDC) is an approach from the cognitive science literature for solving information processing tasks using data represented as high-dimensional random vectors. The technique has a rigorous mathematical backing, and is easy to implement in energy-efficient and highly parallel hardware like FPGAs and "processing-in-memory" architectures. The effectiveness of HDC in machine learning largely depends on how raw data is mapped to high-dimensional space. In this work, we propose NysHD, a new method for constructing this mapping that is based on the Nyström method from the literature on kernel approximation. Our approach provides a simple recipe to turn any user-defined positive-semidefinite similarity function into an equivalent mapping in HDC. There is a vast literature on the design of such functions for learning problems. Our approach provides a mechanism to import them into the HDC setting, expanding the types of problems that can be tackled using HDC. Empirical evaluation against existing HDC encoding methods shows that NysHD can achieve, on average, 11% and 17% better classification accuracy on graph and string datasets respectively.

Artificial Neural networks (ANNs) are often treated as black-box models, making explainability a central challenge in deep learning. Many engineering methods have been proposed to approximately explain the ANN from various perspectives, such as feature attribution and visualization. However, it remains a long-standing open question whether the complex inference logic of an ANN can be explained exhaustively and concisely as sparse symbolic patterns. This raises a deeper inquiry: does the emergence of symbolic patterns reflect a natural law rather than chance? Here, we show that across a broad class of ANNs trained on diverse tasks, their inference logic can indeed be reformulated as sparse symbolic interactions. We further prove that two common mathematical criteria, which are implicitly required across tasks, lead to the emergence of such sparse symbolic interactions. Empirical evidence confirms that the two criteria hold for the majority of input samples in diverse models. Furthermore, the faithfulness of these interactions is also demonstrated by their strong sample-to-sample and model-to-model transferability, as well as their ability to explain the overall generalization power of ANNs. Our theoretical analysis and extensive experiments provide a solid foundation for symbolic explanations of ANNs, and offer novel insights into the ANN's generalization power. Our findings also highlight the potential of communicative learning, a paradigm in which the inference logic of an ANN can be directly inspected and tuned at the level of symbolic patterns, thus complementing traditional end-to-end learning paradigm. Finally, the observed emergence of symbolic patterns in ANNs suggests that similar symbolic representations may also emerge in other types of black-box systems under certain conditions, because our proof does not depend on any specific ANN architecture.

Transformers provide a powerful architecture for global content-based matching, but reasoning problems may benefit from a stronger inductive bias toward iterative traversal of latent relations. We introduce Graph Machine, an architecture with two explicit edge-based mechanisms: Edge-augmented attention, in which edges modulate attention between nodes, and edge-centric referral, in which nodes exchange addresses to update their edges. Conceptually, this enables the model to dynamically and differentiably construct and revise relational graphs across layers. We study this inductive bias using Sudoku under controlled settings and find that Graph Machine outperforms Transformer baselines, with ablation studies and mechanistic analysis attributing the gains to the edge mechanisms. Surprisingly, we found that the model discovers a compact edge-based construction for Sudoku geometry. Our results support explicit edge mechanisms as a promising architectural design, motivating broader evaluation.

Learning from correct demonstrations is harder than supervised learning when many answers are correct: after predicting, the learner sees one valid answer but not whether its own answer was valid, nor any reward. Existing reward-hedging guarantees consequently assume a finite reward class. We give the first horizon-free guarantee for continuous classes. The key is to hedge in one shared vote over tolerant optimality tests at every accuracy scale. A target reward has one surviving proxy per scale, and a prediction with gap above that scale doubles the proxy. This yields the simultaneous tail bound $|\{t:\ell_t>2^{-j}\}|\leq \log_2\mathcal N(\mathcal G,2^{-j-1})+j$, where $\mathcal G$ is the class of optimality-gap functions. Integrating the tails gives cumulative hidden gap bounded by a metric-entropy integral, independently of the number of rounds. Polynomial entropy $(A/\epsilon)^d$ gives $O(d\log A)$ total gap and a fast $O(d/m)$ statistical rate. For bounded linear contextual recommendation, the result is $O(d)$ regret for arbitrary compact menus. This is the first polynomial finite bound without structural restrictions on the menus, at the price of improper prediction. Although the general vote can be expensive, it is exactly polynomial-time for one-dimensional Lipschitz parameter curves. Fixed-radius rank-two recommendation takes $O(KT^2)$ time for menus of size $K$. We also prove an $\Omega(d)$ lower bound, low-rank and bounded ReLU-network corollaries, and a robust theorem that adds only the demonstrator's cumulative suboptimality. A reproducible adaptive stress test illustrates the predicted scale adaptation. After factorization, an exact MovieLens audit runs in 1.7 CPU seconds across ten users and improves mean latent gap over both a demonstrated-rating policy and a proper online baseline. The learner uses only action demonstrations and never observes a reward or a loss.

In this paper, we extend a weak adversary neural network pushforward method for solving time dependent Boltzmann equation and a weak formulation of the collision operator is proposed where an invertible neural pushforward mapping is used to generating samples given by the distribution governed by the Boltzmann equation. The training of the pushforward mapping is learnt by enforcing the weak form of the Boltzmann equation. Numerical results have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method.

How can an analyst decide whether a nonlinear dimensionality reduction embedding can be trusted? Existing diagnostics provide only partial answers: projection glyphs characterize local sensitivity, map-continuity scores measure local conditioning, and transport-based analyses reveal path-dependent inconsistencies. However, these methods appear unrelated and provide no common framework for understanding when they agree or not. We show that they are all derived from a single geometric object induced by every differentiable embedding, whether defined implicitly through optimization or explicitly by a learned mapping. This framework provides two complementary geometric views of an embedding. The differential view explains local behavior: its first-order term recovers projection glyphs, while its second-order curvature quantifies how far their linear approximation remains reliable. The integral view follows the same geometry along high dimensional paths and determines whether an embedding depends only on the current state or also on the path taken to reach it. We further show that map-continuity is a prerequisite for the other analyses. The framework is theoretically complete for diagnostics derived from the embedding geometry, and we prove the integral view irreducible: no amount of local measurement at any number of points, to any order of derivative, reproduces what it detects. Classical rank-based metrics form a complementary class based on finite-scale neighborhood relationships. Experiments on synthetic and real datasets validate theoretical predictions, demonstrate accurate curvature-based trust estimates on single-cell embeddings, and show that the integral analysis distinguishes single-valued embeddings from path-dependent optimization-based embeddings in ways that existing pointwise diagnostics cannot.

A standard self-attention layer consists of two interacting circuits: the query-key circuit that governs attention allocation, and the output-value circuit that maps attended representations to predictions. Collapsed and factorized parameterizations of the query-key and output-value circuits lead to qualitatively different attention patterns. In particular, some parameterizations give sharper attention to task-relevant tokens, at a similar training loss. We analyze how the parameterizations of these circuits shape the parameter trajectories in single-layer self-attention models trained for next-token prediction. Through gradient-flow analysis, we show that factorization induces implicit rescaling of the two circuits' learning rates. We derive closed-form dynamics showing that output-value and query-key parameters move along a line, with relative speeds determined by their learning rates. Faster query-key learning relative to output-value learning thus produces sharper attention, as the model compensates for slower output-value learning by increasing attention mass on relevant tokens. Experiments show that differences in the relative learning rates of the two circuits govern attention concentration. This improves attention interpretability proxies while maintaining comparable predictive performance.

Accurate estimation of building energy use is essential for achieving carbon neutral and sustainable buildings. To better understand the influence of design decisions on building energy use and calibrate machine learning models that can give architects and engineers rapid design feedback, large-scale datasets are needed that explicitly map building geometry to performance. We present ArchEGraph, a large-scale benchmark dataset that represents buildings as heterogeneous graphs with aligned geometry, topology, weather, and zone-level thermal loads. The dataset contains 5,481 buildings and 49,326 validated building-weather simulation cases. In total, it includes over 133,000 space nodes and 1.44 million face nodes, reflecting substantial geometric and topological complexity. Based on ArchEGraph, we define two benchmark tasks: (i) graph reconstruction from polygonal meshes, aiming to recover topological structure from geometric representations; and (ii) topology-informed load prediction, which leverages graph structure and temporal weather conditions to forecast zone-level response time series. We further introduce standardized evaluation protocols for both tasks and conduct cross-building and cross-climate generalization experiments to assess model robustness. ArchEGraph provides a unified testbed for studying geometry-topology-physics coupling in building energy modeling, enabling the development and evaluation of scalable and generalizable surrogate models.

The success of deep learning depends on learning useful representations, yet predicting how training organizes these representations across neurons remains difficult. In this work, we show that changing the scale of initial weights can determine which neurons learn a feature without altering any neuron's initial contribution. We construct ReLU networks with identical initial features and predictions that reach the same final predictions with different roles for their neurons. In one, all neurons share the learned feature. In the other, one neuron acquires it while every other neuron's contribution vanishes. The only change is the relative scale of each neuron's input and output weights. Our analysis explains how an initial learning advantage persists through convergence: as one neuron learns the target, it reduces the error driving the others and limits their subsequent adaptation. We prove this outcome in a nonlinear model under gradient flow and small-step gradient descent, and quantify how scale changes the speed and path of feature learning. Experiments verify the predicted dynamics and show that scale also changes feature assignment when two features compete. These results reveal how initialization can control the organization of a learned representation without changing what the network initially represents.

Weight quantization for large-language-model inference must balance adaptive reconstruction levels with representations regular enough for efficient GPU execution. Uniform integers constrain each group to a linear grid. Low-bit floating-point formats use a fixed exponent-mantissa structure, while learned codebooks gain flexibility at the cost of irregular decoding and additional metadata. We introduce CubicQuant, a parametric non-uniform scalar format that preserves a dense integer code stream while adapting reconstruction levels within each weight group. A monotonic cubic curve, specified by two shape parameters and one scale, maps uniformly spaced magnitude codes to non-uniform levels. The family spans 1-8-bit weight payloads, contains symmetric uniform integer quantization as an exact special case, and has effective width B + 64/G bits per weight for payload width B and group size G. We derive population distortion under Uniform, Gaussian, and Laplace distributions, formulate continuous and Dynamic-A8-carrier-aware fitting objectives, and describe direct packed-weight GPU execution. For finite groups of G=128 with 15,360 samples per distribution, W4 CubicQuant reduced reconstruction RMSE relative to optimally clipped four-bit uniform integer quantization by 3.90% on Uniform, 13.49% on Gaussian, and 28.14% on Laplace samples. Relative to the best enumerated four-bit finite floating-point format, the reductions were 3.90%, 9.44%, and 6.27%. Preliminary H200 kernel measurements show a workload-dependent crossover: model-dtype execution is faster for narrow GEMV, while Dynamic A8 becomes favorable as row count grows. The results establish the format's representational promise and direct executability; downstream model quality and cross-device end-to-end performance remain open evaluation questions.

Bisimulation metrics quantify behavioral similarity in Markov decision processes, but their Wasserstein fixed-point operator updates every state pair and incurs quadratic pairwise work. We give a certificate-carrying sub-quadratic method for MDPs with bounded transition support and a useful low-dimensional indexing representation: an approximate-nearest-neighbor index selects the pairs updated by the exact restricted operator, while monotone lower and upper runs enclose the exact metric at every sweep. The main analytical result is a coverage-augmented anytime bound: local index quality alone cannot control global error, because uncovered pairs retain their initialization gap. The limiting error is at most $\max(\rho,\eop/(1-\gamma))$, and with exact covered backups the lower arm satisfies $\|\dann-d\|_\infty=\rho$. Because $\rho$ depends on the unknown exact metric, the algorithm returns the observable sandwich width instead; agreement of the induced lower and upper clusterings certifies exact recovery of the covered aggregation. A reward-oblivious lower bound shows sub-quadratic index-first coverage cannot remove the coverage term, while a separate adaptive lower bound requires $\Omega(|\Scal|)$ pair evaluations. Exact-operator experiments verify the identity and enclosure in every seeded run, and timing experiments recover quadratic versus sub-quadratic scaling under both cheap and full Wasserstein backups. On the grouped $|\Scal|=64$ benchmark, exact restricted refinement reaches the exact-metric skyline once retrieval covers roughly half of all pairs, while independently trained MICo and DBC baselines stay $22$-$33\times$ above that skyline at every retrieval budget. Taxi shows the certificate abstaining under an uninformative embedding, while a $2500$-state gridworld improves over a reward-only metric by $28.6\%$ using $12.8\%$ of one quadratic sweep.

Probabilistic long-term time-series forecasting commonly relies on trained models. Training-free conformal methods typically construct intervals around a pre-existing point forecaster and do not natively represent a complete predictive distribution; sequential variants additionally suffer from increasingly delayed feedback at long horizons. We propose KReF, a training-free retrieval framework that treats retrieved historical futures as a querylocal empirical predictive distribution. After robust preprocessing, KReF embeds each lookback using handcrafted statistics or frozen random Fourier features and retrieves similar historical lookback-future pairs. Their similarity weights directly define predictive masses, quantiles, CRPS, and a weighted-mean point forecast. KReF further uses the observed query lookback to construct a probability-integral-transform map and applies validation-selected expansion and shrinkage rates to adapt interval boundaries. Across six LTSF benchmarks and four horizons, KReF obtains the lowest CRPS in all 12 dataset-embedding settings and the lowest IS90 in 9 settings. Without gradient-based fitting, its point forecasts also match or surpass trained baselines on two of six datasets. An archive-oracle analysis further reveals substantial headroom under finer horizon- and channel-wise routing. These results establish retrieval as a useful and underexplored inductive bias for LTSF.

Reasoning in large language models (LLMs) is often grounded in human text, human demonstrations, and human-generated rationales. For equilibrium reasoning in complex games, however, relying on human data can be suboptimal. In fact, human play is often guided by intuition and heuristics and can deviate substantially from game equilibrium. This discrepancy is amplified in games with mixed-strategy equilibria, where human data is heavily biased toward pure strategies. Consequently, conditioning LLMs on this data yields weak game strategies. To grant LLMs the reasoning capacity in games, in this work, we study how to elicit equilibrium play using solver output. We propose Mixed-Strategy Decision Tree (MDT), which articulates the silent optimality of the equilibrium into sparse strategic rules that both humans and LLMs could understand. Using solver output rather than human annotation allows us to extend the input to arbitrarily new states and continuations. We instantiate this study on No-Limit Texas Hold'em by querying a solver oracle for over 250 million mixed-strategy decisions; MDT together with other techniques \textbf{reduces the $\ell_1$ distance to the equilibrium by $52.6\%$} across $8$ different LLM configurations. A Route-only ablation tests the incremental contribution of the shadow-based contrast, while complete River-endgame and Liar's Dice experiments evaluate strategic fidelity and portability beyond the original NLH communication setting.

Transformer models for high-dimensional omics analysis process thousands of genes or pathways, although only a subset requires deep computation. Mixture-of-Recursions (MoR) improves efficiency through adaptive token-choice or expert-choice routing. We propose bioMoR, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first framework to apply MoR to gene-level and pathway-level learning. Our contributions include identifying three locations for integrating structured biological knowledge within an MoR backbone: graph-based information sharing refines token embeddings, a structural bias guides self-attention toward biologically related tokens, and a graph-aware router uses neighborhood information to determine each token's recursion depth. These techniques are centered on our insight that additional knowledge of token interaction can effectively help models construct embeddings and select which tokens should be learned more deeply. Across eight benchmarks spanning diverse omics data types and evaluated under a unified five-fold cross-validation protocol, bioMoR improves average macro-F1 by 8.2 percentage points and balanced accuracy by 7.1 percentage points over the strongest biology-agnostic MoR baseline while using 75 percent fewer parameters and up to 58 percent fewer FLOPs than a non-recursive Transformer. The selected marker genes or pathways provide biological interpretability, while their token-specific recursion depths reveal how computation is allocated.

The rapid scaling of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly increased computational cost, energy consumption, and inference latency, making accurate estimation essential for sustainable artificial intelligence deployment and hardware-aware design. In this work, we introduce Hybrid Modeling for Energy and Latency of LLMs (HYMELL), a hybrid three-level framework for estimating LLM inference latency and energy by combining analytical modeling with machine learning (ML). HYMELL models LLM execution through a three-level hierarchy: analytical estimation of primitive operations, ML prediction of higher-level components, and an end-to-end model that captures system-level overheads across both prefill and decode phases. The framework supports diverse architectures, including dense and mixture-of-experts (MoE) feed-forward networks (FFNs), as well as multi-head attention (MHA) and grouped-query attention (GQA) mechanisms. Evaluated on an NVIDIA H100 graphics processing unit (GPU), HYMELL achieves high predictive accuracy; notably, for LLaMA 3 8B, it attains less than 5% error for both prefill and decode phases. By predicting execution costs directly from architectural parameters, it enables fast, hardware-free design space exploration and energy-efficient optimization.

Biomedical knowledge graphs (KGs) accelerate drug discovery, but standard pipelines assume query molecules already exist as graph entities, leaving unregistered molecules disconnected. We address this cold-start challenge, termed the out-of-graph molecule problem, by introducing MolBioKG. This two-layer system grounds unseen molecules in biomedical evidence via multi-resolution structural anchoring. It connects an index of 2.74 million molecules (represented by scaffolds, fragments, functional groups, and fingerprints) to a 9.6-million-edge KG. Given only a SMILES string, MolBioKG retrieves structurally related graph entities and traverses their biomedical neighborhoods without task-specific training. It features two inference mechanisms: static multi-anchor retrieval using Reciprocal Rank Fusion, and Adapt-KG, a tool-using LLM policy for adaptive traversal. Evaluated across in-graph link recovery, complex multi-hop reasoning, and out-of-graph generalization, MolBioKG outperforms strong baselines. Notably, it raises Hits@10 from 0.585 to 0.876 in multi-hop reasoning and out-of-graph target recall from 0.145 to 0.269, all while ensuring predictions retain traceable structural anchors and source-attributed KG evidence.

Latent world models plan by predicting future states from an action, but when a scene contains motion the agent does not control, they quietly go action-blind: predictions for different actions become indistinguishable even as the training loss keeps improving. Existing remedies suppress this distraction with reconstruction, task reward, or auxiliary objectives, each adding machinery or assumptions. We show that a minimal alternative suffices, borrowed from the dueling decomposition of value into a state baseline and an action advantage: in latent dynamics, subtracting a prediction's mean effect over actions cancels whatever the actions share–the action-independent variation where distractors live–leaving a clean, controllable channel, with no reward, no reconstruction, and no distractor-specific auxiliary loss. Because this is only a subtraction at readout time, it applies unchanged to any action-conditioned world model, including frozen pretrained ones. Across a gridworld, synthetic generators with known factors, distracting continuous control, and natural-pixel Atari, the isolated channel recovers the agent's own effect where entangled predictors fail, with nuisance leak indistinguishable from zero; applied post hoc it surfaces an action channel in off-the-shelf models that their raw readouts miss, and it converts into goal-reaching control in the gridworld. We prove the cancellation is exact in finite samples for both discrete and sampled action sets, and we state its measured boundary–distractors whose motion tracks the action–together with the remaining limitations in the appendix.