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Tuesday 11 August

Machine Learning · Cross-listed from math.NA

Efficient Weak-Entropy PINN for Solving Hyperbolic Conservation Laws

In recent years, neural networks have significantly advanced numerical solutions of partial differential equations (PDEs). However, solving PDEs with discontinuous solutions, such as hyperbolic conservation laws, remains challenging for neural network-based methods such as physics-informed neural networks (PINNs). Existing methods often rely on strong prior assumptions such as knowledge of discontinuity locations, or they introduce artificial smoothing terms that degrade accuracy. However, accurately solving these conservation laws and predicting the formation and propagation of discontinuities in solutions is crucial in many practical applications, including gas dynamics and traffic flow modeling. In this paper, we introduce a novel Weak-Entropy PINN (WEPINN) framework for hyperbolic conservation laws with discontinuous solutions. The method enforces the governing equations in their weak (integral) formulation and incorporates the entropy condition to select the physically admissible solution, while employing the discrete fast Fourier transform (DFFT) for efficient numerical integration. Our method is tested through extensive numerical experiments on a variety of scalar conservation laws and systems of conservation laws in one and two dimensional spaces. These experiments demonstrate that our method can accurately resolve sharp discontinuities while effectively capturing interactions between multiple shock and rarefaction waves.
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Machine Learning

Dreamer-SAC: Off-Policy Learning in Latent World Models for Sample-Efficient Autonomous Driving

Sample-efficient reinforcement learning for autonomous driving is often limited by the trade-off between data efficiency and model bias. While world models reduce the reliance on costly environment interactions, policy optimization over learned dynamics remains sensitive to prediction errors. This paper proposes the Dreamer-SAC framework, which integrates a recurrent state-space world model with an off-policy soft actor-critic algorithm trained directly in latent space. The framework uses a combination of real interactions and short-horizon generated trajectories with n-step target estimation and multi-objective supervision. Evaluated in autonomous driving scenarios with objectives encompassing driving efficiency and safety, the proposed framework consistently outperforms representative reinforcement learning baselines, including DreamerV3, SAC, and PPO, while achieving improved performance with substantially fewer real environment interactions. Experiments reveal an inverted-U relationship between rollout horizon and policy performance, where short-horizon latent rollouts achieve the best trade-off between additional training signals and accumulated model bias. Furthermore, n-step target estimation demonstrates more effectiveness over one-step temporal-difference targets in exploiting predicted experience for value learning.
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All authors Jiazhuo Li, Linjiang Cao, Qi Liu, Xi Xiong

Machine Learning

Generator-Guided Inverse Sampling for Lévy-Driven Generative Models

This paper studies inverse sampling for Lévy-driven generative models from the perspective of Markov generators. Unlike conventional diffusion models, Lévy-driven dynamics involve infinite jump activities, which makes their reverse process nonlocal and difficult to characterize using score information alone. We address this challenge by analyzing the forward and reversed generators. It is derived that the reversed jump component generally becomes a state-dependent Markov jump process governed by a nonlocal density ratio. This observation motivates a structured reverse sampler that decomposes the dynamics into diffusion, small jump, and large jump components. Based on this characterization, we develop a computationally tractable sampler for a class of isotropic linear Lévy SDEs with symmetric $\alpha$-stable jump components. For the jump component, the neural network is used only to amortize the rate of large jump activities, while jump amplitudes are generated from analytically derived conditional distributions, which improves interpretability and controllability. Efficient implementation techniques are further introduced under this setting to avoid expensive high-dimensional integration and sampling. The sampler is further adapted to approximate observation-guided sampling and applied to OFDM-SISO channel estimation under mixed Gaussian and impulsive noise. Simulations show robust estimation performance with a favorable tradeoff between complexity and performance.
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Machine Learning

Fisher8: Stabilizing Neural Heteroscedastic Regression via Output-Layer Fisher Geometry

Training neural networks to jointly predict mean and uncertainty estimates from noisy observations can be unstable, prompting a series of independent stabilization efforts. We argue that these interventions highlight a common underlying issue where gradient steps are poorly aligned with the geometry of the loss landscape. To better align updates with local curvature, we derive Fisher8, an output-layer gradient correction that reorients and rescales updates using Fisher geometry rather than Euclidean geometry. Unlike past stabilizers, Fisher8 introduces no data-dependent hyperparameters beyond learning rate and admits an approximate KL trust radius between successive predictive distributions. We show that prior stabilizers converge on overlapping components of this geometric correction. Across multidimensional regression and representation-learning tasks, Fisher8 obtains superior likelihood–error tradeoffs, predicts calibrated uncertainty estimates, and learns rich uncertainty-aware feature spaces.
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Machine Learning

Invertible Logits Transformation for Accuracy-Preserving Post-Hoc Uncertainty Calibration

Post-hoc calibration aligns a classifier's predicted confidences with its empirical accuracy without retraining. An ideal calibrator should correct nonlinear miscalibration, scale gracefully to large label spaces, and preserve the original predictions; existing methods typically violate at least one of these properties—temperature scaling lacks expressivity, more flexible parametric alternatives introduce parameters that grow with the number of classes $C$, and other expressive methods do not preserve the rank ordering of class scores and may alter the predicted class. We propose Invertible Logits Transformation (InvLT), which applies a learned scalar MLP $f:\mathbb{R}\to\mathbb{R}$ element-wise to the pre-softmax logits. Sharing $f$ across all logit dimensions makes the parameter count independent of $C$. Monotonicity of $f$—and hence preservation of the argmax prediction—is softly encouraged via a paired inverse network rather than enforced through the numerical integration required by prior monotone calibrators; this avoids their computational overhead while empirically preserving the original classification accuracy in every setting we evaluate. Across standard image classification benchmarks and a range of architectures, InvLT consistently outperforms a broad set of post-hoc baselines on standard calibration metrics.
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Machine Learning

Efficient Reinforcement Learning for Long-Horizon Tool-Use Agentic Tasks

Long-horizon tool-using agents must reason over user goals, domain policies, tool calls, simulator state, and delayed verifiable rewards. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a natural fit for this setting, but multi-turn on-policy rollouts create long contexts, while model-specific attention layers may require custom masks and learned sink normalization. We present SINKFLEX-RL, a modular training system for RL in dual-control tool-use environments. The system combines a Gymnasium-compatible environment wrapper, a VERL-style rollout dataflow, group-relative policy optimization without a separate value model, and a sink-aware FlexAttention path designed to preserve model-specific sink scaling under causal and sliding-window masks. In a preliminary Tau2Bench retail run, validation reward (mean@1) rises from 0.25 early in training to $0.44$ later in the observed training window, while training-score and trajectory-reward proxies also trend upward. In a fixed-configuration memory benchmark, the optimized attention path reduces peak VRAM from 28.06GB to 22.52GB at 4096 tokens, a $19.7\%$ reduction, and runs the measured 8192-token configuration using $25.53$~GB where the eager baseline runs out of memory. These results illustrate the value of integrating environment interfaces, RL dataflow, and attention-kernel design for memory-feasible long-horizon agent training.
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All authors Zelei Cheng, Amritansh Mishra, Sambit Sahu, William Campbell

Machine Learning

Accelerated Learning of High Dimensional Functions with a Tensor-Featured Training Network

In this work we present a method to accelerate the optimization of learning high dimensional functions using deep neural network (DNN). This optimization procedure introduces contextual features into the first layer of a DNN. The parameters of DNN are optimized via standard gradient descent while keeping the input-feature basis fixed. After optimization of the DNN parameters, the feature layer is provided a chance to update and change before DNN optimization resumes. The feature layer has two types of functions: those that can be evaluated quickly in a matrix-free way on the domain (i.e. rank-1 features) and more complex features that must first be decomposed using tensor network (TN) decomposition strategies (tensor features). In particular, we study the effect of adding features which distill pretrained DNN into TNs using a discretize and decompose strategy. To efficiently decompose high-dimensional functions constructed from discretized DNN, we leverage a randomized tensor decomposition strategy. Using randomization, we are able to reduce the storage cost of decomposing high dimensional functions by at least 8 orders of magnitude. Using this approach, we are able to efficiently train models between 5 and 40 dimensions.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.CR

Beyond Detection Accuracy: Measuring Explanation Cost, Stability, and Utility for Resource-Aware IoT Intrusion Detection

Machine-learning intrusion-detection studies commonly emphasize predictive accuracy while treating explanation generation as a computationally free post-processing step. This study jointly evaluates predictive effectiveness, explanation cost, local explanation stability, and selective explanation for binary Internet of Things (IoT) intrusion detection. A leakage-safe CICIoT2023 corpus was constructed using exact 39-feature hashes, non-finite-value handling, exact-feature deduplication, conservative label-collision removal, and deterministic hash-level partitioning. Logistic Regression, Decision Tree, Random Forest, and XGBoost were evaluated on natural and balanced test distributions. TreeSHAP cost was measured, stability was assessed under prediction-preserving perturbations, and validation-calibrated policies were used to allocate explanation workload. XGBoost provided the strongest overall predictive profile, while Random Forest produced the lowest false-positive rate. At 5,000 samples, TreeSHAP required 700.759 s for Random Forest and 1.471 s for XGBoost. Random Forest showed the strongest overall base-level explanation stability; XGBoost retained high rank and directional consistency but showed greater top-feature turnover and attribution-magnitude drift. On the balanced test, about 90% false-negative explanation coverage permitted 28-32% compute savings, while about 95% coverage permitted 15-23% savings. Savings were much smaller under the attack-heavy natural prevalence. These results show that operationally useful explainable IoT intrusion detection depends on predictive quality, explanation cost, local stability, workload prevalence, and selective invocation rather than detection accuracy alone.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cond-mat.mtrl-sci

On the Importance of Geometric Nonlinearity and Temperature-Dependent Properties in Multi-Material Thermo-Mechanical Topology Optimization

Thermo-mechanical compliant devices are commonly designed with small-strain linear elasticity and temperature-independent material properties, even though they might operate hundreds of kelvin above ambient where both assumptions are questionable. In this work, we quantify the effect and cost of each assumption in multi-material topology optimization of thermally actuated compliant devices. To this end, we introduce a physics-informed, simultaneous analysis-and-design framework with (i) a finite-strain quadratic-Hencky (logarithmic-strain) constitutive model whose isotropic thermal eigenstrain admits an exact additive split in log-strain space, and (ii) temperature-dependent conductivity, thermal expansion, and elastic moduli for a titanium–copper–steel material system. We optimize a thermal actuator and a thermal gripper at three design temperatures under both a baseline model and the full physics, subject to mass and manufacturability constraints. Every converged design is re-evaluated by verified nonlinear finite element solvers in the full factorial of constitutive law and property model. The comparison between the two factors reveals that the constitutive law is the decisive modeling choice: These devices work as linkages where linear kinematics mistakes rotation for compressive strain; its error therefore grows with the design temperature and concentrates on the very layouts that exploit rotation best. Because a linear optimizer also steers away from the rotation-rich mechanisms that would expose this bias, the model can deceptively appear trustworthy when validated against its own designs. Designing with the full physics yields consistently stronger and more temperature-robust devices at a modest increase in design-time cost.
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Machine Learning

MERA: Model Evolution and Routing with Skill Adaptation for Agentic Systems at Scale

LLM agents execute heterogeneous sequences of model calls within a single task: some invocations require careful reasoning, while others are structured steps such as formatting or tool-argument construction. Prior routing methods exploit this asymmetry by assigning easy invocations to a cheaper small model and difficult ones to a large model. Such policies reduce inference cost, but they leave the small model's capability unchanged, so attainable savings remain bounded by the work the student can already solve. MERA instead improves the small model itself, using a single model invocation as the unit of adaptation. In each cycle, MERA replays failed student invocations to obtain execution-verified teacher demonstrations, distills recurring procedures into an iteratively updated SkillBook, and fine-tunes a student LoRA adapter via supervised learning and optional GRPO. Routing serves as supporting machinery for deployment: the improved student is served behind a cost-calibrated router with verifier-backed fallback, and a candidate SkillBook, adapter, or router is admitted only when joint replay preserves task quality. Empirically, four-cycle adaptation raises Qwen2.5-Coder-1.5B from 28.7% to 49.7% pass on held-out HumanEval+MBPP. Under verifier-backed fallback, the deployed policy retains 88.3% pass at 60.8% of always-Luna cost. On TAU-2, a fine-tuned Qwen3.5-2B improves from 14/35 to 18/35 and matches an unadapted 4B model. These results indicate that verifier-backed multi-cycle adaptation can increase small-model capability, rather than only routing around a fixed student.
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All authors Yuhang Yao, Zeyu Wang, Wanyi Chen, Tongyun Yang, Yuhang Han, Jie Xiao, Chengke Bao, Tianyi Zhao, Lynn Ai, Eric Yang, Tianyu Shi

Machine Learning · Cross-listed from eess.SY

Topological Feasibility Guarantees for Differentiable Predictive Control

Differentiable predictive control (DPC), a self-supervised learning approach for approximating explicit model predictive control (MPC) policies, offers significant computational advantages over online optimization-based MPC. However, feasibility guarantees, a core requirement for safe control, are currently provided either probabilistically or via online safety filters. The lack of rigorous feasibility guarantees for offline policy optimization remains an open problem. This paper establishes deterministic feasibility guarantees for DPC using a novel topological analysis of the induced reachable safe set, without requiring online safety filters. By exploiting the inherent model-based nature of DPC, in which differentiable system dynamics are embedded directly into the computational graph, we analyze the properties of the learned control policies and the corresponding system states from topological and geometric perspectives. Inspired by our theoretical analysis, we propose a novel self-supervised offline policy learning strategy that utilizes a proxy loss with Control Barrier Functions (CBFs). Crucially, these properties not only significantly improve policy training but also enable the derivation of strict, deterministic feasibility guarantees from a finite number of training samples. Extensive closed-loop simulations validate our theoretical findings, demonstrating that the empirical constraint violations monotonically decrease to zero as the training sample size increases. Ultimately, this work illustrates that DPC policy optimization yields formal safety certificates that are structurally unattainable with conventional black-box methods, e.g., reinforcement learning (RL) or supervised learning-based approximate MPC, thereby providing a new perspective on feasibility guarantees in learning-based control.
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Monday 10 August

Machine Learning

To Keep or Not to Keep: Learning KV Cache Retention in Disaggregated LLM Serving Systems

Disaggregated LLM serving separates prefill and decode across node pools, placing a network fabric between KV-cache computation and consumption. This breaks a key assumption of classical cache policies: a miss no longer incurs only local recomputation, but also network transfer to the decode node. Likewise, admitting a block to the global cache requires an additional transfer, so poor retention decisions waste both memory and bandwidth. We present KVLearn, a learning-based framework for cost-aware KV-cache retention in disaggregated serving. KVLearn includes: (i) a lightweight Prefix Reuse Predictor (PRP) that estimates reuse probability from structural and temporal prefix features without modifying model weights; (ii) a Cost-Aware Retention Score (CARS) that converts reuse probability into keep/admit decisions using recomputation, transfer, and storage costs; and (iii) an Adaptive Threshold Controller (ATC) that adjusts admission thresholds online from observed hit rates and memory pressure. We integrate KVLearn into a globally disaggregated serving topology and evaluate it on text and multimodal workloads, including large image/video-derived KV blocks with heterogeneous reuse patterns. KVLearn reduces end-to-end time-to-first-token by up to 56% versus No-Cache, 38% versus LRU-Pool, and 33% versus Mooncake-style baselines, while cutting inter-node KV transfer volume by up to 53% versus LRU-Pool. On MM-Session, throughput remains within ${\sim}5%$ of oracle. Code is available at https://github.com/FastLM/KVLearn.
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All authors Dong Liu, Yanxuan Yu, Eric Jiang, Shu Wang, Ying Nian Wu

Machine Learning

Offline Policy Evaluation as a decision support tool for designing Adaptive Experiments

We investigate how historical data from fixed randomized experiments (A/B tests) can be used to inform the deployment of adaptive experiments based on contextual bandits. Given data collected under a static allocation, our goal is to assess which adaptive policies, if any, would have outperformed the original design and under what conditions. To this end, we combine off-policy evaluation (OPE) with a controlled warm-start simulation. From logged A/B test data exhibiting heterogeneous treatment effects, we estimate nuisance components and use doubly robust estimators to rank a portfolio of pre-specified adaptive and non-adaptive policies. When ground truth is available, we then deploy the same offline-trained policies in a simulator that reuses the exact data-generating reward probabilities, providing a safe, ground-truth-anchored environment to study the offline-to-online transition under warm starting. Using synthetic randomized controlled trials with known heterogeneity structures and an oracle policy, our results indicate that adaptive, context-aware policies improve upon fixed allocations when meaningful heterogeneity is present, while providing little benefit in its absence. We reinforce our findings on standard open benchmarks (Hillstrom, Criteo Uplift, and LaLonde), reinterpreted through a policy-value and regret perspective. Overall, our results provide a practical methodology for deciding when adaptive experimentation is worth deploying and how to select among competing adaptive policies using existing A/B test data.
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All authors João Victor Ferreira Alves, Eduardo Rocha Laurentino, Gustavo de Oliveira Kanno, Thiago Costa Rizuti da Rocha

Machine Learning

ENAS: An Efficient Hardware-Aware Neural Architecture Search Framework for TinyML on Resource-Constrained Microcontrollers

We present ENAS, a hardware-aware Neural Architecture Search (NAS) framework that combines a static feasibility check, a cell-based search space supporting standard, depthwise-separable, and bottleneck blocks with optional skip connections, and a three-stage hybrid search strategy (random $\rightarrow$ top-$K$ $\rightarrow$ mutation) with persistent cross-run caching. Unlike many existing NAS frameworks that rely on GPU acceleration, ENAS is designed to operate efficiently without requiring GPUs, making it suitable for resource-constrained development environments. We evaluate ENAS on two TinyML benchmarks, Visual Wake Words and Melanoma Cancer, across eight microcontrollers with memory footprints ranging from 20\,KB to 1\,MB SRAM and nine input image resolutions. Our experimental results show that ENAS achieves mean search-time speedups of $2.41{\times}$ and $1.70{\times}$ on the Visual Wake Words and Melanoma Cancer datasets, respectively, while maintaining competitive test accuracy compared with the recent NanoNAS framework. A measured resource analysis further shows that ENAS-selected models use substantially lower peak activation RAM, the binding constraint for microcontroller deployment at matched accuracy. Additionally, ENAS achieves $79.4\%$ test accuracy on an STM32H743-based microcontroller, outperforming the greedy CPU-only baseline by $2.6$ percentage points. We release the ENAS framework as open-source at: https://github.com/EdgeIntelligenceLab/ENAS
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.AI

Identifying Intelligent Processes via Online Sequential Testing

Active sequential hypothesis testing studies how to identify an unknown hypothesis with a given set of sensing actions. We study this in the setting of identifying large language models (LLMs), i.e., if a user is conversing with an LLM drawn from a known set of models, how can they identify which one is in use? Here, the available sensing actions (evaluations) are themselves a design choice: an evaluator must first decide which environments and prompt families to construct, and only then decide how to use them sequentially. We formalize these two levels as an outer probe-design problem and an inner identification problem. Simply put, the outer stage selects a set of probes to be sent to the entire set of models, creating a kind of fingerprint dataset. This is followed by the inner stage, which sequentially sends a budget-minimizing set of those probes to identify the model in use. For the outer problem, we show that selecting which evaluations to construct at minimum cost, so that every pair of candidates is distinguished, is exactly a weighted set cover problem. Since the response distributions of the candidate models are not known exactly but only through calibration samples, we give a one-shot procedure that estimates the cover instance from these samples. For the inner problem, we bound the number of evaluations needed to identify the unknown model in terms of how well the available evaluations distinguish each pair of candidates.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from eess.SP

Beyond the Raw Waveform: Fusing Visual Representations of EDA for Stress Detection

Electrodermal activity (EDA) is widely used in automatic stress detection, yet most pipelines treat it only as a raw one-dimensional waveform. This study examines whether complementary visual representations of EDA provide useful information for stress classification and whether their fusion im- proves recognition performance. Six image-based representations are derived from each EDA recording: an unwrapped short-time Fourier transform (STFT) phase spectrogram, an instantaneous-frequency map computed from that phase, a power spectral density (PSD) spectrogram, a continuous wavelet transform scalogram, a recurrence plot, and a rendered waveform trace. The selected representations are stacked as channels of a single multichannel input, together with the raw waveform, and processed by a shared asymmetric-attention architecture. Experiments on a 58-subject stress dataset show that representation fusion improves over the raw waveform. The best configuration, which combines five representations while excluding the unwrapped phase spectrogram, reaches 70.97% test accuracy, compared with 67.36% for the raw waveform. The single PSD spectrogram achieves 69.44%, remaining close to the best-fused configuration at a lower computational cost. The results show that alternative visual forms of the same EDA signal can provide useful inductive biases for stress detection, and that a compact selection of complementary representations can be more effective than the raw waveform alone.
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All authors Stefanos Gkikas, Thomas Kassiotis, Yang Guo, Guangliang Li, Eric Nichols, Houshyar Asadi, Nikolaos Smyrnis, Giorgos Giannakakis

Machine Learning

Space as an Interventional Invariant: Cross-Modal Predictive Geometry for Stratified Cities and Em-Spaced Intelligence

Space is a foundational concept across mathematics, physics, spatial cognition, urban science, and embodied intelligence, yet these fields often treat spatial structure either as a shared geometric container or as a collection of disconnected representations. Such approaches struggle to explain how heterogeneous sensory and urban processes can jointly reveal a common spatial structure, particularly when different modalities do not share the same metric or representation. This paper addresses this gap by defining space as an interventional invariant: the minimal relational structure that preserves local compatibility and the conditional laws of future observations under admissible actions. We develop a cross-modal predictive geometry that integrates local state spaces, modality-specific observation maps, an action groupoid, and a canonical predictive-state quotient, with explicit causal conditions for identifying interventional rather than merely observational structure. The key theoretical result shows that, under joint point separation, equivariance, and interventional faithfulness, the latent space is identifiable up to the centraliser of the intervention group, thereby reducing representational ambiguity to residual coordinate freedom. The framework is further extended to stratified urban systems using sheaf-valued representations, allowing geometric, physical, mobility, social, and economic layers to coexist without being reduced to a single metric. Synthetic experiments under noise evaluate equivariance, predictive sufficiency, holonomy, restriction-map recovery, cross-scale consistency, and context saturation. The resulting framework provides a unified and falsifiable foundation for spatial cognition, urban science, embodied AI, and em-spaced intelligence.
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All authors Tao Yang, Xuhui Lin, Kunyao Li, Haijiang Li

Machine Learning

Decoding Mixture Perception through Computational Modeling of Component Interactions

Olfaction played an indispensable role throughout human evolution and civilization. Even in the contemporary era of advanced technology, olfaction remains a critical channel for person to conduct danger discrimination, emotional experience, and memory formation. However, most substances in nature exist as multi-molecule mixtures. The complexity of mixture compositions, as well as concentration dependent saturation effects and receptor specific activation thresholds, pose substantial challenges in identifying olfactory characteristics. In this study, we proposed a novel bio inspired deep learning framework for accurate odor perception recognition of mixtures. We robustly constructed neural response curves for molecule-receptor interactions, and developed a fusion strategy that integrates attention-weighted multi-receptor curves with concentration-dependent multi-molecule curves, replicating the competitive activation and synergistic integration of mixture components. Furthermore, by comparing the consistency of response curve patterns, the model can transfer knowledge from the semantically rich space of molecular associations to guide recognition of mixture perception characteristics. Therefore, we established a complete computational pathway from chemical blending, neural encoding, to perceptual formation. Finally, we conducted comprehensive evaluation, and results demonstrated exceptional superiority, achieving an accuracy of 92.2%. Consequently, our work provides a generalizable solution to the long standing mixture perception challenge. More importantly, it can be integrated into embodied cognitive systems to enhance the agents perceptual and interactive capabilities in complex scenarios.
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All authors Fei Wang, Xiaoya Xie, Junfei Liu, Huihao Wang, Yixiao Wang, Yintao Wang, Yi Li, Hao Dong, Xing Chen

Machine Learning

Entropy-Constrained Adaptive Stochastic Quantization

Adaptive stochastic quantization (ASQ) is a recently introduced quantization approach that optimizes the Mean Squared Error (MSE) for a given input while preserving unbiasedness. It is designed to alleviate the communication and memory bottlenecks of modern data and machine learning workloads, including model, gradient, and KV-cache compression and nearest-neighbor search. Further, practical systems can then compress quantized data with a lossless entropy encoder. However, existing unbiased methods, including ASQ, choose their quantization values without considering this later encoding stage, leaving accuracy on the table. We formulate the Entropy Constrained Adaptive Stochastic Quantization (ECASQ) problem, which jointly selects adaptive quantization values to minimize MSE under an entropy budget and an unbiasedness constraint. We give an optimal dynamic program with $O(sd^2)$ time and $O(d^2)$ space for a length-d vector and at most s quantization values, and a GPU-friendly approximate dynamic program with $O(sd^2)$ time and $O(d)$ space. The approximation guarantees that the solution has an MSE no larger than the optimal solution that uses one fewer bit of entropy per entry. We also provide an iterative refinement procedure for the approximation solution that, in our experiments, yields near-optimal results while retaining a substantial speed advantage over our solver for the optimal solution.
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All authors Ran Ben Basat, Yaniv Ben-Itzhak, Michael Mitzenmacher, Shay Vargaftik

Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.CV

On Cross-Validation for Hyperparameter Optimization of Deep Learning Image Classifiers

Hyperparameter optimization (HPO) can materially affect the performance of deep learning (DL) image classifiers, but there is little empirical guidance on how to derive the validation signal that drives it, especially for the small sample sizes common in fields such as medical imaging. We compared three HPO protocols in terms of absolute performance-estimation error (AEE; the absolute difference between the winning configuration's validation AUROC and its test AUROC): fixed holdout (F), reshuffled holdout (R), and 5-fold cross-validation (C). The search space, sampler, training procedure, architecture, and test set were held identical across protocols. We evaluated the protocols on three public datasets spanning two regimes: binary medical imaging (RSNA pneumonia radiographs and binarized HAM10000 skin lesions) and 200-class natural imaging (Tiny ImageNet), across a range of development set sizes $n$ and two backbones (ResNet-18 on all datasets, Vision Transformer (ViT-S/16) on RSNA). On the medical datasets, every point estimate favored cross-validation over both holdout protocols, with reductions in AEE largest at small sample sizes and diminishing as $n$ increased. This pattern remained robust under conservative family-wise adjustment. On Tiny ImageNet, AEE was negligible under all three protocols. Test AUROC was generally similar among protocols. Fixed holdout had lower mean AEE than reshuffled holdout in 11 of 12 medical conditions, although this secondary finding was less uniformly supported. For small-sample medical image classification, we recommend cross-validation-based HPO when computational resources permit because it trades additional computation for a more reliable development-time estimate of subsequent test performance.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.CV

Deep Analog: Open-Set Film Emulation with Reference-Conditioned 3D LUTs

Film emulation reproduces the look of an analog film stock on a new digital photograph. We target its open-set form – matching any reference film frame from a single example – with a 3D lookup table (LUT) predicted from that reference. Real-time image enhancement predicts per-image weights over a fixed bank of 3D LUTs and blends them. We show this is a gated mixture of experts and inherits its failure: trained end-to-end against reconstruction, the gate collapses onto a single expert, so a bank of K LUTs delivers the capacity of one. An entropy term, the enhancement-setting analogue of mixture-of-experts load balancing, restores utilization and recovers about 1 dB PSNR. The deeper constraint survives: a fixed LUT basis is closed-set, freezing the achievable looks at training time. We therefore discard the basis and predict a single 3D LUT as a residual from a reference image (StyleLUTNet), trained by self-supervision on procedurally generated color transforms. The conditional design removes the gate and generalizes open-set to unseen film stocks without paired data or retraining. Around this color backbone we build Deep Analog, a film-emulation pipeline that adds histogram-based tone matching and a physics-informed optical renderer – multi-scale grain and per-channel halation driven by parameters an inverse network regresses from the reference. On 350 self-supervised pairs the color stage reaches 22.05 dB PSNR / 0.925 SSIM and the full pipeline 21.72 dB / 0.923; the color path runs in 5.2 ms at 1080p (192 FPS) and exports a portable .cube LUT for standard editing tools. A second degeneracy in conditional LUT training – residual-scale collapse – shares the root cause and yields a general principle: auxiliary regularization must stay subordinate to reconstruction.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from stat.ML

Black-Box Knowledge Transfer across Distinct Feature Sets

Pre-trained black-box predictive functions encode knowledge distilled from massive datasets and extensive computation. However, when the available input features differ from those the black box expects, direct use is infeasible. We introduce a method for transferring predictive knowledge from the black box to a new, heterogeneous input space. Our approach decomposes the target regression function into a transferable component, which the black box can inform, and a non-transferable component, which captures information unique to the new space. We propose a two-step neural network procedure, estimating the transferable component from abundant unlabeled feature pairs that bridge the two input spaces and the non-transferable component from limited labels. We derive prediction risk bounds that improve on those of a non-transfer alternative when the non-transferable component is small or smooth, and the procedure adapts to either case. Under additional conditions, the worst-case risk of our estimator is of strictly smaller polynomial order than the minimax risk of estimation from the labeled data alone. We extend the framework to multiple black boxes, each on its own input space, and show that aggregation can reduce prediction error relative to the best single black box. Simulated and real data demonstrate the practical value of the method.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.CV

UniMod: Enhancing Multi-Modal Medical Diagnosis through Cross-Modality and Within-Modality Alignment

Multi-modal learning combining medical images and clinical text is promising for disease diagnosis. However, standard multi-modal training leads to shortcut learning: models exploit the easier modality (e.g., diagnostic cues in text) while neglecting harder-to-learn features (e.g., subtle visual patterns). We propose UniMod, a framework that mitigates shortcut learning by requiring each modality to predict the diagnosis on its own. It supervises image-only, text-only, and multi-modal classification simultaneously, so each modality must extract diagnostic features. We add cross-modality alignment for knowledge transfer and within-modality supervised contrastive alignment over same-diagnosis patients. On Harvard-Glaucoma, UniMod reaches 0.850 AUC, outperforming OGM-GE and Gradient Blending by 1.6-1.8%; on CheXpert Plus, it reaches 0.966 AUC, surpassing them by over 5%. UniMod also extends to 5-class multi-label diagnosis without architectural change, improving mean AUC by 0.097 over CGGM.
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All authors Zijian Gu, Weikai Lin, Shuang Zhou, Zihan Chen, Song Wang

Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.AI

Logit-Boundary Geometric Belief Interfaces and Sparse Sheaf-Enclave Protocols: A Self-Contained Substrate for Secure Network Electronic Health Record (EHR) Interoperability

Electronic health-record interoperability is a boundary problem: legacy systems, generative models, terminology services, identity systems, and human reviewers may each expose rich internal states, while operational exchange requires a narrow shared interface of typed claims, bounded uncertainty, provenance, and explicit admission or abstention. This paper details a mathematical and engineering architecture for that interface. The organizing idea is the logit boundary: a discovery model may propose pre-threshold scores over a local categorical decision, but a deterministic judgment substrate decides whether the proposal is admissible, requires review, or must be quarantined before any Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) transaction is constructed. The resulting Geometric Belief Interface (GBI) combines finite boundary semantics, local Dirichlet evidence, cellular-sheaf and mapping-cone diagnostics, advisory geometric audit charts, and a Decentralized Cryptographic Sheaf-Enclave (DCSE) protocol sketch for fail-closed deployment. The framework does not establish clinical truth, global representation alignment, or end-to-end safety; it defines certificate-producing checks at a model-to-system boundary. A companion frozen synthetic benchmark, GBI BoundaryBench v0.1, evaluated Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507 on 256 held-out tasks across three evidence modes (768 canonical executions). All executions completed, but none produced an output accepted by the benchmark contract: 369 were rejected during safe parsing and 399 during schema validation, yielding zero coverage and deterministic quarantine. This empirical result is deliberately narrow - one 4B open-weight model under one frozen interface - and is reported as evidence about the admission boundary, not as a general claim about LLM capability or clinical safety. A Julia appendix verifies numerical certificates using standard libraries.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.CV

MRIComp4Flow: Compression of 3D Brain MRI for Training Multi-Modal Generative Models

Large-scale multi-modal MRI datasets impose substantial storage and I/O costs, limiting the training of 3D generative models on commodity infrastructure. While lossy compression is known to preserve accuracy for discriminative segmentation networks, its effect on generative models, which must learn the full data distribution rather than a decision boundary, is unexplored. We study whether standard image codecs can effectively compress semantically rich brain tumor MRI while preserving the fidelity required to train and deploy a 3D MRI generative model. Each 3D volume is compressed with JPEG2000 or a near-lossless JPEG-LS pipeline. Next, a Wavelet Flow Matching model, conditioned on BraTS image sequences (T1n, T1c, T2, T2f), is trained on compressed data, and the resulting models are evaluated on the validation set. At a 20:1 compression ratio, synthesis quality is statistically equivalent to a model trained on uncompressed data within a pre-specified margin ($\Delta$PSNR $<1$,dB, $\Delta$SSIM $<0.02$; paired TOST $p=[[p]]$): mean PSNR is 27.3,dB vs. 27.0,dB and mean SSIM is 0.95 vs. 0.96 across modalities. Our results indicate that JPEG2000 compression is a practical step toward scalable 3D MRI generative modeling without degrading synthesis quality. The codebase is available at https://github.com/lisafis/MRIComp4Flow .
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All authors Lisa K. Fischer, Mykhailo Riabets, Daniel Rueckert, Benedikt Wiestler, Anke Meyer-Baese, Sandeep Nagar

Machine Learning · Cross-listed from cs.CV

SeFaR: Semantic Feature-aware Robustness Testing of Deep Neural Networks

Deep neural networks are increasingly deployed in safety-critical domains as perception modules, where failures are often caused due to rare and under-represented scenarios. This necessitates the need to evaluate the semantic robustness of perception models; conformance of behavior to high-level requirements over real-world perceptual variability. To address this, we propose SeFaR, a framework for systematic semantic-feature-centric testing of vision models. Given a natural-language requirement and a set of satisfying inputs, SeFaR evaluates robustness with respect to diverse realistic semantic variations that preserve requirement satisfaction. The approach employs a novel hierarchical concept model enabling structured exploration of the feature space and incorporation of domain knowledge via user-defined concepts. State-of-the-art diffusion and vision-language models are leveraged to generate photorealistic semantics-preserving perturbations and identification of previously unknown features impacting behavior. A feedback-driven adaptive process is adopted to generate interpretable failure-inducing semantic concepts along with corresponding test inputs. Evaluation on case studies demonstrates that the proposed framework effectively satisfies requirement preconditions while identifying requirement-independent features that influence model decisions, enabling it to both uncover faults and relate them to such features.
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All authors Nusrat Jahan Mozumder, Divya Gopinath, Corina Pasareanu, Matthew Dwyer

Machine Learning

Power law graph attention: exact generalization of scaled dot-product attention, empirical collapse at inference

The Large Language Model from Power Law Decoder Representations (PLDR-LLM) and its attention, Power Law Graph Attention (PLGA), replace the fixed bilinear form of scaled dot-product attention (SDPA) with a learned, input-generated bilinear operator $G_{LM}$, built from a positive tensor $A_{LM}$ by elementwise power laws. The architecture is fully specified, verified against pinned reference releases; claims are labeled theorem, conditional theorem, measurement, or conjecture. Unconditionally: PLGA contains SDPA exactly at $G_{LM}=I$; $A_{LM}$ and $A_P$ are strictly entrywise positive, with Perron-Frobenius structure on $A_{LM}$; the DAG regularizer has the NOTEARS walk-counting form and positivity obstructs exact acyclicity; and, under nonresonance (satisfied by standard rotary frequencies), a commutant criterion identifies which operators preserve relative-position dependence. An inference-collapse theorem: exact input invariance of deductive outputs collapses inference to generalized SDPA with a constant operator. Measured invariance: relative fluctuations of $10^{-6}$ and below; perturbation bounds quantify but do not certify cached inference; the assembled proxy misses the decoding margin. A conditional three-stage mechanism (rotary twirl, concentration, row-map contraction) is measured on a released checkpoint. Blockwise training and scoring under the global Gram are stated with explicit target exposure; on tested samples, block and sequential scoring select identical answers and agree on the published TruthfulQA probability-mass metric within $5\times 10^{-5}$ per item. Self-organized criticality enters as a phenomenological framework with an intrinsic order parameter; open claims become falsifiable conjectures. Selected proof cores are machine-checked in Lean 4.
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Machine Learning · Cross-listed from physics.ao-ph

Stochastic Emulation of a Fully Coupled Preindustrial E3SMv3 Simulation

We present a stochastic coupled emulator of E3SM version 3, built on the SamudrACE framework, which couples an atmosphere emulator (ACE2) with a full-depth ocean emulator (Samudra). We replace the deterministic atmosphere emulator with its stochastic counterpart, ACE2S, and fine-tune the coupled system with a probabilistic objective, so that the atmosphere acts as a source of internal variability for the ocean. Trained on 105 years of a pre-industrial control simulation and evaluated on an independent 400 years, the emulator reproduces E3SMv3's mean climate state with biases much smaller than existing model-to-observation differences. Relative to a deterministic baseline, stochastic training maintains internal variability across timescales, most notably in the ENSO power spectrum, eddy-rich SST anomalies, and sea ice variability in the marginal ice zone. The emulator captures daily precipitation accurately up to the 99.99th percentile, but underestimates the rarest tropical extremes. These results show that stochastic coupled emulators can reproduce long-timescale variability with high fidelity, while extrapolation to unseen extremes remains a key challenge.
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All authors Elynn Wu, James P. C. Duncan, Troy Arcomano, Jeremy McGibbon, Oliver Watt-Meyer, Christopher S. Bretherton, Naser Mahfouz, Claudia Tebaldi, Luke Van Roekel, Andrew Roberts, Wuyin Lin, Finn Rebassoo, Jean-Christophe Golaz, Peter M. Caldwell

Machine Learning · Cross-listed from eess.IV

BreastMammo and DenseMammo: Benchmarks for Mammography Domain Generalization

Breast density classification is a critical component of breast cancer risk assessment, yet AI models often struggle to generalize across clinical sites due to vendor-specific acquisition styles. In this work, we introduce two new datasets, BreastMammo and DenseMammo, to facilitate robust multi-view mammography research. We propose a domain generalization framework that utilizes a foreground-only histogram matching protocol to resolve the domain shift issue arising from disparate clinical sources. Internal evaluation using a 5-fold cross-validation protocol demonstrates the efficacy of our approach, with the Swin Transformer backbone achieving a peak AUC of 98.32% for density classification. External evaluation on the TNMammo and LUMINA datasets demonstrates that the proposed approach consistently reduces domain shift, significantly outperforming prominent domain generalization paradigms, including MixStyle and Discrete-Fourier-Transform-based frameworks.
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All authors Hongyi Pan, Gorkem Durak, Halil Ertugrul Aktas, Andrea Mia Bejar, Mustafa Ege Seker, Nebile Alibeyoglu, Rumeysa Guclu, Rana Gunoz Comert Bozkurt, Sibel Ozkan Gurdal, Neslihan Cabioglu, Beyza Ozcinar, Ravza Yilmaz, Vahit Ozmen, Erkin Aribal, Sukru Mehmet Erturk, Yalda Zafari, Mohamed Mabrok, Kayhan Batmanghelich, Mohammad Yaqub, Ziyue Xu, Ulas Bagci

Machine Learning

Toward Human Rights Benchmarking for LLMs: A Pilot Methodology

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly mediate legal determinations over what human rights are realized, and how. Yet, no evaluation benchmark exists to assess whether they can reason correctly about human rights law. To this end, we report our efforts to develop a robust and scalable methodology for creating HumRightsBench: the first expert-validated, scenario-based benchmark for evaluating reasoning grounded in the obligation structure of international human rights law. We adapt the IRAC framework for legal reasoning to better suit the unique reasoning patterns of human rights work (substituting P, "proposing remedies," for C, "legal conclusion," yielding IRAP) to structure our evaluation heuristics. We also produce a pilot series of authentic scenarios designed to implicate the many dimensions of real-world human rights issues and annotated by human rights lawyers and professionals across the world. Ultimately, we find that model accuracy scores range considerably across legal reasoning tasks (overall model performance ranges from 0.339 to 0.577, task min-max ranges from 0.025 to 0.774), which strongly implies that HumRightsBench is a capable instrument for advancing this emerging subfield of AI evaluations science at a critical moment in its evolution.
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All authors Savannah Thais, Wm. Matthew Kennedy, Abhigyan Acherjee, Matilda Wysocki, Malcolm Langford, Caitlin Kraft Buchman