Papers

Pretrained diffusion models represent image distributions through a continuum of progressively smoothed distributions. This multiscale structure organizes generation from global structure to fine detail and supports high-quality, diverse samples. We exploit the same multiscale diffusion prior for linear imaging inverse problems. Rather than using the pretrained model only as a denoiser in an outer iteration, we define a surrogate likelihood whose center is aligned with the clean-image coordinate and whose covariance accounts for residual diffusion uncertainty. This construction defines an explicit surrogate posterior path, from which we derive continuous posterior dynamics. A tunable Langevin component supports target tracking and allows the amount of posterior exploration to be adapted to the application. We prove endpoint consistency and a finite-horizon tracking bound and, in the exact-score setting, first-order weak accuracy. For computation, we derive the Posterior-Dynamics Implicit–Explicit sampler (PD-IMEX), a stable method using one score evaluation per diffusion scale and an implicit data-consistency update. Experiments on deblurring, super-resolution, and inpainting show strong reconstruction quality at 100 score evaluations, coarse-grid stability, and controllable fidelity–diversity behavior.

In contextual optimization, the decision-maker seeks optimal decisions to minimize a cost function, that varies based on observed features. This context is common in many business applications ranging from on-demand delivery and retail operations to portfolio optimization and inventory management. In this paper, we study the learning and optimization approach, which first learns how outcomes result from the features, and then selects optimal decisions based on these outcomes. We focus on the integrated learning and optimization literature, and identify that a lack of control for prediction accuracy can lead to overfitting and a loss of decision effectiveness against simple separate learning and optimization models. Instead, we propose a bi-objective formulation that balances prediction accuracy and cost minimization, termed decision-driven regularization. It also addresses ambiguity in the definition of the cost function via a surrogate that depends on a new hyperparameter. We additionally show that alternative perspectives for formulating the problem, namely robust optimization and regret minimization, lead to models that are closely related to our proposed model. As a consequence, our framework generalizes models such as SPO+. Our model is shown to be numerically superior to other benchmarks, such as OLS, Random Forest, XGBoost, SPO+, Perturbation Gradient, and Learning and Rank, in our synthetic studies.

Sufficient dimension reduction (SDR) seeks the minimal subspace of the predictors that captures the full conditional distribution of the response, which is known as the central subspace (CS). When the response is multivariate, the problem becomes considerably more challenging, particularly when the sample size is limited. Existing methods face different limitations:inverse regression approaches rely on strong distributional assumptions and matrix inversion, and their multi-response extensions suffer from severe slice sparsity; forward regression methods depend on computationally intensive iterative smoothing whose cost grows with the response dimension; and deep learning-based approaches demand large amounts of labeled data. To circumvent these shortcomings, we propose an SDR framework based on the generalized Stein's lemma. Our method constructs a cross-moment matrix between the multivariate response and the marginal score function of the predictors, and recovers the CS via its singular value decomposition. The proposed method does not rely on the linearity condition, avoids matrix inversion as well as iterative smoothing, and can leverage unlabeled data when available. We establish convergence guarantees for the proposed estimator under standard regularity conditions. Moreover, we propose a practical rank-selection algorithm to estimate the dimension of the CS. Extensive simulation studies and a real data application demonstrate that the proposed methods consistently outperform existing approaches across a variety of settings, particularly in moderate-dimensional, label-scarce scenarios with high noise levels.

Analytical models of peak VRAM consumption for LLM inference decompose memory into weight-storage, KV-cache, and activation terms parameterized by step count, tool invocations, and context expansion. We evaluate this decomposition empirically within a strictly scoped measurement study: a LangGraph-based CUDA-kernel-synthesis agent (AgentK), a 4-bit quantization family (Q4 K M), a single NVIDIA H100 GPU, and four LLM backbones across 1,920 trajectories. Focusing on peak-memory forecasting behavior, we report two primary observations. First, closed-form analytical models achieve competitive accuracy when provided with two empirical constants: loaded-weight VRAM and a fixed activation-memory overhead. Supplied with live GPU readings and ground-truth trajectory parameters, the closed-form model matches or outperforms the best learned baseline on three of the four backbones (test MAPE 2.2-4.4% vs. 3.4-6.5%, p = 0.76). The exception is the smallest backbone (Phi-4-mini), where minimal VRAM variance (CV 0.3%) causes dynamic modeling to underperform simple regression. Second, compile success strictly bifurcates by backbone capacity (from 5.7% for Phi-4-mini to 62.0% for Qwen2.5-Coder-14B), demonstrating that functional code synthesis remains constrained by intrinsic LLM capabilities rather than available memory. Furthermore, because overall peak-memory variance is remarkably low across all backbones (CV 0.3-9.4%), learned prompt-feature regression offers statistically insignificant improvements over a constant-mean baseline. Consequently, we find no justification for deploying complex predictive VRAM models in highly quantized, weight-dominated regimes. We release the evaluated corpus and anonymized framework to support replication.

Learned image compression (LIC) has demonstrated remarkable rate-distortion (RD) performance in benign settings. However, the high representational capacity endowed by deep neural networks (DNNs) comes at the expense of increased adversarial vulnerability. This hinders their adoption as trusted standardized codecs. Recent work has sketched test-time refinement (TTR) as a defense in gray-box scenarios, despite its original purpose of improving benign RD performance. Unfortunately, extensive iterations of TTR incur prohibitive overhead, while the robustness mechanism lacks theoretical understanding. Moreover, TTR has not been evaluated in white-box settings or against attacks beyond $\ell_2$-bounded rate and untargeted distortion objectives. To bridge these gaps, we present a systematic study. Our study reveals an Asymmetric Adversarial Trajectory (AAT) property in LIC systems: transitioning from adversarial to benign regions is significantly easier than the reverse process, where adversarial examples can often be roughly recovered within only 1-2 steps. We provide a two-dimensional Tube Model to explain this phenomenon. Based on AAT, we propose a Fast Test-Time Refinement (FTTR) framework for practical and robust LIC systems. We establish that the robustness arises from the contraction of adversarial regions induced by the Input-as-Label property of LIC systems, rather than from obfuscated gradients. Extensive evaluations with diverse strong adaptive attacks across multiple LIC systems demonstrate the promise of the proposed FTTR framework. The code is available at https://github.com/chinaliangjiaming/FTTR.git.

Solving the time-dependent Schrödinger equation (TDSE) via traditional numerical methods is computationally intensive. Transformer models offer a compelling alternative, but standard implementations rely on soft constraints that cannot rigorously guarantee probability conservation. Here, we introduce a Transformer architecture that enforces TDSE probability conservation as a hard constraint. The design intrinsically ensures unitarity across temporal evolution without requiring repeated retraining. Our empirical findings show that this hard-constraint approach is not only physically exact but also computationally superior to conventional soft-constraint methods.

Federated learning (FL) is a practical framework that can train models on distributed user data while guaranteeing data privacy; however, due to heterogeneity in which each user has a different data distribution, problems frequently arise where both global and personalization performance deteriorate simultaneously. This dissertation presents methodologies for building efficient personalized models by identifying which strategies are effective in the global training stage and by showing how to preserve global knowledge while securing user-specific performance during local adaptation. First, we show that as data heterogeneity increases, the collapse of feature vectors is a more fundamental bottleneck than classifier weights, and propose a method that directly mitigates the discrepancy in representation magnitude between local and global models. Second, we analyze that a training approach that strengthens local alignment can induce forgetting of global knowledge (e.g., categories not observed locally), and propose a method that achieves both local alignment and global knowledge preservation by combining feature distillation based on the global model's feature vectors. Third, in federated personalized reward model learning with preference heterogeneity, we empirically verify the conventional belief that "increasing the number of global models yields better initialization," and we show that when sufficient local fine-tuning is allowed, a single global initialization can instead provide stronger personalization performance. This study redefines the role of global initialization under data and preference heterogeneity and provides practical training strategies that simultaneously satisfy global knowledge preservation and personalization.

Recent progress in optimization research has highlighted the sharpness of the loss landscape as a key factor in narrowing the generalization gap. Motivated by this insight, Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) was proposed as a training strategy that enhances generalization. Despite the promising performance, SAM suffers from its twice computational cost due to its core algorithm requiring an extra gradient computation during the perturbation step. To overcome this limitation, we introduce Exponential Moving Average Sharpness-Aware Minimization (EMASAM), a computationally efficient variant of SAM. EMASAM does not require the loss gradient in the perturbation step. Instead, EMASAM defines the perturbation direction based on the discrepancy between the main model and the EMA shadow model. This perturbation travels away from the stable average position toward the less stable area, acting as a softer yet cheaper alternative to SAM's worst-case scenario perturbation. Moreover, since EMASAM's perturbation does not rely on noisy mini-batch gradients, it mitigates the gradient-induced instability inherent in SAM. Hence, EMASAM eliminates the need for an extra backpropagation while also preserving the generalization ability of the SAM-style training. Several experiments have been performed and confirm the efficiency and robustness of our method.

Studies of industrial visual inspection commonly report the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) and the overlap between anomaly maps and defect masks. Neither measure specifies the false-alarm rate at a selected threshold, while recurrent defect locations and mask geometry can inflate overlap. We combine a distribution-free upper tolerance threshold with a paired-minus-crossed spatial test. This test compares each detector's score-contributing locations with the matched defect mask and with masks from other images; the difference in rates defines spatial-evidence lift relative to the empirical chance-overlap rate. We evaluate three detectors on 120 point-defect images from three ISP-AD modalities and three fixed data splits. Of 378 alarms, 230 overlap the matched mask. Paired and crossed rates are nevertheless similar in eight of nine detector–modality cells; only DINOv2–ASM has a positive 95% bootstrap lower bound (lift 0.259, 95% interval 0.159–0.347). On the independent Magnetic Tile Defect dataset, the same analysis gives lifts of 0.203 (0.169–0.236) for Wide ResNet-50 (WRN50) patch memory and 0.231 (0.202–0.262) for Vision Transformer B/16 (ViT-B/16) patch memory, with one-sided permutation $p=10^{-5}$ for both. When crossed masks are restricted to the same defect class, the lifts remain 0.185 and 0.210. Exact sample planning shows that, with 150 calibration normals, a 95%-confidence distribution-free claim is supported only for target false-positive rates of 1.98% or higher; a 1% target requires at least 299 normals. The results support reporting operating-point performance and chance-corrected spatial evidence alongside AUROC and raw mask overlap.

Test-time augmentation (TTA) has proven effective for improving model robustness and uncertainty estimation in computer vision, yet its application to graph-structured data remains largely unexplored. We introduce GATTA (Graph Active Learning with Test-Time Augmentation), a framework for enhancing active learning by aggregating predictions across multiple augmented views to produce more reliable uncertainty estimates. To address the challenge of label-preserving graph augmentations, GATTA incorporates a consistency-based filtering mechanism that discards augmented views yielding unreliable predictions. We systematically evaluate GATTA across multiple graph datasets, GNN architectures, and acquisition strategies. Our results show that simple uncertainty-based methods, such as Entropy and Least Confidence, benefit most from TTA, achieving performance competitive with more sophisticated and computationally expensive approaches. GATTA generalizes across architectures, outperforms model-side ensemble methods such as MC Dropout. We further show that GATTA scales efficiently with both ensemble size and graph size. Extensive analysis of augmentation types, strengths, and filtering strategies provides practical guidelines for effective deployment. Our findings demonstrate that augmenting simple methods with TTA offers a more efficient path to strong active learning performance than engineering complex acquisition functions, enabling practitioners to achieve competitive results with lower computational overhead and reduced implementation complexity.

Scaling transformer language models creates an inherent tension between expressivity and memory efficiency. While unique weights across layers preserve functional specialization—from input-grounding to abstract refinement—they incur a substantial memory footprint. Conversely, standard depth-sharing enforces uniform transformations that collapse representational diversity and degrade modeling quality. We introduce Gated Recurrent Transformer, a recurrent depth transformer where fixed-depth prelude and coda blocks bracket a single shared core iterated R times. Inspired by gated recurrent neural networks, we employ a lightweight projection and an elementwise update gate—conditioned on the hidden state, the fixed prelude output, and noise resampled at every step—to modulate the recurrent update. This allows the model to specialize the input to the same few layers across recurrences, rather than requiring many unique layers to achieve functional diversity. Under an isoFLOPS constraint, a 3-layer Gated Recurrent Transformer matches the accuracy of a 12-layer GPT-2 Small baseline with similar training and inference FLOPs, and leads MoR and heavy-tail depth sampling in all nine scale-by-budget cells; at medium and large scale it approaches dense quality at the standard token budget and overtakes it at medium scale once that budget is doubled. Under an isoPARAMS constraint, deeper recurrence achieves a 2.76 validation loss versus 2.84 for a non-recurrent counterpart at matched parameter and data budget. Our results demonstrate that adaptive depth reuse is a principled strategy for trading parameters for quality: at large scale, 63% fewer parameters and 59% less peak decoding memory for a 10% increase in compiled generation latency.

This paper proposes a Mamba surrogate model with mixture-of-experts (MoE) routing to represent the transient dynamics of inverter-based resources. A Mamba surrogate model is a predictive machine learning model built on the Mamba architecture. MoE routing uses a router network to assign data-dependent weights to specialized subnetworks (experts). The resulting Mamba–MoE surrogate can perform two tasks: (i) closed-loop simulation and (ii) measurement-window forecasting of inverter transients. A single Mamba backbone with task conditioning and expert routing serves both tasks, replacing two separate specialists. Task-matched objectives fit each prediction form, and an adaptive conformal layer provides prediction intervals for both tasks. For the considered grid-following inverter, the unified surrogate model remains in the same low-error regime as a Mamba specialist pair while using 13% fewer parameters. The prediction intervals achieve 94–96% empirical mean marginal coverage across the two tasks. For transient dynamics—that is, beyond the vicinity of an equilibrium point—our surrogate model with MoE routing yields lower errors across all outputs in both tasks compared to a shared Mamba backbone without expert routing. A controller hardware-in-the-loop simulation validates our results and shows that adapting only the shared output head with limited measured data reduces held-out forecasting error.

Noisy binary comparison between two candidates is a common interface between human and learning systems, especially in modern large language model (LLM) post-training alignment. We study online convex optimization with dueling (pairwise comparison) feedback, where the learner observes only a binary preference between two queried points. We consider adversarial sequences of convex losses and measure regret with the loss at both queried points, under a comparison link with a known nonzero slope at the origin. We propose a simple reduction that converts dueling feedback into approximate gradients, enabling the use of standard first-order methods. We show that regret guarantees transfer under this reduction, yielding $\mathcal O(T^{3/4})$ static and adaptive regret, and $\mathcal O(T^{3/4}\sqrt{1+P_T/D})$ dynamic regret with unknown comparator path length $P_T$. For strongly convex losses, the static and adaptive bounds improve to $\widetilde{\mathcal O}(T^{2/3})$. For smooth losses, we presents unified dueling ellipsoidal FTRL, and proves $\widetilde{\mathcal O}(T^{2/3})$ static regret, which improves to $\widetilde{\mathcal O}(\sqrt T)$ under additional strong convexity.

A fraction of a point of benchmark accuracy is the usual evidence that a compressed model is equivalent to its original. That quantity is least informative when two models are most alike: a net delta is what survives cancellation between opposing per-item changes, and cancellation is most complete in the regime equivalence claims occupy. Across an atlas of 1,707 paired model-by-task cells mined from public per-item evaluation dumps (1.3B-405B), churn runs roughly five times the net accuracy delta, and cells scoring identically to their baseline still disagree on individual items. In a preregistered audit of 17 equivalence claims from three registered frames (method papers, model cards, vendor documentation), 16 are eligible. None states a prospective numerical equivalence margin, and none releases task-matched per-item outputs, though 3 release outputs for other tasks only; 5 report too little to assess numerically, so a reader cannot check them at any sample size. We audit evidential sufficiency, not truth: no claim is called false. We supply the missing instrument: paired equivalence testing at a declared margin, with certification tables giving the items an evaluation needs, computed from disagreement observed under compression, not from independent-binomial variance. A controlled experiment pairs GPTQ and AWQ on byte-identical calibration samples across five seeds. Under the frozen eight-cell decision rule H3 is supported: changing the calibration draw was sufficient to reverse the observed method ordering in 5 of 8 confirmatory cells. The reporting standard we propose is five lines: declare a margin, run the paired test, report churn beside net delta, cite the sample size you met, release per-item outputs. It applies to any comparison between two models alike enough to be worth comparing. All per-item outputs, protocols and code are released.

We perform a global search for values of the Yukawa matrices and Majorana masses in the Type-I seesaw mechanism. Using flow matching, which is a generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) method, we generate a broad set of solutions reproducing the experimentally measured values of the neutrino mass-squared differences and the mixing angles. Then, a machine learning method known as an autoencoder is applied to uncover non-trivial correlations among physical quantities in the lepton sector. Our analysis reveals new non-linear relations involving neutrino masses and CP phases. These findings may contribute to elucidating the origins of the mass hierarchies and mixing patterns among generation structure.

Audio-Text Foundation Models (ATMs) fail catastrophically under severe acoustic noise, yet existing adaptation strategies either rely on gradient-based Test-Time Adaptation (TTA), which reinforces noise rather than signal, or on prompt tuning that requires privileged noise annotations unavailable at inference. We address these failures with PRISM (Prototype-Rectified Iterative Self-supervised Manifold Denoising), a training-free, source-free TTA framework grounded in the Affine Noise Hypothesis: severe acoustic noise induces a low-rank affine shift in the multimodal latent space, with more than 90% of distortion energy confined to the leading 60 principal components. PRISM estimates and reverses this distortion from an unlabeled target batch using frozen text prototypes as geometric anchors via three closed-form geometric corrections compiled into a single static projection matrix by Affine Bias Regression. At inference, adaptation reduces to one matrix-vector multiplication in 0.0009 ms, making it substantially faster than gradient-based TTA while requiring no additional training. On UrbanSound8K, PRISM improves over the zero-shot baseline by 12.94 percentage points and surpasses an oracle-assisted TTA baseline by 9.41 percentage points, despite never observing its privileged augmented noise prompts. We further identify the Polyphonic Trap, a principled failure mode of subspace deflation for broadband classes, and resolve it via Confidence-Aware Regression (CAR), recovering up to 8.16 percentage points for the worst-affected class.

The Lipschitz bandit problem extends the traditional multi-armed bandit framework to continuous action spaces by assuming that the reward functions satisfy a Lipschitz condition. This work investigates Lipschitz bandits under arbitrary feedback delays, where reward signals are not received immediately upon taking an action but after an arbitrarily chosen delay. We consider both stochastic and adversarial reward settings, proposing an elimination-based algorithm and an EXP3-based algorithm, respectively. For both settings, our algorithms achieve a regret bound of $\tilde{O}\left(T^{\frac{d_z+1}{d_z+2}}+\sqrt{D}\right)$ over a time horizon $T$ with total delay $D$, where the main difference between settings lies in the definition of the zooming dimension $d_z$. Our bounds match existing delay-free regret guarantees for Lipschitz bandits and characterize the additional $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{D})$ impact introduced by feedback delays.

Breast mass segmentation is an important step in computer-aided mammography, but it remains difficult because masses can have low contrast, irregular shapes, and boundaries that blend with surrounding breast tissue. To address this problem, we present DualMiT-Net, a dual-branch network that uses both a focused view of the mass and a wider view of the surrounding tissue. The local branch uses a Mix Transformer (MiT-B5) encoder to learn mass shape, texture, and boundary information, while the global branch uses an EfficientNet-B5 encoder to learn surrounding breast context. Features from the two branches are shared at the deeper encoder levels and are then progressively fused in a single decoder. A spatial gate controls how much global information is added during decoding. We also evaluated four input representations and selected a percentile-windowed mammogram combined with a Gabor texture response. The model was trained and evaluated on the mass subset of the Curated Breast Imaging Subset of the Digital Database for Screening Mammography (CBIS-DDSM) using a patient-level split. Across three training runs, DualMiT-Net with exponential moving average weights achieved a mean Dice coefficient of 0.9375 and a mean Intersection over Union of 0.8834. It also achieved better Dice and IoU scores than six standard encoder-decoder baselines trained using the same data and training settings. These results show that combining local mass information with wider breast context can provide accurate and consistent breast mass segmentation.

When a robot policy is trained for a new task or dataset, its visual encoder can be frozen and only its action generation module trained, reducing training cost. Freezing removes the encoder's backward pass, but its forward pass must still run at every training step because the input images change, so it keeps consuming GPU compute. We therefore ask whether moving this computation to a low power AI accelerator such as an NPU can reduce total energy despite the added data transfer and longer training time, and how it affects policy performance. We built an asynchronous training pipeline that uses both a GPU and an NPU for the AR-Actor specialist. The frozen visual encoder runs in A8W8 INT8 on a Mobilint Aries2 NPU, while the FP32 action expert is trained on an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Ti GPU. We compared a GPU-only baseline with four conditions, L1 to L4, which gradually extend NPU offloading from one to four Transformer encoder layers. Each condition was trained for 30,000 steps with three random seeds. We measured GPU board power for the GPU-only condition and combined GPU and NPU board power for the NPU conditions. Energy per sample decreased by 17.1% in L1, which offloaded ResNet18 and the first encoder layer, and by 27.9% in L4, which offloaded ResNet18 and all four encoder layers. In contrast, training time per sample increased by 15.2% in L1 and 37.7% in L4, and peak allocated GPU memory decreased by 19.8 to 20.7%. The 15 resulting policies were each evaluated with the same 300 environment seeds, for a total of 4,500 simulator rollouts. The combined success rate was 93.33% for GPU-only and 91.44 to 92.89% for the NPU conditions. These results show that NPU offloading of a frozen visual encoder can reduce training energy, but it increases training time and lowers policy success rate by 0.44 to 1.89 percentage points compared with GPU-only training.

We construct spinning conformal fields from neural networks and the embedding formalism, computing their two-, three- and four-point functions in examples, building on scalar conformal field techniques introduced in \cite{Halverson:2024axc}. For a particular ensemble of i.i.d. neurons we recover the 4d Maxwell CFT in the infinite-width limit.

Transformers applied to spatial imperfect-information games must represent map geometry while tracking hidden entities through time. We ask whether geometry-aware positional encodings improve these capabilities, without claiming a new positional encoding. We construct a four-level benchmark on a hexagonal naval pursuit game: controlled geometry and topology probes, an exact-Bayes hidden-target tracking task, offline policy imitation at 1k and 10k games, and 7,200 fixed-seed games against three legacy opponents. Across matched Transformer backbones, HexRoPE reduces exact-belief posterior cross-entropy relative to no positional encoding by 0.278 on D6-transformed test orbits and 0.329 on a larger map; both hierarchical-bootstrap confidence intervals exclude zero, and both Holm-adjusted p-values are below 0.001. At 1k games, HexRoPE improves policy action accuracy by 4.63 percentage points over no encoding and 2.05 points over rectangular relative bias; the gains shrink to 1.55 and 0.41 points at 10k games. However, HexRoPE does not improve aggregate gameplay win rate: its paired effect over no encoding is -1.56 percentage points (95% CI [-4.50, 1.17]). Rectangular relative bias is strongest on D6 belief consistency but fails sharply when extrapolating from radius 3 to radius 4, while graph bias provides only a small blocked-edge gain. The results show that geometric inductive bias improves belief estimation and data-efficient imitation, but those representation gains do not automatically produce stronger closed-loop play.

We present a physiology-informed digital twin of the human liver designed for longitudinal simulation of liver function and early-stage disease progression. The model, referred to as HEPATWIN, integrates key hepatic processes, including carbohydrate, lipid, and protein metabolism, bilirubin conjugation, bile production, and detoxification, within a unified systems-level framework to generate clinically observable biomarker trajectories. Unlike purely data-driven approaches, HEPATWIN incorporates mechanistic representations of liver physiology and patient-specific inputs such as diet, activity, and baseline biomarkers to simulate disease evolution over time. To ensure consistency with clinical progression patterns, we introduce a stage-transition-driven calibration mechanism that aligns simulated outputs with population-level biomarker distributions across disease stages, including NAFLD, fibrosis, and cirrhosis. Validation using the NIDDK NAFLD dataset demonstrates that HEPATWIN produces longitudinal biomarker estimates within clinically acceptable ranges and can forecast trajectories over multi-year horizons. Furthermore, simulated biomarkers retain sufficient clinical signal to support downstream NASH detection with competitive performance relative to models using ground-truth laboratory data. These results highlight the potential of physiology-informed digital twins for personalized, non-invasive diagnosis and prediction of organ health in general and liver health monitoring in particular.

We consider nonparametric regression when the association between a response and its covariates changes across an unknown partition of a spatial domain. The proposed estimator learns the partition and the cluster-specific regression functions jointly. A neural network depending only on location determines cluster membership, while separate neural networks describe the covariate–response relationship within the clusters. An annealed softmax relaxation permits gradient-based estimation of the otherwise discrete assignments. Graph-Laplacian and occupancy penalties are used to discourage fragmented regions and degenerate solutions. We establish identifiability up to label permutation, bound partition error under a margin condition, and decompose prediction risk into regression and assignment components. The resulting rate agrees with that of an oracle estimator when the partition is estimated sufficiently accurately. Simulations show that joint estimation is useful when regression surfaces change abruptly across spatial boundaries, including settings with nonlinear effects, unequal region sizes, preferential sampling, and spatially correlated errors. Finally, a real data analysis is provided to demonstrate the validity and effectiveness of the proposed method.

Pareto Conditioned Networks learn multiple multi-objective reinforcement learning behaviours by conditioning a single policy on a desired return command. However, the local mapping from command and state to action remains opaque. We propose command-space counterfactual explanations for PCNs: given a fixed state, original command, and foil action, we search, in a black-box setting, for a minimally changed desired-return command under which the same trained policy would choose the foil. Our contributions are threefold. First, we formulate PCN explanations as return-command interventions, using a return-only PCN variant that avoids the added ambiguity of horizon-conditioning. Second, we adapt adversarial machine learning methods to reinforcement-learning explanations. Third, we introduce a boundary-seeded directional search that improves over purely local optimization in the command-action landscape, resulting in our proposed approach CF-ZOO. The resulting explanations are actionable and intuitively expressed in the user's own preferences: "If your trade-off had shifted slightly towards X, the agent would have chosen Y."

The development of models demands sound modeling and simulation knowledge as well as domain knowledge. Every model should accurately represent a system's dynamics and be verifiable. Toward this objective, this research introduces an agentic PDEVS-LLM framework to assist human modelers in generating and verifying PDEVS statecharts for behavior modeling of atomic Parallel Discrete Event System Specification (PDEVS) models. The framework supports (re)generating plausible facts from a system description prompt using the agentic LLM used for generating plausible facts. Inconsistencies in plausible facts lead to incorrect PDEVS statecharts having logical structure and behavioral inaccuracies. A controlled-correction mechanism is developed to verify the logical consistency of the plausible facts. The agentic LLM is used to generate key behavioral conditions from the system description prompt. The plausible facts are then verified against the behavioral conditions using propositional logic entailment for a finite number of times. The verification results enable the generation of modification prompts that can reduce errors in generated plausible facts, resulting in more accurate PDEVS statecharts. To verify a statechart's logical correctness, its Timed Automata counterpart is manually created and verified for deadlock and reachability properties. The human modeler may regenerate plausible facts and PDEVS statecharts iteratively and incrementally. A basic correctness metric is introduced to quantify the completeness and accuracy of the expected behavioral traits of the PDEVS statechart models. A collection of example systems with varying levels of complexity is developed to demonstrate the capabilities and limitations of LLMs. The evaluation of the proposed verification mechanism shows a substantial improvement in the logical consistency of generated statecharts.

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have opened opportunities to apply high-level code transformations to the field of code optimization, and it has since emerged as one of the most fundamental tasks for LLMs to perform; however, at present, LLMs struggle to apply wide-ranging code optimization tasks due to both the complexity of the code and the inability to independently verify the correctness of the transformations. In this paper, we present the Trusted LLM (T-LLM) Compiler, which proposes an advancement in compiler technology through a collaborative effort involving high-level LLM code transformations, traditional compilers, and verification tools. Experimental results reveal that it can significantly improve code correctness when tested on a set of PolyBench/C benchmarks. Our approach facilitates iterative code optimization efforts with verification strategies that enable corrective actions. Through this approach, T-LLM Compiler achieves code optimization accuracy of up to 83.3% and a speedup of up to 16.1% on the PolyBench/C benchmarks, with the transformed code reaching an average of 26.7% speedup wrt standard baselines. Additionally, we release the project's source code to the open-source community.

Low-rank matrix decompositions can uncover patterns and structure in data and have a number of different applications across many disciplines. Extensions to "joint" low-rank decompositions have been proposed to link datasets from different modalities. While these methods enable the discovery of common patterns across modalities, they require that all the multimodal data share one or more dimensions. We propose a new analysis method, PathFinder, that enables co-analysis of datasets that do not necessarily all share a dimension. The key insight is that as long as pairs or subgroups of matrices do share some dimension, and that there are one or more paths that link across the data matrices, a global joint decomposition can be sought out. This enables the joint estimation of common patterns across different modalities, species, or scales, where a one-to-one mapping across all data along some dimension is not necessarily available. We show that PathFinder is a general umbrella under which many matrix decomposition methods fall as special cases. It can be used to discover common patterns across disparate datasets and to make predictions for missing data or modalities.

Adaptive speculative decoding changes the active batch size B and draft length d from one decode step to the next, whereas a CUDA Graph replays a fixed launch configuration. The resulting verification width M = B d forces serving systems to pre-capture many shapes, capture new ones on the serving path, or pad every step to the largest draft. We present PolyGraph, a plan-buffer mechanism for custom Triton kernels that avoids this choice. PolyGraph captures one maximum-grid graph and writes the active shape to GPU memory before each replay. Kernels skip tiles beyond that shape, while graph topology, allocations, layouts, pointers, and launch grids remain fixed; the update transfers only 28 bytes. On one NVIDIA H800, a trace-driven prototype with Qwen2.5-3B dimensions replaces 64 shape-specific graphs with one, matches the warmed baseline in observed step latency (17.7 vs. 17.8 ms P50), and reduces measured pre-serving graph-build time from 3,915 to 93 ms. Fixed-draft controls show that the benefit comes from avoiding padded payload: the P99 difference from MaxPad is negligible at zero padding waste but reaches an 18.7% reduction at 100% waste. Our evidence establishes a bounded work-shape mechanism for custom kernels, not a production serving system, and is limited to synthetic traces on one GPU.

In this chapter, we investigate how classical machine learning models respond to small, targeted modifications in their parameters. We compare and contrast these results to analogous experiments on deep learning models. For classical learning models, we consider Hidden Markov Models (HMM) and Support Vector Machines (SVM), and for comparison, we conduct analogous experiments involving Multilayer Perceptrons (MLP) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks. When applied to the Drebin Android malware dataset, our results show that classical models are brittle, in the sense that a limited set of selected parameters can have a dramatic effect on model behavior. In a related set of experiments, we investigate the steganographic capacity of these same learning models, that is, the proportion of bits in model parameters that can be overwritten without having a significant adverse affect on a model. We find that classical models offer limited steganographic capacity due to their compact, parameter-efficient, and relatively sensitive parameter structure. In contrast, neural networks are parameter-redundant, enabling higher steganographic capacity, where modifications can be distributed across many parameters with minimal impact on performance. These results highlight differences in how classical and neural models respond to parameter changes, with clear implications for both robustness and hidden information embedding. Overall, this work provides a framework for understanding parameter sensitivity and steganographic capacity across different classes of learning models.

The vehicle routing problems with real-world constraints (we consider vehicles capacity limits, time windows constrains, pickup-and-delivery multi-depo — CPDPTW) pose significant computational challenges. While classical exact and heuristic methods remain effective to solve problems of small/medium size ($N\lesssim100$), they often lack adaptability and scalability for larger logistics tasks. In this work, we show how JAMPR+/L2D RL deep learning model, proposed in to solve large CPDPTW problems can be adopted in the case of substantial changes of graph distance matrix. We test performance of JAMPR+/L2D model for medium-sized CVRP and VRPTW problems on CVRPLIB benchmarks: JAMPR+/L2D outperforms the state-of-the-art heuristic HGS in over 85% of instances, achieving improvement in objective gap. We show that the JAMPR+/L2D model trained on CPDPTW problem, generalizes well for tasks with simpler constraints (CVRP, VRPTW), for different problem sizes and for moderate changes in distance matrixes. For more substantial changes in distance matrixes, we propose here to make fast finetuning of JAMPR+: on ORTEC data (for CPDPTW) the proposed strategy remarkably reduces the objective gap without full model retraining, what will give both accuracy and rapid inference of the model in the practical routing scenarios with distance matrix changes.