id
stringlengths
9
16
title
stringlengths
4
278
categories
stringlengths
5
104
abstract
stringlengths
6
4.09k
2502.13514
Shall Your Data Strategy Work? Perform a Swift Study
cs.CL
This work presents a swift method to assess the efficacy of particular types of instruction-tuning data, utilizing just a handful of probe examples and eliminating the need for model retraining. This method employs the idea of gradient-based data influence estimation, analyzing the gradient projections of probe examples from the chosen strategy onto evaluation examples to assess its advantages. Building upon this method, we conducted three swift studies to investigate the potential of Chain-of-thought (CoT) data, query clarification data, and response evaluation data in enhancing model generalization. Subsequently, we embarked on a validation study to corroborate the findings of these swift studies. In this validation study, we developed training datasets tailored to each studied strategy and compared model performance with and without the use of these datasets. The results of the validation study aligned with the findings of the swift studies, validating the efficacy of our proposed method.
2502.13516
SPPD: Self-training with Process Preference Learning Using Dynamic Value Margin
cs.AI
Recently, enhancing the numerical and logical reasoning capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) has emerged as a research hotspot. Existing methods face several limitations: inference-phase techniques (e.g., Chain of Thoughts) rely on prompt selection and the pretrained knowledge; sentence-level Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) struggle with step-wise mathematical correctness and depend on stronger models distillation or human annotations; while Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches incur high GPU memory costs and unstable training. To address these, we propose \textbf{S}elf-training framework integrating \textbf{P}rocess \textbf{P}reference learning using \textbf{D}ynamic value margin (SPPD). SPPD leverages a process-based Markov Decision Process (MDP) and Bellman optimality equation to derive \textbf{dynamic value margin} on step-level preference optimization, which employs tree-based self-sampling on model responses \textbf{without any distillation} from other models. Furthermore, we theoretically prove that SPPD is \textbf{equivalent to on-policy policy gradient methods} under reward constraints. Experiments on 7B-scale models demonstrate superior performance across in-domain and out-domain mathematical benchmarks. We open-source our code at \href{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SSDPO-D-DCDD}{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SPPD-DCDD}.
2502.13519
MILE: Model-based Intervention Learning
cs.RO cs.AI cs.LG
Imitation learning techniques have been shown to be highly effective in real-world control scenarios, such as robotics. However, these approaches not only suffer from compounding error issues but also require human experts to provide complete trajectories. Although there exist interactive methods where an expert oversees the robot and intervenes if needed, these extensions usually only utilize the data collected during intervention periods and ignore the feedback signal hidden in non-intervention timesteps. In this work, we create a model to formulate how the interventions occur in such cases, and show that it is possible to learn a policy with just a handful of expert interventions. Our key insight is that it is possible to get crucial information about the quality of the current state and the optimality of the chosen action from expert feedback, regardless of the presence or the absence of intervention. We evaluate our method on various discrete and continuous simulation environments, a real-world robotic manipulation task, as well as a human subject study. Videos and the code can be found at https://liralab.usc.edu/mile .
2502.13520
A Large and Balanced Corpus for Fine-grained Arabic Readability Assessment
cs.CL
This paper introduces the Balanced Arabic Readability Evaluation Corpus BAREC, a large-scale, fine-grained dataset for Arabic readability assessment. BAREC consists of 68,182 sentences spanning 1+ million words, carefully curated to cover 19 readability levels, from kindergarten to postgraduate comprehension. The corpus balances genre diversity, topical coverage, and target audiences, offering a comprehensive resource for evaluating Arabic text complexity. The corpus was fully manually annotated by a large team of annotators. The average pairwise inter-annotator agreement, measured by Quadratic Weighted Kappa, is 81.3%, reflecting a high level of substantial agreement. Beyond presenting the corpus, we benchmark automatic readability assessment across different granularity levels, comparing a range of techniques. Our results highlight the challenges and opportunities in Arabic readability modeling, demonstrating competitive performance across various methods. To support research and education, we will make BAREC openly available, along with detailed annotation guidelines and benchmark results.
2502.13522
Enhancing Machine Learning Potentials through Transfer Learning across Chemical Elements
cs.LG cond-mat.mtrl-sci
Machine Learning Potentials (MLPs) can enable simulations of ab initio accuracy at orders of magnitude lower computational cost. However, their effectiveness hinges on the availability of considerable datasets to ensure robust generalization across chemical space and thermodynamic conditions. The generation of such datasets can be labor-intensive, highlighting the need for innovative methods to train MLPs in data-scarce scenarios. Here, we introduce transfer learning of potential energy surfaces between chemically similar elements. Specifically, we leverage the trained MLP for silicon to initialize and expedite the training of an MLP for germanium. Utilizing classical force field and ab initio datasets, we demonstrate that transfer learning surpasses traditional training from scratch in force prediction, leading to more stable simulations and improved temperature transferability. These advantages become even more pronounced as the training dataset size decreases. The out-of-target property analysis shows that transfer learning leads to beneficial but sometimes adversarial effects. Our findings demonstrate that transfer learning across chemical elements is a promising technique for developing accurate and numerically stable MLPs, particularly in a data-scarce regime.
2502.13524
MobileViM: A Light-weight and Dimension-independent Vision Mamba for 3D Medical Image Analysis
cs.CV cs.AI cs.LG cs.NI
Efficient evaluation of three-dimensional (3D) medical images is crucial for diagnostic and therapeutic practices in healthcare. Recent years have seen a substantial uptake in applying deep learning and computer vision to analyse and interpret medical images. Traditional approaches, such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and vision transformers (ViTs), face significant computational challenges, prompting the need for architectural advancements. Recent efforts have led to the introduction of novel architectures like the ``Mamba'' model as alternative solutions to traditional CNNs or ViTs. The Mamba model excels in the linear processing of one-dimensional data with low computational demands. However, Mamba's potential for 3D medical image analysis remains underexplored and could face significant computational challenges as the dimension increases. This manuscript presents MobileViM, a streamlined architecture for efficient segmentation of 3D medical images. In the MobileViM network, we invent a new dimension-independent mechanism and a dual-direction traversing approach to incorporate with a vision-Mamba-based framework. MobileViM also features a cross-scale bridging technique to improve efficiency and accuracy across various medical imaging modalities. With these enhancements, MobileViM achieves segmentation speeds exceeding 90 frames per second (FPS) on a single graphics processing unit (i.e., NVIDIA RTX 4090). This performance is over 24 FPS faster than the state-of-the-art deep learning models for processing 3D images with the same computational resources. In addition, experimental evaluations demonstrate that MobileViM delivers superior performance, with Dice similarity scores reaching 92.72%, 86.69%, 80.46%, and 77.43% for PENGWIN, BraTS2024, ATLAS, and Toothfairy2 datasets, respectively, which significantly surpasses existing models.
2502.13525
AS-GCL: Asymmetric Spectral Augmentation on Graph Contrastive Learning
cs.LG
Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) has emerged as the foremost approach for self-supervised learning on graph-structured data. GCL reduces reliance on labeled data by learning robust representations from various augmented views. However, existing GCL methods typically depend on consistent stochastic augmentations, which overlook their impact on the intrinsic structure of the spectral domain, thereby limiting the model's ability to generalize effectively. To address these limitations, we propose a novel paradigm called AS-GCL that incorporates asymmetric spectral augmentation for graph contrastive learning. A typical GCL framework consists of three key components: graph data augmentation, view encoding, and contrastive loss. Our method introduces significant enhancements to each of these components. Specifically, for data augmentation, we apply spectral-based augmentation to minimize spectral variations, strengthen structural invariance, and reduce noise. With respect to encoding, we employ parameter-sharing encoders with distinct diffusion operators to generate diverse, noise-resistant graph views. For contrastive loss, we introduce an upper-bound loss function that promotes generalization by maintaining a balanced distribution of intra- and inter-class distance. To our knowledge, we are the first to encode augmentation views of the spectral domain using asymmetric encoders. Extensive experiments on eight benchmark datasets across various node-level tasks demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method.
2502.13527
Exploiting Prefix-Tree in Structured Output Interfaces for Enhancing Jailbreak Attacking
cs.CR cs.AI
The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to significant applications but also introduced serious security threats, particularly from jailbreak attacks that manipulate output generation. These attacks utilize prompt engineering and logit manipulation to steer models toward harmful content, prompting LLM providers to implement filtering and safety alignment strategies. We investigate LLMs' safety mechanisms and their recent applications, revealing a new threat model targeting structured output interfaces, which enable attackers to manipulate the inner logit during LLM generation, requiring only API access permissions. To demonstrate this threat model, we introduce a black-box attack framework called AttackPrefixTree (APT). APT exploits structured output interfaces to dynamically construct attack patterns. By leveraging prefixes of models' safety refusal response and latent harmful outputs, APT effectively bypasses safety measures. Experiments on benchmark datasets indicate that this approach achieves higher attack success rate than existing methods. This work highlights the urgent need for LLM providers to enhance security protocols to address vulnerabilities arising from the interaction between safety patterns and structured outputs.
2502.13530
Breaking the Clusters: Uniformity-Optimization for Text-Based Sequential Recommendation
cs.IR
Traditional sequential recommendation (SR) methods heavily rely on explicit item IDs to capture user preferences over time. This reliance introduces critical limitations in cold-start scenarios and domain transfer tasks, where unseen items and new contexts often lack established ID mappings. To overcome these limitations, recent studies have shifted towards leveraging text-only information for recommendation, thereby improving model generalization and adaptability across domains. Although promising, text-based SR faces unique difficulties: items' text descriptions often share semantic similarities that lead to clustered item representations, compromising their uniformity, a property essential for promoting diversity and enhancing generalization in recommendation systems. In this paper, we explore a novel framework to improve the uniformity of item representations in text-based SR. Our analysis reveals that items within a sequence exhibit marked semantic similarity, meaning they are closer in representation than items overall, and that this effect is more pronounced for less popular items, which form tighter clusters compared to their more popular counterparts. Based on these findings, we propose UniT, a framework that employs three pairwise item sampling strategies: Unified General Sampling Strategy, Sequence-Driven Sampling Strategy, and Popularity-Driven Sampling Strategy. Each strategy applies varying degrees of repulsion to selectively adjust the distances between item pairs, thereby refining representation uniformity while considering both sequence context and item popularity. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art models, validating the effectiveness of UniT in enhancing both representation uniformity and recommendation accuracy.The source code is available at https://github.com/ccwwhhh/Model-Rec.
2502.13531
Quotients of skew polynomial rings: new constructions of division algebras and MRD codes
math.CO cs.IT math.IT math.RA
We achieve new results on skew polynomial rings and their quotients, including the first explicit example of a skew polynomial ring where the ratio of the degree of a skew polynomial to the degree of its bound is not extremal. These methods lead to the construction of new (not necessarily associative) division algebras and maximum rank distance (MRD) codes over both finite and infinite division rings. In particular, we construct new non-associative division algebras whose right nucleus is a central simple algebra having degree greater than 1. Over finite fields, we obtain new semifields and MRD codes for infinitely many choices of parameters. These families extend and contain many of the best previously known constructions.
2502.13533
Train Small, Infer Large: Memory-Efficient LoRA Training for Large Language Models
cs.LG cs.AI cs.CL
Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced natural language processing with exceptional task generalization capabilities. Low-Rank Adaption (LoRA) offers a cost-effective fine-tuning solution, freezing the original model parameters and training only lightweight, low-rank adapter matrices. However, the memory footprint of LoRA is largely dominated by the original model parameters. To mitigate this, we propose LoRAM, a memory-efficient LoRA training scheme founded on the intuition that many neurons in over-parameterized LLMs have low training utility but are essential for inference. LoRAM presents a unique twist: it trains on a pruned (small) model to obtain pruned low-rank matrices, which are then recovered and utilized with the original (large) model for inference. Additionally, minimal-cost continual pre-training, performed by the model publishers in advance, aligns the knowledge discrepancy between pruned and original models. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of LoRAM across various pruning strategies and downstream tasks. For a model with 70 billion parameters, LoRAM enables training on a GPU with only 20G HBM, replacing an A100-80G GPU for LoRA training and 15 GPUs for full fine-tuning. Specifically, QLoRAM implemented by structured pruning combined with 4-bit quantization, for LLaMA-3.1-70B (LLaMA-2-70B), reduces the parameter storage cost that dominates the memory usage in low-rank matrix training by 15.81$\times$ (16.95$\times$), while achieving dominant performance gains over both the original LLaMA-3.1-70B (LLaMA-2-70B) and LoRA-trained LLaMA-3.1-8B (LLaMA-2-13B).
2502.13534
Solving the Encoding Bottleneck: Of the HHL Algorithm, By the HHL Algorithm
quant-ph cs.AI cs.LG
The Harrow-Hassidim-Lloyd (HHL) algorithm offers exponential speedup for solving the quantum linear-system problem. But some caveats for the speedup could be hard to met. One of the difficulties is the encoding bottleneck, i.e., the efficient preparation of the initial quantum state. To prepare an arbitrary $N$-dimensional state exactly, existing state-preparation approaches generally require a runtime of $O(N)$, which will ruin the speedup of the HHL algorithm. Here we show that the states can be prepared approximately with a runtime of $O(poly(\log N))$ by employing a slightly modified version of the HHL algorithm itself. Thus, applying this approach to prepare the initial state of the original HHL algorithm can preserve the exponential speedup advantage. It can also serve as a standalone solution for other applications demanding rapid state preparation.
2502.13539
Bursting Filter Bubble: Enhancing Serendipity Recommendations with Aligned Large Language Models
cs.IR
Recommender systems (RSs) often suffer from the feedback loop phenomenon, e.g., RSs are trained on data biased by their recommendations. This leads to the filter bubble effect that reinforces homogeneous content and reduces user satisfaction. To this end, serendipity recommendations, which offer unexpected yet relevant items, are proposed. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown potential in serendipity prediction due to their extensive world knowledge and reasoning capabilities. However, they still face challenges in aligning serendipity judgments with human assessments, handling long user behavior sequences, and meeting the latency requirements of industrial RSs. To address these issues, we propose SERAL (Serendipity Recommendations with Aligned Large Language Models), a framework comprising three stages: (1) Cognition Profile Generation to compress user behavior into multi-level profiles; (2) SerenGPT Alignment to align serendipity judgments with human preferences using enriched training data; and (3) Nearline Adaptation to integrate SerenGPT into industrial RSs pipelines efficiently. Online experiments demonstrate that SERAL improves exposure ratio (PVR), clicks, and transactions of serendipitous items by 5.7%, 29.56%, and 27.6%, enhancing user experience without much impact on overall revenue. Now, it has been fully deployed in the "Guess What You Like" of the Taobao App homepage.
2502.13542
Activation-aware Probe-Query: Effective Key-Value Retrieval for Long-Context LLMs Inference
cs.CL cs.AI
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have showcased exceptional performance in long-context tasks, while facing significant inference efficiency challenges with limited GPU memory. Existing solutions first proposed the sliding-window approach to accumulate a set of historical \textbf{key-value} (KV) pairs for reuse, then further improvements selectively retain its subsets at each step. However, due to the sparse attention distribution across a long context, it is hard to identify and recall relevant KV pairs, as the attention is distracted by massive candidate pairs. Additionally, we found it promising to select representative tokens as probe-Query in each sliding window to effectively represent the entire context, which is an approach overlooked by existing methods. Thus, we propose \textbf{ActQKV}, a training-free, \textbf{Act}ivation-aware approach that dynamically determines probe-\textbf{Q}uery and leverages it to retrieve the relevant \textbf{KV} pairs for inference. Specifically, ActQKV monitors a token-level indicator, Activation Bias, within each context window, enabling the proper construction of probe-Query for retrieval at pre-filling stage. To accurately recall the relevant KV pairs and minimize the irrelevant ones, we design a dynamic KV cut-off mechanism guided by information density across layers at the decoding stage. Experiments on the Long-Bench and $\infty$ Benchmarks demonstrate its state-of-the-art performance with competitive inference quality and resource efficiency.
2502.13544
From Sub-Ability Diagnosis to Human-Aligned Generation: Bridging the Gap for Text Length Control via MARKERGEN
cs.CL cs.AI
Despite the rapid progress of large language models (LLMs), their length-controllable text generation (LCTG) ability remains below expectations, posing a major limitation for practical applications. Existing methods mainly focus on end-to-end training to reinforce adherence to length constraints. However, the lack of decomposition and targeted enhancement of LCTG sub-abilities restricts further progress.To bridge this gap, we conduct a bottom-up decomposition of LCTG sub-abilities with human patterns as reference and perform a detailed error analysis.On this basis, we propose MarkerGen, a simple-yet-effective plug-and-play approach that:(1) mitigates LLM fundamental deficiencies via external tool integration;(2) conducts explicit length modeling with dynamically inserted markers;(3) employs a three-stage generation scheme to better align length constraints while maintaining content quality.Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that MarkerGen significantly improves LCTG across various settings, exhibiting outstanding effectiveness and generalizability.
2502.13548
Detecting Linguistic Bias in Government Documents Using Large language Models
cs.CL
This paper addresses the critical need for detecting bias in government documents, an underexplored area with significant implications for governance. Existing methodologies often overlook the unique context and far-reaching impacts of governmental documents, potentially obscuring embedded biases that shape public policy and citizen-government interactions. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Dutch Government Data for Bias Detection (DGDB), a dataset sourced from the Dutch House of Representatives and annotated for bias by experts. We fine-tune several BERT-based models on this dataset and compare their performance with that of generative language models. Additionally, we conduct a comprehensive error analysis that includes explanations of the models' predictions. Our findings demonstrate that fine-tuned models achieve strong performance and significantly outperform generative language models, indicating the effectiveness of DGDB for bias detection. This work underscores the importance of labeled datasets for bias detection in various languages and contributes to more equitable governance practices.
2502.13550
STaR-SQL: Self-Taught Reasoner for Text-to-SQL
cs.CL
Generating step-by-step "chain-of-thought" rationales has proven effective for improving the performance of large language models on complex reasoning tasks. However, applying such techniques to structured tasks, such as text-to-SQL, remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we introduce Self-Taught Reasoner for text-to-SQL (STaR-SQL), a novel approach that reframes SQL query generation as a reasoning-driven process. Our method prompts the LLM to produce detailed reasoning steps for SQL queries and fine-tunes it on rationales that lead to correct outcomes. Unlike traditional methods, STaR-SQL dedicates additional test-time computation to reasoning, thereby positioning LLMs as spontaneous reasoners rather than mere prompt-based agents. To further scale the inference process, we incorporate an outcome-supervised reward model (ORM) as a verifier, which enhances SQL query accuracy. Experimental results on the challenging Spider benchmark demonstrate that STaR-SQL significantly improves text-to-SQL performance, achieving an execution accuracy of 86.6%. This surpasses a few-shot baseline by 31.6% and a baseline fine-tuned to predict answers directly by 18.0%. Additionally, STaR-SQL outperforms agent-like prompting methods that leverage more powerful yet closed-source models such as GPT-4. These findings underscore the potential of reasoning-augmented training for structured tasks and open the door to extending self-improving reasoning models to text-to-SQL generation and beyond.
2502.13555
Democratizing Large Language Model-Based Graph Data Augmentation via Latent Knowledge Graphs
cs.LG cs.AI
Data augmentation is necessary for graph representation learning due to the scarcity and noise present in graph data. Most of the existing augmentation methods overlook the context information inherited from the dataset as they rely solely on the graph structure for augmentation. Despite the success of some large language model-based (LLM) graph learning methods, they are mostly white-box which require access to the weights or latent features from the open-access LLMs, making them difficult to be democratized for everyone as existing LLMs are mostly closed-source for commercial considerations. To overcome these limitations, we propose a black-box context-driven graph data augmentation approach, with the guidance of LLMs -- DemoGraph. Leveraging the text prompt as context-related information, we task the LLM with generating knowledge graphs (KGs), which allow us to capture the structural interactions from the text outputs. We then design a dynamic merging schema to stochastically integrate the LLM-generated KGs into the original graph during training. To control the sparsity of the augmented graph, we further devise a granularity-aware prompting strategy and an instruction fine-tuning module, which seamlessly generates text prompts according to different granularity levels of the dataset. Extensive experiments on various graph learning tasks validate the effectiveness of our method over existing graph data augmentation methods. Notably, our approach excels in scenarios involving electronic health records (EHRs), which validates its maximal utilization of contextual knowledge, leading to enhanced predictive performance and interpretability.
2502.13559
Implementation of an IEEE 802.11ax-Based Maritime Mesh Network in the Red Sea
eess.SY cs.SY
In this article, we explore the limitations of satellite phones in meeting the communication needs of fishermen operating in the Red Sea. We propose AX-MMN, a maritime mesh network based on the IEEE 802.11ax standard, to address these shortcomings of satellite phones and outline AX-MMN's system architecture. To validate the performance of AX-MMN, we conduct extensive real-world experiments, demonstrating its potential to enhance maritime connectivity significantly. We also discuss the broader benefits of AX-MMN, particularly for fishermen in underdeveloped East African countries bordering the Red Sea, emphasizing its capacity to improve their communication capabilities and overall quality of life.
2502.13562
Are Large Language Models In-Context Graph Learners?
cs.LG cs.AI
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable in-context reasoning capabilities across a wide range of tasks, particularly with unstructured inputs such as language or images. However, LLMs struggle to handle structured data, such as graphs, due to their lack of understanding of non-Euclidean structures. As a result, without additional fine-tuning, their performance significantly lags behind that of graph neural networks (GNNs) in graph learning tasks. In this paper, we show that learning on graph data can be conceptualized as a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) process, where specific instances (e.g., nodes or edges) act as queries, and the graph itself serves as the retrieved context. Building on this insight, we propose a series of RAG frameworks to enhance the in-context learning capabilities of LLMs for graph learning tasks. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that our proposed RAG frameworks significantly improve LLM performance on graph-based tasks, particularly in scenarios where a pretrained LLM must be used without modification or accessed via an API.
2502.13564
PRIV-QA: Privacy-Preserving Question Answering for Cloud Large Language Models
cs.CL
The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) is redefining the landscape of human-computer interaction, and their integration into various user-service applications is becoming increasingly prevalent. However, transmitting user data to cloud-based LLMs presents significant risks of data breaches and unauthorized access to personal identification information. In this paper, we propose a privacy preservation pipeline for protecting privacy and sensitive information during interactions between users and LLMs in practical LLM usage scenarios. We construct SensitiveQA, the first privacy open-ended question-answering dataset. It comprises 57k interactions in Chinese and English, encompassing a diverse range of user-sensitive information within the conversations. Our proposed solution employs a multi-stage strategy aimed at preemptively securing user information while simultaneously preserving the response quality of cloud-based LLMs. Experimental validation underscores our method's efficacy in balancing privacy protection with maintaining robust interaction quality. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/ligw1998/PRIV-QA.
2502.13566
Extracting Social Connections from Finnish Karelian Refugee Interviews Using LLMs
cs.CL
We performed a zero-shot information extraction study on a historical collection of 89,339 brief Finnish-language interviews of refugee families relocated post-WWII from Finnish Eastern Karelia. Our research objective is two-fold. First, we aim to extract social organizations and hobbies from the free text of the interviews, separately for each family member. These can act as a proxy variable indicating the degree of social integration of refugees in their new environment. Second, we aim to evaluate several alternative ways to approach this task, comparing a number of generative models and a supervised learning approach, to gain a broader insight into the relative merits of these different approaches and their applicability in similar studies. We find that the best generative model (GPT-4) is roughly on par with human performance, at an F-score of 88.8%. Interestingly, the best open generative model (Llama-3-70B-Instruct) reaches almost the same performance, at 87.7% F-score, demonstrating that open models are becoming a viable alternative for some practical tasks even on non-English data. Additionally, we test a supervised learning alternative, where we fine-tune a Finnish BERT model (FinBERT) using GPT-4 generated training data. By this method, we achieved an F-score of 84.1% already with 6K interviews up to an F-score of 86.3% with 30k interviews. Such an approach would be particularly appealing in cases where the computational resources are limited, or there is a substantial mass of data to process.
2502.13568
LSR-Adapt: Ultra-Efficient Parameter Tuning with Matrix Low Separation Rank Kernel Adaptation
cs.LG cs.CL
Imposing an effective structural assumption on neural network weight matrices has been the major paradigm for designing Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) systems for adapting modern large pre-trained models to various downstream tasks. However, low rank based adaptation has become increasingly challenging due to the sheer scale of modern large language models. In this paper, we propose an effective kernelization to further reduce the number of parameters required for adaptation tasks. Specifically, from the classical idea in numerical analysis regarding matrix Low-Separation-Rank (LSR) representations, we develop a kernel using this representation for the low rank adapter matrices of the linear layers from large networks, named the Low Separation Rank Adaptation (LSR-Adapt) kernel. With the ultra-efficient kernel representation of the low rank adapter matrices, we manage to achieve state-of-the-art performance with even higher accuracy with almost half the number of parameters as compared to conventional low rank based methods. This structural assumption also opens the door to further GPU-side optimizations due to the highly parallelizable nature of Kronecker computations.
2502.13569
Model Evolution Framework with Genetic Algorithm for Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning
cs.AI
Multi-task reinforcement learning employs a single policy to complete various tasks, aiming to develop an agent with generalizability across different scenarios. Given the shared characteristics of tasks, the agent's learning efficiency can be enhanced through parameter sharing. Existing approaches typically use a routing network to generate specific routes for each task and reconstruct a set of modules into diverse models to complete multiple tasks simultaneously. However, due to the inherent difference between tasks, it is crucial to allocate resources based on task difficulty, which is constrained by the model's structure. To this end, we propose a Model Evolution framework with Genetic Algorithm (MEGA), which enables the model to evolve during training according to the difficulty of the tasks. When the current model is insufficient for certain tasks, the framework will automatically incorporate additional modules, enhancing the model's capabilities. Moreover, to adapt to our model evolution framework, we introduce a genotype module-level model, using binary sequences as genotype policies for model reconstruction, while leveraging a non-gradient genetic algorithm to optimize these genotype policies. Unlike routing networks with fixed output dimensions, our approach allows for the dynamic adjustment of the genotype policy length, enabling it to accommodate models with a varying number of modules. We conducted experiments on various robotics manipulation tasks in the Meta-World benchmark. Our state-of-the-art performance demonstrated the effectiveness of the MEGA framework. We will release our source code to the public.
2502.13570
An Efficient Permutation-Based Kernel Two-Sample Test
stat.ML cs.LG math.ST stat.ME stat.TH
Two-sample hypothesis testing-determining whether two sets of data are drawn from the same distribution-is a fundamental problem in statistics and machine learning with broad scientific applications. In the context of nonparametric testing, maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) has gained popularity as a test statistic due to its flexibility and strong theoretical foundations. However, its use in large-scale scenarios is plagued by high computational costs. In this work, we use a Nystr\"om approximation of the MMD to design a computationally efficient and practical testing algorithm while preserving statistical guarantees. Our main result is a finite-sample bound on the power of the proposed test for distributions that are sufficiently separated with respect to the MMD. The derived separation rate matches the known minimax optimal rate in this setting. We support our findings with a series of numerical experiments, emphasizing realistic scientific data.
2502.13571
Diffusion Model Agnostic Social Influence Maximization in Hyperbolic Space
cs.SI cs.LG
The Influence Maximization (IM) problem aims to find a small set of influential users to maximize their influence spread in a social network. Traditional methods rely on fixed diffusion models with known parameters, limiting their generalization to real-world scenarios. In contrast, graph representation learning-based methods have gained wide attention for overcoming this limitation by learning user representations to capture influence characteristics. However, existing studies are built on Euclidean space, which fails to effectively capture the latent hierarchical features of social influence distribution. As a result, users' influence spread cannot be effectively measured through the learned representations. To alleviate these limitations, we propose HIM, a novel diffusion model agnostic method that leverages hyperbolic representation learning to estimate users' potential influence spread from social propagation data. HIM consists of two key components. First, a hyperbolic influence representation module encodes influence spread patterns from network structure and historical influence activations into expressive hyperbolic user representations. Hence, the influence magnitude of users can be reflected through the geometric properties of hyperbolic space, where highly influential users tend to cluster near the space origin. Second, a novel adaptive seed selection module is developed to flexibly and effectively select seed users using the positional information of learned user representations. Extensive experiments on five network datasets demonstrate the superior effectiveness and efficiency of our method for the IM problem with unknown diffusion model parameters, highlighting its potential for large-scale real-world social networks.
2502.13573
Noise May Contain Transferable Knowledge: Understanding Semi-supervised Heterogeneous Domain Adaptation from an Empirical Perspective
cs.LG
Semi-supervised heterogeneous domain adaptation (SHDA) addresses learning across domains with distinct feature representations and distributions, where source samples are labeled while most target samples are unlabeled, with only a small fraction labeled. Moreover, there is no one-to-one correspondence between source and target samples. Although various SHDA methods have been developed to tackle this problem, the nature of the knowledge transferred across heterogeneous domains remains unclear. This paper delves into this question from an empirical perspective. We conduct extensive experiments on about 330 SHDA tasks, employing two supervised learning methods and seven representative SHDA methods. Surprisingly, our observations indicate that both the category and feature information of source samples do not significantly impact the performance of the target domain. Additionally, noise drawn from simple distributions, when used as source samples, may contain transferable knowledge. Based on this insight, we perform a series of experiments to uncover the underlying principles of transferable knowledge in SHDA. Specifically, we design a unified Knowledge Transfer Framework (KTF) for SHDA. Based on the KTF, we find that the transferable knowledge in SHDA primarily stems from the transferability and discriminability of the source domain. Consequently, ensuring those properties in source samples, regardless of their origin (e.g., image, text, noise), can enhance the effectiveness of knowledge transfer in SHDA tasks. The codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/yyyaoyuan/SHDA.
2502.13574
RestoreGrad: Signal Restoration Using Conditional Denoising Diffusion Models with Jointly Learned Prior
eess.IV cs.LG eess.AS
Denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) can be utilized for recovering a clean signal from its degraded observation(s) by conditioning the model on the degraded signal. The degraded signals are themselves contaminated versions of the clean signals; due to this correlation, they may encompass certain useful information about the target clean data distribution. However, existing adoption of the standard Gaussian as the prior distribution in turn discards such information, resulting in sub-optimal performance. In this paper, we propose to improve conditional DDPMs for signal restoration by leveraging a more informative prior that is jointly learned with the diffusion model. The proposed framework, called RestoreGrad, seamlessly integrates DDPMs into the variational autoencoder framework and exploits the correlation between the degraded and clean signals to encode a better diffusion prior. On speech and image restoration tasks, we show that RestoreGrad demonstrates faster convergence (5-10 times fewer training steps) to achieve better quality of restored signals over existing DDPM baselines, and improved robustness to using fewer sampling steps in inference time (2-2.5 times fewer), advocating the advantages of leveraging jointly learned prior for efficiency improvements in the diffusion process.
2502.13575
ETS: Efficient Tree Search for Inference-Time Scaling
cs.LG
Test-time compute scaling has emerged as a new axis along which to improve model accuracy, where additional computation is used at inference time to allow the model to think longer for more challenging problems. One promising approach for test-time compute scaling is search against a process reward model, where a model generates multiple potential candidates at each step of the search, and these partial trajectories are then scored by a separate reward model in order to guide the search process. The diversity of trajectories in the tree search process affects the accuracy of the search, since increasing diversity promotes more exploration. However, this diversity comes at a cost, as divergent trajectories have less KV sharing, which means they consume more memory and slow down the search process. Previous search methods either do not perform sufficient exploration, or else explore diverse trajectories but have high latency. We address this challenge by proposing Efficient Tree Search (ETS), which promotes KV sharing by pruning redundant trajectories while maintaining necessary diverse trajectories. ETS incorporates a linear programming cost model to promote KV cache sharing by penalizing the number of nodes retained, while incorporating a semantic coverage term into the cost model to ensure that we retain trajectories which are semantically different. We demonstrate how ETS can achieve 1.8$\times$ reduction in average KV cache size during the search process, leading to 1.4$\times$ increased throughput relative to prior state-of-the-art methods, with minimal accuracy degradation and without requiring any custom kernel implementation. Code is available at: https://github.com/SqueezeAILab/ETS.
2502.13576
Beyond One-Size-Fits-All: Tailored Benchmarks for Efficient Evaluation
cs.LG cs.AI
Evaluating models on large benchmarks is very resource-intensive, especially during the period of rapid model evolution. Existing efficient evaluation methods estimate the performance of target models by testing them only on a small and static coreset of the benchmark, which is derived from the publicly available evaluation results of source models. These methods rely on the assumption that target models have high prediction consistency with source models. However, we demonstrate that it doesn't generalize well in practice. To alleviate the inconsistency issue, we present TailoredBench, a method that conducts customized evaluation tailored to each target model. Specifically, a Global-coreset is first constructed as a probe to identify the most consistent source models for each target model with an adaptive source model selection strategy. Afterwards, a scalable K-Medoids clustering algorithm is proposed to extend the Global-coreset to a tailored Native-coreset for each target model. According to the predictions on Native-coresets, we obtain the performance of target models on the whole benchmark with a calibrated estimation strategy. Comprehensive experiments on 5 benchmarks across over 300 models demonstrate that compared to best performing baselines, TailoredBench achieves an average reduction of 31.4% in MAE of accuracy estimates under the same inference budgets, showcasing strong effectiveness and generalizability.
2502.13577
Unraveling the Localized Latents: Learning Stratified Manifold Structures in LLM Embedding Space with Sparse Mixture-of-Experts
cs.LG
However, real-world data often exhibit complex local structures that can be challenging for single-model approaches with a smooth global manifold in the embedding space to unravel. In this work, we conjecture that in the latent space of these large language models, the embeddings live in a local manifold structure with different dimensions depending on the perplexities and domains of the input data, commonly referred to as a Stratified Manifold structure, which in combination form a structured space known as a Stratified Space. To investigate the validity of this structural claim, we propose an analysis framework based on a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model where each expert is implemented with a simple dictionary learning algorithm at varying sparsity levels. By incorporating an attention-based soft-gating network, we verify that our model learns specialized sub-manifolds for an ensemble of input data sources, reflecting the semantic stratification in LLM embedding space. We further analyze the intrinsic dimensions of these stratified sub-manifolds and present extensive statistics on expert assignments, gating entropy, and inter-expert distances. Our experimental results demonstrate that our method not only validates the claim of a stratified manifold structure in the LLM embedding space, but also provides interpretable clusters that align with the intrinsic semantic variations of the input data.
2502.13581
ActionPiece: Contextually Tokenizing Action Sequences for Generative Recommendation
cs.IR cs.LG
Generative recommendation (GR) is an emerging paradigm where user actions are tokenized into discrete token patterns and autoregressively generated as predictions. However, existing GR models tokenize each action independently, assigning the same fixed tokens to identical actions across all sequences without considering contextual relationships. This lack of context-awareness can lead to suboptimal performance, as the same action may hold different meanings depending on its surrounding context. To address this issue, we propose ActionPiece to explicitly incorporate context when tokenizing action sequences. In ActionPiece, each action is represented as a set of item features, which serve as the initial tokens. Given the action sequence corpora, we construct the vocabulary by merging feature patterns as new tokens, based on their co-occurrence frequency both within individual sets and across adjacent sets. Considering the unordered nature of feature sets, we further introduce set permutation regularization, which produces multiple segmentations of action sequences with the same semantics. Experiments on public datasets demonstrate that ActionPiece consistently outperforms existing action tokenization methods, improving NDCG@$10$ by $6.00\%$ to $12.82\%$.
2502.13584
Multi-Target Radar Search and Track Using Sequence-Capable Deep Reinforcement Learning
cs.LG cs.SY eess.SY
The research addresses sensor task management for radar systems, focusing on efficiently searching and tracking multiple targets using reinforcement learning. The approach develops a 3D simulation environment with an active electronically scanned array radar, using a multi-target tracking algorithm to improve observation data quality. Three neural network architectures were compared including an approach using fated recurrent units with multi-headed self-attention. Two pre-training techniques were applied: behavior cloning to approximate a random search strategy and an auto-encoder to pre-train the feature extractor. Experimental results revealed that search performance was relatively consistent across most methods. The real challenge emerged in simultaneously searching and tracking targets. The multi-headed self-attention architecture demonstrated the most promising results, highlighting the potential of sequence-capable architectures in handling dynamic tracking scenarios. The key contribution lies in demonstrating how reinforcement learning can optimize sensor management, potentially improving radar systems' ability to identify and track multiple targets in complex environments.
2502.13592
Don't Stop the Multi-Party! On Generating Synthetic Multi-Party Conversations with Constraints
cs.CL
Multi-Party Conversations (MPCs) are widely studied across disciplines, with social media as a primary data source due to their accessibility. However, these datasets raise privacy concerns and often reflect platform-specific properties. For example, interactions between speakers may be limited due to rigid platform structures (e.g., threads, tree-like discussions), which yield overly simplistic interaction patterns (e.g., as a consequence of ``reply-to'' links). This work explores the feasibility of generating diverse MPCs with instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) by providing deterministic constraints such as dialogue structure and participants' stance. We investigate two complementary strategies of leveraging LLMs in this context: (i.) LLMs as MPC generators, where we task the LLM to generate a whole MPC at once and (ii.) LLMs as MPC parties, where the LLM generates one turn of the conversation at a time, provided the conversation history. We next introduce an analytical framework to evaluate compliance with the constraints, content quality, and interaction complexity for both strategies. Finally, we assess the quality of obtained MPCs via human annotation and LLM-as-a-judge evaluations. We find stark differences among LLMs, with only some being able to generate high-quality MPCs. We also find that turn-by-turn generation yields better conformance to constraints and higher linguistic variability than generating MPCs in one pass. Nonetheless, our structural and qualitative evaluation indicates that both generation strategies can yield high-quality MPCs.
2502.13593
Toward Robust Non-Transferable Learning: A Survey and Benchmark
cs.LG cs.CR cs.CV
Over the past decades, researchers have primarily focused on improving the generalization abilities of models, with limited attention given to regulating such generalization. However, the ability of models to generalize to unintended data (e.g., harmful or unauthorized data) can be exploited by malicious adversaries in unforeseen ways, potentially resulting in violations of model ethics. Non-transferable learning (NTL), a task aimed at reshaping the generalization abilities of deep learning models, was proposed to address these challenges. While numerous methods have been proposed in this field, a comprehensive review of existing progress and a thorough analysis of current limitations remain lacking. In this paper, we bridge this gap by presenting the first comprehensive survey on NTL and introducing NTLBench, the first benchmark to evaluate NTL performance and robustness within a unified framework. Specifically, we first introduce the task settings, general framework, and criteria of NTL, followed by a summary of NTL approaches. Furthermore, we emphasize the often-overlooked issue of robustness against various attacks that can destroy the non-transferable mechanism established by NTL. Experiments conducted via NTLBench verify the limitations of existing NTL methods in robustness. Finally, we discuss the practical applications of NTL, along with its future directions and associated challenges.
2502.13595
MMTEB: Massive Multilingual Text Embedding Benchmark
cs.CL cs.AI cs.IR
Text embeddings are typically evaluated on a limited set of tasks, which are constrained by language, domain, and task diversity. To address these limitations and provide a more comprehensive evaluation, we introduce the Massive Multilingual Text Embedding Benchmark (MMTEB) - a large-scale, community-driven expansion of MTEB, covering over 500 quality-controlled evaluation tasks across 250+ languages. MMTEB includes a diverse set of challenging, novel tasks such as instruction following, long-document retrieval, and code retrieval, representing the largest multilingual collection of evaluation tasks for embedding models to date. Using this collection, we develop several highly multilingual benchmarks, which we use to evaluate a representative set of models. We find that while large language models (LLMs) with billions of parameters can achieve state-of-the-art performance on certain language subsets and task categories, the best-performing publicly available model is multilingual-e5-large-instruct with only 560 million parameters. To facilitate accessibility and reduce computational cost, we introduce a novel downsampling method based on inter-task correlation, ensuring a diverse selection while preserving relative model rankings. Furthermore, we optimize tasks such as retrieval by sampling hard negatives, creating smaller but effective splits. These optimizations allow us to introduce benchmarks that drastically reduce computational demands. For instance, our newly introduced zero-shot English benchmark maintains a ranking order similar to the full-scale version but at a fraction of the computational cost.
2502.13603
Efficient Safety Retrofitting Against Jailbreaking for LLMs
cs.CL cs.AI cs.LG
Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is an efficient alignment technique that steers LLMs towards preferable outputs by training on preference data, bypassing the need for explicit reward models. Its simplicity enables easy adaptation to various domains and safety requirements. This paper examines DPO's effectiveness in model safety against jailbreaking attacks while minimizing data requirements and training costs. We introduce Egida, a dataset expanded from multiple sources, which includes 27 different safety topics and 18 different attack styles, complemented with synthetic and human labels. This data is used to boost the safety of state-of-the-art LLMs (Llama-3.1-8B/70B-Instruct, Qwen-2.5-7B/72B-Instruct) across topics and attack styles. In addition to safety evaluations, we assess their post-alignment performance degradation in general purpose tasks, and their tendency to over refusal. Following the proposed methodology, trained models reduce their Attack Success Rate by 10%-30%, using small training efforts (2,000 samples) with low computational cost (3\$ for 8B models, 20\$ for 72B models). Safety aligned models generalize to unseen topics and attack styles, with the most successful attack style reaching a success rate around 5%. Size and family are found to strongly influence model malleability towards safety, pointing at the importance of pre-training choices. To validate our findings, a large independent assessment of human preference agreement with Llama-Guard-3-8B is conducted by the authors and the associated dataset Egida-HSafe is released. Overall, this study illustrates how affordable and accessible it is to enhance LLM safety using DPO while outlining its current limitations. All datasets and models are released to enable reproducibility and further research.
2502.13604
BeamLoRA: Beam-Constraint Low-Rank Adaptation
cs.CL
Due to the demand for efficient fine-tuning of large language models, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has been widely adopted as one of the most effective parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods. Nevertheless, while LoRA improves efficiency, there remains room for improvement in accuracy. Herein, we adopt a novel perspective to assess the characteristics of LoRA ranks. The results reveal that different ranks within the LoRA modules not only exhibit varying levels of importance but also evolve dynamically throughout the fine-tuning process, which may limit the performance of LoRA. Based on these findings, we propose BeamLoRA, which conceptualizes each LoRA module as a beam where each rank naturally corresponds to a potential sub-solution, and the fine-tuning process becomes a search for the optimal sub-solution combination. BeamLoRA dynamically eliminates underperforming sub-solutions while expanding the parameter space for promising ones, enhancing performance with a fixed rank. Extensive experiments across three base models and 12 datasets spanning math reasoning, code generation, and commonsense reasoning demonstrate that BeamLoRA consistently enhances the performance of LoRA, surpassing the other baseline methods.
2502.13606
LaVCa: LLM-assisted Visual Cortex Captioning
q-bio.NC cs.AI cs.CL cs.CV cs.LG
Understanding the property of neural populations (or voxels) in the human brain can advance our comprehension of human perceptual and cognitive processing capabilities and contribute to developing brain-inspired computer models. Recent encoding models using deep neural networks (DNNs) have successfully predicted voxel-wise activity. However, interpreting the properties that explain voxel responses remains challenging because of the black-box nature of DNNs. As a solution, we propose LLM-assisted Visual Cortex Captioning (LaVCa), a data-driven approach that uses large language models (LLMs) to generate natural-language captions for images to which voxels are selective. By applying LaVCa for image-evoked brain activity, we demonstrate that LaVCa generates captions that describe voxel selectivity more accurately than the previously proposed method. Furthermore, the captions generated by LaVCa quantitatively capture more detailed properties than the existing method at both the inter-voxel and intra-voxel levels. Furthermore, a more detailed analysis of the voxel-specific properties generated by LaVCa reveals fine-grained functional differentiation within regions of interest (ROIs) in the visual cortex and voxels that simultaneously represent multiple distinct concepts. These findings offer profound insights into human visual representations by assigning detailed captions throughout the visual cortex while highlighting the potential of LLM-based methods in understanding brain representations. Please check out our webpage at https://sites.google.com/view/lavca-llm/
2502.13607
Environmental Influences on Collaboration Network Evolution: A Historical Analysis
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
We analysed two large collaboration networks -- the Microsoft Academic Graph (1800-2020) and Internet Movie Database (1900-2020) -- to quantify network responses to major historical events. Our analysis revealed four properties of network-environment interaction. First, historical events can influence network evolution, with effects persisting far longer than previously recognised; the academic network showed 45\% declines during World Wars and 90\% growth during La Belle Epoque. Second, node and edge processes exhibited different environmental sensitivities; while node addition/removal tracked historical events, edge formation maintained stable statistical properties even during major disruptions. Third, different collaboration networks showed distinct response patterns; academic networks displayed sharp disruptions and rapid recoveries, while entertainment networks showed gradual changes and greater resilience. Fourth, both networks developed increasing resilience. Our results provide new insights for modelling network evolution and managing collaborative systems during periods of external disruption.
2502.13619
Complex Ontology Matching with Large Language Model Embeddings
cs.CL cs.AI
Ontology, and more broadly, Knowledge Graph Matching is a challenging task in which expressiveness has not been fully addressed. Despite the increasing use of embeddings and language models for this task, approaches for generating expressive correspondences still do not take full advantage of these models, in particular, large language models (LLMs). This paper proposes to integrate LLMs into an approach for generating expressive correspondences based on alignment need and ABox-based relation discovery. The generation of correspondences is performed by matching similar surroundings of instance sub-graphs. The integration of LLMs results in different architectural modifications, including label similarity, sub-graph matching, and entity matching. The performance word embeddings, sentence embeddings, and LLM-based embeddings, was compared. The results demonstrate that integrating LLMs surpasses all other models, enhancing the baseline version of the approach with a 45\% increase in F-measure.
2502.13621
Decentralized Planning Using Probabilistic Hyperproperties
cs.LO cs.AI
Multi-agent planning under stochastic dynamics is usually formalised using decentralized (partially observable) Markov decision processes ( MDPs) and reachability or expected reward specifications. In this paper, we propose a different approach: we use an MDP describing how a single agent operates in an environment and probabilistic hyperproperties to capture desired temporal objectives for a set of decentralized agents operating in the environment. We extend existing approaches for model checking probabilistic hyperproperties to handle temporal formulae relating paths of different agents, thus requiring the self-composition between multiple MDPs. Using several case studies, we demonstrate that our approach provides a flexible and expressive framework to broaden the specification capabilities with respect to existing planning techniques. Additionally, we establish a close connection between a subclass of probabilistic hyperproperties and planning for a particular type of Dec-MDPs, for both of which we show undecidability. This lays the ground for the use of existing decentralized planning tools in the field of probabilistic hyperproperty verification.
2502.13622
REFIND: Retrieval-Augmented Factuality Hallucination Detection in Large Language Models
cs.CL cs.AI
Hallucinations in large language model (LLM) outputs severely limit their reliability in knowledge-intensive tasks such as question answering. To address this challenge, we introduce REFIND (Retrieval-augmented Factuality hallucINation Detection), a novel framework that detects hallucinated spans within LLM outputs by directly leveraging retrieved documents. As part of the REFIND, we propose the Context Sensitivity Ratio (CSR), a novel metric that quantifies the sensitivity of LLM outputs to retrieved evidence. This innovative approach enables REFIND to efficiently and accurately detect hallucinations, setting it apart from existing methods. In the evaluation, REFIND demonstrated robustness across nine languages, including low-resource settings, and significantly outperformed baseline models, achieving superior IoU scores in identifying hallucinated spans. This work highlights the effectiveness of quantifying context sensitivity for hallucination detection, thereby paving the way for more reliable and trustworthy LLM applications across diverse languages.
2502.13624
CardiacMamba: A Multimodal RGB-RF Fusion Framework with State Space Models for Remote Physiological Measurement
cs.CV
Heart rate (HR) estimation via remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) offers a non-invasive solution for health monitoring. However, traditional single-modality approaches (RGB or Radio Frequency (RF)) face challenges in balancing robustness and accuracy due to lighting variations, motion artifacts, and skin tone bias. In this paper, we propose CardiacMamba, a multimodal RGB-RF fusion framework that leverages the complementary strengths of both modalities. It introduces the Temporal Difference Mamba Module (TDMM) to capture dynamic changes in RF signals using timing differences between frames, enhancing the extraction of local and global features. Additionally, CardiacMamba employs a Bidirectional SSM for cross-modal alignment and a Channel-wise Fast Fourier Transform (CFFT) to effectively capture and refine the frequency domain characteristics of RGB and RF signals, ultimately improving heart rate estimation accuracy and periodicity detection. Extensive experiments on the EquiPleth dataset demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, achieving marked improvements in accuracy and robustness. CardiacMamba significantly mitigates skin tone bias, reducing performance disparities across demographic groups, and maintains resilience under missing-modality scenarios. By addressing critical challenges in fairness, adaptability, and precision, the framework advances rPPG technology toward reliable real-world deployment in healthcare. The codes are available at: https://github.com/WuZheng42/CardiacMamba.
2502.13626
AI-Empowered Catalyst Discovery: A Survey from Classical Machine Learning Approaches to Large Language Models
cs.CE
Catalysts are essential for accelerating chemical reactions and enhancing selectivity, which is crucial for the sustainable production of energy, materials, and bioactive compounds. Catalyst discovery is fundamental yet challenging in computational chemistry and has garnered significant attention due to the promising performance of advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques. The development of Large Language Models (LLMs) notably accelerates progress in the discovery of both homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysts, where their chemical reactions differ significantly in material phases, temperature, dynamics, etc. However, there is currently no comprehensive survey that discusses the progress and latest developments in both areas, particularly with the application of LLM techniques. To address this gap, this paper presents a thorough and systematic survey of AI-empowered catalyst discovery, employing a unified and general categorization for homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysts. We examine the progress of AI-empowered catalyst discovery, highlighting their individual advantages and disadvantages, and discuss the challenges faced in this field. Furthermore, we suggest potential directions for future research from the perspective of computer science. Our goal is to assist researchers in computational chemistry, computer science, and related fields in easily tracking the latest advancements, providing a clear overview and roadmap of this area. We also organize and make accessible relevant resources, including article lists and datasets, in an open repository at https://github.com/LuckyGirl-XU/Awesome-Artificial-Intelligence-Empowered-Catalyst-Discovery.
2502.13628
Non-Euclidean Hierarchical Representational Learning using Hyperbolic Graph Neural Networks for Environmental Claim Detection
cs.CL
Transformer-based models dominate NLP tasks like sentiment analysis, machine translation, and claim verification. However, their massive computational demands and lack of interpretability pose challenges for real-world applications requiring efficiency and transparency. In this work, we explore Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Hyperbolic Graph Neural Networks (HGNNs) as lightweight yet effective alternatives for Environmental Claim Detection, reframing it as a graph classification problem. We construct dependency parsing graphs to explicitly model syntactic structures, using simple word embeddings (word2vec) for node features with dependency relations encoded as edge features. Our results demonstrate that these graph-based models achieve comparable or superior performance to state-of-the-art transformers while using 30x fewer parameters. This efficiency highlights the potential of structured, interpretable, and computationally efficient graph-based approaches.
2502.13632
Concept Layers: Enhancing Interpretability and Intervenability via LLM Conceptualization
cs.LG cs.AI cs.CL
The opaque nature of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to significant research efforts aimed at enhancing their interpretability, primarily through post-hoc methods. More recent in-hoc approaches, such as Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs), offer both interpretability and intervenability by incorporating explicit concept representations. However, these methods suffer from key limitations, including reliance on labeled concept datasets and significant architectural modifications that challenges re-integration into existing system pipelines. In this work, we introduce a new methodology for incorporating interpretability and intervenability into an existing model by integrating Concept Layers (CLs) into its architecture. Our approach projects the model's internal vector representations into a conceptual, explainable vector space before reconstructing and feeding them back into the model. Furthermore, we eliminate the need for a human-selected concept set by algorithmically searching an ontology for a set of concepts that can be either task-specific or task-agnostic. We evaluate CLs across multiple tasks, demonstrating that they maintain the original model's performance and agreement while enabling meaningful interventions. Additionally, we present a proof of concept showcasing an intervenability interface, allowing users to adjust model behavior dynamically, such as mitigating biases during inference.
2502.13634
First Glimpse on Physical Layer Security in Internet of Vehicles: Transformed from Communication Interference to Sensing Interference
cs.IT math.IT
Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) plays a crucial role in the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), serving as a key factor in enhancing driving safety and traffic efficiency. To address the security challenges of the confidential information transmission caused by the inherent openness nature of wireless medium, different from current physical layer security (PLS) methods, which depends on the \emph{additional communication interference} costing extra power resources, in this paper, we investigate a novel PLS solution, under which the \emph{inherent radar sensing interference} of the vehicles is utilized to secure wireless communications. To measure the performance of PLS methods in ISAC-based IoV systems, we first define an improved security performance metric called by transmission reliability and sensing accuracy based secrecy rate (TRSA\_SR), and derive closed-form expressions of connection outage probability (COP), secrecy outage probability (SOP), success ranging probability (SRP) for evaluating transmission reliability, security and sensing accuracy, respectively. Furthermore, we formulate an optimization problem to maximize the TRSA\_SR by utilizing radar sensing interference and joint design of the communication duration, transmission power and straight trajectory of the legitimate transmitter. Finally, the non-convex feature of formulated problem is solved through the problem decomposition and alternating optimization. Simulations indicate that compared with traditional PLS methods obtaining a non-positive STC, the proposed method achieves a secrecy rate of 3.92bps/Hz for different settings of noise power.
2502.13637
Exploring Mutual Cross-Modal Attention for Context-Aware Human Affordance Generation
cs.CV cs.MM
Human affordance learning investigates contextually relevant novel pose prediction such that the estimated pose represents a valid human action within the scene. While the task is fundamental to machine perception and automated interactive navigation agents, the exponentially large number of probable pose and action variations make the problem challenging and non-trivial. However, the existing datasets and methods for human affordance prediction in 2D scenes are significantly limited in the literature. In this paper, we propose a novel cross-attention mechanism to encode the scene context for affordance prediction by mutually attending spatial feature maps from two different modalities. The proposed method is disentangled among individual subtasks to efficiently reduce the problem complexity. First, we sample a probable location for a person within the scene using a variational autoencoder (VAE) conditioned on the global scene context encoding. Next, we predict a potential pose template from a set of existing human pose candidates using a classifier on the local context encoding around the predicted location. In the subsequent steps, we use two VAEs to sample the scale and deformation parameters for the predicted pose template by conditioning on the local context and template class. Our experiments show significant improvements over the previous baseline of human affordance injection into complex 2D scenes.
2502.13638
Integrating Inverse and Forward Modeling for Sparse Temporal Data from Sensor Networks
cs.LG cs.AI
We present CavePerception, a framework for the analysis of sparse data from sensor networks that incorporates elements of inverse modeling and forward modeling. By integrating machine learning with physical modeling in a hypotheses space, we aim to improve the interpretability of sparse, noisy, and potentially incomplete sensor data. The framework assumes data from a two-dimensional sensor network laid out in a graph structure that detects certain objects, with certain motion patterns. Examples of such sensors are magnetometers. Given knowledge about the objects and the way they act on the sensors, one can develop a data generator that produces data from simulated motions of the objects across the sensor field. The framework uses the simulated data to infer object behaviors across the sensor network. The approach is experimentally tested on real-world data, where magnetometers are used on an airport to detect and identify aircraft motions. Experiments demonstrate the value of integrating inverse and forward modeling, enabling intelligent systems to better understand and predict complex, sensor-driven events.
2502.13640
Qorgau: Evaluating LLM Safety in Kazakh-Russian Bilingual Contexts
cs.CL
Large language models (LLMs) are known to have the potential to generate harmful content, posing risks to users. While significant progress has been made in developing taxonomies for LLM risks and safety evaluation prompts, most studies have focused on monolingual contexts, primarily in English. However, language- and region-specific risks in bilingual contexts are often overlooked, and core findings can diverge from those in monolingual settings. In this paper, we introduce Qorgau, a novel dataset specifically designed for safety evaluation in Kazakh and Russian, reflecting the unique bilingual context in Kazakhstan, where both Kazakh (a low-resource language) and Russian (a high-resource language) are spoken. Experiments with both multilingual and language-specific LLMs reveal notable differences in safety performance, emphasizing the need for tailored, region-specific datasets to ensure the responsible and safe deployment of LLMs in countries like Kazakhstan. Warning: this paper contains example data that may be offensive, harmful, or biased.
2502.13641
SLAMSpoof: Practical LiDAR Spoofing Attacks on Localization Systems Guided by Scan Matching Vulnerability Analysis
cs.RO
Accurate localization is essential for enabling modern full self-driving services. These services heavily rely on map-based traffic information to reduce uncertainties in recognizing lane shapes, traffic light locations, and traffic signs. Achieving this level of reliance on map information requires centimeter-level localization accuracy, which is currently only achievable with LiDAR sensors. However, LiDAR is known to be vulnerable to spoofing attacks that emit malicious lasers against LiDAR to overwrite its measurements. Once localization is compromised, the attack could lead the victim off roads or make them ignore traffic lights. Motivated by these serious safety implications, we design SLAMSpoof, the first practical LiDAR spoofing attack on localization systems for self-driving to assess the actual attack significance on autonomous vehicles. SLAMSpoof can effectively find the effective attack location based on our scan matching vulnerability score (SMVS), a point-wise metric representing the potential vulnerability to spoofing attacks. To evaluate the effectiveness of the attack, we conduct real-world experiments on ground vehicles and confirm its high capability in real-world scenarios, inducing position errors of $\geq$4.2 meters (more than typical lane width) for all 3 popular LiDAR-based localization algorithms. We finally discuss the potential countermeasures of this attack. Code is available at https://github.com/Keio-CSG/slamspoof
2502.13645
Measuring the Effect of Transcription Noise on Downstream Language Understanding Tasks
cs.CL
With the increasing prevalence of recorded human speech, spoken language understanding (SLU) is essential for its efficient processing. In order to process the speech, it is commonly transcribed using automatic speech recognition technology. This speech-to-text transition introduces errors into the transcripts, which subsequently propagate to downstream NLP tasks, such as dialogue summarization. While it is known that transcript noise affects downstream tasks, a systematic approach to analyzing its effects across different noise severities and types has not been addressed. We propose a configurable framework for assessing task models in diverse noisy settings, and for examining the impact of transcript-cleaning techniques. The framework facilitates the investigation of task model behavior, which can in turn support the development of effective SLU solutions. We exemplify the utility of our framework on three SLU tasks and four task models, offering insights regarding the effect of transcript noise on tasks in general and models in particular. For instance, we find that task models can tolerate a certain level of noise, and are affected differently by the types of errors in the transcript.
2502.13646
D.Va: Validate Your Demonstration First Before You Use It
cs.CL
In-context learning (ICL) has demonstrated significant potential in enhancing the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) during inference. It's well-established that ICL heavily relies on selecting effective demonstrations to generate outputs that better align with the expected results. As for demonstration selection, previous approaches have typically relied on intuitive metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of demonstrations, which often results in limited robustness and poor cross-model generalization capabilities. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel method, \textbf{D}emonstration \textbf{VA}lidation (\textbf{D.Va}), which integrates a demonstration validation perspective into this field. By introducing the demonstration validation mechanism, our method effectively identifies demonstrations that are both effective and highly generalizable. \textbf{D.Va} surpasses all existing demonstration selection techniques across both natural language understanding (NLU) and natural language generation (NLG) tasks. Additionally, we demonstrate the robustness and generalizability of our approach across various language models with different retrieval models.
2502.13647
Instruction Tuning on Public Government and Cultural Data for Low-Resource Language: a Case Study in Kazakh
cs.CL
Instruction tuning in low-resource languages remains underexplored due to limited text data, particularly in government and cultural domains. To address this, we introduce and open-source a large-scale (10,600 samples) instruction-following (IFT) dataset, covering key institutional and cultural knowledge relevant to Kazakhstan. Our dataset enhances LLMs' understanding of procedural, legal, and structural governance topics. We employ LLM-assisted data generation, comparing open-weight and closed-weight models for dataset construction, and select GPT-4o as the backbone. Each entity of our dataset undergoes full manual verification to ensure high quality. We also show that fine-tuning Qwen, Falcon, and Gemma on our dataset leads to consistent performance improvements in both multiple-choice and generative tasks, demonstrating the potential of LLM-assisted instruction tuning for low-resource languages.
2502.13648
Reliability Across Parametric and External Knowledge: Understanding Knowledge Handling in LLMs
cs.CL
Large Language Models (LLMs) enhance their problem-solving capability by leveraging both parametric and external knowledge. Beyond leveraging external knowledge to improve response accuracy, they require key capabilities for reliable knowledge-handling: resolving conflicts between knowledge sources, avoiding distraction from uninformative external knowledge, and abstaining when sufficient knowledge is unavailable. Prior studies have examined these scenarios in isolation or with limited scope. To systematically evaluate these capabilities, we introduce a comprehensive framework for analyzing knowledge-handling based on two key dimensions: the presence of parametric knowledge and the informativeness of external knowledge. Through analysis, we identify biases in knowledge utilization and examine how the ability to handle one scenario impacts performance in others. Furthermore, we demonstrate that training on data constructed based on the knowledge-handling scenarios improves LLMs' reliability in integrating and utilizing knowledge.
2502.13652
C2T: A Classifier-Based Tree Construction Method in Speculative Decoding
cs.CL cs.AI
The growing scale of Large Language Models (LLMs) has exacerbated inference latency and computational costs. Speculative decoding methods, which aim to mitigate these issues, often face inefficiencies in the construction of token trees and the verification of candidate tokens. Existing strategies, including chain mode, static tree, and dynamic tree approaches, have limitations in accurately preparing candidate token trees for verification. We propose a novel method named C2T that adopts a lightweight classifier to generate and prune token trees dynamically. Our classifier considers additional feature variables beyond the commonly used joint probability to predict the confidence score for each draft token to determine whether it is the candidate token for verification. This method outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods such as EAGLE-2 on multiple benchmarks, by reducing the total number of candidate tokens by 25% while maintaining or even improving the acceptance length.
2502.13653
A Query-Driven Approach to Space-Efficient Range Searching
cs.DS cs.CG cs.LG
We initiate a study of a query-driven approach to designing partition trees for range-searching problems. Our model assumes that a data structure is to be built for an unknown query distribution that we can access through a sampling oracle, and must be selected such that it optimizes a meaningful performance parameter on expectation. Our first contribution is to show that a near-linear sample of queries allows the construction of a partition tree with a near-optimal expected number of nodes visited during querying. We enhance this approach by treating node processing as a classification problem, leveraging fast classifiers like shallow neural networks to obtain experimentally efficient query times. Our second contribution is to develop partition trees using sparse geometric separators. Our preprocessing algorithm, based on a sample of queries, builds a balanced tree with nodes associated with separators that minimize query stabs on expectation; this yields both fast processing of each node and a small number of visited nodes, significantly reducing query time.
2502.13656
Refining Sentence Embedding Model through Ranking Sentences Generation with Large Language Models
cs.CL
Sentence embedding is essential for many NLP tasks, with contrastive learning methods achieving strong performance using annotated datasets like NLI. Yet, the reliance on manual labels limits scalability. Recent studies leverage large language models (LLMs) to generate sentence pairs, reducing annotation dependency. However, they overlook ranking information crucial for fine-grained semantic distinctions. To tackle this challenge, we propose a method for controlling the generation direction of LLMs in the latent space. Unlike unconstrained generation, the controlled approach ensures meaningful semantic divergence. Then, we refine exist sentence embedding model by integrating ranking information and semantic information. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves new SOTA performance with a modest cost in ranking sentence synthesis.
2502.13660
Towards Invariance to Node Identifiers in Graph Neural Networks
cs.LG
Message-Passing Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are known to have limited expressive power, due to their message passing structure. One mechanism for circumventing this limitation is to add unique node identifiers (IDs), which break the symmetries that underlie the expressivity limitation. In this work, we highlight a key limitation of the ID framework, and propose an approach for addressing it. We begin by observing that the final output of the GNN should clearly not depend on the specific IDs used. We then show that in practice this does not hold, and thus the learned network does not possess this desired structural property. Such invariance to node IDs may be enforced in several ways, and we discuss their theoretical properties. We then propose a novel regularization method that effectively enforces ID invariance to the network. Extensive evaluations on both real-world and synthetic tasks demonstrate that our approach significantly improves ID invariance and, in turn, often boosts generalization performance.
2502.13662
Generalization error bound for denoising score matching under relaxed manifold assumption
cs.LG math.ST stat.ML stat.TH
We examine theoretical properties of the denoising score matching estimate. We model the density of observations with a nonparametric Gaussian mixture. We significantly relax the standard manifold assumption allowing the samples step away from the manifold. At the same time, we are still able to leverage a nice distribution structure. We derive non-asymptotic bounds on the approximation and generalization errors of the denoising score matching estimate. The rates of convergence are determined by the intrinsic dimension. Furthermore, our bounds remain valid even if we allow the ambient dimension grow polynomially with the sample size.
2502.13663
User Association and Coordinated Beamforming in Cognitive Aerial-Terrestrial Networks: A Safe Reinforcement Learning Approach
cs.IT eess.SP math.IT
Cognitive aerial-terrestrial networks (CATNs) offer a solution to spectrum scarcity by sharing spectrum between aerial and terrestrial networks. However, aerial users (AUs) experience significant interference from numerous terrestrial base stations (BSs). To alleviate such interference, we investigate a user association and coordinated beamforming (CBF) problem in CATN, where the aerial network serves as the primary network sharing its spectrum with the terrestrial network. Specifically, we maximize the sum rate of the secondary terrestrial users (TUs) under the interference temperature constraints of the AUs. Traditional iterative optimization schemes are impractical due to their high computational complexity and information exchange overhead. Although deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based schemes can address these challenges, their performance is sensitive to the weights of the weighted penalty terms for violating constraints in the reward function. Motivated by these issues, we propose a safe DRL-based user association and CBF scheme for CATN, eliminating the need for training multiple times to find the optimal penalty weight before actual deployment. Specifically, the CATN is modeled as a networked constrained partially observable Markov game. Each TU acts as an agent to choose its associated BS, and each BS acts as an agent to decide its beamforming vectors, aiming to maximize the reward while satisfying the safety constraints introduced by the interference constraints of the AUs. By exploiting a safe DRL algorithm, the proposed scheme incurs lower deployment expenses than the penalty-based DRL schemes since only one training is required before actual deployment. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can achieve a higher sum rate of TUs than a two-stage optimization scheme while the average received interference power of the AUs is generally below the threshold.
2502.13668
PeerQA: A Scientific Question Answering Dataset from Peer Reviews
cs.CL cs.AI cs.IR
We present PeerQA, a real-world, scientific, document-level Question Answering (QA) dataset. PeerQA questions have been sourced from peer reviews, which contain questions that reviewers raised while thoroughly examining the scientific article. Answers have been annotated by the original authors of each paper. The dataset contains 579 QA pairs from 208 academic articles, with a majority from ML and NLP, as well as a subset of other scientific communities like Geoscience and Public Health. PeerQA supports three critical tasks for developing practical QA systems: Evidence retrieval, unanswerable question classification, and answer generation. We provide a detailed analysis of the collected dataset and conduct experiments establishing baseline systems for all three tasks. Our experiments and analyses reveal the need for decontextualization in document-level retrieval, where we find that even simple decontextualization approaches consistently improve retrieval performance across architectures. On answer generation, PeerQA serves as a challenging benchmark for long-context modeling, as the papers have an average size of 12k tokens. Our code and data is available at https://github.com/UKPLab/peerqa.
2502.13674
SCOPE: A Self-supervised Framework for Improving Faithfulness in Conditional Text Generation
cs.CL
Large Language Models (LLMs), when used for conditional text generation, often produce hallucinations, i.e., information that is unfaithful or not grounded in the input context. This issue arises in typical conditional text generation tasks, such as text summarization and data-to-text generation, where the goal is to produce fluent text based on contextual input. When fine-tuned on specific domains, LLMs struggle to provide faithful answers to a given context, often adding information or generating errors. One underlying cause of this issue is that LLMs rely on statistical patterns learned from their training data. This reliance can interfere with the model's ability to stay faithful to a provided context, leading to the generation of ungrounded information. We build upon this observation and introduce a novel self-supervised method for generating a training set of unfaithful samples. We then refine the model using a training process that encourages the generation of grounded outputs over unfaithful ones, drawing on preference-based training. Our approach leads to significantly more grounded text generation, outperforming existing self-supervised techniques in faithfulness, as evaluated through automatic metrics, LLM-based assessments, and human evaluations.
2502.13675
A CFL condition for the finite cell method
cs.CE cs.NA math.NA
Immersed boundary finite element methods allow the user to bypass the potentially troublesome task of boundary-conforming mesh generation. However, they suffer from the influence of cut elements, i.e., elements that are intersected by the physical domain boundaries. When combined with explicit time integration, poorly cut elements with little support in the physical domain have a detrimental effect on the critical time step size, thereby hampering the application of immersed boundary methods to wave propagation simulations. In this paper, we investigate the stabilizing effect of the finite cell method concerning explicit time integration. Starting with an analytical solution of an example with one degree of freedom, we systematically study the influence of $\alpha$-stabilization on the maximum eigenvalue and thus on the critical time step size. The analysis is then complemented by a numerical study of an example with one element and an increasing polynomial degree. We demonstrate that the critical time step size does not decrease below a certain limit, even when further reducing the cut fraction of the element. This minimum critical time step size is controlled by the chosen $\alpha$ value and becomes less severe for higher dimensions. Increasing the polynomial degree has little effect on the degradation of the minimum critical time step size. Finally, we provide an estimate of the minimum critical time step size depending on the chosen stabilization parameter $\alpha$ and the dimension of the problem. Based on this estimate, we propose a modified CFL condition for the finite cell method, the validity of which we demonstrate on a numerical example of a perforated plate.
2502.13676
An Adaptive Data-Enabled Policy Optimization Approach for Autonomous Bicycle Control
eess.SY cs.RO cs.SY math.OC
This paper presents a unified control framework that integrates a Feedback Linearization (FL) controller in the inner loop with an adaptive Data-Enabled Policy Optimization (DeePO) controller in the outer loop to balance an autonomous bicycle. While the FL controller stabilizes and partially linearizes the inherently unstable and nonlinear system, its performance is compromised by unmodeled dynamics and time-varying characteristics. To overcome these limitations, the DeePO controller is introduced to enhance adaptability and robustness. The initial control policy of DeePO is obtained from a finite set of offline, persistently exciting input and state data. To improve stability and compensate for system nonlinearities and disturbances, a robustness-promoting regularizer refines the initial policy, while the adaptive section of the DeePO framework is enhanced with a forgetting factor to improve adaptation to time-varying dynamics. The proposed DeePO+FL approach is evaluated through simulations and real-world experiments on an instrumented autonomous bicycle. Results demonstrate its superiority over the FL-only approach, achieving more precise tracking of the reference lean angle and lean rate.
2502.13677
A Framework for Semantics-based Situational Awareness during Mobile Robot Deployments
cs.RO
Deployment of robots into hazardous environments typically involves a ``Human-Robot Teaming'' (HRT) paradigm, in which a human supervisor interacts with a remotely operating robot inside the hazardous zone. Situational Awareness (SA) is vital for enabling HRT, to support navigation, planning, and decision-making. This paper explores issues of higher-level ``semantic'' information and understanding in SA. In semi-autonomous, or variable-autonomy paradigms, different types of semantic information may be important, in different ways, for both the human operator and an autonomous agent controlling the robot. We propose a generalizable framework for acquiring and combining multiple modalities of semantic-level SA during remote deployments of mobile robots. We demonstrate the framework with an example application of search and rescue (SAR) in disaster response robotics. We propose a set of ``environment semantic indicators" that can reflect a variety of different types of semantic information, e.g. indicators of risk, or signs of human activity, as the robot encounters different scenes. Based on these indicators, we propose a metric to describe the overall situation of the environment called ``Situational Semantic Richness (SSR)". This metric combines multiple semantic indicators to summarise the overall situation. The SSR indicates if an information-rich and complex situation has been encountered, which may require advanced reasoning for robots and humans and hence the attention of the expert human operator. The framework is tested on a Jackal robot in a mock-up disaster response environment. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed semantic indicators are sensitive to changes in different modalities of semantic information in different scenes, and the SSR metric reflects overall semantic changes in the situations encountered.
2502.13681
An LLM-based Agent for Reliable Docker Environment Configuration
cs.SE cs.AI cs.CL cs.LG
Environment configuration is a critical yet time-consuming step in software development, especially when dealing with unfamiliar code repositories. While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate the potential to accomplish software engineering tasks, existing methods for environment configuration often rely on manual efforts or fragile scripts, leading to inefficiencies and unreliable outcomes. We introduce Repo2Run, the first LLM-based agent designed to fully automate environment configuration and generate executable Dockerfiles for arbitrary Python repositories. We address two major challenges: (1) enabling the LLM agent to configure environments within isolated Docker containers, and (2) ensuring the successful configuration process is recorded and accurately transferred to a Dockerfile without error. To achieve this, we propose atomic configuration synthesis, featuring a dual-environment architecture (internal and external environment) with a rollback mechanism to prevent environment "pollution" from failed commands, guaranteeing atomic execution (execute fully or not at all) and a Dockerfile generator to transfer successful configuration steps into runnable Dockerfiles. We evaluate Repo2Run~on our proposed benchmark of 420 recent Python repositories with unit tests, where it achieves an 86.0% success rate, outperforming the best baseline by 63.9%.
2502.13685
MoM: Linear Sequence Modeling with Mixture-of-Memories
cs.CL cs.AI cs.LG
Linear sequence modeling methods, such as linear attention, state space modeling, and linear RNNs, offer significant efficiency improvements by reducing the complexity of training and inference. However, these methods typically compress the entire input sequence into a single fixed-size memory state, which leads to suboptimal performance on recall-intensive downstream tasks. Drawing inspiration from neuroscience, particularly the brain's ability to maintain robust long-term memory while mitigating "memory interference", we introduce a novel architecture called Mixture-of-Memories (MoM). MoM utilizes multiple independent memory states, with a router network directing input tokens to specific memory states. This approach greatly enhances the overall memory capacity while minimizing memory interference. As a result, MoM performs exceptionally well on recall-intensive tasks, surpassing existing linear sequence modeling techniques. Despite incorporating multiple memory states, the computation of each memory state remains linear in complexity, allowing MoM to retain the linear-complexity advantage during training, while constant-complexity during inference. Our experimental results show that MoM significantly outperforms current linear sequence models on downstream language tasks, particularly recall-intensive tasks, and even achieves performance comparable to Transformer models. The code is released at https://github.com/OpenSparseLLMs/MoM and is also released as a part of https://github.com/OpenSparseLLMs/Linear-MoE.
2502.13686
Graph Signal Inference by Learning Narrowband Spectral Kernels
stat.ML cs.LG
While a common assumption in graph signal analysis is the smoothness of the signals or the band-limitedness of their spectrum, in many instances the spectrum of real graph data may be concentrated at multiple regions of the spectrum, possibly including mid-to-high-frequency components. In this work, we propose a novel graph signal model where the signal spectrum is represented through the combination of narrowband kernels in the graph frequency domain. We then present an algorithm that jointly learns the model by optimizing the kernel parameters and the signal representation coefficients from a collection of graph signals. Our problem formulation has the flexibility of permitting the incorporation of signals possibly acquired on different graphs into the learning algorithm. We then theoretically study the signal reconstruction performance of the proposed method, by also elaborating on when joint learning on multiple graphs is preferable to learning an individual model on each graph. Experimental results on several graph data sets shows that the proposed method offers quite satisfactory signal interpolation accuracy in comparison with a variety of reference approaches in the literature.
2502.13688
Non-Linear Function Computation Broadcast
cs.IT math.IT
This work addresses the $K$-user computation broadcast problem consisting of a master node, that holds all datasets and users for a general class of function demands, including linear and non-linear functions, over finite fields. The master node sends a broadcast message to enable each of $K$ distributed users to compute its demanded function in an asymptotically lossless manner with user's side information. We derive bounds on the optimal $K$-user computation broadcast rate that allows the users to compute their demanded functions by capturing the structures of the computations and available side information. Our achievability scheme involves the design of a novel graph-based coding model to build a broadcast message to meet each user's demand, by leveraging the structural dependencies among the datasets, the user demands, and the side information of each user, drawing on K{\"o}rner's characteristic graph framework. The converse uses the structures of the demands and the side information available at $K$ users to yield a tight lower bound on the broadcast rate. With the help of examples, we demonstrate our scheme achieves a better communication rate than the existing state of the art.
2502.13691
Is This Collection Worth My LLM's Time? Automatically Measuring Information Potential in Text Corpora
cs.CL
As large language models (LLMs) converge towards similar capabilities, the key to advancing their performance lies in identifying and incorporating valuable new information sources. However, evaluating which text collections are worth the substantial investment required for digitization, preprocessing, and integration into LLM systems remains a significant challenge. We present a novel approach to this challenge: an automated pipeline that evaluates the potential information gain from text collections without requiring model training or fine-tuning. Our method generates multiple choice questions (MCQs) from texts and measures an LLM's performance both with and without access to the source material. The performance gap between these conditions serves as a proxy for the collection's information potential. We validate our approach using three strategically selected datasets: EPFL PhD manuscripts (likely containing novel specialized knowledge), Wikipedia articles (presumably part of training data), and a synthetic baseline dataset. Our results demonstrate that this method effectively identifies collections containing valuable novel information, providing a practical tool for prioritizing data acquisition and integration efforts.
2502.13692
Tight Generalization Bounds for Large-Margin Halfspaces
cs.LG math.ST stat.TH
We prove the first generalization bound for large-margin halfspaces that is asymptotically tight in the tradeoff between the margin, the fraction of training points with the given margin, the failure probability and the number of training points.
2502.13693
Medical Image Classification with KAN-Integrated Transformers and Dilated Neighborhood Attention
cs.CV
Convolutional networks, transformers, hybrid models, and Mamba-based architectures have demonstrated strong performance across various medical image classification tasks. However, these methods were primarily designed to classify clean images using labeled data. In contrast, real-world clinical data often involve image corruptions that are unique to multi-center studies and stem from variations in imaging equipment across manufacturers. In this paper, we introduce the Medical Vision Transformer (MedViTV2), a novel architecture incorporating Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) layers into the transformer architecture for the first time, aiming for generalized medical image classification. We have developed an efficient KAN block to reduce computational load while enhancing the accuracy of the original MedViT. Additionally, to counteract the fragility of our MedViT when scaled up, we propose an enhanced Dilated Neighborhood Attention (DiNA), an adaptation of the efficient fused dot-product attention kernel capable of capturing global context and expanding receptive fields to scale the model effectively and addressing feature collapse issues. Moreover, a hierarchical hybrid strategy is introduced to stack our Local Feature Perception and Global Feature Perception blocks in an efficient manner, which balances local and global feature perceptions to boost performance. Extensive experiments on 17 medical image classification datasets and 12 corrupted medical image datasets demonstrate that MedViTV2 achieved state-of-the-art results in 27 out of 29 experiments with reduced computational complexity. MedViTV2 is 44\% more computationally efficient than the previous version and significantly enhances accuracy, achieving improvements of 4.6\% on MedMNIST, 5.8\% on NonMNIST, and 13.4\% on the MedMNIST-C benchmark.
2502.13699
Secure and Green Rate-Splitting Multiple Access Integrated Sensing and Communications
cs.IT math.IT
In this paper, we investigate the sensing, communication, security, and energy efficiency of integrated sensing and communication (ISAC)-enabled cognitive radio networks (CRNs) in a challenging scenario where communication quality, security, and sensing accuracy are affected by interference and eavesdropping. Specifically, we analyze the communication and sensing signals of ISAC as well as the communication signal consisting of common and private streams, based on rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) of multicast network. Then, the sensing signal-tocluster-plus-noise ratio, the security rate, the communication rate, and the security energy efficiency (SEE) are derived, respectively. To simultaneously enhance the aforementioned performance metrics, we formulate a targeted optimization framework that aims to maximizing SEE by jointly optimizing the transmit signal beamforming (BF) vectors and the echo signal BF vector to construct green interference using the echo signal, as well as common and private streams split by RSMA to refine security rate and suppress power consumption, i.e., achieving a higher SEE. Given the non-convex nature of the optimization problem, we present an alternative approach that leverages Taylor series expansion, majorization-minimization, semi-definite programming, and successive convex approximation techniques. Specifically, we decompose the original non-convex and intractable optimization problem into three simplified sub-optimization problems, which are iteratively solved using an alternating optimization strategy. Simulations provide comparisons with state-of-the-art schemes, highlighting the superiority of the proposed joint multi-BF optimization scheme based on RSMA and constructed green interference in improving system performances.
2502.13701
Causes and Strategies in Multiagent Systems
cs.AI cs.MA
Causality plays an important role in daily processes, human reasoning, and artificial intelligence. There has however not been much research on causality in multi-agent strategic settings. In this work, we introduce a systematic way to build a multi-agent system model, represented as a concurrent game structure, for a given structural causal model. In the obtained so-called causal concurrent game structure, transitions correspond to interventions on agent variables of the given causal model. The Halpern and Pearl framework of causality is used to determine the effects of a certain value for an agent variable on other variables. The causal concurrent game structure allows us to analyse and reason about causal effects of agents' strategic decisions. We formally investigate the relation between causal concurrent game structures and the original structural causal models.
2502.13703
Parameterized Complexity of Hedonic Games with Enemy-Oriented Preferences
cs.GT cs.MA
Hedonic games model settings in which a set of agents have to be partitioned into groups which we call coalitions. In the enemy aversion model, each agent has friends and enemies, and an agent prefers to be in a coalition with as few enemies as possible and, subject to that, as many friends as possible. A partition should be stable, i.e., no subset of agents prefer to be together rather than being in their assigned coalition under the partition. We look at two stability concepts: core stability and strict core stability. This yields several algorithmic problems: determining whether a (strictly) core stable partition exists, finding such a partition, and checking whether a given partition is (strictly) core stable. Several of these problems have been shown to be NP-complete, or even beyond NP. This motivates the study of parameterized complexity. We conduct a thorough computational study using several parameters: treewidth, number of friends, number of enemies, partition size, and coalition size. We give polynomial algorithms for restricted graph classes as well as FPT algorithms with respect to the number of friends an agent may have and the treewidth of the graph representing the friendship or enemy relations. We show W[1]-hardness or para-NP-hardness with respect to the other parameters. We conclude this paper with results in the setting in which agents can have neutral relations with each other, including hardness-results for very restricted cases.
2502.13707
Human-Like Robot Impedance Regulation Skill Learning from Human-Human Demonstrations
cs.RO
Humans are experts in collaborating with others physically by regulating compliance behaviors based on the perception of their partner states and the task requirements. Enabling robots to develop proficiency in human collaboration skills can facilitate more efficient human-robot collaboration (HRC). This paper introduces an innovative impedance regulation skill learning framework for achieving HRC in multiple physical collaborative tasks. The framework is designed to adjust the robot compliance to the human partner states while adhering to reference trajectories provided by human-human demonstrations. Specifically, electromyography (EMG) signals from human muscles are collected and analyzed to extract limb impedance, representing compliance behaviors during demonstrations. Human endpoint motions are captured and represented using a probabilistic learning method to create reference trajectories and corresponding impedance profiles. Meanwhile, an LSTMbased module is implemented to develop task-oriented impedance regulation policies by mapping the muscle synergistic contributions between two demonstrators. Finally, we propose a wholebody impedance controller for a human-like robot, coordinating joint outputs to achieve the desired impedance and reference trajectory during task execution. Experimental validation was conducted through a collaborative transportation task and two interactive Tai Chi pushing hands tasks, demonstrating superior performance from the perspective of interactive forces compared to a constant impedance control method.
2502.13708
Active Illumination for Visual Ego-Motion Estimation in the Dark
cs.RO
Visual Odometry (VO) and Visual SLAM (V-SLAM) systems often struggle in low-light and dark environments due to the lack of robust visual features. In this paper, we propose a novel active illumination framework to enhance the performance of VO and V-SLAM algorithms in these challenging conditions. The developed approach dynamically controls a moving light source to illuminate highly textured areas, thereby improving feature extraction and tracking. Specifically, a detector block, which incorporates a deep learning-based enhancing network, identifies regions with relevant features. Then, a pan-tilt controller is responsible for guiding the light beam toward these areas, so that to provide information-rich images to the ego-motion estimation algorithm. Experimental results on a real robotic platform demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, showing a reduction in the pose estimation error up to 75% with respect to a traditional fixed lighting technique.
2502.13713
TALKPLAY: Multimodal Music Recommendation with Large Language Models
cs.IR cs.SD eess.AS
We present TalkPlay, a multimodal music recommendation system that reformulates the recommendation task as large language model token generation. TalkPlay represents music through an expanded token vocabulary that encodes multiple modalities - audio, lyrics, metadata, semantic tags, and playlist co-occurrence. Using these rich representations, the model learns to generate recommendations through next-token prediction on music recommendation conversations, that requires learning the associations natural language query and response, as well as music items. In other words, the formulation transforms music recommendation into a natural language understanding task, where the model's ability to predict conversation tokens directly optimizes query-item relevance. Our approach eliminates traditional recommendation-dialogue pipeline complexity, enabling end-to-end learning of query-aware music recommendations. In the experiment, TalkPlay is successfully trained and outperforms baseline methods in various aspects, demonstrating strong context understanding as a conversational music recommender.
2502.13714
Hierarchical RL-MPC for Demand Response Scheduling
eess.SY cs.SY
This paper presents a hierarchical framework for demand response optimization in air separation units (ASUs) that combines reinforcement learning (RL) with linear model predictive control (LMPC). We investigate two control architectures: a direct RL approach and a control-informed methodology where an RL agent provides setpoints to a lower-level LMPC. The proposed RL-LMPC framework demonstrates improved sample efficiency during training and better constraint satisfaction compared to direct RL control. Using an industrial ASU case study, we show that our approach successfully manages operational constraints while optimizing electricity costs under time-varying pricing. Results indicate that the RL-LMPC architecture achieves comparable economic performance to direct RL while providing better robustness and requiring fewer training samples to converge. The framework offers a practical solution for implementing flexible operation strategies in process industries, bridging the gap between data-driven methods and traditional control approaches.
2502.13716
Event-Based Video Frame Interpolation With Cross-Modal Asymmetric Bidirectional Motion Fields
cs.CV
Video Frame Interpolation (VFI) aims to generate intermediate video frames between consecutive input frames. Since the event cameras are bio-inspired sensors that only encode brightness changes with a micro-second temporal resolution, several works utilized the event camera to enhance the performance of VFI. However, existing methods estimate bidirectional inter-frame motion fields with only events or approximations, which can not consider the complex motion in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel event-based VFI framework with cross-modal asymmetric bidirectional motion field estimation. In detail, our EIF-BiOFNet utilizes each valuable characteristic of the events and images for direct estimation of inter-frame motion fields without any approximation methods. Moreover, we develop an interactive attention-based frame synthesis network to efficiently leverage the complementary warping-based and synthesis-based features. Finally, we build a large-scale event-based VFI dataset, ERF-X170FPS, with a high frame rate, extreme motion, and dynamic textures to overcome the limitations of previous event-based VFI datasets. Extensive experimental results validate that our method shows significant performance improvement over the state-of-the-art VFI methods on various datasets. Our project pages are available at: https://github.com/intelpro/CBMNet
2502.13718
Multi-Scale and Multi-Objective Optimization for Cross-Lingual Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis
cs.CL
Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is a sequence labeling task that has garnered growing research interest in multilingual contexts. However, recent studies lack more robust feature alignment and finer aspect-level alignment. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, Multi-Scale and Multi-Objective optimization (MSMO) for cross-lingual ABSA. During multi-scale alignment, we achieve cross-lingual sentence-level and aspect-level alignment, aligning features of aspect terms in different contextual environments. Specifically, we introduce code-switched bilingual sentences into the language discriminator and consistency training modules to enhance the model's robustness. During multi-objective optimization, we design two optimization objectives: supervised training and consistency training, aiming to enhance cross-lingual semantic alignment. To further improve model performance, we incorporate distilled knowledge of the target language into the model. Results show that MSMO significantly enhances cross-lingual ABSA by achieving state-of-the-art performance across multiple languages and models.
2502.13719
TrustRAG: An Information Assistant with Retrieval Augmented Generation
cs.IR cs.AI
\Ac{RAG} has emerged as a crucial technique for enhancing large models with real-time and domain-specific knowledge. While numerous improvements and open-source tools have been proposed to refine the \ac{RAG} framework for accuracy, relatively little attention has been given to improving the trustworthiness of generated results. To address this gap, we introduce TrustRAG, a novel framework that enhances \ac{RAG} from three perspectives: indexing, retrieval, and generation. Specifically, in the indexing stage, we propose a semantic-enhanced chunking strategy that incorporates hierarchical indexing to supplement each chunk with contextual information, ensuring semantic completeness. In the retrieval stage, we introduce a utility-based filtering mechanism to identify high-quality information, supporting answer generation while reducing input length. In the generation stage, we propose fine-grained citation enhancement, which detects opinion-bearing sentences in responses and infers citation relationships at the sentence-level, thereby improving citation accuracy. We open-source the TrustRAG framework and provide a demonstration studio designed for excerpt-based question answering tasks \footnote{https://huggingface.co/spaces/golaxy/TrustRAG}. Based on these, we aim to help researchers: 1) systematically enhancing the trustworthiness of \ac{RAG} systems and (2) developing their own \ac{RAG} systems with more reliable outputs.
2502.13721
Learning Novel Transformer Architecture for Time-series Forecasting
cs.LG cs.CL
Despite the success of Transformer-based models in the time-series prediction (TSP) tasks, the existing Transformer architecture still face limitations and the literature lacks comprehensive explorations into alternative architectures. To address these challenges, we propose AutoFormer-TS, a novel framework that leverages a comprehensive search space for Transformer architectures tailored to TSP tasks. Our framework introduces a differentiable neural architecture search (DNAS) method, AB-DARTS, which improves upon existing DNAS approaches by enhancing the identification of optimal operations within the architecture. AutoFormer-TS systematically explores alternative attention mechanisms, activation functions, and encoding operations, moving beyond the traditional Transformer design. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AutoFormer-TS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across various TSP benchmarks, achieving superior forecasting accuracy while maintaining reasonable training efficiency.
2502.13722
Deep Learning for VWAP Execution in Crypto Markets: Beyond the Volume Curve
q-fin.ST cs.LG
Volume-Weighted Average Price (VWAP) is arguably the most prevalent benchmark for trade execution as it provides an unbiased standard for comparing performance across market participants. However, achieving VWAP is inherently challenging due to its dependence on two dynamic factors, volumes and prices. Traditional approaches typically focus on forecasting the market's volume curve, an assumption that may hold true under steady conditions but becomes suboptimal in more volatile environments or markets such as cryptocurrency where prediction error margins are higher. In this study, I propose a deep learning framework that directly optimizes the VWAP execution objective by bypassing the intermediate step of volume curve prediction. Leveraging automatic differentiation and custom loss functions, my method calibrates order allocation to minimize VWAP slippage, thereby fully addressing the complexities of the execution problem. My results demonstrate that this direct optimization approach consistently achieves lower VWAP slippage compared to conventional methods, even when utilizing a naive linear model presented in arXiv:2410.21448. They validate the observation that strategies optimized for VWAP performance tend to diverge from accurate volume curve predictions and thus underscore the advantage of directly modeling the execution objective. This research contributes a more efficient and robust framework for VWAP execution in volatile markets, illustrating the potential of deep learning in complex financial systems where direct objective optimization is crucial. Although my empirical analysis focuses on cryptocurrency markets, the underlying principles of the framework are readily applicable to other asset classes such as equities.
2502.13723
Direct Value Optimization: Improving Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in LLMs with Refined Values
cs.CL cs.AI
We introduce Direct Value Optimization (DVO), an innovative reinforcement learning framework for enhancing large language models in complex reasoning tasks. Unlike traditional methods relying on preference labels, DVO utilizes value signals at individual reasoning steps, optimizing models via a mean squared error loss. The key benefit of DVO lies in its fine-grained supervision, circumventing the need for labor-intensive human annotations. Target values within the DVO are estimated using either Monte Carlo Tree Search or an outcome value model. Our empirical analysis on both mathematical and commonsense reasoning tasks shows that DVO consistently outperforms existing offline preference optimization techniques, even with fewer training steps. These findings underscore the importance of value signals in advancing reasoning capabilities and highlight DVO as a superior methodology under scenarios lacking explicit human preference information.
2502.13725
Adapting Large Language Models for Time Series Modeling via a Novel Parameter-efficient Adaptation Method
cs.CL
Time series modeling holds significant importance in many real-world applications and has been extensively studied. While pre-trained foundation models have made impressive strides in the fields of natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV), their development in time series domains has been constrained by data sparsity. A series of recent studies have demonstrated that large language models (LLMs) possess robust pattern recognition and reasoning abilities over complex sequences of tokens. However, the current literature have yet striked a high-quality balance between (a) effectively aligning the time series and natural language modalities, and (b) keeping the inference efficiency. To address the above issues, we now propose the Time-LlaMA framework. Time-LlaMA first converts the time series input into token embeddings through a linear tokenization mechanism. Second, the time series token embeddings are aligned with the text prompts. Third, to further adapt the LLM backbone for time series modeling, we have developed a dynamic low-rank adaptation technique (D-LoRA). D-LoRA dynamically chooses the most suitable LoRA modules at each layer of the Transformer backbone for each time series input, enhancing the model's predictive capabilities. Our experimental results on an extensive collection of challenging real-world time series tasks confirm that our proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance.
2502.13728
Secure Federated Data Distillation
cs.CR cs.AI
Dataset Distillation (DD) is a powerful technique for reducing large datasets into compact, representative synthetic datasets, accelerating Machine Learning training. However, traditional DD methods operate in a centralized manner, which poses significant privacy threats and reduces its applicability. To mitigate these risks, we propose a Secure Federated Data Distillation framework (SFDD) to decentralize the distillation process while preserving privacy.Unlike existing Federated Distillation techniques that focus on training global models with distilled knowledge, our approach aims to produce a distilled dataset without exposing local contributions. We leverage the gradient-matching-based distillation method, adapting it for a distributed setting where clients contribute to the distillation process without sharing raw data. The central aggregator iteratively refines a synthetic dataset by integrating client-side updates while ensuring data confidentiality. To make our approach resilient to inference attacks perpetrated by the server that could exploit gradient updates to reconstruct private data, we create an optimized Local Differential Privacy approach, called LDPO-RLD (Label Differential Privacy Obfuscation via Randomized Linear Dispersion). Furthermore, we assess the framework's resilience against malicious clients executing backdoor attacks and demonstrate robustness under the assumption of a sufficient number of participating clients. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of SFDD and that the proposed defense concretely mitigates the identified vulnerabilities, with minimal impact on the performance of the distilled dataset. By addressing the interplay between privacy and federation in dataset distillation, this work advances the field of privacy-preserving Machine Learning making our SFDD framework a viable solution for sensitive data-sharing applications.
2502.13729
Emergence of the Primacy Effect in Structured State-Space Models
cs.LG cs.NE q-bio.NC
Human and animal memory for sequentially presented items is well-documented to be more accurate for those at the beginning and end of the sequence, phenomena known as the primacy and recency effects, respectively. By contrast, artificial neural network (ANN) models are typically designed with a memory that decays monotonically over time. Accordingly, ANNs are expected to show the recency effect but not the primacy effect. Contrary to this theoretical expectation, however, the present study reveals a counterintuitive finding: a recently developed ANN architecture, called structured state-space models, exhibits the primacy effect when trained and evaluated on a synthetic task that mirrors psychological memory experiments. Given that this model was originally designed for recovering neuronal activity patterns observed in biological brains, this result provides a novel perspective on the psychological primacy effect while also posing a non-trivial puzzle for the current theories in machine learning.
2502.13730
Cascading CMA-ES Instances for Generating Input-diverse Solution Batches
cs.NE
Rather than obtaining a single good solution for a given optimization problem, users often seek alternative design choices, because the best-found solution may perform poorly with respect to additional objectives or constraints that are difficult to capture into the modeling process. Aiming for batches of diverse solutions of high quality is often desirable, as it provides flexibility to accommodate post-hoc user preferences. At the same time, it is crucial that the quality of the best solution found is not compromised. One particular problem setting balancing high quality and diversity is fixing the required minimum distance between solutions while simultaneously obtaining the best possible fitness. Recent work by Santoni et al. [arXiv 2024] revealed that this setting is not well addressed by state-of-the-art algorithms, performing in par or worse than pure random sampling. Driven by this important limitation, we propose a new approach, where parallel runs of the covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (CMA-ES) inherit tabu regions in a cascading fashion. We empirically demonstrate that our CMA-ES-Diversity Search (CMA-ES-DS) algorithm generates trajectories that allow to extract high-quality solution batches that respect a given minimum distance requirement, clearly outperforming those obtained from off-the-shelf random sampling, multi-modal optimization algorithms, and standard CMA-ES.
2502.13731
Robust Counterfactual Inference in Markov Decision Processes
cs.AI
This paper addresses a key limitation in existing counterfactual inference methods for Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Current approaches assume a specific causal model to make counterfactuals identifiable. However, there are usually many causal models that align with the observational and interventional distributions of an MDP, each yielding different counterfactual distributions, so fixing a particular causal model limits the validity (and usefulness) of counterfactual inference. We propose a novel non-parametric approach that computes tight bounds on counterfactual transition probabilities across all compatible causal models. Unlike previous methods that require solving prohibitively large optimisation problems (with variables that grow exponentially in the size of the MDP), our approach provides closed-form expressions for these bounds, making computation highly efficient and scalable for non-trivial MDPs. Once such an interval counterfactual MDP is constructed, our method identifies robust counterfactual policies that optimise the worst-case reward w.r.t. the uncertain interval MDP probabilities. We evaluate our method on various case studies, demonstrating improved robustness over existing methods.
2502.13732
Homophily Heterogeneity Matters in Graph Federated Learning: A Spectrum Sharing and Complementing Perspective
cs.LG
Since heterogeneity presents a fundamental challenge in graph federated learning, many existing methods are proposed to deal with node feature heterogeneity and structure heterogeneity. However, they overlook the critical homophily heterogeneity, which refers to the substantial variation in homophily levels across graph data from different clients. The homophily level represents the proportion of edges connecting nodes that belong to the same class. Due to adapting to their local homophily, local models capture inconsistent spectral properties across different clients, significantly reducing the effectiveness of collaboration. Specifically, local models trained on graphs with high homophily tend to capture low-frequency information, whereas local models trained on graphs with low homophily tend to capture high-frequency information. To effectively deal with homophily heterophily, we introduce the spectral Graph Neural Network (GNN) and propose a novel Federated learning method by mining Graph Spectral Properties (FedGSP). On one hand, our proposed FedGSP enables clients to share generic spectral properties (i.e., low-frequency information), allowing all clients to benefit through collaboration. On the other hand, inspired by our theoretical findings, our proposed FedGSP allows clients to complement non-generic spectral properties by acquiring the spectral properties they lack (i.e., high-frequency information), thereby obtaining additional information gain. Extensive experiments conducted on six homophilic and five heterophilic graph datasets, across both non-overlapping and overlapping settings, validate the superiority of our method over eleven state-of-the-art methods. Notably, our FedGSP outperforms the second-best method by an average margin of 3.28% on all heterophilic datasets.
2502.13734
CARE: Confidence-Aware Regression Estimation of building density fine-tuning EO Foundation Models
cs.CV cs.LG
Performing accurate confidence quantification and assessment is important for deep neural networks to predict their failures, improve their performance and enhance their capabilities in real-world applications, for their practical deployment in real life. For pixel-wise regression tasks, confidence quantification and assessment has not been well addressed in the literature, in contrast to classification tasks like semantic segmentation. The softmax output layer is not used in deep neural networks that solve pixel-wise regression problems. In this paper, to address these problems, we develop, train and evaluate the proposed model Confidence-Aware Regression Estimation (CARE). Our model CARE computes and assigns confidence to regression output results. We focus on solving regression problems as downstream tasks of an AI Foundation Model for Earth Observation (EO). We evaluate the proposed model CARE and experimental results on data from the Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite constellation for estimating the density of buildings show that the proposed method can be successfully applied to regression problems. We also show that our approach outperforms other methods.
2502.13737
PEDRO-V: From a concurrent engineering case study to a promising phase zero mission definition
eess.SY cs.SY
Each year, the European Space Agency (ESA) organizes challenges for university students, from BSc to PhD levels. The ESA Concurrent Engineering Challange 2024 was hosted by four Concurrent Design Facilites (CDF) across Europe: ESEC Galazia, ISAE SUPAERO, the University of Athens, and the University of Portsmouth. A total of 102 students participated in the event. Over five days, students worked on a feasibility study for a space mission, simulating ESA's design session at ESTEC, the ESA headquarters. Students were divided into specializes groups based on their backgrounds, reflecting ESA's concurrent engineering teams. This paper discusses the design of subsystems by students, their trade-off results, and the outcomes of the CDF study. It highlights the effectiveness of concurrent engineering, which enabled rapid and efficient results even from non-esxpert teams. The future development roadmap and lessons learned are also presented. The students used CDP4-Comet software within the replicated ESA CDF, resulting in the PEDRO-V mission proposal: Planetary Exploration Deployment and Research Operation - Venus. The teams collaboratively defined the Concept of Operations, identified actors, worst-case scenarios, use cases, and activities. Their output included a list of requirements, a draft product breakdown structure, and key subsystems information. The concurrent engineering process led to continuous improvement and convergence of key parameters. This approach proved to be effective by aligning different teams' solutions and comparing them to similar missions. The PEDRO-V mission feasibility was confirmed, demonstrating the potential of concurrent engineering in accademic settings for space missions. (summarized with AI)
2502.13738
Enhancing Input-Label Mapping in In-Context Learning with Contrastive Decoding
cs.CL
Large language models (LLMs) excel at a range of tasks through in-context learning (ICL), where only a few task examples guide their predictions. However, prior research highlights that LLMs often overlook input-label mapping information in ICL, relying more on their pre-trained knowledge. To address this issue, we introduce In-Context Contrastive Decoding (ICCD), a novel method that emphasizes input-label mapping by contrasting the output distributions between positive and negative in-context examples. Experiments on 7 natural language understanding (NLU) tasks show that our ICCD method brings consistent and significant improvement (up to +2.1 improvement on average) upon 6 different scales of LLMs without requiring additional training. Our approach is versatile, enhancing performance with various demonstration selection methods, demonstrating its broad applicability and effectiveness. The code and scripts will be publicly released.
2502.13740
Benchmarking of Different YOLO Models for CAPTCHAs Detection and Classification
cs.CV
This paper provides an analysis and comparison of the YOLOv5, YOLOv8 and YOLOv10 models for webpage CAPTCHAs detection using the datasets collected from the web and darknet as well as synthetized data of webpages. The study examines the nano (n), small (s), and medium (m) variants of YOLO architectures and use metrics such as Precision, Recall, F1 score, mAP@50 and inference speed to determine the real-life utility. Additionally, the possibility of tuning the trained model to detect new CAPTCHA patterns efficiently was examined as it is a crucial part of real-life applications. The image slicing method was proposed as a way to improve the metrics of detection on oversized input images which can be a common scenario in webpages analysis. Models in version nano achieved the best results in terms of speed, while more complexed architectures scored better in terms of other metrics.
2502.13743
Inference of Abstraction for Grounded Predicate Logic
cs.AI
An important open question in AI is what simple and natural principle enables a machine to reason logically for meaningful abstraction with grounded symbols. This paper explores a conceptually new approach to combining probabilistic reasoning and predicative symbolic reasoning over data. We return to the era of reasoning with a full joint distribution before the advent of Bayesian networks. We then discuss that a full joint distribution over models of exponential size in propositional logic and of infinite size in predicate logic should be simply derived from a full joint distribution over data of linear size. We show that the same process is not only enough to generalise the logical consequence relation of predicate logic but also to provide a new perspective to rethink well-known limitations such as the undecidability of predicate logic, the symbol grounding problem and the principle of explosion. The reproducibility of this theoretical work is fully demonstrated by the included proofs.
2502.13747
Reverse Markov Learning: Multi-Step Generative Models for Complex Distributions
cs.LG stat.ME stat.ML
Learning complex distributions is a fundamental challenge in contemporary applications. Generative models, such as diffusion models, have demonstrated remarkable success in overcoming many limitations of traditional statistical methods. Shen and Meinshausen (2024) introduced engression, a generative approach based on scoring rules that maps noise (and covariates, if available) directly to data. While effective, engression struggles with highly complex distributions, such as those encountered in image data. In this work, we extend engression to improve its capability in learning complex distributions. We propose a framework that defines a general forward process transitioning from the target distribution to a known distribution (e.g., Gaussian) and then learns a reverse Markov process using multiple engression models. This reverse process reconstructs the target distribution step by step. Our approach supports general forward processes, allows for dimension reduction, and naturally discretizes the generative process. As a special case, when using a diffusion-based forward process, our framework offers a method to discretize the training and inference of diffusion models efficiently. Empirical evaluations on simulated and climate data validate our theoretical insights, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach in capturing complex distributions.
2502.13751
RobustX: Robust Counterfactual Explanations Made Easy
cs.LG cs.AI
The increasing use of Machine Learning (ML) models to aid decision-making in high-stakes industries demands explainability to facilitate trust. Counterfactual Explanations (CEs) are ideally suited for this, as they can offer insights into the predictions of an ML model by illustrating how changes in its input data may lead to different outcomes. However, for CEs to realise their explanatory potential, significant challenges remain in ensuring their robustness under slight changes in the scenario being explained. Despite the widespread recognition of CEs' robustness as a fundamental requirement, a lack of standardised tools and benchmarks hinders a comprehensive and effective comparison of robust CE generation methods. In this paper, we introduce RobustX, an open-source Python library implementing a collection of CE generation and evaluation methods, with a focus on the robustness property. RobustX provides interfaces to several existing methods from the literature, enabling streamlined access to state-of-the-art techniques. The library is also easily extensible, allowing fast prototyping of novel robust CE generation and evaluation methods.