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Deep Learning · Theory

Florian Redhardt, Yassir Akram, Simon Schug

Can neural networks systematically capture discrete, compositional task structure despite their continuous, distributed nature? The impressive capabilities of large-scale neural networks suggest that the answer to this question is yes. However, even for the most capable models, there are still frequent failure cases that raise doubts about their compositionality. Here, we seek to understand what it takes for a standard neural network to generalize over tasks that share compositional structure. We find that simply scaling data and model size leads to compositional generalization. We show that this holds across different task encodings as long as the training distribution sufficiently covers the task space. In line with this finding, we prove that standard multilayer perceptrons can approximate a general class of compositional task families to arbitrary precision using only a linear number of neurons with respect to the number of task modules. Finally, we uncover that if networks successfully compositionally generalize, the constituents of a task can be linearly decoded from their hidden activations. We show that this metric correlates with failures of text-to-image generation models to compose known concepts.

Social Aspects · Accountability, Transparency and Interpretability

Jiachen Zhao, Jing Huang, Zhengxuan Wu, David Bau, Weiyan Shi

LLMs are trained to refuse harmful instructions, but do they truly understand harmfulness beyond just refusing? Prior work has shown that LLMs’ refusal behaviors can be mediated by a one-dimensional subspace, i.e., a refusal direction. In this work, we identify a new dimension to analyze safety mechanisms in LLMs, i.e., harmfulness, which is encoded internally as a separate concept from refusal. And there exists a harmfulness direction that is distinct from the refusal direction. As causal evidence, steering along the harmfulness direction can lead LLMs to interpret harmless instructions as harmful, but steering along the refusal direction tends to elicit refusal responses directly without reversing the model’s judgment on harmfulness. Furthermore, using our identified harmfulness concept, we find that certain jailbreak methods work by reducing the refusal signals without suppressing the model’s internal belief of harmfulness. We also find that adversarially fine- tuning models to accept harmful instructions has minimal impact on the model’s internal belief of harmfulness. These insights lead to a practical safety application: The model’s latent harmfulness representation can serve as an intrinsic safeguard (Latent Guard) for detecting unsafe inputs and reducing over-refusals that is robust to finetuning attacks. For instance, our Latent Guard achieves performance comparable to or better than Llama Guard 3 8B, a dedicated finetuned safeguard model, across different jailbreak methods. Our findings suggest that LLMs’ internal understanding of harmfulness is more robust than their refusal decision to diverse input instructions, offering a new perspective to study AI safety.

Deep Learning · Algorithms

Manchao Bao, Shengjiang Fang, Tao Yue, Xuemei Hu

Long-distance depth imaging holds great promise for applications such as autonomous driving and robotics. Direct time-of-flight (dToF) imaging offers high-precision, long-distance depth sensing, yet demands ultra-short pulse light sources and high-resolution time-to-digital converters. In contrast, indirect time-of-flight (iToF) imaging often suffers from phase wrapping and low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) as the sensing distance increases. In this paper, we introduce a novel ToF imaging paradigm, termed Burst-Encodable Time-of-Flight (BE-ToF), which facilitates high-fidelity, long-distance depth imaging. Specifically, the BE-ToF system emits light pulses in burst mode and estimates the phase delay of the reflected signal over the entire burst period, thereby effectively avoiding the phase wrapping inherent to conventional iToF systems. Moreover, to address the low SNR caused by light attenuation over increasing distances, we propose an end-to-end learnable framework that jointly optimizes the coding functions and the depth reconstruction network. A specialized double well function and first-order difference term are incorporated into the framework to ensure the hardware implementability of the coding functions. The proposed approach is rigorously validated through comprehensive simulations and real-world prototype experiments, demonstrating its effectiveness and practical applicability. The code is available at: https://github.com/ComputationalPerceptionLab/BE-ToF.

Computer Vision · Segmentation

Yujia Chen, Rui Sun, Wangkai Li, Huayu Mai, Si Chen, Zhuoyuan Li, Zhixin Cheng, Tianzhu Zhang

Domain adaptation for LiDAR semantic segmentation remains challenging due to the complex structural properties of point cloud data. While mix-based paradigms have shown promise, they often fail to fully leverage the rich structural priors inherent in 3D LiDAR point clouds. In this paper, we identify three critical yet underexploited structural priors: permutation invariance, local consistency, and geometric consistency. We introduce BeyondMix, a novel framework that harnesses the capabilities of State Space Models (specifically Mamba) to construct and exploit these structural priors while modeling long-range dependencies that transcend the limited receptive fields of conventional voxel-based approaches. By employing space-filling curves to impose sequential ordering on point cloud data and implementing strategic spatial partitioning schemes, BeyondMix effectively captures domain-invariant representations. Extensive experiments on challenging LiDAR semantic segmentation benchmarks demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, establishing a new paradigm for unsupervised domain adaptation in 3D point cloud understanding.

Optimization · Neural Network Optimization

Banseok Lee, Dongkyu Kim, Youngcheon You, Youngmin Kim

Deploying large language models (LLMs) often faces challenges from substantial memory and computational costs. Quantization offers a solution, yet performance degradation in the sub-1-bit regime remains particularly difficult. This paper introduces LittleBit, a novel method for extreme LLM compression. It targets levels like 0.1 bits per weight (BPW), achieving nearly 31$\times$ memory reduction, e.g., Llama2-13B to under 0.9 GB. LittleBit represents weights in a low-rank form using latent matrix factorization, subsequently binarizing these factors. To counteract information loss from this extreme precision, it integrates a multi-scale compensation mechanism. This includes row, column, and an additional latent dimension that learns per-rank importance. Two key contributions enable effective training: Dual Sign-Value-Independent Decomposition (Dual-SVID) for quantization-aware training (QAT) initialization, and integrated Residual Compensation to mitigate errors. Extensive experiments confirm LittleBit's superiority in sub-1-bit quantization: e.g., its 0.1 BPW performance on Llama2-7B surpasses the leading method's 0.7 BPW. LittleBit establishes a new, viable size-performance trade-off—unlocking a potential 11.6$\times$ speedup over FP16 at the kernel level—and makes powerful LLMs practical for resource-constrained environments.

Deep Learning · Algorithms

Zheng Chen, Zichen Zou, Kewei Zhang, Xiongfei Su, Xin Yuan, Yong Guo, Yulun Zhang

Diffusion models have demonstrated promising performance in real-world video super-resolution (VSR). However, the dozens of sampling steps they require, make inference extremely slow. Sampling acceleration techniques, particularly single-step, provide a potential solution. Nonetheless, achieving one step in VSR remains challenging, due to the high training overhead on video data and stringent fidelity demands. To tackle the above issues, we propose DOVE, an efficient one-step diffusion model for real-world VSR. DOVE is obtained by fine-tuning a pretrained video diffusion model (*i.e.*, CogVideoX). To effectively train DOVE, we introduce the latent-pixel training strategy. The strategy employs a two-stage scheme to gradually adapt the model to the video super-resolution task. Meanwhile, we design a video processing pipeline to construct a high-quality dataset tailored for VSR, termed HQ-VSR. Fine-tuning on this dataset further enhances the restoration capability of DOVE. Extensive experiments show that DOVE exhibits comparable or superior performance to multi-step diffusion-based VSR methods. It also offers outstanding inference efficiency, achieving up to a **28$\times$** speed-up over existing methods such as MGLD-VSR. Code is available at: https://github.com/zhengchen1999/DOVE.

Deep Learning · Generative Models and Autoencoders

Chengxin Hu, Hao Li, Yihe Yuan, Zezheng Song, Chenyang Zhao, Haixin Wang

In the molecular domain, numerous studies have explored the use of multimodal large language models (LLMs) to construct a general-purpose, multi-task molecular model. However, these efforts are still far from achieving a truly universal molecular model. We identify three key challenges in this endeavor: (1) Existing molecular task datasets are typically small in scale and lack comprehensive domain coverage. (2) Tasks from different molecular subfields are difficult to effectively learn jointly through LLMs due to significant distributional shifts and competition among tasks, which introduces instability in the learning process. (3) Both inter-task and intra-task molecular representations demand different intrinsic dimensions in the language space, making it challenging to balance between redundancy and insufficiency in language model representations. To address these challenges, we innovatively categorize existing small-molecule tasks into four types: Mol2Mol, Mol2Text, Mol2Num, and Text2Mol. We then collect a dataset encompassing over 16 tasks with more than 1.4 million samples, making it the largest molecular instruction-tuning dataset to date. Leveraging the extensive pretraining of LLMs on existing chemical literature, we propose a novel multimodal LLM framework, named **Omni-Mol**, which unifies all small-molecule tasks and supports both molecular generation and understanding. The core of Omni-Mol is our proposed MoGE, which dynamically adapts to the intrinsic rank of different tasks. This mixture-of-experts architecture enhances the model's ability to handle diverse tasks and modalities effectively. Our model achieves unified instruction tuning across 16 tasks and attains state-of-the-art performance on 13 of them. Extensive experiments further demonstrate the scalability and versatility of Omni-Mol.

Applications · Neuroscience, Cognitive Science

Nina Nellen, Polina Turishcheva, Michaela Vystrčilová, Shashwat Sridhar, Tim Gollisch, Andreas Tolias, Alexander Ecker

Deep neural networks trained to predict neural activity from visual input and behaviour have shown great potential to serve as digital twins of the visual cortex. Per-neuron embeddings derived from these models could potentially be used to map the functional landscape or identify cell types. However, state-of-the-art predictive models of mouse V1 do not generate functional embeddings that exhibit clear clustering patterns which would correspond to cell types. This raises the question whether the lack of clustered structure is due to limitations of current models or a true feature of the functional organization of mouse V1. In this work, we introduce DECEMber -- Deep Embedding Clustering via Expectation Maximization-based refinement -- an explicit inductive bias into predictive models that enhances clustering by adding an auxiliary $t$-distribution-inspired loss function that enforces structured organization among per-neuron embeddings. We jointly optimize both neuronal feature embeddings and clustering parameters, updating cluster centers and scale matrices using the EM-algorithm. We demonstrate that these modifications improve cluster consistency while preserving high predictive performance and surpassing standard clustering methods in terms of stability. Moreover, DECEMber generalizes well across species (mice, primates) and visual areas (retina, V1, V4). The code is available at https://github.com/Nisone2000/DECEMber, https://github.com/ecker-lab/cnn-training.

Optimization · Discrete Optimization

Peter Blohm, Florian Chen, Aristides Gionis, Stefan Neumann

Online social media provide a platform for people to discuss current events and exchange opinions with their peers. While interactions are predominantly positive, in recent years, there has been a lot of research to understand the conflicts in social networks and how they are based on different views and opinions. In this paper, we ask whether the conflicts in a network reveal a small and interpretable set of prevalent opinion ranges that explain the users' interactions. More precisely, we consider signed graphs, where the edge signs indicate positive and negative interactions of node pairs, and our goal is to infer opinion intervals that are consistent with the edge signs. We introduce an optimization problem that models this question, and we give strong hardness results and a polynomial-time approximation scheme by utilizing connections to interval graphs and the Correlation Clustering problem. We further provide scalable heuristics and show that in experiments they yield more expressive solutions than Correlation Clustering baselines. We also present a case study on a novel real-world dataset from the German parliament, showing that our algorithms can recover the political leaning of German parties based on co-voting behavior.

Deep Learning · Attention Mechanisms

Junlin Mu, Hantao Huang, Jihang Zhang, Minghui Yu, Tao Wang, Yidong Li

Large Language Models (LLMs) capable of handling extended contexts are in high demand, yet their inference remains challenging due to substantial Key-Value (KV) cache size and high memory bandwidth requirements. Previous research has demonstrated that KV cache exhibits low-rank characteristics within the hidden dimension, suggesting the potential for effective compression. However, due to the widely adopted Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) mechanism in modern LLMs, naive low‑-rank compression suffers severe accuracy degradation or creates a new speed bottleneck, as the low-rank cache must first be reconstructed in order to apply RoPE. In this paper, we introduce two key insights: first, the application of RoPE to the key vectors increases their variance, which in turn results in a higher rank; second, after the key vectors are transformed into the latent space, they largely maintain their representation across most layers. Based on these insights, we propose the Sparse Attention in Latent Space (SALS) framework. SALS projects the KV cache into a compact latent space via low-rank projection, and performs sparse token selection using RoPE-free query--key interactions in this space. By reconstructing only a small subset of important tokens, it avoids the overhead of full KV cache reconstruction. We comprehensively evaluate SALS on various tasks using two large-scale models: LLaMA2-7b-chat and Mistral-7b, and additionally verify its scalability on the RULER-128k benchmark with LLaMA3.1-8B-Instruct. Experimental results demonstrate that SALS achieves SOTA performance by maintaining competitive accuracy. Under different settings, SALS achieves 6.4-fold KV cache compression and 5.7-fold speed-up in the attention operator compared to FlashAttention2 on the 4K sequence. For the end-to-end throughput performance, we achieves 1.4-fold and 4.5-fold improvement compared to GPT-fast on 4k and 32K sequences, respectively. The source code will be publicly available in the future.

Theory · Reinforcement Learning and Planning

Xiaoli Tang, Han Yu, Xiaoxiao Li

Auction-based Federated Learning (AFL) fosters collaboration among self-interested data consumers (DCs) and data owners (DOs). A major challenge in AFL pertains to how DCs select and bid for DOs. Existing methods are generally static, making them ill-suited for dynamic AFL markets. To address this issue, we propose the R}einforcement Learning-based Bidding Strategy for DCs in Auction-based Federated Learning (RLB-AFL). We incorporate historical states into a Deep Q-Network to capture sequential information critical for bidding decisions. To mitigate state space sparsity, where specific states rarely reoccur for each DC during auctions, we incorporate the Gaussian Mixture Model into RLB-AFL. This facilitates soft clustering on sequential states, reducing the state space dimensionality and easing exploration and action-value function approximation. In addition, we enhance the $\epsilon$-greedy policy to help the RLB-AFL agent balance exploitation and exploration, enabling it to be more adaptable in the AFL decision-making process. Extensive experiments under 6 widely used benchmark datasets demonstrate that RLB-AFL achieves superior performance compared to 8 state-of-the-art approaches. It outperforms the best baseline by 10.56% and 3.15% in terms of average total utility

Social Aspects · Fairness, Equity, Justice and Safety

Antonio Ferrara, Francesco Cozzi, Alan Perotti, André Panisson, Francesco Bonchi

Determining whether an algorithmic decision-making system discriminates against a specific demographic typically involves comparing a single point estimate of a fairness metric against a predefined threshold. This practice is statistically brittle: it ignores sampling error and treats small demographic subgroups the same as large ones. The problem intensifies in intersectional analyses, where multiple sensitive attributes are considered jointly, giving rise to a larger number of smaller groups. As these groups become more granular, the data representing them becomes too sparse for reliable estimation, and fairness metrics yield excessively wide confidence intervals, precluding meaningful conclusions about potential unfair treatments. In this paper, we introduce a unified, size-adaptive, hypothesis‑testing framework that turns fairness assessment into an evidence‑based statistical decision. Our contribution is twofold. (i) For sufficiently large subgroups, we prove a Central‑Limit result for the statistical parity difference, leading to analytic confidence intervals and a Wald test whose type‑I (false positive) error is guaranteed at level $\alpha$. (ii) For the long tail of small intersectional groups, we derive a fully Bayesian Dirichlet–multinomial estimator; Monte-Carlo credible intervals are calibrated for any sample size and naturally converge to Wald intervals as more data becomes available. We validate our approach empirically on benchmark datasets, demonstrating how our tests provide interpretable, statistically rigorous decisions under varying degrees of data availability and intersectionality.

General Machine Learning · Transfer, Multitask and Meta-learning

Yingnan Liu, Rui Qiao, Mong-Li Lee, Wynne Hsu

Test-time adaptation aims to improve model robustness under distribution shifts by adapting models with access to unlabeled target samples. A primary cause of performance degradation under such shifts is the model’s reliance on features that lack a direct causal relationship with the prediction target. We introduce Test-time Adaptation by Causal Trimming (TACT), a method that identifies and removes non-causal components from representations for test distributions. TACT applies data augmentations that preserve causal features while varying non-causal ones. By analyzing the changes in the representations using Principal Component Analysis, TACT identifies the highest variance directions associated with non-causal features. It trims the representations by removing their projections on the identified directions, and uses the trimmed representations for the predictions. During adaptation, TACT continuously tracks and refines these directions to get a better estimate of non-causal features. We theoretically analyze the effectiveness of this approach and empirically validate TACT on real-world out-of-distribution benchmarks. TACT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin.

Reinforcement Learning · Everything Else

Georgios Tzannetos, Parameswaran Kamalaruban, Adish Singla

Training agents to operate under strict constraints during deployment, such as limited resource budgets or stringent safety requirements, presents significant challenges, especially when these constraints render the task complex. In this work, we propose a curriculum learning strategy that gradually tightens constraints during training, enabling the agent to incrementally master the deployment requirements. Inspired by self-paced learning techniques in unconstrained reinforcement learning (RL), our approach facilitates a smoother transition to challenging environments by initially training on simplified versions of the constraints and progressively introducing the full deployment conditions. We provide a theoretical analysis using an RL agent in a binary-tree Markov Decision Process (MDP) to demonstrate that our curriculum strategy can accelerate training relative to a baseline approach that imposes the trajectory constraints from the outset. Moreover, we empirically validate the effectiveness and generality of our method across both RL and large language model (LLM) agents in diverse settings, including a binary-tree MDP, a multi-task navigation domain, and a math reasoning task with two benchmarks. These results highlight the potential of curriculum design in enhancing the efficiency and performance of agents operating under complex trajectory constraints during deployment. Moreover, when applied to LLMs, our strategy enables compression of output chain-of-thought tokens, achieving a substantial inference speedup on consumer hardware, demonstrating its effectiveness for resource-constrained deployment.

Social Aspects · Fairness, Equity, Justice and Safety

Xin Zhao, Xiaojun Chen, Bingshan Liu, Haoyu Gao, Zhendong Zhao, Yilong Chen

Large language models (LLMs) with Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures achieve impressive performance and efficiency by dynamically routing inputs to specialized subnetworks, known as experts. However, this sparse routing mechanism inherently exhibits task preferences due to expert specialization, introducing a new and underexplored vulnerability to backdoor attacks. In this work, we investigate the feasibility and effectiveness of injecting backdoors into MoE-based LLMs by exploiting their inherent expert routing preferences. We thus propose \textbf{BadSwitch}, a novel backdoor framework that integrates task-coupled dynamic trigger optimization with a sensitivity-guided Top-S expert tracing mechanism. Our approach jointly optimizes trigger embeddings during pretraining while identifying S most sensitive experts, subsequently constraining the Top-K gating mechanism to these targeted experts. Unlike traditional backdoor attacks that rely on superficial data poisoning or model editing, BadSwitch primarily embeds malicious triggers into expert routing paths with strong task affinity, enabling precise and stealthy model manipulation. Through comprehensive evaluations across three prominent MoE architectures (Switch Transformer, QwenMoE, and DeepSeekMoE), we demonstrate that BadSwitch can efficiently hijack pre-trained models with up to 100\% success rate (ASR) while maintaining the highest clean accuracy (ACC) among all baselines. Furthermore, BadSwitch exhibits strong resilience against both text-level and model-level defense mechanisms, achieving 94.07\% ASR and 87.18\% ACC on the AGNews dataset. Our analysis of expert activation patterns reveals fundamental insights into MoE vulnerabilities. We anticipate this work will expose security risks in MoE systems and contribute to advancing AI safety.

General Machine Learning · Transfer, Multitask and Meta-learning

Enneng Yang, Anke Tang, Li Shen, Guibing Guo, Xingwei Wang, Xiaochun Cao, Jie Zhang

Model merging integrates multiple expert models with diverse capabilities into a unified framework, facilitating collaborative learning. However, most existing methods assume simultaneous access to all models, which is often impractical in real-world scenarios where models are received sequentially. While some studies have investigated continual model merging (CMM)--which involves sequentially merging multiple models--the challenge of balancing prior knowledge (stability) and incorporating new tasks (plasticity) remains unresolved. This paper, for the first time, formally defines the stability and plasticity of CMM from the perspective of orthogonal projection. Subsequently, we analyze the relationships among the spaces spanned by task data, historical gradients, and accumulated gradients. Building on this, we propose a data-free \textbf{D}ual \textbf{O}rthogonal \textbf{P}rojection (DOP) method, which eliminates data dependence and mitigates interference between the merged model and models for old and new tasks by projecting their parameter differences onto their respective approximate data spaces. Finally, to solve potential conflicts between stability and plasticity, we reformulate DOP as a multi-objective optimization problem and employ a multi-gradient descent algorithm to obtain a Pareto-optimal solution. Extensive experiments across multiple architectures and task configurations validate that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art CMM methods.

Applications · Language, Speech and Dialog

Tinghui Zhu, Jian Xie, yikai zhang, Aili Chen, Kai Zhang, Yu Su, Yanghua Xiao

While large reasoning models demonstrate strong performance on complex tasks, they lack the ability to adjust reasoning token usage based on task difficulty. This often leads to the "overthinking" problem—excessive and unnecessary reasoning—which, although potentially mitigated by human intervention to control the token budget, still fundamentally contradicts the goal of achieving fully autonomous AI. In this work, we propose Adaptive Reasoning Model (ARM), a reasoning model capable of adaptively selecting appropriate reasoning formats based on the task at hand. These formats include three efficient ones—Direct Answer, Short CoT, and Code—as well as a more elaborate format, Long CoT. To train ARM, we introduce Ada-GRPO, an adaptation of Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), which addresses the format collapse issue in traditional GRPO. Ada-GRPO enables ARM to achieve high token efficiency, reducing tokens by an average of $\sim$30%, and up to $\sim$70%, while maintaining performance comparable to the model that relies solely on Long CoT. Furthermore, not only does it improve inference efficiency through reduced token generation, but it also brings a $\sim$2$\times$ speedup in training. In addition to the default Adaptive Mode, ARM supports two additional reasoning modes: 1) Instruction-Guided Mode, which allows users to explicitly specify the reasoning format via special tokens—ideal when the appropriate format is known for a batch of tasks. 2) Consensus-Guided Mode, which aggregates the outputs of the three efficient formats and resorts to Long CoT in case of disagreement, prioritizing performance with higher token usage. All the resources will be released.

Deep Learning · Generative Models and Autoencoders

Yichao Fu, Rui Ge, Zelei Shao, Zhijie Deng, Hao Zhang

Reasoning models excel by generating long chain-of-thoughts, but decoding the resulting thousands of tokens is slow. Token-level specualtive decoding (SD) helps, but its benefit is capped, because the chance that an entire $\gamma$-token guess is correct falls exponentially as $\gamma$ grows. This means allocating more compute for longer token drafts faces an algorithmic ceiling -- making the speedup modest and hardware-agnostic. We raise this ceiling with lookahead reasoning, which exploits a second, step-level layer of parallelism. Our key insight is that reasoning models generate step-by-step, and each step needs only to be semantically correct, not exact token matching. In lookahead reasoning, a lightweight draft model proposes several future steps; the target model expands each proposal in one batched pass, and a verifier keeps semantically correct steps while letting the target regenerate any that fail. Token-level SD still operates within each reasoning step, so the two layers of parallelism multiply. We show lookahead reasoning lifts the peak speedup of SD both theoretically and empirically. Across GSM8K, AIME, and other benchmarks, lookahead reasoning improves the speedup of SD from 1.4x to 2.1x while preserving answer quality, and its speedup scales better with additional GPU throughput. Our code is available at https://github.com/hao-ai-lab/LookaheadReasoning

General Machine Learning · Representation Learning

Rafael Elberg, Felipe del Río, Mircea Petrache, Denis Parra

Compositionality in knowledge and language—the ability to represent complex concepts as a combination of simpler ones—is a hallmark of human cognition and communication. Despite recent advances, deep neural networks still struggle to acquire this property reliably. Neural models for emergent communication look to endow artificial agents with compositional language by simulating the pressures that form human language. In this work, we introduce CELEBI (Compressive-Expressive Language Emergence through a discrete Bottleneck and Iterated learning), a novel self-supervised framework for inducing compositional representations through a reconstruction-based communication game between a sender and a receiver. Building on theories of language emergence and the iterated learning framework, we integrate three mechanisms that jointly promote compressibility, expressivity, and efficiency in the emergent language. First, Progressive Decoding incentivizes intermediate reasoning by requiring the receiver to produce partial reconstructions after each symbol. Second, Final-State Imitation trains successive generations of agents to imitate reconstructions rather than messages, enforcing a tighter communication bottleneck. Third, Pairwise Distance Maximization regularizes message diversity by encouraging high distances between messages, with formal links to entropy maximization. Our method significantly improves both the efficiency and compositionality of the learned messages on the Shapes3D and MPI3D datasets, surpassing prior discrete communication frameworks in both reconstruction accuracy and topographic similarity. This work provides new theoretical and empirical evidence for the emergence of structured, generalizable communication protocols from simplicity-based inductive biases.

Data-centric AI · Data-centric AI methods and tools

Kiljae Lee, Ziqi Liu, Weijing Tang, Yuan Zhang

Data Shapley is an important tool for data valuation, which quantifies the contribution of individual data points to machine learning models. In practice, group-level data valuation is desirable when data providers contribute data in batch. However, we identify that existing group-level extensions of Data Shapley are vulnerable to \emph{shell company attacks}, where strategic group splitting can unfairly inflate valuations. We propose Faithful Group Shapley Value (FGSV) that uniquely defends against such attacks. Building on original mathematical insights, we develop a provably fast and accurate approximation algorithm for computing FGSV. Empirical experiments demonstrate that our algorithm significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in computational efficiency and approximation accuracy, while ensuring faithful group-level valuation.