论文检索

Deep Learning · Everything Else

Zihan Zhou, Yang Zhou, Ruoming Jin, Pan He, Patrick Emami

Vision–language models such as CLIP embed images and text into a shared space, but still suffer from a modality gap, where image and text features cluster separately and nearest neighbors are dominated by same-modality rather than true cross-modal matches. Existing works alleviate the modality gap by strengthening cross-modal losses, post-processing embeddings or similarities, or imposing geometric regularization, but they primarily enforce global alignment and can distort local geometry, limiting gains in local ranking and zero-shot accuracy. We propose Fractal Spectral Alignment (FSAlign), which reduces the modality gap by shaping and matching the multi-scale geometry of image and text embeddings. By enforcing Ahlfors-regularity and sub-Gaussian heat kernel bounds, FSAlign constructs a shared fractal multi-scale structure for multiple modalities. This structure captures geometry across scales, from local neighborhoods to global structure, and ensures shared fractal spectral geometry across modalities. Based on this structure, we introduce a fractal spectral zeta score derived from multi-scale heat kernels and minimize the discrepancy between pairwise image–text samples to align their multi-scale neighborhoods. We theoretically demonstrate that FSAlign can guarantee the alignment of local spectral measures and global fractional Dirichlet energies.

Reinforcement Learning · Everything Else

Jinmin He, Kai Li, Xiaoyi Dong, Yifan Zang, Yuheng Jing, Yifan Zhang, Junliang Xing, Jian Cheng

Multi-task reinforcement learning (MTRL) aims to improve sample efficiency by sharing knowledge across related tasks, but it often suffers from asynchronous learning progress caused by inherent differences in task difficulty. This imbalance places substantial representational strain on the shared critic network, which emerges as a primary performance bottleneck. To address this issue, we propose Hybrid Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning (HyMTRL), a framework that alleviates critic overload through a phased policy evolution strategy. HyMTRL divides task learning into a reinforcement exploration phase and an imitation refinement phase. By transitioning mastered tasks from reinforcement learning–based policy optimization to imitation learning–based behavior consolidation, these tasks are removed from the critic’s optimization objective, effectively reducing representational strain. In addition, a critic reset mechanism restores network capacity while preserving learned policies and historical experience. HyMTRL is a general framework that can be easily integrated with a wide range of existing MTRL methods. Empirical evaluations on the MetaWorld benchmark demonstrate that combining HyMTRL with representative baselines leads to significant improvements in both learning efficiency and final performance.

Applications · Everything Else

Steven Liu, Jane Luo, Xin Zhang, Aofan Liu, Hao Liu, Jie Wu, Ziyang Huang, Yangyu Huang, Yu Kang, Scarlett Li

Given that Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to automate software development, comprehensive software assurance spans three distinct goals: regression prevention, reactive reproduction, and proactive discovery. Current evaluations systematically overlook the third goal. Specifically, they either constrain models to a compliance trap by treating existing code as the ground truth for regression prevention, or rely on post-failure artifacts (e.g., issue reports) for reactive bug reproduction, failing to expose defects before they manifest as failures. To bridge this gap, we present TestExplora, a benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs as proactive testers within full-scale, realistic repository environments. Comprising 2,389 tasks across 482 repositories, TestExplora conceals all defect-related information, forcing models to uncover bugs by identifying discrepancies between implementation and documentation-derived intent—utilizing documentation as the reference oracle. Furthermore, to ensure sustainable evaluation and mitigate risks of data leakage in static datasets, we propose a continuous, time-aware data collection framework. Our evaluation reveals a significant capability gap: state-of-the-art models achieve a maximum Fail-to-Pass ($F2P$) rate of only 16.06%. Further analysis indicates that navigating complex cross-module interactions and leveraging agentic exploration are critical to advancing LLMs toward autonomous software quality assurance. Consistent with this, SWEAgent instantiated with GPT-5-mini achieves an $F2P$ of 17.27% and an $F2P@5$ of 29.7%, highlighting the effectiveness and promise of agentic exploration in proactive bug discovery tasks.

General Machine Learning · Everything Else

Haemin Park, Diego Klabjan, Martin Braun, Xiuqi Li, Balakrishnan Ananthanarayanan

Class imbalance poses a critical challenge in federated learning (FL), where underrepresented classes suffer from poor predictive performance yet cannot be addressed by standard centralized techniques due to privacy and heterogeneity constraints. We propose FedCGNM (Federated Class-Grouped Normalized Momentum), a client-side optimizer in FL that partitions classes into a small number of groups based on minimum within-group variance, maintains a momentum per group, normalizes each group momentum to unit length, and uses the summation of the normalized group momentums as an update direction. This design both equalizes gradient magnitude across majority and minority groups and mitigates the noise inherent in rare-class gradients. We further provide a theoretical convergence analysis explicitly accounting for time-varying resampling rates. Additionally, to efficiently optimize these rates in small-client regimes, we introduce FedHOO, an X-armed-bandit (XAB) based algorithm that exploits federated parallelism that evaluates many combinations of two candidate rates per client at linear cost. Empirical evaluation on four public long-tailed benchmarks and a proprietary chip-defect dataset demonstrates that FedCGNM consistently outperforms baselines, with FedHOO yielding further gains in small-scale federations.

Probabilistic Methods · Everything Else

Taeseong Yoon, Heeyoung Kim

Single-pass uncertainty quantification (UQ) methods for classification represent uncertainty by predicting a tractable distribution over the class probability vector. While existing approaches primarily focus on enhancing the expressiveness of this distribution, they often provide limited insight into how predictive uncertainty is structured and aggregated, resulting in weak interpretability. We introduce the *courtroom analogy*, which conceptualizes uncertainty-aware classification as a structured debate among class-specific advocates. Each advocate forms a probabilistic opinion, and a final verdict is reached by aggregating these opinions using input-dependent plausibility weights. In this framework, each advocate's opinion is modeled as a Dirichlet distribution whose concentration parameter is decomposed into shared evidence and class-specific advocacy. This yields a structured mixture of Dirichlet distributions with semantically interpretable parameters. To instantiate this formulation, we propose *Mixture of Dirichlet EXperts* (MoDEX), a single-pass neural architecture that predicts the courtroom parameters, enabling efficient and expressive UQ while explicitly modeling uncertainty aggregation. We demonstrate that MoDEX enjoys strong theoretical properties and achieves state-of-the-art UQ performance across diverse benchmarks, yielding interpretable uncertainty estimates with meaningful semantics.

Applications · Everything Else

Yaohui Han, Rongliang Fu, Yanming Liu, Shuo Ren, Shuai Dong, Yunpeng Wang, Tinghuan Chen, Bei Yu, Tsung-Yi Ho

In the field of integrated circuits, leaf cells are the basic units, serving as the fundamental building blocks (e.g., standard cells) that are widely reused in various VLSI designs, forming the basis for more complex circuits. Therefore, the design quality of leaf cell layouts significantly impacts the PPA (Power, Performance, and Area) of the final VLSI designs. To automatically design leaf cell layouts that are close to expert designs, we propose GenLeaf. GenLeaf first utilizes a supervised, performance-aware embedding model to represent layouts and automatically calculate their similarity scores. Since there are expert-designed layouts but no corresponding scripts, we implement Bayesian optimization to generate a layout-script dataset for LLM training. With subsequent supervised fine-tuning and further preference optimization, GenLeaf can generate leaf cell layouts through scripts whose performance closely resembles that designed by human engineers. Experiment results demonstrate that GenLeaf outperforms expert-designed golden layouts across key performance metrics.

Applications · Everything Else

Zan Gong, Biting Huang, Fei He

Program termination is a fundamental liveness property in software verification. Proving termination of a given program is a formidable challenge due to the undecidability of the problem. In this paper, we propose LIFT, a termination verification framework that leverages LLMs to generate loop bounds within a guess-and-check workflow. LIFT couples this generation with a sound formal validation procedure that both guarantees all reported terminations and refutes invalid loop bounds via violation analysis. Experiments on publicly accessible termination benchmarks show that LIFT significantly outperforms existing termination verification tools.

Applications · Everything Else

Luankang Zhang, Hao Wang, Zhongzhou Liu, MINGJIA YIN, Yonghao Huang, Jiaqi Li, Wei Guo, Yong Liu, Huifeng Guo, Defu Lian 等

The scarcity of high-quality training data presents a fundamental bottleneck to scaling machine learning models. This challenge is particularly acute in recommendation systems, where extreme sparsity in user interactions leads to rugged optimization landscapes and poor generalization. We propose the Recursive Self-Improving Recommendation (RSIR) framework, a paradigm in which a model bootstraps its own performance without reliance on external data or teacher models. RSIR operates in a closed loop: the current model generates plausible user interaction sequences, a fidelity-based quality control mechanism filters them for consistency with user’s approximate preference manifold, and a successor model is augmented on the enriched dataset. Our theoretical analysis shows that RSIR acts as a data-driven implicit regularizer, smoothing the optimization landscape and guiding models toward more robust solutions. Empirically, RSIR yields consistent, cumulative gains across multiple benchmarks and architectures. Notably, even smaller models benefit, and weak models can generate effective training curricula for stronger ones. These results demonstrate that recursive self-improvement is a general, model-agnostic approach to overcoming data sparsity, suggesting a scalable path forward for recommender systems and beyond. Our anonymized code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/RSIR-7C5B.

Applications · Everything Else

Ishaan Singh Chandok, Core Francisco Park

Scientific data annotation, such as tracking animals in video or proofreading neural reconstructions, remains bottlenecked by the “last mile” problem: even with strong automation, verification and correction consume substantial human effort. Standard approaches train models to directly predict annotations, discarding the rich supervision in how experts navigate, click, verify, and correct. We introduce a framework for studying behavioral cloning on scientific annotation: 9 synthetic tasks paired with synthetic annotations that simulate realistic human strategies including exploration, mistake correction, and strategic decision-making. Our experiments reveal several findings. First, skills emerge hierarchically: models learn GUI mechanics before task-critical decisions, and commit fewer mistakes than the training data while retaining the ability to correct errors when they occur. Second, scaling models on multi-task behavioral cloning shows that larger models are more data efficient, but exhibit worse decision-making despite similar placement accuracy. Third, multi-task pretraining enables efficient fine-tuning to new tasks, while training from scratch fails entirely. Fourth, linear probes reveal that models internally represent latent variables of the annotation process such as task phase and data position; interestingly, we find a shared mistake representation that generalizes across different annotation tasks. Overall, our framework establishes systematic benchmarks and identifies key bottlenecks, providing a foundation for scaling behavioral cloning to real-world scientific data annotation.

Applications · Everything Else

Shiva Malay, Perampalli Shravan Nayak, Sagar Davasam, Srinivas Sunkara, Sai Rajeswar Mudumba

The rapid evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) has shifted their role from passive information providers to active agents capable of executing complex workflows. However, the realization of a true "AI worker" is currently hindered by benchmarks that fail to capture the intricacy of professional environments, which demand long-horizon planning, complex tool usage, and adherence to strict access protocols. To bridge this gap, we introduce EnterpriseOps-Gym, a benchmark environment designed to evaluate agentic planning in realistic enterprise settings. EnterpriseOps-Gym provides: (i) 1,150 expert-curated tasks across eight interconnected domains (including HR, IT, Customer Service and productivity tools) that require managing persistent state and adhering to strict outcome-based verification logic; and (ii) a high-fidelity, containerized sandbox environment hosting 164 database tables and 512 functional tools. Our evaluation reveals critical limitations in state-of-the-art models: even the top-performing Claude Sonnet~4.5 achieves only 34.1\% success, struggling significantly with planning consistency, error recovery, and policy constraints. Furthermore, we observe that agents frequently fail to refuse infeasible tasks, leading to unintended and potentially harmful side effects on the system. These findings indicate that current agents are not yet ready for enterprise deployment. By releasing EnterpriseOps-Gym, we provide a concrete testbed to advance the reliability of autonomous agents in professional workflows.

Applications · Everything Else

Linbin Tang, Jingyan You, Zilin Kang, Hanzhang Liu, Sophia Zhang, Zenan Li, Chenrui Cao, Liangcheng Song, Jiaao Wu, Xian Zhang 等

Recent formal reasoning systems achieve IMO-level performance, but create a fragmented landscape: algebra and number theory use Lean, while geometry relies on domain-specific languages with limited formal guarantees. This fragmentation increases the trusted computing base and hinders unified model development. Existing geometry-in-Lean efforts (LeanEuclid, LeanGeo) introduce custom axiom systems incompatible with standard \mathlib{}, and their small scale ($<$1K problems) prevents large-scale training. However, native \mathlib{} autoformalization of geometry poses unique challenges: explicating implicit diagrammatic assumptions (e.g., topological configuration and non-degeneracy)---unlike existing custom systems that defer validity checks to external solvers---and adapting to \mathlib{}'s small, rapidly-evolving geometric constructs. We present \method{}, a framework that addresses these challenges through a four-stage pipeline---constraint explication, configuration anchoring, formalization mapping, and iterative repair---to automatically formalize geometry in native \mathlib{}. We construct OMNI-Geometry (768 competition problems) and Numina-Geometry (177,597 problems), the largest geometry formalization dataset in Lean. Human evaluation shows 48.89\% TOP1 and 73.33\% TOP5 accuracy. Training Goedel v2 on our formalizations improves proof success from 13.6\% to 15.1\%, validating dataset quality for unified neural theorem proving.

Applications · Everything Else

Jiaxing Zhao, Hongbin Xie, Yuzhen Lei, Xuan Song, Zhuoran Shi, Lianxin Li, Shuangxue Liu, Haoran Zhang

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently become a strong paradigm for solving complex workflow-structured tasks through expert collaboration. However, the data that make such collaboration effective are typically distributed across organizations and cannot be centrally pooled due to privacy, intellectual property, and compliance constraints. Federated Learning preserves data locality, yet most federated paradigms treat clients as independent and fail to capture workflow dependencies that are essential for coherent multi-stage collaboration. Data locality and workflow dependency are orthogonal, and the key challenge arises where both must be satisfied, namely federated, workflow-aware collaboration. We introduce FedWave, a framework that enables LLM-based experts to solve sequential workflows under strict privacy constraints. FedWave integrates a Value Chain Layer that encodes inter-stage dependencies with communication-efficient federated LoRA adaptation, a server-side Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) router that performs input-conditioned expert fusion at inference time while retaining standard federated aggregation during training, and a Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) stage that aligns collaborative outputs using router-induced preferences. Experiments show that FedWave consistently outperforms strong federated baselines and remains competitive with centralized multi-agent systems without compromising data privacy. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FedWave-111A.

Deep Learning · Everything Else

Xin Yang, Yemin Wang, Mingda Liu, Letian Li, Shuaishuai Cao, ZhengXiao He, Ryan Dong

Scaling large language models (LLMs) has driven their success, yet dense Transformers couple capacity and computation: every parameter is activated for every token, making training and inference costs grow linearly with model size—a critical bottleneck as models approach trillion-parameter regimes. We aim to scale capacity through MoE-style mixture throughout the LLM pipeline rather than only the FFN. Prior pipeline-level approaches include ParaScale, which introduces virtual tokens and parallel streams but incurs substantial overhead and suffers from homogenized routing and gradient collapse, and AltUp, which uses an auxiliary prediction branch but offers limited adaptivity and slow convergence. We establish that MoE-style mixture layers can be reformulated as variable-kernel dynamic convolutions, where each expert corresponds to a $1{\times}1$ convolutional kernel and routing implements input-conditioned kernel aggregation. Building on this equivalence, we introduce cMoLLM: a convolutionally gated mixture-of-LLMs that routes over end-to-end streams through fully differentiable dynamic convolution. In GPT-2-style models trained on FineWeb, cMoLLM improves language modeling perplexity and downstream GLUE and SQuAD accuracy under matched compute, with better stream utilization, more stable optimization, and favorable scaling compared to ParaScale- and AltUp-style baselines.

Applications · Everything Else

Yanfang Liu, Mingjun Wang, Peng XU, Rongliang Fu, Bei Yu, Tsung-Yi Ho

Analog circuits constitute the indispensable interface between physical reality and digital computation, underpinning safety-critical systems from autonomous driving to medical implants. Consequently, verification correctness is paramount; yet, it remains the critical bottleneck in hardware design, consuming over 50\% of engineering cycles due to a heavy reliance on the manual interpretation of unstructured, heterogeneous specifications. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer automation potential, their probabilistic, autoregressive nature is structurally misaligned with the strict determinism required for analog verification tasks. Specifically, generic LLMs struggle to resolve semantic dispersion, latent causal dependencies, and numerical precision. To bridge this gap, we introduce AnalogVerifier, a neuro-symbolic framework that automates end-to-end testbench generation by decoupling semantic translation from logical enforcement. We propose a four-stage architecture: (1) Context-Aware Task Serialization transforms complex specifications into atomic tasks via an agentic workflow; (2) Graph-Symbolic Scheduling satisfies analog design constraints through Port Dependency Graphs (PDG) for correct-by-construction sequencing; (3) Numerical-Symbolic Grounding mitigates numerical hallucination by delegating threshold derivation to a deterministic symbolic oracle; (4) Closed-Loop Repair enables correctness and completeness of the generated testbenches by simulation feedback. Evaluation on five industrial analog circuits demonstrates that AnalogVerifier achieves 82.3\%--100\% functional pass rate, establishing a new paradigm for reliable, automated analog verification. The code and data are publicly available at \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ICML26--AnalogVerifier-72EE/}.

Deep Learning · Everything Else

Meng Bi, Hong Huang, Jinlong Song, Charles Wang, Chengming Hu, Xi Chen, Ting Yu, Xue Liu

Cross-device Federated Learning (FL) is frequently bottlenecked by the prohibitive computational and communication costs of training deep neural networks on resource-constrained edge hardware. While federated dynamic pruning aims to alleviate these costs by adjusting sparse topologies during training, existing methods rely on magnitude-based heuristics that are fundamentally ill-suited for the non-convergent, heterogeneous environments inherent to FL. To address this challenge, we propose Fedfit, a federated dynamic framework that replaces simple heuristics with optimization-centric criteria for topology adjustment. By leveraging a second-order approximation of the loss landscape via the Fisher Information Matrix, Fedfit enables precise and efficient topology adjustment without the overhead of explicit Hessian computation. Empirical evaluations across computer vision and natural language processing benchmarks demonstrate that Fedfit significantly narrows the sparse-to-dense accuracy gap, outperforming state-of-the-art methods while maintaining high communication efficiency.

General Machine Learning · Everything Else

Boyang Zhang, Daning Cheng, Yunquan Zhang, Fangming Liu

Parameter sharing is a key model compression technique, yet existing methods overlook the geometric properties of the loss landscape, often causing severe accuracy degradation under high compression ratios. Inspired by second-order optimization, we propose Curvature-aware Graph Coloring (CGC), a cross-layer parameter sharing framework that treats each network layer as a graph node, with each node assigned to a shared low-rank basis. CGC leverages Hessian eigenspace information to group layers with similar curvature profiles, aligning the perturbations introduced by parameter sharing with the low-curvature (flat) directions of the loss ellipsoid. This effectively mitigates performance loss while enabling flexible, global cross-layer sharing. Experiments on LLaMA-7B and Swin Transformer show that CGC achieves 28\%–50\% parameter compression with Top-1 accuracy loss no more than 0.01\% on Swin—or even accuracy gains on LLaMA—while delivering over 60\% higher inference throughput, significantly outperforming SVD-based and heuristic-based methods. This work demonstrates that curvature-guided, geometry-aware sharing is essential for efficient, stable, and high-ratio model compression.

Optimization · Everything Else

Gal Lifshitz, Shahar Zuler, Ori Fouks, Dan Raviv

End-to-end deep learning has achieved impressive results but often relies on large labeled datasets, exhibits limited generalization to unseen scenarios, and incurs substantial computational cost. Classical optimization methods, in contrast, are data-efficient and lightweight but frequently suffer from slow or unstable convergence. Learned optimizers aim to bridge this gap, yet existing approaches predominantly focus on first-order methods, leaving learned second-order optimization largely unexplored. We introduce L-SR1, a novel learned second-order optimizer that augments the classical Symmetric Rank-One (SR1) method with a lightweight, trainable preconditioning unit. This unit generates data-driven rank-one updates that are explicitly aligned with the secant condition via a learned projection mechanism, ensuring stable and consistent curvature estimation. Through controlled analytic benchmarks, we systematically analyze the stability, generalization across problem dimensions, and the quality of the resulting search directions. We further evaluate L-SR1 on the real-world task of Monocular Human Mesh Recovery (HMR), where it outperforms existing optimization-based and learned-optimization baselines. With a compact model and no reliance on task-specific fine-tuning or annotated data, L-SR1 demonstrates strong generalization and provides an effective drop-in optimizer for a wide range of iterative optimization problems.

Probabilistic Methods · Everything Else

Roman Plaud, Alexandre Perez-Lebel, Antoine Saillenfest, Thomas Bonald, Marine Le Morvan, Gael Varoquaux, Matthieu Labeau

Probabilistic models are typically trained using task-agnostic objectives like log-loss, which can lead to significant errors in downstream estimation. This disconnect is especially critical in Inverse Probability Weighting (IPW) for causal inference, where propensity score errors near $0$ and $1$ often lead to high bias and variance. We propose a principled framework for deriving task-specific strictly proper scoring rules by matching the local curvature of the downstream error metric. We apply this to the Average Treatment Effect (ATE) estimation, deriving a closed-form loss and its corresponding canonical probability mapping that can be readily integrated with any model like a neural network or a gradient boosting algorithm. Extensive evaluations on causal inference benchmarks demonstrate that our tailored objective consistently outperforms standard likelihood-based and covariate-balancing approaches.

Deep Learning · Everything Else

Xinxing Yu, Liying Yang, Hao Mo, Hui Ma, Fang Kai, Ajian Liu, Yanyan Liang

High-curvature regions in 3D point clouds encapsulate critical fine-grained geometric semantics yet exhibit a distinct long-tail sparsity in their spatial distribution. The inherent limitations of polynomial volume growth in Euclidean space frequently render these intricate geometric features challenging to adequately resolve within a uniform-scale feature space. Consequently, these regions are frequently overshadowed by smooth global features dominated by low-curvature regions, thereby limiting the discriminative capacity of the network. To address this issue, we propose PointCHR, a curvature-aware hyperbolic rectification (CHR) for point cloud analysis. Utilising the property of exponential volume expansion in the vicinity of hyperbolic manifolds, CHR presents a learnable curvature-guided radial rectification mechanism. By adaptively projecting high-curvature points towards boundary regions endowed with larger effective embedding capacities, PointCHR effectively mitigates the representation crowding problem inherent in Euclidean settings. Extensive experimentation has demonstrated that PointCHR significantly enhances the ability of backbone to capture fine-grained geometric details, achieving state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks.

Applications · Everything Else

Pawan Sasanka Ammanamanchi, Siddharth Bhat, Stella Biderman

Benchmarks for LLM-assisted theorem proving in Lean are often treated as intrinsically reliable because every solved instance comes with a machine-checked proof. However, the kernel only checks that a proof establishes a \emph{formal} statement; it does not verify that the statement faithfully encodes the intended informal problem, nor that evaluation harnesses are robust to trivial or adversarial solutions. We audit widely used Lean theorem-proving benchmarks and find recurring defects in every dataset we examined, including missing hypotheses, problem simplification, incomplete or incorrect translations, and Lean-specific specification hazards. Beyond dataset construction, we survey and identify evaluation-time failure modes that can inflate reported success without demonstrating meaningful proof capability. We propose a fault taxonomy, a suite of automated checkers and prompts, and release standards to guide the creation of formal math datasets and make evaluation more reproducible and trustworthy.