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Deep Learning · Generative Models and Autoencoders

Adrian Rodriguez-Munoz, William Daspit, Adam Klivans, Antonio Torralba, Constantinos Daskalakis, Giannis Daras

We propose Ambient Dataloops, an iterative framework for refining datasets that makes it easier for diffusion models to learn the underlying data distribution. Modern datasets contain samples of highly varying quality, and training directly on such heterogeneous data often yields suboptimal models. We propose a dataset-model co-evolution process; at each iteration of our method, the dataset becomes progressively higher quality, and the model improves accordingly. To avoid destructive self-consuming loops, at each generation, we treat the synthetically improved samples as noisy, but at a slightly lower noisy level than the previous iteration, and we use Ambient Diffusion techniques for learning under corruption. Empirically, Ambient Dataloops achieve state-of-the-art performance in unconditional and text-conditional image generation and de novo protein design. We further provide a theoretical justification for the proposed framework that captures the benefits of the data looping procedure.

Theory · Everything Else

Daniel Cao, August Chen, Karthik Sridharan, Yuchen Wu

We consider the robustness of score-based generative modeling to errors in the estimate of the score function. In particular, we show that Langevin dynamics is not robust to the $L^2$ errors (more generally $L^p$ errors) in the estimate of the score function. It is well-established that with small $L^2$ errors in the estimate of the score function, diffusion models can sample faithfully from the target distribution under fairly mild regularity assumptions in a polynomial time horizon. In contrast, our work shows that even for simple distributions in high dimensions, Langevin dynamics run for any polynomial time horizon will produce a distribution far from the target distribution in Total Variation (TV) distance, even when the $L^2$ error (more generally $L^p$) of the estimate of the score function is arbitrarily small. Considering such an error in the estimate of the score function is unavoidable in practice when learning the score function from data, our results provide further justification for diffusion models over Langevin dynamics and serve to caution against the use of Langevin dynamics with estimated scores.

Applications · Chemistry, Physics, and Earth Sciences

Abdel-Rahim Mezidi, Jordan Patracone, Amaury Habrard

Operator splitting methods are at the foundation of many numerical solvers for partial differential equations. In parallel, unrolled and hybrid learning-based architectures have been introduced to enhance classical solvers, but their design is rarely linked to the underlying problem structure. In this work, we propose a unifying framework that explicitly links operator splitting algorithms from optimization with unrolled hybrid architectures. We show that each operator splitting scheme naturally defines an unrolled architecture, which recovers a wide range of existing plug-and-play and hybrid models as special cases. Using this framework, we design new unrolled hybrid architectures and validate them on benchmark fluid dynamics simulations, where they achieve improved accuracy and stability.

Social Aspects · Accountability, Transparency, and Interpretability

Yixin Wang, Yucheng Dong

Local post-hoc explanations are widely used to understand black-box models on tabular data, with Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations (LIME) being a popular approach. LIME approximates a black-box model using a sparse linear surrogate in a local neighborhood, implicitly assuming feature-wise linear homogeneity. However, this assumption often fails when local feature effects exhibit heterogeneous or nonlinear behaviors, resulting in unfaithful and unstable explanations. Moreover, LIME relies on a decoupled feature selection procedure that is not aligned with the surrogate modeling objective, further exacerbating instability under local sampling. To address these limitations, we propose PL-LIME, a two-stage sparse local explanation framework that ensures objective consistency across stages. PL-LIME models feature-wise local effects using instance-anchored piecewise linear functions, providing a minimal yet principled extension beyond linear surrogates under a fixed explanation budget. Sparsity is enforced through a decoupled nonnegative shrinkage procedure that directly scales the estimated local effects, improving stability while preserving interpretability. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that PL-LIME achieves higher local fidelity and stability, and provides more reliable local explanations that capture finer-grained local effect structures than LIME.

Applications · Computer Vision

Shangwen Zhu, Qianyu Peng, Zhilei Shu, Yuting Hu, Han Zhang, Andy Zheng, Xinyu Cui, Jian Zhao, Ruili Feng, Fan Cheng

High-fidelity text-to-image and text-to-video generation typically relies on Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG), but achieving optimal results often demands computationally expensive sampling schedules. In this work, we propose MAMBO-G, a training-free acceleration framework that significantly reduces computational cost by dynamically optimizing guidance magnitudes. We observe that standard CFG schedules are inefficient, applying disproportionately large updates in early steps that hinder convergence speed. MAMBO-G mitigates this by modulating the guidance scale based on the update-to-prediction magnitude ratio, effectively stabilizing the trajectory and enabling rapid convergence. This efficiency is particularly vital for resource-intensive tasks like video generation. Our method serves as a universal plug-and-play accelerator, achieving up to 3$\times$ speedup on Stable Diffusion v3.5 (SD3.5) and 4$\times$ on Lumina. Most notably, MAMBO-G accelerates the 14B-parameter Wan2.1 video model by 2$\times$ while preserving visual fidelity, offering a practical solution for efficient large-scale video synthesis. Our implementation follows a mainstream open-source diffusion framework and is plug-and-play with existing pipelines.

Theory · Reinforcement Learning and Planning

Yivan Zhang, Ziyan Luo, Manuel Baltieri

State abstraction plays a central role in scaling reinforcement learning to complex but structured systems. In studying such systems, a wide range of behavioral structures have been proposed in reinforcement learning, including value functions, invariants, bisimulation relations, and behavioral metrics. However, a general principle for determining what structures are provably preserved under state abstraction is still lacking. In this paper, we present a unified framework for defining and analyzing behavioral structures in reinforcement learning. Our framework provides a compositional way to specify behavioral semantics and metrics based on local, one-step descriptions of system dynamics. Using this framework, we establish results showing how behavioral structures can be safely transferred between abstract and concrete systems. We further show how to construct quantitative metrics from logical behavioral semantics with soundness guarantees. Together, these results provide a principled foundation for reasoning about behaviors under state abstraction in reinforcement learning and offer reusable definition and proof principles for a broad class of behavioral structures in reinforcement learning.

Deep Learning · Robustness

Peiyu Yang, Paul MONTAGUE, Feng Liu, Andrew C. Cullen, Amar Kaur, Christopher Leckie, Sarah Erfani

Vision-language models (VLMs) are now widely used in downstream tasks. However, real-world applications often expose VLMs to distribution shifts induced by semantic variation (e.g., shape, size, and style). Robustness certification determines if a model’s prediction changes when transformations are applied to its input. While most certification frameworks study geometric or pixel-level transformations over inputs, this work proposes a novel framework that enables certifying VLM robustness under semantic-level transformations. Leveraging the open-vocabulary capability of VLMs, we use text prompts as semantic proxies to construct transformations parameterized by an extent that controls the degree of semantic variation. By characterizing the VLM decision boundary in closed form, our framework quantitatively certifies extent intervals for which the predicted class remains unchanged under the semantic transformation. Our framework is the first to certify VLM robustness under semantic-level variations without requiring additional data for each variation, making it practical to apply. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world data show that our framework enables certifying robustness under diverse semantic variations across scenarios.

Deep Learning · Generative Models and Autoencoders

Noam Issachar, Mohammad Salama, Raanan Fattal, Sagie Benaim

Flow-based generative models have recently shown impressive performance for conditional generation tasks, such as text-to-image generation. However, current methods transform a general unimodal noise distribution to a specific mode of the target data distribution. As such, every point in the initial source distribution can be mapped to every point in the target distribution, resulting in long average paths. To this end, in this work, we tap into a non-utilized property of conditional flow-based models: the ability to design a non-trivial prior distribution. Given an input condition, such as a text prompt, we first map it to a point lying in data space, representing an “average" data point with the minimal average distance to all data points of the same conditional mode (e.g., class). We then utilize the flow matching formulation to map samples from a parametric distribution centered around this point to the conditional target distribution. Experimentally, our method significantly improves training times and generation efficiency (FID, KID and CLIP alignment scores) compared to baselines, producing high quality samples using fewer sampling steps. Code is available at https://github.com/MoSalama98/conditional-prior-flow-matching.

General Machine Learning · Everything Else

Jin Lee, Zhonghao Chen, Xuhang He, Robert Underwood, Bogdan Nicolae, Franck Cappello, Xiaoyi Lu, Sheng Di, Zheng Zhang

In large-scale LLM pretraining systems with $100\mathrm{k}+$ GPUs, failures become the norm rather than the exception, and restart costs can dominate wall-clock training time. However, existing fault-tolerance mechanisms are largely unprepared for this restart-dominant regime. To address this challenge, we propose SPARe—Stacked Parallelism with Adaptive Reordering—a fault-tolerance framework that masks node failures during gradient synchronization by stacking redundant data shards across parallelism groups and adaptively reordering execution. SPARe achieves availability comparable to traditional replication while maintaining near-constant computation overhead of only $2\sim3\times$, even under high redundancy where traidional replication would require linearly inflating overhead. We derive closed-form expressions for endurable failure count and computation overhead, validate them via SimGrid-based discrete-event simulation, and jointly optimize redundancy and checkpointing to minimize training time. At extreme scale with up to $600\mathrm{k}$ GPUs, SPARe reduces time-to-train by $40\sim50$% compared to traditional replication.

Optimization · Non-Convex

Haosong Zhang, Shenxi Wu, Xingjian Ma, Shirui Bian, Yichi Zhang, Xi Chen, Wei Lin

Deeper modern architectures are costly to train, making hyperparameter transfer preferable to expensive repeated tuning. Maximal Update Parametrization ($\mu$P) helps explain why many hyperparameters transfer across width. Yet depth scaling is less understood for modern architectures, whose computation graphs contain multiple parallel paths and residual aggregation. To unify various non-recurrent multi-path neural networks such as CNNs, ResNets, and Transformers, we introduce a graph-based notion of effective depth. Under stabilizing initializations and a maximal-update criterion, we show that the optimal learning rate decays with effective depth following a universal -3/2 power law. Here, the maximal-update criterion maximizes the typical one-step representation change at initialization without causing instability, and effective depth is the minimal path length from input to output, counting layers and residual additions. Experiments across diverse architectures confirm the predicted slope and enable reliable zero-shot transfer of learning rates across depths and widths, turning depth scaling into a predictable hyperparameter-transfer problem.

Probabilistic Methods · Monte Carlo and Sampling Methods

Michael Van Huffel, Nathan Kirk, Makram Chahine, Daniela Rus, T. Konstantin Rusch

Low-discrepancy points are designed to efficiently fill the space in a uniform manner. This uniformity is highly advantageous in many problems in science and engineering, including in numerical integration, computer vision, machine perception, computer graphics, machine learning, and simulation. Whereas most previous low-discrepancy constructions rely on abstract algebra and number theory, Message-Passing Monte Carlo (MPMC) was recently introduced to exploit machine learning methods for generating point sets with lower discrepancy than previously possible. However, MPMC is limited to generating point sets and cannot be extended to low-discrepancy sequences (LDS), i.e., sequences of points in which every prefix has low discrepancy, a property essential for many applications. To address this limitation, we introduce Neural Low-Discrepancy Sequences *NeuroLDS*, the first machine learning-based framework for generating LDS. Drawing inspiration from classical LDS, we train a neural network to map indices to points such that the resulting sequences exhibit minimal discrepancy across all prefixes. To this end, we deploy a two-stage learning process: supervised approximation of classical constructions followed by unsupervised fine-tuning to minimize prefix discrepancies. We demonstrate that *NeuroLDS* outperforms all previous LDS constructions by a significant margin with respect to discrepancy measures. Moreover, we demonstrate the effectiveness of *NeuroLDS* across diverse applications, including numerical integration, robot motion planning, and scientific machine learning. These results highlight the promise and broad significance of Neural Low-Discrepancy Sequences.

Theory · Probabilistic Methods

Tao Wang, Edgar Dobriban

Prediction sets can wrap around any ML model to cover unknown test outcomes with a guaranteed probability. Yet, it remains unclear how to use them optimally for downstream decision-making. Here, we propose a decision-theoretic framework that seeks to minimize the expected loss (risk) against a worst-case distribution consistent with the prediction set's coverage guarantee. We first characterize the minimax optimal policy for a fixed prediction set, showing that it balances the worst-case loss inside the set with a penalty for potential losses outside the set. Building on this, we derive the optimal prediction set construction that minimizes the resulting robust risk subject to a coverage constraint. Finally, we introduce Risk-Optimal Conformal Prediction (ROCP), a practical algorithm that targets these risk-minimizing sets while maintaining finite-sample distribution-free marginal coverage. Empirical evaluations on medical diagnosis and safety-critical decision-making tasks demonstrate that ROCP reduces critical mistakes compared to baselines, particularly when out-of-set errors are costly.

Deep Learning · Large Language Models

Yunxiang Zhang, Yiheng Li, Ali Payani, Lu Wang

A central challenge for language agents is utilizing past experience to adapt to dynamic test-time conditions. While recent work demonstrates the promise of agentic memory mechanisms, most systems restrict retrieval to episode initiation. Consequently, agents are forced to rely on static guidance that becomes increasingly misaligned as long-horizon tasks unfold. To address this rigidity, we propose the Adaptive Memory Agent (AdaMEM), a novel framework for agent test-time adaptation. Without updating model parameters online, AdaMEM adapts agent behavior via a hybrid memory architecture: it maintains a long-term trajectory memory of raw experiences collected offline while generating dynamic short-term strategy memory on-the-fly to guide decision-making. This mechanism enables the trade-off between token efficiency and adaptability across varying inference-time compute levels. Empirically, AdaMEM significantly outperforms static memory baselines, achieving relative gains of up to 13% on ALFWorld and 11% on WebShop. To further enhance this adaptation, we develop Step-MFT, a Step-wise Memory Fine-Tuning technique that trains the policy to synthesize high-quality strategies from retrieved experiences, yielding additional performance gains. Our work establishes a new scaling dimension for agentic memory, supporting continuous reasoning and self-evolution post-deployment in real-world environments.

Deep Learning · Self-Supervised Learning

Hanxun Huang, Qizhou Wang, Xingjun Ma, Cihang Xie, Christopher Leckie, Sarah Erfani

Audio self-supervised learning (SSL) aims to learn general-purpose representations from large-scale unlabeled audio data and has achieved remarkable progress in recent years. While most prior work relies on generative reconstruction objectives, contrastive approaches remain relatively underexplored, in part due to the high computational cost of designing effective augmentation strategies and the large batch sizes typically required for pre-training. In this work, we introduce **AudioMosaic**, an audio encoder for general audio understanding. During pre-training, AudioMosaic applies time–frequency masking to spectrogram patches to form paired inputs, employing an elegant and efficient augmentation strategy that significantly reduces computational cost while supporting large-batch training. The AudioMosaic encoder learns discriminative utterance-level representations that exhibit strong transferability across datasets, domains, and acoustic conditions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AudioMosaic achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple standard benchmarks. Moreover, we show that the pretrained AudioMosaic encoder enhances audio perception when integrated with large language models (LLMs).

Deep Learning · Large Language Models

Yongshi Ye, Hui Jiang, Feihu Jiang, Tian Lan, Yichao Du, Biao Fu, Xiaodong Shi, Qianghuai Jia, Longyue Wang, Weihua Luo

Self-evolving memory serves as the trainable parameters for Large Language Models (LLMs)-based agents, where extraction (distilling insights from experience) and management (updating the memory bank) must be tightly coordinated. Existing methods predominately optimize memory management while treating memory extraction as a static process, resulting in poor generalization, where agents accumulate instance-specific noise rather than robust memories. To address this, we propose Unified Memory Extraction and Management (UMEM), a self-evolving agent framework that jointly optimizes a Large Language Model to simultaneous extract and manage memories. To mitigate overfitting to specific instances, we introduce Semantic Neighborhood Modeling and optimize the model with a neighborhood-level marginal utility reward via GRPO. This approach ensures memory generalizability by evaluating memory utility across clusters of semantically related queries. Extensive experiments across five benchmarks demonstrate that UMEM significantly outperforms highly competitive baselines, achieving up to a 10.67% improvement in multi-turn interactive tasks. Futhermore, UMEM maintains a monotonic growth curve during continuous evolution. Codes and models will be publicly released.

General Machine Learning · Evaluation

Xiang Liu, Zhenheng Tang, Hong Chen, Peijie Dong, Zeyu Li, Xiuze Zhou, Bo Li, Xuming Hu, Xiaowen Chu

While Key-Value (KV) cache compression is essential for efficient LLM inference, current evaluations disproportionately focus on \textbf{sparse retrieval} tasks, potentially masking the degradation of High-Density Reasoning where Chain-of-Thought (CoT) coherence is critical. We introduce KVFundaBench to systematically evaluate this gap, revealing a sharp dichotomy: while retrieval tasks remain robust, reasoning tasks exhibit severe Task-Dependent Degradation under aggressive compression due to disrupted CoT links. Extending our analysis to the DeepSeek-R1 model, we uncover that its specialized attention patterns offer unique insights into the fragility of reasoning chains. Guided by these findings—specifically the necessity of preserving few-shot examples as indivisible \textbf{Semantic Units}—we propose ShotKV. This approach explicitly separates prefill and decoding phases to prioritize semantic integrity. Empirical results demonstrate that ShotKV achieves 9\%-18\% accuracy improvements on long-context generation tasks and effectively generalizes to document QA, all while delivering an 11\% latency reduction compared to full cache inference.

Applications · Robotics

Dezhong Tong, Jiawen Wang, Hengyi Zhou, Yinlong Shen, Xiaonan Huang, Mohammad Khalid Jawed

Many physical AI tasks are governed by implicit equilibrium: an agent actuates a subset of degrees of freedom (boundary DoFs), while the remaining free DoFs settle by minimizing a total potential energy. Even seemingly basic tasks such as bending a deformable linear object (DLO) to a target shape can exhibit strongly nonlinear behavior due to multi-stability: the same boundary conditions may yield multiple equilibrium shapes depending on the actuation trajectory. However, learning and control in such systems is brittle because the actuation-to-configuration map is defined only implicitly, and naive backpropagation through iterative equilibrium solvers is memory- and compute-intensive. We propose Neural Control, a boundary-control framework that computes trajectory-dependent, memory-efficient proxy gradients by differentiating equilibrium conditions via an adjoint formulation, avoiding unrolling of solver iterations. To improve robustness over long horizons, we integrate these sensitivities into a receding-horizon MPC scheme that repeatedly re-anchors optimization to realized equilibria and mitigates basin-switching in multi-stable regimes. We evaluate Neural Control in simulation and on physical robots manipulating DLOs, and show improved performance over gradient-free baselines such as SPSA and CEM.

Deep Learning · Robustness

Shijie Liu, Andrew C. Cullen, Paul MONTAGUE, Sarah Erfani, Benjamin Rubinstein

Existing backdoor attacks on Reinforcement Learning (RL) typically rely on unrealistic white-box access to victim parameters, rewards, or observations. Inspired by real world behaviors, we introduce the Supply-Chain Backdoor (SCAB) attack to demonstrate that such assumptions are unnecessary. SCAB targets the common practice of training with third-party policies, poisoning the dataset solely through a black-box of legitimate agent-environment interactions. With only 3% data corruption, SCAB achieves a 90% attack success rate and reduces victim returns by 80%. These findings expose a critical vulnerability in the modern RL supply chain, highlighting that reliance on untrusted external agents constitutes a severe and practical security risk.

Deep Learning · Attention Mechanisms

Yusuke Sekikawa, Jun Nagata, Itsumi Araki, Ruka Eto

Spherical signals provide a natural representation for omnidirectional perception and often benefit from equivariance to 3D rotations. Recent spherical vision transformers implement local self-attention on spherical grids, but most retain only partial $\mathrm{SO}(3)$ equivariance and rely on $\textit{location-dependent}$ local positional embeddings (LPEs). Such LPEs can degrade robustness to camera tilt or object reorientation and introduce additional memory and computational overhead. We propose $\textit{Spherical $\mathrm{SO}(3)$-Equivariant Local Attention}$ (SoLA), an LPE-free local attention mechanism for spherical signals. SoLA achieves full $\mathrm{SO}(3)$ equivariance through a distance-preserving positional modulation that couples query/key features with each token’s unit direction. Specifically, the modulation lifts queries and keys using an outer-product with the 4D direction dependent vector. The induced similarity of the modulated queries and keys depends on content affinity and great-circle distance while remaining invariant to global $\mathrm{SO}(3)$ rotations. The same formulation admits a softmax-free linear variant that computes local attention via key-value aggregation without per-query neighbor materialization. We integrate SoLA into a U-shaped spherical transformer for $360^\circ$ depth estimation and semantic segmentation, demonstrating substantially improved robustness to arbitrary 3D rotations compared to prior spherical transformers with similar computational costs.

General Machine Learning · Transfer, Multitask and Meta-learning

Yu Zhang, Xi Zhang, Hualin zhou, Xinyuan Chen, Shang Gao, Hong Jia, Jianfei Yang, Yuankai Qi, Tao Gu

Deep learning for human sensing on edge systems presents significant potential for smart applications. However, its training and development are hindered by the limited availability of sensor data and resource constraints of edge systems. While transferring pre-trained models to different sensing applications is promising, existing methods often require extensive sensor data and computational resources, resulting in high costs and limited transferability. In this paper, we propose XTransfer, a first-of-its-kind method enabling modality-agnostic, few-shot model transfer with resource-efficient design. XTransfer flexibly uses pre-trained models and transfers knowledge across different modalities by (i) model repairing that safely mitigates modality shift by adapting pre-trained layers with only few sensor data, and (ii) layer recombining that efficiently searches and recombines layers of interest from source models in a layer-wise manner to restructure models. We benchmark various baselines across diverse human sensing datasets spanning different modalities. The results show that XTransfer achieves state-of-the-art performance while significantly reducing the costs of sensor data collection, model training, and edge deployment.