论文检索

Applications · Robotics

Chenqi Yan, Zhaoyu Zeng, Yifeng Yang, Jundong Zhou, Zhuoyuan Ni, Junqi Wu, Qinying Gu, Xinbing Wang, Nanyang Ye

Robust aerial target detection for autonomous UAV-on-UAV pursuit is severely hindered by continuous scale drift, long-tailed scale imbalance, and flight-induced visual noise, rendering standard empirical risk minimization strategies poorly aligned with real-world deployment. To address these challenges, we propose a scale-aware robust optimization framework that performs group-wise minimax optimization over scale-partitioned data, ensuring balanced robustness across long-, mid-, and close-range engagement regimes. We further introduce an uncertainty-rectified regression loss to suppress noise-driven errors without discarding informative hard examples, complemented by a control-aligned center accuracy penalty that prioritizes the localization precision required for stable flight control. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method yields substantially improved robustness under visual degradation, with significantly slower decay in detection mAP and center-point accuracy compared to baselines. Validated through both photorealistic simulations and real-world flight tests, our system achieves **real-time performance of 120 FPS** on an embedded NVIDIA Orin NX platform, confirming its practical efficacy for high-speed interception.

General Machine Learning · Transfer, Multitask and Meta-learning

Hossein Zakerinia, Jonathan Scott, Christoph Lampert

Personalized federated learning has emerged as a popular approach to training on devices holding statistically heterogeneous data, known as clients. However, most existing approaches require a client to have labeled data for training or finetuning in order to obtain their own personalized model. In this paper we address this by proposing FLowDUP, a novel method that is able to generate a personalized model using only a forward pass with unlabeled data. The generated model parameters reside in a low-dimensional subspace, enabling efficient communication and computation. FLowDUP's learning objective is theoretically motivated by our new transductive multi-task PAC-Bayesian generalization bound, that provides performance guarantees for unlabeled clients. The objective is structured in such a way that it allows both clients with labeled data and clients with only unlabeled data to contribute to the training process. To supplement our theoretical results we carry out a thorough experimental evaluation of FLowDUP, demonstrating strong empirical performance on a range of datasets with differing sorts of statistically heterogeneous clients. Through numerous ablation studies, we test the efficacy of the individual components of the method.

Ben Lai, Melissa Englund, Ramit Bharanikumar, Isabel Nocedal, Ali Davariashtiyani, Jason Perera, Aly Khan

Modeling recognition between T-cell receptors (TCRs) and peptide-MHC (pMHC) complexes is a fundamental challenge in computational immunology, constrained by sparse paired interaction data relative to abundant unpaired sequences. We introduce DecoderTCR, a masked language model framework that addresses this through two contributions: (1) a compositional continual pre-training curriculum that learns component representations from marginal data before refining cross-chain dependencies from limited pairs, and (2) Iterative Entropy-Guided Refinement (IEGR), a non-autoregressive decoding algorithm that resolves high-confidence positions first to provide context for uncertain regions. On held-out benchmarks, DecoderTCR achieves 0.96 AUROC for zero-shot pMHC binding prediction and 0.76 AUROC for epitope-specific TCR recognition, approaching supervised baselines without epitope-specific training. Learned representations recover structural contacts without coordinate supervision, and generated sequences exhibit realistic recombination statistics. Experimental validation reveals a prediction-generation gap: strong discrimination does not yet yield reliable generation, highlighting an open challenge for the field.

Deep Learning · Large Language Models

Jiaxi Liu, Yifeng Yang, Xinbing Wang, Qinying Gu, Nanyang Ye

Hallucinations in large vision-language models (LVLMs) remain a critical challenge, with models often generate tokens that fail to align with visual evidence. To address this issue, we propose AFS: Anchor-Final Self-Supervision, a novel framework for hallucination-aware optimization in LVLMs. By leveraging discrepancies between intermediate and final layer predictions, AFS selectively applies self-supervision to visually descriptive tokens, incorporates hallucination-aware token classification, and encourages consistency between intermediate and final layer distributions. Unlike traditional methods that rely on explicit supervision or post-hoc interventions, AFS optimizes the model via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), using token-specific rewards derived solely from internal model signals. Experiments demonstrate that AFS significantly reduces hallucinations without compromising recall in caption generation. Beyond captioning, AFS excels in discriminative tasks, improving the reliability of object existence predictions and multimodal reasoning. Furthermore, AFS demonstrates strong cross-dataset generalization, transferring effectively across diverse visual domains.

Tianhao Huang, Guanghui Min, zhenyu lei, Aiying Zhang, Chen Chen

Unraveling how macroscopic cognitive phenotypes emerge from microscopic neuronal connectivity remains one of the core pursuits of neuroscience. To this end, researchers typically leverage multi-modal information from structural connectivity (SC) and functional connectivity (FC) to complete downstream tasks. Recent methodologies explore the intricate coupling mechanisms between SC and FC, attempting to fuse their representations at the regional level. However, lacking fundamental neuroscientific insight, these approaches fail to uncover the latent interactions between neural regions underlying these connectomes, and thus cannot explain why SC and FC exhibit dynamic states of both coupling and heterogeneity. In this paper, we formulate multi-modal fusion through the lens of neural communication dynamics and propose the Adaptive Flow Routing Network (AFR-Net), a physics-informed framework that models how structural constraints (SC) give rise to functional communication patterns (FC), enabling interpretable discovery of critical neural pathways. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AFR-Net significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. The code is available at \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DIAL-F0D1}.

Deep Learning · Generative Models and Autoencoders

Zongye Zhang, Yuzhuo Cui, Qingjie Liu, Yunhong Wang

Generalizing motion representation across diverse characters remains challenging due to significant topological variations in skeletal structures across datasets and species, which hinders the development of scalable generative models. To bridge this gap, we propose a Semantic-Aware Topology-Agnostic framework that learns a unified latent manifold shared by disparate species. Unlike methods relying on fixed hierarchies or rigid padding strategies, our approach leverages a semantic modulation mechanism to align functional joint correspondences, thereby decoupling motion from topology. This design enables the construction of a continuous, generative-friendly motion space from large-scale, unaligned raw BVH data. Experiments on human and animal datasets demonstrate that our framework achieves high-fidelity reconstruction and supports downstream text-to-motion tasks. Notably, the model unlocks emergent capabilities, enabling zero-shot cross-species retargeting without paired data.

Deep Learning · Attention Mechanisms

Tatiana Petrova, Evgeny Polyachenko, Radu State

We study the thermodynamic memory capacity of modern Hopfield networks (Dense Associative Memory models) with continuous states under geometric constraints, extending classical analyses of pairwise associative memory. We derive thermodynamic phase boundaries for Dense Associative Memory networks with exponential capacity $p = e^{\alpha N}$, comparing Gaussian (LSE) and Epanechnikov (LSR) kernels. For continuous neurons on an $N$-sphere, the geometric entropy depends solely on the spherical geometry, not the kernel. In the sharp-kernel regime, the maximum theoretical capacity $\alpha = 0.5$ is achieved at zero temperature; below this threshold, a critical line separates retrieval from a spin-glass phase. The two kernels differ qualitatively in their phase boundary structure: for LSE, the retrieval region extends to arbitrarily high temperatures as $\alpha \to 0$, but interference from spurious patterns is always present. For LSR, the finite support introduces a threshold $\alpha_{\text{th}}$ below which no spurious patterns contribute to the noise floor, producing a qualitatively different retrieval regime in this sub-threshold region. These results advance the theory of high-capacity associative memory and clarify fundamental limits of retrieval robustness in modern attention-like memory architectures.

Applications · Neuroscience, Cognitive Science

Chenyu Liu, MUYUN JIANG, Pu Wan, Jinxin Pi, Jingying Ma, Xinliang Zhou, Peiliang Gong, Yi Ding, Chenyu Liu

Electroencephalography (EEG) foundation models (EFMs) have achieved strong performance across a wide range of downstream EEG tasks via pretraining and fine-tuning. Through empirical analysis, we observe that (i) no single EFM consistently dominates all tasks, yet identifying the task-specific optimal model by fine-tuning all EFMs introduces substantial computational overhead; and (ii) models with inferior task-level performance still exhibit strengths at the sample level as distinct architectures induce diverse inductive biases. These observations motivate EmBrace, a representation-centric framework for sample-aware knowledge fusion that avoids the constraints of parameter-level or output-level alignment. EmBrace synchronizes discriminative intermediate representations into a unified manifold and adaptively weights multiple EFMs at the sample level while selecting the most compatible model as the carrier. Extensive experiments across multiple EEG benchmarks demonstrate that EmBrace consistently improves over SOTA EFMs and generalizes effectively under cross-task settings.

Gabrijel Boduljak, Yushi Lan, Christian Rupprecht, Andrea Vedaldi

Forecasting by generating RGB videos is computationally expensive, often physically implausible, and not directly actionable, since it requires translation into decision-making signals. Direct modality forecasting (e.g., predicting future segmentation) produces directly actionable outputs but fails to scale due to the need for labels. Vision Foundation Model (VFM) features offer the best of both worlds: they contain actionable semantic and geometric information that can be easily decoded from the predicted features, while requiring no labels on the downstream task for training. However, almost all existing VFM feature forecasting methods regress future features from fixed number of input frames, with evaluation predominantly on short horizons matching the training setup. We firstly show that existing regression methods struggle with forecasting from partial observations because they average over multiple plausible futures, failing to capture uncertainty in the future given the past. Interestingly, naively replacing deterministic forecasting with generative flow matching does not match the sample quality of the regression model, despite being a mathematically appropriate formulation of the forecasting task. In this work, we explain why this is the case, and we show how to optimally generate foundation model features. Our key insight is that generative modeling of VFM features requires (auto)encoding into a compact latent space suitable for diffusion. We show that this latent space preserves information more effectively than previously used alternatives, such as uncompressed feature diffusion or PCA-based compression, both for forecasting and other applications, such as image generation. Our results suggest that conditional generation of (compressed) VFM features offers a promising and scalable foundation for future scene forecasters.

Applications · Health / Medicine

ying wang, Guoheng Huang, Chan-Tong Lam, Xiaochen Yuan

Reliable medical audio diagnosis demands models that are not only accurate but also honest about their uncertainty. However, fine-tuned models based on small, imbalanced datasets often become overconfident due to norm bias, whereby they rely on feature magnitude rather than semantic alignment. As a theoretical optimum for class-separating geometric structures, Equiangular Tight Frame (ETF) is effective for class-imbalanced and calibration tasks because of its maximal angular separability and geometric fairness. Yet, existing ETF-based methods perform weak when deal with noisy medical data; specifically, the gradient-based rotation results in instability, while the fixed ETFs fail in adapting to drifting prototypes. To solve this, We propose Spherical Procrustes Alignment (SPA), the first method combining spherical constraints with dynamic ETF alignment for medical audio. The SPA includes two branches: 1) the Spherical branch, which normalizes features and weights to eliminate the norm bias, and 2) the Geometric branch, which adapts features, tracks prototypes, and uses Dynamic Procrustes Alignment to align the fixed ETF with the prototypes, generating stable logits. Then a self-alignment mechanism fuses the two branches to jointly optimize the logits. Experiments on ICBHI 2017 and CirCor DigiScope datasets show that the SPA achieves new state-of-the-art results, turning large pre-trained models into reliable and efficient clinical tools without extra inference costs.

Applications · Health / Medicine

Bowen Shi, Weiwei Cao, Ruifeng Yuan, Wanxing Chang, Wenrui Dai, Hongkai Xiong, Ling Zhang, Jianpeng Zhang

Vision–language pre-training (VLP) holds great promise for general-purpose medical AI by leveraging radiology reports as rich textual supervision, yet existing methods struggle with 3D CT imaging due to inefficient visual backbones and coarse semantic alignment. To address these issues, we propose a tailored VLP framework featuring three key components: (1) a CNN–ViT hybrid encoder that replaces ViT’s patch embedding with a 3D CNN backbone to efficiently capture local anatomical details while preserving global attention and compatibility with pre-trained cross-modal priors; (2) a disease-level contrastive learning mechanism using learnable query tokens to dynamically extract disease-specific semantics from full reports and align them with corresponding visual features, thereby disentangling distinct diseases within the same anatomical region; and (3) a diagnosis-aware prompt strategy that employs real clinical phrases and aggregated disease prototypes to bridge the pre-training–inference gap and enhance zero-shot diagnostic reliability. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on CT-RATE (84.4\% AUC, +5.1%) and Rad-ChestCT (75.4\% AUC, +5.4%), with even larger gains (+9.8% AUC) on a challenging 60-disease benchmark, and demonstrates strong transferability to radiology report generation, underscoring the generality and clinical utility of our approach.

Deep Learning · Algorithms

Yiting Chen, Zongwei Huo, Junchi Yan

Adaptive Moment Estimation (Adam) is one of the most popular and often the default stochastic optimizers for deep neural network training. Using first- and second-moment estimation, Adam provides adaptive learning rates for each parameter, significantly outperforming Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). However, as deep neural networks become larger, estimating the first and second moments consumes substantial memory. It motivates various methods to reduce memory usage for adaptive optimizers. In this paper, we propose to rethink the first and second moment estimation from a gradient computation perspective. The gradient of the weight matrix is the multiplication of the input and the gradient of the output. Instead of finding low-rank approximations of the first and second moments, as in previous work, we propose tracking the input and output gradients to efficiently estimate moments. We provide analyses of the similarities and differences between our proposed method, the widely used Adam optimizer, and previous memory-efficient optimizers designed to reduce memory usage. We conduct experiments to verify the effectiveness of our method, which reduces memory usage by up to $30$% while preserving similar performance or even improving the performance of Adam.

Applications · Neuroscience, Cognitive Science

Runhe Zhou, Shanglin Li, Guanxiang Huang, Xinliang Zhou, Qibin Zhao, Motoaki Kawanabe, Yi Ding, Cuntai Guan

Electroencephalography (EEG)-based multimodal learning integrates brain signals with complementary modalities to improve mental state assessment, providing great clinical potential. The effectiveness of such paradigms largely depends on the representation learning on heterogeneous modalities. For EEG-based paradigms, one promising approach is to leverage their hierarchical structures, as recent studies have shown that both EEG and associated modalities (e.g., facial expressions) exhibit hierarchical structures reflecting complex cognitive processes. However, Euclidean embeddings struggle to represent these hierarchical structures due to their flat geometry, while hyperbolic spaces, with their exponential growth property, are naturally suited for them. In this work, we propose EEG-MoCE, a novel hyperbolic mixture-of-curvature experts framework designed for multimodal neurotechnology. EEG-MoCE assigns each modality to an expert in a learnable-curvature hyperbolic space, enabling adaptive modeling of its intrinsic geometry. A curvature-aware fusion strategy then dynamically weights experts, emphasizing modalities with richer hierarchical information. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that EEG-MoCE achieves state-of-the-art performance, including emotion recognition, sleep staging, and cognitive assessment.

Deep Learning · Large Language Models

Siquan Li, Kaiqi Jiang, Jiacheng Sun, Tianyang Hu

Despite the prevalence of the attention sink phenomenon in Large Language Models (LLMs), where initial tokens disproportionately monopolize attention scores, its structural origins remain elusive. This work provides a _mechanistic explanation_ for this phenomenon, tracing its roots to the value aggregation process inherent in self-attention, which induces a systematic dimension-wise variance discrepancy. We demonstrate that this discrepancy is drastically amplified by the activation of super neurons within Feed-Forward Network (FFN) layers. Specifically, the channel-sparse down-projections trigger a dimension disparity of the first-token representation, necessitating the formation of attention sinks as a structural anchor. We validate this causal chain through two controlled interventions: (i) isolating the aggregation effect via attention mask modifications and (ii) amplifying the variance of targeted token representations. Both interventions can replicate attention sinks at arbitrary positions. Our mechanistic understanding offers a foundation for the systematic control of sink formation. As a proof of concept, we propose _head-wise RMSNorm_, an architectural modification that stabilizes value aggregation outputs during pre-training. Our experiments demonstrate that restoring statistical parity across positions significantly accelerates convergence.

Deep Learning · Algorithms

Jatin Chhugani, Geonhwa Jeong, Bor-Yiing Su, Yunjie Pan, Hanmei Yang, Aayush Ankit, Jiecao Yu, Summer Deng, Yunqing Chen, Nadathur Satish 等

Large Language Models (LLMs) have intensified the need for low-precision formats that enable efficient, large-scale inference. The Open Compute Project (OCP) Microscaling (MX) standard is attractive due to its favorable hardware efficiency, but its 4-bit variant (MXFP4) lags behind NVIDIA’s NVFP4 in accuracy, limiting adoption. We introduce two software-only techniques, Overflow-Aware Scaling (OAS) and Macro Block Scaling (MBS), that improve MXFP4 quantization fidelity without requiring hardware changes. OAS reduces overall errors by increasing effective dynamic range under power-of-two block scaling, while MBS allocates higher-precision scaling at a coarser granularity to better preserve outliers. Across multiple LLMs and standard downstream benchmarks, OAS and MBS reduce the end-to-end accuracy gap between MXFP4 and NVFP4 from about 10% to below 1% on average, while incurring modest GEMM overhead (6.2% on average). These results re-establish MXFP4 as a practical alternative to NVFP4, enabling near-NVFP4 accuracy while retaining MX’s hardware-efficiency advantages (e.g., 12% relative area savings in tensor cores).

Probabilistic Methods · Monte Carlo and Sampling Methods

Wei Yuan, Guanyang Wang

In sampling tasks, it is common for target distributions to be known up to a normalizing constant. However, in many situations, even evaluating the unnormalized distribution can be costly or infeasible. This issue arises in scenarios such as sampling from the Bayesian posterior for tall datasets and the 'doubly-intractable' distributions. In this paper, we begin by observing that seemingly different Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms, such as the exchange algorithm, PoissonMH, and TunaMH, can be unified under a simple common procedure. We then extend this procedure into a novel framework that allows the use of auxiliary variables in both the proposal and the acceptance--rejection step. Several new MCMC algorithms emerge from this framework that uses estimated gradients to guide the proposal moves. They have demonstrated significantly better performance than existing methods on both synthetic and real datasets. We also develop theory for the new framework and use it to simplify and extend results for existing algorithms.

Theory · Optimization

Owen Shen, Haoran Xu, Yinyu Ye, Peter Glynn, Patrick Jaillet

We study online configuration selection with admission control problem, which arises in LLM serving, GPU scheduling, and revenue management. In a planning horizon with $T$ periods, we consider a two-layer framework for the decisions made within each time period. In the first layer, the decision maker selects one of the $K$ configurations (ex. quantization, parallelism, fare class) which induces distribution over the reward-resource pair of the incoming request. In the second layer, the decision maker observes the request and then decides whether to accept it or not. Benchmarking this framework requires care. We introduce a \textbf{switching-aware fluid oracle} that accounts for the value of mixing configurations over time, provably upper-bounding any online policy. We derive a min-max formulation for evaluating the benchmark, and we characterize saddle points of the max-min problem via primal-dual optimality conditions linking equilibrium, feasibility, and complementarity. This guides the design of \textbf{SP-UCB--OLP} algorithm, which solves an optimistic saddle point problem and achieves $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{KT})$ regret.

Social Aspects · Safety

Yiming Wang, Baiqi Wu, Qingming Li, Jiahao Chen, Leqi Zheng, Shouling Ji

Recent advancements in generative AI have led to image editing models capable of producing realistic forgeries that evade traditional image forgery localization methods, as these approaches depend on physical noise absent in synthetic data. To address this challenge, we theoretically demonstrate that the diffusion process inherently suppresses local high-frequency variance, creating a statistical energy gap that is distinguishable from the natural entropy of optical imaging. Guided by this insight, we propose FLAME, a unified framework that utilizes a LAD map to capture these intrinsic anomalies, coupled with a parameter-efficient adapter for the SAM 3 to achieve precise, pixel-level forgery localization. Furthermore, to bridge the lag between forensic benchmarks and evolving generative models, we introduce EditStream, an automated pipeline for continuous, instruction-based training data synthesis. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FLAME establishes a new state-of-the-art, significantly outperforming previous methods on AI-generated forgery datasets while effectively generalizing to unseen generative architectures.

Optimization · Convex

Ji Qi, Mingxiao Liu, VIET THUC, Yuzhe Li, Zhuoshi Pan, Gene Cheung, Hong Zhao

To forecast traffic with both spatial and temporal dimensions, we unroll a mixed-graph-based optimization algorithm into a lightweight and interpretable transformer-like neural net. Specifically, we construct two graphs: an undirected graph $\mathcal{G}^u$ capturing spatial correlations across geography, and a directed graph $\mathcal{G}^d$ capturing sequential relationships over time. We formulate a prediction problem for the future samples of signal $\mathbf{x}$, assuming it is ``smooth'' with respect to both $\mathcal{G}^u$ and $\mathbf{G}^d$, where we design new $\ell_2$ and $\ell_1$-norm variational terms to quantify and promote signal smoothness (low-frequency reconstruction) on a directed graph. We construct an iterative algorithm based on alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), and unroll it into a feed-forward network for data-driven parameter learning. We periodically insert graph learning modules for $\mathcal{G}^u$ and $\mathcal{G}^d$, which are akin to the self-attention mechanism in classical transformers. Experiments show that our unrolled networks achieve competitive traffic forecast performance as state-of-the-art prediction schemes, while reducing parameter counts drastically.

Deep Learning · Large Language Models

Shu Ding, Yang Peng, Hangan Zhou, Xinyu Lu, Shangwei Chen, Junhua Huang, Mingxuan Yuan, Wei Wang

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a widely used parameter-efficient fine-tuning technique, and previous works have studied the update dynamics of LoRA, showing that updating via the low-rank matrix $\mathbf{A}$ can be viewed as a process within the compressed subspace defined by $\mathbf{A}^{\top} \mathbf{A}$ of the gradient $\nabla f\left(\mathbf{W} \right)$. However, few works analyze how the properties of the low-rank matrices affect the performance of LoRA, since existing methods heuristically initialize the low-rank matrices as Gaussian matrices. In this paper, we provide a theoretical understanding of the update dynamics of LoRA. We reveal that the update dynamics can be viewed as a process within the subspace projected by $\mathbf{A}^{\top} (\mathbf{A} \mathbf{A}^{\top})^{\dagger} \mathbf{A}$, and prove that when the gradient $\nabla f\left(\mathbf{W} \right)$ is unavailable, if $\mathbf{A}$ is an Equiangular Tight Frame (ETF), $\mathbf{A}^{\top} \mathbf{A}$ and $\mathbf{A}^{\top} (\mathbf{A} \mathbf{A}^{\top})^{\dagger} \mathbf{A}$ can preserve the maximum information from the gradient $\nabla f\left(\mathbf{W} \right)$. Thus, initializing $\mathbf{A}$ as an ETF is the optimal solution for low-rank adaptation when the gradient $\nabla f\left(\mathbf{W} \right)$ is unavailable. Furthermore, we establish the convergence of Low-Rank Adaptation with a rate of $\mathcal{O}\left(\frac{1}{T}\right)$ when $\mathbf{A}$ is an ETF. Extensive experiments show that initializing the low-rank matrices as ETFs significantly outperforms the commonly used Gaussian initialization for existing primary LoRA variants.