论文检索

Social Aspects · Accountability, Transparency, and Interpretability

Hengyu Liu, TIANYI LI, Zhihong Cui, Yushuai Li, Zhangkai Wu, Torben Pedersen, Kristian Torp, Christian S Jensen

This position paper argues that reliable AI requires infrastructure for human validation of implicit knowledge. AI learns from both explicit knowledge (papers, documentation, structured databases) and implicit knowledge (reasoning patterns, debugging processes, intermediate steps). Implicit knowledge remains unexternalized because documentation cost exceeds perceived value—yet AI learns from it indiscriminately, acquiring both beneficial patterns and harmful biases. Current reliability methods can only verify explicit knowledge against sources, creating a fundamental gap: the most valuable AI capabilities (reasoning, judgment, intuition) are precisely those we cannot verify. We propose Knowledge Objects (KOs)—structured artifacts that externalize implicit knowledge into forms humans can inspect, verify, and endorse. KOs transform verification economics: what was previously too costly to verify becomes feasible, enabling accumulated human validation to improve reliability over time.

General Machine Learning · Evaluation

Utsav Gupta

This position paper argues that ICML should require a minimal drift-audit artifact for papers whose main claims materially rely on hosted LLM APIs. Hosted APIs can change behavior over time, undermining the scientific interpretability of results even when evaluation code and prompts are held fixed. While existing proposals address API contracts and change reporting, there is not yet a widely adopted, venue-aligned standard for attaching a minimal drift-audit artifact to results that rely on hosted endpoints. The paper proposes a lightweight artifact consisting of a small suite of invariant-checking probes (e.g., schema, tool-call, or refusal invariants), machine-readable provenance metadata, and a rerun script that can detect and characterize post-publication behavioral drift at bounded cost. It further argues that provider-side behavioral versioning and machine-readable changelogs are enabling infrastructure that would make drift-aware reporting more reliable and less burdensome. The paper concludes with concrete actions for conferences, providers, and tool builders, and with falsifiable predictions about improved replication stability and reduced time-to-diagnosis when results stop reproducing.

Applications · Computer Vision

Wenjie Yang, Siqi Zhu, Zengfeng Huang

"Thinking with images" has emerged as a central research theme in the realm of Vision-Language Models (VLMs). This multimodal reasoning paradigm typically features interleaved images generated via tool use or code execution as part of the Chain-of-Thought (CoT). While reinforcement learning (RL) has driven impressive performance within this paradigm, **in this position paper, we argue that current VLMs seldom truly "think" with interleaved images.** Through empirical evidence and analysis, we demonstrate that interleaved images do not play a significant role in the success of recent "Thinking with images" methods. Instead, the primary source of performance gains is the improved language generation distribution resulting from fine-tuning. These findings challenge the prevailing belief that "Thinking with images" VLMs actively utilize visual information to complete visual tasks. To improve mechanistic transparency, we suggest that future "Thinking with images" works include lightweight ablation studies to verify the necessity of interleaved images. Furthermore, we call upon the community to develop fundamentally novel benchmarks and advocate for more informative visual tools.

Social Aspects · Accountability, Transparency, and Interpretability

Giovanni De Felice, Riccardo D`Elia, Alberto Termine, Pietro Barbiero, Giuseppe Marra, Silvia Santini

Deep time series models continue to improve predictive performance, yet their deployment remains limited by their black-box nature. In response, existing interpretability approaches in the field keep focusing on explaining the internal model computations, without addressing whether they align or not with how a human would reason about the studied phenomenon. Instead, we state interpretability in deep time series models should pursue semantic alignment: predictions should be expressed in terms of variables that are meaningful to the end user, mediated by spatial and temporal mechanisms that admit user-dependent constraints. In this paper, we formalize this requirement and require that, once established, semantic alignment must be preserved under temporal evolution: a constraint with no analog in static settings. Provided with this definition, we outline a blueprint for semantically aligned deep time series models, identify properties that support trust, and discuss implications for model design.

Zhihao Hao, Bob Zhang, LI Haisheng

Current evaluation paradigms for generative models rely heavily on retrieval-based metrics such as exact match accuracy, creating a bottleneck particularly in domains requiring scientific discovery and creative reasoning. These metrics penalize any deviation from the training distribution, treating all non-factual outputs as errors. This position paper argues that rigidly minimizing these deviations induces a form of epistemic mode collapse that suppresses the stochastic exploration required for innovation. We propose the Higher-Dimensional Cognitive Hypothesis (HDCH), positing that valuable hallucinations represent geodesic traversals in a high-dimensional latent space that appear as errors only when projected onto the lower-dimensional manifold of established knowledge. We introduce a formal distinction between Type I (factually inconsistent noise) and Type II (factually novel but structurally coherent) exploratory hypotheses based on information geometry. Through experiments, we demonstrate that maximizing discovery requires calibrated instability, peaking at a critical thermodynamic phase transition. Furthermore, we advocate for an evaluation framework that optimizes an Exploratory Signal-to-Noise Ratio (ESNR), balancing the novelty of outputs against their structural plausibility. We conclude that evolving evaluation from validating static retrieval to incentivizing calibrated latent exploration is essential to unlock the full, discovery-oriented potential of generative AI.

Social Aspects · Safety

Arthur Goemans, Daniel Altman, Noemi Dreksler, Jonas Freund, Milan Gandhi, Zhengdong Wang, Sarah Cogan, Sebastien Krier, Demetra Brady, Lewis Ho 等

Frontier AI governance often centres on the model-level governance paradigm, which assumes that a model’s capability profile is primarily a function of the compute and data used during training. This position paper argues that model-level governance becomes less effective when capability progress is increasingly driven by "non-model gains"—improvements that are independent from advances in the base model. We formalise the concept of non-model gains and provide a taxonomy of three distinct vectors of capability gain: inference gain (scaling compute at test-time), systems gain (post-training enhancements such as scaffolds), and asset gain (enhancing a model with restricted assets). We demonstrate how these vectors—alongside potential future impacts from embodiment, continual learning, and diffusion—may undermine risk management strategies that hinge mostly on pre-deployment evaluation and mitigation. We provide an overview of governance approaches that go beyond the model level: system, entity, agent, and cloud governance. Finally, we emphasise the importance of societal resilience as a complement to these governance layers.

Alina Wernick, Kristof Meding

The EU has become one of the vanguards in regulating the digital age. A particularly important regulation in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) domain is the 2024 enacted EU AI Act. The AI Act specifies --- due to a risk-based approach --- various obligations for providers of AI systems. These obligations, for example, include a cascade of documentation and compliance measures, which represent a potential obstacle to science. But do these obligations also apply to AI researchers? This position paper argues that, indeed, the AI Act's obligations could apply in many more cases than the AI community is aware of. Moreover, we argue that the AI Act is drafted in a manner that may unwillingly disrupt the scientific publication practices of the AI research community, with a focus on model and system release. We contribute the following: 1.) We offer a high-level roadmap for AI researchers to evaluate whether they need to comply with the AI Act 2.) We explain with everyday research examples why the AI Act applies to AI research. 3) We analyse the exceptions of the AI Act's applicability AI research and offer visual tool for researchers to navigate the AI Act's complex system or research exceptions 4.) We establish a position the AI Act's research exceptions fail to account for current AI research conventions, as publishing AI research may void the research exceptions of the Act. 5.) We propose changes to the AI Act to provide more legal certainty for AI researchers and give two recommendations for AI researchers to reduce the risk of not complying with the AI Act. We see our paper as a starting point for a discussion between policymakers, legal scholars, and AI researchers to avoid unintended side effects of the AI Act.

Harry Zhang, Luca Carlone

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are playing an increasingly important role across multiple domains. In many applications, such as robotics, it is crucial to quantify the uncertainty in the output of these models. } We develop Fused Uncertainty with Semantic Evidence (FUSE), a probabilistic framework for capturing two complementary sources of uncertainty in multimodal language modeling: (i) aleatoric embedding-level uncertainty derived from input data vision-language ambiguity, and (ii) epistemic model-level uncertainty estimated from the semantic response diversity of MLLMs. Our approach formulates a Bayesian fusion mechanism that analytically combines these uncertainty sources to produce a scalar measure of uncertainty. This measure serves as a novel uncertainty representation for downstream applications of MLLMs and provides a principled foundation for uncertainty calibration in multimodal systems, improving reliability and downstream performance in MLLM-based reasoning and vision-language tasks. We demonstrate that our method outperforms baselines in providing uncertainty estimates and achieves state-of-the-art uncertainty calibration.

Deep Learning · Generative Models and Autoencoders

Mashrur M. Morshed, Vishnu Boddeti

The physical world is fundamentally compositional, yet empirical data are often fragmented across decentralized silos that cannot be aggregated due to privacy, legal, or economic constraints. Such scenarios pose a fundamental challenge for generative modeling: learning models that collectively cover the union of these sources while enabling compositional generalization when the factors required for composition are distributed across isolated data sources. We introduce Decentralized Compositional Flow Matching (DCFM), a framework for learning generative models from decentralized private data without exchanging raw samples. DCFM enforces structural constraints that induce conditional independence across the global set of generative factors. As a result, DCFM allows novel combinations to emerge through interactions across peers, even when no single data source contains sufficient information to support composition on its own. Empirically, DCFM substantially outperforms federated learning and mixture-of-experts baselines across conditional image generation, robotic spatial planning and medical attribute co-occurrence modeling.

Junfeng Guo, Heng Huang

While real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL) are becoming increasingly popular, the security of RL systems deserve more attention and exploration. In particular, recent work has revealed that RL agents are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where a victim agent behaves normally under standard conditions but executes malicious actions when a specific trigger is activated. Existing backdoor defenses for RL either require access to the agent’s internal parameters, operate only at the model or trajectory level, or are limited to specific attack types. To ensure the security of RL agents, we propose PolicyGuard, a test-time step-level backdoor defense which leverages Gaussian Process (GP) posterior variance and adapts pseudo trajectories to enable uncertainty computation for individual time step. Besides, we also provide theoretical foundations to explain the efficacy of GP posterior variance. Extensive experiments across seven RL games demonstrate that PolicyGuard achieves state-of-the-art detection performance in most cases, with average AUROC of 0.856 for perturbation-based attacks and 0.859 for adversary-agent attacks.

General Machine Learning · Causality

Edward Chang

This **position paper** argues that influential critiques dismissing Large Language Models (LLMs) as a dead end for AGI misidentify the bottleneck: they confuse the ocean with the net. Pattern repositories are the necessary System-1 substrate; the missing component is a System-2 coordination layer that selects, constrains, and binds these patterns. We formalize this layer via an anchoring theory that models reasoning as a phase transition governed by effective support (rho_d), representational mismatch (d_r), and an adaptive anchoring budget (gamma log k). We translate theory into architecture with a multi-agent coordination stack. Moving beyond the hype of unstructured swarms, this layer provides a principled integration of diversity and control via baiting (PID-modulated debate), filtering (trace-output verification), and persistence (transactional memory). Empirical validation on causal judgment and the sycophancy-paranoia trade-off demonstrates that static prompting fails where adaptive control succeeds, confirming that failures attributed to substrate limitations are often resolved by regulated coordination. By reframing common objections as testable coordination failures, we argue that the path to AGI runs through LLMs, not around them.

Zijun Cui, Sam Griesemer, Sungyong Seo, Joshua Hikida, Yan Liu

Spatiotemporal models have drawn significant interest recently due to their widespread applicability across many domains. These models are often made more practically useful by incorporating beneficial inductive biases, such as laws or symmetries from domain-relevant physics equations. This "physics-awareness" provides an interpretable means of grounding otherwise purely data-driven models, improving robustness and boosting performance in settings with limited data. In this work, we view physical dynamics as domain knowledge that captures fundamental causal relationships across space and time, and can be effectively leveraged by our proposed physics-aware spatiotemporal causal graph network (P-STCGN). We firstly describe a means of deriving causal relationships from spatiotemporal data, serving as physics-aware labels to learn a causal structure via a dedicated neural module. We then formulate a forecasting module that can operate under this causal structure, producing predictions that are guided by physics-aware cause-effect relationships among modeled variables. Extensive experimentation demonstrates that our method is robust to noisy and limited data, outperforming existing models across a variety of challenging synthetic tasks and benchmark datasets. We further evaluate our method on real-world graph signals and observe superior forecasting performance, achieved by effectively utilizing causal signals from prior physics knowledge.

Rong Zhu, Yanqi Qiu

We study best-arm identification (BAI) in the fixed-budget setting. Adaptive allocations based on upper confidence bounds (UCBs), such as UCBE, are known to work well in BAI. However, it is well-known that its optimal regret is theoretically dependent on instances, which we show to be an artifact in many fixed-budget BAI problems. In this paper we propose an UCB exploration algorithm that is both theoretically and empirically efficient for the fixed budget BAI problem under a Bayesian setting. The key idea is to learn prior information, which can enhance the performance of UCB-based BAI algorithm as it has done in the cumulative regret minimization problem. We establish bounds on the failure probability and the simple regret for the Bayesian BAI problem, providing upper bounds of order $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{K/n})$, up to logarithmic factors, where $n$ represents the budget and $K$ denotes the number of arms. Furthermore, we demonstrate through empirical results that our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.

Yewon Byun, Sanket Vaibhav Mehta, Saurabh Garg, Emma Strubell, Michael Oberst, Bryan Wilder, Zachary Lipton

In many real-world settings, regulations and economic incentives permit the sharing of models but not data across institutional boundaries. In such scenarios, practitioners might hope to adapt models to new domains, without losing performance on previous domains (so-called catastrophic forgetting). While any single model may struggle to achieve this goal, learning an ensemble of domain-specific experts offers the potential to adapt more closely to each individual institution. However, a core challenge in this context is determining which expert to deploy at test time. In this paper, we propose Generate to Discriminate (G2D), a domain-incremental learning method that leverages synthetic data to train a domain-discriminator that routes samples at inference time to the appropriate expert. Surprisingly, we find that leveraging synthetic data in this capacity is more effective than using the samples to \textit{directly} train the downstream classifier (the more common approach to leveraging synthetic data in the lifelong learning literature). We observe that G2D outperforms competitive domain-incremental learning methods on tasks in both vision and language modalities, providing a new perspective on the use of synthetic data in the lifelong learning literature.

Dongruo Zhou, Jinghui Chen, Yuan Cao, Ziyan Yang, Quanquan Gu

Adaptive gradient methods are workhorses in deep learning. However, the convergence guarantees of adaptive gradient methods for nonconvex optimization have not been thoroughly studied. In this paper, we provide a fine-grained convergence analysis for a general class of adaptive gradient methods including AMSGrad, RMSProp and AdaGrad. For smooth nonconvex functions, we prove that adaptive gradient methods in expectation converge to a first-order stationary point. Our convergence rate is better than existing results for adaptive gradient methods in terms of dimension. In addition, we also prove high probability bounds on the convergence rates of AMSGrad, RMSProp as well as AdaGrad, which have not been established before. Our analyses shed light on better understanding the mechanism behind adaptive gradient methods in optimizing nonconvex objectives.

Theory · Deep Learning

Francesco Pedrotti, Jan Maas, Marco Mondelli

Score-based generative models (SGMs) are powerful tools to sample from complex data distributions. Their underlying idea is to \emph{(i)} run a forward process for time $T_1$ by adding noise to the data, \emph{(ii)} estimate its score function, and \emph{(iii)} use such estimate to run a reverse process. As the reverse process is initialized with the stationary distribution of the forward one, the existing analysis paradigm requires $T_1\to\infty$. This is however problematic: from a theoretical viewpoint, for a given precision of the score approximation, the convergence guarantee fails as $T_1$ diverges; from a practical viewpoint, a large $T_1$ increases computational costs and leads to error propagation. This paper addresses the issue by considering a version of the popular \emph{predictor-corrector} scheme: after running the forward process, we first estimate the final distribution via an inexact Langevin dynamics and then revert the process. Our key technical contribution is to provide convergence guarantees which require to run the forward process \emph{only for a fixed finite time} $T_1$. Our bounds exhibit a mild logarithmic dependence on the input dimension and the subgaussian norm of the target distribution, have minimal assumptions on the data, and require only to control the $L^2$ loss on the score approximation, which is the quantity minimized in practice.

Deep Learning · Generative Models and Autoencoders

Zixuan Zhang, Hengyu Fu, Zhuoran Yang, Mengdi Wang, Tuo Zhao, Minshuo Chen

Discrete diffusion models have recently emerged as a compelling alternative for language generation, enabling efficient non-autoregressive sampling while achieving strong empirical performance. A key design choice in discrete diffusion---absent in most continuous diffusion formulations---is the forward corruption kernel, with masked/absorbing corruption now dominating practice. Despite this empirical preference, there is limited statistical theory explaining when and why masking should outperform alternative kernels such as uniform replacement. In this paper, we take a step toward closing this gap from a statistical learning perspective. Our analysis establishes generalization bounds and, through an explicit comparison across different forward corruption kernels, reveals a central advantage of masking: it scales with the effective data support rather than the full ambient state space, thereby mitigating the curse of state space cardinality. We further derive structure-aware refinements that capture how concentration and sparsity in real sequential data sharpen the sample complexities. Together, these results offer a principled explanation for the empirical strength of masked diffusion and provide guidance for forward-kernel design in discrete generative modeling.

Deep Learning · Foundation Models

Boris Oreshkin, Shiv Tavker, Dmitry Efimov

While transfer learning has revolutionized computer vision and natural language processing, its application to probabilistic regression remains underexplored, particularly for tabular data. We introduce NIAQUE (Neural Interpretable Any-Quantile Estimation), a novel permutation-invariant architecture that enables effective transfer learning across diverse regression tasks. Through extensive experiments on 101 datasets, we demonstrate that pre-training NIAQUE on multiple datasets and fine-tuning on target datasets consistently outperforms both traditional tree-based models and transformer-based neural baseline. On real-world Kaggle competitions, NIAQUE achieves competitive performance against heavily hand-crafted and feature-engineered solutions and outperforms strong baselines such as TabPFN and TabDPT, while maintaining interpretability through its probabilistic framework. Our results establish NIAQUE as a robust and scalable approach for tabular regression, effectively bridging the gap between traditional methods and modern transfer learning.

Probabilistic Methods · Structure Learning

Hannah Sansford, Nick Whiteley, Patrick Rubin-Delanchy

High-dimensionality of data is often regarded as a fundamental statistical impediment in Machine Learning and AI. The purpose of this paper is to clarify, on the contrary, when and how high-dimensionality may be beneficial. In the setting of a general random function model of data we delineate between three notions of dimensionality: *effective dimension* $p_{\mathrm{eff}}$, measuring total variability across feature directions; *correlation rank* $r$, measuring functional complexity across samples; and *latent intrinsic dimension* $d$ of manifold structure hidden in data. Via a generalized Hanson-Wright inequality, we show that increasing $p_{\mathrm{eff}}$ drives a *blessing of dimensionality* phenomenon, whereby data dot-products concentrate about their expectations. In turn, we show that, under mild continuity assumptions (ensuring that features bring additional information as dimension grows), persistence diagrams recover latent homology when $p_{\mathrm{eff}} \in \omega (\log n)$ as $n\to\infty$. Informed by our theory, we revisit the ground-breaking neuroscience discovery of toroidal structure in grid-cell activity made by Gardner et al. (2022): our findings provide the first empirical evidence that this structure is *isometric* to a flat torus model of physical space, suggesting that grid cell activity conveys a geometrically faithful representation of the real world.

Deep Learning · Large Language Models

Yu Luo, Rongchen Gao, Lu Teng, Xidao Wen, Jiamin Jiang, Qingliang Zhang, Yongqian Sun, Shenglin Zhang, Jiasong Feng, Tong Liu 等

Logical reasoning encompasses deduction, induction, and abduction. However, while Large Language Models (LLMs) have effectively mastered the former two, abductive reasoning remains significantly underexplored. Existing frameworks, predominantly designed for static deductive tasks, fail to generalize to abductive reasoning due to unstructured state representation and lack of explicit state control. Consequently, they are inevitably prone to Evidence Fabrication, Context Drift, Failed Backtracking, and Early Stopping. To bridge this gap, we introduce Graph of States (GoS), a general-purpose neuro-symbolic framework tailored for abductive tasks. GoS grounds multi-agent collaboration in a structured belief states, utilizing a causal graph to explicitly encode logical dependencies and a state machine to govern the valid transitions of the reasoning process. By dynamically aligning the reasoning focus with these symbolic constraints, our approach transforms aimless, unconstrained exploration into a convergent, directed search. Extensive evaluations on two real-world datasets demonstrate that GoS significantly outperforms all baselines, providing a robust solution for complex abductive tasks. Code repo and all prompts: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Graph-of-States-5B4E.