论文检索

Applications · Computer Vision

Kunlun Xu, Xu Zou, Gang Hua, Jiahuan Zhou

Domain Incremental Learning (DIL) aims to learn from non-stationary data streams across domains while retaining and utilizing past knowledge. Although prompt-based methods effectively store multi-domain knowledge in prompt parameters and obtain advanced performance through cross-domain prompt fusion, we reveal an intrinsic limitation: component-wise misalignment between domain-specific prompts leads to conflicting knowledge integration and degraded predictions. This arises from the random positioning of knowledge components within prompts, where irrelevant component fusion introduces interference.To address this, we propose Componential Prompt-Knowledge Alignment (KA-Prompt), a novel prompt-based DIL method that introduces component-aware prompt-knowledge alignment during training, significantly improving both the learning and inference capacity of the model. KA-Prompt operates in two phases: (1) Initial Componential Structure Configuring, where a set of old prompts containing knowledge relevant to the new domain are mined via greedy search, which is then exploited to initialize new prompts to achieve reusable knowledge transfer and establish intrinsic alignment between new and old prompts. (2) Online Alignment Preservation, which dynamically identifies the target old prompts and applies adaptive componential consistency constraints as new prompts evolve. Extensive experiments on DIL benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our KA-Prompt.Our source code is available at https://github.com/zhoujiahuan1991/ICML2025-KA-Prompt.

Probabilistic Methods · Monte Carlo and Sampling Methods

Filip Ekström Kelvinius, Zheng Zhao, Fredrik Lindsten

A recent line of research has exploited pre-trained generative diffusion models as priors for solving Bayesian inverse problems. We contribute to this research direction by designing a sequential Monte Carlo method for linear-Gaussian inverse problems which builds on ``decoupled diffusion", where the generative process is designed such that larger updates to the sample are possible. The method is asymptotically exact and we demonstrate the effectiveness of our Decoupled Diffusion Sequential Monte Carlo (DDSMC) algorithm on both synthetic as well as protein and image data. Further, we demonstrate how the approach can be extended to discrete data.

Applications · Neuroscience, Cognitive Science

jiayue Liu, Zhongchao Yi, Zhengyang Zhou, Qihe Huang, Kuo Yang, Xu Wang, Yang Wang

Discovering regularities from spatiotemporal systems can benefit various scientific and social planning. Current spatiotemporal learners usually train an independent model from a specific source data that leads to limited transferability among sources, where even correlated tasks requires new design and training. The key towards increasing cross-domain knowledge is to enable collective intelligence and model evolution. In this paper, inspired by neuroscience theories, we theoretically derive the increased information boundary via learning cross-domain collective intelligence and propose a Synaptic EVOlutional spatiotemporal network, SynEVO, where SynEVO breaks the model independence and enables cross-domain knowledge to be shared and aggregated. Specifically, we first re-order the sample groups to imitate the human curriculum learning, and devise two complementary learners, elastic common container and task-independent extractor to allow model growth and task-wise commonality and personality disentanglement. Then an adaptive dynamic coupler with a new difference metric determines whether the new sample group should be incorporated into common container to achieve model evolution under various domains. Experiments show that SynEVO improves the generalization capacity by at most 42\% under cross-domain scenarios and SynEVO provides a paradigm of NeuroAI for knowledge transfer and adaptation.Code available at [https://github.com/Rodger-Lau/SynEVO](https://github.com/Rodger-Lau/SynEVO).

General Machine Learning · Supervised Learning

Junbiao Cui, Qin Yue, Jianqing Liang, Jiye Liang

Classification is a cornerstone of machine learning research. Most of the existing classifiers assume that the concepts corresponding to classes can be precisely defined. This notion diverges from the widely accepted understanding in cognitive science, which posits that real-world concepts are often inherently ambiguous. To bridge this big gap, we propose a Human Cognition-Inspired Hierarchical Fuzzy Learning Machine (HC-HFLM), which leverages a novel hierarchical alignment loss to integrate rich class knowledge from human knowledge system into learning process. We further theoretically prove that minimizing this loss can align the hierarchical structure derived from data with those contained in class knowledge, resulting in clear semantics and high interpretability. Systematic experiments verify that the proposed method can achieve significant gains in interpretability and generalization performance.

Deep Learning · Everything Else

Mingzhao Yang, Shangchao Su, Bin Li, Xiangyang Xue

In recent years, One-shot Federated Learning (OSFL) methods based on Diffusion Models (DMs) have garnered increasing attention due to their remarkable performance. However, most of these methods require the deployment of foundation models on client devices, which significantly raises the computational requirements and reduces their adaptability to heterogeneous client models. In this paper, we propose FedLMG, a heterogeneous one-shot Federated learning method with Local Model-Guided diffusion models. In our method, clients do not need access to any foundation models but only train and upload their local models, which is consistent with traditional FL methods. On the clients, we employ classification loss and batch normalization loss to capture the broad category features and detailed contextual features of the client distributions. On the server, based on the uploaded client models, we utilize backpropagation to guide the server’s DM in generating synthetic datasets that comply with the client distributions, which are then used to train the aggregated model. By using the local models as a medium to transfer client knowledge, our method significantly reduces the computational requirements on client devices and effectively adapts to scenarios with heterogeneous clients. Extensive quantitation and visualization experiments on three large-scale real-world datasets, along with theoretical analysis, demonstrate that the synthetic datasets generated by FedLMG exhibit comparable quality and diversity to the client datasets, which leads to an aggregated model that outperforms all compared methods and even the performance ceiling, further elucidating the significant potential of utilizing DMs in FL.

Theory · Optimization

Michael Sucker, Peter Ochs

Learning-to-optimize leverages machine learning to accelerate optimization algorithms. While empirical results show tremendous improvements compared to classical optimization algorithms, theoretical guarantees are mostly lacking, such that the outcome cannot be reliably assured. Especially, convergence is hardly studied in learning-to-optimize, because conventional convergence guarantees in optimization are based on geometric arguments, which cannot be applied easily to learned algorithms. Thus, we develop a probabilistic framework that resembles classical optimization and allows for transferring geometric arguments into learning-to-optimize. Based on our new proof-strategy, our main theorem is a generalization result for parametric classes of potentially non-smooth, non-convex loss functions and establishes the convergence of learned optimization algorithms to critical points with high probability. This effectively generalizes the results of a worst-case analysis into a probabilistic framework, and frees the design of the learned algorithm from using safeguards.

Social Aspects

Manon Revel, Smitha Milli, Tyler Lu, Jamelle Watson-Daniels, Maximilian Nickel

Online comment sections, such as those on news sites or social media, have the potential to foster informal public deliberation, However, this potential is often undermined by the frequency of toxic or low-quality exchanges that occur in these settings. To combat this, platforms increasingly leverage algorithmic ranking to facilitate higher-quality discussions, e.g., by using civility classifiers or forms of prosocial ranking. Yet, these interventions may also inadvertently reduce the visibility of legitimate viewpoints, undermining another key aspect of deliberation: representation of diverse views. We seek to remedy this problem by introducing guarantees of representation into these methods. In particular, we adopt the notion of *justified representation* (JR) from the social choice literature and incorporate a JR constraint into the comment ranking setting. We find that enforcing JR leads to greater inclusion of diverse viewpoints while still being compatible with optimizing for user engagement or other measures of conversational quality.

Applications

Samantha Chen, Pankaj Agarwal, Yusu Wang

The ability to acquire high-resolution, large-scale geospatial data at an unprecedented using LiDAR and other related technologies has intensified the need for scalable algorithms for terrain analysis, including *shortest-path-distance* (SPD) queries on large-scale terrain digital elevation models (DEMs). In this paper, we present a *neural data structure* for efficiently answering SPD queries approximately on a large terrain DEM, which is based on the recently proposed neural geodesic field (NeuroGF) framework (Zhang et al., 2023)---the state-of-the-art neural data structure for estimating geodesic distance.In particular, we propose a decoupled-NeuroGF data structure combined with an efficient two-stage mixed-training strategy, which significantly reduces computational bottlenecks and enables efficient training on terrain DEMs at a scale not feasible before. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach by performing detailed experiments on both synthetic and real data sets.For instance, we can train a small model with around 70000 parameters on a terrain DEM with 16 million nodes in a matter of hours that can answer SPD queries with 1\% relative error in at most 10ms per query.

Deep Learning · Large Language Models

Sebastian Bordt, Suraj Srinivas, Valentyn Boreiko, Ulrike Luxburg

The leakage of benchmark data into the training data has emerged as a significant challenge for evaluating the capabilities of large language models (LLMs). In this work, we challenge the common assumption that small-scale contamination renders benchmark evaluations invalid. First, we experimentally quantify the magnitude of benchmark overfitting based on scaling along three dimensions: The number of model parameters (up to 1.6B), the number of times an example is seen (up to 144), and the number of training tokens (up to 40B). If model and data follow the Chinchilla scaling laws, minor contamination indeed leads to overfitting. At the same time, even 144 times of contamination can be forgotten if the training data is scaled beyond five times Chinchilla, a regime characteristic of many modern LLMs. Continual pre-training of OLMo-7B corroborates these results. Next, we study the impact of the weight decay parameter on example forgetting, showing that empirical forgetting occurs faster than the cumulative weight decay. This allows us to gauge the degree of example forgetting in large-scale training runs, indicating that many LLMs, including Llama 3 405B, have forgotten the data seen at the beginning of training.

Probabilistic Methods · Everything Else

Yifan Zhang, Zijian Wei, Haojie Ren, Changliang Zou

Online multiple hypothesis testing has attracted a lot of attention in many applications, e.g., anomaly status detection and stock market price monitoring. The state-of-the-art generalized $\alpha$-investing (GAI) algorithms can control online false discovery rate (FDR) on p-values only under specific dependence structures, a situation that rarely occurs in practice. The e-LOND algorithm (Xu & Ramdas, 2024) utilizes e-values to achieve online FDR control under arbitrary dependence but suffers from a significant loss in power as testing levels are derived from pre-specified descent sequences. To address these limitations, we propose a novel framework on valid e-values named e-GAI. The proposed e-GAI can ensure provable online FDR control under more general dependency conditions while improving the power by dynamically allocating the testing levels. These testing levels are updated not only by relying on both the number of previous rejections and the prior costs, but also, differing from the GAI framework, by assigning less $\alpha$-wealth for each rejection from a risk aversion perspective. Within the e-GAI framework, we introduce two new online FDR procedures, e-LORD and e-SAFFRON, and provide strategies for the long-term performance to address the issue of $\alpha$-death, a common phenomenon within the GAI framework. Furthermore, we demonstrate that e-GAI can be generalized to conditionally super-uniform p-values. Both simulated and real data experiments demonstrate the advantages of both e-LORD and e-SAFFRON in FDR control and power.

Applications · Chemistry, Physics, and Earth Sciences

Tianyi Bao, Ruizhe Zhong, Xinyu Ye, Yehui Tang, Junchi Yan

Quantum Error Mitigation (QEM) has emerged as a pivotal technique for enhancing the reliability of noisy quantum devices in the *Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum* (NISQ) era. Recently, machine learning (ML)-based QEM approaches have demonstrated strong generalization capabilities without sampling overheads compared to conventional methods. However, evaluating these techniques is often hindered by a lack of standardized datasets and inconsistent experimental settings across different studies. In this work, we present **QEM-Bench**, a comprehensive benchmark suite of *twenty-two* datasets covering diverse circuit types and noise profiles, which provides a unified platform for comparing and advancing ML-based QEM methods. We further propose a refined ML-based QEM pipeline **QEMFormer**, which leverages a feature encoder that preserves local, global, and topological information, along with a two-branch model that captures short-range and long-range dependencies within the circuit. Empirical evaluations on QEM-Bench illustrate the superior performance of QEMFormer over existing baselines, underscoring the potential of integrated ML-QEM strategies.

Deep Learning · Large Language Models

Pinzheng Wang, Juntao Li, Zecheng Tang, Haijia Gui, Min zhang

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated considerable reasoning abilities in various tasks such as mathematics and coding.However, recent studies indicate that even the best models lack true comprehension of their reasoning processes.In this paper, we explore how self-play can enhance the rationality of models in the reasoning process without supervision from humans or superior models.We design a $\textit{\textbf{C}ritic-\textbf{D}iscernment \textbf{G}ame}~(\textbf{CDG})$ in which a prover first provides a solution to a given problem and is subsequently challenged by critiques of its solution. These critiques either aim to assist or mislead the prover. The objective of the prover is to maintain the correct answer when faced with misleading comments, while correcting errors in response to constructive feedback.Our experiments on tasks involving mathematical reasoning, stepwise error detection, self-correction, and long-chain reasoning demonstrate that CDG training can significantly improve the ability of well-aligned LLMs to comprehend their reasoning process.

Deep Learning · Large Language Models

Swarnadeep Saha, Xian Li, Marjan Ghazvininejad, JASON WESTON, Tianlu Wang

LLM-as-a-Judge models generate chain-of-thought (CoT) sequences intended to capture the step-by-step reasoning process that underlies the final evaluation of a response. However, due to the lack of human-annotated CoTs for evaluation, the required components and structure of effective reasoning traces remain understudied. Consequently, previous approaches often (1) constrain reasoning traces to hand-designed components, such as a list of criteria, reference answers, or verification questions and (2) structure them such that planning is intertwined with the reasoning for evaluation. In this work, we propose EvalPlanner, a preference optimization algorithm for Thinking-LLM-as-a-Judge that first generates an unconstrained evaluation plan, followed by its execution, and then the final judgment. In a self-training loop, EvalPlanner iteratively optimizes over synthetically constructed evaluation plans and executions, leading to better final verdicts. Our method achieves a new state-of-the-art performance for generative reward models on RewardBench and PPE, despite being trained on fewer amount of, and synthetically generated, preference pairs. Additional experiments on other benchmarks like RM-Bench, JudgeBench, and FollowBenchEval further highlight the utility of both planning and reasoning for building robust LLM-as-a-Judge reasoning models.

Theory · Learning Theory

Rui Gao, Weiwei Liu

Continual learning has attracted increasing research attention in recent years due to its promising experimental results in real-world applications. In this paper, we study the issue of calibration in continual learning which reliably quantifies the uncertainty of model predictions. Conformal prediction (CP) provides a general framework for model calibration, which outputs prediction intervals or sets with a theoretical high coverage guarantee as long as the samples are exchangeable. However, the tasks in continual learning are learned in sequence, which violates the principle that data should be exchangeable. Meanwhile, the model learns the current task with limited or no access to data from previous tasks, which is not conducive to constructing the calibration set. To address these issues, we propose a CP-based method for model uncertainty quantification in continual learning (CPCL), which also reveals the connection between prediction interval length and forgetting. We analyze the oracle prediction interval in continual learning and theoretically prove the asymptotic coverage guarantee of CPCL. Finally, extensive experiments on simulated and real data empirically verify the validity of our proposed method.

Reinforcement Learning

Siyuan Xu, Minghui Zhu

This paper studies meta-reinforcement learning with adaptation from human feedback. It aims to pre-train a meta-model that can achieve few-shot adaptation for new tasks from human preference queries without relying on reward signals. To solve the problem, we propose the framework *adaptation via Preference-Order-preserving EMbedding* (POEM). In the meta-training, the framework learns a task encoder, which maps tasks to a preference-order-preserving task embedding space, and a decoder, which maps the embeddings to the task-specific policies. In the adaptation from human feedback, the task encoder facilitates efficient task embedding inference for new tasks from the preference queries and then obtains the task-specific policy. We provide a theoretical guarantee for the convergence of the adaptation process to the task-specific optimal policy and experimentally demonstrate its state-of-the-art performance with substantial improvement over baseline methods.

General Machine Learning

Xinsong Ma, Jie Wu, Weiwei Liu

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is a crucial task in reliable and safety-critical applications. Previous studies primarily focus on developing score functions while neglecting the design of decision rules based on these scores. A recent work (Ma et al., 2024) is the first to highlight this issue and proposes the generalized BH (g-BH) algorithm to address it. The g-BH algorithm relies on empirical p-values, with the calibrated set playing a central role in their computation. However, the impact of calibrated set on the performance of g-BH algorithm has not been thoroughly investigated. This paper aims to uncover the underlying mechanisms between them. Theoretically, we demonstrate that conditional expectation of true positive rate (TPR) on calibrated set for the g-BH algorithm follows a beta distribution, which depends on the prescribed level and size of calibrated set. This indicates that a small calibrated set tends to degrade the performance of g-BH algorithm. To address the limitation of g-BH algorithm on small calibrated set, we propose a novel ensemble g-BH (eg-BH) algorithm which integrates various empirical p-values for making decisions. Finally, extensive experimental results validate the effectiveness of our theoretical findings and demonstrate the superiority of our method over g-BH algorithm on small calibrated set.

Applications · Health / Medicine

Sophie Hanna Langbein, Niklas Koenen, Marvin N. Wright

Deep learning survival models often outperform classical methods in time-to-event predictions, particularly in personalized medicine, but their "black box" nature hinders broader adoption. We propose a framework for gradient-based explanation methods tailored to survival neural networks, extending their use beyond regression and classification. We analyze the implications of their theoretical assumptions for time-dependent explanations in the survival setting and propose effective visualizations incorporating the temporal dimension. Experiments on synthetic data show that gradient-based methods capture the magnitude and direction of local and global feature effects, including time dependencies. We introduce GradSHAP(t), a gradient-based counterpart to SurvSHAP(t), which outperforms SurvSHAP(t) and SurvLIME in a computational speed vs. accuracy trade-off. Finally, we apply these methods to medical data with multi-modal inputs, revealing relevant tabular features and visual patterns, as well as their temporal dynamics.

Applications · Robotics

Yan Shen, Ruihai Wu, Yubin Ke, Xinyuan Song, Zeyi Li, Xiaoqi Li, Hongwei Fan, Haoran Lu, Hao Dong

Shape assembly, the process of combining parts into a complete whole, is a crucial skill for robots with broad real-world applications. Among the various assembly tasks, geometric assembly—where broken parts are reassembled into their original form (e.g., reconstructing a shattered bowl)—is particularly challenging. This requires the robot to recognize geometric cues for grasping, assembly, and subsequent bimanual collaborative manipulation on varied fragments. In this paper, we exploit the geometric generalization of point-level affordance, learning affordance aware of bimanual collaboration in geometric assembly with long-horizon action sequences. To address the evaluation ambiguity caused by geometry diversity of broken parts, we introduce a real-world benchmark featuring geometric variety and global reproducibility. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach over both previous affordance-based and imitation-based methods.

General Machine Learning

Jie Bao, Chuangyin Dang, Rui Luo, Hanwei Zhang, Zhixin Zhou

As deep learning models are increasingly deployed in high-risk applications, robust defenses against adversarial attacks and reliable performance guarantees become paramount. Moreover, accuracy alone does not provide sufficient assurance or reliable uncertainty estimates for these models. This study advances adversarial training by leveraging principles from Conformal Prediction. Specifically, we develop an adversarial attack method, termed OPSA (OPtimal Size Attack), designed to reduce the efficiency of conformal prediction at any significance level by maximizing model uncertainty without requiring coverage guarantees. Correspondingly, we introduce OPSA-AT (Adversarial Training), a defense strategy that integrates OPSA within a novel conformal training paradigm. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that our OPSA attack method induces greater uncertainty compared to baseline approaches for various defenses. Conversely, our OPSA-AT defensive model significantly enhances robustness not only against OPSA but also other adversarial attacks, and maintains reliable prediction. Our findings highlight the effectiveness of this integrated approach for developing trustworthy and resilient deep learning models for safety-critical domains. Our code is available at https://github.com/bjbbbb/Enhancing-Adversarial-Robustness-with-Conformal-Prediction.

Deep Learning · Self-Supervised Learning

Samar Khanna, Medhanie Irgau, David Lobell, Stefano Ermon

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) techniques such as low-rank adaptation (LoRA) can effectively adapt large pre-trained foundation models to downstream tasks using only a small fraction (0.1%-10%) of the original trainable weights. An under-explored question of PEFT is in extending the pre-training phase without supervised labels; that is, can we adapt a pre-trained foundation model to a new domain via efficient self-supervised pre-training on this domain? In this work, we introduce ExPLoRA, a highly effective technique to improve transfer learning of pre-trained vision transformers (ViTs) under domain shifts. Initializing a ViT with pre-trained weights on large, natural-image datasets such as from DinoV2 or MAE, ExPLoRA continues the unsupervised pre-training objective on a new domain, unfreezing 1-2 pre-trained ViT blocks and tuning all other layers with LoRA. We then fine-tune the resulting model only with LoRA on this new domain for supervised learning. Our experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art results on satellite imagery, even outperforming fully pre-training and fine-tuning ViTs. Using the DinoV2 training objective, we demonstrate up to 8% improvement in linear probing top-1 accuracy on downstream tasks while using <10% of the number of parameters that are used in prior fully-tuned state-of-the art approaches. Our ablation studies confirm the efficacy of our approach over other baselines such as PEFT. Code is available at: https://samar-khanna.github.io/ExPLoRA/