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Social Aspects · Privacy

Enayat Ullah, Sai Aparna Aketi, Devansh Gupta, Huanyu Zhang, Meisam Razaviyayn

Large language models (LLMs) are trained on vast datasets that may contain sensitive information. Differential privacy (DP), the de facto standard for formal privacy guarantees, provides a principled framework for training LLMs with provable privacy protection. However, state-of-the-art DP training implementations rely on *fast gradient clipping* techniques with memory overhead $O(B\min(T^2, d^2))$, where $B$ is the batch size, $T$ is the sequence length, and $d$ is the layer width. This becomes prohibitive as both model width and context length grow. We propose DP-SGD-RC, a novel variant of DP-SGD with *randomized clipping* that reduces memory and compute overhead. DP-SGD-RC leverages *stochastic trace estimation* methods, specifically *Hutchinson's estimator* and its improved variant, Hutch$^{++}$, to reduce the memory footprint of per-sample gradient norm estimation. We provide a tight privacy analysis showing that DP-SGD-RC achieves noise multipliers competitive with deterministic clipping. Experiments fine-tuning Llama 3.2 1B on long-context benchmarks spanning classification, question answering, and summarization tasks demonstrate that DP-SGD-RC matches baseline utility while significantly reducing memory and compute.

Xueting Chen, Jun-Jie Huang, Yan Yan, Long Lan, Yuhua Tang, Wenjing Yang

Multi-modal prompt learning is a parameter-efficient approach to adapt large vision--language models to downstream classification tasks. However, prompts can inadvertently evolve into a high-capacity pathway encoding environment-dependent spurious correlations that are only predictive in the source domain, thereby undermining transferability. To address this issue, this paper introduces \textbf{Do-Prompt}, a \emph{compress-and-intervene} framework that brings together variational bottlenecks and causal interventions for robust prompt tuning. We model prompts as stochastic latent variables and impose a \emph{variational prompt bottleneck} to explicitly regulate the information transmitted through prompts, effectively mitigating their propensity to memorize spurious nuisance cues. Building on this capacity constraint, we propose lightweight \emph{prompt-level interventions} by perturbing the environment-related prompt components and enforcing prediction consistency under these \textit{do}-style perturbations. This synergistic integration encourages reliance on task-stable, invariant semantics rather than spurious prompt content. Notably, Do-Prompt is plug-and-play compatible with existing multi-modal prompt tuning pipelines with negligible computation overhead. Extensive experiments on base-to-novel generalization, cross-dataset transfer, and ImageNet distribution shifts demonstrate consistent performance gains, with particularly notable improvements on datasets exhibiting pronounced domain or texture biases.

Social Aspects · Robustness

Ivri Hikri, Nir Rosenfeld

A common assumption in strategic classification is that the classifier is made public knowledge. However, it remains unclear if, and why, a system would choose to commit to full disclosure. We study a setting in which regulation requires the system to share some, but not all, of the information. This entails a learning task in which the goal is to jointly learn a classifier and the uncertainty surrounding it. Towards this, we adopt from robust mechanism design the notion of ambiguity, which in our setting permits the learner to reveal a set or range of possible classifiers, and choose one to realize. We investigate how ambiguity affects the learning task, propose efficient algorithms for computing best-responses and training, and empirically explore strategic learning and its outcomes in this novel setting and using our approach.

General Machine Learning · Evaluation

Krishnakant Singh, Simone Schaub-Meyer, Stefan Roth

Object-centric learning (OCL) aims to learn structured scene representations that support compositional generalization and robustness to out-of-distribution (OOD) data. However, OCL models are often not evaluated regarding these goals. Instead, most prior work focuses on evaluating OCL models solely through object discovery and simple reasoning tasks, such as probing the representation via image classification. We identify two limitations in existing benchmarks: (1) They provide limited insights on the representation usefulness of OCL models, and (2) localization and representation usefulness are assessed using disjoint metrics. To address (1), we use instruction-tuned VLMs as evaluators, enabling scalable benchmarking across diverse VQA datasets to measure how well VLMs leverage OCL representations for complex reasoning tasks. To address (2), we introduce a unified evaluation task and metric that jointly assess localization (where) and representation usefulness (what), thereby eliminating inconsistencies introduced by disjoint evaluation. Finally, we include a simple multi-feature reconstruction baseline as a reference point.

General Machine Learning · Transfer, Multitask and Meta-learning

Gezheng Xu, Qi CHEN, QIUHAO Zeng, Charles X. Ling, Boyu Wang

Source-Free Domain Adaptation (SFDA) enables model adaptation under distribution shifts without access to source data, providing a practical solution for privacy-sensitive applications and having shown substantial progress in classification. In contrast, regression involves ordered and continuous target variables, posing unique challenges for representation adaptation and pseudo-label refinement in the SFDA setting. To address this gap, we propose a novel algorithm for continuous target prediction in SFDA that leverages instance-dependent, discretized density–informed supervisory signals to refine pseudo-labels within an uncertainty-aware paradigm. By incorporating auxiliary discretized distribution learning, our method also promotes more compact and structured feature representations, mitigating the inherent difficulties of adapting regression models under distribution shift. We theoretically demonstrate that the resulting density structure is robust to potential perturbations, supporting reliable SFDA for regression. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Applications · Computer Vision

Shaoyuan Mo, MaQi, l r, Bohan Li, WangKe

End-to-end online map generation is a core component of autonomous driving perception systems. However, in complex traffic scenes, Bird’s-Eye-View (BEV) with vectorized mapping suffers from limitations such as target misclassification, spatial localization drift, and ambiguous semantic segmentation. Introducing uncertainty quantification can alleviate these problems, so we propose MapUQ, a robust BEV vectorized mapping method guided by uncertainty-aware optimization. Specifically, we quantify uncertainty at the feature level to enhance semantic perception, apply an error-driven dynamic receptive field adaptation mechanism at the decoding stage to enforce geometric consistency, and leverage negative sample information at the output head to improve lane classification accuracy. Experimental results on the nuScenes and Argoverse 2 datasets show that our method outperforms prior approaches in AP across three road types, achieving an average improvement of 1.5% over the baseline with marginal computational overhead. In addition, our method surpasses the baseline on uncertainty metrics such as ECE and NLL, significantly improving robustness and mapping accuracy in complex scenarios. Our code has been released at github: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MapUQ-D287.

Deep Learning · Other Representation Learning

WenZhang Wei, Zhipeng Gui, Dehua Peng, Tiandi Ye, Huayi Wu

The core of vision-language models lies in measuring cross-modal similarity within a unified representation space. However, most image-text matching or multi-class image classification datasets lack fine-grained cross-modal matching annotations, forcing the continuous similarity space into binary classification boundaries. This compression induces false negative samples and significantly impairs the generalization performance of cross-modal tasks. While prior research has attempted to mitigate this by modeling intra-modal ambiguity, it often overlooks inherent annotation flaws, leading to suboptimal uncertainty allocation. To address these challenges, we propose a Variational Adapter for Cross-modal Similarity Representation (VACSR). This approach reformulates image-text matching with fine-grained semantic scarcity as a variational inference problem. It constructs a latent space for cross-modal similarity and uses regularization techniques to mitigate overfitting to binary annotations. We validate the effectiveness of VACSR in image-text retrieval tasks using the COCO Caption dataset and two extended datasets: CxC and ECCV Caption. Furthermore, we conduct out-of-distribution evaluations including domain generalization on ImageNet and its variants, as well as base-to-novel generalization across 11 datasets, highlighting VACSR’s robust generalization performance.

Social Aspects · Accountability, Transparency, and Interpretability

Berkant Turan, Suhrab Asadulla, David Steinmann, Kristian Kersting, Wolfgang Stammer, Sebastian Pokutta

While *Prover-Verifier Games* (PVGs) offer a promising path toward verifiability in nonlinear classification models, they have not yet been applied to complex inputs such as high-dimensional images. Conversely, expressive *concept encodings* effectively allow to translate such data into interpretable concepts but are often utilised in the context of low-capacity linear predictors. In this work, we push towards real-world verifiability by combining the strengths of both approaches. We introduce *Neural Concept Verifier (NCV)*, a unified framework combining PVGs for formal verifiability with concept encodings to handle complex, high-dimensional inputs in an interpretable way. NCV achieves this by utilizing recent minimally supervised concept discovery models to extract structured concept encodings from raw inputs. A *prover* then selects a subset of these encodings, which a *verifier*, implemented as a nonlinear predictor, uses exclusively for decision-making. Our evaluations show that NCV outperforms classic concept-based models and pixel-based PVG classifier baselines on high-dimensional, logically complex datasets and helps mitigate shortcut behavior. Overall, we demonstrate NCV as a promising step toward concept-level, verifiable AI.

Applications · Computer Vision

Borui Kang, Jinrui Gu, Tao Feng, Qi Fan, Yinghuan Shi, Lei Wang, Wenbin Li, Yang Gao

Continual learning of Vision-Language Model (VLM) aspires to empower foundation models with new expertise without compromising their universal zero-shot capabilities. However, this pursuit faces a critical ''dual-forgetting'' challenge: the catastrophic forgetting of newly acquired classes (Incremental Knowledge Forgetting, IKF) and the insidious erosion of foundational zero-shot capabilities (Pre-trained Knowledge Forgetting, PKF). Existing evaluations often ignore PKF or assess it via confounded protocols where positive transfer on semantically similar domains creates an illusion of retention, masking severe foundational degradation. To address this, we propose the Dual-Forgetting-Aware Class-Incremental Learning (DFA-CIL) framework and the Similarity-Calibrated Retention (SCR) metric. Unlike standard averaging, SCR utilizes the frozen pre-trained feature space to inversely weight performance based on semantic similarity, effectively mitigating the confounding gains to stress-test foundational stability. Building on this, we propose DFA-MoE, a functionally heterogeneous Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) method. DFA-MoE architecturally decouples optimization objectives by assigning a momentum-enhanced contrastive expert for feature alignment, and separate plasticity experts that combine classification with auxiliary contrastive learning to adapt to new tasks while retaining historical knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework uncovers the hidden fragility of existing methods and achieves a state-of-the-art balance in preserving both incremental and pre-trained knowledge.

Deep Learning · Theory

Jian Zhang, Yue Sun, Wangzi Yao, Tielin Zhang

The advancement of artificial neural networks (ANNs) has been driven by diverse and well-established architectural designs, especially in connectivity. Biological neural networks, which exhibit a rich variety of neurodynamic circuits, offer a valuable source of inspiration for developing novel ANN models. In this study, we analyze the meta-connectivity structure and introduce a network motif-based approach, in which 13 distinct motifs are modeled as functional building blocks. These motifs represent low-dimensional, fundamental components of larger network architectures. Through rigorous theoretical analysis, we classify these motifs into a three‑layer hierarchical classification of their dynamical regimes and demonstrate that their hierarchical proportions critically shape collective neural dynamics. Furthermore, by embedding motif distributions into recurrent neural networks (RNNs), we show that these motifs can selectively enhance either network robustness or flexibility. Collectively, our findings provide a theoretical framework—supported by extensive experiments—for understanding how specific network motifs influence the computational properties of artificial intelligence systems via their underlying dynamics. This motif-driven approach offers significant potential for analyzing and modulating neural dynamics in ANNs.

Theory · Game Theory

Nina Balcan, Kiriaki Fragkia, Keegan Harris

We initiate the study of structured Stackelberg games, a novel form of strategic interaction between a leader and a follower where contextual information can be predictive of the follower's (unknown) type. Motivated by applications such as security games and AI safety, we show how this additional structure can help the leader learn a utility-maximizing policy in both the online and distributional settings. In the online setting, we first prove that standard learning-theoretic measures of complexity do not characterize the difficulty of the leader's learning task. Remarkably, we find that there exists a learning-theoretic measure of complexity, analogous to the Littlestone dimension in online classification, that tightly characterizes the leader's instance-optimal regret. We term this the Stackelberg-Littlestone dimension, and leverage it to provide a provably optimal online learning algorithm. In the distributional setting, we provide analogous results by showing that two new dimensions control the sample complexity upper- and lower-bound.

General Machine Learning · Evaluation

Haocheng Wang, Baiyu Huang, Yingjia Wan, Xiao Zhu, Xiaoyang Liu, Yinya Huang, Zhijiang Guo

Autoformalization—translating mathematical problems from natural language into formal proof assistant code—is essential for rigorous machine reasoning. However, existing evaluation frameworks provide only opaque binary verdicts or scalar scores, offering no interpretable insight into where or why translations fail. This opacity severely limits both human understanding and automated system improvement. To bridge this gap, we introduce \textbf{FormalRX}, a comprehensive diagnostic evaluation framework that transforms autoformalization assessment from black-box judgments into actionable feedback. At its core is \textbf{\textsc{Sci} Error Taxonomy}, a hierarchical classification scheme decomposing autoformalization errors into 28 distinct categories with strict priority ordering. Building on this taxonomy, FormalRX provides four critical diagnostic capabilities: (1) alignment verdicts, (2) error categorization, (3) error localization, and (4) correction. Our diagnostic model % specialized diagnostic models and evaluate them across all tasks. Our model FormalRX-8B, achieves F1-scores of 0.88 (verdict) and 0.71 (categorization), along with accuracies of 0.75 (localization) and 0.73 (correction), substantially outperforming both general-purpose LLMs and specialized baselines. By connecting evaluation with actionable insights, FormalRXenables systematic diagnosis and improvement of autoformalization systems.

Xinrui Wang, Shao-Yuan Li, Bartłomiej Twardowski, Alexandra Gomez-Villa, Songcan Chen

Online Continual Learning (OCL) aims to learn from endless non\text{-}stationary data streams, yet most existing methods assume a flat label space and overlook the hierarchical organization of real\text{-}world concepts that evolves both horizontally (sibling classes) and vertically (coarse or fine categories). To better reflect this context, we introduce a new problem setting, DHOCL (Online Continual Learning from Dynamic Hierarchies), where taxonomies evolve across granularities and each sample provides supervision at a single hierarchical level. In this setting, we find two fundamental issues: (i) partial supervision under mixed granularities provides only point-wise signals over an evolving path-wise hierarchy, which constrains plasticity and undermines cross-level semantic consistency, and (ii) the dynamically evolving hierarchies induce granularity-dependent interference, destabilizing popular replay and regularization mechanisms and thereby exacerbating catastrophic forgetting. To tackle these issues, we propose HALO (Hierarchical Adaptive Learning with Organized Prototypes), which adaptively combines complementary classification heads, regularized by organized learnable hierarchical prototypes, enabling rapid adaptation, hierarchical consistency, and structured knowledge consolidation as the taxonomy evolves. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that HALO consistently outperforms existing methods across hierarchical accuracy, mistake severity, and continual performance.

Javier Porras-Valenzuela, Samar Hadou, Alejandro Ribeiro

We introduce a constrained optimization framework for training transformers that behave like optimization descent algorithms. Specifically, we enforce layerwise descent constraints on the objective function and replace standard empirical risk minimization (ERM) with a primal-dual training scheme. This approach yields models whose intermediate representations decrease the loss monotonically in expectation across layers. We apply our method to both unrolled transformer architectures and conventional pretrained transformers on tasks of video denoising and text classification. Across these settings, we observe that constrained transformers achieve stronger robustness to perturbations and maintain higher out-of-distribution generalization, while preserving competitive in-distribution performance.

Theory · Domain Adaptation and Transfer Learning

Zeyu Ma, Jiaqi Huang, Yitong Qin, Ziqiang Zheng, Jiwei Wei, Jie Zou, Yang Yang, Heng Tao Shen

Domain Adaptive Object Detection (DAOD) addresses the challenge of transferring object detectors from labeled source domains to unlabeled target domains. Existing domain adaptation methods primarily rely on feature distribution alignment, which enhances domain-invariant features (statistical invariance) but also inadvertently increases inherent domain-common spurious factors (e.g., common environmental contexts), which act as shortcut features rather than the true causal factors for object classification. We propose Dynamic Causal Refinement (DCR), a novel framework that establishes a closed-loop feedback mechanism between data augmentation and model optimization to progressively refine causal features. Specifically, we design Semantic Prediction Consistency (SPC) to filter domain-specific spurious factors and establish a robust statistical invariance, and Discrepancy-Guided Causal Refinement (DGCR) to actively suppress the dependence on domain-common spurious factors via spectral perturbation for causal refinement. This process encourages the detector to suppress its reliance on shortcut features and instead prioritize semantically meaningful causal representations. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art counterparts significantly.

Deep Learning · Graph Neural Networks

Jiaqing Chen, Zidu Yin, Yichao Cai, Yuhang Liu, Zhen Zhang, Dong Gong, Javen Qinfeng Shi

Graph neural networks (GNNs) excel at aggregating neighbor information for classification, yet their performance is hindered by graph structural entanglement, where spurious correlations from semantically irrelevant neighbors contaminate node embeddings. This challenge is most acute for nodes near class boundaries in the embedding space, where amplified structural noise blurs decision boundaries and destabilizes predictions. Existing robust GNN methods largely treat all nodes uniformly, ignoring boundary vulnerabilities. In this paper, to improve classification performance, we tackle graph structural disentanglement by identifying boundary-region entanglement as the primary bottleneck and propose Boundary Embedding Shaping (BES), an adaptive contrastive learning GNN plug-in module that selectively suppresses spurious structural noise at decision boundaries with minimal model parameter perturbation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BES consistently improves boundary discrimination and outperforms existing leading methods. Notably, BES boosts GCN performance by an average of 3.3% in node classification (up to 5.0% on WikiCS) and achieves superior accuracy in link prediction with gains most pronounced for boundary nodes.

Optimization · Stochastic

Zitao Song, Cedar Site Bai, Zhe Zhang, Brian Bullins, David Gleich

Adaptive methods like Adam have become the *de facto* standard for large-scale vector and Euclidean optimization due to their coordinate-wise adaptation with a second-order nature. More recently, matrix-based spectral optimizers like Muon (Jordan et al., 2024b) show the power of treating weight matrices as matrices rather than long vectors. Linking these is hard because many natural generalizations are not feasible to implement, and we also cannot simply move the Adam adaptation to the matrix spectrum. To address this, we reformulate the AdaGrad update and decompose it into a variance adaptation term and a scale-invariant term. This decoupling produces **DeVA** (**De**coupled **V**ariance **A**daptation), a framework that bridges between vector-based variance adaptation and matrix spectral optimization, enabling a seamless transition from Adam to adaptive spectral descent. Extensive experiments across language modeling and image classification demonstrate that DeVA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods such as Muon and SOAP (Vyas et al., 2024), reducing token usage by around 6.6\%. Theoretically, we show that the variance adaptation term effectively improves the blockwise smoothness, facilitating faster convergence.

Social Aspects · Accountability, Transparency, and Interpretability

Simon Schrodi, Julian Schur, Max Argus, Thomas Brox

Concept-based models like Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) have garnered significant interest for improving model interpretability by first predicting human-understandable concepts before mapping them to the output classes. Early approaches required costly concept annotations. To alleviate this, recent methods utilized large language models to automatically generate class-specific concept descriptions and learned mappings from a pretrained black-box model’s raw features to these concepts using vision-language models. However, these approaches assume prior knowledge of which concepts the black-box model has learned. In this work, we discover the concepts encoded by the model through unsupervised concept discovery techniques instead. We further leverage a simple input-dependent concept selection mechanism that dynamically retains a sparse set of relevant concepts of each input, enhancing both sparsity and interpretability. Our approach not only improves downstream performance, but also needs significantly fewer concepts for accurate classification. Lastly, we show how large vision-language models can guide the editing of our models' weights to correct model errors.

Deep Learning · Generative Models and Autoencoders

Xinchen Yan, Chen Liang, Lijun Yu, Adams Wei Yu, Yifeng Lu, Quoc Le

This paper investigates the scaling properties of autoregressive next-pixel prediction, a simple, end-to-end yet under-explored framework for unified vision models. Starting with images at resolutions of 32x32, we train a family of Transformers using IsoFlops profiles across compute budgets up to 7e19 FLOPs and evaluate three distinct target metrics: next-pixel prediction objective, ImageNet classification accuracy, and generation quality measured by Fr'echet Distance. First, optimal scaling strategy is critically task-dependent. At a fixed 32x32 resolution alone, the optimal scaling properties for image classification and image generation diverge, where generation optimal setup requires the data size grow three to five times faster than for the classification optimal setup. Second, as image resolution increases, the optimal scaling strategy indicates that the model size must grow much faster than data size. Surprisingly, by projecting our findings, we discover that the primary bottleneck is compute rather than the amount of training data. As compute continues to grow four to five times annually, we forecast the feasibility of pixel-by-pixel modeling of images within the next five years.

Deep Learning · Foundation Models

Pavan Karjol, Vivek Kashyap, Rohan Venkatesh Kashyap, Prathosh AP

We propose a modular, data-driven framework for jointly learning unknown functional mappings and discovering the underlying one-parameter symmetry subgroup governing the data. Unlike conventional geometric deep learning methods that assume known symmetries, our approach identifies the relevant continuous subgroup directly from data. We consider the broad class of one-parameter subgroups, which admit a canonical geometric classification into three regimes: elliptical, hyperbolic, and parabolic. Given an assumed regime, our framework instantiates a corresponding symmetry discovery architecture with invariant and equivariant representation layers structured according to the Lie algebra of the subgroup, and learns the exact generator parameters end-to-end from data. This yields models whose invariance or equivariance is guaranteed by construction and admits formal proofs, enabling symmetry to be explicitly traced to identifiable components of the architecture. The approach is applicable to one-parameter subgroups of a wide range of matrix Lie groups, including $SO(n)$, $SL(n)$, and the Lorentz group. Experiments on synthetic and real-world systems—including moment of inertia prediction, double-pendulum dynamics, and high-energy \textit{Top Quark Tagging}—demonstrate accurate subgroup recovery and strong predictive performance across both compact and non-compact regimes.