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Junhao Liu, Xin Zhang

Existing local model-agnostic explanation techniques are ineffective for machine learning models that consider inputs of variable lengths, as they do not consider temporal information embedded in these models. To address this limitation, we propose ReX, a general framework for incorporating temporal information in these techniques. Our key insight is that these techniques typically learn a model surrogate by sampling model inputs and outputs, and we can incorporate temporal information in a uniform way by only changing the sampling process and the surrogate features. We instantiate our approach on three popular explanation techniques: Anchors, LIME, and Kernel SHAP. To evaluate the effectiveness of ReX, we apply our approach to six models in three different tasks. Our evaluation results demonstrate that our approach 1) significantly improves the fidelity of explanations, making model-agnostic techniques outperform a state-of-the-art model-specific technique on its target model, and 2) helps end users better understand the models' behaviors.

Parvaneh Joharinad, Hannaneh Fahimi, Lukas Silvester Barth, Janis Keck, Jürgen Jost

This work introduces IsUMap, a novel manifold learning technique that enhances data representation by integrating aspects of UMAP and Isomap with Vietoris-Rips filtrations and metric realization of one-parameter filtrations of simplicial complexes. Inferring topological information from combinatorial models which have been built according to metric relations (Vietoris-Rips complexes) has proven useful in topological data analysis and general machine learning applications. This encourages the use of such objects for geometric inference. We extend this research direction by proposing a clear theoretical pipeline that not only provides a comprehensive guide for assigning a (triangulated) metric space to every admissible one- parameter filtration of simplicial complexes but also offers a method for merging these objects. With this, our method presents a systematic and detailed construction of a metric representation for locally distorted metric spaces that captures complex data structures more accurately than the previous schemes. Our approach addresses limitations in existing methods by accommodating non-uniform data distributions and intricate local geometries. We validate its performance through extensive experiments on examples with known geometries and in applications to data, in particular from computational biology.

Jian Bi, Qianliang Wu, Jianjun Qian, Lei Luo, Jian Yang

With the rapid advancement of 3D scanning technology, point clouds have become a crucial data type in computer vision and machine learning. However, learning robust representations for point clouds remains a significant challenge due to their irregularity and sparsity. In this paper, we propose a novel Dual Manifold Regularization (DMR) framework that makes full use of the properties of positive and negative curvature in manifolds to improve the representation of point clouds. Specifically, we leverage DMR based on hyperbolic and hyperspherical manifolds to address the limitations of traditional single-manifold regularization techniques, including inadequate generalization ability and adaptability to data diversity, as well as the difficulty of capturing complex relationships between data. To begin, we utilize the tree-like structure of the hyperbolic manifold to model the part-whole hierarchical relationships within point clouds. This allows for a more comprehensive representation of the data, improving the model's capability to understand complex shapes. Additionally, we construct positive samples through topological consistency augmentation and employ contrastive learning techniques in the hyperspherical manifold to capture more discriminative features within the data. Our experimental results show that our method outperforms traditional supervised learning and single-manifold regularization techniques in point cloud analysis. Specifically, for shape classification, DMR achieves a new State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) performance with 94.8% Overall Accuracy (OA) on ModelNet40 and 90.7% OA on ScanObjectNN, surpassing the recent SOTA model without increasing the baseline parameters.

Haodong Feng, Yue Wang, Dixia Fan

In science and engineering, machine learning techniques are increasingly successful in physical systems modeling (predicting future states of physical systems). Effectively integrating PDE loss as a constraint of system transition can improve the model's prediction by overcoming generalization issues due to data scarcity, especially when data acquisition is costly. However, in many real-world scenarios, due to sensor limitations, the data we can obtain is often only partial observation, making the calculation of PDE loss seem to be infeasible, as the PDE loss heavily relies on high-resolution states. We carefully study this problem and propose a novel framework named Re-enable PDE Loss under Partial Observation (RPLPO). The key idea is that although enabling PDE loss to constrain system transition solely is infeasible, we can re-enable PDE loss by reconstructing the learnable high-resolution state and constraining system transition simultaneously. Specifically, RPLPO combines an encoding module for reconstructing learnable high-resolution states with a transition module for predicting future states. The two modules are jointly trained by data and PDE loss. We conduct experiments in various physical systems to demonstrate that RPLPO has significant improvement in generalization, even when observation is sparse, irregular, noisy, and PDE is inaccurate.

Hanrui Zhao, Niuniu Qi, Mengxin Ren, Banglong Liu, Shuming Shi, Zhengfeng Yang

Polynomial Lyapunov function \mathcal V (x) provides mathematically rigorous that converts stability analysis into efficiently solvable optimization problem. Traditional numerical methods rely on user-defined templates, while emerging neural \mathcal V (x) offer flexibility but exhibit poor generalization yield from naive Square polynomial networks. In this paper, we propose a novel learning-enabled polynomial \mathcal V (x) synthesis approach, where a data-driven machine learning process guided by target-based sampling to fit candidate \mathcal V (x) which naturally compatible with the sum-of-squares (SOS) soundness verification. The framework is structured as an iterative loop between a Learner and a Verifier , where the Learner trains expressive polynomial \mathcal V (x) network via polynomial expansions, while the Verifier encodes learned candidates with SOS constraints to identify a real \mathcal V (x) by solving LMI feasibility test problems. The entire procedure is driven by a high-accuracy counterexample guidance technique to further enhance efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms both SMT-based polynomial neural Lyapunov function synthesis and traditional SOS method.

Tao Sun, Yuhao Huang, Li Shen, Kele Xu, Bao Wang

Weight decay is a widely used technique in training machine learning models, known to empirically enhance the generalization of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). While intuitively weight decay allows SGD to train a regularized model rather than the original one, there is limited theoretical understanding of why SGD with weight decay (SGDW) yields results consistent with the unregularized model, or how weight decay improves generalization. This paper establishes a convergence theory for SGDW in the context of the unregularized model, under weaker assumptions than previous analyses of weight decay. Our theory demonstrates that weight decay does not accelerate the convergence of SGD. For generalization, we provide the first theoretical proof of weight decay's benefit in nonconvex optimization. Additionally, we extend our results to sign-based stochastic gradient algorithms, such as SignSGD. Numerical experiments on classical benchmarks validate our theoretical findings.

Noam Elata, Bahjat Kawar, Yaron Ostrovsky-Berman, Miriam Farber, Ron Sokolovsky

Synthesizing a novel view from a single input image is a challenging task. Traditionally, this task was approached by estimating scene depth, warping, and inpainting, with machine learning models enabling parts of the pipeline. More recently, generative models are being increasingly employed in novel view synthesis (NVS), often encompassing the entire end-to-end system.In this work, we adapt a modern diffusion model architecture for end-to-end NVS in the pixel space, substantially outperforming previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) techniques. We explore different ways to encode geometric information into the network.Our experiments show that while these methods may enhance performance, their impact is minor compared to utilizing improved generative models. Moreover, we introduce a novel NVS training scheme that utilizes single-view datasets, capitalizing on their relative abundance compared to their multi-view counterparts. This leads to improved generalization capabilities to scenes with out-of-domain content.

Wenjie Yang, Ruiyuan Huang, Jiaxing Guo, Zicheng Lyu, Tongshan Xu, Shengzhong Zhang, Lun Du, Da Zheng, Zengfeng Huang

Large language models have demonstrated considerable capabilities in various mathematical tasks, yet they often fall short in rigorous, proof-based reasoning essential for research-level mathematics. Retrieval-augmented generation presents a promising direction for enhancing these capabilities. This paper systematically explores RAG for natural language theorem proving, revealing that LLMs, when augmented with retrieved proofs rather than just theorems, can function as potent mimetic theorem provers: these models can effectively generalize proof techniques found in unstructured retrieved contexts to construct correct proofs for novel theorems. Building upon this finding, we introduce Dual RAG, a simple yet effective RAG framework. Dual RAG employs LLMs to identify underlying reasoning challenges within theorems, augmenting both queries and document contexts to improve retrieval performance. Our experiments show that Dual RAG achieves substantial improvements in retrieval performance, with gains of up to 34.19%. Expert evaluations further confirm that these retrieval enhancements directly translate into higher quality proof generation. Notably, when integrated with the arXiv API, Dual RAG demonstrates the ability to prove research-level theorems in theoretical machine learning, highlighting its strong potential as a foundational element for a practical mathematical copilot.

Maeda Hanafi, Ishan Jindal, Yannis Katsis, Lucian Popa, Huaiyu Zhu

Instruction fine-tuning enhances the alignment of autoregressive language models (ArLMs) with human intent but relies on large-scale annotated datasets prone to label and text noise. In this paper, we show that existing noise detection techniques designed for autoencoder models (AeLMs) do not directly generalize to ArLMs due to differences in learning dynamics. We propose TDRanker, a novel approach leveraging training dynamics to rank datapoints from easy-to-learn to hard-to-learn, effectively identifying noisy instances. Our method demonstrates robustness across multiple model architectures covering both autoencoder and autoregressive language models (GPT-2, BERT, LaMini-Cerebras-256M) and across various dataset noise levels, achieving at least 2x faster denoising than previous techniques. Applied to real-world classification and generative tasks, TDRanker significantly improves data quality and model performance. These findings suggest that TDRanker provides a scalable solution for refining instruction-tuning datasets, enhancing the reliability of fine-tuned ArLMs in practical applications.

Advaith Malladi, Rakesh R Menon, Yuvraj Jain, Shashank Srivastava

With the growing adoption of machine learning models in critical domains, techniques for explaining differences between models have become essential for trust, debugging, and informed deployment. Previous approaches address this by identifying input transformations that cause divergent predictions or by learning joint surrogate models to align and contrast behaviors. These methods often require access to training data and do not produce natural language explanations. In this paper, we introduce SLED, a framework that generates faithful natural language explanations of when and how two ML models converge or diverge in their predictions. SLED first uses gradient-based optimization to synthesize input samples that highlight divergence and convergence patterns, and then leverages a large language model (LLM) to generate explanations grounded in these synthetic samples. Across both text-based (3 tasks, 7 models) and structured (10 tasks, 4 models) classification tasks, we show that SLED explanations are 18–24% more faithful than the strongest baselines. User studies also indicate that SLED explanations achieve a real-world simulatability of 63.5%. Importantly, SLED requires minimal access to training data and generalizes well to real-world samples, enabling transparent and data-efficient model comparison.

Applications · Neuroscience, Cognitive Science

Thomas Klein, Sascha Meyen, Wieland Brendel, Felix A. Wichmann, Kristof Meding

Benchmarking models is a key factor for the rapid progress in machine learning (ML) research. Thus, further progress depends on improving benchmarking metrics. A standard metric to measure the behavioral alignment between ML models and human observers is error consistency (EC). EC allows for more fine-grained comparisons of behavior than other metrics such as accuracy, and has been used in the influential Brain-Score benchmark to rank different DNNs by their behavioral consistency with humans. Previously, EC values have been reported without confidence intervals. However, empirically measured EC values are typically noisy - thus, without confidence intervals, valid benchmarking conclusions are problematic. Here we improve on standard EC in two ways: First, we show how to obtain confidence intervals for EC using a bootstrapping technique, allowing us to derive significance tests for EC. Second, we propose a new computational model relating the EC between two classifiers to the implicit probability that one of them copies responses from the other. This view of EC allows us to give practical guidance to scientists regarding the number of trials required for sufficiently powerful, conclusive experiments. Finally, we use our methodology to revisit popular NeuroAI-results. We find that while the general trend of behavioral differences between humans and machines holds up to scrutiny, many reported differences between deep vision models are statistically insignificant. Our methodology enables researchers to design adequately powered experiments that can reliably detect behavioral differences between models, providing a foundation for more rigorous benchmarking of behavioral alignment.

General Machine Learning · Transfer, Multitask and Meta-learning

Wenju Sun, Qingyong Li, Wen Wang, Yang Liu, Yangliao Geng, Boyang Li

Multi-task model merging aims to consolidate knowledge from multiple fine-tuned task-specific experts into a unified model while minimizing performance degradation. Existing methods primarily approach this by minimizing differences between task-specific experts and the unified model, either from a parameter-level or a task-loss perspective. However, parameter-level methods exhibit a significant performance gap compared to the upper bound, while task-loss approaches entail costly secondary training procedures. In contrast, we observe that performance degradation closely correlates with feature drift, i.e., differences in feature representations of the same sample caused by model merging. Motivated by this observation, we propose Layer-wise Optimal Task Vector Merging (LOT Merging), a technique that explicitly minimizes feature drift between task-specific experts and the unified model in a layer-by-layer manner. LOT Merging can be formulated as a convex quadratic optimization problem, enabling us to analytically derive closed-form solutions for the parameters of linear and normalization layers. Consequently, LOT Merging achieves efficient model consolidation through basic matrix operations. Extensive experiments across vision and vision-language benchmarks demonstrate that LOT Merging significantly outperforms baseline methods, achieving improvements of up to 4.4% (ViT-B/32) over state-of-the-art approaches. The source code is available at https://github.com/SunWenJu123/model-merging.

General Machine Learning · Everything Else

Naga Sai Abhiram Kusumba, Maitreya Patel, Kyle Min, Changhoon Kim, Chitta Baral, 'YZ' Yezhou Yang

Erasing harmful or proprietary concepts from powerful text‑to‑image generators is an emerging safety requirement, yet current ``concept erasure'' techniques either collapse image quality, rely on brittle adversarial losses, or demand prohibitive retraining cycles. We trace these limitations to a myopic view of the denoising trajectories that govern diffusion‑based generation. We introduce EraseFlow, the first framework that casts concept unlearning as exploration in the space of denoising paths and optimizes it with a GFlowNets equipped with the trajectory‑balance objective. By sampling entire trajectories rather than single end states, EraseFlow learns a stochastic policy that steers generation away from target concepts while preserving the model’s prior. EraseFlow eliminates the need for carefully crafted reward models and by doing this, it generalizes effectively to unseen concepts and avoids hackable rewards while improving the performance. Extensive empirical results demonstrate that EraseFlow outperforms existing baselines and achieves an optimal trade-off between performance and prior preservation.

General Machine Learning · Transfer, Multitask and Meta-learning

Anke Tang, Enneng Yang, Li Shen, Yong Luo, Han Hu, Lefei Zhang, Bo Du, Dacheng Tao

Deep model merging represents an emerging research direction that combines multiple fine-tuned models to harness their specialized capabilities across different tasks and domains. Current model merging techniques focus on merging all available models simultaneously, with weight interpolation-based methods being the predominant approach. However, these conventional approaches are not well-suited for scenarios where models become available sequentially, and they often suffer from high memory requirements and potential interference between tasks. In this study, we propose a training-free projection-based continual merging method that processes models sequentially through orthogonal projections of weight matrices and adaptive scaling mechanisms. Our method operates by projecting new parameter updates onto subspaces orthogonal to existing merged parameter updates while using an adaptive scaling mechanism to maintain stable parameter distances, enabling efficient sequential integration of task-specific knowledge. Our approach maintains constant memory complexity to the number of models, minimizes interference between tasks through orthogonal projections, and retains the performance of previously merged models through adaptive task vector scaling. Extensive experiments on CLIP-ViT models demonstrate that our method achieves a 5-8% average accuracy improvement while maintaining robust performance in different task orderings. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/tanganke/opcm .

General Machine Learning · Transfer, Multitask and Meta-learning

Hainan Fang, Yuanbo Wen, Jun Bi, Yihan Wang, Tonghui He, Yanlin Tang, Di Huang, Jiaming Guo, Rui Zhang, Qi Guo 等

Compilers, while essential, are notoriously complex systems that demand prohibitively expensive human expertise to develop and maintain. The recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a compelling new paradigm: Neural Compilation, which could potentially simplify compiler development for new architectures and facilitate the discovery of innovative optimization techniques. However, several critical obstacles impede its practical adoption. Firstly, a significant lack of dedicated benchmarks and robust evaluation methodologies hinders objective assessment and tracking of progress in the field. Secondly, systematically enhancing the reliability and performance of LLM-generated assembly remains a critical challenge. Addressing these challenges, this paper introduces NeuComBack, a novel benchmark dataset specifically designed for IR-to-assembly compilation. Leveraging this dataset, we first define a foundational Neural Compilation workflow and conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the capabilities of recent frontier LLMs on Neural Compilation, establishing new performance baselines. We further propose a self-evolving prompt optimization method that enables LLMs to iteratively evolve their internal prompt strategies by extracting insights from prior self-debugging traces, thereby enhancing their neural compilation capabilities. Experiments demonstrate that our method significantly improves both the functional correctness and the performance of LLM-generated assembly code. Compared to baseline prompts, the functional correctness rates improved from 44% to 64% on x86_64 and from 36% to 58% on aarch64, respectively. More significantly, among the 16 correctly generated x86_64 programs using our method, 14 (87.5%) surpassed clang-O3 performance. These consistent improvements across diverse architectures (x86_64 and aarch64) and program distributions (NeuComBack L1 and L2) validate our method's superiority over conventional approaches and its potential for broader adoption in low-level neural compilation.

General Machine Learning · Representation Learning

Sengim Karayalcin, Marina Krček, Stjepan Picek

Side-channel analysis (SCA) poses a real-world threat by exploiting unintentional physical signals to extract secret information from secure devices. Evaluation labs also use the same techniques to certify device security. In recent years, deep learning has emerged as a prominent method for SCA, achieving state-of-the-art attack performance at the cost of interpretability. Understanding how neural networks extract secrets is crucial for security evaluators aiming to defend against such attacks, as only by understanding the attack can one propose better countermeasures. In this work, we apply mechanistic interpretability to neural networks trained for SCA, revealing $\textit{how}$ models exploit $\textit{what}$ leakage in side-channel traces. We focus on sudden jumps in performance to reverse engineer learned representations, ultimately recovering secret masks and moving the evaluation process from black-box to white-box. Our results show that mechanistic interpretability can scale to realistic SCA settings, even when relevant inputs are sparse, model accuracies are low, and side-channel protections prevent standard input interventions.

Andrea Montanari, Pierfrancesco Urbani

Understanding the inductive bias and generalization properties of large overparametrized machine learning models requires to characterize the dynamics of the training algorithm. We study the learning dynamics of large two-layer neural networks via dynamical mean field theory, a well established technique of non-equilibrium statistical physics. We show that, for large network width $m$, and large number of samples per input dimension $n/d$, the training dynamics exhibits a separation of timescales which implies: $(i)$ The emergence of a slow time scale associated with the growth in Gaussian/Rademacher complexity of the network; $(ii)$ Inductive bias towards small complexity if the initialization has small enough complexity; $(iii)$ A dynamical decoupling between feature learning and overfitting regimes; $(iv)$ A non-monotone behavior of the test error, associated `feature unlearning' regime at large times.

General Machine Learning · Transfer, Multitask and Meta-learning

Daniel Dsouza, Julia Kreutzer, Adrien Morisot, Ahmet Üstün, Sara Hooker

One of the most profound challenges of modern machine learning is performing well on the long-tail of rare and underrepresented features. Large general-purpose models are trained for many tasks, but work best on high-frequency use cases. After training, it is hard to adapt a model to perform well on specific use cases underrepresented in the training corpus. Relying on prompt engineering or few-shot examples to maximize the output quality on a particular test case can be frustrating, as models can be highly sensitive to small changes, react in unpredicted ways or rely on a fixed system prompt for maintaining performance. In this work, we ask: Can we optimize our training protocols to both improve controllability and performance on underrepresented use cases at inference time? We revisit the divide between training and inference techniques to improve long-tail performance while providing users with a set of control levers the model is trained to be responsive to. We create a detailed taxonomy of data characteristics and task provenance to explicitly control generation attributes and implicitly condition generations at inference time. We fine-tune a base model to infer these markers automatically, which makes them optional at inference time. This principled and flexible approach yields pronounced improvements in performance on examples from the long tail of the training distribution. Overall, we observe lifts of 5.7% across all tasks. However, treasure markers are particularly effective at finding difficult to obtain gains in the long-tail. We observe relative lifts of up to 14.1% on underrepresented tasks like CodeRepair and absolute improvements of 35.3% on length instruction following evaluations.

Social Aspects

Cong Zeng, Shengkun Tang, Yuanzhou Chen, Zhiqiang Shen, Wenchao Yu, Xujiang Zhao, Haifeng Chen, Wei Cheng, Zhiqiang Xu

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and Claude has significantly increased the presence of AI-generated text in digital communication. This trend has heightened the need for reliable detection methods to distinguish between human-authored and machine-generated content. Existing approaches both zero-shot methods and supervised classifiers largely conceptualize this task as a binary classification problem, often leading to poor generalization across domains and models. In this paper, we argue that such a binary formulation fundamentally mischaracterizes the detection task by assuming a coherent representation of human-written texts. In reality, human texts do not constitute a unified distribution, and their diversity cannot be effectively captured through limited sampling. This causes previous classifiers to memorize observed OOD characteristics rather than learn the essence of `non-ID' behavior, limiting generalization to unseen human-authored inputs. Based on this observation, we propose reframing the detection task as an out-of-distribution (OOD) detection problem, treating human-written texts as distributional outliers while machine-generated texts are in-distribution (ID) samples. To this end, we develop a detection framework using one-class learning method including DeepSVDD and HRN, and score-based learning techniques such as energy-based method, enabling robust and generalizable performance. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets validate the effectiveness of our OOD-based approach. Specifically, the OOD-based method achieves 98.3\% AUROC and AUPR with only 8.9\% FPR95 on DeepFake dataset. Moreover, we test our detection framework on multilingual, attacked, and unseen-model and -domain text settings, demonstrating the robustness and generalizability of our framework. Code will be released openly and also available in the supplementary materials.

Optimization · Neural Network Optimization

Andrei Panferov, Alexandra Volkova, Ionut-Vlad Modoranu, Vage Egiazarian, Mher Safaryan, Dan Alistarh

Scaling laws have shaped recent advances in machine learning by enabling predictable scaling of model performance based on model size, computation, and data volume. Concurrently, the rise in computational cost for AI has motivated model compression techniques, notably quantization and sparsification, which have emerged to mitigate the steep computational demands associated with large-scale training and inference. This paper investigates the interplay between scaling laws and compression strategies, exploring whether a unified scaling framework can accurately predict model performance when training occurs over various compressed representations, such as sparse, scalar-quantized, sparse-quantized or even vector-quantized formats. Our key contributions include proposing and validating a general scaling law formulation applicable both individually but also composably across compression types. We demonstrate both theoretically and empirically that a simple metric based on Gaussian mean squared error fitting can robustly predict parameter efficiency across compressed models. Additionally, we extend our formulation to directly compare the accuracy potential of different compressed formats, and to derive better algorithms for training over sparse-quantized formats. Finally, we identify conditions under which these unified scaling laws fail.