Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive performance across natural language tasks but incur substantial computational and storage costs due to their scale. Post-training structured pruning offers an efficient solution. However, when few-shot calibration sets fail to adequately reflect the pretraining data distribution, existing methods exhibit limited generalization to downstream tasks. To address this issue, we propose Function-Aware Neuron Grouping (FANG), a post-training pruning framework that alleviates calibration bias by identifying and preserving neurons critical to specific function. FANG groups neurons with similar function based on the type of semantic context they process and prunes each group independently. During importance estimation within each group, tokens that strongly correlate with the functional role of the neuron group are given higher weighting. Additionally, FANG also preserves neurons that contribute across multiple context types. To achieve a better trade-off between sparsity and performance, it allocates sparsity to each block adaptively based on its functional complexity. Experiments show that FANG improves downstream accuracy while preserving language modeling performance. It achieves the state-of-the-art (SOTA) results when combined with FLAP and OBC, two representative pruning methods. Specifically, FANG outperforms FLAP and OBC by 1.5%–8.5% in average accuracy under 30% and 40% sparsity.
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In the context of the Classification and Regression Trees (CART) algorithm, the efficient splitting of categorical features using standard criteria like GINI and Entropy is well-established. However, using the Mean Absolute Error (MAE) criterion for categorical features has traditionally relied on various numerical encoding methods. This paper demonstrates that unsupervised numerical encoding methods are not viable for MAE criteria. Furthermore, we present a novel and efficient splitting algorithm that addresses the challenges of handling categorical features with the MAE criterion. Our findings underscore the limitations of existing approaches and offer a promising solution to enhance the handling of categorical data in CART algorithms.
Recent breakthroughs in reasoning models have markedly advanced the reasoning capabilities of large language models, particularly via training on tasks with verifiable rewards. Yet, a significant gap persists in their adaptation to real-world multimodal scenarios, most notably, vision-language tasks, due to a heavy focus on single-modal language settings. While efforts to transplant reinforcement learning techniques from NLP to Visual Language Models (VLMs) have emerged, these approaches often remain confined to perception-centric tasks or reduce images to textual summaries, failing to fully exploit visual context and commonsense knowledge, ultimately constraining the generalization of reasoning capabilities across diverse multimodal environments. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel fine-tuning task, Masked Prediction via Context and Commonsense (MPCC), which forces models to integrate visual context and commonsense reasoning by reconstructing semantically meaningful content from occluded images, thereby laying the foundation for generalized reasoning. To systematically evaluate the model’s performance in generalized reasoning, we developed a specialized evaluation benchmark, MPCC-Eval, and employed various fine-tuning strategies to guide reasoning. Among these, we introduced an innovative training method, Reinforcement Fine-Tuning with Prior Sampling, which not only enhances model performance but also improves its generalized reasoning capabilities in out-of-distribution (OOD) and cross-task scenarios.
TVChain: Leveraging Textual-Visual Prompt Chains for Jailbreaking Large Vision-Language Models
PDF ↗Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) enhance the capabilities of Large Language Models by integrating visual inputs, thereby enabling advanced multimodal reasoning across diverse applications. However, these enhanced reasoning capabilities introduce new security risks, particularly to jailbreaking attacks that bypass built-in safety mechanisms to elicit harmful or unauthorized outputs. While recent efforts have explored adversarial and typographic prompts, most existing attacks suffer from three key limitations: reliance on auxiliary models, limited effectiveness in black-box scenarios, and inadequate exploitation of the LVLMs' intrinsic reasoning abilities. In this work, we propose TVChain, a novel black-box jailbreaking framework that explicitly intervenes in both the visual and textual reasoning processes of LVLMs. TVChain decomposes malicious prompts into a sequence of semantically meaningful sub-images that represent relevant objects and behaviors, thereby circumventing direct exposure of illicit content. In parallel, a carefully designed chain-of-thought (CoT) textual prompt is employed to steer the model's reasoning toward reconstructing the intended activity in a covert yet effective manner. We demonstrate that this compositional prompting strategy reduces the likelihood of triggering safety mechanisms while preserving attack efficacy. Extensive evaluations on eleven LVLMs (seven open-source and four commercial) across two benchmark datasets and three state-of-the-art defenses validate the effectiveness and robustness of TVChain.
Although neural networks achieve promising performance in many tasks, they may still fail when encountering some examples and bring about risks to applications. To discover risky samples, previous literature attempts to search for patterns of risky samples within existing datasets or inject perturbation into them. Yet in this way the diversity of risky samples is limited by the coverage of existing datasets. To overcome this limitation, recent works adopt diffusion models to produce new risky samples beyond the coverage of existing datasets. However, these methods struggle in the conformity between generated samples and expected categories, which could introduce label noise and severely limit their effectiveness in applications. To address this issue, we propose RiskyDiff that incorporates the embeddings of both texts and images as implicit constraints of category conformity. We also design a conformity score to further explicitly strengthen the category conformity, as well as introduce the mechanisms of embedding screening and risky gradient guidance to boost the risk of generated samples. Extensive experiments reveal that RiskyDiff greatly outperforms existing methods in terms of the degree of risk, generation quality, and conformity with conditioned categories. We also empirically show the generalization ability of the models can be enhanced by augmenting training data with generated samples of high conformity.
Despite the great performance of deep learning models in many areas, they still make mistakes and underperform on certain subsets of data, i.e. error slices. Given a trained model, it is important to identify its semantically coherent error slices that are easy to interpret, which is referred to as the error slice discovery problem. However, there is no proper metric of slice coherence without relying on extra information like predefined slice labels. Current evaluation of slice coherence requires access to predefined slices formulated by metadata like attributes or subclasses. Its validity heavily relies on the quality and abundance of metadata, where some possible patterns could be ignored. Besides, current algorithms cannot directly incorporate the constraint of coherence into their optimization objective due to absence of an explicit coherence metric, which could potentially hinder their effectiveness. In this paper, we propose manifold compactness, a coherence metric without reliance on extra information by incorporating the data geometry property into its design, and experiments on typical datasets empirically validate the rationality of the metric. Then we develop Manifold Compactness based error Slice Discovery (MCSD), a novel algorithm that directly treats risk and coherence as the optimization objective, and is flexible to be applied to models of various tasks. Extensive experiments on the benchmark and case studies on other typical datasets demonstrate the superiority of MCSD.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) can effectively model structural information of graphs, making them widely used in knowledge graph (KG) reasoning. However, existing studies on the expressive power of GNNs mainly focuses on simple single-relation graphs, and there is still insufficient discussion on the power of GNN to express logical rules in KGs. How to enhance the logical expressive power of GNNs is still a key issue. Motivated by this, we propose Path-Neighbor enhanced GNN (PN-GNN), a method to enhance the logical expressive power of GNN by aggregating node-neighbor embeddings on the reasoning path. First, we analyze the logical expressive power of existing GNN-based methods and point out the shortcomings of the expressive power of these methods. Then, we theoretically investigate the logical expressive power of PN-GNN, showing that it not only has strictly stronger expressive power than C-GNN but also that its (k+1)-hop logical expressiveness is strictly superior to that of k-hop. Finally, we evaluate the logical expressive power of PN-GNN on six synthetic datasets and two real-world datasets. Both theoretical analysis and extensive experiments confirm that PN-GNN enhances the expressive power of logical rules without compromising generalization, as evidenced by its competitive performance in KG reasoning tasks.
CastX: Cohort-Level Causal Inference Meets Statistical Testing for Faithful and Reliable GNN Explanations
PDF ↗Explainability plays a critical role in understanding the workings of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). While recent methods have introduced causal inference into GNN explanation, they predominantly rely on individual-level interventions and lack rigorous statistical causality testing, resulting in unfaithful and unreliable explanations. To address these challenges, we propose CastX that integrates cohort-level causal analysis with statistical causality testing for GNN explanations. Specifically, CastX formulates the discovery of explanatory subgraphs as a dynamic edge pruning task guided by Conditional Average Treatment Effect (CATE) estimation. A reinforcement learning agent is employed to iteratively eliminate spurious edges and identify causally informative substructures. To further enhance reliability, we introduce an i.i.d.-agnostic non-parametric permutation test that assesses the statistical significance of each target edge. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our CastX outperforms existing methods in yielding explanatory subgraphs that are concise, faithful, reliable, and statistically supported.
Survival prediction of cancers is crucial for clinical practice, as it informs mortality risks and influences treatment plans. However, a static model trained on a single dataset fails to adapt to the dynamically evolving clinical environment and continuous data streams, limiting its practical utility. While continual learning (CL) offers a solution to learn dynamically from new datasets, existing CL methods primarily focus on unimodal inputs and suffer from severe catastrophic forgetting in survival prediction. In real-world scenarios, multimodal inputs often provide comprehensive and complementary information, such as whole slide images and genomics; and neglecting inter-modal correlations negatively impacts the performance. To address the two challenges of catastrophic forgetting and complex inter-modal interactions between gigapixel whole slide images and genomics, we propose ConSurv, the first multimodal continual learning (MMCL) method for survival analysis. ConSurv incorporates two key components: Multi-staged Mixture of Experts (MS-MoE) and Feature Constrained Replay (FCR). MS-MoE captures both task-shared and task-specific knowledge at different learning stages of the network, including two modality encoders and the modality fusion component, learning inter-modal relationships. FCR further enhances learned knowledge and mitigates forgetting by restricting feature deviation of previous data at different levels, including encoder-level features of two modalities and the fusion-level representations. Additionally, we introduce a new benchmark integrating four datasets, Multimodal Survival Analysis Incremental Learning (MSAIL), for comprehensive evaluation in the CL setting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ConSurv outperforms competing methods across multiple metrics.
How Wide and How Deep? Mitigating Over-squashing of GNNs via Channel Capacity Constrained Estimation
PDF ↗Existing graph neural networks typically rely on heuristic choices for hidden dimensions and propagation depths, which often lead to severe information loss during propagation, known as over-squashing. To address this issue, we propose Channel Capacity Constrained Estimation (C³E), a novel framework that formulates the selection of hidden dimensions and depth as a nonlinear programming problem grounded in information theory. Through modeling spectral graph neural networks as communication channels, our approach directly connects channel capacity to hidden dimensions, propagation depth, propagation mechanism, and graph structure. Extensive experiments on nine public datasets demonstrate that hidden dimensions and depths estimated by C³E can mitigate over-squashing and consistently improve representation learning. Experimental results show that over-squashing occurs due to the cumulative compression of information in representation matrices. Furthermore, our findings show that increasing hidden dimensions indeed mitigates information compression, while the role of propagation depth is more nuanced, uncovering a fundamental balance between information compression and representation complexity.
Model robustness indicates a model’s capability to generalize well on unforeseen distributional shifts, including data corruptions and adversarial attacks. Data augmentation is one of the most prevalent and effective ways to enhance robustness. Despite the great success of the diverse augmentations in different fields, a unified theoretical understanding of their efficacy in improving model robustness is lacking. We theoretically reveal a general condition for label-preserving augmentations to bring robustness to diverse distribution shifts through the lens of flat minima and generalization bound, which de facto turns out to be strongly correlated with robustness against different distribution shifts in practice. Unlike most earlier works, our theoretical framework accommodates all the label-preserving augmentations and is not limited to particular distribution shifts. We substantiate our theories through different simulations on the existing common corruption and adversarial robustness benchmarks based on the CIFAR and ImageNet datasets.
R-Tuning: Wavelet-Decomposed Replay and Semantic Alignment for Continual Adaptation of Pretrained Time-Series Models
PDF ↗Pre-trained models have demonstrated exceptional generalization capabilities in time-series forecasting; however, adapting them to evolving data distributions remains a significant challenge. A key hurdle lies in accessing the original training data, as fine-tuning solely on new data often leads to catastrophic forgetting. To address this issue, we propose Replay Tuning (R-Tuning), a novel framework designed for the continual adaptation of pre-trained time-series models. R-Tuning constructs a unified latent space that captures both prior and current task knowledge through a frequency-aware replay strategy. Specifically, it augments model-generated samples via wavelet-based decomposition across multiple frequency bands, generating trend-preserving and fusion-enhanced variants to improve representation diversity and replay efficiency. To further reduce reliance on synthetic samples, R-Tuning introduces a latent consistency constraint that aligns new representations with the prior task space. This constraint guides joint optimization within a compact and semantically coherent latent space, ensuring robust knowledge retention and adaptation. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of R-Tuning, which reduces MAE and MSE by up to 46.9% and 46.8%, respectively, on new tasks, while preserving prior knowledge with gains of up to 5.7% and 6.0% on old tasks. Notably, under few-shot settings, R-Tuning outperforms all state-of-the-art baselines even when synthetic proxy samples account for only 5% of the new task dataset.
With the increasing number of items requiring handling simultaneously in complex logistics, offline three-dimensional packing methods need to plan larger numbers of items. Existing deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based packing methods cannot plan for large numbers of items while keeping high-quality solutions due to limited exploration space and high computational complexity. To address this issue, this paper proposes a scalable DRL-based packing method. An attention-based pack-Q-network (PQNet) is constructed to learn the optimal packing policy by integrating unpacked items, available spaces, and packed items. To expand the valid exploration space, a bidding-based multi-policy (BBMP) framework composed of multiple PQNets is designed to efficiently explore more latent valid solutions, thus enhancing solution quality. To reduce computational complexity, a training-free dynamic candidate selection (DCS) framework is proposed to incorporate comprehensive item information during execution with minimal computation overhead, which helps in effectively planning large numbers of items. Experimental results show that across item numbers of 20~1000, our method consistently outperforms the best-performing baseline at each tested scale by 3.2%~13.1% in space utilization.
DualFete: Revisiting Teacher-Student Interactions from a Feedback Perspective for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation
PDF ↗The teacher-student paradigm has emerged as a canonical framework in semi-supervised learning. When applied to medical image segmentation, the paradigm faces challenges due to inherent image ambiguities, making it particularly vulnerable to erroneous supervision. Crucially, the student's iterative reconfirmation of these errors leads to self-reinforcing bias. While some studies attempt to mitigate this bias, they often rely on external modifications to the conventional teacher-student framework, overlooking its intrinsic potential for error correction. In response, this work introduces a feedback mechanism into the teacher-student framework to counteract error reconfirmations. Here, the student provides feedback on the changes induced by the teacher's pseudo-labels, enabling the teacher to refine these labels accordingly. We specify that this interaction hinges on two key components: the feedback attributor, which designates pseudo-labels triggering the student's update, and the feedback receiver, which determines where to apply this feedback. Building on this, a dual-teacher feedback model is further proposed, which allows more dynamics in the feedback loop and fosters more gains by resolving disagreements through cross-teacher supervision while avoiding consistent errors. Comprehensive evaluations on three medical image benchmarks demonstrate the method's effectiveness in addressing error propagation in semi-supervised medical image segmentation.
The Lipschitz bandit is a key variant of stochastic bandit problems where the expected reward function satisfies a Lipschitz condition with respect to an arm metric space. With its wide-ranging practical applications, various Lipschitz bandit algorithms have been developed, achieving the optimal regret performance in the classical setting. Motivated by recent advancements in quantum computing and the demonstrated success of quantum Monte Carlo in simpler bandit settings, we introduce the first quantum Lipschitz bandit algorithms to address the challenges of continuous action spaces and non-linear reward functions. Specifically, we first leverage the elimination-based framework to propose an efficient quantum Lipschitz bandit algorithm named Q-LAE. Next, we present novel modifications to the classical Zooming algorithm, which results in a simple quantum Lipschitz bandit method, Q-Zooming. Both algorithms exploit the computational power of quantum methods to obtain a provably improved regret bound over classical Lipschitz bandit algorithms. Comprehensive experiments further validate our improved theoretical findings, demonstrating superior empirical performance compared to existing Lipschitz bandit methods.
Multi-task test-time adaptation (MT-TTA) aims to adapt pre-trained models to dynamic environments during multi-task inference by leveraging unlabeled test data. This task is particularly challenging as different tasks respond divergently to distribution shifts, and mixed input streams containing both in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) samples make the models after test-time adaptation prone to catastrophic forgetting of ID knowledge. Although the existing methods like M-TENT extend the classic test entropy minimization (TENT) by minimizing multi-task entropies and employing task-average gradient to adapt a model, it suffers from two key limitations: 1) the average gradient strategy proposed by M-TENT may exacerbate multi-task test-time optimization conflicts, harming individual tasks when gradients are directionally non-consensual; 2) aggressive updates on mixed ID/OOD data cause severe forgetting of ID knowledge. In this paper, we theoretically establish a formal connection between multi-task loss differences and test-time performance under the first-order Taylor analysis, demonstrating that consensual multi-task entropy reductions are likely to increase the performance, while non-consensual ones might decrease the performance. To this end, we propose Consensus-driven Constrained Multi-Task Test-Time Adaptation (CoCo-MT-TTA), consisting of 1) multi-task gradient consensus adaptation, which aligns cross-task gradient directions to seek a consensus gradient; 2) multi-task plasticity-constraint adaptation, which constrains parameter updates using second-moment statistics to preserve ID knowledge. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, including CelebA and PlantData, demonstrate that our method achieves an absolute improvement of up to 16.02% in mean ID/OOD F1-score (Mean I&O) under domain shifts over non-adapted models, outperforming the recent baselines.
Incomplete Multi-View Unsupervised Federated Feature Selection via Cooperative Particle Swarm Optimization and Tensor-Aligned Learning
PDF ↗With the widespread adoption of multi-view data in numerous fields, multi-view unsupervised feature selection (MUFS) has made notable strides in both feature pruning and missing-view completion. Nonetheless, existing MUFS methods typically rely on centralized servers, which cannot meet real-world demands for privacy preservation and distributed learning, and they often suffer from suboptimal solution and weak convergence guarantees. To address these challenges, IMUFFS, an incomplete multi-view unsupervised federated feature selection via cooperative particle swarm optimization (CPSO) and tensor-aligned learning (TAL) is proposed. Specifically, each client executes CPSO-TAL at two stages: (i) an external optimization phase that involves a CPSO, inspired by the co-evolutionary mechanism of hybrid breeding optimization algorithm, performing a global search in the feature space, and (ii) an internal optimization phase that leverages TAL with imputation and CP decomposition, where CP decomposition reduces dimensionality by decomposing the original tensor into a sum of core components, to learn low-dimensional embeddings, while simultaneously updating anchor graphs and view preference weights, thereby harmonizing imputation and representation learning. On the server side, a federated aggregation strategy using adaptive normalized mutual information (NMI) weighting combines the locally optimized feature selection (FS) weights and NMI scores from clients, ensuring privacy while improving the quality of FS and convergence. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that IMUFFS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, yielding more effective and robust FS and enhancing better missing-view completion.
Language model inversion (LMI), i.e., recovering hidden prompts from outputs, emerges as a concrete threat to user privacy and system security. We recast LMI as reusing the LLM's own latent space and propose the Invariant Latent Space Hypothesis (ILSH): (1) diverse outputs from the same source prompt should preserve consistent semantics (source invariance), and (2) inputoutput cyclic mappings should be self-consistent within a shared latent space (cyclic invariance). Accordingly, we present Inv2A, which treats the LLM as an invariant decoder and learns only a lightweight inverse encoder that maps outputs to a denoised pseudo-representation. When multiple outputs are available, they are sparsely concatenated at the representation layer to increase information density. Training proceeds in two stages: contrastive alignment (source invariance) and supervised reinforcement (cyclic invariance). An optional training-free neighborhood search can refine local performance. Across 9 datasets covering user and system prompt scenarios, Inv2A outperforms baselines by an average of 4.77% BLEU score while reducing dependence on large inverse corpora. Our analysis further shows that prevalent defenses provide limited protection, underscoring the need for stronger strategies.
Large vision-language models such as CLIP have shown strong zero-shot classification performance by aligning images and text in a shared embedding space. However, CLIP models often develop multimodal spurious biases, the undesirable tendency to rely on spurious features. For example, CLIP may infer object types in images based on frequently co-occurring backgrounds rather than the object's core features. This bias significantly impairs the robustness of pre-trained CLIP models on out-of-distribution data, where such cross-modal associations no longer hold. Existing methods for mitigating multimodal spurious bias typically require fine-tuning on downstream data or prior knowledge of the bias, which undermines the out-of-the-box usability of CLIP. In this paper, we first theoretically analyze the impact of multimodal spurious bias in zero-shot classification. Based on this insight, we propose Spuriousness-Aware Guided Exploration (SAGE), a simple and effective method that mitigates spurious bias via guided prompt selection. SAGE requires no training, fine-tuning, or external annotations. It explores on a space of prompt templates and selects the prompts that induces the largest semantic separation between classes, thereby improving worst-group robustness. Extensive experiments on four real-world benchmark datasets and five popular backbone models demonstrate that SAGE consistently improves zero-shot performance and generalization, outperforming previous zero-shot approaches without any external knowledge or model updates.
Recommender systems are widely required and deployed to address real-world problems. In this paper, we study a new yet challenging real-world setting for recommender systems, where only user browsing histories are available without any explicit feedback. No item acquisition information, e.g., purchasing or rating, is given. By assuming that user browsing sequences are likely to contain the items to acquire, we draw an analogy to the setting of partial label learning in weakly supervised learning. This enables us to train reliable recommender systems only using browsing histories. We term the proposed method as Partial Acquisition Recommender System (PARS). Empirical results on real-world benchmark datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed method. Surprisingly, we also show that the proposed method even surpasses some baselines using item acquisition information.