论文检索

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.

Deep Learning · Everything Else

Luca Zhou, Bo Zhao, Rose Yu, Emanuele Rodolà

Model merging combines knowledge from separately fine-tuned models, yet success factors remain poorly understood. While recent work treats mergeability as an intrinsic property, we show with an architecture-agnostic framework that it fundamentally depends on both the merging method and the partner tasks. Using linear optimization over a set of interpretable pairwise metrics (e.g., gradient $L_2$ distance), we uncover properties correlating with post-merge performance across four merging methods. We find substantial variation in success drivers (46.7\% metric overlap; 55.3\% sign agreement), revealing method-specific "fingerprints". Crucially, however, \textit{subspace overlap} and \textit{gradient alignment} metrics consistently emerge as foundational, method-agnostic prerequisites for compatibility. These findings provide a diagnostic foundation for understanding mergeability and motivate future fine-tuning strategies that explicitly encourage these properties.

Deep Learning · Attention Mechanisms

Andrew Lee, Yonatan Belinkov, Fernanda Viégas, Martin Wattenberg

Despite the central role of attention heads in Transformers, we lack tools to understand why a model attends to a particular token. To address this, we study the query-key (QK) space -- the bilinear joint embedding space between queries and keys. We present a contrastive covariance method to decompose the QK space into low-rank, human-interpretable components. It is when features in keys and queries align in these low-rank subspaces that high attention scores are produced. We first study our method both analytically and empirically in a simplified setting. We then apply our method to large language models to identify human-interpretable QK subspaces for categorical semantic features and binding features. Finally, we demonstrate how attention scores can be attributed to our identified features.

General Machine Learning · Causality

Tal Ellinson, Hadi Mohasel Afshar, Sally Cripps

Instance-wise feature selection is a valuable tool for interpreting labeled data and the predictions of black-box models. In contrast to global feature selection techniques, instance-wise methods dynamically identify important features for each instance. A growing number of methods learn a *selector*, which identifies important features, and a *predictor*, which uses these to make predictions. However, these pioneering methods face challenges including information leakage and lack of differentiability, which can slow training. In this paper, we present Hide&Seek, an end-to-end differentiable model for instance-wise feature selection. We jointly learn feature selection and prediction under a single objective without information leakage. Hide&Seek outperforms existing state-of-the-art models across a range of synthetic and real-data experiments and is fast to train. We achieve this by reformulating feature removal as a differentiable operation where instead of discretely removing features, we replace a proportion of each feature. Training is further stabilized via a parsimony-weight annealing framework.

Tianhao Huang, Guanghui Min, zhenyu lei, Aiying Zhang, Chen Chen

Unraveling how macroscopic cognitive phenotypes emerge from microscopic neuronal connectivity remains one of the core pursuits of neuroscience. To this end, researchers typically leverage multi-modal information from structural connectivity (SC) and functional connectivity (FC) to complete downstream tasks. Recent methodologies explore the intricate coupling mechanisms between SC and FC, attempting to fuse their representations at the regional level. However, lacking fundamental neuroscientific insight, these approaches fail to uncover the latent interactions between neural regions underlying these connectomes, and thus cannot explain why SC and FC exhibit dynamic states of both coupling and heterogeneity. In this paper, we formulate multi-modal fusion through the lens of neural communication dynamics and propose the Adaptive Flow Routing Network (AFR-Net), a physics-informed framework that models how structural constraints (SC) give rise to functional communication patterns (FC), enabling interpretable discovery of critical neural pathways. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AFR-Net significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. The code is available at \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DIAL-F0D1}.

Optimization · Convex

Ji Qi, Mingxiao Liu, VIET THUC, Yuzhe Li, Zhuoshi Pan, Gene Cheung, Hong Zhao

To forecast traffic with both spatial and temporal dimensions, we unroll a mixed-graph-based optimization algorithm into a lightweight and interpretable transformer-like neural net. Specifically, we construct two graphs: an undirected graph $\mathcal{G}^u$ capturing spatial correlations across geography, and a directed graph $\mathcal{G}^d$ capturing sequential relationships over time. We formulate a prediction problem for the future samples of signal $\mathbf{x}$, assuming it is ``smooth'' with respect to both $\mathcal{G}^u$ and $\mathbf{G}^d$, where we design new $\ell_2$ and $\ell_1$-norm variational terms to quantify and promote signal smoothness (low-frequency reconstruction) on a directed graph. We construct an iterative algorithm based on alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), and unroll it into a feed-forward network for data-driven parameter learning. We periodically insert graph learning modules for $\mathcal{G}^u$ and $\mathcal{G}^d$, which are akin to the self-attention mechanism in classical transformers. Experiments show that our unrolled networks achieve competitive traffic forecast performance as state-of-the-art prediction schemes, while reducing parameter counts drastically.

Social Aspects · Accountability, Transparency, and Interpretability

Viet-Hung Tran, Zichi Zhang, Ngoc Doan, Xuan Hoang Nguyen, Phi Nguyen, Yimeng An, Peixin Li, Hans Vandierendonck, Ira Assent, Thai Son Mai

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) achieve outstanding performance in Time Series Classification (TSC) yet remain opaque "black boxes", hindering their adoption in sensitive domains. While Explainable AI (XAI) aims to bridge this gap, existing TSC XAI methods rely on a single perspective and incur significant computational costs, making them difficult to integrate into real-time applications. To overcome these challenges, we propose a framework, containing two key techniques called Instance-level Multi-Expert Knowledge Distillation (IMEKD) and Semi-Amortized Optimization Explanation (SAOE). Unlike static methods, our IMEKD approach bridges the gap between explanation methods by dynamically selecting the best attribution map from a pool of "XAI experts" for each instance. We then distill this instance-optimal knowledge into a DNN using our SAOE framework, a dual-stage process that learns a global attribution via distillation and refines it using faithfulness and robustness losses, aligning the optimization with objectives of human evaluation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to unify multi-expert selection with semi-amortized optimization for TSC XAI. Also, we introduce a Faithfulness-Preserving Segmentation (FPS) mechanism that converts point-wise maps into interpretable segments without sacrificing fidelity to align explanations with human intuition. Comprehensive experiments on four synthetic datasets, a ECG dataset with human-verified ground truth, and 11 multivariate UEA benchmarks across three DNN architectures show that our framework significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) in terms of faithfulness, robustness, and computational efficiency.

Applications · Computer Vision

Binxiao Xu, Junyu Feng, Xiaopeng Lin, Haodong Li, ZhiYuan Feng, Bohan Zeng, Ruichuan An, Ming Lu, Qi She, Wentao Zhang

Multimodal understanding of advertising videos is essential for interpreting the intricate relationship between visual storytelling and abstract persuasion strategies. However, despite excelling at general search, existing agents often struggle to bridge the cognitive gap between pixel-level perception and high-level marketing logic. To address this challenge, we introduce **AD-MIR**, a framework designed to decode advertising intent via a two-stage architecture. First, in the **Structure-Aware Memory Construction** phase, the system converts raw video into a structured database by integrating semantic retrieval with exact keyword matching. This approach prioritizes fine-grained brand details (e.g., logos, on-screen text) while dynamically filtering out irrelevant background noise to isolate key protagonists. Second, the **Structured Reasoning Agent** mimics a marketing expert through an iterative inquiry loop, decomposing the narrative to deduce implicit persuasion tactics. Crucially, it employs an evidence-based self-correction mechanism that rigorously validates these insights against specific video frames, automatically backtracking when visual support is lacking. Evaluation on the AdsQA benchmark demonstrates that AD-MIR achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing the strongest general-purpose agent, DVD, by 1.8% in strict and 9.5% in relaxed accuracy. These results underscore that effective advertising understanding demands explicitly grounding abstract marketing strategies in pixel-level evidence, paving the way for next-generation agents capable of sophisticated persuasion analysis. The source code is included in the supplementary material.

Deep Learning · Graph Neural Networks

Mohit Kataria, Nikita Malik, Sandeep Kumar, Jayadeva Jayadeva

Graph structure learning is a core problem in graph-based machine learning, essential for uncovering latent relationships and ensuring model interpretability. However, most existing approaches are ill-suited for large-scale and dynamically evolving graphs, as they often require complete re-learning of the structure upon the arrival of new nodes and incur substantial computational and memory costs. In this work, we propose GraphFLEx—a unified and scalable framework for Graph Structure Learning in Large and Expanding Graphs. GraphFLEx mitigates the scalability bottlenecks by restricting edge formation to structurally relevant subsets of nodes identified through a combination of clustering and coarsening techniques. This dramatically reduces the search space and enables efficient, incremental graph updates. The framework supports 48 flexible configurations by integrating diverse choices of learning paradigms, coarsening strategies, and clustering methods, making it adaptable to a wide range of graph settings and learning objectives. Extensive experiments across 26 diverse datasets and graph neural network architectures demonstrate that GraphFLEx achieves state-of-the-art performance with significantly improved scalability. Our implementation is publicly available here: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Scaling_Graph_Learning-CB67/README.md.

Social Aspects · Safety

Huilin Zhou, Jian Zhao, Yilu Zhong, Zhen Liang, Xiuyuan Chen, Yuchen Yuan, Tianle Zhang, Chi Zhang, Lan Zhang, Xuelong Li

Red teaming is critical for uncovering vulnerabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs). While automated methods have improved scalability, existing approaches often rely on static heuristics or stochastic search, rendering them brittle against advanced safety alignment. To address this, we introduce \textbf{Metis}, a framework that reformulates jailbreaking as inference-time policy optimization within an adversarial Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP). Metis employs a self-evolving metacognitive loop to perform causal diagnosis of a target's defense logic and leverages structured feedback as a semantic gradient to refine its policy, offering enhanced interpretability through transparent reasoning traces. Extensive evaluations across 10 diverse models demonstrate that Metis establishes a new state-of-the-art with an average Attack Success Rate (ASR) of 89.2\%, maintaining high efficacy on resilient frontier models (e.g., 76.0\% on O1 and 78.0\% on GPT-5-chat) where traditional baselines exhibit substantial performance degradation. By replacing redundant exploration with directed optimization, Metis reduces token costs by an average of 8.2$\times$ (and up to 11.4$\times$). Our analysis reveals that current defenses remain systematically vulnerable to internally-steered, closed-loop reasoning trajectories, highlighting a critical need for next-generation defenses capable of reasoning about safety dynamically during inference.

Applications · Computer Vision

Maijunxian Wang, Ruisi Wang, Juyi Lin, Ran Ji, Thaddäus Wiedemer, Qingying Gao, Dezhi Luo, Yaoyao Qian, Lianyu Huang, Zelong Hong 等

Video reasoning grounds intelligence in spatiotemporally consistent visual environments that go beyond what text can naturally capture, enabling intuitive reasoning over motion, interaction, and causality. Rapid progress in video models has focused primarily on visual quality. Systematically studying video reasoning and its scaling behavior suffers from a lack of video reasoning (training) data. To address this gap, we introduce the Very Big Video Reasoning (VBVR) Dataset, an unprecedentedly large-scale resource spanning 200 curated reasoning tasks and over one million video clips—approximately three orders of magnitude larger than existing datasets. We further present VBVR-Bench, a verifiable evaluation framework that moves beyond model-based judging by incorporating rule-based, human-aligned scorers, enabling reproducible and interpretable diagnosis of video reasoning capabilities. Leveraging the VBVR suite, we conduct one of the first large-scale scaling studies of video reasoning and observe early signs of emergent generalization to unseen reasoning tasks. Together, VBVR lays a foundation for the next stage of research in generalizable video reasoning. The data, toolkit, and models will be released publicly.

Optimization · Everything Else

Haoming Meng, Anton Sugolov, Vardan Papyan

Deep neural networks with repeated blocks, such as transformers and ResNets, often exhibit closely related representational structure across layers that emerges with training. Motivated by this observation, we introduce *Gradient Smoothing*, a general training paradigm that couples gradient updates across blocks and admits a natural interpretation as a preconditioning method. Our framework applies structured smoothing operators to layer-wise updates, such as weighted averages and exponential moving averages, with minimal computational overhead. We evaluate Gradient Smoothing across a range of architectures and training regimes, including RL post-training of LLMs on reasoning tasks, as well as diffusion and classification with Vision Transformers. Across these settings, Gradient Smoothing consistently improves generalization performance, in addition to promoting structured representation evolution across layers. These results suggest that gradient smoothing is a simple and broadly applicable technique for improving training in modern deep networks.

General Machine Learning · Methodology

Haruki Yajima, Yusuke Matsui

Tree ensembles are machine learning models with strong predictive performance and interpretability, and remain widely used for tabular data. Standard pruning methods for tree ensembles typically optimize an accuracy–compression trade-off and may change a subset of predictions, potentially compromising decision consistency. Faithful pruning methods address this issue by preserving prediction equivalence over the entire input space, but this requirement leads to lower compression ratios. We propose **PINE**, a pruning method that provides strong guarantees within an in-distribution region. PINE preserves prediction equivalence within this region and controls the region size using a single parameter $\\alpha$ via conformal calibration. Experiments on 12 public tabular datasets show that PINE improves the compression ratio by up to 30% while maintaining a comparable rate of prediction equivalence to existing faithful pruning methods. As a result, PINE achieves an improved equivalence–compression trade-off.

Deep Learning · Large Language Models

Naïm Es-sebbani, Esteban Marquer, Yakoub Salhi, Zied Bouraoui

Logic provides a controlled testbed for evaluating LLM-based reasoners, yet standard SAT-style benchmarks often conflate surface difficulty (length, wording, clause order) with the structural phenomena that actually determine satisfiability. We introduce a diagnostic benchmark for \emph{2-SAT} built from parameterized families of structured 2--CNF formulas, where satisfiability is characterized by the implication graph and can be tuned along interpretable axes. Our generators isolate distinct competencies and failure modes: (i) contradiction-cycle UNSAT cores with controllable size and imbalance, (ii) SAT instances with a prescribed fraction of free variables to control solution multiplicity, (iii) planted backbones that modulate propagation, (iv) late bridge clauses that couple otherwise monotone regions to probe sensitivity to ordering and revision, and (v) symmetry/duplication variants that test abstraction under renaming and redundant structure. We evaluate LLM-based reasoners on decision accuracy and assignment validity, and quantify robustness under semantics-preserving perturbations such as clause reordering, filler clauses, and variable renaming. Across models, we observe sharp performance transitions under targeted structural interventions even when surface statistics are held fixed, revealing brittleness regimes that are invisible to aggregate SAT accuracy.

Social Aspects · Accountability, Transparency, and Interpretability

Wenlong Meng, Chen GONG, Terry Yue Zhuo, Fan Zhang, Kecen Li, Zheng Liu, Zhou Yang, Chengkun Wei, Wenzhi CHEN

LLM agents rely heavily on high-quality trajectory data to guide their problem-solving behaviors, yet producing such data requires substantial task design, high-capacity model generation, and manual filtering. Despite the high cost of creating these datasets, existing literature has overlooked copyright protection for LLM agent trajectories. This gap leaves creators vulnerable to data theft and makes it difficult to trace misuse or enforce ownership rights. This paper introduces ActHook, the first watermarking method tailored for agent trajectory datasets. Inspired by hook mechanisms in software engineering, ActHook embeds *hook actions* that are activated by a secret input key and do not alter the original task outcome. Like software execution, LLM agents operate sequentially, allowing hook actions to be inserted at decision points without disrupting task flow. When the activation key is present, an LLM agent trained on watermarked trajectories can produce these hook actions at a significantly higher rate, enabling reliable black-box detection. Experiments on mathematical reasoning, web searching, and software engineering agents show that ActHook achieves an average detection AUC of 94.3 on Qwen-2.5-Coder-7B while incurring negligible performance degradation.

General Machine Learning · Scalable Algorithms

Weiheng Zhong, Jing Bi, Victor Oancea, Hadi Meidani

While neural PDE solvers have demonstrated significant potential for accelerating engineering simulations, existing architectures remain constrained by high memory consumption and the "single-node bottleneck," where the maximum processable mesh resolution is strictly limited by the VRAM of a single compute unit. To address these challenges, we propose PGD-NO, a neural operator with Precomputed Geometry Decomposition, that relocates the computational overhead of geometric encoding to a deterministic pre-computation phase. By utilizing an iterative geometry decomposition algorithm to extract "geometry tokens," our model decouples feature extraction from solution querying. This architecture enables linear memory scalability, allowing high-fidelity learning on meshes exceeding 10 million nodes—a scale where existing architectures typically encounter memory exhaustion. PGD-NO demonstrates competitive predictive accuracy across diverse industrial benchmarks and provides intrinsic interpretability through attention mechanisms. By effectively overcoming traditional mesh-size constraints, PGD-NO offers a robust and efficient solution for the next generation of large-scale, high-fidelity industrial design applications.

Social Aspects · Accountability, Transparency, and Interpretability

Chengsheng Zhang, Chenghao Sun, Zhining Xie, Xinmei Tian

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) represent a significant leap towards empathetic agents, demonstrating remarkable capabilities in emotion understanding. However, the internal mechanisms governing how LVLMs translate abstract visual stimuli into coherent emotional narratives remain largely unexplored, primarily due to the scarcity of visual counterfactuals and the diffuse nature of emotional expression. In this paper, we bridge this gap by introducing a steering-vector-based causal attribution framework tailored for descriptive emotional reasoning. To this end, we construct a specialized dataset to demystify the emotional circuits underlying the three-stage '' Adapt-Aggregate-Execute'' mechanism. Crucially, we discover a functional decoupling: visual emotional cues are aggregated in middle layers via $\textit{sentiment-specific}$ attention heads, but are subsequently translated into narrative generation in deep layers through $\textit{emotion-general}$ pathways. Guided by these insights, we regulate the emotional information routing to strengthen attention flow and amplify the semantic activation to consolidate expression. Extensive experiments on the comprehensive MER-UniBench demonstrate that our methods significantly improve performance via inference-time intervention, effectively mitigating emotional hallucinations and corroborating the causal fidelity of the discovered circuits.

Social Aspects · Accountability, Transparency, and Interpretability

Fabian Fumagalli, Landon Butler, Justin S. Kang, Kannan Ramchandran, R. Teal Witter

The Shapley value is a ubiquitous framework for attribution in machine learning, encompassing feature importance, data valuation, and causal inference. However, its exact computation is generally intractable, necessitating efficient approximation methods. While the most effective and popular estimators leverage the *paired sampling* heuristic to reduce estimation error, the theoretical mechanism driving this improvement has remained opaque. In this work, we provide an elegant and fundamental justification for paired sampling: we prove that the Shapley value depends *exclusively* on the odd component of the set function, and that paired sampling orthogonalizes the regression objective to filter out the irrelevant even component. Leveraging this insight, we propose OddSHAP, a novel consistent estimator that performs polynomial regression solely on the odd subspace. By utilizing the Fourier basis to isolate this subspace and employing a proxy model to identify high-impact interactions, OddSHAP overcomes the combinatorial explosion of higher-order approximations. Through an extensive benchmark evaluation, we find that OddSHAP achieves state-of-the-art estimation accuracy.

Social Aspects · Accountability, Transparency, and Interpretability

Jihoo Jung, Chaeyoung Jung, Ji-Hoon Kim, Joon Son Chung

Audio-visual large language models (AVLLMs) have recently emerged as a powerful architecture capable of jointly reasoning over audio, visual, and textual modalities. In AVLLMs, the bidirectional interaction between audio and video modalities introduces intricate processing dynamics, necessitating a deeper understanding of their internal mechanisms. However, unlike extensively studied text-only or large vision language models, the internal workings of AVLLMs remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we focus on cross-modal information flow between audio and visual modalities in AVLLMs, investigating where information derived from one modality is encoded within the token representations of the other modality. Through an analysis of multiple recent AVLLMs, we uncover two common findings. First, AVLLMs primarily encode integrated audio-visual information in sink tokens. Second, sink tokens do not uniformly hold cross-modal information. Instead, a distinct subset of sink tokens, which we term cross-modal sink tokens, specializes in storing such information. Based on these findings, we further propose a simple training-free hallucination mitigation method by encouraging reliance on integrated cross-modal information within cross-modal sink tokens.

Social Aspects · Safety

Etienne Gauthier, Francis Bach, Michael Jordan

In many multi-agent systems, agents interact repeatedly and are expected to settle into equilibrium behavior over time. Yet in practice, behavior often drifts, and detecting such deviations in real time remains an open challenge. We introduce a sequential testing framework that monitors whether observed play in repeated games is consistent with equilibrium, without assuming a fixed sample size. Our approach builds on the e-value framework for safe anytime-valid inference: by “betting” against equilibrium, we construct a test supermartingale that accumulates evidence whenever observed payoffs systematically violate equilibrium conditions. This yields a statistically sound, interpretable measure of departure from equilibrium that can be monitored online. We also leverage Benjamini-Hochberg-type procedures to increase detection power in large games while rigorously controlling the false discovery rate. Our framework unifies the treatment of Nash, correlated, and coarse correlated equilibria, offering finite-time guarantees and a detailed analysis of detection times. Moreover, we extend our method to stochastic games, broadening its applicability beyond repeated-play settings.