论文检索

Applications · Health / Medicine

Zekuan Shang, Xiaosong Han, Liupu Wang, Wei Du, Peng Zhao, Yuanshu Li, Yubin Xiao, Xuan Wu, You Zhou

For denoising Spatially Resolved Transcriptomics (SRT) data, existing methods often construct spot and gene graphs to model inter-spot and inter-gene relationships, respectively. However, these methods often introduce spurious similarity biases among spots when constructing the spot graph and fail to capture nonlinear relationships among genes when constructing the gene graph. Moreover, ineffective graph fusion strategies further bottleneck denoising performance. To address these challenges, we propose SpaEF, which innovatively constructs spot and gene graphs with two Large Models (LMs) to inject prior knowledge for mitigating biases and capture nonlinear relationships, and then fuses them with the proposed element-wise graph autoencoder. As far as we know, SpaEF is the first SRT denoising method that utilizes pre-trained LMs to construct spot and gene graphs. Experiments on four real-world datasets with corresponding downstream tasks demonstrate that SpaEF not only outperforms SOTA denoising methods in accuracy but also exhibits strong robustness across tasks.

Applications · Time Series

Siru Zhong, Yiqiu Liu, Zhiqing Cui, Zezhi Shao, Fei Wang, Qingsong Wen, Yuxuan Liang

Deep time series models are vulnerable to noisy data ubiquitous in real-world applications. Existing robustness strategies either prune data or rely on costly prior quantification, failing to balance effectiveness and efficiency. In this paper, we introduce DropoutTS, a model-agnostic plugin that shifts the paradigm from "what" to learn to "how much" to learn. DropoutTS employs a Sample-Adaptive Dropout mechanism: leveraging spectral sparsity to efficiently quantify instance-level noise via reconstruction residuals, it dynamically calibrates model learning capacity by mapping noise to adaptive dropout rates—selectively suppressing spurious fluctuations while preserving fine-grained fidelity. Extensive experiments across diverse noise regimes and open benchmarks show DropoutTS consistently boosts superior backbones’ performance, delivering advanced robustness with negligible parameter overhead and no architectural modifications. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DropoutTS/.

General Machine Learning · Everything Else

Zeyu Fang, Mahdi Imani, Tian Lan

Joint planning through language-based interactions is a key area of human-AI teaming. Planning problems in the open world often involve various aspects of incomplete information and unknowns, e.g., objects involved, human goals/intents -- thus leading to knowledge gaps in joint planning. We consider the problem of discovering optimal interaction strategies for AI agents to actively elicit human inputs in object-driven planning. To this end, we propose Minimal Information Neuro-Symbolic Tree (MINT) to reason about the impact of knowledge gaps and leverage self-play with MINT to optimize the AI agent’s elicitation strategies and queries. More precisely, MINT builds a symbolic tree by making propositions of possible human-AI interactions and by consulting a neural planning policy to estimate the uncertainty in planning outcomes caused by remaining knowledge gaps. Finally, we leverage LLM to search and summarize MINT’s reasoning process and curate a set of queries to optimally elicit human inputs for best planning performance. By considering a family of extended Markov decision processes with knowledge gaps, we analyze the return guarantee for a given MINT with active human elicitation. Our evaluation on three benchmarks involving unseen/unknown objects of increasing realism shows that MINT-based planning attains near-expert returns by issuing a limited number of questions per task while achieving significantly improved rewards and success rates.

Ziming Liu, Surya Ganguli, Andreas Tolias

Vafa et al. recently showed that a transformer fails to acquire an internal Newtonian world model when trained on synthetic planetary-motion data. How can we fix this problem? We find that inductive biases are key to learning the veridical world model: (1) **Spatial smoothness** is required for any world model to be learned. However, naive tokenization may disrupt smoothness since two close points in physical space may be far apart in token embedding space without sufficient training or data. We fix this by formulating the prediction problem as regression instead of classification. (2) **Spatial stability** makes the prediction robust to noise, which is not guaranteed by default, but can be taught via correcting in-context noise perturbations. (3) With both spatial smoothness and stability built in, further imposing **temporal locality** induces a Newtonian world model, while the lack of this knowledge induces a Keplerian world model -- fitting elliptical parameters instead of computing gravitational forces. Our results suggest that even simple general inductive biases are powerful enough to induce correct and specific world models. The inductive biases do not need to know that much about the underlying law to be learned, but without them, it is impossible to learn.

General Machine Learning · Transfer, Multitask and Meta-learning

Yuan Yao, Jin Song, Huixia Li, Tongtong Yuan, Jiaqi Wu, Yu Zhang

Transfer learning aims to facilitate the learning of a target domain by transferring knowledge from a source domain. The source domain typically contains semantically meaningful samples (*e.g.*, images) to facilitate effective knowledge transfer. However, a recent study observes that the noise domain constructed from simple distributions (*e.g.*, Gaussian distributions) can serve as a surrogate source domain in the semi-supervised setting, where only a small proportion of target samples are labeled while most remain unlabeled. Based on this surprising observation, we formulate a novel problem termed *Semi-Supervised Noise Adaptation* (SSNA), which aims to leverage a synthetic noise domain to improve the generalization of the target domain. To address this problem, we first establish a generalization bound characterizing the effect of the noise domain on generalization, based on which we propose a Noise Adaptation Framework (NAF). Extensive experiments demonstrate that NAF effectively leverages the noise domain to tighten the generalization bound of the target domain, leading to improved performance. The codes are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SSNA.

General Machine Learning · Transfer, Multitask and Meta-learning

Pengfei Wei, Yiqun Sun, Zhiqiang Xu, Yiping Ke, Lawrence Hsieh

Unsupervised video domain adaptation (UVDA) is a practical but under-explored problem. In this paper, we propose a frustratingly easy UVDA method, called \emph{MetaTrans}. Specifically, \emph{MetaTrans} adopts a concise learning objective that contains only two fundamental loss terms. Despite the simplicity of the learning objective, \emph{MetaTrans} embodies an advanced UVDA idea, that is, handling the spatial and temporal divergence of cross-domain videos separately, through a subtle model architecture design. By implementing a temporal-static subtraction module, \emph{MetaTrans} effectively removes spatial and temporal divergence. Extensive empirical evaluations, particularly on various cross-domain action recognition tasks, show substantial absolute adaptation performance enhancement and significantly superior relative performance gain compared with state-of-the-art UVDA baselines.

Deep Learning · Large Language Models

Bowen Tian, Caixue He, Jiemin Wu, Jingying Wang, Wenshuo Chen, Zexi Li, Yutao Yue

Editing complex, long-form knowledge in Large Language Models remains a significant challenge due to the difficulty of maintaining generation coherence. Existing autoregressive methods like AnyEdit alleviate length constraints but rely on Fixed-window Chunking, which disregards logical structure and compromises consistency. To address this, we present AnyEdit++, a structure-aware framework incorporating Bayes-Chunk, an adaptive segmentation mechanism that dynamically identifies semantic boundaries based on Bayesian Surprise. We underpin this approach with a theoretical framework establishing two key principles: (1) Structural Independence: we prove that cross-segment interference is minimized when anchor keys are geometrically orthogonal (a condition naturally satisfied by our surprisal-based boundaries but violated by fixed windows), and (2) Causal Locality: we demonstrate that updates injected at these semantic peaks yield strictly superior control compared to arbitrary split points. Extensive experiments across mathematical reasoning, code generation, and narrative tasks demonstrate that AnyEdit++ achieves superior performance and robustness compared to state-of-the-art baselines, validating that structural awareness is critical for effective long-form knowledge editing.

Deep Learning · Robustness

Joy Dhar, Manish Pandey, Behzad Bozorgtabar, Nayyar Zaidi, Wenyu Zhang, Weihong Li, Tingting Mu, Dwarikanath Mahapatra, Mahsa Baktashmotlagh, Trung Le 等

We introduce Hybrid Space-aware Stochastic Convolution Attention Noise (HySCAN), a hybrid randomized defense that helps close the long-standing gap between provable robustness under ℓ2 certificates and empirical robustness against strong ℓ∞ attacks, while maintaining strong generalization across diverse imaging benchmarks. HySCAN jointly explores complementary sources of stochasticity at both training and inference: (i) implicit weight-space randomness via stochastic-aware Random Weights, and (ii) explicit feature-space randomness via Stochastic Attention Noise Injection modules. By incorporating randomness at both the parameter and representation levels, HySCAN enables meaningful certified guarantees while improving empirical robustness in practice. Comprehensive experiments on diverse imaging datasets, e.g., CelebA, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100, ImageNet-1k, HAM10000, and NIH Chest X-ray, demonstrate that HySCAN outperforms existing certified and empirical defenses, improving certified robustness by up to ≈ 9.6% and empirical robustness by up to ≈ 5% without reducing clean accuracy.

Applications · Health / Medicine

Evgeny S. Saveliev, Samuel Holt, Nabeel Seedat, David Bentley, Jim Weatherall, Mihaela van der Schaar

Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising avenue for scientific discovery, yet their application to symbolic regression is often constrained by inefficient search strategies and coarse feedback signals. Current methods typically guide LLMs using scalar metrics (e.g., global Mean Squared Error), which fail to identify which specific components of a proposed equation are driving performance or causing error. We introduce \textit{Influence-Guided Symbolic Regression} (IGSR), a method that frames equation discovery as an iterative two-step process combining diverse term generation with rigorous selection: an LLM generates candidate basis functions $\psi_j(\mathbf{x})$ for a linear model, which are then evaluated using granular influence scores $\Delta_j$. These scores quantify each term's marginal contribution to generalization accuracy, enabling an influence-guided pruning process that systematically refines the model structure. Integrating this mechanism into a Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) enables navigating the combinatorial search space while balancing exploration of novel functional forms with exploitation of high-influence components. We demonstrate IGSR's effectiveness across a diverse suite of benchmarks, including LLM-SRBench, pharmacological PKPD models, an epidemiological simulation, and real-world genomic data. Notably, we validate the framework's capacity for genuine discovery in a case study using a high-dimensional biological dataset, in which IGSR identified a novel relationship between DNA methylation and RNA Polymerase II pausing; a hypothesis that was subsequently supported via wet-lab experimentation.

Deep Learning · Large Language Models

Li Lin, Xinyu Hu, Xiaojun Wan

Large language models (LLMs) achieve impressive performance across domains but face significant challenges when deployed on consumer-grade GPUs or personal devices such as laptops, due to high memory consumption and inference costs. Post-training quantization (PTQ) of LLMs offers a promising solution that reduces their memory footprint and decoding latency. In practice, PTQ with uniform quantization representation is favored due to its efficiency and ease of deployment, as uniform quantization is widely supported by mainstream hardware and software libraries. Recent studies on low-bit uniform quantization have led to noticeable improvements in post-quantization model performance; however, they mainly focus on quantization methodologies, while the initialization of quantization parameters remains underexplored and still relies on the conventional *Min-Max formula*. In this work, we identify the limitations of the *Min-Max formula*, move beyond its constraints, and propose **NeUQI**, a method that efficiently determines near-optimal initialization for uniform quantization. Our NeUQI simplifies the joint optimization of the scale and zero-point by deriving the zero-point for a given scale, thereby reducing the problem to a scale-only optimization. Benefiting from the improved quantization parameters, our NeUQI consistently outperforms existing methods in the experiments with the LLaMA and Qwen families on various settings and tasks. Furthermore, when combined with a lightweight distillation strategy, NeUQI even achieves superior performance to PV-tuning, a considerably more resource-intensive method.

Social Aspects · Safety

Liu Yu, Can Chen, PING KUANG, Zhikun Feng, Fan Zhou, Gillian Dobbie

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) exhibit sophisticated reasoning but remain susceptible to object hallucination. Deviating from the prevailing attention intensity assumption, we reveal a deeper dynamic structural misalignment: hallucination is triggered at decision-critical steps where specific attention heads, acting as risky mediators, decouple from visual evidence to lock onto language priors. This establishes a pathological shortcut that bypasses visual grounding. To dismantle this, we propose Fox (Faithfulness and Observational-flow via eXpression-rectification), a training-free inference-time framework. Fox diagnoses structural misalignment using a visual attention entropy probe to localize risky mediators unsupervisedly. We then execute a targeted causal intervention via numerical logit saturation to physically sever the shortcut path. Finally, a conflict-gated cooperative decoding strategy reconciles interventional faithfulness with observational fluency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Fox achieves SOTA performance, outperforming SID by 29.1% while preserving linguistic richness and general reasoning capabilities.

Deep Learning · Large Language Models

Xinrong Li, Zidong Zhou, Keyu Shen, Wenhao Zhou, Shangqi Guo

Best-of-N selection improves reasoning in large language models (LLMs) by allocating additional test-time compute to sample multiple candidate trajectories, but it fundamentally relies on reliable verification. However, widely used proxies based on logit confidence or sample agreement can suffer from calibration collapse, where confidence becomes misaligned with correctness. Instead, we move beyond output-level signals and analyze the model's latent dynamics during inference. Drawing from cognitive neuroscience, we hypothesize that effective reasoning exhibits \textit{metastability}—a balance between stability and flexibility manifested as structured ``dwell-and-jump'' dynamics. We introduce Latent Velocity Entropy (LVE), a training-free metric that quantifies these dynamics via the entropy of internal representation updates. Extensive experiments on four reasoning benchmarks (AIME, GPQA, MATH, Brumo) demonstrate that the metric mitigates calibration collapse and consistently outperforms leading logit-based baselines. It surpasses the state-of-the-art baseline (UID) by 1.6\% and majority voting by 4.0\% in average accuracy. Remarkably, our method matches the performance of 10-sample majority voting using only 3 samples—a 70\% reduction in inference cost.

Reinforcement Learning · Batch/Offline

Yuxiao Yang, Weitong Zhang

Conditioned Sequence Models (CSMs) learn policies by treating return-to-go (RTG) as a control signal. However, existing CSMs often treat the RTGs as simple numerical inputs rather than aligning them with the performance of their policies. In this paper, we propose Q-ALIGN DT, a framework that enforces this alignment by ensuring the $Q$-value of the output policy is consistent with the input RTG. By leveraging a $Q$ function to provide dense guidance to CSMs and further fine-tuning it using an *RTG-perturbation* technique with the CSM, our method ensures that higher RTGs are consistently mapped to trajectories with higher expected returns. Theoretically, we show that Q-ALIGN DT can efficiently learn the desired policy and output a near-optimal one when the RTG is sufficiently high. Empirically, we demonstrate through extensive experiments that \methodname{} achieves superior controllability and performance across the D4RL benchmark. Remarkably, our model effectively learns a structured family of policies that maintains precise alignment and generalizes to tasks like velocity-tracking where prior methods fail.

Probabilistic Methods · Bayesian Models and Methods

Jiaxiang Yi, Miguel Bessa

Real-world data contains aleatoric uncertainty -- irreducible noise arising from imperfect measurements or from incomplete knowledge about the data generation process. Mean variance estimation (MVE) networks can learn this type of uncertainty but require ad-hoc regularization strategies to avoid overfitting and are unable to predict epistemic uncertainty (model uncertainty). Conversely, Bayesian neural networks predict epistemic uncertainty but are notoriously difficult to train due to the approximate nature of Bayesian inference. We propose to cooperatively train a variance estimation network with a Bayesian neural network and empirically demonstrate that the resulting model disentangles aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties while improving the mean estimation. We demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of this method across a diverse range of datasets, including a time-dependent heteroscedastic regression dataset we created where the aleatoric uncertainty is known, used to assess estimation accuracy. The proposed method is straightforward to implement, robust, and adaptable to various model architectures.

Deep Learning · Large Language Models

Shreyas Rajesh, Pavan Holur, Mehmet Yigit Turali, Chenda Duan, Vwani Roychowdhury

Language models are increasingly used to reason over content they were not trained on, such as new documents, evolving knowledge, and user-specific data. A common approach is retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), which stores verbatim documents externally (as chunks) and retrieves only a relevant subset at inference time for an LLM to reason over. However, this results in inefficient usage of test-time compute (LLM repeatedly reasons over the same documents); moreover, chunk retrieval can inject irrelevant context that increases unsupported generation. We propose a human-like non-parametric continual learning framework, where the base model remains fixed, and learning occurs by integrating each new experience into an external semantic memory state that accumulates and consolidates itself continually. We present PANINI, which realizes this by representing documents as Generative Semantic Workspaces (GSW)—an entity- and event-aware network of question–answer (QA) pairs, sufficient for an LLM to reconstruct the experienced situations and mine latent knowledge via reasoning-grounded inference chains on the network. Given a query, PANINI only traverses the continually-updated GSW (not the verbatim documents or chunks), and retrieves the most likely inference chains. Across six QA benchmarks, PANINI achieves the highest average performance, 5%–7% higher than other competitive baselines, while using 2–30× fewer answer-context tokens, supports fully open-source pipelines, and reduces unsupported answers on curated unanswerable queries. The results show that efficient and accurate structuring of experiences at write time—as achieved by the GSW framework—yields both efficiency and reliability gains at read time.

Optimization · Discrete and Combinatorial Optimization

Cheng-Han Huang, Yongliang Sun, Chaoyan Huang, Ismail Alkhouri, Rongrong Wang

Many combinatorial optimization problems admit quadratic unconstrained binary formulations (QUBO) which can often be relaxed to the box $[0,1]^n$ and optimized using scalable gradient-based methods. However, the resulting non-convex landscape can often contain local optima that are spurious or infeasible. In this paper, we establish sufficient structural conditions on quadratic penalties that rule out these failures, guaranteeing that every local minimizer of the relax problem is both binary and feasible. For each problem we study, we examine existing QUBO formulations when available, identify why they fail when they do, and propose alternative relaxed QUBOs that satisfy our conditions. We show for several common combinatorial problems, including open-pit mining, knapsack, and traveling salesman formulations, that these constructions allow gradient-based methods such as projected gradient descent and Adam to be safely applied to obtain valid binary solutions. Our results clarify when differentiable optimization is a reliable local solver for quadratic combinatorial objectives.

Applications · Chemistry, Physics, and Earth Sciences

Yanhui Zhu, Chen Zhao, Yinhao Li, Xiangfu Meng

Current data-driven scientific modeling struggles with a functional dichotomy: neural operators exhibit spectral bias in high-frequency regimes, while physics-constrained paradigms suffer from optimization pathologies. To bridge this gap, we propose Adaptive Physics-Informed Computing (APIC), a neuro-symbolic meta-architecture designed with structural reconfigurability to encode diverse domain priors. Crucially, APIC integrates a gradient-isolated interaction strategy that mechanistically decouples the optimization paths of parameter identification and residual correction, effectively mitigating gradient interference/conflicts. By instantiating this framework for nonlinear dissipative systems, we derive the Generalized Kuramoto-Sivashinsky-Cahn-Hilliard (G-KSCH) kernel, providing a unified representation for sparse dynamic identification. Extensive experiments demonstrate that APIC establishes new benchmarks in 3D compressible supersonic shock wave prediction, surpassing diverse architectures (e.g., CNNs and Transformers) by 20% to 70% in predictive accuracy. Notably, APIC achieves Pareto-optimal performance, delivering superior precision with reduced computational overhead compared to SOTA models, while exhibiting robust cross-domain generalization across meteorological and urban traffic datasets.

Social Aspects · Safety

Zhicheng Fang, Jingjie Zheng, Chenxu Fu, Wei Xu

Jailbreak techniques for large language models (LLMs) evolve faster than benchmarks, making robustness estimates stale and difficult to compare across papers due to drift in datasets, harnesses, and judging protocols. We introduce **JAILBREAK FOUNDRY (JBF)**, a system that addresses this gap via a multi-agent workflow to translate jailbreak papers into executable modules for immediate evaluation within a unified harness. JBF features three core components: (i) *JBF-LIB* for shared contracts and reusable utilities; (ii) *JBF-FORGE* for the multi-agent paper-to-module translation; and (iii) *JBF-EVAL* for standardizing evaluations. Across 30 reproduced attacks, JBF achieves high fidelity with a mean (reproduced$-$reported) attack success rate (ASR) deviation of $+0.26$ percentage points. By leveraging shared infrastructure, JBF reduces attack-specific implementation code by nearly half relative to original repositories and achieves an 82.5% mean reused-code ratio. This system enables a standardized AdvBench evaluation of all 30 attacks across 10 victim models using a consistent GPT-4o judge. By automating both attack integration and standardized evaluation, JBF offers a scalable solution for creating living benchmarks that keep pace with the rapidly shifting security landscape.

Social Aspects · Accountability, Transparency, and Interpretability

Eric Bigelow, Daniel Wurgaft, YingQiao Wang, Hidenori Tanaka, Tomer Ullman, Noah Goodman, Ekdeep Singh Lubana

Large language models (LLMs) can be controlled at inference time through prompts (in-context learning) and internal activations (activation steering). Different accounts have been proposed to explain these methods, yet their common goal of controlling model behavior raises the question of whether these seemingly disparate methodologies can be seen as specific instances of a broader framework. Motivated by this, we develop a unifying, predictive account of LLM control from a Bayesian perspective. Specifically, we posit that both context- and activation-based interventions impact model behavior by altering its belief in latent concepts: steering operates by changing concept priors, while in-context learning leads to an accumulation of evidence. This results in a closed-form Bayesian model that is highly predictive of LLM behavior across context- and activation-based interventions in a set of domains inspired by prior work on many-shot in-context learning. This model helps us explain prior empirical phenomena - e.g., sigmoidal learning curves as in-context evidence accumulates--while predicting novel ones--e.g., additivity of both interventions in log-belief space, which results in distinct phases such that sudden and dramatic behavioral shifts can be induced by slightly changing intervention controls. Taken together, this work offers a unified account of prompt-based and activation-based control of LLM behavior, and a methodology for empirically predicting the effects of these interventions.

Applications · Robotics

Sixu Lin, Yunpeng Qing, Litao Liu, Ming Zhou, Ruixing Jin, Xiaoyi Fan, Guiliang Liu

Recent progress in Reinforcement Learning (RL) provides a principled approach to optimizing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, facilitating a shift from trajectory imitation to active learning in the task environment. Despite improvements in control precision, most RL optimizers remain task-specific, which reduces VLA models from generalist controllers to policies that overfit to a narrow set of tasks. In this study, we conduct an in-depth analysis of this phenomenon and highlight the importance of cross-task feature representations for improving the generalizability of VLA models. Motivated by this finding, we introduce DyGRO-VLA, a two-stage optimization framework that 1) effectively captures cross-task latent representations based on information-theoretic principles, and 2) dynamically refines policy optimization via a mixture-of-RL-residuals. DyGRO-VLA enables the RL optimizer to exploit task-relevant latent information while strategically mitigating adverse interference on the learned representations throughout the optimization process. We evaluate our approach on LIBERO, RoboTwin2 benchmarks, and further validate it on real world, demonstrating consistent improvements over strong baselines under multi-task training and distribution shift.