Daily Papers

Federated Learning (FL) facilitates collaborative training of a shared global model without exposing clients' private data. In practical FL systems, clients (e.g., edge servers, smartphones, and wearables) typically have disparate system resources. Conventional FL, however, adopts a one-size-fits-all solution, where a homogeneous large global model is transmitted to and trained on each client, resulting in an overwhelming workload for less capable clients and starvation for other clients. To address this issue, we propose FedConv, a client-friendly FL framework, which minimizes the computation and memory burden on resource-constrained clients by providing heterogeneous customized sub-models. FedConv features a novel learning-on-model paradigm that learns the parameters of the heterogeneous sub-models via convolutional compression. Unlike traditional compression methods, the compressed models in FedConv can be directly trained on clients without decompression. To aggregate the heterogeneous sub-models, we propose transposed convolutional dilation to convert them back to large models with a unified size while retaining personalized information from clients. The compression and dilation processes, transparent to clients, are optimized on the server leveraging a small public dataset. Extensive experiments on six datasets demonstrate that FedConv outperforms state-of-the-art FL systems in terms of model accuracy (by more than 35% on average), computation and communication overhead (with 33% and 25% reduction, respectively).

Recently, the self-supervised learning framework data2vec has shown inspiring performance for various modalities using a masked student-teacher approach. However, it remains open whether such a framework generalizes to the unique challenges of 3D point clouds. To answer this question, we extend data2vec to the point cloud domain and report encouraging results on several downstream tasks. In an in-depth analysis, we discover that the leakage of positional information reveals the overall object shape to the student even under heavy masking and thus hampers data2vec to learn strong representations for point clouds. We address this 3D-specific shortcoming by proposing point2vec, which unleashes the full potential of data2vec-like pre-training on point clouds. Our experiments show that point2vec outperforms other self-supervised methods on shape classification and few-shot learning on ModelNet40 and ScanObjectNN, while achieving competitive results on part segmentation on ShapeNetParts. These results suggest that the learned representations are strong and transferable, highlighting point2vec as a promising direction for self-supervised learning of point cloud representations.

Latent diffusion models are the state-of-the-art for synthetic image generation. To align these models with human preferences, training the models using reinforcement learning on human feedback is crucial. Black et. al 2024 introduced denoising diffusion policy optimisation (DDPO), which accounts for the iterative denoising nature of the generation by modelling it as a Markov chain with a final reward. As the reward is a single value that determines the model's performance on the entire image, the model has to navigate a very sparse reward landscape and so requires a large sample count. In this work, we extend the DDPO by presenting the Pixel-wise Policy Optimisation (PXPO) algorithm, which can take feedback for each pixel, providing a more nuanced reward to the model.

The long-standing dominance of gradient-boosted decision trees on tabular data is currently challenged by tabular foundation models using In-Context Learning (ICL): setting the training data as context for the test data and predicting in a single forward pass without parameter updates. While the very recent TabPFNv2 foundation model (2025) excels on tables with up to 10K samples, its alternating column- and row-wise attentions make handling large training sets computationally prohibitive. So, can ICL be effectively scaled and deliver a benefit for larger tables? We introduce TabICL, a tabular foundation model for classification, pretrained on synthetic datasets with up to 60K samples and capable of handling 500K samples on affordable resources. This is enabled by a novel two-stage architecture: a column-then-row attention mechanism to build fixed-dimensional embeddings of rows, followed by a transformer for efficient ICL. Across 200 classification datasets from the TALENT benchmark, TabICL is on par with TabPFNv2 while being systematically faster (up to 10 times), and significantly outperforms all other approaches. On 56 datasets with over 10K samples, TabICL surpasses both TabPFNv2 and CatBoost, demonstrating the potential of ICL for large data.

Human-object interaction (HOI) detection aims to comprehend the intricate relationships between humans and objects, predicting <human, action, object> triplets, and serving as the foundation for numerous computer vision tasks. The complexity and diversity of human-object interactions in the real world, however, pose significant challenges for both annotation and recognition, particularly in recognizing interactions within an open world context. This study explores the universal interaction recognition in an open-world setting through the use of Vision-Language (VL) foundation models and large language models (LLMs). The proposed method is dubbed as \textbf{UniHOI}. We conduct a deep analysis of the three hierarchical features inherent in visual HOI detectors and propose a method for high-level relation extraction aimed at VL foundation models, which we call HO prompt-based learning. Our design includes an HO Prompt-guided Decoder (HOPD), facilitates the association of high-level relation representations in the foundation model with various HO pairs within the image. Furthermore, we utilize a LLM (i.e. GPT) for interaction interpretation, generating a richer linguistic understanding for complex HOIs. For open-category interaction recognition, our method supports either of two input types: interaction phrase or interpretive sentence. Our efficient architecture design and learning methods effectively unleash the potential of the VL foundation models and LLMs, allowing UniHOI to surpass all existing methods with a substantial margin, under both supervised and zero-shot settings. The code and pre-trained weights are available at: https://github.com/Caoyichao/UniHOI.

Point clouds provide a flexible geometric representation suitable for countless applications in computer graphics; they also comprise the raw output of most 3D data acquisition devices. While hand-designed features on point clouds have long been proposed in graphics and vision, however, the recent overwhelming success of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for image analysis suggests the value of adapting insight from CNN to the point cloud world. Point clouds inherently lack topological information so designing a model to recover topology can enrich the representation power of point clouds. To this end, we propose a new neural network module dubbed EdgeConv suitable for CNN-based high-level tasks on point clouds including classification and segmentation. EdgeConv acts on graphs dynamically computed in each layer of the network. It is differentiable and can be plugged into existing architectures. Compared to existing modules operating in extrinsic space or treating each point independently, EdgeConv has several appealing properties: It incorporates local neighborhood information; it can be stacked applied to learn global shape properties; and in multi-layer systems affinity in feature space captures semantic characteristics over potentially long distances in the original embedding. We show the performance of our model on standard benchmarks including ModelNet40, ShapeNetPart, and S3DIS.

Real-world data tends to follow a long-tailed distribution, where the class imbalance results in dominance of the head classes during training. In this paper, we propose a frustratingly simple but effective step-wise learning framework to gradually enhance the capability of the model in detecting all categories of long-tailed datasets. Specifically, we build smooth-tail data where the long-tailed distribution of categories decays smoothly to correct the bias towards head classes. We pre-train a model on the whole long-tailed data to preserve discriminability between all categories. We then fine-tune the class-agnostic modules of the pre-trained model on the head class dominant replay data to get a head class expert model with improved decision boundaries from all categories. Finally, we train a unified model on the tail class dominant replay data while transferring knowledge from the head class expert model to ensure accurate detection of all categories. Extensive experiments on long-tailed datasets LVIS v0.5 and LVIS v1.0 demonstrate the superior performance of our method, where we can improve the AP with ResNet-50 backbone from 27.0% to 30.3% AP, and especially for the rare categories from 15.5% to 24.9% AP. Our best model using ResNet-101 backbone can achieve 30.7% AP, which suppresses all existing detectors using the same backbone.

We introduce Layered Self-Supervised Knowledge Distillation (LSSKD) framework for training compact deep learning models. Unlike traditional methods that rely on pre-trained teacher networks, our approach appends auxiliary classifiers to intermediate feature maps, generating diverse self-supervised knowledge and enabling one-to-one transfer across different network stages. Our method achieves an average improvement of 4.54\% over the state-of-the-art PS-KD method and a 1.14% gain over SSKD on CIFAR-100, with a 0.32% improvement on ImageNet compared to HASSKD. Experiments on Tiny ImageNet and CIFAR-100 under few-shot learning scenarios also achieve state-of-the-art results. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in enhancing model generalization and performance without the need for large over-parameterized teacher networks. Importantly, at the inference stage, all auxiliary classifiers can be removed, yielding no extra computational cost. This makes our model suitable for deploying small language models on affordable low-computing devices. Owing to its lightweight design and adaptability, our framework is particularly suitable for multimodal sensing and cyber-physical environments that require efficient and responsive inference. LSSKD facilitates the development of intelligent agents capable of learning from limited sensory data under weak supervision.

3D models are widely used in various industries, and mesh data has become an indispensable part of 3D modeling because of its unique advantages. Mesh data can provide an intuitive and practical expression of rich 3D information. However, its disordered, irregular data structure and complex surface information make it challenging to apply with deep learning models directly. Traditional mesh data processing methods often rely on mesh models with many limitations, such as manifold, which restrict their application scopes in reality and do not fully utilize the advantages of mesh models. This paper proposes a novel end-to-end framework for addressing the challenges associated with deep learning in mesh models centered around graph neural networks (GNN) and is titled InfoGNN. InfoGNN treats the mesh model as a graph, which enables it to handle irregular mesh data efficiently. Moreover, we propose InfoConv and InfoMP modules, which utilize the position information of the points and fully use the static information such as face normals, dihedral angles, and dynamic global feature information to fully use all kinds of data. In addition, InfoGNN is an end-to-end framework, and we simplify the network design to make it more efficient, paving the way for efficient deep learning of complex 3D models. We conducted experiments on several publicly available datasets, and the results show that InfoGNN achieves excellent performance in mesh classification and segmentation tasks.

We present the Temporal Graph Benchmark (TGB), a collection of challenging and diverse benchmark datasets for realistic, reproducible, and robust evaluation of machine learning models on temporal graphs. TGB datasets are of large scale, spanning years in duration, incorporate both node and edge-level prediction tasks and cover a diverse set of domains including social, trade, transaction, and transportation networks. For both tasks, we design evaluation protocols based on realistic use-cases. We extensively benchmark each dataset and find that the performance of common models can vary drastically across datasets. In addition, on dynamic node property prediction tasks, we show that simple methods often achieve superior performance compared to existing temporal graph models. We believe that these findings open up opportunities for future research on temporal graphs. Finally, TGB provides an automated machine learning pipeline for reproducible and accessible temporal graph research, including data loading, experiment setup and performance evaluation. TGB will be maintained and updated on a regular basis and welcomes community feedback. TGB datasets, data loaders, example codes, evaluation setup, and leaderboards are publicly available at https://tgb.complexdatalab.com/.

We present MatSci-NLP, a natural language benchmark for evaluating the performance of natural language processing (NLP) models on materials science text. We construct the benchmark from publicly available materials science text data to encompass seven different NLP tasks, including conventional NLP tasks like named entity recognition and relation classification, as well as NLP tasks specific to materials science, such as synthesis action retrieval which relates to creating synthesis procedures for materials. We study various BERT-based models pretrained on different scientific text corpora on MatSci-NLP to understand the impact of pretraining strategies on understanding materials science text. Given the scarcity of high-quality annotated data in the materials science domain, we perform our fine-tuning experiments with limited training data to encourage the generalize across MatSci-NLP tasks. Our experiments in this low-resource training setting show that language models pretrained on scientific text outperform BERT trained on general text. MatBERT, a model pretrained specifically on materials science journals, generally performs best for most tasks. Moreover, we propose a unified text-to-schema for multitask learning on \benchmark and compare its performance with traditional fine-tuning methods. In our analysis of different training methods, we find that our proposed text-to-schema methods inspired by question-answering consistently outperform single and multitask NLP fine-tuning methods. The code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/BangLab-UdeM-Mila/NLP4MatSci-ACL23.

We study the zero-shot transfer capabilities of text matching models on a massive scale, by self-supervised training on 140 source domains from community question answering forums in English. We investigate the model performances on nine benchmarks of answer selection and question similarity tasks, and show that all 140 models transfer surprisingly well, where the large majority of models substantially outperforms common IR baselines. We also demonstrate that considering a broad selection of source domains is crucial for obtaining the best zero-shot transfer performances, which contrasts the standard procedure that merely relies on the largest and most similar domains. In addition, we extensively study how to best combine multiple source domains. We propose to incorporate self-supervised with supervised multi-task learning on all available source domains. Our best zero-shot transfer model considerably outperforms in-domain BERT and the previous state of the art on six benchmarks. Fine-tuning of our model with in-domain data results in additional large gains and achieves the new state of the art on all nine benchmarks.

With the growing popularity of deep learning and foundation models for tabular data, the need for standardized and reliable benchmarks is higher than ever. However, current benchmarks are static. Their design is not updated even if flaws are discovered, model versions are updated, or new models are released. To address this, we introduce TabArena, the first continuously maintained living tabular benchmarking system. To launch TabArena, we manually curate a representative collection of datasets and well-implemented models, conduct a large-scale benchmarking study to initialize a public leaderboard, and assemble a team of experienced maintainers. Our results highlight the influence of validation method and ensembling of hyperparameter configurations to benchmark models at their full potential. While gradient-boosted trees are still strong contenders on practical tabular datasets, we observe that deep learning methods have caught up under larger time budgets with ensembling. At the same time, foundation models excel on smaller datasets. Finally, we show that ensembles across models advance the state-of-the-art in tabular machine learning and investigate the contributions of individual models. We launch TabArena with a public leaderboard, reproducible code, and maintenance protocols to create a living benchmark available at https://tabarena.ai.

Deep learning has achieved impressive performance in many domains, such as computer vision and natural language processing, but its advantage over classical shallow methods on tabular datasets remains questionable. It is especially challenging to surpass the performance of tree-like ensembles, such as XGBoost or Random Forests, on small-sized datasets (less than 1k samples). To tackle this challenge, we introduce HyperTab, a hypernetwork-based approach to solving small sample problems on tabular datasets. By combining the advantages of Random Forests and neural networks, HyperTab generates an ensemble of neural networks, where each target model is specialized to process a specific lower-dimensional view of the data. Since each view plays the role of data augmentation, we virtually increase the number of training samples while keeping the number of trainable parameters unchanged, which prevents model overfitting. We evaluated HyperTab on more than 40 tabular datasets of a varying number of samples and domains of origin, and compared its performance with shallow and deep learning models representing the current state-of-the-art. We show that HyperTab consistently outranks other methods on small data (with a statistically significant difference) and scores comparable to them on larger datasets. We make a python package with the code available to download at https://pypi.org/project/hypertab/

Self-supervised learning has emerged as a highly effective approach in the fields of natural language processing and computer vision. It is also applicable to brain signals such as electroencephalography (EEG) data, given the abundance of available unlabeled data that exist in a wide spectrum of real-world medical applications ranging from seizure detection to wave analysis. The existing works leveraging self-supervised learning on EEG modeling mainly focus on pretraining upon each individual dataset corresponding to a single downstream task, which cannot leverage the power of abundant data, and they may derive sub-optimal solutions with a lack of generalization. Moreover, these methods rely on end-to-end model learning which is not easy for humans to understand. In this paper, we present a novel EEG foundation model, namely EEGFormer, pretrained on large-scale compound EEG data. The pretrained model cannot only learn universal representations on EEG signals with adaptable performance on various downstream tasks but also provide interpretable outcomes of the useful patterns within the data. To validate the effectiveness of our model, we extensively evaluate it on various downstream tasks and assess the performance under different transfer settings. Furthermore, we demonstrate how the learned model exhibits transferable anomaly detection performance and provides valuable interpretability of the acquired patterns via self-supervised learning.

In this paper, we introduce the Chinese corpus from CLUE organization, CLUECorpus2020, a large-scale corpus that can be used directly for self-supervised learning such as pre-training of a language model, or language generation. It has 100G raw corpus with 35 billion Chinese characters, which is retrieved from Common Crawl. To better understand this corpus, we conduct language understanding experiments on both small and large scale, and results show that the models trained on this corpus can achieve excellent performance on Chinese. We release a new Chinese vocabulary with a size of 8K, which is only one-third of the vocabulary size used in Chinese Bert released by Google. It saves computational cost and memory while works as good as original vocabulary. We also release both large and tiny versions of the pre-trained model on this corpus. The former achieves the state-of-the-art result, and the latter retains most precision while accelerating training and prediction speed for eight times compared to Bert-base. To facilitate future work on self-supervised learning on Chinese, we release our dataset, new vocabulary, codes, and pre-trained models on Github.

This paper proposes a framework for quantitatively evaluating interactive LLMs such as ChatGPT using publicly available data sets. We carry out an extensive technical evaluation of ChatGPT using 23 data sets covering 8 different common NLP application tasks. We evaluate the multitask, multilingual and multi-modal aspects of ChatGPT based on these data sets and a newly designed multimodal dataset. We find that ChatGPT outperforms LLMs with zero-shot learning on most tasks and even outperforms fine-tuned models on some tasks. We find that it is better at understanding non-Latin script languages than generating them. It is able to generate multimodal content from textual prompts, via an intermediate code generation step. Moreover, we find that ChatGPT is 63.41% accurate on average in 10 different reasoning categories under logical reasoning, non-textual reasoning, and commonsense reasoning, hence making it an unreliable reasoner. It is, for example, better at deductive than inductive reasoning. ChatGPT suffers from hallucination problems like other LLMs and it generates more extrinsic hallucinations from its parametric memory as it does not have access to an external knowledge base. Finally, the interactive feature of ChatGPT enables human collaboration with the underlying LLM to improve its performance, i.e, 8% ROUGE-1 on summarization and 2% ChrF++ on machine translation, in a multi-turn "prompt engineering" fashion. We also release codebase for evaluation set extraction.

We propose CURE, a novel reinforcement learning framework with a dedicated reward design that co-evolves coding and unit test generation capabilities based on their interaction outcomes, without any ground-truth code as supervision. This approach enables flexible and scalable training and allows the unit tester to learn directly from the coder's mistakes. Our derived ReasonFlux-Coder-7B and 14B models improve code generation accuracy by 5.3% and Best-of-N accuracy by 9.0% after optimization on Qwen2.5-Instruct models, outperforming similarly sized Qwen-Coder, DeepSeek-Coder, and Seed-Coder. They naturally extend to downstream tasks such as test-time scaling and agentic coding-achieving a 8.1% improvement over the base model. For the long-CoT model, our ReasonFlux-Coder-4B consistently outperforms Qwen3-4B while achieving 64.8% inference efficiency in unit test generation. Notably, we also find that our model can serve as an effective reward model for reinforcement learning on base models. Project: https://github.com/Gen-Verse/CURE

Transformers have recently emerged as powerful neural networks for graph learning, showcasing state-of-the-art performance on several graph property prediction tasks. However, these results have been limited to small-scale graphs, where the computational feasibility of the global attention mechanism is possible. The next goal is to scale up these architectures to handle very large graphs on the scale of millions or even billions of nodes. With large-scale graphs, global attention learning is proven impractical due to its quadratic complexity w.r.t. the number of nodes. On the other hand, neighborhood sampling techniques become essential to manage large graph sizes, yet finding the optimal trade-off between speed and accuracy with sampling techniques remains challenging. This work advances representation learning on single large-scale graphs with a focus on identifying model characteristics and critical design constraints for developing scalable graph transformer (GT) architectures. We argue such GT requires layers that can adeptly learn both local and global graph representations while swiftly sampling the graph topology. As such, a key innovation of this work lies in the creation of a fast neighborhood sampling technique coupled with a local attention mechanism that encompasses a 4-hop reception field, but achieved through just 2-hop operations. This local node embedding is then integrated with a global node embedding, acquired via another self-attention layer with an approximate global codebook, before finally sent through a downstream layer for node predictions. The proposed GT framework, named LargeGT, overcomes previous computational bottlenecks and is validated on three large-scale node classification benchmarks. We report a 3x speedup and 16.8% performance gain on ogbn-products and snap-patents, while we also scale LargeGT on ogbn-papers100M with a 5.9% performance improvement.

Recent advancements in image customization exhibit a wide range of application prospects due to stronger customization capabilities. However, since we humans are more sensitive to faces, a significant challenge remains in preserving consistent identity while avoiding identity confusion with multi-reference images, limiting the identity scalability of customization models. To address this, we present UMO, a Unified Multi-identity Optimization framework, designed to maintain high-fidelity identity preservation and alleviate identity confusion with scalability. With "multi-to-multi matching" paradigm, UMO reformulates multi-identity generation as a global assignment optimization problem and unleashes multi-identity consistency for existing image customization methods generally through reinforcement learning on diffusion models. To facilitate the training of UMO, we develop a scalable customization dataset with multi-reference images, consisting of both synthesised and real parts. Additionally, we propose a new metric to measure identity confusion. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UMO not only improves identity consistency significantly, but also reduces identity confusion on several image customization methods, setting a new state-of-the-art among open-source methods along the dimension of identity preserving. Code and model: https://github.com/bytedance/UMO

Automatic Short Answer Grading (ASAG) is the process of grading the student answers by computational approaches given a question and the desired answer. Previous works implemented the methods of concept mapping, facet mapping, and some used the conventional word embeddings for extracting semantic features. They extracted multiple features manually to train on the corresponding datasets. We use pretrained embeddings of the transfer learning models, ELMo, BERT, GPT, and GPT-2 to assess their efficiency on this task. We train with a single feature, cosine similarity, extracted from the embeddings of these models. We compare the RMSE scores and correlation measurements of the four models with previous works on Mohler dataset. Our work demonstrates that ELMo outperformed the other three models. We also, briefly describe the four transfer learning models and conclude with the possible causes of poor results of transfer learning models.

Deep Learning has been one of the most disruptive technological advancements in recent times. The high performance of deep learning models comes at the expense of high computational, storage and power requirements. Sensing the immediate need for accelerating and compressing these models to improve on-device performance, we introduce Deeplite Neutrino for production-ready optimization of the models and Deeplite Runtime for deployment of ultra-low bit quantized models on Arm-based platforms. We implement low-level quantization kernels for Armv7 and Armv8 architectures enabling deployment on the vast array of 32-bit and 64-bit Arm-based devices. With efficient implementations using vectorization, parallelization, and tiling, we realize speedups of up to 2x and 2.2x compared to TensorFlow Lite with XNNPACK backend on classification and detection models, respectively. We also achieve significant speedups of up to 5x and 3.2x compared to ONNX Runtime for classification and detection models, respectively.

Large pre-trained language models (LMs) such as GPT-3 have acquired a surprising ability to perform zero-shot learning. For example, to classify sentiment without any training examples, we can "prompt" the LM with the review and the label description "Does the user like this movie?", and ask whether the next word is "yes" or "no". However, the next word prediction training objective is still misaligned with the target zero-shot learning objective. To address this weakness, we propose meta-tuning, which directly optimizes the zero-shot learning objective by fine-tuning pre-trained language models on a collection of datasets. We focus on classification tasks, and construct the meta-dataset by aggregating 43 existing datasets and annotating 441 label descriptions in a question-answering (QA) format. When evaluated on unseen tasks, meta-tuned models outperform a same-sized QA model and the previous SOTA zero-shot learning system based on natural language inference. Additionally, increasing parameter count from 220M to 770M improves AUC-ROC scores by 6.3%, and we forecast that even larger models would perform better. Therefore, measuring zero-shot learning performance on language models out-of-the-box might underestimate their true potential, and community-wide efforts on aggregating datasets and unifying their formats can help build models that answer prompts better.

Most previous neural text-to-speech (TTS) methods are mainly based on supervised learning methods, which means they depend on a large training dataset and hard to achieve comparable performance under low-resource conditions. To address this issue, we propose a semi-supervised learning method for neural TTS in which labeled target data is limited, which can also resolve the problem of exposure bias in the previous auto-regressive models. Specifically, we pre-train the reference model based on Fastspeech2 with much source data, fine-tuned on a limited target dataset. Meanwhile, pseudo labels generated by the original reference model are used to guide the fine-tuned model's training further, achieve a regularization effect, and reduce the overfitting of the fine-tuned model during training on the limited target data. Experimental results show that our proposed semi-supervised learning scheme with limited target data significantly improves the voice quality for test data to achieve naturalness and robustness in speech synthesis.

Recently, pre-trained foundation models have enabled significant advancements in multiple fields. In molecular machine learning, however, where datasets are often hand-curated, and hence typically small, the lack of datasets with labeled features, and codebases to manage those datasets, has hindered the development of foundation models. In this work, we present seven novel datasets categorized by size into three distinct categories: ToyMix, LargeMix and UltraLarge. These datasets push the boundaries in both the scale and the diversity of supervised labels for molecular learning. They cover nearly 100 million molecules and over 3000 sparsely defined tasks, totaling more than 13 billion individual labels of both quantum and biological nature. In comparison, our datasets contain 300 times more data points than the widely used OGB-LSC PCQM4Mv2 dataset, and 13 times more than the quantum-only QM1B dataset. In addition, to support the development of foundational models based on our proposed datasets, we present the Graphium graph machine learning library which simplifies the process of building and training molecular machine learning models for multi-task and multi-level molecular datasets. Finally, we present a range of baseline results as a starting point of multi-task and multi-level training on these datasets. Empirically, we observe that performance on low-resource biological datasets show improvement by also training on large amounts of quantum data. This indicates that there may be potential in multi-task and multi-level training of a foundation model and fine-tuning it to resource-constrained downstream tasks.

Self-supervised learning (SSL) foundation models have emerged as powerful, domain-agnostic, general-purpose feature extractors applicable to a wide range of tasks. Such models pre-trained on human speech have demonstrated high transferability for bioacoustic processing. This paper investigates (i) whether SSL models pre-trained directly on animal vocalizations offer a significant advantage over those pre-trained on speech, and (ii) whether fine-tuning speech-pretrained models on automatic speech recognition (ASR) tasks can enhance bioacoustic classification. We conduct a comparative analysis using three diverse bioacoustic datasets and two different bioacoustic tasks. Results indicate that pre-training on bioacoustic data provides only marginal improvements over speech-pretrained models, with comparable performance in most scenarios. Fine-tuning on ASR tasks yields mixed outcomes, suggesting that the general-purpose representations learned during SSL pre-training are already well-suited for bioacoustic tasks. These findings highlight the robustness of speech-pretrained SSL models for bioacoustics and imply that extensive fine-tuning may not be necessary for optimal performance.

As the most basic application and implementation of deep learning, image classification has grown in popularity. Various datasets are provided by renowned data science communities for benchmarking machine learning algorithms and pre-trained models. The ASSIRA Cats & Dogs dataset is one of them and is being used in this research for its overall acceptance and benchmark standards. A comparison of various pre-trained models is demonstrated by using different types of optimizers and loss functions. Hyper-parameters are changed to gain the best result from a model. By applying this approach, we have got higher accuracy without major changes in the training model. To run the experiment, we used three different computer architectures: a laptop equipped with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070, a laptop equipped with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080Ti, and a desktop equipped with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090. The acquired results demonstrate supremacy in terms of accuracy over the previously done experiments on this dataset. From this experiment, the highest accuracy which is 99.65% is gained using the NASNet Large.

We introduce Open-Reasoner-Zero, the first open source implementation of large-scale reasoning-oriented RL training focusing on scalability, simplicity and accessibility. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that a minimalist approach, vanilla PPO with GAE (lambda=1, gamma=1) and straightforward rule-based rewards, without any KL regularization, is sufficient to scale up both response length and benchmark performance, similar to the phenomenon observed in DeepSeek-R1-Zero. Using the same base model as DeepSeek-R1-Zero-Qwen-32B, our implementation achieves superior performance on AIME2024, MATH500, and the GPQA Diamond benchmark while demonstrating remarkable efficiency -- requiring only a tenth of the training steps, compared to DeepSeek-R1-Zero pipeline. In the spirit of open source, we release our source code, parameter settings, training data, and model weights across various sizes.

Using blockchain technology, it is possible to create contracts that offer a reward in exchange for a trained machine learning model for a particular data set. This would allow users to train machine learning models for a reward in a trustless manner. The smart contract will use the blockchain to automatically validate the solution, so there would be no debate about whether the solution was correct or not. Users who submit the solutions won't have counterparty risk that they won't get paid for their work. Contracts can be created easily by anyone with a dataset, even programmatically by software agents. This creates a market where parties who are good at solving machine learning problems can directly monetize their skillset, and where any organization or software agent that has a problem to solve with AI can solicit solutions from all over the world. This will incentivize the creation of better machine learning models, and make AI more accessible to companies and software agents.

The goal of continual learning is to improve the performance of recognition models in learning sequentially arrived data. Although most existing works are established on the premise of learning from scratch, growing efforts have been devoted to incorporating the benefits of pre-training. However, how to adaptively exploit the pre-trained knowledge for each incremental task while maintaining its generalizability remains an open question. In this work, we present an extensive analysis for continual learning on a pre-trained model (CLPM), and attribute the key challenge to a progressive overfitting problem. Observing that selectively reducing the learning rate can almost resolve this issue in the representation layer, we propose a simple but extremely effective approach named Slow Learner with Classifier Alignment (SLCA), which further improves the classification layer by modeling the class-wise distributions and aligning the classification layers in a post-hoc fashion. Across a variety of scenarios, our proposal provides substantial improvements for CLPM (e.g., up to 49.76%, 50.05%, 44.69% and 40.16% on Split CIFAR-100, Split ImageNet-R, Split CUB-200 and Split Cars-196, respectively), and thus outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by a large margin. Based on such a strong baseline, critical factors and promising directions are analyzed in-depth to facilitate subsequent research. Code has been made available at: https://github.com/GengDavid/SLCA.

Recent years have seen the rise of Deep Learning (DL) techniques applied to source code. Researchers have exploited DL to automate several development and maintenance tasks, such as writing commit messages, generating comments and detecting vulnerabilities among others. One of the long lasting dreams of applying DL to source code is the possibility to automate non-trivial coding activities. While some steps in this direction have been taken (e.g., learning how to fix bugs), there is still a glaring lack of empirical evidence on the types of code changes that can be learned and automatically applied by DL. Our goal is to make this first important step by quantitatively and qualitatively investigating the ability of a Neural Machine Translation (NMT) model to learn how to automatically apply code changes implemented by developers during pull requests. We train and experiment with the NMT model on a set of 236k pairs of code components before and after the implementation of the changes provided in the pull requests. We show that, when applied in a narrow enough context (i.e., small/medium-sized pairs of methods before/after the pull request changes), NMT can automatically replicate the changes implemented by developers during pull requests in up to 36% of the cases. Moreover, our qualitative analysis shows that the model is capable of learning and replicating a wide variety of meaningful code changes, especially refactorings and bug-fixing activities. Our results pave the way for novel research in the area of DL on code, such as the automatic learning and applications of refactoring.

Federated learning (FL) allows training machine learning models on distributed data without compromising privacy. However, FL is vulnerable to model-poisoning attacks where malicious clients tamper with their local models to manipulate the global model. In this work, we investigate the resilience of the partial-sharing online FL (PSO-Fed) algorithm against such attacks. PSO-Fed reduces communication overhead by allowing clients to share only a fraction of their model updates with the server. We demonstrate that this partial sharing mechanism has the added advantage of enhancing PSO-Fed's robustness to model-poisoning attacks. Through theoretical analysis, we show that PSO-Fed maintains convergence even under Byzantine attacks, where malicious clients inject noise into their updates. Furthermore, we derive a formula for PSO-Fed's mean square error, considering factors like stepsize, attack probability, and the number of malicious clients. Interestingly, we find a non-trivial optimal stepsize that maximizes PSO-Fed's resistance to these attacks. Extensive numerical experiments confirm our theoretical findings and showcase PSO-Fed's superior performance against model-poisoning attacks compared to other leading FL algorithms.

Recent progress on large language models (LLMs) has enabled dialogue agents to generate highly naturalistic and plausible text. However, current LLM language generation focuses on responding accurately to questions and requests with a single effective response. In reality, many real dialogues are interactive, meaning an agent's utterances will influence their conversational partner, elicit information, or change their opinion. Accounting for how an agent can effectively steer a conversation is a crucial ability in many dialogue tasks, from healthcare to preference elicitation. Existing methods for fine-tuning dialogue agents to accomplish such tasks would rely on curating some amount of expert data. However, doing so often requires understanding the underlying cognitive processes of the conversational partner, which is a skill neither humans nor LLMs trained on human data can reliably do. Our key insight is that while LLMs may not be adept at identifying effective strategies for steering conversations a priori, or in the middle of an ongoing conversation, they can do so post-hoc, or in hindsight, after seeing how their conversational partner responds. We use this fact to rewrite and augment existing suboptimal data, and train via offline reinforcement learning (RL) an agent that outperforms both prompting and learning from unaltered human demonstrations. We apply our approach to two domains that require understanding human mental state, intelligent interaction, and persuasion: mental health support, and soliciting charitable donations. Our results in a user study with real humans show that our approach greatly outperforms existing state-of-the-art dialogue agents.

Modern vision models typically rely on fine-tuning general-purpose models pre-trained on large, static datasets. These general-purpose models only capture the knowledge within their pre-training datasets, which are tiny, out-of-date snapshots of the Internet -- where billions of images are uploaded each day. We suggest an alternate approach: rather than hoping our static datasets transfer to our desired tasks after large-scale pre-training, we propose dynamically utilizing the Internet to quickly train a small-scale model that does extremely well on the task at hand. Our approach, called Internet Explorer, explores the web in a self-supervised manner to progressively find relevant examples that improve performance on a desired target dataset. It cycles between searching for images on the Internet with text queries, self-supervised training on downloaded images, determining which images were useful, and prioritizing what to search for next. We evaluate Internet Explorer across several datasets and show that it outperforms or matches CLIP oracle performance by using just a single GPU desktop to actively query the Internet for 30--40 hours. Results, visualizations, and videos at https://internet-explorer-ssl.github.io/

Web applications are increasingly becoming the primary platform for AI service delivery, making in-browser deep learning (DL) inference more prominent. However, current in-browser inference systems fail to effectively utilize advanced web programming techniques and customize kernels for various client devices, leading to suboptimal performance. To address the issues, this paper presents the first in-browser inference system, nn-JIT.web, which enables just-in-time (JIT) auto-generation of optimized kernels for both CPUs and GPUs during inference. The system achieves this by using two novel web programming techniques that can significantly reduce kernel generation time, compared to other tensor compilers such as TVM, while maintaining or even improving performance. The first technique, Tensor-Web Compiling Co-Design, lowers compiling costs by unifying tensor and web compiling and eliminating redundant and ineffective compiling passes. The second technique, Web-Specific Lite Kernel Optimization Space Design, reduces kernel tuning costs by focusing on web programming requirements and efficient hardware resource utilization, limiting the optimization space to only dozens. nn-JIT.web is evaluated for modern transformer models on a range of client devices, including the mainstream CPUs and GPUs from ARM, Intel, AMD and Nvidia. Results show that nn-JIT.web can achieve up to 8.2x faster within 30 seconds compared to the baselines across various models.

Learning effective protein representations is critical in a variety of tasks in biology such as predicting protein functions. Recent sequence representation learning methods based on Protein Language Models (PLMs) excel in sequence-based tasks, but their direct adaptation to tasks involving protein structures remains a challenge. In contrast, structure-based methods leverage 3D structural information with graph neural networks and geometric pre-training methods show potential in function prediction tasks, but still suffers from the limited number of available structures. To bridge this gap, our study undertakes a comprehensive exploration of joint protein representation learning by integrating a state-of-the-art PLM (ESM-2) with distinct structure encoders (GVP, GearNet, CDConv). We introduce three representation fusion strategies and explore different pre-training techniques. Our method achieves significant improvements over existing sequence- and structure-based methods, setting new state-of-the-art for function annotation. This study underscores several important design choices for fusing protein sequence and structure information. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/DeepGraphLearning/ESM-GearNet.

Full-complexity Earth system models (ESMs) are computationally very expensive, limiting their use in exploring the climate outcomes of multiple emission pathways. More efficient emulators that approximate ESMs can directly map emissions onto climate outcomes, and benchmarks are being used to evaluate their accuracy on standardized tasks and datasets. We investigate a popular benchmark in data-driven climate emulation, ClimateBench, on which deep learning-based emulators are currently achieving the best performance. We implement a linear regression-based emulator, akin to pattern scaling, and find that it outperforms the incumbent 100M-parameter deep learning foundation model, ClimaX, on 3 out of 4 regionally-resolved surface-level climate variables. While emulating surface temperature is expected to be predominantly linear, this result is surprising for emulating precipitation. We identify that this outcome is a result of high levels of internal variability in the benchmark targets. To address internal variability, we update the benchmark targets with ensemble averages from the MPI-ESM1.2-LR model that contain 50 instead of 3 climate simulations per emission pathway. Using the new targets, we show that linear pattern scaling continues to be more accurate on temperature, but can be outperformed by a deep learning-based model for emulating precipitation. We publish our code, data, and an interactive tutorial at github.com/blutjens/climate-emulator.

We introduce MLE-bench, a benchmark for measuring how well AI agents perform at machine learning engineering. To this end, we curate 75 ML engineering-related competitions from Kaggle, creating a diverse set of challenging tasks that test real-world ML engineering skills such as training models, preparing datasets, and running experiments. We establish human baselines for each competition using Kaggle's publicly available leaderboards. We use open-source agent scaffolds to evaluate several frontier language models on our benchmark, finding that the best-performing setup--OpenAI's o1-preview with AIDE scaffolding--achieves at least the level of a Kaggle bronze medal in 16.9% of competitions. In addition to our main results, we investigate various forms of resource scaling for AI agents and the impact of contamination from pre-training. We open-source our benchmark code (github.com/openai/mle-bench/) to facilitate future research in understanding the ML engineering capabilities of AI agents.

In-context Learning (ICL) is an emerging few-shot learning paradigm on Language Models (LMs) with inner mechanisms un-explored. There are already existing works describing the inner processing of ICL, while they struggle to capture all the inference phenomena in large language models. Therefore, this paper proposes a comprehensive circuit to model the inference dynamics and try to explain the observed phenomena of ICL. In detail, we divide ICL inference into 3 major operations: (1) Summarize: LMs encode every input text (demonstrations and queries) into linear representation in the hidden states with sufficient information to solve ICL tasks. (2) Semantics Merge: LMs merge the encoded representations of demonstrations with their corresponding label tokens to produce joint representations of labels and demonstrations. (3) Feature Retrieval and Copy: LMs search the joint representations similar to the query representation on a task subspace, and copy the searched representations into the query. Then, language model heads capture these copied label representations to a certain extent and decode them into predicted labels. The proposed inference circuit successfully captured many phenomena observed during the ICL process, making it a comprehensive and practical explanation of the ICL inference process. Moreover, ablation analysis by disabling the proposed steps seriously damages the ICL performance, suggesting the proposed inference circuit is a dominating mechanism. Additionally, we confirm and list some bypass mechanisms that solve ICL tasks in parallel with the proposed circuit.

Quantization is a crucial technique for deploying deep learning models on resource-constrained devices, such as embedded FPGAs. Prior efforts mostly focus on quantizing matrix multiplications, leaving other layers like BatchNorm or shortcuts in floating-point form, even though fixed-point arithmetic is more efficient on FPGAs. A common practice is to fine-tune a pre-trained model to fixed-point for FPGA deployment, but potentially degrading accuracy. This work presents QFX, a novel trainable fixed-point quantization approach that automatically learns the binary-point position during model training. Additionally, we introduce a multiplier-free quantization strategy within QFX to minimize DSP usage. QFX is implemented as a PyTorch-based library that efficiently emulates fixed-point arithmetic, supported by FPGA HLS, in a differentiable manner during backpropagation. With minimal effort, models trained with QFX can readily be deployed through HLS, producing the same numerical results as their software counterparts. Our evaluation shows that compared to post-training quantization, QFX can quantize models trained with element-wise layers quantized to fewer bits and achieve higher accuracy on both CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets. We further demonstrate the efficacy of multiplier-free quantization using a state-of-the-art binarized neural network accelerator designed for an embedded FPGA (AMD Xilinx Ultra96 v2). We plan to release QFX in open-source format.

Deep learning models have become increasingly popular for a wide range of applications, including computer vision, natural language processing, and speech recognition. However, these models typically require large amounts of computational resources, making them challenging to run on low-power devices such as the Raspberry Pi. One approach to addressing this challenge is to use pruning techniques to reduce the size of the deep learning models. Pruning involves removing unimportant weights and connections from the model, resulting in a smaller and more efficient model. Pruning can be done during training or after the model has been trained. Another approach is to optimize the deep learning models specifically for the Raspberry Pi architecture. This can include optimizing the model's architecture and parameters to take advantage of the Raspberry Pi's hardware capabilities, such as its CPU and GPU. Additionally, the model can be optimized for energy efficiency by minimizing the amount of computation required. Pruning and optimizing deep learning models for the Raspberry Pi can help overcome the computational and energy constraints of low-power devices, making it possible to run deep learning models on a wider range of devices. In the following sections, we will explore these approaches in more detail and discuss their effectiveness for optimizing deep learning models for the Raspberry Pi.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in various NLP applications. However, the majority of existing open-source LLMs are pre-trained primarily on English data and little part of other languages. This deficiency in multilingual training data results in suboptimal performance when applied to languages with fewer available resources. Furthermore, enhancing the performance of LLMs on low-resource languages by full-parameter fine-tuning with additional data requires substantial computational resources, posing computational barriers for research organizations and individual researchers. Consequently, several techniques such as parameter-efficient tuning and advanced embedding initialization have been proposed to address these challenges. In this work, we combine them to facilitate cross-lingual transfer on English-dominated open-source LLM. To effectively enhance the model's proficiency in Traditional Chinese, we conduct secondary pre-training on Llama 2 7B with Traditional Chinese data by leveraging QLoRA and our proposed zip-tie embedding initialization. The resulting model called Bailong, which stands for Bilingual trAnsfer learnIng based on qLOra and zip-tie embeddiNG. We present Bailong-instruct 7B, a fine-tuned version of Bailong 7B optimized for multi-turn dialogue scenarios. Recognizing the inadequacy of benchmark datasets in Traditional Chinese, we further introduce Bailong-bench to assess the alignment of models with human preferences and the capability to follow instructions in both Traditional Chinese and English tasks. In our evaluation, Bailong-instruct 7B exhibits competitive performance on Bailong-bench and other benchmark datasets when compared to other open-source models of similar or even larger parameter sizes. Bailong-instruct 7B and Bailong-bench are publicly available with the aim of empowering the community to build upon our efforts.

We address the challenge of getting efficient yet accurate recognition systems with limited labels. While recognition models improve with model size and amount of data, many specialized applications of computer vision have severe resource constraints both during training and inference. Transfer learning is an effective solution for training with few labels, however often at the expense of a computationally costly fine-tuning of large base models. We propose to mitigate this unpleasant trade-off between compute and accuracy via semi-supervised cross-domain distillation from a set of diverse source models. Initially, we show how to use task similarity metrics to select a single suitable source model to distill from, and that a good selection process is imperative for good downstream performance of a target model. We dub this approach DistillNearest. Though effective, DistillNearest assumes a single source model matches the target task, which is not always the case. To alleviate this, we propose a weighted multi-source distillation method to distill multiple source models trained on different domains weighted by their relevance for the target task into a single efficient model (named DistillWeighted). Our methods need no access to source data, and merely need features and pseudo-labels of the source models. When the goal is accurate recognition under computational constraints, both DistillNearest and DistillWeighted approaches outperform both transfer learning from strong ImageNet initializations as well as state-of-the-art semi-supervised techniques such as FixMatch. Averaged over 8 diverse target tasks our multi-source method outperforms the baselines by 5.6%-points and 4.5%-points, respectively.

Large Language models have demonstrated excellent domain-specific question-answering capabilities when finetuned with a particular dataset of that specific domain. However, fine-tuning the models requires a significant amount of training time and a considerable amount of hardware. In this work, we propose CARE (Customer Assistance and Response Engine), a lightweight model made by fine-tuning Phi3.5-mini on very minimal hardware and data, designed to handle queries primarily across three domains: telecommunications support, medical support, and banking support. For telecommunications and banking, the chatbot addresses issues and problems faced by customers regularly in the above-mentioned domains. In the medical domain, CARE provides preliminary support by offering basic diagnoses and medical suggestions that a user might take before consulting a healthcare professional. Since CARE is built on Phi3.5-mini, it can be used even on mobile devices, increasing its usability. Our research also shows that CARE performs relatively well on various medical benchmarks, indicating that it can be used to make basic medical suggestions.

Cross-silo federated learning offers a promising solution to collaboratively train robust and generalized AI models without compromising the privacy of local datasets, e.g., healthcare, financial, as well as scientific projects that lack a centralized data facility. Nonetheless, because of the disparity of computing resources among different clients (i.e., device heterogeneity), synchronous federated learning algorithms suffer from degraded efficiency when waiting for straggler clients. Similarly, asynchronous federated learning algorithms experience degradation in the convergence rate and final model accuracy on non-identically and independently distributed (non-IID) heterogeneous datasets due to stale local models and client drift. To address these limitations in cross-silo federated learning with heterogeneous clients and data, we propose FedCompass, an innovative semi-asynchronous federated learning algorithm with a computing power-aware scheduler on the server side, which adaptively assigns varying amounts of training tasks to different clients using the knowledge of the computing power of individual clients. FedCompass ensures that multiple locally trained models from clients are received almost simultaneously as a group for aggregation, effectively reducing the staleness of local models. At the same time, the overall training process remains asynchronous, eliminating prolonged waiting periods from straggler clients. Using diverse non-IID heterogeneous distributed datasets, we demonstrate that FedCompass achieves faster convergence and higher accuracy than other asynchronous algorithms while remaining more efficient than synchronous algorithms when performing federated learning on heterogeneous clients. The source code for FedCompass is available at https://github.com/APPFL/FedCompass.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated considerable advances, and several claims have been made about their exceeding human performance. However, in real-world tasks, domain knowledge is often required. Low-resource learning methods like Active Learning (AL) have been proposed to tackle the cost of domain expert annotation, raising this question: Can LLMs surpass compact models trained with expert annotations in domain-specific tasks? In this work, we conduct an empirical experiment on four datasets from three different domains comparing SOTA LLMs with small models trained on expert annotations with AL. We found that small models can outperform GPT-3.5 with a few hundreds of labeled data, and they achieve higher or similar performance with GPT-4 despite that they are hundreds time smaller. Based on these findings, we posit that LLM predictions can be used as a warmup method in real-world applications and human experts remain indispensable in tasks involving data annotation driven by domain-specific knowledge.

Deploying deep learning models on embedded systems has been challenging due to limited computing resources. The majority of existing work focuses on accelerating image classification, while other fundamental vision problems, such as object detection, have not been adequately addressed. Compared with image classification, detection problems are more sensitive to the spatial variance of objects, and therefore, require specialized convolutions to aggregate spatial information. To address this need, recent work introduces dynamic deformable convolution to augment regular convolutions. However, this will lead to inefficient memory accesses of inputs with existing hardware. In this work, we harness the flexibility of FPGAs to develop a novel object detection pipeline with deformable convolutions. We show the speed-accuracy tradeoffs for a set of algorithm modifications including irregular-access versus limited-range and fixed-shape. We then Co-Design a Network CoDeNet with the modified deformable convolution and quantize it to 4-bit weights and 8-bit activations. With our high-efficiency implementation, our solution reaches 26.9 frames per second with a tiny model size of 0.76 MB while achieving 61.7 AP50 on the standard object detection dataset, Pascal VOC. With our higher accuracy implementation, our model gets to 67.1 AP50 on Pascal VOC with only 2.9 MB of parameters-20.9x smaller but 10% more accurate than Tiny-YOLO.

Pretraining a deep learning model on large image datasets is a standard step before fine-tuning the model on small targeted datasets. The large dataset is usually general images (e.g. imagenet2012) while the small dataset can be specialized datasets that have different distributions from the large dataset. However, this 'large-to-small' strategy is not well-validated when the large dataset is specialized and has a similar distribution to small datasets. We newly compiled three hematoxylin and eosin-stained image datasets, one large (PTCGA200) and two magnification-adjusted small datasets (PCam200 and segPANDA200). Major deep learning models were trained with supervised and self-supervised learning methods and fine-tuned on the small datasets for tumor classification and tissue segmentation benchmarks. ResNet50 pretrained with MoCov2, SimCLR, and BYOL on PTCGA200 was better than imagenet2012 pretraining when fine-tuned on PTCGA200 (accuracy of 83.94%, 86.41%, 84.91%, and 82.72%, respectively). ResNet50 pre-trained on PTCGA200 with MoCov2 exceeded the COCOtrain2017-pretrained baseline and was the best in ResNet50 for the tissue segmentation benchmark (mIoU of 63.53% and 63.22%). We found re-training imagenet-pretrained models (ResNet50, BiT-M-R50x1, and ViT-S/16) on PTCGA200 improved downstream benchmarks.

Multimodal learning combines multiple data modalities, broadening the types and complexity of data our models can utilize: for example, from plain text to image-caption pairs. Most multimodal learning algorithms focus on modeling simple one-to-one pairs of data from two modalities, such as image-caption pairs, or audio-text pairs. However, in most real-world settings, entities of different modalities interact with each other in more complex and multifaceted ways, going beyond one-to-one mappings. We propose to represent these complex relationships as graphs, allowing us to capture data with any number of modalities, and with complex relationships between modalities that can flexibly vary from one sample to another. Toward this goal, we propose Multimodal Graph Learning (MMGL), a general and systematic framework for capturing information from multiple multimodal neighbors with relational structures among them. In particular, we focus on MMGL for generative tasks, building upon pretrained Language Models (LMs), aiming to augment their text generation with multimodal neighbor contexts. We study three research questions raised by MMGL: (1) how can we infuse multiple neighbor information into the pretrained LMs, while avoiding scalability issues? (2) how can we infuse the graph structure information among multimodal neighbors into the LMs? and (3) how can we finetune the pretrained LMs to learn from the neighbor context in a parameter-efficient manner? We conduct extensive experiments to answer these three questions on MMGL and analyze the empirical results to pave the way for future MMGL research.

With the global refugee crisis at a historic high, there is a growing need to assess the impact of refugee settlements on their hosting countries and surrounding environments. Because fires are an important land management practice in smallholder agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa, burned area (BA) mappings can help provide information about the impacts of land management practices on local environments. However, a lack of BA ground-truth data in much of sub-Saharan Africa limits the use of highly scalable deep learning (DL) techniques for such BA mappings. In this work, we propose a scalable transfer learning approach to study BA dynamics in areas with little to no ground-truth data such as the West Nile region in Northern Uganda. We train a deep learning model on BA ground-truth data in Portugal and propose the application of that model on refugee-hosting districts in West Nile between 2015 and 2020. By comparing the district-level BA dynamic with the wider West Nile region, we aim to add understanding of the land management impacts of refugee settlements on their surrounding environments.

Most of previous work on learning diacritization of the Arabic language relied on training models from scratch. In this paper, we investigate how to leverage pre-trained language models to learn diacritization. We finetune token-free pre-trained multilingual models (ByT5) to learn to predict and insert missing diacritics in Arabic text, a complex task that requires understanding the sentence semantics and the morphological structure of the tokens. We show that we can achieve state-of-the-art on the diacritization task with minimal amount of training and no feature engineering, reducing WER by 40%. We release our finetuned models for the greater benefit of the researchers in the community.

We present a statistical model for German medical natural language processing trained for named entity recognition (NER) as an open, publicly available model. The work serves as a refined successor to our first GERNERMED model which is substantially outperformed by our work. We demonstrate the effectiveness of combining multiple techniques in order to achieve strong results in entity recognition performance by the means of transfer-learning on pretrained deep language models (LM), word-alignment and neural machine translation. Due to the sparse situation on open, public medical entity recognition models for German texts, this work offers benefits to the German research community on medical NLP as a baseline model. Since our model is based on public English data, its weights are provided without legal restrictions on usage and distribution. The sample code and the statistical model is available at: https://github.com/frankkramer-lab/GERNERMED-pp

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and multi-agent systems have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex problem-solving tasks such as deep research, vibe coding, and mathematical reasoning. However, most existing multi-agent systems are built upon manual prompt/workflow engineering with sophisticated agent frameworks, making them computationally inefficient, less capable, and can not benefit from data-centric learning. In this work, we introduce Chain-of-Agents (CoA), a novel paradigm of LLM reasoning that enables native end-to-end complex problem-solving in the same way as a multi-agent system (i.e., multi-turn problem solving with multiple tools and multiple agents) within one model. In chain-of-agents problem-solving, the model dynamically activates different tool agents and role-playing agents to simulate multi-agent collaboration in an end-to-end fashion. To elicit end-to-end chain-of-agents problem-solving abilities in LLMs, we introduce a multi-agent distillation framework to distill state-of-the-art multi-agent systems into chain-of-agents trajectories for agentic supervised fine-tuning. We then use agentic reinforcement learning on verifiable agentic tasks to further improve the models' capabilities on chain-of-agents problem solving. We call the resulting models Agent Foundation Models (AFMs). Our empirical studies demonstrate that AFM establishes new state-of-the-art performance across diverse benchmarks in both web agent and code agent settings. We make the entire research, including the model weights, code for training and evaluation, and the training data, fully open-sourced, which offers a solid starting point for future research on agent models and agentic RL.

Chest X-rays play a pivotal role in diagnosing respiratory diseases such as pneumonia, tuberculosis, and COVID-19, which are prevalent and present unique diagnostic challenges due to overlapping visual features and variability in image quality. Severe class imbalance and the complexity of medical images hinder automated analysis. This study leverages deep learning techniques, including transfer learning on pre-trained models (AlexNet, ResNet, and InceptionNet), to enhance disease detection and classification. By fine-tuning these models and incorporating focal loss to address class imbalance, significant performance improvements were achieved. Grad-CAM visualizations further enhance model interpretability, providing insights into clinically relevant regions influencing predictions. The InceptionV3 model, for instance, achieved a 28% improvement in AUC and a 15% increase in F1-Score. These findings highlight the potential of deep learning to improve diagnostic workflows and support clinical decision-making.

Federated learning is a popular technology for training machine learning models on distributed data sources without sharing data. Vertical federated learning or feature-based federated learning applies to the cases that different data sources share the same sample ID space but differ in feature space. To ensure the data owners' long-term engagement, it is critical to objectively assess the contribution from each data source and recompense them accordingly. The Shapley value (SV) is a provably fair contribution valuation metric originated from cooperative game theory. However, computing the SV requires extensively retraining the model on each subset of data sources, which causes prohibitively high communication costs in federated learning. We propose a contribution valuation metric called vertical federated Shapley value (VerFedSV) based on SV. We show that VerFedSV not only satisfies many desirable properties for fairness but is also efficient to compute, and can be adapted to both synchronous and asynchronous vertical federated learning algorithms. Both theoretical analysis and extensive experimental results verify the fairness, efficiency, and adaptability of VerFedSV.

Geospatial technologies are becoming increasingly essential in our world for a wide range of applications, including agriculture, urban planning, and disaster response. To help improve the applicability and performance of deep learning models on these geospatial tasks, various works have begun investigating foundation models for this domain. Researchers have explored two prominent approaches for introducing such models in geospatial applications, but both have drawbacks in terms of limited performance benefit or prohibitive training cost. Therefore, in this work, we propose a novel paradigm for building highly effective geospatial foundation models with minimal resource cost and carbon impact. We first construct a compact yet diverse dataset from multiple sources to promote feature diversity, which we term GeoPile. Then, we investigate the potential of continual pretraining from large-scale ImageNet-22k models and propose a multi-objective continual pretraining paradigm, which leverages the strong representations of ImageNet while simultaneously providing the freedom to learn valuable in-domain features. Our approach outperforms previous state-of-the-art geospatial pretraining methods in an extensive evaluation on seven downstream datasets covering various tasks such as change detection, classification, multi-label classification, semantic segmentation, and super-resolution.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) gain widespread practical application, providing the model family of different parameter sizes has become standard practice to address diverse computational requirements. Conventionally, each model in a family is trained independently, resulting in computational costs that scale additively with the number of models. We propose an efficient method for constructing the model family through progressive training, where smaller models are incrementally expanded to larger sizes to create a complete model family. Through extensive experiments with a model family ranging from 1B to 8B parameters, we demonstrate that our method reduces computational costs by approximately 25% while maintaining comparable performance to independently trained models. Furthermore, by strategically adjusting maximum learning rates based on model size, our method outperforms the independent training across various metrics. Beyond performance gains, our approach offers an additional advantage: models in our family tend to yield more consistent behavior across different model sizes.

Vertical Federated Learning (VFL) is a crucial paradigm for training machine learning models on feature-partitioned, distributed data. However, due to privacy restrictions, few public real-world VFL datasets exist for algorithm evaluation, and these represent a limited array of feature distributions. Existing benchmarks often resort to synthetic datasets, derived from arbitrary feature splits from a global set, which only capture a subset of feature distributions, leading to inadequate algorithm performance assessment. This paper addresses these shortcomings by introducing two key factors affecting VFL performance - feature importance and feature correlation - and proposing associated evaluation metrics and dataset splitting methods. Additionally, we introduce a real VFL dataset to address the deficit in image-image VFL scenarios. Our comprehensive evaluation of cutting-edge VFL algorithms provides valuable insights for future research in the field.

Model pruning is a popular approach to enable the deployment of large deep learning models on edge devices with restricted computational or storage capacities. Although sparse models achieve performance comparable to that of their dense counterparts at the level of the entire dataset, they exhibit high accuracy drops for some data sub-groups. Existing methods to mitigate this disparate impact induced by pruning (i) rely on surrogate metrics that address the problem indirectly and have limited interpretability; or (ii) scale poorly with the number of protected sub-groups in terms of computational cost. We propose a constrained optimization approach that directly addresses the disparate impact of pruning: our formulation bounds the accuracy change between the dense and sparse models, for each sub-group. This choice of constraints provides an interpretable success criterion to determine if a pruned model achieves acceptable disparity levels. Experimental results demonstrate that our technique scales reliably to problems involving large models and hundreds of protected sub-groups.

Ground-truth RGBD data are fundamental for a wide range of computer vision applications; however, those labeled samples are difficult to collect and time-consuming to produce. A common solution to overcome this lack of data is to employ graphic engines to produce synthetic proxies; however, those data do not often reflect real-world images, resulting in poor performance of the trained models at the inference step. In this paper we propose a novel training pipeline that incorporates Diffusion4D (D4D), a customized 4-channels diffusion model able to generate realistic RGBD samples. We show the effectiveness of the developed solution in improving the performances of deep learning models on the monocular depth estimation task, where the correspondence between RGB and depth map is crucial to achieving accurate measurements. Our supervised training pipeline, enriched by the generated samples, outperforms synthetic and original data performances achieving an RMSE reduction of (8.2%, 11.9%) and (8.1%, 6.1%) respectively on the indoor NYU Depth v2 and the outdoor KITTI dataset.

Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) is essential for modeling complex decision-making problems but faces challenges in computational tractability and requires expert formulation. Current deep learning approaches for MILP focus on specific problem classes and do not generalize to unseen classes. To address this shortcoming, we take a foundation model training approach, where we train a single deep learning model on a diverse set of MILP problems to generalize across problem classes. As existing datasets for MILP lack diversity and volume, we introduce MILP-Evolve, a novel LLM-based evolutionary framework that is capable of generating a large set of diverse MILP classes with an unlimited amount of instances. We study our methodology on three key learning tasks that capture diverse aspects of MILP: (1) integrality gap prediction, (2) learning to branch, and (3) a new task of aligning MILP instances with natural language descriptions. Our empirical results show that models trained on the data generated by MILP-Evolve achieve significant improvements on unseen problems, including MIPLIB benchmarks. Our work highlights the potential of moving towards a foundation model approach for MILP that can generalize to a broad range of MILP applications. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/microsoft/OptiGuide.

Availability of large and diverse medical datasets is often challenged by privacy and data sharing restrictions. For successful application of machine learning techniques for disease diagnosis, prognosis, and precision medicine, large amounts of data are necessary for model building and optimization. To help overcome such limitations in the context of brain MRI, we present NeuroSynth: a collection of generative models of normative regional volumetric features derived from structural brain imaging. NeuroSynth models are trained on real brain imaging regional volumetric measures from the iSTAGING consortium, which encompasses over 40,000 MRI scans across 13 studies, incorporating covariates such as age, sex, and race. Leveraging NeuroSynth, we produce and offer 18,000 synthetic samples spanning the adult lifespan (ages 22-90 years), alongside the model's capability to generate unlimited data. Experimental results indicate that samples generated from NeuroSynth agree with the distributions obtained from real data. Most importantly, the generated normative data significantly enhance the accuracy of downstream machine learning models on tasks such as disease classification. Data and models are available at: https://huggingface.co/spaces/rongguangw/neuro-synth.

Categorical variables often appear in datasets for classification and regression tasks, and they need to be encoded into numerical values before training. Since many encoders have been developed and can significantly impact performance, choosing the appropriate encoder for a task becomes a time-consuming yet important practical issue. This study broadly classifies machine learning models into three categories: 1) ATI models that implicitly perform affine transformations on inputs, such as multi-layer perceptron neural network; 2) Tree-based models that are based on decision trees, such as random forest; and 3) the rest, such as kNN. Theoretically, we prove that the one-hot encoder is the best choice for ATI models in the sense that it can mimic any other encoders by learning suitable weights from the data. We also explain why the target encoder and its variants are the most suitable encoders for tree-based models. This study conducted comprehensive computational experiments to evaluate 14 encoders, including one-hot and target encoders, along with eight common machine-learning models on 28 datasets. The computational results agree with our theoretical analysis. The findings in this study shed light on how to select the suitable encoder for data scientists in fields such as fraud detection, disease diagnosis, etc.

Transformers excel in Natural Language Processing (NLP) due to their prowess in capturing long-term dependencies but suffer from exponential resource consumption with increasing sequence lengths. To address these challenges, we propose MCSD model, an efficient language model with linear scaling and fast inference speed. MCSD model leverages diverse feature fusion, primarily through the multi-channel slope and decay (MCSD) block, to robustly represent features. This block comprises slope and decay sections that extract features across diverse temporal receptive fields, facilitating capture of both local and global information. In addition, MCSD block conducts element-wise fusion of diverse features to further enhance the delicate feature extraction capability. For inference, we formulate the inference process into a recurrent representation, slashing space complexity to O(1) and time complexity to O(N) respectively. Our experiments show that MCSD attains higher throughput and lower GPU memory consumption compared to Transformers, while maintaining comparable performance to larger-scale language learning models on benchmark tests. These attributes position MCSD as a promising base for edge deployment and embodied intelligence.

Few-shot learning aims at leveraging knowledge learned by one or more deep learning models, in order to obtain good classification performance on new problems, where only a few labeled samples per class are available. Recent years have seen a fair number of works in the field, introducing methods with numerous ingredients. A frequent problem, though, is the use of suboptimally trained models to extract knowledge, leading to interrogations on whether proposed approaches bring gains compared to using better initial models without the introduced ingredients. In this work, we propose a simple methodology, that reaches or even beats state of the art performance on multiple standardized benchmarks of the field, while adding almost no hyperparameters or parameters to those used for training the initial deep learning models on the generic dataset. This methodology offers a new baseline on which to propose (and fairly compare) new techniques or adapt existing ones.

Hypernetworks, or hypernets in short, are neural networks that generate weights for another neural network, known as the target network. They have emerged as a powerful deep learning technique that allows for greater flexibility, adaptability, dynamism, faster training, information sharing, and model compression etc. Hypernets have shown promising results in a variety of deep learning problems, including continual learning, causal inference, transfer learning, weight pruning, uncertainty quantification, zero-shot learning, natural language processing, and reinforcement learning etc. Despite their success across different problem settings, currently, there is no review available to inform the researchers about the developments and to help in utilizing hypernets. To fill this gap, we review the progress in hypernets. We present an illustrative example to train deep neural networks using hypernets and propose categorizing hypernets based on five design criteria as inputs, outputs, variability of inputs and outputs, and architecture of hypernets. We also review applications of hypernets across different deep learning problem settings, followed by a discussion of general scenarios where hypernets can be effectively employed. Finally, we discuss the challenges and future directions that remain under-explored in the field of hypernets. We believe that hypernetworks have the potential to revolutionize the field of deep learning. They offer a new way to design and train neural networks, and they have the potential to improve the performance of deep learning models on a variety of tasks. Through this review, we aim to inspire further advancements in deep learning through hypernetworks.

Progress toward the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has been hindered by a lack of data on key environmental and socioeconomic indicators, which historically have come from ground surveys with sparse temporal and spatial coverage. Recent advances in machine learning have made it possible to utilize abundant, frequently-updated, and globally available data, such as from satellites or social media, to provide insights into progress toward SDGs. Despite promising early results, approaches to using such data for SDG measurement thus far have largely evaluated on different datasets or used inconsistent evaluation metrics, making it hard to understand whether performance is improving and where additional research would be most fruitful. Furthermore, processing satellite and ground survey data requires domain knowledge that many in the machine learning community lack. In this paper, we introduce SustainBench, a collection of 15 benchmark tasks across 7 SDGs, including tasks related to economic development, agriculture, health, education, water and sanitation, climate action, and life on land. Datasets for 11 of the 15 tasks are released publicly for the first time. Our goals for SustainBench are to (1) lower the barriers to entry for the machine learning community to contribute to measuring and achieving the SDGs; (2) provide standard benchmarks for evaluating machine learning models on tasks across a variety of SDGs; and (3) encourage the development of novel machine learning methods where improved model performance facilitates progress towards the SDGs.

Deploying deep learning models on mobile devices draws more and more attention recently. However, designing an efficient inference engine on devices is under the great challenges of model compatibility, device diversity, and resource limitation. To deal with these challenges, we propose Mobile Neural Network (MNN), a universal and efficient inference engine tailored to mobile applications. In this paper, the contributions of MNN include: (1) presenting a mechanism called pre-inference that manages to conduct runtime optimization; (2)deliveringthorough kernel optimization on operators to achieve optimal computation performance; (3) introducing backend abstraction module which enables hybrid scheduling and keeps the engine lightweight. Extensive benchmark experiments demonstrate that MNN performs favorably against other popular lightweight deep learning frameworks. MNN is available to public at: https://github.com/alibaba/MNN.

Wide deployment of machine learning models on edge devices has rendered the model intellectual property (IP) and data privacy vulnerable. We propose GNNVault, the first secure Graph Neural Network (GNN) deployment strategy based on Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). GNNVault follows the design of 'partition-before-training' and includes a private GNN rectifier to complement with a public backbone model. This way, both critical GNN model parameters and the private graph used during inference are protected within secure TEE compartments. Real-world implementations with Intel SGX demonstrate that GNNVault safeguards GNN inference against state-of-the-art link stealing attacks with negligible accuracy degradation (<2%).

Continuity of care is crucial to ensuring positive health outcomes for patients discharged from an inpatient hospital setting, and improved information sharing can help. To share information, caregivers write discharge notes containing action items to share with patients and their future caregivers, but these action items are easily lost due to the lengthiness of the documents. In this work, we describe our creation of a dataset of clinical action items annotated over MIMIC-III, the largest publicly available dataset of real clinical notes. This dataset, which we call CLIP, is annotated by physicians and covers 718 documents representing 100K sentences. We describe the task of extracting the action items from these documents as multi-aspect extractive summarization, with each aspect representing a type of action to be taken. We evaluate several machine learning models on this task, and show that the best models exploit in-domain language model pre-training on 59K unannotated documents, and incorporate context from neighboring sentences. We also propose an approach to pre-training data selection that allows us to explore the trade-off between size and domain-specificity of pre-training datasets for this task.

Interval and large invasive breast cancers, which are associated with worse prognosis than other cancers, are usually detected at a late stage due to false negative assessments of screening mammograms. The missed screening-time detection is commonly caused by the tumor being obscured by its surrounding breast tissues, a phenomenon called masking. To study and benchmark mammographic masking of cancer, in this work we introduce CSAW-M, the largest public mammographic dataset, collected from over 10,000 individuals and annotated with potential masking. In contrast to the previous approaches which measure breast image density as a proxy, our dataset directly provides annotations of masking potential assessments from five specialists. We also trained deep learning models on CSAW-M to estimate the masking level and showed that the estimated masking is significantly more predictive of screening participants diagnosed with interval and large invasive cancers -- without being explicitly trained for these tasks -- than its breast density counterparts.

In this study, we approached the Hit Song Prediction problem, which aims to predict which songs will become Billboard hits. We gathered a dataset of nearly 18500 hit and non-hit songs and extracted their audio features using the Spotify Web API. We test four machine-learning models on our dataset. We were able to predict the Billboard success of a song with approximately 86\% accuracy. The most succesful algorithms were Random Forest and Support Vector Machine.

Despite the success of deep learning models on instance segmentation, current methods still suffer from catastrophic forgetting in continual learning scenarios. In this paper, our contributions for continual instance segmentation are threefold. First, we propose the Y-knowledge distillation (Y-KD), a technique that shares a common feature extractor between the teacher and student networks. As the teacher is also updated with new data in Y-KD, the increased plasticity results in new modules that are specialized on new classes. Second, our Y-KD approach is supported by a dynamic architecture method that trains task-specific modules with a unique instance segmentation head, thereby significantly reducing forgetting. Third, we complete our approach by leveraging checkpoint averaging as a simple method to manually balance the trade-off between performance on the various sets of classes, thus increasing control over the model's behavior without any additional cost. These contributions are united in our model that we name the Dynamic Y-KD network. We perform extensive experiments on several single-step and multi-steps incremental learning scenarios, and we show that our approach outperforms previous methods both on past and new classes. For instance, compared to recent work, our method obtains +2.1% mAP on old classes in 15-1, +7.6% mAP on new classes in 19-1 and reaches 91.5% of the mAP obtained by joint-training on all classes in 15-5.

Student's grade retention is a key issue faced by many education systems, especially those in developing countries. In this paper, we seek to gauge the relevance of students' personality traits in predicting grade retention in Brazil. For that, we used data collected in 2012 and 2017, in the city of Sertaozinho, countryside of the state of Sao Paulo, Brazil. The surveys taken in Sertaozinho included several socioeconomic questions, standardized tests, and a personality test. Moreover, students were in grades 4, 5, and 6 in 2012. Our approach was based on training machine learning models on the surveys' data to predict grade retention between 2012 and 2017 using information from 2012 or before, and then using some strategies to quantify personality traits' predictive power. We concluded that, besides proving to be fairly better than a random classifier when isolated, personality traits contribute to prediction even when using socioeconomic variables and standardized tests results.

Speech-driven 3D facial animation is challenging due to the scarcity of large-scale visual-audio datasets despite extensive research. Most prior works, typically focused on learning regression models on a small dataset using the method of least squares, encounter difficulties generating diverse lip movements from speech and require substantial effort in refining the generated outputs. To address these issues, we propose a speech-driven 3D facial animation with a diffusion model (SAiD), a lightweight Transformer-based U-Net with a cross-modality alignment bias between audio and visual to enhance lip synchronization. Moreover, we introduce BlendVOCA, a benchmark dataset of pairs of speech audio and parameters of a blendshape facial model, to address the scarcity of public resources. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves comparable or superior performance in lip synchronization to baselines, ensures more diverse lip movements, and streamlines the animation editing process.

Designing data sharing mechanisms providing performance and strong privacy guarantees is a hot topic for the Online Advertising industry. Namely, a prominent proposal discussed under the Improving Web Advertising Business Group at W3C only allows sharing advertising signals through aggregated, differentially private reports of past displays. To study this proposal extensively, an open Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning Challenge took place at AdKDD'21, a premier workshop on Advertising Science with data provided by advertising company Criteo. In this paper, we describe the challenge tasks, the structure of the available datasets, report the challenge results, and enable its full reproducibility. A key finding is that learning models on large, aggregated data in the presence of a small set of unaggregated data points can be surprisingly efficient and cheap. We also run additional experiments to observe the sensitivity of winning methods to different parameters such as privacy budget or quantity of available privileged side information. We conclude that the industry needs either alternate designs for private data sharing or a breakthrough in learning with aggregated data only to keep ad relevance at a reasonable level.

With the increasing demand for deep learning models on mobile devices, splitting neural network computation between the device and a more powerful edge server has become an attractive solution. However, existing split computing approaches often underperform compared to a naive baseline of remote computation on compressed data. Recent studies propose learning compressed representations that contain more relevant information for supervised downstream tasks, showing improved tradeoffs between compressed data size and supervised performance. However, existing evaluation metrics only provide an incomplete picture of split computing. This study introduces supervised compression for split computing (SC2) and proposes new evaluation criteria: minimizing computation on the mobile device, minimizing transmitted data size, and maximizing model accuracy. We conduct a comprehensive benchmark study using 10 baseline methods, three computer vision tasks, and over 180 trained models, and discuss various aspects of SC2. We also release sc2bench, a Python package for future research on SC2. Our proposed metrics and package will help researchers better understand the tradeoffs of supervised compression in split computing.

In this paper, we demonstrated the benefit of using pre-trained model to extract acoustic embedding to jointly predict (multitask learning) three tasks: emotion, age, and native country. The pre-trained model was trained with wav2vec 2.0 large robust model on the speech emotion corpus. The emotion and age tasks were regression problems, while country prediction was a classification task. A single harmonic mean from three metrics was used to evaluate the performance of multitask learning. The classifier was a linear network with two independent layers and shared layers, including the output layers. This study explores multitask learning on different acoustic features (including the acoustic embedding extracted from a model trained on an affective speech dataset), seed numbers, batch sizes, and normalizations for predicting paralinguistic information from speech.

Efficient inference is critical for deploying deep learning models on edge AI devices. Low-bit quantization (e.g., 3- and 4-bit) with fixed-point arithmetic improves efficiency, while low-power memory technologies like analog nonvolatile memory enable further gains. However, these methods introduce non-ideal hardware behavior, including bit faults and device-to-device variability. We propose a regularization-based quantization-aware training (QAT) framework that supports fixed, learnable step-size, and learnable non-uniform quantization, achieving competitive results on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet. Our method also extends to Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), demonstrating strong performance on 4-bit networks on CIFAR10-DVS and N-Caltech 101. Beyond quantization, our framework enables fault and variability-aware fine-tuning, mitigating stuck-at faults (fixed weight bits) and device resistance variability. Compared to prior fault-aware training, our approach significantly improves performance recovery under upto 20% bit-fault rate and 40% device-to-device variability. Our results establish a generalizable framework for quantization and robustness-aware training, enhancing efficiency and reliability in low-power, non-ideal hardware.

We propose the Neuro-Symbolic Concept Learner (NS-CL), a model that learns visual concepts, words, and semantic parsing of sentences without explicit supervision on any of them; instead, our model learns by simply looking at images and reading paired questions and answers. Our model builds an object-based scene representation and translates sentences into executable, symbolic programs. To bridge the learning of two modules, we use a neuro-symbolic reasoning module that executes these programs on the latent scene representation. Analogical to human concept learning, the perception module learns visual concepts based on the language description of the object being referred to. Meanwhile, the learned visual concepts facilitate learning new words and parsing new sentences. We use curriculum learning to guide the searching over the large compositional space of images and language. Extensive experiments demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of our model on learning visual concepts, word representations, and semantic parsing of sentences. Further, our method allows easy generalization to new object attributes, compositions, language concepts, scenes and questions, and even new program domains. It also empowers applications including visual question answering and bidirectional image-text retrieval.

Medical images are acquired at high resolutions with large fields of view in order to capture fine-grained features necessary for clinical decision-making. Consequently, training deep learning models on medical images can incur large computational costs. In this work, we address the challenge of downsizing medical images in order to improve downstream computational efficiency while preserving clinically-relevant features. We introduce MedVAE, a family of six large-scale 2D and 3D autoencoders capable of encoding medical images as downsized latent representations and decoding latent representations back to high-resolution images. We train MedVAE autoencoders using a novel two-stage training approach with 1,052,730 medical images. Across diverse tasks obtained from 20 medical image datasets, we demonstrate that (1) utilizing MedVAE latent representations in place of high-resolution images when training downstream models can lead to efficiency benefits (up to 70x improvement in throughput) while simultaneously preserving clinically-relevant features and (2) MedVAE can decode latent representations back to high-resolution images with high fidelity. Our work demonstrates that large-scale, generalizable autoencoders can help address critical efficiency challenges in the medical domain. Our code is available at https://github.com/StanfordMIMI/MedVAE.

A lack of accessible data has historically restricted malware analysis research, and practitioners have relied heavily on datasets provided by industry sources to advance. Existing public datasets are limited by narrow scope - most include files targeting a single platform, have labels supporting just one type of malware classification task, and make no effort to capture the evasive files that make malware detection difficult in practice. We present EMBER2024, a new dataset that enables holistic evaluation of malware classifiers. Created in collaboration with the authors of EMBER2017 and EMBER2018, the EMBER2024 dataset includes hashes, metadata, feature vectors, and labels for more than 3.2 million files from six file formats. Our dataset supports the training and evaluation of machine learning models on seven malware classification tasks, including malware detection, malware family classification, and malware behavior identification. EMBER2024 is the first to include a collection of malicious files that initially went undetected by a set of antivirus products, creating a "challenge" set to assess classifier performance against evasive malware. This work also introduces EMBER feature version 3, with added support for several new feature types. We are releasing the EMBER2024 dataset to promote reproducibility and empower researchers in the pursuit of new malware research topics.

Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning (MADRL) has emerged as a powerful tool for optimizing decentralized decision-making systems in complex settings, such as Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA). However, deploying deep learning models on resource-constrained edge devices remains challenging due to their high computational cost. To address this challenge, in this paper, we present a novel sparse recurrent MARL framework integrating gradual neural network pruning into the independent actor global critic paradigm. Additionally, we introduce a harmonic annealing sparsity scheduler, which achieves comparable, and in certain cases superior, performance to standard linear and polynomial pruning schedulers at large sparsities. Our experimental investigation demonstrates that the proposed DSA framework can discover superior policies, under diverse training conditions, outperforming conventional DSA, MADRL baselines, and state-of-the-art pruning techniques.

Controllable text generation is a fundamental aspect of natural language generation, with numerous methods proposed for different constraint types. However, these approaches often require significant architectural or decoding modifications, making them challenging to apply to additional constraints or resolve different constraint combinations. To address this, our paper introduces Regular Expression Instruction (REI), which utilizes an instruction-based mechanism to fully exploit regular expressions' advantages to uniformly model diverse constraints. Specifically, our REI supports all popular fine-grained controllable generation constraints, i.e., lexical, positional, and length, as well as their complex combinations, via regular expression-style instructions. Our method only requires fine-tuning on medium-scale language models or few-shot, in-context learning on large language models, and requires no further adjustment when applied to various constraint combinations. Experiments demonstrate that our straightforward approach yields high success rates and adaptability to various constraints while maintaining competitiveness in automatic metrics and outperforming most previous baselines.

As offensive content has become pervasive in social media, there has been much research in identifying potentially offensive messages. However, previous work on this topic did not consider the problem as a whole, but rather focused on detecting very specific types of offensive content, e.g., hate speech, cyberbulling, or cyber-aggression. In contrast, here we target several different kinds of offensive content. In particular, we model the task hierarchically, identifying the type and the target of offensive messages in social media. For this purpose, we complied the Offensive Language Identification Dataset (OLID), a new dataset with tweets annotated for offensive content using a fine-grained three-layer annotation scheme, which we make publicly available. We discuss the main similarities and differences between OLID and pre-existing datasets for hate speech identification, aggression detection, and similar tasks. We further experiment with and we compare the performance of different machine learning models on OLID.

The success of self-supervised learning in computer vision and natural language processing has motivated pretraining methods on tabular data. However, most existing tabular self-supervised learning models fail to leverage information across multiple data tables and cannot generalize to new tables. In this work, we introduce XTab, a framework for cross-table pretraining of tabular transformers on datasets from various domains. We address the challenge of inconsistent column types and quantities among tables by utilizing independent featurizers and using federated learning to pretrain the shared component. Tested on 84 tabular prediction tasks from the OpenML-AutoML Benchmark (AMLB), we show that (1) XTab consistently boosts the generalizability, learning speed, and performance of multiple tabular transformers, (2) by pretraining FT-Transformer via XTab, we achieve superior performance than other state-of-the-art tabular deep learning models on various tasks such as regression, binary, and multiclass classification.

We develop information geometric techniques to understand the representations learned by deep networks when they are trained on different tasks using supervised, meta-, semi-supervised and contrastive learning. We shed light on the following phenomena that relate to the structure of the space of tasks: (1) the manifold of probabilistic models trained on different tasks using different representation learning methods is effectively low-dimensional; (2) supervised learning on one task results in a surprising amount of progress even on seemingly dissimilar tasks; progress on other tasks is larger if the training task has diverse classes; (3) the structure of the space of tasks indicated by our analysis is consistent with parts of the Wordnet phylogenetic tree; (4) episodic meta-learning algorithms and supervised learning traverse different trajectories during training but they fit similar models eventually; (5) contrastive and semi-supervised learning methods traverse trajectories similar to those of supervised learning. We use classification tasks constructed from the CIFAR-10 and Imagenet datasets to study these phenomena.

Deep learning thrives with large neural networks and large datasets. However, larger networks and larger datasets result in longer training times that impede research and development progress. Distributed synchronous SGD offers a potential solution to this problem by dividing SGD minibatches over a pool of parallel workers. Yet to make this scheme efficient, the per-worker workload must be large, which implies nontrivial growth in the SGD minibatch size. In this paper, we empirically show that on the ImageNet dataset large minibatches cause optimization difficulties, but when these are addressed the trained networks exhibit good generalization. Specifically, we show no loss of accuracy when training with large minibatch sizes up to 8192 images. To achieve this result, we adopt a hyper-parameter-free linear scaling rule for adjusting learning rates as a function of minibatch size and develop a new warmup scheme that overcomes optimization challenges early in training. With these simple techniques, our Caffe2-based system trains ResNet-50 with a minibatch size of 8192 on 256 GPUs in one hour, while matching small minibatch accuracy. Using commodity hardware, our implementation achieves ~90% scaling efficiency when moving from 8 to 256 GPUs. Our findings enable training visual recognition models on internet-scale data with high efficiency.

Methane (CH_4) is the second most powerful greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide and plays a crucial role in climate change due to its high global warming potential. Accurately modeling CH_4 fluxes across the globe and at fine temporal scales is essential for understanding its spatial and temporal variability and developing effective mitigation strategies. In this work, we introduce the first-of-its-kind cross-scale global wetland methane benchmark dataset (X-MethaneWet), which synthesizes physics-based model simulation data from TEM-MDM and the real-world observation data from FLUXNET-CH_4. This dataset can offer opportunities for improving global wetland CH_4 modeling and science discovery with new AI algorithms. To set up AI model baselines for methane flux prediction, we evaluate the performance of various sequential deep learning models on X-MethaneWet. Furthermore, we explore four different transfer learning techniques to leverage simulated data from TEM-MDM to improve the generalization of deep learning models on real-world FLUXNET-CH_4 observations. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of these approaches, highlighting their potential for advancing methane emission modeling and contributing to the development of more accurate and scalable AI-driven climate models.

Pir\'a is a reading comprehension dataset focused on the ocean, the Brazilian coast, and climate change, built from a collection of scientific abstracts and reports on these topics. This dataset represents a versatile language resource, particularly useful for testing the ability of current machine learning models to acquire expert scientific knowledge. Despite its potential, a detailed set of baselines has not yet been developed for Pir\'a. By creating these baselines, researchers can more easily utilize Pir\'a as a resource for testing machine learning models across a wide range of question answering tasks. In this paper, we define six benchmarks over the Pir\'a dataset, covering closed generative question answering, machine reading comprehension, information retrieval, open question answering, answer triggering, and multiple choice question answering. As part of this effort, we have also produced a curated version of the original dataset, where we fixed a number of grammar issues, repetitions, and other shortcomings. Furthermore, the dataset has been extended in several new directions, so as to face the aforementioned benchmarks: translation of supporting texts from English into Portuguese, classification labels for answerability, automatic paraphrases of questions and answers, and multiple choice candidates. The results described in this paper provide several points of reference for researchers interested in exploring the challenges provided by the Pir\'a dataset.

Graph neural network (GNN), as a powerful representation learning model on graph data, attracts much attention across various disciplines. However, recent studies show that GNN is vulnerable to adversarial attacks. How to make GNN more robust? What are the key vulnerabilities in GNN? How to address the vulnerabilities and defense GNN against the adversarial attacks? In this paper, we propose DefNet, an effective adversarial defense framework for GNNs. In particular, we first investigate the latent vulnerabilities in every layer of GNNs and propose corresponding strategies including dual-stage aggregation and bottleneck perceptron. Then, to cope with the scarcity of training data, we propose an adversarial contrastive learning method to train the GNN in a conditional GAN manner by leveraging the high-level graph representation. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of DefNet in improving the robustness of popular GNN variants, such as Graph Convolutional Network and GraphSAGE, under various types of adversarial attacks.

Most existing text summarization datasets are compiled from the news domain, where summaries have a flattened discourse structure. In such datasets, summary-worthy content often appears in the beginning of input articles. Moreover, large segments from input articles are present verbatim in their respective summaries. These issues impede the learning and evaluation of systems that can understand an article's global content structure as well as produce abstractive summaries with high compression ratio. In this work, we present a novel dataset, BIGPATENT, consisting of 1.3 million records of U.S. patent documents along with human written abstractive summaries. Compared to existing summarization datasets, BIGPATENT has the following properties: i) summaries contain a richer discourse structure with more recurring entities, ii) salient content is evenly distributed in the input, and iii) lesser and shorter extractive fragments are present in the summaries. Finally, we train and evaluate baselines and popular learning models on BIGPATENT to shed light on new challenges and motivate future directions for summarization research.

Exact unlearning was first introduced as a privacy mechanism that allowed a user to retract their data from machine learning models on request. Shortly after, inexact schemes were proposed to mitigate the impractical costs associated with exact unlearning. More recently unlearning is often discussed as an approach for removal of impermissible knowledge i.e. knowledge that the model should not possess such as unlicensed copyrighted, inaccurate, or malicious information. The promise is that if the model does not have a certain malicious capability, then it cannot be used for the associated malicious purpose. In this paper we revisit the paradigm in which unlearning is used for in Large Language Models (LLMs) and highlight an underlying inconsistency arising from in-context learning. Unlearning can be an effective control mechanism for the training phase, yet it does not prevent the model from performing an impermissible act during inference. We introduce a concept of ununlearning, where unlearned knowledge gets reintroduced in-context, effectively rendering the model capable of behaving as if it knows the forgotten knowledge. As a result, we argue that content filtering for impermissible knowledge will be required and even exact unlearning schemes are not enough for effective content regulation. We discuss feasibility of ununlearning for modern LLMs and examine broader implications.

Recent advancement in personalized image generation have unveiled the intriguing capability of pre-trained text-to-image models on learning identity information from a collection of portrait images. However, existing solutions are vulnerable in producing truthful details, and usually suffer from several defects such as (i) The generated face exhibit its own unique characteristics, \ie facial shape and facial feature positioning may not resemble key characteristics of the input, and (ii) The synthesized face may contain warped, blurred or corrupted regions. In this paper, we present FaceChain, a personalized portrait generation framework that combines a series of customized image-generation model and a rich set of face-related perceptual understanding models (\eg, face detection, deep face embedding extraction, and facial attribute recognition), to tackle aforementioned challenges and to generate truthful personalized portraits, with only a handful of portrait images as input. Concretely, we inject several SOTA face models into the generation procedure, achieving a more efficient label-tagging, data-processing, and model post-processing compared to previous solutions, such as DreamBooth ~ruiz2023dreambooth , InstantBooth ~shi2023instantbooth , or other LoRA-only approaches ~hu2021lora . Besides, based on FaceChain, we further develop several applications to build a broader playground for better showing its value, including virtual try on and 2D talking head. We hope it can grow to serve the burgeoning needs from the communities. Note that this is an ongoing work that will be consistently refined and improved upon. FaceChain is open-sourced under Apache-2.0 license at https://github.com/modelscope/facechain.

In modern recommendation systems, the standard pipeline involves training machine learning models on historical data to predict user behaviors and improve recommendations continuously. However, these data training loops can introduce interference in A/B tests, where data generated by control and treatment algorithms, potentially with different distributions, are combined. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel approach called weighted training. This approach entails training a model to predict the probability of each data point appearing in either the treatment or control data and subsequently applying weighted losses during model training. We demonstrate that this approach achieves the least variance among all estimators that do not cause shifts in the training distributions. Through simulation studies, we demonstrate the lower bias and variance of our approach compared to other methods.

The paper presents the submission of the team indicnlp@kgp to the EACL 2021 shared task "Offensive Language Identification in Dravidian Languages." The task aimed to classify different offensive content types in 3 code-mixed Dravidian language datasets. The work leverages existing state of the art approaches in text classification by incorporating additional data and transfer learning on pre-trained models. Our final submission is an ensemble of an AWD-LSTM based model along with 2 different transformer model architectures based on BERT and RoBERTa. We achieved weighted-average F1 scores of 0.97, 0.77, and 0.72 in the Malayalam-English, Tamil-English, and Kannada-English datasets ranking 1st, 2nd, and 3rd on the respective tasks.

Public trust in science depends on honest and factual communication of scientific papers. However, recent studies have demonstrated a tendency of news media to misrepresent scientific papers by exaggerating their findings. Given this, we present a formalization of and study into the problem of exaggeration detection in science communication. While there are an abundance of scientific papers and popular media articles written about them, very rarely do the articles include a direct link to the original paper, making data collection challenging. We address this by curating a set of labeled press release/abstract pairs from existing expert annotated studies on exaggeration in press releases of scientific papers suitable for benchmarking the performance of machine learning models on the task. Using limited data from this and previous studies on exaggeration detection in science, we introduce MT-PET, a multi-task version of Pattern Exploiting Training (PET), which leverages knowledge from complementary cloze-style QA tasks to improve few-shot learning. We demonstrate that MT-PET outperforms PET and supervised learning both when data is limited, as well as when there is an abundance of data for the main task.

The emergence of powerful, general-purpose omnimodels capable of processing diverse data modalities has raised a critical question: can these ``jack-of-all-trades'' systems perform on par with highly specialized models in knowledge-intensive domains? This work investigates this question within the high-stakes field of medical image segmentation. We conduct a comparative study analyzing the zero-shot performance of a state-of-the-art omnimodel (Gemini 2.5 Pro, the ``Nano Banana'' model) against domain-specific deep learning models on three distinct tasks: polyp (endoscopy), retinal vessel (fundus), and breast tumor segmentation (ultrasound). Our study focuses on performance at the extremes by curating subsets of the ``easiest'' and ``hardest'' cases based on the specialist models' accuracy. Our findings reveal a nuanced and task-dependent landscape. For polyp and breast tumor segmentation, specialist models excel on easy samples, but the omnimodel demonstrates greater robustness on hard samples where specialists fail catastrophically. Conversely, for the fine-grained task of retinal vessel segmentation, the specialist model maintains superior performance across both easy and hard cases. Intriguingly, qualitative analysis suggests omnimodels may possess higher sensitivity, identifying subtle anatomical features missed by human annotators. Our results indicate that while current omnimodels are not yet a universal replacement for specialists, their unique strengths suggest a potential complementary role with specialist models, particularly in enhancing robustness on challenging edge cases.

Table extraction from document images is a challenging AI problem, and labelled data for many content domains is difficult to come by. Existing table extraction datasets often focus on scientific tables due to the vast amount of academic articles that are readily available, along with their source code. However, there are significant layout and typographical differences between tables found across scientific, financial, and other domains. Current datasets often lack the words, and their positions, contained within the tables, instead relying on unreliable OCR to extract these features for training modern machine learning models on natural language processing tasks. Therefore, there is a need for a more general method of obtaining labelled data. We present SynFinTabs, a large-scale, labelled dataset of synthetic financial tables. Our hope is that our method of generating these synthetic tables is transferable to other domains. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our dataset in training models to extract information from table images, we create FinTabQA, a layout large language model trained on an extractive question-answering task. We test our model using real-world financial tables and compare it to a state-of-the-art generative model and discuss the results. We make the dataset, model, and dataset generation code publicly available.

The success of deep learning has sparked interest in improving relational table tasks, like data preparation and search, with table representation models trained on large table corpora. Existing table corpora primarily contain tables extracted from HTML pages, limiting the capability to represent offline database tables. To train and evaluate high-capacity models for applications beyond the Web, we need resources with tables that resemble relational database tables. Here we introduce GitTables, a corpus of 1M relational tables extracted from GitHub. Our continuing curation aims at growing the corpus to at least 10M tables. Analyses of GitTables show that its structure, content, and topical coverage differ significantly from existing table corpora. We annotate table columns in GitTables with semantic types, hierarchical relations and descriptions from Schema.org and DBpedia. The evaluation of our annotation pipeline on the T2Dv2 benchmark illustrates that our approach provides results on par with human annotations. We present three applications of GitTables, demonstrating its value for learned semantic type detection models, schema completion methods, and benchmarks for table-to-KG matching, data search, and preparation. We make the corpus and code available at https://gittables.github.io.

We present TaxaBind, a unified embedding space for characterizing any species of interest. TaxaBind is a multimodal embedding space across six modalities: ground-level images of species, geographic location, satellite image, text, audio, and environmental features, useful for solving ecological problems. To learn this joint embedding space, we leverage ground-level images of species as a binding modality. We propose multimodal patching, a technique for effectively distilling the knowledge from various modalities into the binding modality. We construct two large datasets for pretraining: iSatNat with species images and satellite images, and iSoundNat with species images and audio. Additionally, we introduce TaxaBench-8k, a diverse multimodal dataset with six paired modalities for evaluating deep learning models on ecological tasks. Experiments with TaxaBind demonstrate its strong zero-shot and emergent capabilities on a range of tasks including species classification, cross-model retrieval, and audio classification. The datasets and models are made available at https://github.com/mvrl/TaxaBind.

We present a neuro-symbolic (NeSy) workflow combining a symbolic-based learning technique with a large language model (LLM) agent to generate synthetic data for code comment classification in the C programming language. We also show how generating controlled synthetic data using this workflow fixes some of the notable weaknesses of LLM-based generation and increases the performance of classical machine learning models on the code comment classification task. Our best model, a Neural Network, achieves a Macro-F1 score of 91.412% with an increase of 1.033% after data augmentation.

Convolution has been the core ingredient of modern neural networks, triggering the surge of deep learning in vision. In this work, we rethink the inherent principles of standard convolution for vision tasks, specifically spatial-agnostic and channel-specific. Instead, we present a novel atomic operation for deep neural networks by inverting the aforementioned design principles of convolution, coined as involution. We additionally demystify the recent popular self-attention operator and subsume it into our involution family as an over-complicated instantiation. The proposed involution operator could be leveraged as fundamental bricks to build the new generation of neural networks for visual recognition, powering different deep learning models on several prevalent benchmarks, including ImageNet classification, COCO detection and segmentation, together with Cityscapes segmentation. Our involution-based models improve the performance of convolutional baselines using ResNet-50 by up to 1.6% top-1 accuracy, 2.5% and 2.4% bounding box AP, and 4.7% mean IoU absolutely while compressing the computational cost to 66%, 65%, 72%, and 57% on the above benchmarks, respectively. Code and pre-trained models for all the tasks are available at https://github.com/d-li14/involution.

We introduce AutoGluon-Tabular, an open-source AutoML framework that requires only a single line of Python to train highly accurate machine learning models on an unprocessed tabular dataset such as a CSV file. Unlike existing AutoML frameworks that primarily focus on model/hyperparameter selection, AutoGluon-Tabular succeeds by ensembling multiple models and stacking them in multiple layers. Experiments reveal that our multi-layer combination of many models offers better use of allocated training time than seeking out the best. A second contribution is an extensive evaluation of public and commercial AutoML platforms including TPOT, H2O, AutoWEKA, auto-sklearn, AutoGluon, and Google AutoML Tables. Tests on a suite of 50 classification and regression tasks from Kaggle and the OpenML AutoML Benchmark reveal that AutoGluon is faster, more robust, and much more accurate. We find that AutoGluon often even outperforms the best-in-hindsight combination of all of its competitors. In two popular Kaggle competitions, AutoGluon beat 99% of the participating data scientists after merely 4h of training on the raw data.

Learning on tabular data underpins numerous real-world applications. Despite considerable efforts in developing effective learning models for tabular data, current transferable tabular models remain in their infancy, limited by either the lack of support for direct instruction following in new tasks or the neglect of acquiring foundational knowledge and capabilities from diverse tabular datasets. In this paper, we propose Tabular Foundation Models (TabFMs) to overcome these limitations. TabFMs harness the potential of generative tabular learning, employing a pre-trained large language model (LLM) as the base model and fine-tuning it using purpose-designed objectives on an extensive range of tabular datasets. This approach endows TabFMs with a profound understanding and universal capabilities essential for learning on tabular data. Our evaluations underscore TabFM's effectiveness: not only does it significantly excel in instruction-following tasks like zero-shot and in-context inference, but it also showcases performance that approaches, and in instances, even transcends, the renowned yet mysterious closed-source LLMs like GPT-4. Furthermore, when fine-tuning with scarce data, our model achieves remarkable efficiency and maintains competitive performance with abundant training data. Finally, while our results are promising, we also delve into TabFM's limitations and potential opportunities, aiming to stimulate and expedite future research on developing more potent TabFMs.

Reinforcement learning (RL) solves sequential decision-making problems via a trial-and-error process interacting with the environment. While RL achieves outstanding success in playing complex video games that allow huge trial-and-error, making errors is always undesired in the real world. To improve the sample efficiency and thus reduce the errors, model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) is believed to be a promising direction, which builds environment models in which the trial-and-errors can take place without real costs. In this survey, we take a review of MBRL with a focus on the recent progress in deep RL. For non-tabular environments, there is always a generalization error between the learned environment model and the real environment. As such, it is of great importance to analyze the discrepancy between policy training in the environment model and that in the real environment, which in turn guides the algorithm design for better model learning, model usage, and policy training. Besides, we also discuss the recent advances of model-based techniques in other forms of RL, including offline RL, goal-conditioned RL, multi-agent RL, and meta-RL. Moreover, we discuss the applicability and advantages of MBRL in real-world tasks. Finally, we end this survey by discussing the promising prospects for the future development of MBRL. We think that MBRL has great potential and advantages in real-world applications that were overlooked, and we hope this survey could attract more research on MBRL.

In this study, we investigate the protection offered by federated learning algorithms against eavesdropping adversaries. In our model, the adversary is capable of intercepting model updates transmitted from clients to the server, enabling it to create its own estimate of the model. Unlike previous research, which predominantly focuses on safeguarding client data, our work shifts attention protecting the client model itself. Through a theoretical analysis, we examine how various factors, such as the probability of client selection, the structure of local objective functions, global aggregation at the server, and the eavesdropper's capabilities, impact the overall level of protection. We further validate our findings through numerical experiments, assessing the protection by evaluating the model accuracy achieved by the adversary. Finally, we compare our results with methods based on differential privacy, underscoring their limitations in this specific context.

Federated learning (FL) has garnered significant attention as a prominent privacy-preserving Machine Learning (ML) paradigm. Decentralized FL (DFL) eschews traditional FL's centralized server architecture, enhancing the system's robustness and scalability. However, these advantages of DFL also create new vulnerabilities for malicious participants to execute adversarial attacks, especially model poisoning attacks. In model poisoning attacks, malicious participants aim to diminish the performance of benign models by creating and disseminating the compromised model. Existing research on model poisoning attacks has predominantly concentrated on undermining global models within the Centralized FL (CFL) paradigm, while there needs to be more research in DFL. To fill the research gap, this paper proposes an innovative model poisoning attack called DMPA. This attack calculates the differential characteristics of multiple malicious client models and obtains the most effective poisoning strategy, thereby orchestrating a collusive attack by multiple participants. The effectiveness of this attack is validated across multiple datasets, with results indicating that the DMPA approach consistently surpasses existing state-of-the-art FL model poisoning attack strategies.

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as an effective approach to aligning large language models (LLMs) to human preferences. RLHF contains three steps, i.e., human preference collecting, reward learning, and policy optimization, which are usually performed serially. Despite its popularity, however, (fixed) reward models may suffer from inaccurate off-distribution, since policy optimization continuously shifts LLMs' data distribution. Repeatedly collecting new preference data from the latest LLMs may alleviate this issue, which unfortunately makes the resulting system more complicated and difficult to optimize. In this paper, we propose reward learning on policy (RLP), an unsupervised framework that refines a reward model using policy samples to keep it on-distribution. Specifically, an unsupervised multi-view learning method is introduced to learn robust representations of policy samples. Meanwhile, a synthetic preference generation approach is developed to simulate high-quality preference data with policy outputs. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that RLP consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art. Our code is available at https://github.com/AlibabaResearch/DAMO-ConvAI/tree/main/rlp.

The availability of performant pre-trained models has led to a proliferation of fine-tuned expert models that are specialized to a particular domain or task. Model MoErging methods aim to recycle expert models to create an aggregate system with improved performance or generalization. A key component of MoErging methods is the creation of a router that decides which expert model(s) to use for a particular input or application. The promise, effectiveness, and large design space of MoErging has spurred the development of many new methods over the past few years. This rapid pace of development has made it challenging to compare different MoErging methods, which are rarely compared to one another and are often validated in different experimental setups. To remedy such gaps, we present a comprehensive survey of MoErging methods that includes a novel taxonomy for cataloging key design choices and clarifying suitable applications for each method. Apart from surveying MoErging research, we inventory software tools and applications that make use of MoErging. We additionally discuss related fields of study such as model merging, multitask learning, and mixture-of-experts models. Taken as a whole, our survey provides a unified overview of existing MoErging methods and creates a solid foundation for future work in this burgeoning field.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown promising potential in graph representation learning. The majority of GNNs define a local message-passing mechanism, propagating information over the graph by stacking multiple layers. These methods, however, are known to suffer from two major limitations: over-squashing and poor capturing of long-range dependencies. Recently, Graph Transformers (GTs) emerged as a powerful alternative to Message-Passing Neural Networks (MPNNs). GTs, however, have quadratic computational cost, lack inductive biases on graph structures, and rely on complex Positional/Structural Encodings (SE/PE). In this paper, we show that while Transformers, complex message-passing, and SE/PE are sufficient for good performance in practice, neither is necessary. Motivated by the recent success of State Space Models (SSMs), such as Mamba, we present Graph Mamba Networks (GMNs), a general framework for a new class of GNNs based on selective SSMs. We discuss and categorize the new challenges when adopting SSMs to graph-structured data, and present four required and one optional steps to design GMNs, where we choose (1) Neighborhood Tokenization, (2) Token Ordering, (3) Architecture of Bidirectional Selective SSM Encoder, (4) Local Encoding, and dispensable (5) PE and SE. We further provide theoretical justification for the power of GMNs. Experiments demonstrate that despite much less computational cost, GMNs attain an outstanding performance in long-range, small-scale, large-scale, and heterophilic benchmark datasets.

Deep learning sometimes appears to work in unexpected ways. In pursuit of a deeper understanding of its surprising behaviors, we investigate the utility of a simple yet accurate model of a trained neural network consisting of a sequence of first-order approximations telescoping out into a single empirically operational tool for practical analysis. Across three case studies, we illustrate how it can be applied to derive new empirical insights on a diverse range of prominent phenomena in the literature -- including double descent, grokking, linear mode connectivity, and the challenges of applying deep learning on tabular data -- highlighting that this model allows us to construct and extract metrics that help predict and understand the a priori unexpected performance of neural networks. We also demonstrate that this model presents a pedagogical formalism allowing us to isolate components of the training process even in complex contemporary settings, providing a lens to reason about the effects of design choices such as architecture & optimization strategy, and reveals surprising parallels between neural network learning and gradient boosting.

The Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model, known for its strong quantum correlations and chaotic behavior, serves as a key platform for quantum gravity studies. However, variationally preparing thermal states on near-term quantum processors for large systems (N>12, where N is the number of Majorana fermions) presents a significant challenge due to the rapid growth in the complexity of parameterized quantum circuits. This paper addresses this challenge by integrating reinforcement learning (RL) with convolutional neural networks, employing an iterative approach to optimize the quantum circuit and its parameters. The refinement process is guided by a composite reward signal derived from entropy and the expectation values of the SYK Hamiltonian. This approach reduces the number of CNOT gates by two orders of magnitude for systems Ngeq12 compared to traditional methods like first-order Trotterization. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the RL framework in both noiseless and noisy quantum hardware environments, maintaining high accuracy in thermal state preparation. This work advances a scalable, RL-based framework with applications for quantum gravity studies and out-of-time-ordered thermal correlators computation in quantum many-body systems on near-term quantum hardware. The code is available at https://github.com/Aqasch/solving_SYK_model_with_RL.

Text-attributed graphs have recently garnered significant attention due to their wide range of applications in web domains. Existing methodologies employ word embedding models for acquiring text representations as node features, which are subsequently fed into Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for training. Recently, the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has introduced their powerful capabilities in information retrieval and text generation, which can greatly enhance the text attributes of graph data. Furthermore, the acquisition and labeling of extensive datasets are both costly and time-consuming endeavors. Consequently, few-shot learning has emerged as a crucial problem in the context of graph learning tasks. In order to tackle this challenge, we propose a lightweight paradigm called LLM4NG, which adopts a plug-and-play approach to empower text-attributed graphs through node generation using LLMs. Specifically, we utilize LLMs to extract semantic information from the labels and generate samples that belong to these categories as exemplars. Subsequently, we employ an edge predictor to capture the structural information inherent in the raw dataset and integrate the newly generated samples into the original graph. This approach harnesses LLMs for enhancing class-level information and seamlessly introduces labeled nodes and edges without modifying the raw dataset, thereby facilitating the node classification task in few-shot scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate the outstanding performance of our proposed paradigm, particularly in low-shot scenarios. For instance, in the 1-shot setting of the ogbn-arxiv dataset, LLM4NG achieves a 76% improvement over the baseline model.

Computing is still under a significant threat from ransomware, which necessitates prompt action to prevent it. Ransomware attacks can have a negative impact on how smart grids, particularly digital substations. In addition to examining a ransomware detection method using artificial intelligence (AI), this paper offers a ransomware attack modeling technique that targets the disrupted operation of a digital substation. The first, binary data is transformed into image data and fed into the convolution neural network model using federated learning. The experimental findings demonstrate that the suggested technique detects ransomware with a high accuracy rate.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models represent a promising direction for developing general-purpose robotic systems, demonstrating the ability to combine visual understanding, language comprehension, and action generation. However, systematic evaluation of these models across diverse robotic tasks remains limited. In this work, we present a comprehensive evaluation framework and benchmark suite for assessing VLA models. We profile three state-of-the-art VLM and VLAs - GPT-4o, OpenVLA, and JAT - across 20 diverse datasets from the Open-X-Embodiment collection, evaluating their performance on various manipulation tasks. Our analysis reveals several key insights: 1. current VLA models show significant variation in performance across different tasks and robot platforms, with GPT-4o demonstrating the most consistent performance through sophisticated prompt engineering, 2. all models struggle with complex manipulation tasks requiring multi-step planning, and 3. model performance is notably sensitive to action space characteristics and environmental factors. We release our evaluation framework and findings to facilitate systematic assessment of future VLA models and identify critical areas for improvement in the development of general purpose robotic systems.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved widespread adoption, yet our understanding of their behavior remains limited, particularly in detecting data contamination and hallucinations. While recently proposed probing techniques provide insights through activation analysis, they require "white-box" access to model internals, often unavailable. Current "gray-box" approaches typically analyze only the probability of the actual tokens in the sequence with simple task-specific heuristics. Importantly, these methods overlook the rich information contained in the full token distribution at each processing step. To address these limitations, we propose that gray-box analysis should leverage the complete observable output of LLMs, consisting of both the previously used token probabilities as well as the complete token distribution sequences - a unified data type we term LOS (LLM Output Signature). To this end, we develop a transformer-based approach to process LOS that theoretically guarantees approximation of existing techniques while enabling more nuanced analysis. Our approach achieves superior performance on hallucination and data contamination detection in gray-box settings, significantly outperforming existing baselines. Furthermore, it demonstrates strong transfer capabilities across datasets and LLMs, suggesting that LOS captures fundamental patterns in LLM behavior. Our code is available at: https://github.com/BarSGuy/LLM-Output-Signatures-Network.

The performance of many machine learning models depends on their hyper-parameter settings. Bayesian Optimization has become a successful tool for hyper-parameter optimization of machine learning algorithms, which aims to identify optimal hyper-parameters during an iterative sequential process. However, most of the Bayesian Optimization algorithms are designed to select models for effectiveness only and ignore the important issue of model training efficiency. Given that both model effectiveness and training time are important for real-world applications, models selected for effectiveness may not meet the strict training time requirements necessary to deploy in a production environment. In this work, we present a unified Bayesian Optimization framework for jointly optimizing models for both prediction effectiveness and training efficiency. We propose an objective that captures the tradeoff between these two metrics and demonstrate how we can jointly optimize them in a principled Bayesian Optimization framework. Experiments on model selection for recommendation tasks indicate models selected this way significantly improves model training efficiency while maintaining strong effectiveness as compared to state-of-the-art Bayesian Optimization algorithms.

We introduce SynCLR, a novel approach for learning visual representations exclusively from synthetic images and synthetic captions, without any real data. We synthesize a large dataset of image captions using LLMs, then use an off-the-shelf text-to-image model to generate multiple images corresponding to each synthetic caption. We perform visual representation learning on these synthetic images via contrastive learning, treating images sharing the same caption as positive pairs. The resulting representations transfer well to many downstream tasks, competing favorably with other general-purpose visual representation learners such as CLIP and DINO v2 in image classification tasks. Furthermore, in dense prediction tasks such as semantic segmentation, SynCLR outperforms previous self-supervised methods by a significant margin, e.g., improving over MAE and iBOT by 6.2 and 4.3 mIoU on ADE20k for ViT-B/16.

Learning world models can teach an agent how the world works in an unsupervised manner. Even though it can be viewed as a special case of sequence modeling, progress for scaling world models on robotic applications such as autonomous driving has been somewhat less rapid than scaling language models with Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT). We identify two reasons as major bottlenecks: dealing with complex and unstructured observation space, and having a scalable generative model. Consequently, we propose a novel world modeling approach that first tokenizes sensor observations with VQVAE, then predicts the future via discrete diffusion. To efficiently decode and denoise tokens in parallel, we recast Masked Generative Image Transformer into the discrete diffusion framework with a few simple changes, resulting in notable improvement. When applied to learning world models on point cloud observations, our model reduces prior SOTA Chamfer distance by more than 65% for 1s prediction, and more than 50% for 3s prediction, across NuScenes, KITTI Odometry, and Argoverse2 datasets. Our results demonstrate that discrete diffusion on tokenized agent experience can unlock the power of GPT-like unsupervised learning for robotic agents.

We introduce LUMOS, a language-conditioned multi-task imitation learning framework for robotics. LUMOS learns skills by practicing them over many long-horizon rollouts in the latent space of a learned world model and transfers these skills zero-shot to a real robot. By learning on-policy in the latent space of the learned world model, our algorithm mitigates policy-induced distribution shift which most offline imitation learning methods suffer from. LUMOS learns from unstructured play data with fewer than 1% hindsight language annotations but is steerable with language commands at test time. We achieve this coherent long-horizon performance by combining latent planning with both image- and language-based hindsight goal relabeling during training, and by optimizing an intrinsic reward defined in the latent space of the world model over multiple time steps, effectively reducing covariate shift. In experiments on the difficult long-horizon CALVIN benchmark, LUMOS outperforms prior learning-based methods with comparable approaches on chained multi-task evaluations. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to learn a language-conditioned continuous visuomotor control for a real-world robot within an offline world model. Videos, dataset and code are available at http://lumos.cs.uni-freiburg.de.

Continual learning aims to learn a model from a continuous stream of data, but it mainly assumes a fixed number of data and tasks with clear task boundaries. However, in real-world scenarios, the number of input data and tasks is constantly changing in a statistical way, not a static way. Although recently introduced incremental learning scenarios having blurry task boundaries somewhat address the above issues, they still do not fully reflect the statistical properties of real-world situations because of the fixed ratio of disjoint and blurry samples. In this paper, we propose a new Stochastic incremental Blurry task boundary scenario, called Si-Blurry, which reflects the stochastic properties of the real-world. We find that there are two major challenges in the Si-Blurry scenario: (1) inter- and intra-task forgettings and (2) class imbalance problem. To alleviate them, we introduce Mask and Visual Prompt tuning (MVP). In MVP, to address the inter- and intra-task forgetting issues, we propose a novel instance-wise logit masking and contrastive visual prompt tuning loss. Both of them help our model discern the classes to be learned in the current batch. It results in consolidating the previous knowledge. In addition, to alleviate the class imbalance problem, we introduce a new gradient similarity-based focal loss and adaptive feature scaling to ease overfitting to the major classes and underfitting to the minor classes. Extensive experiments show that our proposed MVP significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods in our challenging Si-Blurry scenario.

Zero-shot learning (ZSL) models rely on learning a joint embedding space where both textual/semantic description of object classes and visual representation of object images can be projected to for nearest neighbour search. Despite the success of deep neural networks that learn an end-to-end model between text and images in other vision problems such as image captioning, very few deep ZSL model exists and they show little advantage over ZSL models that utilise deep feature representations but do not learn an end-to-end embedding. In this paper we argue that the key to make deep ZSL models succeed is to choose the right embedding space. Instead of embedding into a semantic space or an intermediate space, we propose to use the visual space as the embedding space. This is because that in this space, the subsequent nearest neighbour search would suffer much less from the hubness problem and thus become more effective. This model design also provides a natural mechanism for multiple semantic modalities (e.g., attributes and sentence descriptions) to be fused and optimised jointly in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks show that our model significantly outperforms the existing models. Code is available at https://github.com/lzrobots/DeepEmbeddingModel_ZSL

To understand why self-supervised learning (SSL) models have empirically achieved strong performances on several speech-processing downstream tasks, numerous studies have focused on analyzing the encoded information of the SSL layer representations in adult speech. Limited work has investigated how pre-training and fine-tuning affect SSL models encoding children's speech and vocalizations. In this study, we aim to bridge this gap by probing SSL models on two relevant downstream tasks: (1) phoneme recognition (PR) on the speech of adults, older children (8-10 years old), and younger children (1-4 years old), and (2) vocalization classification (VC) distinguishing cry, fuss, and babble for infants under 14 months old. For younger children's PR, the superiority of fine-tuned SSL models is largely due to their ability to learn features that represent older children's speech and then adapt those features to the speech of younger children. For infant VC, SSL models pre-trained on large-scale home recordings learn to leverage phonetic representations at middle layers, and thereby enhance the performance of this task.

Continual learning (CL) enables models to adapt to new tasks and environments without forgetting previously learned knowledge. While current CL setups have ignored the relationship between labels in the past task and the new task with or without small task overlaps, real-world scenarios often involve hierarchical relationships between old and new tasks, posing another challenge for traditional CL approaches. To address this challenge, we propose a novel multi-level hierarchical class incremental task configuration with an online learning constraint, called hierarchical label expansion (HLE). Our configuration allows a network to first learn coarse-grained classes, with data labels continually expanding to more fine-grained classes in various hierarchy depths. To tackle this new setup, we propose a rehearsal-based method that utilizes hierarchy-aware pseudo-labeling to incorporate hierarchical class information. Additionally, we propose a simple yet effective memory management and sampling strategy that selectively adopts samples of newly encountered classes. Our experiments demonstrate that our proposed method can effectively use hierarchy on our HLE setup to improve classification accuracy across all levels of hierarchies, regardless of depth and class imbalance ratio, outperforming prior state-of-the-art works by significant margins while also outperforming them on the conventional disjoint, blurry and i-Blurry CL setups.

Memory-based meta-learning is a technique for approximating Bayes-optimal predictors. Under fairly general conditions, minimizing sequential prediction error, measured by the log loss, leads to implicit meta-learning. The goal of this work is to investigate how far this interpretation can be realized by current sequence prediction models and training regimes. The focus is on piecewise stationary sources with unobserved switching-points, which arguably capture an important characteristic of natural language and action-observation sequences in partially observable environments. We show that various types of memory-based neural models, including Transformers, LSTMs, and RNNs can learn to accurately approximate known Bayes-optimal algorithms and behave as if performing Bayesian inference over the latent switching-points and the latent parameters governing the data distribution within each segment.

Curriculum learning, a training technique where data is presented to the model in order of example difficulty (e.g., from simpler to more complex documents), has shown limited success for pre-training language models. In this work, we investigate whether curriculum learning becomes competitive if we replace conventional human-centered difficulty metrics with one that more closely corresponds to example difficulty as observed during model training. Specifically, we experiment with sorting training examples by their training data influence, a score which estimates the effect of individual training examples on the model's output. Models trained on our curricula are able to outperform ones trained in random order by over 10 percentage points in benchmarks, confirming that curriculum learning is beneficial for language model pre-training, as long as a more model-centric notion of difficulty is adopted.

We present a neural operator architecture to simulate Lagrangian dynamics, such as fluid flow, granular flows, and elastoplasticity. Traditional numerical methods, such as the finite element method (FEM), suffer from long run times and large memory consumption. On the other hand, approaches based on graph neural networks are faster but still suffer from long computation times on dense graphs, which are often required for high-fidelity simulations. Our model, GIOROM or Graph Interaction Operator for Reduced-Order Modeling, learns temporal dynamics within a reduced-order setting, capturing spatial features from a highly sparse graph representation of the input and generalizing to arbitrary spatial locations during inference. The model is geometry-aware and discretization-agnostic and can generalize to different initial conditions, velocities, and geometries after training. We show that point clouds of the order of 100,000 points can be inferred from sparse graphs with sim1000 points, with negligible change in computation time. We empirically evaluate our model on elastic solids, Newtonian fluids, Non-Newtonian fluids, Drucker-Prager granular flows, and von Mises elastoplasticity. On these benchmarks, our approach results in a 25times speedup compared to other neural network-based physics simulators while delivering high-fidelity predictions of complex physical systems and showing better performance on most benchmarks. The code and the demos are provided at https://github.com/HrishikeshVish/GIOROM.

Deep learning has achieved remarkable success in graph-related tasks, yet this accomplishment heavily relies on large-scale high-quality annotated datasets. However, acquiring such datasets can be cost-prohibitive, leading to the practical use of labels obtained from economically efficient sources such as web searches and user tags. Unfortunately, these labels often come with noise, compromising the generalization performance of deep networks. To tackle this challenge and enhance the robustness of deep learning models against label noise in graph-based tasks, we propose a method called ERASE (Error-Resilient representation learning on graphs for lAbel noiSe tolerancE). The core idea of ERASE is to learn representations with error tolerance by maximizing coding rate reduction. Particularly, we introduce a decoupled label propagation method for learning representations. Before training, noisy labels are pre-corrected through structural denoising. During training, ERASE combines prototype pseudo-labels with propagated denoised labels and updates representations with error resilience, which significantly improves the generalization performance in node classification. The proposed method allows us to more effectively withstand errors caused by mislabeled nodes, thereby strengthening the robustness of deep networks in handling noisy graph data. Extensive experimental results show that our method can outperform multiple baselines with clear margins in broad noise levels and enjoy great scalability. Codes are released at https://github.com/eraseai/erase.

PyPOTS is an open-source Python library dedicated to data mining and analysis on multivariate partially-observed time series with missing values. Particularly, it provides easy access to diverse algorithms categorized into five tasks: imputation, forecasting, anomaly detection, classification, and clustering. The included models represent a diverse set of methodological paradigms, offering a unified and well-documented interface suitable for both academic research and practical applications. With robustness and scalability in its design philosophy, best practices of software construction, for example, unit testing, continuous integration and continuous delivery, code coverage, maintainability evaluation, interactive tutorials, and parallelization, are carried out as principles during the development of PyPOTS. The toolbox is available on PyPI, Anaconda, and Docker. PyPOTS is open source and publicly available on GitHub https://github.com/WenjieDu/PyPOTS.

Large Language Models (LLMs) still struggle with the structured reasoning and tool-assisted computation needed for problem solving in cybersecurity applications. In this work, we introduce "random-crypto", a cryptographic Capture-the-Flag (CTF) challenge generator framework that we use to fine-tune a tool-augmented Llama-3.1-8B with Guided Reinforcement Prompt Optimisation (GRPO), allowing the agent to iteratively write and execute Python inside an isolated REPL. GRPO yields a +53% absolute jump in Pass@8 on unseen "random-crypto" tasks (0.35 -> 0.88) and raises Majority@8 to 0.41. The fine-tuned agent also generalizes to an external dataset. On a subset of picoCTF cryptography problems, it improves Pass@8 by +13 pp. Ablations show the gains stem from more reliable tool invocation and code synthesis, rather than superficial prompt adaptation.

While Federated Learning (FL) is gaining popularity for training machine learning models in a decentralized fashion, numerous challenges persist, such as asynchronization, computational expenses, data heterogeneity, and gradient and membership privacy attacks. Lately, dataset distillation has emerged as a promising solution for addressing the aforementioned challenges by generating a compact synthetic dataset that preserves a model's training efficacy. However, we discover that using distilled local datasets can amplify the heterogeneity issue in FL. To address this, we propose Federated Learning on Virtual Heterogeneous Data with Local-Global Dataset Distillation (FedLGD), where we seamlessly integrate dataset distillation algorithms into FL pipeline and train FL using a smaller synthetic dataset (referred as virtual data). Specifically, to harmonize the domain shifts, we propose iterative distribution matching to inpaint global information to local virtual data and use federated gradient matching to distill global virtual data that serve as anchor points to rectify heterogeneous local training, without compromising data privacy. We experiment on both benchmark and real-world datasets that contain heterogeneous data from different sources, and further scale up to an FL scenario that contains a large number of clients with heterogeneous and class-imbalanced data. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art heterogeneous FL algorithms under various settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/ubc-tea/FedLGD.

With the rapid growth of computing powers and recent advances in deep learning, we have witnessed impressive demonstrations of novel robot capabilities in research settings. Nonetheless, these learning systems exhibit brittle generalization and require excessive training data for practical tasks. To harness the capabilities of state-of-the-art robot learning models while embracing their imperfections, we present Sirius, a principled framework for humans and robots to collaborate through a division of work. In this framework, partially autonomous robots are tasked with handling a major portion of decision-making where they work reliably; meanwhile, human operators monitor the process and intervene in challenging situations. Such a human-robot team ensures safe deployments in complex tasks. Further, we introduce a new learning algorithm to improve the policy's performance on the data collected from the task executions. The core idea is re-weighing training samples with approximated human trust and optimizing the policies with weighted behavioral cloning. We evaluate Sirius in simulation and on real hardware, showing that Sirius consistently outperforms baselines over a collection of contact-rich manipulation tasks, achieving an 8% boost in simulation and 27% on real hardware than the state-of-the-art methods in policy success rate, with twice faster convergence and 85% memory size reduction. Videos and more details are available at https://ut-austin-rpl.github.io/sirius/

Investigating active learning, we focus on the relation between the number of labeled examples (budget size), and suitable querying strategies. Our theoretical analysis shows a behavior reminiscent of phase transition: typical examples are best queried when the budget is low, while unrepresentative examples are best queried when the budget is large. Combined evidence shows that a similar phenomenon occurs in common classification models. Accordingly, we propose TypiClust -- a deep active learning strategy suited for low budgets. In a comparative empirical investigation of supervised learning, using a variety of architectures and image datasets, TypiClust outperforms all other active learning strategies in the low-budget regime. Using TypiClust in the semi-supervised framework, performance gets an even more significant boost. In particular, state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods trained on CIFAR-10 with 10 labeled examples selected by TypiClust, reach 93.2% accuracy -- an improvement of 39.4% over random selection. Code is available at https://github.com/avihu111/TypiClust.

Deep learning has transformed AI applications but faces critical security challenges, including adversarial attacks, data poisoning, model theft, and privacy leakage. This survey examines these vulnerabilities, detailing their mechanisms and impact on model integrity and confidentiality. Practical implementations, including adversarial examples, label flipping, and backdoor attacks, are explored alongside defenses such as adversarial training, differential privacy, and federated learning, highlighting their strengths and limitations. Advanced methods like contrastive and self-supervised learning are presented for enhancing robustness. The survey concludes with future directions, emphasizing automated defenses, zero-trust architectures, and the security challenges of large AI models. A balanced approach to performance and security is essential for developing reliable deep learning systems.

Federated learning (FL) offers a compelling framework for training large language models (LLMs) while addressing data privacy and decentralization challenges. This paper surveys recent advancements in the federated learning of large language models, with a particular focus on machine unlearning, a crucial aspect for complying with privacy regulations like the Right to be Forgotten. Machine unlearning in the context of federated LLMs involves systematically and securely removing individual data contributions from the learned model without retraining from scratch. We explore various strategies that enable effective unlearning, such as perturbation techniques, model decomposition, and incremental learning, highlighting their implications for maintaining model performance and data privacy. Furthermore, we examine case studies and experimental results from recent literature to assess the effectiveness and efficiency of these approaches in real-world scenarios. Our survey reveals a growing interest in developing more robust and scalable federated unlearning methods, suggesting a vital area for future research in the intersection of AI ethics and distributed machine learning technologies.

Compartmentalization effectively prevents initial corruption from turning into a successful attack. This paper presents O2C, a pioneering system designed to enforce OS kernel compartmentalization on the fly. It not only provides immediate remediation for sudden threats but also maintains consistent system availability through the enforcement process. O2C is empowered by the newest advancements of the eBPF ecosystem which allows to instrument eBPF programs that perform enforcement actions into the kernel at runtime. O2C takes the lead in embedding a machine learning model into eBPF programs, addressing unique challenges in on-the-fly compartmentalization. Our comprehensive evaluation shows that O2C effectively confines damage within the compartment. Further, we validate that decision tree is optimally suited for O2C owing to its advantages in processing tabular data, its explainable nature, and its compliance with the eBPF ecosystem. Last but not least, O2C is lightweight, showing negligible overhead and excellent sacalability system-wide.

Rapid detection and well-timed intervention are essential to mitigate the impacts of wildfires. Leveraging remote sensed data from satellite networks and advanced AI models to automatically detect hotspots (i.e., thermal anomalies caused by active fires) is an effective way to build wildfire monitoring systems. In this work, we propose a novel dataset containing time series of remotely sensed data related to European fire events and a Self-Supervised Learning (SSL)-based model able to analyse multi-temporal data and identify hotspots in potentially near real time. We train and evaluate the performance of our model using our dataset and Thraws, a dataset of thermal anomalies including several fire events, obtaining an F1 score of 63.58.

Recent advancements in Chain of Thought (COT) generation have significantly improved the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), with reinforcement learning (RL) emerging as an effective post-training approach. Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) inherit this reasoning potential but remain underexplored in tasks requiring both perception and logical reasoning. To address this, we introduce SEED-Bench-R1, a benchmark designed to systematically evaluate post-training methods for MLLMs in video understanding. It includes intricate real-world videos and complex everyday planning tasks in the format of multiple-choice questions, requiring sophisticated perception and reasoning. SEED-Bench-R1 assesses generalization through a three-level hierarchy: in-distribution, cross-environment, and cross-environment-task scenarios, equipped with a large-scale training dataset with easily verifiable ground-truth answers. Using Qwen2-VL-Instruct-7B as a base model, we compare RL with supervised fine-tuning (SFT), demonstrating RL's data efficiency and superior performance on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution tasks, even outperforming SFT on general video understanding benchmarks like LongVideoBench. Our detailed analysis reveals that RL enhances visual perception but often produces less logically coherent reasoning chains. We identify key limitations such as inconsistent reasoning and overlooked visual cues, and suggest future improvements in base model reasoning, reward modeling, and RL robustness against noisy signals.

Prompt learning is a new paradigm in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) field which has shown impressive performance on a number of natural language tasks with common benchmarking text datasets in full, few-shot, and zero-shot train-evaluation setups. Recently, it has even been observed that large but frozen pre-trained language models (PLMs) with prompt learning outperform smaller but fine-tuned models. However, as with many recent NLP trends, the performance of even the largest PLMs such as GPT-3 do not perform well on specialized domains (e.g. medical text), and the common practice to achieve State of the Art (SoTA) results still consists of pre-training and fine-tuning the PLMs on downstream tasks. The reliance on fine-tuning large PLMs is problematic in clinical settings where data is often held in non-GPU environments, and more resource efficient methods of training specialized domain models is crucial. We investigated the viability of prompt learning on clinically meaningful decision tasks and directly compared with more traditional fine-tuning methods. Results are partially in line with the prompt learning literature, with prompt learning able to match or improve on traditional fine-tuning with substantially fewer trainable parameters and requiring less training data. We argue that prompt learning therefore provides lower computational resource costs applicable to clinical settings, that can serve as an alternative to fine-tuning ever increasing in size PLMs. Complementary code to reproduce experiments presented in this work can be found at: https://github.com/NtaylorOX/Public_Clinical_Prompt.

Several recent works have shown how highly realistic human head images can be obtained by training convolutional neural networks to generate them. In order to create a personalized talking head model, these works require training on a large dataset of images of a single person. However, in many practical scenarios, such personalized talking head models need to be learned from a few image views of a person, potentially even a single image. Here, we present a system with such few-shot capability. It performs lengthy meta-learning on a large dataset of videos, and after that is able to frame few- and one-shot learning of neural talking head models of previously unseen people as adversarial training problems with high capacity generators and discriminators. Crucially, the system is able to initialize the parameters of both the generator and the discriminator in a person-specific way, so that training can be based on just a few images and done quickly, despite the need to tune tens of millions of parameters. We show that such an approach is able to learn highly realistic and personalized talking head models of new people and even portrait paintings.

Cross-device Federated Learning (FL) faces significant challenges where low-end clients that could potentially make unique contributions are excluded from training large models due to their resource bottlenecks. Recent research efforts have focused on model-heterogeneous FL, by extracting reduced-size models from the global model and applying them to local clients accordingly. Despite the empirical success, general theoretical guarantees of convergence on this method remain an open question. This paper presents a unifying framework for heterogeneous FL algorithms with online model extraction and provides a general convergence analysis for the first time. In particular, we prove that under certain sufficient conditions and for both IID and non-IID data, these algorithms converge to a stationary point of standard FL for general smooth cost functions. Moreover, we introduce the concept of minimum coverage index, together with model reduction noise, which will determine the convergence of heterogeneous federated learning, and therefore we advocate for a holistic approach that considers both factors to enhance the efficiency of heterogeneous federated learning.

Federated learning aims to protect users' privacy while performing data analysis from different participants. However, it is challenging to guarantee the training efficiency on heterogeneous systems due to the various computational capabilities and communication bottlenecks. In this work, we propose FedSkel to enable computation-efficient and communication-efficient federated learning on edge devices by only updating the model's essential parts, named skeleton networks. FedSkel is evaluated on real edge devices with imbalanced datasets. Experimental results show that it could achieve up to 5.52times speedups for CONV layers' back-propagation, 1.82times speedups for the whole training process, and reduce 64.8% communication cost, with negligible accuracy loss.

With the growing applications of Deep Learning (DL), especially recent spectacular achievements of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and LLaMA, the commercial significance of these remarkable models has soared. However, acquiring well-trained models is costly and resource-intensive. It requires a considerable high-quality dataset, substantial investment in dedicated architecture design, expensive computational resources, and efforts to develop technical expertise. Consequently, safeguarding the Intellectual Property (IP) of well-trained models is attracting increasing attention. In contrast to existing surveys overwhelmingly focusing on model IPP mainly, this survey not only encompasses the protection on model level intelligence but also valuable dataset intelligence. Firstly, according to the requirements for effective IPP design, this work systematically summarizes the general and scheme-specific performance evaluation metrics. Secondly, from proactive IP infringement prevention and reactive IP ownership verification perspectives, it comprehensively investigates and analyzes the existing IPP methods for both dataset and model intelligence. Additionally, from the standpoint of training settings, it delves into the unique challenges that distributed settings pose to IPP compared to centralized settings. Furthermore, this work examines various attacks faced by deep IPP techniques. Finally, we outline prospects for promising future directions that may act as a guide for innovative research.

Learning the distribution of data on Riemannian manifolds is crucial for modeling data from non-Euclidean space, which is required by many applications in diverse scientific fields. Yet, existing generative models on manifolds suffer from expensive divergence computation or rely on approximations of heat kernel. These limitations restrict their applicability to simple geometries and hinder scalability to high dimensions. In this work, we introduce the Riemannian Diffusion Mixture, a principled framework for building a generative diffusion process on manifolds. Instead of following the denoising approach of previous diffusion models, we construct a diffusion process using a mixture of bridge processes derived on general manifolds without requiring heat kernel estimations. We develop a geometric understanding of the mixture process, deriving the drift as a weighted mean of tangent directions to the data points that guides the process toward the data distribution. We further propose a scalable training objective for learning the mixture process that readily applies to general manifolds. Our method achieves superior performance on diverse manifolds with dramatically reduced number of in-training simulation steps for general manifolds.

Graph neural networks (GNNs), in general, are built on the assumption of a static set of features characterizing each node in a graph. This assumption is often violated in practice. Existing methods partly address this issue through feature imputation. However, these techniques (i) assume uniformity of feature set across nodes, (ii) are transductive by nature, and (iii) fail to work when features are added or removed over time. In this work, we address these limitations through a novel GNN framework called GRAFENNE. GRAFENNE performs a novel allotropic transformation on the original graph, wherein the nodes and features are decoupled through a bipartite encoding. Through a carefully chosen message passing framework on the allotropic transformation, we make the model parameter size independent of the number of features and thereby inductive to both unseen nodes and features. We prove that GRAFENNE is at least as expressive as any of the existing message-passing GNNs in terms of Weisfeiler-Leman tests, and therefore, the additional inductivity to unseen features does not come at the cost of expressivity. In addition, as demonstrated over four real-world graphs, GRAFENNE empowers the underlying GNN with high empirical efficacy and the ability to learn in continual fashion over streaming feature sets.

Differential privacy (DP) is a popular mechanism for training machine learning models with bounded leakage about the presence of specific points in the training data. The cost of differential privacy is a reduction in the model's accuracy. We demonstrate that in the neural networks trained using differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD), this cost is not borne equally: accuracy of DP models drops much more for the underrepresented classes and subgroups. For example, a gender classification model trained using DP-SGD exhibits much lower accuracy for black faces than for white faces. Critically, this gap is bigger in the DP model than in the non-DP model, i.e., if the original model is unfair, the unfairness becomes worse once DP is applied. We demonstrate this effect for a variety of tasks and models, including sentiment analysis of text and image classification. We then explain why DP training mechanisms such as gradient clipping and noise addition have disproportionate effect on the underrepresented and more complex subgroups, resulting in a disparate reduction of model accuracy.

The recent DeepSeek-R1 release has demonstrated the immense potential of reinforcement learning (RL) in enhancing the general reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). While DeepSeek-R1 and other follow-up work primarily focus on applying RL to competitive coding and math problems, this paper introduces SWE-RL, the first approach to scale RL-based LLM reasoning for real-world software engineering. Leveraging a lightweight rule-based reward (e.g., the similarity score between ground-truth and LLM-generated solutions), SWE-RL enables LLMs to autonomously recover a developer's reasoning processes and solutions by learning from extensive open-source software evolution data -- the record of a software's entire lifecycle, including its code snapshots, code changes, and events such as issues and pull requests. Trained on top of Llama 3, our resulting reasoning model, Llama3-SWE-RL-70B, achieves a 41.0% solve rate on SWE-bench Verified -- a human-verified collection of real-world GitHub issues. To our knowledge, this is the best performance reported for medium-sized (<100B) LLMs to date, even comparable to leading proprietary LLMs like GPT-4o. Surprisingly, despite performing RL solely on software evolution data, Llama3-SWE-RL has even emerged with generalized reasoning skills. For example, it shows improved results on five out-of-domain tasks, namely, function coding, library use, code reasoning, mathematics, and general language understanding, whereas a supervised-finetuning baseline even leads to performance degradation on average. Overall, SWE-RL opens up a new direction to improve the reasoning capabilities of LLMs through reinforcement learning on massive software engineering data.

We present RelBench, a public benchmark for solving predictive tasks over relational databases with graph neural networks. RelBench provides databases and tasks spanning diverse domains and scales, and is intended to be a foundational infrastructure for future research. We use RelBench to conduct the first comprehensive study of Relational Deep Learning (RDL) (Fey et al., 2024), which combines graph neural network predictive models with (deep) tabular models that extract initial entity-level representations from raw tables. End-to-end learned RDL models fully exploit the predictive signal encoded in primary-foreign key links, marking a significant shift away from the dominant paradigm of manual feature engineering combined with tabular models. To thoroughly evaluate RDL against this prior gold-standard, we conduct an in-depth user study where an experienced data scientist manually engineers features for each task. In this study, RDL learns better models whilst reducing human work needed by more than an order of magnitude. This demonstrates the power of deep learning for solving predictive tasks over relational databases, opening up many new research opportunities enabled by RelBench.

Much of the world's most valued data is stored in relational databases and data warehouses, where the data is organized into many tables connected by primary-foreign key relations. However, building machine learning models using this data is both challenging and time consuming. The core problem is that no machine learning method is capable of learning on multiple tables interconnected by primary-foreign key relations. Current methods can only learn from a single table, so the data must first be manually joined and aggregated into a single training table, the process known as feature engineering. Feature engineering is slow, error prone and leads to suboptimal models. Here we introduce an end-to-end deep representation learning approach to directly learn on data laid out across multiple tables. We name our approach Relational Deep Learning (RDL). The core idea is to view relational databases as a temporal, heterogeneous graph, with a node for each row in each table, and edges specified by primary-foreign key links. Message Passing Graph Neural Networks can then automatically learn across the graph to extract representations that leverage all input data, without any manual feature engineering. Relational Deep Learning leads to more accurate models that can be built much faster. To facilitate research in this area, we develop RelBench, a set of benchmark datasets and an implementation of Relational Deep Learning. The data covers a wide spectrum, from discussions on Stack Exchange to book reviews on the Amazon Product Catalog. Overall, we define a new research area that generalizes graph machine learning and broadens its applicability to a wide set of AI use cases.

While large language models based on the transformer architecture have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, understandings of such capabilities are still in an early stage, where existing theory and mechanistic understanding focus mostly on simple scenarios such as learning simple function classes. This paper takes initial steps on understanding ICL in more complex scenarios, by studying learning with representations. Concretely, we construct synthetic in-context learning problems with a compositional structure, where the label depends on the input through a possibly complex but fixed representation function, composed with a linear function that differs in each instance. By construction, the optimal ICL algorithm first transforms the inputs by the representation function, and then performs linear ICL on top of the transformed dataset. We show theoretically the existence of transformers that approximately implement such algorithms with mild depth and size. Empirically, we find trained transformers consistently achieve near-optimal ICL performance in this setting, and exhibit the desired dissection where lower layers transforms the dataset and upper layers perform linear ICL. Through extensive probing and a new pasting experiment, we further reveal several mechanisms within the trained transformers, such as concrete copying behaviors on both the inputs and the representations, linear ICL capability of the upper layers alone, and a post-ICL representation selection mechanism in a harder mixture setting. These observed mechanisms align well with our theory and may shed light on how transformers perform ICL in more realistic scenarios.

In this paper, we address the problem of generalized category discovery (GCD), \ie, given a set of images where part of them are labelled and the rest are not, the task is to automatically cluster the images in the unlabelled data, leveraging the information from the labelled data, while the unlabelled data contain images from the labelled classes and also new ones. GCD is similar to semi-supervised learning (SSL) but is more realistic and challenging, as SSL assumes all the unlabelled images are from the same classes as the labelled ones. We also do not assume the class number in the unlabelled data is known a-priori, making the GCD problem even harder. To tackle the problem of GCD without knowing the class number, we propose an EM-like framework that alternates between representation learning and class number estimation. We propose a semi-supervised variant of the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) with a stochastic splitting and merging mechanism to dynamically determine the prototypes by examining the cluster compactness and separability. With these prototypes, we leverage prototypical contrastive learning for representation learning on the partially labelled data subject to the constraints imposed by the labelled data. Our framework alternates between these two steps until convergence. The cluster assignment for an unlabelled instance can then be retrieved by identifying its nearest prototype. We comprehensively evaluate our framework on both generic image classification datasets and challenging fine-grained object recognition datasets, achieving state-of-the-art performance.

Mobile and embedded machine learning developers frequently have to compromise between two inferior on-device deployment strategies: sacrifice accuracy and aggressively shrink their models to run on dedicated low-power cores; or sacrifice battery by running larger models on more powerful compute cores such as neural processing units or the main application processor. In this paper, we propose a novel Gated Compression layer that can be applied to transform existing neural network architectures into Gated Neural Networks. Gated Neural Networks have multiple properties that excel for on-device use cases that help significantly reduce power, boost accuracy, and take advantage of heterogeneous compute cores. We provide results across five public image and audio datasets that demonstrate the proposed Gated Compression layer effectively stops up to 96% of negative samples, compresses 97% of positive samples, while maintaining or improving model accuracy.

In recent years, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have made significant advances in processing structured data. However, most of them primarily adopted a model-centric approach, which simplifies graphs by converting them into undirected formats and emphasizes model designs. This approach is inherently limited in real-world applications due to the unavoidable information loss in simple undirected graphs and the model optimization challenges that arise when exceeding the upper bounds of this sub-optimal data representational capacity. As a result, there has been a shift toward data-centric methods that prioritize improving graph quality and representation. Specifically, various types of graphs can be derived from naturally structured data, including heterogeneous graphs, hypergraphs, and directed graphs. Among these, directed graphs offer distinct advantages in topological systems by modeling causal relationships, and directed GNNs have been extensively studied in recent years. However, a comprehensive survey of this emerging topic is still lacking. Therefore, we aim to provide a comprehensive review of directed graph learning, with a particular focus on a data-centric perspective. Specifically, we first introduce a novel taxonomy for existing studies. Subsequently, we re-examine these methods from the data-centric perspective, with an emphasis on understanding and improving data representation. It demonstrates that a deep understanding of directed graphs and their quality plays a crucial role in model performance. Additionally, we explore the diverse applications of directed GNNs across 10+ domains, highlighting their broad applicability. Finally, we identify key opportunities and challenges within the field, offering insights that can guide future research and development in directed graph learning.

Large Language Model (LLM) Agents have recently garnered increasing interest yet they are limited in their ability to learn from trial and error, a key element of intelligent behavior. In this work, we argue that the capacity to learn new actions from experience is fundamental to the advancement of learning in LLM agents. While humans naturally expand their action spaces and develop skills through experiential learning, LLM agents typically operate within fixed action spaces, limiting their potential for growth. To address these challenges, our study explores open-action learning for language agents. We introduce a framework LearnAct with an iterative learning strategy to create and improve actions in the form of Python functions. In each iteration, LLM revises and updates the currently available actions based on the errors identified in unsuccessful training tasks, thereby enhancing action effectiveness. Our experimental evaluations across Robotic Planning and Alfworld environments reveal that after learning on a few training task instances, our approach to open-action learning markedly improves agent performance for the type of task (by 32 percent in AlfWorld compared to ReAct+Reflexion, for instance) highlighting the importance of experiential action learning in the development of more intelligent LLM agents.

VQA is an ambitious task aiming to answer any image-related question. However, in reality, it is hard to build such a system once for all since the needs of users are continuously updated, and the system has to implement new functions. Thus, Continual Learning (CL) ability is a must in developing advanced VQA systems. Recently, a pioneer work split a VQA dataset into disjoint answer sets to study this topic. However, CL on VQA involves not only the expansion of label sets (new Answer sets). It is crucial to study how to answer questions when deploying VQA systems to new environments (new Visual scenes) and how to answer questions requiring new functions (new Question types). Thus, we propose CLOVE, a benchmark for Continual Learning On Visual quEstion answering, which contains scene- and function-incremental settings for the two aforementioned CL scenarios. In terms of methodology, the main difference between CL on VQA and classification is that the former additionally involves expanding and preventing forgetting of reasoning mechanisms, while the latter focusing on class representation. Thus, we propose a real-data-free replay-based method tailored for CL on VQA, named Scene Graph as Prompt for Symbolic Replay. Using a piece of scene graph as a prompt, it replays pseudo scene graphs to represent the past images, along with correlated QA pairs. A unified VQA model is also proposed to utilize the current and replayed data to enhance its QA ability. Finally, experimental results reveal challenges in CLOVE and demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. The dataset and code will be available at https://github.com/showlab/CLVQA.

Recent success in deep learning has partially been driven by training increasingly overparametrized networks on ever larger datasets. It is therefore natural to ask: how much of the data is superfluous, which examples are important for generalization, and how do we find them? In this work, we make the striking observation that, in standard vision datasets, simple scores averaged over several weight initializations can be used to identify important examples very early in training. We propose two such scores -- the Gradient Normed (GraNd) and the Error L2-Norm (EL2N) scores -- and demonstrate their efficacy on a range of architectures and datasets by pruning significant fractions of training data without sacrificing test accuracy. In fact, using EL2N scores calculated a few epochs into training, we can prune half of the CIFAR10 training set while slightly improving test accuracy. Furthermore, for a given dataset, EL2N scores from one architecture or hyperparameter configuration generalize to other configurations. Compared to recent work that prunes data by discarding examples that are rarely forgotten over the course of training, our scores use only local information early in training. We also use our scores to detect noisy examples and study training dynamics through the lens of important examples -- we investigate how the data distribution shapes the loss surface and identify subspaces of the model's data representation that are relatively stable over training.

Video diffusion models has been gaining increasing attention for its ability to produce videos that are both coherent and of high fidelity. However, the iterative denoising process makes it computationally intensive and time-consuming, thus limiting its applications. Inspired by the Consistency Model (CM) that distills pretrained image diffusion models to accelerate the sampling with minimal steps and its successful extension Latent Consistency Model (LCM) on conditional image generation, we propose AnimateLCM, allowing for high-fidelity video generation within minimal steps. Instead of directly conducting consistency learning on the raw video dataset, we propose a decoupled consistency learning strategy that decouples the distillation of image generation priors and motion generation priors, which improves the training efficiency and enhance the generation visual quality. Additionally, to enable the combination of plug-and-play adapters in stable diffusion community to achieve various functions (e.g., ControlNet for controllable generation). we propose an efficient strategy to adapt existing adapters to our distilled text-conditioned video consistency model or train adapters from scratch without harming the sampling speed. We validate the proposed strategy in image-conditioned video generation and layout-conditioned video generation, all achieving top-performing results. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Code and weights will be made public. More details are available at https://github.com/G-U-N/AnimateLCM.

Reinforcement Learning Finetuning (RFT) has significantly advanced the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by enabling long chains of thought, self-correction, and effective tool use. While recent works attempt to extend RFT to vision-language models (VLMs), these efforts largely produce text-only reasoning conditioned on static image inputs, falling short of true multimodal reasoning in the response. In contrast, test-time methods like Visual Sketchpad incorporate visual steps but lack training mechanisms. We introduce VTool-R1, the first framework that trains VLMs to generate multimodal chains of thought by interleaving text and intermediate visual reasoning steps. VTool-R1 integrates Python-based visual editing tools into the RFT process, enabling VLMs to learn when and how to generate visual reasoning steps that benefit final reasoning. Trained with outcome-based rewards tied to task accuracy, our approach elicits strategic visual tool use for reasoning without relying on process-based supervision. Experiments on structured visual question answering over charts and tables show that VTool-R1 enhances reasoning performance by teaching VLMs to "think with images" and generate multimodal chain of thoughts with tools.

Enabling On-Device Learning (ODL) for Ultra-Low-Power Micro-Controller Units (MCUs) is a key step for post-deployment adaptation and fine-tuning of Deep Neural Network (DNN) models in future TinyML applications. This paper tackles this challenge by introducing a novel reduced precision optimization technique for ODL primitives on MCU-class devices, leveraging the State-of-Art advancements in RISC-V RV32 architectures with support for vectorized 16-bit floating-point (FP16) Single-Instruction Multiple-Data (SIMD) operations. Our approach for the Forward and Backward steps of the Back-Propagation training algorithm is composed of specialized shape transform operators and Matrix Multiplication (MM) kernels, accelerated with parallelization and loop unrolling. When evaluated on a single training step of a 2D Convolution layer, the SIMD-optimized FP16 primitives result up to 1.72times faster than the FP32 baseline on a RISC-V-based 8+1-core MCU. An average computing efficiency of 3.11 Multiply and Accumulate operations per clock cycle (MAC/clk) and 0.81 MAC/clk is measured for the end-to-end training tasks of a ResNet8 and a DS-CNN for Image Classification and Keyword Spotting, respectively -- requiring 17.1 ms and 6.4 ms on the target platform to compute a training step on a single sample. Overall, our approach results more than two orders of magnitude faster than existing ODL software frameworks for single-core MCUs and outperforms by 1.6 times previous FP32 parallel implementations on a Continual Learning setup.

Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) systems have been shown to efficiently build good models for new datasets. However, it is often not clear how well they can adapt when the data evolves over time. The main goal of this study is to understand the effect of data stream challenges such as concept drift on the performance of AutoML methods, and which adaptation strategies can be employed to make them more robust. To that end, we propose 6 concept drift adaptation strategies and evaluate their effectiveness on different AutoML approaches. We do this for a variety of AutoML approaches for building machine learning pipelines, including those that leverage Bayesian optimization, genetic programming, and random search with automated stacking. These are evaluated empirically on real-world and synthetic data streams with different types of concept drift. Based on this analysis, we propose ways to develop more sophisticated and robust AutoML techniques.

Dynamic graph learning methods have recently emerged as powerful tools for modelling relational data evolving through time. However, despite extensive benchmarking efforts, it remains unclear whether current Temporal Graph Neural Networks (TGNNs) effectively capture core temporal patterns such as periodicity, cause-and-effect, and long-range dependencies. In this work, we introduce the Temporal Graph Reasoning Benchmark (T-GRAB), a comprehensive set of synthetic tasks designed to systematically probe the capabilities of TGNNs to reason across time. T-GRAB provides controlled, interpretable tasks that isolate key temporal skills: counting/memorizing periodic repetitions, inferring delayed causal effects, and capturing long-range dependencies over both spatial and temporal dimensions. We evaluate 11 temporal graph learning methods on these tasks, revealing fundamental shortcomings in their ability to generalize temporal patterns. Our findings offer actionable insights into the limitations of current models, highlight challenges hidden by traditional real-world benchmarks, and motivate the development of architectures with stronger temporal reasoning abilities. The code for T-GRAB can be found at: https://github.com/alirezadizaji/T-GRAB.

We study the process through which reasoning models trained with reinforcement learning on verifiable rewards (RLVR) can learn to solve new problems. We find that RLVR drives performance in two main ways: (1) by compressing pass@k into pass@1 and (2) via "capability gain" in which models learn to solve new problems that they previously could not solve even at high k. We find that while capability gain exists across model scales, learning to solve new problems is primarily driven through self-distillation. We demonstrate these findings across model scales ranging from 0.5B to 72B parameters on >500,000 reasoning problems with prompts and verifiable final answers across math, science, and code domains. We further show that we can significantly improve pass@k rates by leveraging natural language guidance for the model to consider within context while still requiring the model to derive a solution chain from scratch. Based of these insights, we derive Guide -- a new class of online training algorithms. Guide adaptively incorporates hints into the model's context on problems for which all rollouts were initially incorrect and adjusts the importance sampling ratio for the "off-policy" trajectories in order to optimize the policy for contexts in which the hints are no longer present. We describe variants of Guide for GRPO and PPO and empirically show that Guide-GRPO on 7B and 32B parameter models improves generalization over its vanilla counterpart with up to 4% macro-average improvement across math benchmarks. We include careful ablations to analyze Guide's components and theoretically analyze Guide's learning efficiency.

Virtual try-on (VTON) transfers a target clothing image to a reference person, where clothing fidelity is a key requirement for downstream e-commerce applications. However, existing VTON methods still fall short in high-fidelity try-on due to the conflict between the high diversity of dressing styles (\eg clothes occluded by pants or distorted by posture) and the limited paired data for training. In this work, we propose a novel framework Boosted Virtual Try-on (BVTON) to leverage the large-scale unpaired learning for high-fidelity try-on. Our key insight is that pseudo try-on pairs can be reliably constructed from vastly available fashion images. Specifically, 1) we first propose a compositional canonicalizing flow that maps on-model clothes into pseudo in-shop clothes, dubbed canonical proxy. Each clothing part (sleeves, torso) is reversely deformed into an in-shop-like shape to compositionally construct the canonical proxy. 2) Next, we design a layered mask generation module that generates accurate semantic layout by training on canonical proxy. We replace the in-shop clothes used in conventional pipelines with the derived canonical proxy to boost the training process. 3) Finally, we propose an unpaired try-on synthesizer by constructing pseudo training pairs with randomly misaligned on-model clothes, where intricate skin texture and clothes boundaries can be generated. Extensive experiments on high-resolution (1024times768) datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach over state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively. Notably, BVTON shows great generalizability and scalability to various dressing styles and data sources.

Automated detection of defects in Printed Circuit Board (PCB) manufacturing using Solder Paste Inspection (SPI) and Automated Optical Inspection (AOI) machines can help improve operational efficiency and significantly reduce the need for manual intervention. In this paper, using SPI-extracted features of 6 million pins, we demonstrate a data-centric approach to train Machine Learning (ML) models to detect PCB defects at three stages of PCB manufacturing. The 6 million PCB pins correspond to 2 million components that belong to 15,387 PCBs. Using a base extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) ML model, we iterate on the data pre-processing step to improve detection performance. Combining pin-level SPI features using component and PCB IDs, we developed training instances also at the component and PCB level. This allows the ML model to capture any inter-pin, inter-component, or spatial effects that may not be apparent at the pin level. Models are trained at the pin, component, and PCB levels, and the detection results from the different models are combined to identify defective components.

We consider a project (model) owner that would like to train a model by utilizing the local private data and compute power of interested data owners, i.e., trainers. Our goal is to design a data marketplace for such decentralized collaborative/federated learning applications that simultaneously provides i) proof-of-contribution based reward allocation so that the trainers are compensated based on their contributions to the trained model; ii) privacy-preserving decentralized model training by avoiding any data movement from data owners; iii) robustness against malicious parties (e.g., trainers aiming to poison the model); iv) verifiability in the sense that the integrity, i.e., correctness, of all computations in the data market protocol including contribution assessment and outlier detection are verifiable through zero-knowledge proofs; and v) efficient and universal design. We propose a blockchain-based marketplace design to achieve all five objectives mentioned above. In our design, we utilize a distributed storage infrastructure and an aggregator aside from the project owner and the trainers. The aggregator is a processing node that performs certain computations, including assessing trainer contributions, removing outliers, and updating hyper-parameters. We execute the proposed data market through a blockchain smart contract. The deployed smart contract ensures that the project owner cannot evade payment, and honest trainers are rewarded based on their contributions at the end of training. Finally, we implement the building blocks of the proposed data market and demonstrate their applicability in practical scenarios through extensive experiments.

Secure Aggregation protocols allow a collection of mutually distrust parties, each holding a private value, to collaboratively compute the sum of those values without revealing the values themselves. We consider training a deep neural network in the Federated Learning model, using distributed stochastic gradient descent across user-held training data on mobile devices, wherein Secure Aggregation protects each user's model gradient. We design a novel, communication-efficient Secure Aggregation protocol for high-dimensional data that tolerates up to 1/3 users failing to complete the protocol. For 16-bit input values, our protocol offers 1.73x communication expansion for 2^{10} users and 2^{20}-dimensional vectors, and 1.98x expansion for 2^{14} users and 2^{24} dimensional vectors.

We introduce RIPE, an innovative reinforcement learning-based framework for weakly-supervised training of a keypoint extractor that excels in both detection and description tasks. In contrast to conventional training regimes that depend heavily on artificial transformations, pre-generated models, or 3D data, RIPE requires only a binary label indicating whether paired images represent the same scene. This minimal supervision significantly expands the pool of training data, enabling the creation of a highly generalized and robust keypoint extractor. RIPE utilizes the encoder's intermediate layers for the description of the keypoints with a hyper-column approach to integrate information from different scales. Additionally, we propose an auxiliary loss to enhance the discriminative capability of the learned descriptors. Comprehensive evaluations on standard benchmarks demonstrate that RIPE simplifies data preparation while achieving competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art techniques, marking a significant advancement in robust keypoint extraction and description. To support further research, we have made our code publicly available at https://github.com/fraunhoferhhi/RIPE.

Recent advances of reasoning models, exemplified by OpenAI's o1 and DeepSeek's R1, highlight the significant potential of Reinforcement Learning (RL) to enhance the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, replicating these advancements across diverse domains remains challenging due to limited methodological transparency. In this work, we present two-Staged history-Resampling Policy Optimization (SRPO), which successfully surpasses the performance of DeepSeek-R1-Zero-32B on the AIME24 and LiveCodeBench benchmarks. SRPO achieves this using the same base model as DeepSeek (i.e. Qwen2.5-32B) and relies solely on RL, without prior Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). Building upon Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), we introduce two key methodological innovations: (1) a two-stage cross-domain training paradigm designed to balance the development of mathematical reasoning and coding proficiency, and (2) History Resampling (HR), a technique to address ineffective samples. Our comprehensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our approach, dedicating to offer valuable insights into scaling LLM reasoning capabilities across diverse tasks.

Language models for biological and chemical sequences enable crucial applications such as drug discovery, protein engineering, and precision medicine. Currently, these language models are predominantly based on Transformer architectures. While Transformers have yielded impressive results, their quadratic runtime dependency on the sequence length complicates their use for long genomic sequences and in-context learning on proteins and chemical sequences. Recently, the recurrent xLSTM architecture has been shown to perform favorably compared to Transformers and modern state-space model (SSM) architectures in the natural language domain. Similar to SSMs, xLSTMs have a linear runtime dependency on the sequence length and allow for constant-memory decoding at inference time, which makes them prime candidates for modeling long-range dependencies in biological and chemical sequences. In this work, we tailor xLSTM towards these domains and propose a suite of architectural variants called Bio-xLSTM. Extensive experiments in three large domains, genomics, proteins, and chemistry, were performed to assess xLSTM's ability to model biological and chemical sequences. The results show that models based on Bio-xLSTM a) can serve as proficient generative models for DNA, protein, and chemical sequences, b) learn rich representations for those modalities, and c) can perform in-context learning for proteins and small molecules.

Federated learning has exhibited vulnerabilities to Byzantine attacks, where the Byzantine attackers can send arbitrary gradients to a central server to destroy the convergence and performance of the global model. A wealth of robust AGgregation Rules (AGRs) have been proposed to defend against Byzantine attacks. However, Byzantine clients can still circumvent robust AGRs when data is non-Identically and Independently Distributed (non-IID). In this paper, we first reveal the root causes of performance degradation of current robust AGRs in non-IID settings: the curse of dimensionality and gradient heterogeneity. In order to address this issue, we propose GAS, a \shorten approach that can successfully adapt existing robust AGRs to non-IID settings. We also provide a detailed convergence analysis when the existing robust AGRs are combined with GAS. Experiments on various real-world datasets verify the efficacy of our proposed GAS. The implementation code is provided in https://github.com/YuchenLiu-a/byzantine-gas.

Pre-training by numerous image data has become de-facto for robust 2D representations. In contrast, due to the expensive data acquisition and annotation, a paucity of large-scale 3D datasets severely hinders the learning for high-quality 3D features. In this paper, we propose an alternative to obtain superior 3D representations from 2D pre-trained models via Image-to-Point Masked Autoencoders, named as I2P-MAE. By self-supervised pre-training, we leverage the well learned 2D knowledge to guide 3D masked autoencoding, which reconstructs the masked point tokens with an encoder-decoder architecture. Specifically, we first utilize off-the-shelf 2D models to extract the multi-view visual features of the input point cloud, and then conduct two types of image-to-point learning schemes on top. For one, we introduce a 2D-guided masking strategy that maintains semantically important point tokens to be visible for the encoder. Compared to random masking, the network can better concentrate on significant 3D structures and recover the masked tokens from key spatial cues. For another, we enforce these visible tokens to reconstruct the corresponding multi-view 2D features after the decoder. This enables the network to effectively inherit high-level 2D semantics learned from rich image data for discriminative 3D modeling. Aided by our image-to-point pre-training, the frozen I2P-MAE, without any fine-tuning, achieves 93.4% accuracy for linear SVM on ModelNet40, competitive to the fully trained results of existing methods. By further fine-tuning on on ScanObjectNN's hardest split, I2P-MAE attains the state-of-the-art 90.11% accuracy, +3.68% to the second-best, demonstrating superior transferable capacity. Code will be available at https://github.com/ZrrSkywalker/I2P-MAE.

Computational pathology can lead to saving human lives, but models are annotation hungry and pathology images are notoriously expensive to annotate. Self-supervised learning has shown to be an effective method for utilizing unlabeled data, and its application to pathology could greatly benefit its downstream tasks. Yet, there are no principled studies that compare SSL methods and discuss how to adapt them for pathology. To address this need, we execute the largest-scale study of SSL pre-training on pathology image data, to date. Our study is conducted using 4 representative SSL methods on diverse downstream tasks. We establish that large-scale domain-aligned pre-training in pathology consistently out-performs ImageNet pre-training in standard SSL settings such as linear and fine-tuning evaluations, as well as in low-label regimes. Moreover, we propose a set of domain-specific techniques that we experimentally show leads to a performance boost. Lastly, for the first time, we apply SSL to the challenging task of nuclei instance segmentation and show large and consistent performance improvements under diverse settings.

Federated Learning (FL) is a way for machines to learn from data that is kept locally, in order to protect the privacy of clients. This is typically done using local SGD, which helps to improve communication efficiency. However, such a scheme is currently constrained by slow and unstable convergence due to the variety of data on different clients' devices. In this work, we identify three under-explored phenomena of biased local learning that may explain these challenges caused by local updates in supervised FL. As a remedy, we propose FedBR, a novel unified algorithm that reduces the local learning bias on features and classifiers to tackle these challenges. FedBR has two components. The first component helps to reduce bias in local classifiers by balancing the output of the models. The second component helps to learn local features that are similar to global features, but different from those learned from other data sources. We conducted several experiments to test \algopt and found that it consistently outperforms other SOTA FL methods. Both of its components also individually show performance gains. Our code is available at https://github.com/lins-lab/fedbr.

Enabling effective and efficient machine learning (ML) over large-scale graph data (e.g., graphs with billions of edges) can have a great impact on both industrial and scientific applications. However, existing efforts to advance large-scale graph ML have been largely limited by the lack of a suitable public benchmark. Here we present OGB Large-Scale Challenge (OGB-LSC), a collection of three real-world datasets for facilitating the advancements in large-scale graph ML. The OGB-LSC datasets are orders of magnitude larger than existing ones, covering three core graph learning tasks -- link prediction, graph regression, and node classification. Furthermore, we provide dedicated baseline experiments, scaling up expressive graph ML models to the massive datasets. We show that expressive models significantly outperform simple scalable baselines, indicating an opportunity for dedicated efforts to further improve graph ML at scale. Moreover, OGB-LSC datasets were deployed at ACM KDD Cup 2021 and attracted more than 500 team registrations globally, during which significant performance improvements were made by a variety of innovative techniques. We summarize the common techniques used by the winning solutions and highlight the current best practices in large-scale graph ML. Finally, we describe how we have updated the datasets after the KDD Cup to further facilitate research advances. The OGB-LSC datasets, baseline code, and all the information about the KDD Cup are available at https://ogb.stanford.edu/docs/lsc/ .

We tackle NED by comparing entities in short sentences with graphs. Creating a context vector from graphs through deep learning is a challenging problem that has never been applied to NED. Our main contribution is to present an experimental study of recent neural techniques, as well as a discussion about which graph features are most important for the disambiguation task. In addition, a new dataset () is created to allow a clean and scalable evaluation of NED with entries, and to be used as a reference in future research. In the end our results show that a Bi-LSTM encoding of the graph triplets performs best, improving upon the baseline models and scoring an F1 value of 91.6% on the test set

It has long been assumed that the sheer number of parameters in large language models (LLMs) drives in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, enabling remarkable performance improvements by leveraging task-specific demonstrations. Challenging this hypothesis, we introduce DEEP-ICL, a novel task Definition Enriched ExPert Ensembling methodology for ICL. DEEP-ICL explicitly extracts task definitions from given demonstrations and generates responses through learning task-specific examples. We argue that improvement from ICL does not directly rely on model size, but essentially stems from understanding task definitions and task-guided learning. Inspired by this, DEEP-ICL combines two 3B models with distinct roles (one for concluding task definitions and the other for learning task demonstrations) and achieves comparable performance to LLaMA2-13B. Furthermore, our framework outperforms conventional ICL by overcoming pretraining sequence length limitations, by supporting unlimited demonstrations. We contend that DEEP-ICL presents a novel alternative for achieving efficient few-shot learning, extending beyond the conventional ICL.

Existing work in continual learning (CL) focuses on mitigating catastrophic forgetting, i.e., model performance deterioration on past tasks when learning a new task. However, the training efficiency of a CL system is under-investigated, which limits the real-world application of CL systems under resource-limited scenarios. In this work, we propose a novel framework called Sparse Continual Learning(SparCL), which is the first study that leverages sparsity to enable cost-effective continual learning on edge devices. SparCL achieves both training acceleration and accuracy preservation through the synergy of three aspects: weight sparsity, data efficiency, and gradient sparsity. Specifically, we propose task-aware dynamic masking (TDM) to learn a sparse network throughout the entire CL process, dynamic data removal (DDR) to remove less informative training data, and dynamic gradient masking (DGM) to sparsify the gradient updates. Each of them not only improves efficiency, but also further mitigates catastrophic forgetting. SparCL consistently improves the training efficiency of existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) CL methods by at most 23X less training FLOPs, and, surprisingly, further improves the SOTA accuracy by at most 1.7%. SparCL also outperforms competitive baselines obtained from adapting SOTA sparse training methods to the CL setting in both efficiency and accuracy. We also evaluate the effectiveness of SparCL on a real mobile phone, further indicating the practical potential of our method.

Self-supervised learning (SSL) on 3D point clouds has the potential to learn feature representations that can transfer to diverse sensors and multiple downstream perception tasks. However, recent SSL approaches fail to define pretext tasks that retain geometric information such as object pose and scale, which can be detrimental to the performance of downstream localization and geometry-sensitive 3D scene understanding tasks, such as 3D semantic segmentation and 3D object detection. We propose PSA-SSL, a novel extension to point cloud SSL that learns object pose and size-aware (PSA) features. Our approach defines a self-supervised bounding box regression pretext task, which retains object pose and size information. Furthermore, we incorporate LiDAR beam pattern augmentation on input point clouds, which encourages learning sensor-agnostic features. Our experiments demonstrate that with a single pretrained model, our light-weight yet effective extensions achieve significant improvements on 3D semantic segmentation with limited labels across popular autonomous driving datasets (Waymo, nuScenes, SemanticKITTI). Moreover, our approach outperforms other state-of-the-art SSL methods on 3D semantic segmentation (using up to 10 times less labels), as well as on 3D object detection. Our code will be released on https://github.com/TRAILab/PSA-SSL.

Recently, vision-language pre-training shows great potential in open-vocabulary object detection, where detectors trained on base classes are devised for detecting new classes. The class text embedding is firstly generated by feeding prompts to the text encoder of a pre-trained vision-language model. It is then used as the region classifier to supervise the training of a detector. The key element that leads to the success of this model is the proper prompt, which requires careful words tuning and ingenious design. To avoid laborious prompt engineering, there are some prompt representation learning methods being proposed for the image classification task, which however can only be sub-optimal solutions when applied to the detection task. In this paper, we introduce a novel method, detection prompt (DetPro), to learn continuous prompt representations for open-vocabulary object detection based on the pre-trained vision-language model. Different from the previous classification-oriented methods, DetPro has two highlights: 1) a background interpretation scheme to include the proposals in image background into the prompt training; 2) a context grading scheme to separate proposals in image foreground for tailored prompt training. We assemble DetPro with ViLD, a recent state-of-the-art open-world object detector, and conduct experiments on the LVIS as well as transfer learning on the Pascal VOC, COCO, Objects365 datasets. Experimental results show that our DetPro outperforms the baseline ViLD in all settings, e.g., +3.4 APbox and +3.0 APmask improvements on the novel classes of LVIS. Code and models are available at https://github.com/dyabel/detpro.

Recent advances in differentially private deep learning have demonstrated that application of differential privacy, specifically the DP-SGD algorithm, has a disparate impact on different sub-groups in the population, which leads to a significantly high drop-in model utility for sub-populations that are under-represented (minorities), compared to well-represented ones. In this work, we aim to compare PATE, another mechanism for training deep learning models using differential privacy, with DP-SGD in terms of fairness. We show that PATE does have a disparate impact too, however, it is much less severe than DP-SGD. We draw insights from this observation on what might be promising directions in achieving better fairness-privacy trade-offs.

Battery degradation remains a pivotal concern in the energy storage domain, with machine learning emerging as a potent tool to drive forward insights and solutions. However, this intersection of electrochemical science and machine learning poses complex challenges. Machine learning experts often grapple with the intricacies of battery science, while battery researchers face hurdles in adapting intricate models tailored to specific datasets. Beyond this, a cohesive standard for battery degradation modeling, inclusive of data formats and evaluative benchmarks, is conspicuously absent. Recognizing these impediments, we present BatteryML - a one-step, all-encompass, and open-source platform designed to unify data preprocessing, feature extraction, and the implementation of both traditional and state-of-the-art models. This streamlined approach promises to enhance the practicality and efficiency of research applications. BatteryML seeks to fill this void, fostering an environment where experts from diverse specializations can collaboratively contribute, thus elevating the collective understanding and advancement of battery research.The code for our project is publicly available on GitHub at https://github.com/microsoft/BatteryML.

Representation learning methods have revolutionized machine learning on networks by converting discrete network structures into continuous domains. However, dynamic networks that evolve over time pose new challenges. To address this, dynamic representation learning methods have gained attention, offering benefits like reduced learning time and improved accuracy by utilizing temporal information. T-batching is a valuable technique for training dynamic network models that reduces training time while preserving vital conditions for accurate modeling. However, we have identified a limitation in the training loss function used with t-batching. Through mathematical analysis, we propose two alternative loss functions that overcome these issues, resulting in enhanced training performance. We extensively evaluate the proposed loss functions on synthetic and real-world dynamic networks. The results consistently demonstrate superior performance compared to the original loss function. Notably, in a real-world network characterized by diverse user interaction histories, the proposed loss functions achieved more than 26.9% enhancement in Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) and more than 11.8% improvement in Recall@10. These findings underscore the efficacy of the proposed loss functions in dynamic network modeling.

Scholarship on generative pretraining (GPT) remains acutely Anglocentric, leaving serious gaps in our understanding of the whole class of autoregressive models. For example, we have little knowledge about the potential of these models and their societal impacts in diverse linguistic and cultural settings. We alleviate this issue for Arabic, a wide collection of languages and dialectal varieties with more than 400 million population, by introducing JASMINE. JASMINE is a suite of powerful Arabic autoregressive Transformer language models ranging in size between 300 million-6.7 billion parameters pretrained on a large and diverse dataset (~ 235 GB of text). We also carefully design and release a comprehensive benchmark for both automated and human evaluation of Arabic autoregressive models, with coverage of potential social biases, harms, and toxicity. Using our novel benchmark, we evaluate JASMINE extensively showing powerful performance intrinsically as well as in few-shot learning on a wide range of NLP tasks. We aim to responsibly release our models and evaluation benchmark with interested researchers, along with code for experimenting with them.

Characterizing the processes leading to deforestation is critical to the development and implementation of targeted forest conservation and management policies. In this work, we develop a deep learning model called ForestNet to classify the drivers of primary forest loss in Indonesia, a country with one of the highest deforestation rates in the world. Using satellite imagery, ForestNet identifies the direct drivers of deforestation in forest loss patches of any size. We curate a dataset of Landsat 8 satellite images of known forest loss events paired with driver annotations from expert interpreters. We use the dataset to train and validate the models and demonstrate that ForestNet substantially outperforms other standard driver classification approaches. In order to support future research on automated approaches to deforestation driver classification, the dataset curated in this study is publicly available at https://stanfordmlgroup.github.io/projects/forestnet .

TensorFlow is an interface for expressing machine learning algorithms, and an implementation for executing such algorithms. A computation expressed using TensorFlow can be executed with little or no change on a wide variety of heterogeneous systems, ranging from mobile devices such as phones and tablets up to large-scale distributed systems of hundreds of machines and thousands of computational devices such as GPU cards. The system is flexible and can be used to express a wide variety of algorithms, including training and inference algorithms for deep neural network models, and it has been used for conducting research and for deploying machine learning systems into production across more than a dozen areas of computer science and other fields, including speech recognition, computer vision, robotics, information retrieval, natural language processing, geographic information extraction, and computational drug discovery. This paper describes the TensorFlow interface and an implementation of that interface that we have built at Google. The TensorFlow API and a reference implementation were released as an open-source package under the Apache 2.0 license in November, 2015 and are available at www.tensorflow.org.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have led to significant successes across various applications, where the most noticeable is to a series of emerging capabilities, particularly in the areas of In-Context Learning (ICL) and Chain-of-Thought (CoT). To better understand and control model performance, many studies have begun investigating the underlying causes of these phenomena and their impact on task outcomes. However, existing explanatory frameworks predominantly focus on isolating and explaining ICL and CoT independently, leading to an incomplete understanding of their combined influence on model performance. To address this gap, we propose the Electronic Circuit Model (ECM), which provides a foundation for developing scalable, learnable policies and improving the management of AI-generated content. Specifically, ECM conceptualizes model behavior as an electronic circuit: ICL is represented as semantic magnetic field to providing an additional voltage following Faraday's Law, while CoT is modeled as series resistors to constrain the model output performance following Ohm's Law. Experimental results demonstrate that the ECM effectively predicts and explains LLM performance across a variety of prompting strategies. Furthermore, we apply ECM to advanced reasoning strategy optimization on a series of tasks, such as the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) and the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), achieving competitive performance that surpasses nearly 80% of top human competitors.

Visual Question Answering (VQA) is a multimodal task requiring reasoning across textual and visual inputs, which becomes particularly challenging in low-resource languages like Vietnamese due to linguistic variability and the lack of high-quality datasets. Traditional methods often rely heavily on extensive annotated datasets, computationally expensive pipelines, and large pre-trained models, specifically in the domain of Vietnamese VQA, limiting their applicability in such scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose a training framework that combines a paraphrase-based feature augmentation module with a dynamic curriculum learning strategy. Explicitly, augmented samples are considered "easy" while raw samples are regarded as "hard". The framework then utilizes a mechanism that dynamically adjusts the ratio of easy to hard samples during training, progressively modifying the same dataset to increase its difficulty level. By enabling gradual adaptation to task complexity, this approach helps the Vietnamese VQA model generalize well, thus improving overall performance. Experimental results show consistent improvements on the OpenViVQA dataset and mixed outcomes on the ViVQA dataset, highlighting both the potential and challenges of our approach in advancing VQA for Vietnamese language.

Perceiving the environment via cameras is crucial for Reinforcement Learning (RL) in robotics. While images are a convenient form of representation, they often complicate extracting important geometric details, especially with varying geometries or deformable objects. In contrast, point clouds naturally represent this geometry and easily integrate color and positional data from multiple camera views. However, while deep learning on point clouds has seen many recent successes, RL on point clouds is under-researched, with only the simplest encoder architecture considered in the literature. We introduce PointPatchRL (PPRL), a method for RL on point clouds that builds on the common paradigm of dividing point clouds into overlapping patches, tokenizing them, and processing the tokens with transformers. PPRL provides significant improvements compared with other point-cloud processing architectures previously used for RL. We then complement PPRL with masked reconstruction for representation learning and show that our method outperforms strong model-free and model-based baselines on image observations in complex manipulation tasks containing deformable objects and variations in target object geometry. Videos and code are available at https://alrhub.github.io/pprl-website

We propose a novel neural network architecture, the normalized Transformer (nGPT) with representation learning on the hypersphere. In nGPT, all vectors forming the embeddings, MLP, attention matrices and hidden states are unit norm normalized. The input stream of tokens travels on the surface of a hypersphere, with each layer contributing a displacement towards the target output predictions. These displacements are defined by the MLP and attention blocks, whose vector components also reside on the same hypersphere. Experiments show that nGPT learns much faster, reducing the number of training steps required to achieve the same accuracy by a factor of 4 to 20, depending on the sequence length.

Better disentanglement of speech representation is essential to improve the quality of voice conversion. Recently contrastive learning is applied to voice conversion successfully based on speaker labels. However, the performance of model will reduce in conversion between similar speakers. Hence, we propose an augmented negative sample selection to address the issue. Specifically, we create hard negative samples based on the proposed speaker fusion module to improve learning ability of speaker encoder. Furthermore, considering the fine-grain modeling of speaker style, we employ a reference encoder to extract fine-grained style and conduct the augmented contrastive learning on global style. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms previous work in voice conversion tasks.

Current graph neural networks (GNNs) that tackle node classification on graphs tend to only focus on nodewise scores and are solely evaluated by nodewise metrics. This limits uncertainty estimation on graphs since nodewise marginals do not fully characterize the joint distribution given the graph structure. In this work, we propose novel edgewise metrics, namely the edgewise expected calibration error (ECE) and the agree/disagree ECEs, which provide criteria for uncertainty estimation on graphs beyond the nodewise setting. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed edgewise metrics can complement the nodewise results and yield additional insights. Moreover, we show that GNN models which consider the structured prediction problem on graphs tend to have better uncertainty estimations, which illustrates the benefit of going beyond the nodewise setting.

Recently the state space models (SSMs) with efficient hardware-aware designs, i.e., Mamba, have shown great potential for long sequence modeling. Building efficient and generic vision backbones purely upon SSMs is an appealing direction. However, representing visual data is challenging for SSMs due to the position-sensitivity of visual data and the requirement of global context for visual understanding. In this paper, we show that the reliance of visual representation learning on self-attention is not necessary and propose a new generic vision backbone with bidirectional Mamba blocks (Vim), which marks the image sequences with position embeddings and compresses the visual representation with bidirectional state space models. On ImageNet classification, COCO object detection, and ADE20k semantic segmentation tasks, Vim achieves higher performance compared to well-established vision transformers like DeiT, while also demonstrating significantly improved computation & memory efficiency. For example, Vim is 2.8times faster than DeiT and saves 86.8% GPU memory when performing batch inference to extract features on images with a resolution of 1248times1248. The results demonstrate that Vim is capable of overcoming the computation & memory constraints on performing Transformer-style understanding for high-resolution images and it has great potential to become the next-generation backbone for vision foundation models. Code is available at https://github.com/hustvl/Vim.

Can large language models (LLMs) directly serve as powerful world models for model-based agents? While the gaps between the prior knowledge of LLMs and the specified environment's dynamics do exist, our study reveals that the gaps can be bridged by aligning an LLM with its deployed environment and such "world alignment" can be efficiently achieved by rule learning on LLMs. Given the rich prior knowledge of LLMs, only a few additional rules suffice to align LLM predictions with the specified environment dynamics. To this end, we propose a neurosymbolic approach to learn these rules gradient-free through LLMs, by inducing, updating, and pruning rules based on comparisons of agent-explored trajectories and world model predictions. The resulting world model is composed of the LLM and the learned rules. Our embodied LLM agent "WALL-E" is built upon model-predictive control (MPC). By optimizing look-ahead actions based on the precise world model, MPC significantly improves exploration and learning efficiency. Compared to existing LLM agents, WALL-E's reasoning only requires a few principal rules rather than verbose buffered trajectories being included in the LLM input. On open-world challenges in Minecraft and ALFWorld, WALL-E achieves higher success rates than existing methods, with lower costs on replanning time and the number of tokens used for reasoning. In Minecraft, WALL-E exceeds baselines by 15-30% in success rate while costing 8-20 fewer replanning rounds and only 60-80% of tokens. In ALFWorld, its success rate surges to a new record high of 95% only after 6 iterations.

Code has been shown to be effective in enhancing the mathematical reasoning abilities of large language models due to its precision and accuracy. Previous works involving continued mathematical pretraining often include code that utilizes math-related packages, which are primarily designed for fields such as engineering, machine learning, signal processing, or module testing, rather than being directly focused on mathematical reasoning. In this paper, we introduce a novel method for generating mathematical code accompanied with corresponding reasoning steps for continued pretraining. Our approach begins with the construction of a high-quality mathematical continued pretraining dataset by incorporating math-related web data, code using mathematical packages, math textbooks, and synthetic data. Next, we construct reasoning steps by extracting LaTeX expressions, the conditions needed for the expressions, and the results of the expressions from the previously collected dataset. Based on this extracted information, we generate corresponding code to accurately capture the mathematical reasoning process. Appending the generated code to each reasoning step results in data consisting of paired natural language reasoning steps and their corresponding code. Combining this data with the original dataset results in a 19.2B-token high-performing mathematical pretraining corpus, which we name MathCode-Pile. Training several popular base models with this corpus significantly improves their mathematical abilities, leading to the creation of the MathCoder2 family of models. All of our data processing and training code is open-sourced, ensuring full transparency and easy reproducibility of the entire data collection and training pipeline. The code is released at https://github.com/mathllm/MathCoder2 .

The integration of deep learning systems into the medical domain has been hindered by the resource-intensive process of data annotation and the inability of these systems to generalize to different data distributions. Foundation models, which are models pre-trained on large datasets, have emerged as a solution to reduce reliance on annotated data and enhance model generalizability and robustness. DINOv2, an open-source foundation model pre-trained with self-supervised learning on 142 million curated natural images, excels in extracting general-purpose visual representations, exhibiting promising capabilities across various vision tasks. Nevertheless, a critical question remains unanswered regarding DINOv2's adaptability to radiological imaging, and the clarity on whether its features are sufficiently general to benefit radiology image analysis is yet to be established. Therefore, this study comprehensively evaluates DINOv2 for radiology, conducting over 100 experiments across diverse modalities (X-ray, CT, and MRI). Tasks include disease classification and organ segmentation on both 2D and 3D images, evaluated under different settings like kNN, few-shot learning, linear-probing, end-to-end fine-tuning, and parameter-efficient fine-tuning, to measure the effectiveness and generalizability of the DINOv2 feature embeddings. Comparative analyses with established medical image analysis models, U-Net and TransUnet for segmentation, and CNN and ViT models pre-trained via supervised, weakly supervised, and self-supervised learning for classification, reveal DINOv2's superior performance in segmentation tasks and competitive results in disease classification. The findings contribute insights to potential avenues for optimizing pre-training strategies for medical imaging and enhancing the broader understanding of DINOv2's role in bridging the gap between natural and radiological image analysis.

Accurate segmentation of coronary arteries remains a significant challenge in clinical practice, hindering the ability to effectively diagnose and manage coronary artery disease. The lack of large, annotated datasets for model training exacerbates this issue, limiting the development of automated tools that could assist radiologists. To address this, we introduce CM-UNet, which leverages self-supervised pre-training on unannotated datasets and transfer learning on limited annotated data, enabling accurate disease detection while minimizing the need for extensive manual annotations. Fine-tuning CM-UNet with only 18 annotated images instead of 500 resulted in a 15.2% decrease in Dice score, compared to a 46.5% drop in baseline models without pre-training. This demonstrates that self-supervised learning can enhance segmentation performance and reduce dependence on large datasets. This is one of the first studies to highlight the importance of self-supervised learning in improving coronary artery segmentation from X-ray angiography, with potential implications for advancing diagnostic accuracy in clinical practice. By enhancing segmentation accuracy in X-ray angiography images, the proposed approach aims to improve clinical workflows, reduce radiologists' workload, and accelerate disease detection, ultimately contributing to better patient outcomes. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/CamilleChallier/Contrastive-Masked-UNet.

Virtual Try-ON (VTON) aims to synthesis specific person images dressed in given garments, which recently receives numerous attention in online shopping scenarios. Currently, the core challenges of the VTON task mainly lie in the fine-grained semantic extraction (i.e.,deep semantics) of the given reference garments during depth estimation and effective texture preservation when the garments are synthesized and warped onto human body. To cope with these issues, we propose DH-VTON, a deep text-driven virtual try-on model featuring a special hybrid attention learning strategy and deep garment semantic preservation module. By standing on the shoulder of a well-built pre-trained paint-by-example (abbr. PBE) approach, we present our DH-VTON pipeline in this work. Specifically, to extract the deep semantics of the garments, we first introduce InternViT-6B as fine-grained feature learner, which can be trained to align with the large-scale intrinsic knowledge with deep text semantics (e.g.,"neckline" or "girdle") to make up for the deficiency of the commonly adopted CLIP encoder. Based on this, to enhance the customized dressing abilities, we further introduce Garment-Feature ControlNet Plus (abbr. GFC+) module and propose to leverage a fresh hybrid attention strategy for training, which can adaptively integrate fine-grained characteristics of the garments into the different layers of the VTON model, so as to achieve multi-scale features preservation effects. Extensive experiments on several representative datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms previous diffusion-based and GAN-based approaches, showing competitive performance in preserving garment details and generating authentic human images.

Recently, the community has made tremendous progress in developing effective methods for point cloud video understanding that learn from massive amounts of labeled data. However, annotating point cloud videos is usually notoriously expensive. Moreover, training via one or only a few traditional tasks (e.g., classification) may be insufficient to learn subtle details of the spatio-temporal structure existing in point cloud videos. In this paper, we propose a Masked Spatio-Temporal Structure Prediction (MaST-Pre) method to capture the structure of point cloud videos without human annotations. MaST-Pre is based on spatio-temporal point-tube masking and consists of two self-supervised learning tasks. First, by reconstructing masked point tubes, our method is able to capture the appearance information of point cloud videos. Second, to learn motion, we propose a temporal cardinality difference prediction task that estimates the change in the number of points within a point tube. In this way, MaST-Pre is forced to model the spatial and temporal structure in point cloud videos. Extensive experiments on MSRAction-3D, NTU-RGBD, NvGesture, and SHREC'17 demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Objective: To determine if a realistic, but computationally efficient model of the electrocardiogram can be used to pre-train a deep neural network (DNN) with a wide range of morphologies and abnormalities specific to a given condition - T-wave Alternans (TWA) as a result of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD - and significantly boost performance on a small database of rare individuals. Approach: Using a previously validated artificial ECG model, we generated 180,000 artificial ECGs with or without significant TWA, with varying heart rate, breathing rate, TWA amplitude, and ECG morphology. A DNN, trained on over 70,000 patients to classify 25 different rhythms, was modified the output layer to a binary class (TWA or no-TWA, or equivalently, PTSD or no-PTSD), and transfer learning was performed on the artificial ECG. In a final transfer learning step, the DNN was trained and cross-validated on ECG from 12 PTSD and 24 controls for all combinations of using the three databases. Main results: The best performing approach (AUROC = 0.77, Accuracy = 0.72, F1-score = 0.64) was found by performing both transfer learning steps, using the pre-trained arrhythmia DNN, the artificial data and the real PTSD-related ECG data. Removing the artificial data from training led to the largest drop in performance. Removing the arrhythmia data from training provided a modest, but significant, drop in performance. The final model showed no significant drop in performance on the artificial data, indicating no overfitting. Significance: In healthcare, it is common to only have a small collection of high-quality data and labels, or a larger database with much lower quality (and less relevant) labels. The paradigm presented here, involving model-based performance boosting, provides a solution through transfer learning on a large realistic artificial database, and a partially relevant real database.

With the success of pretraining techniques in representation learning, a number of continual learning methods based on pretrained models have been proposed. Some of these methods design continual learning mechanisms on the pre-trained representations and only allow minimum updates or even no updates of the backbone models during the training of continual learning. In this paper, we question whether the complexity of these models is needed to achieve good performance by comparing them to a simple baseline that we designed. We argue that the pretrained feature extractor itself can be strong enough to achieve a competitive or even better continual learning performance on Split-CIFAR100 and CoRe 50 benchmarks. To validate this, we conduct a very simple baseline that 1) use the frozen pretrained model to extract image features for every class encountered during the continual learning stage and compute their corresponding mean features on training data, and 2) predict the class of the input based on the nearest neighbor distance between test samples and mean features of the classes; i.e., Nearest Mean Classifier (NMC). This baseline is single-headed, exemplar-free, and can be task-free (by updating the means continually). This baseline achieved 88.53% on 10-Split-CIFAR-100, surpassing most state-of-the-art continual learning methods that are all initialized using the same pretrained transformer model. We hope our baseline may encourage future progress in designing learning systems that can continually add quality to the learning representations even if they started from some pretrained weights.

Tabular data is prevalent across diverse domains in machine learning. While classical methods like tree-based models have long been effective, Deep Neural Network (DNN)-based methods have recently demonstrated promising performance. However, the diverse characteristics of methods and the inherent heterogeneity of tabular datasets make understanding and interpreting tabular methods both challenging and prone to unstable observations. In this paper, we conduct in-depth evaluations and comprehensive analyses of tabular methods, with a particular focus on DNN-based models, using a benchmark of over 300 tabular datasets spanning a wide range of task types, sizes, and domains. First, we perform an extensive comparison of 32 state-of-the-art deep and tree-based methods, evaluating their average performance across multiple criteria. Although method ranks vary across datasets, we empirically find that top-performing methods tend to concentrate within a small subset of tabular models, regardless of the criteria used. Next, we investigate whether the training dynamics of deep tabular models can be predicted based on dataset properties. This approach not only offers insights into the behavior of deep tabular methods but also identifies a core set of "meta-features" that reflect dataset heterogeneity. The other subset includes datasets where method ranks are consistent with the overall benchmark, acting as a reliable probe for further tabular analysis.

TinyML is a novel area of machine learning that gained huge momentum in the last few years thanks to the ability to execute machine learning algorithms on tiny devices (such as Internet-of-Things or embedded systems). Interestingly, research in this area focused on the efficient execution of the inference phase of TinyML models on tiny devices, while very few solutions for on-device learning of TinyML models are available in the literature due to the relevant overhead introduced by the learning algorithms. The aim of this paper is to introduce a new type of adaptive TinyML solution that can be used in tasks, such as the presented Tiny Speaker Verification (TinySV), that require to be tackled with an on-device learning algorithm. Achieving this goal required (i) reducing the memory and computational demand of TinyML learning algorithms, and (ii) designing a TinyML learning algorithm operating with few and possibly unlabelled training data. The proposed TinySV solution relies on a two-layer hierarchical TinyML solution comprising Keyword Spotting and Adaptive Speaker Verification module. We evaluated the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed TinySV solution on a dataset collected expressly for the task and tested the proposed solution on a real-world IoT device (Infineon PSoC 62S2 Wi-Fi BT Pioneer Kit).

Recent work like GPT-3 has demonstrated excellent performance of Zero-Shot and Few-Shot learning on many natural language processing (NLP) tasks by scaling up model size, dataset size and the amount of computation. However, training a model like GPT-3 requires huge amount of computational resources which makes it challengeable to researchers. In this work, we propose a method that incorporates large-scale distributed training performance into model architecture design. With this method, Yuan 1.0, the current largest singleton language model with 245B parameters, achieves excellent performance on thousands GPUs during training, and the state-of-the-art results on NLP tasks. A data processing method is designed to efficiently filter massive amount of raw data. The current largest high-quality Chinese corpus with 5TB high quality texts is built based on this method. In addition, a calibration and label expansion method is proposed to improve the Zero-Shot and Few-Shot performance, and steady improvement is observed on the accuracy of various tasks. Yuan 1.0 presents strong capacity of natural language generation, and the generated articles are difficult to distinguish from the human-written ones.

We measure the performance of in-context learning as a function of task novelty and difficulty for open and closed questions. For that purpose, we created a novel benchmark consisting of hard scientific questions, each paired with a context of various relevancy. We show that counter-intuitively, a context that is more aligned with the topic does not always help more than a less relevant context. This effect is especially visible for open questions and questions of high difficulty or novelty. This result reveals a fundamental difference between the treatment of close-form and open-form questions by large-language models and shows a need for a more robust evaluation of in-context learning on the variety of different types of questions. It also poses a new question of how to optimally select a context for large language models, especially in the context of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. Our results suggest that the answer to this question can be highly application-dependent and might be contingent on factors including the format of the question, the perceived difficulty level of the questions, and the novelty or popularity of the information we seek.

We propose a unified point cloud video self-supervised learning framework for object-centric and scene-centric data. Previous methods commonly conduct representation learning at the clip or frame level and cannot well capture fine-grained semantics. Instead of contrasting the representations of clips or frames, in this paper, we propose a unified self-supervised framework by conducting contrastive learning at the point level. Moreover, we introduce a new pretext task by achieving semantic alignment of superpoints, which further facilitates the representations to capture semantic cues at multiple scales. In addition, due to the high redundancy in the temporal dimension of dynamic point clouds, directly conducting contrastive learning at the point level usually leads to massive undesired negatives and insufficient modeling of positive representations. To remedy this, we propose a selection strategy to retain proper negatives and make use of high-similarity samples from other instances as positive supplements. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms supervised counterparts on a wide range of downstream tasks and demonstrates the superior transferability of the learned representations.

Multi-task learning (MTL) concurrently trains a model on diverse task datasets to exploit common features, thereby improving overall performance across the tasks. Recent studies have dedicated efforts to merging multiple independent model parameters into a unified model for MTL, thus circumventing the need for training data and expanding the scope of applicable scenarios of MTL. However, current approaches to model merging predominantly concentrate on enhancing performance within in-domain (ID) datasets, often overlooking their efficacy on out-of-domain (OOD) datasets. In this work, we proposed LwPTV (Layer-wise Pruning Task Vector) by building a saliency score, measuring the redundancy of parameters in task vectors. Designed in this way ours can achieve mask vector for each task and thus perform layer-wise pruning on the task vectors, only keeping the pre-trained model parameters at the corresponding layer in merged model. Owing to its flexibility, our method can be seamlessly integrated with most of existing model merging methods to improve their performance on OOD tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the application of our method results in substantial enhancements in OOD performance while preserving the ability on ID tasks.

Given a labeled training set and a collection of unlabeled data, the goal of active learning (AL) is to identify the best unlabeled points to label. In this comprehensive study, we analyze the performance of a variety of AL algorithms on deep neural networks trained on 69 real-world tabular classification datasets from the OpenML-CC18 benchmark. We consider different data regimes and the effect of self-supervised model pre-training. Surprisingly, we find that the classical margin sampling technique matches or outperforms all others, including current state-of-art, in a wide range of experimental settings. To researchers, we hope to encourage rigorous benchmarking against margin, and to practitioners facing tabular data labeling constraints that hyper-parameter-free margin may often be all they need.

Pulmonary Hypertension (PH) is a severe disease characterized by an elevated pulmonary artery pressure. The gold standard for PH diagnosis is measurement of mean Pulmonary Artery Pressure (mPAP) during an invasive Right Heart Catheterization. In this paper, we investigate noninvasive approach to PH detection utilizing Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Computer Models and Machine Learning. We show using the ablation study, that physics-informed feature engineering based on models of blood circulation increases the performance of Gradient Boosting Decision Trees-based algorithms for classification of PH and regression of values of mPAP. We compare results of regression (with thresholding of estimated mPAP) and classification and demonstrate that metrics achieved in both experiments are comparable. The predicted mPAP values are more informative to the physicians than the probability of PH returned by classification models. They provide the intuitive explanation of the outcome of the machine learning model (clinicians are accustomed to the mPAP metric, contrary to the PH probability).

Real-world databases are predominantly relational, comprising multiple interlinked tables that contain complex structural and statistical dependencies. Learning generative models on relational data has shown great promise in generating synthetic data and imputing missing values. However, existing methods often struggle to capture this complexity, typically reducing relational data to conditionally generated flat tables and imposing limiting structural assumptions. To address these limitations, we introduce RelDiff, a novel diffusion generative model that synthesizes complete relational databases by explicitly modeling their foreign key graph structure. RelDiff combines a joint graph-conditioned diffusion process across all tables for attribute synthesis, and a 2K+SBM graph generator based on the Stochastic Block Model for structure generation. The decomposition of graph structure and relational attributes ensures both high fidelity and referential integrity, both of which are crucial aspects of synthetic relational database generation. Experiments on 11 benchmark datasets demonstrate that RelDiff consistently outperforms prior methods in producing realistic and coherent synthetic relational databases. Code is available at https://github.com/ValterH/RelDiff.

In vision-language modeling, critic models are typically trained to evaluate outputs -- assigning scalar scores or pairwise preferences -- rather than to generate responses. This separation from policy models, which produce the responses, is so entrenched that critics are rarely considered for direct policy use. In this work, we challenge this convention. We propose to reorganize preference-labeled critic datasets into verifiable training signals and perform reinforcement learning directly on a base generative model, producing LLaVA-Critic-R1, a multimodal critic trained to optimize preference judgments while retaining full generation ability. Surprisingly, LLaVA-Critic-R1 emerges not only as a top-performing critic but also as a competitive policy model -- matching or surpassing specialized reasoning VLMs trained with in-domain data across 26 visual reasoning and understanding benchmarks, with an average gain of +5.7% over its base model (Qwen-2.5-VL-7B). Extending this approach to existing strong reasoning VLMs yields LLaVA-Critic-R1+, which further advances policy performance without sacrificing critic quality, achieving a SoTA performance of 71.9 on MMMU at the 7B scale. Finally, we show that the enhanced critic ability benefits inference: applying self-critique at test time yields an average +13.8% improvement on five representative reasoning tasks without additional training. Our results reveal that RL training on critic data can produce a unified model excelling at both evaluation and generation, offering a simple path toward scalable, self-improving multimodal systems.

We consider learning to play multiplayer imperfect-information games with simultaneous moves and large state-action spaces. Previous attempts to tackle such challenging games have largely focused on model-free learning methods, often requiring hundreds of years of experience to produce competitive agents. Our approach is based on model-based planning. We tackle the problem of partial observability by first building an (oracle) planner that has access to the full state of the environment and then distilling the knowledge of the oracle to a (follower) agent which is trained to play the imperfect-information game by imitating the oracle's choices. We experimentally show that planning with naive Monte Carlo tree search does not perform very well in large combinatorial action spaces. We therefore propose planning with a fixed-depth tree search and decoupled Thompson sampling for action selection. We show that the planner is able to discover efficient playing strategies in the games of Clash Royale and Pommerman and the follower policy successfully learns to implement them by training on a few hundred battles.

Standard unsupervised domain adaptation methods adapt models from a source to a target domain using labeled source data and unlabeled target data jointly. In model adaptation, on the other hand, access to the labeled source data is prohibited, i.e., only the source-trained model and unlabeled target data are available. We investigate normal-to-adverse condition model adaptation for semantic segmentation, whereby image-level correspondences are available in the target domain. The target set consists of unlabeled pairs of adverse- and normal-condition street images taken at GPS-matched locations. Our method -- CMA -- leverages such image pairs to learn condition-invariant features via contrastive learning. In particular, CMA encourages features in the embedding space to be grouped according to their condition-invariant semantic content and not according to the condition under which respective inputs are captured. To obtain accurate cross-domain semantic correspondences, we warp the normal image to the viewpoint of the adverse image and leverage warp-confidence scores to create robust, aggregated features. With this approach, we achieve state-of-the-art semantic segmentation performance for model adaptation on several normal-to-adverse adaptation benchmarks, such as ACDC and Dark Zurich. We also evaluate CMA on a newly procured adverse-condition generalization benchmark and report favorable results compared to standard unsupervised domain adaptation methods, despite the comparative handicap of CMA due to source data inaccessibility. Code is available at https://github.com/brdav/cma.

Despite the growing scale of medical Vision-Language datasets, the impact of dataset quality on model performance remains under-explored. We introduce Open-PMC, a high-quality medical dataset from PubMed Central, containing 2.2 million image-text pairs, enriched with image modality annotations, subfigures, and summarized in-text references. Notably, the in-text references provide richer medical context, extending beyond the abstract information typically found in captions. Through extensive experiments, we benchmark Open-PMC against larger datasets across retrieval and zero-shot classification tasks. Our results show that dataset quality-not just size-drives significant performance gains. We complement our benchmark with an in-depth analysis of feature representation. Our findings highlight the crucial role of data curation quality in advancing multimodal medical AI. We release Open-PMC, along with the trained models and our codebase.

Reasoning models are large language models that emit a long chain-of-thought before answering, providing both higher accuracy and explicit reasoning for their response. A major question has been whether language model reasoning generalizes beyond mathematics, programming, and logic, where most previous work has focused. We demonstrate that reasoning models can be post-trained for chemistry without additional domain pretraining, and require substantially less data compared to contemporary domain-specific models. We report ether0, a 24B parameter LLM (based on Mistral-Small-24B) that can reason in natural language and respond with chemical structures. This reasoning model was trained with reinforcement learning on 640,730 experimentally-grounded chemistry problems across 375 tasks ranging from synthesizability, to blood-brain barrier permeability, to human receptor activity, to scent. Our model exceeds general-purpose chemistry models, frontier models, and human experts on molecular design tasks. It is also more data efficient relative to specialized models. We anticipate that this method can be applied to train data-efficient language models specialized for tasks across a wide variety of scientific domains.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited an impressive ability to perform In-Context Learning (ICL) from only a few examples. Recent works have indicated that the functions learned by ICL can be represented through compressed vectors derived from the transformer. However, the working mechanisms and optimization of these vectors are yet to be thoroughly explored. In this paper, we address this gap by presenting a comprehensive analysis of these compressed vectors, drawing parallels to the parameters trained with gradient descent, and introduce the concept of state vector. Inspired by the works on model soup and momentum-based gradient descent, we propose inner and momentum optimization methods that are applied to refine the state vector progressively as test-time adaptation. Moreover, we simulate state vector aggregation in the multiple example setting, where demonstrations comprising numerous examples are usually too lengthy for regular ICL, and further propose a divide-and-conquer aggregation method to address this challenge. We conduct extensive experiments using Llama-2 and GPT-J in both zero-shot setting and few-shot setting. The experimental results show that our optimization method effectively enhances the state vector and achieves the state-of-the-art performance on diverse tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/HITsz-TMG/ICL-State-Vector

Clinical diagnosis prediction models, when provided with a patient's medical history, aim to detect potential diseases early, facilitating timely intervention and improving prognostic outcomes. However, the inherent scarcity of patient data and large disease candidate space often pose challenges in developing satisfactory models for this intricate task. The exploration of leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for encapsulating clinical decision processes has been limited. We introduce MERA, a clinical diagnosis prediction model that bridges pertaining natural language knowledge with medical practice. We apply hierarchical contrastive learning on a disease candidate ranking list to alleviate the large decision space issue. With concept memorization through fine-tuning, we bridge the natural language clinical knowledge with medical codes. Experimental results on MIMIC-III and IV datasets show that MERA achieves the state-of-the-art diagnosis prediction performance and dramatically elevates the diagnosis prediction capabilities of generative LMs.

Tracking biosignals is crucial for monitoring wellness and preempting the development of severe medical conditions. Today, wearable devices can conveniently record various biosignals, creating the opportunity to monitor health status without disruption to one's daily routine. Despite widespread use of wearable devices and existing digital biomarkers, the absence of curated data with annotated medical labels hinders the development of new biomarkers to measure common health conditions. In fact, medical datasets are usually small in comparison to other domains, which is an obstacle for developing neural network models for biosignals. To address this challenge, we have employed self-supervised learning using the unlabeled sensor data collected under informed consent from the large longitudinal Apple Heart and Movement Study (AHMS) to train foundation models for two common biosignals: photoplethysmography (PPG) and electrocardiogram (ECG) recorded on Apple Watch. We curated PPG and ECG datasets from AHMS that include data from ~141K participants spanning ~3 years. Our self-supervised learning framework includes participant level positive pair selection, stochastic augmentation module and a regularized contrastive loss optimized with momentum training, and generalizes well to both PPG and ECG modalities. We show that the pre-trained foundation models readily encode information regarding participants' demographics and health conditions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that builds foundation models using large-scale PPG and ECG data collected via wearable consumer devices x2013 prior works have commonly used smaller-size datasets collected in clinical and experimental settings. We believe PPG and ECG foundation models can enhance future wearable devices by reducing the reliance on labeled data and hold the potential to help the users improve their health.

Sequence-to-sequence models are commonly trained via maximum likelihood estimation (MLE). However, standard MLE training considers a word-level objective, predicting the next word given the previous ground-truth partial sentence. This procedure focuses on modeling local syntactic patterns, and may fail to capture long-range semantic structure. We present a novel solution to alleviate these issues. Our approach imposes global sequence-level guidance via new supervision based on optimal transport, enabling the overall characterization and preservation of semantic features. We further show that this method can be understood as a Wasserstein gradient flow trying to match our model to the ground truth sequence distribution. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the utility of the proposed approach, showing consistent improvements over a wide variety of NLP tasks, including machine translation, abstractive text summarization, and image captioning.

Autonomous self-improving robots that interact and improve with experience are key to the real-world deployment of robotic systems. In this paper, we propose an online learning method, SELFI, that leverages online robot experience to rapidly fine-tune pre-trained control policies efficiently. SELFI applies online model-free reinforcement learning on top of offline model-based learning to bring out the best parts of both learning paradigms. Specifically, SELFI stabilizes the online learning process by incorporating the same model-based learning objective from offline pre-training into the Q-values learned with online model-free reinforcement learning. We evaluate SELFI in multiple real-world environments and report improvements in terms of collision avoidance, as well as more socially compliant behavior, measured by a human user study. SELFI enables us to quickly learn useful robotic behaviors with less human interventions such as pre-emptive behavior for the pedestrians, collision avoidance for small and transparent objects, and avoiding travel on uneven floor surfaces. We provide supplementary videos to demonstrate the performance of our fine-tuned policy on our project page.

Designing a single model to address multiple tasks has been a long-standing objective in artificial intelligence. Recently, large language models have demonstrated exceptional capability in solving different tasks within the language domain. However, a unified model for various graph tasks remains underexplored, primarily due to the challenges unique to the graph learning domain. First, graph data from different areas carry distinct attributes and follow different distributions. Such discrepancy makes it hard to represent graphs in a single representation space. Second, tasks on graphs diversify into node, link, and graph tasks, requiring distinct embedding strategies. Finally, an appropriate graph prompting paradigm for in-context learning is unclear. We propose One for All (OFA), the first general framework that can use a single graph model to address the above challenges. Specifically, OFA proposes text-attributed graphs to unify different graph data by describing nodes and edges with natural language and uses language models to encode the diverse and possibly cross-domain text attributes to feature vectors in the same embedding space. Furthermore, OFA introduces the concept of nodes-of-interest to standardize different tasks with a single task representation. For in-context learning on graphs, OFA introduces a novel graph prompting paradigm that appends prompting substructures to the input graph, which enables it to address varied tasks without fine-tuning. We train the OFA model using graph data from multiple domains (including citation networks, molecular graphs, knowledge graphs, etc.) simultaneously and evaluate its ability in supervised, few-shot, and zero-shot learning scenarios. OFA performs well across different tasks, making it the first general-purpose across-domains classification model on graphs.

We study variance-dependent regret bounds for Markov decision processes (MDPs). Algorithms with variance-dependent regret guarantees can automatically exploit environments with low variance (e.g., enjoying constant regret on deterministic MDPs). The existing algorithms are either variance-independent or suboptimal. We first propose two new environment norms to characterize the fine-grained variance properties of the environment. For model-based methods, we design a variant of the MVP algorithm (Zhang et al., 2021a). We apply new analysis techniques to demonstrate that this algorithm enjoys variance-dependent bounds with respect to the norms we propose. In particular, this bound is simultaneously minimax optimal for both stochastic and deterministic MDPs, the first result of its kind. We further initiate the study on model-free algorithms with variance-dependent regret bounds by designing a reference-function-based algorithm with a novel capped-doubling reference update schedule. Lastly, we also provide lower bounds to complement our upper bounds.

The scaling of large language models to encode all the world's knowledge in model parameters is unsustainable and has exacerbated resource barriers. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) presents a potential solution, yet its application to vision-language models (VLMs) is under explored. Existing methods focus on models designed for single tasks. Furthermore, they're limited by the need for resource intensive pre training, additional parameter requirements, unaddressed modality prioritization and lack of clear benefit over non-retrieval baselines. This paper introduces RAVEN, a multitask retrieval augmented VLM framework that enhances base VLMs through efficient, task specific fine-tuning. By integrating retrieval augmented samples without the need for additional retrieval-specific parameters, we show that the model acquires retrieval properties that are effective across multiple tasks. Our results and extensive ablations across retrieved modalities for the image captioning and VQA tasks indicate significant performance improvements compared to non retrieved baselines +1 CIDEr on MSCOCO, +4 CIDEr on NoCaps and nearly a +3\% accuracy on specific VQA question types. This underscores the efficacy of applying RAG approaches to VLMs, marking a stride toward more efficient and accessible multimodal learning.

Matching cross-modality features between images and point clouds is a fundamental problem for image-to-point cloud registration. However, due to the modality difference between images and points, it is difficult to learn robust and discriminative cross-modality features by existing metric learning methods for feature matching. Instead of applying metric learning on cross-modality data, we propose to unify the modality between images and point clouds by pretrained large-scale models first, and then establish robust correspondence within the same modality. We show that the intermediate features, called diffusion features, extracted by depth-to-image diffusion models are semantically consistent between images and point clouds, which enables the building of coarse but robust cross-modality correspondences. We further extract geometric features on depth maps produced by the monocular depth estimator. By matching such geometric features, we significantly improve the accuracy of the coarse correspondences produced by diffusion features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that without any task-specific training, direct utilization of both features produces accurate image-to-point cloud registration. On three public indoor and outdoor benchmarks, the proposed method averagely achieves a 20.6 percent improvement in Inlier Ratio, a three-fold higher Inlier Number, and a 48.6 percent improvement in Registration Recall than existing state-of-the-arts.

While deep learning models have shown remarkable performance in various tasks, they are susceptible to learning non-generalizable spurious features rather than the core features that are genuinely correlated to the true label. In this paper, beyond existing analyses of linear models, we theoretically examine the learning process of a two-layer nonlinear convolutional neural network in the presence of spurious features. Our analysis suggests that imbalanced data groups and easily learnable spurious features can lead to the dominance of spurious features during the learning process. In light of this, we propose a new training algorithm called PDE that efficiently enhances the model's robustness for a better worst-group performance. PDE begins with a group-balanced subset of training data and progressively expands it to facilitate the learning of the core features. Experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmark datasets confirm the superior performance of our method on models such as ResNets and Transformers. On average, our method achieves a 2.8% improvement in worst-group accuracy compared with the state-of-the-art method, while enjoying up to 10x faster training efficiency.

Transfer learning has been widely utilized to mitigate the data scarcity problem in the field of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Conventional transfer learning relies on re-using models trained on AD-irrelevant tasks such as natural image classification. However, it often leads to negative transfer due to the discrepancy between the non-medical source and target medical domains. To address this, we present evidence-empowered transfer learning for AD diagnosis. Unlike conventional approaches, we leverage an AD-relevant auxiliary task, namely morphological change prediction, without requiring additional MRI data. In this auxiliary task, the diagnosis model learns the evidential and transferable knowledge from morphological features in MRI scans. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework is not only effective in improving detection performance regardless of model capacity, but also more data-efficient and faithful.

Pretraining on noisy, internet-scale datasets has been heavily studied as a technique for training models with broad, general capabilities for text, images, and other modalities. However, for many sequential decision domains such as robotics, video games, and computer use, publicly available data does not contain the labels required to train behavioral priors in the same way. We extend the internet-scale pretraining paradigm to sequential decision domains through semi-supervised imitation learning wherein agents learn to act by watching online unlabeled videos. Specifically, we show that with a small amount of labeled data we can train an inverse dynamics model accurate enough to label a huge unlabeled source of online data -- here, online videos of people playing Minecraft -- from which we can then train a general behavioral prior. Despite using the native human interface (mouse and keyboard at 20Hz), we show that this behavioral prior has nontrivial zero-shot capabilities and that it can be fine-tuned, with both imitation learning and reinforcement learning, to hard-exploration tasks that are impossible to learn from scratch via reinforcement learning. For many tasks our models exhibit human-level performance, and we are the first to report computer agents that can craft diamond tools, which can take proficient humans upwards of 20 minutes (24,000 environment actions) of gameplay to accomplish.

Application of deep learning on histopathological whole slide images (WSIs) holds promise of improving diagnostic efficiency and reproducibility but is largely dependent on the ability to write computer code or purchase commercial solutions. We present a code-free pipeline utilizing free-to-use, open-source software (QuPath, DeepMIB, and FastPathology) for creating and deploying deep learning-based segmentation models for computational pathology. We demonstrate the pipeline on a use case of separating epithelium from stroma in colonic mucosa. A dataset of 251 annotated WSIs, comprising 140 hematoxylin-eosin (HE)-stained and 111 CD3 immunostained colon biopsy WSIs, were developed through active learning using the pipeline. On a hold-out test set of 36 HE and 21 CD3-stained WSIs a mean intersection over union score of 96.6% and 95.3% was achieved on epithelium segmentation. We demonstrate pathologist-level segmentation accuracy and clinical acceptable runtime performance and show that pathologists without programming experience can create near state-of-the-art segmentation solutions for histopathological WSIs using only free-to-use software. The study further demonstrates the strength of open-source solutions in its ability to create generalizable, open pipelines, of which trained models and predictions can seamlessly be exported in open formats and thereby used in external solutions. All scripts, trained models, a video tutorial, and the full dataset of 251 WSIs with ~31k epithelium annotations are made openly available at https://github.com/andreped/NoCodeSeg to accelerate research in the field.

Much of machine learning research focuses on producing models which perform well on benchmark tasks, in turn improving our understanding of the challenges associated with those tasks. From the perspective of ML researchers, the content of the task itself is largely irrelevant, and thus there have increasingly been calls for benchmark tasks to more heavily focus on problems which are of social or cultural relevance. In this work, we introduce Kuzushiji-MNIST, a dataset which focuses on Kuzushiji (cursive Japanese), as well as two larger, more challenging datasets, Kuzushiji-49 and Kuzushiji-Kanji. Through these datasets, we wish to engage the machine learning community into the world of classical Japanese literature. Dataset available at https://github.com/rois-codh/kmnist

While deep learning has achieved remarkable success across many domains, it has historically underperformed on tabular learning tasks, which remain dominated by gradient boosting decision trees (GBDTs). However, recent advancements are paving the way for Tabular Foundation Models, which can leverage real-world knowledge and generalize across diverse datasets, particularly when the data contains free-text. Although incorporating language model capabilities into tabular tasks has been explored, most existing methods utilize static, target-agnostic textual representations, limiting their effectiveness. We introduce TabSTAR: a Foundation Tabular Model with Semantically Target-Aware Representations. TabSTAR is designed to enable transfer learning on tabular data with textual features, with an architecture free of dataset-specific parameters. It unfreezes a pretrained text encoder and takes as input target tokens, which provide the model with the context needed to learn task-specific embeddings. TabSTAR achieves state-of-the-art performance for both medium- and large-sized datasets across known benchmarks of classification tasks with text features, and its pretraining phase exhibits scaling laws in the number of datasets, offering a pathway for further performance improvements.

To induce desired behaviors in large language models (LLMs) for interaction-driven tasks, the instruction-tuning stage typically trains LLMs on instruction-response pairs using the next-token prediction (NTP) loss. Previous work aiming to improve instruction-tuning performance often emphasizes the need for higher-quality supervised fine-tuning (SFT) datasets, which typically involves expensive data filtering with proprietary LLMs or labor-intensive data generation by human annotators. However, these approaches do not fully leverage the datasets' intrinsic properties, resulting in high computational and labor costs, thereby limiting scalability and performance gains. In this paper, we propose SFTMix, a novel recipe that elevates instruction-tuning performance beyond the conventional NTP paradigm, without the need for well-curated datasets. Observing that LLMs exhibit uneven confidence across the semantic representation space, we argue that examples with different confidence levels should play distinct roles during the instruction-tuning process. Based on this insight, SFTMix leverages training dynamics to identify examples with varying confidence levels, then applies a Mixup-based regularization to mitigate overfitting on confident examples while propagating supervision signals to improve learning on relatively unconfident ones. This approach enables SFTMix to significantly outperform NTP across a wide range of instruction-following and healthcare domain-specific SFT tasks, demonstrating its adaptability to diverse LLM families and scalability to datasets of any size. Comprehensive ablation studies further verify the robustness of SFTMix's design choices, underscoring its versatility in consistently enhancing performance across different LLMs and datasets in broader natural language processing applications.

Medical text embedding models are foundational to a wide array of healthcare applications, ranging from clinical decision support and biomedical information retrieval to medical question answering, yet they remain hampered by two critical shortcomings. First, most models are trained on a narrow slice of medical and biological data, beside not being up to date in terms of methodology, making them ill suited to capture the diversity of terminology and semantics encountered in practice. Second, existing evaluations are often inadequate: even widely used benchmarks fail to generalize across the full spectrum of real world medical tasks. To address these gaps, we leverage MEDTE, a GTE model extensively fine-tuned on diverse medical corpora through self-supervised contrastive learning across multiple data sources, to deliver robust medical text embeddings. Alongside this model, we propose a comprehensive benchmark suite of 51 tasks spanning classification, clustering, pair classification, and retrieval modeled on the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB) but tailored to the nuances of medical text. Our results demonstrate that this combined approach not only establishes a robust evaluation framework but also yields embeddings that consistently outperform state of the art alternatives in different tasks.

Instrument playing techniques (IPTs) constitute a pivotal component of musical expression. However, the development of automatic IPT detection methods suffers from limited labeled data and inherent class imbalance issues. In this paper, we propose to apply a self-supervised learning model pre-trained on large-scale unlabeled music data and finetune it on IPT detection tasks. This approach addresses data scarcity and class imbalance challenges. Recognizing the significance of pitch in capturing the nuances of IPTs and the importance of onset in locating IPT events, we investigate multi-task finetuning with pitch and onset detection as auxiliary tasks. Additionally, we apply a post-processing approach for event-level prediction, where an IPT activation initiates an event only if the onset output confirms an onset in that frame. Our method outperforms prior approaches in both frame-level and event-level metrics across multiple IPT benchmark datasets. Further experiments demonstrate the efficacy of multi-task finetuning on each IPT class.

This work presents In-Context Policy Iteration, an algorithm for performing Reinforcement Learning (RL), in-context, using foundation models. While the application of foundation models to RL has received considerable attention, most approaches rely on either (1) the curation of expert demonstrations (either through manual design or task-specific pretraining) or (2) adaptation to the task of interest using gradient methods (either fine-tuning or training of adapter layers). Both of these techniques have drawbacks. Collecting demonstrations is labor-intensive, and algorithms that rely on them do not outperform the experts from which the demonstrations were derived. All gradient techniques are inherently slow, sacrificing the "few-shot" quality that made in-context learning attractive to begin with. In this work, we present an algorithm, ICPI, that learns to perform RL tasks without expert demonstrations or gradients. Instead we present a policy-iteration method in which the prompt content is the entire locus of learning. ICPI iteratively updates the contents of the prompt from which it derives its policy through trial-and-error interaction with an RL environment. In order to eliminate the role of in-weights learning (on which approaches like Decision Transformer rely heavily), we demonstrate our algorithm using Codex, a language model with no prior knowledge of the domains on which we evaluate it.

Biomedical literature often uses complex language and inaccessible professional terminologies. That is why simplification plays an important role in improving public health literacy. Applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) models to automate such tasks allows for quick and direct accessibility for lay readers. In this work, we investigate the ability of state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) on the task of biomedical abstract simplification, using the publicly available dataset for plain language adaptation of biomedical abstracts (PLABA). The methods applied include domain fine-tuning and prompt-based learning (PBL) on: 1) Encoder-decoder models (T5, SciFive, and BART), 2) Decoder-only GPT models (GPT-3.5 and GPT-4) from OpenAI and BioGPT, and 3) Control-token mechanisms on BART-based models. We used a range of automatic evaluation metrics, including BLEU, ROUGE, SARI, and BERTscore, and also conducted human evaluations. BART-Large with Control Token (BART-L-w-CT) mechanisms reported the highest SARI score of 46.54 and T5-base reported the highest BERTscore 72.62. In human evaluation, BART-L-w-CTs achieved a better simplicity score over T5-Base (2.9 vs. 2.2), while T5-Base achieved a better meaning preservation score over BART-L-w-CTs (3.1 vs. 2.6). We also categorised the system outputs with examples, hoping this will shed some light for future research on this task. Our code, fine-tuned models, and data splits are available at https://github.com/HECTA-UoM/PLABA-MU

Medical image segmentation is an important analysis task in clinical practice and research. Deep learning has massively advanced the field, but current approaches are mostly based on models trained for a specific task. Training such models or adapting them to a new condition is costly due to the need for (manually) labeled data. The emergence of vision foundation models, especially Segment Anything, offers a path to universal segmentation for medical images, overcoming these issues. Here, we study how to improve Segment Anything for medical images by comparing different finetuning strategies on a large and diverse dataset. We evaluate the finetuned models on a wide range of interactive and (automatic) semantic segmentation tasks. We find that the performance can be clearly improved for interactive segmentation. However, semantic segmentation does not benefit from pretraining on medical images. Our best model, MedicoSAM, is publicly available at https://github.com/computational-cell-analytics/medico-sam. We show that it is compatible with existing tools for data annotation and believe that it will be of great practical value.

Learning semantically meaningful representations from scientific documents can facilitate academic literature search and improve performance of recommendation systems. Pre-trained language models have been shown to learn rich textual representations, yet they cannot provide powerful document-level representations for scientific articles. We propose MIReAD, a simple method that learns high-quality representations of scientific papers by fine-tuning transformer model to predict the target journal class based on the abstract. We train MIReAD on more than 500,000 PubMed and arXiv abstracts across over 2,000 journal classes. We show that MIReAD produces representations that can be used for similar papers retrieval, topic categorization and literature search. Our proposed approach outperforms six existing models for representation learning on scientific documents across four evaluation standards.

Many learning algorithms used as normative models in neuroscience or as candidate approaches for learning on neuromorphic chips learn by contrasting one set of network states with another. These Contrastive Learning (CL) algorithms are traditionally implemented with rigid, temporally non-local, and periodic learning dynamics that could limit the range of physical systems capable of harnessing CL. In this study, we build on recent work exploring how CL might be implemented by biological or neurmorphic systems and show that this form of learning can be made temporally local, and can still function even if many of the dynamical requirements of standard training procedures are relaxed. Thanks to a set of general theorems corroborated by numerical experiments across several CL models, our results provide theoretical foundations for the study and development of CL methods for biological and neuromorphic neural networks.

A flow control system is a critical concept for increasing the production capacity of manufacturing systems. To solve the scheduling optimization problem related to the flow control with the aim of improving productivity, existing methods depend on a heuristic design by domain human experts. Therefore, the methods require correction, monitoring, and verification by using real equipment. As system designs increase in complexity, the monitoring time increases, which decreases the probability of arriving at the optimal design. As an alternative approach to the heuristic design of flow control systems, the use of deep reinforcement learning to solve the scheduling optimization problem has been considered. Although the existing research on reinforcement learning has yielded excellent performance in some areas, the applicability of the results to actual FAB such as display and semiconductor manufacturing processes is not evident so far. To this end, we propose a method to implement a physical simulation environment and devise a feasible flow control system design using a transfer robot in display manufacturing through reinforcement learning. We present a model and parameter setting to build a virtual environment for different display transfer robots, and training methods of reinforcement learning on the environment to obtain an optimal scheduling of glass flow control systems. Its feasibility was verified by using different types of robots used in the actual process.

Despite the impressive generative abilities of black-box large language models (LLMs), their inherent opacity hinders further advancements in capabilities such as reasoning, planning, and personalization. Existing works aim to enhance LLM capabilities via domain-specific adaptation or in-context learning, which require additional training on accessible model parameters, an infeasible option for black-box LLMs. To address this challenge, we introduce Matryoshika, a lightweight white-box LLM controller that guides a large-scale black-box LLM generator by decomposing complex tasks into a series of intermediate outputs. Specifically, we consider the black-box LLM as an environment, with Matryoshika serving as a policy to provide intermediate guidance through prompts for driving the black-box LLM. Matryoshika is trained to pivot the outputs of the black-box LLM aligning with preferences during iterative interaction, which enables controllable multi-turn generation and self-improvement in optimizing intermediate guidance. Empirical evaluations on three diverse tasks demonstrate that Matryoshika effectively enhances the capabilities of black-box LLMs in complex, long-horizon tasks, including reasoning, planning, and personalization. By leveraging this pioneering controller-generator framework to mitigate dependence on model parameters, Matryoshika provides a transparent and practical solution for improving black-box LLMs through controllable multi-turn generation using white-box LLMs.

This paper studies the evolving domain of Continual Learning (CL) in large language models (LLMs), with a focus on developing strategies for efficient and sustainable training. Our primary emphasis is on continual domain-adaptive pretraining, a process designed to equip LLMs with the ability to integrate new information from various domains while retaining previously learned knowledge and enhancing cross-domain knowledge transfer without relying on domain-specific identification. Unlike previous studies, which mostly concentrate on a limited selection of tasks or domains and primarily aim to address the issue of forgetting, our research evaluates the adaptability and capabilities of LLMs to changing data landscapes in practical scenarios. To this end, we introduce a new benchmark designed to measure the adaptability of LLMs to these evolving data environments, offering a comprehensive framework for evaluation. We examine the impact of model size on learning efficacy and forgetting, as well as how the progression and similarity of emerging domains affect the knowledge transfer within these models. Our findings uncover several key insights: (i) when the sequence of domains shows semantic similarity, continual pretraining enables LLMs to better specialize in the current domain compared to stand-alone fine-tuning, (ii) training across a diverse range of domains enhances both backward and forward knowledge transfer, and (iii) smaller models are particularly sensitive to continual pretraining, showing the most significant rates of both forgetting and learning. We posit that our research marks a shift towards establishing a more realistic benchmark for investigating CL in LLMs, and has the potential to play a key role in guiding the direction of future research in the field.

This paper introduces Diffusion Policy, a new way of generating robot behavior by representing a robot's visuomotor policy as a conditional denoising diffusion process. We benchmark Diffusion Policy across 11 different tasks from 4 different robot manipulation benchmarks and find that it consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art robot learning methods with an average improvement of 46.9%. Diffusion Policy learns the gradient of the action-distribution score function and iteratively optimizes with respect to this gradient field during inference via a series of stochastic Langevin dynamics steps. We find that the diffusion formulation yields powerful advantages when used for robot policies, including gracefully handling multimodal action distributions, being suitable for high-dimensional action spaces, and exhibiting impressive training stability. To fully unlock the potential of diffusion models for visuomotor policy learning on physical robots, this paper presents a set of key technical contributions including the incorporation of receding horizon control, visual conditioning, and the time-series diffusion transformer. We hope this work will help motivate a new generation of policy learning techniques that are able to leverage the powerful generative modeling capabilities of diffusion models. Code, data, and training details will be publicly available.

Knowledge Graph Foundation Models (KGFMs) are at the frontier for deep learning on knowledge graphs (KGs), as they can generalize to completely novel knowledge graphs with different relational vocabularies. Despite their empirical success, our theoretical understanding of KGFMs remains very limited. In this paper, we conduct a rigorous study of the expressive power of KGFMs. Specifically, we show that the expressive power of KGFMs directly depends on the motifs that are used to learn the relation representations. We then observe that the most typical motifs used in the existing literature are binary, as the representations are learned based on how pairs of relations interact, which limits the model's expressiveness. As part of our study, we design more expressive KGFMs using richer motifs, which necessitate learning relation representations based on, e.g., how triples of relations interact with each other. Finally, we empirically validate our theoretical findings, showing that the use of richer motifs results in better performance on a wide range of datasets drawn from different domains.