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Fundamental bounds on efficiency-confidence trade-off for transductive conformal prediction
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arxiv.org
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3 months ago
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eng
arXiv:2509.04631v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Transductive conformal prediction addresses the simultaneous prediction for multiple data points. Given a desired confidence level, the objective is to construct a prediction set that includes the true outcomes with the prescribed confidence. We demonstrate a fundamental trade-off between confidence and efficiency in transductive methods, where efficiency is measured by the size of ....
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arXiv:2509.13805v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Foundation models have revolutionized natural language processing through a ``train once, deploy anywhere'' paradigm, where a single pre-trained model adapts to countless downstream tasks without retraining. Access to a Physics Foundation Model (PFM) would be transformative - democratizing access to high-fidelity simulations, accelerating scientific discovery, and eliminating the ne....
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arXiv:2509.18025v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: One can see deep-learning models as compositions of functions within the so-called tame geometry. In this expository note, we give an overview of some topics at the interface of tame geometry (also known as o-minimality), optimization theory, and deep learning theory and practice. To do so, we gradually introduce the concepts and tools used to build convergence guarantees for stocha..
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Interpretable Self-Supervised Learning via Representer Landmarks and Nystr\"om Approximation
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arxiv.org
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3 months ago
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eng
arXiv:2509.24467v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Self-supervised learning (SSL) learns representations from massive unlabeled data, yet the resulting models typically operate as black boxes, necessitating domain-specific explanations. We introduce KREPES, a unified framework to analytically interpret the learned representations of SSL objectives, including SimCLR, BYOL, and VICReg. By bridging empirical neural tangent kernel appro....
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Trajectory Data Suffices for Statistically Efficient Policy Evaluation in Fixed-Horizon Offline RL with Linear $q^\pi$-Realizability and Concentrability
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arxiv.org
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3 months ago
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eng
arXiv:2510.03494v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study finite-horizon offline reinforcement learning (RL) with function approximation for both policy evaluation and policy optimization. Prior work established that statistically efficient learning is impossible for either of these problems when the only assumptions are that the data has good coverage (concentrability) and the state-action value function of every policy is linear..
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From Moments to Models: Graphon-Mixture Learning for Mixup and Contrastive Learning
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arxiv.org
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3 months ago
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eng
arXiv:2510.03690v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Real-world graph datasets often arise from mixtures of populations, where graphs are generated by multiple distinct underlying distributions. In this work, we propose a unified framework that explicitly models graph data as a mixture of probabilistic graph generative models represented by graphons. To characterize and estimate these graphons, we leverage graph moments (motif densiti....
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Generalization of Gibbs and Langevin Monte Carlo Algorithms in the Interpolation Regime
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arxiv.org
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3 months ago
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eng
arXiv:2510.06028v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper provides data-dependent bounds on the expected error of the Gibbs algorithm in the overparameterized interpolation regime, where low training errors are also obtained for impossible data, such as random labels in classification. The results show that generalization in the low-temperature regime is already signaled by small training errors in the noisier high-temperature r..
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arXiv:2510.17303v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Symmetries are known to improve the empirical performance of machine learning models, yet theoretical guarantees explaining these gains remain limited. Prior work has focused mainly on compact group symmetries and often assumes that the data distribution itself is invariant, an assumption rarely satisfied in real-world applications. In this work, we extend generalization guarantees ....
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Two Datasets Are Better Than One: Method of Double Moments for 3-D Reconstruction in Cryo-EM
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arxiv.org
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3 months ago
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eng
arXiv:2511.07438v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) is a powerful imaging technique for reconstructing three-dimensional molecular structures from noisy tomographic projection images of randomly oriented particles. We introduce a new data fusion framework, termed the method of double moments (MoDM), which reconstructs molecular structures from two instances of the second-order moment of projection i....
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arXiv:2511.21140v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are widely used as scalable evaluators of model responses in lieu of human annotators. However, imperfect sensitivity and specificity of the LLM judges induce bias in naive evaluation scores. We propose a simple plug-in framework that corrects this bias and enables statistically principled uncertainty quantification. Our framework constructs confidence i....
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Safeguarded Stochastic Polyak Step Sizes for Non-smooth Optimization: Robust Performance Without Small (Sub)Gradients
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arxiv.org
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3 months ago
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eng
arXiv:2512.02342v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The stochastic Polyak step size (SPS) has proven to be a promising choice for stochastic gradient descent (SGD), delivering competitive performance relative to state-of-the-art methods on smooth convex and non-convex optimization problems, including deep neural network training. However, extensions of this approach to non-smooth settings remain in their early stages, often relying o....
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State and Parameter Estimation for a Neural Model of Local Field Potentials
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arxiv.org
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3 months ago
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eng
arXiv:2512.07842v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The study of cortical dynamics during different states such as decision making, sleep and movement, is an important topic in Neuroscience. Modelling efforts aim to relate the neural rhythms present in cortical recordings to the underlying dynamics responsible for their emergence. We present an effort to characterize the neural activity from the cortex of a mouse during natural sleep....
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arXiv:2601.16884v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study multigrade deep learning (MGDL) as a principled framework for structured error refinement in deep neural networks. While the approximation power of neural networks is now relatively well understood, training very deep architectures remains challenging due to highly nonconvex and often ill-conditioned optimization landscapes. In contrast, for relatively shallow networks, mos....
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arXiv:2602.02819v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Membership Inference Attacks (MIAs) aim to distinguish training points (members) from unseen data (non-members), and are widely used to quantify memorization and assess privacy risks. Standard MIA evaluation requires repeated retraining, which is computationally costly for large models. One-run (single training with randomized data inclusion) and zero-run (post hoc evaluation) metho....
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arXiv:2602.03685v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Training large language models (LLMs) is computationally expensive, partly because the loss exhibits slow power-law convergence whose origin remains debatable. Through systematic analysis of toy models and empirical evaluation of LLMs, we show that this behavior can arise intrinsically from the use of softmax and cross-entropy. When learning peaked probability distributions, e.g., n..
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arXiv:2602.05970v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Neural scaling laws relate loss to model size in large language models (LLMs), yet depth and width may contribute to performance differently, requiring more detailed studies. Here, we quantify how depth affects loss via analysis of LLMs and toy residual networks. We find loss scales inversely proportional to depth in LLMs, probably due to functionally similar layers reducing error t..
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Sharpness-Aware Hybrid Model Learning for Architecture-Agnostic Parameter Estimation
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arxiv.org
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3 months ago
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eng
arXiv:2602.06837v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Hybrid modeling, the combination of machine learning models and scientific mathematical models, enables flexible and robust data-driven prediction with partial interpretability. However, the unknown parameters of the scientific model cannot necessarily be estimated properly, since the flexibility of the machine learning model might make the scientific model part effectively ignored ....
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Collaborative and Efficient Fine-tuning: Leveraging Task Similarity
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arxiv.org
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3 months ago
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eng
arXiv:2602.07218v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Adaptability has been regarded as a central feature in the foundation models, enabling them to effectively acclimate to unseen downstream tasks. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods such as celebrated LoRA facilitate efficient adaptation of large foundation models using labeled, high-quality and generally scarce task data. To mitigate data scarcity in fine-tuning of foundation mo....
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A Task-Centric Theory for Iterative Self-Improvement with Easy-to-Hard Curricula
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arxiv.org
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3 months ago
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eng
arXiv:2602.10014v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Iterative self-improvement fine-tunes an autoregressive large language model (LLM) on reward-verified outputs generated by the LLM itself. In contrast to the empirical success of self-improvement, the theoretical foundation of this generative, iterative procedure in a practical, finite-sample setting remains limited. We make progress toward this goal by modeling each round of self-i....
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arXiv:2602.10056v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce WildCat, a high-accuracy, low-cost approach to compressing the attention mechanism in neural networks. While attention is a staple of modern network architectures, it is also notoriously expensive to deploy due to resource requirements that scale quadratically with the input sequence length $n$. WildCat avoids these quadratic costs by only attending over a small weighte....
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Scaling Reproducibility: An AI-Assisted Workflow for Large-Scale Replication and Reanalysis
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arxiv.org
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3 months ago
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eng
arXiv:2602.16733v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Computational reproducibility is central to scientific credibility, yet verifying published results at scale remains costly. We develop an AI-assisted workflow for automated full-paper replication -- retrieving materials, reconstructing environments, executing code, and matching outputs to point estimates reported in regression tables. We define a universe of all empirical and quant....
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Robust Predictive Uncertainty and Double Descent in Contaminated Bayesian Random Features
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arxiv.org
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3 months ago
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eng
arXiv:2602.19126v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose a robust Bayesian formulation of random feature (RF) regression that accounts explicitly for prior and likelihood misspecification via Huber-style contamination sets. Starting from the classical equivalence between ridge-regularized RF training and Bayesian inference with Gaussian priors and likelihoods, we replace the single prior and likelihood with $\epsilon$- and $\et....
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Fine-Tuning Without Forgetting In-Context Learning: A Theoretical Analysis of Linear Attention Models
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arxiv.org
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3 months ago
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eng
arXiv:2602.23197v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Transformer-based large language models exhibit in-context learning, enabling adaptation to downstream tasks via few-shot prompting with demonstrations. In practice, such models are often fine-tuned to improve zero-shot performance on downstream tasks, allowing them to solve tasks without examples and thereby reducing inference costs. However, fine-tuning can degrade in-context lear....
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arXiv:2603.01157v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Risk forecasts in financial regulation and internal management are calculated through historical data. The unknown structural changes of financial data pose a substantial challenge in selecting an appropriate look-back window for risk modeling and forecasting. We develop a data-driven online learning method, called the bootstrap-based adaptive window selection (BAWS), that adaptivel....
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AgentDS Technical Report: Benchmarking the Future of Human-AI Collaboration in Domain-Specific Data Science
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arxiv.org
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3 months ago
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eng
arXiv:2603.19005v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Data science plays a critical role in transforming complex data into actionable insights across numerous domains. Recent developments in large language models (LLMs) and artificial intelligence (AI) agents have significantly automated data science workflow. However, it remains unclear to what extent AI agents can match the performance of human experts on domain-specific data science....
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Graph Energy Matching: Transport-Aligned Energy-Based Modeling for Graph Generation
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arxiv.org
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3 months ago
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eng
arXiv:2603.23398v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Generative modeling of discrete data, such as graphs, underpins many scientific and industrial applications, including molecular discovery and materials design. In these domains, probabilistic inference is particularly valuable, as it enables composable generation and principled incorporation of desired constraints, such as structural or functional properties. Energy-based models na....
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Revisiting Marked Galaxy Clustering from a Joint Point Process Perspective
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arxiv.org
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3 months ago
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eng
arXiv:2604.00578v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Marked correlation functions, in which galaxy properties such as luminosity or stellar mass are treated as marks, are widely used to test models of galaxy formation. In astronomy, however, these statistics are typically implemented as summary measures that do not preserve the joint structure of mark pairs conditioned on separation. In this work, we formulate galaxies as points $(x,m....
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A Direct Approach for Handling Contextual Bandits with Latent State Dynamics
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arxiv.org
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3 months ago
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eng
arXiv:2604.08149v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We consider a linear contextual bandit model where contexts and rewards are governed by a finite hidden Markov chain. We first revisit the simplified model by Nelson et al. (2022), in which rewards are linear functions of the posterior probabilities over the hidden states given the observed contexts (called beliefs), rather than functions of the hidden states themselves. This simpli....
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U-Cast: A Surprisingly Simple and Efficient Frontier Probabilistic AI Weather Forecaster
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arxiv.org
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3 months ago
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eng
arXiv:2604.09041v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AI-based weather forecasting now rivals traditional physics-based ensembles, but state-of-the-art (SOTA) models rely on specialized architectures and massive computational budgets, creating a high barrier to entry. We demonstrate that such complexity is unnecessary for frontier performance. We introduce \ours, a probabilistic forecaster built on a standard U-Net backbone trained wit....
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Efficient Diffusion Models under Nonconvex Equality and Inequality constraints via Landing
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arxiv.org
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3 months ago
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eng
arXiv:2604.17838v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Generative modeling within constrained sets is essential for scientific and engineering applications involving physical, geometric, or safety requirements (e.g., molecular generation, robotics). We present a unified framework for constrained diffusion models on generic nonconvex feasible sets $\Sigma$ that simultaneously enforces equality and inequality constraints throughout the di....
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RISED: A Pre-Deployment Evaluation Framework for High-Stakes AI Decision-Support Systems, with Application to Healthcare
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arxiv.org
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3 months ago
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eng
arXiv:2605.12895v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Clinical decision-support systems are expert systems whose recommendations clinicians act on directly, yet they are usually cleared on one aggregate accuracy number from a held-out test set. That number says nothing about input reliability under encoding shifts, subgroup gaps, threshold sensitivity, or operational feasibility. We present RISED, a pre-deployment evaluation framework ....
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arXiv:2605.14432v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study far-field discrimination between one and two incoherent point sources in the singular regime of weak and closely spaced emitters. Under ideal alignment, spatial-mode demultiplexing (SPADE) attains the quantum-optimal large-sample Stein exponent, but the finite-photon behavior near the one-source boundary and the effect of realistic imperfections remain less understood. Usin....
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Can Adaptive Gradient Methods Converge under Heavy-Tailed Noise? A Case Study of AdaGrad
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arxiv.org
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3 months ago
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eng
arXiv:2605.18694v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Many tasks in modern machine learning are observed to involve heavy-tailed gradient noise during the optimization process. To manage this realistic and challenging setting, new mechanisms, such as gradient clipping and gradient normalization, have been introduced to ensure the convergence of first-order algorithms. However, adaptive gradient methods, a famous class of modern optimiz..
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Decision-Path Patterns as Tree Reliability Signals: Path-based Adaptive Weighting for Random Forest Classification
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arxiv.org
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3 months ago
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eng
arXiv:2605.20716v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Random forests construct each tree with a different, randomised representation of the feature space. Their uniform voting cannot correct errors in regions where trees with incorrect representations probabilistically outnumber correct ones, even when the ensemble collectively holds enough correct information - a reducible error that this paper addresses. We propose using the structur....
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Dropout Universality: Scaling Laws and Optimal Scheduling at the Edge-of-Chaos
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arxiv.org
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3 months ago
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eng
arXiv:2605.21648v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We develop a mean-field theory of dropout as a perturbation of critical signal propagation at the edge of chaos, and show that it predicts a simple, no-cost change to standard practice: \emph{front-loaded} dropout schedules cut test loss by \(18\)--\(35\%\) over constant dropout in MLPs and Vision Transformers at fixed budget. The theoretical mechanism is that dropout shifts the per....
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Measuring Alignment-Induced Activation Shifts Correctly: A Template-Controlled Difference-in-Differences Protocol
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arxiv.org
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3 months ago
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eng
arXiv:2605.24583v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Comparing a model's internal activations before and after alignment is a natural way to ask what safety training changes: one forms the matrix of paired aligned-minus-base activations on safety-relevant inputs and reads off its effective rank or top direction. We show the obvious way to form this matrix is confounded. The aligned model is evaluated under a chat template the base mod....
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Probing Minimalist Phase Structure in LLMs: What Universal Dependencies Cannot Represent
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arxiv.org
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3 months ago
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eng
arXiv:2605.26431v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Structural probes train on Universal Dependencies (UD), which does not encode formal-syntactic abstractions such as phase boundaries or phase-internal cohesion. Whether large language models (LLMs) encode these remains an open question that UD-based probing cannot answer by construction. We evaluate structural probes on wh-movement stimuli where UD distances are invariant across con....
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Agile Online Model Selection: Resolving Adaptation Lag via Safeguarded Large Learning Rates
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arxiv.org
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3 months ago
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eng
arXiv:2605.26919v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Maintaining predictive accuracy in non-stationary environments requires online model selection to adapt autonomously to unknown distribution shifts. However, existing tuning-free algorithms face a fundamental trade-off between robustness and agility. Specifically, to ensure dynamic regret bounds, they must restrict learning rates to small constants (e.g., $O(1)$). This restriction i....
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arXiv:2605.30188v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reliable probability estimates are critical in many machine learning applications, yet modern classifiers are often poorly calibrated. Post-hoc calibration provides a simple and widely used solution, but the large number of proposed methods, combined with small-scale and inconsistent evaluations, makes it difficult to determine which approaches are truly effective in practice. We in....
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Beyond Additive Decompositions: Interpretability Through Separability
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arxiv.org
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3 months ago
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eng
arXiv:2605.31200v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Interpretable machine learning requires models that are accurate and structurally faithful to the data. Existing explainability methods rely heavily on additive representations (e.g., Generalized Additive Models (GAMs), SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP), functional ANOVA), which can suffer from signal cancellation and off-support extrapolation in the presence of strong interactio....
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arXiv:2606.00233v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Density estimation is often presented as a choice among parametric summaries, finite mixtures, and nonparametric smoothers. This review argues for a complementary view: a data set can be studied through a path of densities indexed by smoothing scale, diffusion time, model complexity, density level, or noise level. We call this perspective density evolution. Under this lens, Gaussian kernel de....
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arXiv:2606.00246v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Fourier Entropy-Influence (FEI) conjecture states that the Fourier entropy of Boolean functions is uniformly bounded by their total influence. It has been verified for canonical examples such as disjoint tribes and for some classes of Boolean functions such as symmetric functions and read-$k$ decision trees (with a constant that depends linearly on $k$). In this note we present new classe....
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arXiv:2606.00247v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We show that Grothendieck's real constant $K_G$ can be upper bounded by projecting vectors onto a random plane through the origin and thresholding a degree five Hermite polynomial. This resolves a conjecture of Braverman-Makarychev-Makarychev-Naor from 2011, who required an extra randomization step in their rounding scheme and proved $K_G<\frac{\pi}{2\log(1+\sqrt{2})}-10^{-500}$. As a corolla..
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arXiv:2606.00273v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The goal of this work is to study the combinatorics of the lattices of higher torsion classes of the higher Auslander and Nakayama algebras of type \textbf{A}. Combinatorial descriptions of these higher torsion classes were recently obtained by August \textit{et al.} (2025), and it was observed that the lattices that they form are not semidistributive. We study in some depth these lattices, p....
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