Generative models can produce images nearly indistinguishable from real data, yet rigorous and interpretable evaluation remains challenging. Conventional metrics such as FID provide only scalar scores with limited diagnostic insight. Widely adopted CLIP-based metrics enable semantic evaluation beyond simple training class labels, but inherit limitations from CLIP's training paradigm that restrict attribute-wise analysis. We propose RA-CLIPScore, a novel metric that mitigates these issues and extends CLIP-based evaluation to spatial distribution alignment, measuring whether generated objects adhere to the positional priors found in the training data. RA-CLIPScore introduces dual prompts to decouple competing attributes and leverages local patch tokens to capture fine-grained regional semantics. We evaluate image generative models on their ability to match both attribute and spatial distributions of the training data. Extensive experiments show that RA-CLIPScore provides more robust and interpretable evaluations than prior methods, particularly under distribution misalignment or partially irrelevant textual attributes. We further demonstrate how it reveals spatial biases in generative models. User evaluations confirm that Regional Single Attribute Divergence based on our RA-CLIPScore aligns more closely with human perception of visual diversity than existing semantic metrics.
Olivier Tieleman, Samuel J. Bell, Ziyi Zhu, Ting Su, Elizabeth Kroll, Thomas D. Hull, Caitlin A. Stamatis
Depression is a leading cause of disability worldwide, yet validated questionnaires such as the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) often go uncompleted, yielding sparse, biased data. Users of AI mental health applications often describe their mood, sleep and functioning unprompted, producing a continuous record of symptoms. Here, we predict PHQ-9 scores from these conversations alone. As in many clinical language tasks, labels are scarce and imbalanced. We address both by fine-tuning Qwen 3.5 27B with a regression head and augmenting 3,111 ground-truth labels with pseudo-labels from a frontier reasoning model and iteratively trained intermediate models, expanding to 5,524 users with more balanced scores. On 422 held-out users, the model achieved MAE $= 3.98$, Pearson $r = 0.67$, and AUC $= 0.88$ at the clinical threshold (PHQ-9 $\geq 10$); AUC was $> 0.80$ across severity thresholds from PHQ-9 $\geq 3$ to PHQ-9 $\geq 24$, demonstrating that the model captures depression severity across the full clinical spectrum. These results support passive depression monitoring without self-report.
Multiple proton-proton interactions occur in the same bunch crossing at the LHC ("pile-up"), with the mean number of interactions per bunch crossing reaching up to about 60 in Run 3 and up to about 200 at the High-Luminosity LHC. As a direct consequence, hadronic activity within each bunch crossing increases, making it more difficult to identify collisions of interest pertaining to multijet final states. This work introduces DIPz, an uncertainty-aware Deep Sets-based machine-learning model that estimates each jet's origin along the beam axis as a Gaussian likelihood using the set of charged-particle tracks matched to the jet. Next, the DIPz predictions for each jet are combined into a likelihood-based event-level discriminant, which is optimised to select events compatible with a single collision producing a given jet multiplicity. This combined approach provides a robust and computationally efficient method for pile-up rejection in multijet final states, applicable to real-time event selections at the ATLAS High Level Trigger (HLT). Deployed online during Run 3 data taking, this approach reduces background rates by more than a factor of two, and decreases CPU consumption by approximately one third relative to the baseline data-taking configuration. It provides an early, flavour-agnostic pile-up jet rejection layer at the HLT preselection stage, introducing a previously unavailable handle for high-multiplicity jet signatures targeted by ATLAS.
Quantum relays are central to both quantum communication and distributed quantum computing, enabling long-distance transmission and modular architectures. Unlike classical repeaters, quantum repeaters preserve coherence without amplifying quantum information, relying on entanglement swapping and quantum error correction to overcome loss and decoherence. In this work, we investigate the transmission of quantum information via quantum relay channels. Our three-terminal relay model captures the trade-off between repeater-assisted and repeaterless communication strategies. Specifically, we propose a partial decode-forward strategy, in which quantum ``message system" consists of two components. The first component is decoded by the relay and then sent to the destination receiver, whereas the second component is decoded by the destination receiver without the relay's help. We analyze both entanglement-assisted and unassisted scenarios. As a special case, the full decode-forward strategy is recovered, with the relay decoding, re-encoding, and forwarding the entire message. Our framework allows for different entanglement topologies between the transmitter, the relay and the destination receiver, recovering known results on entanglement-assisted and unassisted communication. Furthermore, we discuss the interpretation of coding with quantum side information. These findings provide a foundation for designing secure, efficient, and reliable quantum networks and for realizing practical quantum repeaters and long-range quantum key distribution.
Vulnerability detection methods based on deep learning (DL) have shown strong performance on benchmark datasets, yet their real-world effectiveness remains underexplored. Recent work suggests that graph neural network-based and transformer-based models, including large language models (LLMs), yield promising results when evaluated on curated benchmark datasets. These datasets are typically characterized by similar data distributions and may contain synthetic samples, heuristic labels, or labeling noise. In this study, we systematically evaluate four representative DL models---Devign, ReVeal, LineVul, and VulBERTa---across four representative datasets: Juliet, Devign, BigVul, and ICVul. Each model is trained independently on each dataset, and the graph-based and CodeBERT representations adopted by these models are analyzed using t-SNE and centroid distance to examine vulnerability-related patterns. To assess realistic applicability, we further evaluate trained ReVeal and LineVul models, along with four open-weight LLMs, on VentiVul, our newly constructed temporally separated out-of-distribution (OOD) dataset comprising 200 recent vulnerabilities from Linux and Chromium. Our experiments reveal that current representation methods struggle to distinguish vulnerable from non-vulnerable code and that trained models generalize poorly across datasets with differing distributions and characteristics. When evaluated on VentiVul, performance drops sharply, with most models failing to detect vulnerabilities reliably or distinguish vulnerable functions from their patched counterparts. These results expose a persistent gap between academic benchmarks and real-world deployment, emphasizing the value of our deployment-oriented evaluation framework and the need for more robust code representations, higher-quality datasets, and evaluation methods that account for vulnerability-fixing changes.
Jules Viennot, Arthur Wendling, Armaël Guéneau, François Pottier
We present OCaml and Rocq implementations of Kaplan and Tarjan's purely functional, real-time catenable deques. The correctness of our Rocq code is machine-checked.
Markus Frey, Behzad Shomali, Joachim Koehler, Mehdi Ali
Looped transformers apply a shared block multiple times and have emerged as a parameter-efficient route to scaling compute in language models. However, at fixed FLOPs a looped model has strictly less capacity than a baseline transformer. We argue that compute, the number of sequential operations applied to a hidden state, and capacity, the parameters available at a single step, are distinct scaling axes that standard transformer layers conflate. We propose a dual-path block that exposes both axes as parallel pathways within a single layer: a deep sublayer re-applied $K$ times with shared parameters, and a wide sublayer with an enlarged feed-forward network applied once, combined by independent per-token gates. At two FLOP budgets, the best dual-path configuration surpasses both iso-FLOP single-axis controls on aggregate language modelling, commonsense, and math metrics, while using 17-33% fewer parameters than the width-scaled baseline. The learned gates are directly interpretable and show systematic per-token allocation: function words and lexical content trend wide, while punctuation, symbols, and arithmetic tokens trend deep. Our results suggest that compute and capacity can be scaled separately, with the model balancing the two token by token.
Current research on security monitoring is increasingly focusing on machine-learning-based approaches, but caveats remain. In addition to huge computational overhead, one concern is the lack of insights into ``why" alerts are raised. Existing interpretability approaches rely on feature attribution methods that ignore dependencies among features or on causal modeling that requires extensive domain knowledge or computational resources. This work proposes XION, a method for modeling relationships among network-flow features based on benign traffic only. During detection, anomalies are identified through violations of expected feature dependencies. Further, XION supports post-alert analysis by identifying which feature relationships break, when they break along the attack timeline, and how dependency violations evolve relatively to other identified violations. XION is evaluated on standard IDS datasets and compared against an Isolation Forest (IF) baseline across multiple attack scenarios, including both volumetric and stealthier attacks. Results show that XION matches or exceeds IF recall in all evaluated scenarios, while requiring up to 7$\times$ less inference time. At the post-alert stage, the dependency violation analysis reveals temporal and structural patterns consistent with known attack behaviors, and is further evaluated against SHAP-based feature attribution of IF alerts. Together, these findings confirm that attacks indeed disrupt feature dependencies learned from benign traffic, and that these disruptions provide additional information for understanding an alert.
Alaa Anani, Tobias Lorenz, Bernt Schiele, Mario Fritz, Jonas Fischer
Understanding how neural networks arrive at their predictions is essential for debugging, auditing, and deployment. Mechanistic interpretability pursues this goal by identifying circuits--minimal subnetworks responsible for specific behaviors. However, existing circuit discovery methods are brittle: circuits depend strongly on the chosen concept dataset and often fail to transfer out-of-distribution, raising doubts whether they capture the concept or merely dataset-specific artifacts. We introduce Certified Circuits, which provide provable stability guarantees for circuit discovery. Our framework wraps any black-box discovery algorithm with randomized data subsampling to certify that inclusion decisions over circuit components--neurons or edges of the model graph, depending on the base algorithm--are invariant to bounded edit-distance perturbations of the concept dataset. Unstable components are abstained from, yielding circuits that are more compact and more accurate. We validate across three architectures (ResNet, ViT, GPT-2) on vision (ImageNet and four OOD datasets) and language (IOI, IOI-Hard, Greater-Than) tasks. Certified circuits achieve up to 56% higher accuracy and up to 80% fewer components, and remain reliable where baselines degrade. Certified Circuits puts circuit discovery on formal ground by producing mechanistic explanations that are provably stable and better aligned with the target concept. Code: https://github.com/AlaaAnani/certified-circuits.
Lirong Che, Peidong Wang, Yimeng Su, Jiong Wang, Yang Chen, Wenbo Fu, Zhenyu Huang, Tiancheng Xu 等 14 位作者
Embodied agents are usually organized around individual tasks, yet the physical world keeps changing between tasks and during execution. We introduce LIFE (Lifelong Intelligence from Experience), a framework in which a robot observes continuously, remembers selectively, and turns experience into new capabilities. RoboBeats, a family of lightweight streaming gates, tracks conditions set by the agent and discovers new events, deciding when an observation warrants a response or a memory write. Selected observations enter Plastic Memory, a flat store of images and structured records that keeps the source evidence, so new fields and indexes can be added when later questions need them. When existing tools fall short, Explore-Distill-Mount (EDM) turns solutions found during problem solving into validated, reusable tools and skills. Under matched protocols, RoboBeats substantially improves condition tracking over its base models and, at the same writing budget, retains more useful evidence for memory question answering than uniform sampling. A case study of limited scale, replaying 24 hours of continuous video recorded by a real robot, illustrates how the integrated system builds memory from a day of experience and uses it to answer everyday questions. LIFE takes a step toward robots that become more familiar with their surroundings and more capable through experience: learning not only to complete tasks, but to live in the world.
Yegyu Han, Taegyoon Yoon, Dayeon Woo, Sojeong Kim, Hyung-Sin Kim
Recent advances on 6D object pose estimation have achieved high performance on representative benchmarks such as LM-O, YCB-V, and T-Less. These datasets capture natural-occurring variations in illumination and camera setup but do not systematically explore the effects of controllable sensor configurations, such as exposure, gain, and depth-sensor modes. To bridge this gap, we introduce SenseShift6D, the first RGB-D object-pose benchmark that physically sweeps 13 RGB exposures, 9 RGB gains, auto-exposure, 4 depth-capture modes, and 5 illumination levels. For six common household objects, we acquire 198.8k RGB and 20.0k depth images (i.e., 795.4k RGB-D scenes), providing 1,380 unique sensor-lighting permutations per object pose. Experiments with state-of-the-art pretrained, generalizable pose estimators reveal substantial performance variation across lighting and sensor settings, despite their large-scale pretraining. Strikingly, even instance-level estimators-trained and tested on identical objects and backgrounds-exhibit pronounced sensitivity to environmental and sensor shifts. These findings establish sensor- and environment-aware robustness as an underexplored yet essential dimension of 6D pose estimation. To illustrate the opportunity enabled by this benchmark, we evaluate test-time sensor selection without retraining. An idealized controller yields remarkable gains of up to +16.2 pp for generalizable models, whereas a practical consistency-based proxy provides only limited improvements, highlighting substantial headroom and the need for future research on reliable sensor-aware adaptation. SenseShift6D is available at huggingface.co/datasets/Yegyu/SenseShift6D.
An electrical outlet can look like a face without depicting a person. Face pareidolia is thus a revealing probe of how vision models turn ambiguous visual evidence into category judgments. When a model calls such an object Human, does that answer depend on its face-like arrangement? Using the FacesInThings dataset, we test six vision models, from a vision-only ViT to CLIP and generative vision-language models, with face detectors as a reference. Each face-like region is paired with three controls from the same photograph that lack the arrangement: a background crop, the region with its tiles shuffled, and its average color. A Human answer driven by the arrangement should appear less often on these controls. We also vary how the categories are described. Three findings emerge. First, models respond to illusory faces, but not as people do: face detectors rarely return a face for these regions, yet CLIP ViT-L/14 and two generative models label roughly half of them Human when the categories are described as kinds of face. Annotators, by contrast, read these faces as non-human, such as animal or cartoon faces. For these models, a face is a human face by default. Second, similar Human rates hide opposite behavior. LLaVA-1.5 answers Human less often once the arrangement is removed; Qwen2-VL calls every average-color patch Human and describes a person in each; CLIP ViT-B/32 calls shuffled regions Human more often than real faces; SmolVLM rarely answers Human, but mostly for face-like regions. Third, rewording the categories changes whether Human answers favor the face at all, removing this preference in LLaVA-1.5 and creating it in CLIP. A Human answer is not evidence of a face: vision models can keep giving it after the face is gone.
Merging finetuned Large Language Models (LLMs) has become increasingly important for integrating diverse capabilities into a single unified model. However, prevailing model merging methods rely on linear arithmetic in Euclidean space, which often destroys the intrinsic geometric properties of pretrained weights, such as hyperspherical energy. To address this, we propose Orthogonal Model Merging (OrthoMerge), a method that performs merging operations on the Riemannian manifold formed by the orthogonal group to preserve the geometric structure of the model's weights. By mapping task-specific orthogonal matrices learned by Orthogonal Finetuning (OFT) to the Lie algebra, OrthoMerge enables a principled yet efficient integration that takes into account both the direction and intensity of adaptations. In addition to directly leveraging orthogonal matrices obtained by OFT, we further extend this approach to general models finetuned with non-OFT methods (i.e., low-rank finetuning, full finetuning) via an Orthogonal-Residual Decoupling strategy. This technique extracts the orthogonal components of expert models by solving the orthogonal Procrustes problem, which are then merged on the manifold of the orthogonal group, while the remaining linear residuals are processed through standard additive merging. Extensive empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of OrthoMerge in mitigating catastrophic forgetting and maintaining model performance across diverse tasks.
Offline MARL increasingly relies on generative policies to model multimodal joint behavior, typically by distilling a centralized teacher into decentralized one-step actors under the CTDE. We identify a failure mode at the teacher training stage: standard flow-based teachers pair noise with replay targets independently, so nearby noise samples can be routed toward conflicting coordination modes. The teacher then produces samples between valid modes, and because the distillation loss regresses each local actor onto the conditional mean of the teacher's output given local input, this error is not absorbed but propagated to the student. To remove this teacher-side artifact, we propose Mode-Support Semi-Discrete Optimal Transport (MoSDOT), which summarizes multimodal replay into a finite mode support with prescribed capacities and uses conditional semi-discrete optimal transport to assign each noise sample to a single mode before teacher training. We additionally study a shared-randomness variant that uses a shared noise component at execution to expose the residual gap intrinsic to strict-product execution. On controlled diagnostics and offline MARL benchmarks, MoSDOT improves endpoint quality and routing consistency, particularly on datasets exhibiting multimodal joint behavior.
Nour Jamoussi, Ikram Dridi, Giuseppe Serra, Marios Kountouris
Differential privacy provides formal privacy guarantees for training neural networks on sensitive data, while Bayesian deep learning offers a principled framework for uncertainty-aware prediction. Combining these two objectives remains challenging, as privacy noise can interact with the stochasticity introduced by Bayesian posterior sampling. In this work, we investigate differentially private variational Bayesian learning through the Improved Variational Online Newton (IVON) optimizer. We introduce DP-IVON-Gradsq, a private variant of IVON. The proposed method constructs its curvature estimate from the privatized gradient using a noise-corrected squared-gradient estimator, reducing the direct interaction between posterior-sampling noise and privacy noise while preserving the Adam-like computational efficiency of IVON. We evaluate DP-IVON-Gradsq on CIFAR-10 against the standard private optimizers DP-SGD and DP-Adam over a range of privacy budgets. The results show that DP-IVON-Gradsq is competitive under weak-to-moderate privacy constraints, i.e., large-to-moderate values of $\varepsilon$, while degrading under strong privacy. Code is available at https://github.com/NourJamoussi/DP-IVON-Gradsq.git.
Pieter M. Blok, Haozhou Wang, Hyun Kwon Suh, Peicheng Wang, James Burridge, Wei Guo
Key phenotypic traits, such as crop size, volume, and weight, can be estimated non-destructively from point clouds. In practice, however, point clouds of crops are typically incomplete due to self-occlusion, leading to systematic errors when estimating these traits. To overcome this limitation, crop traits can be inferred directly from incomplete point clouds using deep learning-based regression networks. These networks, however, may perform suboptimally, because their predictions do not incorporate prior geometric knowledge of the crop. Such geometric knowledge is often available in structured settings, such as on a potato harvester, where the fixed distance between the camera and the conveyor belt allows tuber height to be derived from the point cloud. To exploit this geometric cue, we introduce PointRAFT, a high-throughput point cloud regression network that incorporates object height through a dedicated height embedding. We hypothesized that this height embedding improves tuber weight estimation from partial point clouds. To test this hypothesis, we collected 26,688 point clouds of 859 potato tubers on an operational harvester, spanning four cultivars and three growing seasons. On a test set of 5,254 point clouds representing 172 tubers, PointRAFT achieved a mean absolute error (MAE) of 11.7 g and a root mean squared error (RMSE) of 17.1 g, outperforming six point cloud regression networks without a height embedding. Requiring only 6.3 ms per point cloud for preprocessing and inference, PointRAFT is fast enough for high-throughput weight estimation on a commercial potato harvester. Beyond potato weight estimation, PointRAFT provides a versatile regression network applicable to a wide range of 3D phenotyping and robotic perception tasks. The code, network weights, and a subset of the dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/pieterblok/pointraft.
Online comments offer perspectives on long-form articles but are often separated from the passages they discuss, requiring readers to navigate back and forth and mentally reconstruct comment-text relationships. To preserve these relationships while maintaining reading continuity, we explored contextual comment presentation that makes comments locally accessible at the passages they address. We compared Text-End, Sentence-End, Between-Line, and Click-to-Show in a within-subject study with 24 participants using constructed comments and fixed sentence-level anchors. All three local layouts reduced initial-reading scrolling, with no significant condition effects on accuracy or elapsed task time. Sentence-End and Between-Line received higher comment-accessibility ratings than Text-End, while Click-to-Show received higher physical-demand ratings than Text-End and Sentence-End. Preferences remained distributed across all four layouts.
Multi-agent reinforcement learning is a key method for training multi-robot systems. Through rewarding or punishing robots over a series of episodes according to their performance, they can be trained and then deployed in the real world. However, poorly trained policies can lead to unsafe behaviour during early training stages. We introduce Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning guided by language-based Inter-robot Negotiation (MARLIN), a hybrid framework in which large language models provide high-level planning before the reinforcement learning policy has learned effective behaviours. Robots use language models to negotiate actions and generate plans that guide policy learning. The system dynamically switches between reinforcement learning and language-model-based negotiation during training, enabling more effective exploration. MARLIN is evaluated using both simulated and physical robots with local and remote language models. Results show that, compared to standard multi-agent reinforcement learning, the hybrid approach achieves higher performance in early training with limited impact on the final performance. The code is available at https://github.com/SooratiLab/MARLIN.
Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) is sample-efficient but struggles in sparse reward settings. A critical bottleneck arises from the lack of informative gradients in sparse settings, where standard reward models often yield flat landscapes that struggle to guide planning. To address this challenge, we propose Shaping Landscapes with Optimistic Potential Estimates (SLOPE), a novel framework that shifts reward modeling from predicting sparse scalars to constructing informative potential landscapes. SLOPE employs optimistic distributional regression to estimate high-confidence upper bounds, which amplifies rare success signals and ensures sufficient exploration gradients. Evaluations on 30+ tasks across 5 benchmarks and real-world robotic deployments, demonstrate that SLOPE consistently outperforms leading baselines in fully sparse, semi-sparse, and dense rewards. The project code is available at https://github.com/Arya87/SLOPE.
We consider a fundamental problem of \emph{mixedness testing}: Given $n$ copies of an $N$-qubit state $ρ$, determine whether $ρ= \mathbb{I}_d/d$ or $\|ρ-\mathbb{I}_d/d\|_1 \geq \varepsilon$ with high probability, where $d = 2^N$. In particular, we focus on performing this task with simple single-qubit measurements, i.e. measurements that are prepared independently on each qubit. We provide a nearly complete picture of single-qubit mixedness testing by showing that its copy-complexity is $\tildeΘ\left(\sqrt{10}^N/\varepsilon^2\right)$. To establish our lower bound, we introduce a new measurement-dependent lower bound framework for adaptive single-copy state certification. For the upper bound, we present a randomized Pauli basis measurement protocol, which relies on a new primitive for computationally efficient uniformity testing of correlation-concentrated distributions on the Boolean hypercube. In conjunction, we provide lower and upper bounds for mixedness testing with fixed Pauli measurement protocols.
Dalton Raphael Harmsen, Swier Garst, Thomas van Osch, Zarè Palanciyan, Joaquin Vanschoren
Cross-lingual transfer describes how knowledge in a source language benefits a target language. Measuring it quantitatively requires broad multilingual pre-training, as prior work has done with cross-lingual transfer matrices. We ask whether transfer is predictable from freely available typological features, and whether the prominence of high-resource source languages reflects typology or data quality and quantity. We show that typological databases contain cheap and dense signals about cross-lingual transfer. Our typology-only random forest on a 24-language prior-work transfer matrix scores leave-one-language-out $ρ{=}0.705$ and $R^2{=}0.49$, against $ρ{=}0.62$ for a tuned non-typological control, an increment that a paired bootstrap cannot separate at this scale. When both languages of a held-out pair are unseen, performance degrades to $ρ{\approx}0.41$, so the model interpolates a ground-truth matrix more reliably than it predicts new languages. The signal survives leave-one-script-out and leave-one-family-out protocols, so script and family confounding do not explain the effect. By decomposing the transfer into a typology term and a resource-and-script bias term, we find the best-source ranking sensitive to this bias. Typological features never observe this bias, which makes them a zero-compute screening tool that replaces hundreds of training runs with a model fit. Our code is available \href{https://github.com/dharmsen/typo-x-ling-transfer}{here}.
While teaching untyped $λ$-calculus to undergraduate students, we were wondering why $α$-equivalence is not directly inductively defined. In this paper, we demonstrate that this is indeed feasible. Specifically, we provide a grounded, inductive definition for $α$-equivalence and show that it conforms to the specification provided in the literature. The work presented in this paper is fully formalized in the Rocq Prover.
We present the first worst-case, sublinear protocol to estimate the fidelity between a known target state and unknown lab-prepared state using Pauli basis measurements. More precisely, for $d$-dimensional states, we estimate the fidelity to $\pm \varepsilon$ using $o(d^{0.9675})/\varepsilon^2$ copies, which applies to all target states. Furthermore, our results establish improved guarantees for Pauli shadow tomography and Distributed Inner Product Estimation.
Filip Blašković, Tim O. F. Conrad, Stefan Klus, Nataša Djurdjevac Conrad
Temporal (or time-evolving) networks provide a natural framework for modeling complex systems with time-dependent interactions, where understanding the evolution of community structures is a central challenge. While random walk-based approaches to community detection in static networks are well established through the spectral analysis of associated transfer operators, extending these ideas to temporal networks is nontrivial due to the inherent time-dependence of the underlying dynamics. In this work, we develop a general framework for community detection in temporal networks that is based on multi-view canonical correlation analysis (mCCA). We show that the proposed formulation admits a spectral characterization via a time-reversible random walk on an augmented space-time network, providing a clear dynamical interpretation of temporal communities as metastable structures of the process. Furthermore, we analyze key spectral properties of the resulting transfer operators and the interplay between spatial and temporal effects, which allows us to distinguish between structural features and artifacts induced by the snapshot coupling. Finally, we derive a reduced-order model, which preserves the essential spectral properties while significantly improving computational efficiency. We show that the proposed approach effectively detects communities in temporal networks and captures their evolution.
Time-series forecasting is foundational to a wide spectrum of web-scale services, spanning personalized recommendations, energy scheduling, and infrastructure capacity planning. Accurate long-term time series forecasting (LTSF) requires models to capture long-range temporal dependencies while adapting to periodic patterns that vary across variables. Although frequency-aware methods offer a global view of temporal dynamics, they typically rely on inflexible heuristic designs, such as predefined period lengths, manually selected or randomly sampled top-k frequency components, and separate spectral transformations. Consequently, they fail to account for time-frequency heterogeneity, where variables that appear synchronized in the time domain can differ substantially in the frequency domain. Meanwhile, Mamba-based forecasters, despite their efficiency in long-range modeling, introduce frequency information only as auxiliary signals, leaving spectral evidence disconnected from state transitions. In this work, we propose AdaMamba, a novel approach that explicitly internalizes input-dependent frequency information into the modeling of temporal dependencies. AdaMamba comprises an interaction learning module and an adaptive frequency-gated state space module: the former captures cross-variable dependencies and multi-scale temporal context, while the latter generates context-dependent frequency bases and unifies temporal forgetting into a single time-frequency gate that directly modulates state evolution. Extensive experiments on seven public LTSF benchmarks and four domain-specific datasets demonstrate that AdaMamba consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines while maintaining competitive computational efficiency.
Qi Huang, Furong Ye, Ananta Shahane, Thomas Bäck, Niki van Stein
Large Language Models (LLMs) have already been widely adopted for automated algorithm design, demonstrating strong abilities in generating and evolving algorithms across various fields. Existing work has largely focused on examining their effectiveness in solving specific problems, with search strategies primarily guided by adaptive prompt designs. In this paper, through investigating the token-wise attribution of the prompts to LLM-generated algorithmic code, we show that the embedded code examples and their associated strategy instructions have the strongest influence on the generated algorithms. Building upon this insight, we propose leveraging existing benchmark algorithms as strong priors to guide LLM-driven optimization. We evaluate this approach with three LLMs on two black-box optimization benchmarks: the pseudo-Boolean optimization suite (pbo) and the black-box optimization suite (bbob). Despite relying on a simple (1+1) elitist search, it obtains the best average rank in five of six benchmark--LLM settings against six state-of-the-art LLM-driven methods, including more sophisticated search strategies. Our findings highlight the value of integrating benchmarking studies to enhance both efficiency and robustness of the LLM-driven black-box optimization methods.
Image characterization relates coding budgets to the probability carried by source cells and their output images. At second order, refining a cell can reveal unavailable information, while a change of reference measure can alter the relevant likelihood fluctuations. We establish image bounds that account for both effects. A finite-block partition theorem bounds the cost of merging component images by the joint conditional information spectrum of their label. It preserves continuous second-order profiles when that cost is negligible on the square-root blocklength scale. For reconstruction constraints, cell-dependent reference measures retain the actual distortion deficits in a single likelihood. A Gaussian evaluation gives matching second-order rates for Heegard--Berger coding with one uninformed decoder in the strict both-active regime, common reconstruction under a joint agreement and distortion criterion, and two-stage refinement with side information absent at the first decoder. A structured binary source illustrates partition stability even when its global density and conditional-divergence deficits are linear in blocklength. Posterior-mass images also sharpen extraction after a public refinement by charging its residual information rather than its alphabet size. These results preserve the joint constraints and the observations available for choosing the local coding experiment.
Francesco Ferrini, Veronica Lachi, Antonio Longa, Bruno Lepri, Andrea Passerini
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) often struggle to capture the link-specific structural patterns crucial for accurate link prediction, as their node-centric message-passing schemes overlook the subgraph structures connecting a pair of nodes. Existing methods to inject such structural context either incur high computational cost or rely on simplistic heuristics (e.g., common neighbor counts) that fail to model multi-hop dependencies. We introduce SP4LP (Shortest Path for Link Prediction), a novel framework that combines GNN-based node encodings with sequence modeling over shortest paths. Specifically, SP4LP first applies a GNN to compute representations for all nodes, then extracts the shortest path between each candidate node pair and processes the resulting sequence of node embeddings using a sequence model. This design enables SP4LP to capture expressive multi-hop relational patterns with computational efficiency. Empirically, SP4LP achieves state-of-the-art performance across link prediction benchmarks. Theoretically, we prove that SP4LP is strictly more expressive than standard message-passing GNNs and several state-of-the-art structural features methods, establishing it as a general and principled approach for link prediction in graphs.
Ning Yang, Chengzhi Wang, Yibo Liu, Baoliang Tian, Haijun Zhang
Prefill-only KV compression freezes a token subset at the end of prefill and decodes from it without further eviction. The retention decision is therefore irreversible, yet existing methods estimate the corrective signals it relies on, per-head reliability and prompt-level compression sensitivity, online from a single noisy prompt. We argue this is the wrong statistical unit: these signals exhibit far higher cross-prompt regularity than within-prompt signal-to-noise. We introduce \textsc{CompilerKV}, a KV-retention policy whose corrective tables are compiled offline from a calibration corpus, reducing online correction after the standard observation-window scan to $O(1)$ lookups plus a budget clamp. We find that compiled retention tables behave as portable architectural priors: rankings transfer across disjoint corpora on four backbones (mean Spearman $\barρ{=}0.90$), and direct model-to-model table transfer costs only $0.4$--$0.8$ LongBench points on average. At a 512-token budget, \textsc{CompilerKV} attains compressed-SOTA on all four backbones, improving over the strongest prefill-only baseline by $+1.67$ points on average (task-bootstrap 95\% CI $[+1.08,+2.37]$). Pressure regimes amplify the gap: under a fixed $512/32k$ cache ratio, \textsc{CompilerKV} remains the strongest compressed method through 128k RULER ($\sim\!73$ vs.\ FullKV $\sim\!79$, SnapKV $\sim\!38$); on 32k NIAH it reaches $0.89$ vs.\ SnapKV $0.42$; and at 32k input, retaining only $1.56\%$ of the prefill KV, batch-16 serving remains feasible where FullKV is OOM.
Aleksandros Sobczyk, Gioele Gottardo, Christos K. Matzoros, Mirko De Vita, Filip Skogh, Anastasios Zouzias, Jiawei Zhuang
Linear attention has emerged as a cornerstone for efficient long-context architectures, as evidenced by its integration into state-of-the-art open-source models including Qwen3.5/3.6, Kimi Linear/K3, and RWKV-7. Models that incorporate linear attention layers with the so-called Delta-Rule involve the inversion of triangular matrices as a core sub-routine. This operation often forms a performance bottleneck, and, due to its high-sensitivity to numerical errors, it can significantly deteriorate end-to-end model accuracy if it is not carefully implemented. This work provides a systematic analysis of both direct and iterative triangular inversion algorithms, targeting methods that are rich in matrix products, and, therefore, have the potential to efficiently utilize modern hardware. To that end, our analysis covers a broad spectrum of mathematical and practical aspects, with a heavy focus on numerical stability, computational complexity, and, ultimately, hardware efficiency and practical considerations. We provide a rigorous experimental evaluation to verify these properties in practical scenarios, and in low-precision floating-point representations, highlighting the strengths and limitations of each method. Performance benchmarks on NPUs reveal up to $4.3\times$ speed-up against the state-of-the-art implementations of SGLang for triangular matrix inversion, leading to significant performance improvements on the entire layer level, while maintaining end-to-end model accuracy.