Precision and Recall are fundamental metrics in machine learning tasks where both accurate predictions and comprehensive coverage are essential, such as in multi-label learning, language generation, medical studies, and recommender systems. A key challenge in these settings is the prevalence of one-sided feedback, where only positive examples are observed during training--e.g., in multi-label tasks like tagging people in Facebook photos, we may observe only a few tagged individuals, without knowing who else appears in the image. To address learning under such partial feedback, we introduce a Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) framework in which hypotheses are set functions that map each input to a set of items, extending beyond single-label predictions and generalizing classical binary, multi-class, and multi-label models. Our results reveal sharp statistical and algorithmic separations from standard settings: classical methods such as Empirical Risk Minimization provably fail, even for simple hypothesis classes. We develop new algorithms that learn from positive data alone, achieving optimal sample complexity in the realizable case, and establishing multiplicative--rather than additive--approximation guarantees in the agnostic case, where achieving additive regret is impossible.

Brain-computer interfaces have shown great potential in motor and speech rehabilitation, but still suffer from low performance stability across days, mostly due to the instabilities in neural signals. These instabilities, partially caused by neuron deaths and electrode shifts, leading to channel-level variabilities among different recording days. Previous studies mostly focused on aligning multi-day neural signals onto a low-dimensional latent manifold to reduce the variabilities, while faced with difficulties when neural signals exhibit significant drift. Here, we propose to learn a channel-level invariant neural representation to address the variabilities in channels across days. It contains a channel-rearrangement module to learn stable representations against electrode shifts, and a channel reconstruction module to handle the missing neurons. The proposed method achieved the state-of-the-art performance with cross-day decoding tasks over two months, on multiple benchmark BCI datasets. The proposed approach showed good generalization ability that can be incorporated to different neural networks.

Current parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods have shown superior performance in continual learning. However, most existing PEFT-based methods focus on mitigating catastrophic forgetting by limiting modifications to the old task model caused by new tasks. This hinders backward knowledge transfer, as when new tasks have a strong positive correlation with old tasks, appropriately training on new tasks can transfer beneficial knowledge to old tasks. Critically, achieving backward knowledge transfer faces two fundamental challenges: (1) some parameters may be ineffective on task performance, which constrains the task solution space and model capacity; (2) since old task data are inaccessible, modeling task correlation via shared data is infeasible. To address these challenges, we propose CaLoRA, a novel causal-aware low-rank adaptation framework that is the first PEFT-based continual learning work with backward knowledge transfer. Specifically, we first propose parameter-level counterfactual attribution (PaCA) that estimates the causal effect of LoRA parameters via counterfactual reasoning, identifying effective parameters from a causal view. Second, we propose cross-task gradient adaptation (CaGA) to quantify task correlation by gradient projection and evaluate task affinity based on gradient similarity. By incorporating causal effect, task correlation, and affinity, CaGA adaptively adjusts task gradients, facilitating backward knowledge transfer without relying on data replay. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks and continual learning settings show that CaLoRA outperforms stateof-the-art methods.

Learning with relational and network-structured data is increasingly vital in sensitive domains where protecting the privacy of individual entities is paramount. Differential Privacy (DP) offers a principled approach for quantifying privacy risks, with DP-SGD emerging as a standard mechanism for private model training. However, directly applying DP-SGD to relational learning is challenging due to two key factors: (i) entities often participate in multiple relations, resulting in high and difficult-to-control sensitivity; and (ii) relational learning typically involves multistage, potentially coupled (interdependent) sampling procedures that make standard privacy amplification analyses inapplicable. This work presents a principled framework for relational learning with formal entity-level DP guarantees. We provide a rigorous sensitivity analysis and introduce an adaptive gradient clipping scheme that modulates clipping thresholds based on entity occurrence frequency. We also extend the privacy amplification results to a tractable subclass of coupled sampling, where the dependence arises only through sample sizes. These contributions lead to a tailored DP-SGD variant for relational data with provable privacy guarantees. Experiments on fine-tuning text encoders over text-attributed network-structured relational data demonstrate the strong utility-privacy trade-offs of our approach.

Flexible docking, which predicts the binding conformations of both proteins and small molecules by modeling their structural flexibility, plays a vital role in structure-based drug design. Although recent generative approaches, particularly diffusion-based models, have shown promising results, they require iterative sampling to generate candidate structures and depend on separate scoring functions for pose selection. This leads to an inefficient pipeline that is difficult to scale in real-world drug discovery workflows. To overcome these challenges, we introduce FIGRDock, a fast and accurate flexible docking framework that understands complicated interactions between molecules and proteins with a regression-based approach. FIGRDock leverages initial docking poses from conventional tools to distill interaction-aware distance patterns, which serve as explicit structural conditions to directly guide the prediction of the final protein-ligand complex via a regression model. This one-shot inference paradigm enables rapid and precise pose prediction without reliance on multi-step sampling or external scoring stages. Experimental results show that FIGRDock achieves up to 100 faster inference than diffusion-based docking methods, while consistently surpassing them in accuracy across standard benchmarks. These results suggest that FIGRDock has the potential to offer a scalable and efficient solution for flexible docking, advancing the pace of structure-based drug discovery.4

While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate strong performance across domains, their long-context capabilities are limited by transient neural activations causing information decay and unstructured feed-forward network (FFN) weights leading to semantic fragmentation. Inspired by the brain's working memory and cortical modularity, we propose PaceLLM, featuring two innovations: (1) a Persistent Activity (PA) Mechanism that mimics prefrontal cortex (PFC) neurons' persistent firing by introducing an activation-level memory bank to dynamically retrieve, reuse, and update critical FFN states, addressing contextual decay; and (2) Cortical Expert (CE) Clustering that emulates task-adaptive neural specialization to reorganize FFN weights into semantic modules, establishing cross-token dependencies and mitigating fragmentation.

Accurate network estimation serves as the cornerstone for understanding complex systems across scientific domains, from decoding gene regulatory networks in systems biology to identifying social relationship patterns in computational sociology. Modern applications demand methods that simultaneously address two critical challenges: capturing nonlinear dependencies between variables and reconstructing inherent hierarchical structures where higher-level entities coordinate lower-level components (e.g., functional pathways organizing gene clusters). Traditional Gaussian graphical models fundamentally fail in these aspects due to their restrictive linear assumptions and flat network representations. We propose NNBLNet, a neural network-based learning framework for bi-level network inference. The core innovation lies in hierarchical selection layers that enforce structural consistency between high-level coordinator groups and their constituent low-level connections via adaptive sparsity constraints. This architecture is integrated with a compositional neural network architecture that learn cross-level association patterns through constrained nonlinear transformations, explicitly preserving hierarchical dependencies while overcoming the representational limitations of linear methods. Crucially, we establish formal theoretical guarantees for the consistent recovery of both high-level connections and their internal low-level structures under general statistical regimes. Extensive validation demonstrates NNBLNet's effectiveness across synthetic and real-world scenarios, achieving superior F1 scores compared to competitive methods and particularly beneficial for complex systems analysis through its interpretable bi-level structure discovery.

In this work, we first empirically demonstrate the instability and suboptimal performance of existing popular MU methods when deployed in different scenarios. To address this issue, we propose Dual Optimizer (DualOptim), which incorporates adaptive learning rate and decoupled momentum factors. Empirical and theoretical evidence demonstrates that DualOptim contributes to effective and stable unlearning. Through extensive experiments, we show that DualOptim can significantly boost MU efficacy and stability across diverse tasks, including image classification, image generation, and large language models, making it a versatile approach to empower existing MU algorithms.

In online inverse linear optimization, a learner observes time-varying sets of feasible actions and an agent's optimal actions, selected by solving linear optimization over the feasible actions. The learner sequentially makes predictions of the agent's true linear objective function, and their quality is measured by the regret, the cumulative gap between optimal objective values and those achieved by following the learner's predictions. A seminal work by Bärmann et al. (2017) obtained a regret bound of O( T), where T is the time horizon. Subsequently, the regret bound has been improved to O(n4 lnT) by Besbes et al. (2021, 2025) and to O(nlnT) by Gollapudi et al. (2021), where nis the dimension of the ambient space of objective vectors. However, these logarithmic-regret methods are highly inefficient when T is large, as they need to maintain regions specified by O(T) constraints, which represent possible locations of the true objective vector.

Visual place recognition (VPR) is typically regarded as a specific image retrieval task, whose core lies in representing images as global descriptors. Over the past decade, dominant VPR methods (e.g., NetVLAD) have followed a paradigm that first extracts the patch features/tokens of the input image using a backbone, and then aggregates these patch features into a global descriptor via an aggregator. This backbone-plus-aggregator paradigm has achieved overwhelming dominance in the CNN era and remains widely used in transformer-based models. In this paper, however, we argue that a dedicated aggregator is not necessary in the transformer era, that is, we can obtain robust global descriptors only with the backbone. Specifically, we introduce some learnable aggregation tokens, which are prepended to the patch tokens before a particular transformer block. All these tokens will be jointly processed and interact globally via the intrinsic self-attention mechanism, implicitly aggregating useful information within the patch tokens to the aggregation tokens.