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STARK denoises spatial transcriptomics images via adaptive regularization

Kubal, Sharvaj, Graham, Naomi, Heitz, Matthieu, Warren, Andrew, Friedlander, Michael P., Plan, Yaniv, Schiebinger, Geoffrey

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We present an approach to denoising spatial transcriptomics images that is particularly effective for uncovering cell identities in the regime of ultra-low sequencing depths, and also allows for interpolation of gene expression. The method -- Spatial Transcriptomics via Adaptive Regularization and Kernels (STARK) -- augments kernel ridge regression with an incrementally adaptive graph Laplacian regularizer. In each iteration, we (1) perform kernel ridge regression with a fixed graph to update the image, and (2) update the graph based on the new image. The kernel ridge regression step involves reducing the infinite dimensional problem on a space of images to finite dimensions via a modified representer theorem. Starting with a purely spatial graph, and updating it as we improve our image makes the graph more robust to noise in low sequencing depth regimes. We show that the aforementioned approach optimizes a block-convex objective through an alternating minimization scheme wherein the sub-problems have closed form expressions that are easily computed. This perspective allows us to prove convergence of the iterates to a stationary point of this non-convex objective. Statistically, such stationary points converge to the ground truth with rate $\mathcal{O}(R^{-1/2})$ where $R$ is the number of reads. In numerical experiments on real spatial transcriptomics data, the denoising performance of STARK, evaluated in terms of label transfer accuracy, shows consistent improvement over the competing methods tested.



Open-Set Fault Diagnosis in Multimode Processes via Fine-Grained Deep Feature Representation

Li, Guangqiang, Atoui, M. Amine, Li, Xiangshun

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

A reliable fault diagnosis system should not only accurately classify known health states but also effectively identify unknown faults. In multimode processes, samples belonging to the same health state often show multiple cluster distributions, making it difficult to construct compact and accurate decision boundaries for that state. To address this challenge, a novel open-set fault diagnosis model named fine-grained clustering and rejection network (FGCRN) is proposed. It combines multiscale depthwise convolution, bidirectional gated recurrent unit and temporal attention mechanism to capture discriminative features. A distance-based loss function is designed to enhance the intra-class compactness. Fine-grained feature representations are constructed through unsupervised learning to uncover the intrinsic structures of each health state. Extreme value theory is employed to model the distance between sample features and their corresponding fine-grained representations, enabling effective identification of unknown faults. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method.


OR-R1: Automating Modeling and Solving of Operations Research Optimization Problem via Test-Time Reinforcement Learning

Ding, Zezhen, Tan, Zhen, Zhang, Jiheng, Chen, Tianlong

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Optimization modeling and solving are fundamental to the application of Operations Research (OR) in real-world decision making, yet the process of translating natural language problem descriptions into formal models and solver code remains highly expertise intensive. While recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have opened new opportunities for automation, the generalization ability and data efficiency of existing LLM-based methods are still limited, asmost require vast amounts of annotated or synthetic data, resulting in high costs and scalability barriers. In this work, we present OR-R1, a data-efficient training framework for automated optimization modeling and solving. OR-R1 first employs supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to help the model acquire the essential reasoning patterns for problem formulation and code generation from limited labeled data. In addition, it improves the capability and consistency through Test-Time Group Relative Policy Optimization (TGRPO). This two-stage design enables OR-R1 to leverage both scarce labeled and abundant unlabeled data for effective learning. Experiments show that OR-R1 achieves state-of-the-art performance with an average solving accuracy of $67.7\%$, using only $1/10$ the synthetic data required by prior methods such as ORLM, exceeding ORLM's solving accuracy by up to $4.2\%$. Remarkably, OR-R1 outperforms ORLM by over $2.4\%$ with just $100$ synthetic samples. Furthermore, TGRPO contributes an additional $3.1\%-6.4\%$ improvement in accuracy, significantly narrowing the gap between single-attempt (Pass@1) and multi-attempt (Pass@8) performance from $13\%$ to $7\%$. Extensive evaluations across diverse real-world benchmarks demonstrate that OR-R1 provides a robust, scalable, and cost-effective solution for automated OR optimization problem modeling and solving, lowering the expertise and data barriers for industrial OR applications.


Explaining Decisions in ML Models: a Parameterized Complexity Analysis (Part I)

Ordyniak, Sebastian, Paesani, Giacomo, Rychlicki, Mateusz, Szeider, Stefan

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This paper presents a comprehensive theoretical investigation into the parameterized complexity of explanation problems in various machine learning (ML) models. Contrary to the prevalent black-box perception, our study focuses on models with transparent internal mechanisms. We address two principal types of explanation problems: abductive and contrastive, both in their local and global variants. Our analysis encompasses diverse ML models, including Decision Trees, Decision Sets, Decision Lists, Boolean Circuits, and ensembles thereof, each offering unique explanatory challenges. This research fills a significant gap in explainable AI (XAI) by providing a foundational understanding of the complexities of generating explanations for these models. This work provides insights vital for further research in the domain of XAI, contributing to the broader discourse on the necessity of transparency and accountability in AI systems.



Person-Centric Annotations of LAION-400M: Auditing Bias and Its Transfer to Models

Girrbach, Leander, Alaniz, Stephan, Smith, Genevieve, Darrell, Trevor, Akata, Zeynep

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Vision-language models trained on large-scale multimodal datasets show strong demographic biases, but the role of training data in producing these biases remains unclear. A major barrier has been the lack of demographic annotations in web-scale datasets such as LAION-400M. We address this gap by creating person-centric annotations for the full dataset, including over 276 million bounding boxes, perceived gender and race/ethnicity labels, and automatically generated captions. These annotations are produced through validated automatic labeling pipelines combining object detection, multimodal captioning, and finetuned classifiers. Using them, we uncover demographic imbalances and harmful associations, such as the disproportionate linking of men and individuals perceived as Black or Middle Eastern with crime-related and negative content. We also show that 60-70% of gender bias in CLIP and Stable Diffusion can be linearly explained by direct co-occurrences in the data. Our resources establish the first large-scale empirical link between dataset composition and downstream model bias.


Hardware-Aware Data and Instruction Mapping for AI Tasks: Balancing Parallelism, I/O and Memory Tradeoffs

Chowdhury, Md Rownak Hossain, Rahman, Mostafizur

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

-- We introduce a mapping framework for deep learning inference that takes advantage of predictable neural network behavior to plan both computation and communication ahead of time. The framework generates a unified stream of instructions and data, enabling t he hardware to execute operations and route information on its own, without frequent involvement from the host and with minimal off - chip memory use. This naturally reduces reliance on I/O, off - chip memory, and host control. By leveraging fine - grained messa ge passing on a programmable, message - based compute architecture, the framework keeps data movement local and coordinates computation across the array using techniques such as stationary - weight reuse, in - array multicasting, and staged reductions. Applied t o VGG - 19, the framework sustains high utilization (88 to 92 percent), with over 97 percent of messages generated internally and nearly 89 percent of time consumed on - chip transfers. Overall, the results highlight the effectiveness of streaming - based computation and show how our mapper enables this execution style by tightly coordinating data and instruction flow across the hardware. Transitioning across layers or handling boundaries (e.g., padding or strides) requires flushing state and reprogramming the array, which breaks opportunities for reuse In our work, we take the view that deep - learning inference is structured enough to shift control away from the host.


CHORUS: Zero-shot Hierarchical Retrieval and Orchestration for Generating Linear Programming Code

Ahmed, Tasnim, Choudhury, Salimur

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Linear Programming (LP) problems aim to find the optimal solution to an objective under constraints. These problems typically require domain knowledge, mathematical skills, and programming ability, presenting significant challenges for non-experts. This study explores the efficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) in generating solver-specific LP code. We propose CHORUS, a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework for synthesizing Gurobi-based LP code from natural language problem statements. CHORUS incorporates a hierarchical tree-like chunking strategy for theoretical contents and generates additional metadata based on code examples from documentation to facilitate self-contained, semantically coherent retrieval. Two-stage retrieval approach of CHORUS followed by cross-encoder reranking further ensures contextual relevance. Finally, expertly crafted prompt and structured parser with reasoning steps improve code generation performance significantly. Experiments on the NL4Opt-Code benchmark show that CHORUS improves the performance of open-source LLMs such as Llama3.1 (8B), Llama3.3 (70B), Phi4 (14B), Deepseek-r1 (32B), and Qwen2.5-coder (32B) by a significant margin compared to baseline and conventional RAG. It also allows these open-source LLMs to outperform or match the performance of much stronger baselines-GPT3.5 and GPT4 while requiring far fewer computational resources. Ablation studies further demonstrate the importance of expert prompting, hierarchical chunking, and structured reasoning.


Probing the Subtle Ideological Manipulation of Large Language Models

Paschalides, Demetris, Pallis, George, Dikaiakos, Marios D.

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed natural language processing, but concerns have emerged about their susceptibility to ideological manipulation, particularly in politically sensitive areas. Prior work has focused on binary Left-Right LLM biases, using explicit prompts and fine-tuning on political QA datasets. In this work, we move beyond this binary approach to explore the extent to which LLMs can be influenced across a spectrum of political ideologies, from Progressive-Left to Conservative-Right. We introduce a novel multi-task dataset designed to reflect diverse ideological positions through tasks such as ideological QA, statement ranking, manifesto cloze completion, and Congress bill comprehension. By fine-tuning three LLMs-Phi-2, Mistral, and Llama-3-on this dataset, we evaluate their capacity to adopt and express these nuanced ideologies. Our findings indicate that fine-tuning significantly enhances nuanced ideological alignment, while explicit prompts provide only minor refinements. This highlights the models' susceptibility to subtle ideological manipulation, suggesting a need for more robust safeguards to mitigate these risks.