Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Europe


Towards Interpretability Without Sacrifice: Faithful Dense Layer Decomposition with Mixture of Decoders

Neural Information Processing Systems

Multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) are an integral part of large language models, yet their dense representations render them difficult to understand, edit, and steer. Recent methods learn interpretable approximations via neuron-level sparsity, yet fail to faithfully reconstruct the original mapping-significantly increasing model's next-token cross-entropy loss. In this paper, we advocate for moving to layer-level sparsity to overcome the accuracy trade-off in sparse layer approximation. Under this paradigm, we introduce Mixture of Decoders (MxDs). MxDs generalize MLPs and Gated Linear Units, expanding pre-trained dense layers into tens of thousands of specialized sublayers. Through a flexible form of tensor factorization, each sparsely activating MxD sublayer implements a linear transformation with fullrank weights-preserving the original decoders' expressive capacity even under heavy sparsity. Experimentally, we show that MxDs significantly outperform state-of-the-art methods (e.g., Transcoders) on the sparsity-accuracy frontier in language models with up to 3B parameters. Further evaluations on sparse probing and feature steering demonstrate that MxDs learn similarly specialized features of natural language-opening up a promising new avenue for designing interpretable yet faithful decompositions. Our code is included at: https://github.com/


K-DECORE: Facilitating Knowledge Transfer in Continual Structured Knowledge Reasoning via Knowledge Decoupling

Neural Information Processing Systems

Continual Structured Knowledge Reasoning (CSKR) focuses on training models to handle sequential tasks, where each task involves translating natural language questions into structured queries grounded in structured knowledge. Existing general continual learning approaches face significant challenges when applied to this task, including poor generalization to heterogeneous structured knowledge and inefficient reasoning due to parameter growth as tasks increase. To address these limitations, we propose a novel CSKR framework, K-DECORE, which operates with a fixed number of tunable parameters. Unlike prior methods, K-DECORE introduces a knowledge decoupling mechanism that disentangles the reasoning process into task-specific and task-agnostic stages, effectively bridging the gaps across diverse tasks. Building on this foundation, K-DECORE integrates a dualperspective memory consolidation mechanism for distinct stages and introduces a structure-guided pseudo-data synthesis strategy to further enhance the model's generalization capabilities. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of K-DECORE over existing continual learning methods across multiple metrics, leveraging various backbone large language models.


Learning (Approximately) Equivariant Networks via Constrained Optimization

Neural Information Processing Systems

Equivariant neural networks are designed to respect symmetries through their architecture, boosting generalization and sample efficiency when those symmetries are present in the data distribution.


Disentangling Latent Shifts of In-Context Learning with Weak Supervision

Neural Information Processing Systems

In-context learning (ICL) enables large language models to perform few-shot learning by conditioning on labeled examples in the prompt. Despite its flexibility, ICL suffers from instability - especially as prompt length increases with more demonstrations. To address this, we treat ICL as a source of weak supervision and propose a parameter-efficient method that disentangles demonstration-induced latent shifts from those of the query. An ICL-based teacher generates pseudo-labels on unlabeled queries, while a student predicts them using only the query input, updating a lightweight adapter.


QiMeng-MuPa: Mutual-Supervised Learning for Sequential-to-Parallel Code Translation

Neural Information Processing Systems

The rise of GPU-based high-performance computing (HPC) has driven the widespread adoption of parallel programming models such as CUDA. Yet, the inherent complexity of parallel programming creates a demand for the automated sequential-to-parallel approaches. However, data scarcity poses a significant challenge for machine learning-based sequential-to-parallel code translation. Although recent back-translation methods show promise, they still fail to ensure functional equivalence in the translated code. In this paper, we propose QiMeng-MuPa, a novel Mutual-Supervised Learning framework for Sequential-to-Parallel code translation, to address the functional equivalence issue.


HR consultant wins English court case using AI lawyer in apparent legal first

The Guardian

A freelance HR consultant paid Garfield AI about ยฃ400 to send a legal letter and then issue court proceedings over an unpaid debt of ยฃ7,000. A freelance HR consultant paid Garfield AI about ยฃ400 to send a legal letter and then issue court proceedings over an unpaid debt of ยฃ7,000. Barrister who was given material produced by Garfield AI says advocacy at trial'remained fundamentally human' An artificial intelligence law firm has won a case in an English court, in what is believed to be the first time a trial has been won using an AI lawyer. A freelance HR consultant, Tamires Camal Taquidir, paid the firm, Garfield AI, about ยฃ400 to send a legal letter and then issue court proceedings over an unpaid debt of ยฃ7,000. The co-founder of Garfield, Philip Young, called it a "landmark moment" for access to justice and said many small businesses have had to write off debts because the cost of litigation outweighed the money they could hope to win.


Dependency Parsing is More Parameter-Efficient with Normalization

Neural Information Processing Systems

Dependency parsing is the task of inferring natural language structure, often approached by modeling word interactions via attention through biaffine scoring. This mechanism works like self-attention in Transformers, where scores are calculated for every pair of words in a sentence. However, unlike Transformer attention, biaffine scoring does not use normalization prior to taking the softmax of the scores. In this paper, we provide theoretical evidence and empirical results revealing that a lack of normalization necessarily results in overparameterized parser models, where the extra parameters compensate for the sharp softmax outputs produced by high variance inputs to the biaffine scoring function. We argue that biaffine scoring can be made substantially more efficient by performing score normalization. We conduct experiments on semantic and syntactic dependency parsing in multiple languages, along with latent graph inference on non-linguistic data, using various settings of a k-hop parser. We train N-layer stacked BiLSTMs and evaluate the parser's performance with and without normalizing biaffine scores. Normalizing allows us to achieve state-of-the-art performance with fewer samples and trainable parameters.


Efficient Data Selection at Scale via Influence Distillation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Effective data selection is critical for efficient training of modern Large Language Models (LLMs). This paper introduces Influence Distillation, a novel, mathematically-justified framework for data selection that employs second-order information to optimally weight training samples. By distilling each sample's influence on a target distribution, our method assigns model-specific weights that are used to select training data for LLM fine-tuning, guiding it toward strong performance on the target domain. We derive these optimal weights for both Gradient Descent and Adam optimizers. To ensure scalability and reduce computational cost, we propose a landmark-based approximation: influence is precisely computed for a small subset of "landmark" samples and then efficiently propagated to all other samples to determine their weights.


Russia preparing hybrid attacks on NATO's eastern flank, intelligence warns

FOX News

Latvian intelligence says Russia is preparing military provocations against Baltic states or Poland, including drones and missiles, to pressure NATO to stop supporting Ukraine.


DOTA: DistributiOnal Test-time Adaptation of Vision-Language Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

However, deploying these models can be unreliable when significant distribution gaps exist between training and test data, while fine-tuning for diverse scenarios is often costly. This creates a need for methods that can efficiently adapt to new data at test time without expensive retraining. Cache-based test-time adapters serve this purpose by storing representative test samples to guide subsequent classifications. Yet, these methods typically employ naive cache management with limited capacity, leading to severe catastrophic forgetting when samples are inevitably dropped during updates. In this paper, we propose Dota(DistributiOnal Test-time Adaptation), a simple yet effective method addressing this limitation. Crucially, instead of merely memorizing individual test samples, Dotacontinuously estimates the underlying distribution of the test data stream. Test-time posterior probabilities are then computed using these dynamically estimated distributions via Bayes' theorem for adaptation. This distribution-centric approach enables the model to continually learn and adapt to the deployment environment. Extensive experiments validate that Dota significantly mitigates forgetting and achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing methods.