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Trajectory Alignment: Understanding the Edge of Stability Phenomenon via Bifurcation Theory

Neural Information Processing Systems

Cohen et al. (2021) empirically study the evolution of the largest eigenvalue of the loss Hessian, also known as sharpness, along the gradient descent (GD) trajectory and observe the Edge of Stability (EoS) phenomenon.





Active inference and artificial reasoning

Friston, Karl, Da Costa, Lancelot, Tschantz, Alexander, Heins, Conor, Buckley, Christopher, Verbelen, Tim, Parr, Thomas

arXiv.org Machine Learning

This technical note considers the sampling of outcomes that provide the greatest amount of information about the structure of underlying world models. This generalisation furnishes a principled approach to structure learning under a plausible set of generative models or hypotheses. In active inference, policies - i.e., combinations of actions - are selected based on their expected free energy, which comprises expected information gain and value. Information gain corresponds to the KL divergence between predictive posteriors with, and without, the consequences of action. Posteriors over models can be evaluated quickly and efficiently using Bayesian Model Reduction, based upon accumulated posterior beliefs about model parameters. The ensuing information gain can then be used to select actions that disambiguate among alternative models, in the spirit of optimal experimental design. We illustrate this kind of active selection or reasoning using partially observed discrete models; namely, a 'three-ball' paradigm used previously to describe artificial insight and 'aha moments' via (synthetic) introspection or sleep. We focus on the sample efficiency afforded by seeking outcomes that resolve the greatest uncertainty about the world model, under which outcomes are generated.


Amorphous Solid Model of Vectorial Hopfield Neural Networks

Gallavotti, F., Zaccone, A.

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We introduce a three-dimensional vectorial extension of the Hopfield associative-memory model in which each neuron is a unit vector on $S^2$ and synaptic couplings are $3\times 3$ blocks generated through a vectorial Hebbian rule. The resulting block-structured operator is mathematically analogous to the Hessian of amorphous solids and induces a rigid energy landscape with deep minima for stored patterns. Simulations and spectral analysis show that the vectorial network substantially outperforms the classical binary Hopfield model. For moderate connectivity, the critical storage ratio $γ_c$ grows approximately linearly with the coordination number $Z$, while for $Z\gtrsim 40$ a high-connectivity regime emerges in which $γ_c$ systematically exceeds the extrapolated low-$Z$ linear fit. At the same time, a persistent spectral gap separates pattern modes from the bulk and basins of attraction enlarge, yielding enhanced robustness to initialization noise. Thus geometric constraints combined with amorphous-solid-inspired structure produce associative memories with superior storage and retrieval performance, especially in the high-connectivity ($Z \gtrsim 20$-$30$) regime.


Chromatic Feature Vectors for 2-Trees: Exact Formulas for Partition Enumeration with Network Applications

Allagan, J., Morgan, G., Langley, S., Lopez-Bonilla, R., Deriglazov, V.

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We establish closed-form enumeration formulas for chromatic feature vectors of 2-trees under the bichromatic triangle constraint. These efficiently computable structural features derive from constrained graph colorings where each triangle uses exactly two colors, forbidding monochromatic and rainbow triangles, a constraint arising in distributed systems where components avoid complete concentration or isolation. For theta graphs Theta_n, we prove r_k(Theta_n) = S(n-2, k-1) for k >= 3 (Stirling numbers of the second kind) and r_2(Theta_n) = 2^(n-2) + 1, computable in O(n) time. For fan graphs Phi_n, we establish r_2(Phi_n) = F_{n+1} (Fibonacci numbers) and derive explicit formulas r_k(Phi_n) = sum_{t=k-1}^{n-1} a_{n-1,t} * S(t, k-1) with efficiently computable binomial coefficients, achieving O(n^2) computation per component. Unlike classical chromatic polynomials, which assign identical features to all n-vertex 2-trees, bichromatic constraints provide informative structural features. While not complete graph invariants, these features capture meaningful structural properties through connections to Fibonacci polynomials, Bell numbers, and independent set enumeration. Applications include Byzantine fault tolerance in hierarchical networks, VM allocation in cloud computing, and secret-sharing protocols in distributed cryptography.


MultiGA: Leveraging Multi-Source Seeding in Genetic Algorithms

Ng, Isabelle Diana May-Xin, Weerasooriya, Tharindu Cyril, Zhu, Haitao, Wei, Wei

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used across research domains to tackle complex tasks, but their performance can vary significantly depending on the task at hand. Evolutionary algorithms, inspired by natural selection, can be used to refine solutions iteratively at inference-time. To the best of our knowledge, there has not been exploration on leveraging the collective capabilities of multi-source seeding for LLM-guided genetic algorithms. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach, MultiGA, which applies genetic algorithm principles to address complex natural language tasks and reasoning problems by sampling from a diverse population of LLMs to initialize the population. MultiGA generates a range of outputs from various parent LLMs, open source and closed source, and uses a neutral fitness function to evaluate them. Through an iterative recombination process, we mix and refine these generations until an optimal solution is achieved. We benchmark our approach using text-to-SQL code generation tasks, trip planning, GPQA benchmark for grad-level science questions, and the BBQ bias benchmark. Our results show that MultiGA converges to the accuracy of the LLM best fit for the task, and these insights lay the foundation for future research looking closer at integrating multiple LLMs for unexplored tasks in which selecting only one pre-trained model is unclear or suboptimal.


Access Paths for Efficient Ordering with Large Language Models

Zhao, Fuheng, Chen, Jiayue, Pan, Yiming, Rabbani, Tahseen, Sohaib, null, Agrawal, Divyakant, Abbadi, Amr El, Aggarwal, Paritosh, Datta, Anupam, Tsirogiannis, Dimitris

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In this work, we present the \texttt{LLM ORDER BY} semantic operator as a logical abstraction and conduct a systematic study of its physical implementations. First, we propose several improvements to existing semantic sorting algorithms and introduce a semantic-aware external merge sort algorithm. Our extensive evaluation reveals that no single implementation offers universal optimality on all datasets. From our evaluations, we observe a general test-time scaling relationship between sorting cost and the ordering quality for comparison-based algorithms. Building on these insights, we design a budget-aware optimizer that utilizes heuristic rules, LLM-as-Judge evaluation, and consensus aggregation to dynamically select the near-optimal access path for LLM ORDER BY. In our extensive evaluations, our optimizer consistently achieves ranking accuracy on par with or superior to the best static methods across all benchmarks. We believe that this work provides foundational insights into the principled optimization of semantic operators essential for building robust, large-scale LLM-powered analytic systems.


From monoliths to modules: Decomposing transducers for efficient world modelling

Boyd, Alexander, Nowak, Franz, Hyland, David, Baltieri, Manuel, Rosas, Fernando E.

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

World models have been recently proposed as sandbox environments in which AI agents can be trained and evaluated before deployment. Although realistic world models often have high computational demands, efficient modelling is usually possible by exploiting the fact that real-world scenarios tend to involve subcomponents that interact in a modular manner. In this paper, we explore this idea by developing a framework for decomposing complex world models represented by transducers, a class of models gen-eralising POMDPs. Whereas the composition of transducers is well understood, our results clarify how to invert this process deriving sub-transducers operating on distinct input-output subspaces, enabling parallelizable and interpretable alternatives to monolithic world modelling that can support distributed inference. Overall, these results lay a groundwork for bridging the structural transparency demanded by AI safety and the computational efficiency required for real-world inference.