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The invisibility cloak inventor now has better tricks up his sleeve

New Scientist

John Pendry is known for creating an invisibility cloak. John Pendry's kitchen is dominated by a huge photograph of what looks like the view through a kaleidoscope: dizzying shards of purple, green, yellow and white. Given that Pendry is famous above all else for inventing an invisibility cloak - a device that can bend light around objects - I wonder if I am looking at something related to that. But no, he tells me, the image simply shows crystals of vitamin C magnified many times. All that invisibility-cloak stuff is in the past, he says, and he has moved on to "more exciting things".


Efficient machine unlearning with minimax optimality

arXiv.org Machine Learning

There is a growing demand for efficient data removal to comply with regulations like the GDPR and to mitigate the influence of biased or corrupted data. This has motivated the field of machine unlearning, which aims to eliminate the influence of specific data subsets without the cost of full retraining. In this work, we propose a statistical framework for machine unlearning with generic loss functions and establish theoretical guarantees. For squared loss, especially, we develop Unlearning Least Squares (ULS) and establish its minimax optimality for estimating the model parameter of remaining data when only the pre-trained estimator, forget samples, and a small subsample of the remaining data are available. Our results reveal that the estimation error decomposes into an oracle term and an unlearning cost determined by the forget proportion and the forget model bias. We further establish asymptotically valid inference procedures without requiring full retraining. Numerical experiments and real-data applications demonstrate that the proposed method achieves performance close to retraining while requiring substantially less data access.


StrADiff: A Structured Source-Wise Adaptive Diffusion Framework for Linear and Nonlinear Blind Source Separation

arXiv.org Machine Learning

This paper presents a Structured Source-Wise Adaptive Diffusion Framework for linear and nonlinear blind source separation. The framework interprets each latent dimension as a source component and assigns to it an individual adaptive diffusion mechanism, thereby establishing source-wise latent modeling rather than relying on a single shared latent prior. The resulting formulation learns source recovery and the mixing/reconstruction process jointly within a unified end-to-end objective, allowing model parameters and latent sources to adapt simultaneously during training. This yields a common framework for both linear and nonlinear blind source separation. In the present instantiation, each source is further equipped with its own adaptive Gaussian process (GP) prior to impose source-wise temporal structure on the latent trajectories, while the overall framework is not restricted to Gaussian process priors and can in principle accommodate other structured source priors. The proposed model thus provides a general structured diffusion-based route to unsupervised source recovery, with potential relevance beyond blind source separation to interpretable latent modeling, source-wise disentanglement, and potentially identifiable nonlinear latent-variable learning under appropriate structural conditions.


Lipschitz regularity in Flow Matching and Diffusion Models: sharp sampling rates and functional inequalities

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Under general assumptions on the target distribution $p^\star$, we establish a sharp Lipschitz regularity theory for flow-matching vector fields and diffusion-model scores, with optimal dependence on time and dimension. As applications, we obtain Wasserstein discretization bounds for Euler-type samplers in dimension $d$: with $N$ discretization steps, the error achieves the optimal rate $\sqrt{d}/N$ up to logarithmic factors. Moreover, the constants do not deteriorate exponentially with the spatial extent of $p^\star$. We also show that the one-sided Lipschitz control yields a globally Lipschitz transport map from the standard Gaussian to $p^\star$, which implies Poincaré and log-Sobolev inequalities for a broad class of probability measures.


Hierarchical Contrastive Learning for Multimodal Data

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Multimodal representation learning is commonly built on a shared-private decomposition, treating latent information as either common to all modalities or specific to one. This binary view is often inadequate: many factors are shared by only subsets of modalities, and ignoring such partial sharing can over-align unrelated signals and obscure complementary information. We propose Hierarchical Contrastive Learning (HCL), a framework that learns globally shared, partially shared, and modality-specific representations within a unified model. HCL combines a hierarchical latent-variable formulation with structural sparsity and a structure-aware contrastive objective that aligns only modalities that genuinely share a latent factor. Under uncorrelated latent variables, we prove identifiability of the hierarchical decomposition, establish recovery guarantees for the loading matrices, and derive parameter estimation and excess-risk bounds for downstream prediction. Simulations show accurate recovery of hierarchical structure and effective selection of task-relevant components. On multimodal electronic health records, HCL yields more informative representations and consistently improves predictive performance.


Individual-heterogeneous sub-Gaussian Mixture Models

arXiv.org Machine Learning

The classical Gaussian mixture model assumes homogeneity within clusters, an assumption that often fails in real-world data where observations naturally exhibit varying scales or intensities. To address this, we introduce the individual-heterogeneous sub-Gaussian mixture model, a flexible framework that assigns each observation its own heterogeneity parameter, thereby explicitly capturing the heterogeneity inherent in practical applications. Built upon this model, we propose an efficient spectral method that provably achieves exact recovery of the true cluster labels under mild separation conditions, even in high-dimensional settings where the number of features far exceeds the number of samples. Numerical experiments on both synthetic and real data demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing clustering algorithms, including those designed for classical Gaussian mixture models.


The Hiremath Early Detection (HED) Score: A Measure-Theoretic Evaluation Standard for Temporal Intelligence

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We introduce the Hiremath Early Detection (HED) Score, a principled, measure-theoretic evaluation criterion for quantifying the time-value of information in systems operating over non-stationary stochastic processes subject to abrupt regime transitions. Existing evaluation paradigms, chiefly the ROC/AUC framework and its downstream variants, are temporally agnostic: they assign identical credit to a detection at t + 1 and a detection at t + tau for arbitrarily large tau. This indifference to latency is a fundamental inadequacy in time-critical domains including cyber-physical security, algorithmic surveillance, and epidemiological monitoring. The HED Score resolves this by integrating a baseline-neutral, exponentially decaying kernel over the posterior probability stream of a target regime, beginning precisely at the onset of the regime shift. The resulting scalar simultaneously encodes detection acuity, temporal lead, and pre-transition calibration quality. We prove that the HED Score satisfies three axiomatic requirements: (A1) Temporal Monotonicity, (A2) Invariance to Pre-Attack Bias, and (A3) Sensitivity Decomposability. We further demonstrate that the HED Score admits a natural parametric family indexed by the Hiremath Decay Constant (lambda_H), whose domain-specific calibration constitutes the Hiremath Standard Table. As an empirical vehicle, we present PARD-SSM (Probabilistic Anomaly and Regime Detection via Switching State-Space Models), which couples fractional Stochastic Differential Equations (fSDEs) with a Switching Linear Dynamical System (S-LDS) inference backend. On the NSL-KDD benchmark, PARD-SSM achieves a HED Score of 0.0643, representing a 388.8 percent improvement over a Random Forest baseline (0.0132), with statistical significance confirmed via block-bootstrap resampling (p < 0.001). We propose the HED Score as the successor evaluation standard to ROC/AUC.


Effective Dynamics and Transition Pathways from Koopman-Inspired Neural Learning of Collective Variables

arXiv.org Machine Learning

The ISOKANN (Invariant Subspaces of Koopman Operators Learned by Artificial Neural Networks) framework provides a data-driven route to extract collective variables (CVs) and effective dynamics from complex molecular systems. In this work, we integrate the theoretical foundation of Koopman operators with Krylov-like subspace algorithms, and reduced dynamical modeling to build a coherent picture of how to describe metastable transitions in high-dimensional systems based on CVs. Starting from the identification of CVs based on dominant invariant subspaces, we derive the corresponding effective dynamics on the latent space and connect these to transition rates and times, committor functions, and transition pathways. The combination of Koopman-based learning and reduced-dimensional effective dynamics yields a principled framework for computing transition rates and pathways from simulation data. Numerical experiments on one-, two-, and three-dimensional benchmark potentials illustrate the ability of ISOKANN to reconstruct the coarse-grained kinetics and reproduce transition times across enthalpic and entropic barriers.


Jeffreys Flow: Robust Boltzmann Generators for Rare Event Sampling via Parallel Tempering Distillation

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Sampling physical systems with rough energy landscapes is hindered by rare events and metastable trapping. While Boltzmann generators already offer a solution, their reliance on the reverse Kullback--Leibler divergence frequently induces catastrophic mode collapse, missing specific modes in multi-modal distributions. Here, we introduce the Jeffreys Flow, a robust generative framework that mitigates this failure by distilling empirical sampling data from Parallel Tempering trajectories using the symmetric Jeffreys divergence. This formulation effectively balances local target-seeking precision with global modes coverage. We show that minimizing Jeffreys divergence suppresses mode collapse and structurally corrects inherent inaccuracies via distillation of the empirical reference data. We demonstrate the framework's scalability and accuracy on highly non-convex multidimensional benchmarks, including the systematic correction of stochastic gradient biases in Replica Exchange Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics and the massive acceleration of exact importance sampling in Path Integral Monte Carlo for quantum thermal states.


High-dimensional reliability-based design optimization using stochastic emulators

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Reliability-based design optimization (RBDO) is traditionally formulated as a nested optimization and reliability problem. Although surrogate models are generally employed to improve efficiency, the approach remains computationally prohibitive in high-dimensional settings. This paper proposes a novel RBDO framework based on a stochastic simulator viewpoint, in which the deterministic limit-state function and the uncertainty in the model inputs are combined into a unified stochastic representation. Under this formulation, the system response conditioned on a given design is modeled directly through its output distribution, rather than through an explicit limit-state function. Stochastic emulators are constructed in the design space to approximate the conditional response distribution, enabling the semi-analytical evaluation of failure probabilities or associated quantiles without resorting to Monte Carlo simulation. Two classes of stochastic emulators are investigated, namely generalized lambda models and stochastic polynomial chaos expansions. Both approaches provide a deterministic mapping between design variables and reliability constraints, which breaks the classical double-loop structure of RBDO and allows the use of standard deterministic optimization algorithms. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated on a set of benchmark problems with dimensionality ranging from low to very high, including a case with stochastic excitation. The results are compared against a Kriging-based approach formulated in the full input space. The proposed method yields substantial computational gains, particularly in high-dimensional settings. While its efficiency is comparable to Kriging for low-dimensional problems, it significantly outperforms Kriging as the dimensionality increases.