Genre
Holographic Invariant Storage: Design-Time Safety Contracts via Vector Symbolic Architectures
We introduce Holographic Invariant Storage (HIS), a protocol that assembles known properties of bipolar Vector Symbolic Architectures into a design-time safety contract for LLM context-drift mitigation. The contract provides three closed-form guarantees evaluable before deployment: single-signal recovery fidelity converging to $1/\sqrt{2} \approx 0.707$ (regardless of noise depth or content), continuous-noise robustness $2Φ(1/σ) - 1$, and multi-signal capacity degradation $\approx\sqrt{1/(K+1)}$. These bounds, validated by Monte Carlo simulation ($n = 1{,}000$), enable a systems engineer to budget recovery fidelity and codebook capacity at design time -- a property no timer or embedding-distance metric provides. A pilot behavioral experiment (four LLMs, 2B--7B, 720 trials) confirms that safety re-injection improves adherence at the 2B scale; full results are in an appendix.
Preconditioned One-Step Generative Modeling for Bayesian Inverse Problems in Function Spaces
Cheng, Zilan, Wang, Li-Lian, Wang, Zhongjian
We propose a machine-learning algorithm for Bayesian inverse problems in the function-space regime based on one-step generative transport. Building on the Mean Flows, we learn a fully conditional amortized sampler with a neural-operator backbone that maps a reference Gaussian noise to approximate posterior samples. We show that while white-noise references may be admissible at fixed discretization, they become incompatible with the function-space limit, leading to instability in inference for Bayesian problems arising from PDEs. To address this issue, we adopt a prior-aligned anisotropic Gaussian reference distribution and establish the Lipschitz regularity of the resulting transport. Our method is not distilled from MCMC: training relies only on prior samples and simulated partial and noisy observations. Once trained, it generates a $64\times64$ posterior sample in $\sim 10^{-3}$s, avoiding the repeated PDE solves of MCMC while matching key posterior summaries.
Gradient Boosting for Spatial Panel Models with Random and Fixed Effects
Balzer, Michael, Benlahlou, Adhen
Due to the increase in data availability in urban and regional studies, various spatial panel models have emerged to model spatial panel data, which exhibit spatial patterns and spatial dependencies between observations across time. Although estimation is usually based on maximum likelihood or generalized method of moments, these methods may fail to yield unique solutions if researchers are faced with high-dimensional settings. This article proposes a model-based gradient boosting algorithm, which enables estimation with interpretable results that is feasible in low- and high-dimensional settings. Due to its modular nature, the flexible model-based gradient boosting algorithm is suitable for a variety of spatial panel models, which can include random and fixed effects. The general framework also enables data-driven model and variable selection as well as implicit regularization where the bias-variance trade-off is controlled for, thereby enhancing accuracy of prediction on out-of-sample spatial panel data. Monte Carlo experiments concerned with the performance of estimation and variable selection confirm proper functionality in low- and high-dimensional settings while real-world applications including non-life insurance in Italian districts, rice production in Indonesian farms and life expectancy in German districts illustrate the potential application.
Robust Automatic Differentiation of Square-Root Kalman Filters via Gramian Differentials
Square-root Kalman filters propagate state covariances in Cholesky-factor form for numerical stability, and are a natural target for gradient-based parameter learning in state-space models. Their core operation, triangularization of a matrix $M \in \mathbb{R}^{n \times m}$, is computed via a QR decomposition in practice, but naively differentiating through it causes two problems: the semi-orthogonal factor is non-unique when $m > n$, yielding undefined gradients; and the standard Jacobian formula involves inverses, which diverges when $M$ is rank-deficient. Both are resolved by the observation that all filter outputs relevant to learning depend on the input matrix only through the Gramian $MM^\top$, so the composite loss is smooth in $M$ even where the triangularization is not. We derive a closed-form chain-rule directly from the differential of this Gramian identity, prove it exact for the Kalman log-marginal likelihood and filtered moments, and extend it to rank-deficient inputs via a two-component decomposition: a column-space term based on the Moore--Penrose pseudoinverse, and a null-space correction for perturbations outside the column space of $M$.
Understanding the geometry of deep learning with decision boundary volume
Burfitt, Matthew, Brodzki, Jacek, Dłotko, Pawel
For classification tasks, the performance of a deep neural network is determined by the structure of its decision boundary, whose geometry directly affects essential properties of the model, including accuracy and robustness. Motivated by a classical tube formula due to Weyl, we introduce a method to measure the decision boundary of a neural network through local surface volumes, providing a theoretically justifiable and efficient measure enabling a geometric interpretation of the effectiveness of the model applicable to the high dimensional feature spaces considered in deep learning. A smaller surface volume is expected to correspond to lower model complexity and better generalisation. We verify, on a number of image processing tasks with convolutional architectures that decision boundary volume is inversely proportional to classification accuracy. Meanwhile, the relationship between local surface volume and generalisation for fully connected architecture is observed to be less stable between tasks. Therefore, for network architectures suited to a particular data structure, we demonstrate that smoother decision boundaries lead to better performance, as our intuition would suggest.
Robust Sequential Tracking via Bounded Information Geometry and Non-Parametric Field Actions
Standard sequential inference architectures are compromised by a normalizability crisis when confronted with extreme, structured outliers. By operating on unbounded parameter spaces, state-of-the-art estimators lack the intrinsic geometry required to appropriately sever anomalies, resulting in unbounded covariance inflation and mean divergence. This paper resolves this structural failure by analyzing the abstraction sequence of inference at the meta-prior level (S_2). We demonstrate that extremizing the action over an infinite-dimensional space requires a non-parametric field anchored by a pre-prior, as a uniform volume element mathematically does not exist. By utilizing strictly invariant Delta (or ν) Information Separations on the statistical manifold, we physically truncate the infinite tails of the spatial distribution. When evaluated as a Radon-Nikodym derivative against the base measure, the active parameter space compresses into a strictly finite, normalizable probability droplet. Empirical benchmarks across three domains--LiDAR maneuvering target tracking, high-frequency cryptocurrency order flow, and quantum state tomography--demonstrate that this bounded information geometry analytically truncates outliers, ensuring robust estimation without relying on infinite-tailed distributional assumptions.
Do Diffusion Models Dream of Electric Planes? Discrete and Continuous Simulation-Based Inference for Aircraft Design
Ghiglino, Aurelien, Elenius, Daniel, Roy, Anirban, Kaur, Ramneet, Acharya, Manoj, Samplawski, Colin, Matejek, Brian, Jha, Susmit, Alonso, Juan, Cobb, Adam
In this paper, we generate conceptual engineering designs of electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft. We follow the paradigm of simulation-based inference (SBI), whereby we look to learn a posterior distribution over the full eVTOL design space. To learn this distribution, we sample over discrete aircraft configurations (topologies) and their corresponding set of continuous parameters. Therefore, we introduce a hierarchical probabilistic model consisting of two diffusion models. The first model leverages recent work on Riemannian Diffusion Language Modeling (RDLM) and Unified World Models (UWMs) to enable us to sample topologies from a discrete and continuous space. For the second model we introduce a masked diffusion approach to sample the corresponding parameters conditioned on the topology. Our approach rediscovers known trends and governing physical laws in aircraft design, while significantly accelerating design generation.
IQP Born Machines under Data-dependent and Agnostic Initialization Strategies
Lerch, Sacha, Bowles, Joseph, Puig, Ricard, Armengol, Erik, Holmes, Zoë, Thanasilp, Supanut
Quantum circuit Born machines based on instantaneous quantum polynomial-time (IQP) circuits are natural candidates for quantum generative modeling, both because of their probabilistic structure and because IQP sampling is provably classically hard in certain regimes. Recent proposals focus on training IQP-QCBMs using Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) losses built from low-body Pauli-$Z$ correlators, but the effect of initialization on the resulting optimization landscape remains poorly understood. In this work, we address this by first proving that the MMD loss landscape suffers from barren plateaus for random full-angle-range initializations of IQP circuits. We then establish lower bounds on the loss variance for identity and an unbiased data-agnostic initialization. We then additionally consider a data-dependent initialization that is better aligned with the target distribution and, under suitable assumptions, yields provable gradients and generally converges quicker to a good minimum (as indicated by our training of circuits with 150 qubits on genomic data). Finally, as a by-product, the developed variance lower bound framework is applicable to a general class of non-linear losses, offering a broader toolset for analyzing warm-starts in quantum machine learning.
Power-Law Spectrum of the Random Feature Model
Paquette, Elliot, Xiao, Ke Liang, Zhu, Yizhe
Scaling laws for neural networks, in which the loss decays as a power-law in the number of parameters, data, and compute, depend fundamentally on the spectral structure of the data covariance, with power-law eigenvalue decay appearing ubiquitously in vision and language tasks. A central question is whether this spectral structure is preserved or destroyed when data passes through the basic building block of a neural network: a random linear projection followed by a nonlinear activation. We study this question for the random feature model: given data $x \sim N(0,H)\in \mathbb{R}^v$ where $H$ has $α$-power-law spectrum ($λ_j(H ) \asymp j^{-α}$, $α> 1$), a Gaussian sketch matrix $W \in \mathbb{R}^{v\times d}$, and an entrywise monomial $f(y) = y^{p}$, we characterize the eigenvalues of the population random-feature covariance $\mathbb{E}_{x }[\frac{1}{d}f(W^\top x )^{\otimes 2}]$. We prove matching upper and lower bounds: for all $1 \leq j \leq c_1 d \log^{-(p+1)}(d)$, the $j$-th eigenvalue is of order $\left(\log^{p-1}(j+1)/j\right)^α$. For $ c_1 d \log^{-(p+1)}(d)\leq j\leq d$, the $j$-th eigenvalue is of order $j^{-α}$ up to a polylog factor. That is, the power-law exponent $α$ is inherited exactly from the input covariance, modified only by a logarithmic correction that depends on the monomial degree $p$. The proof combines a dyadic head-tail decomposition with Wick chaos expansions for higher-order monomials and random matrix concentration inequalities.
Standard Acquisition Is Sufficient for Asynchronous Bayesian Optimization
Riegler, Ben, Odgers, James, Fortuin, Vincent
Asynchronous Bayesian optimization is widely used for gradient-free optimization in domains with independent parallel experiments and varying evaluation times. Existing methods posit that standard acquisitions lead to redundant and repeated queries, proposing complex solutions to enforce diversity in queries. Challenging this fundamental premise, we show that methods, like the Upper Confidence Bound, can in fact achieve theoretical guarantees essentially equivalent to those of sequential Thompson sampling. A conceptual analysis of asynchronous Bayesian optimization reveals that existing works neglect intermediate posterior updates, which we find to be generally sufficient to avoid redundant queries. Further investigation shows that by penalizing busy locations, diversity-enforcing methods can over-explore in asynchronous settings, reducing their performance. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that simple standard acquisition functions match or outperform purpose-built asynchronous methods across synthetic and real-world tasks.