Education
ACloser Look at TabPFN v2: Understanding Its Strengths and Extending Its Capabilities
Tabular datasets are inherently heterogeneous, presenting significant challenges for developing pre-trained foundation models. The recently introduced transformerbased Tabular Prior-data Fitted Network v2 (TabPFN v2) achieves unprecedented in-context learning performance across diverse downstream datasets, marking a pivotal advancement in tabular foundation models. In this paper, we take a closer look at TabPFN v2 to examine how it effectively handles heterogeneity and achieves high predictive accuracy, and to explore how its limitations in high-dimensional, many-category, and large-scale tasks can be mitigated. We find that TabPFN v2 can infer attribute relationships even when provided with randomized attribute token inputs, eliminating the need to explicitly learn dataset-specific attribute embeddings to address heterogeneity. We further show that TabPFN v2 can be transformed into a feature extractor, revealing its ability to construct a highly separable feature space for accurate predictions. Lastly, we demonstrate that TabPFN v2's limitations can be addressed through a test-time divide-and-conquer strategy, enabling scalable inference without requiring re-training. By uncovering the mechanisms behind TabPFN v2's success and introducing strategies to extend its applicability, this study offers key insights into the design of future tabular foundation models.
An End to End Framework for Error Detection and Correction in Text to
Text-to-SQL systems translate natural language (NL) questions into SQL queries, enabling non-technical users to interact with structured data. While large language models (LLMs) have shown promising results on the text-to-SQL task, they often produce semantically incorrect yet syntactically valid queries, with limited insight into their reliability. We propose SQLENS, an end-to-end framework for fine-grained detection and correction of semantic errors in LLM-generated SQL. SQLENS integrates error signals from both the underlying database and the LLM to identify potential semantic errors within SQL clauses. It further leverages these signals to guide query correction. Empirical results on two public benchmarks show that SQLENS outperforms the best LLM-based self-evaluation method by 25.78% in F1 for error detection, and improves execution accuracy of out-of-thebox text-to-SQL systems by up to 20%.
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Recurrent Memory for Online Interdomain Gaussian Processes
We propose a novel online Gaussian process (GP) model that is capable of capturing long-term memory in sequential data in an online learning setting. Our model, Online HiPPO Sparse Variational Gaussian Process (OHSVGP), leverages the HiPPO (High-order Polynomial Projection Operators) framework, which is popularized in the RNN domain due to its long-range memory modeling capabilities. We interpret the HiPPO time-varying orthogonal projections as inducing variables with timedependent orthogonal polynomial basis functions, which allows the SVGP inducing variables to memorize the process history. We show that the HiPPO framework fits naturally into the interdomain GP framework and demonstrate that the kernel matrices can also be updated online in a recurrence form based on the ODE evolution of HiPPO. We evaluate OHSVGP with online prediction for 1D time series, continual learning in discriminative GP model for data with multidimensional inputs, and deep generative modeling with sparse Gaussian process variational autoencoder, showing that it outperforms existing online GP methods in terms of predictive performance, long-term memory preservation, and computational efficiency.
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The emergence of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has driven breakthroughs in egocentric vision applications. These applications necessitate persistent, context-aware understanding of objects, as users interact with tools in dynamic and cluttered environments. However, existing embodied benchmarks primarily focus on static scene exploration, emphasizing object's appearance and spatial attributes while neglecting the assessment of dynamic changes arising from users' interactions. To address this gap, we introduce EOC-Bench, an innovative benchmark designed to systematically evaluate object-centric embodied cognition in dynamic egocentric scenarios. Specially, EOC-Benchfeatures 3,277 meticulously annotated QA pairs categorized into three temporal categories: Past, Present, and Future, covering 11 fine-grained evaluation dimensions and 3 visual object referencing types. To ensure thorough assessment, we develop a mixed-format human-inthe-loop annotation framework with four types of questions and design a novel multi-scale temporal accuracy metric for open-ended temporal evaluation. Based on EOC-Bench, we conduct comprehensive evaluations of various proprietary, open-source, and object-level MLLMs. EOC-Bench serves as a crucial tool for advancing the embodied object cognitive capabilities of MLLMs, establishing a robust foundation for developing reliable core models for embodied systems.
Online Time Series Forecasting with Theoretical Guarantees
This paper is concerned with online time series forecasting, where unknown distribution shifts occur over time, i.e., latent variables influence the mapping from historical to future observations. To develop an automated way of online time series forecasting, we propose a Theoretical framework for Online Time-series forecasting (TOT in short) with theoretical guarantees. Specifically, we prove that supplying a forecaster with latent variables tightens the Bayes risk--the benefit endures under estimation uncertainty of latent variables and grows as the latent variables achieve a more precise identifiability. To better introduce latent variables into online forecasting algorithms, we further propose to identify latent variables with minimal adjacent observations. Based on these results, we devise a modelagnostic blueprint by employing a temporal decoder to match the distribution of observed variables and two independent noise estimators to model the causal inference of latent variables and mixing procedures of observed variables, respectively. Experiment results on synthetic data support our theoretical claims. Moreover, plugin implementations built on several baselines yield general improvement across multiple benchmarks, highlighting the effectiveness in real-world applications.
Revisiting Reinforcement Learning for LLM Reasoning from ACross-Domain Perspective
Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise in enhancing large language model (LLM) reasoning, yet progress towards broader capabilities is limited by the availability of high-quality, multi-domain datasets. This work introduces GURU, a 92KRL-for-reasoning dataset designed to address this gap, covering six reasoning domains: Math, Code, Science, Logic, Simulation, and Tabular, each with corresponding verifiers. We build GURU via a careful data-curation pipeline, including sourcing, deduplication, reward design, and domain-specific and difficulty-based filtering. With GURU, we present a systematic investigation of cross-domain RL generalization, and reveal several key aspects affecting crossdomain transferability. We further train two models GURU-7B and GURU-32B purely with RL on our curated data and observe largely improved performance over leading open RL reasoning model baselines, with gains of 7.3% and 7.8% respectively on an extensive 17-task, six-domain evaluation suite. We are releasing our dataset, code, and evaluation suite to the community, aiming to support further research and development of more general RL-enhanced reasoning models.
ASTROVISBENCH: ACode Benchmark for Scientific Computing and Visualization in Astronomy
Large Language Models (LLMs) are being explored for applications in scientific research, including their capabilities to synthesize literature, answer research questions, generate research ideas, and even conduct computational experiments. Ultimately, our goal is for these to help scientists derive novel scientific insights. In many areas of science, such insights often arise from processing and visualizing data to understand its patterns. However, evaluating whether an LLM-mediated scientific workflow produces outputs conveying the correct scientific insights is challenging to evaluate and has not been addressed in past work. We introduce ASTROVISBENCH, the first benchmark for both scientific computing and visualization in the astronomy domain. ASTROVISBENCH judges a language model's ability to both (1) create astronomy-specific workflows to process and analyze data and (2) visualize the results of these workflows through complex plots.
Finite-Time Analysis of Stochastic Nonconvex Nonsmooth Optimization on the Riemannian Manifolds
This work addresses the finite-time analysis of nonsmooth nonconvex stochastic optimization under Riemannian manifold constraints. We adapt the notion of Goldstein stationarity to the Riemannian setting as a performance metric for nonsmooth optimization on manifolds. We then propose a Riemannian Online to NonConvex (RO2NC) algorithm, for which we establish the sample complexity of O(ϵ 3δ 1)in finding (δ,ϵ)-stationary points. This result is the first-ever finite-time guarantee for fully nonsmooth, nonconvex optimization on manifolds and matches the optimal complexity in the Euclidean setting. When gradient information is unavailable, we develop a zeroth order version of RO2NC algorithm (ZO-RO2NC), for which we establish the same sample complexity. The numerical results support the theory and demonstrate the practical effectiveness of the algorithms.
Strategic Classification with Non-Linear Classifiers
In strategic classification, the standard supervised learning setting is extended to support the notion of strategic user behavior in the form of costly feature manipulations made in response to a classifier. While standard learning supports a broad range of model classes, the study of strategic classification has, so far, been dedicated mostly to linear classifiers. This work aims to expand the horizon by exploring how strategic behavior manifests under non-linear classifiers and what this implies for learning. We take a bottom-up approach showing how non-linearity affects decision boundary points, classifier expressivity, and model class complexity. Our results show how, unlike the linear case, strategic behavior may either increase or decrease effective class complexity, and that the complexity decrease may be arbitrarily large. Another key finding is that universal approximators (e.g., neural nets) are no longer universal once the environment is strategic. We demonstrate empirically how this can create performance gaps even on an unrestricted model class.