This raises the question: how do graph SSL methods, such as contrastive learning (CL), work well?

This problem is known to be complicated by many unobserved confounders.

In particular, we express generalization gap in terms of the power spectra of the sample design and that of the function to be learned.

Q. Are relationships between individual instances made explicit (e.g., users' movie ratings,

Tabular data - collections of continuous and categorical variables organized into matrices - underlies all aspects of modern commerce and science from airplane engines to biology labs to bagel shops. Yet, while Machine Learning and AI for language and vision have seen unprecedented progress, the primary methodologies of prediction from tabular data have been relatively static, dominated by variations of Gradient Boosted Decision Trees (GBDTs), such as XGBoost [7]. Nevertheless, hundreds of tabular datasets have been assembled to form extensive regression and classification benchmarks [11, 12, 16, 35, 37], and, recently, there has been renewed interest in building state-of-the-art predictive models for tabular data [15, 18, 19]. Notably, given the remarkable effectiveness of large, "foundation" models for text, there has been much excitement in developing similar models on tabular data, and recent effort has led to the development of TabPFN-v2, a foundation model for tabular data appearing in Nature [18]. Yet, despite this progress, tabular data still remains an active area for model development and building scalable, effective, and interpretable machine learning models in this domain remains an open challenge. In this work, we introduce xRFM, a tabular predictive model that combines recent advances in feature learning kernel machines with an adaptive tree structure, making it effective, scalable, and interpretable.

We investigate the potential of large language models (LLMs) to serve as efficient simulators for agentic search tasks in reinforcement learning (RL), thereby reducing dependence on costly interactions with external search engines. To this end, we first quantify the intrinsic search capability of LLMs via structured prompting and repeated sampling, which we term Self-Search. Our results reveal that LLMs exhibit strong scaling behavior with respect to the inference budget, achieving high pass@k on question-answering benchmarks, including the challenging BrowseComp task. Building on these observations, we introduce Self-Search RL (SSRL), which enhances LLMs' Self-Search capability through format-based and rule-based rewards. SSRL enables models to iteratively refine their knowledge utilization internally, without requiring access to external tools. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that SSRL-trained policy models provide a cost-effective and stable environment for search-driven RL training, reducing reliance on external search engines and facilitating robust sim-to-real transfer. We draw the following conclusions: 1) LLMs possess world knowledge that can be effectively elicited to achieve high performance; 2) SSRL demonstrates the potential of leveraging internal knowledge to reduce hallucination; 3) SSRL-trained models integrate seamlessly with external search engines without additional effort. Our findings highlight the potential of LLMs to support more scalable RL agent training.

As AI systems are increasingly deployed to support decision-making in critical domains, explainability has become a means to enhance the understandability of these outputs and enable users to make more informed and conscious choices. However, despite growing interest in the usability of eXplainable AI (XAI), the accessibility of these methods, particularly for users with vision impairments, remains underexplored. This paper investigates accessibility gaps in XAI through a two-pronged approach. First, a literature review of 79 studies reveals that evaluations of XAI techniques rarely include disabled users, with most explanations relying on inherently visual formats. Second, we present a four-part methodological proof of concept that opera-tionalizes inclusive XAI design: (1) categorization of AI systems, (2) persona definition and contex-tualization, (3) prototype design and implementation, and (4) expert and user assessment of XAI techniques for accessibility. Preliminary findings suggest that simplified explanations are more comprehensible for non-visual users than detailed ones, and that multimodal presentation is required for more equitable interpretability.