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FAPEX: Fractional Amplitude-Phase Expressor for Robust Cross-Subject Seizure Prediction
Precise, generalizable subject-agnostic seizure prediction (SASP) remains a fundamental challenge due to the intrinsic complexity and significant spectral variability of electrophysiologial signals across individuals and recording modalities. We propose FAPEX, a novel architecture that introduces a learnable fractional neural frame operator (FrNFO) for adaptive time-frequency decomposition. Unlike conventional models that exhibit spectral bias toward low frequencies, our FrNFO employs fractional-order convolutions to capture both high and low-frequency dynamics, achieving approximately 10% improvement in F1-score and sensitivity over state-of-the-art baselines. The FrNFO enables the extraction of instantaneous phase and amplitude representations that are particularly informative for preictal biomarker discovery and enhance out-of-distribution generalization. FAPEXfurther integrates structural state-space modeling and channelwise attention, allowing it to handle heterogeneous electrode montages.
Inverse Optimization Latent Variable Models for Learning Costs Applied to Route Problems
Learning representations for solutions of constrained optimization problems (COPs) with unknown cost functions is challenging, as models like (Variational) Autoencoders struggle to enforce constraints when decoding structured outputs. We propose an Inverse Optimization Latent Variable Model (IO-LVM) that learns a latent space of COP cost functions from observed solutions and reconstructs feasible outputs by solving a COP with a solver in the loop. Our approach leverages estimated gradients of a Fenchel-Young loss through a non-differentiable deterministic solver to shape the latent space. Unlike standard Inverse Optimization or Inverse Reinforcement Learning methods, which typically recover a single or context-specific cost function, IO-LVM captures a distribution over cost functions, enabling the identification of diverse solution behaviors arising from different agents or conditions not available during the training process. We validate our method on real-world datasets of ship and taxi routes, as well as paths in synthetic graphs, demonstrating its ability to reconstruct paths and cycles, predict their distributions, and yield interpretable latent representations.
Robust Hallucination Detection in LLMs via Adaptive Token Selection
Hallucinations in large language models (LLMs) pose significant safety concerns that impede their broader deployment. Recent research in hallucination detection has demonstrated that LLMs' internal representations contain truthfulness hints, which can be harnessed for detector training. However, the performance of these detectors is heavily dependent on the internal representations of predetermined tokens, fluctuating considerably when working on free-form generations with varying lengths and sparse distributions of hallucinated entities. To address this, we propose HaMI, a novel approach that enables robust detection of hallucinations through adaptive selection and learning of critical tokens that are most indicative of hallucinations. We achieve this robustness by an innovative formulation of the Hallucination detection task as Multiple Instance (HaMI) learning over tokenlevel representations within a sequence, thereby facilitating a joint optimisation of token selection and hallucination detection on generation sequences of diverse forms. Comprehensive experimental results on four hallucination benchmarks show that HaMI significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/mala-lab/HaMI.
Bi-Level Knowledge Transfer for Multi-Task Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) has achieved remarkable success in various real-world scenarios, but its high cost of online training makes it impractical to learn each task from scratch. To enable effective policy reuse, we consider the problem of zero-shot generalization from offline data across multiple tasks. While prior work focuses on transferring individual skills of agents, we argue that the effective policy transfer across tasks should also capture the team-level coordination knowledge. In this paper, we propose Bi-Level Knowledge Transfer (BiKT) for Multi-Task MARL, which performs knowledge transfer at both the individual and team levels. At the individual level, we extract transferable individual skill embeddings from offline MARL trajectories.
Learning to Think: Information-Theoretic Reinforcement Fine-Tuning for LLMs
Large language models (LLMs) excel at complex tasks thanks to advances in their reasoning abilities. However, existing methods overlook the trade-off between reasoning effectiveness and efficiency, often encouraging unnecessarily long reasoning chains and wasting tokens. To address this, we propose Learning to Think (L2T) 3, an information-theoretic reinforcement fine-tuning framework for LLMs to make the models achieve optimal reasoning with fewer tokens. Specifically, L2T treats each query-response interaction as a hierarchical session of multiple episodes and proposes a universal dense process reward, i.e., quantifies the episode-wise information gain in parameters, requiring no extra annotations or task-specific evaluators. We propose a method to quickly estimate this reward based on PACBayes bounds and the Fisher information matrix. Theoretical analyses show that it significantly reduces computational complexity with high estimation accuracy. By immediately rewarding each episode's contribution and penalizing excessive updates, L2T optimizes the model via reinforcement learning to maximize the use of each episode and achieve effective updates. Empirical results on various reasoning benchmarks and base models demonstrate the advantage of L2T across different tasks, boosting both reasoning effectiveness and efficiency.
On Group Sufficiency Under Label Bias
Real-world classification datasets often contain label bias, where observed labels differ systematically from the true labels at different rates for different demographic groups. Machine learning models trained on such datasets may then exhibit disparities in predictive performance across these groups. In this work, we characterize the problem of learning fair classification models with respect to the underlying ground truth labels when given only label biased data. We focus on the particular fairness definition of group sufficiency, i.e. equal calibration of risk scores across protected groups. We theoretically show that enforcing fairness with respect to label biased data necessarily results in group miscalibration with respect to the true labels. We then propose a regularizer which minimizes an upper bound on the sufficiency gap by penalizing a conditional mutual information term. Across experiments on eight tabular, image, and text datasets with both synthetic and real label noise, we find that our method reduces the sufficiency gap by up to 7.2% with no significant decrease in overall accuracy.
The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI by Cory Doctorow review โ the real price of artificial intelligence
Cory Doctorow speaks at a digital society conference. Cory Doctorow speaks at a digital society conference. The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI by Cory Doctorow review - the real price of artificial intelligence A s former Google CEO Eric Schmidt could tell you, AI is a hard sell these days. Last month, he tried talking up the AI revolution during a commencement address at the University of Arizona and was loudly booed by students about to enter an AI-ravaged job market. Schmidt is not the only AI booster to crash out with students recently as the popular backlash grows.
Functional Virtual Adversarial Training for Semi-Supervised Time Series Classification
Real-world time series analysis, such as healthcare, autonomous driving, and solar energy, faces unique challenges arising from the scarcity of labeled data, highlighting the need for effective semi-supervised learning methods. While the Virtual Adversarial Training (VAT) method has shown promising performance in leveraging unlabeled data for smoother predictive distributions, straightforward extensions of VAT often fall short on time series tasks as they neglect the temporal structure of the data in the adversarial perturbation. In this paper, we propose the framework of functional Virtual Adversarial Training (f-VAT) that can incorporate the functional structure of the data into perturbations. By theoretically establishing a duality between the perturbation norm and the functional model sensitivity, we propose to use an appropriate Sobolev (H s) norm to generate structured functional adversarial perturbations for semi-supervised time series classification. Our proposed f-VAT method outperforms recent methods and achieves superior performance in extensive semi-supervised time series classification tasks (e.g., up to 9% performance improvement). We also provide additional visualization studies to offer further insights into the superiority of f-VAT.
EvaLearn Quantifying the Learning Capability and Efficiency of LLMs via Sequential Problem Solving
We introduce EvaLearn, a pioneering benchmark designed to evaluate large language models (LLMs) on their learning capability and efficiency in challenging tasks, a critical, yet underexplored aspect of model potential. EvaLearn contains 648 challenging problems across six task types, grouped into 182 sequences, each sequence dedicated to one task type. Diverging from most existing benchmarks that evaluate models in parallel, EvaLearn requires models to solve problems sequentially, allowing them to leverage the experience gained from previous solutions. EvaLearn provides five comprehensive automated metrics to evaluate models and quantify their learning capability and efficiency. We extensively benchmark nine frontier models and observe varied performance profiles: some models, such as Claude-3.7-sonnet,
OmniResponse: Online Multimodal Conversational Response Generation in Dyadic Interactions
In this paper, we introduce Online Multimodal Conversational Response Generation (OMCRG), a novel task designed to produce synchronized verbal and non-verbal listener feedback online, based on the speaker's multimodal inputs. OMCRG captures natural dyadic interactions and introduces new challenges in aligning generated audio with listeners' facial responses. To tackle these challenges, we incorporate text as an intermediate modality to connect audio and facial responses. We propose OmniResponse, a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) that autoregressively generates accurate multimodal listener responses. OmniResponse leverages a pretrained LLM enhanced with two core components: Chrono-Text Markup, which precisely timestamps generated text tokens, and TempoVoice, a controllable online text-to-speech (TTS) module that outputs speech synchronized with facial responses. To advance OMCRG research, we offer ResponseNet, a dataset of 696 detailed dyadic interactions featuring synchronized split-screen videos, multichannel audio, transcripts, and annotated facial behaviors. Comprehensive evaluations on ResponseNet demonstrate that OmniResponse outperforms baseline models in terms of semantic speech content, audio-visual synchronization, and generation quality. Our dataset, code, and models are publicly available at https://omniresponse.github.io/.