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FRAM: Frobenius-Regularized Assignment Matching with Mixed-Precision Computing
Graph matching, usually cast as a discrete Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP), aims to identify correspondences between nodes in two graphs. Since QAP is NPhard, many methods its discrete constraints by projecting the discrete feasible set onto its convex hull and solving the resulting continuous problem. However, these relaxations inevitably enlarge the feasible set and introduce two errors: sensitivity to numerical scales and geometric misalignment between the relaxed and original feasible domains. To address these issues, we propose a novel relaxation framework to reformulate the projection step as a Frobenius-Regularized Linear Assignment (FRA) problem. This formulation incorporates a tunable regularization term to curb the inflation of the feasible region and ensure numerical scale invariance.
Dimension-adapted Momentum Outscales SGD
We investigate scaling laws for stochastic momentum algorithms with small batch on the power law random features model, parameterized by data complexity, target complexity, and model size. When trained with a stochastic momentum algorithm, our analysis reveals four distinct loss curve shapes determined by varying data-target complexities. While traditional stochastic gradient descent with momentum (SGD-M) yields identical scaling law exponents to SGD, dimension-adapted Nesterov acceleration (DANA) improves these exponents by scaling momentum hyperparameters based on model size and data complexity. This outscaling phenomenon, which also improves compute-optimal scaling behavior, is achieved by DANA across a broad range of data and target complexities, while traditional methods fall short. Extensive experiments on high-dimensional synthetic quadratics validate our theoretical predictions and large-scale text experiments with LSTMs show DANA's improved loss exponents over SGD hold in a practical setting.
An Evidence-Based Post-Hoc Adjustment Framework for Anomaly Detection Under Data Contamination
Unsupervised anomaly detection (AD) methods typically assume clean training data, yet real-world datasets often contain undetected or mislabeled anomalies, leading to significant performance degradation. Existing solutions require access to the training pipelines, data or prior knowledge of the proportions of anomalies in the data, limiting their real-world applicability. To address this challenge, we propose EPHAD, a simple yet effective test-time adaptation framework that updates the outputs of AD models trained on contaminated datasets using evidence gathered at test time. Our approach integrates the prior knowledge captured by the AD model trained on contaminated datasets with evidence derived from multimodal foundation models like Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP), classical AD methods like the Local Outlier Factor or domain-specific knowledge. We illustrate the intuition behind EPHAD using a synthetic toy example and validate its effectiveness through comprehensive experiments across eight visual AD datasets, twenty-six tabular AD datasets, and a real-world industrial AD dataset. Additionally, we conduct an ablation study to analyse hyperparameter influence and robustness to varying contamination levels, demonstrating the versatility and robustness of EPHAD across diverse AD models and evidence pairs. To ensure reproducibility, our code is publicly available2.
Self-Improving Embodied Foundation Models
Foundation models trained on web-scale data have revolutionized robotics, but their application to low-level control remains largely limited to behavioral cloning. Drawing inspiration from the success of the reinforcement learning stage in finetuning large language models, we propose a two-stage post-training approach for robotics.
Large Language Models as Model Organisms for Human Associative Learning
Testing hypotheses on how representational changes occur in biological systems is challenging, but large language models (LLMs) offer a scalable alternative. Building on LLMs' in-context learning, we adapt a cognitive neuroscience associative learning paradigm and investigate how representations evolve across six models. Our initial findings reveal a non-monotonic pattern consistent with the Non-Monotonic Plasticity Hypothesis, with moderately similar items differentiating after learning. Leveraging the controllability of LLMs, we further show that this differentiation is modulated by the overlap of associated items with the broader vocabulary-a factor we term vocabulary interference, capturing how new associations compete with prior knowledge. We find that higher vocabulary interference amplifies differentiation, suggesting that representational change is influenced by both item similarity and global competition.
Towards Generalizable Retina Vessel Segmentation with Deformable Graph Priors
Retinal vessel segmentation is critical for medical diagnosis, yet existing models often struggle to generalize across domains due to appearance variability, limited annotations, and complex vascular morphology. We propose GraphSeg, a variational Bayesian framework that integrates anatomical graph priors with structure-aware image decomposition to enhance cross-domain segmentation.
Unmasking Puppeteers: Leveraging Biometric Leakage to Expose Impersonation in AI-based Videoconferencing
AI-based talking-head videoconferencing systems reduce bandwidth by sending a compact pose-expression latent and re-synthesizing RGB at the receiver--but this latent can be "puppeteered," letting an attacker hijack a victim's likeness in real time. Because every frame is synthetic, deepfake and synthetic video detectors fail outright. To address this security problem, we exploit a key observation: the pose expression latent inherently contain biometric information of the driving identity. Therefore, we introduce the first biometric leakage defense without ever looking at the reconstructed RGB video: a pose-conditioned, large-margin contrastive encoder that isolates persistent identity cues inside the transmitted latent while cancelling transient pose and expression. A simple cosine test on this disentangled embedding flags illicit identity swaps as the video is rendered.
Validating LLM-as-a-Judge Systems under Rating Indeterminacy
The LLM-as-a-judge paradigm, in which a judge LLM system replaces human raters in rating the outputs of other generative AI (GenAI) systems, plays a critical role in scaling and standardizing GenAI evaluations. To validate such judge systems, evaluators assess human-judge agreement by first collecting multiple human ratings for each item in a validation corpus, then aggregating the ratings into a single, per-item gold label rating. For many items, however, rating criteria may admit multiple valid interpretations, so a human or LLM rater may deem multiple ratings "reasonable" or "correct". We call this condition rating indeterminacy. Problematically, many rating tasks that contain rating indeterminacy rely on forced-choice elicitation, whereby raters are instructed to select only one rating for each item.
Bernstein-von Mises for Adaptively Collected Data
Uncertainty quantification (UQ) for adaptively collected data, such as that coming from adaptive experiments, bandits, or reinforcement learning, is necessary for critical elements of data collection such as ensuring safety and conducting afterstudy inference. The data's adaptivity creates significant challenges for frequentist UQ, yet Bayesian UQ remains the same as if the data were independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.), making it an appealing and commonly used approach. Bayesian UQ requires the (correct) specification of a prior distribution while frequentist UQ does not, but for i.i.d.
Can NeRFs " See " without Cameras?
Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have been remarkably successful at synthesizing novel views of 3D scenes by optimizing a volumetric scene function. This scene function models how optical rays bring color information from a 3D object to the camera pixels. Radio frequency (RF) or audio signals can also be viewed as a vehicle for delivering information about the environment to a sensor. However, unlike camera pixels, an RF/audio sensor receives a mixture of signals that contain many environmental reflections (also called "multipath"). Is it still possible to infer the environment using such multipath signals? We show that with redesign, NeRFs can be taught to learn from multipath signals, and thereby "see" the environment. As a grounding application, we aim to infer the indoor floorplan of a home from sparse WiFi measurements made at multiple locations inside the home. Although a difficult inverse problem, our implicitly learnt floorplans look promising, and enables forward applications, such as indoor signal prediction and basic ray tracing.