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The U.S. Men Are Beginning to Look Like the Team We Were Promised

TIME - Tech

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FoGE: Fock Space inspired encoding for graph prompting

Neural Information Processing Systems

Recent results show that modern Large Language Models (LLM) are capable of understanding and answering questions about structured data such as graphs. Existing proposals often use some description of the graph to create an "augmented" prompt fed to the LLM. For a chosen class of graphs, if a well-tailored graph encoder is deployed to play together with a pre-trained LLM, the model can answer graph-related questions well. Current solutions to graph-based prompts range from graph serialization to graph transformers. In this work, we show that the use of a parameter-free graph encoder based on Fock space representations, a concept borrowed from physics, is remarkably versatile in this problem setting. The simple construction, with a few small adjustments, can provide rich and informative graph encodings, for a wide range of different graphs. We investigate the use of this idea for prefix-tuned prompts leveraging the capabilities of a pre-trained, frozen LLM. The modifications lead to a model that can answer graph-related questions - from simple graphs to proteins to hypergraphs - effectively and with minimal, if any, adjustments to the architecture.


SGN: Shifted Window-Based Hierarchical Variable Grouping for Multivariate Time Series Classification

Neural Information Processing Systems

Multivariate time series (MTS) classification has attracted increasing attention across various domains. Existing methods either decompose MTS into separate univariate series, ignoring inter-variable dependencies, or jointly model all variables, which may lead to over-smoothing and loss of semantic structure. These limitations become particularly pronounced when dealing with complex and heterogeneous variable types. To address these challenges, we propose SwinGroupNet (SGN), which explores a novel perspective for constructing variable interaction and temporal dependency. Specifically, SGN processes multi-scale time series using (1) Variable Group Embedding (VGE), which partitions variables into groups and performs independent group-wise embedding; (2) Multi-Scale Group Window Mixing (MGWM), which reconstructs variable interactions by modeling both intra-group and inter-group dependencies while extracting multi-scale temporal features; and (3) Periodic Window Shifting and Merging (PWSM), which exploits inherent periodic patterns to enable hierarchical temporal interaction and feature aggregation. Extensive experiments on diverse benchmark datasets from multiple domains demonstrate that SGN consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance, with an average improvement of 4.2% over existing methods. We release the source code at https://github.com/colison/SGN.


PubSub-VFL: Towards Efficient Two-Party Split Learning in Heterogeneous Environments via Publisher/Subscriber Architecture

Neural Information Processing Systems

With the rapid advancement of the digital economy, data collaboration between organizations has become a well-established business model, driving the growth of various industries. However, privacy concerns make direct data sharing impractical. To address this, Two-Party Split Learning (a.k.a. Vertical Federated Learning (VFL)) has emerged as a promising solution for secure collaborative learning. Despite its advantages, this architecture still suffers from low computational resource utilization and training efficiency.


The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity

Neural Information Processing Systems

Recent generations of frontier language models have introduced Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) that generate detailed thinking processes before providing answers. While these models demonstrate improved performance on reasoning benchmarks, their fundamental capabilities, scaling properties, and limitations remain insufficiently understood. Current evaluations primarily focus on established mathematical and coding benchmarks, emphasizing final answer accuracy. However, this evaluation paradigm often suffers from data contamination and does not provide insights into the reasoning traces' structure and quality. In this work, we systematically investigate these gaps with the help of controllable puzzle environments that allow precise manipulation of compositional complexity while maintaining consistent logical structures.



Inv-Entropy: AFully Probabilistic Framework for Uncertainty Quantification in Language Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large language models (LLMs) have transformed natural language processing, but their reliable deployment requires effective uncertainty quantification (UQ). Existing UQ methods are often heuristic and lack a probabilistic interpretation. This paper begins by providing a theoretical justification for the role of perturbations in UQ for LLMs. We then introduce a dual random walk perspective, modeling input-output pairs as two Markov chains with transition probabilities defined by semantic similarity. Building on this, we propose a fully probabilistic framework based on an inverse model, which quantifies uncertainty by evaluating the diversity of the input space conditioned on a given output through systematic perturbations.


Mitigating Spurious Features in Contrastive Learning with Spectral Regularization

Neural Information Processing Systems

Neural networks generally prefer simple and easy-to-learn features. When these features are spuriously correlated with the labels, the network's performance can suffer, particularly for underrepresented classes or concepts. Self-supervised representation learning methods, such as contrastive learning, are especially prone to this issue, often resulting in worse performance on downstream tasks. We identify a key spectral signature of this failure: early reliance on dominant singular modes of the learned feature matrix. To mitigate this, we propose a novel framework that promotes a uniform eigenspectrum of the feature covariance matrix, encouraging diverse and semantically rich representations. Our method operates in a fully self-supervised setting, without relying on ground-truth labels or any additional information. Empirical results on SimCLR and SimSiam demonstrate consistent gains in robustness and transfer performance, suggesting broad applicability across self-supervised learning paradigms.


How to keep ticks off your dog (and out of your home)

Popular Science

Your dog is a tick magnet. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Don't let your dog bring ticks into your home. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy .