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 Inductive Learning


Towards Effective Federated Graph Foundation Model via Mitigating Knowledge Entanglement

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recent advances in graph machine learning have shifted to data-centric paradigms, driven by two emerging fields: (1) Federated graph learning (FGL) enables multi-client collaboration but faces challenges from data and task heterogeneity, limiting its practicality; (2) Graph foundation models (GFM) offer strong domain generalization but are usually trained on single machines, missing out on cross-silo data and resources. These paradigms are complementary, and their integration brings notable benefits. Motivated by this, we propose FedGFM, a novel decentralized GFM training paradigm. However, a key challenge is knowledge entanglement, where multi-domain knowledge merges into indistinguishable representations, hindering downstream adaptation. To address this, we present FedGFM+, an enhanced framework with two core modules to reduce knowledge entanglement: (1) AncDAI: A global anchor-based domain-aware initialization strategy. Before pre-training, each client encodes its local graph into domain-specific prototypes that serve as semantic anchors. Synthetic embeddings around these anchors initialize the global model. We theoretically prove these prototypes are distinguishable across domains, providing a strong inductive bias to disentangle domain-specific knowledge. (2) AdaDPP: A local adaptive domain-sensitive prompt pool. Each client learns a lightweight graph prompt capturing domain semantics during pre-training. During fine-tuning, prompts from all clients form a pool from which the GFM selects relevant prompts to augment target graph attributes, improving downstream adaptation. FedGFM+ is evaluated on 8 diverse benchmarks across multiple domains and tasks, outperforming 20 baselines from supervised learning, FGL, and federated GFM variants.


Evaluation Protocol: The most ambitious aim of self-supervised learning is to create universal visual representations

Neural Information Processing Systems

We thank the reviewers for valuable feedback. Before addressing individual comments, we clarify common concerns. Moreover, "image-level" vs "pixel-level" training has no bearing on the validity of evaluating with Any method that uses a CNN learns more than just "image-level" representations; for Our task is to learn pixel-wise semantic-aware embeddings from scratch. We will update the final version to reflect the full 200 training epochs. We first sample regions, then a fixed number of pixels within chosen regions.





SAMora: Enhancing SAM through Hierarchical Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Medical Images

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The Segment Anything Model (SAM) has demonstrated significant potential in medical image segmentation. Y et, its performance is limited when only a small amount of labeled data is available, while there is abundant valuable yet often overlooked hierarchical information in medical data. T o address this limitation, we draw inspiration from self-supervised learning and propose SAMora, an innovative framework that captures hierarchical medical knowledge by applying complementary self-supervised learning objectives at the image, patch, and pixel levels. T o fully exploit the complementarity of hierarchical knowledge within LoRAs, we introduce HL-Attn, a hierarchical fusion module that integrates multi-scale features while maintaining their distinct characteristics. SAMora is compatible with various SAM variants, including SAM2, SAMed, and H-SAM. Experimental results on the Synapse, LA, and PROMISE12 datasets demonstrate that SAMora outperforms existing SAM variants. It achieves state-of-the-art performance in both few-shot and fully supervised settings while reducing fine-tuning epochs by 90%.


p2-TQA: A Process-based Preference Learning Framework for Self-Improving Table Question Answering Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Table question answering (TQA) focuses on answering questions based on tabular data. Developing TQA systems targets effective interaction with tabular data for tasks such as cell retrieval and data analysis. While recent work has leveraged fine-tuning to improve TQA systems, existing approaches often under-utilize available data and neglect the potential of post-training for further gains. In this work, we introduce p2-TQA, a process-based preference learning framework for TQA post-training. p2-TQA automatically constructs process-based preference data via a table-specific pipeline, eliminating the need for manual or costly data collection. It then optimizes models through contrastive learning on the collected data. Experiments show that p2-TQA effectively improves TQA models by up to 5% on in-domain datasets and 2.4% on out-of-domain datasets with only 8,000 training instances. Furthermore, models enhanced with p2-TQA achieve competitive results against larger, more complex state-of-the-art TQA systems, while maintaining up to five times higher efficiency.


Anatomy-VLM: A Fine-grained Vision-Language Model for Medical Interpretation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Accurate disease interpretation from radiology remains challenging due to imaging heterogeneity. Achieving expert-level diagnostic decisions requires integration of subtle image features with clinical knowledge. Yet major vision-language models (VLMs) treat images as holistic entities and overlook fine-grained image details that are vital for disease diagnosis. Clinicians analyze images by utilizing their prior medical knowledge and identify anatomical structures as important region of interests (ROIs). Inspired from this human-centric workflow, we introduce Anatomy-VLM, a fine-grained, vision-language model that incorporates multi-scale information. First, we design a model encoder to localize key anatomical features from entire medical images. Second, these regions are enriched with structured knowledge for contextually-aware interpretation. Finally, the model encoder aligns multi-scale medical information to generate clinically-interpretable disease prediction. Anatomy-VLM achieves outstanding performance on both in- and out-of-distribution datasets. We also validate the performance of Anatomy-VLM on downstream image segmentation tasks, suggesting that its fine-grained alignment captures anatomical and pathology-related knowledge. Furthermore, the Anatomy-VLM's encoder facilitates zero-shot anatomy-wise interpretation, providing its strong expert-level clinical interpretation capabilities.


A robust methodology for long-term sustainability evaluation of Machine Learning models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Among the many desirable properties of Artificial Intelligence systems, sustainability and efficiency have become increasingly important in the context of worsening climate change, massive water use in data centres, and the need for simpler, faster models in IoT settings. Consequently, there have been not few attempts to both promote and regulate the sustainability of Machine Learning models; the EU's AI Act indicates that the sustainability of AI - in terms of its environmental and social footprint-should be considered when developing and deploying AI pipelines [1], and manifests like that of UNESCO highlight sustainability as one of the core principles of the broader Responsible AI paradigm [2]. However, this seemingly consensual agreement on the importance of sustainability and efficiency for real-world AI systems and the social and regulatory efforts heavily contrasts with the practical applicability of such regulations; without looking further, the AI Act itself defines the requirement for sustainability, but does not indicate what metrics and evaluation pipelines should be considered for a robust, reliable, and practically relevant assessment of the environmental impact of a model. We argue that this lack of comprehensiveness in sustainability recommendations for AI systems does not stem from a careless or sloppy construction of the regulations themselves, but rather from an actual absence of suitable evaluation protocols that are formal, model-agnostic, reproducible, and grounded in real-life usage protocols for the ML lifecycle. The authors of this preprint are aware of a single regulatory standard for measuring AI sustainability, namely UNE 0086 [3], which limits evaluation to the epoch-batch training paradigm of supervised learning systems, rendering it useless for any task or type of learning that deviates from that standard. Although many researchers and companies have made it a habit to report efficiency figures and comparisons (e.g., in terms of emitted CO


Learning from N-Tuple Data with M Positive Instances: Unbiased Risk Estimation and Theoretical Guarantees

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Weakly supervised learning often operates with coarse aggregate signals rather than instance labels. We study a setting where each training example is an $n$-tuple containing exactly m positives, while only the count m per tuple is observed. This NTMP (N-tuple with M positives) supervision arises in, e.g., image classification with region proposals and multi-instance measurements. We show that tuple counts admit a trainable unbiased risk estimator (URE) by linking the tuple-generation process to latent instance marginals. Starting from fixed (n,m), we derive a closed-form URE and extend it to variable tuple sizes, variable counts, and their combination. Identification holds whenever the effective mixing rate is separated from the class prior. We establish generalization bounds via Rademacher complexity and prove statistical consistency with standard rates under mild regularity assumptions. To improve finite-sample stability, we introduce simple ReLU corrections to the URE that preserve asymptotic correctness. Across benchmarks converted to NTMP tasks, the approach consistently outperforms representative weak-supervision baselines and yields favorable precision-recall and F1 trade-offs. It remains robust under class-prior imbalance and across diverse tuple configurations, demonstrating that count-only supervision can be exploited effectively through a theoretically grounded and practically stable objective.