Deep Learning
Optimized Machine Learning Methods for Studying the Thermodynamic Behavior of Complex Spin Systems
Kapitan, Dmitrii, Ovchinnikov, Pavel, Soldatov, Konstantin, Andriushchenko, Petr, Kapitan, Vitalii
This paper presents a systematic study of the application of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) as an efficient and versatile tool for the analysis of critical and low-temperature phase states in spin system models. The problem of calculating the dependence of the average energy on the spatial distribution of exchange integrals for the Edwards-Anderson model on a square lattice with frustrated interactions is considered. We further construct a single convolutional classifier of phase states of the ferromagnetic Ising model on square, triangular, honeycomb, and kagome lattices, trained on configurations generated by the Swendsen-Wang cluster algorithm. Computed temperature profiles of the averaged posterior probability of the high-temperature phase form clear S-shaped curves that intersect in the vicinity of the theoretical critical temperatures and allow one to determine the critical temperature for the kagome lattice without additional retraining. It is shown that convolutional models substantially reduce the root-mean-square error (RMSE) compared with fully connected architectures and efficiently capture complex correlations between thermodynamic characteristics and the structure of magnetic correlated systems.
Persian-Phi: Efficient Cross-Lingual Adaptation of Compact LLMs via Curriculum Learning
Akhlaghi, Amir Mohammad, Shabani, Amirhossein, Abdolmaleki, Mostafa, Kheradpisheh, Saeed Reza
The democratization of AI is currently hindered by the immense computational costs required to train Large Language Models (LLMs) for low-resource languages. This paper presents Persian-Phi, a 3.8B parameter model that challenges the assumption that robust multilingual capabilities require massive model sizes or multilingual baselines. We demonstrate how Microsoft Phi-3 Mini -- originally a monolingual English model -- can be effectively adapted to Persian through a novel, resource-efficient curriculum learning pipeline. Our approach employs a unique "warm-up" stage using bilingual narratives (Tiny Stories) to align embeddings prior to heavy training, followed by continual pretraining and instruction tuning via Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT). Despite its compact size, Persian-Phi achieves competitive results on Open Persian LLM Leaderboard in HuggingFace. Our findings provide a validated, scalable framework for extending the reach of state-of-the-art LLMs to underrepresented languages with minimal hardware resources. The Persian-Phi model is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/amirakhlaghiqqq/PersianPhi.
KAN-Dreamer: Benchmarking Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks as Function Approximators in World Models
DreamerV3 is a state-of-the-art online model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) algorithm known for remarkable sample efficiency. Concurrently, Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) have emerged as a promising alternative to Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs), offering superior parameter efficiency and interpretability. To mitigate KANs' computational overhead, variants like FastKAN leverage Radial Basis Functions (RBFs) to accelerate inference. In this work, we investigate integrating KAN architectures into the DreamerV3 framework. We introduce KAN-Dreamer, replacing specific MLP and convolutional components of DreamerV3 with KAN and FastKAN layers. To ensure efficiency within the JAX-based World Model, we implement a tailored, fully vectorized version with simplified grid management. We structure our investigation into three subsystems: Visual Perception, Latent Prediction, and Behavior Learning. Empirical evaluations on the DeepMind Control Suite (walker_walk) analyze sample efficiency, training time, and asymptotic performance. Experimental results demonstrate that utilizing our adapted FastKAN as a drop-in replacement for the Reward and Continue predictors yields performance on par with the original MLP-based architecture, maintaining parity in both sample efficiency and training speed. This report serves as a preliminary study for future developments in KAN-based world models.
When normalization hallucinates: unseen risks in AI-powered whole slide image processing
Moens, Karel, Blaschko, Matthew B., Tuytelaars, Tinne, Diricx, Bart, De Vylder, Jonas, Yousif, Mustafa
Whole slide image (WSI) normalization remains a vital preprocessing step in computational pathology. Increasingly driven by deep learning, these models learn to approximate data distributions from training examples. This often results in outputs that gravitate toward the average, potentially masking diagnostically important features. More critically, they can introduce hallucinated content, artifacts that appear realistic but are not present in the original tissue, posing a serious threat to downstream analysis. These hallucinations are nearly impossible to detect visually, and current evaluation practices often overlook them. In this work, we demonstrate that the risk of hallucinations is real and underappreciated. While many methods perform adequately on public datasets, we observe a concerning frequency of hallucinations when these same models are retrained and evaluated on real-world clinical data. To address this, we propose a novel image comparison measure designed to automatically detect hallucinations in normalized outputs. Using this measure, we systematically evaluate several well-cited normalization methods retrained on real-world data, revealing significant inconsistencies and failures that are not captured by conventional metrics. Our findings underscore the need for more robust, interpretable normalization techniques and stricter validation protocols in clinical deployment.
Revolutionizing Mixed Precision Quantization: Towards Training-free Automatic Proxy Discovery via Large Language Models
Kang, Haidong, Du, Jun, Lin, Lihong
Mixed-Precision Quantization (MPQ) liberates the Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) from the Out-Of-Memory (OOM) bottleneck, which garnered increasing research attention. However, conventional methods either searched from costly differentiable optimization, which is neither efficient nor flexible, or learned a quantized DNN from the proxy (i.e., HAWQ) manually designed by human experts, which is labor-intensive and requires huge expert knowledge. Can we design a proxy without involving any human experts and training? In this paper, we provide an affirmative answer by proposing a novel Large Language Models (LLMs)-driven Training-free Automatic Proxy (dubbed TAP) discovery framework, which reforms the design paradigm of MPQ by utilizing LLMs to find superior TAP tailored for MPQ, automatically. In addition, to bridge the gap between black-box LLMs and the tough MPQ task, we ingeniously propose simple Direct Policy Optimization (DPO) based reinforcement learning to enhance LLMs' reasoning by optimizing prompts, which can construct a positive feedback loop between the LLM and the MPQ task, enabling LLMs to generate better TAP in the next evolution. Extensive experiments on mainstream benchmarks demonstrate that TAP achieves state-of-the-art performance. Finally, we truly believe that our TAP will significantly contribute to the MPQ community by providing a new perspective on LLM-driven design algorithms.
Training Language Models to Use Prolog as a Tool
Mellgren, Niklas, Schneider-Kamp, Peter, Poech, Lukas Galke
Ensuring reliable tool use is critical for safe agentic AI systems. Language models frequently produce unreliable reasoning with plausible but incorrect solutions that are difficult to verify. To address this, we investigate fine-tuning models to use Prolog as an external tool for verifiable computation. Using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), we fine-tune Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct on a cleaned GSM8K-Prolog-Prover dataset while varying (i) prompt structure, (ii) reward composition (execution, syntax, semantics, structure), and (iii) inference protocol: single-shot, best-of-N, and two agentic modes where Prolog is invoked internally or independently. Our reinforcement learning approach outperforms supervised fine-tuning, with our 3B model achieving zero-shot MMLU performance comparable to 7B few-shot results. Our findings reveal that: 1) joint tuning of prompt, reward, and inference shapes program syntax and logic; 2) best-of-N with external Prolog verification maximizes accuracy on GSM8K; 3) agentic inference with internal repair yields superior zero-shot generalization on MMLU-Stem and MMLU-Pro. These results demonstrate that grounding model reasoning in formal verification systems substantially improves reliability and auditability for safety-critical applications. The source code for reproducing our experiments is available under https://github.com/niklasmellgren/grpo-prolog-inference
Empirical Results for Adjusting Truncated Backpropagation Through Time while Training Neural Audio Effects
Bourdin, Yann, Legrand, Pierrick, Roche, Fanny
This paper investigates the optimization of Truncated Backpropagation Through Time (TBPTT) for training neural networks in digital audio effect modeling, with a focus on dynamic range compression. The study evaluates key TBPTT hyperparameters -- sequence number, batch size, and sequence length -- and their influence on model performance. Using a convolutional-recurrent architecture, we conduct extensive experiments across datasets with and without conditionning by user controls. Results demonstrate that carefully tuning these parameters enhances model accuracy and training stability, while also reducing computational demands. Objective evaluations confirm improved performance with optimized settings, while subjective listening tests indicate that the revised TBPTT configuration maintains high perceptual quality.
Towards Reliable Test-Time Adaptation: Style Invariance as a Correctness Likelihood
Nam, Gilhyun, Kim, Taewon, Jeong, Joonhyun, Yang, Eunho
Test-time adaptation (TTA) enables efficient adaptation of deployed models, yet it often leads to poorly calibrated predictive uncertainty - a critical issue in high-stakes domains such as autonomous driving, finance, and healthcare. Existing calibration methods typically assume fixed models or static distributions, resulting in degraded performance under real-world, dynamic test conditions. To address these challenges, we introduce Style Invariance as a Correctness Likelihood (SICL), a framework that leverages style-invariance for robust uncertainty estimation. SICL estimates instance-wise correctness likelihood by measuring prediction consistency across style-altered variants, requiring only the model's forward pass. This makes it a plug-and-play, backpropagation-free calibration module compatible with any TTA method. Comprehensive evaluations across four baselines, five TTA methods, and two realistic scenarios with three model architecture demonstrate that SICL reduces calibration error by an average of 13 percentage points compared to conventional calibration approaches.
Recover-to-Forget: Gradient Reconstruction from LoRA for Efficient LLM Unlearning
Liu, Yezi, Chen, Hanning, Huang, Wenjun, Ni, Yang, Imani, Mohsen
Unlearning in large foundation models (e.g., LLMs) is essential for enabling dynamic knowledge updates, enforcing data deletion rights, and correcting model behavior. However, existing unlearning methods often require full-model fine-tuning or access to the original training data, which limits their scalability and practicality. In this work, we introduce Recover-to-Forget (R2F), a novel framework for efficient unlearning in LLMs based on reconstructing full-model gradient directions from low-rank LoRA adapter updates. Rather than performing backpropagation through the full model, we compute gradients with respect to LoRA parameters using multiple paraphrased prompts and train a gradient decoder to approximate the corresponding full-model gradients. To ensure applicability to larger or black-box models, the decoder is trained on a proxy model and transferred to target models. We provide a theoretical analysis of cross-model generalization and demonstrate that our method achieves effective unlearning while preserving general model performance. Experimental results demonstrate that R2F offers a scalable and lightweight alternative for unlearning in pretrained LLMs without requiring full retraining or access to internal parameters.
A Geometric Unification of Concept Learning with Concept Cones
Rocchi--Henry, Alexandre, Fel, Thomas, Franchi, Gianni
Two traditions of interpretability have evolved side by side but seldom spoken to each other: Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs), which prescribe what a concept should be, and Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs), which discover what concepts emerge. While CBMs use supervision to align activations with human-labeled concepts, SAEs rely on sparse coding to uncover emergent ones. We show that both paradigms instantiate the same geometric structure: each learns a set of linear directions in activation space whose nonnegative combinations form a concept cone. Supervised and unsupervised methods thus differ not in kind but in how they select this cone. Building on this view, we propose an operational bridge between the two paradigms. CBMs provide human-defined reference geometries, while SAEs can be evaluated by how well their learned cones approximate or contain those of CBMs. This containment framework yields quantitative metrics linking inductive biases -- such as SAE type, sparsity, or expansion ratio -- to emergence of plausible\footnote{We adopt the terminology of \citet{jacovi2020towards}, who distinguish between faithful explanations (accurately reflecting model computations) and plausible explanations (aligning with human intuition and domain knowledge). CBM concepts are plausible by construction -- selected or annotated by humans -- though not necessarily faithful to the true latent factors that organise the data manifold.} concepts. Using these metrics, we uncover a ``sweet spot'' in both sparsity and expansion factor that maximizes both geometric and semantic alignment with CBM concepts. Overall, our work unifies supervised and unsupervised concept discovery through a shared geometric framework, providing principled metrics to measure SAE progress and assess how well discovered concept align with plausible human concepts.