Deep Learning
BioCG: Constrained Generative Modeling for Biochemical Interaction Prediction
Predicting interactions between biochemical entities is a core challenge in drug discovery and systems biology, often hindered by limited data and poor generalization to unseen entities. Traditional discriminative models frequently underperform in such settings. We propose BioCG (Biochemical Constrained Generation), a novel framework that reformulates interaction prediction as a constrained sequence generation task. BioCG encodes target entities as unique discrete sequences via Iterative Residual Vector Quantization (I-RVQ) and trains a generative model to produce the sequence of an interacting partner given a query entity. A trie-guided constrained decoding mechanism, built from a catalog of valid target sequences, concentrates the model's learning on the critical distinctions between valid biochemical options, ensuring all outputs correspond to an entity within the pre-defined target catalog. An information-weighted training objective further focuses learning on the most critical decision points. BioCG achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance across diverse tasks, Drug-Target Interaction (DTI), Drug-Drug Interaction (DDI), and Enzyme-Reaction Prediction, especially in data-scarce and cold-start conditions.
Jacobian-Based Interpretation of Nonlinear Neural Encoding Model
In recent years, the alignment between artificial neural network (ANN) embeddings and blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) responses in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) via neural encoding models has significantly advanced research on neural representation mechanisms and interpretability in the brain. However, these approaches remain limited in characterizing the brain's inherently nonlinear response properties. To address this, we propose the Jacobianbased Nonlinearity Evaluation (JNE), an interpretability metric for nonlinear neural encoding models. JNE quantifies nonlinearity by statistically measuring the dispersion of local linear mappings (Jacobians) from model representations to predicted BOLD responses, thereby approximating the nonlinearity of BOLD signals. Centered on proposing JNE as a novel interpretability metric, we validated its effectiveness through controlled simulation experiments on various activation functions and network architectures, and further verified it on real fMRI data, demonstrating a hierarchical progression of nonlinear characteristics from primary to higher-order visual cortices, consistent with established cortical organization. We further extended JNE with Sample-Specificity (JNE-SS), revealing stimulus-selective nonlinear response patterns in functionally specialized brain regions. As the first interpretability metric for quantifying nonlinear responses, JNE provides new insights into brain information processing.
RoMA: Scaling up Mamba-based Foundation Models for Remote Sensing
Recent advances in self-supervised learning for Vision Transformers (ViTs) have fueled breakthroughs in remote sensing (RS) foundation models. However, the quadratic complexity of self-attention poses a significant barrier to scalability, particularly for large models and high-resolution images. While the linear-complexity Mamba architecture offers a promising alternative, existing RS applications of Mamba remain limited to supervised tasks on small, domain-specific datasets. To address these challenges, we propose RoMA, a framework that enables scalable self-supervised pretraining of Mamba-based RS foundation models using largescale, diverse, unlabeled data. RoMA enhances scalability for high-resolution images through a tailored auto-regressive learning strategy, incorporating two key innovations: 1) a rotation-aware pretraining mechanism combining adaptive cropping with angular embeddings to handle sparsely distributed objects with arbitrary orientations, and 2) multi-scale token prediction objectives that address the extreme variations in object scales inherent to RS imagery. Systematic empirical studies validate that Mamba adheres to RS data and parameter scaling laws, with performance scaling reliably as model and data size increase. Furthermore, experiments across scene classification, changing detection, and semantic segmentation tasks demonstrate that RoMA-pretrained Mamba models consistently outperform ViTbased counterparts in both accuracy and computational efficiency. The source code and pretrained models were released at RoMA.
VIKING: Deep variational inference with stochastic projections
Variational mean field approximations tend to struggle with contemporary overparametrized deep neural networks. Where a Bayesian treatment is usually associated with high-quality predictions and uncertainties, the practical reality has been the opposite, with unstable training, poor predictive power, and subpar calibration. Building upon recent work on reparametrizations of neural networks, we propose a simple variational family that considers two independent linear subspaces of the parameter space. These represent functional changes inside and outside the support of training data. This allows us to build a fully-correlated approximate posterior reflecting the overparametrization that tunes easy-to-interpret hyperparameters. We develop scalable numerical routines that maximize the associated evidence lower bound (ELBO) and sample from the approximate posterior. Empirically, we observe state-of-the-art performance across tasks, models, and datasets compared to a wide array of baseline methods. Our results show that approximate Bayesian inference applied to deep neural networks is far from a lost cause when constructing inference mechanisms that reflect the geometry of reparametrizations.
Spectral Compressive Imaging via Chromaticity-Intensity Decomposition
In coded aperture snapshot spectral imaging (CASSI), the captured measurement(a) entangles spatial and spectral information, posing a severely ill-posed inverse problem for hyperspectral images (HSIs) reconstruction. Moreover, the captured radiance inherently depends on scene illumination, making it difficult to recover the intrinsic spectral reflectance that remains invariant to lighting conditions. To address these challenges, we propose a chromaticity-intensity decomposition framework, which disentangles an HSI into a spatially smooth intensity map and a spectrally variant chromaticity cube.
Closed-form training dynamics of word2vec
We examine the quartic Taylor approximation of the word2vecloss around the origin, and we show that both the resulting training dynamics and the final performance on downstream tasks are empirically very similar to those of word2vec. Our main contribution is to analytically solve for both the gradient flow training dynamics and the final word embeddings in terms of only the corpus statistics and training hyperparameters. The solutions reveal that these models learn orthogonal linear subspaces one at a time, each one incrementing the effective rank of the embeddings until model capacity is saturated. Training on Wikipedia, we find that each of the top linear subspaces represents an interpretable topic-level concept. Finally, we apply our theory to describe how linear representations of more abstract semantic concepts emerge during training; these can be used to complete analogies via vector addition.
MLE-Dojo: Interactive Environments for Empowering LLMAgents in Machine Learning Engineering
We introduce MLE-Dojo, a Gym-style framework for systematically reinforcement learning, evaluating, and improving autonomous large language model (LLM) agents in iterative machine learning engineering (MLE) workflows. Unlike existing benchmarks that primarily rely on static datasets or single-attempt evaluations, MLE-Dojoprovides an interactive environment enabling agents to iteratively experiment, debug, and refine solutions through structured feedback loops. Built upon 200+ real-world Kaggle challenges, MLE-Dojocovers diverse, open-ended MLE tasks carefully curated to reflect realistic engineering scenarios such as data processing, architecture search, hyperparameter tuning, and code debugging. Its fully executable environment supports comprehensive agent training via both supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, facilitating iterative experimentation, realistic data sampling, and real-time outcome verification. Extensive evaluations of eight frontier LLMs reveal that while current models achieve meaningful iterative improvements, they still exhibit significant limitations in autonomously generating long-horizon solutions and efficiently resolving complex errors.
PhysVLM-AVR: Active Visual Reasoning for Multimodal Large Language Models in Physical Environments
Visual reasoning in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has primarily been studied in static, fully observable settings, limiting their effectiveness in real-world environments where information is often incomplete due to occlusion or limited field of view. Humans, in contrast, actively explore and interact with their environment--moving, examining, and manipulating objects--to gather information through a closed-loop process integrating perception, reasoning, and action. Inspired by this human capability, we introduce the Active Visual Reasoning (AVR) task, extending visual reasoning to partially observable, interactive environments. AVR necessitates agents to: (1) actively acquire information via sequential physical actions, (2) integrate observations across multiple steps for coherent reasoning, and (3) dynamically adjust decisions based on evolving visual feedback. To rigorously evaluate AVR, we introduce CLEVR-AVR, a simulation benchmark featuring multi-round interactive environments designed to assess both reasoning correctness and information-gathering efficiency. We present AVR-152k, a large-scale dataset offers rich Chain-of-Thought (CoT) annotations detailing iterative reasoning for uncertainty identification, action-conditioned information gain prediction, and information-maximizing action selection, crucial for training agents in a higher-order Markov Decision Process. Building on this, we develop PhysVLM-AVR, an MLLM achieving state-of-the-art performance on CLEVR-AVR, embodied reasoning (OpenEQA, RoboVQA), and passive visual reasoning (GeoMath, Geometry30K). Our analysis also reveals that current embodied MLLMs, despite detecting information incompleteness, struggle to actively acquire and integrate new information through interaction, highlighting a fundamental gap in active reasoning capabilities.
Audits Under Resource, Data, and Access Constraints: Scaling Laws For Less Discriminatory Alternatives
AI audits play a critical role in AI accountability and safety. They are particularly salient in anti-discrimination law. Several areas of anti-discrimination law implicate what is known as the "less discriminatory alternative" (LDA) requirement, under which a protocol is defensible if no less discriminatory model that achieves comparable performance can be found with reasonable effort. Notably, the burden of proving an LDA exists typically falls on the claimant (the party alleging discrimination). This creates a significant hurdle in AI cases, as the claimant would seemingly need to train a less discriminatory yet high-performing model, a task requiring resources and expertise beyond most litigants.
PINN Balls: Scaling Second-Order Methods for PINNs with Domain Decomposition and Adaptive Sampling
Recent advances in Scientific Machine Learning have shown that second-order methods can enhance the training of Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs), making them a suitable alternative to traditional numerical methods for Partial Differential Equations (PDEs). However, second-order methods induce large memory requirements, making them scale poorly with the model size. In this paper, we define a local Mixture of Experts (MoE) combining the parameter-efficiency of ensemble models and sparse coding to enable the use of second-order training. Our model - PINNBALLS - also features a fully learnable domain decomposition structure, achieved through the use of Adversarial Adaptive Sampling (AAS), which adapts the DD to the PDE and its domain. PINNBALLS achieves better accuracy than the state-of-the-art in scientific machine learning, while maintaining invaluable scalability properties and drawing from a sound theoretical background.