Deep Learning
What Is The Performance Ceiling of My Classifier? Utilizing Category-Wise Influence Functions for Pareto Frontier Analysis
Nahin, Shahriar Kabir, Xiao, Wenxiao, Liu, Joshua, Chhabra, Anshuman, Liu, Hongfu
Data-centric learning seeks to improve model performance from the perspective of data quality, and has been drawing increasing attention in the machine learning community. Among its key tools, influence functions provide a powerful framework to quantify the impact of individual training samples on model predictions, enabling practitioners to identify detrimental samples and retrain models on a cleaner dataset for improved performance. However, most existing work focuses on the question: "what data benefits the learning model?" In this paper, we take a step further and investigate a more fundamental question: "what is the performance ceiling of the learning model?" Unlike prior studies that primarily measure improvement through overall accuracy, we emphasize category-wise accuracy and aim for Pareto improvements, ensuring that every class benefits, rather than allowing tradeoffs where some classes improve at the expense of others. To address this challenge, we propose category-wise influence functions and introduce an influence vector that quantifies the impact of each training sample across all categories. Leveraging these influence vectors, we develop a principled criterion to determine whether a model can still be improved, and further design a linear programming-based sample reweighting framework to achieve Pareto performance improvements. Through extensive experiments on synthetic datasets, vision, and text benchmarks, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in estimating and achieving a model's performance improvement across multiple categories of interest.
LLM Chemistry Estimation for Multi-LLM Recommendation
Sanchez, Huascar, Hitaj, Briland
Multi-LLM collaboration promises accurate, robust, and context-aware solutions, yet existing approaches rely on implicit selection and output assessment without analyzing whether collaborating models truly complement or conflict. We introduce LLM Chemistry -- a framework that measures when LLM combinations exhibit synergistic or antagonistic behaviors that shape collective performance beyond individual capabilities. We formalize the notion of chemistry among LLMs, propose algorithms that quantify it by analyzing interaction dependencies, and recommend optimal model ensembles accordingly. Our theoretical analysis shows that chemistry among collaborating LLMs is most evident under heterogeneous model profiles, with its outcome impact shaped by task type, group size, and complexity. Evaluation on classification, summarization, and program repair tasks provides initial evidence for these task-dependent effects, thereby reinforcing our theoretical results. This establishes LLM Chemistry as both a diagnostic factor in multi-LLM systems and a foundation for ensemble recommendation.
On the Convergence and Size Transferability of Continuous-depth Graph Neural Networks
Yan, Mingsong, Kulick, Charles, Tang, Sui
Continuous-depth graph neural networks, also known as Graph Neural Differential Equations (GNDEs), combine the structural inductive bias of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) with the continuous-depth architecture of Neural ODEs, offering a scalable and principled framework for modeling dynamics on graphs. In this paper, we present a rigorous convergence analysis of GNDEs with time-varying parameters in the infinite-node limit, providing theoretical insights into their size transferability. To this end, we introduce Graphon Neural Differential Equations (Graphon-NDEs) as the infinite-node limit of GNDEs and establish their well-posedness. Leveraging tools from graphon theory and dynamical systems, we prove the trajectory-wise convergence of GNDE solutions to Graphon-NDE solutions. Moreover, we derive explicit convergence rates under two deterministic graph sampling regimes: (1) weighted graphs sampled from smooth graphons, and (2) unweighted graphs sampled from $\{0,1\}$-valued (discontinuous) graphons. We further establish size transferability bounds, providing theoretical justification for the practical strategy of transferring GNDE models trained on moderate-sized graphs to larger, structurally similar graphs without retraining. Numerical experiments using synthetic and real data support our theoretical findings.
Refactoring with LLMs: Bridging Human Expertise and Machine Understanding
Piao, Yonnel Chen Kuang, Paul, Jean Carlors, Da Silva, Leuson, Dakhel, Arghavan Moradi, Hamdaqa, Mohammad, Khomh, Foutse
Code refactoring is a fundamental software engineering practice aimed at improving code quality and maintainability. Despite its importance, developers often neglect refactoring due to the significant time, effort, and resources it requires, as well as the lack of immediate functional rewards. Although several automated refactoring tools have been proposed, they remain limited in supporting a broad spectrum of refactoring types. In this study, we explore whether instruction strategies inspired by human best-practice guidelines can enhance the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform diverse refactoring tasks automatically. Leveraging the instruction-following and code comprehension capabilities of state-of-the-art LLMs (e.g., GPT-mini and DeepSeek-V3), we draw on Martin Fowler's refactoring guidelines to design multiple instruction strategies that encode motivations, procedural steps, and transformation objectives for 61 well-known refactoring types. We evaluate these strategies on benchmark examples and real-world code snippets from GitHub projects. Our results show that instruction designs grounded in Fowler's guidelines enable LLMs to successfully perform all benchmark refactoring types and preserve program semantics in real-world settings, an essential criterion for effective refactoring. Moreover, while descriptive instructions are more interpretable to humans, our results show that rule-based instructions often lead to better performance in specific scenarios. Interestingly, allowing models to focus on the overall goal of refactoring, rather than prescribing a fixed transformation type, can yield even greater improvements in code quality.
PsycholexTherapy: Simulating Reasoning in Psychotherapy with Small Language Models in Persian
Abbasi, Mohammad Amin, Naderi, Hassan
This study presents PsychoLexTherapy, a framework for simulating psychotherapeutic reasoning in Persian using small language models (SLMs). The framework tackles the challenge of developing culturally grounded, therapeutically coherent dialogue systems with structured memory for multi-turn interactions in underrepresented languages. To ensure privacy and feasibility, PsychoLexTherapy is optimized for on-device deployment, enabling use without external servers. Development followed a three-stage process: (i) assessing SLMs psychological knowledge with PsychoLexEval; (ii) designing and implementing the reasoning-oriented PsychoLexTherapy framework; and (iii) constructing two evaluation datasets-PsychoLexQuery (real Persian user questions) and PsychoLexDialogue (hybrid simulated sessions)-to benchmark against multiple baselines. Experiments compared simple prompting, multi-agent debate, and structured therapeutic reasoning paths. Results showed that deliberate model selection balanced accuracy, efficiency, and privacy. On PsychoLexQuery, PsychoLexTherapy outperformed all baselines in automatic LLM-as-a-judge evaluation and was ranked highest by human evaluators in a single-turn preference study. In multi-turn tests with PsychoLexDialogue, the long-term memory module proved essential: while naive history concatenation caused incoherence and information loss, the full framework achieved the highest ratings in empathy, coherence, cultural fit, and personalization. Overall, PsychoLexTherapy establishes a practical, privacy-preserving, and culturally aligned foundation for Persian psychotherapy simulation, contributing novel datasets, a reproducible evaluation pipeline, and empirical insights into structured memory for therapeutic reasoning.
THEMIS: Unlocking Pretrained Knowledge with Foundation Model Embeddings for Anomaly Detection in Time Series
Lorik, Yadav Mahesh, Sarveswaran, Kaushik, Sundaramahalingam, Nagaraj, Venugopalan, Aravindakumar
Time series anomaly detection forms a very crucial area in several domains but poses substantial challenges. Due to time series data possessing seasonality, trends, noise, and evolving patterns (concept drift), it becomes very difficult to set a general notion of what constitutes normal behavior. Anomalies themselves could be varied, ranging from a single outlier to contextual or collective anomalies, and are normally very rare; hence, the dataset is largely imbalanced. Additional layers of complexities arise due to the problems of increased dimensionality of modern time series, real-time detection criteria, setting up appropriate detection thresholds, and arriving at results that are interpretable. To embrace these multifaceted challenges, very strong, flexible, and interpretable approaches are required. This paper presents THEMIS, a new framework for time series anomaly detection that exploits pretrained knowledge from foundation models. THEMIS extracts embeddings from the encoder of the Chronos time series foundation model and applies outlier detection techniques like Local Outlier Factor and Spectral Decomposition on the self-similarity matrix, to spot anomalies in the data. Our experiments show that this modular method achieves SOTA results on the MSL dataset and performs quite competitively on the SMAP and SWAT$^*$ datasets. Notably, THEMIS exceeds models trained specifically for anomaly detection, presenting hyperparameter robustness and interpretability by default. This paper advocates for pretrained representations from foundation models for performing efficient and adaptable anomaly detection for time series data.
LLM as an Algorithmist: Enhancing Anomaly Detectors via Programmatic Synthesis
Ye, Hangting, Li, Jinmeng, Zhao, He, Zhuge, Mingchen, Guo, Dandan, Chang, Yi, Zha, Hongyuan
Existing anomaly detection (AD) methods for tabular data usually rely on some assumptions about anomaly patterns, leading to inconsistent performance in real-world scenarios. While Large Language Models (LLMs) show remarkable reasoning capabilities, their direct application to tabular AD is impeded by fundamental challenges, including difficulties in processing heterogeneous data and significant privacy risks. To address these limitations, we propose LLM-DAS, a novel framework that repositions the LLM from a ``data processor'' to an ``algorithmist''. Instead of being exposed to raw data, our framework leverages the LLM's ability to reason about algorithms. It analyzes a high-level description of a given detector to understand its intrinsic weaknesses and then generates detector-specific, data-agnostic Python code to synthesize ``hard-to-detect'' anomalies that exploit these vulnerabilities. This generated synthesis program, which is reusable across diverse datasets, is then instantiated to augment training data, systematically enhancing the detector's robustness by transforming the problem into a more discriminative two-class classification task. Extensive experiments on 36 TAD benchmarks show that LLM-DAS consistently boosts the performance of mainstream detectors. By bridging LLM reasoning with classic AD algorithms via programmatic synthesis, LLM-DAS offers a scalable, effective, and privacy-preserving approach to patching the logical blind spots of existing detectors.
Rare Text Semantics Were Always There in Your Diffusion Transformer
Kang, Seil, Han, Woojung, Ju, Dayun, Hwang, Seong Jae
Starting from flow- and diffusion-based transformers, Multi-modal Diffusion Transformers (MM-DiTs) have reshaped text-to-vision generation, gaining acclaim for exceptional visual fidelity. As these models advance, users continually push the boundary with imaginative or rare prompts, which advanced models still falter in generating, since their concepts are often too scarce to leave a strong imprint during pre-training. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective intervention that surfaces rare semantics inside MM-DiTs without additional training steps, data, denoising-time optimization, or reliance on external modules (e.g., large language models). In particular, the joint-attention mechanism intrinsic to MM-DiT sequentially updates text embeddings alongside image embeddings throughout transformer blocks. We find that by mathematically expanding representational basins around text token embeddings via variance scale-up before the joint-attention blocks, rare semantics clearly emerge in MM-DiT's outputs. Furthermore, our results generalize effectively across text-to-vision tasks, including text-to-image, text-to-video, and text-driven image editing. Our work invites generative models to reveal the semantics that users intend, once hidden yet ready to surface.
Multi-Modal Oral Cancer Detection Using Weighted Ensemble Convolutional Neural Networks
George, Ajo Babu, George, Sreehari J R Ajo Babu, George, Sreehari J R Ajo Babu, R, Sreehari J
Aims Late diagnosis of Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma (OSCC) contributes significantly to its high global mortality rate, with over 50\% of cases detected at advanced stages and a 5-year survival rate below 50\% according to WHO statistics. This study aims to improve early detection of OSCC by developing a multimodal deep learning framework that integrates clinical, radiological, and histopathological images using a weighted ensemble of DenseNet-121 convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Material and Methods A retrospective study was conducted using publicly available datasets representing three distinct medical imaging modalities. Each modality-specific dataset was used to train a DenseNet-121 CNN via transfer learning. Augmentation and modality-specific preprocessing were applied to increase robustness. Predictions were fused using a validation-weighted ensemble strategy. Evaluation was performed using accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score. Results High validation accuracy was achieved for radiological (100\%) and histopathological (95.12\%) modalities, with clinical images performing lower (63.10\%) due to visual heterogeneity. The ensemble model demonstrated improved diagnostic robustness with an overall accuracy of 84.58\% on a multimodal validation dataset of 55 samples. Conclusion The multimodal ensemble framework bridges gaps in the current diagnostic workflow by offering a non-invasive, AI-assisted triage tool that enhances early identification of high-risk lesions. It supports clinicians in decision-making, aligning with global oncology guidelines to reduce diagnostic delays and improve patient outcomes.
PoseGaze-AHP: A Knowledge-Based 3D Dataset for AI-Driven Ocular and Postural Diagnosis
Al-Dabet, Saja, Turaev, Sherzod, Zaki, Nazar, Khan, Arif O., Eldweik, Luai
Diagnosing ocular - induced abnormal head posture (AHP) requires a comprehensive analysis of both head pose and ocular movements. However, existing datasets focus on these aspects separately, limiting the development of integrated diagnostic approaches and r estricting AI - driven advancements in AHP analysis. T o address this gap, we introduce PoseGaze - AHP, a novel 3D dataset that synchronously captures head pose and gaze movement information for ocular - induced AHP assessment. Structured clinical data were extra cted from medical literature using large language models (LLMs) through an iterative process with the Claude 3.5 Sonnet model, combining stepwise, hierarchical, and complex prompting strategies. The extracted records were systematically imputed and transfo rmed into 3D representations using the Neural Head Avatar (NHA) framework. The dataset includes 7,920 images generated from two head textures, covering a broad spectrum of ocular conditions. The extraction method achieved an overall accuracy of 91.92%, dem onstrating its reliability for clinical dataset construction. PoseGaze - AHP is the first publicly available resource tailored for AI - driven ocular - induced AHP diagnosis, supporting the development of accurate and privacy - compliant diagnostic tools .