Deep Learning
TDK ready to step up investment to ride AI wave
TDK CEO Noboru Saito says the firm is prepared to add investments to ride the global boom in generative artificial intelligence. Electronics component linchpin TDK is prepared to add to what is already its biggest capital spending campaign ever in a push to ride the global boom in generative artificial intelligence. The company has added ยฅ100 billion ($640 million) to its multiyear investment plan each year since it rolled it out in 2024, and now CEO Noboru Saito says the effort may accelerate to match an expected surge in orders and demand. "Should promising prospects arise, our commitment is to make timely and opportunistic investments," Saito, 59, said in an interview. "If we don't sow the seeds for medium-to long-term growth now, we won't be able to reap the harvest later." In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.
Microsoft is retiring Copilot Mode on Edge, because everything is Copilot Mode now
Microsoft is retiring Copilot Mode on Edge, because its features are now built directly into the browser for both desktop and mobile. If you'll recall, Microsoft started testing Copilot Mode on Edge in July last year, allowing you to use it to search for information across multiple open browser tabs and to analyze the details on each page. Now, the feature is available not just on desktop, but also on Edge for mobile. Just ask Copilot a question or give it a command, such as Compare the smart TVs across all my open tabs, and it will pull info from your tabs to give you a structured, side-by-side comparison analysis. After the initial testing of Copilot Mode, Microsoft rolled out Journeys, which you can use to save projects you can revisit in the future. It's now also available for free on mobile, so you can pick up planning trips or making purchases from where you left off days or weeks ago.
Population Risk Bounds for Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks Trained by DP-SGD with Correlated Noise
Wang, Puyu, Schuchardt, Jan, Kalinin, Nikita, Zhou, Junyu, Fellenz, Sophie, Lampert, Christoph, Kloft, Marius
We establish the first population risk bounds for Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) trained by mini-batch SGD with gradient clipping, covering non-private SGD as well as differentially private SGD (DP-SGD) with Gaussian perturbations that interpolate between independent and temporally correlated noise. This setting is substantially closer to practice than prior KAN theory along two axes: training is by mini-batch SGD, the standard recipe for modern networks, rather than full-batch gradient descent (GD); and correlated-noise mechanisms have empirically shown a more favorable privacy-utility tradeoff than independent-noise mechanisms. Our results cover the corresponding full-batch GD and independent-noise DP-GD results for KANs by Wang et al. (2026), while yielding sharper fixed-second-layer specializations. The technical core is a new analysis route for correlated-noise DP training in the non-convex regime. Temporal dependence breaks the conditional-centering structure underlying standard one-step SGD arguments, and the projection step obstructs the exact cancellation structure of correlated perturbations. We address these difficulties through an auxiliary unprojected dynamics, a shifted iterate that absorbs the current noise perturbation, and a high-probability bootstrap certifying projection inactivity. Combining this optimization analysis with a stability-based generalization argument yields the stated population risk bounds. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first optimization and population risk analysis of a correlated-noise mechanism for DP training beyond convex learning, in particular for neural networks.
A Unified Framework for Critical Scaling of Inverse Temperature in Self-Attention
Hayase, Tomohiro, Karakida, Ryo
Length-dependent logit rescaling is widely used to stabilize long-context self-attention, but existing analyses and methods suggest conflicting inverse-temperature laws for the context length $n$, ranging from $(\log n)^{1/2}$ to $\log n$ and $(\log n)^2$. We provide a general theory showing that the desirable scale is determined by the gap-counting function $N_n$ of each attention row. Counting how many competitors lie within each gap from the maximum, we define an upper-tail accumulation scale and prove that it gives the critical inverse-temperature scale for softmax concentration: below this scale, the top competitors remain unseparated, whereas above it, the attention entropy collapses. This framework unifies prior scaling laws as different $N_n$ and yields a direct diagnostic for attention-score families, from idealized theoretical models to more practical transformers.
Uncovering Symmetry Transfer in Large Language Models via Layer-Peeled Optimization
Du, Zhehang, He, Hangfeng, Su, Weijie
Large language models (LLMs) are pretrained by minimizing the cross-entropy loss for next-token prediction. In this paper, we study whether this optimization strategy can induce geometric structure in the learned model weights and context embeddings. We approach this problem by analyzing a constrained layer-peeled optimization program, which serves as a mathematically tractable surrogate for LLMs by treating the output projection matrix and last-layer context embeddings as optimization variables. Our analysis of this nonconvex optimization program demonstrates that symmetries in the target next-token distributions are transferred to the global minimizers of the layer-peeled model in a precise group-theoretic sense. Specifically, we prove that when the target tokens exhibit a cyclic-shift symmetry (such as the seven days of the week or the twelve months of the year), the optimal logit matrix is exactly circulant, and the Gram matrices of both the output projections and the context embeddings form circulant geometries as well. Next, for exchangeable target distributions invariant under the symmetric group and, more generally, under two-transitive group actions, we show that the global optimal output projection matrix forms a simplex equiangular tight frame, while the optimal logit matrix and context embeddings inherit the permutation symmetries present in the input data. A key technical step is to reduce the constrained nonconvex factorized problem to an explicit logit-level convex characterization for cyclic symmetry and to a symmetry-based lower bound for permutation symmetry, together with a sharp characterization of the optimal factorization. Finally, we empirically demonstrate that open-source LLMs naturally exhibit symmetries consistent with our theoretical predictions, despite being trained without any explicit regularization promoting such geometric structure.
Adaptive Kernel Density Estimation with Pre-training
Density estimation in high-dimensional settings is an important and challenging statistical problem.Traditional methods based on kernel smoothing are inefficient in high dimensions due to the difficulties in specifying appropriate location-adaptive kernels. In this work, we introduce pre-training, a key idea behind many cutting-edge AI technologies, to the context of non-parametric density estimation. By establishing a pre-trained neural network that can recommend an appropriate location-adaptive kernel for each sample point, efficient density estimation with adaptive kernels is achieved in high dimensions. A wide range of numerical experiments show that this strategy is highly effective for improving density-estimation accuracy, when the target distribution is close to the distribution family for pre-training. When the target distribution is substantially different from the pre-training distribution family, the benefit from the proposed pre-training strategy may be diluted, but can be reactivated by an additional fine-tuning procedure.
On Hallucinations in Inverse Problems: Fundamental Limits and Provable Assessment Methods
Iagaru, David, Gottschling, Nina M., Hansen, Anders C., Garnier, Josselin
While deep learning has revolutionised inverse problems, its safe deployment is hindered by three primary reliability concerns: hallucinations, instabilities, and performance volatility [48]. Hallucinations manifest as high-fidelity features that are factually false; instabilities reflect heightened sensitivity to measurement noise; and performance volatility refers to significant fluctuations in reconstruction quality across the data, yielding high-fidelity results for some samples while failing on seemingly similar images. In many applications, the risk of generating realistic but unfaithful content can impede the safe deployment of AI methods for inverse problems. The choice of "hallucinate" as the Cambridge Dictionary's word of the year in 2023 illustrates this open problem [53]. The problem of AI hallucinations persists, as the Financial Times [44] highlighted that, "AI hallucinations haunt users more than job losses." A first step toward training AI methods that do not suffer from hallucinations is the assessment and identification of hallucinated outputs. Consider the inverse problem of recovering xfrom noisy measurements y " Fpx,eq, x PM1 ฤX, e PEฤY, (1.1)
Unified generalization analysis for physics informed neural networks
Hashimoto, Yuka, Iwata, Tomoharu
Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) and their variational counterparts (VPINNs) are neural networks that incorporate physical laws, making them useful for scientific problems. Existing generalization analyses for PINNs and VPINNs remain limited, often requiring restrictive assumptions such as stability conditions or linear ellipticity. In this paper, we derive generalization bounds for neural networks that involve differentiation with respect to input variables, covering PINNs and VPINNs under a unified framework. We apply Taylor expansion to represent nonlinear differential operators as linear operators on a high-dimensional space, enabling the use of Koopman-based analysis and showing that high-rank networks can generalize well even in settings involving differential operators. We also show that the nonlinearity of the differential operator exponentially enlarges the bound, highlighting its significant impact on generalization.
Learning Perturbations to Extrapolate Your LLM
Cen, Zetai, Gu, Chenfei, Zhu, Jin, Li, Ting, Chen, Yunxiao, Shi, Chengchun
Training large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-5 and Qwen-3 (Singh et al., 2025; Yang et al., 2025) on massive text corpora aims at capturing the underlying distribution of natural language. Yet, it remains challenging for the trained model to extrapolate to out-of-distribution or out-of-domain settings beyond the support of its training data. The literature has seen the development of various data perturbation techniques, such as synonym replacement, random insertion, deletion, and swap, that modify training instances into semantically similar variants to effectively expose LLMs to a broader range of inputs and improve their ability to generalize beyond the training data (Feng et al., 2019, 2020; Li et al., 2024; Cen et al., 2026). However, their approach remains grounded in the discrete, word-level augmentation procedures mentioned previously, which may restrict its adaptivity across diverse domains. While discrete perturbations are simple to use, they could be too coarse and hard to refine due to the complexity of natural language (Park et al., 2022; Li et al., 2023). Meanwhile, fixed perturbations apply the same transformations to the data regardless of the contexts, thus failing to generalize appropriately (Ismailov and Asanova, 2025).
Deep Learning as Neural Low-Degree Filtering: A Spectral Theory of Hierarchical Feature Learning
Dandi, Yatin, Vilucchio, Matteo, Arnaboldi, Luca, Tabanelli, Hugo, Krzakala, Florent
Understanding how deep neural networks learn useful internal representations from data remains a central open problem in the theory of deep learning. We introduce Neural Low-Degree Filtering (Neural LoFi), a stylized limit of gradient-based training in which hierarchical feature learning becomes an explicit iterative spectral procedure. In this limit, the dynamics at each layer decouple: given the current representation, the next layer selects directions with maximal accessible low-degree correlation to the label. This yields a tractable surrogate mechanism for deep learning, together with a natural kernel-space interpretation. Neural LoFi provides a mathematically explicit framework for studying multi-layer feature learning beyond the lazy regime. It predicts how representations are selected layer by layer, explains how emergence of concepts arises with given sample complexity,and gives a concrete mechanism by which depth progressively constructs new features from old ones through low-degree compositionality. We complement the theory with mechanistic experiments on fully connected and convolutional architectures, showing that Neural LoFi improves over lazy random-feature baselines, recovers meaningful structured filters, and predicts representations aligned with early gradient-descent feature discovery with real datasets.