Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

First, we show that MMC is theoretically possible (well-posed).

Multidimensional scaling visualizes dissimilarities among objects and reduces data dimensionality. While many methods address symmetric proximity data, asymmetric and especially three-way proximity data (capturing relationships across multiple occasions) remain underexplored. Recent developments, such as the h-plot, enable the analysis of asymmetric and non-reflexive relationships by embedding dissimilarities in a Euclidean space, allowing further techniques like archetypoid analysis to identify representative extreme profiles. However, no existing methods extract archetypal profiles from three-way asymmetric proximity data. This work extends the h-plot methodology to three-way proximity data under both symmetric and asymmetric, conditional and unconditional frameworks. The proposed approach offers several advantages: intuitive interpretability through a unified Euclidean representation; an explicit, eigenvector-based analytical solution free from local minima; scale invariance under linear transformations; computational efficiency for large matrices; and a straightforward goodness-of-fit evaluation. Furthermore, it enables the identification of archetypal profiles and clustering structures for three-way asymmetric proximities. Its performance is compared with existing models for multidimensional scaling and clustering, and illustrated through a financial application. All data and code are provided to facilitate reproducibility.

Quantum machine learning (QML) is a computational paradigm that seeks to apply quantum-mechanical resources to solve learning problems. As such, the goal of this framework is to leverage quantum processors to tackle optimization, supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement learning, and generative modeling-among other tasks-more efficiently than classical models. Here we offer a high level overview of QML, focusing on settings where the quantum device is the primary learning or data generating unit. We outline the field's tensions between practicality and guarantees, access models and speedups, and classical baselines and claimed quantum advantages-flagging where evidence is strong, where it is conditional or still lacking, and where open questions remain. By shedding light on these nuances and debates, we aim to provide a friendly map of the QML landscape so that the reader can judge when-and under what assumptions-quantum approaches may offer real benefits.

Since the 21st century, artificial intelligence has been leading a new round of industrial revolution. Under the training framework, the optimization algorithm aims to stably converge high-dimensional optimization to local and even global minima. Entering the era of large language models, although the scale of model parameters and data has increased, Adam remains the mainstream optimization algorithm. However, compared with stochastic gradient descent (SGD) based optimization algorithms, Adam is more likely to converge to non-flat minima. To address this issue, the AdamNX algorithm is proposed. Its core innovation lies in the proposition of a novel type of second-order moment estimation exponential decay rate, which gradually weakens the learning step correction strength as training progresses, and degrades to momentum SGD in the stable training period, thereby improving the stability of training in the stable period and possibly enhancing generalization ability. Experimental results show that our second-order moment estimation exponential decay rate is better than the current second-order moment estimation exponential decay rate, and AdamNX can stably outperform Adam and its variants in terms of performance. Our code is open-sourced at https://github.com/mengzhu0308/AdamNX.

Graph spectral representations are fundamental in graph signal processing, offering a rigorous framework for analyzing and processing graph-structured data. The graph fractional Fourier transform (GFRFT) extends the classical graph Fourier transform (GFT) with a fractional-order parameter, enabling flexible spectral analysis while preserving mathematical consistency. The angular graph Fourier transform (AGFT) introduces angular control via GFT eigenvector rotation; however, existing constructions fail to degenerate to the GFT at zero angle, which is a critical flaw that undermines theoretical consistency and interpretability. To resolve these complementary limitations - GFRFT's lack of angular regulation and AGFT's defective degeneracy - this study proposes an angular GFRFT (AGFRFT), a unified framework that integrates fractional-order and angular spectral analyses with theoretical rigor. A degeneracy-friendly rotation matrix family ensures exact GFT degeneration at zero angle, with two AGFRFT variants (I-AGFRFT and II-AGFRFT) defined accordingly. Rigorous theoretical analyses confirm their unitarity, invertibility, and smooth parameter dependence. Both support learnable joint parameterization of the angle and fractional order, enabling adaptive spectral processing for diverse graph signals. Extensive experiments on real-world data denoising, image denoising, and point cloud denoising demonstrate that AGFRFT outperforms GFRFT and AGFT in terms of spectral concentration, reconstruction quality, and controllable spectral manipulation, establishing a robust and flexible tool for integrated angular fractional spectral analysis in graph signal processing.

Linear probes are widely used to interpret and evaluate neural representations, yet their reliability remains unclear, as probes may appear accurate in some regimes but collapse unpredictably in others. We uncover a spectral mechanism behind this phenomenon and formalize it as the Spectral Identifiability Principle (SIP), a verifiable Fisher-inspired condition for probe stability. When the eigengap separating task-relevant directions is larger than the Fisher estimation error, the estimated subspace concentrates and accuracy remains consistent, whereas closing this gap induces instability in a phase-transition manner. Our analysis connects eigengap geometry, sample size, and misclassification risk through finite-sample reasoning, providing an interpretable diagnostic rather than a loose generalization bound. Controlled synthetic studies, where Fisher quantities are computed exactly, confirm these predictions and show how spectral inspection can anticipate unreliable probes before they distort downstream evaluation.

We consider an efficient computational framework for speeding up several machine learning algorithms with almost no loss of accuracy. The proposed framework relies on projections via structured matrices that we call Structured Spinners, which are formed as products of three structured matrix-blocks that incorporate rotations. The approach is highly generic, i.e. i) structured matrices under consideration can either be fully-randomized or learned, ii) our structured family contains as special cases all previously considered structured schemes, iii) the setting extends to the non-linear case where the projections are followed by non-linear functions, and iv) the method finds numerous applications including kernel approximations via random feature maps, dimensionality reduction algorithms, new fast cross-polytope LSH techniques, deep learning, convex optimization algorithms via Newton sketches, quantization with random projection trees, and more. The proposed framework comes with theoretical guarantees characterizing the capacity of the structured model in reference to its unstructured counterpart and is based on a general theoretical principle that we describe in the paper. As a consequence of our theoretical analysis, we provide the first theoretical guarantees for one of the most efficient existing LSH algorithms based on the HD3HD2HD1 structured matrix [Andoni et al., 2015]. The exhaustive experimental evaluation confirms the accuracy and efficiency of structured spinners for a variety of different applications.

The task of dataset distillation aims to find a small set of synthetic images such that training a model on them reproduces the performance of the same model trained on a much larger dataset of real samples. Existing distillation methods focus on synthesizing datasets that enable training randomly initialized models. In contrast, state-of-the-art vision approaches are increasingly building on large, pre-trained self-supervised models rather than training from scratch. In this paper, we investigate the problem of distilling datasets that enable us to optimally train linear probes on top of such large, pre-trained vision models. We introduce a method of dataset distillation for this task called Linear Gradient Matching that optimizes the synthetic images such that, when passed through a pre-trained feature extractor, they induce gradients in the linear classifier similar to those produced by the real data. Our method yields synthetic data that outperform all real-image baselines and, remarkably, generalize across pre-trained vision models, enabling us, for instance, to train a linear CLIP probe that performs competitively using a dataset distilled via a DINO backbone. Further, we show that our distilled datasets are exceptionally effective for fine-grained classification and provide a valuable tool for model interpretability, predicting, among other things, how similar two models' embedding spaces are under the platonic representation hypothesis or whether a model is sensitive to spurious correlations in adversarial datasets.

We introduce Adaptive Guided Upsampling (AGU), an efficient method for upscaling low-light images capable of optimizing multiple image quality characteristics at the same time, such as reducing noise and increasing sharpness. It is based on a guided image method, which transfers image characteristics from a guidance image to the target image. Using state-of-the-art guided methods, low-light images lack sufficient characteristics for this purpose due to their high noise level and low brightness, rendering suboptimal/not significantly improved images in the process. We solve this problem with multi-parameter optimization, learning the association between multiple low-light and bright image characteristics. Our proposed machine learning method learns these characteristics from a few sample images-pairs. AGU can render high-quality images in real time using low-quality, low-resolution input; our experiments demonstrate that it is superior to state-of-the-art methods in the addressed low-light use case.