We propose a unified information-geometric framework that formalizes understanding in learning as a trade-off between informativeness and geometric simplicity. An encoder ϕ is evaluated by U(ϕ): = I(ϕ(X);Y) βC(ϕ), where C(ϕ) penalizes curvature and intrinsic dimensionality, enforcing smooth, low-complexity manifolds. Under mild manifold and regularity assumptions, we derive non-asymptotic bounds showing that generalization error scales with intrinsic dimension while curvature controls approximation stability, directly linking geometry to sample efficiency. To operationalize this theory, we introduce the Varia-tional Geometric Information Bottleneck (V-GIB); a varia-tional estimator that unifies mutual-information compression and curvature regularization through tractable geometric proxies (Hutchinson trace, Jacobian norms, and local PCA). Experiments across synthetic manifolds, few-shot settings, and real-world datasets (Fashion-MNIST, CIFAR-10) reveal a robust information-geometry Pareto frontier, stable estimators, and substantial gains in interpretive efficiency. Notably, fractional-data experiments on CIFAR-10 confirm that curvature-aware encoders maintain predictive power under data scarcity, validating the predicted efficiency-curvature law. Overall, V-GIB provides a principled and measurable route to representations that are geometrically coherent, data-efficient, and aligned with human-understandable structure. Keywords: geometry of understanding; information bottleneck; curvature regularization; few-shot learning; mutual information; Hutchinson trace estimator; inter-pretability; human-machine alignment.

The capability of a novel Kullback-Leibler divergence method is examined herein within the Kalman filter framework to select the input-parameter-state estimation execution with the most plausible results. This identification suffers from the uncertainty related to obtaining different results from different initial parameter set guesses, and the examined approach uses the information gained from the data in going from the prior to the posterior distribution to address the issue. Firstly, the Kalman filter is performed for a number of different initial parameter sets providing the system input-parameter-state estimation. Secondly, the resulting posterior distributions are compared simultaneously to the initial prior distributions using the Kullback-Leibler divergence. Finally, the identification with the least Kullback-Leibler divergence is selected as the one with the most plausible results. Importantly, the method is shown to select the better performed identification in linear, nonlinear, and limited information applications, providing a powerful tool for system monitoring.

Predicting interspecies interactions is a key challenge in microbial ecology, as these interactions are critical to determining the structure and activity of microbial communities. In this work, we used data on monoculture growth capabilities, interactions with other species, and phylogeny to predict a negative or positive effect of interactions. More precisely, we used one of the largest available pairwise interaction datasets to train our models, comprising over 7,500 interactions be- tween 20 species from two taxonomic groups co-cultured under 40 distinct carbon conditions, with a primary focus on the work of Nestor et al.[28 ]. In this work, we propose Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) as a powerful classifier to predict the direction of the effect. We construct edge-graphs of pairwise microbial interactions in order to leverage shared information across individual co-culture experiments, and use GNNs to predict modes of interaction. Our model can not only predict binary interactions (positive/negative) but also classify more complex interaction types such as mutualism, competition, and parasitism. Our initial results were encouraging, achieving an F1-score of 80.44%. This significantly outperforms comparable methods in the literature, including conventional Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) models, which reported an F1-score of 72.76%.

Access to clinical multi-channel EEG remains limited in many regions worldwide. We present NEUROSKY-EPI, the first open dataset of single-channel, consumer-grade EEG for epilepsy, collected in a South Asian clinical setting along with rich contextual metadata. To explore its utility, we introduce EmbedCluster, a patient-stratification pipeline that transfers representations from EEGNet models trained on clinical data and enriches them with contextual autoencoder embeddings, followed by unsupervised clustering of patients based on EEG patterns. Results show that low-cost, single-channel data can support meaningful stratification. Beyond algorithmic performance, we emphasize human-centered concerns such as deployability in resource-constrained environments, interpretability for non-specialists, and safeguards for privacy, inclusivity, and bias. By releasing the dataset and code, we aim to catalyze interdisciplinary research across health technology, human-computer interaction, and machine learning, advancing the goal of affordable and actionable EEG-based epilepsy care.

As a computer vision task, automatic object segmentation remains challenging in specialized image domains without massive labeled data, such as synthetic aperture sonar images, remote sensing, biomedical imaging, etc. In any domain, obtaining pixel-wise segmentation masks is expensive. In this work, we propose a method for training a masking network to perform binary object segmentation using weak supervision in the form of image-wise presence or absence of an object of interest, which provides less information but may be obtained more quickly from manual or automatic labeling. A key step in our method is that the segmented objects can be placed into background-only images to create realistic images of the objects with counterfactual backgrounds. To create a contrast between the original and counterfactual background images, we propose to first cluster the background-only images and then, during learning, create counterfactual images that blend objects segmented from their original source backgrounds to backgrounds chosen from a targeted cluster. One term in the training loss is the divergence between these counterfactual images and the real object images with backgrounds of the target cluster. The other term is a supervised loss for background-only images. While an adversarial critic could provide the divergence, we use sample-based divergences. We conduct experiments on side-scan and synthetic aperture sonar in which our approach succeeds compared to previous unsupervised segmentation baselines that were only tested on natural images. Furthermore, to show generality we extend our experiments to natural images, obtaining reasonable performance with our method that avoids pretrained networks, generative networks, and adversarial critics. The code for this work can be found at \href{GitHub}{https://github.com/bakerhassan/WSOS}.

This study investigates zero-shot forecasting capabilities of Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) for macroeconomic indicators. We apply TSFMs to forecasting economic indicators under univariate conditions, bypassing the need for train bespoke econometric models using and extensive training datasets. Our experiments were conducted on a case study dataset, without additional customisation. We rigorously back-tested three state-of-the-art TSFMs (Chronos, TimeGPT and Moirai) under data-scarce conditions and structural breaks. Our results demonstrate that appropriately engineered TSFMs can internalise rich economic dynamics, accommodate regime shifts, and deliver well-behaved uncertainty estimates out of the box, while matching state-of-the-art multivariate models on this domain. Our findings suggest that, without any fine-tuning, TSFMs can match or exceed classical models during stable economic conditions. However, they are vulnerable to degradation in performances during periods of rapid shocks. The findings offer guidance to practitioners on when zero-shot deployments are viable for macroeconomic monitoring and strategic planning.

The number of studies that combine Evolutionary Machine Learning and self-supervised learning has been growing steadily in recent years. Evolutionary Machine Learning has been shown to help automate the design of machine learning algorithms and to lead to more reliable solutions. Self-supervised learning, on the other hand, has produced good results in learning useful features when labelled data is limited. This suggests that the combination of these two areas can help both in shaping evolutionary processes and in automating the design of deep neural networks, while also reducing the need for labelled data. Still, there are no detailed reviews that explain how Evolutionary Machine Learning and self-supervised learning can be used together. To help with this, we provide an overview of studies that bring these areas together. Based on this growing interest and the range of existing works, we suggest a new sub-area of research, which we call Evolutionary Self-Supervised Learning and introduce a taxonomy for it. Finally, we point out some of the main challenges and suggest directions for future research to help Evolutionary Self-Supervised Learning grow and mature as a field.

In Major League Baseball, strategy and planning are major factors in determining the outcome of a game. Previous studies have aided this by building machine learning models for predicting the winning team of any given game. We extend this work by training a comprehensive set of machine learning models using a common dataset. In addition, we relate the win probabilities produced by these models to win strength as measured by score differential. In doing so we show that the most common machine learning models do indeed demonstrate a relationship between predicted win probability and the strength of the win. Finally, we analyze the results of using predicted win probabilities as a decision making mechanism on run-line betting. We demonstrate positive returns when utilizing appropriate betting strategies, and show that naive use of machine learning models for betting lead to significant loses.

Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed training paradigm wherein participants collaborate to build a global model while ensuring the privacy of the involved data, which remains stored on participant devices. However, proposals aiming to ensure such privacy also make it challenging to protect against potential attackers seeking to compromise the training outcome. In this context, we present Fast, Private, and Protected (FPP), a novel approach that aims to safeguard federated training while enabling secure aggregation to preserve data privacy. This is accomplished by evaluating rounds using participants' assessments and enabling training recovery after an attack. FPP also employs a reputation-based mechanism to mitigate the participation of attackers. We created a dockerized environment to validate the performance of FPP compared to other approaches in the literature (FedAvg, Power-of-Choice, and aggregation via Trimmed Mean and Median). Our experiments demonstrate that FPP achieves a rapid convergence rate and can converge even in the presence of malicious participants performing model poisoning attacks.

Despite the popularity of the Adam optimizer in practice, most theoretical analyses study Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) as a proxy for Adam, and little is known about how the solutions found by Adam differ. In this paper, we show that Adam implicitly reduces a unique form of sharpness measure shaped by its adaptive updates, leading to qualitatively different solutions from SGD. More specifically, when the training loss is small, Adam wanders around the manifold of minimizers and takes semi-gradients to minimize this sharpness measure in an adaptive manner, a behavior we rigorously characterize through a continuous-time approximation using stochastic differential equations. We further demonstrate how this behavior differs from that of SGD in a well-studied setting: when training overparameterized models with label noise, SGD has been shown to minimize the trace of the Hessian matrix, $\tr(\mH)$, whereas we prove that Adam minimizes $\tr(\Diag(\mH)^{1/2})$ instead. In solving sparse linear regression with diagonal linear networks, this distinction enables Adam to achieve better sparsity and generalization than SGD. Finally, our analysis framework extends beyond Adam to a broad class of adaptive gradient methods, including RMSProp, Adam-mini, Adalayer and Shampoo, and provides a unified perspective on how these adaptive optimizers reduce sharpness, which we hope will offer insights for future optimizer design.