This paper presents EGSTalker, a real-time audio-driven talking head generation framework based on 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). Designed to enhance both speed and visual fidelity, EGSTalker requires only 3-5 minutes of training video to synthesize high-quality facial animations. The framework comprises two key stages: static Gaussian initialization and audio-driven deformation. In the first stage, a multi-resolution hash triplane and a Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) are used to extract spatial features and construct a compact 3D Gaussian representation. In the second stage, we propose an Efficient Spatial-Audio Attention (ESAA) module to fuse audio and spatial cues, while KAN predicts the corresponding Gaussian deformations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EGSTalker achieves rendering quality and lip-sync accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art methods, while significantly outperforming them in inference speed. These results highlight EGSTalker's potential for real-time multimedia applications.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across various tasks, but fine-tuning them for domain-specific applications often requires substantial domain-specific data that may be distributed across multiple organizations. Federated Learning (FL) offers a privacy-preserving solution, but faces challenges with computational constraints when applied to LLMs. Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has emerged as a parameter-efficient fine-tuning approach, though a single LoRA module often struggles with heterogeneous data across diverse domains. This paper addresses two critical challenges in federated LoRA fine-tuning: 1. determining the optimal number and allocation of LoRA experts across heterogeneous clients, and 2. enabling clients to selectively utilize these experts based on their specific data characteristics. We propose FedLEASE (Federated adaptive LoRA Expert Allocation and SElection), a novel framework that adaptively clusters clients based on representation similarity to allocate and train domain-specific LoRA experts. It also introduces an adaptive top-$M$ Mixture-of-Experts mechanism that allows each client to select the optimal number of utilized experts. Our extensive experiments on diverse benchmark datasets demonstrate that FedLEASE significantly outperforms existing federated fine-tuning approaches in heterogeneous client settings while maintaining communication efficiency.

We provide our perspective on X-Learning (XL), a novel distributed learning architecture that generalizes and extends the concept of decentralization. Our goal is to present a vision for XL, introducing its unexplored design considerations and degrees of freedom. To this end, we shed light on the intuitive yet non-trivial connections between XL, graph theory, and Markov chains. We also present a series of open research directions to stimulate further research.

Graph representation learning on Analog-Mixed Signal (AMS) circuits is crucial for various downstream tasks, e.g., parasitic estimation. However, the scarcity of design data, the unbalanced distribution of labels, and the inherent diversity of circuit implementations pose significant challenges to learning robust and transferable circuit representations. To address these limitations, we propose CircuitGCL, a novel graph contrastive learning framework that integrates representation scattering and label rebalancing to enhance transferability across heterogeneous circuit graphs. CircuitGCL employs a self-supervised strategy to learn topology-invariant node embeddings through hyperspherical representation scattering, eliminating dependency on large-scale data. Simultaneously, balanced mean squared error (BMSE) and balanced softmax cross-entropy (BSCE) losses are introduced to mitigate label distribution disparities between circuits, enabling robust and transferable parasitic estimation. Evaluated on parasitic capacitance estimation (edge-level task) and ground capacitance classification (node-level task) across TSMC 28nm AMS designs, CircuitGCL outperforms all state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, with the $R^2$ improvement of $33.64\% \sim 44.20\%$ for edge regression and F1-score gain of $0.9\times \sim 2.1\times$ for node classification. Our code is available at https://github.com/ShenShan123/CircuitGCL.

A major bottleneck in scientific discovery consists of narrowing an exponentially large set of objects, such as proteins or molecules, to a small set of promising candidates with desirable properties. While this process can rely on expert knowledge, recent methods leverage reinforcement learning (RL) guided by a proxy reward function to enable this filtering. By employing various forms of entropy regularization, these methods aim to learn samplers that generate diverse candidates that are highly rated by the proxy function. In this work, we make two main contributions. First, we show that these methods are liable to generate overly diverse, suboptimal candidates in large search spaces. To address this issue, we introduce a novel unified operator that combines several regularized RL operators into a general framework that better targets peakier sampling distributions. Secondly, we offer a novel, robust RL perspective of this filtering process. The regularization can be interpreted as robustness to a compositional form of uncertainty in the proxy function (i.e., the true evaluation of a candidate differs from the proxy's evaluation). Our analysis leads us to a novel, easy-to-use algorithm we name trajectory general mellowmax (TGM): we show it identifies higher quality, diverse candidates than baselines in both synthetic and real-world tasks. Code: https://github.com/marcojira/tgm.

Changepoint localization aims to provide confidence sets for a changepoint (if one exists). Existing methods either relying on strong parametric assumptions or providing only asymptotic guarantees or focusing on a particular kind of change(e.g., change in the mean) rather than the entire distributional change. A method (possibly the first) to achieve distribution-free changepoint localization with finite-sample validity was recently introduced by \cite{dandapanthula2025conformal}. However, while they proved finite sample coverage, there was no analysis of set size. In this work, we provide rigorous theoretical guarantees for their algorithm. We also show the consistency of a point estimator for change, and derive its convergence rate without distributional assumptions. Along that line, we also construct a distribution-free consistent test to assess whether a particular time point is a changepoint or not. Thus, our work provides unified distribution-free guarantees for changepoint detection, localization, and testing. In addition, we present various finite sample and asymptotic properties of the conformal $p$-value in the distribution change setup, which provides a theoretical foundation for many applications of the conformal $p$-value. As an application of these properties, we construct distribution-free consistent tests for exchangeability against distribution-change alternatives and a new, computationally tractable method of optimizing the powers of conformal tests. We run detailed simulation studies to corroborate the performance of our methods and theoretical results. Together, our contributions offer a comprehensive and theoretically principled approach to distribution-free changepoint inference, broadening both the scope and credibility of conformal methods in modern changepoint analysis.

Smart training set selections procedures enable the reduction of data needs and improves predictive robustness in machine learning problems relevant to chemistry. We introduce Gradient Guided Furthest Point Sampling (GGFPS), a simple extension of Furthest Point Sampling (FPS) that leverages molecular force norms to guide efficient sampling of configurational spaces of molecules. Numerical evidence is presented for a toy-system (Styblinski-Tang function) as well as for molecular dynamics trajectories from the MD17 dataset. Compared to FPS and uniform sampling, our numerical results indicate superior data efficiency and robustness when using GGFPS. Distribution analysis of the MD17 data suggests that FPS systematically under-samples equilibrium geometries, resulting in large test errors for relaxed structures. GGFPS cures this artifact and (i) enables up to two fold reductions in training cost without sacrificing predictive accuracy compared to FPS in the 2-dimensional Styblinksi-Tang system, (ii) systematically lowers prediction errors for equilibrium as well as strained structures in MD17, and (iii) systematically decreases prediction error variances across all of the MD17 configuration spaces. These results suggest that gradient-aware sampling methods hold great promise as effective training set selection tools, and that naive use of FPS may result in imbalanced training and inconsistent prediction outcomes.

In this growing age of data and technology, large black-box models are becoming the norm due to their ability to handle vast amounts of data and learn incredibly complex input-output relationships. The deficiency of these methods, however, is their inability to explain the prediction process, making them untrustworthy and their use precarious in high-stakes situations. SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) analysis is an explainable AI method growing in popularity for its ability to explain model predictions in terms of the original features. For each sample and feature in the data set, we associate a SHAP value that quantifies the contribution of that feature to the prediction of that sample. Clustering these SHAP values can provide insight into the data by grouping samples that not only received the same prediction, but received the same prediction for similar reasons. In doing so, we map the various pathways through which distinct samples arrive at the same prediction. To showcase this methodology, we present a simulated experiment in addition to a case study in Alzheimer's disease using data from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) database. We also present a novel generalization of the waterfall plot for multi-classification.

Complex, high-dimensional data is ubiquitous across many scientific disciplines, including machine learning, biology, and the social sciences. One of the primary methods of visualizing these datasets is with two-dimensional scatter plots that visually capture some properties of the data. Because visually determining the accuracy of these plots is challenging, researchers often use quality metrics to measure the projection's accuracy and faithfulness to the original data. One of the most commonly employed metrics, normalized stress, is sensitive to uniform scaling (stretching, shrinking) of the projection, despite this act not meaningfully changing anything about the projection. Another quality metric, the Kullback--Leibler (KL) divergence used in the popular t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE) technique, is also susceptible to this scale sensitivity. We investigate the effect of scaling on stress and KL divergence analytically and empirically by showing just how much the values change and how this affects dimension reduction technique evaluations. We introduce a simple technique to make both metrics scale-invariant and show that it accurately captures expected behavior on a small benchmark.