The adoption of Foundation Models in resource-constrained environments remains challenging due to their large size and inference costs. A promising way to overcome these limitations is post-training compression, which aims to balance reduced model size against performance degradation. This work presents Any Compression via Iterative Pruning (ACIP), a novel algorithmic approach to determine a compression-performance trade-off from a single stochastic gradient descent run. To ensure parameter efficiency, we use an SVD-reparametrization of linear layers and iteratively prune their singular values with a sparsity-inducing penalty. The resulting pruning order gives rise to a global parameter ranking that allows us to materialize models of any target size. Importantly, the compressed models exhibit strong predictive downstream performance without the need for costly fine-tuning. We evaluate ACIP on a large selection of open-weight LLMs and tasks, and demonstrate state-of-the-art results compared to existing factorisation-based compression methods. We also show that ACIP seamlessly complements common quantization-based compression techniques.

Adaptive optimization algorithms -- such as Adagrad, Adam, and their variants -- have found widespread use in machine learning, signal processing and many other settings. Several methods in this family are not rotationally equivariant, meaning that simple reparameterizations (i.e. change of basis) can drastically affect their convergence. However, their sensitivity to the choice of parameterization has not been systematically studied; it is not clear how to identify a "favorable" change of basis in which these methods perform best. In this paper we propose a reparameterization method and demonstrate both theoretically and empirically its potential to improve their convergence behavior. Our method is an orthonormal transformation based on the expected gradient outer product (EGOP) matrix, which can be approximated using either full-batch or stochastic gradient oracles. We show that for a broad class of functions, the sensitivity of adaptive algorithms to choice-of-basis is influenced by the decay of the EGOP matrix spectrum. We illustrate the potential impact of EGOP reparameterization by presenting empirical evidence and theoretical arguments that common machine learning tasks with "natural" data exhibit EGOP spectral decay.

The preservation of aquatic biodiversity is critical in mitigating the effects of climate change. Aquatic scene understanding plays a pivotal role in aiding marine scientists in their decision-making processes. In this paper, we introduce AquaticCLIP, a novel contrastive language-image pre-training model tailored for aquatic scene understanding. AquaticCLIP presents a new unsupervised learning framework that aligns images and texts in aquatic environments, enabling tasks such as segmentation, classification, detection, and object counting. By leveraging our large-scale underwater image-text paired dataset without the need for ground-truth annotations, our model enriches existing vision-language models in the aquatic domain. For this purpose, we construct a 2 million underwater image-text paired dataset using heterogeneous resources, including YouTube, Netflix, NatGeo, etc. To fine-tune AquaticCLIP, we propose a prompt-guided vision encoder that progressively aggregates patch features via learnable prompts, while a vision-guided mechanism enhances the language encoder by incorporating visual context. The model is optimized through a contrastive pretraining loss to align visual and textual modalities. AquaticCLIP achieves notable performance improvements in zero-shot settings across multiple underwater computer vision tasks, outperforming existing methods in both robustness and interpretability. Our model sets a new benchmark for vision-language applications in underwater environments. The code and dataset for AquaticCLIP are publicly available on GitHub at xxx.

Federated multi-task learning (FMTL) aims to simultaneously learn multiple related tasks across clients without sharing sensitive raw data. However, in the decentralized setting, existing FMTL frameworks are limited in their ability to capture complex task relationships and handle feature and sample heterogeneity across clients. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel sheaf-theoretic-based approach for FMTL. By representing client relationships using cellular sheaves, our framework can flexibly model interactions between heterogeneous client models. We formulate the sheaf-based FMTL optimization problem using sheaf Laplacian regularization and propose the Sheaf-FMTL algorithm to solve it. We show that the proposed framework provides a unified view encompassing many existing federated learning (FL) and FMTL approaches. Furthermore, we prove that our proposed algorithm, Sheaf-FMTL, achieves a sublinear convergence rate in line with state-of-the-art decentralized FMTL algorithms. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Sheaf-FMTL exhibits communication savings by sending significantly fewer bits compared to decentralized FMTL baselines.

Diffusion bridge models have recently become a powerful tool in the field of generative modeling. In this work, we leverage their power to address another important problem in machine learning and information theory - the estimation of the mutual information (MI) between two random variables. We show that by using the theory of diffusion bridges, one can construct an unbiased estimator for data posing difficulties for conventional MI estimators. We showcase the performance of our estimator on a series of standard MI estimation benchmarks.

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into embedded devices, a paradigm known as embedded artificial intelligence (eAI) or tiny machine learning (TinyML), is transforming industries by enabling intelligent data processing at the edge. However, the many tools available in this domain leave researchers and developers wondering which one is best suited to their needs. This paper provides a review of existing eAI tools, highlighting their features, trade-offs, and limitations. Additionally, we introduce EdgeMark, an open-source automation system designed to streamline the workflow for deploying and benchmarking machine learning (ML) models on embedded platforms. EdgeMark simplifies model generation, optimization, conversion, and deployment while promoting modularity, reproducibility, and scalability. Experimental benchmarking results showcase the performance of widely used eAI tools, including TensorFlow Lite Micro (TFLM), Edge Impulse, Ekkono, and Renesas eAI Translator, across a wide range of models, revealing insights into their relative strengths and weaknesses. The findings provide guidance for researchers and developers in selecting the most suitable tools for specific application requirements, while EdgeMark lowers the barriers to adoption of eAI technologies.

The objective to be minimized in the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) has a restricted form, which allows a specialized sequential minimal optimization (SMO) that requires only a few observations in each iteration. However, the SMO iteration is still costly due to the observation noise -- one observation at a point typically requires averaging over hundreds to thousands of repeated quantum measurement shots for achieving a reasonable noise level. In this paper, we propose an adaptive cost control method, named subspace in confident region (SubsCoRe), for SMO. SubsCoRe uses the Gaussian process (GP) surrogate, and requires it to have low uncertainty over the subspace being updated, so that optimization in each iteration is performed with guaranteed accuracy. The adaptive cost control is performed by first setting the required accuracy according to the progress of the optimization, and then choosing the minimum number of measurement shots and their distribution such that the required accuracy is satisfied. We demonstrate that SubsCoRe significantly improves the efficiency of SMO, and outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

In the Learning to Defer (L2D) framework, a prediction model can either make a prediction or defer it to an expert, as determined by a rejector. Current L2D methods train the rejector to decide whether to reject the entire prediction, which is not desirable when the model predicts long sequences. We present an L2D setting for sequence outputs where the system can defer specific outputs of the whole model prediction to an expert in an effort to interleave the expert and machine throughout the prediction. We propose two types of model-based post-hoc rejectors for pre-trained predictors: a token-level rejector, which defers specific token predictions to experts with next token prediction capabilities, and a one-time rejector for experts without such abilities, which defers the remaining sequence from a specific point onward. In the experiments, we also empirically demonstrate that such granular deferrals achieve better cost-accuracy tradeoffs than whole deferrals on Traveling salesman solvers and News summarization models.

Most existing process compliance monitoring approaches detect compliance violations in an ex post manner. Only predicate prediction focuses on predicting them. However, predicate prediction provides a binary yes/no notion of compliance, lacking the ability to measure to which extent an ongoing process instance deviates from the desired state as specified in constraints. Here, being able to quantify the magnitude of violation would provide organizations with deeper insights into their operational performance, enabling informed decision making to reduce or mitigate the risk of non-compliance. Thus, we propose two predictive compliance monitoring approaches to close this research gap. The first approach reformulates the binary classification problem as a hybrid task that considers both classification and regression, while the second employs a multi-task learning method to explicitly predict the compliance status and the magnitude of violation for deviant cases simultaneously. In this work, we focus on temporal constraints as they are significant in almost any application domain, e.g., health care. The evaluation on synthetic and real-world event logs demonstrates that our approaches are capable of quantifying the magnitude of violations while maintaining comparable performance for compliance predictions achieved by state-of-the-art approaches.

Bilevel optimization, addressing challenges in hierarchical learning tasks, has gained significant interest in machine learning. The practical implementation of the gradient descent method to bilevel optimization encounters computational hurdles, notably the computation of the exact lower-level solution and the inverse Hessian of the lower-level objective. Although these two aspects are inherently connected, existing methods typically handle them separately by solving the lowerlevel problem and a linear system for the inverse Hessian-vector product. In this paper, we introduce a general framework to address these computational challenges in a coordinated manner. Specifically, we leverage quasi-Newton algorithms to accelerate the resolution of the lower-level problem while efficiently approximating the inverse Hessian-vector product. Furthermore, by exploiting the superlinear convergence properties of BFGS, we establish the non-asymptotic convergence analysis of the BFGS adaptation within our framework. Numerical experiments demonstrate the comparable or superior performance of the proposed algorithms in real-world learning tasks, including hyperparameter optimization, data hypercleaning, and few-shot meta-learning. Bilevel optimization (BLO), which addresses challenges in hierarchical decision process, has gained significant interest in many real-world applications.