This paper studies the problem of class-incremental learning (CIL), a core setting within continual learning where a model learns a sequence of tasks, each containing a distinct set of classes. Traditional CIL methods, which do not leverage pretrained models (PTMs), suffer from catastrophic forgetting (CF) due to the need to incrementally learn both feature representations and the classifier. The integration of PTMs into CIL has recently led to efficient approaches that treat the PTM as a fixed feature extractor combined with analytic classifiers, achieving state-ofthe-art performance. However, they still face a major limitation: the inability to continually adapt feature representations to best suit the CIL tasks, leading to suboptimal performance. To address this, we propose AnaCP (Analytic Contrastive Projection), a novel method that preserves the efficiency of analytic classifiers while enabling incremental feature adaptation without gradient-based training, thereby eliminating the CF caused by gradient updates. Our experiments show that AnaCP not only outperforms existing baselines but also achieves the accuracy level of joint training, which is regarded as the upper bound of CIL.

Deep State Space Models (SSMs) reignite physics-grounded compute paradigms, as RNNs could natively be embodied into dynamical systems. This calls for dedicated learning algorithms obeying to core physical principles, with efficient techniques to simulate these systems and guide their design. We propose Recurrent Hamiltonian Echo Learning (RHEL), an algorithm which provably computes loss gradients as finite differences of physical trajectories of non-dissipative, Hamiltonian systems. In ML terms, RHEL only requires three "forward passes" irrespective of model size, without explicit Jacobian computation, nor incurring any variance in the gradient estimation. Motivated by the potential to implement our algorithm in non-digital physical systems, we first introduce RHEL in continuous time and demonstrate its formal equivalence with the continuous adjoint state method.

A common approach for accelerating optimization algorithms is to minimize the loss achieved in a fixed time, which enables a differentiable framework with respect to the algorithm's hyperparameters. In contrast, the complementary objective of minimizing the time to reach a target loss is traditionally considered non-differentiable. To address this limitation, we propose a differentiable discrete stopping time and theoretically justify it based on its connection to continuous differential equations. We design an efficient algorithm to compute its sensitivities, thereby enabling a new differentiable formulation for directly accelerating algorithms. We demonstrate its effectiveness in applications such as online hyperparameter tuning and learning to optimize. Our proposed methods show superior performance in comprehensive experiments across various problems, which confirms their effectiveness.

Tensorized Incomplete Multi-View Clustering (TIMVC) algorithms have attracted growing attention for their ability to capture high-order correlations across multiple views. However, most existing TIMVC methods rely on simplistic noise assumptions using specific norms (e.g., ℓ1 or ℓ2,1), which fail to reflect the complex noise patterns encountered in real-world scenarios. Moreover, they primarily focus on modeling the global Euclidean structure of the tensor representation, while overlooking the preservation of local manifold structures. To address these limitations, we propose a novel approach, GaUssian regressIon-driven TIMVC with dual mAnifold Regularization (GUITAR). Specifically, we employ a Gaussian regression model to characterize complex noise distributions in a more realistic and flexible manner. Meanwhile, a dual manifold regularization is introduced in tensor representation learning, simultaneously modeling manifold information at both the view-specific and cross-view consensus levels, thereby promoting intra-view and inter-view consistency in the tensor representation. Furthermore, to better capture the intrinsic low-rank structure, we propose the high-preservation ℓδ-norm tensor rank constraint, which applies differentiated penalties to the singular values, thereby enhancing the robustness of the tensor representation. In addition, an efficient optimization algorithm is developed to solve the resulting non-convex problem with provable convergence. Extensive experiments on six datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms SOTA approaches.

Gradient boosting has become a cornerstone of machine learning, enabling base learners such as decision trees to achieve exceptional predictive performance. While existing algorithms primarily handle scalar or Euclidean outputs, increasingly prevalent complex-structured data, such as distributions, networks, and manifoldvalued outputs, present challenges for traditional methods. Such non-Euclidean data lack algebraic structures such as addition, subtraction, or scalar multiplication required by standard gradient boosting frameworks. To address these challenges, we introduce Fréchet geodesic boosting (FGBoost), a novel approach tailored for outputs residing in geodesic metric spaces. FGBoost leverages geodesics as proxies for residuals and constructs ensembles in a way that respects the intrinsic geometry of the output space. Through theoretical analysis, extensive simulations, and realworld applications, we demonstrate the strong performance and adaptability of FGBoost, showcasing its potential for modeling complex data.

We propose Equivariance by Contrast (EbC) to learn equivariant embeddings from observation pairs (y,g y), where g is drawn from a finite group acting on the data. Our method jointly learns a latent space and a group representation in which group actions correspond to invertible linear maps--without relying on group-specific inductive biases. We validate our approach on the infinite dSprites dataset with structured transformations defined by the finite group G:= (Rm Zn Zn), combining discrete rotations and periodic translations. The resulting embeddings exhibit high-fidelity equivariance, with group operations faithfully reproduced in latent space.

Measuring the alignment between representations lets us understand similarities between the feature spaces of different models, such as Vision Transformers trained under diverse paradigms. However, traditional measures for representational alignment yield only scalar values that obscure how these spaces agree in terms of learned features. To address this, we combine alignment analysis with concept discovery, allowing a fine-grained breakdown of alignment into individual concepts. This approach reveals both universal concepts across models and each representation's internal concept structure. We introduce a new definition of concepts as non-linear manifolds, hypothesizing they better capture the geometry of the featurespace. A sanity check demonstrates the advantage of this manifold-based definition over linear baselines for concept-based alignment. Finally, our alignment analysis of four different ViTs shows that increased supervision tends to reduce semantic organization in learned representations.

Binary data factorization is common, but real-valued methods ignore discreteness and yield hard-to-interpret factors. Boolean Matrix Factorization (BooMF) instead decomposes a binary matrix into two lower-rank binary matrices via logical AND and OR, expressing the data as a Boolean disjunction of interpretable patterns. In cancer genomics, BooMF can reveal coordinated feature changes that may drive tumor evolution, unlike rotational or additive decompositions. Most existing BooMF methods are heuristic, greedy, sensitive to initialization, prone to local optima, and do not support principled model selection or uncertainty quantification. We introduce Bayesian Boolean Matrix Factorization (BBMF), a fully conjugate generative model with sparsity-inducing priors. It enforces Boolean constraints, yields interpretable latent factors with coherent uncertainty quantification, and admits Gibbs sampling with closed-form full conditionals. Because cancer evolution often involves widespread, near-simultaneous chromosome-number changes (e.g., whole-genome duplication followed by instability and selection), Boolean factorizations capture these patterns more naturally than additive models. Applied to arm-level copy-number alteration data in multiple myeloma, where entries indicate presence/absence of chromosomal-arm amplifications, BBMF finds a small set of interpretable bicliques linking patient subsets to recurrently co-altered chromosomal arms, providing a compact, biologically meaningful summary of tumor heterogeneity and demonstrating BBMF's utility for uncovering discrete latent structure in complex binary data.

We develop a framework for conformal prediction in dyadic regression problems under complex missingness mechanisms. At the theoretical level, we develop general technical tools for establishing finite-sample validity of conformal prediction under distributional invariance conditions weaker than exchangeability. A key result handles the case where the sample itself is a random subset of the index set, a setting not covered by existing theory, via a novel bijection argument that constructs an explicit measure-preserving correspondence between events. In addition, we propose conformal prediction procedures for jointly exchangeable arrays, including full conformal, split conformal, a row-column approach exploiting similarities within rows and columns, and a selective conformal procedure achieving mask-conditional validity. For missing elements, we establish asymptotic validity of a weighted conformal procedure under a nonparametric graphon model for the missingness mechanism. We further establish conditional validity results for both continuous and discrete responses; to the best of our knowledge, this is the first formal proof of asymptotic conditional validity for weighted conformal prediction under a missing-not-at-random assumption. The proposed methods are illustrated on synthetic and real network data.

A variety of widely used optimization methods like SignSGD and Muon can be interpreted as instances of steepest descent under different norm-induced geometries. In this work, we study the implicit bias of mini-batch stochastic steepest descent in multi-class classification, characterizing how batch size, momentum, and variance reduction shape the limiting max-margin behavior and convergence rates under general entry-wise and Schatten-$p$ norms. We show that, without momentum, worst-case convergence and successful classification can only be guaranteed with full-batch gradient. In contrast, momentum enables small-batch convergence to an approximate max-margin solution through a batch-momentum trade-off, though it slows convergence. This approach provides fully explicit, dimension-free rates that improve upon prior results. Moreover, we prove that variance reduction can recover the exact full-batch implicit bias for any batch size, albeit at a slower convergence rate. Finally, we further investigate the batch-size-one steepest descent without momentum, and reveal its convergence to a fundamentally different bias via a concrete data example, which reveals a key limitation of purely stochastic updates. Overall, our unified analysis clarifies when stochastic optimization aligns with full-batch behavior, and paves the way for perform deeper explorations of the training behavior of stochastic gradient steepest descent algorithms.