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On the Construction and Implications of Low-Loss Valleys in LoRA-based Bayesian Inference
Dold, Daniel, Sommer, Emanuel, Kobialka, Julius, Dürr, Oliver, Rügamer, David
While parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods like low-rank adaptation (LoRA) are standard for large language models, principled estimation of epistemic uncertainty remains challenging. Recent results in the LoRA regime suggest that discrete multi-mode approaches such as deep ensembles offer little benefit over single-mode methods. This contradicts broader observations in deep learning, where ensembling independent optima typically improves generalization, and linking these modes through continuous low-loss valleys further enhances Bayesian model averaging (BMA). Whether such structure exists in the LoRA space and whether it yields functional diversity missed by local or discrete methods has not been studied. We introduce LoRA-Curve, a segmented Bézier curve parameterization in the LoRA space, with two variants: a free configuration that jointly optimizes all control points, and an anchored configuration that connects independently fine-tuned LoRA optima. We prove pathwise continuity and Lipschitz regularity of the loss along the curve and empirically show, across reasoning and classification benchmarks with Qwen2.5 7B, that linear interpolation encounters loss barriers, while our anchored multi-segment curves connect independent optima through continuous low-loss valleys. Combined with flat-minima perturbations and a Jensen-Shannon divergence regularizer, LoRA-Curve yields measurably higher mutual information of the predictive distribution without sacrificing performance, and links continuous parameter-space traversal to functional diversity.
AgensFlow: A Coordination-Policy Substrate for Multi-Agent Systems
Multi-agent systems built on large language models (LLMs) require many coordination choices that are difficult to fix a priori: which skill protocol to invoke, which agent role should perform a subtask, which model to bind to each role, how roles should interact, when to use retrieval or verification, and when to omit a step entirely. These choices interact with task regime and operational constraints, so static pipelines and one-off model comparisons provide only a limited view of the design space. This paper introduces AgensFlow, an open-source framework that treats multi-agent coordination as an online policy-learning problem under partial observability. The framework makes coordination decisions observable and learnable from repeated trajectories, rather than treating skill, role, model, topology, and evaluation choices as fixed pipeline design. AgensFlow is evaluated on two corpora: distributed-systems incident tasks and security-advisory tasks. The evaluation shows three main results: learned routing reaches a higher-quality operating point than a fixed pipeline baseline on coordination-heavy classes; skip:X isolates topology compression as a meaningful part of the substrate; and warm-started policy graphs can reduce exploration cost while preserving plateau quality. Overall, the results support that learned, auditable routing can improve coordination-heavy multi-agent workflows over static wiring.
Symmetry-Compatible Principle for Optimizer Design: Embeddings, LM Heads, SwiGLU MLPs, and MoE Routers
A striking geometric disparity has long persisted in the practice of deep learning. While modern neural network architectures naturally exhibit rich symmetry and equivariance properties, popular optimizers such as Adam and its variants operate inherently coordinate-wise, rendering them unable to respect the equivariance structures of the parameter space. We address this disparity by introducing a symmetry-compatible principle for optimizer design: the gradient update rule should be equivariant under the symmetry group acting on the corresponding weight block. Following this principle, we first provide a unified perspective on bi-orthogonally equivariant updates for general matrix layers, as employed by stochastic spectral descent, Muon, Scion, and polar gradient methods. More importantly, by moving from orthogonal groups to permutation and shared-shift symmetries, we derive symmetry-compatible optimizers for parameter blocks whose symmetries differ from those of general matrix layers: embedding and LM head matrices, SwiGLU MLP projections, and MoE router matrices. These constructions include one-sided spectral, row-norm, hybrid row-norm/spectral, row-aware, column-aware, centered row-norm, and left-spectral updates. They yield an end-to-end layerwise optimizer stack in which each major matrix-valued parameter class is assigned an update whose equivariance matches its symmetry group. We corroborate this principle through pre-training experiments on dense and sparse MoE language models, including Qwen3-0.6B-style, Gemma 3 1B-style, OLMoE-1B-7B-style, and downsized gpt-oss architectures. Across these experiments, symmetry-compatible update rules consistently improve final validation loss, reduce load imbalance in sparse MoE models, and in several cases improve training stability over the corresponding AdamW updates.
High-Dimensional Change-Point Detection via Angular Kernel Statistics
Choudhury, Jyotishka Ray, Xie, Yao
We study change-point detection for high-dimensional data in regimes where inference must be performed from small batches of observations. Our primary focus is the high-dimensional, low sample size (HDLSS) regime, where the sequence length is fixed while the ambient dimension diverges. We propose a dimension-averaged angular kernel scan framework for detecting marginal distributional shifts. The statistic aggregates bounded one-dimensional angular discrepancies across coordinates, yielding a fully nonparametric, hyperparameter-free, and moment-agnostic estimator that remains well-defined without specifying, estimating, or assuming finite marginal moments, for example under heavy-tailed or contaminated distributions. For the offline single-change problem, we derive an exact population mean factorization into a universal deterministic shape function and a scalar signal factor, characterize the null covariance structure up to a scalar long-run variance factor, and establish an HDLSS multivariate central limit theorem under cross-coordinate mixing. These results lead to plug-in Gaussian calibration, asymptotic type-I error control, and power and localization guarantees, including a $d^{-1/2}$ local detection scale. We further extend the offline procedure to a fixed-window sequential monitoring procedure for high-dimensional streaming data, and obtain ARL calibration and worst-case EDD bounds. Simulation studies demonstrate that the proposed method can accurately detect and localize changes in challenging HDLSS and streaming settings where moment-based or hyperparameter-sensitive procedures may be unreliable.
Training-Free Looped Transformers
Chen, Lizhang, Li, Jonathan, Liang, Chen, Lao, Ni, Liu, Qiang
We introduce training-free looped transformers, in which a lightweight inference-time wrapper loops a contiguous mid-stack block of layers of a frozen checkpoint without additional fine-tuning, continued training, or architectural changes. Unlike prior looped transformer methods that train with the looped structure end-to-end, we retrofit recurrence onto pretrained models at test time. We show that naive block reapplication usually degrades performance, highlighting the importance of the loop application strategy. Motivated by viewing a pre-norm transformer block as a forward Euler step on an ODE, we instead treat looping as a refinement of the same approximation, replacing one large update with smaller damped sub-steps. Across seven dense, sparse MoE, and MLA+MoE model families, our method improves Qwen3-4B-Instruct by +2.64 pp on MMLU-Pro, Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct by +1.14 pp on CommonsenseQA, and Moonlight-16B-A3B-Instruct by +1.20 pp on OpenBookQA.
Markov Chain Decoders Overcome the Heavy-Tail Limitations of Lipschitz Generative Models
Ziani, Abdelhakim, Horvath, Andras, Ballarini, Paolo
Heavy-tailed distributions are prevalent in performance evaluation, network traffic, and risk modeling. This behavior poses a fundamental challenge for modern deep generative models. Standard Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) employ Gaussian decoder likelihoods and Lipschitz-constrained neural networks, a combination that is structurally incapable of producing heavy-tailed outputs: the Gaussian tail decays exponentially, and Lipschitz continuity prevents the decoder from amplifying rare events from the latent space input to sufficiently overcome this decay. We provide both a theoretical characterization of this limitation and a controlled empirical demonstration using synthetic Pareto data across a grid of tail indices $α$ $\in$ {2, 3, 5, 30} and dimensions d $\in$ {1, 5, 10}. As a solution, we replace the Gaussian decoder with a Phase-Type (PH) distribution based on Markov chains, while keeping the encoder, latent space, and training procedure identical. PH distributions allow for arbitrarily precise approximations of any positive-valued distributions, including heavy-tailed families. Experiments showed that the PH-based model reduces tail Kolmogorov-Smirnov distance by up to x6 and extreme quantile error by up to x10 compared to the Gaussian baseline for heavy-tailed data. These results demonstrate that integrating Markov chain-based distributions into the decoder of a generative model institutes a principled and practically effective solution to the heavy-tail generation problem.
CogScale: Scalable Benchmark for Sequence Processing
Bendi-Ouis, Yannis, de Coudenhove, Romain, Hinaut, Xavier
The ability to maintain and manipulate information over time is a fundamental aspect of living beings and Artificial Intelligence. While modern models have achieved remarkable success in tasks like natural language processing, evaluating the capacity of novel architectures to process sequential information remains computationally expensive and time-consuming. Testing a new architecture often requires scaling up to massive datasets and models, leading to vast computational costs and slow iteration cycles. In this paper, we propose CogScale, a benchmark of 14 scalable synthetic tasks designed to isolate and evaluate specific cognitive and memory abilities at different parametrizable scales. By providing a standardized, lightweight framework, CogScale allows researchers to rapidly validate architectural innovations before committing to large-scale training. To establish a solid baseline, we evaluate seven distinct architectures: Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), xLSTM, Echo State Network (ESN), Mamba, Transformer Decoder, and Transformer Encoder-Decoder. These evaluations are conducted under strict parameter budgets (1k, 10k, and 100k) and across different difficulty levels and scales. Our results show that while classical RNNs and Echo State Networks excel at basic retention within strict parameter budgets, only attention mechanisms and modern state-space models consistently maintain high performance as reasoning complexity and task difficulty scale.
A faster way to estimate AI power consumption
Due to the explosive growth of artificial intelligence, it is estimated that data centers will consume up to 12 percent of total U.S. electricity by 2028, according to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Improving data center energy efficiency is one way scientists are striving to make AI more sustainable. Toward that goal, researchers from MIT and the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab developed a rapid prediction tool that tells data center operators how much power will be consumed by running a particular AI workload on a certain processor or AI accelerator chip. Their method produces reliable power estimates in a few seconds, unlike traditional modeling techniques that can take hours or even days to yield results. Moreover, their prediction tool can be applied to a wide range of hardware configurations -- even emerging designs that haven't been deployed yet.
A neurosymbolic Approach with Epistemic Deep Learning for Hierarchical Image Classification
Kilicdere, Ezel, Manchingal, Shireen Kudukkil, Cuzzolin, Fabio
Deep neural networks achieve high accuracy on image classification tasks. Yet, they often produce overconfident predictions as which fail to express epistemic uncertainty, and frequently violate logical or structural constraints present in the data. These limitations are particularly pronounced in hierarchical classification, where predictions across fine and coarse levels must remain coherent. We propose, for the first time, a unified neurosymbolic and epistemic modelling framework that augments Swin Transformers with focal set reasoning and differentiable fuzzy logic. Rather than treating labels as isolated categories, our method induces data-driven focal sets within the learnt embedding space, which helps capture epistemic uncertainty over multiple plausible fine-grained classes. These focal sets form the basis of a belief-theoretic layer that uses fuzzy membership functions and t-norm conjunctions to encourage consistency between fine- and coarse-grained predictions. A learnable loss further balances calibration, mass regularisation, and logical consistency, allowing the model to adaptively trade off symbolic structure with data-driven evidence. In experiments on hierarchical image classification, our framework maintains accuracy on par with transformer baselines while providing more calibrated and interpretable predictions, reducing overconfidence and enforcing high logical consistency across hierarchical outputs. Our experimental results show that combining focal set reasoning with fuzzy logic provides a practical step toward deep learning models that are both accurate and epistemically aware.
A Cubing Strategy for Identifying Stable Hyperparameter Regions for Uncertainty Quantification in Spatial Deep Learning
Amouzou, Isaac, Lee, Ben Seiyon
Spatially referenced datasets have become increasingly prevalent across many fields, largely driven by advances in data collection methods such as satellite remote sensing. In many applications, predictions at unobserved locations are accompanied by reliable uncertainty estimates. While deep learning methods provide both scalable and accurate models for spatial predictions, there remains no clear consensus for addressing uncertainty quantification in spatial deep learning. Monte Carlo (MC) dropout has become a popular approach for uncertainty quantification, yet existing implementations typically focus on tuning the dropout rate while fixing other influential hyperparameters, such as weight decay and the predictive standard deviation multiplier, often through ad-hoc or manual tuning. We propose a cubing-based diagnostic framework that recursively partitions the hyperparameter space to identify stable regions where MC dropout yields well-calibrated predictive intervals. The approach evaluates hyperparameter regions using scoring rules relative to a statistical baseline model, which serves as a calibration anchor. Through a simulation study spanning multiple spatial dependence regimes as well as a large remotely-sensed land surface temperature dataset, we demonstrate that our approach produces competitive or superior predictive intervals compared to the baseline model. Our methodology provides practitioners with a systematic procedure for incorporating uncertainty quantification into spatial deep learning models.