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 early stopping


RG-TTA: Regime-Guided Meta-Control for Test-Time Adaptation in Streaming Time Series

Kumar, Indar, Tiwari, Akanksha, Jasti, Sai Krishna, Lade, Ankit Hemant

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Test-time adaptation (TTA) enables neural forecasters to adapt to distribution shifts in streaming time series, but existing methods apply the same adaptation intensity regardless of the nature of the shift. We propose Regime-Guided Test-Time Adaptation (RG-TTA), a meta-controller that continuously modulates adaptation intensity based on distributional similarity to previously-seen regimes. Using an ensemble of Kolmogorov-Smirnov, Wasserstein-1, feature-distance, and variance-ratio metrics, RG-TTA computes a similarity score for each incoming batch and uses it to (i) smoothly scale the learning rate -- more aggressive for novel distributions, conservative for familiar ones -- and (ii) control gradient effort via loss-driven early stopping rather than fixed budgets, allowing the system to allocate exactly the effort each batch requires. As a supplementary mechanism, RG-TTA gates checkpoint reuse from a regime memory, loading stored specialist models only when they demonstrably outperform the current model (loss improvement >= 30%). RG-TTA is model-agnostic and strategy-composable: it wraps any forecaster exposing train/predict/save/load interfaces and enhances any gradient-based TTA method. We demonstrate three compositions -- RG-TTA, RG-EWC, and RG-DynaTTA -- and evaluate 6 update policies (3 baselines + 3 regime-guided variants) across 4 compact architectures (GRU, iTransformer, PatchTST, DLinear), 14 datasets (6 real-world multivariate benchmarks + 8 synthetic regime scenarios), and 4 forecast horizons (96, 192, 336, 720) under a streaming evaluation protocol with 3 random seeds (672 experiments total). Regime-guided policies achieve the lowest MSE in 156 of 224 seed-averaged experiments (69.6%), with RG-EWC winning 30.4% and RG-TTA winning 29.0%. Overall, RG-TTA reduces MSE by 5.7% vs TTA while running 5.5% faster; RG-EWC reduces MSE by 14.1% vs standalone EWC.




SupplementaryMaterials

Neural Information Processing Systems

We first prove the direction Z T SI(Z;T) = 0, which is equivalent to prove I(Z;T) = 0 SI(Z;T) = 0. We prove the contrapositive, i.e. rather than show LHS = RHS, we show that RHS = LHS. Now assume that supwi,vj ρ(w i Z i,v j T j) > ϵ for some i,j. Then by setting those elements in w,v unrelated to Z i,T j to zero, and those related to Z i,T j exactlythesameaswi,vj,weknowthatsupw,vρ(w Z,v T) > ϵ. All neural networks are trained by Adam with its default settings and a learning rate η = 0.001. Early stopping is an useful technique for avoiding overfitting, however it needs to be carefully considered when applied to adversarial methods.




A Theoretical Framework for LLM Fine-tuning Using Early Stopping for Non-random Initialization

Sun, Zexuan, Raskutti, Garvesh

arXiv.org Machine Learning

In the era of large language models (LLMs), fine-tuning pretrained models has become ubiquitous. Yet the theoretical underpinning remains an open question. A central question is why only a few epochs of fine-tuning are typically sufficient to achieve strong performance on many different tasks. In this work, we approach this question by developing a statistical framework, combining rigorous early stopping theory with the attention-based Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) for LLMs, offering new theoretical insights on fine-tuning practices. Specifically, we formally extend classical NTK theory [Jacot et al., 2018] to non-random (i.e., pretrained) initializations and provide a convergence guarantee for attention-based fine-tuning. One key insight provided by the theory is that the convergence rate with respect to sample size is closely linked to the eigenvalue decay rate of the empirical kernel matrix induced by the NTK. We also demonstrate how the framework can be used to explain task vectors for multiple tasks in LLMs. Finally, experiments with modern language models on real-world datasets provide empirical evidence supporting our theoretical insights.