As major progress in LLM-based long-form text generation enables paradigms such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and inference-time scaling, safely incorporating private information into the generation remains a critical open question.

Many domain experts do not have the time or expertise to write formal Bayesian models. This paper takes an informal problem description as input, and combines a large language model and a probabilistic programming language to define a joint distribution over formal models, latent variables, and data. A posterior over latent variables follows by conditioning on observed data and integrating over formal models. This presents a challenging inference problem. We suggest an inference recipe that amounts to generating many formal models from the large language model, performing approximate inference on each, and then doing a weighted average. This is justified and analyzed as a combination of self-normalized importance sampling, MCMC, and importance-weighted variational inference. Experimentally, this produces sensible predictions from only data and an informal problem description, without the need to specify a formal model.

Label Smoothing (LS) is widely adopted to reduce overconfidence in neural network predictions and improve generalization. Despite these benefits, recent studies reveal two critical issues with LS. First, LS induces overconfidence in misclassified samples. Second, it compacts feature representations into overly tight clusters, diluting intra-class diversity, although the precise cause of this phenomenon remained elusive. In this paper, we analytically decompose the LS-induced loss, exposing two key terms: (i) a regularization term that dampens overconfidence only when the prediction is correct, and (ii) an error-amplification term that arises under misclassifications. This latter term compels the network to reinforce incorrect predictions with undue certainty, exacerbating representation collapse. To address these shortcomings, we propose Max Suppression (MaxSup), which applies uniform regularization to both correct and incorrect predictions by penalizing the top-1 logit rather than the ground-truth logit. Through extensive feature-space analyses, we show that MaxSup restores intra-class variation and sharpens inter-class boundaries. Experiments on large-scale image classification and multiple downstream tasks confirm that MaxSup is a more robust alternative to LS. 4

We introduce the zero-one censored transformed normal (ZOC-TN) model for proportional responses with potential probability mass at the boundaries 0 and 1. The model combines a censored Gaussian variable with a two-parameter affine-logit transformation on the interior (0,1). We characterize the transformation parameters, establish large-sample properties, and relate the affine-logit specification to broader classes of interior distributions. Theoretical and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model can capture a wider range of qualitative density shapes than several benchmark models while remaining parsimonious, computationally efficient, and numerically stable. Furthermore, the ZOC-TN model can be extended (i) to account for nonlinearities and interactions in a tree-boosting machine learning framework and (ii) to explicitly model residual spatio-temporal variability. We apply the ZOC-TN model to loss given default (LGD) modeling for a large dataset of U.S. residential mortgages and compare it to multiple benchmark models. We find that a tree-boosted ZOC-TN model with a spatio-temporal frailty Gaussian process delivers the strongest out-of-sample performance, indicating that mortgage losses are shaped by nonlinear covariate effects and by unaccounted-for space-time variation.

Regression models are crucial in recommender systems. However, retransformation bias problem has been conspicuously neglected within the community. While many works in other fields have devised effective bias correction methods, all of them are post-hoc cures externally to the model, facing practical challenges when applied to real-world recommender systems. Hence, we propose a preemptive paradigm to eradicate the bias intrinsically from the models via minor model refinement. Specifically, a novel TranSUN method is proposed with a joint bias learning manner to offer theoretically guaranteed unbiasedness under empirical superior convergence. It is further generalized into a novel generic regression model family, termed Generalized TranSUN (GTS), which not only offers more theoretical insights but also serves as a generic framework for flexibly developing various bias-free models. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our methods across data from various domains, which have been successfully deployed in two real-world industrial recommendation scenarios, i.e. product and short video recommendation scenarios in Guess What You Like business domain in the homepage of Taobao App (a leading e-commerce platform with DAU > 300M), to serve the major online traffic.

Knowledge distillation is a model compression technique in which a compact "student" network is trained to replicate the predictive behavior of a larger "teacher" network. In logit-based knowledge distillation, it has become the de facto approach to augment cross-entropy with a distillation term. Typically, this term is either a KL divergence that matches marginal probabilities or a correlation-based loss that captures intra-and inter-class relationships. In every case, it acts as an additional term to cross-entropy. This term has its own weight, which must be carefully tuned. In this paper, we adopt a choice-theoretic perspective and recast knowledge distillation under the Plackett-Luce model by interpreting teacher logits as "worth" scores. We introduce Plackett-Luce Distillation (PLD), a weighted list-wise ranking loss. In PLD, the teacher model transfers knowledge of its full ranking of classes, weighting each ranked choice by its own confidence.

Deep networks have shown remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks, yet getting a global concept-level understanding of how they function remains a key challenge. Many post-hoc concept-based approaches have been introduced to understand their workings, yet they are not always faithful to the model. Further, they make restrictive assumptions on the concepts a model learns, such as classspecificity, small spatial extent, or alignment to human expectations. In this work, we put emphasis on the faithfulness of such concept-based explanations and propose a new model with model-inherent mechanistic concept-explanations. Our concepts are shared across classes and, from any layer, their contribution to the logit and their input-visualization can be faithfully traced. We also leverage foundation models to propose a new concept-consistency metric, C2-score, that can be used to evaluate concept-based methods. Compared to prior work, we show that our concepts are quantitatively more consistent and that users find them to be more interpretable, while retaining competitive ImageNet performance. 1

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have intensified efforts to fuse heterogeneous open-source models into a unified system that inherits their complementary strengths. Existing logit-based fusion methods maintain inference efficiency but treat vocabulary dimensions independently, overlooking semantic dependencies encoded by cross-dimension interactions. These dependencies reflect how token types interact under a model's internal reasoning and are essential for aligning models with diverse generation behaviors. To explicitly model these dependencies, we propose InfiGFusion, the first structure-aware fusion framework with a novel Graph-on-Logits Distillation (GLD) loss. Specifically, we retain the top-k logits per output and aggregate their outer products across sequence positions to form a global co-activation graph, where nodes represent vocabulary channels and edges quantify their joint activations. To ensure scalability and efficiency, we design a sorting-based closed-form approximation that reduces the original O(n4)cost of Gromov-Wasserstein distance to O(nlogn), with provable approximation guarantees. Experiments across multiple fusion settings show that GLD consistently improves fusion quality and stability. InfiGFusion outperforms SOTA models and fusion baselines across 11 benchmarks spanning reasoning, coding, and mathematics. It shows particular strength in complex reasoning tasks, with +35.6 improvement on Multistep Arithmetic and +37.06 on Causal Judgement over SFT, demonstrating superior multi-step and relational inference.

Pseudo-label-based Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) often suffers from classifier bias, particularly under class imbalance, as inaccurate pseudo-labels tend to exacerbate existing biases towards majority classes. Existing methods, such as CDMAD[30], utilize simplistic reference inputs--typically uniform or blank-colored images--to estimate and correct this bias. However, such simplistic references fundamentally ignore realistic statistical information inherent to real datasets, specifically typical color distributions, texture details, and frequency characteristics. This lack of statistical representativeness can lead the model to inaccurately estimate its inherent bias, limiting the effectiveness of bias correction, particularly under severe class imbalance or substantial distribution mismatches between labeled and unlabeled datasets. To overcome these limitations, we introduce the FARAD (Fourier-Adapted Reference for Accurate Debiasing) System.