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The end of the America we know? Startling new images show how major cities could look in 250 years

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Taylor Swift marries Travis Kelce in'moving' ceremony where the bride wore Dior and walked down the aisle to one of her own songs... before partying the night away at Madison Square Garden Mississippi teen's'bad decision' cost him his life just days after graduation, mom says, as mourning family demands answers Lena Dunham leaves Taylor Swift wedding guests GASPING with shockingly rude dinner speech after taking microphone... as world famous celeb is dramatically turned away: Insiders leak outrageous MSG gossip Blake Lively's fury after Taylor Swift left her off wedding guest list as sources say it's the final straw Taylor Swift's celebrity wedding guests FLEE lavish MSG reception early... as Travis Kelce extravaganza runs into the early hours The WORST dressed guests at Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce's lavish wedding Does this photo capture Travis Kelce's last dose of Dutch courage before marriage? After all the wild lengths Taylor went to hide wedding... one image seems all too human Probe into fiery Missouri plane crash that killed 11 skydivers and pilot takes shocking twist... as investigators reveal head-scratching findings Trump takes swipe at Iranian leaders during America 250 speech revealing he gave them'a week off' for Ayatollah funeral Meghan's Taylor Swift wedding humiliation: KENNEDY's Montecito mole tells all as Prince William rubs salt in the wound! Bruised Tom Selleck feasts on McDonald's just after gym visit as fears grow about actor's grim new look All the BEST dressed guests at Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce's extravagant wedding Taylor Swift's wedding officiant is Adam Sandler! Twisted family secrets of postal worker mom, 35, slaughtered on delivery route just six months after husband's shock death: Horrifying new details of her final moments emerge The end of the America we know? Victoria Beckham risks Brooklyn's fury as she extends another olive branch in anniversary post for David - after'fuming' son said he'wished they'd stop posting about him' Taylor Swift's '40-page prenup': How $2BILLION in assets divide up... and the one major concession Travis is predicted to have written in as special clause Iconic Las Vegas casinos' years-long infestation with bed bugs exposed...as unearthed records reveal YEARS of disgusting stays that have sent mortified guests fleeing Elon Musk's next target could be your smartphone as SpaceX schemes to take on America's biggest mobile phone companies TV icon, 84, shares rare throwback photos ahead of Fourth of July holiday... can you guess who it is?


Prototype Language Models

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Knowing which training examples drive outputs is fundamental to auditing, correcting, and understanding language models, yet for modern LLMs this remains expensive, approximate, and largely post-hoc. Standard language models generate tokens through a dense network pathway, causing training data's influence to be distributed across parameters rather than organized along explicit, traceable components. We introduce a prototype language model architecture, Prototypes for Interpretable Sequence Modeling (PRISM), that forms each prediction via a sparse, non-negative mixture of learned prototypes, trained with clustering objectives that anchor each prototype to coherent neighborhoods of training examples. Across architectures from 130M to 1.6B parameters trained on up to 50B tokens, prototype language models either surpass or remain within 2.5 percentage points on average downstream accuracy of matched dense baselines. We show that sparse prototype structure localizes curvature in the loss landscape, yielding a more tractable Hessian and enabling training data attribution that is ~500x faster than post hoc baselines when consuming equivalent memory. Calibrating linear prototype controllers can improve downstream accuracy by roughly 3 points while tracing those corrections back to training neighborhoods, and targeted prototype suppression can remove model behaviors without finetuning or measurable loss in generation quality.


Self-Organized Conformal Prediction: Reducing Regional Coverage Gaps with Unsupervised Group Discovery

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Conformal prediction guarantees marginal coverage, but pooled calibration averages over heterogeneous regions and can mask regional undercoverage in safety-critical subgroups. We introduce Self-Organized Conformal Prediction (SOCP), a calibration scheme that discovers input-space groups with a Self-Organizing Map (SOM) and, at test time, draws a local calibration buffer from the query's best-matching unit (BMU) cell or a fixed grid neighborhood. The same retrieval rule applies to regression and classification tasks across tabular features and image embeddings, leaving the predictor and nonconformity score untouched. SOCP gives exact validity for BMU-cell retrieval and fixed retrieved-set validity for neighborhood buffers; central-cell validity for neighborhood retrieval holds up to a Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) bias term. A split-routed extension recovers fixed retrieved-set validity conditional on the routing split. On eight regression and classification benchmarks, SO-SCP reduces the weighted regional coverage gap on $7/8$ datasets (mean paired change $-7.1\%$) for a mean prediction-set size increase of $6.2\%$, with negligible overhead on the largest six datasets; SO-CQR yields smaller gains, since quantile regression already absorbs much of the heterogeneity. By learning groups directly from the input geometry, SOCP provides group-local calibration with exact fixed-group guarantees and approximate central-cell guarantees, without supervised partitions or predictor retraining.


Information from coincidences

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We prove a single algebraic mixed coincidence identity that unifies a broad swath of information-theoretic variational results. For any family of priors $\{π_i\}$ and real exponents $\{ α_i \}$, the log of the mixed count $E_{x\simν}\!\left[\prod_{i=1}^W π_i^{α_i}(x)\right]$ is simultaneously a Boltzmann coincidence weight, an exponential-family normalizer, a maximum-entropy value, and a KL-barycenter optimum. The identity yields a unified derivation of classical cornerstones of information theory: concentration of empirical distributions (Sanov-type decompositions and Gibbs conditioning), hypothesis-testing error exponents (Chernoff information and its multi-way analogue), change-of-measure inequalities (Donsker-Varadhan and PAC-Bayes), and laws governing rare-pattern coincidences (Erdos-Renyi run-length, iterative guesswork, rate-distortion, and birthday thresholds). Each is recovered as a specialization of the same algebraic equality. It strictly generalizes the classical Renyi entropy and divergence variational formulas (one and two priors respectively) to a $W$-prior simplex, and holds for unnormalized and continuum-indexed priors. Among its consequences are an exact multi-prior PAC-Bayes penalty that subtracts an explicit "coincidence bonus" from the usual single-prior posterior penalty, and the asymptotic MAP error exponent for $W$-ary hypothesis testing as an edge-restricted simplex optimum. We demonstrate the calculus at scale on two large alphabets encoding richly modeled sequential languages: on language-model next-token predictives where we recover contrastive decoding, and on human genomic regulatory sequence where it separates correlated from diverse prior families along a sliding-window trace.


Transfer Learning on Edge Connecting Probability Estimation Under Graphon Model

Neural Information Processing Systems

Graphon models provide a flexible nonparametric framework for estimating latent connectivity probabilities in networks, enabling a range of downstream applications such as link prediction and data augmentation. However, accurate graphon estimation typically requires a large graph, whereas in practice, one often only observes a small-sized network. One approach to addressing this issue is to adopt a transfer learning framework, which aims to improve estimation in a small target graph by leveraging structural information from a larger, related source graph. In this paper, we propose a novel method, namely GTRANS, a transfer learning framework that integrates neighborhood smoothing and Gromov-Wasserstein optimal transport to align and transfer structural patterns between graphs. To prevent negative transfer, GTRANS includes an adaptive debiasing mechanism that identifies and corrects for target-specific deviations via residual smoothing. We provide theoretical guarantees on the stability of the estimated alignment matrix and demonstrate the effectiveness of GTRANS in improving the accuracy of target graph estimation through extensive synthetic and real data experiments. These improvements translate directly to enhanced performance in downstream applications, such as the graph classification task and the link prediction task.


Locally Optimal Private Sampling: Beyond the Global Minimax

Neural Information Processing Systems

We study the problem of sampling from a distribution under local differential privacy (LDP). Given a private distribution P P, the goal is to generate a single sample from a distribution that remains close to P in f-divergence while satisfying the constraints of LDP.


Token Embeddings Violate the Manifold Hypothesis

Neural Information Processing Systems

A full understanding of the behavior of a large language model (LLM) requires our grasp of its input token space. If this space differs from our assumptions, our comprehension of and conclusions about the LLM will likely be flawed.


Bridging Theory and Practice in Link Representation with Graph Neural Networks

Neural Information Processing Systems

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are widely used to compute representations of node pairs for downstream tasks such as link prediction. Yet, theoretical understanding of their expressive power has focused almost entirely on graph-level representations. In this work, we shift the focus to links and provide the first comprehensive study of GNN expressiveness in link representation. We introduce a unifying framework, the kϕ-kρ-mframework, that subsumes existing messagepassing link models and enables formal expressiveness comparisons. Using this framework, we derive a hierarchy of state-of-the-art methods and offer theoretical tools to analyze future architectures. To complement our analysis, we propose a synthetic evaluation protocol comprising the first benchmark specifically designed to assess link-level expressiveness. Finally, we ask: does expressiveness matter in practice? We use a graph symmetry metric that quantifies the difficulty of distinguishing links and show that while expressive models may underperform on standard benchmarks, they significantly outperform simpler ones as symmetry increases, highlighting the need for dataset-aware model selection.


7ff65a57e916785a271d97f7236f1323-Paper-Conference.pdf

Neural Information Processing Systems

Membership inference tests aim to determine whether a particular data point was included in a language model's training set. However, recent works have shown that such tests often fail under the strict definition of membership based on exact matching, and have suggested relaxing this definition to include semantic neighbors as members as well. In this work, we show that membership inference tests are still unreliable under this relaxation -- it is possible to poison the training dataset in a way that causes the test to produce incorrect predictions for a target point. We theoretically reveal a trade-off between a test's accuracy and its robustness to poisoning. We also present a concrete instantiation of this poisoning attack and empirically validate its effectiveness. Our results show that it can degrade the performance of existing tests to well below random.


Learning Memory-Enhanced Improvement Heuristics for Flexible Job Shop Scheduling

Neural Information Processing Systems

The rise of smart manufacturing under Industry 4.0 introduces mass customization and dynamic production, demanding more advanced and flexible scheduling techniques. The flexible job-shop scheduling problem (FJSP) has attracted significant attention due to its complex constraints and strong alignment with real-world production scenarios. Current deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based approaches to FJSP predominantly employ constructive methods. While effective, they often fall short of reaching (near-)optimal solutions. In contrast, improvement-based methods iteratively explore the neighborhood of initial solutions and are more effective in approaching optimality.