sine
A Robust SINDy Autoencoder for Noisy Dynamical System Identification
Sparse identification of nonlinear dynamics (SINDy) has been widely used to discover the governing equations of a dynamical system from data. It uses sparse regression techniques to identify parsimonious models of unknown systems from a library of candidate functions. Therefore, it relies on the assumption that the dynamics are sparsely represented in the coordinate system used. To address this limitation, one seeks a coordinate transformation that provides reduced coordinates capable of reconstructing the original system. Recently, SINDy autoencoders have extended this idea by combining sparse model discovery with autoencoder architectures to learn simplified latent coordinates together with parsimonious governing equations. A central challenge in this framework is robustness to measurement error. Inspired by noise-separating neural network structures, we incorporate a noise-separation module into the SINDy autoencoder architecture, thereby improving robustness and enabling more reliable identification of noisy dynamical systems. Numerical experiments on the Lorenz system show that the proposed method recovers interpretable latent dynamics and accurately estimates the measurement noise from noisy observations.
Stable Forgetting: Bounded Parameter-Efficient Unlearning in LLMs
Garg, Arpit, Saratchandran, Hemanth, Garg, Ravi, Lucey, Simon
Machine unlearning in large language models (LLMs) is essential for privacy and safety; however, existing approaches remain unstable and unreliable. A widely used strategy, the gradient difference method, applies gradient descent on retained data while performing gradient ascent on forget data, the data whose influence should be removed. However, when combined with cross-entropy loss, this procedure causes unbounded growth of weights and gradients, leading to training instability and degrading both forgetting and retention. We provide a theoretical framework that explains this failure, explicitly showing how ascent on the forget set destabilizes optimization in the feedforward MLP layers of LLMs. Guided by this insight, we propose Bounded Parameter-Efficient Unlearning, a parameter-efficient approach that stabilizes LoRA-based fine-tuning by applying bounded functions to MLP adapters. This simple modification controls the weight dynamics during ascent, enabling the gradient difference method to converge reliably. Across the TOFU, TDEC, and MUSE benchmarks, and across architectures and scales from 125M to 8B parameters, our method achieves substantial improvements in forgetting while preserving retention, establishing a novel theoretically grounded and practically scalable framework for unlearning in LLMs.
Think Smarter not Harder: Adaptive Reasoning with Inference Aware Optimization
Yu, Zishun, Xu, Tengyu, Jin, Di, Sankararaman, Karthik Abinav, He, Yun, Zhou, Wenxuan, Zeng, Zhouhao, Helenowski, Eryk, Zhu, Chen, Wang, Sinong, Ma, Hao, Fang, Han
Solving mathematics problems has been an intriguing capability of large language models, and many efforts have been made to improve reasoning by extending reasoning length, such as through self-correction and extensive long chain-of-thoughts. While promising in problem-solving, advanced long reasoning chain models exhibit an undesired single-modal behavior, where trivial questions require unnecessarily tedious long chains of thought. In this work, we propose a way to allow models to be aware of inference budgets by formulating it as utility maximization with respect to an inference budget constraint, hence naming our algorithm Inference Budget-Constrained Policy Optimization (IBPO). In a nutshell, models fine-tuned through IBPO learn to ``understand'' the difficulty of queries and allocate inference budgets to harder ones. With different inference budgets, our best models are able to have a $4.14$\% and $5.74$\% absolute improvement ($8.08$\% and $11.2$\% relative improvement) on MATH500 using $2.16$x and $4.32$x inference budgets respectively, relative to LLaMA3.1 8B Instruct. These improvements are approximately $2$x those of self-consistency under the same budgets.
Sine, Transient, Noise Neural Modeling of Piano Notes
Simionato, Riccardo, Fasciani, Stefano
This paper introduces a novel method for emulating piano sounds. We propose to exploit the sine, transient, and noise decomposition to design a differentiable spectral modeling synthesizer replicating piano notes. Three sub-modules learn these components from piano recordings and generate the corresponding harmonic, transient, and noise signals. Splitting the emulation into three independently trainable models reduces the modeling tasks' complexity. The quasi-harmonic content is produced using a differentiable sinusoidal model guided by physics-derived formulas, whose parameters are automatically estimated from audio recordings. The noise sub-module uses a learnable time-varying filter, and the transients are generated using a deep convolutional network. From singular notes, we emulate the coupling between different keys in trichords with a convolutional-based network. Results show the model matches the partial distribution of the target while predicting the energy in the higher part of the spectrum presents more challenges. The energy distribution in the spectra of the transient and noise components is accurate overall. While the model is more computationally and memory efficient, perceptual tests reveal limitations in accurately modeling the attack phase of notes. Despite this, it generally achieves perceptual accuracy in emulating single notes and trichords.
[D] Simple Questions Thread July 05, 2020
Okay so I'm gonna get out front that while I've studied artificial neural networks, I don't know a whole lot about them. So I hope that these questions are not extremely noobish. I know a little about activation functions, which are (as I understand) really important in most or all forms of neural networks, as they introduce a meaningful non-linearity into the network. Otherwise the network would just be one complicated linear function. And there are several common activation functions like rectified linear, softplus, and sigmoid.