Common approaches to explainable AI (XAI) for deep learning focus on analyzing the importance of input features on the classification task in a given model: saliency methods like SHAP and GradCAM are used to measure the impact of spatial regions of the input image on the classification result. Combined with ground truth information about the location of the object in the input image (e.g., a binary mask), it is determined whether object pixels had a high impact on the classification result, or whether the classification focused on background pixels. The former is considered to be a sign of a healthy classifier, whereas the latter is assumed to suggest overfitting on spurious correlations. A major challenge, however, is that these intuitive interpretations are difficult to test quantitatively, and hence the output of such explanations lacks an explanation itself. One particular reason is that correlations in real-world data are difficult to avoid, and whether they are spurious or legitimate is debatable. Synthetic data in turn can facilitate to actively enable or disable correlations where desired but often lack a sufficient quantification of realism and stochastic properties. [...] Therefore, we systematically generate six synthetic datasets for the task of traffic sign recognition, which differ only in their degree of camera variation and background correlation [...] to quantify the isolated influence of background correlation, different levels of camera variation, and considered traffic sign shapes on the classification performance, as well as background feature importance. [...] Results include a quantification of when and how much background features gain importance to support the classification task based on changes in the training domain [...]. Download: synset.de/datasets/synset-signset-ger/background-effect

Machine learning techniques offer an effective approach to modeling dynamical systems solely from observed data. However, without explicit structural priors -- built-in assumptions about the underlying dynamics -- these techniques typically struggle to generalize to aspects of the dynamics that are poorly represented in the training data. Here, we demonstrate that reservoir computing -- a simple, efficient, and versatile machine learning framework often used for data-driven modeling of dynamical systems -- can generalize to unexplored regions of state space without explicit structural priors. First, we describe a multiple-trajectory training scheme for reservoir computers that supports training across a collection of disjoint time series, enabling effective use of available training data. Then, applying this training scheme to multistable dynamical systems, we show that RCs trained on trajectories from a single basin of attraction can achieve out-of-domain generalization by capturing system behavior in entirely unobserved basins.

Identifying from observation data the governing differential equations of a physical dynamics is a key challenge in machine learning. Although approaches based on SINDy have shown great promise in this area, they still fail to address a whole class of real world problems where the data is sparsely sampled in time. In this article, we introduce Unrolled-SINDy, a simple methodology that leverages an unrolling scheme to improve the stability of explicit methods for PDE discovery. By decorrelating the numerical time step size from the sampling rate of the available data, our approach enables the recovery of equation parameters that would not be the minimizers of the original SINDy optimization problem due to large local truncation errors. Our method can be exploited either through an iterative closed-form approach or by a gradient descent scheme. Experiments show the versatility of our method. On both traditional SINDy and state-of-the-art noise-robust iNeuralSINDy, with different numerical schemes (Euler, RK4), our proposed unrolling scheme allows to tackle problems not accessible to non-unrolled methods.

We would like to thank the reviewers for taking the time to carefully read, evaluate, and give feedback on our submission. "[T]his paper ... assumes that the feature map is regular (Assumption 3.1)... In particular, this gives us the flexibility of encoding many "inductive biases" into the architecture since only the two Therefore, Theorem 3.3 implies that if dropout is used to improve "One can hope that something as simple as the softmax function ... does not spoil It is not surprising that the softmax function preserve's the ability for an architecture Similar issues arise with the other mentioned examples and we would be happy to add a brief discussion outlining each.

Linking implicit scientific claims made on social media to their original publications is crucial for evidence-based fact-checking and scholarly discourse, yet it is hindered by lexical sparsity, very short queries, and domain-specific language. Team AIRwaves ranked second in Subtask 4b of the CLEF-2025 CheckThat! Lab with an evidence-retrieval approach that markedly outperforms the competition baseline. The optimized sparse-retrieval baseline(BM25) achieves MRR@5 = 0.5025 on the gold label blind test set. To surpass this baseline, a two-stage retrieval pipeline is introduced: (i) a first stage that uses a dual encoder based on E5-large, fine-tuned using in-batch and mined hard negatives and enhanced through chunked tokenization and rich document metadata; and (ii) a neural re-ranking stage using a SciBERT cross-encoder. Replacing purely lexical matching with neural representations lifts performance to MRR@5 = 0.6174, and the complete pipeline further improves to MRR@5 = 0.6828. The findings demonstrate that coupling dense retrieval with neural re-rankers delivers a powerful and efficient solution for tweet-to-study matching and provides a practical blueprint for future evidence-retrieval pipelines.

This equality is theoretically validated.

Training large language models (LLMs) to follow instructions has significantly enhanced their ability to tackle unseen tasks. However, despite their strong generalization capabilities, instruction-following LLMs encounter difficulties when dealing with tasks that require domain knowledge. This work introduces a specialized instruction fine-tuning for the domain of computational argumentation (CA). The goal is to enable an LLM to effectively tackle any unseen CA tasks while preserving its generalization capabilities. Reviewing existing CA research, we crafted natural language instructions for 105 CA tasks to this end. On this basis, we developed a CA-specific benchmark for LLMs that allows for a comprehensive evaluation of LLMs' capabilities in solving various CA tasks. We synthesized 52k CA-related instructions, adapting the self-instruct process to train a CA-specialized instruction-following LLM. Our experiments suggest that CA-specialized instruction fine-tuning significantly enhances the LLM on both seen and unseen CA tasks. At the same time, performance on the general NLP tasks of the SuperNI benchmark remains stable.

Cross encoders (CEs) are trained with sentence pairs to detect relatedness. As CEs require sentence pairs at inference, the prevailing view is that they can only be used as re-rankers in information retrieval pipelines. Dual encoders (DEs) are instead used to embed sentences, where sentence pairs are encoded by two separate encoders with shared weights at training, and a loss function that ensures the pair's embeddings lie close in vector space if the sentences are related. DEs however, require much larger datasets to train, and are less accurate than CEs. We report a curious finding that embeddings from earlier layers of CEs can in fact be used within an information retrieval pipeline. We show how to exploit CEs to distill a lighter-weight DE, with a 5.15x speedup in inference time.