Experimental results have shown that curriculum learning, i.e., presenting simpler

Large language models (LLMs) can be adapted to new tasks using parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods that modify only a small number of trainable parameters, often through low-rank updates. In this work, we adopt a quantum-information-inspired perspective to understand their effectiveness. From this perspective, low-rank parameterizations naturally correspond to low-dimensional Matrix Product States (MPS) representations, which enable entanglement-based characterizations of parameter structure. Thereby, we term and measure "Artificial Entanglement", defined as the entanglement entropy of the parameters in artificial neural networks (in particular the LLMs). We first study the representative low-rank adaptation (LoRA) PEFT method, alongside full fine-tuning (FFT), using LLaMA models at the 1B and 8B scales trained on the Tulu3 and OpenThoughts3 datasets, and uncover: (i) Internal artificial entanglement in the updates of query and value projection matrices in LoRA follows a volume law with a central suppression (termed as the "Entanglement Valley"), which is sensitive to hyper-parameters and is distinct from that in FFT; (ii) External artificial entanglement in attention matrices, corresponding to token-token correlations in representation space, follows an area law with logarithmic corrections and remains robust to LoRA hyper-parameters and training steps. Drawing a parallel to the No-Hair Theorem in black hole physics, we propose that although LoRA and FFT induce distinct internal entanglement signatures, such differences do not manifest in the attention outputs, suggesting a "no-hair" property that results in the effectiveness of low rank updates. We further provide theoretical support based on random matrix theory, and extend our analysis to an MPS Adaptation PEFT method, which exhibits qualitatively similar behaviors.

Abstract--This study explores the application of deep learning to improve and automate pollen grain detection and classification in both optical and holographic microscopy images, with a particular focus on veterinary cytology use cases. We used YOLOv8s for object detection and MobileNetV3L for the classification task, evaluating their performance across imaging modalities. The models achieved 91.3% mAP50 for detection and 97% overall accuracy for classification on optical images, whereas the initial performance on greyscale holographic images was substantially lower . We addressed the performance gap issue through dataset expansion using automated labeling and bounding box area enlargement. These techniques, applied to holographic images, improved detection performance from 2.49% to 13.3% mAP50 and classification performance from 42% to 54%. Our work demonstrates that, at least for image classification tasks, it is possible to pair deep learning techniques with cost-effective lensless digital holographic microscopy devices. I. INTRODUCTION Microscopy is an integral part of most veterinary medicine diagnostic procedures.

The performance of deep (reinforcement) learning systems crucially depends on the choice of hyperparameters. Their tuning is notoriously expensive, typically requiring an iterative training process to run for numerous steps to convergence. Traditional tuning algorithms only consider the final performance of hyperparameters acquired after many expensive iterations and ignore intermediate information from earlier training steps. In this paper, we present a Bayesian optimization(BO) approach which exploits the iterative structure of learning algorithms for efficient hyperparameter tuning. We propose to learn an evaluation function compressing learning progress at any stage of the training process into a single numeric score according to both training success and stability. Our BO framework is then trade-off the benefit of assessing a hyperparameter setting over additional training steps against their computation cost. We further increase model efficiency by selectively including scores from different training steps for any evaluated hyperparameter set. We demonstrate the efficiency of our algorithm by tuning hyperparameters for the training of deep reinforcement learning agents and convolutional neural networks. Our algorithm outperforms all existing baselines in identifying optimal hyperparameters in minimal time.

Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning (GCRL) mitigates the difficulty of reward design by framing tasks as goal reaching rather than maximizing hand-crafted reward signals. In this setting, the optimal goal-conditioned value function naturally forms a quasimetric, motivating Quasimetric RL (QRL), which constrains value learning to quasimetric mappings and enforces local consistency through discrete, trajectory-based constraints. We propose Eikonal-Constrained Quasimetric RL (Eik-QRL), a continuous-time reformulation of QRL based on the Eikonal Partial Differential Equation (PDE). This PDE-based structure makes Eik-QRL trajectory-free, requiring only sampled states and goals, while improving out-of-distribution generalization. We provide theoretical guarantees for Eik-QRL and identify limitations that arise under complex dynamics. To address these challenges, we introduce Eik-Hierarchical QRL (Eik-HiQRL), which integrates Eik-QRL into a hierarchical decomposition. Empirically, Eik-HiQRL achieves state-of-the-art performance in offline goal-conditioned navigation and yields consistent gains over QRL in manipulation tasks, matching temporal-difference methods.

Current long-tailed semi-supervised learning methods assume that labeled data exhibit a long-tailed distribution, and unlabeled data adhere to a typical predefined distribution (i.e., long-tailed, uniform, or inverse long-tailed). However, the distribution of the unlabeled data is generally unknown and may follow an arbitrary distribution. To tackle this challenge, we propose a Controllable Pseudo-label Generation (CPG) framework, expanding the labeled dataset with the progressively identified reliable pseudo-labels from the unlabeled dataset and training the model on the updated labeled dataset with a known distribution, making it unaffected by the unlabeled data distribution. Specifically, CPG operates through a controllable self-reinforcing optimization cycle: (i) at each training step, our dynamic controllable filtering mechanism selectively incorporates reliable pseudo-labels from the unlabeled dataset into the labeled dataset, ensuring that the updated labeled dataset follows a known distribution; (ii) we then construct a Bayes-optimal classifier using logit adjustment based on the updated labeled data distribution; (iii) this improved classifier subsequently helps identify more reliable pseudo-labels in the next training step. We further theoretically prove that this optimization cycle can significantly reduce the generalization error under some conditions. Additionally, we propose a class-aware adaptive augmentation module to further improve the representation of minority classes, and an auxiliary branch to maximize data utilization by leveraging all labeled and unlabeled samples. Comprehensive evaluations on various commonly used benchmark datasets show that CPG achieves consistent improvements, surpassing state-of-the-art methods by up to $\textbf{15.97%}$ in accuracy. The code is available at https://github.com/yaxinhou/CPG.

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a critical component of large language model (LLM) post-training. However, on-policy algorithms used for post-training are not naturally robust to a diversified content of experience replay buffers, which asynchronous off-policy actors can efficiently populate in parallel to training. We propose efficiently learning on such off-policy data via Trajectory Balance with Asynchrony (TBA), an approach to asynchronous RL for LLMs that leverages the principled off-policy TB objective. On math, preference-tuning, and automated red-teaming tasks, we post-train models ranging from Pythia 410M to Qwen 2.5 7B, finding TBA offers speed and performance boosts over strong baselines like Online DPO and Dr. GRPO. Beyond TBA's performance benefits (high accuracy even as asynchrony grows) and speedups ($4\times$ or more), we show its reward- and recency-prioritizing sampling enable further gains as data generation is scaled. Our code is available at https://github.com/bbartoldson/TBA.

While data augmentation is widely used to train symmetry-agnostic models, it remains unclear how quickly and effectively they learn to respect symmetries. We investigate this by deriving a principled measure of equivariance error that, for convex losses, calculates the percent of total loss attributable to imperfections in learned symmetry. We focus our empirical investigation to 3D-rotation equivariance on high-dimensional molecular tasks (flow matching, force field prediction, denoising voxels) and find that models reduce equivariance error quickly to $\leq$2\% held-out loss within 1k-10k training steps, a result robust to model and dataset size. This happens because learning 3D-rotational equivariance is an easier learning task, with a smoother and better-conditioned loss landscape, than the main prediction task. For 3D rotations, the loss penalty for non-equivariant models is small throughout training, so they may achieve lower test loss than equivariant models per GPU-hour unless the equivariant ``efficiency gap'' is narrowed. We also experimentally and theoretically investigate the relationships between relative equivariance error, learning gradients, and model parameters.