cs.LG · 2026-08-12 · No. 82

Machine Learning, 2026-08-12.

50 new papers in cs.LG. Titles, authors, abstracts. Links to arXiv. Want this in your inbox every morning? Subscribe →

01 — The papers

50 entries
  1. 01

    Beyond a Bag of Features: Set-Level Instability in Sparse Autoencoders

    Nikolai Bolik, Lennart Stöpler, Artur Andrzejak

    cs.LG · cs.CL

    Shani et al. (2026) show that LLM representations broadly recover human category boundaries, while failing to reflect fine-grained typicality structure. Their analysis uses cosine similarity over dense model representations. We revisit their approach using overlap over active sparse autoencoder (SAE) latent sets as a more interpretable similarity measure. We first verify that this set-level measure is meaningful: SAE latent sets can recover...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.11197 · PDF

  2. 02

    Hierarchical Empirical-Bayes Naive Bayes: Minimax Smoothing and Calibration with AODE Extension

    Nguyen Thai Anh, Truong Viet Vu, Tran Thien Thanh, Vo Nguyen Quoc Bao, Ngo Hoang Tu

    cs.LG

    The Naive Bayes (NB) classifier remains a standard choice for categorical data, yet its widely used smoothing rules, such as Laplace, Lidstone, Krichevsky-Trofimov, and the $m$-estimate, all prescribe a fixed smoothing strength that ignores feature cardinality, sample size, and class imbalance, inducing a non-vanishing bias on modern high-cardinality tabular data. We propose hierarchical empirical-Bayes Naive Bayes (HEB-NB), in which each...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.11162 · PDF

  3. 03

    DACRI: Decision-Aware Causal Intervention Ranking for Critical Supply Chains

    Shiqi Huang, Jiani He, Dingyan Shang, Yihua Xu, Jize Li, Yan Lyu, Lashimi Muraleedharan Nair

    cs.LG

    Detecting or attributing a supply-chain disruption is not the same as selecting the intervention that maximizes recoverable net value. We present CriticalSCM-Bench v1, a controlled synthetic benchmark with causal ground truth, paired factual/counterfactual rollouts, and an explicit net-value objective. Relative to a full-information train-selected static benchmark, LambdaMART improves median normalized net value by 5.7--16.2\%, with paired...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.11154 · PDF

  4. 04

    A Recommendation System Approach for Interference-Robust Sensor Subset Selection

    Kaan Buyukkalayci, Kyle Pak, Merve Karakas, Christina Fragouli

    cs.LG

    This paper develops a method for sensor-subset selection for tracking. Prior work showed that low-cost acoustic Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) measurements can be used to recommend subsets of sensor nodes whose expensive sensing modalities, such as cameras, can achieve high tracking accuracy. While efficient, RSSI-based approaches are challenged by acoustic interference. We propose a recommendation-system-inspired framework that...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.11143 · PDF

  5. 05

    Two-stage Odd Residual Flows for Mean-Preserving Probabilistic Time Series Forecasting

    Kiran Madhusudhanan, Christian Klötergens, Lars Schmidt-Thieme, Vijaya Krishna Yalavarthi

    cs.LG · cs.AI

    Probabilistic forecasting plays an essential role in risk-sensitive decision-making, particularly in long-horizon settings. However, existing approaches often face a fundamental trade-off between distributional flexibility and accurate mean prediction. Traditional parametric methods, such as Mean Variance Estimation (MVE), can suffer from degraded point accuracy when trained under joint Negative Log-Likelihood (NLL) objectives, while...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.11114 · PDF

  6. 06

    Cross-View Feature Matching: Survey, Benchmarking, and Foundation-Model Perspectives

    Songlin Du, Xiaoyong Lu, Zeyu Wu, Xiaobo Lu, Guobao Xiao, Bin Fan, Jiayi Ma, Takeshi Ikenaga

    cs.LG · cs.CV

    Cross-view feature matching aims to establish reliable correspondences across images with large viewpoint variations. Over the past decade, the field has evolved from task-specific models toward increasingly unified and generalizable correspondence models, with recent progress further driven by the emergence of vision foundation models (VFMs). Despite these advances, existing studies remain highly diverse in their problem formulations, model...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.11093 · PDF

  7. 07

    Batch Size or Negatives? A Selection Rule for Memory-Constrained Recommender Training

    Artyom Sabitov, Daniil Volkov, Alexey Zaytsev

    cs.LG

    Large-scale neural recommender systems are typically trained with a softmax cross-entropy objective over the full item vocabulary. For a typical large number of possible items $K$, the final classification layer dominates memory, requiring $O(nK)$ logits and gradients to materialize for a batch of $n$ examples. Sampled softmax reduces this cost by restricting the objective to only $k \ll K$ candidate negative items, resulting in an $O(nk)$...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.11061 · PDF

  8. 08

    Uncertainty-Aware Deep Learning for Genomics Applications: Insights from an Empirical Study

    Sepideh Saran, Mahsa Ghanbari, Uwe Ohler

    cs.LG

    Deep learning models have emerged as the standard computational tool for a wide range of applications in genomics. Yet, uncertainty quantification (UQ) -- and more specifically, the reliability of different uncertainty estimates in this domain -- has received little systematic attention. This work presents an empirical analysis of UQ in deep learning models, focusing on genomics applications. In a series of experiments, we contrast Deep...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.11054 · PDF

  9. 09

    Efficient Hypergradient Descent for Inverse Reinforcement Learning

    Nikita Sevriukov, Anna Barabanova, Uliana Gagarina, Karina Ivanova, Sofiia Kasaeva, Ilya Levin, Marina Sheshukova

    cs.LG · stat.ML

    Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to recover a reward function under which the resulting policy reproduces the behavior observed in expert demonstrations. A natural approach is to formulate IRL as a bilevel optimization problem, in which the inner level corresponds to policy optimization under the learned reward and the outer level measures the discrepancy between the induced policy and expert data. However, this formulation is...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.11052 · PDF

  10. 10

    ReRound: Reconstructive Rounding to Resolve Midpoint Ambiguity in Calibration-Free LLM Quantization

    He-Yen Hsieh, H. T. Kung

    cs.LG · cs.CL

    ReRound (Reconstructive Rounding) is a post-training quantization method that addresses the midpoint ambiguity inherent in standard round-to-nearest (RTN) schemes when quantizing weights near the centers of quantization intervals. Starting from a pretrained LLM, ReRound trains a conditional diffusion model to produce continuous reconstructions of low-bit weights for the LLM. These reconstructed weights act as a guidance signal to disambiguate...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.11045 · PDF

  11. 11

    Mapping and Measuring the Behavioral Evolution of Large Language Models

    Dong Qiao, Chris Ding, Jicong Fan

    cs.LG · cs.CL

    Benchmark leaderboards summarize how well a language model performs, but not how its behavior relates to that of other models or changes across generations. We characterize the output behavior of 32 models from six families using their responses to a shared bank of 10{,}000 prompts. After embedding each response, we construct three complementary sentence-level dissimilarities: an aligned mean per-prompt distance, which is a pseudometric on...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.11027 · PDF

  12. 12

    Derivative Computation in PINNs: Automatic Differentiation, Finite Differences and Beyond

    Maciej J. Mikulski, Tadeusz Uhl

    cs.LG · math.NA · physics.comp-ph

    We systematically investigate finite-difference (FD) derivative computation in Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) as an alternative to automatic differentiation (AD). On three benchmark PDEs we show that, with a properly calibrated step size, FD matches AD in accuracy on every problem while running faster across the full tested batch-size range and using substantially less GPU memory, and that a stochastic variant we propose outperforms...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.11020 · PDF

  13. 13

    DEFT: Data-Efficient Frequency-domain Top-k Sampling via Inverse Discrete Fourier Transform for Spatiotemporal Dynamical Systems Modeling

    Hengbo Xiao, Jiale Liu, Jiahao Song, Guannan He

    cs.LG

    Modeling spatiotemporal dynamical systems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs) poses two major challenges: it either requires expensive physics-based simulators that entail iterative numerical solving at high computational cost, or it depends on abundant training data, yet purely data-driven models often generalize poorly to downstream dynamic operating conditions. We propose DEFT, a frequency-domain data sampling method that...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.11019 · PDF

  14. 14

    GARLIC: Graph Attention-based Relational Learning of Multivariate Time Series in Intensive Care

    Ruirui Wang, Yanke Li, Manuel Günther, Diego Paez-Granados

    cs.LG

    Healthcare data, such as Intensive Care Unit (ICU) records, comprise heterogeneous multivariate time series sampled at irregular intervals with pervasive missingness. However, clinical applications demand predictive models that are both accurate and interpretable. We present our Graph Attention-based Relational Learning for Intensive Care (GARLIC) model, a novel neural network architecture that imputes missing data through a learnable...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.10969 · PDF

  15. 15

    Physics-informed Diffusion Generative Model for Time-Series Data Synthesis in Dynamic Systems

    Haiteng Wang, Yunfei Zhu, Tao Wang, Yikang Li, Jiabao Dong, Xiaoge Zhang, Lei Ren

    cs.LG

    Industrial time-series signals, such as turbine temperature and rotational speed in aero-engines, are essential for monitoring the health and operational status of complex dynamical systems. However, collecting such data is often limited by harsh environments (e.g., high temperature and high pressure) and the high cost of experimental testing. To address this challenge, we introduce PhysDGM, a stepwise physics-embedded diffusion generative...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.10941 · PDF

  16. 16

    ReOrder-OPD:Reliability-Aware Prompt Ordering for On-Policy Distillation

    Ximo Zhu, Ruiqi Liu, Rong Wang, Ping Wu, Xiang Zheng, Wenzhuo Xu, Xubin Yao, Zhiyuan Yan, Bo Li, Jun Gao, Xiaolei Lv

    cs.LG

    On-policy distillation (OPD) applies token-level teacher supervision to student-generated trajectories, but this supervision is not always reliable. Existing methods use local confidence or teacher-student agreement to weight, filter, or truncate the sampled trajectory. These signals do not directly determine whether the teacher can continue a student prefix to a correct answer, and trajectory-level interventions can conflate one rollout's...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.10905 · PDF

  17. 17

    Partially Observable Learning for Multi-Platform Dispatch Optimization

    Fengming Yao, Man Luo

    cs.LG

    Instant delivery platforms have become a critical component of urban logistics, increasingly relying on crowdsourced couriers to fulfill highly dynamic orders. In real-world systems, couriers are not exclusive to a single platform and may concurrently serve multiple platforms, while each platform can only observe its own orders and couriers' interactions due to privacy and operational constraints. This results in a multi-platform dispatch...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.10897 · PDF

  18. 18

    Benchmarking Time Series Generation Methods for Privacy-Preserving Forecasting

    Luis Amorim, Vitor Cerqueira, Moises Santos, Paulo J. Azevedo, Carlos Soares

    cs.LG

    Time series forecasting in privacy-sensitive domains often requires training models on released data rather than original observations. Synthetic time series generation has been developed primarily for data augmentation, where generated series supplement the original training set. How well these methods perform when fully replacing the original data - and how much privacy risk the released series carry - remains underexplored. We address this...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.10891 · PDF

  19. 19

    Optimistic Rates for Multiclass PAC Learning

    Xiaoyu Li, Andi Han, Jiaojiao Jiang, Junbin Gao

    cs.LG · stat.ML

    Worst-case multiclass bounds do not become smaller when the best classifier is already nearly correct: what is missing is an optimistic rate, a guarantee whose fluctuation scales with the oracle risk itself. For a class of Natarajan dimension $d_N$ and Daniely-Shalev-Shwartz dimension $d_{DS}$, the optimal excess risk is known at the two endpoints ($d_{DS}/n$ realizable, $\sqrt{d_N/n}+d_{DS}/n$ agnostic [HMZ24, CEH+26, Pab26]) and open in...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.10869 · PDF

  20. 20

    Can Bayesian Optimization Efficiently Find a Strong Single Expert in Neural Thickets?

    Nigel Bastian Cendra, Abdelhamid Ezzerg, Fernando Julio Cendra, Jeremias Knoblauch, Jakob Zeitler

    cs.LG

    Gradient-free post-training has emerged as a compelling alternative to gradient-based optimization for large language models (LLMs), but existing approaches remain costly. We ask whether structured search can identify a strong single expert under a modest evaluation budget. Motivated by evidence that useful weight updates lie in low-dimensional subspaces, we apply Bayesian optimization within a random linear embedding of weight space. Our...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.10867 · PDF

  21. 21

    FiGuRO: Intrinsic Dimension Estimation for Multi-Modal Data

    Viktoria Schuster, Sana Tonekaboni, Caroline Uhler

    cs.LG

    Determining the complexity, or Intrinsic Dimension (ID), of data is fundamental to efficient and interpretable representation learning. This is particularly challenging in multi-modal settings when trying to learn disentangled representations for shared and private information. Existing techniques leave a critical gap: they are often static, uni-modal, or in the case of contrastive methods, adapt only to the shared ID implicitly. We introduce...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.10857 · PDF

  22. 22

    Diffract: Spectral View of LLM Domain Adaptation

    Nikita Borodin, Maria Krylova, Artem Zabolotnyi, Dmitry Aspisov, Egor Shikov, Nikita Tyuplyaev, Oleg Travkin, Roman...

    cs.LG

    We study continual pre-training (CPT) as a mechanism for adapting general-purpose large language models to specialized domains: mathematics, instruction, code, and natural text. Using singular value decomposition of weight matrices, we find that CPT leaves singular value spectra largely invariant, with adaptation driven mainly by changes in singular vectors. An analysis of attention-head projection matrices reveals strong, domain-dependent...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.10850 · PDF

  23. 23

    TACTICL: Task-Aware Compression of Tabular ICL Models

    Mykhailo Koshil, Matthias Feurer, Katharina Eggensperger

    cs.LG · cs.AI

    The strong performance of foundation models for tabular tasks comes at substantial inference costs. Distilling models into task-specific architectures reduces model size and computational demands but also sacrifices in-context adaptability. Here we introduce TACTICL, an automated task-aware compression framework for tabular in-context learning models that jointly prunes transformer layers and replaces them with lightweight adapters trained on...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.10837 · PDF

  24. 24

    MoE Proxy Models for Low-Cost Failure Reproduction and Diagnosis in LLM RL Post-Training

    Yikai Wang, Chuansai Zhou, Yuhang Zhou, Weiqiang Wu, Cong Wu, Yue Deng, Ben Feng, Mingming Zhu, Beirong Zhou, Zhibin...

    cs.LG

    Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training of large language models (LLMs) is computationally intensive and involves complex system pipelines with substantial debugging overhead. In practice, factors such as framework adaptation, numerical precision, and operator implementation can cause failures, including gradient overflow and loss divergence. Reproducing such failures directly on large models requires considerable time and computational...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.10823 · PDF

  25. 25

    Path Integral Value Matching for Linear Quadratic Stochastic Optimal Control

    Bangyan Liao, Chenglei Yu, Yuchen Yang, Chuanrui Wang, Zhisheng Song, Peidong Liu, Tailin Wu

    cs.LG · math.OC · stat.ML

    Linear Quadratic Stochastic Optimal Control (LQ-SOC) establishes a fundamental framework for steering noisy dynamical systems and has recently gained renewed interest in the machine learning community. However, current state-of-the-art policy-based methods suffer from prohibitive computational costs and instability due to their heavy reliance on full-trajectory simulation. To overcome these limitations, we propose a paradigm shift toward a...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.10777 · PDF

  26. 26

    Long-Time Trajectory Approximation via SA-NODEs: Model Predictive and Floquet Strategies

    Ziqian Li, Nikolaos M. Matzakos

    cs.LG · math.NA

    We study the approximation of dynamical systems by semi-autonomous neural ordinary differential equations (SA-NODEs) over long time horizons. For a single network trained on the whole horizon, the available error bound deteriorates double exponentially in the horizon length. We develop two training strategies that avoid this barrier, each built on a reset of the state. The model predictive strategy partitions the horizon adaptively and...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.10738 · PDF

  27. 27

    SQuaT: Self-Supervised Knowledge Distillation via Student-Aware Quantized Teacher Features

    HyeonJun Lee, Hyeonsik Jo, Jinwoo Chung, Jangho Kim

    cs.LG

    Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) enables the deployment of quantized models with minimal accuracy degradation. However, in practical scenarios, training labels are often unavailable due to privacy, copyright, or cost constraints. Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a common approach to address this challenge, but we observe that prior work combining QAT with KD suffers from a fundamental limitation: during distillation, the range mismatch between...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.10709 · PDF

  28. 28

    Your LLM, Your Style: Behavioral Mode Axes for LLM Behavioral Control

    Haoze Liu, Run Liu, Haiying Xu, Jiahui Han, Siyuan Fang, Siyu Yan, Huiqi Deng, Guanchu Wang, Na Zou

    cs.LG · cs.AI · cs.CL · cs.HC

    Large language models (LLMs) increasingly act in interactive settings where their behavioral styles affect user experience, safety, and downstream decision making. Existing LLM personality studies largely rely on self-report questionnaires administered in first-person settings, making the resulting profiles sensitive to surface elicitation choices and poorly grounded in concrete model behavior. In this work, we introduce a situated...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.10703 · PDF

  29. 29

    ProTAGAD: A Foundation Model for TAG Anomaly Detection with Decoupled Topological and Textual Prototypes

    Ziyan Wang, Liwen Wu, Cheng Xie, Song Gao, Zhenli He, Xin Jin

    cs.LG · cs.AI

    Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs), endowed with abundant textual content along with topological structures, have emerged as a versatile backbone for real-world anomaly detection spanning large language model security, social network moderation, and cyber threat identification. Unlike conventional Graph Anomaly Detection (GAD), which relies primarily on structural irregularities, TAG anomaly detection must jointly leverage both topological...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.10699 · PDF

  30. 30

    Optimize Cheap, Deploy Strong: Cost-Aware Cross-Tier Transfer for Evolutionary Optimization

    Tal Oved, Roi Pony, Oshri Naparstek, Udi barzelay

    cs.LG · cs.AI · cs.CL · cs.NE

    Evolutionary optimization of LLM prompts and agentic programs (e.g., GEPA) is dominated by fitness evaluation: scoring each candidate runs an answering LLM over a validation set, so the evaluator's price tier dictates total search cost. We restructure that search by decoupling the three roles an LLM plays, running the high-volume answering role on the cheapest tier, reserving a strong model for the rare reflection/variation operator, then...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.10694 · PDF

  31. 31

    IADD-TR: Intervention-Aware Dynamics Decoupling with Targeted Regularization for Model-Based Reinforcement Learning

    Zefeng Liang, Jie Qiao, Ruichu Cai, Weilin Chen, Zhifeng Hao

    cs.LG

    Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL), which learns environment dynamics to generate synthetic experience, is a promising approach to sample-efficient decision making. Numerous methods have been developed to improve dynamics prediction and policy optimization for MBRL through uncertainty estimation, model regularization, and conservative value learning. However, these methods typically treat the transition model and critic as monolithic...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.10634 · PDF

  32. 32

    ProbGuard: Calibrated Safety Risk Estimation from LLM Output Distributions

    Xinzhe Huang, Biwu Yao, Kedong Xiu, Mengnan Zhao, Di Wang, Puning Zhao, Tianhang Zheng

    cs.LG

    Recent research on Large Language Model (LLM) safety has widely adopted guardrails to identify unsafe LLM outputs. Existing guardrails typically formulate safety assessment as a deterministic classification task, mapping a discrete token sequence to a discrete safety label. However, this paradigm has two limitations: First, safety assessment is inherently an uncertain problem, particularly during the early generation state. Second, relying...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.10621 · PDF

  33. 33

    Pair-Centric Graph Rewiring for Over-Squashing via Optimal Transport-Guided Communication Alignment

    Yan Wang, Chuan-Xian Ren

    cs.LG

    Message-passing neural networks (MPNNs) often struggle when task-relevant information is distributed across distant regions of a graph, since local propagation must compress remote signals through limited structural interfaces. Graph rewiring provides a structural response to over-squashing. Most existing methods rely on edge-level bottleneck scores or graph-level connectivity surrogates. With a limited rewiring budget, the key question is...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.10619 · PDF

  34. 34

    Compute-Optimal Is Not Cluster-Optimal: Systems-Aware Scaling for Sparse Mixture-of-Experts

    Soumajyoti Sarkar, Yuxin Tang, Sheng Zha

    cs.LG · cs.AI

    In large-scale pretraining, the algorithm, architecture, and systems decisions are conventionally made in disconnected stages. A scaling law stage selects an architecture and training recipe, optimizing loss under compute constraints, and a separate systems stage then optimizes the implementation for hardware efficiency. In this work, we develop MOSAIC, which formulates model architecture and systems co-design as an optimization problem....

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.10605 · PDF

  35. 35

    $β$-VAEs as Effective Theories: Tolerance-Dependent Dimension

    Johannes Hirn

    cs.LG

    In a $β$-VAE, increasing the regularization strength acts as a spectral cutoff by collapsing low-utility latent coordinates. In the linear Gaussian VAE, the collapse order matches the ranking of reconstruction utilities exactly, because both are set by the PCA spectrum. We ask which parts of this picture survive in fully connected nonlinear VAEs trained on WorldClim. We find that nonlinear interactions shift and broaden collapse onsets, so...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.10599 · PDF

  36. 36

    BREAD: Baseline-Referenced Explanations for Anomaly Diagnosis

    Jiaqi Qiu, Rob Goedhart, Jannis Kurtz, Inez M. Zwetsloot

    cs.LG

    Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based prospective anomaly detection methods are increasingly deployed in high-dimensional and nonlinear settings. Among these approaches, AI-based statistical process monitoring (SPM) is widely used, providing a structured framework for prospective monitoring. Once an anomaly is detected, a diagnosis method is needed to identify the features driving the flagged observation away from normal behaviour. Traditional...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.10587 · PDF

  37. 37

    MARCO: Click-Intent Decomposition for Calibrated Ads Conversion Prediction

    Shiwen Shen, Xiru Huang, Liang Luo, Jianbo Sun, He Lyu, Zihang Fu, Ivonne Xu, Zhizhuo Li, Zhengyu Zhang, Pei-Ju...

    cs.LG

    Not all clicks are equal. Industrial ads ranking decouples conversion probability into click-through rate (CTR) and post-click conversion rate (CVR), yet treats every click as the same event. In reality, users provide a free, self-generated signal of intent through their physical UI interactions. Different click types on the same ad exhibit a 4-fold difference in actual conversion rates. By conflating these signals, the standard CVR model...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.10562 · PDF

  38. 38

    Retrieval-Corrected Conformal Prediction for Time Series

    Sangjin Jin, Kangmin Kim, Junhyeong Lee, Yongjae Lee

    cs.LG · cs.AI

    Conformal prediction (CP) provides distribution-free prediction intervals for fixed forecasters, but its standard calibration procedure is often inefficient for time series data, where forecast errors are temporally dependent and change across time and operating conditions. Recent time series CP methods improve local calibration using recent, weighted, or localized residuals. Yet local calibration can remain indirect, since broad residual...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.10553 · PDF

  39. 39

    Robust Multi-Agent Bandits with Heavy-Tailed Rewards and Information Asymmetry

    Daphne Feng, Ricardo Parada, Lily Jiang, Sophia Yi, William Chang

    cs.LG · cs.AI

    The multi-armed bandit problem is a central framework in sequential decision-making, extensively studied under sub-Gaussian reward assumptions. However, real-world applications often involve heavy-tailed reward distributions and decentralized, information-asymmetric interactions. We study multi-agent multi-armed bandits with heavy-tailed rewards under three information-asymmetry regimes: unobserved actions with common rewards, observed...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.10529 · PDF

  40. 40

    Coordinating the Unknown Lipschitz Constant in Multiplayer Bandits

    Ricardo Parada, Chenzhang Zhao, William Chang

    cs.LG · cs.AI

    Motivated by decentralized applications, we study cooperative multi-agent bandits in continuous (Lipschitz) action spaces when the Lipschitz constant is unknown. We consider three information structures: (A)~unobserved actions with common rewards, (B)~observed actions with independent rewards, and (C)~unobserved actions with independent rewards. In each case we design and analyze an algorithm that estimates the Lipschitz constant, chooses a...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.10526 · PDF

  41. 41

    Exploration-Driven Personalized Federated Reinforcement Learning via Intrinsic Motivation

    Md Rafid Islam, Rafsan Jany, Zahid Hasan, Ratun Rahman

    cs.LG · cs.AI

    Personalized Federated Reinforcement Learning (PFRL) takes a decentralized approach to storing and accessing information based on past experiences while keeping each client's data private during the learning of each client's policy. Many current methods for PFRL rely heavily on exploiting existing reinforcement learning reward signals to derive an optimal policy for each client, thereby neglecting exploration in non-stationary or...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.10499 · PDF

  42. 42

    Critic-Free Pretraining for Efficient Online Reinforcement Learning Fine-Tuning

    Daoyi Li, Yixian Zhang, Chao Yu, Wenbo Ding, Yu Wang

    cs.LG · cs.AI

    Offline-to-online (O2O) reinforcement learning aims to leverage policies pretrained on static datasets while improving them through online interaction. However, directly reusing an offline-trained critic can hinder online fine-tuning: as the policy and data distribution change rapidly, value estimates inherited from offline training may become misaligned with the online environment, leading to inaccurate policy improvement and inefficient...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.10473 · PDF

  43. 43

    A Joint-Distribution Route to Fair Representations with Continuous Sensitive Attributes

    Yijin Ni, Xiaoming Huo

    cs.LG · stat.AP

    Fair representation learning with a continuous sensitive attribute $S$ requires a representation $Z$ that is statistically independent of $S$. Existing criteria, including generalized demographic parity, the expectation of integral probability metrics (EIPM), and mutual information, enforce this independence by averaging a per-value discrepancy between the conditional law $P_{Z \mid S=s}$ and the marginal $P_Z$ over the law of $S$. This...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.10470 · PDF

  44. 44

    Detecting an Effect Is Not Learning to Act on It: A Reward-SNR Floor for LLM Acquisition Agents

    Ying Yuan

    cs.LG · cs.CL · cs.IR

    Many pipelines can pay a per-example cost to acquire an auxiliary, model-derived observation -- an LLM's structured reasoning, a slow oracle, an expensive measurement -- and then must decide when the acquired signal is worth using. Our thesis is a distinction that is easy to miss: detecting that such a signal helps on average is not the same as learning to act on it per instance, and a reward-SNR floor governs when the second is even...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.10441 · PDF

  45. 45

    Do Time-Series Forecasters Use the Right History: Recoverability, Recovery, and Functional Use of Temporal Delays

    Qipeng Qian, Yuntao Qian

    cs.LG

    Forecast accuracy does not tell us which past inputs produced a prediction. We separate three questions for time-series models with known delay structure: can the true delay be recovered from the observed data, does the model report it, and does the forecast actually use the same history? We first derive input-conditioned recoverability measures that separate intrinsic ambiguity from model error. We then prove that a delay report can become...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.10433 · PDF

  46. 46

    Actionable Hallucination Detection: Translating Latent Uncertainty into Agentic Critique

    Sanidhya Vijayvargiya, Rahul Lokesh

    cs.LG · cs.AI

    Large Language Models (LLMs) deployed as AI agents frequently exhibit user specification-grounding failures, executing hallucinated, undesired actions to force a resolution rather than expressing uncertainty. Existing detection methods fail to provide actionable, real-time correction as they either do not localize the hallucinations, or incur prohibitive inference latency. We introduce the Latent Critic, a lightweight low-rank adapter (LoRA)...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.10430 · PDF

  47. 47

    TideRL: Boosting Agentic RL Goodput with Readiness-Aware Scheduling

    Yanyu Ren, Xizheng Wang, Xiao Liu, Bowen Lv, Hanchen Zhang, Shudan Zhang, Hanyu Lai, Shuai Wang, Li Chen, Dan Li, Jie Tang

    cs.LG · cs.DC

    Reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models is moving toward multi-turn agentic workloads, where rollout tasks repeatedly pause for external environments, resume with growing contexts, and finish at highly variable times. In this setting, RL training goodput, measured by training throughput, matters more than raw GPU occupancy: GPU waiting and repeated prefill recomputation are pure overhead. We present TideRL, a readiness-aware...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.10402 · PDF

  48. 48

    Do Judges Behave Like Algorithms?

    Riya Manchanda, Eric Chen, Chloe Zhu, Cynthia Rudin, Brandon Garrett, Songman Kang

    cs.LG

    What if judges already behave like algorithms? As artificial intelligence and algorithms are deployed in many settings, including the judicial system, many have debated whether judges should be allowed to rely on them. Instead, we ask whether judges follow predictable, algorithmic-like rules already. If judges already follow consistent, formula-like rules based on discrete and static factors such as criminal history, age, and charge type,...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.10400 · PDF

  49. 49

    ELVAE: Evidential Learning-Based Variational Autoencoder for Uncertainty-Aware Generation

    Ge Wang

    cs.LG · cs.AI

    Variational autoencoders generate samples from probabilistic latent representations but do not distinguish uncertainty about the latent location from variability around it. We formulate ELVAE, an evidential learning-based VAE in which each latent coordinate is governed by an input-dependent normal-inverse-gamma posterior. This hierarchy yields an explicit latent-location uncertainty that can be used during generation, not merely reported...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.10398 · PDF

  50. 50

    Share First, Route What Remains: A Unified Framework for Token-Adaptive MoE Computation

    Gongli Zhang, Zhulin Liu, C. L. Philip Chen

    cs.LG · cs.CL · cs.CV

    Mixture-of-experts (MoE) models have recently moved beyond routing a fixed number of complete experts. Shared-expert designs preserve reusable knowledge, fine-grained methods vary computation within experts, and dynamic routers adapt the number of active experts. Yet these decisions are usually made independently, overlooking a basic dependency: extracting reusable computation changes both what remains and how much expert capacity the...

    arxiv.org/abs/2608.10392 · PDF

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