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arXiv

Semantically Labelled Automata for Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning with LTL Instructions

Alessandro Abate, Giuseppe De Giacomo, Mathias Jackermeier, Jan Kretínský, Maximilian Prokop, Christoph Weinhuber

We study multi-task reinforcement learning (RL), a setting in which an agent learns a single, universal policy capable of generalising to arbitrary, possibly unseen tasks. We consider tasks specified as linear temporal logic (LTL) formulae, which are commonly used in formal methods to specify properties of systems, and have recently been successfully adopted in RL. In this setting, we present a novel task embedding technique leveraging a new generation of semantic LTL-to-automata translations, originally developed for temporal synthesis. The resulting semantically labelled automata contain rich, structured information in each state that allow us to (i) compute the automaton efficiently on-the-fly, (ii) extract expressive task embeddings used to condition the policy, and (iii) naturally support full LTL. Experimental results in a variety of domains demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance and is able to scale to complex specifications where existing methods fail.

arXiv

PEFT-MuTS: A Multivariate Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning Framework for Remaining Useful Life Prediction based on Cross-domain Time Series Representation Model

En Fu, Yanyan Hu, Zengwang Jin, Kaixiang Peng

The application of data-driven remaining useful life (RUL) prediction has long been constrained by the availability of large amount of degradation data. Mainstream solutions such as domain adaptation and meta-learning still rely on large amounts of historical degradation data from equipment that is identical or similar to the target, which imposes significant limitations in practical applications. This study investigates PEFT-MuTS, a Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning framework for few-shot RUL prediction, built on cross-domain pre-trained time-series representation models. Contrary to the widely held view that knowledge transfer in RUL prediction can only occur within similar devices, we demonstrate that substantial benefits can be achieved through pre-training process with large-scale cross-domain time series datasets. A independent feature tuning network and a meta-variable-based low rank multivariate fusion mechanism are developed to enable the pre-trained univariate time-series representation backbone model to fully exploit the multivariate relationships in degradation data for downstream RUL prediction task. Additionally, we introduce a zero-initialized regressor that stabilizes the fine-tuning process under few-shot conditions. Experiments on aero-engine and industrial bearing datasets demonstrate that our method can achieve effective RUL prediction even when less than 1\% of samples of target equipment are used. Meanwhile, it substantially outperforms conventional supervised and few-shot approaches while markedly reducing the data required to achieve high predictive accuracy. Our code is available at https://github.com/fuen1590/PEFT-MuTS.

arXiv

Semantic Differentiation for Tackling Challenges in Watermarking Low-Entropy Constrained Generation Outputs

Nghia T. Le, Alan Ritter, Kartik Goyal

We demonstrate that while the current approaches for language model watermarking are effective for open-ended generation, they are inadequate at watermarking LM outputs for constrained generation tasks with low-entropy output spaces. Therefore, we devise SeqMark, a sequence-level watermarking algorithm with semantic differentiation that balances output quality, watermark detectability, and imperceptibility. It improves on the shortcomings of token-level watermarking algorithms that cause under-utilization of the sequence-level entropy available for constrained generation tasks. Moreover, we identify and improve upon the problem of region collapse, a different failure mode associated with prior sequence-level watermarking algorithms. This occurs because the pseudorandom partitioning of semantic space for watermarking in these approaches causes all high-probability outputs to collapse into either invalid or valid regions, leading to a trade-off in output quality and watermarking effectiveness. Instead, SeqMark differentiates the high-probable output subspace and partitions it into valid and invalid regions, ensuring the even spread of high-quality outputs among all the regions. On various constrained generation tasks like machine translation, abstractive summarization, and code generation, SeqMark substantially improves watermark detection accuracy (up to 28% increase in F1) while maintaining high generation quality.

arXiv

Implicit Bias and Invariance: How Hopfield Networks Efficiently Learn Graph Orbits

Michael Murray, Tenzin Chan, Kedar Karhadker, Christopher J. Hillar

Many learning problems are organized by group symmetries. While invariance is often imposed through architectures or group averaging, we ask when it can emerge from training on a finite random subset of an orbit. We study this question in classical Hopfield networks, where strict memorization can be expressed as a linear margin problem. Reparameterizing minimization of energy flow (MEF) as an exponential loss connects gradient descent to the corresponding minimum-norm hard-margin memorizer. Our main result shows that, for independent uniform samples from any finite permutation orbit, the exact sample hard-margin support vector machine (HSVM) concentrates exponentially around the invariant full-orbit HSVM. Consequently, an orbit-size-independent polynomial number of samples suffices both for approximate parameter invariance and for simultaneous memorization of every orbit element; directional convergence transfers this conclusion asymptotically to MEF gradient descent. For graph-isomorphism orbits, we characterize the invariant parameters as a three-dimensional subspace and show that every such orbit is memorizable. For cliques of fixed linear density, additional symmetry sharpens the uniform memorization bound to $O(v^4\log(1/δ))$, exponentially smaller than the orbit size. Together with experiments across several learning rules, these results give a finite-sample account of how optimization bias can recover symmetry from partial group-structured data.

arXiv

Learnability Window in Gated Recurrent Neural Networks

Lorenzo Livi

We develop a statistical theory of temporal learnability in recurrent neural networks, quantifying the maximal temporal horizon $\mathcal{H}_N$ over which gradient-based learning can recover lag-dependent structure at finite sample size $N$. The theory is built on the effective learning rate envelope $f(\ell)$, a function that captures how gating mechanisms and adaptive optimizers jointly shape the coupling between state-space dynamics and parameter updates during Backpropagation Through Time. Under heavy-tailed ($α$-stable) fluctuations, where empirical averages concentrate at rate $N^{-1/κ_α}$ with $κ_α= α/(α-1)$, the interplay between envelope decay and statistical concentration yields explicit scaling laws for the growth of $\mathcal{H}_N$: logarithmic, polynomial, and exponential temporal learning regimes emerge according to the decay law of $f(\ell)$. These results identify envelope decay as the key determinant of temporal learnability. Slower attenuation of $f(\ell)$ enlarges $\mathcal{H}_N$, while heavy-tailed fluctuations compress it by weakening statistical concentration. Moreover, envelope geometry outweighs dataset size: slowing the envelope's decay enlarges $\mathcal{H}_N$ more than adding data, so more complex architectures that realize slower-decaying envelopes can be more data-efficient than simpler ones. Experiments across multiple gated architectures and optimizers corroborate these structural predictions.

arXiv

PHASE: Passive Human Activity Simulation Evaluation

Steven Lamp, Jason D. Hiser, Anh Nguyen-Tuong, Jack W. Davidson

Cybersecurity simulation environments, such as cyber ranges, honeypots, and sandboxes, require realistic human behavior to be effective, yet no quantitative method exists to assess the behavioral fidelity of synthetic user personas. This paper presents PHASE (Passive Human Activity Simulation Evaluation), a machine learning framework that analyzes Zeek connection logs and distinguishes human from non-human activity with over 90\% accuracy. PHASE operates entirely passively, relying on standard network monitoring without any user-side instrumentation or visible signs of surveillance. All network activity used for machine learning is collected via a Zeek network appliance to avoid introducing unnecessary network traffic or artifacts that could disrupt the fidelity of the simulation environment. The paper also proposes a novel labeling approach that utilizes local DNS records to classify network traffic, thereby enabling machine learning analysis. Furthermore, we apply SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) analysis to uncover temporal and behavioral signatures indicative of genuine human users. In a case study, we evaluate a synthetic user persona and identify distinct non-human patterns that undermine behavioral realism. Based on these insights, we develop a revised behavioral configuration that significantly improves the human-likeness of synthetic activity yielding a more realistic and effective synthetic user persona.

arXiv

READ: A Retrieval-Alignment Diffusion Framework for Structure-based Drug Design

Dong Xu, Zhangfan Yang, Junchuang Cai, Sisi Yuan, Zexuan Zhu, Jianqiang Li, Junkai Ji

Structure-based drug design (SBDD) models are central to modern pharmaceutical research, enabling the rational exploration of protein-ligand interactions at atomic resolution. However, most existing approaches frame molecular generation as an isolated optimization or a one-to-one matching task, overlooking the shared binding patterns and intrinsic similarities among protein-ligand complexes. This fragmented perspective constrains their ability to capture the fundamental principles governing molecular recognition and binding specificity. Moreover, the limited availability of high-quality experimental data further hampers model generalization and real-world applicability. To address these challenges, we present READ, a retrieval-alignment molecular generation framework that conditions the generative process on small molecules targeting homologous proteins. Retrieved ligands are aligned with a diffusion model across multiple representational spaces and integrated as conditional guidance throughout successive stages of generation. Under a standardized docking-based evaluation protocol, READ achieves consistently strong performance against state-of-the-art SBDD methods. More importantly, it introduces a retrieval-alignment paradigm for structure-based molecular generation, offering a practical framework for early-stage computational hit generation while leaving prospective experimental validation as future work.

arXiv

Generative Modeling with Bayesian Sample Inference

Marten Lienen, Marcel Kollovieh, Stephan Günnemann

We present a novel view of diffusion-like generative modeling from the perspective of iterative Gaussian posterior inference. By treating the generated sample as an unknown variable, we formulate the sampling process in the language of Bayesian probability: at each step, a model predicts the unknown sample from our current belief state and we compute a posterior belief from that prediction. Based on this formulation, we propose the generative model Bayesian Sample Inference (BSI). In addition to a rigorous theoretical analysis, we show that our perspective includes Bayesian Flow Networks (BFNs) and that BSI and BFNs represent the two opposite ends of a range of isotropic hyper-priors over the initial belief state. In our experiments, we demonstrate that BSI improves sample quality over both BFNs and the closely related Variational Diffusion Models on ImageNet32 and ImageNet64, while achieving equivalent log-likelihoods on both datasets.

arXiv

A Probabilistic Framework for Learnable Optimization Algorithms

Peter Ochs, Michael Sucker

We propose a statistical-learning framework for optimization algorithms. The framework is based on probability distributions over optimization trajectories induced by a distribution of optimization problems and a learnable optimization algorithm. Within this setting, optimization performance is represented through measurable performance functionals, including stopping times, contraction factors, and trajectory-level properties. The resulting framework provides a statistical perspective on optimization algorithms, allows their performance to be studied at the population level, and naturally accommodates the learning of optimization algorithms from data. Moreover, it enables the application of statistical-learning techniques to optimization, including PAC-Bayesian generalization guarantees for bounded optimization-specific performance measures. Experiments on convex, non-smooth, non-convex, and stochastic optimization problems illustrate the framework and demonstrate the statistical nature of optimization performance.

arXiv

Separation capacity of linear reservoirs with random connectivity matrix

Youness Boutaib

A natural hypothesis for the success of reservoir computing in generic tasks is the ability of the untrained reservoir to map distinct input time series to separable reservoir states, a property we term separation capacity. In this work, we develop a rigorous mathematical framework for analysing the separation capacity of random linear reservoirs. We show that the expected separation induced by a random reservoir is completely characterised by the spectral properties of a positive semi-definite matrix naturally associated with the connectivity matrix, which we call the generalised matrix of moments. Taking Gaussian connectivity matrices as an example, we investigate how separation depends on the reservoir dimension $N$, the scaling of the connectivity matrix, and structural assumptions such as symmetry. In the symmetric case, we show that, although the classical scaling $N^{-1/2}$ yields the most balanced separation for large reservoirs, the quality of separation inevitably deteriorates as the length of the input time series increases. In contrast, for reservoirs with independent and identically distributed connectivity entries, we prove that the classical scaling $N^{-1/2}$ is asymptotically optimal from the perspective of separation and derive quantitative bounds describing the evolution of separation with the time horizon. Finally, numerical experiments suggest a strong practical connection between balanced separation profiles and downstream learning performance. Beyond providing a theoretical justification for several common reservoir design choices, our results introduce separation capacity as a tractable and informative framework for the analysis of random reservoirs.

arXiv

Exposition on over-squashing problem on GNNs: Current Methods, Benchmarks and Challenges

Dai Shi, Andi Han, Lequan Lin, Yi Guo, Junbin Gao

Graph-based message-passing neural networks (MPNNs) have achieved remarkable success in both node and graph-level learning tasks. However, several identified problems, including over-smoothing (OSM), limited expressive power, and over-squashing (OSQ), still limit the performance of MPNNs. In particular, OSQ serves as the latest identified problem, where MPNNs gradually lose their learning accuracy when long-range dependencies between graph nodes are required. In this work, we provide an exposition on the OSQ problem by summarizing different formulations of OSQ from current literature, as well as the three different categories of approaches for addressing the OSQ problem. In addition, we also discuss the alignment between OSQ and expressive power and the trade-off between OSQ and OSM. Furthermore, we summarize the empirical methods leveraged from existing works to verify the efficiency of OSQ mitigation approaches, with illustrations of their computational complexities. Lastly, we list some open questions that are of interest for further exploration of the OSQ problem along with potential directions from the best of our knowledge.

arXiv

Holdout predictive checks for Bayesian model criticism

Gemma E. Moran, David M. Blei, Rajesh Ranganath

Bayesian modeling helps applied researchers articulate assumptions about their data and develop models tailored for specific applications. Thanks to good methods for approximate posterior inference, researchers can now easily build, use, and revise complicated Bayesian models for large and rich data. These capabilities, however, bring into focus the problem of model criticism. Researchers need tools to diagnose the fitness of their models, to understand where they fall short, and to guide their revision. In this paper we develop a new method for Bayesian model criticism, the holdout predictive check (HPC). HPCs are built on posterior predictive checks (PPCs), a seminal method that checks a model by assessing the posterior predictive distribution on the observed data. However, PPCs use the data twice---both to calculate the posterior predictive and to evaluate it---which can lead to uncalibrated $p$-values. HPCs, in contrast, compare the posterior predictive distribution to a draw from the population distribution, a heldout dataset. This method blends Bayesian modeling with frequentist assessment. Unlike the PPC, we prove that the HPC is properly calibrated. Empirically, we study HPCs on classical regression, a hierarchical model of text data, and factor analysis.

arXiv

Active Regression via Linear-Sample Sparsification

Xue Chen, Eric Price

We present an approach that improves the sample complexity for a variety of curve fitting problems, including active learning for linear regression, polynomial regression, and continuous sparse Fourier transforms. In the active linear regression problem, one would like to estimate the least squares solution $β^*$ minimizing $\|Xβ- y\|_2$ given the entire unlabeled dataset $X \in \mathbb{R}^{n \times d}$ but only observing a small number of labels $y_i$. We show that $O(d)$ labels suffice to find a constant factor approximation $\tildeβ$: \[ \mathbb{E}[\|X\tildeβ - y\|_2^2] \leq 2 \mathbb{E}[\|X β^* - y\|_2^2]. \] This improves on the best previous result of $O(d \log d)$ from leverage score sampling. We also present results for the \emph{inductive} setting, showing when $\tildeβ$ will generalize to fresh samples; these apply to continuous settings such as polynomial regression. Finally, we show how the techniques yield improved results for the non-linear sparse Fourier transform setting.

arXiv

Topology of a Smile: Persistent Homology in Dental Imaging

Leon Dahlmeier, Sara Kališnik, Albert Mehl, Bastian Rieck

CBCT (Cone Beam Computed Tomography) scans provide detailed three-dimensional images, widely used in dentistry for diagnostic and treatment planning tasks. While invaluable, analyzing and documenting these scans is labor-intensive, prompting efforts to automate key steps like the classification and segmentation of anatomical structures to identify tooth types and associated pathologies. In this article, we propose an approach to automation that leverages persistent homology, a framework from topological data analysis that studies the shape of data by identifying features like connected components, holes, and voids across multiple scales. Persistent homology, together with a support vector machine, allows us to classify teeth in a CBCT scan and to perform diagnostics. Our method advances the state of the art, reaching average accuracy scores of 97.67% for tooth-labeling and 96.77% for diagnostic tasks, outperforming a CNN trained on the same data with accuracy of 70.27% and 86.67%, respectively.

arXiv

MV2: Multi-View Multi-Vehicle Driving Dataset for Novel View Synthesis

Sanjay Bhargav Dharavath, Hanvitha Saraswathi Mukkamala, Faizan Farooq Khan, Ioannis Kakogeorgiou, Aditya Arun, C. V. Jawahar, Zakaria Laskar

Differentiable rendering has advanced novel view synthesis (NVS), yet applying it to real-world driving remains difficult due to sparse capture viewpoints, dynamic objects, and limited multi-trajectory data. We introduce the Multi-View Multi-Vehicle (MV2) dataset and benchmark for evaluating NVS models under large viewpoint changes in dynamic urban scenes. MV2 features synchronized captures from a car, scooter, and drone, each following distinct yet synchronized trajectories. Training NVS methods on one vehicle's camera stream and testing on another enables evaluation under substantially larger viewpoint variations than existing single-trajectory datasets. All sequences are registered via Structure-from-Motion and camera poses verified using manual pixel-level correspondence annotations, yielding 50 high-quality scenes with 12000 images. Benchmarking recent NVS and camera pose estimation methods shows that NVS performance degrades with increasing viewpoint disparity, and that feed-forward pose estimators notably lag behind optimization-based approaches, highlighting MV2 as a rigorous testbed for NVS in driving. The dataset, benchmark protocol, and project resources are available at https://mv2-dataset.github.io/.

arXiv

ORV: 4D Occupancy-centric Robot Video Generation

Xiuyu Yang, Bohan Li, Shaocong Xu, Nan Wang, Chongjie Ye, Zhaoxi Chen, Minghan Qin, Yikang Ding, Zheng Zhu, Xin Jin, Hang Zhao, Hao Zhao

Recent embodied intelligence suffers from data scarcity, while conventional simulators lack visual realism. Controllable video generation is emerging as a promising data engine, yet current action-conditioned methods still fall short: generated videos are limited in fidelity and temporal consistency, poorly aligned with controls, and often constrained to singleview settings. We attribute these issues to the representational gap between sparse control inputs and dense pixel outputs. Thus, we introduce ORV, a 4D occupancy-centric framework for robot video generation that couples action priors with occupancy-derived visual priors. Concretely, we align chunked 7-DoF actions with video latents via an Action-Expert AdaLN modulation, and inject 2D renderings of 4D semantic occupancy into the generation process as soft guidance. Meanwhile, a central obstacle is the lack of occupancy data for embodied scenarios; we therefore curate ORV-Data, a large-scale, high-quality 4D semantic occupancy dataset of robot manipulation. Across BridgeV2, DROID, and RT-1, ORV improves video generation quality and controllability, achieving 18.8% lower FVD than state of the art, +3.5% success rate on visual planning, and +6.4% success rate on policy learning. Beyond singleview generation, ORV natively supports multiview consistent synthesis and enables simulation-to-real transfer despite significant domain gaps. Code, models, and data are at: https://orangesodahub.github.io/ORV

arXiv

Evolve Vision-Language-Action Model into an Agent with On-the-fly Tool-use

Yi Ding, Yanzhao Yu, Xili Dai, Xianbiao Qi, Peiwen Sun, Xueqian Wang, Xiangyu Yue, Jianan Wang

This paper integrates end-to-end Visual-Language-Action (VLA) models with agentic tool-use to propose Agentic Robot with Tool-use (ART). ART is a tool-injection framework that tunes any VLA model to leverage off-the-shelf tool modules for low-level vision, high-level affordance, and embodiment enhancement. Compared to vanilla VLA models with a whole continuous action solution space, ART reduces the complexity of the action solution space through tool-use, which not only improves generalizability across different tasks but also reduces data dependency. To demonstrate the advantages (high generalizability and low data dependency) of this framework, we first built a dataset of 30K tool-use trajectories and action demonstrations, which is much smaller than those used by baseline methods. We then designed a training regimen for long-trajectory tool-use reasoning in challenging environments. Experiments show that ART achieves a 20% higher success rate than mainstream baselines on simulation and real-world tasks, such as pick-and-place in the dark at novel viewpoints. Empirical results highlight the benefits of an agent-based approach: modular tool utilization enables more efficient training, lightweight deployment, and scalable integration of new tools. This design fosters robustness, adaptability, and extensibility, paving the way for the practical deployment of VLA systems in complex real-world scenarios.

arXiv

Looks Can be Deceiving: Annotator and Reviewer Performance Across Imagery Sources in Crowd-Sourced Aerial Damage Assessment

Thomas Manzini, Priyankari Perali, Raisa Karnik, Stephen Johnson, Robin R. Murphy

This paper presents the first known empirical investigation of annotator and reviewer performance across multi-source remotely sensed imagery, evaluating human labeling across drone, crewed aviation, and satellite views. Because existing aerial imagery datasets rely predominantly on single-source imagery, there is no currently established state of practice for efficiently allocating human labor to curate large-scale, multi-source aerial datasets. This work addresses this limitation by analyzing annotator and reviewer performance within a post-disaster building damage assessment dataset of 9 disasters, where 20041 buildings in drone, 20695 buildings in crewed aviation, and 33392 buildings in satellite imagery were labeled. These labels, provided by 187 annotators, were then refined through two successive quality-control stages: a single-reviewer pass followed by a consensus-committee review. Our analysis reveals two findings that raise questions for standard crowd-sourcing practices. First, initial annotations were revised by the final committee at rates that rise steeply from higher- to lower-resolution sources (25.27% for crewed aviation and 36.95% for satellite), with the same ordering at every observed workflow stage. Second, a single individual review reduced but did not resolve this disagreement: after review, the committee still revised 6.85% of drone, 14.05% of crewed, and 20.86% of satellite labels. These observations suggest that, in workflows like this one, uniform review allocation leaves the most residual disagreement in lower-resolution imagery. Based on this evidence, and consistent with prior work on adaptive task assignment and budget-aware quality control, this paper offers three recommendations for multi-source dataset curation.

arXiv

PaSTel: Anchoring Histology in Spatial Transcriptomics via Multi-Scale Hierarchical Bio-Prior Contrastive Pretraining

Azim Dehghani Amirabad, Junchao Zhu, Pushpak Pati, Walid Abdelmoula, Tommaso Mansi, Rui Liao

Spatial transcriptomics (ST) links tissue morphology with molecular programs, motivating multimodal pretraining methods that align histology images with gene expression. However, existing approaches suffer from two key limitations: spatially informative gene selection is often dominated by ubiquitous housekeeping genes, leading to weakly discriminative representations, and independent spot-patch alignment fails to capture spatial dependencies that are critical for tissue organization. To address these challenges, we introduce PaSTel, a hierarchical multimodal pretraining framework that integrates biological priors at three levels. At the spot level, TF-IDF reweighting is used to identify spatially informative genes; at the functional level, curated KEGG pathways serve as anchors for encoding global biological semantics; and at the regional level, spatial clustering aggregates neighboring spots to model meso-scale tissue structure. Across multiple downstream tasks, PaSTel consistently outperforms existing vision and vision-omics encoders, demonstrating that incorporating multiscale biological priors yields more informative and transferable representations for spatial transcriptomics.

arXiv

SpIn-ViT: Designing a Sparsity-Induced Vision Transformer That Is Mechanistically Interpretable

Philip H. Lee, Parth Padalkar

Mechanistic interpretability has recently expanded to Vision Transformers (ViTs), with Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) increasingly used as post-hoc tools to decompose internal representations into sparse and more interpretable features. However, because post-hoc SAEs are trained on frozen representations after the ViT has already been optimized, their latent features are not directly aligned with the downstream classification objective. We introduce SpIn-ViT, a framework that jointly trains a pretrained ViT and a modified SAE end-to-end, directly aligning sparse patch-level representations with image classification. SpIn-ViT learns semantically coherent neuron activations that localize meaningful image regions while maintaining competitive predictive performance. We evaluate SpIn-ViT across nine image-classification benchmarks using classification accuracy, quantitative interpretability metrics, AI-based and Human evaluations. Compared with the previous state-of-the-art post-hoc SAE method, SpIn-ViT achieves 8.84% higher average classification accuracy, an AI-based interpretability score nearly four times as high, and a human-evaluation score more than twice as high. We further extract interpretable rule-sets using the SAE neurons to create neurosymbolic models which achieve 5.97% higher average classification accuracy while requiring a 58.8\% smaller rule-set than the neurosymbolic models created from the SOTA post-hoc SAE method.

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