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Search papers from 30+ top conferences, including NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, CVPR, ACL and AAAI. Filter by keyword, then open any paper for its abstract, authors and links.

arXiv

Trident : How to Break Deep Reinforcement Learning Cyber Defenses (Agentic)

Ryozo Masukawa, Ian Bryant, Armita Kazeminajafabadi, Sanggeon Yun, Hyunwoo Oh, SungHeon Jeong, Nathaniel D. Bastian, Mahdi Imani, Mohsen Imani

Autonomous cyber defense systems based on Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) have attracted significant research attention, yet remain evaluated almost exclusively against static, heuristic red agents, leaving their robustness against adaptive threats critically understudied. Meanwhile, recent advances in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) have improved LLM reasoning, but their integration into cybersecurity remains elusive due to the absence of suitable benchmark environments and interaction datasets. To bridge this gap, we introduce Trident, an agentic LLM red teaming framework comprising three components: a dynamic benchmark with isolated sandbox servers spanning CybORG CAGE 4 and CyberWheel, a dataset comprises over 13,000 high-fidelity red-blue interaction trajectories for RLVR, and a ``Code-as-Policy'' RLVR agentic architecture Trident Agentic). The latter reformulates red agent training as a contextual bandit via a tripartite Log Summarizer--Planner--Coder design, where a trainable Planner generates complete attack strategies from compressed execution logs, which a frozen Coder translates into executable Python policies deployed against live DRL defenders. Empirical evaluations reveal a fundamental brittleness in existing defenses: with a single trainable 7B planner, Trident reduces blue agent defensive performance by an average of 522% compared to static red agent baselines while autonomously discovering emergent behaviors such as decoy avoidance and adaptive state prioritization that static heuristics entirely fail to uncover.

arXiv

Adaptive Finite-Budget Training for CVaR Risk-Aware Q-Learning

Yifan Wu, Junjie Lei, Wenjie Huang

Risk-aware Q-learning (RaQL) provides a model-free, two-timescale estimator for dynamic risk objectives, but its finite-budget behavior remains fragile: fixed inner-loop hyperparameters can produce unstable value estimates, persistent Bellman residuals, and inefficient sample reuse. This paper proposes an adaptive training controller for Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) RaQL and evaluates it on a daily Bitcoin trading task. The controller preserves the original CVaR estimator and Bellman fixed point; instead, it redesigns the training procedure through six coordinated mechanisms: per-cell inner-step sizing, outer-rate-matched decay synchronization, a short early correction for the VaR-like inner variable, a coverage-first-then-greedy sample allocation rule, progressive suffix aggregation of mature inner estimates, and data-driven calibration of key scales from online-observable quantities. Across 20 random seeds and 856,000 inner-transition samples, the controller reduces the mean empirical CVaR Bellman residual by approximately 85% relative to the fixed-parameter baseline (MeanBEQ: 1.2202 to 0.1854; MeanBEV: 1.1624 to 0.0535) and maintains stability across CVaR levels, discount factors, and training budgets. On the chronological out-of-sample test set, the learned policy attains a Sharpe ratio of 0.9281 with a maximum drawdown of 6.46% after transaction costs. Although buy-and-hold yields a higher cumulative return (35.43% vs. 23.61%), the adaptive policy achieves far lower volatility (9.57% vs. 47.93%), drawdown, and CVaR loss. These results demonstrate that adaptive finite-budget training design, applied solely to the training procedure without altering the risk objective, can materially improve the reliability and risk-adjusted performance of risk-aware Q-learning in financial applications.

arXiv

Robust Low-Tubal-Rank Tensor Completion under Cross-Concentrated Sampling

HanQin Cai, Longxiu Huang, Jing Qin, Chengyue Wu

Tensor cross-concentrated sampling (t-CCS) bridges entrywise sampling and t-CUR slice-wise sampling by observing entries only within selected horizontal and lateral slices. Existing t-CCS completion methods, however, assume that the observations are free of gross corruption. In this work, we study robust recovery of a third-order low-tubal-rank tensor from partial t-CCS observations contaminated by sparse, arbitrarily large outliers. We propose Robust Iterative t-CUR (R-ItCUR), a tensor-native algorithm that partitions the sampled tensor cross into two exterior blocks and an intersection block, applies adaptive blockwise Welsch correction for outlier suppression, and updates the low-rank component through projected blockwise gradient descent. By operating directly on the sampled cross, R-ItCUR avoids reconstructing the full tensor throughout the iterations, resulting in substantial memory and computational savings. Experiments on synthetic tensors, cardiac MRI data, and three-dimensional seismic data demonstrate accurate recovery and strong robustness to sparse gross corruptions. The results further highlight the importance of explicitly exploiting the cross-concentrated sampling structure in robust tensor completion.

arXiv

When Correct Solutions Repeat: Rarity-Aware Credit Redistribution for GRPO

Zhe Cao, Miaowen Wen, Fangjiong Chen

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) com- monly optimizes each correct completion as an independent learning signal. In GRPO, this completion-level uniformity creates structure-level skew: recurring correct solution forms accumulate positive coefficient mass in proportion to how often they are sampled, while rare forms receive limited credit. We formalize this behavior as multiplicity-induced structure-level credit concentration and introduce a partition- conditioned rule that redistributes positive advantages accord- ing to cluster rarity. Cue-GRPO instantiates this rule with- out auxiliary-model inference by using deterministic Strategy Cues to construct rollout-local partitions of verified-correct traces. Across Qwen2.5-Math-7B and Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, Cue-GRPO improves AIME repeated-sampling performance, with the largest gains at high sampling budgets. Credit Re- distribution (CR) under Judge Partitions (JP) further indi- cates that the proposed redistribution mechanism can oper- ate with judge-derived partitions. Cue-GRPO adds only 6% wall-clock training overhead over GRPO. These results sup- port structure-level credit redistribution as a practical design axis for RLVR, with Strategy Cues providing a low-overhead implementation for competition mathematics. Code is avail- able at https://github.com/CzZ12/When-Correct-Solutions- Repeat-Rarity-Aware-Credit-Redistribution-for-GRPO.

arXiv

Maglev: Sliding Recurrent Memory

Bo Liu, Qiang Liu

We introduce \ours{}, a recurrent Transformer architecture with fixed-size memory that generalizes sliding-window attention while remaining parallelizable during training. \ours{} consists of two coupled models: a prefiller $Q$, which leverages full attention\footnote{In practice, we use interleaved full and sliding-window attention for $Q$, as this yields stronger performance. The essential requirement is that $Q$ be more expressive than $P$, with access to the full history.} to produce memory targets $m'_t$, and a decoder $P$, which uses only sliding-window attention and recurrent K/V injection to produce decoder memories $m_t$ for next-token prediction. We train \ours{} with a memory consistency loss that aligns $m_t$ with $m'_t$, allowing inference to use $P$ alone. Empirically, \ours{} improves validation loss and downstream pretraining benchmarks over sliding-window and latent recurrent transformer baselines. Moreover, sharing parameters between $P$ and $Q$ reduces parameter memory while preserving most of the gains.

arXiv

Breaking the Periodicity Assumption: Robust Tensorial Multi-View Clustering via Graph-Spectral Low-Rank Learning

Jintian Ji, Xingsu Li, Songhe Feng

Tensorial multi-view clustering (TMC) has achieved strong performance due to its ability to capture high-order correlations across multiple views. Most existing t-SVD-based TMC frameworks apply the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) along the sample mode to impose frequency-domain low-rank constraints. However, we reveal that this widely adopted design critically relies on an implicit ``periodicity assumption'' induced by the sample arrangement. When samples are ordered by class, neighboring indices tend to be semantically similar, creating artificial local continuity along the sample mode and a favorable spectral structure for FFT-based low-rank regularization. Once this ordering is removed by random permutation, existing t-SVD-based TMC methods suffer severe performance degradation. This strong sensitivity to class ordering conflicts with the permutation-invariant nature of clustering and indicates that part of the reported performance may be attributed to a privileged sample arrangement rather than genuine high-order structure modeling. In this paper, we systematically investigate this phenomenon and its underlying algebraic and spectral mechanisms. To address this fundamental flaw, we further propose a graph-spectral low-rank tensor learning framework based on the Graph Fourier Transform (GFT), which replaces the fixed Fourier basis along the sample mode with a data-driven graph spectral basis, thereby capturing the intrinsic manifold structure without relying on a particular sample ordering. Moreover, we develop an anchor-based variant to address large-scale datasets efficiently. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks validate our findings and demonstrate the competitive or superior performance of the proposed methods compared with state-of-the-art TMC approaches.

arXiv

SpecBox: Speculative Sandbox Scheduling for Efficient LLM Agent Serving

Yihui Zhang, Tianyu Wo, Jinghao Wang, Xiaoyang Sun, Menghao Zhang, Cangzhou Yuan, Li Li, Chunming Hu, Albert Y. Zomaya, Renyu Yang

As LLM agents increasingly rely on the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to invoke isolated external sandboxes, disaggregated sandbox deployment introduces a fundamental tension between resource utilization and interactive tail latency. Persistent long-lived sandbox reservations incur excessive memory overhead at scale, while lazy on-demand instantiation generates severe cold-start penalties that degrade response performance under multi-tenant, multi-turn agent workloads. To resolve this dilemma, we present SpecBox, a runtime built around speculative sandbox preallocation tailored for dynamic LLM agent execution pipelines. At its core, SpecBox implements keyword matching and streaming semantic embedding to enable intent-driven sandbox prewarming, which identifies pending tool execution demands mid-LLM token generation and fully overlaps sandbox bootstrapping with model inference. To extend prewarming windows across sequential agent steps, the framework leverages context-aware stochastic prefetching atop a sandbox dependency graph to probabilistically forecast future sandbox switches ahead of execution. We complement these speculative mechanisms with two orthogonal optimizations: a semantic result cache that prunes redundant repeated sandbox invocations, and a dedicated out-of-band shared-memory transport plane that bypasses conventional network serialization to deliver zero-copy artifact transfers. Evaluated on high-concurrency multi-turn agent traces, our prototype demonstrates that SpecBox cuts P99 end-to-end latency by up to $2.9\times$ relative to the on-demand sandbox baseline, while slashing peak memory consumption by $45.9\%$ compared to permanently reserved sandbox deployments.

arXiv

Subject-Level Heterogeneity in EEG Motor Imagery Decoding: A Large-Scale Benchmark and Portfolio-Based Reduction of the Search Space

Xavier Vasques, Paul Barbaste, Olivier Oullier

Robust EEG motor imagery decoding remains limited by strong inter-individual variability, making it difficult to identify pipelines that generalize across users. We present a large-scale, standardized within-session benchmark of decoding pipelines across three public datasets: Cho2017 (52 subjects), PhysionetMI (109 subjects), and Zhou2016 (4 subjects). Using a common MOABB LeftRightImagery setting, two frequency bands (8-15 Hz and 8-30 Hz), and a broad combination of feature extraction, preprocessing, and classification steps, we analyzed 216,714 raw evaluation rows, which after structured aggregation yielded 44,928, 109,000, and 4,192 subject-level observations respectively. Covariance tangent-space projection (cov-tgsp) and Common Spatial Patterns (CSP) consistently defined the strongest methodological families, though their relative ordering was dataset-dependent. On Cho2017, the best family-level mean accuracy came from cov-tgsp in 8-30 Hz (0.712 +/- 0.140), whereas Zhou2016 favored CSP (0.832 +/- 0.121 in 8-15 Hz). These aggregate rankings concealed substantial subject-level heterogeneity: 42 distinct winning pipelines across 52 Cho2017 subjects, and 93 across 109 PhysionetMI subjects. We then used the benchmark as an empirical performance landscape for building compact portfolios of pipelines of size K. Several construction procedures were compared, including a ranking-based Top-K Mean heuristic and search-based strategies. Results were broadly consistent, with Top-K Mean giving the best trade-off. A single best global pipeline already retained 94.2% of the oracle in Cho2017 and 81.8% in PhysionetMI; at K = 12, oracle retention rose to 96.5% and 90.0%. The landscape is therefore subject-dependent, and this heterogeneity can be exploited through compact portfolios that make personalization more feasible.

arXiv

Cautious optimism for deep parameterized quantum circuits

Marie Kempkes, Elies Gil-Fuster, Carlos Bravo-Prieto, Aroosa Ijaz, Alissa Wilms, Jens Eisert, Evert van Nieuwenburg, Vedran Dunjko

A central challenge in quantum machine learning is understanding the scaling behavior of parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs). In particular, it remains unclear how their performance on unseen data changes as the number of trainable parameters increases. Prior works have derived formal generalization guarantees for quantum models, but it is well-known that many such results do not fully characterize generalization behavior in practice. In this work, we show that gradient-based PQCs can exhibit improved performance on unseen data as model size increases, displaying the phenomenon of double descent. This contrasts with the traditional view that larger models lead to degraded generalization. We provide analytical results rigorously underpinning this behavior by leveraging add-one-in perturbation techniques and spectral properties of random matrices. We support these results with numerical experiments on re-uploading PQCs across several data sets and training set sizes, consistently observing the predicted double descent behavior. While other obstacles on the path toward practical quantum machine learning remain, our finding that deeper parameterized quantum circuits do not necessarily exhibit degraded performance provides reasons for cautious optimism.

arXiv

Guarantees by Construction for Learned Finite Volume Schemes on Steady Supersonic Flow

Denis Gueyffier

A second order finite volume scheme rests on two local quantities: a gradient reconstructed in each cell, and a limiter which scales it down where the reconstruction would overshoot. Both are set by fixed formulas, and on coarse unstructured meshes a small network can supply better values. But a network is free to output anything, and the usual safeguard is a penalty in the training loss, which discourages inadmissible states without preventing them. We replace the penalty by a hard constraint. The network still sets both quantities, and every value it can produce lies inside safe bounds: its stencil weights cannot cancel a neighbour, and its limiter is capped by the local flow. The flux, the wall treatment and the time step are not learned and carry their own guarantees. Admissibility therefore holds for every value of the weights rather than as an outcome of training, and no negative density or pressure occurred in any computation reported here. Because the scheme is safe whatever the network does, we could ask what the network contributes. We test it on supersonic channel flow over an obstacle, including the forward facing step of Woodward and Colella. Learning lowers the error by 38% on an unseen geometry and 29% on an unseen obstacle topology, measured against the same scheme with the network switched off. The method aims at the accuracy of a fine mesh for the cost of a coarse one, and refining once improves the error fourfold while multiplying the run time by eight. Learning secures half of this improvement for a sixth of this time. All of this comes from one of the two quantities the network sets. The gradient reconstruction reproduces the full effect on its own, and the limiter accounts for about a tenth as much. This also explains why the gain fades beyond the Mach numbers the weights were trained on.

arXiv

Plausibility-Driven Prioritization of Candidate Biomedical Annotations

Emanuele Cavalleri, Miad Alavinezhad, Dario Malchiodi, Marco Mesiti

The rapid growth of biomedical knowledge has made the validation of automatically generated biological annotations a major bottleneck in biomedical curation. While computational methods can rapidly produce large numbers of candidate annotations, determining which are biologically valid still requires costly expert review. Prioritizing these candidates before manual curation has therefore become a fundamental challenge. Machine learning techniques can support this process by exploiting biomedical knowledge graphs (bioKGs), which capture biological entities and their functional associations. In this work, we propose a framework that leverages bioKGs to estimate the plausibility of candidate annotations and guide expert curation. Starting from knowledge graph embeddings, we train relation-specific binary classifiers using a community-based negative sampling strategy to obtain reliable confidence estimates. We then introduce a family of plausibility measures that combine classifier confidence, classifier reliability, and the semantic context provided by alternative relationships involving the same pair of biological entities. Unlike conventional confidence estimation, the proposed approach explicitly accounts for multiple biologically meaningful relations that may coexist between the same entities. Experimental results on five large bioKGs demonstrate that the proposed negative sampling strategy consistently improves classifier robustness, increasing balanced accuracy by an average of 5.8%. Moreover, the plausibility measures outperform classifier confidence alone, enabling more effective prioritization of candidate annotations for expert review. Overall, our results show that the use of bioKGs improves the efficiency of AI-assisted biomedical curation while preserving expert control over the final annotation assessment.

arXiv

Optimizing the Preconditioner: A Black-box Online-to-Nonconvex Conversion with Static Regret Minimization Oracles

Haichen Hu, David Simchi-Levi

We study whether stochastic nonconvex optimization can be reduced to ordinary static regret minimization in online convex optimization in a black-box manner. For smooth nonconvex objectives, our reduction maintains a predictable gradient tracker, while a black-box online learner selects a preconditioner that determines how this tracker is transformed into the update direction. The learner receives linear convex losses and is evaluated against a single fixed comparator over one undiscounted online game. For a $β$-smooth objective with range bounded by $M$ and an unbiased stochastic-gradient oracle with variance bounded by \(σ^2\), we establish $$\frac{1}{T}\sum_{t=1}^T \mathbb E\!\left[\|\nabla f(x_t)\|_2^2\right] \lesssim \frac{σ\sqrt{Mβ}}{\sqrt T} + \frac{\sqrt{Mβ}\, \mathscr R_T(\mathcal A,I_d)}{T} + \frac{Mβ}{T}.$$ Consequently, any black-box OCO algorithm with $\mathscr R_T(\mathcal A,I_d)=O(\sqrt T)$ recovers the classical $O(\frac{1}{\sqrt{T}})$ convergence rate. We further show that the same black-box framework extends beyond the smooth setting to Lipschitz nonconvex objectives without Lipschitz continuous gradients. Importantly, this extension continues to rely only on an ordinary static-regret guarantee and requires no stronger notion of online regret. When the OCO oracle admits square-root static regret, the resulting conversion achieves the optimal $O(T^{-2/7})$ convergence rate for the corresponding Goldstein stationary point. These results resolve the open problem posed by Chen and Hazan (2024). More broadly, our framework separates optimizer design into gradient prediction and online preconditioner selection, providing a principled perspective on how adaptive optimization methods may be understood through static regret and applied in nonconvex optimization.

arXiv

Decision Making Needs Uncertainty Quantification [Lecture Notes]

Osvaldo Simeone

Many signal processing systems ultimately exist to {act}. Whenever the state variable that determines the action to be taken by a decision maker, or agent, is uncertain, the way that uncertainty is represented decides how well the agent performs and how much its performance can be trusted. This lecture note develops, from first principles and within a single decision-theoretic setting, the link between the {objective} and the knowledge of an agent and the form of uncertainty representation that is sufficient to act optimally. To start, assuming a known environment distribution, we show that a risk-neutral agent needs the posterior distribution over the state, whereas a risk-averse agent can rely without loss of optimality on a {prediction set} and a worst-case decision rule. We then turn to the case in which the environment is unknown, and identify three complementary approaches to address the resulting epistemic uncertainty: calibration of a fixed predictor, credal (ambiguity) sets with distributionally robust optimization, and Bayesian inference over model parameters. The common thread is that reliable decisions require an uncertainty representation matched to the decision objective and to the knowledge profile of the agent, together with a guarantee that certifies the utility the agent will actually obtain.

arXiv

An interpretable Good--Turing restart criterion for k-means++

Renato Cordeiro de Amorim

The k-means++ algorithm is commonly restarted multiple times to avoid poor local optima, yet the number of restarts is almost always chosen arbitrarily and applied uniformly regardless of data set difficulty. This undermines any comparison relying on such a choice and wastes computation on easy data sets while potentially under-serving hard ones. Here, we introduce the Good-Turing Restart Criterion (GTRC). This combines a Good-Turing estimate, a proven unconditional bound, and a confidence-based bound on the probability that a further restart would improve on the current result, stopping once this probability falls below a user-specified tolerance. Our experiments on 34 real-world data sets show that GTRC identifies the point beyond which further k-means++ restarts yield only negligible improvement, achieving a more favourable balance between the number of restarts used and clustering quality than three existing stopping rules for multistart local search and popular fixed restart counts. Software: https://github.com/RCdeAmorim/Good-Turing-Restart-Criterion.

arXiv

A More Accurate Algorithm Comparison through A/B Testing using Offline Evaluation Methods

Koki Konishi, Masataka Ushiku, Yuta Saito

A/B testing is the gold standard for selecting the better algorithm in online services. While offline evaluation has attracted attention as a safer alternative due to the high experimental costs and the potential risk of degrading user experience and revenue in A/B testing, it is widely recognized that the estimation accuracy of offline evaluation is substantially lower. As a result, final selection decisions are typically made through A/B testing. Contrary to this conventional view, we reveal a counterintuitive phenomenon in which A/B testing can produce a higher algorithm selection error rate than offline evaluation. This occurs because the sample mean estimator used in A/B testing does not induce positive correlation, which is crucial for reducing critical selection errors, namely underestimating the truly superior algorithm and overestimating the truly inferior one. In contrast, offline evaluation methods unintentionally generate this beneficial correlation by relying on shared offline data when estimating and comparing the performance of multiple algorithms. Building on this insight, we propose an estimator that intentionally induces positive correlation to improve algorithm selection in A/B testing. The key idea is to introduce a hypothetical middle algorithm and to estimate the performance difference between algorithms A, M, and B in a stepwise manner using shared data at each step. This approach enables the application of offline evaluation techniques in each step, thereby inducing positive correlation and reducing critical selection errors. Furthermore, we derive the optimal middle algorithm regarding the resulting variance and analyze its advantages over existing methods through bias-variance analysis. Experiments on real-world data demonstrate that our estimator achieves the same selection error rate as existing approaches while using only one half of the A/B testing data.

arXiv

AdaBoosting Text Prompts for Vision-Language Models

Seokhee Jin, Changhwan Sung, Sunung Mun, Hoyoung Kim, Jungseul Ok

The classification accuracy of pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) relies on the quality of the text prompts. Handcrafted templates and Large Language Model (LLM)-generated descriptions not only make predictions more interpretable, but also enable reuse of the same prompts across heterogeneous VLMs. Recent works construct task-adapted text prompts with a small number of labeled images. However, existing few-shot text prompting methods do not explicitly focus on misclassified examples during prompt construction, leading to only marginal improvements even as more shots become available. To fully exploit few-shot supervision, we propose Text Prompt Boosting (TPB), an AdaBoost-inspired framework that treats each text-prompt-based classifier as a weak learner and sequentially aggregates them into a strong ensemble by explicitly targeting hard, misclassified examples. Extensive experiments show that TPB preserves task-intrinsic, model-agnostic cues in text space, enabling robust cross-model transfer. Across eleven classification benchmarks, TPB improves accuracy on the source model and preserves shot-driven gains when transferred to larger, more capable VLMs, where existing methods struggle to sustain such improvements.

arXiv

GRIMIP: A General Framework for Instance-Specific Configuration of MIP Solvers Using LLMs

Yidong Luo, Xuemin Chen, Chenguang Wang, Fangzhou Zhu, Tao Zhong, Tianshu Yu

Configuring the hyperparameters of Mixed-integer programming (MIP) solvers is a high-dimensional, instance-dependent optimization problem where suboptimal settings can degrade solving time by orders of magnitude. Default configurations are often suboptimal, while traditional tuning methods either suffer from the ``cold-start'' problem and inefficient search or heavily rely on expert experience. This paper introduces \textbf{GRIMIP} (\textbf{\underline{G}}eneral \textbf{\underline{R}}easoning for \textbf{\underline{I}}nstance-specific \textbf{\underline{MIP}} configuration), a novel hybrid intelligence framework that synergistically integrates the semantic reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) with the sample-efficient search of Bayesian Optimization (BO). GRIMIP enables the LLM to function as a complete probabilistic surrogate within the BO loop, significantly improving performance and reducing sampling and evaluation costs. On seven benchmarks including MIPLIB, GRIMIP achieves over 40\% reduction in Primal-Dual Integral on hard instances, outperforming SMAC and other LLM-assisted BO methods. By granting LLMs sufficient autonomy, GRIMIP combines the expert-level reasoning of LLMs with the efficient search of BO, achieving state-of-the-art performance.

arXiv

MemNovo: Look Back at the Spectrum for Balanced De Novo Peptide Sequencing from Mass Spectrometry

Dongxin Lyu, Jingbo Zhou, hongxin xiang, Yuqiang Li, Jun Xia

De novo peptide sequencing from tandem mass spectrometry is pivotal in proteomics, enabling identification of novel peptides without reference databases. While recent Transformer-based encoder-decoder models have achieved remarkable performance, we uncover a critical pathology in their inference dynamics. Through comprehensive feature scaling experiments, we demonstrate that existing auto-regressive peptide decoders tend to over-rely on generated-sequence priors while progressively under-utilizing fine-grained physical evidence from the input mass spectrum. This phenomenon leads to suboptimal results, where generated peptide sequences are biologically plausible yet not faithful to the input spectrum. To rectify this, we propose MemNovo, a training-free and plug-and-play mechanism that re-balances peptide and spectral contributions at inference time. MemNovo alleviates the information bottleneck by establishing a persistent spectral memory bank and injecting retrieved features directly into the final decoding stage via an ultra-conservative residual connection. Theoretical analysis confirms that this mechanism restores the mutual information between the decoder state and the raw spectrum. Extensive experiments on the Nine Species benchmark with two representative baselines, Casanovo and InstaNovo, demonstrate that MemNovo consistently improves both amino acid precision and peptide precision, achieving up to 39.1% relative improvement in peptide precision for Casanovo and up to 3.9% for InstaNovo, with negligible computational overhead.

arXiv

Distributionally Robust Transfer Learning with Structurally Missing Covariates, with Application to Cross-National Cardiac Arrest Prediction

Siqi Li, Chuan Hong, Ziye Tian, Benjamin Sieu-Hon Leong, Koshi Nakagawa, Hideharu Tanaka, Sang Do Shin, Khuong Quoc Dai, Do Ngoc Son, Marcus Eng Hock Ong, Nan Liu, Molei Liu

Deploying clinical prediction models across healthcare systems often fails when key training covariates are unavailable at deployment and labeled outcomes are limited in the target domain. For example, high-performing models for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) rely on detailed prehospital measurements routinely collected in high-resource settings but unavailable in many international registries. Existing methods either discard missing covariates, sacrificing predictive information, or rely on untestable assumptions about their target distribution. We propose DRUM (\underline{D}istributionally \underline{R}obust \underline{U}nsupervised transfer learning with structurally \underline{M}issing covariates), a framework that transfers prediction models to target populations where certain covariates are structurally absent and outcome labels are unavailable. DRUM partitions covariates into shared components ($X$), observed across all settings, and missing components ($A$), observed only in the source. Rather than imputing missing covariates, DRUM optimizes worst-case predictive performance over the unknown target distribution of $A \mid X$ using a neural network generator, with a robustness parameter controlling allowable deviation from the source conditional. We further develop a bias correction procedure that reduces sensitivity to nuisance estimation error. Simulations show substantial improvements in both mean and worst-case prediction error under distribution shift. Applied to cross-national OHCA prediction, transferring models from a US registry to multiple Asian registries where prehospital variables are unrecorded, DRUM yields better-calibrated predictions and improved clinical classification performance across sites.

arXiv

Stable Attention Response for Reliable Precipitation Nowcasting

Penghui Wen, Zexin Hu, Sen Zhang, Patrick Filippi, Xiaogang Zhu, Allen Benter, Thomas Bishop, Zhiyong Wang, Kun Hu

Precipitation nowcasting remains challenging due to the highly localized, rapidly evolving, and heterogeneous nature of atmospheric dynamics. Although recent methods increasingly adopt attention-based architectures in both unimodal and multimodal settings, they mainly emphasize stronger representation learning and prediction capacity, while paying less attention to the stability of attention responses across samples. In this work, we show that cross-sample instability of attention-response energy is an important and previously underexplored source of forecasting unreliability. Empirically, inaccurate forecasts are associated with larger attention-response energy variance across heads and layers. Theoretically, we show that cross-sample variability can propagate through self-attention, and enlarge a lower bound on prediction error. Based on this insight, we propose HARECast, a Head-wise Attention Response Energy-regulated framework for precipitation nowcasting. HARECast explicitly models head-wise attention-response energy and stabilizes it through a group-wise regularization objective that reduces cross-sample fluctuations. The proposed formulation is generic and applicable to both unimodal and multimodal nowcasting architectures. We instantiate HARECast in a standard forecasting pipeline with reconstruction branches and a diffusion-based predictor, and evaluate it on commonly used benchmarks--SEVIR and MeteoNet. Experimental results demonstrate that HARECast achieves state-of-the-art performance.

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