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#machine learning Preprint Aug 2026

Personalized and Multi-View Representation for Federated Cold-Start Recommendation

Federated recommendation (FedRec) enables personalized modeling without centralizing users'interaction histories, but most existing methods assume a fixed item pool and thus overlook the practical cold-item setting where new items continuously arrive. Under the dual-sided constraint, where the server cannot access clients'interactions while clients cannot access the server's proprietary item attribute features, prior federated cold-start recommendation approaches suffer from three structural limitations: a lack of personalization, compositionality failure caused by forcing heterogeneous semantics into a single embedding space, and training- and communication-inefficiency arising from explicit alignment between separate collaborative and attribute representations. To address these challenges, we propose Personalized and Multi-view Representation for Federated Cold-Start Recommendation (PMFRec). PMFRec learns a personalized representation generator to produce user-specific item representations from attribute features, and introduces a global multi-view encoder with item-adaptive gating and an orthogonality objective to capture complementary semantic views while reducing cross-view redundancy. In addition, PMFRec fuses collaborative and attribute knowledge into a single exchanged item representation, eliminating the need for an explicit client-side regularizer and reducing communication overhead. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show that PMFRec consistently outperforms strong baselines in cold-item recommendation and further improves user-level fairness, warm-scenario adaptability, and robustness under Local Differential Privacy (LDP).

Jaehyung Lim, Wonbin Kweon, Woojoo Kim et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Aug 2026

Memorization Is Not Extraction: Tight Differential-Privacy Bounds and Audit Blind Spots

Memorization in large language models is measured through a zoo of definitions whose formal relations are unknown, and differential privacy (DP) is treated as a proxy against all of them at once. We pin down the exact DP constant for the two that carry the practical weight, counterfactual memorization and adaptive extraction, and show that they do not control each other. Under $f$-DP, every adaptive extraction protocol with list budget $m$ succeeds with probability at most $1-f(\kappa)$ for the oblivious baseline $\kappa$, and the bound is tight on a dense set of baselines: DP uniformly controls extraction exactly up to a threshold in how well the secret can be guessed a priori. Min-entropy certifies that baseline distribution-free, since $H_\infty\ge\epsilon\log_2 e+\log_2(m/\tau)$ holds extraction below a risk level $\tau\le1/2$ under pure $\epsilon$-DP for every prior, and is exact on uniform priors. On the memorization side, $f$-DP caps the counterfactual memorization of any bounded score at an advantage functional $\eta(f)$, equal to $\tanh(\epsilon/2)$ under pure DP; for $k\ge2$ duplicated copies the naive $\epsilon\mapsto k\epsilon$ bound $\tanh(k\epsilon/2)$ is unattainable, the exact constant being a closed-form staircase attained by geometric noisy counting. That cap is attained inside the local score class used in practice, and it is there that the two measures separate: one mechanism is memorized yet unextractable, another fully extractable yet exactly invisible to every loss-based score. The two-sided blind spot this opens for loss-based auditing and unlearning verification survives on billion-parameter models: a reserved-trigger release is recovered verbatim from one prompt while the audits practitioners deploy certify it clean.

Xujun Che, Depeng Xu, Shuhan Yuan · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Aug 2026

Beyond Procrustes distances: a multilinear Gromov-Wasserstein distance capturing chirality

Efficiently and robustly analyzing shape data is critical across many scientific disciplines. While chirality is a fundamental property in numerous applications - most notably in molecular science - existing shape analysis metrics fail to distinguish between a shape and its mirror image. To address this gap, we introduce a multilinear generalization of the Gromov-Wasserstein objective. Under mild assumptions, this objective yields a distance between shapes, represented as probability distributions quotiented by a symmetry group $G$. In particular, for $G = SO(d)$, we introduce the Chiral Gromov-Wasserstein ($\mathrm{CGW}$) distance, sensitive to chirality. We establish robustness properties for the multilinear Gromov-Wasserstein distances and develop efficient algorithms to compute them, reformulating the underlying optimization problem by projecting couplings onto a low-dimensional space. We derive algorithms for both local and approximate global solutions, yielding a fully polynomial-time approximation scheme for these problems. We validate the framework through numerical experiments that demonstrate the effectiveness of $\mathrm{CGW}$ as a shape metric for chiral objects.

Clément Soubrier, Geoffrey Woollard, Andrew Warren et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Aug 2026

On the Computational and Statistical Efficiency of the Empirical Maximum Entropy on the Mean Method

It is shown that the MEM dual problem admits a reformulation as an expected risk minimization problem, thereby placing MEM within the modern framework of stochastic optimization and enabling scalable stochastic gradient algorithms for large-scale inverse problems.

Matthew King-Roskamp, Gabriel Rioux, R. Choksi et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Aug 2026

Quantum SEDONet: Spectrally-Embedded Quantum Deep Operator Networks for Partial Differential Equations

Quantum DeepONet accelerates neural-operator inference by evaluating an orthogonally parameterized network on a quantum computer, reproducing in ideal simulation the accuracy of its classical counterpart at asymptotically lower inference cost. Its trunk network, however, receives query coordinates with limited spectral structure, requiring the network to learn oscillatory features through its nonlinearities. We propose Quantum SEDONet (Spectral-Embedded Deep Operator Network), which assigns each trunk coordinate a spectral basis according to its boundary condition: Fourier features for periodic coordinates and Chebyshev features for bounded, non-periodic coordinates. The basis is selected per coordinate rather than per problem, allowing both representations within a single problem. Under unary amplitude encoding, the embedding incurs no additional qubits or circuit depth when its dimension remains within the network width, while increasing the parameter count by only a few percent. Across four benchmarks, Quantum SEDONet reduces the mean relative L2 error by 54.1% for the antiderivative, 49.6% for advection, 36.0% for Burgers, and 36.2% for a mixed-boundary channel Poisson problem. Quantum and classical evaluation paths agree to within 10^-8 throughout. The channel Poisson problem simultaneously uses Fourier features in the periodic direction and Chebyshev features in the bounded direction, demonstrating coordinate-wise boundary-matched spectral embedding without additional quantum-resource cost.

Muhammad Abid, Arth Sojitra, Bipin Tiwari et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Aug 2026

Physics-informed learning for the inverse problem in resonant ultrasound spectroscopy

Inferring elastic constants from resonant ultrasound spectra is a nonlinear and typically overdetermined inverse problem based on finite spectral data. We formulate the Rayleigh-Ritz inverse problem as a constrained inverse-isospectral problem on the set of physically admissible elasticity tensors. This induces effective low-dimensional variables for the inverse map on the admissible elasticity manifold: length and elastic scales, aspect-ratio coordinates, scale-free spectral features, and stability-respecting elastic ratios. We use these variables to construct a physics-informed learning pipeline in which a regression model acts only on reduced spectral and geometric features, while scale recovery and final elastic-constant reconstruction are imposed analytically. For the full cubic benchmark, the reconstructed constants have MAE values of $20.37(35.15)$, $24.30(41.33)$, and $2.13(3.66)~\mathrm{GPa}$ for $C_{11}$, $C_{12}$, and $C_{44}$. In the fixed-geometry benchmark, the corresponding cubic MAPE values are $4.14(3.87)\%$, $8.31(8.50)\%$, and $2.44(2.86)\%$, while the isotropic values are $4.0(3.6)\%$ and $0.4(0.3)\%$ for the bulk and shear moduli. The inverse problem then becomes a constrained regression problem in variables adapted to the geometry, scaling, crystal symmetry, and thermodynamic stability of Hookean elasticity.

Alejandro Cubillos Mu\~noz, Manuela Rivas, Julian Rincon · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Aug 2026

Towards Large-Scale Heterogeneous Data Organization for Scientific Foundation Models: A Nuclear Fusion Case Study

Training effective foundation models requires massive and organized datasets, yet scientific domains such as nuclear fusion present unique challenges due to largely heterogeneous and sparse data. Here we characterize the data used in developing such a model: with over 20 sensor types spanning 5 orders of magnitude in sampling rate, mixed tensor structures (point measurements, spectrograms, images), and nonstationary physics. We analyze our input complexity and discuss trade-offs between temporal context and frequency resolution. Our analysis provides a template for representing multi-modal fluctuation data at scale, with implications for both multi-modal control systems and nuclear fusion.

Nathaniel Chen, Kouroche Bouchiat, Peter Steiner et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Aug 2026

Towards a mathematical theory of superposition

A mathematical theory of superposition in neural networks using tools from frame theory and compressed sensing and a novel characterization of the distribution of signs in the Gram matrix is developed.

Michael I. Ivanitskiy, J. Jasper, Emily J. King et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Aug 2026

How Do Linear Probes Emerge? A Circuit-Tracing Framework with Concept-Targeted Attribution

Concept-Targeted Attribution (CTA) provides a framework for moving from behavioral probe accuracy to mechanistic explanations of probe performance, enabling more detailed audits of internal concept representations, including safety-critical ones.

V. Palit, Florent Draye, Terry Jingchen Zhang et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Aug 2026

Optimal Transport for Network Comparison: A Review with Machine Learning Applications

Network comparison using optimal transport is a growing area of research in network science. Unlike standard graph metrics, optimal transport computes both network dissimilarity and a transport plan that explains how one graph morphs into another. In this paper, we review how optimal transport compares undirected, unweighted graphs using three primary distances: the Wasserstein, Gromov-Wasserstein, and Bures-Wasserstein distances. We examine the closed form of the Wasserstein distance in one dimension via node feature probability distributions, and show how the transport plans of the Wasserstein and Gromov-Wasserstein distances capture which specific nodes influence the distance after graph perturbation. For the Bures-Wasserstein distance, we derive bounds using Laplacian spectra to bypass full spectral decompositions. Finally, we evaluate these distances using a synthetic network dataset for clustering and a real-world time series network for anomaly detection.

James Hyun, Fran\c{c}ois G. Meyer · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Aug 2026

Multiscale Community-Based Fingerprinting of Signed Functional Networks

Objective: Recent studies demonstrate that functional connectomes contain subject-specific signatures, or \textit{fingerprints}, that can identify individuals across repeated sessions and tasks. Existing methods mostly rely on edge-level features that are sensitive to noise, difficult to interpret, and limited in their ability to generalize across tasks and datasets. Methods: We propose a multiscale community-based functional connectome fingerprinting framework that characterizes each individual by the mesoscale structure of their functional networks. We introduce a signed multilayer community detection framework that incorporates both correlated and anti-correlated brain activity to identify subject-specific community structures across tasks and sessions. Graph-theoretic metrics are then computed from the resulting joint community structures to derive low-dimensional community-level fingerprint representations. Results: The proposed framework is evaluated on 810 healthy control subjects from the Human Connectome Project (HCP). The results show that community-based fingerprints provide a reliable and interpretable substrate for individualized brain characterization across sessions and tasks. Conclusion: Mesoscale community structure provides meaningful and discriminative subject-specific fingerprints. Significance: The proposed framework offers a promising foundation for precision neuroimaging and personalized neuroscience applications.

Sema Athamnah, Selin Aviyente · 0 citations

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MIT News · Artificial Intelligence Aug 27, 2026

Looking beyond natural sequences

A new machine-learning framework aims to improve the success rate of computational protein design while moving away from results that reproduce sequences found in nature.