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#machine learning Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Large-Scale Bayesian Tensor Reconstruction via Approximate Message Passing

While CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP) decomposition (CPD) is fundamental for tensor reconstruction, Bayesian CPD often scales poorly because variational updates require repeated matrix inversions. We develop CP generalized approximate message passing (CP-GAMP) for incomplete noisy Bayesian CPD. The algorithm uses Gaussian message approximations to avoid high-dimensional inversions, and it combines a Bernoulli-Gaussian prior with expectation-maximization updates to estimate effective CP rank and noise variance. We also give a formal state evolution (SE) recursion and relate its fixed points to replica-symmetric saddle points, so CP-GAMP's SE-predicted error can be compared with the formal replica-symmetric minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) benchmark in the matched limit. Synthetic and image-inpainting experiments show that CP-GAMP substantially reduces runtime relative to variational Bayesian CPD while maintaining competitive reconstruction accuracy.

Bingyang Cheng, Zhongtao Chen, Yichen Jin et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Graph Representational Learning: When Does More Expressivity Hurt Generalization?

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are powerful tools for learning on structured data, yet the relationship between their expressivity and predictive performance remains unclear. We introduce a family of premetrics that capture different degrees of structural similarity between graphs and relate these similarities to generalization, and consequently, the performance of expressive GNNs. By considering a setting where graph labels are correlated with structural features, we derive generalization bounds that depend on the distance between training and test graphs, model complexity, and training set size. These bounds reveal that more expressive GNNs may generalize worse unless their increased complexity is balanced by a sufficiently large training set or reduced distance between training and test graphs. Our findings relate expressivity and generalization, offering theoretical insights supported by empirical results.

Sohir Maskey, Raffaele Paolino, Fabian Jogl et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Semantics at an Angle: When Cosine Similarity Works Until It Doesn't

Cosine similarity is a standard comparison rule for learned representations in information retrieval, natural language processing, computer vision, and multimodal learning. Its popularity is well founded: it removes positive radial scale, is computationally convenient, and often matches objectives that train normalized embeddings. These same properties also delimit what cosine can express. Normalization discards radial variation; anisotropic representations can compress angular contrast; high-dimensional neighborhoods can develop hubs; and a symmetric, uncalibrated score may be mismatched to the relation of interest. This article offers a selective review organized around a simple principle: the usefulness of cosine similarity depends jointly on the learned representation, any normalization or post-processing, the scoring rule, and the downstream decision. We derive the main geometric identities, distinguish failure mechanisms that are often conflated, review representative evidence about embedding norms, and describe objective-matched, geometry-aware, hubness-aware, norm-aware, and learned alternatives. The central conclusion is conditional rather than adversarial: cosine's positive-scale invariance is justified when radial variation is nuisance or fixed by the representation contract, but its angular geometry and downstream decision must still be validated.

Kisung You · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Temporal Analysis of NetFlow Datasets for Network Intrusion Detection Systems

This paper investigates the temporal analysis of NetFlow datasets for machine learning (ML)-based network intrusion detection systems (NIDS). Although many previous studies have highlighted the critical role of temporal features, such as inter-packet arrival time and flow length/duration, in NIDS, the currently available NetFlow datasets for NIDS lack these temporal features. This study addresses this gap by creating and making publicly available a set of NetFlow datasets that incorporate these temporal features [1]. With these temporal features, we provide a comprehensive temporal analysis of NetFlow datasets by examining the distribution of various features over time and presenting time-series representations of NetFlow features. This temporal analysis has not been previously provided in the existing literature. We also borrowed an idea from signal processing, time frequency analysis, and tested it to see how different the time frequency signal presentations (TFSPs) are for various attacks. The results indicate that many attacks have unique patterns, which could help ML models to identify them more easily.

Majed Luay, Siamak Layeghy, Seyedehfaezeh Hosseininoorbin et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

RSPO: Regularized Self-Play Alignment of Large Language Models

Self-play-based policy optimization has emerged as an effective approach for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs), formulating preference optimization as a two-player game. However, the regularization with respect to the reference policy, which is crucial for mitigating over-optimization, has been insufficiently investigated in self-play alignment. To study the impact of different regularization strategies, we propose Regularized Self-Play Policy Optimization (RSPO), a novel framework that unifies prior methods and enables simple plug-and-play regularizers, meanwhile preserving convergence to Nash equilibrium of the corresponding regularized game. We empirically show that RSPO with appropriate regularizers can substantially improve the length-controlled win rate (LCWR) on AlpacaEval-2 across a range of base models, while also achieving consistently superior performance on Arena-Hard, MT-Bench, ArmoRM, and response diversity. In particular, RSPO improves unregularized self-play baseline (SPPO) on AlpacaEval-2 LCWR from $28.5\%$ to $ 35.4\%$ with base model Mistral-7B, from $38.77\%$ to $43.66\%$ with LLaMA-8B, and from $50.54\%$ to $51.83\%$ with Gemma-2B. Combining simplicity, convergence guarantees, and significant empirical gains, RSPO offers a strong foundation for exploring regularized self-play in alignment. Code is available at https://github.com/xiaohangt/RSPO

Xiaohang Tang, Sangwoong Yoon, Seongho Son et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Sep 2026

You Do Not Fully Utilize Transformer's Representation Capacity

In contrast to RNNs, which compress their history into a single hidden state, Transformers can attend to all past tokens directly. However, standard Transformers rely solely on the hidden state from the previous layer to represent the entire context. We show that this design creates pressure toward representation collapse and can degrade performance. To address this issue, we introduce Layer-Integrated Memory (LIMe), a lightweight extension that leverages existing key-value buffers and learns per-head, per-layer routing weights to integrate representations from previous layers. Across language modeling, synthetic reasoning, and deep architectures, LIMe improves perplexity per FLOP in the studied regimes and yields strong gains on synthetic tasks while preserving higher value-vector entropy and token separability. Finally, learned routing weights reveal systematic reuse of local and long-distance features, showing how LIMe enriches attention-time memory without increasing hidden-state size. Code is available at https://github.com/corl-team/lime.

Gleb Gerasimov, Yaroslav Aksenov, Nikita Balagansky et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Alert: Learning Trigger Functions for Early Classification of Time Series using Deep-RL

Early Classification of Time Series (ECTS) is vital in fields like industrial monitoring and medical triage, where quick and accurate predictions are essential. One of the core challenges lies in the trigger function, which decides when to make a prediction, independently of the classifier itself. Most existing methods rely on handcrafted rules, but can data-driven approaches outperform them? This paper introduces Alert, a Deep-RL framework that learns trigger functions from any state representation. Systematic comparisons on 30 datasets show that the design of the state space significantly influences performance. Building on this, we propose Alert+, a simple yet effective variant that consistently outperforms traditional methods in balancing accuracy and delay within an imbalanced misclassification and exponential delay cost setting. Alert and Alert+ are released to support reproducible research and practical applications.

Aur\'elien Renault, Alexis Bondu, Antoine Cornu\'ejols et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Sep 2026

H-FedSN: Personalized Sparse Networks for Efficient and Accurate Hierarchical Federated Learning for IoT Applications

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT), federated learning (FL) has gained increasing attention for its privacy-preserving use of distributed data. However, conventional two-tier FL architectures are poorly suited to the hierarchical and heterogeneous nature of real-world IoT systems. Hierarchical Federated Learning (HFL) introduces multi-layer aggregation to better match IoT environments, but still suffers from communication inefficiencies and performance limitations caused by large data transfers, non-IID data distributions, and uneven device participation. These challenges hinder the realization of low-latency and high-accuracy training in practical IoT deployments. To address these limitations, we propose H-FedSN for practical IoT environments. H-FedSN leverages a binary mask mechanism with shared and personalized layers to reduce communication overhead by creating a sparse network without altering original weights. To tackle data heterogeneity and imbalanced device distribution, H-FedSN incorporates personalized layers for local data adaptation and employs Bayesian aggregation with cumulative Beta distribution updates at edge and cloud levels, effectively balancing contributions from diverse client groups. Experiments on three real-world IoT datasets and MNIST under non-IID conditions show that H-FedSN reduces communication costs by up to 477 times compared to baseline methods while maintaining high accuracy, making it well-suited for hierarchical FL in IoT deployments.

Jiechao Gao, Yuangang Li, Jie Wang et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Sep 2026

MEGA: Message Passing Neural Networks for Multigraphs with EdGe Attributes

Edge-attributed multigraphs, in which multiple edges with distinct attributes connect the same pair of nodes, arise naturally in many real-world systems. In these graphs, effective learning requires preserving information from repeated interactions while distinguishing contributions from different neighbors. Existing neural network solutions for edge-attributed multigraphs remain limited: some lose information from repeated interactions, while others break permutation equivariance. To address this, we introduce \emph{neighbor-aware aggregation}, an operator that first combines multi-edge features for each neighbor and then aggregates across neighbors. This operator captures per-neighbor statistics that standard single-stage aggregation cannot represent. Building on this operator, we present MEGA-GNN, a model-agnostic message-passing framework for edge-attributed multigraphs. We show that MEGA-GNN is permutation equivariant and has the same asymptotic complexity as standard GNNs with edge updates. We evaluate our approach on datasets from social networks and financial transaction networks. Neighbor-aware aggregation consistently improves GNN performance and matches or surpasses state-of-the-art methods.

H. \c{C}a\u{g}r{\i} Bilgi, Kubilay Atasu · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Adaptive teachers for amortized samplers

Amortized inference is the task of training a parametric model, such as a neural network, to approximate a distribution with a given unnormalized density where exact sampling is intractable. When sampling is implemented as a sequential decision-making process, reinforcement learning (RL) methods, such as generative flow networks, can be used to train the sampling policy. Off-policy RL training facilitates the discovery of diverse, high-reward candidates, but existing methods still face challenges in efficient exploration. We propose to use an adaptive training distribution (the \teacher) to guide the training of the primary amortized sampler (the \student). The \teacher, an auxiliary behavior model, is trained to sample high-loss regions of the \student and can generalize across unexplored modes, thereby enhancing mode coverage by providing an efficient training curriculum. We validate the effectiveness of this approach in a synthetic environment designed to present an exploration challenge, two diffusion-based sampling tasks, and four biochemical discovery tasks demonstrating its ability to improve sample efficiency and mode coverage. Source code is available at https://github.com/alstn12088/adaptive-teacher.

Minsu Kim, Sanghyeok Choi, Taeyoung Yun et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Understanding Deep Learning via Notions of Rank

Despite the extreme popularity of deep learning in science and industry, its formal understanding is limited. This thesis puts forth notions of rank as key for developing a theory of deep learning, focusing on the fundamental aspects of generalization and expressiveness. In particular, we establish that gradient-based training can induce an implicit regularization towards low rank for several neural network architectures, and demonstrate empirically that this phenomenon may facilitate an explanation of generalization over natural data (e.g., audio, images, and text). Then, we characterize the ability of graph neural networks to model interactions via a notion of rank, which is commonly used for quantifying entanglement in quantum physics. A central tool underlying these results is a connection between neural networks and tensor factorizations. Practical implications of our theory for designing explicit regularization schemes and data preprocessing algorithms are presented.

Noam Razin · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Branch Scaling Manifests as Implicit Architectural Regularization for Improving Generalization in Overparameterized ResNets

Scaling factors in residual branches have emerged as a prevalent method for boosting neural network performance, especially in normalization-free architectures. While prior work has primarily examined scaling effects from an optimization perspective, this paper investigates their role in residual architectures through the lens of generalization theory. Specifically, we establish that wide residual networks (ResNets) with constant scaling factors become asymptotically unlearnable as depth increases. In contrast, when the scaling factor exhibits rapid depth-wise decay combined with early stopping, over-parameterized ResNets achieve minimax-optimal generalization rates. To establish this, we demonstrate that the generalization capability of wide ResNets can be approximated by kernel regression associated with the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK). Our theoretical findings are validated through experiments on synthetic data and real-world classification tasks, including MNIST and CIFAR-100.

Zixiong Yu, Guhan Chen, Jianfa Lai et al. · 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.