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#machine learning Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Estimating Population-Risk Curves Along Nonconvex Gradient Flows from the Training Sample

We estimate the conditional population-risk curve of a realized smooth nonconvex gradient flow from the training sample. Flow approximate leave-one-out (Flow-ALO) propagates a deletion response and evaluates omitted observations at approximate deleted paths. The risk-curve error decomposes into response approximation, exact-LOO fluctuation, and deletion-to-full risk transfer. On each fixed finite horizon, bounded centered training-loss gradients, a one-sided Hessian lower bound, locally Lipschitz Hessians, and a strict tube-closure condition yield an explicit $(n-1)^{-2}$ bound for the deletion-response error. Bounded evaluation-loss gradients transfer the deletion-response bound to the score without requiring the Hessian to be invertible. Direct first-order jackknife cancellation and exact-LOO concentration control deletion-to-full risk transfer and fluctuation, respectively, completing recovery of the conditional population-risk curve. For bounded smooth two-layer mean-field networks training both layers, the score-error bound is uniform in width.

Mingzhi Song · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Using Prosody to Predict Syntactic Structure

While it is well-established that prosody carries crucial cues for syntactic structure, the degree and nature of correspondence between these two domains remains contested. We investigate the syntax-prosody interface through an information-theoretic lens, quantifying the interaction between prosodic features and syntactic representations as their mutual information. We provide a general-purpose framework for estimating this quantity over large speech-text corpora using multimodal language models. Our framework is structure-agnostic and modular, insofar as it can be used to measure the contributions of individual prosodic features or components of structure. We evaluate the syntax-prosody relationship for two features (word duration and inter-word pauses) across two domains--read audiobooks and spontaneous conversations--both in English. Our results demonstrate that prosody contains measurable syntactic information, with prosodic features reducing syntactic uncertainty in spontaneous conversations by up to 10.2%. Our findings offer new empirical support for several theoretical accounts of the syntax-prosody interface.

Junghyun Min, Alex Warstadt, Tamar I. Regev et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Sep 2026

A Borel Concept Class of VC Dimension One with a Non-PAC Consistent Learner in ZFC

The fundamental theorem of statistical learning states that, under suitable measurability assumptions, finite Vapnik--Chervonenkis (VC) dimension guarantees that every proper consistent learning rule is probably approximately correct (PAC). Blumer, Ehrenfeucht, Haussler, and Warmuth showed, assuming the Continuum Hypothesis, that the "well-behavedness" condition of the concept class cannot be omitted: they constructed a concept class of Borel sets of VC dimension one admitting a consistent learning rule that is not PAC. We show that the Continuum Hypothesis is unnecessary. Working in Zermelo--Fraenkel set theory with the Axiom of Choice (ZFC) alone, we construct a concept class of Borel sets on $[0,1]$ of VC dimension one and a proper consistent learning rule that is not PAC. More precisely, for a suitable Borel probability measure and target concept, the rule has true risk one at every sample size on a set of samples of outer probability one. Consequently, finite VC dimension and Borel measurability of the individual concepts do not suffice to guarantee that every proper consistent learning rule is PAC. The result shows, with no need of extra set-theoretical assumptions, that the additional regularity assumption in the fundamental theorem cannot in general be omitted.

Mateus Jesus de Arruda Campos, Gabriel Fernandes, Vinicius de Oliveira Rodrigues · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Motus2: A Self-Evolving General World Model for Dexterous Manipulation

General embodied agents should perceive, predict, act, evaluate, and improve within a unified system. World models have shown great promise in building such agents, yet existing models typically append an action output head to a world simulator, without coupling them into a closed decision-and-learning loop for policy improvement. We present Motus2, a self-evolving general world model for dexterous manipulation. Motus2 advances world modeling through model scaling and data scaling. For model scaling, a single model with shared weights exposes three control interfaces: a policy (world-action model), a simulator (action-conditioned world model), and an evaluator (value model). The policy proposes candidate action chunks, the simulator predicts their visual consequences, and the evaluator assesses the predicted outcomes. Their coupling forms a closed decision-and-learning loop for policy improvement. This formulation uses curated expert demonstrations for action learning, while failed and suboptimal interactions provide valuable evidence for dynamics modeling and value learning. For data scaling, Motus2 progresses from large-scale monocular egocentric data to synchronized stereo egocentric data, followed by robot-domain adaptation with robot trajectories and supplementary human-robot alignment data. Motus2 further studies global-autoregressive and hybrid-memory extensions of its sliding-window context, adds tactile feedback for contact-aware control, and is instantiated on a fully biomimetic platform with stereo vision, dual arms, dual dexterous hands, and tactile sensing. Together, egocentric data scaling and closed-loop general world model scaling provide a general path toward self-evolving dexterous manipulation.

Hongzhe Bi, Zihao Zhou, Yihang Tang et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Fairness in multi-class multi-group classification problems via contextial coherent risk measures

We propose a new design of fair classifiers for multi-class classification problems in the presence of vector-valued sensitive attributes. In that scenario each sensitive attribute has multiple values and forms several groups relevant to the fairness consideration. Naturally those groups are overlapping and one should also analyze the interaction of factors. Additionally, the decision makers aided by the classification should not violate individual rights at the expense of satisfying fairness metrics at the group level. We propose an approach using the theory and methods of coherent measures of risk aiming at resolving the fairness challenges. Further, we propose a specialized numerical method for solving the resulting optimization problem. The method scales well with the increase of the number of observations. Additionally, we note that the obtained classifier is robust with respect to corrupted data or to situation when data is scarce. We demonstrate the advantages of the proposed framework in comparison to the support-vector machine framework and other methods handling fairness.

Darinka Dentcheva, Xiangyu Tian · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Sep 2026

The PUR-1 Cyber-Physical Digital Twin

Digital twin technologies have the potential to improve operational flexibility and responsiveness capabilities of nuclear systems. To provide decision support, cyber event characterization, state estimation, predictive control, and real-time dynamic processing of operational data, however, an efficient digital twin needs to integrate multiple models (data-driven as well as physics-based) with explainability while at the same time maintain two-way synchronization with the physical facility at a time constant less than its operational cycle. In this work, we present the Purdue University Reactor One Digital Twin (PUR-1 DT), a cyber-physical digital twin with a complete high-fidelity physics-based and AI-driven virtual model stack (neutronics, thermal-hydraulics, point kinetics) which provides closed-loop explainable diagnostics, forecasting, predictive control, and action recommendation back to the reactor via two-way communications and a cyber-physical testbed. We demonstrate real-time synchronized state estimation and short-term forecasting over a full reactor operational cycle and conduct a series of benchmarking experiments to validate accuracy and latency. Our results show good agreement with experimental results and lay the groundwork for further development and experimental demonstration of DT-enabled functionalities in real-world facilities.

Vasileios Theos, Jonah Lau, Konstantinos Gkouliaras et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Balancing Privacy, Utility, and Safety in LLM Alignment through Preference Optimization

Preference optimization is widely used to align large language models with human preferences, but preference-data composition may also influence privacy-relevant memorization. We examine whether adding synthetic privacy-preference pairs to Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is associated with lower canary-based memorization signals without modifying the objective or introducing a formal privacy mechanism. We propose Privacy-Pressure Preference Mixing (P3M), a data-composition protocol that varies the amount of privacy-preference data while keeping helpfulness and harmlessness preference data fixed. We evaluate a non-privacy Baseline and privacy-mixing ratios of 0.5, 1.0, and 2.0 using Gemma 3 270M-IT across five random seeds and validate the same four conditions using 4-bit-quantized Gemma 2 2B-IT across three seeds. Overall, under the tested conditions, privacy-preference mixing is associated with lower mean canary suffix log-likelihood proxy values across both model settings and lower aggregate membership-inference attack performance relative to the Baseline in the mixed-source 2B evaluation. Specifically, across the privacy-aware 2B configurations, the mean area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) ranges from 0.596 to 0.629, and the mean area under the precision-recall curve (AUPRC) ranges from 0.541 to 0.575, compared with 0.804 and 0.790, respectively, for the Baseline. However, the reduction in membership distinguishability does not hold uniformly across data sources. Moreover, the relationship between the privacy ratio and harmlessness preference accuracy varies by model setting, whereas helpfulness preference accuracy remains broadly stable. These findings suggest that P3M should be viewed as a lightweight empirical protocol for examining privacy-utility-safety trade-offs rather than as a formal privacy guarantee or a defense against extraction attacks.

Dishu Yang, Jingjing Liu, Jize Li · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

VIBE: Video Instruction-aligned Background music gEneration

Current video-to-music (V2M) models lack semantic control and fail to penalize instruction violations, largely due to their reliance on reconstruction objectives and the representational bottleneck of static cross-modal conditioning in Diffusion Autoregressive (DAR) architectures. To resolve this, we introduce VIBE, a novel text-and-video-to-music (T+V2M) generation model that leverages: (1) Conditioning Connection, a depth-wise cross-layer conditioning mechanism that dynamically bridges the planning and diffusion refinement heads and (2) a comprehensive reward modeling taxonomy, optimizing for both hard, verifiable constraints (e.g., tempo, key) and soft, subjective qualities (e.g., musicality, multimodal alignment) with a structured 5-stage training curriculum. Upon evaluation using audio-visual alignment, instruction following, and audio quality metrics, along with a subjective human evaluation study, we observe that VIBE demonstrates enhanced controllability and instruction adherence while performing comparably to most evaluated baselines on generation fidelity and multimodal alignment.

Aryan Vijay Bhosale, Vaibhavi Lokegaonkar, Vishnu Raj et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Aligning Multi-Trajectory Supervision with Policy Optimization for VLA Driving

Vision-language-action (VLA) driving methods increasingly combine multi-trajectory imitation learning with group-relative policy optimization (GRPO), making trajectory selection critical to final performance. However, some high-scoring trajectories that improve imitation can degrade subsequent GRPO by inducing advantage estimates misaligned with the current policy's feasible behavior distribution, driving updates away from safe and compliant behaviors. To address this, we propose a novel framework that aligns multi-trajectory supervision with policy optimization. To address the policy gradient bias induced by infeasible noisy trajectories outside the feasible region, augmented trajectories are constrained to a neighboring manifold of the ground-truth feasible region, and a Pareto-optimality criterion is adopted in place of the conventional aggregate score, retaining only non-dominated candidates and thereby filtering out conflicting samples at the source. To ensure that expanded trajectory supervision is effectively absorbed during policy optimization, we introduce two complementary mechanisms: feasibility-first advantage assignment and dynamic distillation. The former adapts Pareto credit to the feasibility composition of each rollout group and guides fully infeasible groups toward safe references. The latter updates teacher trajectories across refinement rounds to continually transfer useful supervision. Together, they progressively translate the benefits of expanded supervision into policy improvement. On NAVSIM v1 and v2, our method achieves 91.4 PDMS and 89.1 EPDMS, respectively, under single-trajectory inference, and recovers 440 of 658 initially failed scenes, 11.1\% higher than the original GRPO baseline.

Tian Zhang, Zhuo Huang, Hongrui Ye et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Sep 2026

A Simple Transformer Pipeline for Full-Key Side-Channel Attacks on Uncropped Datasets

Deep learning-based side-channel analysis has historically focused on single-byte targets and manually cropped traces, which risks discarding exploitable leakage. While recent work has proposed specialized architectures and resampling techniques to address this gap, the literature lacks a simple transformer baseline for simultaneous full-key attacks on uncropped traces. We present an open-source transformer implementation for uncropped full-key attacks which uses the standard transformer encoder backbone, adapting only the input and output layers to the side-channel setting. We release our implementation, training recipes, and pretrained weights for uncropped ASCADv1f, ASCADv1r, and CHES-CTF-2018 which achieve performance competitive with previously-reported results, while using less than 10GB of VRAM and requiring at most 3.34 hours of training on a single NVIDIA A6000.

Jimmy Gammell, Kaushik Roy · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Sep 2026

A Hybrid State-Space Approach for Census-Tract Population Estimation

Sequence models---the architecture family behind large language models and, increasingly, state-of-the-art image recognition---have redefined how machines learn from high-dimensional data. Yet population estimation from satellite imagery, a task that underpins infrastructure planning, public health, and disaster response, has scarcely benefited: leading systems still bind population to a uniform raster, disaggregating census counts onto grid cells through weighting surfaces built from ancillary data (e.g., in WorldPop and LandScan), which can introduce systematic spatial bias, and predicting population per grid cell with convolutional neural networks. In this approach, the administrative-unit structure in which the census was actually collected is discarded. We close this gap with MambaPop, which renders each administrative unit as a single polygon-masked satellite image and treats tract-level population estimation as a sequence-modeling problem over its image patches, pairing each tract image directly with its population label and eliminating the disaggregation step entirely. Built on the hybrid state-space--attention MambaVision backbone, MambaPop is, to our knowledge, the first method to learn population directly from an administrative unit's own image as well as the first to apply a state-space based (Mamba) hybrid architecture to the population estimation task. Across all $\sim$84{,}000 contiguous-US census tracts of the 2020 census, MambaPop attains a mean absolute error (MAE) of $1{,}141$ persons per tract, matching the strongest convolutional baseline (YOLOv11, MAE $1{,}122$).

Jackson R. Ye, Alexandre V. Morozov · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Sep 2026

When Does a Classifier Help an LLM? Classifier-Guided Prompting and Hybrid Classifier-LLM Models for Credit-Default Prediction

Credit-default prediction is an important task in financial decision making. Traditional methods use fitted classifiers such as logistic regression and random forests on tabular features. Large language models (LLMs) have recently been applied to this task through prompting. In this work we study how a fitted classifier and an LLM can be combined for credit-default prediction. We distinguish telling the LLM to imitate a classifier from using the classifier to build the prompt. We hypothesize that a fitted classifier can supply the ranking ability that an LLM prompt lacks. We experiment on the Default of Credit Card Clients dataset, and report recall, F1, and the area under the ROC and precision-recall curves, with bootstrap confidence intervals. We observe that a few-shot LLM has the highest recall (0.47) and F1 (0.50) of any single model but ranks worse than a random forest (AUC-ROC 0.72 against 0.79). Instructing the LLM to imitate a classifier gives no significant change. Pruning the prompt to the classifier's eight most important features raises recall by 0.071 and F1 by 0.032. Adding the classifier's predicted probability to the prompt raises the LLM's AUC-ROC from 0.72 to 0.78, matching the random forest, while keeping 0.118 higher recall than it. The reverse composition, and the use of several classifiers, do not help. We thus recommend a simple classifier-guided prompt for LLM-based credit prediction.

Rishi Datta, Lavanya Prahallad · 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.