Layer-skipping methods for efficient LLM inference decide, at some granularity, which transformer layers to execute for a given input. We present a rigor-matched, three-seed audit of two periodic-step, search-based methods that make this decision online at inference time and re-evaluate it every few generation steps: a confidence-gated early-exit baseline (ConfLayers) and genuine self-speculative decoding (SWIFT, Xia et al. 2024), together with vanilla autoregressive decoding, across two model scales (Qwen2.5-0.5B and Qwen2.5-1.5B) and two tasks (GSM8K reasoning and CNN/DailyMail summarization). SWIFT is the strongest method on accuracy in three of four cells; ConfLayers is dominated everywhere, with particularly large deficits on GSM8K at 1.5B. Once online-search overhead is separated from pure inference cost, SWIFT's true inference speed is faster than ConfLayers's in all four cells (5-21%), reversing the naive wall-clock ranking in three of them. ConfLayers's search overhead is small and stable (1-2% of cost), while SWIFT's is larger and more variable (up to 28.7%). We additionally examine two trained-routing methods, LayerRoute (Sikdar, 2026) and LayerDrop (Fan et al. 2020), as a supplemental analysis because they operate at coarser decision granularities. Under a verified protocol with genuine per-input gating, a genuine full-model baseline, and genuine inference-time compute skipping, both show modest speedups (1.08-1.33x) but accuracy well below the periodic-step methods, including a near-total collapse for LayerRoute on GSM8K at 1.5B (0.003 mean exact-match across three seeds). We release the full audit protocol as a template for rigor-matched efficiency comparisons.
Ensuring a safe virtual reality (VR) experience requires systems that can predict and respond when users lose their balance. Although prior work has examined fall prediction and motion sickness, many approaches are regression-based and postural state classification remains less explored. This study compares machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models for classifying postural states in VR under visual perturbations. We used a multimodal dataset containing kinematic, electromyographic (EMG), and electrodermal activity (EDA) signals. The data were prepared for a binary task to distinguish balanced from imbalanced postural states, and participant-wise downsampling addressed class imbalance. All models were evaluated with Leave-One-Participant-Out (LOPO) cross-validation to test generalization to unseen participants. Among the models, the Mamba-inspired CNN (MI-CNN) achieved the highest accuracy of 96.76%. SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) analysis improved interpretability and identified the most influential classification factors. The SHAP results showed that kinematic features were dominant, indicating that body-motion patterns are informative for detecting imbalance in VR. We also evaluated MI-CNN using only the top two-thirds of features ranked by SHAP importance. Despite a 33% reduction in input dimensionality, the model maintained performance, achieving 0.957 accuracy and 0.957 F1-score, with about a 1% decrease compared with the full-feature model. These findings suggest that multimodal sensing, temporal deep learning, and explainable AI can support reliable classification of balance-related instability in VR. Accurate recognition of imbalanced postural states may raise awareness of fall risk and guide safer, adaptive VR systems that respond to instability while improving user safety and experience. Code is available at: https://github.com/NipaAnjum/MI-CNN.
Nipa Anjum, Md Irfan Pavel, Robert Gonzalez Jr et al.· 0 citations
Representation learning begins when training changes the features that define similarity between data. A frozen-kernel model only reweights a fixed geometry. We establish quantum signal processing (QSP) as a solvable quantum model of the representation-learning regime. At arbitrary depth, we compute the exact mean and variance of its quantum neural tangent kernel, revealing an input-dependent angular geometry whose diagonal remains non-self-averaging even when the underlying unitary approaches Haar randomness. We also prove a sparse-data guarantee for the full nonlinear gradient flow without freezing or ensemble-averaging the kernel: the realized dynamics converges to an integrable scalar flow with a time-dependent kernel closure and explicit convergence times. A finite-depth speed limit holds for every data set and trajectory. At higher data density, numerical results show coupled evolution beyond both the scalar and frozen-kernel descriptions. These results give a controlled theory of learned quantum data geometry with provable training dynamics beyond the frozen limit.
We establish quantitative convergence to the target and uniform-in-time propagation of chaos for Langevin-regularized Stein variational gradient descent. The Stein interaction need not be small relative to the confining Langevin drift and does not generally yield a contractive particle coupling. At the mean-field level, the Stein and Langevin components dissipate the same relative entropy in the kernel-induced Stein and $2$-Wasserstein geometries, producing the squared kernel Stein discrepancy and relative Fisher information. Under a log-Sobolev inequality for the target, this yields exponential last-iterate convergence. We also derive a finite-particle entropy identity relative to the product target, giving exponential-in-time convergence of the empirical measure up to polynomial sampling errors.
For propagation of chaos, we develop two complementary finite-time approaches. A synchronous coupling, combined with exponential moment estimates for the nonlinear mean-field diffusion, yields explicit single-exponential bounds in Wasserstein distance and kernel Stein discrepancy (KSD). Moving-product entropy gives joint-law relative entropy control relative to the evolving mean-field product law and, through entropy superadditivity and concentration, fixed-marginal relative entropy and total variation bounds and empirical KSD estimates. Under an additional $T_2$ inequality for the initial law, it also yields Wasserstein bounds. Combining these finite-time estimates with target convergence at a logarithmic cutoff time gives polynomial uniform-in-time propagation of chaos rates in expectation for empirical KSD and $W_2^2$, and for fixed-marginal total variation and $W_2^2$. All bounds control the last iterate in physical time. We also compare the two finite-time mechanisms and identify regimes in which each gives the sharper polynomial exponent.
Sayan Banerjee, Dohyeon Kim· 0 citations
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Separable nonnegative matrix factorization (SNMF) has been widely used for low-rank representation and clustering of nonnegative data, owing to its ability to produce part-based and interpretable decompositions. In particular, SNMF is closely related to graph clustering and community detection. To enhance sparsity and identifiability of the learned factors, we propose an $\ell_1^p/\ell_2$-regularized SNMF model based on a powered ratio-of-norms regularizer. The resulting formulation is nonconvex and nonsmooth, which poses significant challenges for optimization. To address this, we develop efficient algorithms based on the difference-of-convex function algorithm (DCA) and the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). The proposed methods decompose the original problem into tractable subproblems, leveraging closed-form proximal operators associated with the powered norm terms. We establish descent and limiting criticality properties for the DCA scheme and convergence under standard assumptions for the ADMM scheme. Extensive numerical experiments on synthetic datasets and hand gesture classification tasks demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves competitive or improved performance in anchor identification and classification accuracy compared with existing SNMF methods, while maintaining competitive computational efficiency.
Technical operations teams resolve large volumes of incidents by synthesizing fragmented evidence from ticket text, historical cases, system logs, and technical documentation. Existing automation often relies on monolithic generation without explicit evidence modeling or provenance, making outputs difficult to verify when critical signals are sparse across sources. We propose ASTRA, an agentic system for ticket resolution in which a central orchestrator coordinates three specialist information-gathering agents and drives a judge-orchestrator refinement loop to produce evidence-backed troubleshooting reports. TicketSimilarityAgent retrieves relevant historical precedents through dense retrieval and LLM reranking; LogAgent distills hundreds of thousands of log lines into structured, quote-grounded findings using deterministic filtering and constrained LLM analysis; and DomainKnowledgeAgent retrieves relevant technical knowledge via the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Their outputs are transformed into a claim-evidence representation linking each claim to a verbatim source passage, assigning a support level, and preventing cross-attribution. A JudgeAgent scores the report on five criteria, while the OrchestratorAgent converts low scores into targeted follow-up queries for bounded iterative refinement. Evaluated on 987 real-world telecom fault tickets across seven product lines, ASTRA achieves a mean quality score of 4.13/5.0, with 59.9% of reports identifying the fault area at the component-family level or better. Relevance and Clarity scores are 4.88 and 4.94, respectively, while fabricated technical details remain below 3% of error cases. Stratification by fault type reveals that hardware faults remain substantially harder than software or configuration faults (Cohen's d=0.80), pointing to a fundamental limitation of text-based evidence channels for hardware fault diagnosis.
Shashidhar Reddy Javaji, Mohamed Trabelsi, Jin Cao et al.· 0 citations
Autonomous vehicles (AVs) rely on accurate camera-LiDAR calibration for multimodal sensor fusion. In practice, calibration can drift due to vibration, temperature variation, or minor sensor displacement, motivating online calibration algorithms that detect and correct misalignment at runtime while allowing the vehicle to continue operating without a factory visit. Existing AV attacks largely assume correct calibration. We instead identify online sensor calibration as a new attack plane. A corrupted calibration update can persist across subsequent fusion operations, causing system-wide errors that propagate from perception to planning and control. We present Adversarial Calibration Attack (ACA), the first physical attack against camera-LiDAR online calibration. Using a single adversarial poster, ACA first spoofs the miscalibration detector to trigger the calibration process and then steers the calibration estimator toward an incorrect transformation. A unified optimization jointly designs the poster's geometry and texture for both objectives. We evaluate ACA across benchmark datasets, simulation, and physical experiments. On benchmark datasets such as KITTI and nuScenes, ACA induces up to 33.9 degrees mean rotational calibration error, thereby severely degrading object detection. In the CARLA simulator, the attack causes a collision when the corrupted calibration is accepted in vulnerable scenarios crafted by the attacker. On a real Husky robot, a printed adversarial poster successfully reproduces the calibration error. These results demonstrate that online calibration is a practical and safety-critical attack surface for AVs.
Liangkai Liu, Qingzhao Zhang, Kang G. Shin· 0 citations
Indoor 3D Scene Graphs (3DSGs) represent environments as multi-layer hierarchies that connect observed geometric primitives (e.g., planes) to higher-level metric-semantic concepts (e.g., rooms, floors, buildings), enabling incremental spatial reasoning for robotic perception and SLAM. However, classical high-level concept generation approaches rely on hand-crafted rules for specific concept classes, while learning-based methods require separate models for graph structure and spatial node features (e.g., centroids), which limits scalability to novel classes and more complex hierarchies. We propose a unified autoregressive diffusion-based graph generative model that jointly learns structure and features, constructing complete 3DSGs bottom-up from observed vertical planes across arbitrary hierarchy depths. Our method consistently surpasses all learning-based and random baselines across 3DSG datasets spanning synthetic scenes, real architectural floor plans, and robotic sensor data, with varying layout complexity and hierarchy depth, and surpasses a one-shot model with oracle access to the target graph size on the largest hierarchy and on real single-floor data. Finally, we propose an adaptation of the Fused Gromov--Wasserstein distance for principled graph-level evaluation of generated 3DSGs against ground truth.
Jose Andres Millan-Romera, Samuel Cognolato, Holger Voos et al.· 0 citations
AI agents increasingly perform long-term reasoning, planning, tool use, memory integration, and autonomous decision making, yet erroneous intermediate states can propagate and cause inconsistent decisions and unreliable outputs. Existing reasoning approaches mainly rely on iterative planning, self-reflection, augmented memory, or verification, but rarely localize and selectively repair faulty reasoning. We present ORDDAR (Observation-Driven Reasoning for Distortion-Resilient Decision, Action, and Cognitive Recovery), a reasoning framework that models reasoning as cognitive state transitions, detects localized distortions, retrieves related reasoning from prior experiences, and repairs only the affected states. ORDDAR therefore performs recovery at the local reasoning-transition level rather than regenerating the complete trajectory. Experiments across mathematical, commonsense, multi-hop, and clinical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate improved reasoning quality, recovery ability, and interpretability over multiple evaluated reasoning baselines.
Deblina Kar, Anant Nawalgaria, Shyamal Kumar Das Mandal· 0 citations
Frequency features and compression-invariant representation learning are widely assumed to be key to deepfake detection that survives video compression. We test this with CAFRL - block-DCT and FFT-phase streams, compression-level-conditioned band attention, and adversarial (gradient-reversal) compression invariance - and report a controlled negative. Under a pre-registered protocol with capacity- and augmentation-matched controls, a plain EfficientNet-B0 on multi-quality data beat CAFRL as specified at every compression level on the FaceForensics++ test split, by 3.66 AUC points at CRF 40 (paired, single seed). A self-audit of our own negative found four defects biased against the frequency hypothesis, and pre-specified re-tests repairing all four showed the deficit to be a recipe artifact, not an architecture failure: the baseline recipe recovered 3.96 points over the matching shipped-recipe variant. The frequency path made no detectable difference: discriminative alone (standalone validation AUC 0.91-0.98 late in training) but of no marginal value under this fusion, at two feature widths of one 4.0 M trunk, every seed-pooled interval for the intra-dataset compression contrasts including zero; on the single held-out manipulation tested, the fair variants sat below the plain backbone. The adversarial branch, as specified, added nothing and degraded its own conditioning estimator; at the fair recipe it is untested. Robustness under single-pass H.264 re-encoding came instead from data diversity: real constant-rate-factor variants beat synthetic JPEG augmentation by 7.3 points (single runs, non-overlapping intervals). The evidence is FaceForensics++-family, GAN-era and single-codec. Match controls on training recipe as well as capacity, and buy compression robustness with codec diversity before architecture.
Distributed deep neural networks (DNNs) for dense perception tasks such as semantic segmentation execute an encoder DNN on edge devices, and a decoder DNN typically on a large-scale cloud platform with a particular constraint on transmission bitrate. Recent works employ source codecs to enable bitrate-efficient transmission between the edge device and the cloud. However, as these approaches are typically bound to a particular type of source codec and alternative network architectures are often not explored, this results in a suboptimal rate-distortion (RD) trade-off in the low-bitrate regime. In this work, we propose two novel source codecs that \textit{enable extremely low bitrates, while improving RD performance}. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed source codecs by achieving state-of-the-art performance in distributed semantic segmentation at below 0.2 (0.03) bits per pixel, measured using the mean intersection-over-union metric on ADE20K (Cityscapes).
Danish Nazir, Timo Bartels, Thorsten Bagdonat et al.· 0 citations
Deploying vision perception models in autonomous vehicles requires that we prioritize inference speeds, resulting in a model with shallower architectures and lesser model parameters (i.e., more pruned). Such small models do not generalize well, which could result in poor performance when encountered with novel scenarios. We propose a system that overcomes this by continuously retraining the vision models on the cloud with data uploaded by vehicles. We leverage the abundant compute resources, including machine learning accelerators, of the cloud to run a highly-accurate oracle model that will guide the retraining process of the on-vehicle model. This newly trained model is transmitted to the vehicle over the network and is utilized by the vehicle for perceptions, leading to improved inference accuracy over time.
Yuheng Zhu, Dhruva Ungrupulithaya, Boluo Ge et al.· 0 citations
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.
MIT News · Artificial Intelligence· news.mit.eduAug 24, 2026
A new method for surgically removing training examples from a model reveals that as datasets grow, the link between what a model learns and what it produces dissolves.
