arXiv AI

When Softmax Fails at the Top: Extreme Value Corrections for InfoNCE

arXiv:2606. 00262v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: InfoNCE is the standard contrastive learning objective, but its softmax form is not only a computational convenience: it also encodes a statistical assumption about how the top-scoring example is selected.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 14

A Strong Balanced-Softmax Classifier-Retraining Baseline for Long-Tailed Recognition

arXiv:2607. 09832v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-tailed recognition methods often modify losses, margins, or representations to reduce the dominance of frequent classes.

By Juan Terven, Diana Margarita C\'ordova Esparza, Julio Alejandro Romero Gonzalez, Edgar Arturo Ch\'avez Urbiola, Francisco Javier Willars Rodriguez, Juan Bautista Hurtado Ramos, Alfonso Ramirez Pedraza
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 23

eXplaining to Learn (eX2L): Regularization Using Contrastive Visual Explanation Pairs for Distribution Shifts

The paper introduces eXplaining to Learn (eX2L), an interpretable framework that regularizes a classifier by penalizing similarity between Grad‑CAM maps of the main label classifier and a confounder classifier. This approach decorrelates confounding features from latent representations during training. On the Spawrious Many‑to‑Many Hard Challenge benchmark, eX2L outperforms the current state‑of‑the‑art by 5.49% in average accuracy and 10.90% in worst‑group accuracy, while also demonstrating functional domain invariance through explicit label‑nuisance decoupling.

By Paulo Mario P. Medina, Jose Marie Antonio Mi\~noza, Sebastian C. Iba\~nez
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 10

Threshold Differential Attention for Sink-Free, Ultra-Sparse, and Non-Dispersive Language Modeling

arXiv:2601. 12145v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Softmax attention struggles with long contexts due to structural limitations: the strict sum-to-one constraint forces attention sinks on irrelevant tokens, and probability mass disperses as sequence lengths increase.

By Xingyue Huang, Xueying Ding, Mingxuan Ju, Yozen Liu, Neil Shah, Tong Zhao
arXiv AI
Jun 3

FFR: Forward-Forward Learning for Regression

arXiv:2606. 03927v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Forward-Forward (FF) algorithm offers a computationally efficient and biologically plausible alternative to backpropagation (BP) by training neural networks through purely local, layer-wise optimization.

By Xinyang Liu, Xuanyu Liang, Shiqi Ding, Boyang Li, Zhiqiang Que, Jiayang Li, Guosheng Hu