arXiv AI

KITE: Kernelized and Information Theoretic Exemplars for In-Context Learning

arXiv:2509. 15676v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for adapting large language models (LLMs) to new and data-scarce tasks using only a few carefully selected task-specific examples presented in the prompt.

arXiv AI
Sep 18

Lens: Bringing the Right Semantic Perspective into Focus for Training-Free Multimodal Representation Learning

The paper introduces Lens, a training‑free framework that aligns multimodal representations with the semantic perspective required by downstream tasks. Lens uses a task‑specific readout phrase to anchor the perspective and then aggregates token states after the full input, ensuring the extracted representation reflects task‑conditioned evidence integration rather than generic salient content. The method achieves a Precision@1 of 63.9 across 36 MMEB datasets, outperforming the nearest training‑free baseline by 10.2 points.

By Xinran Liu, Shouqian Shi, Yixian Chen, Ruizhi Chen, Xin-Wei Yao, Sheng Zhong
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 19

Understanding the Surprising Generalization Properties of Tabular Foundation Models

The paper investigates how Tabular Foundation Models (TFMs) can achieve strong transfer learning by self‑supervised pre‑training on a single real table. It finds that a table’s usefulness is largely determined by its number of features rather than instances, and that fine‑grained column‑level preprocessing improves downstream performance while dataset‑level filtering does not. The authors propose that tabular in‑context generalization is primarily retrieval‑based, with models learning to identify and aggregate relevant examples from the provided context.

By Nour Shaheen, Junwei Ma, Alex Labach, Frank Hutter, Valentin Thomas, Anthony L. Caterini
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Beyond Truncation: Rethinking LLM Decoding as Ensemble Pruning

The paper introduces Mahalanobis-Ensemble Decoding (ME-Decoding), a new framework for Large Language Model decoding that treats candidate token selection as an ensemble pruning problem. It uses a Mahalanobis distance-driven objective to promote semantic diversity while maintaining high probabilities, employing a token similarity matrix built with an adaptive-bandwidth kernel over token embeddings. An efficient greedy algorithm with near-linear complexity and theoretical guarantees makes ME-Decoding a plug‑and‑play module with negligible inference overhead, and experiments show strong performance across reasoning and generation tasks.

By Dunyao Xue, Chengshuo Du, Zhengbo Wang, Wenlin Dai, Cheng Meng
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 20

Pretraining Reusable Inference Across Views with Synthetic Task Priors

The paper introduces SIMPLE, a prior‑fitted multi‑view in‑context learner that learns a reusable, task‑conditioned inference procedure instead of a fixed fusion function. By generating synthetic task priors in embedding space, SIMPLE can handle diverse view configurations, class structures, and missingness patterns. Experiments on multi‑view and multi‑omics benchmarks show that a frozen SIMPLE model performs competitively, and lightweight adapter calibration further improves performance across most datasets.

By Jielong Lu, Zhihao Wu, Jiajun Yu, Zhaoliang Chen, Haishuai Wang