arXiv Machine Learning

Keeping Score: Adaptive, Tuning-Free Loss Weighting for Score-Augmented Neural Ratio Estimation

The paper introduces an adaptive, tuning‑free method for weighting the score‑matching term in the loss function of neural ratio estimators, eliminating the need for manual hyper‑parameter tuning. By adjusting the score loss weights during training based on loss gradients, the approach adds minimal overhead to standard classifier training. Experiments on network dynamics and spatial process models show that this technique improves surrogate quality and can match the inference performance of a 10× larger training set while keeping training time under 1.1× higher.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

ExpTest: Loss-Curve Hypothesis Testing for Autonomous Learning-Rate Selection in Deep Neural Networks

ExpTest is an autonomous learning‑rate controller that uses the training loss curve as an online signal to perform sequential statistical tests on theoretically motivated windows, detecting convergent behavior and triggering learning‑rate reductions. It combines a covariance‑based initial learning‑rate estimate, curvature‑motivated window sizing, and a two‑phase test‑driven decay, relying on the approximately exponential decay predicted under linearized network dynamics. Experiments on regression, classification, forecasting, and natural‑language tasks across various architectures show that ExpTest achieves competitive performance compared to hand‑tuned SGD baselines and recent learning‑rate‑free methods, without requiring manual initial learning‑rate selection or predefined scheduling.

By Zan Chaudhry, Naoko Mizuno
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 18

BLADE: Scalable Bi-level Adaptive Data Selection for LLM Training

arXiv:2606. 18650v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As Large Language Model (LLM) datasets scale to trillions of tokens, data selection has emerged as a critical frontier to filter out uninformative noise and construct adaptive learning trajectories.

By Jiaxing Wang, Deping Xiang, Jin Xu, Zirui Liu, Zicheng Zhang, Guoqiang Gong, Jun Fang, Chao Liu, Pengzhang Liu, Tongxuan Liu, Ke Zhang, Qixia Jiang
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 16

Pairwise AUC Optimization Needs Corrective Power: A Unified View

The paper investigates why direct pairwise AUC surrogate training, though aligned with the ranking metric, can fail to provide corrective updates during stochastic training. It introduces the concept of Corrective Power, showing that in certain regions severe ranking errors persist without generating strong gradient signals, a phenomenon linked to degeneracies in the U‑statistics of pairwise gradients. The authors explain empirical observations—such as the effectiveness of squared‑hinge loss, the benefit of cross‑entropy warm‑up, and the advantage of parameter‑efficient fine‑tuning—through this theoretical lens, and validate their claims with experiments on eight computer‑vision and eight NLP tasks using various models.

By Jia Chen, Zhiyong Yang, Shilong Bao, Qianqian Xu, Qingming Huang
arXiv AI
Jul 23

In-Run Data Shapley for Adam Optimizer

arXiv:2602. 00329v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reliable data attribution is essential for mitigating bias and reducing computational waste in modern machine learning, with the Shapley value serving as the theoretical gold standard.

By Meng Ding, Zeqing Zhang, Di Wang, Lijie Hu
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Efficiently Estimating Optimal Hyperparameter Scaling Laws through Power-Law Entropy Search

The paper introduces Power‑Law Entropy Search (PLES), a computational‑cost‑aware acquisition function that uses multi‑fidelity Bayesian optimization to efficiently estimate optimal hyperparameter scaling laws for large language model training. PLES focuses on reducing the overall uncertainty of scaling law estimates rather than optimizing a single objective, selecting configurations that maximize uncertainty reduction per unit computational cost. Experiments on synthetic benchmarks, surrogate models, and real LLM pre‑training runs show that PLES converges to accurate scaling laws using less than one‑tenth of the computational budget required by conventional grid search and other baselines.

By Zhiliang Chen, Sebastian Ament, David Eriksson, Maximilian Balandat, Eytan Bakshy, Jihao Andreas Lin
arXiv Machine Learning
2d ago

Fragility-aware Classification for Risk Characterization and Robust Learning

The paper introduces the Fragility Index (FI), a new performance metric that measures the tail risk of confident misclassifications in classification models. FI is framed within a robust satisficing framework to assess classifier sensitivity under distributional uncertainty, and the authors develop a surrogate-based training method with provable bounds linking training fragility to ranking-error FI. The approach is extended to common loss functions and includes an FI-based regularizer for deep neural networks, with empirical studies on medical diagnosis tasks showing that FI reveals risk not captured by accuracy or AUC and leads to models with lower operational costs in a human–AI diagnostic workflow.

By Zheng Cui, Daniel Zhuoyu Long, Jin Qi, Chen Yang, Ruohan Zhan