arXiv Machine Learning

Curating Same-Family Neural Networks for LLM-Guided Model Improvement: A Controlled Case Study

The study investigates whether a curated same-family neural network experiment can guide large language model (LLM)-based improvements for a low-performing target model under equal generation and evaluation budgets. Using TuneNNGen, an extension of NNGPT, the authors compare source-guided generation with target-only generation on CIFAR-10, SVHN, Imagenette, and CIFAR-100 datasets, achieving significant accuracy gains across these benchmarks. The results demonstrate that the benefits depend on source-target compatibility and LLM adaptation, rather than merely on stored source accuracy.

arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 3

LESS: Lightweight Evolutionary Supernet Search in Minutes

LESS (Lightweight Evolutionary Supernet Search) is a data‑driven NAS method that uses a brief hard‑path warm‑up and CMA‑ES to evaluate candidate architectures as decoded hard genotypes after six supernet updates. On NAS‑Bench‑201, LESS attains 93.189 % CIFAR‑10 accuracy in just 409.1 seconds, nearly matching FairNAS while using only about 1/24 of its search time. The approach also transfers well to CIFAR‑100, ImageNet16‑120, and the larger DARTS space, achieving high accuracies with searches completed in roughly 43.5 minutes on a single GPU.

By Aviral Gandhi, Jinglue Xu, Jialong Li, Hitoshi Iba
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 19

The Ephemeral Cost of Switching Optimizers Across LLM Training Stages

The study investigates whether switching optimizers between pretraining and subsequent training stages of large language models (LLMs) incurs a performance penalty. By pretraining 1.2B Llama‑3 models with varying proportions of AdamW and Muon updates, and interpolating between the two during continued pretraining and supervised fine‑tuning (SFT), the authors find little evidence of a meaningful optimizer mismatch penalty. The results show that final performance is largely determined by the independent effects of the pretraining and post‑training optimizers, with downstream performance generally improving as the proportion of Muon updates during SFT increases, and that Muon remains competitive with AdamW even for task‑general SFT on larger models.

By Xinyu Zhao, Davis Wertheimer, Ashutosh Sharma, Rameswar Panda, Paul Pu Liang
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 19

Data-DPO: Direct Preference Optimization for Target Model Data Selection in LLM Post-Training

Data-DPO is a target model‑oriented supervised fine‑tuning data selection method that uses one‑step probing of the target model to generate pairwise data preferences, trains a lightweight reward model to capture these preferences, and then selects a training subset by combining target‑model preference, external quality scores, and marginal diversity. Experiments on Vision‑Flan and LLaVA‑CoT demonstrate that Data‑DPO consistently outperforms existing data selection baselines across multiple data budgets and even surpasses full data training performance.

By Peng Sun, Yi Yang, Antong Zhang, Chunxiao Li, Yanbo Wang, Dianbo Liu, xin chen, Kai Yu, Lu Chen, Tianfan Fu
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 13

Similarity-Guided Curriculum Fine-Tuning of LLMs for Neural Architecture Synthesis

Introduce a MinHash-based similarity scheduling framework that constructs a progressive curriculum over neural architecture code for LLM-based neural architecture search (NAS). Using 128-permutation MinHash signatures over normalised 7-gram source code shingles, we partition the reference pool into similarity bands and present them in increasing architectural heterogeneity, with the best LoRA adapter from each stage merged cumulatively into the backbone.

arXiv AI
Oct 27

How well are open sourced AI-generated image detection models out-of-the-box: A comprehensive benchmark study

The study evaluates 16 AI‑generated image detection methods in a zero‑shot setting, testing 23 pretrained variants on 12 datasets with 2.6 million images from 291 generators. Results show no single detector consistently outperforms others, with accuracy ranging from 37.5 % to 75.0 %. The study highlights that training data alignment and generator type significantly affect performance, especially against modern commercial models, and identifies systematic failure patterns across datasets.

By Simiao Ren (Neo), Yuchen Zhou (Neo), Xingyu Shen (Neo), Kidus Zewde (Neo), Tommy Duong (Neo), George Huang (Neo), Hatsanai (Neo), Tiangratanakul (Dennis), Tsang (Dennis), Ng (Dennis), En Wei, Jiayu Xue