arXiv Machine Learning

$\sigma$Transfer: Uncertainty Transfer from Small to Large Networks under $\mu\mathrm{P}$

arXiv:2610. 11668v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reliable predictive uncertainty in Laplace approximations depends critically on the prior precision, yet selecting it requires a posterior sweep that is prohibitively expensive for neural networks with billions of parameters.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 17

You Only Pass Once: Answering and Abstaining Together in a Single Forward Pass of a Frozen Language Model

arXiv:2608. 14465v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A frozen language model on reasoning tasks has two coupled weaknesses: it under-uses evidence its own residual stream already encodes, and it fails to detect when the input is insufficient to answer, so it confabulates.

By Ziyang Luo, Zhongyao Chu, Xinjie He, Youting Wang, Xukui Qin, Runxiong Wu, Yan-Syuan Chen
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 18

Not Just How Much, But Where: Decomposing Epistemic Uncertainty into Per-Class Contributions

arXiv:2602. 21160v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In safety-critical classification, the cost of failure is often asymmetric, yet Bayesian deep learning summarises epistemic uncertainty with a single scalar, mutual information (MI), that cannot distinguish whether a model's ignorance involves a benign or safety-critical class.

By Mame Diarra Toure, David A. Stephens
arXiv AI
5d ago

One-Shot Localisation of the Global Minimum of a Noisy One-Dimensional Function: An Iterative Neural Minimizer Compared with Set Transformers and Classical Estimators

The paper introduces the Neural Function Minimizer (NFM), an iterative neural model that predicts the global minimum of a noisy one‑dimensional function from only twenty samples. It compares the NFM to two Set Transformers and classical zero‑query estimators, finding that all learned models outperform classical methods on held‑out data, with the NFM achieving the lowest error relative to the Gaussian‑process posterior argmin. The study also examines how different estimator outputs affect tie‑breaking between equally deep valleys and plans to release a benchmark and self‑checking harness.

By Qusay Muzaffar, David Levin, Michael Werman
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 24

The Drift Contract: Spectral Updates for Depth-Robust Local Learning

The paper introduces the Drift Contract, a spectral update geometry for local learning that improves depth robustness and hyperparameter stability. By applying momentum orthogonalization with spectral step scaling to per‑layer updates, the authors achieve consistent performance across a wide range of widths and depths on CIFAR‑10 MLPs, outperforming local Adam and providing a per‑layer, input‑conditioned drift bound. The study also shows that the spectral geometry itself, rather than step‑size rules, drives the observed depth robustness, while a negative result indicates that the stability benefit is limited to non‑normalized layers.

By Fabien Polly
arXiv AI
Jul 22

Soft-TransFormers for Continual Learning

arXiv:2411. 16073v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Inspired by the Well-initialized Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (WLTH), we introduce Soft-TransFormers (Soft-TF), a continual learning framework that adapts a frozen pre-trained Transformer through task-specific soft subnetworks: real-valued multiplicative masks over the query, key, value, and output projections of selected self-attention layers.

By Haeyong Kang, Chang D. Yoo
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Adapting Without Gradients: Affine Statistics Transport and What Its Certificate Can Tell You

The paper introduces CASTER, a gradient‑free test‑time adaptation method that keeps the model frozen by storing source class statistics in a discriminative subspace and applying an affine transformation estimated from target‑batch moments. CASTER avoids backward passes, optimizer state, and large feature banks, outperforming k‑NN on frozen features in most backbone‑dataset settings while using far less memory. The authors also propose a residual‑to‑margin transportability certificate that flags when affine transport is unreliable, and demonstrate that gating based on this certificate can recover performance losses.

By Salim Khazem, Ibrahim Mohamed Serouis
arXiv AI
Sep 3

Modeling What Changes: Sparse, Residual World Models for Object-Centric Manipulation

The paper introduces a sparse, residual world model that focuses on predicting only the changes in a scene by using a per-object change gate and a residual delta head. On a MuJoCo tabletop pushing benchmark, this approach outperforms a dense multilayer perceptron, achieving 2.5 to 4.6 times better next‑state pose accuracy with 8.6 to 11.1 times fewer parameters, maintaining high change‑detection F1 scores, and showing strong transfer across object counts. In autoregressive rollout and sampling‑based planning, the sparse model accumulates less error and enables successful planning where dense models fail.

By Param Thakkar, Parsika Paresh Shah, Manisha Sushant Gote