arXiv Machine Learning

Labeled-Data-Free Meta-Learning: Efficient Task Generation Using Pre-trained Models and Unlabeled Data

arXiv:2607. 02850v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Meta-learning without labeled data is crucial for real-world applications, where obtaining labeled datasets can be expensive or restricted due to privacy concerns.

arXiv AI
Jun 4

Learning to Evaluate: Cost-Effective Model Evaluation on Unlabeled Data with Meta-Learning

arXiv:2605. 23595v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The rapid advancement of machine learning has led to an unprecedented expansion of model ecosystems, making it increasingly difficult to assess the reliability of newly released models on unseen and unlabeled data.

By Trinh Pham, Viet Huynh, Hongzhi Yin, Quoc Viet Hung Nguyen, Thanh Tam Nguyen
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 14

Metadata-Free Meta-Reweighted Direct Preference Optimization under Noisy Preference Labels

arXiv:2607. 09796v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has become an important method for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences because it removes the need for explicit reward modeling and reinforcement learning optimization.

By Hua Qu, Yifan Li, Xiaodong Yuan
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 2

DECSELFMASK: Leveraging Unlabeled Text via Self-Relevance-Guided Masking for Decoder-Only Classification

DECSELFMASK is a decoder‑only classification method that uses unlabeled clinical text to improve performance. It creates self‑supervised training examples by masking portions of the text identified as relevant through relevance attribution, then trains the model to reconstruct the masked tokens via next‑token prediction. Experiments on 136 tasks from 1.9 M Italian hospital notes show consistent gains across five models, outperforming base models (+9.1 Macro F1), continual pretraining (+6.3), and synthetic label generation (+12.5).

By Pietro Ferrazzi, Matteo Merler, Giovanni Bonetta, Alberto Lavelli, Bernardo Magnini
arXiv AI
Sep 15

Generalization Can Emerge in Tabular Foundation Models From a Single Table

The paper demonstrates that a tabular foundation model can achieve strong generalization using only a single real table for self‑supervised pre‑training, challenging the belief that large synthetic or real datasets are necessary. By systematically pre‑training and evaluating across diverse benchmarks, the authors show that the number and quality of tasks that can be derived from a dataset are critical for downstream performance. This finding suggests that carefully constructed task sets from limited data can enable effective transfer learning in tabular models.

By Junwei Ma, Nour Shaheen, Alex Labach, Amine Mhedhbi, Frank Hutter, Anthony L. Caterini, Valentin Thomas
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

Are We Really Doing Few-Shot Learning? A Critical Examination of Pre-Training Assumptions

The paper critically evaluates common few‑shot learning protocols that rely on pre‑training a model on a large auxiliary set with classes disjoint from the target but drawn from the same visual domain. By comparing no pre‑training, class‑disjoint in‑domain pre‑training, supervised out‑of‑domain pre‑training, and label‑free out‑of‑domain pre‑training across eight datasets and three architectures, the authors find that in‑domain pre‑training yields a 33.41‑point average improvement, while out‑of‑domain pre‑training offers a 23.75‑point gain, revealing a 9.66‑point optimistic bias due to domain overlap. They also demonstrate that a label‑free augmentation strategy can match supervised out‑of‑domain performance and propose a descriptor‑based source‑selection method that closely approximates oracle selection, underscoring the need to move beyond in‑domain pre‑training as the default evaluation protocol.

By Alejandro Galan-Cuenca, Marcelo Saval-Calvo, Antonio Javier Gallego