arXiv AI
Jul 3

Neuron-Aware Active Few-Shot Learning for LLMs

arXiv:2607. 02423v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Active Few-Shot Learning (AFSL) adapts LLMs to specialized domains by identifying the most valuable unlabeled samples for annotation and use as few-shot demonstrations, effectively reducing human annotation costs while promoting high performance.

By Zhuowei Chen, Liwei Chen, Christian Schunn, Raquel Coelho, Xiang Lorraine Li
arXiv AI
Sep 7

An Empirical Study into Clustering of Unseen Datasets with Self-Supervised Encoders

The paper investigates whether pretrained image models can generalize to unseen datasets by clustering their embeddings. Using encoders trained only on ImageNet‑1k, both supervised and self‑supervised, the authors evaluate clustering performance on out‑of‑domain images. They find that supervised encoders perform better within the training domain, while self‑supervised encoders excel far outside it, and that fine‑tuning self‑supervised models reverses this trend. Additionally, the study shows that the silhouette score in UMAP‑reduced space correlates strongly with clustering accuracy, offering a proxy metric when labels are unavailable.

By Scott C. Lowe, Joakim Bruslund Haurum, Sageev Oore, Thomas B. Moeslund, Graham W. Taylor
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
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 9

Converge to Surprise: Evolutionary Self-supervised Image Clustering

arXiv:2607. 06887v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most self-supervised image clustering models, actually almost all deep learning approaches, are based on gradient descent: In order to calculate the loss, every optimization step requires a clearly defined target, whether a contrastive split, a masked patch or entity, an EMA-teacher output, a pseudo-label, or a differentiable information-theoretic functional.

By Canlin Zhang, Xiuwen Liu
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 6

LP-SFT: Local-Preserving Supervised Fine-Tuning via Multimodal Entropy Structure

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is the standard approach for adapting pretrained language models to downstream domains, yet it often improves target-domain behavior at the cost of degrading pre-existing capabilities. Standard cross-entropy fine-tuning promotes only the observed label token and leaves unconstrained how probability mass is redistributed over other plausible alternatives, potentially distorting the rich local preference structure learned during pretraining.