Neural networks are increasingly employed to identify both well-defined and ambiguous concepts, yet output-level metrics reveal little about how those concepts are represented internally. Our study asks if these networks exhibit \textit{conceptual separation}: if examples of the same concept form coherent representations, and whether related concepts lie closer together in the representation space. We examine this conceptual organisation in Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Large Language Models (LLMs) through geometric and distributional analysis of their internal activations. In CNNs, familiar ImageNet concepts form coherent and semantically ordered representations, while this coherence weakens for unseen concepts and suffers within-class domain shift. In LLMs, clearly distinct domains remain well separated, related subdomains move closer together, and the distinction between ambiguous topics collapses at both the mean and covariance level. These results suggest that conceptual separation can reveal structure that output accuracy alone cannot, and may serve as a useful diagnostic of how robustly a model represents the concepts it is asked to identify. Code and data available on \href{https://github.com/JaeeRoshniCapstoneProject/Are-You-Thinking-What-I-m-Thinking-Examining-Conceptual-Separation-in-Neural-Architectures}{GitHub}.
Local learning methods offer an alternative to end-to-end backpropagation, but their unstructured local objectives can produce weak feature learning in deep networks. We study whether the order of hidden-state optimization can address this limitation. We propose a boundary-first inference schedule that partitions a model into chunks, first coordinates hidden states at chunk boundaries, and then refines representations within each chunk. We instantiate this schedule in predictive coding networks (PCNs), a local-learning framework in which hidden activities and prediction errors are explicitly exposed during inference. On CIFAR-10, the resulting boundary-first predictive-coding instantiation improves accuracy over standard predictive coding by $9.77\%$ under a standard parametrization and by $5.51\%$ under a $\mu$-parametrization. Diagnostic analyses further show more non-trivial early-layer updates, lower initial-to-final CKA, and more diverse layerwise gradients, consistent with stronger feature learning. These results support boundary-first, chunk-based inference as a practical design principle for predictive-coding training and motivate its study in broader local-learning systems.
Electroencephalography (EEG) is a non-invasive technique for measuring neural activity and has been widely used in neuroscience applications. Recent advances in EEG foundation models have enabled strong performance across diverse neural decoding tasks. However, no single foundation model consistently performs best across datasets or individual EEG instances, while instance-level model selection remains largely unexplored. To address this limitation, we formulate EEG foundation model selection as an instance-level Algorithm Selection (AS) problem. We propose \textbf{EEG-AS}, an instance-level algorithm selection framework that characterizes each EEG instance using inference-available latent EEG embeddings, handcrafted neurophysiological features, and an anchor foundation model. During training, EEG-AS learns to reconstruct unavailable foundation-model behaviors from privileged prediction tokens conditioned on an anchor foundation model, while during inference it estimates these behaviors without executing the entire model portfolio, enabling efficient selection from seven EEG foundation models. Experiments on seven public EEG benchmarks demonstrate that EEG-AS substantially narrows the gap between the Single Best Solver (SBS) and the oracle upper bound for each instance. These results highlight the effectiveness of instance-level AS for adaptive deployment of EEG foundation models.
Yunzhen Zhang, Ruoxi Piao, Hasan Onur Keles et al.· 0 citations
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across diverse domains, but their adaptation to privacy-sensitive, distributed datasets remains a challenge. While Federated Learning (FL) combined with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) provides a resource-efficient paradigm for collaborative fine-tuning, practical deployments are hindered by the dual challenges of resource heterogeneity and data heterogeneity. Existing rank-heterogeneous methods primarily focus on bridging dimension mismatches for aggregation but typically provide a unified global model for all clients sharing the same rank, failing to capture client-specific features in non-IID scenarios. In this paper, we propose FedRoRA (Federated Rank-wise Personalized LoRA), a novel framework that enables fine-grained personalization within rank-heterogeneous federations. FedRoRA decouples adaptation into shared global directions and personalized rank-wise magnitudes governed by learnable diagonal scales. On the server side, it extracts a global subspace via singular value decomposition (SVD) and redistributes client-specific initializations through a personalized projection and top-$k$ selection mechanism. Extensive experiments on NLU and NLG benchmarks demonstrate that FedRoRA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Lei Wang, Jieming Bian, Letian Zhang et al.· 0 citations
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Machine unlearning for large language models (LLMs) often assumes that a pre-defined forget set matches what the model has memorized, but this frequently breaks in realistic privacy settings where the original training data is inaccessible. We term this gap forget-set misalignment and identify two cases. In Under Unlearning, the forget set omits memorized information and leakage persists. In Out-of-Knowledge Unlearning, the algorithm is driven to"forget"knowledge the model never learned, perturbing parameters and degrading utility. Using gradient-level analysis, we show these behaviors arise from misaligned unlearning targets rather than specific optimization choices. We then propose CONfession-to-Forget-Set (CONFS), a data-blind framework that constructs model-aligned forget sets by eliciting and formalizing the model's memorized knowledge. Across synthetic, multimodal, and real-world benchmarks, CONFS approaches Gold-standard performance on several metrics and achieves a competitive forgetting-utility balance, while preserving utility better than other data-blind forget-set constructions.
Miso Kim, Georu Lee, Seungwon Jeong et al.· 0 citations
Multi-agent combinatorial optimization problems are notoriously challenging due to their NP-hard nature. Recent parallel autoregressive neural solvers improve inference efficiency by allowing agents to make decisions simultaneously, but their performance often degrades on large-scale instances. This is largely attributable to weak modeling of local geometric structures and the fact that conflicting task selections are handled only after action generation. To address these limitations, we propose GeoPAR, a geometry-guided parallel autoregressive reinforcement learning framework for scalable multi-agent combinatorial optimization. GeoPAR integrates three key components: (1) a projection-window sparse geometry mechanism that builds lightweight local candidate neighborhoods through multi-directional projections, (2) sparse edge-biased attention that injects these geometric relations into node representations, and (3) cache-guided conflict-aware assignment that reuses the geometric cache during decoding to suppress duplicate selections of exclusive tasks. Experiments on heterogeneous vehicle routing and open multi-depot pickup-and-delivery problems show that GeoPAR improves large-scale zero-shot generalization while substantially reducing rollout steps and maintaining efficient inference.
Wenjie Wu, Zepeng Jia, Jia-Ying Tang et al.· 0 citations
We propose EEG-VID, a task-guided latent predictive pretraining framework for EEG decoding under session and subject shifts. EEG-VID predicts future latent EEG states from recent history using an exponential-moving-average target encoder and weak task guidance, followed by supervised fine-tuning. Across VIG-48 and BCI Competition IV-2a/IV-2b, Stage 1 improves mean accuracy in 41 of 42 matched backbone-dataset-protocol comparisons, including all 12 leave-one-subject-out settings, with a maximum gain of 16.22 percentage points. On the 48-region cross-day VIG-48 task, EEG-VID achieves 6.52% Top-1 and 30.50% Top-5 accuracy. In a separate six-participant offline robot-scene study, candidate-constrained target selection reaches 40.24% versus a 25% chance level after subject-specific calibration. These results support task-guided latent prediction as a transferable pretraining strategy for EEG decoding and scene-constrained assistive target selection.
Guanzhong Sun, Junyi Ma, Yuxuan Wu et al.· 0 citations
Multimodal memory offers a scalable interface for long-video question answering, but existing methods often retrieve captions, frames, transcripts, summaries, or graph facts as isolated fragments. Although searchable, such fragments are not generation-ready: language models must reconstruct cross-modal and temporal alignments at inference time, when context is limited and attribution is difficult. We propose EM^2Mem, an event-centric multimodal memory framework that binds heterogeneous evidence to event anchors during memory construction. Each event-indexed memory cell aligns multimodal records, temporal context, graph-linked relations, semantic facts, and provenance, enabling compact evidence readout over grounded multimodal events rather than modality-specific fragments. Across three long-video QA benchmarks, EM^2Mem improves average accuracy over the strongest memory baseline by 2.0, 2.4, and 3.7 points, improves strict event-level Top-5 evidence recall by 7.0 points, and reduces per-query latency by 4.67 times and total inference tokens by 63.66% (The code will be integrated into https://github.com/zjunlp/LightMem).
Yijun Chen, Yangfan Zheng, Yanyang Li et al.· 0 citations
In this work, we study radically uncoupled learning in discounted general-sum Markov games. Assuming ``$\mathsf{ETH}$ for $\mathsf{PPAD}$", we show that, for every fixed discount factor, there is no polynomial-time algorithm for computing inverse-polynomially accurate coarse correlated equilibria in discounted general-sum Markov games when players learn independently in decentralized settings. Complementing this hardness result, we provide what appears to be the first \emph{radically uncoupled} algorithm with sub-exponential convergence guarantees to coarse correlated equilibria in discounted general-sum Markov games without imposing any structural restrictions on the game. Our algorithm is a \emph{layered} variant of optimistic mirror descent with an increasing step-size schedule tailored to the multi-agent setting. Finally, we develop both full-feedback and partial feedback versions of the aforementioned algorithm and establish sub-exponential convergence guarantees for each case.
Asrin Efe Yorulmaz, Uğur Aydın, Tamer Başar· 0 citations
Frontier language models that refuse harmful single-turn prompts often comply when the same intent is reached gradually over many turns, making multi-turn attacks one of the least understood failure modes of large language models. Most automated red-teaming methods treat this as a generation problem: produce attacks that break the model. We argue it is better framed as a search problem: discover, organize, and iteratively refine a diverse archive of attack strategies, producing a structured map of how a target model fails rather than a list of one-off successes. We introduce EvoFlint, which applies evolutionary quality-diversity search to multi-turn red-teaming. Attack strategies are phased conversation plans, not raw prompts, and are evolved through LLM-driven mutation and crossover. A Pareto fitness over attack success rate and peak severity preserves selection signal from near-miss attacks. A risk-indexed archive runs novelty search with local competition over strategy description embeddings inside each cell, maintaining diversity without committing to a predefined style taxonomy. A generation-level memory accumulates target-model insights across the population and feeds them back into strategy generation. On the HarmBench-test split, EvoFlint reaches attack success rates of 35.8% on Claude Sonnet 4.6, 59.7% on GPT-5.4, and 94.3% on Qwen3-32B, alongside 98.7% on the older GPT-4o included as a baseline reference. The resulting archive, organized by risk category, exposes for each target which categories of harm its safety training has and has not covered.
Fei-Tong Qiao, Li-Ren Peng, Shi-Ming Ren et al.· 0 citations
We provide an expository introduction on the importance of higher-arity tensor operations to deep learning. Then, we conduct a novel empirical investigation of higher-arity phenomenon in trained neural networks, introduce a hypergraphical generalization of the multilayer perceptron, and explore connections to evolutionary algorithms. We conclude with a discussion of promising directions for future research.
Michael L. Roberts, Carlos Zapata Carratal\'a. Nicholas J. Cooper, Lijun Chen et al.· 0 citations
Block Quantization (BQ) is a promising approach for efficient deployment of large language models (LLMs), enabling low-precision computation with controlled accuracy degradation. Compared to scalar weight-only quantization (WoQ), BQ quantizes both weight and activation, offering higher hardware efficiency and end-to-end inference on a unified datapath, but its design space, spanning bit-width, block size, scaling, and numeric formats, remains underexplored. We provide hardware/benchmark results through design space exploration (DSE). We find that increasing block size improves hardware efficiency by amortizing dequantization and accumulation costs, but degrades accuracy. This trade-off limits conventional BQ methods. Motivated by this insight, we propose Hierarchical Block Quantization (HBQ). Unlike prior methods [1], [2], which use small blocks and conventional Power-of-Two (PoT) or integer-based scaling, HBQ uses large blocks to maximize efficiency and introduces low-overhead significand (SIG) scaling for second-level quantization. By allocating quantization levels effectively and accounting for distinct activation and weight distributions, SIG scaling compensates for large-block errors more effectively than prior PoT and INT schemes. HBQ-A (accurate) achieves W4A16-level accuracy using only W4A5 while requiring less silicon area than NVFP4. HBQ-E (efficient) further reduces hardware cost by 17% while maintaining higher accuracy than all existing BQ methods. We implemented a 28nm ASIC accelerator applying HBQ to weights, activations, and KV cache, and integrated a novel partial-sum BQ scheme to further reduce EMA energy. Compared to state-of-the-art WoQ, HBQ delivers $2.3\times$/$4.6\times$ higher area/energy efficiency at the same accuracy level; $1.6$--$3.3\times$ system energy reduction and $1.5$--$3.0\times$ speedup over prior BQ methods while providing best accuracy.
Chun-Ting Chen, Dongguang Han, HanGyeol Mun et al.· 0 citations
A weeklong summer workshop brought higher education faculty to campus to explore how AI and machine learning materials can be adapted for their classrooms.
Adaptive AI agents can help make BIM data more machine-readable by navigating IFC models, interpreting inconsistent information, and mapping it to defined standards. In this blog, Alok Rawat shares findings from a real-world pilot in construction workflows. The post Adaptive AI Agents in Construction Workflows appeared first on GPT-Lab.
