Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting is widely adopted for mathematical problem solving, including in low-resource languages, yet its behavior under irrelevant context remains underexplored. To systematically study this challenge, we introduce DISTRACTMATH-BN, a Bangla benchmark that augments MGSM and MSVAMP with semantically coherent but computationally irrelevant information. Evaluating seven models ranging from 3B to 12B parameters, we observe substantial performance degradation under distractors: standard models drop by up to 41 points, while reasoning-specialized models decline by 14 to 20 points despite consuming five times more tokens. We propose {\dag}DAGGER, which reformulates mathematical problem solving as executable computational graph generation with explicit modeling of distractor nodes. Fine-tuning Gemma-3 models using supervised fine-tuning followed by Group Relative Policy Optimization achieves comparable weighted accuracy on augmented benchmarks while using 89 percent fewer tokens than reasoning models. Importantly, this robustness emerges without explicit training on distractor-augmented examples. Our results suggest that enforcing structured intermediate representations improves robustness and inference efficiency in mathematical reasoning compared to free-form approaches, particularly in noisy, low-resource settings.
Zabir Al Nazi, Shubhashis Roy Dipta, Sudipta Kar· 0 citations
Traffic forecasting systems rely on fixed sensor networks that frequently exhibit contiguous blackouts. Such outages are usually treated as ignorable missingness, although dropout can depend on unobserved traffic conditions. We study this possibility with an MNAR-aware latent state-space model that combines linear traffic dynamics with a Bernoulli missingness channel whose probability depends on the latent state. Inference uses an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) followed by Rauch-Tung-Striebel (RTS) smoothing, and parameters are learned by approximate EM. We evaluate Seattle using a leakage-free, month-balanced set of 300 unique all-horizon-aligned blackout windows. On this benchmark, MAR-LDS attains 4.264 mph pooled imputation RMSE and MNAR-LDS improves it to 4.177 (difference -0.086); the detector-cluster bootstrap 95% interval is [-0.182,-0.002]. A causal one-step predicted latent representation raises missingness ROC-AUC from 0.685 using observed-only features to 0.784. We further test whether this compact probabilistic model remains competitive with substantially larger neural time-series architectures under the identical masked-imputation protocol. MNAR-LDS ranks second in pooled RMSE and outperforms 8 of 9 evaluated neural architectures; it is within 1.22% of the best neural result, with no statistically resolved difference under detector-cluster bootstrap, while achieving lower P95 error, lower long-blackout RMSE, and orders of magnitude fewer stored scalar entries. MNAR roughly doubles end-to-end training time relative to MAR and increases EKF+RTS inference time by 41%, making the accuracy-complexity-cost tradeoff explicit. Controlled state-dependent blackouts further show larger gains when dropout is genuinely informative, including a 6.34% reduction in 30-minute forecast RMSE relative to MAR.
Aman Sunesh (New York University), Allan Ma (New York University), Siddarth Nilol (New York University)· 0 citations
Computer-aided design (CAD) defines 3D models as compact, precise, and editable representations, making it directly useful for several fields. Recently, CAD generation has been gaining more attention in both the research community and industry. Crafting CAD models has long been a painstaking and time-intensive task, demanding both precision and expertise from designers. Prior works have achieved early success in single-part CAD generation, which is not well-suited for real-world applications, as multiple parts need to be assembled under semantic constraints and geometric compatibility. In this paper, we propose CADKnitter, a compositional CAD generation framework with geometric-guiding cues to steer diffusion sampling. CADKnitter is able to generate a complementary CAD part that follows both the geometric constraints of the given CAD model and the semantic constraints of the desired design text prompt. We also curate a dataset, so-called KnitCAD, containing over 310,000 samples of CAD models, along with textual prompts and assembly metadata that provide semantic and geometric constraints. Intensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art baselines by a clear margin. Our project page is available at https://cadknitter.github.io/.
Tri Le, Khang Nguyen, Baoru Huang et al.· 0 citations
Accurate and reliable aircraft landing time prediction is essential for effective resource allocation in air traffic management. However, the inherent uncertainty of aircraft trajectories and traffic flows poses significant challenges to both prediction accuracy and trustworthiness. Therefore, prediction models should not only provide point estimates of aircraft landing times but also the uncertainties associated with these predictions. Furthermore, aircraft trajectories are frequently influenced by the presence of nearby aircraft through air traffic control interventions such as radar vectoring. Consequently, landing time prediction models must account for multi-agent interactions in the airspace. In this work, we propose a probabilistic multi-agent aircraft landing time prediction framework that provides the landing times of multiple aircraft as distributions. We evaluate the proposed framework using an air traffic surveillance dataset collected from the terminal airspace of the Incheon International Airport in South Korea. The results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves higher prediction accuracy than the baselines and quantifies the associated uncertainties of its outcomes. In addition, the model uncovered underlying patterns in air traffic control through its attention scores, thereby enhancing explainability.
Kyungmin Kim, Seokbin Yoon, Keumjin Lee· 0 citations
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In this work, we study the nonlinear dynamics of a shallow neural network trained with mean-squared loss and leaky ReLU activation. Under Gaussian inputs and equal layer width k, (1) we establish, based on the equivariant gradient degree, a theoretical framework, applicable to any number of neurons k>= 4, to detect bifurcation of critical points with associated symmetries from global minimum as leaky parameter $\alpha$ varies. Typically, our analysis reveals that a multi-mode degeneracy consistently occurs at the critical number 0, independent of k. (2) As a by-product, we further show that such bifurcations are width-independent, arise only for nonnegative $\alpha$ and that the global minimum undergoes no further symmetry-breaking instability throughout the engineering regime $\alpha$ in range (0,1). An explicit example with k=5 is presented to illustrate the framework and exhibit the resulting bifurcation together with their symmetries.
Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) excel in Audio QA but often suffer from hallucinations ungrounded in the audio. To our knowledge, we are the first to propose applying vector steering to the audio domain to mitigate this. Unlike text-based steering, our silence-anchored contrastive approach steers the model away from hallucinations by contrasting active audio against a silent baseline. Probing internal states reveals a strong correlation between specific layer representations and output correctness. Leveraging this, we introduce Layer-Weighted Vector Steering (LWVS), a training-free intervention that increases steering strength at influential layers. On the Audio Hallucination QA dataset, LWVS significantly outperforms baselines, boosting Recall on the Gemma model by 15.6% (53.4% to 69.0%). Crucially, MMAU benchmark tests confirm LWVS preserves and even enhances general audio understanding, achieving an 8% relative accuracy increase on the Qwen model (54.8% to 59.2%).
Balancing resource efficiency and fairness is critical in networked systems that support modern learning applications. We introduce the \emph{Fair Minimum Labeling} (FML) problem: the task of designing a minimum-cost temporal edge activation plan that ensures each group of nodes in a network has sufficient access to a designated target set, according to specified coverage requirements. FML captures key trade-offs in systems where edge activations incur resource costs and equitable access is essential, such as distributed data collection, update dissemination in edge-cloud systems, and fair service restoration in critical infrastructure. We first give a structural characterisation of the single-terminal case, showing that it is equivalent to the rooted Covering Steiner problem. We prove that FML is NP-hard and admits no $((1-\epsilon)\ln |\mathcal{C}|)$-approximation for $|\mathcal{C}|$ groups, already on a star, while for any fixed number of groups it inherits a constant-factor approximation and remains APX-hard. We then present probabilistic approximation algorithms for the two-group, single-terminal case: an algorithm whose tree subroutine is exact, hence optimal on tree-structured networks and $\mathcal{O}(\log |V|)$ in expectation on general graphs, together with a faster bicriteria variant whose coverage violation degrades gracefully with the merge depth of the tree computation. For practical scalability, we additionally introduce a graph-native variant based on a shortest-path-tree reduction. Empirical results show that FML enforces group-level fairness, while the graph-native variant substantially improves scalability and achieves competitive activation cost.
Urban Air Mobility (UAM) envisions the widespread use of small aerial vehicles to transform transportation in dense urban environments. However, UAM faces critical operational challenges, particularly the balance between minimizing noise exposure and maintaining safe separation in low-altitude urban airspace, two potentially conflicting objectives that are often addressed separately. We propose a reinforcement learning (RL)-based air traffic management system that integrates both noise and safety considerations within a unified, decentralized framework. Under this scalable air traffic coordination solution, agents operate in a structured, multi-layered airspace and learn altitude adjustment policies to jointly manage noise impact and separation constraints. The system demonstrates strong performance across both objectives and reveals tradeoffs among separation, noise exposure, and energy efficiency under high traffic density. Among the three objectives, safe separation is accorded the highest priority, whereas the relative significance of noise and energy varies by location and is contingent upon financial and public policy considerations. The findings highlight the potential of RL and multi-objective coordination strategies in enhancing the safety, quietness, and efficiency of UAM operations.
Surya Murthy, Zhenyu Gao, John-Paul Clarke et al.· 0 citations
To fine-tune large language models (LLMs) over private data, federated learning (FL) has emerged as a promising paradigm. However, the prohibitive memory and communication demands of LLMs render standard FL impractical for resource-constrained edge devices. While split federated learning (SFL) alleviates the computing burdens via model partitioning, existing frameworks still suffer from communication bottlenecks and straggler problem due to the parameter aggregation process. To address these challenges, we propose FlexP-SFT, a novel aggregation-free framework for personalized split federated fine-tuning, which fundamentally eliminates the client-side aggregation process. Crucially, to ensure robust training in the absence of global synchronization, we introduce a layer-flexible alignment strategy to balance personalization and generalization capabilities. We further formulate split-ratio selection as a resource-aware discrete optimization problem that jointly accounts for personalization accuracy and system cost. Our proposed scheme simultaneously enhances personalized performance, reduces communication overhead, and resolves the straggler problem. Extensive results show that FlexP-SFT substantially outperforms baselines in both accuracy and latency, and that the optimized split ratio achieves a better resource-accuracy trade-off than static or memory-only choices.
Jiaxiang Geng, Tianjun Yuan, Pengchao Han et al.· 0 citations
What fundamentally distinguishes an adversarial attack from a misclassification due to limited model expressivity or finite data? In this work, we investigate this question in the setting of high-dimensional binary classification, where statistical effects due to limited data availability play a central role. We introduce a new error metric that precisely capture this distinction, quantifying model vulnerability to consistent adversarial attacks -- perturbations that preserve the ground-truth labels. Our main technical contribution is an exact and rigorous asymptotic characterization of these metrics in both well-specified models and latent space models, revealing different vulnerability patterns compared to standard robust error measures. The theoretical results demonstrate that as models become more overparameterized, their vulnerability to label-preserving perturbations grows, offering theoretical insight into the mechanisms underlying model sensitivity to adversarial attacks.
Matteo Vilucchio, Lenka Zdeborov\'a, Bruno Loureiro· 0 citations
This paper considers the estimation of quantiles via a smoothed version of the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm. By smoothing the score function with a bandwidth tied to the learning rate, we obtain estimates that are monotone in the quantile level at every iteration, while retaining the memory and computational efficiency required for streaming data. We establish non-asymptotic tail probability bounds for the smoothed estimate with and without Polyak-Ruppert averaging, which are sub-exponential with a multi-regime structure. For the averaged estimate we further derive a Bahadur representation that is uniform in the quantile level and across coordinates, and a resulting Gaussian approximation by the maximum of Brownian bridges, with the dimension $p$ allowed to grow exponentially in the sample size. This yields simultaneous inference across coordinates and quantile levels. As an alternative that avoids estimating the sparsity function, we propose an online multiplier bootstrap that preserves monotonicity, runs in a single pass and is asymptotically valid. Extending the theory to a localized recursion, we obtain online nonparametric conditional quantile estimates with uniform bands over design points and quantile levels. Simulations confirm accurate finite-sample coverage, and we illustrate the method on conditional value-at-risk curves.
Likai Chen, Georg Keilbar, Wei Biao Wu· 0 citations
Many learning algorithms can be represented as Markov processes, and understanding their generalization error is a central topic in learning theory. For specific continuous-time noisy algorithms, a prominent analysis technique relies on information-theoretic tools and the so-called ``entropy flow'' method. This technique is compatible with a broad range of assumptions and leverages the convergence properties of learning dynamics to produce meaningful generalization bounds, which can also be informative or extend to discrete-time settings. Despite their success, existing entropy flow formulations are limited to specific noise and algorithm structures (\eg, Langevin dynamics). In this work, we exploit new technical tools to extend its applicability to all learning algorithms whose iterative dynamics is governed by a time-homogeneous Markov process. Our approach builds on a principled continuous-time approximation of Markov algorithms and introduces a new, exact entropy flow formula for such processes. Within this unified framework, we establish novel connections to a well-studied family of modified logarithmic Sobolev inequalities, which we use to connect the generalization error to the ergodic properties of Markov processes. Finally, we provide a detailed analysis of all the terms appearing in our theory and demonstrate its effectiveness by deriving new generalization bounds for several concrete algorithms.
Benjamin Dupuis, Maxime Haddouche, George Deligiannidis et al.· 0 citations
A new machine-learning framework aims to improve the success rate of computational protein design while moving away from results that reproduce sequences found in nature.
MIT News · Artificial Intelligence· news.mit.eduAug 24, 2026
A new method for surgically removing training examples from a model reveals that as datasets grow, the link between what a model learns and what it produces dissolves.
