Existing post-hoc explainers for machine learning classifiers primarily focus on feature attribution, assigning importance scores to individual features. While valuable, this approach struggles to articulate the complex, combinatorial patterns that often drive a model's decision-making process. To overcome this limitation, we introduce ProToMEx, a new paradigm for explainability that leverages Probabilistic Topic Models (PTMs). Our model-agnostic framework learns latent ''topics'' that represent distinct, high-level reasons for a classification, moving beyond simple feature importance to reveal underlying semantic structures. ProToMEx naturally provides both global explanations of a model's overall behaviour and local explanations that can disentangle multiple co-existing reasons for a specific prediction. We demonstrate empirically that ProToMEx not only produces explanations of comparable fidelity to popular methods like SHAP and LIME but also drastically reduces the amortised computational cost of generating local explanations, making it highly suitable for real-time applications. Specifically, we show that ProToMEx is ~30-40x faster than SHAP and LIME over standardised tabular datasets and synthetic datasets.
Athina Georgara, Adarsh Valoor, Sarvapali D. Ramchurn· 0 citations
Latent world models have become increasingly popular as a method to predict and plan in latent space rather than pixel space. Recent architectures, such as LeWorldModel (LeWM), jointly train the encoder and predictor using regularization techniques like SIGReg to prevent representation collapse. Even with such regularization preventing representation collapse, we identify a new world model failure mode of \textit{physical representation laziness}, particularly noted in highly dynamic environments. For these lazy cases, the learned latent states do not collapse but nonetheless fail to represent key physical properties, causing ubiquitous downstream planning failure. To resolve this issue, we propose training-time auxiliary supervision with a lightweight "Fourier auxiliary head", which enforces physically-informed structuring of the latent space with no additional inference-time cost and can be generalized to any environment. Experimentally, we show that the auxiliary head substantially improves planning success rates in dynamic environments where the baseline LeWM exhibits physical representation laziness. It also leads to modest improvements in other environments, even when the baseline does not exhibit physical representation laziness. We further observe superior planning performance being accompanied by higher latent space correlations with key physical properties, indicating both the ability of our method to physically structure latent states and the potential planning-side benefit to the learned representation being physically structured. We also see in low-data regimes, auxiliary supervision is particularly impactful in increasing success rate. These findings support the use of our Fourier auxiliary head method to improve both overall success rate and data efficiency, while avoiding representation laziness in latent world models.
Penghao Zhu, Salvatore Penachio, Kaustav Mukherjee et al.· 0 citations
Time series forecasting (TSF) is evolving toward multimodal and agentic settings, yet using foundation models remains uneconomical in resource-constrained scenarios, where compact, specialized forecasters are more desirable. However, lightweight forecasters typically require substantial training data, limiting their use in domains with scarce, slowly accumulated, or privacy-sensitive time series. To address this dilemma, we investigate the challenging problem of few-shot learning for lightweight forecasters. We propose MetaCaster, a meta-harness-optimized multi-agent framework that uses agentic data generation to automatically train specialized lightweight forecasters from only a few examples and textual contexts. Our work highlights a new TSF paradigm in which agents act not as forecasters but as intermediary engineers that prepare efficient, task-specific forecasters for deployment. Experiments on 18 datasets, 23 state-of-the-art lightweight forecasters, and 14 baselines demonstrate that MetaCaster achieves both data efficiency and computational efficiency while maintaining high-quality TSF performance.
ChengAo Shen, Wenchao Yu, Fangyu Wu et al.· 0 citations
Rising energy demand, fossil fuel depletion and climate change highlight the need for more efficient energy production and consumption. Offshore oil and gas platforms face challenges related to inefficient energy use, system failures, accessibility and environmental impact. Machine learning (ML) offers opportunities to improve the safety, sustainability and efficiency of these systems; however, previous research has largely focused on increasing oil production rather than reducing energy consumption on platforms. This study investigates the use of ML and search algorithms to improve diesel efficiency on an offshore oil platform. Data collected over 18 months from a platform in Scotland were analysed, focusing on four diesel generators as the primary diesel-consuming equipment. Following exploratory data analysis and outlier detection, regression models were developed to predict daily diesel consumption for different generator power loads. Multiple Linear Regression and Artificial Neural Networks achieved the best predictive performance compared with Extra Trees Regression, Extreme Gradient Boosting and Random Forest. Search algorithms were then used to identify combinations of generator power loads that minimised daily diesel consumption. The results showed an average diesel saving of 27% per day compared with the worst daily power-load combinations, equivalent to approximately 24,000 litres/day. These findings demonstrate significant opportunities for improving energy efficiency on offshore oil platforms using ML-based optimisation.
Khivishta Boodhoo, Josh Plumbly, Nicholas Watson· 0 citations
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An accurate estimation of the state of health (SOH) underpins safe and optimized use of the battery system. Although compelling, data-driven SOH estimation models typically require large amounts of high-quality labeled cycling data, while in practice such labels are often sparse in both quantity and coverage. Therefore, in this work, we propose a degradation-aligned self-supervised learning (SSL) framework based on a convolutional neural network-gated recurrent unit (CNN-GRU) model, which learns aging-consistent representations from unlabeled data through a cycle-order ranking objective as the pretext task for pretraining, thereby enabling robust SOH estimation after fine-tuning on sparsely labeled data. Test results showcase that the proposed ranking-based SSL approach proves to endow the pretrained model with degradation awareness from unlabeled data, and after fine-tuning the model can carry out accurate, robust SOH estimation, even when only an extremely limited amount of 1% of unevenly distributed labeled training data is available, where the MAE of 1.718% and RMSE of 2.329% can be achieved on the test cell. In addition, in-depth analyses are presented regarding the influences of label distribution and cross-cell robustness. We believe this work could shed new light on label-efficient SOH estimation of lithium-ion batteries, addressing a practical need in battery management.
Large language models produce fluent, confident, factually wrong output. Existing taxonomies classify these failures by output type -- intrinsic versus extrinsic, faithfulness versus factuality -- but say nothing about which computational component produced a given failure. We ask what would be required to attribute an individual hallucination to a specific component of the decoder-only stack. We treat three components -- self-attention's associative retrieval, the maximum-likelihood pretraining objective, and autoregressive commitment under exposure bias -- as candidate failure surfaces, justify their separability rather than assuming it, and specify an attribution procedure requiring only sampling access: an ordered set of three interventions on prefix, context, and frequency competition, together with a validation design based on independent annotation and a classifier baseline. We state five falsifiable predictions and identify competing accounts each would discriminate against. We analyse how instruction tuning, RLHF, DPO, retrieval augmentation, scale, and calibration bear on the argument. We execute a direct, pre-registered test of the commitment prediction (P3) across three model families: substituting a correct continuation at the point of divergence reduces downstream failing claims by 46.7 percentage points relative to baseline (p<10^-9). However, a wrong-fact substitution reduces errors at a statistically indistinguishable rate, and the model answers correctly in isolation on only 2.2% of items where substitution succeeded -- a genuine partial result rather than a confirmation. Dataset pathologies amplify each component without originating failure independently, supporting an asymmetric-dependence claim: components are necessary intermediaries for data-induced failure, but data defects are not necessary for component-induced failure.
This work investigates the ``small-vs-large gap'', where repeating on fewer samples can lead to compute saving during training compared to using a larger dataset. This is observed across algorithmic tasks, architectures and optimizers and cannot be explained using prior theory. We argue that the speedup comes from appropriate layer-wise growth enabled by sampling biases, which is more pronounced when the dataset size is smaller. We provide both theoretical analysis and empirical evidence from various interventions. Our results suggest that using a smaller dataset with more repetitions is not just a fallback strategy under data scarcity, but can be proactively leveraged as a favorable inductive biases for optimization, particularly in reasoning tasks.
Jingwen Liu, Ezra Edelman, Surbhi Goel et al.· 0 citations
High-Level Synthesis (HLS) compiles algorithmic C/C++ descriptions into hardware, with Quality of Results (QoR)---latency and resource utilization---critically governed by pragma configurations and code structure. Existing natural-language-to-HLS (NL-to-HLS) training approaches prioritize functional correctness while largely ignoring QoR. We observe that reinforcement learning (RL) for HLS does not require absolute synthesis results---only relative comparisons between candidates. Based on this insight, we propose \textbf{HLS-Seek}, a QoR-aware NL-to-HLS framework that avoids full synthesis-in-the-loop RL via a comparative proxy reward model achieving 99.53\% Pareto-dominance accuracy. To prevent reward hacking, we introduce \textit{uncertainty-aware Monte Carlo (MC) dropout switching} that selectively invokes real Vitis HLS synthesis for low-confidence candidates and online updates the proxy, creating a self-improving reward system. HLS-Seek achieves 84.7\% syntax correctness pass@1 and 81.4\% functional correctness pass@5 on HLS-Eval~\cite{abikaram2025hlseval} with only 7B parameters, surpassing GPT-5.1 on functional pass@5, while achieving 8.5$\times$ faster training than real-reward RL. On QoR evaluation, HLS-Seek achieves the lowest latency on 19/30 kernels and Pareto-dominates HLS-specific baselines on 9 kernels.
Qingyun Zou, Feng Yu, Hongshi Tan et al.· 0 citations
The trustworthy object detection capabilities of a novel Kolmogorov-Arnold network framework are examined here. The approach addresses a key limitation in computer vision for vehicle detection perception, and beyond. These systems offer limited transparency regarding the reliability of their confidence scores in visually degraded or ambiguous scenes. To this end, a Kolmogorov-Arnold network is employed as an interpretable post-hoc surrogate to model the trustworthiness of the You Only Look Once (Yolov10) detections using seven geometric and semantic features. The additive spline-based structure of the Kolmogorov-Arnold network enables direct visualisation of each feature's influence. This produces smooth and transparent functional mappings that reveal when the model's confidence is well supported and when it is unreliable. Furthermore, a bootstrapped language-image (BLIP) foundation model generates descriptive captions of each scene. This tool enables a lightweight multimodal interface without affecting the interpretability layer. Experiments on both Common Objects in Context (COCO), and images from the University of Bath campus demonstrate that the framework accurately identifies low-trust predictions under blur, occlusion, or low texture. This provides actionable insights for acceptance, review, or downstream risk mitigation. The resulting system delivers interpretable object detection with trustworthy confidence estimates. It offers a powerful tool for transparent and practical perception component for autonomous and multimodal artificial intelligence applications.
Marios Impraimakis, Daniel Vazquez, Feiyu Zhou· 0 citations
Real-world time series exhibit complex and evolving dynamics, making accurate forecasting extremely challenging. Recent multi-modal forecasting methods leverage textual information such as news reports to improve prediction, but most rely on token-level fusion that mixes temporal patches with language tokens in a shared embedding space. However, such fusion can be ill-suited when high-quality time-text pairs are scarce and when time series exhibit substantial variation in characteristics, thus complicating cross-modal alignment. In parallel, mixture-of-experts (MoE) architectures have proven effective for both time series modeling and multi-modal learning, yet many existing MoE-based modality integration methods still depend on token-level fusion. To address this, we propose Expert Modulation, a new mechanism for multi-modal time series prediction that conditions both routing and expert computation on textual signals, enabling direct and efficient cross-modal control over expert behavior. Through theoretical analysis and experiments, our proposed method demonstrates strong improvements in multi-modal time series prediction. The current code implementation is available at https://github.com/BruceZhangReve/MoME
Lige Zhang, Ali Maatouk, Jialin Chen et al.· 0 citations
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to telecom engineering tasks, yet perform poorly on 3GPP specifications. These standards encode much of their technical information in complex tables, but LLM knowledge and interpretation of such tables remain largely unexplored. We introduce TeleTables, a benchmark comprising 2,220 tables from 13 3GPP specifications in four formats and 500 human-verified MCQs spanning direct retrieval to multi-step reasoning. Evaluating 20 open-weight LLMs across non reasoning, multimodal, reasoning, and table specialized architectures reveals two distinct performance bottlenecks. In the closed-book setting, domain knowledge is the primary constraint, with no general-purpose model exceeding 41% accuracy. When the table is provided as context, the best models exceed 90%, but performance degrades systematically with reasoning depth, evidence scope, and structural complexity, with a 32.2pp spread across reasoning skills. Table specialization on non-telecom data provides no consistent benefit, while strong reasoning capabilities remain essential for reliable interpretation of complex technical tables.
Anas Ezzakri, Nicola Piovesan, Mohamed Sana et al.· 0 citations
Agentic Workflows (AWs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for solving complex tasks. However, automatically generating high-quality AWs remains expensive because AW optimization requires evaluating a large number of candidate AWs via execution, resulting in high computational cost and latency. Recently, AW performance prediction has become a hot research topic to avoid costly execution-based evaluation, but existing methods primarily use Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to model workflow structures and insufficiently capture the semantic relationships among agents. To address this limitation, we propose GLOW, a unified framework for AW performance prediction that combines the graph-structure modeling ability of GNNs with the topology-aware semantic encoding capability of LLMs. Specifically, a graph-oriented LLM is first built through instruction-tuning on graph understanding tasks to extract topology-aware semantic representations from descriptive text of AWs. Meanwhile, a GNN explicitly models the structural information of AWs and produces corresponding structural representations. The semantic and structural representations are then fused in a shared latent space using a Transformer-based fusion module. A contrastive learning strategy is further introduced to learn more discriminative representations for AWs. Experiments on the FLORA-Bench benchmark demonstrate that GLOW consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both prediction accuracy and ranking utility. Moreover, when integrated into the AFLOW, an automatic AW generation framework, GLOW reduces optimization time by 98.7% with only a 0.031 average score decrease across three datasets, showing its effectiveness as an efficient surrogate evaluator for AW optimization.
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.
