Daily Papers

Training state-of-the-art neural networks requires a high cost in terms of compute and time. Model scale is recognized to be a critical factor to achieve and improve the state-of-the-art. Increasing the scale of a neural network normally requires restarting from scratch by randomly initializing all the parameters of the model, as this implies a change of architecture's parameters that does not allow for a straightforward transfer of knowledge from smaller size models. In this work, we propose six composable transformations to incrementally increase the size of transformer-based neural networks while preserving functionality, allowing to expand the capacity of the model as needed. We provide proof of exact function preservation under minimal initialization constraints for each transformation. The proposed methods may enable efficient training pipelines for larger and more powerful models by progressively expanding the architecture throughout training.

Weight decay (WD) is a traditional regularization technique in deep learning, but despite its ubiquity, its behavior is still an area of active research. Golatkar et al. have recently shown that WD only matters at the start of the training in computer vision, upending traditional wisdom. Loshchilov et al. show that for adaptive optimizers, manually decaying weights can outperform adding an l_2 penalty to the loss. This technique has become increasingly popular and is referred to as decoupled WD. The goal of this paper is to investigate these two recent empirical observations. We demonstrate that by applying WD only at the start, the network norm stays small throughout training. This has a regularizing effect as the effective gradient updates become larger. However, traditional generalizations metrics fail to capture this effect of WD, and we show how a simple scale-invariant metric can. We also show how the growth of network weights is heavily influenced by the dataset and its generalization properties. For decoupled WD, we perform experiments in NLP and RL where adaptive optimizers are the norm. We demonstrate that the primary issue that decoupled WD alleviates is the mixing of gradients from the objective function and the l_2 penalty in the buffers of Adam (which stores the estimates of the first-order moment). Adaptivity itself is not problematic and decoupled WD ensures that the gradients from the l_2 term cannot "drown out" the true objective, facilitating easier hyperparameter tuning.

Multi-omics research has enhanced our understanding of cancer heterogeneity and progression. Investigating molecular data through multi-omics approaches is crucial for unraveling the complex biological mechanisms underlying cancer, thereby enabling effective diagnosis, treatment, and prevention strategies. However, predicting patient outcomes through integration of all available multi-omics data is an under-study research direction. Here, we present SeNMo (Self-normalizing Network for Multi-omics), a deep neural network trained on multi-omics data across 33 cancer types. SeNMo is efficient in handling multi-omics data characterized by high-width (many features) and low-length (fewer samples) attributes. We trained SeNMo for the task of overall survival using pan-cancer data involving 33 cancer sites from Genomics Data Commons (GDC). The training data includes gene expression, DNA methylation, miRNA expression, DNA mutations, protein expression modalities, and clinical data. We evaluated the model's performance in predicting overall survival using concordance index (C-Index). SeNMo performed consistently well in training regime, with the validation C-Index of 0.76 on GDC's public data. In the testing regime, SeNMo performed with a C-Index of 0.758 on a held-out test set. The model showed an average accuracy of 99.8% on the task of classifying the primary cancer type on the pan-cancer test cohort. SeNMo proved to be a mini-foundation model for multi-omics oncology data because it demonstrated robust performance, and adaptability not only across molecular data types but also on the classification task of predicting the primary cancer type of patients. SeNMo can be further scaled to any cancer site and molecular data type. We believe SeNMo and similar models are poised to transform the oncology landscape, offering hope for more effective, efficient, and patient-centric cancer care.

Normalization layers are one of the key building blocks for deep neural networks. Several theoretical studies have shown that batch normalization improves the signal propagation, by avoiding the representations from becoming collinear across the layers. However, results on mean-field theory of batch normalization also conclude that this benefit comes at the expense of exploding gradients in depth. Motivated by these two aspects of batch normalization, in this study we pose the following question: "Can a batch-normalized network keep the optimal signal propagation properties, but avoid exploding gradients?" We answer this question in the affirmative by giving a particular construction of an Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) with linear activations and batch-normalization that provably has bounded gradients at any depth. Based on Weingarten calculus, we develop a rigorous and non-asymptotic theory for this constructed MLP that gives a precise characterization of forward signal propagation, while proving that gradients remain bounded for linearly independent input samples, which holds in most practical settings. Inspired by our theory, we also design an activation shaping scheme that empirically achieves the same properties for certain non-linear activations.

With the growing use of information technology in all life domains, hacking has become more negatively effective than ever before. Also with developing technologies, attacks numbers are growing exponentially every few months and become more sophisticated so that traditional IDS becomes inefficient detecting them. This paper proposes a solution to detect not only new threats with higher detection rate and lower false positive than already used IDS, but also it could detect collective and contextual security attacks. We achieve those results by using Networking Chatbot, a deep recurrent neural network: Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) on top of Apache Spark Framework that has an input of flow traffic and traffic aggregation and the output is a language of two words, normal or abnormal. We propose merging the concepts of language processing, contextual analysis, distributed deep learning, big data, anomaly detection of flow analysis. We propose a model that describes the network abstract normal behavior from a sequence of millions of packets within their context and analyzes them in near real-time to detect point, collective and contextual anomalies. Experiments are done on MAWI dataset, and it shows better detection rate not only than signature IDS, but also better than traditional anomaly IDS. The experiment shows lower false positive, higher detection rate and better point anomalies detection. As for prove of contextual and collective anomalies detection, we discuss our claim and the reason behind our hypothesis. But the experiment is done on random small subsets of the dataset because of hardware limitations, so we share experiment and our future vision thoughts as we wish that full prove will be done in future by other interested researchers who have better hardware infrastructure than ours.

In the era of Internet of Things (IoT), network-wide anomaly detection is a crucial part of monitoring IoT networks due to the inherent security vulnerabilities of most IoT devices. Principal Components Analysis (PCA) has been proposed to separate network traffics into two disjoint subspaces corresponding to normal and malicious behaviors for anomaly detection. However, the privacy concerns and limitations of devices' computing resources compromise the practical effectiveness of PCA. We propose a federated PCA-based Grassmannian optimization framework that coordinates IoT devices to aggregate a joint profile of normal network behaviors for anomaly detection. First, we introduce a privacy-preserving federated PCA framework to simultaneously capture the profile of various IoT devices' traffic. Then, we investigate the alternating direction method of multipliers gradient-based learning on the Grassmann manifold to guarantee fast training and the absence of detecting latency using limited computational resources. Empirical results on the NSL-KDD dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms baseline approaches. Finally, we show that the Grassmann manifold algorithm is highly adapted for IoT anomaly detection, which permits drastically reducing the analysis time of the system. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first federated PCA algorithm for anomaly detection meeting the requirements of IoT networks.

This paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of instance segmentation models with respect to real-world image corruptions as well as out-of-domain image collections, e.g. images captured by a different set-up than the training dataset. The out-of-domain image evaluation shows the generalization capability of models, an essential aspect of real-world applications and an extensively studied topic of domain adaptation. These presented robustness and generalization evaluations are important when designing instance segmentation models for real-world applications and picking an off-the-shelf pretrained model to directly use for the task at hand. Specifically, this benchmark study includes state-of-the-art network architectures, network backbones, normalization layers, models trained starting from scratch versus pretrained networks, and the effect of multi-task training on robustness and generalization. Through this study, we gain several insights. For example, we find that group normalization enhances the robustness of networks across corruptions where the image contents stay the same but corruptions are added on top. On the other hand, batch normalization improves the generalization of the models across different datasets where statistics of image features change. We also find that single-stage detectors do not generalize well to larger image resolutions than their training size. On the other hand, multi-stage detectors can easily be used on images of different sizes. We hope that our comprehensive study will motivate the development of more robust and reliable instance segmentation models.

Exact firing rate models, also known as next-generation neural mass models (NG-NMMs), provide a rigorous description of the dynamics of neural populations. While in its simplest form a single population only displays fixed-point activity, multi-population models may display a range of different behaviors. In this work, we study the dynamics of all-excitatory or all-inhibitory NG-NMMs coupled through sparse random networks with row-normalized network topology. Linear stability analysis of the homogeneous states of the system, representing asynchronous neural activity, provides a dispersion relation linking the emergence of spatiotemporal dynamics to the spectra of the connectivity matrix. Using bounds from random matrix theory, we identify the parameter regions where instabilities occur. In undirected networks, only inhibitory systems produce heterogeneous stationary patterns, corresponding to a winner-takes-all mechanism. In directed networks, exotic rhythmic states with high frequencies emerge in both, excitatory and inhibitory systems. Numerical simulations reveal that these hectic oscillatory states correspond to high-dimensional chaos with extensive properties.

Restoring 3D scenes with low-light conditions is challenging, and most existing methods depend on precomputed camera poses and scene-specific optimization, which greatly restricts their application to real-world scenarios. To overcome these limitations, we propose Lumos3D, a pose-free single-forward framework for 3D low-light scene restoration. First, we develop a cross-illumination distillation scheme, where a frozen teacher network takes normal-light ground truth images as input to distill accurate geometric information to the student model. Second, we define a Lumos loss to improve the restoration quality of the reconstructed 3D Gaussian space. Trained on a single dataset, Lumos3D performs inference in a purely feed-forward manner, directly restoring illumination and structure from unposed, low-light multi-view images without any per-scene training or optimization. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that Lumos3D achieves competitive restoration results compared to scene-specific methods. Our codes will be released soon.

Federated learning (FL) is a distributed learning protocol in which a server needs to aggregate a set of models learned some independent clients to proceed the learning process. At present, model averaging, known as FedAvg, is one of the most widely adapted aggregation techniques. However, it is known to yield the models with degraded prediction accuracy and slow convergence. In this work, we find out that averaging models from different clients significantly diminishes the norm of the update vectors, resulting in slow learning rate and low prediction accuracy. Therefore, we propose a new aggregation method called FedNNNN. Instead of simple model averaging, we adjust the norm of the update vector and introduce momentum control techniques to improve the aggregation effectiveness of FL. As a demonstration, we evaluate FedNNNN on multiple datasets and scenarios with different neural network models, and observe up to 5.4% accuracy improvement.

Artificial Intelligence (AI), with its multiplier effect and wide applications in multiple areas, could potentially be an important application of quantum computing. Since modern AI systems are often built on neural networks, the design of quantum neural networks becomes a key challenge in integrating quantum computing into AI. To provide a more fine-grained characterisation of the impact of quantum components on the performance of neural networks, we propose a framework where classical neural network layers are gradually replaced by quantum layers that have the same type of input and output while keeping the flow of information between layers unchanged, different from most current research in quantum neural network, which favours an end-to-end quantum model. We start with a simple three-layer classical neural network without any normalisation layers or activation functions, and gradually change the classical layers to the corresponding quantum versions. We conduct numerical experiments on image classification datasets such as the MNIST, FashionMNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets to demonstrate the change of performance brought by the systematic introduction of quantum components. Through this framework, our research sheds new light on the design of future quantum neural network models where it could be more favourable to search for methods and frameworks that harness the advantages from both the classical and quantum worlds.

Network protocols are programs with inputs and outputs that follow predefined communication patterns to synchronize and exchange information. There are many protocols and each serves a different purpose, e.g., routing, transport, secure communication, etc. The functional and performance requirements for a protocol can be expressed using a formal specification, such as, a set of logical predicates over its traces. A protocol could be prevented from achieving its requirements due to a bug in its design or implementation, a component failure (e.g., a crash), or an attack. This dissertation shows that formal methods can feasibly characterize the functionality and performance of network protocols under normal conditions as well as when subjected to attacks.

We uncover how SGD interacts with batch normalization and can exhibit undesirable training dynamics such as divergence. More precisely, we study how Single Shuffle (SS) and Random Reshuffle (RR) -- two widely used variants of SGD -- interact surprisingly differently in the presence of batch normalization: RR leads to much more stable evolution of training loss than SS. As a concrete example, for regression using a linear network with batch normalization, we prove that SS and RR converge to distinct global optima that are "distorted" away from gradient descent. Thereafter, for classification we characterize conditions under which training divergence for SS and RR can, and cannot occur. We present explicit constructions to show how SS leads to distorted optima in regression and divergence for classification, whereas RR avoids both distortion and divergence. We validate our results by confirming them empirically in realistic settings, and conclude that the separation between SS and RR used with batch normalization is relevant in practice.

Binary neural networks utilize 1-bit quantized weights and activations to reduce both the model's storage demands and computational burden. However, advanced binary architectures still incorporate millions of inefficient and nonhardware-friendly full-precision multiplication operations. A&B BNN is proposed to directly remove part of the multiplication operations in a traditional BNN and replace the rest with an equal number of bit operations, introducing the mask layer and the quantized RPReLU structure based on the normalizer-free network architecture. The mask layer can be removed during inference by leveraging the intrinsic characteristics of BNN with straightforward mathematical transformations to avoid the associated multiplication operations. The quantized RPReLU structure enables more efficient bit operations by constraining its slope to be integer powers of 2. Experimental results achieved 92.30%, 69.35%, and 66.89% on the CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet datasets, respectively, which are competitive with the state-of-the-art. Ablation studies have verified the efficacy of the quantized RPReLU structure, leading to a 1.14% enhancement on the ImageNet compared to using a fixed slope RLeakyReLU. The proposed add&bit-operation-only BNN offers an innovative approach for hardware-friendly network architecture.

Diabetes, resulting from inadequate insulin production or utilization, causes extensive harm to the body. Existing diagnostic methods are often invasive and come with drawbacks, such as cost constraints. Although there are machine learning models like Classwise k Nearest Neighbor (CkNN) and General Regression Neural Network (GRNN), they struggle with imbalanced data and result in under-performance. Leveraging advancements in sensor technology and machine learning, we propose a non-invasive diabetes diagnosis using a Back Propagation Neural Network (BPNN) with batch normalization, incorporating data re-sampling and normalization for class balancing. Our method addresses existing challenges such as limited performance associated with traditional machine learning. Experimental results on three datasets show significant improvements in overall accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity compared to traditional methods. Notably, we achieve accuracies of 89.81% in Pima diabetes dataset, 75.49% in CDC BRFSS2015 dataset, and 95.28% in Mesra Diabetes dataset. This underscores the potential of deep learning models for robust diabetes diagnosis. See project website https://steve-zeyu-zhang.github.io/DiabetesDiagnosis/

This paper introduces a pipeline to parametrically sample and render multi-task vision datasets from comprehensive 3D scans from the real world. Changing the sampling parameters allows one to "steer" the generated datasets to emphasize specific information. In addition to enabling interesting lines of research, we show the tooling and generated data suffice to train robust vision models. Common architectures trained on a generated starter dataset reached state-of-the-art performance on multiple common vision tasks and benchmarks, despite having seen no benchmark or non-pipeline data. The depth estimation network outperforms MiDaS and the surface normal estimation network is the first to achieve human-level performance for in-the-wild surface normal estimation -- at least according to one metric on the OASIS benchmark. The Dockerized pipeline with CLI, the (mostly python) code, PyTorch dataloaders for the generated data, the generated starter dataset, download scripts and other utilities are available through our project website, https://omnidata.vision.

Grokking is one of the most surprising puzzles in neural network generalization: a network first reaches a memorization solution with perfect training accuracy and poor generalization, but with further training, it reaches a perfectly generalized solution. We aim to analyze the mechanism of grokking from the lottery ticket hypothesis, identifying the process to find the lottery tickets (good sparse subnetworks) as the key to describing the transitional phase between memorization and generalization. We refer to these subnetworks as ''Grokking tickets'', which is identified via magnitude pruning after perfect generalization. First, using ''Grokking tickets'', we show that the lottery tickets drastically accelerate grokking compared to the dense networks on various configurations (MLP and Transformer, and an arithmetic and image classification tasks). Additionally, to verify that ''Grokking ticket'' are a more critical factor than weight norms, we compared the ''good'' subnetworks with a dense network having the same L1 and L2 norms. Results show that the subnetworks generalize faster than the controlled dense model. In further investigations, we discovered that at an appropriate pruning rate, grokking can be achieved even without weight decay. We also show that speedup does not happen when using tickets identified at the memorization solution or transition between memorization and generalization or when pruning networks at the initialization (Random pruning, Grasp, SNIP, and Synflow). The results indicate that the weight norm of network parameters is not enough to explain the process of grokking, but the importance of finding good subnetworks to describe the transition from memorization to generalization. The implementation code can be accessed via this link: https://github.com/gouki510/Grokking-Tickets.

Following the success of Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) for Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), new techniques such as Sequence Likelihood Calibration (SLiC) and Direct Policy Optimization (DPO) have been proposed that are offline in nature and use rewards in an indirect manner. These techniques, in particular DPO, have recently become the tools of choice for LLM alignment due to their scalability and performance. However, they leave behind important features of the PPO approach. Methods such as SLiC or RRHF make use of the Reward Model (RM) only for ranking/preference, losing fine-grained information and ignoring the parametric form of the RM (eg., Bradley-Terry, Plackett-Luce), while methods such as DPO do not use even a separate reward model. In this work, we propose a novel approach, named BRAIn, that re-introduces the RM as part of a distribution matching approach.BRAIn considers the LLM distribution conditioned on the assumption of output goodness and applies Bayes theorem to derive an intractable posterior distribution where the RM is explicitly represented. BRAIn then distills this posterior into an amortized inference network through self-normalized importance sampling, leading to a scalable offline algorithm that significantly outperforms prior art in summarization and AntropicHH tasks. BRAIn also has interesting connections to PPO and DPO for specific RM choices.

We introduce a novel approach for analyzing the training dynamics of ReLU networks by examining the characteristic activation boundaries of individual ReLU neurons. Our proposed analysis reveals a critical instability in common neural network parameterizations and normalizations during stochastic optimization, which impedes fast convergence and hurts generalization performance. Addressing this, we propose Geometric Parameterization (GmP), a novel neural network parameterization technique that effectively separates the radial and angular components of weights in the hyperspherical coordinate system. We show theoretically that GmP resolves the aforementioned instability issue. We report empirical results on various models and benchmarks to verify GmP's theoretical advantages of optimization stability, convergence speed and generalization performance.

3D anomaly detection and localization is of great significance for industrial inspection. Prior 3D anomaly detection and localization methods focus on the setting that the testing data share the same category as the training data which is normal. However, in real-world applications, the normal training data for the target 3D objects can be unavailable due to issues like data privacy or export control regulation. To tackle these challenges, we identify a new task -- zero-shot 3D anomaly detection and localization, where the training and testing classes do not overlap. To this end, we design 3DzAL, a novel patch-level contrastive learning framework based on pseudo anomalies generated using the inductive bias from task-irrelevant 3D xyz data to learn more representative feature representations. Furthermore, we train a normalcy classifier network to classify the normal patches and pseudo anomalies and utilize the classification result jointly with feature distance to design anomaly scores. Instead of directly using the patch point clouds, we introduce adversarial perturbations to the input patch xyz data before feeding into the 3D normalcy classifier for the classification-based anomaly score. We show that 3DzAL outperforms the state-of-the-art anomaly detection and localization performance.

Probabilistic dynamics model ensemble is widely used in existing model-based reinforcement learning methods as it outperforms a single dynamics model in both asymptotic performance and sample efficiency. In this paper, we provide both practical and theoretical insights on the empirical success of the probabilistic dynamics model ensemble through the lens of Lipschitz continuity. We find that, for a value function, the stronger the Lipschitz condition is, the smaller the gap between the true dynamics- and learned dynamics-induced Bellman operators is, thus enabling the converged value function to be closer to the optimal value function. Hence, we hypothesize that the key functionality of the probabilistic dynamics model ensemble is to regularize the Lipschitz condition of the value function using generated samples. To test this hypothesis, we devise two practical robust training mechanisms through computing the adversarial noise and regularizing the value network's spectral norm to directly regularize the Lipschitz condition of the value functions. Empirical results show that combined with our mechanisms, model-based RL algorithms with a single dynamics model outperform those with an ensemble of probabilistic dynamics models. These findings not only support the theoretical insight, but also provide a practical solution for developing computationally efficient model-based RL algorithms.

Often, labeling large amount of data is challenging due to high labeling cost limiting the application domain of deep learning techniques. Active learning (AL) tackles this by querying the most informative samples to be annotated among unlabeled pool. Two promising directions for AL that have been recently explored are task-agnostic approach to select data points that are far from the current labeled pool and task-aware approach that relies on the perspective of task model. Unfortunately, the former does not exploit structures from tasks and the latter does not seem to well-utilize overall data distribution. Here, we propose task-aware variational adversarial AL (TA-VAAL) that modifies task-agnostic VAAL, that considered data distribution of both label and unlabeled pools, by relaxing task learning loss prediction to ranking loss prediction and by using ranking conditional generative adversarial network to embed normalized ranking loss information on VAAL. Our proposed TA-VAAL outperforms state-of-the-arts on various benchmark datasets for classifications with balanced / imbalanced labels as well as semantic segmentation and its task-aware and task-agnostic AL properties were confirmed with our in-depth analyses.

Surface reconstruction has been widely studied in computer vision and graphics. However, existing surface reconstruction works struggle to recover accurate scene geometry when the input views are extremely sparse. To address this issue, we propose MeshSplat, a generalizable sparse-view surface reconstruction framework via Gaussian Splatting. Our key idea is to leverage 2DGS as a bridge, which connects novel view synthesis to learned geometric priors and then transfers these priors to achieve surface reconstruction. Specifically, we incorporate a feed-forward network to predict per-view pixel-aligned 2DGS, which enables the network to synthesize novel view images and thus eliminates the need for direct 3D ground-truth supervision. To improve the accuracy of 2DGS position and orientation prediction, we propose a Weighted Chamfer Distance Loss to regularize the depth maps, especially in overlapping areas of input views, and also a normal prediction network to align the orientation of 2DGS with normal vectors predicted by a monocular normal estimator. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our proposed improvement, demonstrating that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in generalizable sparse-view mesh reconstruction tasks. Project Page: https://hanzhichang.github.io/meshsplat_web

Exploration remains a critical challenge in online reinforcement learning, as an agent must effectively explore unknown environments to achieve high returns. Currently, the main exploration algorithms are primarily count-based methods and curiosity-based methods, with prediction-error methods being a prominent example. In this paper, we propose a novel method called Random Distribution Distillation (RDD), which samples the output of a target network from a normal distribution. RDD facilitates a more extensive exploration by explicitly treating the difference between the prediction network and the target network as an intrinsic reward. Furthermore, by introducing randomness into the output of the target network for a given state and modeling it as a sample from a normal distribution, intrinsic rewards are bounded by two key components: a pseudo-count term ensuring proper exploration decay and a discrepancy term accounting for predictor convergence. We demonstrate that RDD effectively unifies both count-based and prediction-error approaches. It retains the advantages of prediction-error methods in high-dimensional spaces, while also implementing an intrinsic reward decay mode akin to the pseudo-count method. In the experimental section, RDD is compared with more advanced methods in a series of environments. Both theoretical analysis and experimental results confirm the effectiveness of our approach in improving online exploration for reinforcement learning tasks.

Training Deep Neural Networks is complicated by the fact that the distribution of each layer's inputs changes during training, as the parameters of the previous layers change. This slows down the training by requiring lower learning rates and careful parameter initialization, and makes it notoriously hard to train models with saturating nonlinearities. We refer to this phenomenon as internal covariate shift, and address the problem by normalizing layer inputs. Our method draws its strength from making normalization a part of the model architecture and performing the normalization for each training mini-batch. Batch Normalization allows us to use much higher learning rates and be less careful about initialization. It also acts as a regularizer, in some cases eliminating the need for Dropout. Applied to a state-of-the-art image classification model, Batch Normalization achieves the same accuracy with 14 times fewer training steps, and beats the original model by a significant margin. Using an ensemble of batch-normalized networks, we improve upon the best published result on ImageNet classification: reaching 4.9% top-5 validation error (and 4.8% test error), exceeding the accuracy of human raters.

Frame reconstruction (current or future frame) based on Auto-Encoder (AE) is a popular method for video anomaly detection. With models trained on the normal data, the reconstruction errors of anomalous scenes are usually much larger than those of normal ones. Previous methods introduced the memory bank into AE, for encoding diverse normal patterns across the training videos. However, they are memory-consuming and cannot cope with unseen new scenarios in the testing data. In this work, we propose a dynamic prototype unit (DPU) to encode the normal dynamics as prototypes in real time, free from extra memory cost. In addition, we introduce meta-learning to our DPU to form a novel few-shot normalcy learner, namely Meta-Prototype Unit (MPU). It enables the fast adaption capability on new scenes by only consuming a few iterations of update. Extensive experiments are conducted on various benchmarks. The superior performance over the state-of-the-art demonstrates the effectiveness of our method.

Agentic AI systems increasingly operate in shared social environments where they exchange information, instructions, and behavioral cues. However, little empirical evidence exists on how such agents regulate one another in the absence of human participants or centralized moderation. In this work, we present an empirical analysis of OpenClaw agents interacting on Moltbook, an agent-only social network. Analyzing 39,026 posts and 5,712 comments produced by 14,490 agents, we quantify the prevalence of action-inducing instruction sharing using a lexicon-based Action-Inducing Risk Score (AIRS), and examine how other agents respond to such content. We find that 18.4% of posts contain action-inducing language, indicating that instruction sharing is a routine behavior in this environment. While most social responses are neutral, posts containing actionable instructions are significantly more likely to elicit norm-enforcing replies that caution against unsafe or risky behavior, compared to non-instructional posts. Importantly, toxic responses remain rare across both conditions. These results suggest that OpenClaw agents exhibit selective social regulation, whereby potentially risky instructions are more likely to be challenged than neutral content, despite the absence of human oversight. Our findings provide early empirical evidence of emergent normative behavior in agent-only social systems and highlight the importance of studying social dynamics alongside technical safeguards in agentic AI ecosystems.

This work introduces the first toolkit around path-norms that fully encompasses general DAG ReLU networks with biases, skip connections and any operation based on the extraction of order statistics: max pooling, GroupSort etc. This toolkit notably allows us to establish generalization bounds for modern neural networks that are not only the most widely applicable path-norm based ones, but also recover or beat the sharpest known bounds of this type. These extended path-norms further enjoy the usual benefits of path-norms: ease of computation, invariance under the symmetries of the network, and improved sharpness on layered fully-connected networks compared to the product of operator norms, another complexity measure most commonly used. The versatility of the toolkit and its ease of implementation allow us to challenge the concrete promises of path-norm-based generalization bounds, by numerically evaluating the sharpest known bounds for ResNets on ImageNet.

Convolutional neural network training can suffer from diverse issues like exploding or vanishing gradients, scaling-based weight space symmetry and covariant-shift. In order to address these issues, researchers develop weight regularization methods and activation normalization methods. In this work we propose a weight soft-regularization method based on the Oblique manifold. The proposed method uses a loss function which pushes each weight vector to have a norm close to one, i.e. the weight matrix is smoothly steered toward the so-called Oblique manifold. We evaluate our method on the very popular CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet 2012 datasets using two state-of-the-art architectures, namely the ResNet and wide-ResNet. Our method introduces negligible computational overhead and the results show that it is competitive to the state-of-the-art and in some cases superior to it. Additionally, the results are less sensitive to hyperparameter settings such as batch size and regularization factor.

We propose a novel neural network architecture, the normalized Transformer (nGPT) with representation learning on the hypersphere. In nGPT, all vectors forming the embeddings, MLP, attention matrices and hidden states are unit norm normalized. The input stream of tokens travels on the surface of a hypersphere, with each layer contributing a displacement towards the target output predictions. These displacements are defined by the MLP and attention blocks, whose vector components also reside on the same hypersphere. Experiments show that nGPT learns much faster, reducing the number of training steps required to achieve the same accuracy by a factor of 4 to 20, depending on the sequence length.

The goal of this paper is to estimate the 6D pose and dimensions of unseen object instances in an RGB-D image. Contrary to "instance-level" 6D pose estimation tasks, our problem assumes that no exact object CAD models are available during either training or testing time. To handle different and unseen object instances in a given category, we introduce a Normalized Object Coordinate Space (NOCS)---a shared canonical representation for all possible object instances within a category. Our region-based neural network is then trained to directly infer the correspondence from observed pixels to this shared object representation (NOCS) along with other object information such as class label and instance mask. These predictions can be combined with the depth map to jointly estimate the metric 6D pose and dimensions of multiple objects in a cluttered scene. To train our network, we present a new context-aware technique to generate large amounts of fully annotated mixed reality data. To further improve our model and evaluate its performance on real data, we also provide a fully annotated real-world dataset with large environment and instance variation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method is able to robustly estimate the pose and size of unseen object instances in real environments while also achieving state-of-the-art performance on standard 6D pose estimation benchmarks.

A neural network trained on a classification dataset often exhibits a higher vector norm of hidden layer features for in-distribution (ID) samples, while producing relatively lower norm values on unseen instances from out-of-distribution (OOD). Despite this intriguing phenomenon being utilized in many applications, the underlying cause has not been thoroughly investigated. In this study, we demystify this very phenomenon by scrutinizing the discriminative structures concealed in the intermediate layers of a neural network. Our analysis leads to the following discoveries: (1) The feature norm is a confidence value of a classifier hidden in the network layer, specifically its maximum logit. Hence, the feature norm distinguishes OOD from ID in the same manner that a classifier confidence does. (2) The feature norm is class-agnostic, thus it can detect OOD samples across diverse discriminative models. (3) The conventional feature norm fails to capture the deactivation tendency of hidden layer neurons, which may lead to misidentification of ID samples as OOD instances. To resolve this drawback, we propose a novel negative-aware norm (NAN) that can capture both the activation and deactivation tendencies of hidden layer neurons. We conduct extensive experiments on NAN, demonstrating its efficacy and compatibility with existing OOD detectors, as well as its capability in label-free environments.

Feature Normalization (FN) is an important technique to help neural network training, which typically normalizes features across spatial dimensions. Most previous image inpainting methods apply FN in their networks without considering the impact of the corrupted regions of the input image on normalization, e.g. mean and variance shifts. In this work, we show that the mean and variance shifts caused by full-spatial FN limit the image inpainting network training and we propose a spatial region-wise normalization named Region Normalization (RN) to overcome the limitation. RN divides spatial pixels into different regions according to the input mask, and computes the mean and variance in each region for normalization. We develop two kinds of RN for our image inpainting network: (1) Basic RN (RN-B), which normalizes pixels from the corrupted and uncorrupted regions separately based on the original inpainting mask to solve the mean and variance shift problem; (2) Learnable RN (RN-L), which automatically detects potentially corrupted and uncorrupted regions for separate normalization, and performs global affine transformation to enhance their fusion. We apply RN-B in the early layers and RN-L in the latter layers of the network respectively. Experiments show that our method outperforms current state-of-the-art methods quantitatively and qualitatively. We further generalize RN to other inpainting networks and achieve consistent performance improvements. Our code is available at https://github.com/geekyutao/RN.

Monocular 3D Semantic Scene Completion (SSC) has garnered significant attention in recent years due to its potential to predict complex semantics and geometry shapes from a single image, requiring no 3D inputs. In this paper, we identify several critical issues in current state-of-the-art methods, including the Feature Ambiguity of projected 2D features in the ray to the 3D space, the Pose Ambiguity of the 3D convolution, and the Computation Imbalance in the 3D convolution across different depth levels. To address these problems, we devise a novel Normalized Device Coordinates scene completion network (NDC-Scene) that directly extends the 2D feature map to a Normalized Device Coordinates (NDC) space, rather than to the world space directly, through progressive restoration of the dimension of depth with deconvolution operations. Experiment results demonstrate that transferring the majority of computation from the target 3D space to the proposed normalized device coordinates space benefits monocular SSC tasks. Additionally, we design a Depth-Adaptive Dual Decoder to simultaneously upsample and fuse the 2D and 3D feature maps, further improving overall performance. Our extensive experiments confirm that the proposed method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both outdoor SemanticKITTI and indoor NYUv2 datasets. Our code are available at https://github.com/Jiawei-Yao0812/NDCScene.

Deep multitask networks, in which one neural network produces multiple predictive outputs, can offer better speed and performance than their single-task counterparts but are challenging to train properly. We present a gradient normalization (GradNorm) algorithm that automatically balances training in deep multitask models by dynamically tuning gradient magnitudes. We show that for various network architectures, for both regression and classification tasks, and on both synthetic and real datasets, GradNorm improves accuracy and reduces overfitting across multiple tasks when compared to single-task networks, static baselines, and other adaptive multitask loss balancing techniques. GradNorm also matches or surpasses the performance of exhaustive grid search methods, despite only involving a single asymmetry hyperparameter alpha. Thus, what was once a tedious search process that incurred exponentially more compute for each task added can now be accomplished within a few training runs, irrespective of the number of tasks. Ultimately, we will demonstrate that gradient manipulation affords us great control over the training dynamics of multitask networks and may be one of the keys to unlocking the potential of multitask learning.

Solar energy is one of the most dependable renewable energy technologies, as it is feasible almost everywhere globally. However, improving the efficiency of a solar PV system remains a significant challenge. To enhance the robustness of the solar system, this paper proposes a trained convolutional neural network (CNN) based fault detection scheme to divide the images of photovoltaic modules. For binary classification, the algorithm classifies the input images of PV cells into two categories (i.e. faulty or normal). To further assess the network's capability, the defective PV cells are organized into shadowy, cracked, or dusty cells, and the model is utilized for multiple classifications. The success rate for the proposed CNN model is 91.1% for binary classification and 88.6% for multi-classification. Thus, the proposed trained CNN model remarkably outperforms the CNN model presented in a previous study which used the same datasets. The proposed CNN-based fault detection model is straightforward, simple and effective and could be applied in the fault detection of solar panel.

Normal-form games (NFGs) are the fundamental model of strategic interaction. We study their representation using neural networks. We describe the inherent equivariance of NFGs -- any permutation of strategies describes an equivalent game -- as well as the challenges this poses for representation learning. We then propose the NfgTransformer architecture that leverages this equivariance, leading to state-of-the-art performance in a range of game-theoretic tasks including equilibrium-solving, deviation gain estimation and ranking, with a common approach to NFG representation. We show that the resulting model is interpretable and versatile, paving the way towards deep learning systems capable of game-theoretic reasoning when interacting with humans and with each other.

Normalising Flows are non-parametric statistical models characterised by their dual capabilities of density estimation and generation. This duality requires an inherently invertible architecture. However, the requirement of invertibility imposes constraints on their expressiveness, necessitating a large number of parameters and innovative architectural designs to achieve good results. Whilst flow-based models predominantly rely on neural-network-based transformations for expressive designs, alternative transformation methods have received limited attention. In this work, we present Ferumal flow, a novel kernelised normalising flow paradigm that integrates kernels into the framework. Our results demonstrate that a kernelised flow can yield competitive or superior results compared to neural network-based flows whilst maintaining parameter efficiency. Kernelised flows excel especially in the low-data regime, enabling flexible non-parametric density estimation in applications with sparse data availability.

The standard normalization method for neural network (NN) models used in Natural Language Processing (NLP) is layer normalization (LN). This is different than batch normalization (BN), which is widely-adopted in Computer Vision. The preferred use of LN in NLP is principally due to the empirical observation that a (naive/vanilla) use of BN leads to significant performance degradation for NLP tasks; however, a thorough understanding of the underlying reasons for this is not always evident. In this paper, we perform a systematic study of NLP transformer models to understand why BN has a poor performance, as compared to LN. We find that the statistics of NLP data across the batch dimension exhibit large fluctuations throughout training. This results in instability, if BN is naively implemented. To address this, we propose Power Normalization (PN), a novel normalization scheme that resolves this issue by (i) relaxing zero-mean normalization in BN, (ii) incorporating a running quadratic mean instead of per batch statistics to stabilize fluctuations, and (iii) using an approximate backpropagation for incorporating the running statistics in the forward pass. We show theoretically, under mild assumptions, that PN leads to a smaller Lipschitz constant for the loss, compared with BN. Furthermore, we prove that the approximate backpropagation scheme leads to bounded gradients. We extensively test PN for transformers on a range of NLP tasks, and we show that it significantly outperforms both LN and BN. In particular, PN outperforms LN by 0.4/0.6 BLEU on IWSLT14/WMT14 and 5.6/3.0 PPL on PTB/WikiText-103. We make our code publicly available at https://github.com/sIncerass/powernorm.

Photometric data-driven classification of supernovae becomes a challenge due to the appearance of real-time processing of big data in astronomy. Recent studies have demonstrated the superior quality of solutions based on various machine learning models. These models learn to classify supernova types using their light curves as inputs. Preprocessing these curves is a crucial step that significantly affects the final quality. In this talk, we study the application of multilayer perceptron (MLP), bayesian neural network (BNN), and normalizing flows (NF) to approximate observations for a single light curve. We use these approximations as inputs for supernovae classification models and demonstrate that the proposed methods outperform the state-of-the-art based on Gaussian processes applying to the Zwicky Transient Facility Bright Transient Survey light curves. MLP demonstrates similar quality as Gaussian processes and speed increase. Normalizing Flows exceeds Gaussian processes in terms of approximation quality as well.

Data normalization is one of the most important preprocessing steps when building a machine learning model, especially when the model of interest is a deep neural network. This is because deep neural network optimized with stochastic gradient descent is sensitive to the input variable range and prone to numerical issues. Different than other types of signals, financial time-series often exhibit unique characteristics such as high volatility, non-stationarity and multi-modality that make them challenging to work with, often requiring expert domain knowledge for devising a suitable processing pipeline. In this paper, we propose a novel data-driven normalization method for deep neural networks that handle high-frequency financial time-series. The proposed normalization scheme, which takes into account the bimodal characteristic of financial multivariate time-series, requires no expert knowledge to preprocess a financial time-series since this step is formulated as part of the end-to-end optimization process. Our experiments, conducted with state-of-the-arts neural networks and high-frequency data from two large-scale limit order books coming from the Nordic and US markets, show significant improvements over other normalization techniques in forecasting future stock price dynamics.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have garnered significant attention as a central paradigm in neuromorphic computing, owing to their energy efficiency and biological plausibility. However, training deep SNNs has critically depended on explicit normalization schemes, leading to a trade-off between performance and biological realism. To resolve this conflict, we propose a normalization-free learning framework that incorporates lateral inhibition inspired by cortical circuits. Our framework replaces the traditional feedforward SNN layer with distinct excitatory (E) and inhibitory (I) neuronal populations that capture the key features of the cortical E-I interaction. The E-I circuit dynamically regulates neuronal activity through subtractive and divisive inhibition, which respectively control the excitability and gain of neurons. To stabilize end-to-end training of the biologically constrained SNNs, we propose two key techniques: E-I Init and E-I Prop. E-I Init is a dynamic parameter initialization scheme that balances excitatory and inhibitory inputs while performing gain control. E-I Prop decouples the backpropagation of the circuit from the forward pass, regulating gradient flow. Experiments across multiple datasets and network architectures demonstrate that our framework enables stable training of deep normalization-free SNNs with biological realism, achieving competitive performance. Therefore, our work not only provides a solution to training deep SNNs but also serves as a computational platform for further exploring the functions of E-I interaction in large-scale cortical computation. Code is available at https://github.com/vwOvOwv/DeepEISNN.

Spatial and temporal resource constraints are critical for both biological and artificial intelligent systems. Here we define differentiable cost terms for breadth, depth, and time within a recurrent convolutional neural network conceived as a finite subset of an infinite lattice. We optimize these costs jointly with task errors via backpropagation. We set different pressures on breadth, depth, and time, which leads to diverse computational graphs emerging organically through training. We find that all three resources can be traded off against each other to achieve a given level of accuracy. Networks grow in all three dimensions with task complexity and spontaneously take more recurrent steps when inputs are occluded. Surprisingly, time used by the model correlates with human reaction times in an object recognition task. Our framework provides a normative account of how resource constraints shape neural architectures, connecting to questions about brain design in neuroscience, and may help illuminate the diversity of neural solutions found in nature.

This paper presents a margin-based multiclass generalization bound for neural networks that scales with their margin-normalized "spectral complexity": their Lipschitz constant, meaning the product of the spectral norms of the weight matrices, times a certain correction factor. This bound is empirically investigated for a standard AlexNet network trained with SGD on the mnist and cifar10 datasets, with both original and random labels; the bound, the Lipschitz constants, and the excess risks are all in direct correlation, suggesting both that SGD selects predictors whose complexity scales with the difficulty of the learning task, and secondly that the presented bound is sensitive to this complexity.

A burgeoning line of research leverages deep neural networks to approximate the solutions to high dimensional PDEs, opening lines of theoretical inquiry focused on explaining how it is that these models appear to evade the curse of dimensionality. However, most prior theoretical analyses have been limited to linear PDEs. In this work, we take a step towards studying the representational power of neural networks for approximating solutions to nonlinear PDEs. We focus on a class of PDEs known as nonlinear elliptic variational PDEs, whose solutions minimize an Euler-Lagrange energy functional E(u) = int_Omega L(x, u(x), nabla u(x)) - f(x) u(x)dx. We show that if composing a function with Barron norm b with partial derivatives of L produces a function of Barron norm at most B_L b^p, the solution to the PDE can be epsilon-approximated in the L^2 sense by a function with Barron norm Oleft(left(dB_Lright)^{max{p log(1/ epsilon), p^{log(1/epsilon)}}}right). By a classical result due to Barron [1993], this correspondingly bounds the size of a 2-layer neural network needed to approximate the solution. Treating p, epsilon, B_L as constants, this quantity is polynomial in dimension, thus showing neural networks can evade the curse of dimensionality. Our proof technique involves neurally simulating (preconditioned) gradient in an appropriate Hilbert space, which converges exponentially fast to the solution of the PDE, and such that we can bound the increase of the Barron norm at each iterate. Our results subsume and substantially generalize analogous prior results for linear elliptic PDEs over a unit hypercube.

Batch Normalization (BN) has become an out-of-box technique to improve deep network training. However, its effectiveness is limited for micro-batch training, i.e., each GPU typically has only 1-2 images for training, which is inevitable for many computer vision tasks, e.g., object detection and semantic segmentation, constrained by memory consumption. To address this issue, we propose Weight Standardization (WS) and Batch-Channel Normalization (BCN) to bring two success factors of BN into micro-batch training: 1) the smoothing effects on the loss landscape and 2) the ability to avoid harmful elimination singularities along the training trajectory. WS standardizes the weights in convolutional layers to smooth the loss landscape by reducing the Lipschitz constants of the loss and the gradients; BCN combines batch and channel normalizations and leverages estimated statistics of the activations in convolutional layers to keep networks away from elimination singularities. We validate WS and BCN on comprehensive computer vision tasks, including image classification, object detection, instance segmentation, video recognition and semantic segmentation. All experimental results consistently show that WS and BCN improve micro-batch training significantly. Moreover, using WS and BCN with micro-batch training is even able to match or outperform the performances of BN with large-batch training.

People ``understand'' the world via vision, hearing, tactile, and also the past experience. Human experience can be learned through normal learning (we call it explicit knowledge), or subconsciously (we call it implicit knowledge). These experiences learned through normal learning or subconsciously will be encoded and stored in the brain. Using these abundant experience as a huge database, human beings can effectively process data, even they were unseen beforehand. In this paper, we propose a unified network to encode implicit knowledge and explicit knowledge together, just like the human brain can learn knowledge from normal learning as well as subconsciousness learning. The unified network can generate a unified representation to simultaneously serve various tasks. We can perform kernel space alignment, prediction refinement, and multi-task learning in a convolutional neural network. The results demonstrate that when implicit knowledge is introduced into the neural network, it benefits the performance of all tasks. We further analyze the implicit representation learnt from the proposed unified network, and it shows great capability on catching the physical meaning of different tasks. The source code of this work is at : https://github.com/WongKinYiu/yolor.

Layer normalization (LayerNorm) has been successfully applied to various deep neural networks to help stabilize training and boost model convergence because of its capability in handling re-centering and re-scaling of both inputs and weight matrix. However, the computational overhead introduced by LayerNorm makes these improvements expensive and significantly slows the underlying network, e.g. RNN in particular. In this paper, we hypothesize that re-centering invariance in LayerNorm is dispensable and propose root mean square layer normalization, or RMSNorm. RMSNorm regularizes the summed inputs to a neuron in one layer according to root mean square (RMS), giving the model re-scaling invariance property and implicit learning rate adaptation ability. RMSNorm is computationally simpler and thus more efficient than LayerNorm. We also present partial RMSNorm, or pRMSNorm where the RMS is estimated from p% of the summed inputs without breaking the above properties. Extensive experiments on several tasks using diverse network architectures show that RMSNorm achieves comparable performance against LayerNorm but reduces the running time by 7%~64% on different models. Source code is available at https://github.com/bzhangGo/rmsnorm.

Normalizing flow models have been used successfully for generative image super-resolution (SR) by approximating complex distribution of natural images to simple tractable distribution in latent space through Invertible Neural Networks (INN). These models can generate multiple realistic SR images from one low-resolution (LR) input using randomly sampled points in the latent space, simulating the ill-posed nature of image upscaling where multiple high-resolution (HR) images correspond to the same LR. Lately, the invertible process in INN has also been used successfully by bidirectional image rescaling models like IRN and HCFlow for joint optimization of downscaling and inverse upscaling, resulting in significant improvements in upscaled image quality. While they are optimized for image downscaling too, the ill-posed nature of image downscaling, where one HR image could be downsized to multiple LR images depending on different interpolation kernels and resampling methods, is not considered. A new downscaling latent variable, in addition to the original one representing uncertainties in image upscaling, is introduced to model variations in the image downscaling process. This dual latent variable enhancement is applicable to different image rescaling models and it is shown in extensive experiments that it can improve image upscaling accuracy consistently without sacrificing image quality in downscaled LR images. It is also shown to be effective in enhancing other INN-based models for image restoration applications like image hiding.

This paper introduces an improved duration informed attention neural network (DurIAN-E) for expressive and high-fidelity text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. Inherited from the original DurIAN model, an auto-regressive model structure in which the alignments between the input linguistic information and the output acoustic features are inferred from a duration model is adopted. Meanwhile the proposed DurIAN-E utilizes multiple stacked SwishRNN-based Transformer blocks as linguistic encoders. Style-Adaptive Instance Normalization (SAIN) layers are exploited into frame-level encoders to improve the modeling ability of expressiveness. A denoiser incorporating both denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM) for mel-spectrograms and SAIN modules is conducted to further improve the synthetic speech quality and expressiveness. Experimental results prove that the proposed expressive TTS model in this paper can achieve better performance than the state-of-the-art approaches in both subjective mean opinion score (MOS) and preference tests.

This study harnesses the predictive capabilities of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks to analyse and predict road traffic accidents in Great Britain. It addresses the challenge of traffic accident forecasting, which is paramount for devising effective preventive measures. We utilised an extensive dataset encompassing reported collisions, casualties, and vehicles involvements from 1926 to 2022, provided by the Department for Transport (DfT). The data underwent stringent processing to rectify missing values and normalise features, ensuring robust LSTM network input.

Creating plausible surfaces is an essential component in achieving a high degree of realism in rendering. To relieve artists, who create these surfaces in a time-consuming, manual process, automated retrieval of the spatially-varying Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (SVBRDF) from a single mobile phone image is desirable. By leveraging a deep neural network, this casual capturing method can be achieved. The trained network can estimate per pixel normal, base color, metallic and roughness parameters from the Disney BRDF. The input image is taken with a mobile phone lit by the camera flash. The network is trained to compensate for environment lighting and thus learned to reduce artifacts introduced by other light sources. These losses contain a multi-scale discriminator with an additional perceptual loss, a rendering loss using a differentiable renderer, and a parameter loss. Besides the local precision, this loss formulation generates material texture maps which are globally more consistent. The network is set up as a generator network trained in an adversarial fashion to ensure that only plausible maps are produced. The estimated parameters not only reproduce the material faithfully in rendering but capture the style of hand-authored materials due to the more global loss terms compared to previous works without requiring additional post-processing. Both the resolution and the quality is improved.

We present weight normalization: a reparameterization of the weight vectors in a neural network that decouples the length of those weight vectors from their direction. By reparameterizing the weights in this way we improve the conditioning of the optimization problem and we speed up convergence of stochastic gradient descent. Our reparameterization is inspired by batch normalization but does not introduce any dependencies between the examples in a minibatch. This means that our method can also be applied successfully to recurrent models such as LSTMs and to noise-sensitive applications such as deep reinforcement learning or generative models, for which batch normalization is less well suited. Although our method is much simpler, it still provides much of the speed-up of full batch normalization. In addition, the computational overhead of our method is lower, permitting more optimization steps to be taken in the same amount of time. We demonstrate the usefulness of our method on applications in supervised image recognition, generative modelling, and deep reinforcement learning.

Normalizing flows (NFs) have become a prominent method for deep generative models that allow for an analytic probability density estimation and efficient synthesis. However, a flow-based network is considered to be inefficient in parameter complexity because of reduced expressiveness of bijective mapping, which renders the models unfeasibly expensive in terms of parameters. We present an alternative parameterization scheme called NanoFlow, which uses a single neural density estimator to model multiple transformation stages. Hence, we propose an efficient parameter decomposition method and the concept of flow indication embedding, which are key missing components that enable density estimation from a single neural network. Experiments performed on audio and image models confirm that our method provides a new parameter-efficient solution for scalable NFs with significant sublinear parameter complexity.

Estimating surface normals from 3D point clouds is critical for various applications, including surface reconstruction and rendering. While existing methods for normal estimation perform well in regions where normals change slowly, they tend to fail where normals vary rapidly. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach called MSECNet, which improves estimation in normal varying regions by treating normal variation modeling as an edge detection problem. MSECNet consists of a backbone network and a multi-scale edge conditioning (MSEC) stream. The MSEC stream achieves robust edge detection through multi-scale feature fusion and adaptive edge detection. The detected edges are then combined with the output of the backbone network using the edge conditioning module to produce edge-aware representations. Extensive experiments show that MSECNet outperforms existing methods on both synthetic (PCPNet) and real-world (SceneNN) datasets while running significantly faster. We also conduct various analyses to investigate the contribution of each component in the MSEC stream. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in surface reconstruction.

Single object tracking in satellite videos is inherently challenged by small target, blurred background, large aspect ratio changes, and frequent visual occlusions. These constraints often cause appearance-based trackers to accumulate errors and lose targets irreversibly. To systematically mitigate both spatial ambiguities and temporal information loss, we propose SiamGM, a novel geometry-aware and motion-guided Siamese network. From a spatial perspective, we introduce an Inter-Frame Graph Attention (IFGA) module, closely integrated with an Aspect Ratio-Constrained Label Assignment (LA) method, establishing fine-grained topological correspondences and explicitly preventing surrounding background noise. From a temporal perspective, we introduce the Motion Vector-Guided Online Tracking Optimization method. By adopting the Normalized Peak-to-Sidelobe Ratio (nPSR) as a dynamic confidence indicator, we propose an Online Motion Model Refinement (OMMR) strategy to utilize historical trajectory information. Evaluations on two challenging SatSOT and SV248S benchmarks confirm that SiamGM outperforms most state-of-the-art trackers in both precision and success metrics. Notably, the proposed components of SiamGM introduce virtually no computational overhead, enabling real-time tracking at 130 frames per second (FPS). Codes and tracking results are available at https://github.com/wenzx18/SiamGM.

Surface normal estimation from a single image is an important task in 3D scene understanding. In this paper, we address two limitations shared by the existing methods: the inability to estimate the aleatoric uncertainty and lack of detail in the prediction. The proposed network estimates the per-pixel surface normal probability distribution. We introduce a new parameterization for the distribution, such that its negative log-likelihood is the angular loss with learned attenuation. The expected value of the angular error is then used as a measure of the aleatoric uncertainty. We also present a novel decoder framework where pixel-wise multi-layer perceptrons are trained on a subset of pixels sampled based on the estimated uncertainty. The proposed uncertainty-guided sampling prevents the bias in training towards large planar surfaces and improves the quality of prediction, especially near object boundaries and on small structures. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art in ScanNet and NYUv2, and that the estimated uncertainty correlates well with the prediction error. Code is available at https://github.com/baegwangbin/surface_normal_uncertainty.

Swarm aerial robots are required to maintain close proximity to successfully traverse narrow areas in cluttered environments. However, this movement is affected by the downwash effect generated from other quadrotors in the swarm. This aerodynamic effect is highly nonlinear and hard to describe through mathematical modeling. Additionally, the existence of the downwash disturbance can be predicted based on the states of neighboring quadrotors. If this prediction is considered, the control loop can proactively handle the disturbance, resulting in improved performance. To address these challenges, we propose an approach that integrates a Neural network Downwash Predictor with Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NDP-NMPC). The neural network is trained with spectral normalization to ensure robustness and safety in uncollected cases. The predicted disturbances are then incorporated into the optimization scheme in NMPC, which enforces constraints to ensure that states and inputs remain within safe limits. We also design a quadrotor system, identify its parameters, and implement the proposed method on board. Finally, we conduct a prediction experiment to validate the safety and effectiveness of the network. In addition, a real-time trajectory tracking experiment is performed with the entire system, demonstrating a 75.37% reduction in tracking error in height under the downwash effect.

Finding the optimal pass sequence of compilation can lead to a significant reduction in program size and/or improvement in program efficiency. Prior works on compilation pass ordering have two major drawbacks. They either require an excessive budget (in terms of compilation steps) at compile time or fail to generalize to unseen programs. In this paper, for code-size reduction tasks, we propose a novel pipeline to find program-dependent pass sequences within 45 compilation calls. It first identifies a coreset of 50 pass sequences via greedy optimization of a submodular function, and then learns a policy with Graph Neural Network (GNN) to pick the optimal sequence by predicting the normalized values of the pass sequences in the coreset. Despite its simplicity, our pipeline outperforms the default -Oz flag by an average of 4.7% over a large collection (4683) of unseen code repositories from diverse domains across 14 datasets. In comparison, previous approaches like reinforcement learning on the raw pass sequence space may take days to train due to sparse reward, and may not generalize well in held-out ones from different domains. Our results demonstrate that existing human-designed compiler flags can be improved with a simple yet effective technique that transforms the raw action space into a small one with denser rewards.

We propose using Normalizing Flows as a trainable kernel within the molecular dynamics update of Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC). By learning (invertible) transformations that simplify our dynamics, we can outperform traditional methods at generating independent configurations. We show that, using a carefully constructed network architecture, our approach can be easily scaled to large lattice volumes with minimal retraining effort. The source code for our implementation is publicly available online at https://github.com/nftqcd/fthmc.

Online Normalization is a new technique for normalizing the hidden activations of a neural network. Like Batch Normalization, it normalizes the sample dimension. While Online Normalization does not use batches, it is as accurate as Batch Normalization. We resolve a theoretical limitation of Batch Normalization by introducing an unbiased technique for computing the gradient of normalized activations. Online Normalization works with automatic differentiation by adding statistical normalization as a primitive. This technique can be used in cases not covered by some other normalizers, such as recurrent networks, fully connected networks, and networks with activation memory requirements prohibitive for batching. We show its applications to image classification, image segmentation, and language modeling. We present formal proofs and experimental results on ImageNet, CIFAR, and PTB datasets.

Normalization layers are a staple in state-of-the-art deep neural network architectures. They are widely believed to stabilize training, enable higher learning rate, accelerate convergence and improve generalization, though the reason for their effectiveness is still an active research topic. In this work, we challenge the commonly-held beliefs by showing that none of the perceived benefits is unique to normalization. Specifically, we propose fixed-update initialization (Fixup), an initialization motivated by solving the exploding and vanishing gradient problem at the beginning of training via properly rescaling a standard initialization. We find training residual networks with Fixup to be as stable as training with normalization -- even for networks with 10,000 layers. Furthermore, with proper regularization, Fixup enables residual networks without normalization to achieve state-of-the-art performance in image classification and machine translation.

Batch normalization (BN) is an effective method to accelerate model training and improve the generalization performance of neural networks. In this paper, we propose an improved batch normalization technique called attentive batch normalization (ABN) in Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) based acoustic modeling for automatic speech recognition (ASR). In the proposed method, an auxiliary network is used to dynamically generate the scaling and shifting parameters in batch normalization, and attention mechanisms are introduced to improve their regularized performance. Furthermore, two schemes, frame-level and utterance-level ABN, are investigated. We evaluate our proposed methods on Mandarin and Uyghur ASR tasks, respectively. The experimental results show that the proposed ABN greatly improves the performance of batch normalization in terms of transcription accuracy for both languages.

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) plays a critical role in numerous applications, including healthcare monitoring, fitness tracking, and smart environments. Traditional deep learning (DL) approaches, while effective, often require extensive parameter tuning and may lack interpretability. In this work, we investigate the use of a single three-axis accelerometer and the Kolmogorov--Arnold Network (KAN) for HAR tasks, leveraging its ability to model complex nonlinear relationships with improved interpretability and parameter efficiency. The MotionSense dataset, containing smartphone-based motion sensor signals across various physical activities, is employed to evaluate the proposed approach. Our methodology involves preprocessing and normalization of accelerometer and gyroscope data, followed by KAN-based feature learning and classification. Experimental results demonstrate that the KAN achieves competitive or superior classification performance compared to conventional deep neural networks, while maintaining a significantly reduced parameter count. This highlights the potential of KAN architectures as an efficient and interpretable alternative for real-world HAR systems. The open-source implementation of the proposed framework is available at the Project's GitHub Repository.

Deep residual architectures, such as ResNet and the Transformer, have enabled models of unprecedented depth, yet a formal understanding of why depth is so effective remains an open question. A popular intuition, following Veit et al. (2016), is that these residual networks behave like ensembles of many shallower models. Our key finding is an explicit analytical formula that verifies this ensemble perspective, proving that increasing network depth is mathematically equivalent to expanding the size of this implicit ensemble. Furthermore, our expansion reveals a hierarchical ensemble structure in which the combinatorial growth of computation paths leads to an explosion in the output signal, explaining the historical necessity of normalization layers in training deep models. This insight offers a first principles explanation for the historical dependence on normalization layers and sheds new light on a family of successful normalization-free techniques like SkipInit and Fixup. However, while these previous approaches infer scaling factors through optimizer analysis or a heuristic analogy to Batch Normalization, our work offers the first explanation derived directly from the network's inherent functional structure. Specifically, our Residual Expansion Theorem reveals that scaling each residual module provides a principled solution to taming the combinatorial explosion inherent to these architectures. We further show that this scaling acts as a capacity controls that also implicitly regularizes the model's complexity.

We introduce the "exponential linear unit" (ELU) which speeds up learning in deep neural networks and leads to higher classification accuracies. Like rectified linear units (ReLUs), leaky ReLUs (LReLUs) and parametrized ReLUs (PReLUs), ELUs alleviate the vanishing gradient problem via the identity for positive values. However, ELUs have improved learning characteristics compared to the units with other activation functions. In contrast to ReLUs, ELUs have negative values which allows them to push mean unit activations closer to zero like batch normalization but with lower computational complexity. Mean shifts toward zero speed up learning by bringing the normal gradient closer to the unit natural gradient because of a reduced bias shift effect. While LReLUs and PReLUs have negative values, too, they do not ensure a noise-robust deactivation state. ELUs saturate to a negative value with smaller inputs and thereby decrease the forward propagated variation and information. Therefore, ELUs code the degree of presence of particular phenomena in the input, while they do not quantitatively model the degree of their absence. In experiments, ELUs lead not only to faster learning, but also to significantly better generalization performance than ReLUs and LReLUs on networks with more than 5 layers. On CIFAR-100 ELUs networks significantly outperform ReLU networks with batch normalization while batch normalization does not improve ELU networks. ELU networks are among the top 10 reported CIFAR-10 results and yield the best published result on CIFAR-100, without resorting to multi-view evaluation or model averaging. On ImageNet, ELU networks considerably speed up learning compared to a ReLU network with the same architecture, obtaining less than 10% classification error for a single crop, single model network.

Background Precise prediction of cancer types is vital for cancer diagnosis and therapy. Important cancer marker genes can be inferred through predictive model. Several studies have attempted to build machine learning models for this task however none has taken into consideration the effects of tissue of origin that can potentially bias the identification of cancer markers. Results In this paper, we introduced several Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models that take unstructured gene expression inputs to classify tumor and non-tumor samples into their designated cancer types or as normal. Based on different designs of gene embeddings and convolution schemes, we implemented three CNN models: 1D-CNN, 2D-Vanilla-CNN, and 2D-Hybrid-CNN. The models were trained and tested on combined 10,340 samples of 33 cancer types and 731 matched normal tissues of The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). Our models achieved excellent prediction accuracies (93.9-95.0%) among 34 classes (33 cancers and normal). Furthermore, we interpreted one of the models, known as 1D-CNN model, with a guided saliency technique and identified a total of 2,090 cancer markers (108 per class). The concordance of differential expression of these markers between the cancer type they represent and others is confirmed. In breast cancer, for instance, our model identified well-known markers, such as GATA3 and ESR1. Finally, we extended the 1D-CNN model for prediction of breast cancer subtypes and achieved an average accuracy of 88.42% among 5 subtypes. The codes can be found at https://github.com/chenlabgccri/CancerTypePrediction.

Automated neural network architecture design remains a significant challenge in computer vision. Task diversity and computational constraints require both effective architectures and efficient search methods. Large Language Models (LLMs) present a promising alternative to computationally intensive Neural Architecture Search (NAS), but their application to architecture generation in computer vision has not been systematically studied, particularly regarding prompt engineering and validation strategies. Building on the task-agnostic NNGPT/LEMUR framework, this work introduces and validates two key contributions for computer vision. First, we present Few-Shot Architecture Prompting (FSAP), the first systematic study of the number of supporting examples (n = 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) for LLM-based architecture generation. We find that using n = 3 examples best balances architectural diversity and context focus for vision tasks. Second, we introduce Whitespace-Normalized Hash Validation, a lightweight deduplication method (less than 1 ms) that provides a 100x speedup over AST parsing and prevents redundant training of duplicate computer vision architectures. In large-scale experiments across seven computer vision benchmarks (MNIST, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, CelebA, ImageNette, SVHN, Places365), we generated 1,900 unique architectures. We also introduce a dataset-balanced evaluation methodology to address the challenge of comparing architectures across heterogeneous vision tasks. These contributions provide actionable guidelines for LLM-based architecture search in computer vision and establish rigorous evaluation practices, making automated design more accessible to researchers with limited computational resources.

All 26 neural network merge strategies we tested including weight averaging, SLERP, TIES, DARE, Fisher merging, and evolutionary approaches -- fail the algebraic properties (commutativity, associativity, idempotency) required for conflict-free distributed operation. We prove that this failure is structural: normalisation-based merges cannot simultaneously satisfy all three properties. To resolve this, we present a two-layer architecture -- CRDTMergeState -- that wraps any merge strategy in a CRDT-compliant (Conflict-Free Replicated Data Type) layer. Layer 1 manages contributions via OR-Set CRDT semantics, where the merge operation is set union -- trivially commutative, associative, and idempotent. Layer 2 applies merge strategies as deterministic pure functions over a canonically-ordered contribution set, with randomness seeded from the Merkle root. We prove that this separation guarantees Strong Eventual Consistency: all replicas receiving the same contributions compute identical merged models, regardless of message ordering. Empirical validation spans three tiers: controlled 4x4 tensors (104/104 tests pass), production-scale models up to 7.24B parameters (208 strategy-level tests, 43,368 layer-level property checks at capped tensor resolution), and multi-node convergence under gossip and partition healing (100 nodes, 20 orderings), with CRDT overhead below 0.5 ms. Because the wrapper is transparent, downstream performance is identical by construction, confirmed via byte-identical output verification. The reference implementation is available as crdt-merge v0.9.4.

Low-bit quantization suffers severe accuracy degradation on compact networks, rooted in the dominant full-parameter coupled training paradigm that ignores parameter subspace heterogeneity. Their limited feature redundancy leaves little room to absorb quantization errors. Conventional pipelines adopt monolithic optimization: PTQ reconstructs fixed pretrained models without improving inherent quantization friendliness; QAT updates all parameters jointly, suffering from gradient coupling between backbone weights and calibration parameters. In this paper, we identify normalization affine parameters as a low-dimensional high-leverage subspace dominating quantization robustness, and propose Normalization Affine Preconditioning (NAP) for targeted subspace optimization. For PTQ, NAP freezes backbone weights and fine-tunes only affine parameters under the target fake-quantization graph on full-precision models, proactively boosting quantization friendliness before downstream reconstruction. For QAT, we introduce an alternating QAT-NAP schema that decouples feature learning and numerical calibration, breaking the performance ceiling of saturated joint training. Theoretical analysis confirms BN affine parameters fully cancel the channel-wise affine component of quantization distortion, while nonlinear rounding and clipping residuals form the irreducible error boundary; distillation-guided NAP acts as directional flatness optimization, projecting teacher-student logit mismatch onto the restricted subspace. Experiments on ImageNet and CIFAR-100 show NAP recovers severely collapsed low-bit quantization, consistently boosts reconstruction-based PTQ, and outperforms saturated full-parameter QAT with negligible tuning cost. This work reveals the principle of targeted low-dimensional subspace optimization, offering a new perspective beyond full-parameter coupled training for efficient deep learning.

A photo captured with bokeh effect often means objects in focus are sharp while the out-of-focus areas are all blurred. DSLR can easily render this kind of effect naturally. However, due to the limitation of sensors, smartphones cannot capture images with depth-of-field effects directly. In this paper, we propose a novel generator called Glass-Net, which generates bokeh images not relying on complex hardware. Meanwhile, the GAN-based method and perceptual loss are combined for rendering a realistic bokeh effect in the stage of finetuning the model. Moreover, Instance Normalization(IN) is reimplemented in our network, which ensures our tflite model with IN can be accelerated on smartphone GPU. Experiments show that our method is able to render a high-quality bokeh effect and process one 1024 times 1536 pixel image in 1.9 seconds on all smartphone chipsets. This approach ranked First in AIM 2020 Rendering Realistic Bokeh Challenge Track 1 \& Track 2.

Weakly-supervised Temporal Action Localization (W-TAL) aims to classify and localize all action instances in an untrimmed video under only video-level supervision. However, without frame-level annotations, it is challenging for W-TAL methods to identify false positive action proposals and generate action proposals with precise temporal boundaries. In this paper, we present a Two-Stream Consensus Network (TSCN) to simultaneously address these challenges. The proposed TSCN features an iterative refinement training method, where a frame-level pseudo ground truth is iteratively updated, and used to provide frame-level supervision for improved model training and false positive action proposal elimination. Furthermore, we propose a new attention normalization loss to encourage the predicted attention to act like a binary selection, and promote the precise localization of action instance boundaries. Experiments conducted on the THUMOS14 and ActivityNet datasets show that the proposed TSCN outperforms current state-of-the-art methods, and even achieves comparable results with some recent fully-supervised methods.

We propose a general framework called Network Dissection for quantifying the interpretability of latent representations of CNNs by evaluating the alignment between individual hidden units and a set of semantic concepts. Given any CNN model, the proposed method draws on a broad data set of visual concepts to score the semantics of hidden units at each intermediate convolutional layer. The units with semantics are given labels across a range of objects, parts, scenes, textures, materials, and colors. We use the proposed method to test the hypothesis that interpretability of units is equivalent to random linear combinations of units, then we apply our method to compare the latent representations of various networks when trained to solve different supervised and self-supervised training tasks. We further analyze the effect of training iterations, compare networks trained with different initializations, examine the impact of network depth and width, and measure the effect of dropout and batch normalization on the interpretability of deep visual representations. We demonstrate that the proposed method can shed light on characteristics of CNN models and training methods that go beyond measurements of their discriminative power.

We develop a spacetime neural network method with second order optimization for solving quantum dynamics from the high dimensional Schr\"{o}dinger equation. In contrast to the standard iterative first order optimization and the time-dependent variational principle, our approach utilizes the implicit mid-point method and generates the solution for all spatial and temporal values simultaneously after optimization. We demonstrate the method in the Schr\"{o}dinger equation with a self-normalized autoregressive spacetime neural network construction. Future explorations for solving different high dimensional differential equations are discussed.

Unsupervised anomaly detection (UAD) is a widely adopted approach in industry due to rare anomaly occurrences and data imbalance. A desirable characteristic of an UAD model is contained generalization ability which excels in the reconstruction of seen normal patterns but struggles with unseen anomalies. Recent studies have pursued to contain the generalization capability of their UAD models in reconstruction from different perspectives, such as design of neural network (NN) structure and training strategy. In contrast, we note that containing of generalization ability in reconstruction can also be obtained simply from steep-shaped loss landscape. Motivated by this, we propose a loss landscape sharpening method by amplifying the reconstruction loss, dubbed Loss AMPlification (LAMP). LAMP deforms the loss landscape into a steep shape so the reconstruction error on unseen anomalies becomes greater. Accordingly, the anomaly detection performance is improved without any change of the NN architecture. Our findings suggest that LAMP can be easily applied to any reconstruction error metrics in UAD settings where the reconstruction model is trained with anomaly-free samples only.

Continuous normalizing flows (CNFs) construct invertible mappings between an arbitrary complex distribution and an isotropic Gaussian distribution using Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (neural ODEs). It has not been tractable on large datasets due to the incremental complexity of the neural ODE training. Optimal Transport theory has been applied to regularize the dynamics of the ODE to speed up training in recent works. In this paper, a temporal optimization is proposed by optimizing the evolutionary time for forward propagation of the neural ODE training. In this appoach, we optimize the network weights of the CNF alternately with evolutionary time by coordinate descent. Further with temporal regularization, stability of the evolution is ensured. This approach can be used in conjunction with the original regularization approach. We have experimentally demonstrated that the proposed approach can significantly accelerate training without sacrifying performance over baseline models.

Loss explosions in training deep neural networks can nullify multi-million dollar training runs. Conventional monitoring metrics like weight and gradient norms are often lagging and ambiguous predictors, as their values vary dramatically across different models and even between layers of the same model, making it difficult to establish a unified standard for detecting impending failure. We introduce Spectral Alignment (SA), a novel, theoretically-grounded metric that monitors the distributional alignment between layer inputs and the principal singular vectors of weight matrices. We show that a collapse in the sign diversity of this alignment is a powerful early predictor of representational collapse and training divergence. Empirical results on language models demonstrate that monitoring the SA distribution provides a significantly earlier and clearer warning of loss explosions than traditional scalar metrics. SA's low computational overhead makes it a practical tool for safeguarding model training.

Deep Learning has revolutionized vision via convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and natural language processing via recurrent neural networks (RNNs). However, success stories of Deep Learning with standard feed-forward neural networks (FNNs) are rare. FNNs that perform well are typically shallow and, therefore cannot exploit many levels of abstract representations. We introduce self-normalizing neural networks (SNNs) to enable high-level abstract representations. While batch normalization requires explicit normalization, neuron activations of SNNs automatically converge towards zero mean and unit variance. The activation function of SNNs are "scaled exponential linear units" (SELUs), which induce self-normalizing properties. Using the Banach fixed-point theorem, we prove that activations close to zero mean and unit variance that are propagated through many network layers will converge towards zero mean and unit variance -- even under the presence of noise and perturbations. This convergence property of SNNs allows to (1) train deep networks with many layers, (2) employ strong regularization, and (3) to make learning highly robust. Furthermore, for activations not close to unit variance, we prove an upper and lower bound on the variance, thus, vanishing and exploding gradients are impossible. We compared SNNs on (a) 121 tasks from the UCI machine learning repository, on (b) drug discovery benchmarks, and on (c) astronomy tasks with standard FNNs and other machine learning methods such as random forests and support vector machines. SNNs significantly outperformed all competing FNN methods at 121 UCI tasks, outperformed all competing methods at the Tox21 dataset, and set a new record at an astronomy data set. The winning SNN architectures are often very deep. Implementations are available at: github.com/bioinf-jku/SNNs.

Finding out the computational redundant part of a trained Deep Neural Network (DNN) is the key question that pruning algorithms target on. Many algorithms try to predict model performance of the pruned sub-nets by introducing various evaluation methods. But they are either inaccurate or very complicated for general application. In this work, we present a pruning method called EagleEye, in which a simple yet efficient evaluation component based on adaptive batch normalization is applied to unveil a strong correlation between different pruned DNN structures and their final settled accuracy. This strong correlation allows us to fast spot the pruned candidates with highest potential accuracy without actually fine-tuning them. This module is also general to plug-in and improve some existing pruning algorithms. EagleEye achieves better pruning performance than all of the studied pruning algorithms in our experiments. Concretely, to prune MobileNet V1 and ResNet-50, EagleEye outperforms all compared methods by up to 3.8%. Even in the more challenging experiments of pruning the compact model of MobileNet V1, EagleEye achieves the highest accuracy of 70.9% with an overall 50% operations (FLOPs) pruned. All accuracy results are Top-1 ImageNet classification accuracy. Source code and models are accessible to open-source community https://github.com/anonymous47823493/EagleEye .

This paper discusses the weight parametrization of two standard 1-Lipschitz network architectures, the Almost-Orthogonal-Layers (AOL) and the SDP-based Lipschitz Layers (SLL). It examines their impact on initialization for deep 1-Lipschitz feedforward networks, and discusses underlying issues surrounding this initialization. These networks are mainly used in certifiably robust classification applications to combat adversarial attacks by limiting the impact of perturbations on the classification output. Exact and upper bounds for the parameterized weight variance were calculated assuming a standard Normal distribution initialization; additionally, an upper bound was computed assuming a Generalized Normal Distribution, generalizing the proof for Uniform, Laplace, and Normal distribution weight initializations. It is demonstrated that the weight variance holds no bearing on the output variance distribution and that only the dimension of the weight matrices matters. Additionally, this paper demonstrates that the weight initialization always causes deep 1-Lipschitz networks to decay to zero.

In our work we not explicitly hint that it is a misconception to think that humans learn fast. Learning process takes time. Babies start learning to move in the restricted liquid area called placenta. Children often are limited by underdeveloped body. Even adults are not allowed to participate in complex competitions right away. However, with robots, when learning from scratch, we often don't have the privilege of waiting for dozen millions of steps. "Swaddling" regularization is responsible for restraining an agent in rapid but unstable development penalizing action strength in a specific way not affecting actions directly. The Symphony, Transitional-policy Deterministic Actor and Critic algorithm, is a concise combination of different ideas for possibility of training humanoid robots from scratch with Sample Efficiency, Sample Proximity and Safety of Actions in mind. It is no secret that continuous increase in Gaussian noise without appropriate smoothing is harmful for motors and gearboxes. Compared to Stochastic algorithms, we set a limited parametric noise and promote a reduced strength of actions, safely increasing entropy, since the actions are kind of immersed in weaker noise. When actions require more extreme values, actions rise above the weak noise. Training becomes empirically much safer for both the environment around and the robot's mechanisms. We use Fading Replay Buffer: using a fixed formula containing the hyperbolic tangent, we adjust the batch sampling probability: the memory contains a recent memory and a long-term memory trail. Fading Replay Buffer allows us to use Temporal Advantage when we improve the current Critic Network prediction compared to the exponential moving average. Temporal Advantage allows us to update Actor and Critic in one pass, as well as combine Actor and Critic in one Object and implement their Losses in one line.

This paper presents the data-driven techniques and methodologies used to predict the remaining useful life (RUL) of a fleet of aircraft engines that can suffer failures of diverse nature. The solution presented is based on two Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNN) stacked in two levels. The first DCNN is used to extract a low-dimensional feature vector using the normalized raw data as input. The second DCNN ingests a list of vectors taken from the former DCNN and estimates the RUL. Model selection was carried out by means of Bayesian optimization using a repeated random subsampling validation approach. The proposed methodology was ranked in the third place of the 2021 PHM Conference Data Challenge.

Effectively scaling up deep reinforcement learning models has proven notoriously difficult due to network pathologies during training, motivating various targeted interventions such as periodic reset and architectural advances such as layer normalization. Instead of pursuing more complex modifications, we show that introducing static network sparsity alone can unlock further scaling potential beyond their dense counterparts with state-of-the-art architectures. This is achieved through simple one-shot random pruning, where a predetermined percentage of network weights are randomly removed once before training. Our analysis reveals that, in contrast to naively scaling up dense DRL networks, such sparse networks achieve both higher parameter efficiency for network expressivity and stronger resistance to optimization challenges like plasticity loss and gradient interference. We further extend our evaluation to visual and streaming RL scenarios, demonstrating the consistent benefits of network sparsity.

Since the invention of word2vec, the skip-gram model has significantly advanced the research of network embedding, such as the recent emergence of the DeepWalk, LINE, PTE, and node2vec approaches. In this work, we show that all of the aforementioned models with negative sampling can be unified into the matrix factorization framework with closed forms. Our analysis and proofs reveal that: (1) DeepWalk empirically produces a low-rank transformation of a network's normalized Laplacian matrix; (2) LINE, in theory, is a special case of DeepWalk when the size of vertices' context is set to one; (3) As an extension of LINE, PTE can be viewed as the joint factorization of multiple networks' Laplacians; (4) node2vec is factorizing a matrix related to the stationary distribution and transition probability tensor of a 2nd-order random walk. We further provide the theoretical connections between skip-gram based network embedding algorithms and the theory of graph Laplacian. Finally, we present the NetMF method as well as its approximation algorithm for computing network embedding. Our method offers significant improvements over DeepWalk and LINE for conventional network mining tasks. This work lays the theoretical foundation for skip-gram based network embedding methods, leading to a better understanding of latent network representation learning.

Cinematic audio source separation is a relatively new subtask of audio source separation, with the aim of extracting the dialogue, music, and effects stems from their mixture. In this work, we developed a model generalizing the Bandsplit RNN for any complete or overcomplete partitions of the frequency axis. Psychoacoustically motivated frequency scales were used to inform the band definitions which are now defined with redundancy for more reliable feature extraction. A loss function motivated by the signal-to-noise ratio and the sparsity-promoting property of the 1-norm was proposed. We additionally exploit the information-sharing property of a common-encoder setup to reduce computational complexity during both training and inference, improve separation performance for hard-to-generalize classes of sounds, and allow flexibility during inference time with detachable decoders. Our best model sets the state of the art on the Divide and Remaster dataset with performance above the ideal ratio mask for the dialogue stem.

Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) is a recently-developed variation of the long short-term memory (LSTM) unit, both of which are types of recurrent neural network (RNN). Through empirical evidence, both models have been proven to be effective in a wide variety of machine learning tasks such as natural language processing (Wen et al., 2015), speech recognition (Chorowski et al., 2015), and text classification (Yang et al., 2016). Conventionally, like most neural networks, both of the aforementioned RNN variants employ the Softmax function as its final output layer for its prediction, and the cross-entropy function for computing its loss. In this paper, we present an amendment to this norm by introducing linear support vector machine (SVM) as the replacement for Softmax in the final output layer of a GRU model. Furthermore, the cross-entropy function shall be replaced with a margin-based function. While there have been similar studies (Alalshekmubarak & Smith, 2013; Tang, 2013), this proposal is primarily intended for binary classification on intrusion detection using the 2013 network traffic data from the honeypot systems of Kyoto University. Results show that the GRU-SVM model performs relatively higher than the conventional GRU-Softmax model. The proposed model reached a training accuracy of ~81.54% and a testing accuracy of ~84.15%, while the latter was able to reach a training accuracy of ~63.07% and a testing accuracy of ~70.75%. In addition, the juxtaposition of these two final output layers indicate that the SVM would outperform Softmax in prediction time - a theoretical implication which was supported by the actual training and testing time in the study.

Normalization layers have recently experienced a renaissance in the deep reinforcement learning and continual learning literature, with several works highlighting diverse benefits such as improving loss landscape conditioning and combatting overestimation bias. However, normalization brings with it a subtle but important side effect: an equivalence between growth in the norm of the network parameters and decay in the effective learning rate. This becomes problematic in continual learning settings, where the resulting effective learning rate schedule may decay to near zero too quickly relative to the timescale of the learning problem. We propose to make the learning rate schedule explicit with a simple re-parameterization which we call Normalize-and-Project (NaP), which couples the insertion of normalization layers with weight projection, ensuring that the effective learning rate remains constant throughout training. This technique reveals itself as a powerful analytical tool to better understand learning rate schedules in deep reinforcement learning, and as a means of improving robustness to nonstationarity in synthetic plasticity loss benchmarks along with both the single-task and sequential variants of the Arcade Learning Environment. We also show that our approach can be easily applied to popular architectures such as ResNets and transformers while recovering and in some cases even slightly improving the performance of the base model in common stationary benchmarks.

Geometry-aware optimization algorithms, such as Muon, have achieved remarkable success in training deep neural networks (DNNs). These methods leverage the underlying geometry of DNNs by selecting appropriate norms for different layers and updating parameters via norm-constrained linear minimization oracles (LMOs). However, even within a group of layers associated with the same norm, the local curvature can be heterogeneous across layers and vary dynamically over the course of training. For example, recent work shows that sharpness varies substantially across transformer layers and throughout training, yet standard geometry-aware optimizers impose fixed learning rates to layers within the same group, which may be inefficient for DNN training. In this paper, we introduce a noise-adaptive layerwise learning rate scheme on top of geometry-aware optimization algorithms and substantially accelerate DNN training compared to methods that use fixed learning rates within each group. Our method estimates gradient variance in the dual norm induced by the chosen LMO on the fly, and uses it to assign time-varying noise-adaptive layerwise learning rates within each group. We provide a theoretical analysis showing that our algorithm achieves a sharp convergence rate. Empirical results on transformer architectures such as LLaMA and GPT demonstrate that our approach achieves faster convergence than state-of-the-art optimizers.

Is the standard weight decay in AdamW truly optimal? Although AdamW decouples weight decay from adaptive gradient scaling, a fundamental conflict remains: the Radial Tug-of-War. In deep learning, gradients tend to increase parameter norms to expand effective capacity while steering directions to learn features, whereas weight decay indiscriminately suppresses norm growth. This push--pull interaction induces radial oscillations, injecting noise into Adam's second-moment estimates and potentially degrading delicate tangential feature learning. We argue that magnitude and direction play distinct roles and should be decoupled in optimizer dynamics. We propose Orthogonal Dynamics Decoupling and instantiate it as AdamO: an SGD-style update handles the one-dimensional norm control, while Adam's adaptive preconditioning is confined to the tangential subspace. AdamO further incorporates curvature-adaptive radial step sizing and architecture-aware rules and projections for scale-invariant layers and low-dimensional parameters. Experiments on vision and language tasks show that AdamO improves generalization and stability over AdamW without introducing additional complex constraints.

This paper studies the properties of solutions to multi-task shallow ReLU neural network learning problems, wherein the network is trained to fit a dataset with minimal sum of squared weights. Remarkably, the solutions learned for each individual task resemble those obtained by solving a kernel regression problem, revealing a novel connection between neural networks and kernel methods. It is known that single-task neural network learning problems are equivalent to a minimum norm interpolation problem in a non-Hilbertian Banach space, and that the solutions of such problems are generally non-unique. In contrast, we prove that the solutions to univariate-input, multi-task neural network interpolation problems are almost always unique, and coincide with the solution to a minimum-norm interpolation problem in a Sobolev (Reproducing Kernel) Hilbert Space. We also demonstrate a similar phenomenon in the multivariate-input case; specifically, we show that neural network learning problems with large numbers of tasks are approximately equivalent to an ell^2 (Hilbert space) minimization problem over a fixed kernel determined by the optimal neurons.

We propose spatially-adaptive normalization, a simple but effective layer for synthesizing photorealistic images given an input semantic layout. Previous methods directly feed the semantic layout as input to the deep network, which is then processed through stacks of convolution, normalization, and nonlinearity layers. We show that this is suboptimal as the normalization layers tend to ``wash away'' semantic information. To address the issue, we propose using the input layout for modulating the activations in normalization layers through a spatially-adaptive, learned transformation. Experiments on several challenging datasets demonstrate the advantage of the proposed method over existing approaches, regarding both visual fidelity and alignment with input layouts. Finally, our model allows user control over both semantic and style. Code is available at https://github.com/NVlabs/SPADE .

Over-parameterized deep networks trained using gradient-based optimizers are a popular choice for solving classification and ranking problems. Without appropriately tuned ell_2 regularization or weight decay, such networks have the tendency to make output scores (logits) and network weights large, causing training loss to become too small and the network to lose its adaptivity (ability to move around) in the parameter space. Although regularization is typically understood from an overfitting perspective, we highlight its role in making the network more adaptive and enabling it to escape more easily from weights that generalize poorly. To provide such a capability, we propose a method called Logit Attenuating Weight Normalization (LAWN), that can be stacked onto any gradient-based optimizer. LAWN controls the logits by constraining the weight norms of layers in the final homogeneous sub-network. Empirically, we show that the resulting LAWN variant of the optimizer makes a deep network more adaptive to finding minimas with superior generalization performance on large-scale image classification and recommender systems. While LAWN is particularly impressive in improving Adam, it greatly improves all optimizers when used with large batch sizes

Data-free quantization is a task that compresses the neural network to low bit-width without access to original training data. Most existing data-free quantization methods cause severe performance degradation due to inaccurate activation clipping range and quantization error, especially for low bit-width. In this paper, we present a simple yet effective data-free quantization method with accurate activation clipping and adaptive batch normalization. Accurate activation clipping (AAC) improves the model accuracy by exploiting accurate activation information from the full-precision model. Adaptive batch normalization firstly proposes to address the quantization error from distribution changes by updating the batch normalization layer adaptively. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed data-free quantization method can yield surprisingly performance, achieving 64.33% top-1 accuracy of ResNet18 on ImageNet dataset, with 3.7% absolute improvement outperforming the existing state-of-the-art methods.

We present FastRP, a scalable and performant algorithm for learning distributed node representations in a graph. FastRP is over 4,000 times faster than state-of-the-art methods such as DeepWalk and node2vec, while achieving comparable or even better performance as evaluated on several real-world networks on various downstream tasks. We observe that most network embedding methods consist of two components: construct a node similarity matrix and then apply dimension reduction techniques to this matrix. We show that the success of these methods should be attributed to the proper construction of this similarity matrix, rather than the dimension reduction method employed. FastRP is proposed as a scalable algorithm for network embeddings. Two key features of FastRP are: 1) it explicitly constructs a node similarity matrix that captures transitive relationships in a graph and normalizes matrix entries based on node degrees; 2) it utilizes very sparse random projection, which is a scalable optimization-free method for dimension reduction. An extra benefit from combining these two design choices is that it allows the iterative computation of node embeddings so that the similarity matrix need not be explicitly constructed, which further speeds up FastRP. FastRP is also advantageous for its ease of implementation, parallelization and hyperparameter tuning. The source code is available at https://github.com/GTmac/FastRP.

Many machine learning tasks involve learning functions that are known to be invariant or equivariant to certain symmetries of the input data. However, it is often challenging to design neural network architectures that respect these symmetries while being expressive and computationally efficient. For example, Euclidean motion invariant/equivariant graph or point cloud neural networks. We introduce Frame Averaging (FA), a general purpose and systematic framework for adapting known (backbone) architectures to become invariant or equivariant to new symmetry types. Our framework builds on the well known group averaging operator that guarantees invariance or equivariance but is intractable. In contrast, we observe that for many important classes of symmetries, this operator can be replaced with an averaging operator over a small subset of the group elements, called a frame. We show that averaging over a frame guarantees exact invariance or equivariance while often being much simpler to compute than averaging over the entire group. Furthermore, we prove that FA-based models have maximal expressive power in a broad setting and in general preserve the expressive power of their backbone architectures. Using frame averaging, we propose a new class of universal Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), universal Euclidean motion invariant point cloud networks, and Euclidean motion invariant Message Passing (MP) GNNs. We demonstrate the practical effectiveness of FA on several applications including point cloud normal estimation, beyond 2-WL graph separation, and n-body dynamics prediction, achieving state-of-the-art results in all of these benchmarks.

The Attention mechanism is the main component of the Transformer architecture, and since its introduction, it has led to significant advancements in Deep Learning that span many domains and multiple tasks. The Attention Mechanism was utilized in Computer Vision as the Vision Transformer ViT, and its usage has expanded into many tasks in the vision domain, such as classification, segmentation, object detection, and image generation. While this mechanism is very expressive and capable, it comes with the drawback of being computationally expensive and requiring datasets of considerable size for effective optimization. To address these shortcomings, many designs have been proposed in the literature to reduce the computational burden and alleviate the data size requirements. Examples of such attempts in the vision domain are the MLP-Mixer, the Conv-Mixer, the Perciver-IO, and many more. This paper introduces a new computational block as an alternative to the standard ViT block that reduces the compute burdens by replacing the normal Attention layers with a Network in Network structure that enhances the static approach of the MLP Mixer with a dynamic system of learning an element-wise gating function by a token mixing process. Extensive experimentation shows that the proposed design provides better performance than the baseline architectures on multiple datasets applied in the image classification task of the vision domain.

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) learn a target probability distribution by optimizing a generator and a discriminator with minimax objectives. This paper addresses the question of whether such optimization actually provides the generator with gradients that make its distribution close to the target distribution. We derive metrizable conditions, sufficient conditions for the discriminator to serve as the distance between the distributions by connecting the GAN formulation with the concept of sliced optimal transport. Furthermore, by leveraging these theoretical results, we propose a novel GAN training scheme, called slicing adversarial network (SAN). With only simple modifications, a broad class of existing GANs can be converted to SANs. Experiments on synthetic and image datasets support our theoretical results and the SAN's effectiveness as compared to usual GANs. Furthermore, we also apply SAN to StyleGAN-XL, which leads to state-of-the-art FID score amongst GANs for class conditional generation on ImageNet 256times256.

Large sky spectroscopic surveys have reached the scale of photometric surveys in terms of sample sizes and data complexity. These huge datasets require efficient, accurate, and flexible automated tools for data analysis and science exploitation. We present the Galaxy Spectra Network/GaSNet-II, a supervised multi-network deep learning tool for spectra classification and redshift prediction. GaSNet-II can be trained to identify a customized number of classes and optimize the redshift predictions for classified objects in each of them. It also provides redshift errors, using a network-of-networks that reproduces a Monte Carlo test on each spectrum, by randomizing their weight initialization. As a demonstration of the capability of the deep learning pipeline, we use 260k Sloan Digital Sky Survey spectra from Data Release 16, separated into 13 classes including 140k galactic, and 120k extragalactic objects. GaSNet-II achieves 92.4% average classification accuracy over the 13 classes (larger than 90% for the majority of them), and an average redshift error of approximately 0.23% for galaxies and 2.1% for quasars. We further train/test the same pipeline to classify spectra and predict redshifts for a sample of 200k 4MOST mock spectra and 21k publicly released DESI spectra. On 4MOST mock data, we reach 93.4% accuracy in 10-class classification and an average redshift error of 0.55% for galaxies and 0.3% for active galactic nuclei. On DESI data, we reach 96% accuracy in (star/galaxy/quasar only) classification and an average redshift error of 2.8% for galaxies and 4.8% for quasars, despite the small sample size available. GaSNet-II can process ~40k spectra in less than one minute, on a normal Desktop GPU. This makes the pipeline particularly suitable for real-time analyses of Stage-IV survey observations and an ideal tool for feedback loops aimed at night-by-night survey strategy optimization.

Covariance matrices have proven highly effective across many scientific fields. Since these matrices lie within the Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) manifold - a Riemannian space with intrinsic non-Euclidean geometry, the primary challenge in representation learning is to respect this underlying geometric structure. Drawing inspiration from the success of Euclidean deep learning, researchers have developed neural networks on the SPD manifolds for more faithful covariance embedding learning. A notable advancement in this area is the implementation of Riemannian batch normalization (RBN), which has been shown to improve the performance of SPD network models. Nonetheless, the Riemannian metric beneath the existing RBN might fail to effectively deal with the ill-conditioned SPD matrices (ICSM), undermining the effectiveness of RBN. In contrast, the Bures-Wasserstein metric (BWM) demonstrates superior performance for ill-conditioning. In addition, the recently introduced Generalized BWM (GBWM) parameterizes the vanilla BWM via an SPD matrix, allowing for a more nuanced representation of vibrant geometries of the SPD manifold. Therefore, we propose a novel RBN algorithm based on the GBW geometry, incorporating a learnable metric parameter. Moreover, the deformation of GBWM by matrix power is also introduced to further enhance the representational capacity of GBWM-based RBN. Experimental results on different datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Video Anomaly Detection (VAD) methods based on reconstruction or prediction face two critical challenges: (1) strong generalization capability often results in accurate reconstruction or prediction of abnormal events, making it difficult to distinguish normal from abnormal patterns; (2) reliance only on low-level appearance and motion cues limits their ability to identify high-level semantic in abnormal events from complex scenes. To address these limitations, we propose a novel VAD framework with two key innovations. First, to suppress excessive generalization, we introduce the Sparse Feature Filtering Module (SFFM) that employs bottleneck filters to dynamically and adaptively remove abnormal information from features. Unlike traditional memory modules, it does not need to memorize the normal prototypes across the training dataset. Further, we design the Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture for SFFM. Each expert is responsible for extracting specialized principal features during running time, and different experts are selectively activated to ensure the diversity of the learned principal features. Second, to overcome the neglect of semantics in existing methods, we integrate a Vision-Language Model (VLM) to generate textual descriptions for video clips, enabling comprehensive joint modeling of semantic, appearance, and motion cues. Additionally, we enforce modality consistency through semantic similarity constraints and motion frame-difference contrastive loss. Extensive experiments on multiple public datasets validate the effectiveness of our multimodal joint modeling framework and sparse feature filtering paradigm. Project page at https://qzfm.github.io/sfn_vad_project_page/.

Gatys et al. recently introduced a neural algorithm that renders a content image in the style of another image, achieving so-called style transfer. However, their framework requires a slow iterative optimization process, which limits its practical application. Fast approximations with feed-forward neural networks have been proposed to speed up neural style transfer. Unfortunately, the speed improvement comes at a cost: the network is usually tied to a fixed set of styles and cannot adapt to arbitrary new styles. In this paper, we present a simple yet effective approach that for the first time enables arbitrary style transfer in real-time. At the heart of our method is a novel adaptive instance normalization (AdaIN) layer that aligns the mean and variance of the content features with those of the style features. Our method achieves speed comparable to the fastest existing approach, without the restriction to a pre-defined set of styles. In addition, our approach allows flexible user controls such as content-style trade-off, style interpolation, color & spatial controls, all using a single feed-forward neural network.

A Controller Area Network (CAN) bus in the vehicles is an efficient standard bus enabling communication between all Electronic Control Units (ECU). However, CAN bus is not enough to protect itself because of lack of security features. To detect suspicious network connections effectively, the intrusion detection system (IDS) is strongly required. Unlike the traditional IDS for Internet, there are small number of known attack signatures for vehicle networks. Also, IDS for vehicle requires high accuracy because any false-positive error can seriously affect the safety of the driver. To solve this problem, we propose a novel IDS model for in-vehicle networks, GIDS (GAN based Intrusion Detection System) using deep-learning model, Generative Adversarial Nets. GIDS can learn to detect unknown attacks using only normal data. As experiment result, GIDS shows high detection accuracy for four unknown attacks.

This work presents MExECON, a novel pipeline for 3D reconstruction of clothed human avatars from sparse multi-view RGB images. Building on the single-view method ECON, MExECON extends its capabilities to leverage multiple viewpoints, improving geometry and body pose estimation. At the core of the pipeline is the proposed Joint Multi-view Body Optimization (JMBO) algorithm, which fits a single SMPL-X body model jointly across all input views, enforcing multi-view consistency. The optimized body model serves as a low-frequency prior that guides the subsequent surface reconstruction, where geometric details are added via normal map integration. MExECON integrates normal maps from both front and back views to accurately capture fine-grained surface details such as clothing folds and hairstyles. All multi-view gains are achieved without requiring any network re-training. Experimental results show that MExECON consistently improves fidelity over the single-view baseline and achieves competitive performance compared to modern few-shot 3D reconstruction methods.

Climate change is expected to intensify and increase extreme events in the weather cycle. Since this has a significant impact on various sectors of our life, recent works are concerned with identifying and predicting such extreme events from Earth observations. With respect to wildfire danger forecasting, previous deep learning approaches duplicate static variables along the time dimension and neglect the intrinsic differences between static and dynamic variables. Furthermore, most existing multi-branch architectures lose the interconnections between the branches during the feature learning stage. To address these issues, this paper proposes a 2D/3D two-branch convolutional neural network (CNN) with a Location-aware Adaptive Normalization layer (LOAN). Using LOAN as a building block, we can modulate the dynamic features conditional on their geographical locations. Thus, our approach considers feature properties as a unified yet compound 2D/3D model. Besides, we propose using the sinusoidal-based encoding of the day of the year to provide the model with explicit temporal information about the target day within the year. Our experimental results show a better performance of our approach than other baselines on the challenging FireCube dataset. The results show that location-aware adaptive feature normalization is a promising technique to learn the relation between dynamic variables and their geographic locations, which is highly relevant for areas where remote sensing data builds the basis for analysis. The source code is available at https://github.com/HakamShams/LOAN.

The DC Optimal Power Flow (DC-OPF) problem is fundamental to power system operations, requiring rapid solutions for real-time grid management. While traditional optimization solvers provide optimal solutions, their computational cost becomes prohibitive for large-scale systems requiring frequent recalculations. Machine learning approaches offer promise for acceleration but often struggle with constraint satisfaction and cost optimality. We present a novel two-stage learning framework that combines physics-informed Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) with Continuous Flow Matching (CFM) for solving DC-OPF problems. Our approach embeds fundamental physical principles--including economic dispatch optimality conditions, Kirchhoff's laws, and Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) complementarity conditions--directly into the training objectives. The first stage trains a GNN to produce feasible initial solutions by learning from physics-informed losses that encode power system constraints. The second stage employs CFM, a simulation-free continuous normalizing flow technique, to refine these solutions toward optimality through learned vector field regression. Evaluated on the IEEE 30-bus system across five load scenarios ranging from 70\% to 130\% nominal load, our method achieves near-optimal solutions with cost gaps below 0.1\% for nominal loads and below 3\% for extreme conditions, while maintaining 100\% feasibility. Our framework bridges the gap between fast but approximate neural network predictions and optimal but slow numerical solvers, offering a practical solution for modern power systems with high renewable penetration requiring frequent dispatch updates.

Unsupervised anomaly detection and localization is crucial to the practical application when collecting and labeling sufficient anomaly data is infeasible. Most existing representation-based approaches extract normal image features with a deep convolutional neural network and characterize the corresponding distribution through non-parametric distribution estimation methods. The anomaly score is calculated by measuring the distance between the feature of the test image and the estimated distribution. However, current methods can not effectively map image features to a tractable base distribution and ignore the relationship between local and global features which are important to identify anomalies. To this end, we propose FastFlow implemented with 2D normalizing flows and use it as the probability distribution estimator. Our FastFlow can be used as a plug-in module with arbitrary deep feature extractors such as ResNet and vision transformer for unsupervised anomaly detection and localization. In training phase, FastFlow learns to transform the input visual feature into a tractable distribution and obtains the likelihood to recognize anomalies in inference phase. Extensive experimental results on the MVTec AD dataset show that FastFlow surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy and inference efficiency with various backbone networks. Our approach achieves 99.4% AUC in anomaly detection with high inference efficiency.

Low-Light Image Enhancement (LLIE) task tends to restore the details and visual information from corrupted low-light images. Most existing methods learn the mapping function between low/normal-light images by Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) on sRGB and HSV color space. Nevertheless, enhancement involves amplifying image signals, and applying these color spaces to low-light images with a low signal-to-noise ratio can introduce sensitivity and instability into the enhancement process. Consequently, this results in the presence of color artifacts and brightness artifacts in the enhanced images. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel trainable color space, named Horizontal/Vertical-Intensity (HVI). It not only decouples brightness and color from RGB channels to mitigate the instability during enhancement but also adapts to low-light images in different illumination ranges due to the trainable parameters. Further, we design a novel Color and Intensity Decoupling Network (CIDNet) with two branches dedicated to processing the decoupled image brightness and color in the HVI space. Within CIDNet, we introduce the Lightweight Cross-Attention (LCA) module to facilitate interaction between image structure and content information in both branches, while also suppressing noise in low-light images. Finally, we conducted 22 quantitative and qualitative experiments to show that the proposed CIDNet outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on 11 datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/Fediory/HVI-CIDNet.

Cancer is the uncontrollable cell division of abnormal cells inside the human body, which can spread to other body organs. It is one of the non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and NCDs accounts for 71% of total deaths worldwide whereas lung cancer is the second most diagnosed cancer after female breast cancer. Cancer survival rate of lung cancer is only 19%. There are various methods for the diagnosis of lung cancer, such as X-ray, CT scan, PET-CT scan, bronchoscopy and biopsy. However, to know the subtype of lung cancer based on the tissue type H and E staining is widely used, where the staining is done on the tissue aspirated from a biopsy. Studies have reported that the type of histology is associated with prognosis and treatment in lung cancer. Therefore, early and accurate detection of lung cancer histology is an urgent need and as its treatment is dependent on the type of histology, molecular profile and stage of the disease, it is most essential to analyse the histopathology images of lung cancer. Hence, to speed up the vital process of diagnosis of lung cancer and reduce the burden on pathologists, Deep learning techniques are used. These techniques have shown improved efficacy in the analysis of histopathology slides of cancer. Several studies reported the importance of convolution neural networks (CNN) in the classification of histopathological pictures of various cancer types such as brain, skin, breast, lung, colorectal cancer. In this study tri-category classification of lung cancer images (normal, adenocarcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma) are carried out by using ResNet 50, VGG-19, Inception_ResNet_V2 and DenseNet for the feature extraction and triplet loss to guide the CNN such that it increases inter-cluster distance and reduces intra-cluster distance.

Modern generative adversarial networks (GANs) predominantly use piecewise linear activation functions in discriminators (or critics), including ReLU and LeakyReLU. Such models learn piecewise linear mappings, where each piece handles a subset of the input space, and the gradients per subset are piecewise constant. Under such a class of discriminator (or critic) functions, we present Gradient Normalization (GraN), a novel input-dependent normalization method, which guarantees a piecewise K-Lipschitz constraint in the input space. In contrast to spectral normalization, GraN does not constrain processing at the individual network layers, and, unlike gradient penalties, strictly enforces a piecewise Lipschitz constraint almost everywhere. Empirically, we demonstrate improved image generation performance across multiple datasets (incl. CIFAR-10/100, STL-10, LSUN bedrooms, and CelebA), GAN loss functions, and metrics. Further, we analyze altering the often untuned Lipschitz constant K in several standard GANs, not only attaining significant performance gains, but also finding connections between K and training dynamics, particularly in low-gradient loss plateaus, with the common Adam optimizer.

Diffusion-based models decompose sampling into many small Gaussian denoising steps -- an assumption that breaks down when generation is compressed to a few coarse transitions. Existing few-step methods address this through distillation, consistency training, or adversarial objectives, but sacrifice the likelihood framework in the process. We introduce Normalizing Trajectory Models (NTM), which models each reverse step as an expressive conditional normalizing flow with exact likelihood training. Architecturally, NTM combines shallow invertible blocks within each step with a deep parallel predictor across the trajectory, forming an end-to-end network trainable from scratch or initializable from pretrained flow-matching models. Its exact trajectory likelihood further enables self-distillation: a lightweight denoiser trained on the model's own score produces high-quality samples in four steps. On text-to-image benchmarks, NTM matches or outperforms strong image generation baselines in just four sampling steps while uniquely retaining exact likelihood over the generative trajectory.

The large number of parameters in Pretrained Language Models enhance their performance, but also make them resource-intensive, making it challenging to deploy them on commodity hardware like a single GPU. Due to the memory and power limitations of these devices, model compression techniques are often used to decrease both the model's size and its inference latency. This usually results in a trade-off between model accuracy and efficiency. Therefore, optimizing this balance is essential for effectively deploying LLMs on commodity hardware. A significant portion of the efficiency challenge is the Feed-forward network (FFN) component, which accounts for roughly 2{3} total parameters and inference latency. In this paper, we first observe that only a few neurons of FFN module have large output norm for any input tokens, a.k.a. heavy hitters, while the others are sparsely triggered by different tokens. Based on this observation, we explicitly split the FFN into two parts according to the heavy hitters. We improve the efficiency-accuracy trade-off of existing compression methods by allocating more resource to FFN parts with heavy hitters. In practice, our method can reduce model size by 43.1\% and bring 1.25sim1.56times wall clock time speedup on different hardware with negligible accuracy drop.

Leveraging the models' outputs, specifically the logits, is a common approach to estimating the test accuracy of a pre-trained neural network on out-of-distribution (OOD) samples without requiring access to the corresponding ground truth labels. Despite their ease of implementation and computational efficiency, current logit-based methods are vulnerable to overconfidence issues, leading to prediction bias, especially under the natural shift. In this work, we first study the relationship between logits and generalization performance from the view of low-density separation assumption. Our findings motivate our proposed method MaNo which (1) applies a data-dependent normalization on the logits to reduce prediction bias, and (2) takes the L_p norm of the matrix of normalized logits as the estimation score. Our theoretical analysis highlights the connection between the provided score and the model's uncertainty. We conduct an extensive empirical study on common unsupervised accuracy estimation benchmarks and demonstrate that MaNo achieves state-of-the-art performance across various architectures in the presence of synthetic, natural, or subpopulation shifts.

Deep neural networks perform remarkably well on image classification tasks but remain vulnerable to carefully crafted adversarial perturbations. This work revisits linear dimensionality reduction as a simple, data-adapted defense. We empirically compare standard Principal Component Analysis (PCA) with its sparse variant (SPCA) as front-end feature extractors for downstream classifiers, and we complement these experiments with a theoretical analysis. On the theory side, we derive exact robustness certificates for linear heads applied to SPCA features: for both ell_infty and ell_2 threat models (binary and multiclass), the certified radius grows as the dual norms of W^top u shrink, where W is the projection and u the head weights. We further show that for general (non-linear) heads, sparsity reduces operator-norm bounds through a Lipschitz composition argument, predicting lower input sensitivity. Empirically, with a small non-linear network after the projection, SPCA consistently degrades more gracefully than PCA under strong white-box and black-box attacks while maintaining competitive clean accuracy. Taken together, the theory identifies the mechanism (sparser projections reduce adversarial leverage) and the experiments verify that this benefit persists beyond the linear setting. Our code is available at https://github.com/killian31/SPCARobustness.

In this work, we revisit Transformer optimization through the lens of second-order geometry and establish a direct connection between architectural design, activation scale, the Hessian matrix, and the maximum tolerable learning rate. We introduce a simple normalization strategy, termed SimpleNorm, which stabilizes intermediate activation scales by construction. Then, by analyzing the Hessian of the loss with respect to network activations, we theoretically show that SimpleNorm significantly reduces the spectral norm of the Hessian, thereby permitting larger stable learning rates. We validate our theoretical findings through extensive experiments on large GPT models at parameter scales 1B, 1.4B, 7B and 8B. Empirically, SimpleGPT, our SimpleNorm-based network, tolerates learning rates 3times-10times larger than standard convention, consistently demonstrates strong optimization stability, and achieves substantially better performance than well-established baselines. Specifically, when training 7B-scale models for 60K steps, SimpleGPT achieves a training loss that is 0.08 lower than that of LLaMA2 with QKNorm, reducing the loss from 2.290 to 2.208. Our source code will be released at https://github.com/Ocram7/SimpleGPT.

The placement of normalization layers, specifically Pre-Norm and Post-Norm, remains an open question in Transformer architecture design. In this work, we rethink these approaches through the lens of manifold optimization, interpreting the outputs of the Feed-Forward Network (FFN) and attention layers as update directions in optimization. Building on this perspective, we introduce GeoNorm, a novel method that replaces standard normalization with geodesic updates on the manifold. Furthermore, analogous to learning rate schedules, we propose a layer-wise update decay for the FFN and attention components. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that GeoNorm consistently outperforms existing normalization methods in Transformer models. Crucially, GeoNorm can be seamlessly integrated into standard Transformer architectures, achieving performance improvements with negligible additional computational cost.

Modern neural network training relies on optimizers such as Adam and Muon which act on each weight matrix as a single object. Yet every weight matrix carries two distinct quantities -- a magnitude and a direction -- and all optimizers stepping in the matrix as a whole couple their dynamics: the directional change from an update depends on the current magnitude, while the magnitude drifts as a byproduct of learning the direction, so neither is governed directly by the learning rate. Typical training therefore leans on surrounding recipes such as weight decay and warmup to keep learning stable at scale, though these regulate the coupling only indirectly; other recent methods instead constrain the weight to a fixed-norm sphere, but add no learnable magnitude, leaving scale control to normalization layers alone. We propose Magnitude--Direction (MD) Decoupling, an optimizer modification that factorizes each weight into a fixed-norm direction on a hypersphere and learnable per-row and per-column magnitude gains, updated at separate learning rates, all while the model still sees a single fused weight tensor. The method is agnostic to the base optimizer and removes the need for weight decay and warmup. Across both Adam and Muon, MD Decoupling improves on well-tuned baselines, transfers the optimal LR across model width without retuning, and continues to help at scale on large Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models. Treating magnitude and direction as separately controlled quantities thus yields more predictable training dynamics and a simple, broadly applicable improvement to modern optimizers.

In this paper, we present a method which combines the flexibility of the neural algorithm of artistic style with the speed of fast style transfer networks to allow real-time stylization using any content/style image pair. We build upon recent work leveraging conditional instance normalization for multi-style transfer networks by learning to predict the conditional instance normalization parameters directly from a style image. The model is successfully trained on a corpus of roughly 80,000 paintings and is able to generalize to paintings previously unobserved. We demonstrate that the learned embedding space is smooth and contains a rich structure and organizes semantic information associated with paintings in an entirely unsupervised manner.

Image-based sequence recognition has been a long-standing research topic in computer vision. In this paper, we investigate the problem of scene text recognition, which is among the most important and challenging tasks in image-based sequence recognition. A novel neural network architecture, which integrates feature extraction, sequence modeling and transcription into a unified framework, is proposed. Compared with previous systems for scene text recognition, the proposed architecture possesses four distinctive properties: (1) It is end-to-end trainable, in contrast to most of the existing algorithms whose components are separately trained and tuned. (2) It naturally handles sequences in arbitrary lengths, involving no character segmentation or horizontal scale normalization. (3) It is not confined to any predefined lexicon and achieves remarkable performances in both lexicon-free and lexicon-based scene text recognition tasks. (4) It generates an effective yet much smaller model, which is more practical for real-world application scenarios. The experiments on standard benchmarks, including the IIIT-5K, Street View Text and ICDAR datasets, demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm over the prior arts. Moreover, the proposed algorithm performs well in the task of image-based music score recognition, which evidently verifies the generality of it.

We propose a simple and application-friendly network (called SimpleNet) for detecting and localizing anomalies. SimpleNet consists of four components: (1) a pre-trained Feature Extractor that generates local features, (2) a shallow Feature Adapter that transfers local features towards target domain, (3) a simple Anomaly Feature Generator that counterfeits anomaly features by adding Gaussian noise to normal features, and (4) a binary Anomaly Discriminator that distinguishes anomaly features from normal features. During inference, the Anomaly Feature Generator would be discarded. Our approach is based on three intuitions. First, transforming pre-trained features to target-oriented features helps avoid domain bias. Second, generating synthetic anomalies in feature space is more effective, as defects may not have much commonality in the image space. Third, a simple discriminator is much efficient and practical. In spite of simplicity, SimpleNet outperforms previous methods quantitatively and qualitatively. On the MVTec AD benchmark, SimpleNet achieves an anomaly detection AUROC of 99.6%, reducing the error by 55.5% compared to the next best performing model. Furthermore, SimpleNet is faster than existing methods, with a high frame rate of 77 FPS on a 3080ti GPU. Additionally, SimpleNet demonstrates significant improvements in performance on the One-Class Novelty Detection task. Code: https://github.com/DonaldRR/SimpleNet.

Efficient, reliable and reproducible target volume delineation is a key step in the effective planning of breast radiotherapy. However, post-operative breast target delineation is challenging as the contrast between the tumor bed volume (TBV) and normal breast tissue is relatively low in CT images. In this study, we propose to mimic the marker-guidance procedure in manual target delineation. We developed a saliency-based deep learning segmentation (SDL-Seg) algorithm for accurate TBV segmentation in post-operative breast irradiation. The SDL-Seg algorithm incorporates saliency information in the form of markers' location cues into a U-Net model. The design forces the model to encode the location-related features, which underscores regions with high saliency levels and suppresses low saliency regions. The saliency maps were generated by identifying markers on CT images. Markers' locations were then converted to probability maps using a distance-transformation coupled with a Gaussian filter. Subsequently, the CT images and the corresponding saliency maps formed a multi-channel input for the SDL-Seg network. Our in-house dataset was comprised of 145 prone CT images from 29 post-operative breast cancer patients, who received 5-fraction partial breast irradiation (PBI) regimen on GammaPod. The performance of the proposed method was compared against basic U-Net. Our model achieved mean (standard deviation) of 76.4 %, 6.76 mm, and 1.9 mm for DSC, HD95, and ASD respectively on the test set with computation time of below 11 seconds per one CT volume. SDL-Seg showed superior performance relative to basic U-Net for all the evaluation metrics while preserving low computation cost. The findings demonstrate that SDL-Seg is a promising approach for improving the efficiency and accuracy of the on-line treatment planning procedure of PBI, such as GammaPod based PBI.