Self-supervised joint embedding learning aligns representations of augmented views while regularizing their distribution to prevent collapse. Regularization aims to shape the overall representation distribution, but most joint embedding methods restrict its computation to the active minibatch. We propose out-of-batch regularization, which maintains a dataset-level state in CPU memory and uses globally constructed per-instance targets during minibatch training. Evaluated on natural images and biomedical datasets, these anchors approximate the full-dataset regularization gradient more faithfully than conventional minibatch estimation at small batch sizes. Applications to contrastive (SimCLR) and non-contrastive (SIGReg) approaches show consistent improvement over the corresponding in-batch objectives for image classification, minority-class performance under controlled imbalance, instance retrieval, and continued self-supervised pretraining, with the largest gains at small batch sizes. These results suggest that dataset-level regularization can be decoupled from minibatch optimization, making batch size an optimization choice that does not affect the geometry of the regularizer.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20158
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising approach to mechanistic interpretability by decomposing language-model activations into sparse, potentially interpretable features. However, differences in design assumptions, evaluation objectives, and experimental settings complicate conclusions about their effectiveness. We present a critical survey of 138 studies on SAEs in natural language processing. Our contributions are fourfold: (1) we propose a task-grounded taxonomy connecting dictionary design, feature operations, and NLP functions; (2) we examine how sparsity allocation, geometry, data coverage, and inference affect feature recoverability; (3) we assess evidence for semantic interpretability, mechanistic faithfulness, and behavioral utility; and (4) we synthesize findings across multilingual processing, retrieval, reasoning, classification, and behavioral regulation, highlighting the roles of objectives, baselines, supervision, and intervention pipelines. Through comparative analyses of published results, we reconcile apparent disagreements, identify unresolved questions, and propose directions for more rigorous evaluation. An anonymous research register this https URL accompanies the survey.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20139
The number of attention heads in a transformer is usually set by convention or grid search. We test a simple heuristic for setting it in advance: estimate the intrinsic dimension of token representations without labels, and use roughly that many heads. We estimate intrinsic dimension with a nested-dropout VAE trained on DistilBERT embeddings of WikiText-2, choosing the KL weight at the knee of the VAE's rate-distortion curve rather than by hand. This gives $k^*=9.2$ (95% CI [8.6, 9.8]). In a small 4-layer transformer trained from scratch, 10 heads and 32 heads are statistically equivalent on SST-2 and on MRPC (paired TOST over 10 seeds, $\pm1$ point margin), with 69% fewer attention parameters for the 10-head model. Training 10 heads from the start also slightly outperforms training 32 heads and pruning to 10 (0.6 points, $p=0.008$). The evidence is narrow: two classification tasks, one small architecture, no pretrained models, and no formal link between intrinsic dimension and head count. We present the result as a practical heuristic worth testing at larger scale, not as a general principle.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19966
Seizure prediction and detection, essential for clinical treatment of epilepsy, remain the crucial task of this neurological disease. EEG and iEEG are widely used to analyze epilepsy due to its capability of capturing discriminative brain activities at high time resolution. However, existing works generally analyze either EEG or iEEG seizure activity separately, where EEG analysis has been well-researched, while more and more works consider iEEG for its higher specificity at the spatial level and signal quality. Currently, most of the existing seizure prediction systems are single-modal in nature, which limits its application to a variety of clinical conditions. Therefore, a common framework to analyze seizures with both EEG and iEEG signals needs to be developed. This paper presents a new framework of multimodal seizure classification integrating the heterogeneous EEG and iEEG recordings from different subjects and sources. A specific framework, called Unified Multimodal Signal Harmonization (UMSH), is developed for harmonizing signals with varied sampling rates and recording conditions. Moreover, to handle the extremely class-imbalanced problem in the data sets, we use a Conditional Generative Adversarial Network (cGAN) based data augmentation technique to generate synthetic samples to balance the class distribution. The proposed framework uses the EEGNet-Vision Transformer (EEGNet-ViT) as the feature extraction and classification network to learn the local discriminative patterns as well as global contextual information in the multimodal seizure data. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework for robust seizure classification, emphasizing the potential of integrated EEG-iEEG multimodal learning in advancing next-generation epilepsy monitoring and clinical decision-support systems.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16596
Adapting a single vision-language model to medical image parsing requires training choices that reflect the demands of each task. We study task-specific adaptation with Qwen3.5-9B for FLARE 2026 Task 3, covering six task families and seven imaging modalities. Our system couples a shared, frozen 4-bit backbone with LoRA adapters selected from the input question. We customize adapter ranks and prompts, rebalance rare classification targets, and supplement regression training with dermatology classification examples. On the fixed internal holdout, the task-specific adapters achieve a dataset-macro balanced accuracy of 0.7791 for classification, a dataset-macro micro-F1 of 0.6286 for multi-label classification, a counting mean absolute error (MAE) of 11.73, a dataset-macro detection F1 of 0.8914, a dataset-macro regression MAE of 9.78, and a report-generation CRIMSON score of 0.8204. On the organizer's 1,703-example hidden-validation set, the submitted system achieves 0.8496 classification balanced accuracy, 0.5338 sample-averaged multi-label F1, and 14.5950 regression MAE. The final 30.1 GB container averages 3.1 seconds per case, including model loading, and produces identical outputs across repeated verification runs. The benefits vary across tasks, supporting the use of task-specific adapter configurations and image budgets within a shared medical vision-language model. Code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19901
Vision-language models suffer significant accuracy drops under common corruptions. While test-time adaptation (TTA) successfully mitigates these shifts in CLIP-like contrastive models, its application to generative multimodal large language models (MLLMs) remains underexplored and uniquely challenging due to their sequential token generation. In this work, we demonstrate that representation-based TTA fails to recover performance in MLLMs. Our experiments reveal that even when violating standard TTA assumptions by leveraging target data offline, sample-blind feature alignment recovers only marginal accuracy. We attribute this failure to the nature of corruption shifts: unlike CLIP-like architectures, which benefit from a shared domain-shift direction within a single pooled classification embedding, MLLM visual token sequence shifts are nearly orthogonal and span the full embedding this http URL findings bound what any sample-blind, position-shared correction at a single encoder site can achieve, establishing that representation-space interventions alone might be insufficient to ensure corruption robustness in MLLMs.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19892
Discriminative models are trained with task-specific objectives such as classification, detection, or representation learning, yet their practical utility depends on generalizing beyond the training task to unseen samples from the same domain. This suggests that a discriminative model may retain an implicit trace of the data manifold beyond its task labels. We ask whether this trace can be exposed as a generative signal without task-specific guidance. We introduce the Discriminative Score Function (DSF), which extracts an image-space generative field from the loss-gradient geometry of a pretrained discriminative model. DSF provides a training-free update rule that moves images toward model-consistent visual regions without retraining or task-specific targets. We apply DSF to diverse pretrained discriminative models, including ResNet classifiers, DETR detectors, and DINOv2 ViT encoders. DSF generates unconditional images from noise and supports conditional guidance, editing, inpainting, and explanation through the same field. DSF-generated samples also provide effective zero-shot quantization calibration when real images or labels are unavailable, preserving feature geometry better than data-free calibration baselines. These results show that discriminative training leaves a generative functional signal for synthesis and calibration. Project page: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19743
Recent advances in deep learning have significantly improved underwater acoustic vessel recognition. However, existing publicly available datasets are typically limited in scale, hindering large-scale representation learning and downstream task evaluation. To address this limitation, we introduce ONCship, a large-scale underwater acoustic dataset comprising 4521 hours of curated recordings from Ocean Networks Canada (ONC) hydrophones and Automatic Identification System (AIS) data. We evaluate the proposed dataset across three tasks: self-supervised representation learning, vessel-type classification, and MMSI-Level Vessel Classification. Experiments on DeepShip and ShipsEar demonstrate the effectiveness of ONCship for acoustic representation learning, with joint pre-training on ONCship and AudioSet achieving a classification accuracy of 62.45% on DeepShip through linear probing. Furthermore, incorporating ONCship as auxiliary training data improves downstream vessel-type classification performance. Beyond conventional vessel-type classification, we further investigate MMSI-Level Vessel Classification, treating each vessel as a distinct identity. Experimental results show that models fine-tuned with different loss functions achieve Top-1 accuracies exceeding 53% and Top-5 accuracies approaching 69%, demonstrating the feasibility of distinguishing individual vessels through MMSI-Level Vessel Classification. Overall, ONCship provides a valuable resource for underwater acoustic representation learning and vessel recognition, while its rich vessel-level metadata enables further exploration of MMSI-Level Vessel Classification.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19722
Accurately delineating Arctic coastal polynyas from sea ice concentration data remains challenging because of complex coastal geometry and spatially heterogeneous ice conditions. We develop a daily sea ice concentration (SIC) mapping framework based on hierarchical partitioning, connected-component analysis, and differentiated region growing for polynya and open-water regions. Applied to September-May ice seasons from 2002/03 to 2024/25, the framework achieves a mean overall accuracy of 96.74% and a mean kappa coefficient of 0.93 in the 63-scene visual assessment. Sensitivity experiments reveal a consistent pattern: the absolute magnitude of SIC-defined polynya extent is strongly configuration-dependent, whereas major temporal features are comparatively more stable. Relative to a 75% upper SIC threshold, seasonal extent integrals differ by 13.48%, 32.47%, and 65.04% at thresholds of 80%, 85%, and 90%, respectively, while the broad interannual structure remains recognizable. The response is also strongly regional and seasonal, with the largest threshold sensitivity in the Central Arctic Ocean, very weak sensitivity in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and greater pan-Arctic curve separation from January onward. At an 80% threshold, product-comparison MAPE is 68.19% between the 6.25 and 25 km products and 11.47% between the 12.5 and 25 km products under their respective comparison periods and reference definitions. Regional product disagreement is likewise heterogeneous. Together, these results show that reproducible long-term polynya monitoring requires a fixed and explicitly documented combination of SIC product, threshold, and spatial classification rules, while broad temporal patterns can remain informative even when absolute extent differs substantially.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19647
Visual recognition models usually process a fixed view under a fixed computation budget, although images often benefit from different scales and amounts of spatial evidence. Active vision can adapt by observing a coarse scene and then selecting informative fixations, but the public AdaptiveNN-DeiT-S pipeline still fixes both field of view and observation count. We extend this fixed-step recognizer with a controllable observation interface that adapts both the field of view and the number of fixations to the input. Specifically, the model predicts a per-fixation scale that sets its field of view, refines each selected crop with optional scale-gated foveation and a residual high-resolution detail-token branch, and uses label-grounded stop heads for input-dependent early termination. Experiments across fine-grained benchmarks, full ImageNet-1K, and ImageNet-A/R-derived classification splits show that the interface remains competitive with fixed-step references while exposing a controllable observation budget. The same checkpoint enables threshold-controlled accuracy-compute trade-offs without per-threshold retraining. On sequential ImageNet-1K, the learned stop rule outperforms fixed-step truncation of the same checkpoint, sustaining 81.9% top-1 using 2.45 of the four focus steps and exceeding three-step truncation at lower cost. On each benchmark, a variant combining scale control and detail-token fusion achieves the highest accuracy among the tested component-added non-exit variants. Our code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19624
Time-series analysis is increasingly studied in multimodal settings, yet most benchmarks pair temporal signals with text or with visualizations derived from the same signal. This leaves open whether multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can integrate time series with real-world visual evidence. We introduce MMTA (multimodal temporal analysis), a benchmark of tri-modal tasks with diverse cross-modal complementarity patterns among time series, text, and vision. MMTA spans nine domains -- robotics, autonomous driving, human action, manufacturing, AR assistance, healthcare, recommendation, finance, and climate -- under video+TS and image+TS layouts, with a 3,524-sample test split covering classification and forecasting. The benchmark standardizes heterogeneous real-world sources into a shared schema with domain-specific prompts, provenance documentation, and success-weighted metrics that penalize both wrong answers and failed generations. Evaluating eight open-source and proprietary MLLMs reveals a shared bottleneck: representing time series as text creates very long token sequences and weakens fine-grained alignment with visual evidence, especially in long-video settings. We then introduce TimeOmni-v, a multimodal LLM extension with a dedicated time-series encoder, temporal positional alignment, modality-aware token layout, and a forecasting head. TimeOmni-v improves long-video classification and time-series inference efficiency, showing that MMTA not only exposes representation and grounding failures but also motivates targeted model design.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17856
A knowledge graph needs a stable address for its evidence even where the literature offers competing classifications and agrees on none. Yet an address chosen for retrieval readily passes for the only classification available. This happens whenever records gathered under one name concern units that differ in boundaries, rank, or the criteria by which they are described or counted. In Sinitic dialectology the same localities recur in schemes whose units differ in membership and rank, and a unit may change its affiliation when the evidence for its diagnosis changes. Two tone counts, each quoted faithfully, may still count different things. The taxonomy of an entire field thus comes to rest on the unstable frame of a literature that contradicts itself. Neither verifying a quotation nor searching for conflicting values detects these differences. I distinguish the working address that gathers candidate evidence, the category that the source defines and the decision that admits a passage to a particular comparison, and argue that such decisions, together with the dependence among records, belong to the provenance of a comparison. On four re-runnable cases, the accompanying PaRAGraph Casebook shows where such differences arise among claims extracted by a language model and verified before entering the graph. The platform now stores the corresponding decisions as objects for one dimension of comparability, the address of a record: the placement of a locality in each source's scheme, the decision that a name in a given publication denotes a unit rather than a place, and the origin of every address. The working taxonomy can then be revised as new sources yield new claims, while the path from each comparison to its evidence stays fixed. Keywords: knowledge graphs; source attribution; classification; claim extraction; comparative concepts; Sinitic dialectology; Yue
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28663
Typed decision models are language models that answer a question with a fixed set of possible answers by returning a probability for each answer instead of generating text. We study them on tabular data and compare four decision models with three large language models (LLMs) on row classification, fact verification and anomaly detection. Every request is sent in its original form and under 21 types of rewrite that keep its content, such as renaming the options or writing the table in another format. The decision models perform as well as the LLMs at a lower cost. Three of them are also far more robust to how the question is formulated. No model we test is robust to how the table is organized. For every model, at least a third of the row decisions change under some rewrite of the table or the question. The decisions to which a decision model gives low probability are the ones most likely to change. Decision models are a practical choice for tabular decisions, but their robustness remains an open problem.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19536
Wrist-worn inertial measurement units (IMUs) provide a common sensing modality for tasks ranging from activity and gesture recognition to pose estimation, inertial odometry and clinical motor assessment. Existing wearable benchmarks evaluate performance across multiple tasks, but leave open how supervision for one task affects transfer to others and whether these tasks benefit from a shared representation. We present IMU-Bench, a benchmark of ten tasks from eight datasets for studying IMU multi-task performance and cross-task transfer. We compare six self-supervised methods pretrained on unlabeled recorded and simulated wrist motion, evaluating classification, pose and velocity estimation, and IMU-language retrieval. We find that our masked autoencoder, InrtlWrist, achieves the best or joint-best frozen-probe performance on nine of ten tasks, and fine-tuning improves on training from scratch on nine of ten tasks, including full-body pose, odometry and retrieval. Across transfer and joint-training experiments, supervision that benefits one target can reduce performance on others, with supervised sources transferring within kinematic estimation while, under frozen probing, none approaches the pretrained encoder on language retrieval, and joint-training gains that come at a cost to the paired task. These findings distinguish broad downstream usefulness from complementary task supervision. Code, task cards and a leaderboard are publicly available.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19481
The Continuous Thought Machine (CTM) is a recurrent network that attends to inputs and makes predictions based on the synchronization between its neurons. On tasks spanning many domains, it displays emergent thought processes that have not been explained. We report a number of findings about how the CTM classifies images, focusing on ImageNet. Each thinking step is an attracting but strongly non-normal map exhibiting balanced amplification (Murphy and Miller, 2009); while attraction is already present at CTM initialization, training highly promotes non-normality. By Banach's theorem, the neural state has a locally unique attracting fixed point, which moves at every step, and the thought trajectory is the curve these fixed points trace, followed one tick behind. Most of that curve's motion is shared across images, and visible as a previously reported traveling wave of activity across neurons. The attention schedule along the thought is largely generic: shuffling queries across images at every tick costs only 7 percent of classification accuracy, while image-independent increments predict the next query with R^2 = 0.98 (held out). Our results suggest that the CTM has found a single strategy to process all ImageNet images.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19220
Existing malware detection approaches heavily rely on handcrafted features derived from static or dynamic analysis of the executable files. These methods require specialized domain expertise, dedicated analysis tools, and time-consuming analysis, which limits their scalability and robustness in the face of the increasing complexity and diversity of modern malware. Consequently, there is a growing interest in approaches that operate directly on raw bytes, which contain rich semantic and structural information. However, capturing long-range dependencies within executable files remains challenging for conventional static and CNN-based methods. This paper presents MalwareFormer, a transformer-based, byte-level malware detection framework that operates directly on raw bytes, without requiring domain knowledge or feature extraction. MalwareFormer achieves an accuracy of 98.35%, a balanced accuracy of 98.32%, a macro-F1 of 98.32%, and a false positive rate of 1.94%, outperforming both baselines across all threshold-dependent classification metrics and demonstrating that transformers provide a powerful and scalable approach for byte-level malware detection.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18787
Understanding agent heterogeneity can inform the design of shared and agent-specific policy representations, however existing criteria provide no unified structural test. We study finite-horizon POSGs and define a type-compatible transformation as a policy-evaluation symmetry when complete policy evaluation commutes with it for every decentralized behavioral policy. Policy-evaluation symmetries form a group for which agent orbits define structural agent types. This classification does not depend on the particular policy chosen or the distribution of initial states. We prove that every componentwise environment automorphism is a policy-evaluation symmetry, but that the converse does not hold. Applying the framework to cooperative Dec-POMDPs shows that agents can belong to different structural types even when they share a common reward. For prescribed weighted reward aggregation, we derive an exact value identity and sufficient conditions for the resulting Dec-POMDP to inherit the policy-evaluation symmetries of the source POSG. Finally, we give sufficient conditions under which repeated model factorizations induce policy-evaluation symmetry, and show that preserving an optimal Boltzmann policy set neither implies nor follows from this symmetry in general.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18538
Guardrail approaches that rely on reasoning-based large language models (LLM) improve safety decisions, but come with substantial inference overhead due to the explicit reasoning. We introduce LR-Guard (Latent Reasoning Guardrail), an efficient and explainable guardrail that jointly learns structured latent reasoning and on-demand reasoning reconstruction. Our method distills a frozen teacher's analysis of safe and unsafe prompt interpretations and their comparison into compact latent representations. Joint training optimizes these representations for both safety prediction and reconstruction of the teacher's explicit reasoning traces, enabling human-readable explanations without requiring intermediate text generation for every decision. Experiments show that LR-Guard outperforms its explicit-reasoning teacher in most in-domain and out-of-domain settings on safety classification and explanation extraction, while achieving a 19.4x inference speedup at batch size one. Further, reconstructed reasoning traces from the latent information exhibit high semantic similarity to the teacher's explicit reasoning.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18304
Proactive human-robot collaboration requires autonomous systems to infer not only immediate actions but also the underlying hierarchical intentions governing human behavior. Current deep learning approaches predominantly focus on flat action classification, failing to capture the structural dependencies connecting kinematic motion to high-level goals. A Neuro-Symbolic Graph Transformer (NSGT) is proposed within this multimodal framework, a Human Reasoning Graph (HR-G) is integrated into the self-attention mechanism via learnable topological biases. Furthermore, the architecture is augmented with a differentiable First-Order Logic (FOL) loss, acting as a structural regularizer by which ontological consistency is enforced across four levels: atomic actions, composite activities, Low-Level Intentions, and High-Level Intentions. Evaluation is performed on the synthesized NTU-Hierarchy dataset, a four-level ontological extension of NTU RGB+D 120, wherein existing sequences were mapped into 119,383 complex hierarchical episodes (85 actions, 16 activities, 8 LLIs, 4 HLIs). To prevent circular supervision, strict isolation between label generation and FOL constraints was maintained. In the base configuration, 91.65% top-1 action accuracy is achieved by the NSGT. When the FOL loss is incorporated into the baseline, logic consistency is improved by 3.26 percentage points to 96.67%. Through the HR-G biases, a tunable trade-off between accuracy and structural coherence is established. In the primary consistency-maximizing configuration ($\lambda$ = 0.5), a logic consistency of 94.59% is reached and ontological contradictions are reduced by 33%, while a robust 89.90% top-1 action accuracy is retained. Finally, interpretable reasoning evidence is provided by the learned HR-G weights, wherein transition edges are strongly exploited ($\beta$ trans $\approx$ +2.6) without explicit supervision.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18176
Reliable uncertainty evaluation is essential for assessing the trustworthiness of machine learning (ML) predictions, particularly in safety-critical applications. This paper explores conceptual analogies between uncertainty evaluation in ML and measurement science, drawing on the evolution of metrology from error-based approaches to the framework established by the Guide to the Expression of Uncertainty in Measurement (GUM). Particular attention is devoted to the distinction between process-level and result-level quality and to the limitations of the conventional classification of ML uncertainty into aleatoric and epistemic components. It is argued that this dichotomy, similarly to the traditional distinction between random and systematic measurement errors, is inherently model-dependent and provides an insufficient basis for a unified uncertainty evaluation framework. Further analogies between machine learning and measurement field of knowledge are identified concerning distribution shifts, anomalous operating conditions, and the validity of uncertainty evaluation. Building on the proposed considerations, the paper advocates a metrology-inspired approach based on the systematic identification, quantification, and propagation of uncertainty contributions. By extending the methodology already established in measurement science to ML, this approach could offer a potentially rigorous, consistent, and transferable framework for evaluating the trustworthiness of individual predictions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18066