Transfer learning plays a vital role in improving model performance in data-scarce scenarios. However, naive uniform transfer from multiple source tasks may result in negative transfer, highlighting the need to properly balance the contributions of heterogeneous sources. Moreover, existing transfer learning methods typically focus on optimizing either the source weights or the amount of transferred samples, while largely neglecting the joint consideration of the other. In this work, we propose a theoretical framework, Unified Optimization of Weights and […]

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arXiv:2601.04254v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a controlled study of multi-hop contextual reasoning in large language models, providing a clean demonstration of the task-method dissociation: rule-based pattern matching achieves 100% success on structured information retrieval but only 6.7% on tasks requiring cross-document reasoning, while LLM-based multi-agent systems show the inverse pattern, achieving up to 80% on reasoning tasks where rule-based methods fail. Using a synthetic evaluation framework with 120 trials across four models (LLaMA-3 8B, LLaMA-2 13B, […]

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arXiv:2602.15845v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge Distillation (KD) as a research area has gained a lot of traction in recent years as a compression tool to address challenges related to ever-larger models in NLP. Remarkably, Machine Translation (MT) offers a much more nuanced take on this narrative: in MT, KD also functions as a general-purpose knowledge transfer mechanism that shapes supervision and translation quality as well as efficiency. This survey synthesizes KD for MT (KD4MT) across 105 papers […]

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Self-correction is essential for solving complex reasoning problems in vision-language models (VLMs). However, existing reinforcement learning (RL) methods struggle to learn it, as effective self-correction behaviors emerge only rarely, making learning signals extremely sparse. To address this challenge, we propose correction-specific rollouts (Octopus), an RL rollout augmentation framework that synthesizes dense self-correction examples by recombining existing rollouts. This augmentation simultaneously improves sample efficiency due to rollout reuse and stabilizes RL optimization through balanced supervision. Furthermore, we introduce a […]

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arXiv:2602.03906v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Information Bottleneck (IB) is widely used, but in deep learning, it is usually implemented through tractable surrogates, such as variational bounds or neural mutual information (MI) estimators, rather than directly controlling the MI I(X;Z) itself. The looseness and estimator-dependent bias can make IB “compression” only indirectly controlled and optimization fragile. We revisit the IB problem through the lens of information geometry and propose a textbf{Geo}metric textbf{I}nformation textbf{B}ottleneck (textbf{GeoIB}) that dispenses with mutual information […]

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arXiv:2601.20399v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Randomized subspace methods reduce per-iteration cost; however, in nonconvex optimization, most analyses are expectation-based, and high-probability bounds remain scarce even under sub-Gaussian noise. We first prove that randomized subspace SGD (RS-SGD) admits a high-probability convergence bound under sub-Gaussian noise, achieving the same order of oracle complexity as prior in-expectation results. Motivated by the prevalence of heavy-tailed gradients in modern machine learning, we then propose randomized subspace normalized SGD (RS-NSGD), which integrates direction normalization […]

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Detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) graphs is crucial for ensuring the safety and reliability of Graph Neural Networks. In unsupervised graph-level OOD detection, models are typically trained using only in-distribution (ID) data, resulting in incomplete feature space characterization and weak decision boundaries. Although synthesizing outliers offers a promising solution, existing approaches rely on fixed, non-adaptive sampling heuristics (e.g., distance- or density-based), limiting their ability to explore informative OOD regions. We propose a Policy-Guided Outlier Synthesis (PGOS) framework that replaces static […]

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If there’s one database that promises both performance and cost and also delivers, then it’s Amazon DynamoDB. Single digit millisecond latency, fully managed with automatic scaling, pay per use – DynamoDB is genuinely impressive. But here’s the thing, there are rarely any mentions about what happens when your data model doesn’t fit DynamoDB’s worldview, or when you discover a limitation (I would rather say understand DynamoDB architecture better) three months into production that forces a complete redesign. I’ve […]

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arXiv:2601.07839v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern large language models (LLMs) place extraordinary pressure on memory and compute budgets, making principled compression indispensable for both deployment and continued training. We present Hierarchical Sparse Plus Low-Rank (HSS) compression, a two-stage scheme that (i) removes the largest-magnitude weights into a sparse matrix S and (ii) applies a recursive Hierarchically Sparse Separable (HSS) low-rank factorisation to the dense residual matrix. A recursive rank-reducing strategy and a reverse Cuthill-Mckee (RCM) permutation are introduced […]

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