OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Aggressive or Imperceptible, or Both: Network Pruning Assisted Hybrid Byzantines in Federated Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

In federated learning (FL), profiling and verifying each client is inherently difficult, which introduces a significant security vulnerability: malicious clients, commonly referred to as Byzantines, can degrade the accuracy of the global model by submitting poisoned updates during training. To mitigate this, the aggregation process at the parameter server must be robust against such adversarial behaviour. Most existing defences approach the Byzantine problem from an outlier detection perspective, treating malicious updates as statistical anomalies and ignoring the internal structure of the trained neural network (NN). Motivated by this, this work highlights the potential of leveraging side information tied to the NN architecture to design stronger, more targeted attacks. In particular, inspired by insights from sparse NNs, we introduce a hybrid sparse Byzantine attack. The attack consists of two coordinated components: (i) A sparse attack component that selectively manipulates parameters with higher sensitivity in the NN, aiming to cause maximum disruption with minimal visibility; (ii) A slow-accumulating attack component that silently poisons parameters over multiple rounds to evade detection. Together, these components create a strong but imperceptible attack strategy that can bypass common defences. We evaluate the proposed attack through extensive simulations and demonstrate its effectiveness against eight state-of-the-art defence mechanisms.
Faster Game Solving via Hyperparameter Schedules
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2026
Year: 2026

Counterfactual regret minimization (CFR) algorithms are a foundational class of methods for solving imperfect-information games, with the time average of their iterates converging to a Nash equilibrium in two-player zero-sum games. Prior state-of-the-art variants, Discounted CFR (DCFR) and Predictive CFR$^+$ (PCFR$^+$), achieved the fastest known practical performance by improving convergence rates over vanilla CFR through discounting early iterations with a fixed discounting scheme. More recently, Dynamic DCFR (DDCFR) introduced agent-learned dynamic discounting schemes to further accelerate convergence, at the cost of increased complexity. To address this, we propose Hyperparameter Schedules (HSs), a remarkably simple, training-free framework that dynamically adjusts CFR discounting over time. HSs aggressively downweight early updates and gradually transition to trusting late-stage strategies, leading to substantially faster convergence with only a few lines of code modifications. We show that HSs derived from just three small extensive-form games generalize effectively to 17 diverse games (including large-scale realistic poker) in both extensive-form and normal-form settings, without any game-specific tuning. Our method establishes a new state of the art for solving two-player zero-sum games.
Synergising Human-like Responses and Machine Intelligence for Planning in Disaster Response
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2026
Year: 2026

In the rapidly changing environments of disaster response, planning and decision-making for autonomous agents involve complex and interdependent choices. Although recent advancements have improved traditional artificial intelligence (AI) approaches, they often struggle in such settings, particularly when applied to agents operating outside their well-defined training parameters. To address these challenges, we propose an attention-based cognitive architecture inspired by Dual Process Theory (DPT). This framework integrates, in an online fashion, rapid yet heuristic (human-like) responses (System 1) with the slow but optimized planning capabilities of machine intelligence (System 2). We illustrate how a supervisory controller can dynamically determine in real-time the engagement of either system to optimize mission objectives by assessing their performance across a number of distinct attributes. Evaluated for trajectory planning in dynamic environments, our framework demonstrates that this synergistic integration effectively manages complex tasks by optimizing multiple mission objectives.
Know Yourself Better: Diverse Object-Related Features Improve Open Set Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Open set recognition (OSR) is a critical aspect of machine learning, addressing the challenge of detecting novel classes during inference. Within the realm of deep learning, neural classifiers trained on a closed set of data typically struggle to identify novel classes, leading to erroneous predictions. To address this issue, various heuristic methods have been proposed, allowing models to express uncertainty by stating "I don't know." However, a gap in the literature remains, as there has been limited exploration of the underlying mechanisms of these methods. In this paper, we conduct an analysis of open set recognition methods, focusing on the aspect of feature diversity. Our research reveals a significant correlation between learning diverse discriminative features and enhancing OSR performance. Building on this insight, we propose a novel OSR approach that leverages the advantages of feature diversity. The efficacy of our method is substantiated through rigorous evaluation on a standard OSR testbench, demonstrating a substantial improvement over state-of-the-art methods.
On $γ$-Contraction and $β$-Contraction: A Unified Framework for Colour-Preserving Graph Reduction
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2026
Year: 2026

Graphs are a fundamental abstraction in computer science and discrete mathematics, where information is encoded in their combinatorial structure. Graph-reduction techniques aim at simplifying graphs while preserving selected structural properties, typically by grouping vertices and replacing each group with a representative, yielding a contracted graph. A common instance of this paradigm arises when vertices carry categorical information, formalised as a colouring of the vertex set. In this setting, natural contraction units correspond to connected components of vertices sharing the same colour. In this work, we provide a rigorous mathematical formalisation of $γ$-contraction, a colour-based graph contraction operation. We interpret $γ$-contraction as a quotient-like construction that preserves categorical connectivity, and clarify its relationship with classical notions of graph contraction and quotient graphs. To support a constructive and algorithmic treatment, we introduce a locally-defined iterative variant, termed $β$-contraction, which captures the core mechanism underlying $γ$-contraction. Building on this framework, we analyse the contraction process from a theoretical perspective and establish formal guarantees of correctness and convergence. In particular, we prove that $β$-contraction converges in a logarithmic number of iterations to $γ$-contraction, and that this bound is asymptotically tight, with base equal to the golden ratio.
Federated Learning for Heterogeneous Electronic Health Record Systems with Cost Effective Participant Selection
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

The increasing volume of electronic health records (EHRs) presents the opportunity to improve the accuracy and robustness of models in clinical prediction tasks. Unlike traditional centralized approaches, federated learning enables training on data from multiple institutions while preserving patient privacy and complying with regulatory constraints. In practice, healthcare institutions (i.e., hosts) often need to build predictive models tailored to their specific needs (e.g., creatinine-level prediction, N-day readmission prediction) using federated learning. When building a federated learning model for a single healthcare institution, two key challenges arise: (1) ensuring compatibility across heterogeneous EHR systems, and (2) managing federated learning costs within budget constraints. Specifically, heterogeneity in EHR systems across institutions hinders compatible modeling, while the computational costs of federated learning can exceed practical budget limits for healthcare institutions. To address these challenges, we propose EHRFL, a federated learning framework designed for building a cost-effective, host-specific predictive model using patient EHR data. EHRFL consists of two components: (1) text-based EHR modeling, which facilitates cross-institution compatibility without costly data standardization, and (2) a participant selection strategy based on averaged patient embedding similarity to reduce the number of participants without degrading performance. Our participant selection strategy sharing averaged patient embeddings is differentially private, ensuring patient privacy. Experiments on multiple open-source EHR datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of both components. With our framework, healthcare institutions can build institution-specific predictive models under budgetary constraints with reduced costs and time.
Toward a Unified Lyapunov-Certified ODE Convergence Analysis of Smooth Q-Learning with p-Norms
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Convergence of Q-learning has been the subject of extensive study for decades. Among the available techniques, the ordinary differential equation (ODE) method is particularly appealing as a general-purpose, off-the-shelf tool for sanity-checking the convergence of a wide range of reinforcement learning algorithms. In this paper, we develop a unified ODE-based convergence framework that applies to standard Q-learning and several soft/smoothed variants, including those built on the log-sum-exponential softmax, Boltzmann softmax, and mellowmax operators. Our analysis uses a smooth p-norm Lyapunov function, leading to concise yet rigorous stability arguments and circumventing the non-smoothness issues inherent to classical infty-norm-based approaches. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed framework is among the first to provide a unified ODE-based treatment that is broadly applicable to smooth Q-learning algorithms while also encompassing standard Q-learning. Moreover, it remains valid even in settings where the associated Bellman operator is not a contraction, as may happen in Boltzmann soft Q-learning.
Finding patterns of meaning: Reassessing Construal Clustering via Bipolar Class Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2026
Year: 2026

Empirical research on \textit{construals}--social affinity groups that share similar patterns of meaning--has advanced significantly in recent years. This progress is largely driven by the development of \textit{Construal Clustering Methods} (CCMs), which group survey respondents into construal clusters based on similarities in their response patterns. We identify key limitations of existing CCMs, which affect their accuracy when applied to the typical structures of available data, and introduce Bipolar Class Analysis (BCA), a CCM designed to address these shortcomings. BCA measures similarity in response shifts between expressions of support and rejection across survey respondents, addressing conceptual and measurement challenges in existing methods. We formally define BCA and demonstrate its advantages through extensive simulation analyses, where it consistently outperforms existing CCMs in accurately identifying construals. Along the way, we develop a novel data-generation process that approximates more closely how individuals map latent opinions onto observable survey responses, as well as a new metric to evaluate the performance of CCMs. Additionally, we find that applying BCA to previously studied real-world datasets reveals substantively different construal patterns compared to those generated by existing CCMs in prior empirical analyses. Finally, we discuss limitations of BCA and outline directions for future research.
The PRODSAT phase of random quantum satisfiability
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2026
Year: 2026

The $k$-QSAT problem is a quantum analog of the famous $k$-SAT constraint satisfaction problem. We must determine the zero energy ground states of a Hamiltonian of $N$ qubits consisting of a sum of $M$ random $k$-local rank-one projectors. It is known that product states of zero energy exist with high probability if and only if the underlying factor graph has a clause-covering dimer configuration. This means that the threshold of the PRODSAT phase is a purely geometric quantity equal to the dimer covering threshold. We revisit and fully prove this result through a combination of complex analysis and algebraic methods based on Buchberger's algorithm for complex polynomial equations with random coefficients. We also discuss numerical experiments investigating the presence of entanglement in the PRODSAT phase in the sense that product states do not span the whole zero energy ground state space.
Welfare Loss in Connected Resource Allocation
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2026
Year: 2026

We study the allocation of indivisible items that form an undirected graph and investigate the worst-case welfare loss when requiring that each agent must receive a connected subgraph. Our focus is on both egalitarian and utilitarian welfare. Specifically, we introduce the concept of egalitarian (resp., utilitarian) price of connectivity, which captures the worst-case ratio between the optimal egalitarian (resp., utilitarian) welfare among all allocations and that among connected allocations. We provide tight or asymptotically tight bounds on the price of connectivity for several large classes of graphs in the case of two agents -- including graphs with vertex connectivity $1$ or $2$ and complete bipartite graphs -- as well as for paths, stars, and cycles in the general case where the number of agents can be arbitrary.
Efficient Multimodal Large Language Models: A Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

In the past year, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in tasks such as visual question answering, visual understanding and reasoning. However, the extensive model size and high training and inference costs have hindered the widespread application of MLLMs in academia and industry. Thus, studying efficient and lightweight MLLMs has enormous potential, especially in edge computing scenarios. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive and systematic review of the current state of efficient MLLMs. Specifically, we summarize the timeline of representative efficient MLLMs, research state of efficient structures and strategies, and the applications. Finally, we discuss the limitations of current efficient MLLM research and promising future directions. Please refer to our GitHub repository for more details: https://github.com/lijiannuist/Efficient-Multimodal-LLMs-Survey.
Vikhr: The Family of Open-Source Instruction-Tuned Large Language Models for Russian
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2026
Year: 2026

There has been a surge in the development of various Large Language Models (LLMs). However, text generation for languages other than English often faces significant challenges, including poor generation quality and reduced computational performance due to the disproportionate representation of tokens in the model's vocabulary. In this work, we address these issues by developing a pipeline for the adaptation of English-oriented pre-trained models to other languages and constructing efficient bilingual LLMs. Using this pipeline, we construct Vikhr, a series of bilingual open-source instruction-following LLMs designed specifically for the Russian language. ``Vikhr'' refers to the name of the Mistral LLM series and means a ``strong gust of wind.'' Unlike previous Russian-language models that typically rely on LoRA adapters on top of English-oriented models, sacrificing performance for lower training costs, Vikhr features an adapted tokenizer vocabulary and undergoes the continued pre-training and instruction tuning of all weights. This not only enhances the model's performance but also significantly improves its computational and contextual efficiency. We also expanded the instruction datasets and corpora for continued pre-training. The model weights, instruction sets, and code are publicly available.
A New Formulation for Zeroth-Order Optimization of Adversarial EXEmples in Malware Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Machine learning malware detectors are vulnerable to adversarial EXEmples, i.e., carefully-crafted Windows programs tailored to evade detection. Unlike other adversarial problems, attacks in this context must be functionality-preserving, a constraint that is challenging to address. As a consequence, heuristic algorithms are typically used, which inject new content, either randomly-picked or harvested from legitimate programs. In this paper, we show how learning malware detectors can be cast within a zeroth-order optimization framework, which allows incorporating functionality-preserving manipulations. This permits the deployment of sound and efficient gradient-free optimization algorithms, which come with theoretical guarantees and allow for minimal hyper-parameters tuning. As a by-product, we propose and study ZEXE, a novel zeroth-order attack against Windows malware detection. Compared to state-of-the-art techniques, ZEXE provides improvement in the evasion rate, reducing to less than one third the size of the injected content.
RAEE: A Robust Retrieval-Augmented Early Exit Framework for Efficient Inference
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2026
Year: 2026

Deploying large language model inference remains challenging due to their high computational overhead. Early exit optimizes model inference by adaptively reducing the number of inference layers. Current methods typically train internal classifiers or use heuristic methods to determine the exit layer. However, those methods either introduce significant training overheads or lead to performance degradation. To address these limitations, this paper proposes RAEE, a robust Retrieval-Augmented Early Exit framework that not only enables early exit but also enhances model performance through corrective exit information at intermediate layers. This paper first demonstrates that the early exit problem can be effectively modeled as a distribution prediction problem, in which the distribution can be further approximated through the exit information of similar data. Subsequently, this paper introduces the process of collecting exit information of correct predictions and the steps to construct the retrieval database. Finally, leveraging the pre-constructed retrieval database, RAEE utilizes the exit information from retrieved similar data to guide the backbone model's exit. Experimental results demonstrate that RAEE can not only accelerate inference while achieving robust zero-shot performance across eight downstream tasks.
Finite-time convergence to an $ε$-efficient Nash equilibrium in potential games
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2026
Year: 2026

This paper investigates the convergence time of log-linear learning to an $ε$-efficient Nash equilibrium in potential games, where an efficient Nash equilibrium is defined as the maximizer of the potential function. Previous literature provides asymptotic convergence rates to efficient Nash equilibria, and existing finite-time rates are limited to potential games with further assumptions such as the interchangeability of players. We prove the first finite-time convergence to an $ε$-efficient Nash equilibrium in general potential games. Our bounds depend polynomially on $1/ε$, an improvement over previous bounds for subclasses of potential games that are exponential in $1/ε$. We then strengthen our convergence result in two directions: first, we show that a variant of log-linear learning requiring a constant factor less feedback on the utility per round enjoys a similar convergence time; second, we demonstrate the robustness of our convergence guarantee if log-linear learning is subject to small perturbations such as alterations in the learning rule or noise-corrupted utilities.
Sparse maximal update parameterization: A holistic approach to sparse training dynamics
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Several challenges make it difficult for sparse neural networks to compete with dense models. First, setting a large fraction of weights to zero impairs forward and gradient signal propagation. Second, sparse studies often need to test multiple sparsity levels, while also introducing new hyperparameters (HPs), leading to prohibitive tuning costs. Indeed, the standard practice is to re-use the learning HPs originally crafted for dense models. Unfortunately, we show sparse and dense networks do not share the same optimal HPs. Without stable dynamics and effective training recipes, it is costly to test sparsity at scale, which is key to surpassing dense networks and making the business case for sparsity acceleration in hardware. A holistic approach is needed to tackle these challenges and we propose S$μ$Par as one such approach. For random unstructured static sparsity, S$μ$Par ensures activations, gradients, and weight updates all scale independently of sparsity level. Further, by reparameterizing the HPs, S$μ$Par enables the same HP values to be optimal as we vary both sparsity level and model width. HPs can be tuned on small dense networks and transferred to large sparse models, greatly reducing tuning costs. On large-scale language modeling, S$μ$Par shows increasing improvements over standard parameterization as sparsity increases, leading up to 11.9% relative loss improvement at 99.2% sparsity. A minimal implementation of S$μ$Par is available at https://github.com/EleutherAI/nanoGPT-mup/tree/supar.
Explainable Molecular Property Prediction: Aligning Chemical Concepts with Predictions via Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Providing explainable molecular property predictions is critical for many scientific domains, such as drug discovery and material science. Though transformer-based language models have shown great potential in accurate molecular property prediction, they neither provide chemically meaningful explanations nor faithfully reveal the molecular structure-property relationships. In this work, we develop a framework for explainable molecular property prediction based on language models, dubbed as Lamole, which can provide chemical concepts-aligned explanations. We take a string-based molecular representation -- Group SELFIES -- as input tokens to pretrain and fine-tune our Lamole, as it provides chemically meaningful semantics. By disentangling the information flows of Lamole, we propose combining self-attention weights and gradients for better quantification of each chemically meaningful substructure's impact on the model's output. To make the explanations more faithfully respect the structure-property relationship, we then carefully craft a marginal loss to explicitly optimize the explanations to be able to align with the chemists' annotations. We bridge the manifold hypothesis with the elaborated marginal loss to prove that the loss can align the explanations with the tangent space of the data manifold, leading to concept-aligned explanations. Experimental results over six mutagenicity datasets and one hepatotoxicity dataset demonstrate Lamole can achieve comparable classification accuracy and boost the explanation accuracy by up to 14.3%, being the state-of-the-art in explainable molecular property prediction.