Backpropagation remains the dominant algorithm for training deep neural networks, but it incurs substantial memory overhead and relies on global error propagation, which is often regarded as biologically implausible. The Forward-Forward (FF) algorithm is an appealing local-learning alternative to backpropagation, yet it still lags behind backpropagation in accuracy. A central unresolved question is whether this gap arises from FF's locality or from the positive-negative double-pass goodness objective used to train each layer. In this work, we revisit FF under the supervised setting through a decomposition that separates these two design choices. Our analysis suggests that FF's performance limitations are not explained by locality alone, but are also likely influenced by its goodness objective. Motivated by this view, we introduce Mono-Forward (MF), a simplification of FF that preserves its locality while replacing the contrastive goodness objective with a standard multi-class cross-entropy objective applied locally at each layer, serving as a controlled baseline for evaluating local learning under a standard classification objective. Across MLPs and convolutional networks, MF outperforms vanilla FF and remains competitive in multiple FF variants. On MLP-Mixers, MF achieves stronger results on PathMNIST than backpropagation while requiring only 31% of backpropagation's memory.

In this paper we present the first goal-driven query answering technique for first- and second-order dependencies with equality. Our technique transforms the input dependencies so that applying the chase to the output avoids many inferences that are irrelevant to the query. The transformation proceeds in several steps, which comprise the following three novel techniques. First, we present a variant of the singularisation technique by Marnette [59] that can handle function variables and that corrects an incompleteness of a related formulation by ten Cate et al. [73]. Second, we present a relevance analysis technique that can eliminate dependencies that provably do not contribute to query answers. Third, we present a variant of the magic sets algorithm [19] that can handle second-order dependencies with equality. We also present the results of an extensive empirical evaluation, which show that goal-driven query answering can be orders of magnitude faster than computing the full universal model.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved strong performance on implicit and explicit visual grounding and related tasks. However, such abilities are generally tested on simple, single-object phrases. We find that grounding performance degrades for complex, multi-object references. These limitations largely arise from training objectives that leverage image-caption alignment, where direct multi-object references are rare, the number of possible such references is theoretically large (exponential in the number of objects), and attribution is difficult. To address this, without requiring any additional annotations, we propose Compositional Attention-Regularized Training (CompART), which decomposes captions into object-centric phrases and constructs composite phrases by pairing them with conjunctions. We then introduce a composition loss that encourages the attention induced by a composite phrase to equal the sum of the attentions of its constituent phrases, promoting balanced multi-object localization. We evaluate CompART across four VLM architectures, spanning both contrastive-based and generative-based models, on four benchmarks for multi-object grounding and two VQA benchmarks for general visual understanding. CompART consistently improves grounding for both single- and multi-object references across diverse VLM architectures and datasets, and further demonstrates enhanced visual understanding, as evidenced by gains on VQA, despite not being explicitly trained for this task.

Scalable high-quality MAP inference in arbitrary-order Markov Random Fields (MRFs) remains challenging. Approximate message-passing methods are often efficient but can degrade on dense or high-order instances, while exact solvers such as Toulbar2 become increasingly expensive at scale. We present ReMAP, an instance-wise neural reparameterization framework that directly optimizes a differentiable relaxation of the original MRF energy. Instead of relying on supervised labels or amortized training, ReMAP treats each MRF as an independent optimization problem: a Graph Neural Network produces node-wise label distributions, and gradient-based optimization searches for a low-energy discrete solution in an over-parameterized continuous space. The method supports pairwise and arbitrary-order factors, heterogeneous label cardinalities, and efficient GPU execution, without requiring labeled solutions. We show that the relaxed objective is consistent with the discrete MAP problem and analyze how neural over-parameterization can expose low-energy optimization paths unavailable in the original discrete space. Empirically, on synthetic pairwise and high-order MRFs, UAI 2022 inference benchmarks, and real-world Physical Cell Identity (PCI) problems, ReMAP consistently outperforms approximate baselines and often finds lower-energy solutions than Toulbar2 on hard large-scale instances within practical time budgets.

Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training across distributed devices while preserving local data privacy, making it ideal for mobile and embedded systems. However, the decentralized nature of FL also opens vulnerabilities to model poisoning attacks, particularly backdoor attacks, where adversaries implant trigger patterns to manipulate model predictions. In this paper, we propose DeTrigger, a scalable and efficient backdoor-robust federated learning framework that leverages insights from adversarial attack methodologies. By employing gradient analysis with temperature scaling, DeTrigger detects and isolates backdoor triggers, allowing for precise model weight pruning of backdoor activations without sacrificing benign model knowledge. Extensive evaluations across four widely used datasets demonstrate that DeTrigger achieves up to 251x faster detection than traditional methods and mitigates backdoor attacks by up to 98.9%, with minimal impact on global model accuracy. Our findings establish DeTrigger as a robust and scalable solution to protect federated learning environments against sophisticated backdoor threats.

The classical text preprocessing pipeline, comprising Tokenisation, Normalisation, Stop Words Removal, and Stemming/Lemmatisation, has been implemented in many systems for ontology matching (OM). However, the lack of standardisation in text preprocessing creates diversity in the mapping results. In this paper, we investigate the effect of the text preprocessing pipeline on 8 Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI) tracks with 49 distinct alignments. We find that Tokenisation and Normalisation (categorised as Phase 1 text preprocessing) are more effective than Stop Words Removal and Stemming/Lemmatisation (categorised as Phase 2 text preprocessing). We propose two novel approaches to repair unwanted false mappings that occur in Phase 2 text preprocessing. One is a pre hoc logic-based repair approach used before text preprocessing, employing an ontology-specific check to find common words that cause false mappings. The other repair approach is the post hoc large language model (LLM)-based approach, used after text preprocessing, which utilises the strong background knowledge provided by LLMs to repair non-existent and counter-intuitive false mappings. The experimental results indicate that these two approaches can significantly improve the matching correctness and the overall matching performance.

The efficacy of mathematical models heavily depends on the quality of the training data, yet collecting sufficient data is often expensive and challenging. Many modeling applications require inferring parameters only as a means to predict other quantities of interest (QoI). Because models often contain many unidentifiable (sloppy) parameters, QoIs often depend on a relatively small number of parameter combinations. Therefore, we introduce an information-matching criterion based on the Fisher Information Matrix to select the most informative training data from a candidate pool. This method ensures that the selected data contain sufficient information to learn only those parameters that are needed to constrain downstream QoIs. It is formulated as a convex optimization problem, making it scalable to large models and datasets. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach across various modeling problems in diverse scientific fields, including power systems and underwater acoustics. Finally, we use information-matching as a query function within an Active Learning loop for material science applications. In all these applications, we find that a relatively small set of optimal training data can provide the necessary information for achieving precise predictions. These results are encouraging for diverse future applications, particularly active learning in large machine learning models.

To evaluate the safety and usefulness of deployment protocols for untrusted AIs, AI Control uses a red-teaming exercise played between a protocol designer and an adversary. This paper introduces AI-Control Games, a formal decision-making model of the red-teaming exercise as a multi-objective, partially observable, stochastic game. We also introduce reductions from AI-Control Games to a special case of zero-sum partially observable stochastic games that allow us to leverage existing algorithms to find Pareto-optimal protocols. We apply our formalism to model, evaluate and synthesise protocols for deploying untrusted language models as programming assistants, focusing on Trusted Monitoring protocols, which use weaker language models and limited human assistance. To demonstrate the utility of our formalism, we show improvements over empirical studies in existing settings, evaluate protocols in new settings, and analyse how modelling assumptions affect the safety and usefulness of protocols. Finally, we leverage our formalism to precisely describe some of the implicit assumptions in prior control work.

Recently, generative graph models have shown promising results in learning graph representations through self-supervised methods. However, most existing generative graph representation learning (GRL) approaches rely on random masking across the entire graph, which overlooks the entanglement of learned representations. This oversight results in non-robustness and a lack of explainability. Furthermore, disentangling the learned representations remains a significant challenge and has not been sufficiently explored in GRL research. Based on these insights, this paper introduces DiGGR (Disentangled Generative Graph Representation Learning), a self-supervised learning framework. DiGGR aims to learn latent disentangled factors and utilizes them to guide graph mask modeling, thereby enhancing the disentanglement of learned representations and enabling end-to-end joint learning. Extensive experiments on 11 public datasets for two different graph learning tasks demonstrate that DiGGR consistently outperforms many previous self-supervised methods, verifying the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Large Language Models (LLMs) possess vast amounts of knowledge within their parameters, prompting research into methods for locating and editing this knowledge. Previous work has largely focused on locating entity-related (often single-token) facts in smaller models. However, several key questions remain unanswered: (1) How can we effectively locate query-relevant neurons in decoder-only LLMs, such as Llama and Mistral? (2) How can we address the challenge of long-form (or free-form) text generation? (3) Are there localized knowledge regions in LLMs? In this study, we introduce Query-Relevant Neuron Cluster Attribution (QRNCA), a novel architecture-agnostic framework capable of identifying query-relevant neurons in LLMs. QRNCA allows for the examination of long-form answers beyond triplet facts by employing the proxy task of multi-choice question answering. To evaluate the effectiveness of our detected neurons, we build two multi-choice QA datasets spanning diverse domains and languages. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that our method outperforms baseline methods significantly. Further, analysis of neuron distributions reveals the presence of visible localized regions, particularly within different domains. Finally, we show potential applications of our detected neurons in knowledge editing and neuron-based prediction.

This study presents an innovative approach to optimal gait control for a soft quadruped robot enabled by four Compressible Tendon-driven Soft Actuators (CTSAs). Improving our previous studies of using model-free reinforcement learning for gait control, we employ model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) to further enhance the performance of the gait controller. Compared to rigid robots, the proposed soft quadruped robot has better safety, less weight, and a simpler mechanism for fabrication and control. However, the primary challenge lies in developing sophisticated control algorithms to attain optimal gait control for fast and stable locomotion. The research employs a multi-stage methodology, including state space restriction, data-driven model training, and reinforcement learning algorithm development. Compared to benchmark methods, the proposed MBRL algorithm, combined with post-training, significantly improves the efficiency and performance of gait control policies. The developed policy is both robust and adaptable to the robot's deformable morphology. The study concludes by highlighting the practical applicability of these findings in real-world scenarios.

AI has become pervasive in recent years, but state-of-the-art approaches predominantly neglect the need for AI systems to be contestable. Instead, contestability is advocated by AI guidelines (e.g. by the OECD) and regulation of automated decision-making (e.g. GDPR). In this position paper we explore how contestability can be achieved computationally in and for AI. We argue that contestable AI requires dynamic (human-machine and/or machine-machine) explainability and decision-making processes, whereby machines can (i) interact with humans and/or other machines to progressively explain their outputs and/or their reasoning as well as assess grounds for contestation provided by these humans and/or other machines, and (ii) revise their decision-making processes to redress any issues successfully raised during contestation. Given that much of the current AI landscape is tailored to static AIs, the need to accommodate contestability will require a radical rethinking, that, we argue, computational argumentation is ideally suited to support.

The profusion of knowledge encoded in large language models (LLMs) and their ability to apply this knowledge zero-shot in a range of settings makes them promising candidates for use in decision-making. However, they are currently limited by their inability to provide outputs which can be faithfully explained and effectively contested to correct mistakes. In this paper, we attempt to reconcile these strengths and weaknesses by introducing \emph{argumentative LLMs (ArgLLMs)}, a method for augmenting LLMs with argumentative reasoning. Concretely, ArgLLMs construct argumentation frameworks, which then serve as the basis for formal reasoning in support of decision-making. The interpretable nature of these argumentation frameworks and formal reasoning means that any decision made by ArgLLMs may be explained and contested. We evaluate ArgLLMs' performance experimentally in comparison with state-of-the-art techniques, in the context of the decision-making task of claim verification. We also define novel properties to characterise contestability and assess ArgLLMs formally in terms of these properties.

Offshore wind structures are subject to deterioration mechanisms throughout their operational lifetime. Even if the deterioration evolution of structural elements can be estimated through physics-based deterioration models, the uncertainties involved in the process hurdle the selection of lifecycle management decisions. In this scenario, the collection of relevant information through an efficient monitoring system enables the reduction of uncertainties, ultimately driving more optimal lifecycle decisions. However, a full monitoring instrumentation implemented on all wind turbines in a farm might become unfeasible due to practical and economical constraints. Besides, certain load monitoring systems often become defective after a few years of marine environment exposure. Addressing the aforementioned concerns, a farm-wide virtual load monitoring scheme directed by a fleet-leader wind turbine offers an attractive solution. Fetched with data retrieved from a fully-instrumented wind turbine, a model can be trained and then deployed, thus yielding load predictions of non-fully monitored wind turbines, from which only standard data remains available. In this paper, we propose a virtual load monitoring framework formulated via Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) and we provide relevant implementation details needed for the construction, training, and deployment of BNN data-based virtual monitoring models. As opposed to their deterministic counterparts, BNNs intrinsically announce the uncertainties associated with generated load predictions and allow to detect inaccurate load estimations generated for non-fully monitored wind turbines. The proposed virtual load monitoring is thoroughly tested through an experimental campaign in an operational offshore wind farm and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of BNN models for fleet-leader-based farm-wide virtual monitoring.

In the context of multi-modality knowledge distillation research, the existing methods was mainly focus on the problem of only learning teacher final output. Thus, there are still deep differences between the teacher network and the student network. It is necessary to force the student network to learn the modality relationship information of the teacher network. To effectively exploit transfering knowledge from teachers to students, a novel modality relation distillation paradigm by modeling the relationship information among different modality are adopted, that is learning the teacher modality-level Gram Matrix.

Camera sensor RAW data offers intrinsic advantages for object detection, including deeper bit depth, preserved physical information, and freedom from image signal processor (ISP) distortions. However, varying exposure conditions, spectral sensitivities, and bit depths across devices introduce substantially larger domain gaps than sRGB, making sensor-agnostic generalization a fundamental challenge. In this study, we present \textbf{RAWild}, a physics-guided global-local tone mapping framework for sensor-agnostic RAW object detection. By factoring sensor-induced variations into a global tonal correction and a spatially adaptive local color adjustment, both driven by RAW distribution priors, our framework enables a single network to train jointly across heterogeneous sensors. To further support cross-sensor generalization, we construct a physics-based RAW simulation pipeline that synthesizes realistic sensor outputs spanning diverse spectral sensitivities, illuminants, and sensor non-idealities. Extensive experiments across multiple RAW benchmarks covering bit depths from 10 to 24 demonstrate state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance under single-dataset, mixed-dataset, and challenging robustness settings.

Standard knowledge distillation for autoregressive models often suffers from distribution mismatch. While on-policy methods mitigate this by leveraging student-generated outputs, they rely on computationally expensive Reinforcement Learning (RL) frameworks. To improve efficiency, we propose Near-Policy Distillation (NPD), an asynchronous approach that decouples student generation from training. This reformulation enables Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with sequence packing. However, asynchronous updates inevitably introduce policy lag and sample noise, which can cause the behavior to drift from near-policy toward off-policy. To counteract this without sacrificing efficiency, NPD integrates sparse student updates and the $Δ$-IFD filtering mechanism, a heuristic sample selection mechanism that empirically stabilizes the optimization trajectory. By filtering extreme out-of-distribution samples, $Δ$-IFD prevents noise from dominating the gradients, ensuring updates remain within a safe proximal learning zone. Empirically, the NPD framework achieves a 8.1x speedup over on-policy baselines and outperforms SFT by 8.09%. Crucially, by effectively narrowing the exploration space for subsequent RL, our method enables openPangu-Embedded-1B to reach a state-of-the-art score of 68.73%, outperforming the substantially larger Qwen3-1.7B. Codes will be released soon.

Although Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress across many domains, their training on large-scale multimodal datasets raises serious privacy concerns, making effective machine unlearning increasingly necessary. However, existing benchmarks mainly focus on static or short-sequence settings, offering limited support for evaluating continual privacy deletion requests in realistic deployments. To bridge this gap, we introduce ICU-Bench, a continual multimodal unlearning benchmark built on privacy-critical document data. ICU-Bench contains 1,000 privacy-sensitive profiles from two document domains, medical reports and labor contracts, with 9,500 images, 16,000 question-answer pairs, and 100 forget tasks. Additionally, new continual unlearning metrics are introduced, facilitating a comprehensive analysis of forgetting effectiveness, historical forgetting preservation, retained utility, and stability throughout the continual unlearning process. Through extensive experiments with representative unlearning methods on ICU-Bench, we show that existing methods generally struggle in continual settings and exhibit clear limitations in balancing forgetting quality, utility preservation, and scalability over long task sequences. These findings highlight the need for multimodal unlearning methods explicitly designed for continual privacy deletion.

Interpreting quantitative CT biomarkers, such as organ volume and tissue attenuation, requires large-scale healthy reference distributions. However, creating these is challenging because clinical datasets are often heavily enriched with pathology. Here, we develop an evidence-grounded, cross-verified large language model (LLM) ensemble to filter pathological findings from radiology reports, enabling the construction of pathology-reduced cohorts from over 350,000 CT examinations. Five LLMs, first, flag structure-level abnormality candidates grounded in verbatim report evidence and, second, resolve disagreements via cross-verification. Using distribution-aware generalized additive models for location, scale, and shape, we establish comprehensive whole-body reference charts for 106 anatomical structures (volumes and attenuation) across adulthood, accounting for age, sex, contrast enhancement, and acquisition parameters. Longitudinal analyses reveal structure- and contrast-dependent changes distinct from cross-sectional trends. These resources facilitate covariate-adjusted centile scoring from routine CT, supporting standardized quantitative phenotyping, multi-site imaging studies, and scalable opportunistic screening research.

Emerging digital technologies are exacerbating the existing divide in Open Access Data (OAD) between high-and low-resource languages, excluding many communities from participating in the global digital transformation. In this PhD proposal, we aim to address this gap, focusing on the language coverage of Linked Open Data knowledge graphs (LOD KGs). First, we identify key variables that characterize language distribution in LOD, including the number of Wikipedia articles per language edition and the number of language-tagged entities in LOD KGs. These variables are analyzed across three major multilingual LOD KGs, DBpedia, BabelNet, and Wikidata, providing insights into the representation and distribution of languages within LOD. Building on this analysis, we intend to study the impact of cross-lingual transfer candidate selection on the task of multilingual KG completion. In particular, we plan to investigate strategies based on linguistic proximity and the availability of curated annotated alignments between languages. Language proximity also motivates us to explore the benefits of analogical reasoning that relies on (dis)similarities and has not yet been investigated to identify correspondences across languages to improve KG completion performance and enhance language coverage in LOD.

Emerging digital technologies are exacerbating the existing divide in Open Access Data (OAD) between high-and low-resource languages, excluding many communities from the global digital transformation. Multilingual Linked Open Data Knowledge Graphs (LOD KGs) could contribute to mitigating this divide through cross-lingual transfer; however, no clear quantitative definition of low-resource languages has yet been established in the context of LOD KGs. In this poster, we present a methodology to analyze the distribution of languages across LOD KGs and propose a preliminary multi-level categorization based on DBpedia, BabelNet, and Wikidata. This categorization is leveraged to bring a formal definition of low-, high-, and medium-resource languages that could be later leveraged to select cross-lingual transfer candidates.

Backdoor attacks can implant malicious behaviours into deep models while preserving performance on clean data, posing a serious threat to safety-critical vision systems. Although backdoor mitigation has been studied extensively for image classification, defenses for object detection remain comparatively underdeveloped. Adversarial fine-tuning is a common backdoor mitigation approach in classification, but adapting it to detection is nontrivial as classification-oriented adversarial generation does not match the detection attack space, where attacks may cause object misclassification or disappearance, and standard detection losses can dilute the repair signal across many predictions. We address these challenges through a detection-aware adversarial fine-tuning framework for mitigating object-detection backdoors when the defender has access only to a compromised detector and a small clean dataset, without knowing the attack objective. For adversarial generation that does not require knowledge of the attack objective, we introduce soft-branch minimisation, which uses a soft gate to combine objectives aligned with misclassification and disappearance attacks, together with a detection-aware classification-loss maximisation. For targeted repair, we introduce a dual-objective fine-tuning loss applied to target-matched predictions, concentrating the defensive update on predictions most relevant to the backdoor behaviour. Experiments across CNN- and Transformer-based detectors show that our approach more effectively reduces attack success while preserving true detections, compared with classification-oriented baselines, and maintains competitive clean detection performance.

Artificial intelligence offers powerful new tools for scientific discovery, but the interaction paradigms required to effectively harness these systems remain underexplored. In this paper, we present findings from a formative user study with 11 expert mathematicians who used AlphaEvolve, an evolutionary coding agent, to tackle advanced problems in their fields of expertise. We identify and characterize a distinct workflow we term intentmaking, the iterative process of discovering, defining, and refining one's experimental goals through active system interaction. We frame this as a natural extension to sensemaking, the cognitive process of building an understanding of complex or novel data. We suggest that users enter a cycle of intentmaking (defining and updating their experiment) and sensemaking (interpreting the results) which repeats many times during the course of an investigation. Our documentation of these themes suggests an approach to designing AI tools for scientific discovery that goes beyond the existing question/answer model of many current systems, treating them as collaborative instruments rather than opaque black-box assistants.

DNA language model aims to decipher the regulatory grammar and semantic of genomes by capturing long range dependencies in DNA sequences. Existing methods emphasize long range token interactions but often ignore the interplay between local motifs and global dependencies. In this paper, we propose Wisteria, a genomic language model that integrates multi scale feature learning within a unified framework for DNA sequence. Specifically, Wisteria augments the Mamba based architecture with gated dilated convolutions to capture local motifs and regulatory patterns, while gated multilayer perceptrons refine global dependencies. We further introduce a Fourier based attention mechanism to support frequency domain modeling, periodic extension and length generalization. Across four experimental settings with both short and long range dependencies, Wisteria demonstrates strong performance on downstream benchmarks against competitive DNA language model baselines. These results indicate that Wisteria effectively unifies local and global dependency modeling for multi scale genomic sequence analysis.

High-resolution rainfall observations are crucial for weather forecasting, water management, and hazard mitigation. Traditional operational measurements are often biased and low-resolution, limiting their ability to capture local rainfall. Accurate high-resolution rainfall maps require integrating sparse surface observations, yet existing deep learning densification methods are hindered by rainfall's skewed, localized nature, noise, and limited spatio-temporal fusion. We present DropsToGrid, a Neural Process-based method that generates dense rainfall fields by fusing temporal sequences from noisy, irregularly distributed private weather stations with spatial context from radar. Leveraging multi-scale feature extraction, temporal attention, and multi-modal fusion, the model produces stochastic, continuous rainfall estimates and explicitly quantifies uncertainty. Evaluations on real-world datasets demonstrate that DropsToGrid outperforms both operational and deep learning baselines, generating accurate high-resolution rainfall maps with well-calibrated uncertainty, even when only few stations are available and in cross-regional scenarios.

Product reviews significantly influence purchasing decisions on e-commerce platforms. However, the sheer volume of reviews can overwhelm users, obscuring the information most relevant to their specific needs. Current e-commerce summarization systems typically produce generic, static summaries that fail to account for the fact that (i) different users care about different product characteristics, and (ii) these preferences may evolve with interactions. To address the challenge of unknown latent preferences, we propose an online learning framework that generates personalized summaries for each user. Our system iteratively refines its understanding of user preferences by incorporating feedback directly from the generated summaries over time. We provide a case study using the Amazon Reviews'23 dataset, showing in controlled simulations that online preference learning improves alignment with target user interests while maintaining summary quality.

Prompt learning has become an effective and widely used technique in enhancing vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP for various downstream tasks, particularly in zero-shot classification within specific domains. Existing methods typically focus on either learning class-shared prompts for a given domain or generating instance-specific prompts through conditional prompt learning. While these methods have achieved promising performance, they often overlook class-specific knowledge in prompt design, leading to suboptimal outcomes. The underlying reasons are: 1) class-specific prompts offer more fine-grained supervision compared to coarse class-shared prompts, which helps prevent misclassification of data from different classes into a single class; 2) compared to class-specific prompts, instance-specific prompts neglect the richer class-level information across multiple instances, potentially causing data from the same class to be divided into multiple classes. To effectively supplement the class-specific knowledge into existing methods, we propose a plug-and-play Class-Aware Knowledge Injection (CAKI) framework. CAKI comprises two key components, i.e., class-specific prompt generation and query-key prompt matching. The former encodes class-specific knowledge into prompts from few-shot samples that belong to the same class and stores the learned prompts in a class-level knowledge bank. The latter provides a plug-and-play mechanism for each test instance to retrieve relevant class-level knowledge from the knowledge bank and inject such knowledge to refine model predictions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our CAKI effectively improves the performance of existing methods on base and novel classes. Code is publicly available at \href{https://github.com/yjh576/CAKI}{this https URL}.

The core challenge of machine unlearning is to strike a balance between target knowledge removal and non-target knowledge retention. In the context of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), this challenge becomes even more pronounced, as knowledge is further divided into visual and textual modalities that are tightly intertwined. In this paper, we introduce an MLLM unlearning approach that aims to forget target visual knowledge while preserving non-target visual knowledge and all textual knowledge. Specifically, we freeze the LLM backbone and achieve unlearning by fine-tuning the visual module. First, we propose a Contrastive Visual Forgetting (CVF) mechanism to separate target visual knowledge from retained visual knowledge, guiding the representations of target visual concepts toward appropriate regions in the feature space. Second, we identify the null space associated with retained knowledge and constrain the unlearning process within this space, thereby significantly mitigating degradation in knowledge retention. Third, beyond static unlearning scenarios, we extend our approach to continual unlearning, where forgetting requests arrive sequentially. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that our approach achieves a strong balance between effective forgetting and robust knowledge retention.

Label noise remains a critical bottleneck for the generalization of supervised deep learning models, particularly when errors are structured rather than random. Standard robust training methods often fail in the presence of such semantically proximal classification errors. This work presents an architecture-agnostic Lipschitz-constant Bayesian header that can be integrated into feature extractors such as vision transformers, yielding the bi-Lipschitz-constrained Bayesian Vision Transformer (LipB-ViT). In contrast to conventional Bayesian layers, our approach enforces spectral normalization on both the mean and log-variance of the variational weights, which promotes calibrated predictive uncertainty and mitigates noise amplification. We further propose a novel metric to jointly capture uncertainty and confidence across misclassification rates, as well as an adaptive arithmetic-mean fusion scheme that combines feature-space proximity with predictive uncertainty to detect corrupted labels outperforming the state of the art k-nearest neighbor based identification methods by more than 7% reaching a recall of more than 0.93 at 15% semantically misclassified labels. Although computational costs increase due to Monte Carlo sampling, the method offers plug-and-play compatibility with pre-trained backbones and consistent hyperparameters across domains, suggesting strong utility for high-stakes applications with variable annotation reliability. The stabilized confidence estimates serve as the foundation for an analysis pipeline that jointly assesses dataset quality and label noise, yielding a second novel metric for their combined quantification. Lastly, we systematically evaluate LipB-ViT under both structured (adversarial) and unstructured noise at inference time, demonstrating its robustness in realistic high-noise and attack scenarios. We compare its performance against baseline methods.

Objective perturbation is a standard mechanism in differentially private empirical risk minimization. In particular, Linear Objective Perturbation (LOP) enforces privacy by adding a random linear term, while strong convexity and stability are ensured by an additional deterministic quadratic term. However, this approach requires the strong assumption of bounded gradients of the loss function, which excludes many modern machine learning models. In this work, we introduce Quadratic Objective Perturbation (QOP), which perturbs the objective with a random quadratic form. This perturbation induces strong convexity and enforces stability of the problem through curvature, thereby enabling privacy and allowing sensitivity to be controlled through spectral properties of the perturbation rather than assumptions on the gradients. As a result, we obtain $(\varepsilon, δ)$-differential privacy under weaker assumptions, in the interpolation regime. Furthermore, we extend the analysis to account for approximate solutions, showing that privacy guarantees are preserved under inexact solves. Additionally, we derive utility guarantees in terms of empirical excess risk, and provide a theoretical and numerical comparison to LOP, highlighting the advantages of curvature-based perturbations. Finally, we discuss algorithmic aspects and show that the resulting problems can be solved efficiently using modern splitting schemes.