Archives AI News

arXiv:2509.00035v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate prediction of chip performance is critical for ensuring energy efficiency and reliability in semiconductor manufacturing. However, developing minimum operating voltage ($V_{min}$) prediction models at advanced technology nodes is challenging due to limited training data and the complex relationship between process variations and $V_{min}$. To address these issues, we propose a novel transfer learning framework that leverages abundant legacy data from the 16nm technology node to enable accurate $V_{min}$ prediction at the advanced 5nm node. A key innovation of our approach is the integration of input features derived from on-chip silicon odometer sensor data, which provide fine-grained characterization of localized process variations -- an essential factor at the 5nm node -- resulting in significantly improved prediction accuracy.

arXiv:2509.00034v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Steel casting processes are vulnerable to financial losses due to slag flow contamination, making accurate slag flow condition detection essential. This study introduces a novel cross-domain diagnostic method using vibration data collected from an industrial steel foundry to identify various stages of slag flow. A hybrid deep learning model combining one-dimensional convolutional neural networks and long short-term memory layers is implemented, tested, and benchmarked against a standard one-dimensional convolutional neural network. The proposed method processes raw time-domain vibration signals from accelerometers and evaluates performance across 16 distinct domains using a realistic cross-domain dataset split. Results show that the hybrid convolutional neural network and long short-term memory architecture, when combined with root mean square preprocessing and a selective embedding data loading strategy, achieves robust classification accuracy, outperforming traditional models and loading techniques. The highest test accuracy of 99.10 +/- 0.30 demonstrates the method's capability for generalization and industrial relevance. This work presents a practical and scalable solution for real-time slag flow monitoring, contributing to improved reliability and operational efficiency in steel manufacturing.

arXiv:2509.00031v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantization is an effective technique to reduce the deployment cost of large language models (LLMs), and post-training quantization (PTQ) has been widely studied due to its efficiency. However, existing low-bit PTQ methods suffer from accuracy degradation because their layer-wise optimization introduces cumulative error propagation and misalignment between local reconstruction objectives and downstream performance. While quantization-aware training (QAT) provides a principled solution, its reliance on backpropagation incurs prohibitive data, time, and memory costs, limiting its practicality. To address these challenges, we propose ZeroQAT, a zeroth-order optimization-based QAT framework. ZeroQAT leverages forward-only gradient estimation to eliminate the need for backpropagation, significantly reducing computational and memory overhead while retaining the benefits of end-to-end optimization. Moreover, ZeroQAT jointly learns quantized weights, weight clipping thresholds, and equivalent transformations to mitigate quantization error and handle activation outliers. Experiments demonstrate that ZeroQAT achieves the efficiency of PTQ while retaining the accuracy of QAT, offering a practical solution for high-quality low-bit quantization of LLMs.

arXiv:2410.23300v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Collaborative Filtering (CF) methods dominate real-world recommender systems given their ability to learn high-quality, sparse ID-embedding tables that effectively capture user preferences. These tables scale linearly with the number of users and items, and are trained to ensure high similarity between embeddings of interacted user-item pairs, while maintaining low similarity for non-interacted pairs. Despite their high performance, encouraging dispersion for non-interacted pairs necessitates expensive regularization (e.g., negative sampling), hurting runtime and scalability. Existing research tends to address these challenges by simplifying the learning process, either by reducing model complexity or sampling data, trading performance for runtime. In this work, we move beyond model-level modifications and study the properties of the embedding tables under different learning strategies. Through theoretical analysis, we find that the singular values of the embedding tables are intrinsically linked to different CF loss functions. These findings are empirically validated on real-world datasets, demonstrating the practical benefits of higher stable rank, a continuous version of matrix rank which encodes the distribution of singular values. Based on these insights, we propose an efficient warm-start strategy that regularizes the stable rank of the user and item embeddings. We show that stable rank regularization during early training phases can promote higher-quality embeddings, resulting in training speed improvements of up to 66%. Additionally, stable rank regularization can act as a proxy for negative sampling, allowing for performance gains of up to 21% over loss functions with small negative sampling ratios. Overall, our analysis unifies current CF methods under a new perspective, their optimization of stable rank, motivating a flexible regularization method.

arXiv:2509.00050v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We apply deep learning techniques for anomaly detection to analyze activity of Russian-owned resident space objects (RSO) prior to the Ukraine invasion and assess the results for any findings that can be used as indications and warnings (I&W) of aggressive military behavior for future conflicts. Through analysis of anomalous activity, an understanding of possible tactics and procedures can be established to assess the existence of statistically significant changes in Russian RSO pattern of life/pattern of behavior (PoL/PoB) using publicly available two-line element (TLE) data. This research looks at statistical and deep learning approaches to assess anomalous activity. The deep learning methods assessed are isolation forest (IF), traditional autoencoder (AE), variational autoencoder (VAE), Kolmogorov Arnold Network (KAN), and a novel anchor-loss based autoencoder (Anchor AE). Each model is used to establish a baseline of on-orbit activity based on a five-year data sample. The primary investigation period focuses on the six months leading up to the invasion date of February 24, 2022. Additional analysis looks at RSO activity during an active combat period by sampling TLE data after the invasion date. The deep learning autoencoder models identify anomalies based on reconstruction errors that surpass a threshold sigma. To capture the nuance and unique characteristics of each RSO an individual model was trained for each observed space object. The research made an effort to prioritize explainability and interpretability of the model results thus each observation was assessed for anomalous behavior of the individual six orbital elements versus analyzing the input data as a single monolithic observation. The results demonstrate not only statistically significant anomalies of Russian RSO activity but also details anomalous findings to the individual orbital element.

arXiv:2505.12552v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reconstructing natural images from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data remains a core challenge in natural decoding due to the mismatch between the richness of visual stimuli and the noisy, low resolution nature of fMRI signals. While recent two-stage models, combining deep variational autoencoders (VAEs) with diffusion models, have advanced this task, they treat all spatial-frequency components of the input equally. This uniform treatment forces the model to extract meaning features and suppress irrelevant noise simultaneously, limiting its effectiveness. We introduce FreqSelect, a lightweight, adaptive module that selectively filters spatial-frequency bands before encoding. By dynamically emphasizing frequencies that are most predictive of brain activity and suppressing those that are uninformative, FreqSelect acts as a content-aware gate between image features and natural data. It integrates seamlessly into standard very deep VAE-diffusion pipelines and requires no additional supervision. Evaluated on the Natural Scenes dataset, FreqSelect consistently improves reconstruction quality across both low- and high-level metrics. Beyond performance gains, the learned frequency-selection patterns offer interpretable insights into how different visual frequencies are represented in the brain. Our method generalizes across subjects and scenes, and holds promise for extension to other neuroimaging modalities, offering a principled approach to enhancing both decoding accuracy and neuroscientific interpretability.

arXiv:2509.00057v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine learning-based failure management in optical networks has gained significant attention in recent years. However, severe class imbalance, where normal instances vastly outnumber failure cases, remains a considerable challenge. While pre- and in-processing techniques have been widely studied, post-processing methods are largely unexplored. In this work, we present a direct comparison of pre-, in-, and post-processing approaches for class imbalance mitigation in failure detection and identification using an experimental dataset. For failure detection, post-processing methods-particularly Threshold Adjustment-achieve the highest F1 score improvement (up to 15.3%), while Random Under-Sampling provides the fastest inference. In failure identification, GenAI methods deliver the most substantial performance gains (up to 24.2%), whereas post-processing shows limited impact in multi-class settings. When class overlap is present and latency is critical, over-sampling methods such as the SMOTE are most effective; without latency constraints, Meta-Learning yields the best results. In low-overlap scenarios, Generative AI approaches provide the highest performance with minimal inference time.

arXiv:2509.01397v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recently, the benefit of heavily overparameterized models has been observed in machine learning tasks: models with enough capacity to easily cross the emph{interpolation threshold} improve in generalization error compared to the classical bias-variance tradeoff regime. We demonstrate this behavior for the first time in particle physics data and explore when and where `double descent' appears and under which circumstances overparameterization results in a performance gain.

arXiv:2509.00066v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Level-of-detail (LoD) representation is critical for efficiently modeling and transmitting various types of signals, such as images and 3D shapes. In this work, we present a novel neural architecture that supports LoD signal representation. Our architecture is based on an elaborate modification of the widely used Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), which inherently operates at a single scale and therefore lacks native support for LoD. Specifically, we introduce the Tailed Multi-Layer Perceptron (T-MLP) that extends the MLP by attaching multiple output branches, also called tails, to its hidden layers, enabling direct supervision at multiple depths. Our loss formulation and training strategy allow each hidden layer to effectively learn a target signal at a specific LoD, thus enabling multi-scale modeling. Extensive experimental results show that our T-MLP outperforms other neural LoD baselines across a variety of signal representation tasks.

arXiv:2509.01878v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Marine ecosystems face increasing pressure due to climate change, driving the need for scalable, AI-powered monitoring solutions. This paper examines the rapid emergence of underwater AI as a major research frontier and analyzes the factors that have transformed marine perception from a niche application into a catalyst for AI innovation. We identify three convergent drivers: environmental necessity for ecosystem-scale monitoring, democratization of underwater datasets through citizen science platforms, and researcher migration from saturated terrestrial computer vision domains. Our analysis reveals how unique underwater challenges - turbidity, cryptic species detection, expert annotation bottlenecks, and cross-ecosystem generalization - are driving fundamental advances in weakly supervised learning, open-set recognition, and robust perception under degraded conditions. We survey emerging trends in datasets, scene understanding and 3D reconstruction, highlighting the paradigm shift from passive observation toward AI-driven, targeted intervention capabilities. The paper demonstrates how underwater constraints are pushing the boundaries of foundation models, self-supervised learning, and perception, with methodological innovations that extend far beyond marine applications to benefit general computer vision, robotics, and environmental monitoring.