#01Oct 26, 2026
cs.LG
Quantitative Generalization Bounds for Multi-Layer Transformers: A Few Long Strings can Beat Many Short Ones
Marius Henry, Michael Rizvi-Martel, Michael Hahn
Transformer-based language models exhibit an astonishing capacity to generalize to longer and more difficult problem instances than those seen in training. However, theoretical understanding of this phenomenon still lags behind. Unlike most machine learning models, the generalisation abilities of transformers inherently require considering two axes. On one hand, one must examine in-distribution statistical generalisation, which concerns the ability of a model to broaden a function from training samples to novel samples of the same distribution. On the other hand, given the sequential nature of language data, one must also consider length generalisation, which reflects whether a model trained on inputs of a given length can extrapolate to longer ones.These two notions have mostly been studied separately, leaving open how they interact. In this work, we give a joint treatment of both axes for fixed-precision transformers. We give generalisation guarantees in terms of the parameter sizes of the involved models, as well as the quantization space and the alphabet size that supply the sequences. Finally, we illustrate how the requirements in the sample count and training length trade off. In particular, we find that increasing training length can be exponentially more efficient than increasing the sample size. Experiments support predictions of the theory.
#02Oct 26, 2026
cs.LG
A Hybrid Framework for Explainable Aviation Risk: Causal Chain Extraction from Safety Reports with Physics-Based Failure Quantification and Interventional Analysis
Yutian Pang, Yifang Tian, Jiacheng Xie and 4 more
Aviation authorities hold decades of accident reports whose narratives record how investigators reconstructed each accident. Computational work on these archives has mostly sorted reports into fixed taxonomies. In this work, we propose a hybrid framework in which a text-based corpus identifies the leading factors of a failure mode. Physics-based models then quantify how likely that failure is at a stated operating point. Ordered causal chains extracted from 56,202 American accident reports with a local large language model aggregate into a causation knowledge graph. On an evaluation sample of 2,000 reports, the chains recover 90.8% of investigator-flagged causes. Each physical factor whose drivers the record carries receives an occurrence model calibrated to the accident population. A leaky noisy-OR fitted to the corpus combines the factors into a failure mode probability that supports intervention. For engine power loss, the carburetor icing model separates 1,205 icing accidents from other accidents using temperature and dewpoint alone, reaching 0.61 in area under the receiver operating characteristic curve against a density ratio ceiling of 0.64. Routine weather hours give no valid control, because flying concentrates in fair weather. On later years the physics adds 0.03 to that area for occurrence and nothing for severity, so its value lies in interpretability. On four named accidents, abduction gives a probability of necessity of 0.29 to 0.50 for the heat omission, under monotonicity. The Fast Causal Inference algorithm does not license the largest backdoor adjustment on the learned networks.
#03Oct 26, 2026
cs.CL
Learning When to Commit: Schedule Distillation for Fast Diffusion Language Models
Aidar Myrzakhan, Zhiqiang Shen
Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) can generate multiple tokens in parallel, but often require many decoding rounds to complete a response. Efficient generation depends not only on which tokens are easy to predict, but also on how committing to them helps predict the remaining positions. A highly predictable token may provide little useful context, while revealing a less predictable token can help several other positions become predictable sooner. We propose dSpark, a new schedule distillation-based framework for learning when to commit tokens for faster diffusion language generation. To achieve this, we construct unmasking schedules that prioritize tokens whose reveal makes other positions easier to predict, reducing uncertainty earlier in decoding. We then distill these schedules into the model to enable faster parallel sampling, with a KL-divergence regularizer to help preserve generation quality. We extensively evaluate our approach across mathematical reasoning and code generation tasks. On GSM8K, our method achieves remarkable 10.12$\times$ and 5.12$\times$ speedups over the various baselines on LLaDA-8B-Instruct and Dream-7B-Instruct, respectively, while maintaining superior task performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/VILA-Lab/dSpark.
#04Oct 26, 2026
cs.IT
Information-Theoretic Secure Aggregation With Heterogeneous Client Quantization
Shreya Meel, Sennur Ulukus, Itzhak Tamo
In federated learning (FL), secure aggregation enables a server to compute the sum of local model updates of $N$ clients, without revealing any information on the individual model updates to the server, beyond their sum. Different clients may be subject to heterogeneous bandwidth constraints, and consequently may choose different numbers of quantization levels to represent the information they send. Most secure aggregation works require the clients to project the values of their update parameters to a common finite group (or field), which does not directly accommodate heterogeneous precision constraints on their transmitted masked updates. Existing approaches of secure aggregation with heterogeneous quantization levels reveal partial aggregates of model-updates, and can reveal segments of individual model updates, under certain dropout and client-server collusion patterns. To prevent this privacy breach, we propose an information-theoretic secure aggregation scheme that tolerates client drop-outs, and up to $T$ semi-honest clients that collude with each other and with the server, under heterogeneous quantization at clients. Our protocol utilizes the $(T+1, N)$ threshold black-box secret sharing construction, where secret shares of the client updates, despite belonging to distinct algebraic groups owing to different quantization, are generated from identical linear integer systems.
#05Oct 26, 2026
cs.LG
GNN-VIEW: Visual Inspection and Explanation of Graph-based Earth-System Models
Alessandro Lucatelli, Ferdinand Unterhuber, Katharina Krenzer and 4 more
Machine learning Earth-system models are becoming increasingly important, and so is their development. Graph-based models, one of the most prominent approaches, allow developers to constrain the learning process before training via graph connectivity. Yet, developing these models remains challenging: the graph is built algorithmically with little intuition about the final result beyond static plotting, which requires extra work and is often not detailed enough. Even after successful training, how the model arrives at forecasts remains obscure. We present GNN-VIEW, an interactive browser-based tool that supports the development of such systems. GNN-VIEW exposes the graph's information pathways, allowing model developers to debug the graph structure before training. After training, GNN-VIEW uses attribution-based explainability to reveal which input features are used by the trained model for a given forecast. This helps developers understand why a model fails. We showcase the usefulness of GNN-VIEW in the construction stage of a graph for an ocean forecasting model, and in explaining poorly predicted precipitation of a trained weather forecasting model during Hurricane Laura.