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ML papers to read today.

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5 papers

#01Oct 27, 2026

cs.NI

Keeping Inference in the Radio: Design and Measurement of a Spiking Accelerator for mmWave ISAC Activity Recognition

Anthony Sánchez, Rafael Ruiz, José A. Belloch and 2 more

Integrated sensing and communication allows wireless networks to recognize human activity from the channel estimates that the receiver computes anyway. The inference, however, runs on the general-purpose processors of the base station, access point or handset, which are the first components a device switches off to save energy. Always-on sensing therefore requires a classifier that is small enough to remain powered while the rest of the system sleeps. We investigate whether Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) can provide such a classifier. To this end, we generate SNN accelerators for micro-Doppler activity recognition on the public DISC dataset (IEEE 802.11ay at 60 GHz) with the open-source Spiker+ framework, and implement them together with a spike encoder on a ZCU208 RFSoC, so that the complete chain from micro-Doppler frame to activity label runs in programmable logic. A fully connected SNN with 132 neurons achieves 94.7 % accuracy (90.7 % macro-F1) on unseen subjects and performs an inference in 206 microseconds. Compared to conventional networks of the same topology on the same device, it requires an eighth of the logic and 3.4X less dynamic energy per decision than a network fed the same binary spikes, at comparable accuracy, and 7.6X less than a network fed the 16-bit spectrogram, at 1.2 points lower accuracy. Quantization-aware training reduces its weights to 3 bits within half a percentage point of the 6-bit network at the same encoder threshold

#02Oct 27, 2026

stat.ML

Graph Representation Learning via Adaptive Expectile Aggregation

Tianyi Zhu, Wei Lan

Graph neural networks (GNNs) rely critically on neighborhood aggregation, yet conventional mean aggregation may fail to capture class-relevant distributional information, particularly in heterophilic graphs. We propose ExpectileGCN, an adaptive graph aggregation framework that introduces a learnable expectile level to capture neighborhood information beyond the mean. The proposed operator continuously adjusts aggregation between minimum- and maximum-type behaviors, with mean aggregation as a special case. A differentiable approximation based on sigmoid smoothing and fixed-point iterations enables end-to-end optimization. Theoretically, we establish stability properties and transductive generalization guarantees for ExpectileGCN. We further investigate its classification risk under heterophilic neighborhood models. For informative neighborhoods, we show that expectile aggregation can exploit class-dependent scale differences to achieve a classification advantage over mean aggregation. Under a local asymptotic regime with diminishing per-neighbor label informativeness, we establish that this advantage can persist in terms of limiting classification risk. Experiments on homophilic and heterophilic benchmark graphs demonstrate strong predictive performance and improved robustness under feature corruption and structural perturbations.

#03Oct 27, 2026

cs.LG

LCM-Promo: An LLM-Based Uplift Model for Promotion Allocation

Nesta Midavaine, Floris Fok, Paulo Mendes and 4 more

We present LCM-Promo, an LLM-based uplift model for promotion allocation. LCM-Promo is a task-specific Large Commerce Model (LCM): a finetuned LLM trained on transactional commerce data to predict user intent and promotion response. It learns monotonic promotion-response curves from production logs by interpreting single-token outputs as conversion-threshold probabilities, while conditioning on session context such as day and delivery shift. In a production A/B test on churn reactivation, LCM-Promo increased conversion by 1% and reduced promotion cost by 6% relative to the Segment-EMA production baseline.

#04Oct 27, 2026

cs.LG

Follow the Gradient: Tracing Safety Degradation Back to Training Data

Saket Reddy, Amro Abbas, Anshuman Suri and 3 more

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) on instruction data can quietly erode their safety, even when no training example looks harmful. Because this safety-degrading data looks benign, standard content filters struggle to catch it. We tackle this problem by developing SimpleLoRIF, a scalable gradient embedding method that identifies fine-tuning examples whose gradients align with unsafe behavior. By simplifying a low-rank attribution method and restricting backpropagation to the final four transformer blocks, SimpleLoRIF can embed datasets on the order of a million examples, boosting gradient attribution from a small-scale analysis tool into a practical filter for full post-training datasets. We first validate it on emergent misalignment, where we find that gradients can connect insecure-code training data to the broadly harmful behaviors that appear after fine-tuning, with AUC as high as 0.865 in the gradient space of misaligned models. We then use SimpleLoRIF to build SafeTulu, a version of Tulu 3 with the 20% of examples most gradient-aligned with unsafe responses removed. Training on SafeTulu reduces GCG attack success rate by up to 22% across Qwen, Llama, and Olmo, outperforming both LLM-as-a-judge and prior gradient-based filtering, while largely preserving or even improving capability. Finally, we analyzed the removed data and identify possibly under-studied sources of safety degradation, such as tool-execution failures and narrative arithmetic. We release SafeTulu along with a Hugging Face Space that lets researchers build their own customized versions of SafeTulu to fine-tune on, such as by changing the removal fraction or filtering only certain subsets.

#05Oct 27, 2026

cs.CV

GroundControl: Satellite-Conditioned Multi-View Diffusion for Reconstruction-Free Novel View Synthesis

Akshay Krishnan, Matias Turkulainen, Jamie Wynn and 7 more

Multi-view or video diffusion models have recently emerged as state-of-the-art approaches for novel-view synthesis from sparse image collections. While they can produce high quality images, they tend to hallucinate unrealistic spatial layouts when synthesizing views outside the input views (scene extrapolation). We propose to address this challenge for outdoor scenes by using satellite images as an additional information source to condition the multi-view generative model. We introduce a new satellite-conditioned multi-view diffusion model that combines conditioning from a satellite image and street-level input images when generating novel-views. Our cross-attention based conditioning allows us to retain pretrained multi-view diffusion priors to generate seamless, realistic, novel views from a handful of source views, while also adhering to the scene layout as seen from satellite images. Our model does not use 3D scene reconstruction, and only relies on posed street and satellite views. Our experiments on outdoor datasets show that our model is better than both satellite-conditioned or street-view conditioned baselines on novel-view synthesis, especially on challenging cases where target views have very little overlap with source views. Project page: https://nianticspatial.github.io/groundcontrol