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ML papers to read today.

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5 papers

#01Nov 5, 2026

math.OC

Last-Iterate Convergence of Stochastic Gradient Methods for Unbounded Problems

Kevin Kurian Thomas Vaidyan, Ahmet Alacaoglu, Michael P. Friedlander

Last-iterate convergence guarantees for stochastic gradient methods have attracted significant attention as practical implementations typically return the last iterate instead of an average of the iterates. In this paper, we study two approaches for analyzing the last-iterate convergence of proximal and projected stochastic gradient methods without bounded domain or bounded variance assumptions, where black-box variational inference serves as a running example. Under two related assumptions relaxing the bounded variance, we show near-optimal anytime rate $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(1/\sqrt{T})$ for the last iterate. Moreover, when the horizon $T$ is known, we remove the logarithmic factor and obtain the optimal order $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{T})$, matching the order known under bounded variance or bounded domain assumptions.

#02Nov 5, 2026

cs.LG

Acoustic Anomaly Detection for Early Identification of Drill Jamming

Maria Beatriz Silva, Lucas Edson Silva de Araújo, Sergio F. Chevtchenko and 3 more

In the context of Industry 4.0, predictive maintenance is essential to minimize unplanned downtime and ensure operational safety. In machining processes, drill jamming is a critical failure that compromises both workpiece quality and tool integrity. This work proposes an acoustic anomaly detection system using ultrasonic sensors to identify pre-failure patterns in Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machining. We release a public dataset of time- and frequency-domain acoustic features from 17 drills, and benchmark semi-supervised autoencoder-based normality modelling against supervised XGBoost classification using Leave-One-Drill-Out validation. The results demonstrate that the Autoencoder is highly effective for industrial safety, achieving a Recall of 1.00 and a consolidated F1-score of 0.81. Furthermore, the threshold-independent analysis shows that the Autoencoder better separates normal and pre-failure acoustic patterns, achieving a consolidated AUC of 0.8294, compared with 0.7559 for the supervised model under inter-tool covariate shift. In contrast, the supervised XGBoost achieved an average F1-score of 0.55 and failed to detect failures in some of the evaluated drills. The findings highlight that the ultrasonic spectrum provides a reliable window for identifying incipient mechanical instabilities, and the AE model offers a robust safety envelope by anticipating all jamming events across the tested drill bits.

#03Nov 5, 2026

cs.LG

Permanent and Transient Representations for Continual Reinforcement Learning

Nishanth Anand, Doina Precup

Continual Reinforcement Learning (CRL) agents struggle to adapt to new situations while retaining prior knowledge, leading to a stability-plasticity trade-off. One approach to solving this problem is by using complementary learning systems: one for slow, long-term learning and another for quick, transient adaptation. Anand & Precup (2023) instantiated this idea using permanent and transient value functions, but used the same features in both systems. Intuitively, long-term learning should rely more on parametric representations for broad generalization, while transient learning would be best served by non-parametric representations for situation-specific adaptation. In this paper, we explore this idea both theoretically and empirically. By introducing a novel non-parametric approximation for estimating the transient value function in complex tasks, we demonstrate that our method enables online learning and outperforms competitive baselines on image-based tasks and Craftax-Classic, underscoring the effectiveness of our system-level decomposition.

#04Nov 5, 2026

cs.DB

Selective Retrieval Routing for Multi-Violation Knowledge Graph Repair

Tung-Wei Lin, Gabe Fierro, Han Li and 3 more

Knowledge graphs often contain missing or inconsistent facts that undermine the applications built on them. Schema validation detects such violations but does not identify which of several valid repairs recovers the intended graph. External corpora can supply the evidence needed to identify the intended repair, but retrieving from them is costly and not always successful. We propose a framework for selective retrieval in iterative graph repair. An LLM repair agent explores and edits the graph, while a router controls its access to a researcher agent that retrieves external evidence. We extend a violation-injection framework to generate cases with multiple compatible violations and known reference repairs. The agent's repair outcomes on these cases provide supervision for training the deployment-specific router. On two building-automation datasets, researcher access improves repairs for some violations and degrades them for others, with effects differing across deployments. The router uses fewer repair-time tokens than always enabling access in all six evaluation suites. It achieves higher repair $F_1$ than always disabling access in five of six suites.

#05Nov 5, 2026

cs.LG

IMUDINO: Self-distilled Foundation Model for Inertial Sensing

Zhoutong Ye, Chengwen Zhang, Zixuan Wang and 9 more

We present IMUDINO, the first foundation model (FM) for inertial sensing to achieve competitive performance across diverse sensing tasks including human activity recognition (HAR), health, motion capture, and odometry. Prior inertial FMs often focus on one subfield of inertial sensing and sometimes underperform state-of-the-art supervised methods (e.g., in HAR), making their scope considerably narrower than FMs for vision and natural language. Moreover, they often require fixed input length and sampling rate, and generalize poorly to unseen sensor locations. To build a general-purpose foundation model for inertial sensing, we adapt the DINO self-supervised learning (SSL) paradigm to inertial data through a set of semantics-preserving motion transformations that simulate variations in motion pattern and sensor setup. For model architecture, we use a plain transformer encoder with frequency-aware positional encoding that natively supports varying input length and sampling rate. This simple setup proved remarkably effective for learning global and dense features generalizable across users, sensor setups, tasks, and, in the case of robot odometry, embodiments. We hope IMUDINO can serve as a backbone for inertial sensing and kickstart the development of general-purpose inertial FMs.