#01Nov 8, 2026
stat.ML
Identifiable alignment of unpaired representations
Stas Syrota, Albert Lopez I Serrano, Johanne Franck and 1 more
Aligning two models without paired data requires a distance that both share, yet existing methods use Euclidean or spherical geometry. This is either an arbitrary choice or imposed by their loss function. We show that, under a precise form of the manifold hypothesis, the pullback of the data metric gives such a distance for any two models of one data-generating process. This holds whether the models are encoders, decoders or both, and whatever their architecture, loss, prior or training data. The alignment map preserves this distance and the distribution of representations, and is identifiable if and only if the data distribution breaks every symmetry of the data manifold. We show that this symmetry breaking holds generically. Identifiability makes the alignment coupling the unique optimum of Gromov--Wasserstein and of its weighted combinations with a linear program. The linear program alone has the same optimum if almost every data point has a distinct distribution of distances. The coupling, and with it the alignment map, is recovered exactly from permuted samples, even without identifiability, and consistently from independent ones. Our method, Neural Gromov--Monge Alignment (NGMA), uses no pairs or labels and outperforms every unpaired and label-informed baseline. It relies on pullback distances to align image models with different priors and single-cell models trained on disjoint cells, where Euclidean distances fail.
#02Nov 8, 2026
cs.CR
Robust and Private Swarm Learning via Zero-Knowledge Validator Admission and Consensus Aggregation
Marco Arazzi, Mert Cihangiroglu, Antonino Nocera
Swarm Learning improves resilience and removes the need for a single trusted coordinator by distributing model aggregation and validation across participating nodes. However, it also delegates the validation of model updates to peers whose private data may be biased, unrepresentative, or adversarial, and existing Swarm Learning protocols generally do not attest that data, leaving decentralized validation as an attack surface. We present a robust, privacy-preserving Swarm Learning framework that makes verifiable data quality the condition for admission to the learning task. A validator joins only after a zero-knowledge attestation proves, without revealing any raw sample, that a reference model ran correctly on its private data. The attested outputs also yield a label-free class profile, so the network assembles a collectively IID validator pool from individually skewed validators as accurately as an oracle with the true labels (total-variation distance to uniform 0.025, against 0.021 for the oracle and 0.21 for random selection). Admitted validators score client updates and, through a Tendermint-style Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus, agree on a gradient mask and a quality-derived aggregation weight for each submission, replacing dataset-size weighting with a quality-aware signal. Adapting the cut-layer idea of Split Learning, a challenge-based audit lets peers re-verify that a mask was computed on the attested data without an expensive end-to-end zero-knowledge proof. Across four benchmarks under non-IID partitions the framework matches FedAvg on clean data; under a gradient-scaling attack that collapses FedAvg to random chance, it retains 94% of clean accuracy on CIFAR-100 and over 99% on FashionMNIST, where FedAvg achieves only 2.1% and 11%. The result is a private, robust, and auditable foundation for decentralized learning.
#03Nov 8, 2026
cs.CL
Vietnamese Legal Ontology: Every legal answer, traced to the article that grounds it
Khac-Hoai Nam Bui, Quan Tran Minh
A legal answer is only as good as the article it rests on. Vietnam's largest open legal corpus pairs 109,543 published questions and answers with 573,851 legal documents, yet its citations are free text: "Khoan 3 Dieu 101 cua Bo luat nay" ("Clause 3, Article 101 of this Code") names neither the code nor its version. Following the five stages of NVIDIA Auto Ontology, Discover, Ground, Validate, Expose and Learn, we turn four open datasets into a knowledge graph of 11.5 M nodes and 16.0 M edges in which every node and edge carries its source record and method, with no duplicate keys, dangling edges or schema violations. Of 67,868 cited provisions, 61,487 resolve to a dated law version, 51,694 to a parsed article, clause or point, and 19,012 are confirmed word for word. The ontology then shows what flat records hide. 36% of the 78,361 answers whose citations resolve now cite a law that is no longer in force; 2,525 verified citations point to an article number that says something else in the current law; 2,520 citations were re-versioned because their words match a different version than their date suggests; and 5,575 document numbers are shared by several local authorities, one of them by 72. Every number in this paper is computed from the graph.
#04Nov 8, 2026
cs.LG
Decomposing Earth Embeddings with Sparse Autoencoders
Vitus Benson, Fanny Yang, Markus Reichstein
Earth observation foundation models produce global metre-resolution embeddings that underpin work across agriculture, ecology, hydrology, and beyond. Yet these embeddings are opaque: each dimension entangles unrelated physical concepts, which makes them difficult to interpret and their robustness hard to assess. Here, we propose sparse autoencoders (SAEs) as a principled way to decompose Earth embeddings into sparse, approximately monosemantic features over an overcomplete dictionary. Because LLM judges of interpretations do not transfer to satellite pixels, and spatial autocorrelation matters, we introduce a tailored evaluation protocol. It scores any SAE on reconstruction at matched sparsity, alignment with reference concepts, and spatial scale, each against baselines that include an SAE whose decoder is a frozen random dictionary. On this protocol, SAEs reconstruct AlphaEarth and Tessera embeddings better than every baseline at matched sparsity. Their features align with far fewer reference concepts than raw embedding dimensions (on AlphaEarth, 88% align with at most one of 20 concept groups, most with none, against a median of 12 per raw dimension). They also carry more of their variance at fine spatial scales (23 to 32% within a 640 m patch for BatchTopK and Matryoshka, against 9%). An SAE with a frozen random decoder shares both properties, which therefore follow from sparsity, whereas only a learned dictionary reconstructs the embedding accurately: on AlphaEarth, trained SAEs leave eight times less variance unexplained. We test the sparse code on two applications, discovering land-cover sub-concepts and detecting out-of-distribution pixels by area-of-applicability estimation. Both indicate how sparse features could be used, but neither is yet reliable enough for practical use. Together, these results are a step toward Earth observation models whose features can be inspected.
#05Nov 8, 2026
cs.SE
SWHForest: A Structural Curation and Search Layer for Large-Scale Code Corpora
Federico Pennino, Andrea Gurioli, Maurizio Gabbrielli and 1 more
Pre-training code language models relies on massive code corpora usually streamed over the internet. However, researchers rarely need a multi-terabyte archive in its entirety; instead, their workflow centers on curated subsets: selecting well-documented files, filtering out repetitive boilerplate, auditing for benchmark contamination, or retrieving specific code patterns. Yet, because modern corpora are typically published as file pointers and basic attributes rather than source text, no general structural layer exists to select which files to download: curating a subset requires downloading and parsing millions of files first just to discard most of them. We present SWHForest, an open-source framework and public dataset that provides this missing structural layer for any pointer-based corpus without redistributing source code. A single pass over the archive parses each file into an AST and immediately discards the source text, keeping only its structural summary. Queried locally or exposed by archive providers as a server-side filtering API, SWHForest selects matching files first (via SQL or index intersection) and downloads only surviving candidates. Across the ten largest languages of Stack-Edu (52.1M unique files, 341M definitions), SWHForest answers curation queries in milliseconds while cutting downloads by 46-72%, reducing live structural searches from hours of per-language streaming to seconds or minutes.