#01Nov 7, 2026
stat.ML
Beyond Discrete Ancestry Groups: Distribution-Aware In-Context Learning for Cancer Outcome Prediction Across the Genetic Ancestry Continuum
Weizhi Li, Yan Cui
Machine learning models for omics-based prediction of cancer outcomes are commonly built on aggregated data without distinguishing ancestry groups, or under an ancestry-discrete design, which partitions samples into ancestry groups and fits a separate model within each group. Recent evidence shows that this approach is inherently limited: predictive accuracy declines with genetic distance from the training samples, even within a single ancestry group, because the data distribution shifts continuously rather than only between predefined categories. In this paper, we propose distribution-aware in-context learning (DA-ICL) for ancestry-continuum modeling. Our method extends conventional ancestry-discrete modeling to ancestry-continuum modeling, capturing the nonstationary omics-endpoint relationship across the genetic continuum while enabling efficient modeling through an in-context learning foundation model. We provide theoretical analysis demonstrating the superiority of the ancestry-continuum over ancestry-discrete modeling, along with empirical results supporting the proposed framework. Source code is available at https://github.com/ai4pm/DA-ICL-Continuum.
#02Nov 7, 2026
cs.AI
BunshinRL: Splitting Live Agent Workspaces for Memory-Efficient Agentic RL
Yutong Huang, Vikranth Srivatsa, Alex Asch and 1 more
Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) rollouts interleave model reasoning with tool calls in persistent workspaces. Scaling these rollouts incurs substantial memory costs for concurrent environments, while slow tool calls delay entire rollout batches. We present BunshinRL, an agentic RL rollout system that exploits shared environment state and recurring tool calls through three techniques: memory sharing across environments, tool-prefix caching, and speculative tool execution. These techniques build on BunshinFork, a novel live whole-workspace forking mechanism for containers. BunshinFork reconstructs process trees, shares memory copy-on-write, and preserves file, communication, and GUI state, enabling cached-state reuse and rollback after incorrect speculation. We implement BunshinRL and BunshinFork through Linux kernel module and CRIU modifications. BunshinRL reduces peak memory by up to 43%, total memory consumption by up to 51%, and end-to-end rollout latency by 23%.
#03Nov 7, 2026
cs.AI
DiSARM: Diverse and Surprising Association Rule Mining with Large Language Models
Lijia Liu, Hisashi Kashima
Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) aims to discover informative patterns in large datasets. For transactional data, Association Rule Mining (ARM) is an established approach that facilitates EDA by efficiently generating candidate patterns. Beyond efficient mining, identifying informative rules has also been extensively studied through both objective and subjective interestingness measures. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) offer new opportunities for assessing subjective interestingness using world knowledge. Nevertheless, relying solely on LLMs raises concerns about scalability and statistical reliability. Building on prior ARM research, we propose a hybrid framework, DiSARM, that leverages the world knowledge of LLMs to assess the subjective interestingness of rules, while maintaining statistical reliability and promoting diversity among the selected rules. Across three transactional datasets, experiments demonstrate that DiSARM effectively combines statistical reliability with surprise and diversity, offering a promising approach to ADE from transactional data.
#04Nov 7, 2026
cs.LG
Bayesian Low-Rank Posteriors for Scalable Membership Inference
Khanh Nguyen, Antonio Emanuele Cinà, Andrey Barsky and 3 more
Membership inference attacks (MIAs) aim to determine whether a sample was used during the training of a target model. Strong MIAs rely on reference (or shadow) models to estimate target-conditional score distributions, but training such ensembles is computationally expensive for modern large-scale Vision--Language Models (VLMs). In this work, we propose a scalable alternative that replaces explicit reference-model training with a Bayesian approximation over low-rank adaptation parameters. Specifically, we model uncertainty only within the LoRA subspace and construct a posterior from a single training run, from which we sample a diverse set of \emph{virtual reference models}. We instantiate this approach using Stochastic Weight Averaging Gaussian (SWAG), enabling efficient approximation of target-conditional score distributions at a fraction of the cost of conventional shadow-model ensembles. We evaluate the resulting attack on three downstream-adapted VLMs across two privacy-sensitive visual question answering tasks, namely Document VQA and Medical VQA. To isolate the effect of pretraining knowledge, we additionally introduce a controlled synthetic dataset. Our approach outperforms standard reference-based attacks while requiring only a single reference-model fine-tuning run, making membership inference more practical for large VLMs.
#05Nov 7, 2026
cs.CL
Test-Time Scaling for Diffusion Language Models with Frequency-Aware Remasking
Bowen Zuo, Yue Yu, Dongruo Zhou and 1 more
Diffusion language models (DLMs) generate text through iterative denoising, where decisions about which tokens to commit or remask strongly affect output quality. Existing certainty-aware strategies rely on instantaneous confidence or entropy, but these local signals can be misleading on difficult reasoning problems. We formulate DLM test-time scaling as adaptive allocation of both inference compute and decoding strategies. Our two-stage approach uses a fast base sampler to solve easy questions, then applies frequency-aware remasking to the remaining hard questions. This strategy tracks how often each token's prediction changes across denoising steps and preferentially commits frequently changing tokens, encouraging samples to explore alternative reasoning paths rather than collapse onto the model's preferred trajectory. Experiments with LLaDA-8B-Instruct and Dream-7B-Instruct show consistent improvements over a strong adaptive allocation baseline, with absolute accuracy gains of up to 3.73 percentage points (LLaDA) and 7.33 percentage points (Dream) on MATH-500, and absolute coverage gains of up to 11.39 percentage points (LLaDA) and 10.98 percentage points (Dream) on HumanEval. On questions unsolved by the base certainty-aware strategy after 100 samples, frequency-aware remasking recovers solutions for 3.75% to 18.75% of examples.