#01Oct 23, 2026
cs.CV
LoCA: Enabling Multi-Modality in Geospatial Location Encoders
Panagiotis Koromilas, Eleanna Vali, Diogenis Antonopoulos and 7 more
Location encoders map geographic coordinates to high-dimensional descriptors through contrastive alignment with paired Earth Observation imagery. We prove that this construction is structurally limited: any Lipschitz location encoder produces an output of intrinsic dimension at most 2, regardless of architecture or bandwidth, which forces the contrastive loss to strictly exceed its asymptotic optimum. Empirically, joint training also collapses the encoder's embedding covariance to low rank. Although dimension-limited, current location encoders sidestep this spectral collapse by training against a frozen image encoder, which we reinterpret as a covariance regularizer that supplies a high-rank target for the location encoder to fold onto. However, extending this approach to multimodal inputs is challenging, as location encoders should simultaneously map a single location to multiple, potentially incompatible, descriptors. We identify two requirements a regularizer must satisfy for location encoding in multimodal regimes: co-alignment across modalities, since adapters alone cannot align independently pretrained encoders; and high effective rank, since the location encoder inherits its target's spectrum. We propose LoCA (Location Contrastive Alignment), a two-stage pipeline that satisfies both. Stage 1 jointly trains Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 encoders with contrastive learning, producing a co-aligned, high-rank multimodal target. Stage 2 freezes the image encoders and trains a location and a tabular metadata encoder as projection adapters with multi-view contrastive learning. Against five state-of-the-art encoders on 17 tasks ranging from land cover and wildfire forecasting to geophysical, socio-economic, biodiversity and climate applications, LoCA achieves the most task wins, is the only model to outperform every other on a majority of tasks, and wins 68.8% of all per-task comparisons.
#02Oct 23, 2026
cs.CL
Adaptive Frequency Threshold Byte Pair Encoding for Mixed Natural Language and Structured Symbolic Corpora
Pietro Di Nicco, Lucio La Cava, Andrea Tagarelli
Modern language models rely on subwording tokenization to define the discrete units of input processing, typically using methods like Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) that treat whitespace as a fixed semantic boundary. This design is inherently limited, as many meaningful concepts---including multiword expressions and the structured environments of formal languages like LaTeX---frequently span across whitespaces. While recent superword tokenization methods attempt to address this by relaxing whitespace constraints, they often rely on greedy frequency-driven merging that fails to account for token length or the specific needs of underrepresented domain-specific languages. In this paper, we introduce Adaptive Frequency Threshold Byte Pair Encoding (AdaBPE), a new tokenization method that leverages an adaptive frequent-pattern mining approach. AdaBPE features a twofold dynamicity: it adapts minimum frequency thresholds based on both the length of a candidate token, to prevent favoring frequent short patterns, and its type, to distinguish between general and formal language patterns, using LaTeX as case in point. This allows the model to efficiently allocate vocabulary capacity to domain-specific notations, such as LaTeX, even when they represent a small fraction of the training data. We evaluate AdaBPE across five datasets spanning LaTeX and natural language, showing consistent gains in encoding efficiency and downstream language-model performance on domain-specific content without compromising general-language performance.
#03Oct 23, 2026
cs.LG
PoKER: A Probability of Kill Estimation Rate Model for Air-to-Air Missiles Using Machine Learning on Stochastic Targets
Joao P. A. Dantas, Andre N. Costa, Diego Geraldo and 2 more
This work introduces PoKER, a novel probabilistic model engineered to optimize missile launch effectiveness in air-to-air scenarios, specifically within Beyond Visual Range (BVR) air combat. Unlike conventional Weapon Engagement Zone (WEZ) models that delineate zones based on static distances such as maximum, minimum, and no-escape ranges, PoKER applies machine learning to predict kill probabilities more accurately by integrating the stochastic behaviors of targets and missile miss distances. This model dynamically evaluates target behavior, greatly expanding the predictive capabilities of engagement analysis. By factoring in elements such as warhead lethality, target and shooter orientations, and the specific conditions of engagement, PoKER provides important insights into engagement dynamics and quantifies success probabilities. Consequently, it can potentially be an important tool for BVR air combat pilots, improving operational decision-making within this specialized combat domain.
#04Oct 23, 2026
cs.LG
Interpretable sparse fine-tuning with TopKLoRA enables faithful circuit discovery
Marek Masiak, Andrzej Szablewski, Nicola Cancedda and 1 more
Fine-tuning on datasets of unknown origin can create a backdoor in the trained model when the data includes poisoned examples. Difficult to localise and remove, backdoors can persist through safety training. While parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods capture the full parameter changes introduced during training, they are not easily interpretable. We present the full method of TopKLoRA, extending the preliminary proposal of Masiak et al. (2025), an interpretable-by-design LoRA variant in which only the $k$ largest adapter latents are active at each token. Unlike SAEs, TopKLoRA is trained purely on downstream loss, where optimisation pressure incentivises learning functionally causal latents. We demonstrate this sparse LoRA adapter in a sleeper-agent backdoor case study where we create model organisms by fine-tuning gemma-2-2b, Qwen2.5-1.5B, and Qwen2.5-7B on a poisoned instruction-following dataset. For each organism, we identify and ablate a circuit that is both necessary and sufficient to implement the backdoor. Furthermore, our new fine-tuning method produces sparse circuits that are up to an order of magnitude smaller than a dense LoRA baseline, allowing surgical ablation of the malicious capability without sacrificing instruction-following performance. Finally, we propose a technique to construct model organisms with localised circuits using TopKLoRA latents and gradient-routing, which we use to validate the findings of our circuit search algorithm. We consider these findings as a step toward interpretable-by-design architectures that provide faithful units of analysis without compromising model performance. We share our code: https://github.com/interpretable-finetuning/TopKLoRA.
#05Oct 23, 2026
cs.LG
Neural LoFi with Backward Coupling: A Spectral Theory of Cross-Layer Feature Learning
Yatin Dandi, Matteo Vilucchio, Hugo Tabanelli and 1 more
During joint training, backpropagation allows later layers to reshape earlier representations, a feedback mechanism absent from purely layer-wise learning. We extend Neural Low-Degree Filtering (Neural LoFi), a recently proposed layer-wise spectral surrogate for feature learning, to capture this interaction. Starting from the exact backpropagation gradients, we derive a local coupling between a neuron's incoming weights and its corresponding next-layer column. In a controlled small-initialization regime with smooth activations and fixed surroundings, these dynamics amplify singular modes of a cross-layer correlation operator. Each growing mode pairs an earlier feature with an upper-layer response through shared neuron coefficients. This motivates a backward-coupling algorithm in which upper-layer sensitivities generate sample-dependent effective labels for earlier spectral steps, while corrected features refine upward transmission. A function-space variational principle characterizes the selected feature-response pairs by maximizing the label correlation of their product under kernel-norm constraints. For three-layer networks, we derive self-consistent continuous-time dynamics for the filtered hidden-layer features, the activation kernels, and the network output under the proposed backward coupling. In a hierarchical multi-index model, we establish a feature-recovery separation: backward coupling recovers lower-layer directions invisible to the original forward label-weighted statistic. The linear specialization recovers residual-dependent singular-mode dynamics, while paired modes provide a dynamical mechanism for linked low-rank covariance components consistent with the rainbow-network picture. Experiments with fully connected and convolutional networks on binary CIFAR-10 show improved accuracy over forward Neural LoFi at matched widths.