#01Aug 31, 2026
cs.LG
A Human-in-the-Loop Autonomous Agent for Industry Time Series Forecasting
Xiaoyu Tao, Mingyue Cheng, Ze Guo and 4 more
Real-world time-series forecasting is rarely a one-shot model invocation: practitioners must formulate tasks, connect data and models, incorporate domain expertise, assess prediction plausibility, and communicate uncertainty. Specialized forecasting models provide strong numerical predictions but usually operate in fixed pipelines, while general-purpose large language model (LLM) agents often lack forecasting-specific checks, constraints, and stopping rules. We present CastClaw, a human-in-the-loop autonomous forecasting system built through forecasting-oriented harness engineering. CastClaw connects data, specialized models, analytical tools, user input, and a versioned execution record in one runtime. Users specify the target, horizon, constraints, and hypotheses in natural language. Starting from a supplied or model-generated forecast, CastClaw checks temporal patterns and user constraints; when evidence is missing, it retrieves context, runs an analysis or another model, or asks the user. It then keeps, revises, or escalates the result under explicit stopping conditions. The output contains the final forecast and an execution report recording inputs, evidence, actions, and revisions. In this five-dataset electricity-price setting, CastClaw reports the lowest point-estimate MSE and MAE among 16 baselines. A Nord Pool case demonstrates the inspectable workflow. CastClaw was also validated offline on provincial electricity-load data from North China covering January--June 2026.
#02Aug 31, 2026
cs.LG
Universal Transformers for Circuit Computations: Perfect Length Generalization in Tiny Transformers
Takuya Ito, Ruchir Puri, Murray Campbell and 1 more
Learning generalizable algorithmic computations remains a challenge for neural networks, as reflected in persistent failures on compositional and length generalization benchmarks. We present a provably correct, transformer parameterization (with only 280 learnable parameters for Boolean algebra tasks) capable of learning and evaluating problems of any depth or length. We assume inputs are fully parenthesized, well-formed expressions. Our approach conceptualizes algorithmic tasks as circuit models embedded in transformers, enabling depth-1 circuit reduction in a single forward pass. To achieve depth generalization, we introduce a positional encoding that tracks each gate's depth within the circuit, enabling the model to identify evaluable subexpressions at each iteration via masked hard attention, with $O(n)$ per-iteration complexity via linear attention. Combined with an autonomous halting criterion, the model terminates after $d$ iterations for problems of depth $d$, yielding $O(n \cdot d)$ total complexity. We show that training on shallow problem instances (depth 1 and depth 2) effectively recovers interpretable parameters that {\em snap} into place, resulting in exact length generalization. Though we establish that our construction provably evaluates Boolean expressions -- a universal symbolic computation -- of arbitrary length perfectly, in other experiments we also demonstrate that our transformer variant can learn and generalize perfectly (100% accuracy) on other common length generalization benchmarks, including modular arithmetic and ListOps.
#03Aug 31, 2026
stat.ML
Learning the Geometry of Admissible Hypotheses through Inductive Bias in Training Distributions
James Crowley, Faez Ahmed, Anton van Beek
Scientific discovery often requires reasoning over competing hypotheses that are consistent with experimental observations. For mixed-variable and combinatorial hypothesis spaces, however, constructing probabilistic representations remains challenging because both the active model components and their associated parameters are unknown. In this work, we present a framework for learning continuous latent representations of admissible partial differential equations (PDEs) by embedding a scientific inductive bias directly into the training distribution. Progressively richer structural principles (e.g., sparsity, logical dependencies, common PDE families, and physical admissibility) are used to generate a structured distribution of hypotheses from which a gated variational autoencoder learns a continuous latent manifold. Experimental results show that the resulting 11-dimensional representation accurately reconstructs a broad collection of representative PDEs, while exhibiting smooth geometric transitions both within and across equation families. Through an ablation study we further demonstrate that introducing scientific principles reduces both structural misclassifications of equation forms and parameter estimation errors when reconstructing a representative benchmark set of admissible partial differential equations. These results show that embedding a scientific inductive bias in the training distribution enables the learning of compact and geometrically meaningful hypothesis manifolds, providing a principled foundation for future inference over competing governing equations.
#04Aug 31, 2026
cs.LG
Sparse Competition during Training For the Emergence of Specialized Modules
Baptiste Rossigneux, Karim Haroun
Modularity in deep neural networks has been proposed as a means of improving both interpretability and training by promoting disentangled representations and reducing redundancy. In this work, we study the emergence of modular structure through competition dynamics between groups of neurons during training. We introduce a method that (i) maintains near-baseline accuracy, (ii) induces usage-based modularity by sparsely routing inputs to neuron groups, and (iii) encourages specialization of these modules, such that their activations are correlated with input classes. We evaluate the proposed approach on ImageNet-100 and CIFAR-100 and show that with it, specialized modules emerge without module-level supervision. These modules capture a meaningful high-level structure in the data, with individual modules responding to semantic categories (e.g., dogs or vehicles). We also study the emergence of a hierarchical partition of sub-tasks depending on the number of modules. Our results suggest that competitive dynamics can serve as a simple mechanism for inducing functional modularity in standard architectures.
#05Aug 31, 2026
cs.LG
Sharp Approximation Rates for Neural Networks with Affine Latent Parameterizations
Shijun Zhang
Many parameter-efficient methods generate the parameters of a large neural network from a low-dimensional latent representation. Given an architecture $Φ$ with $P_Φ$ parameter slots, we write $\boldsymbolθ_f=\mathcal{G}(\boldsymbolξ_f)$, where $\mathcal{G}\colon\mathbb{R}^M\to\mathbb{R}^{P_Φ}$ is a parameter generator and $\boldsymbolξ_f\in\mathbb{R}^M$ is a latent representation of the target function $f$. The architecture $Φ$ and the generator $\mathcal{G}$ are shared across the entire target class, while each target $f$ is represented by its own latent vector $\boldsymbolξ_f$, with $Φ_{\mathcal{G}(\boldsymbolξ_f)}$ approximating $f$. This framework encompasses hypernetworks, low-dimensional parameterizations, parameter-efficient adaptation, and model compression. Understanding the tradeoff between the latent dimension $M$ and the network budget $P$ is therefore fundamental to characterizing the expressive efficiency of these methods. We study this tradeoff for affine generators and fully connected ReLU architectures. More precisely, optimizing jointly over architectures $Φ$ satisfying $P_Φ\leq P$ and affine generators $\mathcal{G}:\mathbb{R}^M\to \mathbb{R}^{P_Φ}$, we prove that the optimal worst-case uniform approximation error over the unit ball of $α$-Hölder functions on $[0,1]^d$, where $0<α\leq1$, has the sharp order $ \bigl(P\min\{M,P\}\bigr)^{-α/d}. $ In particular, our result shows that even a fixed-dimensional latent space suffices to achieve vanishing approximation error as the network budget increases.