arXiv subjects

Kris Atallah

Publications and source records attributed to Kris Atallah.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

AircraftWitness: How Often Aircraft Can Locate Recordings

Aircraft overhead can reveal where an outdoor recording was made. Propellers and rotors leave Doppler curves in audio, and public ADS-B archives log equipped aircraft. We measure how often, blind and against chance. Our main test was registered and timestamped before any audio, and its two amendments came before any answer was read. It covers 24 new places, with the recorders' own clocks, a 300 s slack and a 20 km square. The best of three locators places clear-pass clips within 1 km at 4 places, where a uniform guess predicts 0.57 (p = 0.0065 after correcting for the pick). With the wrong time or swapped audio it places none. The other two hit 1 and 2. On 360 clips from 7 places of a GPS-timed network, two locators place 6% and 8% within 1 km. By place, a unit chosen after that run, they hit 4 and 5 of 7 where a uniform guess predicts 2.3. On 1,600 random public recordings, picked and cut without the truth in a time-bounded run, the three locators answer at most 20 times and place at most 2. We release AircraftWitness, a benchmark, and pass labels for 11.7 million recordings.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2026

LionVote: Per-Layer Learning Rate Adaptation for Lion

Per-layer diagnostics reveal that, at the prescribed learning rate, Lion's effective scale is 2.6-2.8x too high for attention and MLP parameters and ~2x too high for normalization layers on ViT-Tiny/CIFAR-100; this 32% cross-layer-type disparity cannot be reproduced by a single global rate. The measurement comes from LionVote, a per-layer learning rate mechanism in which each parameter tensor maintains a compound level, a persistent integer updated every c epochs by two diagnostics (gradient direction stability and momentum health) resolved by a validation loss tiebreaker. Voting thresholds derive from geometric identities, the EMA time constant, and a noise-floor estimate; cadence is bounded structurally and selected by ablation. On ViT-Tiny/CIFAR-100, LionVote achieves 69.7% top-1 accuracy vs. Lion's 69.0% (p < 0.02, Welch's t-test) and AdamW's 68.8%. Per-layer adaptation value depends on both architectural heterogeneity and task; on uniform CNN architectures tuned SGD with cosine annealing remains dominant, and on ViT architectures gains are task-dependent.

cs.LG↗