Searcharxiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Trung Le

Publications and source records attributed to Trung Le.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources
arXiv2026

Mitigating Semantic Collapse in Generative Personalization with Test-Time Embedding Adjustment

In this paper, we investigate the semantic collapsing problem in generative personalization, an under-explored topic where the learned visual concept ($V$) gradually shifts from its original textual meaning and comes to dominate other concepts in multi-concept input prompts. This issue not only reduces the semantic richness of complex input prompts like "a photo of $V$ wearing glasses and playing guitar" into simpler, less contextually rich forms such as "a photo of $V$" but also leads to simplified output images that fail to capture the intended concept. We identify the root cause as unconstrained optimisation, which allows the learned embedding $V$ to drift arbitrarily in the embedding space, both in direction and magnitude. To address this, we propose a simple yet effective training-free method that adjusts the magnitude and direction of pre-trained embedding at inference time, effectively mitigating the semantic collapsing problem. Our method is broadly applicable across different personalization methods and demonstrates significant improvements in text-image alignment in diverse use cases. Our code is anonymously published at https://github.com/tuananhbui89/Embedding-Adjustment

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

DWA-KD: Dual-Space Weighting and Time-Warped Alignment for Cross-Tokenizer Knowledge Distillation

Knowledge Distillation (KD) has emerged as a crucial technique for compressing Large Language Models (LLMs). Although existing cross-tokenizer KD methods have made notable progress, their effectiveness remains constrained by suboptimal alignment across sequence and vocabulary levels. To address these limitations, we introduce Dual-Space Weighting and Time-Warped Alignment (DWA-KD), a novel cross-tokenizer distillation framework that enhances token-wise distillation through dual-space entropy-based weighting and achieves precise sequence-level alignment by leveraging both lexical and semantic information. At the token level, DWA-KD maps teacher representations into the student space and vice versa, performing dual-space KD via Kullback-Leibler divergence (KL). The process is modulated by dual-space weights that up-weight tokens where the student is uncertain and the teacher is confident, thereby focusing learning on informative tokens rather than treating all positions equally. At the sequence level, DWA-KD applies Soft Dynamic Time Warping (Soft-DTW) to both the embedding and final hidden-state layers, enabling robust alignment of lexical and contextual semantics between teacher and student sequences. Extensive experiments across diverse NLP benchmarks demonstrate that DWA-KD outperforms state-of-the-art KD baselines, while ablation studies confirm the complementary contributions of entropy-based token weighting and embedding and final hidden state layer Soft-DTW alignment.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

On the Mechanisms of Collaborative Learning in VAE Recommenders

Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) are a powerful alternative to matrix factorization for recommendation. A common technique in VAE-based collaborative filtering (CF) consists in applying binary input masking to user interaction vectors, which improves performance but remains underexplored theoretically. In this work, we analyze how collaboration arises in VAE-based CF and show it is governed by \emph{latent proximity}: we derive a latent sharing radius that informs when an SGD update on one user strictly reduces the loss on another user, with influence decaying as the latent Wasserstein distance increases. We further study the induced geometry: with clean inputs, VAE-based CF primarily exploits \emph{local} collaboration between input-similar users and under-utilizes \emph{global} collaboration between far-but-related users. We compare two mechanisms that encourage \emph{global} mixing and characterize their trade-offs: \ding{172} $β$-KL regularization directly tightens the information bottleneck, promoting posterior overlap but risking representational collapse if too large; \ding{173} input masking induces stochastic \emph{geometric} contractions and expansions, which can bring distant users onto the same latent neighborhood but also introduce neighborhood drift. To preserve user identity while enabling global consistency, we propose an anchor regularizer that aligns user posteriors with item embeddings, stabilizing users under masking and facilitating signal sharing across related items. Our analyses are validated on the Netflix, MovieLens-20M, and Million Song datasets. We also successfully deployed our proposed algorithm on an Amazon streaming platform following a successful online experiment.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

CTPD: Cross Tokenizer Preference Distillation

While knowledge distillation has seen widespread use in pre-training and instruction tuning, its application to aligning language models with human preferences remains underexplored, particularly in the more realistic cross-tokenizer setting. The incompatibility of tokenization schemes between teacher and student models has largely prevented fine-grained, white-box distillation of preference information. To address this gap, we propose Cross-Tokenizer Preference Distillation (CTPD), the first unified framework for transferring human-aligned behavior between models with heterogeneous tokenizers. CTPD introduces three key innovations: (1) Aligned Span Projection, which maps teacher and student tokens to shared character-level spans for precise supervision transfer; (2) a cross-tokenizer adaptation of Token-level Importance Sampling (TIS-DPO) for improved credit assignment; and (3) a Teacher-Anchored Reference, allowing the student to directly leverage the teacher's preferences in a DPO-style objective. Our theoretical analysis grounds CTPD in importance sampling, and experiments across multiple benchmarks confirm its effectiveness, with significant performance gains over existing methods. These results establish CTPD as a practical and general solution for preference distillation across diverse tokenization schemes, opening the door to more accessible and efficient alignment of language models.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2025

Layer-Wise High-Impact Parameter Ratio Optimization in Post-Training Quantization for Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced natural language processing, but their massive parameter counts create substantial computational and memory challenges during deployment. Post-training quantization (PTQ) has emerged as a promising approach to mitigate these challenges with minimal overhead. While existing PTQ methods can effectively quantize LLMs, they experience substantial accuracy loss at extremely low bit-widths, primarily due to high-impact parameters that significantly influence quantization performance. Several approaches address these issues by identifying and retaining the high-impact parameters in FP16 format. However, they apply fixed ratios of high-impact parameters across all layers, overlooking layer-wise sensitivity variations. In this paper, we propose a quadratic optimization framework that determines layer-specific ratios of high-impact parameters while considering inter-layer dependencies. We quantize high-impact parameters to moderate bit-widths, which often result in negligible performance degradation in quantized LLMs, while the remaining parameters can be quantized to extremely low bit-widths. Under the same resource-constrained budget, this allows for preserving more high-impact parameters than methods that keep selecting a few in FP16 format. Additionally, the proposed framework allows us to leverage an advanced quantization method that often requires extensive learnable parameters solely for high-impact parameters, while applying a computationally efficient method to the rest. Our approach achieves an effective balance between computational efficiency and model accuracy while maintaining high performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2025

Adaptive Layer-Wise Transformations for Post-Training Quantization of Large Language Models

Large language models require significant computational resources for deployment, making quantization essential for practical applications. However, the main obstacle to effective quantization lies in systematic outliers in activations and weights, which cause substantial LLM performance degradation, especially at low-bit settings. While existing transformation-based methods like affine and rotation transformations successfully mitigate outliers, they apply the homogeneous transformation setting, i.e., using the same transformation types across all layers, ignoring the heterogeneous distribution characteristics within LLMs. In this paper, we propose an adaptive transformation selection framework that systematically determines optimal transformations on a per-layer basis. To this end, we first formulate transformation selection as a differentiable optimization problem to achieve the accurate transformation type for each layer. However, searching for optimal layer-wise transformations for every model is computationally expensive. To this end, we establish the connection between weight distribution kurtosis and accurate transformation type. Specifically, we propose an outlier-guided layer selection method using robust $z$-score normalization that achieves comparable performance to differentiable search with significantly reduced overhead. Comprehensive experiments on LLaMA family models demonstrate that our adaptive approach consistently outperforms the widely-used fixed transformation settings. For example, our method achieves an improvement of up to 4.58 perplexity points and a 2.11% gain in average six-task zero-shot accuracy under aggressive W3A3K2V2 quantization settings for the LLaMA-3-8B model compared to the current best existing method, FlatQuant, demonstrating the necessity of heterogeneous transformation selection for optimal LLM quantization.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2025

Generalization Bounds for Robust Contrastive Learning: From Theory to Practice

Contrastive Learning first extracts features from unlabeled data, followed by linear probing with labeled data. Adversarial Contrastive Learning (ACL) integrates Adversarial Training into the first phase to enhance feature robustness against attacks in the probing phase. While ACL has shown strong empirical results, its theoretical understanding remains limited. Furthermore, while a fair amount of theoretical works analyze how the unsupervised loss can support the supervised loss in the probing phase, none has examined its role to the robust supervised loss. To fill this gap, our work develops rigorous theories to identify which components in the unsupervised training can help improve the robust supervised loss. Specifically, besides the adversarial contrastive loss, we reveal that the benign one, along with a global divergence between benign and adversarial examples can also improve robustness. Proper experiments are conducted to justify our findings.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2025

XTRA: Cross-Lingual Topic Modeling with Topic and Representation Alignments

Cross-lingual topic modeling aims to uncover shared semantic themes across languages. Several methods have been proposed to address this problem, leveraging both traditional and neural approaches. While previous methods have achieved some improvements in topic diversity, they often struggle to ensure high topic coherence and consistent alignment across languages. We propose XTRA (Cross-Lingual Topic Modeling with Topic and Representation Alignments), a novel framework that unifies Bag-of-Words modeling with multilingual embeddings. XTRA introduces two core components: (1) representation alignment, aligning document-topic distributions via contrastive learning in a shared semantic space; and (2) topic alignment, projecting topic-word distributions into the same space to enforce crosslingual consistency. This dual mechanism enables XTRA to learn topics that are interpretable (coherent and diverse) and well-aligned across languages. Experiments on multilingual corpora confirm that XTRA significantly outperforms strong baselines in topic coherence, diversity, and alignment quality. Code and reproducible scripts are available at https: //github.com/tienphat140205/XTRA.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2025

Beyond Losses Reweighting: Empowering Multi-Task Learning via the Generalization Perspective

Multi-task learning (MTL) trains deep neural networks to optimize several objectives simultaneously using a shared backbone, which leads to reduced computational costs, improved data efficiency, and enhanced performance through cross-task knowledge sharing. Although recent gradient manipulation techniques aim to find a common descent direction that benefits all tasks, conventional empirical loss minimization still leaves models vulnerable to overfitting and gradient conflicts. To address this, we introduce a novel MTL framework that leverages weight perturbation to regulate gradient norms, thus improving generalization. By adaptively modulating weight perturbations, our approach harmonizes task-specific gradients, reducing conflicts and encouraging more robust learning across tasks. Theoretical insights reveal that controlling the gradient norm through weight perturbation directly contributes to better generalization. Extensive experiments across diverse applications demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing gradient-based MTL techniques in terms of task performance and overall model robustness.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2025

SPINT: Spatial Permutation-Invariant Neural Transformer for Consistent Intracortical Motor Decoding

Intracortical Brain-Computer Interfaces (iBCI) aim to decode behavior from neural population activity, enabling individuals with motor impairments to regain motor functions and communication abilities. A key challenge in long-term iBCI is the nonstationarity of neural recordings, where the composition and tuning profiles of the recorded populations are unstable across recording sessions. Existing methods attempt to address this issue by explicit alignment techniques; however, they rely on fixed neural identities and require test-time labels or parameter updates, limiting their generalization across sessions and imposing additional computational burden during deployment. In this work, we introduce SPINT - a Spatial Permutation-Invariant Neural Transformer framework for behavioral decoding that operates directly on unordered sets of neural units. Central to our approach is a novel context-dependent positional embedding scheme that dynamically infers unit-specific identities, enabling flexible generalization across recording sessions. SPINT supports inference on variable-size populations and allows few-shot, gradient-free adaptation using a small amount of unlabeled data from the test session. To further promote model robustness to population variability, we introduce dynamic channel dropout, a regularization method for iBCI that simulates shifts in population composition during training. We evaluate SPINT on three multi-session datasets from the FALCON Benchmark, covering continuous motor decoding tasks in human and non-human primates. SPINT demonstrates robust cross-session generalization, outperforming existing zero-shot and few-shot unsupervised baselines while eliminating the need for test-time alignment and fine-tuning. Our work contributes an initial step toward a robust and scalable neural decoding framework for long-term iBCI applications.

q-bio.NC↗
arXiv2025

Multilayer GNN for Predictive Maintenance and Clustering in Power Grids

Unplanned power outages cost the US economy over $150 billion annually, partly due to predictive maintenance (PdM) models that overlook spatial, temporal, and causal dependencies in grid failures. This study introduces a multilayer Graph Neural Network (GNN) framework to enhance PdM and enable resilience-based substation clustering. Using seven years of incident data from Oklahoma Gas & Electric (292,830 records across 347 substations), the framework integrates Graph Attention Networks (spatial), Graph Convolutional Networks (temporal), and Graph Isomorphism Networks (causal), fused through attention-weighted embeddings. Our model achieves a 30-day F1-score of 0.8935 +/- 0.0258, outperforming XGBoost and Random Forest by 3.2% and 2.7%, and single-layer GNNs by 10 to 15 percent. Removing the causal layer drops performance to 0.7354 +/- 0.0418. For resilience analysis, HDBSCAN clustering on HierarchicalRiskGNN embeddings identifies eight operational risk groups. The highest-risk cluster (Cluster 5, 44 substations) shows 388.4 incidents/year and 602.6-minute recovery time, while low-risk groups report fewer than 62 incidents/year. ANOVA (p < 0.0001) confirms significant inter-cluster separation. Our clustering outperforms K-Means and Spectral Clustering with a Silhouette Score of 0.626 and Davies-Bouldin index of 0.527. This work supports proactive grid management through improved failure prediction and risk-aware substation clustering.

eess.SY↗
arXiv2025

PromptDSI: Prompt-based Rehearsal-free Continual Learning for Document Retrieval

Differentiable Search Index (DSI) utilizes pre-trained language models to perform indexing and document retrieval via end-to-end learning without relying on external indexes. However, DSI requires full re-training to index new documents, causing significant computational inefficiencies. Continual learning (CL) offers a solution by enabling the model to incrementally update without full re-training. Existing CL solutions in document retrieval rely on memory buffers or generative models for rehearsal, which is infeasible when accessing previous training data is restricted due to privacy concerns. To this end, we introduce PromptDSI, a prompt-based, rehearsal-free continual learning approach for document retrieval. PromptDSI follows the Prompt-based Continual Learning (PCL) framework, using learnable prompts to efficiently index new documents without accessing previous documents or queries. To improve retrieval latency, we remove the initial forward pass of PCL, which otherwise greatly increases training and inference time, with a negligible trade-off in performance. Additionally, we introduce a novel topic-aware prompt pool that employs neural topic embeddings as fixed keys, eliminating the instability of prompt key optimization while maintaining competitive performance with existing PCL prompt pools. In a challenging rehearsal-free continual learning setup, we demonstrate that PromptDSI variants outperform rehearsal-based baselines, match the strong cache-based baseline in mitigating forgetting, and significantly improving retrieval performance on new corpora.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2025

Preserving Clusters in Prompt Learning for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Recent approaches leveraging multi-modal pre-trained models like CLIP for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) have shown significant promise in bridging domain gaps and improving generalization by utilizing rich semantic knowledge and robust visual representations learned through extensive pre-training on diverse image-text datasets. While these methods achieve state-of-the-art performance across benchmarks, much of the improvement stems from base pseudo-labels (CLIP zero-shot predictions) and self-training mechanisms. Thus, the training mechanism exhibits a key limitation wherein the visual embedding distribution in target domains can deviate from the visual embedding distribution in the pre-trained model, leading to misguided signals from class descriptions. This work introduces a fresh solution to reinforce these pseudo-labels and facilitate target-prompt learning, by exploiting the geometry of visual and text embeddings - an aspect that is overlooked by existing methods. We first propose to directly leverage the reference predictions (from source prompts) based on the relationship between source and target visual embeddings. We later show that there is a strong clustering behavior observed between visual and text embeddings in pre-trained multi-modal models. Building on optimal transport theory, we transform this insight into a novel strategy to enforce the clustering property in text embeddings, further enhancing the alignment in the target domain. Our experiments and ablation studies validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, demonstrating superior performance and improved quality of target prompts in terms of representation.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2025

Sharpness-Aware Teleportation on Riemannian Manifolds

Recent studies highlight the effectiveness of flat minima in enhancing generalization, with sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) achieving state-of-the-art performance. Additionally, insights into the intrinsic geometry of the loss landscape have shown promise for improving model generalization. Building on these advancements, we introduce a novel sharpness-aware, geometry-aware teleportation mechanism to further enhance robustness and generalization. The core innovation of our approach is to decompose each iteration into a teleportation step within a local orbit and a sharpness-aware step that transitions between different orbits, leveraging the Riemannian quotient manifold. Our approach is grounded in a theoretical framework that analyzes the generalization gap between population loss and worst-case empirical loss within the context of Riemannian manifolds. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, we evaluate and compare our algorithm on diverse vision benchmarks with various datasets and Riemannian manifolds.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2025

Improving Generalization with Flat Hilbert Bayesian Inference

We introduce Flat Hilbert Bayesian Inference (FHBI), an algorithm designed to enhance generalization in Bayesian inference. Our approach involves an iterative two-step procedure with an adversarial functional perturbation step and a functional descent step within a reproducing kernel Hilbert space. This methodology is supported by a theoretical analysis that extends previous findings on generalization ability from finite-dimensional Euclidean spaces to infinite-dimensional functional spaces. To evaluate the effectiveness of FHBI, we conduct comprehensive comparisons against nine baseline methods on the \texttt{VTAB-1K} benchmark, which encompasses 19 diverse datasets across various domains with diverse semantics. Empirical results demonstrate that FHBI consistently outperforms the baselines by notable margins, highlighting its practical efficacy.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2025

RepLoRA: Reparameterizing Low-Rank Adaptation via the Perspective of Mixture of Experts

Low-rank Adaptation (LoRA) has emerged as a powerful method for fine-tuning large-scale foundation models. Despite its popularity, the theoretical understanding of LoRA has remained limited. This paper presents a theoretical analysis of LoRA by examining its connection to the Mixture of Experts models. Under this framework, we show that simple reparameterizations of the LoRA matrices can notably accelerate the low-rank matrix estimation process. In particular, we prove that reparameterization can reduce the data needed to achieve a desired estimation error from an exponential to a polynomial scale. Motivated by this insight, we propose Reparameterized Low-Rank Adaptation (RepLoRA), which incorporates lightweight MLPs to reparameterize the LoRA matrices. Extensive experiments across multiple domains demonstrate that RepLoRA consistently outperforms vanilla LoRA. Notably, with limited data, RepLoRA surpasses LoRA by a margin of up to 40.0% and achieves LoRA's performance with only 30.0% of the training data, highlighting both the theoretical and empirical robustness of our PEFT method.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2025

Promoting Ensemble Diversity with Interactive Bayesian Distributional Robustness for Fine-tuning Foundation Models

We introduce Interactive Bayesian Distributional Robustness (IBDR), a novel Bayesian inference framework that allows modeling the interactions between particles, thereby enhancing ensemble quality through increased particle diversity. IBDR is grounded in a generalized theoretical framework that connects the distributional population loss with the approximate posterior, motivating a practical dual optimization procedure that enforces distributional robustness while fostering particle diversity. We evaluate IBDR's performance against various baseline methods using the VTAB-1K benchmark and the common reasoning language task. The results consistently show that IBDR outperforms these baselines, underscoring its effectiveness in real-world applications.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2025

Erasing Undesirable Concepts in Diffusion Models with Adversarial Preservation

Diffusion models excel at generating visually striking content from text but can inadvertently produce undesirable or harmful content when trained on unfiltered internet data. A practical solution is to selectively removing target concepts from the model, but this may impact the remaining concepts. Prior approaches have tried to balance this by introducing a loss term to preserve neutral content or a regularization term to minimize changes in the model parameters, yet resolving this trade-off remains challenging. In this work, we propose to identify and preserving concepts most affected by parameter changes, termed as \textit{adversarial concepts}. This approach ensures stable erasure with minimal impact on the other concepts. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method using the Stable Diffusion model, showing that it outperforms state-of-the-art erasure methods in eliminating unwanted content while maintaining the integrity of other unrelated elements. Our code is available at https://github.com/tuananhbui89/Erasing-Adversarial-Preservation.

cs.LG↗