Skip to content

Category

data science

2,430 papers

#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

Simulation-Free Learning of Population Dynamics with Wasserstein Lagrangian Residuals

The dynamics of cells, organisms, and fluids are often modeled as probability distributions evolving over time. Reconstructing and extrapolating this evolution from unpaired snapshots requires assumptions about the underlying process. Wasserstein gradient flows are a common choice, but they cannot describe conservative...

F. Sergeev, Markus Heinonen, Daniel Waxman et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Planning to Learn

Policy-gradient methods are central to modern reinforcement learning, including LLM post-training. When they struggle, the usual suspects are exploration, credit assignment and action-sampling noise. Classification has none of them. A classifier is a policy whose expected reward, its \emph{expected accuracy}, is the pr...

Ian Osband · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

When May a Bandit Leave Its Anchor? E-Process-Authorized Thompson Sampling under Non-stationarity

Stationarity rewards memory, but after a change the same history can mislead. We ask when forgetting should be permitted. E-process-authorized Thompson sampling (e-ATS) gives each arm full-history and discounted Beta states. An anytime-valid e-process first authorizes the discounted state, then a reversible relevance s...

Mayand Gulati, Kerong Wang, WeiChen Au · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

Broken scale symmetries in undercomplete linear autoencoders

Neural network loss landscapes have many symmetries, which are preserved by gradient flow but broken by finite-stepsize stochastic gradient descent (SGD). A canonical example of such a symmetry is scale in homogeneous networks: one can scale up the parameters in one layer and down in the next without changing the netwo...

Farhad Pashakhanloo, Jacob A. Zavatone-Veth · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Below what training size do deep tabular generators stop beating trivial baselines? A preregistered benchmark on a size ladder of clinical and standard datasets

Deep tabular generative models are benchmarked on datasets with tens of thousands of rows; clinical datasets have hundreds. We preregistered and ran a size-ladder benchmark to find where the two regimes diverge: 8 public datasets subsampled from 200 to 20,000 training rows, seven generators (independent marginals, Gaus...

Shivam Shrivastava · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

Muon Learns Facts Better: Understanding the Role of Spectral Orthogonalization

The Muon optimizer applies spectral orthogonalization to matrix-valued updates and has shown strong performance in large-scale neural network training, yet the mechanisms of this transformation in feature learning remain poorly understood. In this work, we investigate this question through a tractable factual-recall mo...

Xu-Heng Li, Qi-Wei Di, Yuan Cao et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Oct 2026

Differential Privacy of Gradient Descent on Perturbed Objectives

Objective perturbation adds a random linear term to a regularized empirical risk and releases the exact perturbed minimizer. We study the finite computation obtained by releasing the $N$-th iterate of deterministic gradient descent on $w\mapsto F(w;S)+\langle z,w\rangle$, where $z\sim\mathcal N(0,\sigma^2I_d)$ is drawn...

Austin Watkins, Raman Arora · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

TRACE: A Reproducible Benchmark for Electricity Price Forecasting with Official Operational Text

Electricity price forecasting (EPF) supports scheduling, bidding, and risk management in electricity markets, yet existing benchmarks focus mainly on numerical inputs, leaving the forecasting value of forecast-time textual context insufficiently evaluated. We introduce TRACE, a reproducible benchmark of 7,300 zone--day...

Xinyi Yi, Moy Yuan, Ioannis Lestas · 0 citations
#machine learning Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Nearest-neighbour baselines for fingerprint prediction from MS/MS spectra under different assumptions

It has recently been shown that nearest-neighbour retrieval provides a strong baseline for molecular fingerprint prediction from MS/MS spectra, with several variants matching or outperforming current deep learning models (Khoo and Barzilay, 2026; Liu et al., 2026; Gupta et al., 2026). Importantly, "nearest neighbour" e...

Ling Min Serena Khoo · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Deep learning-based prediction of time-resolved adhesive forces in viscoelastic Hertzian contacts

Fast prediction of the response of adhesive soft viscoelastic contacts represents a current challenge in soft robotics and for gripping and manipulation tasks. Determining the complete time-resolved force trajectory requires full numerical simulations, whose computational cost is strongly parameter-dependent, making th...

Ali Maghami, Merten Stender, Michele Ciavarella et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

Beyond Global Divergences: A Local-Mass Perspective on Bayesian Inference

Global objectives, such as KL divergence and ELBO, are widely used in Bayesian inference for measuring distributional discrepancy. This paper studies distributional ``local-mass behaviours'' that are not directly captured by such global objectives. We introduce and use two mathematical tools: (1) Mass Index for recordi...

Hanli Xu, Fengxiang He, Sarat Moka · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Oct 2026

On the Limits of LLM Adaptability: Impact of Model-Internalized Priors on Annotation Task Performance

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for zero-shot annotation and LLM-as-a-judge tasks, yet their reliability hinges on how model-internalized priors interact with user-provided instructions. We investigate three dimensions of this interaction: (1) how an LLM's familiarity with data and task definitions r...

Etienne Casanova, Rafal Kocielnik, R. Michael Alvarez · 0 citations

From tech blogs

See all →
Microsoft Research Blog Oct 6, 2026

What AI gets wrong and what failure teaches us

Jennifer Neville did not want to go into computer science—but that’s exactly where she landed. Neville discusses the starts and stops that led to her professional sweet spot and her work identifying “surprising failures” making it hard for AI to handle complexity.  The post What AI gets wrong and what failure teaches us appeared first on Microsoft Research.

We use cookies to run the site and, with your consent, for analytics and to show ads. See our Cookie Policy.