Neural Field Thermal Tomography: A Differentiable Physics Framework for Non-Destructive Evaluation

The paper introduces Neural Field Thermal Tomography (NeFTY), a differentiable physics framework that parameterizes 3D material diffusivity as a continuous neural field optimized via a rigorous numerical solver to achieve high-resolution, quantitative reconstruction of subsurface defects from transient surface temperature measurements, overcoming the limitations of traditional 1D approximations and soft-constrained PINNs.

Tao Zhong, Yixun Hu, Dongzhe Zheng, Aditya Sood, Christine Allen-Blanchette2026-03-12🔬 cond-mat.mtrl-sci

XConv: Low-memory stochastic backpropagation for convolutional layers

XConv is a drop-in replacement for standard convolutional layers that significantly reduces memory usage during training by storing compressed activations and approximating weight gradients via randomized trace estimation, while maintaining performance comparable to exact gradient methods without imposing architectural constraints or requiring codebase modifications.

Anirudh Thatipelli, Jeffrey Sam, Mathias Louboutin, Ali Siahkoohi, Rongrong Wang, Felix J. Herrmann2026-03-11🤖 cs.LG

A Survey on Decentralized Federated Learning

This survey systematically reviews decentralized federated learning methods from 2018 to early 2026, categorizing them into traditional distributed and blockchain-based architectures, proposing a unified challenge-driven taxonomy, and outlining future research directions to address security, privacy, and system-level trade-offs in coordinator-free settings.

Edoardo Gabrielli, Anthony Di Pietro, Dario Fenoglio, Giovanni Pica, Gabriele Tolomei2026-03-11🤖 cs.LG

Polynomially Over-Parameterized Convolutional Neural Networks Contain Structured Strong Winning Lottery Tickets

This paper proves that randomly initialized, polynomially over-parameterized convolutional neural networks contain structured subnetworks capable of approximating smaller networks without training, by developing new mathematical tools to overcome previous limitations in analyzing the Strong Lottery Ticket Hypothesis for structured pruning.

Arthur da Cunha, Francesco d'Amore, Emanuele Natale2026-03-11🤖 cs.LG

Enhancing Computational Efficiency in Multiscale Systems Using Deep Learning of Coordinates and Flow Maps

This paper proposes a deep learning framework that jointly discovers optimal coordinates and flow maps to enable precise, computationally efficient time-stepping for multiscale systems, achieving state-of-the-art predictive accuracy with reduced costs on complex models like the Fitzhugh-Nagumo neuron and Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equations.

Asif Hamid, Danish Rafiq, Shahkar Ahmad Nahvi, Mohammad Abid Bazaz2026-03-11🤖 cs.LG

Sparse Variational Student-t Processes for Heavy-tailed Modeling

This paper introduces Sparse Variational Student-t Processes (SVTP), a scalable framework that extends sparse inducing point methods to Student-t processes via novel inference algorithms and natural gradient optimization, achieving superior robustness to outliers and heavy-tailed data with significantly faster convergence and lower prediction error compared to sparse Gaussian processes on large datasets.

Jian Xu, Delu Zeng, John Paisley2026-03-11🤖 cs.AI

Robust Training of Neural Networks at Arbitrary Precision and Sparsity

This paper introduces a unified framework that models quantization and sparsification as additive noise to derive a principled, noise-corrective gradient path, enabling the stable training of neural networks at arbitrary low precisions and sparsity levels without relying on heuristic estimators like the Straight-Through Estimator.

Chengxi Ye, Grace Chu, Yanfeng Liu, Yichi Zhang, Lukasz Lew, Li Zhang, Mark Sandler, Andrew Howard2026-03-11🤖 cs.AI

ARLBench: Flexible and Efficient Benchmarking for Hyperparameter Optimization in Reinforcement Learning

The paper introduces ARLBench, a flexible and efficient benchmark for hyperparameter optimization in reinforcement learning that utilizes a representative subset of tasks to enable cost-effective comparisons of diverse AutoRL methods and lower the barrier to entry for researchers with limited compute resources.

Jannis Becktepe, Julian Dierkes, Carolin Benjamins, Aditya Mohan, David Salinas, Raghu Rajan, Frank Hutter, Holger Hoos, Marius Lindauer, Theresa Eimer2026-03-11🤖 cs.LG

DRUPI: Dataset Reduction Using Privileged Information

The paper introduces DRUPI (Dataset Condensation using Privileged Information), a framework that enhances dataset condensation by synthesizing auxiliary privileged information, such as feature or attention labels, alongside reduced data to significantly improve model training performance across various benchmarks.

Shaobo Wang, Youxin Jiang, Tianle Niu, Yantai Yang, Ruiji Zhang, Shuhao Hu, Shuaiyu Zhang, Chenghao Sun, Weiya Li, Conghui He, Xuming Hu, Linfeng Zhang2026-03-11🤖 cs.AI

Unsupervised Representation Learning from Sparse Transformation Analysis

This paper proposes an unsupervised representation learning framework that factorizes latent variable transformations into sparse rotational and potential flow fields, enabling the model to learn disentangled representations based on independent transformation primitives while achieving state-of-the-art performance in data likelihood and equivariance on sequence data.

Yue Song, Thomas Anderson Keller, Yisong Yue, Pietro Perona, Max Welling2026-03-11🤖 cs.LG

Adaptive and Stratified Subsampling for High-Dimensional Robust Estimation

This paper introduces Adaptive Importance Sampling and Stratified Subsampling estimators that achieve minimax-optimal rates for robust high-dimensional sparse regression under heavy-tailed noise, contamination, and temporal dependence, while also providing fully specified de-biasing procedures for valid confidence intervals and demonstrating superior empirical performance over uniform subsampling.

Prateek Mittal, Joohi Chauhan2026-03-11🤖 cs.LG

Scalable Message Passing Neural Networks: No Need for Attention in Large Graph Representation Learning

The paper introduces Scalable Message Passing Neural Networks (SMPNNs), a deep Graph Neural Network architecture that replaces computationally expensive attention mechanisms with standard convolutional message passing within a Pre-Layer Normalization Transformer-style block, achieving state-of-the-art performance on large graphs while theoretically addressing oversmoothing through the necessity of residual connections for universal approximation.

Haitz Sáez de Ocáriz Borde, Artem Lukoianov, Anastasis Kratsios, Michael Bronstein, Xiaowen Dong2026-03-11🤖 cs.LG