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Principal Component Analysis (PCA) minimises aggregate reconstruction error, which can inadvertently represent majority subgroups with substantially higher fidelity than minority subgroups. Fairness-aware extensions of PCA correct this disparity but require group labels as input. We address the logically prior question: given only a data matrix, which binary partition of the data suffers the greatest representational disparity under a shared PCA projection? We formalise this as the max-disparity partition problem and propose a greedy local-search algorithm, grounded in the Fiduccia-Mattheyses bipartitioning framework, that discovers the disparity-maximising partition without any predefined group labels. Two benchmark algorithms, a fixed-projection sorting baseline and a simulated-annealing variant, confirm that the greedy solution is empirically near-optimal. Having identified the partition, we attribute the disparity to specific features via PCA loading scores and association rule mining, enabling a practitioner to assess whether the disadvantaged group corresponds to a human-meaningful minority. On the Predict Students' Dropout and Academic Success dataset, representational disparity is driven predominantly by institutional and programmatic proxies for socioeconomic disadvantage, with gender emerging as a secondary but consistent contributor within the disadvantaged group. The discovered partition is then passed directly to Fair PCA, completing a detect-explain-mitigate pipeline.
We introduce the Endless Exam, a benchmark for measuring mathematical progress from today's models toward artificial superintelligence through fourteen parameterised construction families. Each submitted object is checked automatically for validity and assigned a relative quality score against a published frontier or construction baseline, without capping improvements at 1. The families draw on open mathematical problems for long-term targets and generate new instances at larger parameters, where compact certificates keep large constructions verifiable. Across eight models evaluated on 69 distinct instances, continuous quality scores distinguish performance even though no evaluated system surpasses a published frontier. Size-quality curves show how construction quality changes as problem size increases. We release the generators, verifiers, references, model responses and analysis to support continued measurement before and beyond human frontiers.
Concepts are commonly defined as abstract, compact representations of knowledge and treated as basic units of intelligent behavior. Yet, cognition, psychology, and AI lack a shared mathematical language for them. Modern systems represent concepts as vectors, distributions, symbols, graphs, and other structures, but these formalisms are typically treated as competing rather than as solutions to a common problem. We propose an operation-based view that evaluates mathematical frameworks by the conceptual operations they support, identifying thirteen operations (including similarity, composition, generalization, and grounding) that recur across cognition, psychology, and AI. We show that ten frameworks embody distinct commitments to concepts as self-contained content, relational structure, or evolving process, and that these commitments determine which operations each supports naturally. For example, vector-based models facilitate graded similarity and generalization but struggle with explicit composition, whereas symbolic models support composition but offer but generalize poorly. No single framework we examined naturally supports all operations without extension. We test this account empirically using categorization as a case study, operationalizing nine theories on the same items against human judgments. Despite addressing the same conceptual question, the theories produce different procedures and results, demonstrating that mathematical commitment shapes what a theory can explain. We call for hybrid formalisms that treat content, relation, and process as jointly primary.
New text-to-image model. Tags: gguf, qwen, image-generation, comfyui, comfyui-gguf, text-to-image, base_model:Qwen/Qwen-Image-2.1, base_model:quantized:Qwen/Qwen-Image-2.1
Functional annotation of newly sequenced proteins remains a bottleneck in molecular biology: the number of sequences in public repositories grows far faster than the capacity for manual curation. Most computational approaches consider annotation as multi-label classification over a fixed ontology, which constrains predictions to a predefined label set. In this work we study the the protein annotation as a sequence-to-text generation problem. We fine-tune the 3B-parameter Ministral 3 base model with QLoRA (4-bit NF4 quantization with low-rank adapters) on sequence annotation pairs. We assess predictions with an LLM-as-expert protocol: a GPT model prompted as a senior molecular-biology curator scores organism identification as binary and function annotation quality. We conclude that QLoRA-fine-tuned compact LLMs can generate curator-style annotations with genuine biological value for a substantial subset of proteins. We also discuss future directions in data quality, model scaling, and evidence grounding that are needed to make the approach sufficiently reliable for practical use.
Random forests (RFs) predict well but are opaque, whereas single decision trees are interpretable but unstable. Artificial representative trees (ARTs) were developed as interpretable surrogate models for RFs, but their use as standalone prediction models with uncertainty quantification has not been systematically investigated. We combine ARTs with leaf-wise Mondrian conformal predictive systems (CPS), enabling a single tree to provide continuous predictions, prediction intervals, and probabilities of exceeding arbitrary thresholds. We compared ARTs with CPS against decision trees with CPS and separate regression and probability trees across five simulation scenarios, 21 benchmark datasets, and a cross-sectional NHANES example data set. Repeated cross-validation assessed predictive performance, interpretability, and stability. ARTs with CPS yield compact, structurally stable trees with substantially more reproducible split-variable selection than decision trees across benchmark datasets and NHANES. Decision trees showed slightly better predictive performance and narrower prediction intervals, while coverage was broadly comparable. CPS-based trees generally achieved lower and less variable Brier scores than multi-model approaches. Combining ARTs with CPS therefore provides a single, interpretable, and stable model for continuous predictions and calibrated probabilities, balancing predictive performance with reproducibility and transparency in settings where stability and interpretability are essential.
Model merging aims to combine multiple fine-tuned models derived from a common pretrained model into a single multi-task model without additional joint training. Recent spectral merging methods improve over simple weight averaging by exploiting low-rank structures of task-specific updates, but they commonly assign the same rank capacity to every task. This uniform allocation ignores that task vectors can have heterogeneous spectral complexity, causing the shared merging space to be used suboptimally. In this paper, we propose Spectral Energy-proportional Rank Allocation (SERA), a simple task-adaptive strategy that allocates ranks according to the singular-value energy structure of each task vector. By assigning richer spectral capacity to complex or isolated tasks and fewer directions to compact tasks, SERA extends SVD-based model merging from uniform-capacity merging to task-dependent capacity allocation. Experiments under standard vision model merging protocols show that SERA improves multi-task merging performance while preserving the same total rank budget as existing spectral merging methods. Further analysis demonstrates that task-level spectral concentration is closely related to the per-task effect of adaptive rank allocation, providing insight into when and why SERA is effective.
In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a popular alternative for evaluation. Often referred to as LLMs as judges (LLJs), these systems have been widely adopted by researchers and practitioners across a broad range of measurement tasks, driven by their strong performance, scalability, and cost-effectiveness relative to human judgment. However, a growing body of work has shown that the use of LLJs raise concerns about their validity and reliability as evaluators. Existing efforts to address these challenges have largely focused on developing bias-mitigation techniques and refining prompting strategies. While these approaches represent an important step forward, they primarily offer technical fixes and leave a more fundamental challenge unaddressed: the lack of standardized, transparent, and reproducible evaluation practices. In this paper, we introduce LLJ Cards, a framework that synthesizes best practices from measurement theory, natural language generation, and machine learning literature into practical guidelines for LLJ-based evaluations. While LLJs offer a promising path toward scalable evaluation, their effective use requires grounding in rigorous evaluation principles to ensure validity, reliability, and reproducibility. LLJ Cards addresses this need by providing a structured framework for applying these principles in the design and reporting of automated evaluations.
AI agents are being deployed rapidly, accompanied by a growing number of AI-specific attacks and corresponding incidents. As incident reporting becomes increasingly important for legal compliance, governance, accountability, and security; current frameworks must be adapted to the unique characteristics of AI agents. In this paper, two editorial authors compare AI systems and AI agents and, drawing on input from 23 experts in academia and industry, identify the information required for reporting incidents where the security of AI agents is harmed. %involving AI agents. Potential reporting elements include, for example, agent memory and memory accesses, actual and potential levels of autonomy, and tool usage. Based on these findings, we identify several open research questions, including how to efficiently record incidents and how to determine whether vulnerabilities and incidents generalize. Expert feedback also highlighted potential reporting weaknesses, such as risks of data leakage and attacks targeting the reporting infrastructure itself, creating additional research needs. Lastly, we summarize privacy requirements and outline research directions for the secure and trustworthy deployment of AI agents.
