Daily TMLR digest for Aug 26, 2025
TMLR
Accepted papers
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Title: PrivShap: A Finer-granularity Network Linearization Method for Private Inference
Authors: Xiangrui Xu, Zhenzhen Wang, Rui Ning, Chunsheng Xin, Hongyi Wu
Abstract: Private inference applies cryptographic techniques like homomorphic encryption, garble circuit and secret sharing to keep both sides privacy in a client-server setting during inference. It is often hindered by the high communication overheads, especially at non-linear activation layers such as ReLU. Hence ReLU pruning has been widely recognized as an efficient way to accelerate private inference. Existing approaches to ReLU pruning typically rely on coarse hypothesis, which assume an inverse correlation between the importance of ReLU and linear layers or shallow activation layers have less importance for universal models, to assign the budgets according to the layer while preserving the inference accuracy. However, these assumptions are based on limited empirical evidence and can fail to generalize to diverse model architectures. In this work, we introduce a finer-granularity ReLU budget assignment approach by assessing the layer-wise importance of ReLU with the Shapley value.
To address the computational burden of exact Shapley value calculation, we propose a tree-trimming algorithm for fast estimation. We provide both theoretical guarantees and empirical validation of our method. Our extensive experiments show that we achieve better efficiency and accuracy than the state-of-the-art across diverse model architectures, activation functions, and datasets. Specifically, we only need $\sim$$2.5\times$ fewer ReLU operations to achieve a similar inference accuracy and gains up to $\sim$$8.13\%$ increase on inference accuracy with similar ReLU budgets.
URL: https://openreview.net/forum?id=7TliYmJr2m
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Title: Enhancing Plaque Segmentation in CCTA with Prompt- based Diffusion Data Augmentation
Authors: Ruan Yizhe, Xuangeng Chu, Ziteng Cui, Yusuke Kurose, JUNICHI IHO, Yoji Tokunaga, Makoto Horie, YUSAKU HAYASHI, Keisuke Nishizawa, Yasushi Koyama, Tatsuya Harada
Abstract: Coronary computed tomography angiography (CCTA) is essential for non-invasive assessment of coronary artery disease (CAD). However, accurate segmentation of atherosclerotic plaques remains challenging due to data scarcity, severe class imbalance, and significant variability between calcified and non-calcified plaques. Inspired by DiffTumor’s tumor synthesis and PromptIR’s adaptive restoration framework, we introduce PromptLesion, a prompt-conditioned diffusion model for multi-class lesion synthesis. Unlike single-class methods, our approach integrates lesion-specific prompts within the diffusion generation process, enhancing diversity and anatomical realism in synthetic data. We validate PromptLesion on a private CCTA dataset and multi-organ tumor segmentation tasks (kidney, liver, pancreas) using public datasets, achieving superior performance compared to baseline methods. Models trained with our prompt-guided synthetic augmentation significantly improve Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) scores for both plaque and tumor segmentation. Extensive evaluations and ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of prompt conditioning.
URL: https://openreview.net/forum?id=hbTYt8PX9n
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New submissions
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Title: Fast weight programming and linear transformers: from machine learning to neurobiology
Abstract: Recent advances in artificial neural networks for machine learning, and language modeling in particular, have established a family of recurrent neural network (RNN) architectures that, unlike conventional RNNs with vector-form hidden states, use two-dimensional (2D) matrix-form hidden states. Such 2D-state RNNs, known as Fast Weight Programmers (FWPs), can be interpreted as a neural network whose synaptic weights (called fast weights) dynamically change over time as a function of input observations, and serve as short-term memory storage; corresponding synaptic weight modifications are controlled or programmed by another network (the programmer) whose parameters are trained (e.g., by gradient descent). In this Primer, we review the technical foundations of FWPs, their computational characteristics, and their connections to transformers and state space models. We also discuss connections between FWPs and models of synaptic plasticity in the brain, suggesting a convergence of natural and artificial intelligence.
URL: https://openreview.net/forum?id=TDG8EkNmQR
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Title: Model Debiasing by Learnable Data Augmentation
Abstract: Deep Neural Networks are well known for efficiently fitting training data, yet experiencing poor generalization capabilities whenever some kind of bias dominates over the actual task labels, resulting in models learning “shortcuts”. In essence, such models are often prone to learn spurious correlations between data and labels. In this work, we tackle the problem of learning from biased data in the very realistic unsupervised scenario, i.e., when the bias is unknown. This is a much harder task as compared to the supervised case, where auxiliary, bias-related annotations, can be exploited in the learning process. This paper proposes a novel 2-stage learning pipeline featuring a data augmentation strategy able to regularize the training. First, biased/unbiased samples are identified by training over-biased models.
Second, such subdivision (typically noisy) is exploited within a data augmentation framework, properly combining the original samples while learning mixing parameters, which has a regularization effect. Experiments on synthetic and realistic biased datasets show state-of-the-art classification accuracy, outperforming competing methods, ultimately proving robust performance on both biased and unbiased examples. Notably, being our training method totally agnostic to the level of bias, it also positively affects performance for any, even apparently unbiased, dataset, thus improving the model generalization regardless of the level of bias (or its absence) in the data.
URL: https://openreview.net/forum?id=3ac7heNftC
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