Data-Efficient Learning

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14 papers in the last four weeks, up 75% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

Jul 13Week of Sep 28

Latest papers 158

Oct 8, 2026cs.CV

HAND: A Biologically-Inspired Activation Function that Improves Generalisation and Sample Efficiency in Image Classification

DNNs exhibit robustness and generalisation issues not seen in humans. They are also far less data-efficient learners, requiring considerably more training samples to accurately classify novel exemplars. Inductive bias could help with these issues by providing in-built mechanisms to improve generalisation, and hence, reduce reliance on learning from data. We incorporate a biologically-inspired inductive bias into a new activation function, HAND (Homeostasis, Accelerating Nonlinearity, and Divisive-nomalisation), and show its effectiveness with CNNs trained on image classification. Using HAND a ConvNeXt-tiny required 25 training epochs to reach the same accuracy on ImageNet1k as the unmodified model achieved after 200 epochs. Consistent with the effects of an inductive bias, the performance gap reduced with training time and increased data augmentation. When the volume of training data was reduced and unevenly distributed between classes (Long-tailed ImageNet) the improvements in accuracy were even larger and did not reduce with increased training time. Generalisation performance with the common-corruptions data, and the ability to reject samples from unknown classes, were unaffected or improved by HAND. Results generalised across CNN architectures and training data-sets. HAND can, therefore, reduce the required training time and/or the required volume and variety of training data, helping to improve sample efficiency.

Michael W. Spratling, Heiko H. Schütt

University of Luxembourg, Department of Behavioural and Cognitive Sciences, L-4366 Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg.

Neural Network Activation Functions Neural Network Generalization Data-Efficient Learning Image Classification Convolutional Neural Networks

Oct 7, 2026cs.LG

SPD-MetaFormer is what you need for small-data brain decoding

Brain signal decoding is challenging because neural recordings are noisy and vary across individuals, while labeled data are often limited. Recent attention-based models on the symmetric positive definite (SPD) manifold have nevertheless achieved strong performance using covariance and connectivity representations, yet the contribution of learned token weighting remains unclear. We examine two representative architectures, MAtt (based on log-Euclidean geometry) and GBWAtt (based on generalized Bures--Wasserstein geometry), and find that their learned attention weights remain close to uniform after training. We relate this behavior to bounded similarity parameterizations that, under the original softmax scaling, limit attention-weight contrast. Moreover, replacing learned weights with uniform weights, throughout training and evaluation, has little effect on mean predictive performance while preserving each model's original aggregation geometry. Motivated by these findings, we introduce SPD-MetaFormer, an attention-free architecture built on uniformly weighted Fréchet aggregation under log-Euclidean geometry. Its backbone uses a geodesic residual to update a summary token and a shared spectral feedforward map to transform all tokens, followed by a learned weighted readout. Token states remain SPD-valued until tangent-space classification. Across three EEG benchmarks, SPD-MetaFormer achieves competitive results relative to published Euclidean and manifold baselines. Separate matched reproductions test learned versus uniform weighting within MAtt and GBWAtt. These results suggest that, in the short-sequence and limited-data regimes studied, carefully designed SPD architectures can provide a simpler and effective alternative to adaptive manifold attention.

Zhida Wang, Wei Lyu, Guo Yu +1

EEG Decoding Attention Mechanisms Riemannian Geometry Data-Efficient Learning

Oct 7, 2026cs.LG

Stream-Based Active Learning with Cooperative Neural Networks for Data-Efficient Partial Inverse Design: An Automotive Glass Run Channel Case Study

Inverse design in engineering often runs into a simple problem. Each labeled training sample must be produced through expensive simulation, so building a large dataset is slow and costly. This study addresses that problem for partial inverse design, where only some design variables are specified and the rest must be inferred to reach a target performance value. We propose CoNN-AL, a framework for data-efficient partial inverse design that adds stream-based active learning to the Cooperative Neural Network with Denoising Autoencoder (CoNN-DAE). The model estimates predictive uncertainty through Monte Carlo dropout and uses it to decide, in real time, which incoming candidate samples are worth labeling, so the limited labeling budget is spent on the most informative designs. We validate the framework on a real-world automotive glass run channel dataset of more than 900,000 unique simulated designs. With only 20,000 actively selected labels, about 2.3% of the training pool, CoNN-AL reaches R-squared values of 0.967 to 0.982 across all missing-variable levels, approaching the upper-bound models trained on far more data. It reaches R-squared of at least 0.95 with 30 to 40% fewer labels than random sampling at the more difficult missing-variable levels and, at the most challenging level, is the only strategy in this study to reach R-squared of 0.98. Together with this work, we publicly release the dataset to support future research on data-driven design.

Agung Nugraha, Hyerin Kwon, Heungjun Im +2

Department of Industrial and Data Engineering, Major in Industrial Data Science and Engineering, Pukyong National University, Busan, 48513, Republic of Korea · DRB Co., Ltd., Busan, 46329, Republic of Korea

Inverse Design Data-Efficient Learning Active Learning

Oct 5, 2026cs.CV

Label-Free Coreset Selection with Foundation Models for Efficient Annotation in Computational Pathology

Computational pathology has the potential to improve clinical outcomes through a demonstrated increase in diagnostic and prognostic accuracy. However, the development and validation of deep learning algorithms still require annotated data, a costly procedure involving expert pathologists who already face critical workforce shortages. Existing coreset selection methods to optimize annotation efforts currently all rely on hyperparameters tuned on natural-image benchmarks that do not transfer to histopathology and are cumbersome to use in clinical practice. In this study, we present GCcore, a novel label-free coreset selection method that embeds every image of a dataset with any pathology foundation model and greedily selects the samples that collectively maximize the global coverage of the embedding space. The proposed method provides a lower-bound guarantee on the global coverage of the returned coreset for any coreset size, while being completely hyperparameter-free and deterministic. We demonstrate GCcore's superior performance over 14 baselines including state-of-the-art methods across 10 tasks and datasets spanning whole slide image classification, tile classification, and tissue segmentation, where it ranks first on six and within the top three on nine, while also demonstrating how existing methods can shift by up to five rank positions depending on their hyperparameter settings. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/OncoAI-ULBHUB/GCcore.

Tuo Yin, Jennifer Dhont

Department of Medical Physics, Institut Jules Bordet, Hˆpital Universitaire de Bruxelles (HUB), Belgium · Radiophysics and MRI Physics Laboratory, Universit´e Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium · Laboratory of Image Synthesis and Analysis (LISA), Universit´e Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium

Computational Pathology Coreset Selection Data-Efficient Learning

Oct 2, 2026cs.AI

Geometry Meets Physics: Data-Efficient Pre-Training for Unstructured Neural PDE Solvers

Neural surrogate models for Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) on unstructured 3D geometries are often limited by poor generalization and the high cost of generating large-scale training datasets. Consequently, pre-training on massive datasets of related PDE dynamics has emerged as a critical alternative to enhance the robustness and scalability of these models. However, this strategy is neither compute- nor data-efficient, as it relies on massive pre-computed data that is very costly to generate. In this work, we introduce a disk-data-free pre-training framework tailored to both steady-state and transient regimes. For steady-state problems, we propose a geometry-driven strategy that leverages intrinsic shape descriptors to learn representations of complex 3D domains. For transient problems, we introduce a physics-driven approach based on online generation of synthetic PDE data, enabling scalable pre-training without reliance on expensive datasets. Across multiple experiments, our approach achieves faster convergence, greater data efficiency, and higher accuracy during fine-tuning, particularly under realistic low-data regimes. This methodology provides a practical pathway toward data-efficient neural emulators for large-scale simulations.

Luis Medrano-Navarro, Giacomo Baldan, Qiang Liu +4

Technical University of Munich · University of Stuttgart

Synthetic Data Pretraining Neural PDE Solvers PDE Solving PDE Surrogate Modeling Data-Efficient Learning

Oct 1, 2026cs.LG

Sharpen Before You Adapt: Data-Free Entry-State Sharpening for Test-Time Reinforcement Learning

Test-time reinforcement learning (TTRL) adapts language models on unlabeled test problems using supervision derived from their own samples. This makes the checkpoint's \emph{entry state} consequential: a diffuse policy provides noisier self-supervision and may spend much of a limited adaptation budget merely concentrating probability mass before reliably expressing capability it already possesses. We propose \textbf{entry-state sharpening}: use data-free training \emph{before} TTRL to prepare a general-purpose checkpoint in a state that subsequent label-free adaptation can exploit more efficiently. The idea is not tied to one training recipe; different data-free objectives can move the same base model to different entry states. Across five data-free checkpoints derived from Qwen3-4B and evaluated under an identical 15-step TTRL protocol, entry policy entropy strongly rank-orders endpoint conversion efficiency, a reliability-to-reachability measure (Spearman

ρ=-0.90

;

ρ=-0.99

after controlling for entry reachability). The contrast across objectives is striking: R-Zero remains diffuse at

3.39

nats and finishes below the untuned base in 6/6 matched comparisons across MATH, GPQA, and AMC, whereas SPIRAL reaches

0.07

nats and achieves the highest post-TTRL accuracy on MATH and GPQA despite its self-play stage using no math training data. An in-domain label-free self-distillation intervention further shows that the entry state can be deliberately sharpened. These results motivate treating checkpoint preparation as a \emph{state-control problem}: use data-free training to improve TTRL readiness, with entry entropy as a label-free control signal and reachable capability as the constraint.

Zhanming Zhang, Vinoth Selvendran

Independent Researcher New York, NY · Independent Researcher Palo Alto, CA

RL for Language Model Reasoning Test-Time RL Data-Efficient Learning

Sep 30, 2026physics.ao-ph

Less is more: error-distance scaling relation for data-efficient kilometer-scale downscaling of extreme heat

Extreme heat is where urban adaptation needs kilometer-scale data the most, but the simulations training a downscaler can cost more than they save, and how much is needed has not been identified. We measured it with CASPER, a U-Net with a structure-preserving loss downscaling 32 km reanalysis to 1 km temperature, humidity and wind, across 24 configurations of one to eight months. Held-out error grows linearly with climatological distance to the training data, RMSE = 0.83 + 2.95 d, explaining 90% of its variance against 7% for volume and predicting unseen months in advance. On held-out extreme summer weeks CASPER preserves the fine-scale structure and cross-variable physics that matched-budget baselines degrade, and matches station observations during documented heat waves to within 1.8 K. Transfer to a new region degrades geographically; 11 days of local simulation cuts Vancouver's held-out error from 3.8 to 1.3 K. Training periods should span the target climate: the same accuracy for four times less simulation, putting kilometer-scale downscaling of extreme heat within reach of groups without large computing facilities.

Ahmed Marey, Henry Lu, Abhishek Gaur +6

Centre for Zero Energy Building Studies, Department of Building, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Concordia University, Montreal, H3G 1M8 Canada · Building and Climate Interface, Construction Research Centre, National Research Council Canada, Ottawa, ON, K1A 0R6, Canada · Department of Architecture, School of Sciences and Engineering, The American University in Cairo, New Cairo 11835, Egypt +3

Spatial Generalization Scaling Laws Climate Downscaling Data-Efficient Learning Weather Forecasting

Sep 30, 2026cs.LG

Can Domain Generalization be Guaranteed in Small-Sample Learning?

The small-sample learning problem remains a fundamental challenge in machine learning because limited training data lead to unstable model estimation and generalization. Structural Risk Minimization (SRM) has long been regarded as a principled solution under the classical i.i.d. assumption. However, domain generalization (DG) violates this assumption, leaving the theoretical role of SRM in DG largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we establish the first theoretical guarantees for SRM in DG under mild assumptions. Specifically, based on the concept of stability, we derive learning consistency and generalization error bounds and prove that these bounds become tight when the hypotheses satisfy the stability condition. Building upon this, under a specific hypothesis space assumption, we establish stability, learning, and generalization bounds for SRM. We further discuss the applicability of these bounds to deep learning. This work establishes theoretical foundations for SRM under distribution shifts and sheds light on the design of robust DG algorithms in small-sample scenarios.

Hong Zheng

This work was completed during my Ph.D. period and was the result of a flash of inspiration. I decided to submit it to arXiv and leave its value to the readers.

Domain Generalization Statistical Learning Theory Data-Efficient Learning Generalization Bounds

Sep 30, 2026stat.ML

Asymptotic Properties of Support Vector Machines in High-Dimension, Low-Sample-Size Settings under a Spiked Model

In this paper, we consider asymptotic properties of the support vector machine (SVM) in high-dimension, low-sample-size (HDLSS) settings under a spiked model. The existing theory of the SVM in the HDLSS context relies on the geometric representation of HDLSS data, which requires that the eigenvalues of the covariance matrices are not dominant. We first show that the geometric representation does not hold under the spiked model. We show that the Gram matrix of HDLSS data converges in distribution to a random matrix, namely, the HDLSS data converge to a random configuration in a finite-dimensional space whose dimension is given by the number of the spikes. We show that the misclassification rates of the SVM do not tend to zero, that is, the SVM does not hold the consistency property. We also show that the bias-corrected SVM (BC-SVM) does not give preferable performance in this setting because the bias term itself should be modified. In order to overcome such difficulties, we propose a spike-corrected SVM (SC-SVM). We show that the SC-SVM holds the consistency property when the sample size goes to infinity, and that the growth of the sample size is essential in the sense that any projection-based procedure fails when the sample size is fixed. Finally, we check the performance of the classifiers by numerical simulations.

Yugo Nakayama

Independent researcher

Support Vector Machines Classification Statistical Learning Theory Data-Efficient Learning

Sep 30, 2026cs.LG

Scale-Split Neural Operator for Memory- and Data-Efficient 3D Turbulence Prediction

Neural surrogates have emerged as fast alternatives to the numerical simulation of three-dimensional turbulence. However, training them at high resolution remains challenging, since the memory of full-field models grows with the resolution. In addition, full-resolution training data are expensive to simulate and store, and therefore scarce. We introduce ScaleSplit-NO (Scale-Split Neural Operator), which exploits the scale structure of turbulence with two neural operators: a Parent predicts the global coarse field at the next time step, and a Child predicts full-resolution local patches conditioned on this prediction. Neither model operates on the full-resolution field. The Child is pretrained alone and then attached to the Parent's coarse prediction through zero-initialized connections. On two complex high-resolution turbulence benchmarks, ScaleSplit-NO surpasses all competing baselines in both prediction accuracy and data efficiency. On the higher-resolution dataset JHTDB256 (

256^3

), its normalized mean squared error (NMSE) is 53% lower than that of the strongest baseline, and its training memory is 79% lower than that of the most memory-efficient baseline. We further demonstrate its effectiveness for urban wind prediction in a real district of Montreal on a

500\times150\times500

grid, reducing one-step NMSE by 65.8% relative to the baseline. Moreover, swapping in a Parent trained on additional coarse fields improves prediction without retraining the Child, providing further accuracy gains at a small storage cost.

Shaoxiang Qin, Yucheng Zhao, Zongyi Li +2

University of Tennessee, Knoxville · McGill University · New York University +1

PDE Surrogate Modeling Neural Operators Memory-Efficient Training Data-Efficient Learning Computational Fluid Dynamics

Sep 28, 2026stat.ML

Statistical Benefits of Fine-Tuning from Pretrained Initialization in Diagonal Linear Networks

Adapting pretrained models to downstream tasks with limited data has become a central paradigm in modern deep learning. Yet, despite its widespread practical success, how fine-tuning leverages information from pretraining remains poorly understood theoretically. We study fine-tuning from pretrained weights through the lens of sparse linear regression and two-layer diagonal linear networks. In our setting, pretraining provides information through the support (and signs) of the initialization predictor, which may contain coordinates relevant to the downstream task. We show how pretrained information reshapes the implicit bias and training dynamics, and can thereby reduce the sample complexity of recovering the target parameters and support. In particular, for a clean initialization with correctly inherited signs, we show that the required sample size is comparable to that of a weighted Lasso estimator that explicitly exploits the pretrained support through a suitably chosen regularizer. Our results thus show how information encoded in pretrained weights can be implicitly exploited by gradient-based fine-tuning, reducing the amount of data needed to recover a downstream task.

Alexandre Declèves, Etienne Boursier, Nicolas Flammarion

TML, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland · INRIA, LMO, Université Paris-Saclay, Orsay, France

Fine-Tuning Deep Linear Networks Linear Regression Data-Efficient Learning

Sep 28, 2026stat.ML

Two-Timescale Fine-tuning Provably Learns New Features for Two-Layer ReLU Networks

Fine-tuning pre-trained models on specialized tasks with scarce data is central to modern deep learning. Despite its empirical success, theoretical understanding of fine-tuning remains limited. We introduce a Gaussian multi-index setting to study fine-tuning from pre-trained weights, where the teacher network has

m+1

features,

m

of which are learned during pre-training and one of which must be learned during fine-tuning. For two-layer ReLU networks, we show that two-timescale training, i.e., updating the outer weights infinitely faster than the hidden ones, learns the new task-specific feature while preserving the pre-trained ones in the model representation. Moreover, only

\mathcal{O}(d)

fine-tuning samples are required for this recovery, independently of the number of pre-trained features. In contrast, with random initialization, the same number of samples is insufficient to recover the target parameters. Our results therefore demonstrate that pre-training can induce an implicit bias with a clear statistical advantage over random initialization, enabling feature learning from scarce fine-tuning data.

Etienne Boursier, Nicolas Flammarion

INRIA, LMO, Universit´e Paris-Saclay, Orsay, France · EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland

Representation Learning Fine-Tuning ReLU Neural Networks Neural Network Training Dynamics Data-Efficient Learning

Sep 27, 2026cs.LG

From Grey-Box to Green-Box: When can Physics-Informed Machine Learning Reduce Carbon Footprints in Structural Health Monitoring?

Machine learning plays an increasingly vital role in engineering, but the corresponding increase in compute time is not without environmental cost. Physics-informed machine learning or "grey-box" models have been developed to overcome some of the limitations of traditional black-box learners, utilising the physical insight that an engineer would have about the structure they are modelling and have shown promising results in the structural engineering field among many others. This work explores whether an additional advantage could be a reduced environmental impact, considering the relationship between training data quantity and training time, linking this duration to carbon emissions from computing. In a structural health monitoring context, four physics-informed machine learning approaches - spanning Gaussian processes and neural networks - are evaluated: residual modelling, input augmentation, hybrid modelling, and constrained learning. The emissions for training each of the models to reach a given error threshold is compared, and in most examples, shown to be lower for the physics-informed models (with input augmented models being an exception). This reduction in training emissions further compounds the environmental savings achieved by collecting and storing less data. Although promising results, we cannot expect a silver bullet and the case studies demonstrate that a trade-off is needed between the increased complexity that comes from introducing physics into a machine learner, against the gain from reduced training data requirements.

Daisy R. Bradley, Nathan A. Hinchliffe, Daniel J. Pitchforth +2

Dynamics Research Group, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

Energy-Efficient ML Physics-Informed ML Data-Efficient Learning Structural Health Monitoring

Sep 27, 2026stat.ML

The Statistical Benefits of Multiple Responses for Learning from Demonstrations

Many generative systems return multiple candidate responses and are evaluated according to the best one. Recent work shows that, when demonstrations are optimal, pass@

k

can reduce the sample complexity of learning from demonstrations by a logarithmic factor in

k

. We ask what happens when the demonstrator is not assumed to be optimal. We find that multiple responses provide a qualitatively stronger benefit in this setting. In a finite reward-class model with no reward feedback, moving from pass@

1

to any pass@

k

with

k\ge2

changes the worst-case dependence on target accuracy from

1/\varepsilon^2

to

1/\varepsilon

, uniformly over demonstrator quality. Under standard evaluation, where an unknown reward is fixed before training, increasing

k

provides an additional and distinct benefit: the optimal dependence on a reward class of size

N

improves from

\log N

to

\log N/\log k

. We further show that these two effects can be separated. Under robust evaluation, where one learned policy must compete with the demonstrator simultaneously for every reward in the class, the fast

1/\varepsilon

dependence persists, while the

1/\log k

improvement can disappear. We establish matching upper and lower bounds in the corresponding regimes and give a greedy multiplicative-weights learner achieving the upper bounds without any assumption on demonstrator quality.

Chandramauli Chakraborty, Cong Ma

Department of Statistics, University of Chicago

Learning from Demonstration Statistical Learning Theory Data-Efficient Learning

Sep 23, 2026cs.LG

When Labels Are Scarce: An Oscillatory State Space Model for Vibration Diagnosis

Machine fault diagnosis from vibration requires learning from scarce labelled fault recordings while meeting the computational constraints of edge devices for local inference. We introduce DualRes, a compact oscillatory state-space model that combines two complementary spectral views of vibration, capturing rapid changes and fine frequency structure. Time-aligned views are processed by selective oscillatory memory, which learns how long to retain temporal patterns. The encoder contains 39,528 parameters. We evaluate supervised learning across six bearing datasets and a gearbox benchmark, with an additional gearbox pilot. Recording-level splits and explicit accounting of labelled duration distinguish data efficiency from repeated exposure to correlated samples. On the main gearbox benchmark, DualRes achieves state-of-the-art performance among the nine evaluated methods at six of seven label budgets. With about six labelled seconds per class, it improves macro-F1 by 16.1 percentage points over the next strongest comparator. On the same benchmark, DualRes achieves a 1.44-fold recording-level speedup and a 24.8-fold reduction in checkpoint storage relative to a selective state-space baseline under matched hardware and runtime conditions. Bearing results reveal task-dependent trade-offs. These findings support oscillatory memory as a compact approach to vibration diagnosis under limited labelled exposure.

Mainak Mallick, Seung-Kyum Choi

Georgia Institute of Technology

Predictive Maintenance Tiny ML Bearing Fault Diagnosis Data-Efficient Learning State Space Models

Sep 22, 2026cs.LG

Label-Efficient Learning for Ground-Based Sky-Image Classification: A Benchmark of Transfer Learning, Active Learning, and Pseudo-Labeling on GCD

Accurate ground-based cloud classification is important for atmospheric monitoring, solar-energy forecasting, aviation weather assessment, and climate observation systems. However, reliable sky-image annotation is time-consuming, especially when cloud types are visually similar or mixed. We study the label efficiency of deep learning for ground-based cloud classification using the Ground-based Cloud Dataset (GCD). Rather than proposing a new architecture, we benchmark three practical strategies under limited annotation budgets: supervised transfer learning, uncertainty-based active learning, and high-confidence pseudo-labeling. An ImageNet-pretrained ResNet50 is used as a common frozen backbone, with experiments repeated over five random seeds for label budgets from

1\%

to

100\%

of the training labels. Supervised transfer learning is already highly label-efficient: test accuracy increases from

0.635 \pm 0.018

with

1\%

labels to

0.730 \pm 0.002

with

40\%

labels, approaching the full-label result of

0.735 \pm 0.003

. Active learning and pseudo-labeling are competitive with supervised sampling and provide small improvements for some metrics and budgets, but neither gives a large or consistent aggregate gain. Diagnostic analyses show that accepted pseudo-labels are reliable, with accuracy from

0.946

to

0.977

, but biased toward easier high-confidence sky-type groups. In contrast, uncertainty sampling preferentially queries visually challenging groups, including Mixed and the confusable Stratocumulus and Cumulonimbus groups, but these targeted acquisitions yield only modest gains. Overall, transfer learning substantially reduces annotation requirements for GCD, while simple active and semi-supervised strategies provide limited additional benefit over a strong supervised baseline.

Esther Bou Dagher, Viktoriya Bu-Dager, Boguslaw Zegarlinski

CEREMADE, Universit´e Paris Dauphine-PSL, Paris, France. · School of Computing and Information Science, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, United Kingdom. · Institute of Mathematics, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland.

Active Learning Transfer Learning Pseudo-Labeling Data-Efficient Learning

Sep 17, 2026cs.LG

QUALS: Corpus Equilibrium for Universal Forecasting via Pattern Quantization and Learnability Synchronization

Ubiquitous time series data across diverse domains enables critical applications in areas such as transportation systems and power grids. Recently, training foundation models on massive datasets to achieve accurate zero-shot forecasting has emerged as a major research focus. However, current studies predominantly prioritize architectural innovations while insufficiently addressing data diversity, often relying on simple data sampling strategies that fail to manage complex data distributions effectively, leading to inefficient use of training data and suboptimal performance. To address this, we propose QUALS, a large-scale time series corpus equilibrium framework. QUALS significantly enhances data efficiency, i.e., enabling existing models to achieve superior performance using only a small fraction of the original training data. Specifically, QUALS operates through two core mechanisms. First, a pattern quantization framework systematically decodes heterogeneous patterns from mixed corpora via vector quantization and uniform binning. Second, a learnability synchronization framework calibrates sampling weights for heterogeneous patterns, bridging the optimization gap between simple and complex motifs to maximize overall training efficiency. Extensive benchmarks demonstrate that pre-training on QUALS consistently achieves superior zero-shot performance, even under substantially reduced training budgets.

Yujie Li, Zezhi Shao, Chengqing Yu +7

State Key Laboratory of AI Safety, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China · School of Data Science and Engineering, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China

Zero-Shot Time Series Forecasting Data Selection Time-Series Foundation Models Data-Efficient Learning

Sep 9, 2026cs.LG

A Kernel-Based Modular Discriminant Analysis Framework for Small-Sample Learning

The small-sample-size (SSS) problem remains a fundamental challenge in machine learning when labeled data are scarce due to cost, accessibility, or ethical constraints. While numerous approaches have been proposed, existing methods often struggle to maintain stable and discriminative representations under high-dimensional and limited-data conditions. Kernelized Linear Principal Component Discriminant Analysis (KLPCDA), a recently proposed modular framework, integrates variance preservation, inter-class separability, and intra-class compactness within a unified kernel space. Although its formulation has shown promising initial results, a systematic understanding of how its components interact across diverse SSS scenarios remains lacking. In this paper, we present a systematic cross-domain study of KLPCDA to characterize the interaction mechanisms among its core objectives. We analyze the behavior of its seven variants across multiple real-world SSS tasks, including hyperspectral image classification, mechanical fault diagnosis, medical diagnosis, and face recognition. Through extensive experiments and ablation studies, we investigate how different objective combinations influence performance under varying conditions such as noise, class imbalance, and high dimensionality. Our analysis reveals consistent patterns in the interaction of the three core objectives variance, between-class, and within-class terms, providing a unified and interpretable understanding of their roles in stabilizing representations and enhancing discrimination in SSS settings. Based on these findings, we further derive practical guidelines for selecting appropriate KLPCDA variants under different data characteristics. Experimental results demonstrate that KLPCDA achieves strong and robust performance across domains, while maintaining low computational complexity suitable for resource-constrained environments.

Lingxiao Qu, Yan Pei

Graduate School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Aizu, 90 Kamiiawase, Tsuruga, Ikki-machi, Aizuwakamatsu, 965-8580, Fukushima, Japan · Computer Science Division, University of Aizu, 90 Kamiiawase, Tsuruga, Ikki-machi, Aizuwakamatsu, 965-8580, Fukushima, Japan

Kernel Methods Data-Efficient Learning

Sep 3, 2026cs.LG

DE-Venus: A Data-Efficient RLVR Framework for Large Language Models

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) improves large language model reasoning, but its practical scaling is constrained by expensive on-policy rollouts and the cost of obtaining reliable targets at scale. Existing methods address sample selection, incomplete supervision, or noisy labels separately, often entangling supervision logic with distributed training and hindering controlled comparison and reuse. We present DE-Venus, a unified framework for data-efficient RLVR that treats supervision as evolving state across data preparation and policy optimization. It organizes this lifecycle into three modules: Active Data Selection allocates training and annotation budgets; Weak Supervision Construction derives learning signals from unlabeled examples; and Training-Time Supervision Refinement filters or corrects unreliable supervision. DE-Venus supports seven representative methods and a data-selection pipeline by expressing method-specific decisions as offline dataset transitions or online transformations of targets, rewards, batches, and advantages while preserving verl's distributed execution contracts. Across public benchmarks and three business scenarios, separate configurations preserve or improve model quality with only 10% of labels or as little as 13% of relevant data; selected business configurations also reduce observed convergence steps by 63%--75%. DE-Venus thus reduces annotation and training costs without sacrificing scalable RL execution.

Shenzhi Yang, Guangcheng Zhu, Kai Tang +11

1Zhejiang University · 2Ant Group · 3Hong Kong Baptist University +2

RL for Language Model Reasoning Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards Data-Efficient Learning

Sep 2, 2026cs.AI

Task-Level Natural Language Priors as Learning Signals for Low-Resource LLM Training

Large language models (LLMs) often struggle when low-resource training data are ambiguous or incomplete. Task-level natural-language priors can provide useful guidance in such settings, but existing approaches usually treat these priors as input context rather than as learning signals during training. We propose Prior-Guided Tuning (PGT), a training perspective that incorporates natural-language priors as auxiliary learning signals for low-resource LLM training. Under this perspective, we introduce Contrastive Prior Steering (CPS), which keeps the original supervised objective intact while adding positive and negative prior-conditioned auxiliary losses to encourage task-consistent learning and discourage plausible but misleading alternatives. Experiments on AmbiMath, Jigsaw, and MNLI/HANS show that CPS consistently improves over plain and prompt fine-tuning. On AmbiMath, CPS achieves 97.6% average exact-match accuracy. On Jigsaw, CPS improves average Macro F1 by 9.5 percentage points over standard fine-tuning, and with 1/10 of the experimental training data slightly exceeds full-data plain fine-tuning. On HANS, CPS improves non-entailment accuracy by 8.3 and 5.2 percentage points for LLaMA 3.1 8B and Qwen 2.5 7B, respectively, while maintaining comparable in-domain MNLI accuracy. These results support our central claim: task-level natural-language priors can provide useful guidance as auxiliary learning signals for low-resource LLM training. Our code and data will be publicly available.

Jian Gao, Xiao Zhang, Xun Zhu +2

College of AI, Tsinghua University · Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University

LLM Fine-Tuning Data-Efficient Learning

Sep 2, 2026eess.IV

Data-Efficient Networks for Multi-Contrast MRI Reconstruction based on a Generalized Content/Style Prior

Multi-contrast MR scans contain redundant structural information that can be leveraged during reconstruction and potentially accelerate acquisition times. This idea has inspired end-to-end guided reconstruction models, leveraging one or more contrasts to guide the reconstruction of a different contrast. However, these models require large paired multi-contrast raw datasets for training, limiting their application in low-data regimes. In this work, we propose a modular framework, namely CoSMo-RecNet, for learning guided reconstruction models in the low-data regime. At its core is a reusable multi-contrast representation based on a content/style model, which can be learned from large-scale, publicly accessible, unpaired multi-contrast image datasets, without available k-space data. Using this frozen model as a multi-contrast prior and using a set of reference contrasts, the reconstruction problem reduces to a much simpler refinement problem that can be solved by a lightweight unrolled network and thus learned from small, task-specific reconstruction datasets. We demonstrate the efficacy of CoSMo-RecNet by evaluating it on the low-field 0.3 T M4Raw dataset, showing stable reconstruction quality on decreasing the raw training data budget. CoSMo-RecNet achieved higher reconstruction quality with 5 training subjects or lower compared to a parameter-count-matched MoDL trained on 100 subjects. On a data-limited and severely out-of-distribution ultra-low-field 47 mT Halbach scanner dataset, CoSMo-RecNet was superior to other viable strategies, including classical reconstruction, transfer learning, and zero-shot reconstruction.

Chinmay Rao, Efe Ilıcak, Matthias J. P. van Osch +5

Department of Radiology, Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden, The Netherlands · Philips Innovative Technologies, Hamburg, Germany · Philips Cardiologs, Paris, France +1

Accelerated MRI Reconstruction Magnetic Resonance Imaging Data-Efficient Learning

Aug 26, 2026cs.CL

Leveraging Speech Acts for Low-Data and Cross-Domain Conversation Derailment Forecasting

Conversational derailment forecasting aims to predict when online discussions will escalate into hostility, enabling proactive moderation. Existing approaches often struggle in low-data settings and to generalize across domains. This poses a challenge for new platforms and smaller communities where annotated data is limited. We propose modeling pragmatic representations of conversations to reduce lexical noise and improve generalizability. Specifically, speech act information is used as an auxiliary learning signal alongside textual semantics. Experimental results show improved performance across three datasets, particularly in low-data and cross-domain settings.

Angela Yifei Yuan, Christine De Kock, Christopher Leckie

The University of Melbourne

Cross-Domain Generalization Data-Efficient Learning

Aug 11, 2026cs.CV

Foundation Model-Enabled Efficient Data Sampling (FEEDS): A label-efficient training strategy for pan-cancer, multi-tracer PET/CT datasets

Automated lesion segmentation in whole-body PET/CT imaging can assist clinicians with cancer detection, staging, and treatment planning across radiotracers and cancer types. However, training lesion segmentation models that capture variations in lesion size, distribution, and appearance requires large annotated datasets, whose creation is both time- and expertise-intensive. As a result, models trained on limited labeled PET/CT data often lack the accuracy and generalizability needed for clinical use. We present FEEDS (Foundation model-Enabled Efficient Data Sampling), a label- and compute-efficient learning strategy that uses vision foundation model embeddings to select the most informative and diverse unlabeled cases for expert annotation. Unlike unsupervised, semi-supervised, and active learning approaches, FEEDS is a one-step training paradigm requiring only a limited, representative training set, making it label- and compute-efficient. We train and validate FEEDS using the AutoPET-III dataset. We test its accuracy and generalizability on three held-out sets: AutoPET-III, DeepPSMA, and an internal Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center dataset. We evaluate clinical utility at the voxel, lesion, and anatomic region level to assess performance in high-risk areas and treatment planning utility. FEEDS outperforms random-sampling-based labeling, pseudolabel-based semi-supervised learning, and training with limited labeled data alone. It generalizes across all three test sets, FDG and PSMA tracers, and multiple diseases, matching fully-labeled (100%) training performance with 70% less annotation burden. FEEDS addresses the challenge of label scarcity in an automatic lesion segmentation framework by providing a practical approach for constructing representative and diverse annotation queues from large, unannotated clinical repositories.

Biratal Raj Wagle, Bashirul Azam Biswas, Grant Chau +5

Department of Biomedical Data Science Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth Hanover, NH 03755, USA · Radiology Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center Lebanon, NH 03766, USA · Department of Urology Yale University New Haven, CT, USA +1

Data Selection Medical Image Segmentation PET/CT Tumor Segmentation Data-Efficient Learning

Aug 11, 2026cs.LG

DEFT: Data-Efficient Frequency-domain Top-k Sampling via Inverse Discrete Fourier Transform for Spatiotemporal Dynamical Systems Modeling

Modeling spatiotemporal dynamical systems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs) poses two major challenges: it either requires expensive physics-based simulators that entail iterative numerical solving at high computational cost, or it depends on abundant training data, yet purely data-driven models often generalize poorly to downstream dynamic operating conditions. We propose DEFT, a frequency-domain data sampling method that identifies the dominant Fourier modes of a physical system and systematically varies the corresponding amplitudes and phases to generate physically consistent training data via the inverse discrete Fourier transform. In addition, we derive a generalization bound of this method. We note that it also provides a theoretically principled criterion for selecting

K

. We evaluate the proposed method through three sets of experiments, each targeting a distinct aspect of its utility. First, we validate the framework on canonical PDEs solving demonstrating that it outperforms traditional methods when the system is dominated by a few prominent frequency components. Second, we employ DEFT as a data-value filter on the diffusion--sorption and Burgers equations of PDEBench, showing that it reduces data requirements by

40\%

while sacrificing less than

2\%

in predictive accuracy. Third, to evaluate DEFT for more challenging and practically relevant problems, we validate it in the battery degradation PDE system, achieving consistently high predictive accuracy across various test datasets with

R^2

values exceeding

0.99

. Moreover, the learned frequency-domain features transfer to other battery chemistries with only

20\%

of the fine-tuning data. These results demonstrate that DEFT is an effective data-sampling method for efficient operator learning.

Hengbo Xiao, Jiale Liu, Jiahao Song +1

Peking University

PDE Operator Learning Data-Efficient Learning

Aug 11, 2026cs.CV

Grid-Preserving Knowledge Distillation: Transferring Convolutional Inductive Bias to Vision Transformers under Data Scarcity

Vision Transformers demonstrate remarkable global modeling capacity but often underperform in data-scarce regimes. Distilling convolutional inductive biases from a CNN teacher provides an effective remedy while leaving the deployed model unchanged. However, general-purpose feature distillation transfers little in this setting. In CNN-to-CNN distillation, pooling, flattening, and logit-space projections remove the spatial grid that encodes locality and translation equivariance. Unlike a convolutional student, a ViT cannot readily reconstruct this structure on its own. In this paper, we propose iBKD, a distillation framework that preserves the spatial grid throughout the entire transfer process. Its core module, the Inductive Bias Attention Module, aggregates features from all student layers onto the teacher's grid using learned weights. It then enhances structural cues through channel and deformable spatial attention and injects them via convolutional cross-attention operating directly between spatial grids rather than token sets. The module is used only during training, leaving the deployed model as an unmodified ViT with no inference overhead. Across seven Transformer backbones and six data-scarce benchmarks, iBKD consistently outperforms both locality-guidance methods and general knowledge distillation baselines, with its advantage increasing as the amount of training data decreases.

Junyong Choi, Cheolhyeon Park, Jaehoon Cho

Hyundai Motor Company · School of Electronics and Avionics Engineering, Korea Aerospace University

Vision Transformer Cross-Architecture Knowledge Distillation Inductive Bias Knowledge Distillation Data-Efficient Learning

Aug 11, 2026cs.CV

Rethinking Data Efficiency in Industrial Dense Prediction: Pretraining Coherence, Not Inductive Bias, Determines ViTs Low-Data Advantage

Vision Transformers (ViTs) are widely believed to require more labeled data than CNNs for industrial dense prediction. Through controlled experiments on four industrial datasets, we show that the data-efficiency gap stems from pretraining incoherence, which refers to the statistical mismatch between ImageNet-pretrained ViT backbones and COCO-pretrained CNN necks, rather than from inherent self-attention deficits. We characterize the cross-architecture feature gap and propose a lightweight AlignBlock family for pyramid-level feature recalibration. Our core finding empirically identifies a data-efficiency frontier: for domain-proximal scenes with >= 200 samples, Swin-Graft surpasses YOLOv11x (terminal 703-shot: 0.973 vs 0.956 mAP@50); for domain-distant scenes, CNNs retain advantage (hook 141-shot: 0.900 vs 0.600 mAP@50). Grafted neck weights yield up to 2.5x the mAP of a randomly initialized neck.

Haoran Sui, Yaoyuan Jia

ZTE Corporation, Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, P.R. China · The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, P.R. China

Vision Transformer Object Detection Data-Efficient Learning

Aug 3, 2026cs.LG

GLOBE: Trajectory-Aligned Gradient Matching with Structured SparseOptimization for Coreset Selection

On-device training of deep neural networks is fundamentally constrained by the computational and memory costs of large-scale datasets. Coreset selection offers a practical solution by retaining only a compact subset of real training samples. However, existing gradient-based methods commonly rely on gradients computed at a single model snapshot and employ greedy or pursuit-based selection procedures, limiting their ability to capture evolving optimization dynamics and handle strongly correlated samples. We propose GLOBE (Gradient Local-Balanced Extraction), a trajectory-aligned coreset selection framework that formulates sample selection as a globally optimized sparse weighting problem. GLOBE represents each sample by a gradient trajectory constructed across multiple training checkpoints, thereby capturing its influence throughout different stages of optimization. To preserve the training behavior of the full dataset, we introduce a multi-order matching objective that jointly aligns the first-order mean and projected uncentered second-order moments of gradient trajectories. GLOBE further combines Group LASSO, Elastic Net regularization, and nonnegative budget constraints to induce group- and sample-level sparsity while stabilizing the weights of correlated trajectories. Finally, class-balanced Top-K selection maintains adequate category coverage under limited sampling budgets. Experiments across six benchmarks and five evaluation architectures demonstrate that GLOBE consistently outperforms existing coreset selection methods in downstream test accuracy, particularly at low retention ratios. These results highlight the effectiveness of combining dynamic gradient information, multi-order distribution matching, and structured sparsity for data-efficient learning.

Hetian Liu, Jin Cui, Mengcheng Shi +4

State Key Laboratory of Human-Machine Hybrid Augmented Intelligence, and Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Xi’an Jiaotong University · School of Software Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University · School of Computer Science and Technology, Xi’an Jiaotong University

Training Data Selection Coreset Selection Data-Efficient Learning

Jul 31, 2026cs.RO

Bootstrapping Self-Supervised Learning of Binary Classification Using Error Bounds: A Case Study on a Robotic Insertion Task

Flexible manufacturing requires rapid deployment of solutions and minimal setup time to remain competitive. An essential attribute is the ability to control error levels, as failures can range from minor performance degradation to severe equipment damage. However, conventional deployment often involves extensive setup, data collection, model training or parameter tuning, and system testing, resulting in significant delays that hinder commercial feasibility. We propose a data engine which gathers data and improves its performance while executing the task. The data engine consists of two classifiers, a fast model prediction and expensive verification. First, a model prediction is performed and based on the confidence level of the prediction, the expensive verification can be used. By adjusting the confidence level, users can control the level of tolerable error. Our method is implemented on a real-world robotic insertion task, which uses force data for the model prediction. The system applies UMAP dimensionality reduction and uses Wilson-Score to compute the confidence bounds of the prediction. Results demonstrate the ability to learn and reduce the need for expensive verifications over time, while staying within the set error-rate. The results highlight the potential of confidence bounds in self-improving models to enhance reliability in robotic classification task.

Zebin Duan, Norbert Krüger, Juan Heredia +2

Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller Institute, University of Southern Denmark, 5230 Odense M, Denmark · Danish Institute for Advanced Study (DIAS), University of Southern Denmark, 5230 Odense M, Denmark

Self-Supervised Learning Robotic Data Collection Robotic Insertion Data-Efficient Learning

Jul 31, 2026cs.LG

Curriculum Matters: Data-Efficient Relational PFN Pretraining with Synthetic Data

Relational Prior-Data Fitted Networks (PFNs) such as RDB-PFN approximate Bayesian inference over multi-table relational databases by pretraining on millions of synthetic tasks. We investigate three intertwined questions about this paradigm. First, can a structurally different synthetic generator PluRel substitute for RDB-PFN's prior? Second, how much does the order in which synthetic data is presented to the PFN affect downstream performance? Third, how much relational reasoning can a PFN acquire from single-table synthetic pretraining alone, before any relational data is introduced? Using PluRel as the sole synthetic data source across all experiments, we find: (i) a progressive single-table curriculum that gradually widens schema complexity from 7 to 17 columns reaches 0.703 average ROC-AUC on the 23-task tabular benchmark using only approximately 13,300 synthetic tables (approximately 45x fewer single-table datasets than RDB-PFN's reported warm-up recipe), while the same data trained all-at-once collapses to 0.541 ROC-AUC; (ii) a relational curriculum trained from scratch on only approximately 5,500 PluRel databases reaches 0.638 average ROC-AUC on the 19-task RelBench/4DBInfer benchmark, recovering 88% of RDB-PFN's reported performance with approximately 220x less relational synthetic data; and (iii) the single-table curriculum model, evaluated directly on the relational benchmark without any relational adaptation, achieves 0.631, nearly matching the dedicated relational pipeline. Together, these findings suggest that curriculum design and synthetic data diversity may matter more for relational PFN pretraining than the specific relational generator or raw synthetic scale alone.

Mohammad Sadeq Abolhasani, Viswanath Ganapathy

SAP Labs, LLC. Palo Alto, CA, United States

Synthetic Data Pretraining Synthetic Data Generation Relational Reasoning Prior-Data Fitted Networks Curriculum Learning Relational Deep Learning+1

Jul 29, 2026cs.LG

SDO: Structure-Aware Data Organization for Efficient LLM Post-Training

Post-training of large language models is expensive, and existing efficiency improvements mainly focus on selecting informative samples or designing training schedules. However, data organization itself is usually treated as a static preprocessing step: embedding-based grouping methods construct fixed partitions before training and cannot adapt to the evolving sample exposure during optimization. As a result, all samples receive similar exposure despite their different optimization needs, leading to redundant updates for some samples while leaving others under-optimized. To address this problem, we propose SDO (Structure-Aware Data Organization), a plug-and-play data organization framework with an exposure-driven feedback mechanism that organizes mini-batch composition and sample exposure according to representation-space structure. SDO operates epoch by epoch on frozen external embeddings, avoiding model warm-up training overhead: within each epoch, locality-aware batching forms coherent mini-batches via KNN neighborhood traversal; across epochs, exposure-balanced scheduling records per-sample participation and reduces the sampling probability of over-exposed samples to preserve long-term coverage. Across SFT, DPO, and GRPO, SDO accelerates convergence, with the largest gains observed in the early-to-mid phase, producing more coherent gradients and more balanced accuracy across question types without permanently excluding training samples.

Jinliang Gao, Ning Yang, Hai Wang +2

Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences · National University of Defense Technology

Training Data Curation Efficient Language Model Training LLM Post-Training Data-Efficient Learning