Continual Learning (CL) aims to enable models to sequentially learn multiple tasks without forgetting previous knowledge. Recent studies have shown that optimizing towards flatter loss minima can improve model generalization. However, existing sharpness-aware methods for CL suffer from two key limitations: (1) they treat sharpness regularization as a unified signal without distinguishing the contributions of its components. and (2) they introduce substantial computational overhead that impedes practical deployment. To address these challenges, we propose FLAD, a novel optimization framework that decomposes sharpness-aware perturbations into gradient-aligned and stochastic-noise components, and show that retaining only the noise component promotes generalization. We further introduce a lightweight scheduling scheme that enables FLAD to maintain significant performance gains even under constrained training time. FLAD can be seamlessly integrated into various CL paradigms and consistently outperforms standard and sharpness-aware optimizers in diverse experimental settings, demonstrating its effectiveness and practicality in CL.

Multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA) seeks to decode human emotions by integrating heterogeneous modalities. However, real-world scenarios often involve missing or misaligned data due to sensor failures or transmission errors, leading to disrupted temporal dynamics and degraded cross-modal correlations. To address these challenges, we propose RECAP (REcovery of Coherent Affective Patterns), a robust two-stage framework to restore temporal and structural emotional integrity under modality incompleteness. The first stage employs a causality-aware adversarial generator for multi-granularity temporal reconstruction, complemented by a contrastive mutual information factorization module that disentangles shared and modality-specific semantics. The second stage introduces a mutual information-guided attention fusion mechanism with a ranking-based objective, enabling adaptive integration of complementary signals for refined prediction. Extensive experiments on MOSI, MOSEI, and SIMS under various missing-modality conditions demonstrate that RECAP consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Notably, it improves ACC-7 on MOSI by 2.71 percentage points and F1 on SIMS by 6.38 percentage points. These results verify the performance of RECAP in terms of capturing fine-grained emotional cues and robustness.

Adversarially robust generalization of Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) has garnered significant attention in various security-sensitive application areas, driven by intrinsic adversarial vulnerability. Albeit remarkable empirical advancement, theoretical understanding of the generalization behavior of GCNs subjected to adversarial attacks remains elusive. To make progress on the mystery, we establish unified high-probability generalization bounds for GCNs in the context of node classification, by leveraging adversarial Transductive Rademacher Complexity (TRC) and developing a novel contraction technique on graph convolution. Our bounds capture the interaction between generalization error and adversarial perturbations, revealing the importance of key quantities in mitigating the negative effects of perturbations, such as low-dimensional feature projection, perturbation-dependent norm regularization, normalized graph matrix, proper number of network layers, etc. Furthermore, we provide TRC-based bounds of popular GCNs with $\ell_r$-norm-additive perturbations for arbitrary $r\geq 1$. A comparison of theoretical results demonstrates that specific network architectures (e.g., residual connection) can help alleviate the cumulative effect of perturbations during the forward propagation of deep GCNs. Experimental results on benchmark datasets validate our theoretical findings.

Information-theoretic bounds, while achieving significant success in analyzing the generalization of randomized learning algorithms, have been criticized for their slow convergence rates and overestimation. This paper presents novel bounds that bridge the expected empirical and population risks through a binarized variant of the Jensen-Shannon divergence. Leveraging our foundational lemma that characterizes the interaction between an arbitrary and a binary variable, we derive hypothesis-based bounds that enhance existing conditional mutual information bounds by reducing the number of conditioned samples from $2$ to $1$. We additionally establish prediction-based bounds that surpass prior bounds based on evaluated loss mutual information measures. Thereafter, through a new binarization technique for the evaluated loss variables, we obtain exactly tight generalization bounds broadly applicable to general randomized learning algorithms for any bounded loss functions. Our results effectively address key limitations of previous results in analyzing certain stochastic convex optimization problems, without requiring additional stability or compressibility assumptions about the learning algorithm.

The Segment Anything Model (SAM), a vision foundation model, exhibits impressive zero-shot capabilities in general tasks but struggles in specialized domains. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) is a promising approach to unleash the potential of SAM in novel scenarios. However, existing PEFT methods for SAM neglect the domain-invariant relations encoded in the pre-trained model. To bridge this gap, we propose InfoSAM, an information-theoretic approach that enhances SAM fine-tuning by distilling and preserving its pre-trained segmentation knowledge. Specifically, we formulate the knowledge transfer process as two novel mutual information-based objectives: (i) to compress the domain-invariant relation extracted from pre-trained SAM, excluding pseudo-invariant information as possible, and (ii) to maximize mutual information between the relational knowledge learned by the teacher (pre-trained SAM) and the student (fine-tuned model). The proposed InfoSAM establishes a robust distillation framework for PEFT of SAM. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks validate InfoSAM’s effectiveness in improving SAM family’s performance on real-world tasks, demonstrating its adaptability and superiority in handling specialized scenarios. The code and models are available at https://muyaoyuan.github.io/InfoSAM_Page.

Neural networks have been successfully applied in numerous domains with the help of high-quality training samples. However, datasets containing noises and outliers (i.e., corrupted samples) are ubiquitous in the real world. When using these datasets as training samples, most neural networks exhibit poor predictive performance. In this paper, motivated by the modal regression, we propose a Modal Neural Network, which is robust to corrupted samples. Specifically, the modal neural network can reveal the most likely trends of training samples without overfitting the corrupted samples. On the theoretical side, we establish the generalization error bounds of the proposed method with Rademacher complexity. On the experimental side, the numerical results demonstrate our method yields substantial effectiveness and robustness to different levels of corruption on both synthetic and real-world benchmark datasets. Furthermore, our method, as a plug-and-play algorithm, can be readily applied to most neural network architectures and optimizers.