Neural networks generally prefer simple and easy-to-learn features. When these features are spuriously correlated with the labels, the network's performance can suffer, particularly for underrepresented classes or concepts. Self-supervised representation learning methods, such as contrastive learning, are especially prone to this issue, often resulting in worse performance on downstream tasks. We identify a key spectral signature of this failure: early reliance on dominant singular modes of the learned feature matrix. To mitigate this, we propose a novel framework that promotes a uniform eigenspectrum of the feature covariance matrix, encouraging diverse and semantically rich representations. Our method operates in a fully self-supervised setting, without relying on ground-truth labels or any additional information. Empirical results on SimCLR and SimSiam demonstrate consistent gains in robustness and transfer performance, suggesting broad applicability across self-supervised learning paradigms. Code: https://github.com/NaghmehGh/SpuriousCorrelation_SSRL

Monitoring chemical processes is essential to prevent catastrophic failures, optimize costs and profits, and ensure the safety of employees and the environment. A key component of modern monitoring systems is the automated detection of anomalies in sensor data over time, called time series, enabling partial automation of plant operation and adding additional layers of supervision to crucial components. The development of anomaly detection methods in this domain is challenging, since real chemical process data are usually proprietary, and simulated data are generally not a sufficient replacement. In this paper, we present NoBOOM, the first collection of datasets for anomaly detection in real-world chemical process data, including labeled data from a running process at our industry partner BASF SE — one of the world’s leading chemical companies — and several chemical processes run in laboratory‑scale and pilot‑scale plants. While we are not able to share every detail about the industrial process, for the laboratory‑ and pilot‑scale plants, we provide comprehensive information on plant configuration, process operation, and, in particular, anomaly events, enabling a differentiated analysis of anomaly detection methods. To demonstrate the complexity of the benchmark, we analyze the data with regard to common issues of time-series anomaly detection (TSAD) benchmarks, including potential triviality and bias.

Adversarial examples are manipulated samples used to deceive machine learning models, posing a serious threat in safety-critical applications. Existing safety certificates for machine learning models are limited to individual input examples, failing to capture generalization to unseen data. To address this limitation, we propose novel generalization bounds based on the PAC-Bayesian and randomized smoothing frameworks, providing certificates that predict the model’s performance and robustness on unseen test samples based solely on the training data. We present an effective procedure to train and compute the first non-vacuous generalization bounds for neural networks in adversarial settings. Experimental results on the widely recognized MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our approach, yielding the first robust risk certificates for stochastic convolutional neural networks under the $L_2$ threat model. Our method offers valuable tools for evaluating model susceptibility to real-world adversarial risks.

A scientific workflow is a set of programs with DAG-structured data dependencies used to analyze large amounts of data. The execution of workflows often requires scheduling of thousands of tasks with heterogeneous resource requirements on distributed compute resources. To effectively utilize compute resources, schedulers require task resource usage estimates. We propose a predictive online scheduling (POS) approach that learns those estimates during workflow execution using online models. We evaluated POS on a test suite of 1000 workflows (Montage, Sipht, etc.) generated by the Pegasus workflow generator. We added randomly sampled memory usage for the tasks in the workflows and measured the impact of different scheduling policies and prediction models (linear regression, kernel regression, prediction models with controllable learning rate) on workflow execution time and memory utilization. Simulation experiments were conducted in Dynamic-CloudSim. The accuracy of the simulation was validated by running a selection of workflows on real Hadoop clusters. We showed that our scheduler mitigates memory bottlenecks which leads to significantly faster workflow execution.