Daily Papers

We study singularities of height functions on singular surfaces in R^3 parameterized by smooth map-germs A-equivalent to H_k in Mond's classification, and the versality of the family of the height functions. We also study relations of the singularities of the height functions with the parabolic locus of these singular surfaces.

Chinchilla Approach 2 is among the most widely used methods for fitting neural scaling laws. Its parabolic approximation introduces systematic biases in compute-optimal allocation estimates, even on noise-free synthetic data. Applied to published Llama 3 IsoFLOP data at open frontier compute scales, these biases imply a parameter underallocation corresponding to 6.5% of the 3.8times10^{25} FLOP training budget and \1.4M (90% CI: 412K-\2.9M) in unnecessary compute at 50% H100 MFU. Simulated multimodal model misallocations show even greater opportunity costs due to higher loss surface asymmetry. Three sources of this error are examined: IsoFLOP sampling grid width (Taylor approximation accuracy), uncentered IsoFLOP sampling, and loss surface asymmetry (α\neq β$). Chinchilla Approach 3 largely eliminates these biases but is often regarded as less data-efficient, numerically unstable, prone to local minima, and harder to implement. Each concern is shown to be unfounded or addressable, especially when the partially linear structure of the objective is exploited via Variable Projection, enabling unbiased inference on all five loss surface parameters through a two-dimensional optimization that is well-conditioned, analytically differentiable, and amenable to dense, or even exhaustive, grid search. It may serve as a more convenient replacement for Approach 2 or a more scalable alternative for adaptations of Approach 3 to richer scaling law formulations.

This paper proposes a new gradient-based optimization approach for designing optimal feedback kernels for parabolic distributed parameter systems with boundary control. Unlike traditional kernel optimization methods for parabolic systems, our new method does not require solving non-standard Riccati-type or Klein-Gorden-type partial differential equations (PDEs). Instead, the feedback kernel is parameterized as a second-order polynomial whose coefficients are decision variables to be tuned via gradient-based dynamic optimization, where the gradient of the system cost functional (which penalizes both kernel and output magnitude) is computed by solving a so-called costate PDE instandard form. Special constraints are imposed on the kernel coefficients to ensure that, under mild conditions, the optimized kernel yields closed-loop stability. Numerical simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Existing single-view 3D generative models typically adopt multiview diffusion priors to reconstruct object surfaces, yet they remain prone to inter-view inconsistencies and are unable to faithfully represent complex internal structure or nontrivial topologies. In particular, we encode geometry information by projecting it onto a bounding sphere and unwrapping it into a compact and structural multi-layer 2D Spherical Projection (SP) representation. Operating solely in the image domain, SPGen offers three key advantages simultaneously: (1) Consistency. The injective SP mapping encodes surface geometry with a single viewpoint which naturally eliminates view inconsistency and ambiguity; (2) Flexibility. Multi-layer SP maps represent nested internal structures and support direct lifting to watertight or open 3D surfaces; (3) Efficiency. The image-domain formulation allows the direct inheritance of powerful 2D diffusion priors and enables efficient finetuning with limited computational resources. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SPGen significantly outperforms existing baselines in geometric quality and computational efficiency.

We study the momentum-based minimization of a diffuse perimeter functional on Euclidean spaces and on graphs with applications to semi-supervised classification tasks in machine learning. While the gradient flow in the task at hand is a parabolic partial differential equation, the momentum-method corresponds to a damped hyperbolic PDE, leading to qualitatively and quantitatively different trajectories. Using a convex-concave splitting-based FISTA-type time discretization, we demonstrate empirically that momentum can lead to faster convergence if the time step size is large but not too large. With large time steps, the PDE analysis offers only limited insight into the geometric behavior of solutions and typical hyperbolic phenomena like loss of regularity are not be observed in sample simulations.