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All fields1977Multimodal332Frontier LLMs256Recursive self improvement213Inference & serving162Agents & indirect prompt injection158Neural operators136Robotics135Clinical reasoning124Forecasting time94Linear bandits69Voice AI59AI safety35Molecular property prediction33Character recognition OCR33Federated learning27All 23 fields

Rising research topics

  • Diffusion priors20−4.8%
  • Voice AI59−14.5%
  • Character recognition OCR33−17.5%
  • Spiking neural networks6−25.0%
  • Quantum machine learning23−25.8%
  • Channel state information14−30.0%
  • Forecasting time94−35.2%
  • Algorithmic fairness7−36.4%

Papers

  • arXiv cs.LGSep 28

    On the spectral properties of generative denoiser Jacobians

    Alexandros Graikos, Nebojsa Jojic, Dimitris Samaras

    Generative denoising models, such as diffusion and flow-matching, learn to sample from complex distributions by training a deep neural network denoiser to recover clean data from noise-corrupted samples. While such models are typically compared on the quality of their synthesized samples, these metrics provide limited insight into how the underlying denoiser, which drives generation, differs. In this work, we propose to analyze the spectrum of the denoiser Jacobian as a tool to characterize these differences. Across pre-trained denoising models, we observe that better generative performance is associated with larger Jacobian eigenvalues. Motivated by this, we introduce a regularization scheme that controls the Jacobian spectrum by training the denoiser on perturbed inputs, with perturbations suppressing or amplifying Jacobian responses. On ImageNet, we test whether directly modifying the Jacobian spectral properties leads to improved generations. Our findings suggest that denoisers benefit from both strengthening responses along data-relevant principal eigen-directions and suppressing the noisy, data-irrelevant ones. This establishes the denoiser Jacobian as a useful tool for…

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  • arXiv cs.CLSep 28

    The Canonical Order Problem: When Large Language Models Are Unreliable Knowledge Bases for Multi-Valued Relations

    Timo Pierre Schrader, Annemarie Friedrich, Simon Razniewski, Lukas Lange

    Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as knowledge bases (KBs) due to the vast amount of knowledge they acquire during pre-training. While many works focus on extracting single relational triples, most real-world relations are multi-valued and require generating sets of entities. In this paper, we investigate how LLMs represent and generate multi-valued relations. We identify the canonical order problem: The probabilistic distributions inside LLMs organize many multi-valued relations according to a canonical ordering (e.g., alphabetical or chronological). Through mechanistic analysis, we show that set generation in LLMs can be thought of in terms of three phases: (1) retrieval of candidate entities, (2) internal sorting, and (3) selection of the next element. As a result, prompts aiming to construct KBs that deviate from this internal canonical ordering lead to a markedly reduced reliability of LLMs when aiming to generate complete sets for multi-valued relations.

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  • arXiv cs.LGSep 28

    Representable but Unlearned: Encoding Rank and the Interaction-Prediction Floor

    Zahra Khodagholi, Niloofar Yousefi

    Input encodings can restrict which measured contrasts a predictor can jointly reproduce, even when no single contrast is forced to vanish. We compute the attainable contrast space from an encoder's equivalence classes and a fixed contrast design, without labels, loss, or a fitted model; projecting the recorded contrasts onto that space gives an empirical error floor for any unrestricted decoder on those classes. On a 140-rectangle siRNA interaction panel, a graph neural network's training-only feature mask merges 165 endpoint states into 90 classes and cuts the rank of the 140 interaction contrasts to 72. The resulting floor is 0.009980, which is 14.6% of the fitted model's interaction squared error; the fitted model reaches 0.068335, slightly worse than a control predicting no interaction at all. A minimum of three restored chemistry columns recovers full rank. Refitting without the mask removes the floor entirely, yet interaction MSE improves by only 0.000017 under the reported protocol, and the restored columns remain absent from every training input. On a released RNA-splicing predictor, whose encoding is injective on the measured states, the same computation returns the full…

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  • arXiv cs.CLSep 28

    Geometric Representations of African Languages: A Regional Semantic Hub and Cultural Steering

    Muhammad Abdullahi Said, Jonathan Shock

    We study how Gemma 4 31B represents African languages and responds to cultural steering. The first study compares nine African languages and three controls using probes, contrast directions, and measures of representation similarity. Transfer from English varies across languages and layers. Directions representing an Africa versus West contrast are more aligned among the African languages than between these languages and the controls at several layers. The comparison across language families passes the reported Holm threshold at five of twelve layers, although dependence between language pairs limits the statistical interpretation. Within Nigeria, Yoruba and Igbo are more aligned than the average of their pairs with Hausa at eleven of twelve layers. The second study uses separate English data to construct directions for Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa. Under union scoring at the selected strengths, estimated differences in attribution rates from random directions range from 0.63 to 0.81. Most outputs pass the automated structural coherence screen. Comparisons with Aya Expanse 32B show that results depend on the representation measure. Together, the studies document…

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  • arXiv cs.CLSep 28

    FastGuide: Accelerating Reward Guidance for Diffusion Large Language Models

    Darshan Thaker, Lachlan Ewen MacDonald, René Vidal

    Gradient-based reward guidance provides a flexible way to use downstream reward models to control masked diffusion language models at inference time. However, its computational cost remains high as each decoding iteration incurs expensive diffusion model forward passes and reward model backpropagation steps. To address this, we introduce FastGuide, an adaptive hybrid of parallel and autoregressive decoding to accelerate reward guidance for diffusion language models. In analogy to parallel decoding, FastGuide amortizes the cost of reward model backpropagation by computing guidance once per decoding step and reusing it to generate multiple tokens. Within each decoding step, FastGuide makes diffusion forward passes autoregressive by unmasking tokens one at a time while efficiently recomputing token distributions after each unmasking by utilizing KV caching techniques and sparse recomputation of attention. Lastly, to adapt hybrid decoding to the model's confidence, FastGuide defers any token that the model is unconfident about under its recomputed distribution. Experiments on three reward benchmarks demonstrate that FastGuide is up to $4.4\times$ faster than sequential reward-guided…

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  • arXiv cs.CLSep 28

    SCOUT: Synergizing Reasoning and Tool-Use for Computer-Use Safety

    Jianxing Chen, Xiao Yu, Shipra Agrawal, Zhou Yu

    Computer-use agents (CUAs), while capable of completing computer tasks in everyday and professional workflows, can cause unintended harm even under benign instructions and environments. However, detecting such harm remains challenging. First, it requires careful, task-specific reasoning: verifiers guided only by general safety criteria often overlook many important but subtle harmful behaviors. Second, it requires active investigation: past trajectory screenshots show what the agent did but not always what actually changed in the environment, so LLM-as-a-judge verifiers that rely on screenshots alone may be unable to determine the actual consequences of actions. To address these challenges, we introduce SCOUT, a two-stage agentic safety verifier that synergizes reasoning-intensive rubric generation with tool-intensive evidence gathering. First, our SCOUT rubric generator extensively reasons over the task and the agent's trajectory to determine what successful and safe execution should entail, generating task-specific completion and safety rubrics. Then, our SCOUT probing agent follows these rubrics to interact with the post-execution environment and collect grounded evidence for…

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  • arXiv cs.CVSep 28

    PreviewDiff: Multimodal Critic-Guided Search over Diffusion Latents

    Vighnesh Subramaniam, Boris Katz, Brian Cheung, Chun-Liang Li, Tomas Pfister +1

    Diffusion models can produce striking images and videos, but they still struggle with the compositional details that make a generation faithful to a prompt, such as object counts, attribute binding, spatial relations, and temporally grounded actions. A common way to improve prompt satisfaction is to spend more compute at test time through Best-of-N sampling, but final-sample selection is fixed. Best-of-N can only choose among completed outputs and cannot repair a promising trajectory before it fails. We introduce PreviewDiff, a training-free test-time search method that turns diffusion sampling from scalar search into a multimodal critic-guided search over intermediate latents. At selected denoising checkpoints, PreviewDiff decodes a partial preview, asks a multimodal judge to score and critique it, and uses the resulting natural-language feedback to branch over semantic prompt edits and locally re-noised latent continuations. These branches are then scored and selectively rolled forward, allowing verifier compute to guide generation while the sample is still editable. Across image and video generation benchmarks, PreviewDiff consistently improves over budget-matched Best-of-N…

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  • arXiv cs.CLSep 28

    Concept Direction Reliability Across Languages with Different Tokenizer Fertility

    Muhammad Abdullahi Said, Abass Oguntade, Elisha Komolafe, Babangida Sani, Fatima Muhammad Adam +1

    Extracted sentiment directions can vary across samples even when downstream sentiment classification remains accurate. To evaluate direction reproducibility, we measure split-half agreement in English, Hausa, and Yoruba representations across four language models using both native and translated texts. We identify layers selected for agreement using ten topics and evaluate direction agreement across separate groups of fifteen topics. Using the final token, split-half agreement ranges from 0.737 to 0.870 for English, 0.589 to 0.762 for Hausa, and 0.101 to 0.399 for Yoruba, maintaining this language rank order across all 77 complete model comparisons. Classifiers trained on these same layers consistently predict sentiment above chance, demonstrating that predictive accuracy does not imply directional consistency. Furthermore, averaging token representations yields less consistent agreement, and high agreement can partially reflect sentence length. Ultimately, our findings highlight the need to measure vector direction reproducibility independently of classification performance, though they do not establish that tokenizer fertility which is the average number of tokens per…

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  • arXiv cs.LGSep 28

    Physical Cross-Modal Masked Autoencoding for Seismic-to-Well Representation Learning

    Meher Gajula, Keyla Gonzalez, Ben Lasscock, Alejandro Valenciano

    Learning from scientific measurements often requires aligning modalities with different spatial support and resolution. Subsurface characterization is an extreme dense-sparse problem in which 3D seismic provides volumetric but indirect measurements and well logs provide high-resolution 1D measurements at sparse borehole locations. We introduce a physically grounded cross-modal masked autoencoder (CM-MAE) for seismic-to-well representation learning. The model jointly tokenizes seismic volumes and well-log depth patches, embeds both modalities in continuous physical coordinates using four-axis rotary position embeddings, and reconstructs masked targets with a cross-modal decoder. Sparse Mixture-of-Experts layers provide modality-specific capacity while dense attention allows information exchange between modalities. Pretraining uses 23 seismic volumes covering approximately 178,000 square km across U.S. offshore and onshore basins, together with approximately 92,000 wells. Matched-mask ablations show strongly asymmetric information flow. Seismic context improves held-out well-log reconstruction by 9.73%, while well-log context improves seismic reconstruction by 0.65%. We evaluate…

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  • arXiv cs.AISep 28

    FigAct: Turning Scientific Figures into Active Canvases for Explanation

    Shishi Xiao, Zichao Wang, Alexa Siu, David H. Laidlaw, Jennifer Healey

    Scientific figures are designed to communicate information visually, yet MLLMs typically explain them by translating their visual content back into text. This requires readers to manually map the resulting explanations back to the figure. Inspired by how people present visual information, we introduce FigAct, a framework that transforms static scientific figures into question-conditioned visual presentations by acting directly on their existing graphical elements. Like a human presenter, FigAct generates a sequence of short narrations, grounds each narration in the corresponding visual evidence, and applies visual actions to guide the viewer's attention. We develop a hierarchical search strategy for efficient element localization, reducing token usage by approximately 40$\times$. We further train FigAct-8B using three task-specific rewards for grounding accuracy, search efficiency, and rendering quality. We further build a human-verified benchmark from figures in real-world scientific papers to evaluate the ability of MLLMs to generate grounded visual explanations. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of FigAct and show that treating scientific figures as presentation…

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  • arXiv cs.CVSep 28

    FD-AA: A Lightweight Focal-Diffuse And Attenuation-Aware Head for Incidental Abdominal Abnormality Detection in Chest CT

    Haoyan Ding, Kritika Iyer, Halid Yerebakan, Zhenyu Bu, Chushu Shen +7

    Routine chest CT captures upper-abdominal structures that may contain clinically relevant incidental abnormalities. Detecting these findings requires feature extraction from organs with different spatial extents and attenuation patterns. We propose FD-AA, a lightweight organ-aware classification head adaptable for frozen 3-D CT encoders. Within each organ, an attenuation-aware module preserves sparse focal evidence, while masked generalized-mean pooling captures diffuse anomaly patterns. In seven abdominal organs, FD-AA with Pillar-0 achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in both the CT-RATE test set (AUC = 0.798) and the external RAD-ChestCT dataset (AUC = 0.713). More specifically, FD-AA improved macro AUC/AP from 0.763/0.346 to 0.798/0.405 over direct classification using frozen Pillar-0 only (p = 0.034/0.016). Such performance gain generalizes across multiple frozen encoders (AUC improvement on MedicalNet +9.8%, CT-CLIP +14.7%, ResNet +3.7%), demonstrating the effectiveness of FD-AA across different feature representations. These results support the effectiveness of integrating focal-diffuse aggregation with explicit HU evidence for incidental abdominal abnormality…

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  • arXiv cs.LGSep 28

    EvoMO-SR: Multiobjective LLM-based Evolution of Symbolic Expressions with substructure guidance

    Cristina Rossetti, Anna V. Kononova, Thomas Bäck, Fei Liu, Niki Van Stein

    Symbolic Regression (SR) is a data-driven method for scientific discovery which searches for interpretable analytical relationships within data. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have also had a significant impact on scientific discovery, enabling the automation of various stages of the process. For these reasons, the possibility of harnessing the embedded scientific knowledge and programming capabilities of LLMs to solve SR tasks has emerged, showing promising performance compared with traditional methods. We propose EvoMO-SR, a novel LLM-driven SR framework in which the LLM generates equation skeletons, with their coefficients fitted separately by an external optimizer. The framework includes a multi-objective survival selection which controls bloating by balancing accuracy and complexity, and a substructure guidance mechanism which mutates expressions with candidate reusable building blocks. EvoMO-SR achieves the best accuracy in seven of the eight in-domain and out-of-domain settings for LSR-Synth, using a small LLM model, i.e., Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct. We also evaluated structural recovery through two symbolic accuracy metrics based on canonicalized subtree overlap and…

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  • arXiv cs.CRSep 28

    Tokenized Key-Gated Adapter Routing: A Secure Access Control Mechanism Against Private Data Leakage in LLMs

    Mohamed Shaaban, Mohamed Elmahallawy

    Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in privacy-critical domains (e.g., healthcare, finance, and government), but their propensity to memorize and disclose personally identifiable information (PII) poses serious security and compliance risks. Existing defenses typically force a trade-off between model utility, privacy protection, and access to fine-tuned private knowledge. We propose LoRA-Oriented Control via Keyed Entry Tokens (Locket), a practical framework that embeds fine-grained, policy-driven access control directly into LLM generation. Locket trains a set of lightweight LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) adapters, each encoding a distinct access policy (e.g., full reveal, partial redaction via PII masking, or reveal under a specified differential privacy level). A compact gating module is trained to associate a learned keyed entry token with exactly one LoRA adapter via sequence-level hard routing; the presence of a valid token acts as an authorization key that unlocks corresponding private knowledge, while an invalid or absent token triggers a privacy-preserving adapter that redacts or sanitizes sensitive content. This design ensures Locket remains fully…

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  • arXiv cs.CLSep 28

    Targeting Pivotal Decisions for Credit Assignment in Agentic Reinforcement Learning

    Dongwon Jung, Hemanth Neelgund Ramesh, Yifan Wang, Xiaomin Li, Yuexing Hao +5

    Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has become a promising approach for training large language model agents. However, its uniform assignment of trajectory-level advantages to all policy tokens fails to distinguish consequential decisions from less relevant ones, obscuring which intermediate decisions contributed to success. We introduce ProVer, a framework that targets potentially pivotal decisions for fine-grained credit assignment in agentic reinforcement learning. Given a rollout group, an agentic judge contrasts successful and failed trajectories to propose a segment potentially responsible for their divergent outcomes. Rather than directly trusting the judge's assessment, ProVer verifies the proposed segment by estimating its advantage from the difference in terminal success rates between current-policy continuations sampled before and after the segment. Positive estimates are then incorporated into the GRPO advantages of policy tokens within the proposed segment. By using model judgment only to select where to verify, ProVer grounds local credit in observed outcomes without exhaustively evaluating every intermediate state. Across ALFWorld, WebShop, and SearchQA,…

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  • arXiv cs.LGSep 28

    Fair Policy Optimization in Major-Minor Weakly Coupled Markov Decision Processes

    Xiaohui Tu, Yossiri Adulyasak, Erick Delage

    We consider fair resource allocation in sequential decision-making environments modeled as major-minor weakly coupled Markov decision processes (M2WCMDP). In this framework, resource constraints couple the action spaces of a major sub-Markov decision process (sub-MDP) and a population of minor sub-MDPs that would otherwise operate independently. Instead of using the traditional utilitarian (total-sum) objective, we optimize a general class of monotone, concave, permutation-invariant, normalized fairness functions. With homogeneous minor sub-MDPs, we prove that the problem under symmetry reduces to optimizing the platform-plus-mean-participant utilitarian objective over the class of \textit{permutation-invariant} policies, which allows us to exploit efficient algorithms that optimize the utilitarian-based objective to solve this fairness-aware problem. For more general settings, we introduce a count-proportion-based deep reinforcement learning approach with a priority-based sampler that generates feasible count actions. The generality of our framework means that the proposed algorithms and theoretical guarantees transfer to any domain with a symmetric M2WCMDP structure. We…

    AI30PDF
  • arXiv cs.LGSep 28

    Draft in Parallel, Condition Through Depth: Adjacent Causal Injection for Speculative Decoding

    Haohui Zhang, Keyu Chen, Haocheng Sun, Weibo Gu, Ruizhi Qiao +2

    Parallel speculative drafting generates multiple candidates in one backbone pass, but independent token selection can produce inconsistent continuations that shorten the accepted prefix. Existing methods mostly leave conditional decoding to a lightweight module after the backbone, which limits the flow of predecessor information to successors. Our analysis of DFlash shows that early positions already form recoverable predictions in shallow layers, and that accurate adjacent predecessors help successors more when they enter earlier. We therefore propose DSpine, a drafter with causal conditioning injection throughout the backbone: at every layer, gated adjacent injection writes each predecessor's predicted feature into its successor, so the causal conditioning chain unfolds over network depth while all positions update in parallel. A unified transfer space built from the target model's output embeddings unifies layer-wise injection with predecessor-conditioned decoding, and layer-wise output-embedding supervision promotes the formation of predicted features in shallow layers. Fused kernels and a transition cache execute both efficiently in parallel within SGLang. Across seven math,…

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  • arXiv cs.CVSep 28

    Exploring Learning Models for Topological Relationship Recognition from Image Data

    Saptak Das, Monidipa Das

    Figuring out how objects relate to each other, like whether they touch, overlap, stay completely separate or one sits inside another, matters a lot in fields like GIS, biomedical imaging, and robotics. Even though machine learning has come a long way, people haven't really focused on spotting these topological relationships in images. The main roadblocks? Not enough good datasets and no clear way to measure results. So, we rolled up our sleeves and built a new dataset. It's pretty sizable: over 11,000 labelled images showing all those essential relationships. We ran tests with some classic machine learning models, Naive Bayes, KNN, Random Forest, SVM, and Artificial Neural Networks, and threw in some deep learning stars like VGG16 and InceptionResNetV2. For the dataset itself, we used segmentation, contour detection, and grayscale normalization to tease out solid feature vectors. The results? Deep learning methods, especially VGG16, pulled ahead, with validation accuracy hitting 89.55%. That's a big jump compared to the traditional models. This shows how powerful transfer learning is for analyzing topological relationships in images, and it gives researchers a new standard to aim…

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  • arXiv cs.CVSep 28

    Boosting Metric Depth Completion via Training-Free Adaptive Response Geometry

    Mia Zhang, Jizong Peng

    Depth completion aims to recover dense metric depth from sparse sensor measurements, increasingly leveraging visual foundation models as geometric priors. However, aligning these priors to true metric scale typically relies on rigid affine assumptions in predefined coordinate systems, leaving systematic calibration errors. Linearity in depth calibration depends on the response coordinate. We introduce adaptive response geometry, which makes the fixed choice of depth, log depth, or disparity an image-level unknown. A continuous response family unifies these coordinates and defines an explicit depth-dependent gain. We derive the response-gradient relation and estimate the response parameters in metric space. Hard-Dirichlet residual reconstruction completes the calibrated prior. Under deliberately incomplete metric observations, the training-free pipeline achieves macro AbsRel 0.0301 and macro NMed 14.04°, improving both aggregate measures over PriorDA, LDCM, and Any2Full. Linearity diagnostics examine how the selected response changes the depth relation and its metric error.

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  • arXiv cs.CRSep 28

    Adversarial Debiasing of Machine Learning Models for Enhanced Network Security against DDoS Attacks

    Aadith Sukumar, Isha Singh, Devershika Mohane, Ankit Mukherjee, Ankush Dutta +2

    Distributed Denial of Service attacks are a growing threat to network infrastructure, and new techniques, including the use of generative AI, make them harder to detect. Traditional detection systems, such as rule based firewalls, often fail to identify these evolving attack patterns. In this study, we propose a new method for detecting DDoS attacks by combining synthetic data generation using Generative Adversarial Networks with a Random Forest classifier. The GAN generated data showed 80.3 percent cosine similarity to real traffic, which helped the model learn underlying traffic patterns more effectively. To address imbalances in the data, especially in packet related features, we applied adversarial debiasing. This reduced the model's sensitivity to skewed distributions in variables such as forward and backward packet counts and total byte lengths. Our results show that models trained on a mix of synthetic and real data achieved significantly better performance: 99.98 percent accuracy on benchmark data and a 22.60 percent improvement when tested on previously unseen synthetic traffic. This suggests that the method can generalize well across different traffic scenarios and…

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  • arXiv math.OCSep 28

    Tensor-Train Compressed Separable PINNs: A Curvature-Aware Optimization Framework for Parametric PDEs in High Dimensions

    Denis Korolev, Martin Eigel

    In this work, we develop a second-order optimization framework for physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) applied to high-dimensional parametric partial differential equations (PDEs). The framework is built on the Gauss--Newton pullback metric, which provides an operator-informed notion of curvature in parameter space and connects the method to the broader family of natural gradient schemes. We show that, for coordinate-separable neural architectures and linear differential operators (or linearized operators in the nonlinear case) admitting a finite separable representation, the residual Jacobian inherits a structured separable factorization. This yields an exact compressed formulation of the Gauss--Newton step in a reduced space, without assembling the full residual Jacobian on the exponentially large tensor-product collocation grid. The dimension of the reduced space (the effective compressed dimension) is determined by the local collocation grid sizes, the separable operator structure, and the contraction pattern of the architecture, thereby avoiding dependence on the full tensor-product grid size and replacing dense linear algebra in parameter space by a substantially…

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