Inner Loop Inference for Pretrained Transformers: Unlocking Latent Capabilities Without Training

Deep Learning architectures, and in particular Transformers, are conventionally viewed as a composition of layers. These layers are actually often obtained as the sum of two contributions: a residual path that copies the input and the output of a Transformer block. As a consequence, the inner representations (i.e. the input of these blocks) can be interpreted as iterative refinement of a propagated latent representation. Under this lens, many works suggest that the inner space is shared across layers, meaning that tokens can be decoded at early stages. Mechanistic interpretability even goes further by conjecturing that some layers act as refinement layers. Following this path, we propose inference-time inner looping, which prolongs refinement in pretrained off-the-shelf language models by repeatedly re-applying a selected block range. Across multiple benchmarks, inner looping yields modest but consistent accuracy improvements. Analyses of the resulting latent trajectories suggest more stable state evolution and continued semantic refinement. Overall, our results suggest that additional refinement can be obtained through simple test-time looping, extending computation in frozen pretrained models.

Residual Connections and the Causal Shift: Uncovering a Structural Misalignment in Transformers

Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained with next-token prediction, implemented in autoregressive Transformers via causal masking for parallelism. This creates a subtle misalignment: residual connections tie activations to the current token, while supervision targets the next token, potentially propagating mismatched information if the current token is not the most informative for prediction. In this work, we empirically localize this input-output alignment shift in pretrained LLMs, using decoding trajectories over tied embedding spaces and similarity-based metrics. Our experiments reveal that the hidden token representations switch from input alignment to output alignment deep within the network. Motivated by this observation, we propose a lightweight residual-path mitigation based on residual attenuation, implemented either as a fixed-layer intervention or as a learnable gating mechanism. Experiments on multiple benchmarks show that these strategies alleviate the representation misalignment and yield improvements, providing an efficient and general architectural enhancement for autoregressive Transformers.

REVE: A Foundation Model for EEG -- Adapting to Any Setup with Large-Scale Pretraining on 25,000 Subjects

Foundation models have transformed AI by reducing reliance on task-specific data through large-scale pretraining. While successful in language and vision, their adoption in EEG has lagged due to the heterogeneity of public datasets, which are collected under varying protocols, devices, and electrode configurations. Existing EEG foundation models struggle to generalize across these variations, often restricting pretraining to a single setup, resulting in suboptimal performance, in particular under linear probing. We present REVE (Representation for EEG with Versatile Embeddings), a pretrained model explicitly designed to generalize across diverse EEG signals. REVE introduces a novel 4D positional encoding scheme that enables it to process signals of arbitrary length and electrode arrangement. Using a masked autoencoding objective, we pretrain REVE on over 60,000 hours of EEG data from 92 datasets spanning 25,000 subjects, representing the largest EEG pretraining effort to date. REVE achieves state-of-the-art results on 10 downstream EEG tasks, including motor imagery classification, seizure detection, sleep staging, cognitive load estimation, and emotion recognition. With little to no fine-tuning, it demonstrates strong generalization, and nuanced spatio-temporal modeling. We release code, pretrained weights, and tutorials to support standardized EEG research and accelerate progress in clinical neuroscience.

Event Classification of Accelerometer Data for Industrial Package Monitoring with Embedded Deep Learning

Package monitoring is an important topic in industrial applications, with significant implications for operational efficiency and ecological sustainability. In this study, we propose an approach that employs an embedded system, placed on reusable packages, to detect their state (on a Forklift, in a Truck, or in an undetermined location). We aim to design a system with a lifespan of several years, corresponding to the lifespan of reusable packages. Our analysis demonstrates that maximizing device lifespan requires minimizing wake time. We propose a pipeline that includes data processing, training, and evaluation of the deep learning model designed for imbalanced, multiclass time series data collected from an embedded sensor. The method uses a one-dimensional Convolutional Neural Network architecture to classify accelerometer data from the IoT device. Before training, two data augmentation techniques are tested to solve the imbalance problem of the dataset: the Synthetic Minority Oversampling TEchnique and the ADAptive SYNthetic sampling approach. After training, compression techniques are implemented to have a small model size. On the considered twoclass problem, the methodology yields a precision of 94.54% for the first class and 95.83% for the second class, while compression techniques reduce the model size by a factor of four. The trained model is deployed on the IoT device, where it operates with a power consumption of 316 mW during inference.

Multimodal Object Detection via Probabilistic a priori Information Integration

Multimodal object detection has shown promise in remote sensing. However, multimodal data frequently encounter the problem of low-quality, wherein the modalities lack strict cell-to-cell alignment, leading to mismatch between different modalities. In this paper, we investigate multimodal object detection where only one modality contains the target object and the others provide crucial contextual information. We propose to resolve the alignment problem by converting the contextual binary information into probability maps. We then propose an early fusion architecture that we validate with extensive experiments on the DOTA dataset.

LLM meets Vision-Language Models for Zero-Shot One-Class Classification

We consider the problem of zero-shot one-class visual classification. In this setting, only the label of the target class is available, and the goal is to discriminate between positive and negative query samples without requiring any validation example from the target task. We propose a two-step solution that first queries large language models for visually confusing objects and then relies on vision-language pre-trained models (e.g., CLIP) to perform classification. By adapting large-scale vision benchmarks, we demonstrate the ability of the proposed method to outperform adapted off-the-shelf alternatives in this setting. Namely, we propose a realistic benchmark where negative query samples are drawn from the same original dataset as positive ones, including a granularity-controlled version of iNaturalist, where negative samples are at a fixed distance in the taxonomy tree from the positive ones. Our work shows that it is possible to discriminate between a single category and other semantically related ones using only its label

Unsupervised Adaptive Deep Learning Method For BCI Motor Imagery Decoding

In the context of Brain-Computer Interfaces, we propose an adaptive method that reaches offline performance level while being usable online without requiring supervision. Interestingly, our method does not require retraining the model, as it consists in using a frozen efficient deep learning backbone while continuously realigning data, both at input and latent spaces, based on streaming observations. We demonstrate its efficiency for Motor Imagery brain decoding from electroencephalography data, considering challenging cross-subject scenarios. For reproducibility, we share the code of our experiments.

Few and Fewer: Learning Better from Few Examples Using Fewer Base Classes

When training data is scarce, it is common to make use of a feature extractor that has been pre-trained on a large base dataset, either by fine-tuning its parameters on the ``target'' dataset or by directly adopting its representation as features for a simple classifier. Fine-tuning is ineffective for few-shot learning, since the target dataset contains only a handful of examples. However, directly adopting the features without fine-tuning relies on the base and target distributions being similar enough that these features achieve separability and generalization. This paper investigates whether better features for the target dataset can be obtained by training on fewer base classes, seeking to identify a more useful base dataset for a given task.We consider cross-domain few-shot image classification in eight different domains from Meta-Dataset and entertain multiple real-world settings (domain-informed, task-informed and uninformed) where progressively less detail is known about the target task. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration that fine-tuning on a subset of carefully selected base classes can significantly improve few-shot learning. Our contributions are simple and intuitive methods that can be implemented in any few-shot solution. We also give insights into the conditions in which these solutions are likely to provide a boost in accuracy. We release the code to reproduce all experiments from this paper on GitHub. https://github.com/RafLaf/Few-and-Fewer.git

Inferring Latent Class Statistics from Text for Robust Visual Few-Shot Learning

In the realm of few-shot learning, foundation models like CLIP have proven effective but exhibit limitations in cross-domain robustness especially in few-shot settings. Recent works add text as an extra modality to enhance the performance of these models. Most of these approaches treat text as an auxiliary modality without fully exploring its potential to elucidate the underlying class visual features distribution. In this paper, we present a novel approach that leverages text-derived statistics to predict the mean and covariance of the visual feature distribution for each class. This predictive framework enriches the latent space, yielding more robust and generalizable few-shot learning models. We demonstrate the efficacy of incorporating both mean and covariance statistics in improving few-shot classification performance across various datasets. Our method shows that we can use text to predict the mean and covariance of the distribution offering promising improvements in few-shot learning scenarios.

A Strong and Simple Deep Learning Baseline for BCI MI Decoding

We propose EEG-SimpleConv, a straightforward 1D convolutional neural network for Motor Imagery decoding in BCI. Our main motivation is to propose a very simple baseline to compare to, using only very standard ingredients from the literature. We evaluate its performance on four EEG Motor Imagery datasets, including simulated online setups, and compare it to recent Deep Learning and Machine Learning approaches. EEG-SimpleConv is at least as good or far more efficient than other approaches, showing strong knowledge-transfer capabilities across subjects, at the cost of a low inference time. We advocate that using off-the-shelf ingredients rather than coming with ad-hoc solutions can significantly help the adoption of Deep Learning approaches for BCI. We make the code of the models and the experiments accessible.