A Decade of Deep Learning: A Survey on The Magnificent Seven

Deep learning has fundamentally reshaped the landscape of artificial intelligence over the past decade, enabling remarkable achievements across diverse domains. At the heart of these developments lie multi-layered neural network architectures that excel at automatic feature extraction, leading to significant improvements in machine learning tasks. To demystify these advances and offer accessible guidance, we present a comprehensive overview of the most influential deep learning algorithms selected through a broad-based survey of the field. Our discussion centers on pivotal architectures, including Residual Networks, Transformers, Generative Adversarial Networks, Variational Autoencoders, Graph Neural Networks, Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training, and Diffusion models. We detail their historical context, highlight their mathematical foundations and algorithmic principles, and examine subsequent variants, extensions, and practical considerations such as training methodologies, normalization techniques, and learning rate schedules. Beyond historical and technical insights, we also address their applications, challenges, and potential research directions. This survey aims to serve as a practical manual for both newcomers seeking an entry point into cutting-edge deep learning methods and experienced researchers transitioning into this rapidly evolving domain.

MGM: Global Understanding of Audience Overlap Graphs for Predicting the Factuality and the Bias of News Media

In the current era of rapidly growing digital data, evaluating the political bias and factuality of news outlets has become more important for seeking reliable information online. In this work, we study the classification problem of profiling news media from the lens of political bias and factuality. Traditional profiling methods, such as Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown promising results, but they face notable challenges. PLMs focus solely on textual features, causing them to overlook the complex relationships between entities, while GNNs often struggle with media graphs containing disconnected components and insufficient labels. To address these limitations, we propose MediaGraphMind (MGM), an effective solution within a variational Expectation-Maximization (EM) framework. Instead of relying on limited neighboring nodes, MGM leverages features, structural patterns, and label information from globally similar nodes. Such a framework not only enables GNNs to capture long-range dependencies for learning expressive node representations but also enhances PLMs by integrating structural information and therefore improving the performance of both models. The extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework and achieve new state-of-the-art results. Further, we share our repository1 which contains the dataset, code, and documentation

All Languages Matter: Evaluating LMMs on Culturally Diverse 100 Languages

Existing Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) generally focus on only a few regions and languages. As LMMs continue to improve, it is increasingly important to ensure they understand cultural contexts, respect local sensitivities, and support low-resource languages, all while effectively integrating corresponding visual cues. In pursuit of culturally diverse global multimodal models, our proposed All Languages Matter Benchmark (ALM-bench) represents the largest and most comprehensive effort to date for evaluating LMMs across 100 languages. ALM-bench challenges existing models by testing their ability to understand and reason about culturally diverse images paired with text in various languages, including many low-resource languages traditionally underrepresented in LMM research. The benchmark offers a robust and nuanced evaluation framework featuring various question formats, including true/false, multiple choice, and open-ended questions, which are further divided into short and long-answer categories. ALM-bench design ensures a comprehensive assessment of a model's ability to handle varied levels of difficulty in visual and linguistic reasoning. To capture the rich tapestry of global cultures, ALM-bench carefully curates content from 13 distinct cultural aspects, ranging from traditions and rituals to famous personalities and celebrations. Through this, ALM-bench not only provides a rigorous testing ground for state-of-the-art open and closed-source LMMs but also highlights the importance of cultural and linguistic inclusivity, encouraging the development of models that can serve diverse global populations effectively. Our benchmark is publicly available.

Contrastive Continual Learning with Importance Sampling and Prototype-Instance Relation Distillation

Recently, because of the high-quality representations of contrastive learning methods, rehearsal-based contrastive continual learning has been proposed to explore how to continually learn transferable representation embeddings to avoid the catastrophic forgetting issue in traditional continual settings. Based on this framework, we propose Contrastive Continual Learning via Importance Sampling (CCLIS) to preserve knowledge by recovering previous data distributions with a new strategy for Replay Buffer Selection (RBS), which minimize estimated variance to save hard negative samples for representation learning with high quality. Furthermore, we present the Prototype-instance Relation Distillation (PRD) loss, a technique designed to maintain the relationship between prototypes and sample representations using a self-distillation process. Experiments on standard continual learning benchmarks reveal that our method notably outperforms existing baselines in terms of knowledge preservation and thereby effectively counteracts catastrophic forgetting in online contexts. The code is available at https://github.com/lijy373/CCLIS.

Computational Complexity of Sub-Linear Convergent Algorithms

Optimizing machine learning algorithms that are used to solve the objective function has been of great interest. Several approaches to optimize common algorithms, such as gradient descent and stochastic gradient descent, were explored. One of these approaches is reducing the gradient variance through adaptive sampling to solve large-scale optimization's empirical risk minimization (ERM) problems. In this paper, we will explore how starting with a small sample and then geometrically increasing it and using the solution of the previous sample ERM to compute the new ERM. This will solve ERM problems with first-order optimization algorithms of sublinear convergence but with lower computational complexity. This paper starts with theoretical proof of the approach, followed by two experiments comparing the gradient descent with the adaptive sampling of the gradient descent and ADAM with adaptive sampling ADAM on different datasets.