TodayNewsResearchFieldsStacksMarketAnalytics
⌘K

Research

New papers ranked by attention, with their code, models and discussion linked. Pick a field on the left.

WeekMonthQuarterAll
NewestMost relevant

Papers

Open problems across fields

Open problems for this view are being prepared; they appear within a day.

Rising research topics

Ask the research

Sample
ByteTrail · AI and developer-tools intelligence
NewsResearchStacksFor AI agentsAPI
Fields · this week
All fields1944Multimodal331Frontier LLMs250Recursive self improvement210Inference & serving158Agents & indirect prompt injection155Neural operators134Robotics130Clinical reasoning123Forecasting time92Linear bandits67Voice AI59AI safety34Character recognition OCR33Molecular property prediction32Federated learning27All 23 fields

Rising research topics

  • Diffusion priors200.0%
  • Voice AI59−11.9%
  • Character recognition OCR33−17.5%
  • Quantum machine learning23−23.3%
  • Spiking neural networks6−25.0%
  • Channel state information14−30.0%
  • Algorithmic fairness7−36.4%
  • Forecasting time92−36.6%

Papers

  • arXiv cs.CLSep 26

    AdaTutoRank: Learning to Rerank Document Sets via Adaptive Tutoring Optimization for RAG and Deep Research

    Kailin Jiang, Lei Liu, Jian Xi, Yangqi Chen, Hui Xu +4

    Document rerankers determine what evidence reaches the downstream model in RAG and deep research, yet mainstream rerankers select by relevance matching, and individually relevant documents rarely constitute the complete, complementary, non-redundant set a complex information need demands. Prior work rewards a set by its aggregate rubric score, shifting the objective from ranking documents to composing sets. Yet that score is one scalar shared by every document in the set, so the supervision is sparse: a redundant document is rewarded with the rest whenever the set scores well, and a decisive one penalized with the rest whenever it does not; credit assignment leaves contributors indistinguishable from free riders. On-policy distillation could densify this supervision, but existing methods give every rollout the same fixed guidance, too prescriptive for strong rollouts and too abstract for weak ones. We therefore propose AdaTutoRank, a setwise reranker trained with Adaptive Tutoring Optimization (ATO) under a three-level hierarchy of nine rubric dimensions, which supplies silver labels for the cold start, rewards for reinforcement learning, and hints for distillation. ATO draws…

    PDF
  • arXiv cs.LGSep 26

    On the Pitfalls of Verbalized Confidence Priors for Calibrating Large Reasoning Models

    Shuoyuan Wang, Beier Luo, Hao Zeng, Chengyao Yu, Songxin Zhang +3

    Large reasoning models (LRMs) often suffer from overconfidence when expressing their uncertainty. Confidence-aware reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising way to optimize calibration. However, it relies on on-policy rollouts and is thus constrained by the model's pre-RL confidence distribution, which we term confidence prior. In this work, we reveal that off-the-shelf LRMs exhibit a confidence prior heavily concentrated on a few high values, which persists throughout RL. Theoretically, we prove that this concentration suppresses policy gradient updates for rarely sampled confidence values and inflates the lower bound on expected Brier risk. To overcome this exploration bottleneck, we propose CalibSFT, a plug-and-play supervised fine-tuning stage that shapes a calibrated confidence prior with broad support before RL. For each question, CalibSFT constructs confidence targets combining its success rate with response-level correctness, which provably preserves proper-scoring optimality, and then balances training responses across the confidence spectrum to enable diverse confidence exploration during RL. To learn from incorrect responses without imitating their reasoning,…

    PDF
  • arXiv cs.AISep 26

    PULSE: Identifying Demonstration-Utility Features with Sparse Autoencoders

    Chenduo Hao, Chuanbao Gao, Pinjun Zeng, Jingze Zhu, Chonghan Liu +2

    In-context learning is highly sensitive to demonstration choice, yet most methods select demonstrations using external query-demonstration similarity. Such criteria can miss model-specific signals: Similar demonstrations may activate different internal features and downstream behaviors. We introduce PULSE (Paired Utility Localization over Sparse Encodings), an SAE-based framework for identifying model-internal features associated with demonstration utility and using them for demonstration selection. Using a small labeled discovery set, PULSE samples candidate demonstration sets, measures their zero-shot-relative utility under the target model, and scores SAE features by how their activation differences align with utility differences. The top positive and negative coordinates form a sparse utility-localization vector. We use this vector in two complementary ways: as a signed score for controlled complete-set ranking, and as PULSE-Retriever, which converts its magnitude into a feature-relevance mask for scalable pool-scale retrieval. Across classification, generation, and reasoning benchmarks, PULSE-Retriever improves over the strongest baseline by 2-3 accuracy points, 0.6-0.9…

    PDF
  • arXiv cs.LGSep 26

    Bison: Cross-Dataset Learning for Unseen-Compound Perturbation Prediction

    Yunfan Liu, Kasra Ghorbani, Yufei Huang, Zicheng Liu, Jiangbin Zheng +4

    Predicting transcriptional responses to unseen compounds is limited by fragmented chemical coverage and heterogeneous experimental platforms and gene panels. To assess molecular generalization across these settings, we build on Chem-PerturBridge to benchmark eight datasets with 16,771 compounds, withholding test compounds from every training dataset. This comparison reveals that high overall response agreement can coexist with weak prediction of drug-specific differences, despite reproducible signals across repeated measurements. To exploit complementary chemical supervision while targeting these differences, we introduce Bison: a shared gene representation connects native panels, while two discrete diffusion models compose context-dependent responses with molecular deviations learned through matched drug-contrast supervision. A single Bison model jointly trained across all eight datasets achieves the highest mean overall-response and drug-contrast Pearson correlations on the full benchmark in comparison with 11 methods trained independently per dataset. Compared with dataset-specific training of the same architecture, joint training increases mean drug-contrast correlation by…

    PDF
  • arXiv cs.LGSep 26

    PolyStepOR: Learning to Decide Without Optimal Decisions

    Viet The Nguyen, Gunther Gust, An Thai Le

    Decision-focused learning (DFL) trains predictors for downstream decision quality, but often relies on optimal reference decisions that are expensive to obtain. We present PolyStepOR, which trains directly from realized decision costs without pre-computed optima and extends to in-constraint predictions through repair or infeasibility penalties. To handle piecewise-constant losses, PolyStepOR perturbs predictor parameters, evaluates the resulting decisions, and uses optimal transport to favor lower-cost directions, requiring no derivatives. Without task-specific tuning, PolyStepOR performs strongly on classical optimization benchmarks and competitively on predicted-constraint and real-world problems. Theoretically, we characterize decision-preserving perturbations and boundary detection, bound sensitivity to cost errors, and establish stationarity guarantees for a smoothed objective. PolyStepOR thus replaces optimal reference decisions and derivatives with forward evaluations.

    PDF
  • arXiv cs.LGSep 26

    Adapting Nonstationary Multi-output Gaussian Processes to Bayesian Optimization

    Zikai Xie

    Multi-objective Bayesian optimization (MOBO) commonly relies on independent Gaussian processes (GPs) with stationary kernels, limiting its ability to represent nonstationary structure and share information between objectives. However, expressive nonstationary GPs do not necessarily make reliable BO decisions. We study this mismatch for the multi-output low-rank nonstationary (MO-LRN) GP: strong training fit can coexist with large off-design errors and optimistic acquisition predictions. We introduce MOLRN-BO, which combines a regularized shared-spectral surrogate with objective-specific residuals, prequential mean correction and tempered covariance scaling, and Pareto-local qLogEHVI optimization with periodic global search. Experiments on 12 deterministic bi-objective benchmarks show that MOLRN-BO substantially improves upon the original MO-LRN and achieves the best average problem ranks for final normalized hypervolume and normalized inverted generational distance among nine evaluated algorithms. It also achieves the strongest adverse-tail performance while remaining competitive with the leading baselines in anytime optimization. Ablation studies further show that the shared…

    AI30PDF
  • arXiv cs.CVSep 26

    Can Motion-Language Models Ground Structure? STRIDE for Evaluating the Evaluators

    Lixing Tan, Qing Xia, Yuting Guo, Shuai Li, Aimin Hao

    Motion-language models are typically scored by motion-language evaluators, but how well these evaluators ground language structure remains unclear. Here, we introduce the Structure grounding via Temporal-order, Reflection, and Identity Diagnostic Evaluation (STRIDE) benchmark to systematically evaluate the ability of evaluators to track temporal order, mirror reflection, and action identity. STRIDE comprises $5{,}869$ triples, each consisting of a motion, its original caption, and a perturbed caption, spanning both short and long descriptions. We likelihood-balance caption pairs to reduce text-only bias and estimate each evaluator's caption preference under unrelated motions to measure the discrimination gain from matched motions relative to this baseline. Our experiments reveal weak structural grounding and severe deficits in mirror sensitivity among the audited evaluators, which commonly used evaluation protocols fail to expose. To understand why these limitations go undetected in standard tests, we examine the evaluators more closely. We find that text-only priors alone can solve naive perturbation tests on existing datasets, while common retrieval and distributional metrics…

    PDF
  • arXiv cs.CVEvalsSep 26

    REMEDY: How Far Is Video Generation from Medical Education World Models?

    Lixing Tan, Yanghao Zhou, Qing Xia, Yuting Guo, Shuai Li +1

    Recent video generation models produce realistic videos and show potential as a foundation for world models. These advances create opportunities for generating medical teaching demonstrations, which requires both convincing visual quality and precise procedural actions. However, whether current generators can meet these requirements has not been measured. To address this problem, we introduce Readiness Evaluation of Medical Education Demonstration sYnthesis (REMEDY), to our knowledge, the first benchmark for AI-generated medical teaching demonstrations. REMEDY provides 900 first frames from real demonstration videos, covering 12 tasks across four scenarios: operating room, imaging, clinic and bedside, and resuscitation. Five contemporary open-source video generation models produce 4,500 videos from these frames. We combine task-specific clinical checklists with video and motion quality metrics. Evaluation covers four dimensions: clinical action following, clinical profiles, video quality, and motion quality. Our results show that realistic appearance and temporal consistency do not ensure correct clinical actions. Even the most advanced MiniMax-H3 achieves only 28.25% on strict…

    AIImage & video generation70PDF
  • arXiv cs.CLSep 26

    Streamlined Reflective Evolution for Task-Adaptive Self-Refinement Pipelines

    Xiaofan Zhou, Lu Cheng

    Reflective prompt optimization improves large language model (LLM) systems without updating model weights, but fixed architectures constrain how self-refinement is organized. We introduce Workflow-Designing Agents (WDA), a framework for streamlined reflective evolution of task-adaptive self-refinement pipelines. Starting from a minimal prompt, WDA jointly evolves stage instructions and their sequential structure. During evolution, we find that repeated revisions can accumulate redundant instructions in a single prompt. In WDA, we propose to address this problem with SPLIT, which redistributes these instructions across specialized stages. Three-example reflection and local screening guide selective search, while calibration scores guide Pareto admission and rollback of unhelpful trailing updates. The resulting pipelines are task-adaptive: their instructions and depth are learned from task data, then fixed for all test inputs within that task. We evaluate WDA on five benchmarks spanning knowledge, mathematical reasoning, multi-hop question answering, and instruction following. On Qwen3.5-9B, WDA achieves an average score of 51.24%, improving over the initial solver by 8.63…

    PDF
  • arXiv cs.LGSep 26

    Write Back the $Δ$: Revisiting the Same Tokens with Fresh Representations

    Wencheng Ye, Anning Hu, Xiangdong Zhang, Tianyi Wang, Yikang Li +3

    Transformers process information strictly forward through depth, preventing deeper computation from revisiting and refining earlier representations. To augment the standard forward pass, existing approaches either re-execute depth, incurring additional computation, or modify the residual stream using predefined directions, limiting their instance-level adaptation. Recently, inference-time feedback offers a direct mechanism for recycling endogenously produced computation by writing deeper residual states back to earlier layers, yet what should be fed back remains unclear. We argue that the depth increment Delta, capturing newly accumulated computation between two layers, provides a more effective, composable, and scalable feedback signal than the full state. Building on this observation, we introduce ReFlux, a learnable feedback graph that dynamically selects and composes increment-carrying routes. ReFlux supports synchronous feedback to the same token and streaming feedback to subsequent tokens. Extensive experiments across various models, corpora, and benchmarks show that synchronous ReFlux consistently reduces perplexity across ten language-modeling corpora, and improves…

    PDF
  • arXiv cs.CVSep 26

    Seeing Parts, Reasoning about Worlds: Visual Inference under Partial Observation

    Wei Wang, Wenqiao Zhang, Yutong Lin, Jun Xiao, Yueting Zhuang

    World modeling under partial observation requires reasoning about the complete worlds that remain compatible with limited visual evidence. Occluded objects and unseen regions can leave several world states possible; additional views can exclude alternatives and strengthen the conclusions supported by the observations. We introduce WorldScope to study this process through possible-world semantics, evidence-grounded data, and learned visual representations. WorldScope-1.2M provides 1.2 million English question-answer pairs spanning eight world properties, ten task interfaces, and three observation protocols. Its answers encode confirmed facts, supported bounds, and unresolved possibilities. Complementary supervision comprises 4,800 certified counterworld groups with equivalent base observations and different hidden object configurations and query answers. These groups provide physical witnesses of ambiguity and training-only labels for world compatibility and view-induced exclusions. We propose WorldFlow, which composes cross-view entity evidence and support-surface coverage into an image-subset evidence lattice. Counterworld compatibility and transition objectives train subset…

    PDF
  • arXiv cs.CVComputer visionSep 26

    QuacamFM: Quaternion-Constrained Flow Matching for Camera Pose Estimation

    Bao-Long Tran, Cuong Le, Tahereh Dehdarirad, Fredrik Viksten, Per-Erik Forssén

    Camera pose estimation from multi-view images remains a challenge in computer vision. Traditional methods often address this problem using Structure-from-Motion (SfM) with bundle adjustment. However, camera poses estimated from sparse views are inherently ambiguous due to insufficient geometric constraints. Recent work leverages probabilistic models, such as diffusion models, to generate multiple camera pose hypotheses and therefore capture this uncertainty better. Most of these methods represent camera rotations using unit quaternions, but treat them as unconstrained 4D vectors during the generative processes, thereby ignoring the unit-norm constraint of quaternions. Unconstrained quaternions create non-smooth and suboptimal generation trajectories. To this end, we propose *QuacamFM*, a quaternion-constrained flow matching framework for camera pose estimation that preserves unit quaternion representations throughout the entire flow trajectory. We design the optimal transport of the quaternion flows using smooth spherical linear interpolation. Experiments on CO3Dv2 demonstrate our method's advantage in camera pose accuracy over diffusion-based methods and classical SfM…

    AI60PDF
  • arXiv cs.CVSep 26

    De-biasing Skeleton-based Action Recognition with Convex Hull Adaptive Shift

    Mengyuan Liu, Yuhang Wen, Yi Zhang, Songtao Wu, Hong Liu +2

    Skeleton sequences can represent both individual actions and multi-entity interactions, encompassing human bodies, hands, objects, and robots. Existing approaches to recognize skeleton-based actions and interactions usually adopt a late fusion strategy, which expects individuals are independent and identically distributed to train a robust weight-shared entity encoder. However, observed entity bias in various skeletal data violates this assumption, leading to suboptimal optimization of backbone models that might produce wrong recognition results. This bias arises from the world coordinate system's initial configuration, where the choice of origin often creates bias in representation. To this end, we propose a Convex Hull Adaptive Shift based normalization method to reduce Entity bias (CHASE), improving performance across a variety of skeleton-based action and interaction recognition tasks. To adaptively apply plausible shifts to the input skeletons, we formulate a plug-and-play parameterized network that ensures the relocated world origin lies within the skeleton convex hull, which avoids non-convergence by limiting the search space. To further minimize entity bias, we…

    PDF
  • arXiv cs.ROSep 26

    DRAM: Delta-rule Recurrent Associative Memory for Robot Manipulation Policies

    Xinyu Zhao, Yixiang Shan, Tao Yang, Runyu Lei, Yiming Zhao +3

    Robotic manipulation is inherently history-dependent, yet most pretrained robotic policies condition on only the current observation or a short temporal window. Equipping such policies with long-term memory remains challenging: existing approaches either feed the backbone multi-frame observation windows, which substantially increase inference cost, or rely on pre-defined semantic features, which limit task generality and may also require the retraining of the backbone to adapt to the memory. We introduce DRAM (Delta-rule Recurrent Associative Memory), a plug-and-play memory module that can be attached to a wide range of pretrained robotic policies, endowing them with long-horizon memory without architectural modification or backbone retraining, requiring only task-specific post-training of the memory module and action expert. DRAM maintains a fixed-size associative memory using gated delta-rule linear attention, with a modified update that incorporates all tokens within each frame in parallel. An architecture-agnostic readout integrates historical context into action prediction across different policy architectures. Experiments show that DRAM consistently improves frozen…

    PDF
  • arXiv cs.CLSep 26

    What Should the Reflector See? An Empirical Study of Evidence in Reflective Prompt Optimization

    Xiaofan Zhou, Lu Cheng

    Reflective prompt optimization revises instructions using examples of a model's behavior, but which evidence the reflector should receive remains unclear. We study evidence composition, visibility of examples, candidate selection and domain-knowledge policy within a single-parent Pareto-guided search. Using Qwen3.5-9B as both task model and reflector, we evaluate nine reflection strategies on five datasets. From these experiments, we find three distinct patterns. For performance improvement, Failures-only produces the largest mean test gain (+8.0 percentage points), while Balanced-mix and No-examples+Val share the best mean performance rank. For reflection effectiveness, No-examples achieves the best rank for improving sampled parents, yet yields only a 1.4-point mean test gain: local reflection success does not necessarily produce a stronger final prompt. For overfitting assessment, Failures-only and Balanced-mix share the lowest mean calibration-gap rank, while larger gaps on GPQA and IFBench show that calibration gains can overstate held-out improvement. This gap is a descriptive indicator, not a direct measure of overfitting. Together, these results show why reflection…

    PDF
  • arXiv cs.CLSep 26

    Self-Reports Do Not Identify Self-Models: An Identifiability Test for Counterfactual Reports

    Phongsakon Mark Konrad, Toygar Tanyel, Serkan Ayvaz

    Language-model self-reports are evidence about behavior in a prompt environment, not by themselves evidence of a self-model. We investigate counterfactual reports about affect-like states under activation interventions and ask whether the report remains bound to the named intervention when the demonstration environment changes. Across three open instruction models, wrong-source demonstrations move reports toward the source answer family, while explicit mechanism binding reduces this pull. Self-report benchmarks should include environment-shift invariance tests under fixed intervention before treating accuracy as evidence for an autonomous report mechanism.

    PDF
  • arXiv cs.AISep 26

    ForkLeft: Entropy-First Rollouts for Prefix-Aligned Autoregressive-to-Diffusion Distillation

    Junming Liu, Jicheng Wang, Yifeng He, Hao Chen, Jianzhong Qi

    Autoregressive Next-Token Prediction (NTP) has enabled strong reasoning capabilities in language models, while Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) offer flexible token orders and parallel generation. We ask whether DLMs can acquire NTP-style reasoning through distillation without giving up their native generation process. Direct distillation, however, faces a fundamental mismatch: an autoregressive teacher predicts from a left prefix, whereas a DLM can condition on tokens on both sides. We introduce ForkLeft, a distillation framework that resolves this mismatch by separating the student's rollout from teacher supervision. During training, the student first performs entropy-first rollouts that commit uncertain positions and expose potential forks. We then fix the resulting student prefix and distill an NTP teacher under the same context, with answer correctness determining the supervision source. At inference, the student returns to its native confidence-first parallel decoding. With Qwen3-30B-A3B-Base, ForkLeft improves Efficient-DLM-4B on all ten benchmarks, raising MATH500 from 72.60% to 79.60% and consistently outperforming three alternative designs. The gains scale with teacher…

    PDF
  • arXiv cs.LGSep 26

    Length-Independent State Tracking Under a Parallel Scan

    Julien Brandoit, Arthur Fyon, Thomas Braipson, Tom Clara, Florent De Geeter +3

    Learning robust and scalable finite-state tracking is fundamental to sequence processing. While linear recurrent neural networks (RNNs), linear attention, and state space models enable scalable parallel training through affine recurrences, their theoretical expressivity guarantees assume idealized arithmetic and do not extend to finite precision, where the parallel scan that makes them fast is itself a source of perturbation. We formalize finite-state tracking at finite precision and characterize length independence: tracking that stays correct at every sequence length, at a precision cost that does not grow with the length. We show that length-independent state tracking requires two competing dynamics within a single map: contraction to suppress numerical perturbations and separation to keep distinct states apart. We prove that affine recurrences, which offer a single rate at each step to serve both roles, realize at most definite automata at finite precision. Instead of treating scan compatibility as a restriction on the update map, we reinterpret it as a computational budget and introduce the Neural Finite-State Machine (NFSM): a nonaffine, scan-compatible RNN built for…

    PDF
  • arXiv cs.CLSep 26

    Masking Frequent Tokens Sharpens Direct Preference Optimization

    Harshvardhan Saini, Samyak Jha, Yiming Tang, Dianbo Liu

    Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) aligns language models by optimizing over sequence-level sums of token-wise implicit reward differences. However, we identify a pervasive pathology in this formulation: a disproportionately small subset of high-frequency token types dominates cumulative sequence scores while appearing symmetrically across both preferred and dispreferred responses. Specifically, under canonical Qwen tokenization on Anthropic HH-RLHF, merely 69 token types account for $55.1\%$ of all response tokens and $85.9\%$ of within-pair shared token mass, exhibiting substantially lower preference-side specificity than the remaining vocabulary. This symmetric ubiquity induces gradient entanglement and dilutes the discriminative preference signal propagated through the objective. To resolve this issue, we introduce \emph{Anisotropic DPO} (\textsf{ADPO}) and its canonical realization, \emph{Frequency-Hard DPO}. Using a fixed, label-agnostic vocabulary mask, our method zeroes the implicit reward contribution of high-frequency response tokens while assigning unit weight to informative positions, thereby suppressing gradient interference without modifying preference pairs,…

    PDF
  • arXiv cs.LGSep 26

    Rethinking Training-Inference Mismatch in LLM Reinforcement Learning: Where It Arises and How to Correct It

    Tianrun Yu, Kaixiang Zhao, Shangzhe Li, Yuxiao Yang, Porter Jenkins +2

    We study training-inference mismatch in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) for large language models, where rollouts are sampled by an inference engine while gradients are computed by a training engine, and the two engines assign different probabilities to the same tokens. To account for this discrepancy in policy updates, we introduce calibrated importance sampling (CIS). CIS is motivated by an empirically supported logit-displacement characterization that expresses the mismatch as an additive displacement $\varepsilon_t$ in log-odds, determined by the per-logit perturbation before the softmax, whose distribution is approximately invariant to token confidence. This characterization motivates a confidence-aware truncation: large positive displacements are truncated at a single constant threshold, which maps back to an importance-ratio cap that tightens as token confidence increases. Theoretically, we show that CIS replaces the unbounded second moment that governs the error of exact importance sampling with a term bounded by a constant, at the cost of a bias controlled by the truncated excess. In evaluation across three mixture-of-experts models and five…

    PDF
Load more