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All fields1979Multimodal332Frontier LLMs256Recursive self improvement213Inference & serving162Agents & indirect prompt injection159Neural operators136Robotics135Clinical reasoning124Forecasting time94Linear bandits69Voice AI59AI safety35Molecular property prediction33Character recognition OCR33Federated learning27All 23 fields

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Papers

  • arXiv cs.CLSep 28

    Learning from Teacher Continuations at Student States

    Haojin Wang, Dylan Zhang, Huaibo Chen, Suhao Yu, Yihang Sun +6

    We present OLIVE (OnLine InterVEntion). At each iteration, the evolving student policy generates a new prefix, the teacher continues it autoregressively, and the student is updated using cross-entropy computed on the teacher-generated tokens. Each design choice targets a corresponding limitation of existing distillation methods: (1) sequential covariate shift in offline supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on fixed teacher trajectories, (2) fragmented supervision under prefix failure in token-level on-policy distillation (OPD), and (3) the need for access to teacher token probabilities in distribution-matching distillation. OLIVE achieves higher reasoning performance than OPD (with a top-16 KL approximation) at comparable GPU-hour cost. Our asynchronous implementation further reduces OLIVE's total training time by 23.8\%. We evaluate OLIVE on both hard reasoning tasks and agentic tasks which reflects modern post-training scenarios, and it consistently outperforms existing distillation methods under the same training budget. By regenerating prefixes from the evolving student, OLIVE continues improving after offline distillation plateaus while better preserving the general capabilities and…

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  • arXiv cs.AISep 28

    CoRe: Co-Evolving Reward Models for Mitigating Latent Reward Hacking in Video Diffusion Models

    Zhaolong Su, Yujin Han, Feng Wang, Jameson Dong, Hins Hu +1

    Latent reward models (LRMs) enable efficient alignment of video diffusion models by scoring intermediate states directly in latent space. However, we find that optimizing against a fixed latent reward rapidly leads to latent reward hacking: the predicted reward stays high while perceptual and motion quality deteriorate. Our analysis identifies distributional escape as the central cause: within a few hundred updates, the generator moves beyond the reward model's training support, where its scores no longer reflect video quality. Based on this insight, we introduce CoRe, a co-evolving reward framework that treats latent-space alignment as a dynamic interaction between the generator and the reward model. Rather than optimizing against a stationary proxy, CoRe continually refits the reward model on the generator's current samples while anchoring it to real-video preferences, so the generator cannot gain reward by drifting away from the data. On Wan2.1-T2V-1.3B, experiments show that CoRe consistently improves generation quality over both the pretrained model and prior alignment methods, while avoiding the quality collapse of fixed-reward optimization.

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  • arXiv cs.CVSep 28

    Think Before You Restore: Risk-Aware Manchu Manuscript Restoration with Stroke-Guided Attention

    Mingqiu Liang, Dongdong Wang, Siyang Lu, Ting Huang, Yingjun Qi

    Full-page blind restoration of historical Manchu manuscripts is challenging due to scarce annotations, unknown degradation regions, and fragile connected strokes. Generic restoration models may improve visual quality but often modify intact content, leading to over-restoration. We propose SAGE-Restore (Stroke-Aware Gated rEstoration), a selective restoration framework that first assesses where restoration is needed and then uses this assessment to guide restoration candidate generation and pixel-level selection. Its encoder predicts patch-level repair probabilities from complementary appearance and stroke-structural cues to condition restoration candidate generation, while the corresponding repair logits are refined into a pixel-level soft gate that selectively controls where the restoration candidate is applied. We further introduce a fidelity-aware evaluation protocol that jointly measures degraded-region recovery, intact-content preservation, and their balance. SAGE-Restore achieves the highest R-Recovery (0.463) and RFS (0.626), while maintaining high U-Fidelity (0.968), demonstrating an effective balance between restoration and content preservation.

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  • arXiv cs.LGSep 28

    Can Representation Learning Decouple from Loss Minimization? Polar Updates Have an Answer

    Akash Kumar

    Does representation learning stop when the training loss stops improving? We study this question for matrix Muon, whose polar-normalised updates have a step length set by the gradient's rank rather than its norm. Near the edge of stability, full-batch Muon on teacher-student problems enters approximately period-2 loss oscillations that persist for thousands of steps: the cycle-mean loss stays flat or rises, yet the weights keep moving and the learned features continue to align with the teacher subspace. For linear teacher-student learning toys, we derive explicit cycle and alignment formulas and conditional plateau and decay bounds. For a population mean-field ReLU model, we prove that, under stated dimension, initialisation and small-head conditions, the leading eigenspace of the average gradient outer product (AGOP) recovers the teacher subspace exactly during a loss plateau, before the loss later drops. In all 33 ReLU, GELU and SiLU teacher configurations we study, direction-only alignment metrics show the student AGOP aligned with, or still aligning to, the teacher subspace during the period-2 oscillations; projected head refitting on selected configurations shows that the…

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  • arXiv cs.CLSep 28

    Cognitive Expert Language Models Better Align with the Corresponding Brain Systems

    Zhivar Sourati, Mengxuan Helen Wu, Nona Ghazizadeh, Jonas Kaplan, Morteza Dehghani +1

    Large language models (LLMs) can predict human brain activity across a variety of brain regions during natural language comprehension. Typically, however, LLM-brain alignment is measured using one model for different regions of the brain, and then model performance is summarized across regions. This one-model-fits-all approach ignores the functional specialization of brain regions. In this study, we assess whether a model oriented toward a particular cognitive domain aligns better with the brain system dedicated to that domain. Through prompting and fine-tuning, we first build expert LLM variants for six domains: sensory, spatial, numerical, reasoning, social, and abstract processing. We then examine whether each expert best predicts activity in the brain region associated with the corresponding cognitive domain. Consistent with our hypotheses, each expert's representations align more closely with the brain system most associated with the matching domain than do other experts. This holds under both prompting and fine-tuning, across three base models and three fMRI datasets. In a series of control analyses, we show that this model-brain alignment is specific to cognitive domain…

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  • arXiv cs.AISep 28

    ChronoSRL: Temporal Geometry for Self-Supervised Reinforcement Learning

    Nico Bohlinger, Jan Peters

    A goal that is close in space can be far away in time. Obstacles, terrain, and the agent's own capabilities determine how long it takes to get there. Yet, critics in contrastive and survival reinforcement learning do not measure the distances in their representation space in units of time. We therefore introduce ChronoSRL, which gives the critic's embeddings an explicit temporal geometry. The distance between state-action and goal embeddings is trained to match the time that the agent takes to reach the goal (goal-reaching time), while goals that were not reached, and goals from other trajectories, are pushed at least one discount horizon away. Furthermore, reaching a goal quickly once does not mean that reaching it is reliable in general, so the policy should not follow the temporal distance directly. Instead, we build on survival reinforcement learning and predict from our temporal embeddings not only the full distribution of goal-reaching times but also the time spent near the goal. Thereby, the policy is trained to favor actions that reach the goal sooner and more reliably and that keep the agent near it. ChronoSRL learns faster and reaches higher performance than…

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  • arXiv cs.LGSep 28

    Transversal Pooling Neural Networks

    Emily J. King, Dustin G. Mixon, Michael Perlmutter, Lander Ver Hoef

    Many learning tasks require stability to small transformations while retaining sensitivity to larger ones. We introduce \emph{transversal pooling neural networks}, which generalize spatial max pooling to affine group actions. We establish equivariance to a chosen subgroup and derive explicit stability bounds for individual pooled wavelet coefficients under affine perturbations of the input. Experimentally, we demonstrate the utility of our networks in low-data environments and for predicting tropical cyclone intensification.

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  • arXiv cs.AISep 28

    MERID: Multimodal Exploration via Recursive Self-Improvement Agents for Major Depression Analysis

    Lei Liu, Zhaokang Liang, Qingcheng Zeng, Chenda Duan, Lu Mi +2

    Major depressive disorder (MDD) severely impacts daily activities and quality of life. Detecting MDD involves multimodal data, such as interview recordings and sensor measurements. This is particularly challenging, as these heterogeneous modalities often demand distinct, customized prediction pipelines. Existing efforts to address this challenge have explored both manually engineered multimodal architectures and agent-assisted pipeline development. Despite their progress, it remains challenging to autonomously revise pipelines based on experimental feedback and carry verified improvements forward into subsequent designs. To this end, we propose Multimodal Exploration via Recursive Self-Improvement Agents for Major Depression Analysis (MERID). The framework develops depression pipelines through experience-based recursive self-improvement (RSI). Grounded State Construction (GSC) grounds experience by aligning multimodal records with subject-level depression targets. Coupled Pipeline Exploration (CPE) jointly modifies representations, fusion, and predictors to build successor pipelines for classification and severity estimation. Evidence-Guided Evolution (EGE) guides revisions…

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  • arXiv cs.LGSep 28

    The Role of Feed-Forward Layers in Transformer Dynamics

    Thomas Jacob Maranzatto, Semih Akkoc, Sennur Ulukus

    We study the dynamical behavior of tokens in transformers from a control-theoretic perspective. Our model includes the feed-forward layer present after the self-attention mechanism, with the self-attention mechanism interpreted as an interacting particle system and the feed-forward layer as an independent control. Our main theoretical result establishes that the feed-forward network can steer the tokens arbitrarily close to consensus regardless of the key, query, and value matrices. Our result are easily extended to convergence to many clusters and to multi-head attention. We conduct numerical experiments to verify our results, and compare thresholding behavior from our theory to real-world LLMs.

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  • arXiv cs.AISep 28

    An Empirical Study and Assessment of EU AI Act Compliance Checkers

    Zhen Tao, Alize Kahraman, Shidong Pan, Zhenchang Xing, Chiara Ullstein +2

    The EU AI Act introduces extensive compliance requirements for organizations that develop, deploy, or integrate AI systems. Many of these requirements are directly relevant to security and privacy, while also addressing closely related issues such as data governance, transparency, accuracy, and robustness. However, stakeholders such as small-to-medium businesses and individual developers often lack the legal expertise required to interpret these obligations and translate them into engineering and governance practices. This disconnect creates challenges for implementing the EU AI Act and may lead to missing safeguards or misdirected development and deployment efforts. To address this, various automated EU AI Act compliance checkers (AIACCs) have emerged, claiming to streamline compliance assessments and provide practical guidance. In this paper, we present the first empirical study and assessment of AIACCs. We characterize 12 mainstream AIACCs across multiple dimensions, evaluate their legal coverage and alignment, and analyze checker-generated compliance reports for structure, determinacy, and actionability. We find that the quality of AIACCs varies significantly and that they…

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  • arXiv stat.MLSep 28

    One-Step Next-Latent Prediction Is Not a World Model

    Shitong Wang, Zhongang Cai, Yuzhou Hong

    Next-latent prediction fits a map from the current embedding to the next one. LeNEPA carries this objective to time series, replacing the stop-gradient of next-embedding prediction with the isotropy penalty of LeJEPA. A world model is a transition kernel that can be rolled out. The one-step regression identifies a conditional mean, and a mean is a kernel only in special cases. For a linear-Gaussian Markov latent, the mean transition and the innovation covariance are fixed by the one-step problem, and the open-loop squared error at horizon $K$ equals the trace of the sum of the pushed-forward innovation covariances. That error grows with $K$ after the one-step fit is exact. If the conditional mean is nonlinear, composing it is not the multi-step conditional mean. If the observation is a non-injective function of a Markov state, a memoryless one-step map does not determine future observations, while a short window can. An isotropy penalty is a function of the embedding marginal, so its partial derivative in the transition weights is zero. On a scalar autoregression with coefficient $0.9$, the one-step mean squared error is $0.998$ and the $16$-step open-loop error is $5.10$. On a…

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  • arXiv cs.CVMultimodalSep 28

    Mutually Adversarial Self-Training with Evolving Data for Unified Multimodal Models

    Wentao Zhou, Weijie Gan, Jiayun Wang

    Unified multimodal models (UMMs) combine image generation and visual understanding in a shared backbone. Since generation and understanding are inverse tasks, recent studies self-train UMMs by letting the two branches cooperatively supervise each other. We introduce MATE (Mutually Adversarial self-Training with Evolving data), a reinforcement-learning-based post-training framework in which the two branches instead challenge each other, and the challenges evolve as the model trains. MATE lets generation and understanding take turns to be challenger and solver. Given an image, the understanding branch proposes several candidate descriptions that the generation branch must turn back into similar images, and vice versa. The candidates are screened for consistency with the image or prompt they were proposed from, and the solver is trained on the candidate it handles worst. The adversary thus comes from the model's own outputs, and no separate adversary is trained. Moreover, the candidates that defeat one branch become the sources of the next challenges to the other in the next epoch, which keeps the challenges evolving with the model and turns the training into self-play in data…

    AITraining & fine-tuning70Code
  • arXiv cs.LGSep 28

    BASE: Batch-Aware Selection of Experts Using Predicted Removal Error for Efficient MoE Decoding

    Ali Abbasi, Justin Shi, Soheil Kolouri

    Large language models are increasingly expensive to serve. In large-scale serving systems, autoregressive decoding is often bottlenecked by transferring model weights from accelerator high-bandwidth memory into on-chip SRAM. Mixture-of-experts (MoE) models reduce computation by activating only a small subset of experts per token, but this sparsity does not translate directly to batched decoding. Different requests select different experts; therefore, the combined active set across many concurrent requests can span a substantial fraction of the expert pool and require significantly more expert weights to be transferred. Most expert-reduction techniques make retention decisions independently for each token and therefore do not address this batch-level expansion. More recently, batch-aware methods have attempted to coordinate expert use across concurrent requests and reuse experts already fetched for the batch. Yet their selection criteria are based primarily on router rankings or expert statistics collected during calibration. Consequently, these criteria are not directly tied to the output error caused by dropping an expert, nor do they capture how an expert's contribution changes…

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  • arXiv cs.LGSep 28

    How Language Models Differ in Redistributing Attention-Head Activity Under Serial Demand

    Johnny Jingze Li, Abdulla Kuleib, Kalyan Basu, Gabriel A. Silva

    The way a model distributes activity over each layer's attention heads offers a coarse view of how it routes information through depth; how this changes with the task is part of what a mechanistic account must explain. Holding prompt length fixed, we vary how many serial steps a task demands and measure, in every layer of 17 open-weight models, whether activity concentrates on a few heads or spreads across many as demand rises. Both occur: in most models, layers just before mid-depth concentrate activity and later layers spread it. Models differ in where and how strongly this happens. The Qwen2.5 base models from 0.5B to 7B, for example, spread less than the average model in every task and concentrate activity in parts of their second half, where Llama models from 1B to 8B and OLMo-2 spread; the contrast largely holds between Llama-3.1-70B and Qwen2.5-72B, which have the same number of layers and heads. These differences are reproducible, and post-trained models keep much of their base model's pattern. An ablation study suggests that, within a task, models whose activity is more concentrated on their top heads also depend more on those heads for the answer. Concentration and…

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  • arXiv cs.CVSep 28

    LeRF: Learning Reference Coordinate Frames for Perspective Taking Reasoning

    Bang Xiao, Wenqi Jia, Ozgur Kara, Tiancheng Shen, Yibo Yang +3

    Perspective taking is a fundamental component of spatial intelligence, requiring models interpret spatial relations from a specified viewpoint, such as that of another entity or an imagined observer. Despite the increasing spatial reasoning capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), they still struggle with perspective taking, often defaulting to the camera viewpoint when a query requires reasoning from a different perspective. We introduce Learning Reference Coordinate Frames for Perspective Taking (LeRF), a framework that trains VLMs to construct and use explicit reference frames for viewpoint-dependent reasoning. Given an image and a query, LeRF decides whether a coordinate frame is necessary. If so, it grounds the reference entity and predicts the frame's origin and entity-centered reference frame. A lightweight renderer overlays the frame onto the image, enabling subsequent reasoning over these visual cues without external perception models or explicit 3D reconstruction. To learn this process, we first perform supervised fine-tuning to teach selective tool invocation and reference coordinate frame prediction, followed by reinforcement learning on spatial VQA pairs to…

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  • arXiv cs.CLSep 28

    CineSubBench: Evaluating LLMs on Long-Form Narrative and Cultural Understanding from Multilingual Movie Subtitles

    Mir Tafseer Nayeem, Susmoy Chakraborty, Davood Rafiei

    Large language models are increasingly evaluated in specialized domains such as law, medicine, software engineering, and cybersecurity, yet film remains comparatively underexplored despite requiring long-form narrative integration, multilingual interpretation, and culturally situated audience judgments. We introduce CineSubBench, a benchmark for evaluating long-context film understanding from multilingual movie subtitles. A subtitle track represents a film as thousands of short, temporally ordered utterances from which models must reconstruct characters, relationships, events, causal progression, and themes without explicit scene or event structure. CineSubBench contains 1,012 films with complete subtitle coverage in six languages, yielding 6,072 tracks and 8.13M timestamped subtitle entries. It provides a matched multi-task, multilingual, and multicultural (MultiX) evaluation setting: seven tasks span narrative reconstruction and abstraction, genre prediction, age suitability, country-specific motion-picture ratings across ten national classification systems, and subtitle-grounded language safety. Across nine LLMs, plot premises are recovered more reliably than event-complete…

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  • arXiv cs.CVSep 28

    Sparse-View Interpretable 3D Animal Behavior Representations for Neural Encoding and Decoding

    Xinming Dai, Qihang Jin, Tianshu Tan, Baiyuan Chen, Hanrui Lyu +6

    A deeper understanding of brain function requires a precise, structured characterization of behavior. Yet, extracting behavioral representations from video in a form suitable for scientific analysis remains a fundamental challenge. Many prior studies represent behavior via pose estimation or nonlinear video embeddings. However, pose tracking discards rich information beyond predefined keypoints, while nonlinear video embeddings lack interpretability. We address this limitation with SABLE (Sparse-view Animal Behavior Latent Embeddings), a self-supervised framework that leverages a geometric inductive bias to learn behavior representations. By augmenting a multi-view transformer with priors from monocular depth and pose estimation, SABLE reconstructs 3D animal behavior from extremely sparse views while learning explicit 3D latent structure. Without ground-truth 3D labels, it reliably recovers 3D behavior from two-view videos, whereas state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods fail or yield degenerate solutions. Across the International Brain Lab and Cheese3D datasets, we demonstrate that SABLE learns 3D representations that match or exceed prior SOTA performance in neural encoding and…

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  • arXiv cs.LGSep 28

    Preconditioned Physics-Informed Neural Operator Training

    Shizheng Wen, Siddhartha Mishra, Marius Zeinhofer

    Neural operators are typically trained in a supervised fashion, which requires a dataset to be generated with a classical solver. Training them physics-informed, i.e., purely from the governing equations, removes this large offline cost and allows fresh samples to be drawn at every optimization step, but has so far been limited to simplified problems and trails supervised training in accuracy. The obstacle is the ill-conditioning of physics-informed losses, which differential operators induce and which worsens as the discretization is refined. We therefore propose a preconditioned residual loss function and show mesh-independent conditioning for elliptic problems and greatly improved conditioning for saddle point problems. Realized through geometric and algebraic multigrid, the construction applies to linear and nonlinear equations, steady or time-dependent, on structured and unstructured meshes, is agnostic to the neural operator architecture, and adds no cost at inference. On the Poisson, Allen-Cahn and stationary Stokes equations, the resulting label-free training matches supervised training and is four to twenty-five times more accurate than previous physics-informed operator…

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  • arXiv cs.LGSep 28

    EnergyEminence: Source-Aware Environmental Calibration and Evaluation in a Physics-Grounded Grid Digital Twin

    Huy Trinh, Michael Mai, Yu Nong

    Power-grid digital twins must combine data-driven prediction with physically meaningful state evolution while preserving the provenance of environmental observations. This paper presents an early-stage EnergyEminence testbed that couples an IEEE 118-bus-style graph-temporal predictor, nonlinear AC cascade simulation, and operator-dashboard-like temporal replay. In addition, we introduce a shared bounded calibration that converts wildfire-detection confidence and spatial extent into source-comparable wildfire interpretable and explainable evidence. We then evaluate it with visually diverse fire and hard-negative videos. Sixteen synthetic environmental videos are curated to generate 160 source-tracked grid scenarios, and a source-video-disjoint test yields 10 true positives, 8 false positives, 22 true negatives, and no false negatives. The errors occur in stressed, non-cascading scenarios conditioned on an unseen growing-fire source. Our diagnostic then reveals environmental shortcut learning that is obscured by scenario-level random splitting. The paper therefore contributes a data-centric and inspectable evaluation workflow for multimodal grid-resilience models, together with…

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  • arXiv cs.CLSep 28

    Lost in Translation: Measuring the Effect of Non-Native English on End User Performance of Large Language Models

    Yusheng Zhou, Eleanor Lin, David Jurgens

    Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used by people whose first language is not English, yet these users have been shown to receive systematically lower-quality responses than fluent speakers. Which specific features of non-native English drive this gap remains unclear, because fluency is itself a composite of mechanical accuracy, vocabulary use, organization, and discourse coherence. Here, we introduce FABLE, a controlled dataset of 190,911 English prompt variants derived from 174K real user prompts for writing-related tasks. Evaluating responses from 34 open-weight LLMs, we find a clear asymmetry; while models do not propagate surface errors such as misspellings into their outputs, models do mirror higher-level rhetorical and lexical qualities present in the user's prompt. Further, the overall quality of responses differs substantially between the least- and most-fluent prompts. These results highlight a key LLM performance disparity for non-native English LLM users, resulting in both lower-quality and less-fluent answers.

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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%