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Research

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

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Papers

arXiv cs.LGSep 30
Localizing Transfer Between Memorization Tasks
Yimiao Yu, Florentin Guth
A central puzzle in transfer learning is why pre-training on one task can accelerate training or improve performance on another task, and what mechanisms underlie this transfer. In this work, we examine the transfer between memorization tasks of random input-output mappings. We find two surprising transfer patterns: equivalent transfer, where each additional pre-training epoch saves approximately one downstream fine-tuning epoch; and non-equivalent transfer, where pre-training on a mismatched task can be even more efficient than directly training on the downstream task itself. Through ablation experiments, we decompose and localize the transfer into two separate effects: a "trivial" magnitude-driven transfer in the last layer, and a "non-trivial" structure-driven transfer, partially attributable to the covariance of the other layers. These results advance our understanding of the underlying mechanisms of transfer learning and have the potential to lead to principled pre-training strategies.
PDF
arXiv cs.LGSep 30
Pre-training interventions, ex post facto: Grafting model beliefs across checkpoints
Peter Nutter, Dani Roytburg, Clément Dumas, Jinghua Ou, Shi Feng
Pre-training interventions are critical to alignment research, since beliefs formed during pre-training shape how a model generalizes from later training. One recently popular technique for such interventions is synthetic document fine-tuning (SDF), which aims to alter what the model believes. Ideally, synthetic documents would be mixed into pre- or mid-training, but every change to a pre-training corpus must be followed by a full post-training run before its effect can be measured, making iteration slow and expensive. Common practice instead applies SDF to an already post-trained model. This is known to leave artifacts and degrade capabilities, and, as we show, it makes the model treat fabricated entities unrelated to the documents as real, a failure we call reality drift. We propose grafting: train the SDF adapter on the pre-trained checkpoint, then add the learned weight update to the post-trained model, which approximates the faithful approach while reusing the existing post-training. We demonstrate this by installing false facts, training misaligned model organisms and applying a constitutional mid-training intervention, across model families up to 284B parameters. Grafting…
PDF
arXiv cs.CRSep 30
Crossing the Cyber Divide: Sim-to-Sim and Sim-to-Real Transfer for RL Agents
Sabrina Saika, Yinuo Du, Aritran Piplai
Cyber attack agents are typically trained and evaluated within a single simulator, making it unclear whether learned policies transfer beyond the environments in which they were developed. This limitation hinders both deployment and fair comparison, as cyber simulators differ substantially in their state representations, observation models, and action spaces. In this paper, we study policy transfer across cyber environments and argue that simulator-to-simulator and simulator-to-real transfer can be viewed as instances of the same underlying alignment problem. We propose a framework that separates state alignment from action translation, enabling a policy trained in one environment to operate in another without retraining. We evaluate transfer across four cyber platforms, CyberBattleSim, NetSecGame, CyberWheel, and NASim, including emulated deployments in NASim. Our experiments show that zero-shot transfer is feasible, fully preserving source-policy performance in closely aligned environments and achieving 45.2% win rates when transferring policies whose source performance is 60.5%. In emulated virtual machine environments, transferred policies exhibit a Jensen-Shannon divergence…
PDF
arXiv cs.LGSep 30
Scalable Multi-Task Inverse Reinforcement Learning
Allen Tran, Jia Wan, Nathan Kallus, Aurélien Bibaut
By learning transferable rewards, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) enables counterfactual evaluation of agents under modified environments. Such transfer places strict requirements on coverage since target environments affect agents' state occupancy. We propose a multi-task IRL method that pools data across multiple agents with different rewards in the same environment under a low-rank assumption. In addition to alleviating coverage requirements, so each task need not visit every state as long as others do, the method offers scalable evaluation of multiple tasks under new environments as computationally intensive planning scales with rank rather than the number of tasks. We provide finite sample guarantees on reward recovery and on policy learning in new environments. Experiments show our method is robust to limited coverage, recovers rewards on and off of each task's support, transfers to target environments at lower regret than baselines, with its computational advantage over per-task methods widening as tasks grow.
PDF
arXiv cs.CVSep 30
Video Evidence Indexing: Learning Where to Look from Video Previews for Token-Budgeted Long-Video Question Answering
Haowen Guan, Shengzhi Li, Shichao Pei
Long-video question answering is limited by the high cost of visual tokens and by the fixed context width of current VLMs. A long-video question may require broad temporal coverage, but the answer is often supported by only a compact set of moments. To locate these moments efficiently, we propose token-budgeted Video Evidence Indexing (VEI): given a dense low-resolution Video Preview, the model constructs a compact high-resolution Evidence Set for final reasoning. We treat VEI as a policy that must jointly solve \textit{evidence localization}, which finds question-relevant moments, and \textit{budget planning}, which decides where to spend the limited high-resolution frame budget. We implement this idea with an inference pipeline: the Video Preview provides cheap global coverage, Video Evidence Indexing constructs the Evidence Set, and Answer Generation combines both inputs for final VQA. To address missing frame-level supervision, we adopt privileged self-distillation, where an answer-aware teacher guides the normal test-time policy on student-generated indexing traces. We explore previews at 1, 6, 12, and 24 visual tokens per frame, training a single policy that supports all…
PDF
arXiv stat.MLSep 30
Learning to Price Electricity for Optimal Demand Response
Jing Shang, Mohammad Mehrabi, Xinyang Zhou, Mahmoud Saleh, Andrey Bernstein +1
There is considerable interest in using time-varying electricity prices to shape consumer demand response, and better align energy demand with renewable production. However, optimal prices generally vary over time in response to complex signals such as weather forecasts, sunrise/sunset times, and day-of-week patterns; and existing methods are not able to make efficient use of such rich contextual information. Here, we propose a neural-network-based algorithm for contextual energy pricing, modeling pricing as a Stackelberg game and leveraging a mean-field solution representation from Mehrabi et al.(2024). The approach learns constrained mappings from contextual features to feasible price signals. We validate our approach by simulating the energy grid in several US cities, and show that incorporating contextual information can considerably increase the value of the demand response programs.
PDF
arXiv cs.LGSep 30
Increasing Width Allows Greedy Layer-wise Training to Rival End-to-End Backpropagation in Self-Supervised Learning
Syon Mansur, Joel Zylberberg
End-to-end backpropagation has been the dominant mode of training in deep learning, allowing for the coordination of parameter updates across layers of a neural network. Prior studies have explored alternative -- and, in some cases, simpler -- training mechanisms, showing that they can sometimes achieve performance similar to backpropagation. However, the architectural conditions under which locally optimized networks, which avoid end-to-end backpropagation of error, can learn representations comparable to those learned through end-to-end training remain unclear. We aim to answer this question in the context of self-supervised learning, an important framework for large-scale pretraining in artificial intelligence. Here, we investigate how network width and depth affect the efficacy of greedy layer-wise and end-to-end self-supervised training in convolutional networks. We find that in wider networks, the benefits of end-to-end backpropagation over greedy layer-wise training shrink: in relatively shallow and very wide networks, we even observed higher performance in models trained with greedy layer-wise training. Subsequent analysis of the representations formed by these networks…
PDF
arXiv cs.LGSep 30
Signal-Noise Factorization Isolates Nuisance Variation into Removable Subspaces
Sakin Kirti, Joel Zylberberg
Recent theoretical work identified fundamental properties of representation geometry that shape inference ability of deep neural networks. These include signal-noise factorization (SNF), the ability to segregate signal from noise, and signal-signal factorization (SSF), the ability to segregate task-specific and task-irrelevant signals. Here, we built regularizers that reinforce these two properties during training. We compared networks trained with these regularizers to $L_2$-regularized baseline networks on the CIFAR-100 classification task to understand how our regularizers shape representation geometry and impact performance on a well-known computer vision baseline. Enhancing SNF via regularization improved model performance but enhancing SSF did not. Motivated by biomedical applications, we investigated how our regularizers affected performance on the BloodMNIST dataset treated with MedMNIST-C corruptions at five severity levels, and found even larger performance gains using the SNF regularizer. To understand the mechanism by which SNF-regularization produces improved performance, we analyzed the nuisance subspaces across regularization regimes, finding that the…
PDF
arXiv cs.CVSep 30
What Do Verifiable Rewards Teach Video-Language Models About Time? A Controlled Multi-Model Study
Avyay Sadhu, Patrick Cooper
Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) has produced large reasoning gains in language models, and verifiable video benchmarks make it applicable to causal-temporal video question answering. We study what RLVR teaches video-language models about time. We fine-tune four open models (Qwen3-VL-8B/4B, Qwen2.5-VL-7B, Gemma-3-12B) with group relative policy optimization under three data recipes: verified (synthetic CLEVRER questions with exact answer and event-order rewards), unverified (self-supervised pretext tasks over 43,751 real web videos), and a 1:1 mixture, plus a verified+real arm that adds 4,000 verifiable questions on real video. Each cell is evaluated in-domain and on out-of-domain real video (a NExT-QA temporal stress set and an MVBench subset), with frames in order, shuffled, and absent. (1) Verified training yields large in-domain gains that shrink as base competence grows (+14 to +19 points on weaker models; +6 on the strongest). (2) Much of the gain is non-visual: accuracy with no frames rises nearly as much as with frames. (3) Verified-only training can severely degrade out-of-domain accuracy with no sign during training: Qwen3-VL-8B loses 26.7 and 25.2…
PDF
arXiv cs.CVComputer visionSep 30
What Builds the Scene? Luminance Dominates Geometry Formation in 3D Gaussian Splatting
Rezvan Joshaghani, Steven Cutchin
Standard 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) learns geometry and appearance jointly from RGB supervision, making it difficult to isolate how luminance and chroma contribute to the learned representation. We study this by training models under different channel supervision, freezing their non-appearance parameters (position, scale, rotation, and opacity), and re-estimating appearance with the same solver before comparing held-out reconstruction. Across eleven benchmark scenes with four independent runs each, geometry learned from luminance alone supports held-out reconstruction 0.085 dB below RGB-trained geometry on average. If chroma is deleted from a trained model, a sufficiently expressive solver can re-fit it on the frozen geometry to the original quality or slightly better. Higher-order spherical harmonics contribute much more reconstruction quality to luminance than to chroma, improving PSNR by 1.44 dB versus 0.19 dB on average, although on mirror-like surfaces hue does still change with viewpoint. The luminance advantage is even larger when geometry is being formed. Chroma-only supervision produces geometry 3.9-5.5 dB worse than luminance-only supervision after the same appearance…
AIImage & video generation60PDF
arXiv q-bio.BMSep 30
StabilityArc: Decoding Protein Sequence Embeddings into Generalizable Stability Landscapes
Aaron L. Feller, Andrew D. Ellington, Claus O. Wilke
Every protein has a unique stability landscape, but the physical consequences of mutation are governed by recurring biochemical constraints. We test whether a shared decoder, trained on measurements from diverse proteins, can interpret these constraints in an unseen target, enabling cross-protein transfer for initial experimental round prescreening. We present StabilityArc , which maps frozen ESMC-600M residue representations through a shared RoPE transformer to an Lx20 matrix of substitution effects; a symmetric, contact-aware residual aids in predicting epistasis in simultaneous substitutions. In 66 strict leave-one-protein-out evaluations covering 134,794 ProteinGym variants, StabilityArc achieves 0.7134 Spearman correlation, exceeding the strongest zero-shot baseline, ProSST-2048 (0.6526), by 0.0608. We further explore the utility of this method by providing the score as a prior for Kermut, achieving Spearman correlation of 0.8280 across three supervised split schemes, improving on Kermut's reported 0.8167.
PDF
arXiv math.OCSep 30
Q-MINO: A Minimal-Norm Method for Quantization-Aware Training
Don Li
The Straight-Through Estimator (STE) is a widely used heuristic for Quantization-Aware Training (QAT), but its surrogate gradients can exhibit substantial mismatch with the underlying quantized objective, leading to noisy updates and parameter oscillations, particularly in ultra-low-bit regimes. We propose the Quantization-Aware Minimal-Norm Optimizer (Q-MINO), a temporal bundle method that combines gradient consensus, state-drift regularization, and an alignment constraint to construct stabilized, minimum-norm update directions from recent optimization states. Q-MINO solves the resulting constrained subproblem using a warm-started Frank--Wolfe procedure with a feasible fallback initialization. Theoretically, via a stochastic Lyapunov Kurdyka--Łojasiewicz (KL) framework, we show that Q-MINO achieves asymptotic neighborhood convergence. Moreover, we detail numerical experiments with Q-MINO at various quantizations.
PDF
arXiv cs.CVSep 30
Personalized Image Generation with Reasoning and Reflection
Bo Ni, Ngoc N. Tran, Qinwen Ge, Franck Dernoncourt, Seunghyun Yoon +8
Personalized image generation has remained narrowly focused on conditional synthesis from curated visual exemplars, rather than capturing who a user is. In practice, however, a user's personal context is much richer, comprising reviews, posts, images, captions, and metadata accumulated over time. A truly personalized generator should leverage this history to produce images aligned with the user's lifestyle and aesthetic preferences. To this end, we introduce the first unified benchmark for personalized image generation from user histories. The benchmark comprises two complementary tasks and a multi-axis evaluation protocol that assesses target fidelity, visual quality, user distinguishability, semantic alignment with the user's history, and task-specific utility. Grounded in real-world e-commerce and social media settings, the benchmark includes: (1) Personalized Scene Generation, which places a given object in a scene that reflects a user's preferences and lifestyle, motivated by personalized product presentation; and (2) Personalized Creative Generation, which generates a novel image on a specified topic that is faithful to a user's aesthetic and visual identity, motivated by…
PDF
arXiv cs.LGSep 30
Reformulation-Contrastive Learning for Mixed Integer Programs
Ousema Bouaneni, Mathis Le Bail, Clément Elliker, Maël Jenny, Sonia Vanier
Mixed-integer linear programs (MILP) model many real-world decision problems, motivating machine-learning methods that exploit recurring structure to accelerate MILP solving. MILPs can admit many equivalent formulations: integrality-preserving changes of variables and the addition of redundant constraints can alter their formulations while preserving the optimization problem. We leverage these reformulations as a source of self-supervision for learning general-purpose representations of MILP variables and constraints. We characterize the affine reformulations that are valid for every input instance, and distinguish re-descriptions, which leave variables unchanged, from substitutions, which transform them predictably. Building on equivariant self-supervised learning, we introduce ReMILP (reformulation-contrastive MILP representation learning), which jointly trains a graph neural network and a hypernetwork to predict how variable embeddings transform under changes of variables. Without solver-derived labels, ReMILP learns representations that exhibit the intended invariance and equivariance on unseen problem classes. Across binary solution, constraint activity and integrality gap…
PDF
arXiv cs.LGSep 30
Reward as Observation: Learning Reward-Based Policies for Rapid Adaptation
Morgan Byrd, Jacob Blevins, Maks Sorokin, Robert Wright, Sehoon Ha
This paper explores a reward-based policy to achieve zero-shot transfer between source and target environments with completely different observation spaces. While humans can demonstrate impressive adaptation capabilities, deep neural network policies often struggle to adapt to a new environment and require a considerable amount of samples for successful transfer. Instead, we propose a novel reward-based policy only conditioned on rewards and actions, enabling zero-shot adaptation to new environments with completely different observations. We discuss the challenges and feasibility of a reward-based policy and then propose a practical algorithm for training. We demonstrate that a reward policy can be trained within three different environments, Pointmass, Cartpole, and 2D Car Racing, and transferred to completely different observations, such as different color palettes or 3D rendering, or Stretch robot navigation in Habitat-Sim, in a zero-shot manner. We also demonstrate that a reward-based policy can further guide the training of an observation-based policy in the target environment.
PDF
arXiv cs.LGSep 30
Benchmarking Generative Models for Near-Surface Data Assimilation on Real Station Observations
Ruizhe Huang, Qidong Yang, Jonathan Giezendanner, Sherrie Wang
Weather reanalysis products rely on computationally intensive numerical weather predictions followed by data assimilation that corrects the forecast toward observations. Recent advances in deep generative models offer a cheaper alternative that shifts much of this cost from inference to offline training. However, existing generative approaches have been evaluated on synthetic observations or under different datasets and evaluation schemes, making it unclear which design choices improve real-world data assimilation. We present the first controlled benchmark of generative data assimilation for single-time near-surface analysis from real weather station observations. Using 11,849 NOAA MADIS stations across the contiguous United States and four near-surface variables, we hold the dataset, observation operator, and deep learning architecture fixed, and measure spatial generalization at held-out stations. The benchmark compares the major design choices proposed for generative data assimilation, including diffusion versus flow matching, pixel versus latent-space formulations, and multiple inference-time conditioning strategies, against a classical 3D-Var baseline. The benchmark reveals…
PDF
arXiv cs.ROSep 30
CF-JEPA: Improving Robustness of JEPA World Models via Controllability Factorization
Morgan Byrd, Robert Wright, Sehoon Ha
Controlling an agent with vision requires being able to separate useful information from irrelevant background information. JEPA-style latent world models seem like a natural approach for this, as they do not perform pixel-level reconstruction; however, they are still sensitive to these distractor signals and experience latent collapse. In this work, we introduce Controllability Factorized JEPA (CF-JEPA), a JEPA-style world model which splits the latent space into controllable and uncontrollable subspaces. This factorization allows us to capture all the distractor information into the uncontrollable region, while we use the control-relevant latent information for our task. With this, we show comparable performance across 2D and 3D control tasks under nominal conditions and improved performance under distracted conditions, where CF-JEPA is the only model that does not experience latent collapse. We also validate our model under distracted conditions for a simulated robot task, highlighting the practical application of such a scheme.
PDF
arXiv cs.CLSep 30
Reason in Style: Discovering and Controlling Style in Language Models
Ioana Marinescu, Eric Karl Oermann, Kyunghyun Cho
Language models learn content and style jointly, making stylistic variation in their outputs difficult to identify and control. We study whether recurring styles in model responses can be discovered without supervision and explicitly controlled. We design an algorithm that learns to separate representations of content and style from language models' outputs and validate its effectiveness on math questions in a controlled setting. By applying this method to over 100K verified traces from nine distinct teacher models, we discover six recurring yet imbalanced styles. We then fine-tune smaller student models to follow these styles when explicitly conditioned on them, using importance weighting to balance the contribution of the styles represented in the corpus. This approach improves Pass@$k$ over standard fine-tuning on the same data across six math reasoning benchmarks, demonstrating that we can diversify the style of answers effectively. We confirm that this also results in strong correspondence between requested and realized styles. We find that style affects correctness: the probability of solving a problem depends on the style we condition on, and different problems benefit…
PDF
arXiv cs.LGSep 30▲ 3
JEPA-TTT: Persistent Test-Time Training of Latent World Models for Planning under Dynamics Shifts
Zheyuan Zhang, Suyu Ye, Nakul Agarwal, Hossein Nourkhiz Mahjoub, Ehsan Moradi Pari +3
World models enable agents to plan by predicting future states of the environment, but their predictions can become unreliable when test-time dynamics differ from those seen during training. We present JEPA-TTT, which adapts the latent dynamics predictor of a pretrained action-conditioned Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture world model throughout test time. Self-supervised updates accumulate across episodes, while the visual encoder and reward head remain fixed, preserving the pretrained representation and task objective. Planning requires neither a goal image nor online environment reward. JEPA-TTT uses dense replay, which forms prediction windows at every temporal offset, retains them in a growing buffer, and samples minibatches from that buffer for predictor updates. Across eight dynamics shifts in four continuous-control environments, JEPA-TTT improves planning on every shift. After 500 test-time episodes, it reduces autoregressive latent prediction error by 83% on average and improves planning performance by 153% over the frozen JEPA world model. These results show that persistent self-supervised test-time training can adapt a pretrained latent world model under changed…
PDF
arXiv cs.GTSep 30
Outer Diversity of Condorcet Domains
Piotr Faliszewski, Jan Jabrocki, Mateusz Słuszniak, Krzysztof Sornat, Stanisław Szufa +1
A Condorcet domain is a set of rankings over a given candidate set, such that every election that consists only of (an odd number of) votes from the domain has a transitive majority relation. We study outer diversity of Condorcet domains, i.e., a measure that quantifies expected swap distance from a random vote to a closest one in the domain. We numerically analyze outer diversity for maximal Condorcet domains with few candidates, and then we establish its asymptotic behavior for several special domains, mostly obtaining theoretical results.
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Papers

Open problems across fields

Dynamic model and policy routing for general-purpose AI1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it
Balancing performance and computational cost across diverse tasks and modalities is critical for scalable AI systems.
- Route Anything: A Study of Model and Policy Routing for General-Purpose AI Systemsraises · addresses
Cross-repository consistency in coding agents1 paper raises it · 0 address it
Real-world software development often requires coordinated changes across interdependent repositories, which current agents struggle to maintain.
- CrossSWE: Benchmarking Cross-Repository Joint Development for Coding Agentsraises
Efficient long-video generation with consistent quality1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it
Real-time streaming video generation demands continuous output without quality degradation or camera drift.
- Wave Forcing: Towards Speed-of-Light Streaming Video Generationraises · addresses
Local decision-making for reasoning compression1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it
Reducing inference costs without sacrificing accuracy requires models to know when to stop reasoning.
- Think Less, Locally: Local Preference Learning for Reasoning Compressionraises · addresses
Unified taxonomy and coordination for agentic systems1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it
Fragmented terminology and rapid growth in agentic systems hinder systematic understanding and collaboration.
- Advances in Agentic Computer Graphicsraises · addresses

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Speech emotion24+84.6%
Federated learning43+13.2%
Forecasting time125+5.9%
Algorithmic trading260.0%
Databases60.0%
Linear bandits102−3.8%
Robotics183−5.7%
Anomaly detectors25−7.4%

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Papers

arXiv cs.LGSep 30
Localizing Transfer Between Memorization Tasks
Yimiao Yu, Florentin Guth
A central puzzle in transfer learning is why pre-training on one task can accelerate training or improve performance on another task, and what mechanisms underlie this transfer. In this work, we examine the transfer between memorization tasks of random input-output mappings. We find two surprising transfer patterns: equivalent transfer, where each additional pre-training epoch saves approximately one downstream fine-tuning epoch; and non-equivalent transfer, where pre-training on a mismatched task can be even more efficient than directly training on the downstream task itself. Through ablation experiments, we decompose and localize the transfer into two separate effects: a "trivial" magnitude-driven transfer in the last layer, and a "non-trivial" structure-driven transfer, partially attributable to the covariance of the other layers. These results advance our understanding of the underlying mechanisms of transfer learning and have the potential to lead to principled pre-training strategies.
PDF
arXiv cs.LGSep 30
Pre-training interventions, ex post facto: Grafting model beliefs across checkpoints
Peter Nutter, Dani Roytburg, Clément Dumas, Jinghua Ou, Shi Feng
Pre-training interventions are critical to alignment research, since beliefs formed during pre-training shape how a model generalizes from later training. One recently popular technique for such interventions is synthetic document fine-tuning (SDF), which aims to alter what the model believes. Ideally, synthetic documents would be mixed into pre- or mid-training, but every change to a pre-training corpus must be followed by a full post-training run before its effect can be measured, making iteration slow and expensive. Common practice instead applies SDF to an already post-trained model. This is known to leave artifacts and degrade capabilities, and, as we show, it makes the model treat fabricated entities unrelated to the documents as real, a failure we call reality drift. We propose grafting: train the SDF adapter on the pre-trained checkpoint, then add the learned weight update to the post-trained model, which approximates the faithful approach while reusing the existing post-training. We demonstrate this by installing false facts, training misaligned model organisms and applying a constitutional mid-training intervention, across model families up to 284B parameters. Grafting…
PDF
arXiv cs.CRSep 30
Crossing the Cyber Divide: Sim-to-Sim and Sim-to-Real Transfer for RL Agents
Sabrina Saika, Yinuo Du, Aritran Piplai
Cyber attack agents are typically trained and evaluated within a single simulator, making it unclear whether learned policies transfer beyond the environments in which they were developed. This limitation hinders both deployment and fair comparison, as cyber simulators differ substantially in their state representations, observation models, and action spaces. In this paper, we study policy transfer across cyber environments and argue that simulator-to-simulator and simulator-to-real transfer can be viewed as instances of the same underlying alignment problem. We propose a framework that separates state alignment from action translation, enabling a policy trained in one environment to operate in another without retraining. We evaluate transfer across four cyber platforms, CyberBattleSim, NetSecGame, CyberWheel, and NASim, including emulated deployments in NASim. Our experiments show that zero-shot transfer is feasible, fully preserving source-policy performance in closely aligned environments and achieving 45.2% win rates when transferring policies whose source performance is 60.5%. In emulated virtual machine environments, transferred policies exhibit a Jensen-Shannon divergence…
PDF
arXiv cs.LGSep 30
Scalable Multi-Task Inverse Reinforcement Learning
Allen Tran, Jia Wan, Nathan Kallus, Aurélien Bibaut
By learning transferable rewards, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) enables counterfactual evaluation of agents under modified environments. Such transfer places strict requirements on coverage since target environments affect agents' state occupancy. We propose a multi-task IRL method that pools data across multiple agents with different rewards in the same environment under a low-rank assumption. In addition to alleviating coverage requirements, so each task need not visit every state as long as others do, the method offers scalable evaluation of multiple tasks under new environments as computationally intensive planning scales with rank rather than the number of tasks. We provide finite sample guarantees on reward recovery and on policy learning in new environments. Experiments show our method is robust to limited coverage, recovers rewards on and off of each task's support, transfers to target environments at lower regret than baselines, with its computational advantage over per-task methods widening as tasks grow.
PDF
arXiv cs.CVSep 30
Video Evidence Indexing: Learning Where to Look from Video Previews for Token-Budgeted Long-Video Question Answering
Haowen Guan, Shengzhi Li, Shichao Pei
Long-video question answering is limited by the high cost of visual tokens and by the fixed context width of current VLMs. A long-video question may require broad temporal coverage, but the answer is often supported by only a compact set of moments. To locate these moments efficiently, we propose token-budgeted Video Evidence Indexing (VEI): given a dense low-resolution Video Preview, the model constructs a compact high-resolution Evidence Set for final reasoning. We treat VEI as a policy that must jointly solve \textit{evidence localization}, which finds question-relevant moments, and \textit{budget planning}, which decides where to spend the limited high-resolution frame budget. We implement this idea with an inference pipeline: the Video Preview provides cheap global coverage, Video Evidence Indexing constructs the Evidence Set, and Answer Generation combines both inputs for final VQA. To address missing frame-level supervision, we adopt privileged self-distillation, where an answer-aware teacher guides the normal test-time policy on student-generated indexing traces. We explore previews at 1, 6, 12, and 24 visual tokens per frame, training a single policy that supports all…
PDF
arXiv stat.MLSep 30
Learning to Price Electricity for Optimal Demand Response
Jing Shang, Mohammad Mehrabi, Xinyang Zhou, Mahmoud Saleh, Andrey Bernstein +1
There is considerable interest in using time-varying electricity prices to shape consumer demand response, and better align energy demand with renewable production. However, optimal prices generally vary over time in response to complex signals such as weather forecasts, sunrise/sunset times, and day-of-week patterns; and existing methods are not able to make efficient use of such rich contextual information. Here, we propose a neural-network-based algorithm for contextual energy pricing, modeling pricing as a Stackelberg game and leveraging a mean-field solution representation from Mehrabi et al.(2024). The approach learns constrained mappings from contextual features to feasible price signals. We validate our approach by simulating the energy grid in several US cities, and show that incorporating contextual information can considerably increase the value of the demand response programs.
PDF
arXiv cs.LGSep 30
Increasing Width Allows Greedy Layer-wise Training to Rival End-to-End Backpropagation in Self-Supervised Learning
Syon Mansur, Joel Zylberberg
End-to-end backpropagation has been the dominant mode of training in deep learning, allowing for the coordination of parameter updates across layers of a neural network. Prior studies have explored alternative -- and, in some cases, simpler -- training mechanisms, showing that they can sometimes achieve performance similar to backpropagation. However, the architectural conditions under which locally optimized networks, which avoid end-to-end backpropagation of error, can learn representations comparable to those learned through end-to-end training remain unclear. We aim to answer this question in the context of self-supervised learning, an important framework for large-scale pretraining in artificial intelligence. Here, we investigate how network width and depth affect the efficacy of greedy layer-wise and end-to-end self-supervised training in convolutional networks. We find that in wider networks, the benefits of end-to-end backpropagation over greedy layer-wise training shrink: in relatively shallow and very wide networks, we even observed higher performance in models trained with greedy layer-wise training. Subsequent analysis of the representations formed by these networks…
PDF
arXiv cs.LGSep 30
Signal-Noise Factorization Isolates Nuisance Variation into Removable Subspaces
Sakin Kirti, Joel Zylberberg
Recent theoretical work identified fundamental properties of representation geometry that shape inference ability of deep neural networks. These include signal-noise factorization (SNF), the ability to segregate signal from noise, and signal-signal factorization (SSF), the ability to segregate task-specific and task-irrelevant signals. Here, we built regularizers that reinforce these two properties during training. We compared networks trained with these regularizers to $L_2$-regularized baseline networks on the CIFAR-100 classification task to understand how our regularizers shape representation geometry and impact performance on a well-known computer vision baseline. Enhancing SNF via regularization improved model performance but enhancing SSF did not. Motivated by biomedical applications, we investigated how our regularizers affected performance on the BloodMNIST dataset treated with MedMNIST-C corruptions at five severity levels, and found even larger performance gains using the SNF regularizer. To understand the mechanism by which SNF-regularization produces improved performance, we analyzed the nuisance subspaces across regularization regimes, finding that the…
PDF
arXiv cs.CVSep 30
What Do Verifiable Rewards Teach Video-Language Models About Time? A Controlled Multi-Model Study
Avyay Sadhu, Patrick Cooper
Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) has produced large reasoning gains in language models, and verifiable video benchmarks make it applicable to causal-temporal video question answering. We study what RLVR teaches video-language models about time. We fine-tune four open models (Qwen3-VL-8B/4B, Qwen2.5-VL-7B, Gemma-3-12B) with group relative policy optimization under three data recipes: verified (synthetic CLEVRER questions with exact answer and event-order rewards), unverified (self-supervised pretext tasks over 43,751 real web videos), and a 1:1 mixture, plus a verified+real arm that adds 4,000 verifiable questions on real video. Each cell is evaluated in-domain and on out-of-domain real video (a NExT-QA temporal stress set and an MVBench subset), with frames in order, shuffled, and absent. (1) Verified training yields large in-domain gains that shrink as base competence grows (+14 to +19 points on weaker models; +6 on the strongest). (2) Much of the gain is non-visual: accuracy with no frames rises nearly as much as with frames. (3) Verified-only training can severely degrade out-of-domain accuracy with no sign during training: Qwen3-VL-8B loses 26.7 and 25.2…
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arXiv cs.CVComputer visionSep 30
What Builds the Scene? Luminance Dominates Geometry Formation in 3D Gaussian Splatting
Rezvan Joshaghani, Steven Cutchin
Standard 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) learns geometry and appearance jointly from RGB supervision, making it difficult to isolate how luminance and chroma contribute to the learned representation. We study this by training models under different channel supervision, freezing their non-appearance parameters (position, scale, rotation, and opacity), and re-estimating appearance with the same solver before comparing held-out reconstruction. Across eleven benchmark scenes with four independent runs each, geometry learned from luminance alone supports held-out reconstruction 0.085 dB below RGB-trained geometry on average. If chroma is deleted from a trained model, a sufficiently expressive solver can re-fit it on the frozen geometry to the original quality or slightly better. Higher-order spherical harmonics contribute much more reconstruction quality to luminance than to chroma, improving PSNR by 1.44 dB versus 0.19 dB on average, although on mirror-like surfaces hue does still change with viewpoint. The luminance advantage is even larger when geometry is being formed. Chroma-only supervision produces geometry 3.9-5.5 dB worse than luminance-only supervision after the same appearance…
AIImage & video generation60PDF
arXiv q-bio.BMSep 30
StabilityArc: Decoding Protein Sequence Embeddings into Generalizable Stability Landscapes
Aaron L. Feller, Andrew D. Ellington, Claus O. Wilke
Every protein has a unique stability landscape, but the physical consequences of mutation are governed by recurring biochemical constraints. We test whether a shared decoder, trained on measurements from diverse proteins, can interpret these constraints in an unseen target, enabling cross-protein transfer for initial experimental round prescreening. We present StabilityArc , which maps frozen ESMC-600M residue representations through a shared RoPE transformer to an Lx20 matrix of substitution effects; a symmetric, contact-aware residual aids in predicting epistasis in simultaneous substitutions. In 66 strict leave-one-protein-out evaluations covering 134,794 ProteinGym variants, StabilityArc achieves 0.7134 Spearman correlation, exceeding the strongest zero-shot baseline, ProSST-2048 (0.6526), by 0.0608. We further explore the utility of this method by providing the score as a prior for Kermut, achieving Spearman correlation of 0.8280 across three supervised split schemes, improving on Kermut's reported 0.8167.
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arXiv math.OCSep 30
Q-MINO: A Minimal-Norm Method for Quantization-Aware Training
Don Li
The Straight-Through Estimator (STE) is a widely used heuristic for Quantization-Aware Training (QAT), but its surrogate gradients can exhibit substantial mismatch with the underlying quantized objective, leading to noisy updates and parameter oscillations, particularly in ultra-low-bit regimes. We propose the Quantization-Aware Minimal-Norm Optimizer (Q-MINO), a temporal bundle method that combines gradient consensus, state-drift regularization, and an alignment constraint to construct stabilized, minimum-norm update directions from recent optimization states. Q-MINO solves the resulting constrained subproblem using a warm-started Frank--Wolfe procedure with a feasible fallback initialization. Theoretically, via a stochastic Lyapunov Kurdyka--Łojasiewicz (KL) framework, we show that Q-MINO achieves asymptotic neighborhood convergence. Moreover, we detail numerical experiments with Q-MINO at various quantizations.
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arXiv cs.CVSep 30
Personalized Image Generation with Reasoning and Reflection
Bo Ni, Ngoc N. Tran, Qinwen Ge, Franck Dernoncourt, Seunghyun Yoon +8
Personalized image generation has remained narrowly focused on conditional synthesis from curated visual exemplars, rather than capturing who a user is. In practice, however, a user's personal context is much richer, comprising reviews, posts, images, captions, and metadata accumulated over time. A truly personalized generator should leverage this history to produce images aligned with the user's lifestyle and aesthetic preferences. To this end, we introduce the first unified benchmark for personalized image generation from user histories. The benchmark comprises two complementary tasks and a multi-axis evaluation protocol that assesses target fidelity, visual quality, user distinguishability, semantic alignment with the user's history, and task-specific utility. Grounded in real-world e-commerce and social media settings, the benchmark includes: (1) Personalized Scene Generation, which places a given object in a scene that reflects a user's preferences and lifestyle, motivated by personalized product presentation; and (2) Personalized Creative Generation, which generates a novel image on a specified topic that is faithful to a user's aesthetic and visual identity, motivated by…
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arXiv cs.LGSep 30
Reformulation-Contrastive Learning for Mixed Integer Programs
Ousema Bouaneni, Mathis Le Bail, Clément Elliker, Maël Jenny, Sonia Vanier
Mixed-integer linear programs (MILP) model many real-world decision problems, motivating machine-learning methods that exploit recurring structure to accelerate MILP solving. MILPs can admit many equivalent formulations: integrality-preserving changes of variables and the addition of redundant constraints can alter their formulations while preserving the optimization problem. We leverage these reformulations as a source of self-supervision for learning general-purpose representations of MILP variables and constraints. We characterize the affine reformulations that are valid for every input instance, and distinguish re-descriptions, which leave variables unchanged, from substitutions, which transform them predictably. Building on equivariant self-supervised learning, we introduce ReMILP (reformulation-contrastive MILP representation learning), which jointly trains a graph neural network and a hypernetwork to predict how variable embeddings transform under changes of variables. Without solver-derived labels, ReMILP learns representations that exhibit the intended invariance and equivariance on unseen problem classes. Across binary solution, constraint activity and integrality gap…
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arXiv cs.LGSep 30
Reward as Observation: Learning Reward-Based Policies for Rapid Adaptation
Morgan Byrd, Jacob Blevins, Maks Sorokin, Robert Wright, Sehoon Ha
This paper explores a reward-based policy to achieve zero-shot transfer between source and target environments with completely different observation spaces. While humans can demonstrate impressive adaptation capabilities, deep neural network policies often struggle to adapt to a new environment and require a considerable amount of samples for successful transfer. Instead, we propose a novel reward-based policy only conditioned on rewards and actions, enabling zero-shot adaptation to new environments with completely different observations. We discuss the challenges and feasibility of a reward-based policy and then propose a practical algorithm for training. We demonstrate that a reward policy can be trained within three different environments, Pointmass, Cartpole, and 2D Car Racing, and transferred to completely different observations, such as different color palettes or 3D rendering, or Stretch robot navigation in Habitat-Sim, in a zero-shot manner. We also demonstrate that a reward-based policy can further guide the training of an observation-based policy in the target environment.
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arXiv cs.LGSep 30
Benchmarking Generative Models for Near-Surface Data Assimilation on Real Station Observations
Ruizhe Huang, Qidong Yang, Jonathan Giezendanner, Sherrie Wang
Weather reanalysis products rely on computationally intensive numerical weather predictions followed by data assimilation that corrects the forecast toward observations. Recent advances in deep generative models offer a cheaper alternative that shifts much of this cost from inference to offline training. However, existing generative approaches have been evaluated on synthetic observations or under different datasets and evaluation schemes, making it unclear which design choices improve real-world data assimilation. We present the first controlled benchmark of generative data assimilation for single-time near-surface analysis from real weather station observations. Using 11,849 NOAA MADIS stations across the contiguous United States and four near-surface variables, we hold the dataset, observation operator, and deep learning architecture fixed, and measure spatial generalization at held-out stations. The benchmark compares the major design choices proposed for generative data assimilation, including diffusion versus flow matching, pixel versus latent-space formulations, and multiple inference-time conditioning strategies, against a classical 3D-Var baseline. The benchmark reveals…
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arXiv cs.ROSep 30
CF-JEPA: Improving Robustness of JEPA World Models via Controllability Factorization
Morgan Byrd, Robert Wright, Sehoon Ha
Controlling an agent with vision requires being able to separate useful information from irrelevant background information. JEPA-style latent world models seem like a natural approach for this, as they do not perform pixel-level reconstruction; however, they are still sensitive to these distractor signals and experience latent collapse. In this work, we introduce Controllability Factorized JEPA (CF-JEPA), a JEPA-style world model which splits the latent space into controllable and uncontrollable subspaces. This factorization allows us to capture all the distractor information into the uncontrollable region, while we use the control-relevant latent information for our task. With this, we show comparable performance across 2D and 3D control tasks under nominal conditions and improved performance under distracted conditions, where CF-JEPA is the only model that does not experience latent collapse. We also validate our model under distracted conditions for a simulated robot task, highlighting the practical application of such a scheme.
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arXiv cs.CLSep 30
Reason in Style: Discovering and Controlling Style in Language Models
Ioana Marinescu, Eric Karl Oermann, Kyunghyun Cho
Language models learn content and style jointly, making stylistic variation in their outputs difficult to identify and control. We study whether recurring styles in model responses can be discovered without supervision and explicitly controlled. We design an algorithm that learns to separate representations of content and style from language models' outputs and validate its effectiveness on math questions in a controlled setting. By applying this method to over 100K verified traces from nine distinct teacher models, we discover six recurring yet imbalanced styles. We then fine-tune smaller student models to follow these styles when explicitly conditioned on them, using importance weighting to balance the contribution of the styles represented in the corpus. This approach improves Pass@$k$ over standard fine-tuning on the same data across six math reasoning benchmarks, demonstrating that we can diversify the style of answers effectively. We confirm that this also results in strong correspondence between requested and realized styles. We find that style affects correctness: the probability of solving a problem depends on the style we condition on, and different problems benefit…
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arXiv cs.LGSep 30▲ 3
JEPA-TTT: Persistent Test-Time Training of Latent World Models for Planning under Dynamics Shifts
Zheyuan Zhang, Suyu Ye, Nakul Agarwal, Hossein Nourkhiz Mahjoub, Ehsan Moradi Pari +3
World models enable agents to plan by predicting future states of the environment, but their predictions can become unreliable when test-time dynamics differ from those seen during training. We present JEPA-TTT, which adapts the latent dynamics predictor of a pretrained action-conditioned Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture world model throughout test time. Self-supervised updates accumulate across episodes, while the visual encoder and reward head remain fixed, preserving the pretrained representation and task objective. Planning requires neither a goal image nor online environment reward. JEPA-TTT uses dense replay, which forms prediction windows at every temporal offset, retains them in a growing buffer, and samples minibatches from that buffer for predictor updates. Across eight dynamics shifts in four continuous-control environments, JEPA-TTT improves planning on every shift. After 500 test-time episodes, it reduces autoregressive latent prediction error by 83% on average and improves planning performance by 153% over the frozen JEPA world model. These results show that persistent self-supervised test-time training can adapt a pretrained latent world model under changed…
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arXiv cs.GTSep 30
Outer Diversity of Condorcet Domains
Piotr Faliszewski, Jan Jabrocki, Mateusz Słuszniak, Krzysztof Sornat, Stanisław Szufa +1
A Condorcet domain is a set of rankings over a given candidate set, such that every election that consists only of (an odd number of) votes from the domain has a transitive majority relation. We study outer diversity of Condorcet domains, i.e., a measure that quantifies expected swap distance from a random vote to a closest one in the domain. We numerically analyze outer diversity for maximal Condorcet domains with few candidates, and then we establish its asymptotic behavior for several special domains, mostly obtaining theoretical results.
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