Histórias consolidadas

Cientistas do MIT desenvolveram um método de treinamento para gerar modelos que simulam os efeitos das atividades humanas no clima muito mais rapidamente que outras abordagens.

Foundation models pretrained on large natural-image collections are increasingly adapted for medical image segmentation, in the expectation that they will replace models trained for each task. Most comparisons, however, use data from the training distribution and a single task-specific baseline whose configuration is rarely justified, and therefore provide limited evidence of performance at new clinical sites. It also remains unclear how much of a foundation model must be adapted, and what determines this. We adapted a foundation model, DINOv2, with strategies ranging from tuning only its bias terms to full fine-tuning, and compared it with U-Nets and ResU-Nets trained from scratch. Experiments covered colonoscopy, breast ultrasound and dermoscopy, with testing on held-out data from the training source and on independent datasets from other institutions. The adapted foundation model gen…

DeepLearning (DL)-based Computer-Aided Diagnostic (CAD) systems have shown great promise in supporting clinicians, but their performance heavily depends on the availability of large, well-annotated datasets. In medical lesion detection, the scarcity of comprehensive, stan dardized annotations and the heterogeneity of existing datasets limit the development of robust foundation models. In this work, we introduce a novel approach to building a multi-domain foundation model for le sion detection by integrating diverse medical image datasets annotated for both anatomical structures and abnormalities. We first propose a student-teacher training strategy to effectively combine datasets with heterogeneous label spaces, mitigating catastrophic forgetting, and im proving feature learning. In addition, building on our previously pro posed example-based EM-DETR framework, we adapt it to jointly le…

We present TorchCurves, a PyTorch library that treats vector-valued parametric curves as learnable primitives. Its central operation maps batches of scalar inputs to points on curves represented in B-spline or Legendre polynomial bases, with differentiation through both inputs and coefficients. Curve coefficients can be optimized jointly with the surrounding model or produced by another network. The library provides trainable modules, reusable basis modules, and a functional interface, supporting applications ranging from continuous feature embeddings to Kolmogorov-Arnold networks and functional regression. Its implementation combines classical evaluation algorithms with vectorized PyTorch operations, emphasizing readability and maintainability without custom hardware kernels. Timing experiments compare curve evaluation against NumPy and SciPy and KAN training against EfficientKAN acros…

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) produces rich training experience, yet outcome rewards reduce each attempt to a single number and leave most of this information unused. Training-time scaffolds, such as strategies or hints added to the prompt during training, offer a natural way to turn this information into guidance, but their design and adaptation are largely left to humans and tailored to specific domains. We introduce AutoScaffold, a unified AI-for-AI framework that turns a student's training experience into adaptive scaffolds, with minimal domain-specific information and no human intervention during training. A frozen teacher periodically examines this experience, diagnoses bottlenecks, and designs scaffolds in two forms: (i) strategies shared across a class of tasks and (ii) hints for individual hard tasks, adjusting the content and amount of support as the st…

LLM agents are increasingly used for open-ended, data-driven scientific discovery, yet most of them evaluate hypotheses pointwise, testing an empirical claim $h$ only against its complement $\neg h$. When evidence rejects $h$, the agent learns that one explanation is unlikely but not which alternative the evidence supports. To recover that alternative, we introduce Contrastive Discovery, which replaces the single hypothesis with a contrast set, a scientific question paired with mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive competing explanations. Each experiment is scored by how its evidence redistributes belief across the set, and the question is resolved when belief concentrates on one explanation. Because contrast sets change only the unit an agent proposes and scores, an existing agent can use them to re-evaluate evidence it has already collected or to guide its search. Across six …

Predicting how a ligand binds to its target is central to small-molecule drug discovery. Modern cofolding models can generate diverse candidate poses, but reliably ranking these candidates remains challenging. We introduce Pyrite, a pairwise pose-ranking benchmark comprising 1,500 pose pairs across diverse protein-ligand complexes. Expert chemists equipped with 3D visualization tools and physics-based scores perform near chance, highlighting the difficulty of interpreting available chemical signals. To investigate automated ranking, we introduce PyriteRep, a structured representation of molecular geometry, protein-ligand interactions, and physicochemical scores, and develop two LLM-based agents: PyriteReasoner, which directly compares poses through text-based reasoning, and PyriteFeaturizer, which generates executable code to construct features for logistic regression, optionally incorp…

Connectome-constrained models are often used to argue that a measured wiring diagram outperforms shuffled or rewired wiring, and hence that structure shapes function. Such comparisons can confound wiring with how the models are tuned: a connectome fixes who connects to whom, not the excitability, gains or plasticity rates the model also needs, and modellers often tune these until the real-wiring model works. We separate three estimands: physiology tuned on the real wiring and transferred to nulls (P1), each wiring tuned on its own (P2), and P2 restricted to physiology consistent with independent data (P3). The biases involved are known in machine learning (under-tuned baselines, inherited weights, winner's curse); we measure what they do to biological conclusions, using synthetic ground truth, placebo nulls and three Drosophila circuit models. Some claims survive every protocol we test:…

Agent harnesses have emerged as a promising mechanism for continual learning, alongside test-time parametric learning. However, the current benchmarks have several limitations: they generally focus on a single applied domain, serve each instance only once, and assume a single family of learner, so memory-based and weight-based systems are rarely compared on the same scale. We propose Continual-ARC, a lifelong stream built from the three ARC-AGI editions, whose tasks need no domain knowledge. The same tasks return after dormant gaps with fresh instances, while new tasks keep arriving. On each instance, the learner may pay for demonstrations, submit answers, or act inside the harness, with retries permitted on incorrect submissions, which are paid for. Each instance is scored based on the share of this feedback budget consumed. Since a learner may keep anything between instances, memory-b…

Foundation models trained on large unlabeled corpora develop emergent capabilities, tasks that go beyond the training objective. We extend this paradigm to multimodal biology with Bonbon, a foundation model for molecular interactions trained on approximately 3.2 trillion tokens of paired protein-ligand sequences. From a single representation space, Bonbon exhibits three zero-shot emergent capabilities at hierarchical levels of resolution: functional (mechanism of action), residue (binding site localization, including orthosteric/allosteric discrimination), and bond (covalent versus non-covalent engagement). All three capabilities generalize to out-of-distribution complexes. Bonbon was trained on protein-ligand sequences alone, without any task-specific supervision and without structural coordinates. We conducted controlled scaling experiments across six model scales from 42M to 1.6B par…

Deploying LLM-based analytics agents in enterprise settings requires evaluation frameworks that can reliably detect failures across complex, multi-tool workflows. We present a three-phase comparative study of three evaluation frameworks, each representing a distinct evaluation paradigm (trace-based LLM judging, text-only LLM judging with red-teaming, and deterministic heuristics), applied to two analytics agents in a controlled research setting using frozen execution traces. Phase 1 quantifies evaluation harness stability through repeated measurements, finding that 97% of configurations meet the stability threshold and that stability patterns are agent-independent. Phase 2 measures known risk detection on 72 ground-truth test cases, where the trace-based framework achieves the best precision-recall balance (F1=0.90) while text-only evaluation matches on recall but generates 5x more fals…

Business process automation runs the same Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) again and again on new inputs. Large Language Model (LLM) agents can follow an SOP written in natural language, but they call an LLM to choose every step of every run, which adds latency and cost at scale. We present ReTrace, which turns an SOP and a few logged agent runs into a reusable workflow in which code, not an LLM, selects the next step. The agent's reasoning, the explanation it writes with each tool call, often states why it took an action; the tool calls alone do not. ReTrace extracts the condition behind each step, merges these conditions across runs into a compact rule document, and generates an executable workflow from it. Only this last stage depends on the platform, so rule documents can be compiled for different orchestration platforms. On $79$ procedures from our production platform, ReTrace wo…

Time series analytics has been widely applied across various domains. While existing time series foundation models (TSFMs) have demonstrated promising results, they still face two major challenges: 1) Most TSFMs mainly rely on stacking Transformer layers to increase parameter size, lacking the ability to adaptively model complex time series patterns from multi-domain data. 2) Current TSFMs are primarily pre-trained for specific tasks, e.g., forecasting or anomaly detection, and a few models support multiple tasks, but they fail to fully leverage task specificity and commonality, resulting in suboptimal performance. To address these challenges, we propose TimeSeek, a novel generalized time series analytics model that adaptively models time series patterns from multi-domain data and unifies multiple tasks in pre-training. Conceptually, TimeSeek is guided by selective information sharing u…

Research ideation is iterative: researchers refine their ideas step by step based on feedback. Yet existing evaluations obscure this search process, making it difficult to understand how LLMs explore the space of research ideas and what limits their progress. We introduce Re-Search, which adapts the format of Twenty Questions to research ideation: given only the research problem of a published paper, a model must rediscover the paper's core idea by asking yes-or-no questions. Built from 200 ICML 2026 papers, Re-Search tracks how a model's idea evolves as it asks questions and receives binary oracle feedback, isolating ideation from execution. Across six recent LLMs, nearly all progress happens within the first 30 of 100 questions, which largely decide how the game ends; after that, most models plateau. Through controlled interventions on the candidate questions and the hypothesis space,…

Neural networks are increasingly studied not merely as predictive systems, but as complex systems whose internal computations are themselves objects of scientific inquiry. Recent progress in mechanistic interpretability (MI) has made it possible to identify neurons, features, circuits, population structures, and dynamical patterns associated with model behavior. As these tools improve, attention is shifting from what can be observed inside a model to how those observations support mechanistic explanations. We examine the parallel efforts of neuroscience and MI to address this question and identify recurring inferential bottlenecks when inferring mechanisms from complex neural systems. We propose five principles and organize them into a recursive logic for a more rigorous procedure of mechanistic inference. These principles provide a framework that supports scientific discovery in two se…

In this paper, we present 1020 Group's submission to the WMT26 shared task on automated quality evaluation. Our system, Pterodactyl, was engineered specifically for subtasks 2 and 3, that is, segment-level quality score prediction and the detection of error-free segments. Pterodactyl is a highly customizable, ultra-low cost system optimized for binary classification in translation triage and data curation. It is based on an LLM-as-a-judge approach, with prompt engineering and model selection guided by ROC analysis. We also developed several variants of Pterodactyl that were specifically adapted for subtasks 3.

Text-to-SQL systems over large pooled catalogs must first retrieve the tables a question needs. We compare against the published table recall of RASL, which uses Claude 3.5 models to extract keywords and select tables, on pooled BIRD, Spider, and Fiben catalogs. FERN (Feature-Engineered Ranking with No generative LLM) instead fuses three frozen retrievers into 100 candidates, describes each with up to 120 features, and reorders them with LightGBM rankers fitted once on BIRD's training questions. On Spider, where it was not fitted, its candidate pool alone reaches RASL's published recall at fifteen tables (98.0), and the ranker raises the share of questions with every gold table in the top five (complete@5) from 83.9% to 95.6%. At five tables, FERN's recall is within one point of RASL's on Spider (96.7 vs 97.0) and on BIRD with its evidence hints (96.6 vs 97.5), and 8.2 points below on B…

UTF-8's role as the de facto encoding standard in language models introduces cross-lingual inequities due to its variable-length design. However, the effect that this encoding choice has on model performance remains largely unexamined. In this work, we investigate how text encoding impacts the performance of byte-level language models, comparing UTF-8 with a wide range of other encoding strategies, including other Unicode-based approaches, language-specific encodings, and our own customized encodings. To facilitate our analysis, we propose Aether: a hybrid encoding scheme that uses script-specific encodings for our target setting while maintaining full Unicode coverage through UTF-8 fallbacks, using this framework to model four orthographically diverse languages. Surprisingly, we find that while languages with information-dense characters (Chinese, Korean) significantly benefit from com…

We describe our solution for the 2026 BEHAVIOR Challenge: 100 long-horizon household tasks in the OmniGibson simulator. We placed 9th on the final leaderboard, the only independent team in the top 10. The core of the solution is a single vision-language-action (VLA) model, one checkpoint for all 100 tasks, built on our 1st-place 2025 solution, which is based on $π_{0.5}$. On the 50 tasks shared with 2025, its Q rises from 0.260 to 0.371; across all 100 tasks it scores 0.392. Our main conclusion from 2025 was that the model was undertrained, so most of the 2026 work went into training the model for longer, optimizing some training parameters, making each training step slightly faster and reducing the gradient noise: a migration from 50 to 100 tasks (semantic stages built from the demonstrations' skill annotations, task and stage embeddings of new tasks warm-started from similar old ones,…

Branch-and-Bound (B&B) and $A^*$ are popular exact search methods originating from Operations Research and Artificial Intelligence, respectively. Although the two methods share fundamental search principles, their different ways of exploring the search space can lead to substantially different computational performance. We investigate these differences using the Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (RCPSP) as an exemplary problem setting. We first establish the relationships between mixed-integer linear programming, state-action, and timed Petri-net representations. Since B&B and $A^*$ admit numerous algorithmic enhancements, we focus on relatively basic implementations. This allows us to examine the fundamental differences between the methods rather than compare the performance of state-of-the-art solvers. By using the same lower bound and best-first node selection, we isola…

Time-Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) are increasingly used in sensor applications, where sampling frequency (SF) varies across sensors, devices, and operating modes (e.g., power saving). Ideally, TSFMs must remain effective during such SF changes, provided the SF retains task-critical bandwidth. In this paper, we stress-test 4 prominent TSFMs: MOMENT, Chronos-2, Moirai-MoE, and TimesFM, to quantify their SF-invariance and investigate whether their behavior tracks the resulting loss of information bandwidth rather than the SF value itself. Our stress-test probes 3 dimensions: (i) the shift in embeddings, (ii) the degradation in forecasting performance, and (iii) the degradation in downstream performance, quantified by three novel metrics: FSI, FDI, and CDI, respectively. To our knowledge, this is the first study to place SF-invariance at the core of TSFM evaluations. Our results charact…

Streaming speech recognizers output a word only after the speaker has finished it, typically 90-400 ms later. For a voice agent every millisecond counts: the sooner the words are outputted, the sooner the agent can start a search or plan its reply. We present Earlybird, a 29M-parameter streaming recognizer (16.8 MB at 4 bits). Earlybird learns from audio cut off at random points, including partway through a word, and is asked to predict every word that is due by then in full, plus a guess of the next two words. Its raw token probabilities give a confidence for every word including the one still being spoken. On clean audiobook speech (LibriSpeech test-clean), the median word is predicted correctly 90 ms before the speaker finishes it, while released streaming models get it 90 to 400 ms after it ends. Earlybird is the earliest on all six test sets we time, covering audiobooks, TED talks,…

Formal world models can support planning, verification, and safety reasoning, but constructing them from open-ended natural-language situations is difficult, particularly in multi-agent settings where several formalizations may be plausible. We study whether five LLMs can generate such world models as partially observable stochastic games and whether mechanical validity is sufficient to establish that the resulting model faithfully represents the intended decision problem. We introduce a benchmark of 44 scenarios spanning game, situational, and cultural settings and evaluate generated world models along three dimensions: mechanical validity, reference-relative structural agreement, and semantic criteria. Across three empirical tracks, we analyze 410 first-pass generations. In the reference-backed game track, 134/135 generated world models pass a strict mechanical audit, yet mean permuta…

Local language models can save memory by storing weights in fewer bits, and they can reduce sensitivity to the order of answer options by averaging a few reorderings. We ask whether the first makes the second worse, and which is the cheaper way to spend a fixed budget. On Qwen3-0.6B and Qwen3-1.7B with simulated round-to-nearest weight quantization (8, 6, 4 and 3 bits, fp16 reference), read from the logits of the letters A to D on ARC-Easy, ARC-Challenge, MMLU and HellaSwag (300 items each), 6 bits lose no accuracy against fp16 (they score +1.8 (+1.0 to +2.5) and +0.9 (+0.3 to +1.5) points higher, which we do not explain), and 8 bits change it by -0.7 (-1.1 to -0.3) and -0.4 (-0.7 to -0.2) points. At 4 bits the answer-slot skew rises from 0.15 to 0.53 (0.6B) and from 0.07 to 0.12 (1.7B); Gaussian noise at the same weight SNR gives 0.15 and 0.37 (two draws) and 0.19 (one draw), so the co…

Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by having a draft model propose multiple tokens for the target model to verify in one pass. The speedup is governed by the expected acceptance length (EAL), yet standard training objectives such as cross-entropy, KL divergence, and total variation focus only on distribution matching or single-step overlap. Recent studies instead propose block-level training objectives, aiming to optimize EAL directly. However, these objectives remain surrogates rather than exact formulations of EAL. For example, some average later acceptance over target-distributed continuations rather than the verification branches selected by accepted tokens, introducing a covariance gap that can reverse the gradient direction. We analyze this gap and derive REAL, a real EAL training loss that uses path weights for unbiased estimation and Rao-Blackwellization for variance…

Structural causal bandits use causal knowledge to guide exploration when reward mechanisms are unknown. This paper extends the approach to partially known causal structure, information from other environments, and realizable counterfactual actions. First, we develop graphical criteria for minimal intervention sets under Markov equivalence and characterize possibly-optimal minimal intervention sets for maximal ancestral graphs. A search algorithm finds sets that are possibly optimal in at least one graph represented by a partial ancestral graph. Second, we derive target reward bounds from source distributions through partial transportability, accounting for non-manipulable variables. Dominance relations provide further bounds for action pruning and restricted exploration, with a regret guarantee under valid prior bounds. Third, we formulate counterfactual structural causal bandits over a…

A vision-language model may take left-right direction from the orientation of image content within patches, its vision transformer's (ViT) position code, or token positions and order in its language model (LLM). Ablations show the ViT code is necessary; we test sufficiency by mirroring only a position code. In Qwen2.5-VL-7B, Qwen3-VL-4B and InternVL3-2B, mirroring ViT width positions reproduces the flipped-image answer on 84.3-93.2% of CV-Bench left-right questions (Qwen2.5-VL-3B: 87.5%, partly a left fallback). With two options, this also counts disruption; a half-grid shift flips most answers too. With the ViT code intact, LLM-side id and token-order mirrors change few left-right answers in all three series (a weak id test in Qwen2.5-VL). In Qwen2.5-VL-7B the effect sits in the global-attention ViT blocks, mostly the last. On What'sUp, flipping content and token order, not the positio…

Emergencies can occur where there is no phone signal and no ambulance nearby. A small language model on a phone can be helpful in such situations, but its advice needs to be safe and accurate. We built HandsOnAid, a 4-bit Gemma 2B model fine-tuned with QLoRA on FirstAidQA dataset, a corpus of 5,550 first-aid question-answer pairs. We compared seven configurations, including the base, 4-bit and 8-bit fine-tuned models, and versions with a length floor, safety gate, or retrieval. We used a 41-pair question-answer bank with medically reviewed references that followed ANZCOR guidelines, and a strict 0-5 score rubric, with twelve safety overrides. Four frontier LLM judges (GPT-5.6 Sol, Claude Opus 5, DeepSeek V4 Pro, GLM-5.3) blindly scored every answer, with 45 hidden controls used to check judge reliability. Fine-tuning improved the mean score by +1.08 over the base model to 2.34. The best…

Reusing key--value (KV) caches across language model updates could avoid repeated computation of shared context, but changes in model weights raise a fundamental question about what these caches preserve. We investigate direct cache reuse across four model updates, with a detailed study of DeepSeek-V4-Flash to Flash-0731. Our central finding is that caches can retain useful task information without faithfully reproducing the updated model's behavior. Retrieval accuracy varies substantially across updates, ranging from near-native performance to large losses. With source caches already available, reuse achieves median time-to-first-token speedups of $2.10$--$5.08\times$ on three longer-prefix QA benchmarks. To characterize the behavioral differences behind these outcomes, we introduce Functional Cache Divergence, which compares next-token distributions under reused and native caches. Dir…

Adversarial training is often plagued by "pseudo-attacks", perturbations that significantly increase the loss value but fail to truly alter the model's confidence structure. To address this, we propose two complementary approaches to directly attack and defend against confidence structure deformation. First, building upon the traditional loss maximization perspective, we introduce a hybrid objective that integrates cross-entropy and KL divergence, encouraging adversarial examples to simultaneously disrupt prediction accuracy and distribution consistency. Second, we geometrically reconstruct adversarial training by generating perturbations that maximize the distribution distance on the confidence manifold. Theoretical analysis shows that the optimal perturbation direction aligns with the principal eigenvectors of the Fisher information matrix. We also propose an efficient algorithm to av…

We introduce the word thermalization hypothesis according to which in a literary work there are effective interactions between words that drive them to thermalization where their word frequency distribution is the same as for the phenomenon of Rayleigh-Jeans (RJ) thermalization and condensation. In this concept, the different words play a role of classical oscillators (particles) and their word frequencies, or related tokens, are analogous to certain filling factors over energy state levels. The thermalization process is characterized by the conservation of total system energy, or total number of words/tokens, and total probability norm, or total number of different words. We apply this approach to analyze 16 literary works, including Bible, complete works of Shakespeare, and data from American National Corpus. We show that for these cases the effective system energy is very low and thu…

Misogyny is among the most prevalent forms of online hate speech directed at Brazilian users, yet open and auditable resources dedicated to it in Brazilian Portuguese remain scarce. We introduce MISO-BR, an open, documented and versioned corpus of 896 balanced social media texts annotated for binary misogyny, released with its construction protocol and reproducible baselines. The corpus combines lexicon- and target-guided scraping from X with items imported from OLID-BR, a large language model triage stage whose prompt and decoding parameters are released, and manual annotation by three annotators following a written guide. Inter-annotator reliability reaches a Fleiss' kappa of 0.788 over 816 items. Under a single fixed protocol we compare four classical classifiers (Multinomial and Bernoulli Naive Bayes, a linear SVM and a random forest) with fine-tuned BERTimbau Base and Large. The cl…

Few-step sampling reduces the cost of streaming video generation. Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) supervises few-step generators with a separate fake-score network, which adds training memory and computation and must track the evolving generator. We extend APEX to streaming video by using condition shifting to estimate the velocity field of the generated distribution within the generator. The original text condition selects generation, while a shifted condition selects fake estimation using the same parameters. This removes the independent fake network while retaining S2-Avatar's frozen reference teacher, Self-Replay Forcing, and perceptual regularization. We evaluate APEX on 180-second videos using three backbone evaluations per block and a one-step spatial Refiner, with a 70-case human study and a 320-case StreamAV-Bench comparison. Compared with S2-Avatar, APEX achieves high…

Agent skills have emerged as an effective means of enabling LLM agents to solve complex, interactive tasks by encoding reusable knowledge without modifying model parameters. Recent approaches further improve skill adaptation by distilling reusable experience from agent execution trajectories and evolving skills based on downstream task feedback. However, existing methods primarily represent skills as natural language documents, intertwining procedural logic with descriptive knowledge and making skills difficult to maintain and evolve. To address this limitation, we propose PASE (Program-Aided Patchable Skill Evolution), a program-aided framework that iteratively evolves skills by associating them with executable programs. Unlike prior approaches that encode trajectory-derived experience primarily in natural language, PASE separates reusable procedural logic into editable programs, enabl…

Automated radiology report generation can draft clinically plausible reports, yet the pathway from visual evidence to reported findings remains opaque, leaving the diagnostic basis of these reports unexplained and the generated reports difficult to review or revise. We introduce ARIVE (Anatomy-guided Reasoning with Interleaved Visual Evidence), an explainable report generation framework that interleaves anatomical inspection with diagnostic reasoning prior to final report composition. To support this process, we constructed 159,416 multimodal chain-of-thought (MCoT) trajectories from MIMIC-CXR, wherein visual evidence from inspected anatomical regions informs subsequent clinical interpretation. Trained on these trajectories and further optimized using anatomical and clinical-content rewards, ARIVE achieved superior clinical-efficacy performance compared with strong baselines on MIMIC-CX…

Long-horizon personalized agents maintain an evolving memory by continuously deciding what to add, modify, or discard. However, learning an optimal update policy remains challenging. Conventional training relies solely on terminal question-answering accuracy, yielding a coarse feedback signal that treats all intermediate updates identically. Furthermore, update utility is inherently user-specific, as identical memory actions may yield opposite effects across different user personas. Existing methods fail to address this heterogeneity, relying on globally shared evaluation standards with at most a single scalar intermediate reward. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{Personalized Memory Rubrics} (\textbf{PMR}), a framework that translates terminal feedback into fine-grained, per-step, and per-user credit assignment. PMR decomposes evaluation into a universal layer capturing c…

In reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards, a language model is rewarded for a correct final answer, and GRPO passes that reward to every token of the solution in equal measure. We instead place the credit where the model hesitated, in a method we call MCPO (Margin-Credit Policy Optimization). We measure hesitation by the top-2 margin $M=p_1-p_2$ of the policy's next-token distribution, map it to a score with two fixed thresholds, and spread each solution's advantage over its tokens so that the mean stays unchanged. The margin is read from a forward pass the trainer already performs, so the method needs no extra model evaluation and no batch statistics. We train MiniCPM5-2B-Base with LoRA for 200 steps on 2,048 DAPO-Math problems and evaluate on six competition-math benchmarks. MCPO beats an unmodified GRPO baseline for all five data seeds, by 6.55 points of macro avg@32 on avera…

The arteriolar-to-venular diameter ratio (AVR) is a clinically motivated marker of retinal vascular health. We present a five-stage pipeline for AVR estimation and exploratory retinopathy screening from fundus images, with inspectable intermediate outputs at each stage. The pipeline combines vessel and artery-vein masks, optic-disc localization, vessel-calibre estimation using a minimal-chord boundary walk, and AVR computation from dominant arterial and venular branches. An explicit threshold-based rule produces the screening decision, enabling errors to be traced to individual processing stages. On an exploratory cohort of 30 HRF images, we report 96.7% accuracy, an F1-score of 0.968 and ROC-AUC of 0.978. Ablation studies and an exploratory comparison with VascX examine the effects of vessel pairing, calibre measurement and aggregation. Interpretation is limited by the small cohort, pr…

Users of model APIs and third-party platforms often rely on the declared model name to identify the model responding to their requests. However, the actual model may differ from the declared one, motivating identity verification based on observable outputs. Previous studies have shown that preferences in simple numerical-choice tasks can serve as model fingerprints. We investigate whether a single fixed-length integer sequence can combine multiple numerical observations to identify its source model. For this task, we introduce NumPrint, a benchmark of 5,036 answers from 51 models, collected using Chinese, Japanese, and English prompts that request 294 integers between 1 and 355 in one response. We propose the Shallow MLP and Causal Transformer (SMCT) to capture aggregate numerical preferences and behavioral patterns in generated sequences. In 51-class closed-set evaluation, SMCT achieve…

Language-model agents increasingly tackle long-horizon tasks whose interaction histories exceed the model's active context. They must therefore decide what to write down and what to read back, and when to do either. Recent work has begun to use on-policy distillation (OPD) to make memory control part of the policy, relying on memory tools and compaction protocols that lie outside either model's pre-training. However, this weakens the distillation on both sides: the teacher cannot give useful guidance on an interface it has never used, and the student samples too few meaningful memory actions for that guidance to take effect. To study this problem, we introduce Coding Agent Memory Gym II (CAMG-II), a suite of long-horizon agentic-RL environments spanning Shop, Coding, AutoResearch, General, and Visual. Alongside each environment's native task interface, CAMG-II provides ordinary Bash acc…

We present a novel framework to learn a representation of quantum circuits based on the phase space formulation of many-body systems. Given that $N$-qubit states can be represented as probability distributions on a smooth $2N$-dimensional manifold, we show how unitary gates can be parameterized as normalizing flows between these distributions, opening a new avenue for quantum circuit simulation using generative models. We evaluate our method on three common families of quantum circuits, and show that its accuracy exceeds that of current state-of-the-art neural network methods for large system sizes.

As multimodal tourism-related information collected from heterogeneous data sources has become increasingly available, learning effective representations has attracted attention for improving recommendation performance. Existing approaches often tightly couple multimodal fusion with the architecture and optimization objective of a specific downstream model, which limits the generality and reusability of the learned representations. To address these limitations, we propose LUMIR, a decoupled multimodal representation learning framework based on contrastive learning. Multimodal information collected from heterogeneous data sources is first semantically unified into a shared textual representation space using large language models (LLMs). An interaction-aware fusion mechanism is then designed to model cross-modal interactions, while sequential signals are incorporated as a structural const…

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities but raise significant privacy concerns due to their abilities to infer sensitive personal information from images with high precision. While current LVLMs are relatively well aligned to protect universal privacy, e.g., credit card data, we argue that privacy is inherently personalized and context-dependent. This work pivots towards a novel task: can LVLMs achieve Inference-Time Personalized Privacy Protection (ITP$^3$), allowing users to dynamically specify privacy boundaries through language specifications? To this end, we present SPY-Bench, the first systematic assessment of ITP$^3$ ability, which comprises (1) 32,700 unique samples with image-question pairs and personalized privacy instructions across 67 categories and 24 real-world scenarios, and (2) novel metrics grounded in user specifications and conte…

Which linguistic units minimise the bitrate required to encode speech content: phones, syllables, words, maybe larger units, or something in between? This question has implications for the development of speech and language systems and theories of human language processing. Using a transcribed corpus of 960 hours of English audiobooks, I compare the information rates of phones, syllables, words, multi-word combinations and intermediate tokenisations. While all units are equivalent under a perfect language model, it makes sense to compare these under limited modelling budgets; I use $n$-gram and transformer language models. The lowest bitrates are achieved using words, with slightly longer units sometimes performing best. The results show that, when modelling capacity is limited, units larger than syllables but smaller than long multi-word phrases provide the most efficient representatio…

In Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models, the nature of expert specialization remains controversial. Reports of domain-associated expert preferences contrast with analyses attributing routing primarily to token identity or syntactic patterns. To clarify these differing accounts, we look beyond expert-level routing to investigate the neuron-level organization of domain-specialized computation using Routing-Aware Magnitude Profiling (RAMP), a measure developed for this analysis. Using mixed-domain calibration data, we identify domain-specialized neuron sets with 58-74% overlap across multi-source samples of the same domain, compared with 15-24% across domains. To understand how this organization evolves during training, we trace neuron importance throughout pre-training and post-training across three fully open MoE families. Neuron importance continues to reorganize between pre-training checkpo…

} Predicting who will speak next, and when, is a prerequisite for conversational agents and social robots that take turns without waiting for silence. Multiparty next-speaker prediction (NSP) has been studied on corpora with per-speaker sensors, each with its own event definitions. No public benchmark covers the single camera and microphone a robot has, and no model has been compared against how well people perform the same prediction. We turn AVCC, a 31-hour audio-visual corpus of two- and three-speaker online conversation recorded with a single static camera and microphone, into a public NSP benchmark. We add a speaker-disjoint seven-video test partition with 865 hold and 865 shift events at mutual-silence gaps, word-level forced-aligned transcripts for the whole corpus, and a human reference benchmark collected at the same events. We score an audio-only Role-Relative VAP model (RoleV…

Com até $53 million da ARPA-H, os pesquisadores usarão AI para gerar herbicidas mais seguros que reduzam a dependência de importações e melhorem a segurança do abastecimento alimentar dos U.S.

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) lesions vary widely in shape, and microaneurysms (MAs) span only a few pixels. We hypothesize that modeling the spatial organization of lesion regions, with global context and shape-adaptive scanning, improves the segmentation of such small and irregular lesions. To test this, we propose D$^2$Mamba, which couples non-causal state space duality with deformable Mamba scanning. We evaluate it with five-fold cross-validation on the DDR dataset, comparing against representative segmentation baselines under an identical training protocol, and conduct ablations on each component. D$^2$Mamba achieved the best overall performance, with 33.87% mIoU, 2.99 percentage points above the strongest baseline. The largest gain appeared on MAs, the smallest and most easily missed lesions, where Dice improved by 10.06 percentage points. These results confirm our hypothesis that spa…

We propose a novel conditional entropy function as a basis for quantifying predictive uncertainty in Evidential Deep Learning (EDL) for glaucoma detection from retinal fundus images. Using the EyePACS-AIROGS-light-V2 and RIM-ONE-DL datasets for validation, we found that our proposed EDL model regularized by conditional entropy function produced uncertainty estimates with substantially lower calibration errors than Deep Ensembles, MC Dropout, post-hoc calibration and the conventional EDL framework based on Dempster uncertainty. To further probe our models' interpretability, we analyzed Grad-CAM heatmaps using a focus index representing spatial concentration. Compared with the other uncertainty quantification methods, EDL models exhibited greater separation between the index distributions of correctly and incorrectly classified fundus images. In particular, false negatives were associated…

Remote sensing imagery acquired by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) supports wide range of applications; however, deploying machine learning (ML) models on resource-constrained aerial platforms introduces challenges beyond predictive accuracy, particularly when deployment data differ from the distributions observed during training. Such shifts are common in remote sensing due to geographic, sensor, seasonal, and other visual variations. A practical solution is to equip deployed models with mechanisms that detect emerging distribution shifts and support subsequent responsive actions. This paper presents an empirical case study of three open-source detection tools: (i) Alibi-Detect; (ii) NannyML; and (iii) PyTorch-OOD. Using cross-dataset remote-sensing shifts, we evaluate both detection effectiveness and computational latency of these tools. Our results reveal differences in detection beh…

Compositional generalization is an important form of out-of-distribution generalization, defined as the ability to train on some combinations of modules (e.g., functions such as sort, filter) and then generalize to unseen combinations. Despite substantial empirical work evaluating compositional generalization in transformers, findings have been inconsistent because evaluations were often conducted on a limited set of train-test splits, defined in an ad hoc manner. Through a systematic evaluation, we identify two key aspects of the train-test distribution that strongly affect performance: composition equivalence and module coverage. We show that the apparent performance of direct models (trained only on final outputs) results primarily from exploiting composition equivalences, meaning different sequences of modules that reduce to identical end-to-end functions. When benchmarks eliminate …

Simulation optimization typically returns a single estimated optimal point. When decisions also depend on criteria evaluated independently of simulation, such as resource cost, the decision maker instead needs the set of designs whose expected performance lies within a tolerance of the optimum, often choosing the tolerance only after seeing the tradeoffs. We study how to identify these near-optimal regions on a continuous design space, simultaneously for all tolerances up to a prescribed maximum $T$, with region estimation error at most $η$. We show that region identification is not a by-product of optimization. Specifically, when $α>ν$, any procedure, even one given the optimal design in advance, needs at least $Ω\bigl(η^{-(2+d/ν)}\min\{1,KT^{d/α}\}\bigr)$ simulation evaluations, where $d$ is the dimension, $ν$ the smoothness, and $(K,α)$ the covering parameters that describe the geome…

Reliable inference for rankings of large language models based on human pairwise comparisons must preserve the privacy of individual preference records. To meet this need, we develop methods for score and rank inference under the Bradley-Terry model with edge differential privacy. For an objective-perturbed estimator, a new leave-one-out analysis establishes finite-sample bounds on Euclidean and entrywise estimation errors. For sufficiently dense comparison graphs, the error bounds extend to smaller privacy budgets, including regimes in which its privacy term dominates its statistical term. A uniform asymptotic expansion yields asymptotically valid confidence intervals for individual scores and pairwise score differences. To improve finite-sample performance, we account for both regularization bias and privacy-induced randomness by combining a plug-in ridge-bias correction with Gaussian…

KL-regularized reinforcement learning, the objective behind maximum-entropy RL and RL from human feedback, is variational inference in the graphical model of "control as inference": the regularized optimal policy is a posterior over trajectories, and the suboptimality of a policy is $β$ times a KL divergence between path measures. However, it is not known how many samples it takes to learn this posterior, even with a generative model. Earlier $1/ε$ guarantees scale with $H^5$ in the effective horizon $H$, and no lower bound for MDPs depends on the temperature $β$. In this work, we show that for a discounted MDP with $K$ state-action pairs, the plug-in estimator finds a policy that is $ε$-optimal from every initial state with $\widetilde{O}(KH^3/(ε\max\{ε,β\}) + KH)$ samples, and that no algorithm, even one that chooses where to sample, can do with fewer when $ε\lesssim \min\{H, H^2/β\}$…

Integrating human feedback into language models has gained increasing attention as a means to align model outputs with human preferences, with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) serving as a prominent framework for preference-based alignment. Recent studies have incorporated eye-tracking (ET) data as an additional supervisory signal for reward model training, grounding reward learning in human reading behavior. Building on this approach, we extend prior fixation-centric models by leveraging established findings from cognitive psychology on human letter recognition. Specifically, we model visual attention as a spatially graded distribution centered on the current gaze location and incorporate this representation into reward model training. Our results show that the reward model trained with the proposed gaze distribution achieves higher preference prediction accuracy than …

As AI agents become increasingly capable, users must still recognize when and how to ask for help, leaving many opportunities for useful support unrealized. Proactive agents hold the promise to close this gap, but effective proactivity requires understanding users' real-time activities and personalizing intervention timing so that assistance is offered when it is likely to be helpful rather than disruptive. We introduce deep personalization, a closed-loop process that connects continuous context observation with continual agent adaptation: an agent observes user activity, selectively retains long-term context, and adapts intervention decisions from implicit feedback. We initiate deep personalization in Coco, a proactive desktop agent, by having a separate Observer Agent that monitors desktop activity, maintains compact long-term user modeling context, and learns when assistance is desir…

Analog integrated circuit (IC) design is a multi-turn, simulator-grounded engineering task that demands iterative reasoning over coupled performance tradeoffs, yet proprietary process design kits (PDKs) make hosted large language model workflows difficult to deploy in practical design settings. We present SLIC (Small LM Iterating on Circuits), a reinforcement fine-tuning framework that trains a 4B-scale, locally deployable language model for closed-loop analog circuit optimization. SLIC pairs structured circuit representations with discretized relative-update actions, domain- and success-gated multiobjective rewards, and Reward-Guided Rollout Steering (RGRS), which turns per-step simulator feedback into signals for both policy learning and online rollout construction in this sparse, highly constrained domain. We further release an open, goal-conditioned benchmark of 41 amplifier topolog…

Ao aprender como a matéria se move, o sistema WorldParticle pode ajudar no desenvolvimento de robôs flexíveis, medicamentos e muito mais.

Machine learning models often achieve high average accuracy in the training data while performing poorly on test data due to subpopulation shift. A common data-centric solution is to enforce balanced subgroup proportions, but full balance can be costly, infeasible, and not always necessary. In this work, we study whether balanced training data is the unique optimal configuration for robust subpopulation generalization. We extend a Gaussian feature-model framework to theoretically characterize the performance landscape across general training subgroup distributions. We show that multiple configurations, including substantially imbalanced ones, can perform comparably to the balanced one. We further derive gradient-based directions for adjusting subgroup proportions to improve adjusted accuracy and worst-group accuracy more efficiently. These findings suggest that strategically allocating …

Stochastic differential equations (SDEs) describe stochastic processes across a wide range of scientific domains, including physics, biology, and finance. Although individual numerical integration steps are inexpensive, observing meaningful events or transitions can require millions of sequential steps, resulting in substantial wall-clock simulation time and poor hardware utilization. Deep learning offers an alternative by amortizing many integration steps into a single neural network forward pass, potentially enabling much faster simulation. However, existing supervised approaches typically require long simulated trajectory data, which restricts their applicability. In this work, we introduce Kolmogorov-Chapman Maps (KC-Maps), a method for learning the transition kernel of an SDE that relies only on the trajectory-free marginal samples together with the known drift and diffusion coeffi…