Hardware Architecture
Papers
Fresh from arXiv, typeset properly. Highlighted words trade on the market.
Monday 28 September
Modern deep learning (DL) workloads are limited by data movement, and processing-in-memory (PIM) targets this bottleneck by placing compute units near the memory. However, PyTorch and other DL frameworks lack compiler support for making this decision on the code they lower: existing offloading frameworks target hand-written C/C++ programs, while those that address DL fix the candidate set to a list of operator types before lowering. We present Torch-PIM, a compiler framework that uses profile-guided optimization (PGO) to decide host-versus-PIM placement over the loop nests that progressive lowering materializes. Every parallel loop nest the pipeline emits enters the candidate space, and each is assessed in two stages: the amount of work it carries, and its memory boundedness. Every quantity the assessment consumes is profiled on the host or obtained from the multi-level intermediate representation (MLIR) of the code. Across PIM configurations of 32 to 128 cores, Torch-PIM's offloading decisions yield speedups of up to 8.6x on tensor operators, 2.9x on MLP, 4.4x on Attention, 5.1x on GPT-J-6B, and 3.6x on LLaMA-7B over CPU-only execution.
Machine Learning
Minimax Last-Iterate Convergence in Matrix Games with Observed Actions
We study last-iterate convergence in unknown two-player zero-sum matrix games with bandit payoff feedback and observed opponent actions. For games with $d$ actions per player, we develop an algorithm achieving a duality gap of $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{d/t})$ with high probability, simultaneously at every round $t$. This improves the dimension dependence of the best previously known guarantee by a factor of $d^{3/2}$. The rate matches a standard bandit lower bound, establishing minimax optimality in both the number of actions and the number of rounds, up to logarithmic factors. The algorithm is computationally efficient, requiring only $\mathcal{O}(d)$ time and memory per round. Our technical contribution is a joint design of adaptive averaging and corrected exponential weights that absorbs estimation variance, together with a potential argument that bounds phase durations.
Read the full abstract
Human-Computer Interaction
AI Tools Adoption across the Double Diamond Workflow: Phase, Mode, and Barriers in Designer Practice
Designers are adopting AI faster than the tools built for them can keep up. General-purpose conversational AI led AI use among designers in three of the four phases of design work, ahead of tools built for design. We surveyed 443 designers from at least 43 countries about AI use in each phase of the Double Diamond: Discover, Define, Develop and Deliver. Tools were classified by output and function. Of these designers, 79.7% confirmed AI use in at least one phase. Adopters used AI in a mean of 2.89 phases, and only 35.1% used it in all four. They added phases in workflow order, from Discover onward. Conversational tools led in Discover, Define and Deliver. AI-native image generation led in Develop, where AI-native tools peaked at 57.6% of tool picks. Embedded AI features in existing design software peaked later, in Deliver (37.5%). Fewer designers used AI in later phases, from 318 in Discover to 182 in Deliver. Those who did named a similar number of tools per phase. Low perceived usefulness was the only barrier that separated non-adopters (40.5%) from adopters (16.4%) after correction for multiple tests. Concern about accuracy was similar in both groups.
Read the full abstract
Artificial Intelligence
A General Harness for Protein Foundation Model Fitness Prediction
Accurate fitness prediction is central to protein engineering and understanding sequence-function relationships. With advances in deep learning, protein foundation models (PFMs) have become widely used for this task. Recent analyses, however, show that these models share preferences reflecting their training corpora, while unreliable inputs can further distort fitness predictions. Family-specific evolutionary evidence and structural context can help address these limitations by providing complementary constraints on model scores, motivating VenusREM-Harness (VRH), a general, model-agnostic, training-free Retrieval-Enhanced Mutation harness. It fuses frozen model scores with multiple sequence alignment (MSA) evidence according to model uncertainty, then applies gated background correction and score shrinkage based on structural confidence and solvent exposure. Across 1,211 assays and 3.1 million measured variants from ProteinGym, VenusMutHub, and the newly curated viral benchmark VenusViroHub, all 71 configurations improve Spearman correlation on all 3 benchmarks by 0.073 on average, with broad gains across 5 metrics. Extended analyses relate retrieval gains to model-MSA preference differences, assess domain-level gains and immune-escape cases, and quantify computational speedups. Built with VRH, VenusREM2 is the first to rank highest in all function, taxon, MSA-depth, and mutation-depth categories, with a ProteinGym Average Spearman of 0.556, 0.038 above the prior best.
Read the full abstract
Artificial Intelligence
OmniTide: Co-Designing Algorithms and Systems for Efficient On-Device Omni-LLM Streaming
On-device streaming omni-modal inference safeguards user privacy and eliminates prohibitive per-token API costs, but faces a critical bottleneck: the continuous influx of multimodal data rapidly exhausts constrained memory and compute budgets via monotonic KV cache growth. Existing sparse attention methods fall short, either incurring prohibitive online estimation latency or destroying interleaved cross-modal context, while failing to resolve physical memory fragmentation. We present OmniTide, the first algorithm-system co-design tailored for efficient on-device streaming omni-modal inference. Driven by the observation of modality-aware structural sparsity, OmniTide adopts a unit-based abstraction with two components: (1) At the algorithm level, OmniPick logically retains critical multimodal context based on unit boundaries and modality importance to preserve task accuracy; (2) At the system level, OmniPage physically partitions the cache by retention likelihood and dynamically compacts surviving sparse tokens, minimizing both memory fragmentation and data-movement overhead. Extensive evaluations across three streaming benchmarks and two consumer-device architectures show that OmniTide achieves up to $12.72\times$ kernel speedups and $2.40\times$ lower stream-loop latency. On StreamingBench, it improves accuracy by up to 18.0 percentage points over sliding-window baselines at comparable session cost. OmniPage further reduces the physical KV span by up to 26.7% relative to native logical eviction, unlocking real-time, infinite-context streaming on edge devices.
Read the full abstract
Computer Vision
Revitalizing Medical Time Series with Vision-Informed Retrieval: A Vision-Language Perspective
Medical time series (MedTS) underpin many clinical classification tasks, yet existing methods usually represent them only as numerical sequences and underuse the morphology that is explicit in waveform inspection. To bridge this gap, we introduce Vision-Informed Retrieval (ViRe), which uses a frozen VLM-derived waveform representation as a morphology-aware Query to guide retrieval from raw numerical MedTS features. Specifically, a Vision Query is extracted using pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) to obtain morphology-aware priors from waveform plots. A tailored attention-based cross-modal retrieval mechanism then uses the Vision Query to select morphology-relevant temporal and channel evidence from the numerical representation. ViRe demonstrates strong effectiveness against ten established baselines, yielding an overall 6.42% relative improvement over the previous state of the art across six public benchmarks. Code, training scripts, and reproducibility materials are publicly available in the GitHub Repository: https://github.com/Levi-Ackman/ViRe.
Read the full abstract
Computer Vision
DirectUV: Image-Conditioned UV Texture Generation with Surface-Aware Positional Encoding
Generating high-quality UV textures for 3D meshes remains challenging. Multi-view projection pipelines suffer from occlusion and view inconsistency, and recent methods that generate textures directly in UV space still rely on auxiliary modules to supply 3D information, leaving the attention mechanism tied to UV-grid positions rather than to the underlying surface geometry. This mismatch limits coherence across seams and disconnected UV islands. We propose DirectUV, an image-conditioned UV texture diffusion framework that operates in the latent UV space of a pretrained image VAE, in which a Diffusion Transformer denoises the UV latent given a single input image and a coarse UV map. At its core, Surface-Aware Positional Encoding (SAPE) replaces the standard 2D-grid positional encoding with encodings derived from per-token 3D surface coordinates obtained via UV-to-surface correspondence. As positional encodings define the distance metric used by attention, SAPE enables tokens to interact according to 3D positional proximity derived from surface correspondence rather than UV-grid distance, restoring coherence across seams and disconnected islands. A multi-level extension further assigns different attention heads to progressively finer subdivisions of the same latent UV patch, allowing the model to reason about surface structure at multiple granularities. Experiments show that DirectUV produces sharper and more globally consistent textures than other baselines, with the largest improvements in occluded and view-unseen regions where projection-based methods leave gaps or stretched textures.
Read the full abstract
Machine Learning
When Can Attention Heads Be Statically Defined?
Some attention heads learn similar patterns across inputs. Reusing these patterns could reduce training cost by avoiding repeated query-key score computation and softmax. Through controlled pretraining comparisons, we identify Selective Attention Freezing (SAF), which selects heads with low attention-pattern variance and replaces their attention weights with fitted post-softmax means halfway through training. We represent these fixed patterns with absolute-position and relative-distance preferences, reducing storage from quadratic to linear in sequence length. A fused kernel reconstructs the patterns and executes ordinary-attention and replaced heads together. At matched training-token budgets, replacing 25% of attention heads gives 1.056x faster post-replacement optimiser updates at 124M parameters and 4K context, with a 0.77% perplexity increase. At 1B and 8K context, post-replacement updates are 1.068x faster on four GPUs including communication, with a 0.51% perplexity increase. The resulting models also accelerate long-input finetuning and causal prefill. After associative-recall adaptation, the 124M model with 25% replacement generalises to more key-value pairs at a fixed length better than ordinary attention and two pruning controls.
Read the full abstract
Artificial Intelligence
Beyond Skill Evolution: Self-Evolving Context Management Policies for Long-Horizon Agent Harnesses
Harness evolution improves LLM agents by learning from execution trajectories, but existing experience- and skill-based methods are less effective on long-horizon tasks. As interactions grow, useful evidence can be buried by redundant or outdated context, making context management itself a key bottleneck. We introduce ContextEvo, a framework that learns a context policy from long-horizon trajectories. ContextEvo reconstructs the model-visible context at key decision points, identifies context-related failures, and applies targeted policy updates. Starting from the open-source Pi-agent harness, ContextEvo improves performance across three long-horizon task benchmarks, achieving results comparable to or better than several prominent agent harnesses, including Codex, OpenCode, and OpenClaw. Additional analyses show that fixed or locally evolved context strategies can fall short under long-horizon information pressure, while our methods adapt to the information demands of each environment.
Read the full abstract
Sound
SEmoEdit: Probing and Harnessing the Editability of Pre-trained Speech Flows
Existing training-based speech emotion editing methods often require substantial task-specific training and can be unstable. This motivates us to investigate whether the pretrained generative dynamics of large-scale text-to-speech (TTS) models can be directly manipulated for training-free emotion editing. To answer this question, we probe the editability of pretrained flow-matching and hybrid TTS models by constructing a controlled test set and systematically diagnosing editing effects along the generative trajectory. Our analysis reveals that pretrained TTS models are substantially editable in emotion, but such editability is architecture- and trajectory-dependent and can be disrupted by early flow-matching steps, while cross-speaker emotion transport carries additional acoustic attributes beyond emotion. To address these limitations, we propose SEmoEdit, the first training-free framework that formulates emotion editing as dynamic velocity transport between source and target emotions, enabling robust, flow-based speech emotion editing directly within pretrained TTS models. SEmoEdit unifies three core operations: emotion replacement, emotion erasure, and continuous emotion interpolation, requiring neither parameter updates nor task-specific optimization. To systematically evaluate these capabilities, we introduce SEmoEditBench, a dataset comprising 600 editing cases, and conduct extensive experiments across state-of-the-art (SOTA) models and backbones. Our results show that SEmoEdit is highly effective and broadly applicable, outperforming existing training-based and activation-steering methods. Ultimately, this work reveals that pretrained speech flows possess rich, latent emotion-editing capabilities, providing useful guidance for real applications. Code, benchmark, and Audio samples are available at https://github.com/imxtx/SEmoEdit.
Read the full abstract
Programming Languages
Episodic Loops: Finitary Event Structures and Operational Semantics for C11 Programs with Retries
Lock-free synchronisation algorithms are often implemented with fallible operations, such as compare-and-swap (CAS), wrapped in unbounded retry loops. Verifying such algorithms requires considering arbitrarily many failing iterations, yielding large state spaces, compounded by the interleavings of concurrent threads. Prior work discarded failing iterations, arguing that they leave no trace in the post-loop state. Compilers and hardware reorder instructions, and load-store reorderings may cross the boundaries of failing iterations, introducing subtle concurrency bugs. We demonstrate one such bug, making use-after-free possible in a previously verified variant of Read-Copy-Update - a synchronisation primitive widely adopted in the Linux Kernel - and we provide and verify a fix. We find that practical retries in lock-free algorithms adhere to a common pattern. We introduce episodic loops, a semantic characterisation of unbounded retry loops which is syntactically recognisable in many practical cases, and synchronisation points, operations that bound both instruction reordering and state space within episodic loops. We show that SMRD - a symbolic event structure semantics for C11 programs which allows for load-store reordering - admits a finite representation in programs where unbounded loops are episodic. We further introduce a finitary operational semantics that allows safety properties to be verified in finitely many steps. For the use-after-free bug we demonstrate, verification takes a single pass over the program, linear in the program size. We provide a reference implementation of SMRD reproducing the bug and verifying the fix, and mechanise the operational semantics together with the minimal bug and its fix in Isabelle/HOL.
Read the full abstract
Distributed Computing
Nereus: Adaptive Parallelism for LLM Post-Training
Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training for large language models (LLMs) coordinates multiple models across generation, inference, and training on GPU clusters. Several factors may change during a run, including resource availability, sequence length, memory pressure, and stage bottlenecks. As a consequence, an execution plan that was initially suitable can then become slow or even infeasible over time. However, adapting a job whose models share GPUs entails significant challenges: deciding whether a new plan is worth the transition cost, reusing the job's distributed state, and coordinating GPU transfers across models and stages. Nereus targets these challenges as a cost-aware runtime that adapts RL post-training jobs into efficient execution plans. Its low-overhead controller selects a memory-feasible global plan and admits the transition using a cost model calibrated against the running job. To estimate and execute a transition, Nereus represents the distributed state of each replica of a model-stage (one model in one stage) as an Elastic Model Unit. It then employs a global transition graph to order the transformations and GPU transfers of these units. In a trace built from real data, online TP/PP adaptation reduces average step latency by 27.7% relative to the initial fixed TP/PP layout with DP scaling. In a 1,000-step run reaching 1,024 GPUs, six transitions consume 0.079% of total run time. Nereus improves end-to-end 8B PPO throughput by 2.14–7.27$\times$ over OpenRLHF and by 1.10–1.47$\times$ over Verl across diverse clusters.
Read the full abstract
Machine Learning
Universal Dynamic Portfolios
Cover's Universal Portfolio (Cover, 1991) matches the performance of the best constant rebalanced portfolio in hindsight. We generalize this framework to compete with an arbitrary comparator sequence $\mathbf{u}_1,\ldots,\mathbf{u}_T$, leading to a dynamic regret minimization problem for the log loss where existing methods break down due to potentially unbounded gradients. The log loss is exp-concave, a curvature property that classically yields fast rates for static regret, yet we show that this advantage generally disappears in the dynamic setting. In particular, a linear-loss-type $\sqrt{TP_T}$ dependence is unavoidable, where $P_T=\sum_{t=2}^T\lVert\mathbf{u}_t-\mathbf{u}_{t-1}\rVert_1$ is the standard path length. This limitation stems from the coarse nature of $P_T$, which obscures finer spatial and temporal structure of the comparator sequence. We therefore introduce two structure-aware measures—the Jensen-Shannon distance for spatial structure and the JS$^q$-path length for temporal structure—under which faster rates are attainable when the comparator sequence has favorable structure. To achieve sharp bounds for both measures simultaneously, we develop Universal Dynamic Portfolio, a parameter-free method that combines a new Dirichlet Hedge algorithm with a fixed-share update, while retaining a near-optimal $P_T$ guarantee in the worst case. Finally, under an additional bounded-gradient assumption, we show that OPS admits the faster $T^{1/3}P_T^{2/3}$ dynamic regret rate over all comparator sequences. We attain this rate with a tractable proper algorithm that applies more broadly to general online exp-concave optimization over arbitrary compact convex domains.
Read the full abstract
Machine Learning
Tilted Schrödinger Bridge Matching
Schrödinger bridges provide an entropy-regularized framework and a principled solution for unpaired domain translation. In practice, a pretrained bridge may need to be adapted to human preferences or physical constraints through a reward a problem closely related to reward tilting in diffusion models but underexplored for Schrödinger bridges. We introduce Tilted Schrödinger Bridge Matching (TSBM), a post-training method for fine-tuning a learned bridge $P$ between source $p_0$ and target $p_1$ toward a reward-tilted target $p_1^r\propto p_1e^r$, while preserving source $p_0$. We formulate this adaptation as alternating optimization initialized from $P$, provide theoretical justification, and derive a practical algorithm based on Adjoint Matching. We evaluate TSBM on unpaired image-to-image translation targeting digit properties in MNIST and facial attributes in CelebA.
Read the full abstract
Computer Vision
Backdoor as Probe: Test-Time Adversarial Defense for CLIP
Test-time adversarial defense improves the robustness of vision-language foundation models such as CLIP without retraining. However, adversarial activation shifts are typically treated as distortions to suppress, rather than signals to exploit. We turn these shifts into defense signals by repurposing the trigger-to-target mechanism of backdoors. The key is to implant a defender-controlled backdoor as a probe that is weakly activated by clean inputs but strongly activated by adversarial shifts. Based on this insight, we propose Backdoor as Probe (BaP), a test-time adversarial defense for CLIP. BaP constructs the probe through a closed-form model edit to a selected MLP layer. It projects the average adversarial activation shift and a defender-specified semantic direction onto the layer's low-energy input and output activation subspaces to obtain the trigger and target directions, respectively. At inference time, adversarial inputs produce measurable responses along the target direction for detection. BaP then selectively rectifies detected inputs by optimizing a small perturbation that steers their representations away from adversarial shifts and toward the clean subspace. Experiments across 16 benchmarks show that BaP improves average robust accuracy from 1.0% to 52.3% while retaining clean accuracy, achieving performance comparable to state-of-the-art methods with up to a \(5.7\times\) inference speedup. BaP further shows the generalization to adversarial attacks on large vision-language models. Project page: https://robin-wzq.github.io/Backdoor-as-Probe/
Read the full abstract
Machine Learning
Uniform Race: Parameter-Free Approximate Rejection Sampling
We study approximate sampling: given $N$ independent samples from a proposal distribution $\mu$, the goal is to select one whose distribution is close to a target $\pi$ specified only up to a normalizing constant. Block and Polyanskiy (2023) provide finite budget error bounds for approximate rejection sampling (RS) as a function of the acceptance threshold $M$. The threshold $M$ giving the smallest bound, however, depends on properties of $(\pi,\mu)$ that are typically unavailable from the observed sample. This raises a natural question: Can one attain the best RS guarantee without taking $M$ as input? We answer affirmatively by proposing a parameter-free sampling algorithm called uniform race (UR), based on importance weights, which are ratios of target to proposal probabilities (or densities). It divides each observed weight by an independent uniform random variable to form a score and returns the candidate with the largest score. For every budget $N$, its total variation error satisfies the RS upper bound for every fixed threshold $M$ simultaneously, thereby achieving the best such bound in hindsight. We also characterize its output distribution conditional on the largest score, identifying when it is exactly the target $\pi$. Uniform race has no larger total variation error than a natural budget-calibrated RS derived from Rohatgi et al. (2025) and sampling importance resampling (SIR). In particular, we exhibit instances where UR's error is exponentially smaller in $N$ than that of either baseline. Furthermore, we establish conditions under which attaining this RS guarantee for every $(\pi,\mu)$ uniquely determines the selection probabilities as those of UR. Finally, test-time scaling experiments on LLM math-reasoning tasks corroborate the theoretical comparisons and demonstrate that UR remains competitive in ground-truth accuracy without requiring threshold selection.
Read the full abstract
Machine Learning
Correction-space Cross-variate Interaction for Test-time Adaptation in Time Series Forecasting
Test-time adaptation (TTA) is a promising paradigm for handling distribution shift in time-series forecasting (TSF), where models adapt at inference time, often leveraging delayed observed data to refine predictions. In the multivariate setting, distribution shifts often exhibit cross-variate dependencies, yet existing TSF-TTA methods adapt each variate independently and ignore this cross-variate structure. Exploiting such structure motivates cross-variate interaction, but coupling variates through backbone predictions introduces direct pathways for mixing uncorrected errors across variates, a concern under the delayed supervision of TSF-TTA. We identify the interaction space as a key design choice, and show that acting on adapter corrections that refine backbone outputs, the correction space, rather than on the predictions themselves, avoids directly propagating backbone errors across variates. We build on this to propose CoRe (Correction-space Interaction Refinement), realizing correction-space interaction through (i) Shared-anchor Correction Refinement (SCR), which combines each variate's correction with a shared anchor through a parameter-efficient bottleneck, and (ii) input-conditioned spectral gating, which adaptively modulates the refinement from the current input window. Across seven backbones, six datasets, and four prediction horizons, CoRe reduces MSE by 25.82% on average over backbones and 10.57% over the state-of-the-art TSF-TTA method, with stronger gains at medium-to-long horizons and modest computational overhead. Data and code are available at: https://github.com/yyddou/CoReTTA
Read the full abstract
Artificial Intelligence
MechReasoner: A Simulator and Benchmark for Mechanistic Reasoning in Qualitative Physics
This work introduces MechReasoner, a mechanistic qualitative simulator grounded in confluence-based qualitative physics, together with a benchmark for mechanistic inference. Current large language models (LLMs) generate fluent mechanistic descriptions that do not reliably follow from underlying structural and causal constraints. The benchmark tests whether answers preserve simulator-licensed ambiguity, quantified claims, episode-graph transition evidence, repairs, and trace-support judgments. Its 1,120 items are generated deterministically from admissible interpretation sets, component states, scenario restrictions, confluence constraints, and derivation steps across 18 catalog mechanisms and six task families. Each mechanism undergoes converter checks of structure and topology and behavioral checks against quantitative simulations. GPT-5.5 accuracy decreases as family-specific mechanistic complexity increases, from 76.1% in the lowest-complexity bucket (B1) to 38.0% in the highest-complexity bucket (B4). The negative association remains after controls for rendered-prompt and expected-answer length. These results show that qualitative simulators can support auditable NLP benchmarks for mechanistic inference.
Read the full abstract
Artificial Intelligence
A Persistent State for Auditable Mixture-of-Experts Routing
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models repeatedly route tokens to sparse subsets of experts, but conventional routers expose no routing-specific record of how cross-layer influences accumulate. We introduce Scratchpad-Augmented Mixture-of-Experts (SA-MoE), which gives each router access to a low-dimensional persistent state that is not provided to the experts. Learned layerwise writes update this state, and their realized post-update changes exactly decompose the state-mediated contribution to any later routing margin, forming a routing ledger. Across sparsely upcycled SmolLM2- and Gemma-based models and three independent training seeds per architecture, this pathway adds less than 1% analytical forward compute and is strongly used by trained routers: local removal of its router contribution changes the selected Top-2 expert set in 87.6% and 69.9% of decisions, respectively. Relative to a matched latest-write-only control, persistent accumulation increases long-horizon future-routing accessibility by 19.4 and 12.2 percentage points, with positive effects in every seed. More than 90% of absolute ledger contribution comes from non-recent writes in both families, and full-forward suppression of ledger-selected writes changes later routing and output distributions. The ledger is an exact provenance object for the persistent-state pathway, not a complete causal explanation of routing. Sensitivity-aware scores better predict full-forward intervention effects, and post-hoc methods recover related cross-layer attribution without architectural modification. SA-MoE instead makes one routing-specific computational history explicit and directly inspectable within the model's natural forward computation.
Read the full abstract
Machine Learning
GenMem: Generative Symbolic Memory for Self-Evolving Harness
Long-term memory supports the self-evolution of LLM agents by retaining experience and skills across tasks and enabling their retrieval, reuse, and revision in subsequent long-horizon decision-making. Yet existing memory management approaches remain limited to discriminative retrieval and to address the sparse, hierarchical, and highly redundant structure of reusable experience: only a small, task-dependent subset of trajectories and memories warrants retention, retrieval, or revision. Learning these operations is further complicated by sparse, delayed, and indirect task-level feedback, with weak supervision across the memory lifecycle. Moreover, continual memory evolution introduces an architectural tension as addressing invariance: stored experience is perpetually revised, yet the addressing interface consumed by learned retrieval policies must remain stable. To address, we present GenMem, which reformulates memory management as generative symbolic addressing. Its core mechanism is the Symbolic Identifier (SID), a multi-level discrete token tuple drawn from a Cartesian-product address space that factorizes a million-scale sparse memory space using fewer than one hundred discrete symbols. Instead of generating ever-changing raw content, the memory agent learns to generate SIDs, while memory evolution rewrites the payload at a fixed address without shifting the address itself. Architecturally, GenMem couples a MemRetriever and a MemEvolver within a multi-agent harness, trained via GRPO with dense process and outcome rewards with two-channels optimization. Under offline memory evolution, experiments spanning ALFWorld, WebShop, multi-hop QA, medical reasoning, and deep research evaluate GenMem against strong memory-augmented baselines...
Read the full abstract
Computer Vision
Long Time No See: Benchmarking VLMs for Out-of-Sight Spatiotemporal Reasoning in Egocentric Videos
Real-world AI systems must reason about objects that are no longer visible: an AR assistant guiding a user back to an object used earlier, a household robot retrieving an item someone put away. This requires not just recalling where an object was last seen, but updating its state when it is moved and retaining that update once it leaves view. We refer to this as out-of-sight spatiotemporal reasoning. We introduce Beyond3D, the first VQA benchmark to isolate this ability in dynamic egocentric video: every query targets an object that has been relocated and has since left the field of view. We create our questions from HD-EPIC annotations, building a visibility track for each dynamic object from its 3D position, the camera pose, and the scene geometry to understand at each moment whether it is visible, occluded, or out of view. Beyond3D comprises 9,000 questions in eight types over 135 videos from nine participants, organized as one reasoning chain: visual grounding (is the target observable now), temporal grounding (when it was last visible and last placed), scene localization (which fixture anchors that location), and 3D spatial perception (where it lies relative to the current viewpoint or another object in the scene). We benchmark nine general-purpose and spatially specialized VLMs. The best model reaches 42.2% against 29.7% chance and text-only baselines reaching 31.9%, with the largest failures in recovering when an object was last visible, showing that tracking object movement out of sight remains far from solved for current VLMs.
Read the full abstract
Machine Learning
DisKO: Deep Koopman Learning in Distribution Space from Unpaired Snapshots
Many complex systems are observed only through temporally unpaired distribution snapshots, making trajectory-based dynamical learning difficult without additional assumptions. We therefore formulate the problem directly in distribution space, treating the distribution itself as the dynamical state. The challenge is that distribution space is infinite-dimensional, making compact and approximately closed representations difficult to learn from finite snapshots. We introduce DisKO, which extends deep Koopman learning to distribution dynamics by jointly learning predictive distributional observables, a finite-dimensional Koopman representation, and a generative map back to the full distribution. Across seven diverse benchmarks, DisKO achieves state-of-the-art extrapolation performance, with substantially slower error accumulation on long-horizon prediction tasks. DisKO further recovers leading Koopman eigenvalues and eigenfunctions on systems with analytic spectra, revealing meaningful dynamical structure in the learned representation.
Read the full abstract
Software Engineering
CLAD: Constrained Abstract Domain for Neural Network Verification
Neural network verification (NNV) formally verifies that a network satisfies a specified property for all inputs within a defined region. Modern NNV tools employ abstract domains to compute a sound over-approximation of the network's behavior from the given input region, thus the tightness of these abstractions essentially determines efficiency. A long line of increasingly precise domains has been developed, but they all describe the valid input region in the same restrictive way, e.g., an Lp-norm ball. A practical input region is rarely a simple Lp ball, but rather a combination Lp ball with additional constraints. Verifying a network over such a region with existing abstraction produces a loose over-approximation, which results in either failing to verify a property or spurious counterexamples. We introduce Constrained Lagrangian Abstract Domain (CLAD), a new abstract domain that computes a sound over-approximation of neural networks over input regions defined by a combination of convex constraints. CLAD propagates these constraints and tightens bounds over the true feasible region. However, bounding a neuron over the intersection of these constraints has no closed-form solution, so CLAD relaxes each constraint into the objective with a Lagrange multiplier and solves the resulting max-min problem with a projected primal-dual method, alternating a projected gradient step on the input with a multiplier update. CLAD supports any convex constraint with a subgradient, e.g., from automatic differentiation. We evaluate CLAD on 1,944 instances across four convolutional networks with motion-blur structured perturbations with halfspace or L2-ball constraints. On standard unconstrained Linf property, CLAD verifies as many instances as GCPCROWN at a similar runtime. On constrained properties, CLAD verifies 60% more instances than GCPCROWN on L2-ball properties, and 22% more in total.
Read the full abstract
Machine Learning
Evaluating Dynamical Fidelity through Predictive Structure in Physical Representations
Machine-learning models for physical systems are currently evaluated primarily through errors between predicted and reference states and, increasingly, through tests of physical consistency. These metrics assess whether predictions are accurate and satisfy selected physical requirements, but provide limited insight into whether learned trajectories reproduce the underlying dynamics. Domain experts examine such relationships through physical representations that expose relevant processes, interactions, and responses, but these analyses are often separated from typical machine-learning evaluation. We introduce a practical framework for evaluating dynamical fidelity through predictive structure in physical representation spaces. Experts define the representations, while reference trajectories determine which relationships are predictive and retained as evaluation tests. We demonstrate the approach in atmospheric forecasting using ERA5 representations of planetary-wave activity and Northern Annular Mode evolution, and evaluate Pangu-Weather, GraphCast, and FengWu. The models exhibit distinct departures from reference predictive structure that are not reflected by conventional forecast errors. The framework thereby turns domain-expert representations into systematic tests of learned physical dynamics without prescribing the relationships in advance.
Read the full abstract
Numerical Analysis
The Numerical Onsager-Machlup action functional for Euler discretized SDEs driven by fractional Brownian motion
In this work, different from previous results, the explicit expression of numerical Onsager-Machlup action functional for Euler discretized SDEs driven by fractional Brownian motion is derived provided the drift coefficient and numerical reference path satisfy some suitable conditions. Then numerical fractional Euler-Lagrange equations for numerical Onsager-Machlup action functional are also obtained. Finally, numerical experiments to illustrate and support the theoretical findings.
Read the full abstract
Numerical Analysis
A weighted polygonal discontinuous Galerkin method for hierarchically coupled reaction-diffusion systems with cubic interactions
We develop and analyse a symmetric weighted interior penalty polytopal discontinuous Galerkin (SWIP-PolyDG) method for multi-species reaction–diffusion systems with nonlinear reaction terms of up to cubic order. Such terms arise naturally when higher-order interactions are incorporated into population models, allowing non-additive effects among multiple species to influence local growth and conversion mechanisms. The proposed framework accommodates heterogeneous and possibly anisotropic diffusion tensors on general polygonal meshes. To control the nonlinear coupling, we consider a hierarchical block structure in the reaction operator, whereby each population block depends only on its own variables and on those associated with preceding blocks. In addition, the cubic self-interactions within each block are assumed to have a dissipative diagonal structure. Under these hypotheses and proceeding recursively over the hierarchy of population blocks, we derive local-in-time stability estimates in two spatial dimensions for the semi-discrete formulation in both the $L^2(\Omega)$-and dG-norms. We further establish an a priori error estimate in a combined $L^2(\Omega)$-dG energy norm for sufficiently regular solutions for the semi-discrete formulation. Finally, numerical experiments confirm the predicted convergence behaviour and illustrate the robustness of the method under heterogeneous diffusion.
Read the full abstract
Computer Vision
BMND: Direct Poisson Denoising by N-Dimensional Block Matching and Collaborative Filtering
Poisson denoising of scientific data requires methods that account for signal-dependent noise while accommodating different data dimensionalities and preserving quantitative intensity information. We present BMND, a dimension-independent extension of block matching and collaborative filtering for Gaussian and Poisson observations. Building on the two-stage structure of BM3D and BM4D, BMND processes Poisson data directly, without a variance-stabilizing transform, by combining noise-aware patch matching with propagation of signal-dependent noise variances through collaborative filtering and aggregation. A dimension-independent reference-patch traversal scheme supports arrays with an arbitrary number of axes. An optional aggregation-aware mass conservation preserves the observed total intensity after weighted overlap-add. We evaluate the framework on one-dimensional physiological signals, two-dimensional images, and three-dimensional volumes, using controlled noise experiments and measured fluorescence microscopy acquisitions. The experiments demonstrate improved reconstruction quality from noise-aware matching and Wiener filtering, while low-count phantom experiments show reduced denoising-induced intensity loss through mass conservation. The framework provides a unified, non-learning-based approach to denoising across arbitrary data dimensions and is released as an open-source library.
Read the full abstract
Computer Vision
Does Native 3D Texture Generation Necessarily Require 3D Assets for Training?
Native 3D texture generation synthesizes colors directly in 3D space for a given geometry, conditioned on multi-view reference images. It is generally believed that training such models requires large-scale, high-quality real 3D asset data, whose acquisition remains a long-standing and challenging problem. In this work, we propose Tex-Zero, demonstrating that a high-fidelity native 3D texture generation framework can be trained without 3D assets. Our key observation is that only high-quality and fine-grained color information is essential for 3D texture training, while the required geometric information is less critical and can be manually constructed rather than obtained from real 3D assets. This finding makes it possible to transform abundant, high-quality 2D images into effective training samples for 3D texture generation. Specifically, we convert high-quality 2D images into 3D training samples by representing each image as a plane in 3D space and applying patch-wise random rotations and aggregation to construct complex geometric structures. Using these constructed image data, we train the Tex-Zero VAE, which can reconstruct real 3D assets with high quality despite never observing them during training. Building upon the Tex-Zero VAE, we train the Tex-Zero DiT also exclusively on the constructed image data, where the conditioning 2D multi-view images are transformed into planes in 3D space and also encoded by the Tex-Zero VAE, thereby reducing the representation gap and improving generation quality. Extensive experiments show that Tex-Zero generates high-fidelity 3D textures with fine-grained details solely using images as training data, offering a promising perspective on the data paradigm for scaling 3D texture generation.
Read the full abstract
Numerical Analysis
Spectral analysis of a class of IRK stage preconditioners for linear wave equations
We lay out the analysis of the “Kronecker preconditioners” adopted in [24] for the linear wave equations. Importantly, we deliver the analysis justifying the claims in~[24, Section 4.2] about these preconditioners and we unpack all of the necessary numerical background for a full understanding of the observed phenomena.
Read the full abstract
Artificial Intelligence
LLMs for Executable Multi-Agent System Specification Generation
MAS specifications express the effects of the actions of the agents and their environment, as well as other temporal phenomena, such as the intervals during which an agent may perform an action. The specification of a MAS should also be executable in order to allow for run-time monitoring. Constructing the specification of a MAS requires formal language expertise, while machine learning techniques depend on labelled data which are rarely available. To address these issues, we propose `genRTEC', a method that leverages pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate executable MAS specifications, in the language of the `Run-Time Event Calculus' (RTEC), from natural language descriptions. genRTEC constructs MAS specifications with complex hierarchical and cyclic dependencies based only on short natural language descriptions of the concepts involved. We present an extensive empirical evaluation of genRTEC, spanning various MAS specifications, including both a qualitative and a quantitative assessment. Our results demonstrate that genRTEC constructs executable MAS specifications of high predictive accuracy without compromising reasoning efficiency.