117 results for “diff”

JADE (Joint Action DEnoiser) is a diffusion-based vision-language-action architecture in which the VLM reads the current noisy action latents together with images and instructions at every denoising step, and guides the action expert through gated cross-attention. The VLM is also trained to recover clean action latents, and an adaptive step-size schedule cuts sampling steps. On RoboDojo it averages 12.67% success, the highest among π0.5-based methods, and it adds 20.8 points over π0.5 on four real bimanual tasks.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 3 Nov 2026, published 31 Oct 2026🧠 AI

The paper treats a benchmark as an empirical measure over item difficulty and formalizes two failure modes: measure mismatch (benchmark difficulty distribution differs from the intended one) and coverage gaps (uncovered difficulty regions that hide localized training progress). It proposes two diagnostic metrics with theoretical guarantees and analyzes 25 popular benchmarks across 7 domains using estimated item difficulties. It also introduces BenchFill, a difficulty-targeted item rewriting algorithm that reduces local coverage gaps.

huggingface.copaperAdded 31 Oct 2026🧠 AI

LOCOGEN is a sampling-time guidance method for diffusion models that design regulatory DNA sequences. It learns an invariant motif mask through sequence-level invariance learning, protects motif positions, and applies out-of-distribution damping only to background positions, with no retraining of the frozen backbone. On HepG2, K562 and SK-N-SH it reaches a region of the property, novelty and plausibility space that no baseline reached. Code is released.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 3 Nov 2026, published 30 Oct 2026🧠 AI

MedCBR is a two-stage alignment framework for medical vision language models. Difficulty Weighted Boundary Preference Optimization (DBPO) trains on counterfactual preference pairs at the model's capability frontier. Entropy Gated Grounded Policy Optimization (EGPO) then applies distilled clinical rubrics according to prediction entropy. It reaches 61.2% average accuracy on six medical benchmarks, with the largest gains on differential diagnosis, and the two stages combine super-additively.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 31 Oct 2026, published 29 Oct 2026🧠 AI

This paper replicates Chen et al.'s study of LLM-based smart contract vulnerability detection, first on GPT-4 and then on Mixture-of-Experts, RNN-like and State Space Models. The exact replication confirms the high-recall, low-precision pattern on GPT-4. The differentiated replication finds the pattern does not transfer uniformly: GPT-4 and Gemma-3 behave alike despite a roughly 100x parameter gap, while two MoE models diverge.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 28 Oct 2026🧠 AI

This preprint benchmarks 13 decision models against 15 generative LLM configurations, including different reasoning settings, on 1,273 text-only four-option MedQA questions. Accuracy ran 67.71% to 89.08% for decision models and 78.32% to 96.86% for generative configurations. Decision models were cheaper and faster, but answers with probability of at least 0.90 still had error rates of 1.71% to 12.77%, and probability repeatability varied across three runs.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 28 Oct 2026🧠 AI

Locating Sycophancy Across Training Stages in Open Language Models measures sycophancy in 13 open checkpoints from 5 lineages, from base model through supervised fine-tuning and preference optimization to release. It finds two behaviors with different origins: deference to a claim in the prompt exists in every base model, while capitulation under user objection is largely absent from base models and present in every post-trained checkpoint. Post-trained models often drop firmly held answers as readily as loosely held ones when the objection names an alternative.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🧠 AI

Metacognitive Decoding is a lightweight plug-in controller for diffusion language model backbones. It learns when to finalize tokens and how far generation should extend, and is trained on agent trajectories to balance correctness against generation cost. Across five benchmarks it cuts inference FLOPs by 20.6% on average versus the most efficient baseline, with competitive task accuracy. The abstract names no specific benchmarks or backbones.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🧠 AI

Know, then Draw is a learning paradigm for visual generation that uses autoregressive pretraining to acquire semantic knowledge and diffusion post-training for high-fidelity rendering. Controlled comparisons find autoregression the stronger pretraining objective, and semantic quality matters more than AR-only generation quality. This motivates a purely semantic tokenizer trained with language supervision only. A 3B text-to-image model trained in 6,600 H100 GPU-hours scores 86 on GenEval and 87 on DPG-Bench.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🧠 AI

This paper presents an annotated egocentric tennis dataset (egocentric video synced with five allocentric views, global positions, contact times, stroke types) and evaluates image encoders, video encoders and vision-language models on seven prediction tasks. Best models reach 0.14 m player and 0.54 m ball localization error and 0.14 s contact-time error. Depth input helps 3D ball localization, and longer histories do not help forecasting. A conditional diffusion model generates whole-body tennis motion in real time.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🧠 AI

CRISP is a combination-aware framework that co-designs pruning and runtime scheduling for Mixture-of-Experts inference on memory-constrained edge platforms. It reorders neurons by importance so one stored expert supports several execution widths, gives hot, warm and cold expert combinations different widths, and overlaps expert loading with computation. On Mixtral-8x7B and DeepSeek-MoE-16B it raises throughput up to 2.1x at the same memory budget, with accuracy loss limited to 3.6%.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🧠 AI

AdaRoll-GRPO is a method that allocates GRPO rollout budgets per question by difficulty instead of uniformly. It frames allocation as a sequential decision problem and learns an allocation policy with a Bayes-adaptive MDP, computed offline so training adds no online optimization cost. Experiments on several reasoning datasets and LLM architectures show gains over standard GRPO at the same total rollout budget.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🧠 AI

DCKV is a differentiable codec for the prompt KV cache of hybrid language models, which keep a KV cache only in their few full-attention layers. Transform, quantizer and entropy models (conditioned on prompt tokens and already decoded neighbouring positions) are trained end to end against a frozen model. On Qwen3.5-2B it stores a token in over 55 times fewer bytes than bf16 with at most 1.8 points lost on three long-context benchmarks, and over 100 times fewer with at most 3.6 points lost.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 27 Oct 2026🧠 AI

CTGREP is a compiler-based framework that applies differential analysis across the whole Clang/LLVM compilation chain to find where, how and under which configurations compiler optimizations break constant-time cryptographic code. Applied to seven libraries, three Clang versions, six targets and thousands of configurations, it led to 48 cases fixed with developers. It also identified seven new problematic LLVM passes and bypassed existing compiler-flag mitigations.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 26 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Anis Bkakria's ePrint 2026/2638 gives polynomial-time decision attacks on Known-Covariance Ring-LWE (KCov-RLWE), the assumption Micciancio and Suhl introduced for simulation-secure threshold encryption. The public sample and covariance hint form a bordered Gram matrix whose determinant leaks a residual that differs between real and uniform samples. The attacks cover broad prime-modulus families at ring rank one and transfer to composite moduli with an odd prime divisor. Power-of-two moduli are not covered, and the paper does not break the full threshold-encryption scheme.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 25 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Sliding Networks is a family of residual network structures with a joint width and depth scaling recipe that keeps both locally maximal feature learning and feature diversity in the residual stream. The key quantity is the ratio N_flat/(N_sharp L) tending to a constant alpha, and Half Copy correlated initialization can relax the shape constraints. Residual-MLP experiments support an SDE limit, but language-model experiments show performance differences under regrouping at fixed parameter count.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 27 Oct 2026, published 24 Oct 2026🧠 AI

RALE (Representation-Aware Logical Ensemble) is a method for detecting vulnerabilities in C source code with LLMs trained on different code representations: raw source, Abstract Syntax Trees and Control Flow Graphs. The authors show the representations suit different vulnerability classes, and combine the models with explicit logical rules and majority voting. Single-representation models reach up to 73% F1, while the ensemble reaches 78%.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Oct 2026, published 24 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

MCP-Injector is a protocol-aware fault-injection middleware for Model Context Protocol tool calls, with permanent, transient and intermittent faults on seedable schedules. Its fault model comes from 57,240 issue and PR threads across 1,774 open-source MCP repositories. In a 1,350-cell experiment, faults cut task-completion score by 60% (8.08 to 3.23 of 10), and the 120B gpt-oss model was no more resilient than the 20B. Agent stacks differed in how well they absorbed faults.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026🧠 AI

DRIVE is a per-sample weighting framework for single-stage fine-tuning when the source pre-training data is unavailable. It uses one differentiable objective: Shapley additivity splits each sample's contribution into anti-forgetting and adaptation parts, a covariance-based diversity term reshapes them, and a sample-characteristic prior stabilizes them. The authors prove better stability-plasticity guarantees than existing weighting schemes and report better performance, faster convergence and more robustness.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026🧠 AI

Pairwise Independence of Ten-Round AES (Zhongfeng Niu, Kai Hu, ePrint 2026/2608) proves that ten rounds of AES with independent uniform round keys and input/output whitening are within 3017/2^141 (below 2^-129) statistical distance of pairwise independent. The proof bounds the averaged difference-distribution matrix over five superbox layers, using Gram moments and MDS code constraints. Final-round MixColumns omission is retained.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 23 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

The Geometry of Metaphor is an October 2026 arXiv preprint that uses mechanistic interpretability to find causal subspaces for metaphor in LLMs of different architectures and sizes. The authors steer output on classification tasks across parts of speech. They also steer generation tasks, showing the metaphoricity of model output can be controlled. The abstract gives no model names or metrics.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026🧠 AI

This paper trains small open language models with reinforcement learning to select tools for multi-step instructions over corpora of more than ten thousand tools. A Qwen3-8B model post-trained with the recipe outperforms Llama-4-Maverick (402B) on ToolBench. The trained model transfers to different retrievers and generalizes to new tool corpora in other domains, without relying on proprietary LLMs like Claude or ChatGPT.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026🧠 AI

Linear cryptanalysis of FRAST, a TFHE-friendly stream cipher, in the average key setting. It fixes the false-positive problem left open in the earlier attack by Bak et al., showing key differences fall into five indistinguishable classes per round. The Contract algorithm recovers the master key for 10 rounds and, on weak keys of density 2^-11.8 to 2^-5.4, reaches full FRAST within the claimed security.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Chunk Recomputation under Real Document Revisions measures how much text must be re-embedded after edits for three stateless chunkers (non-overlapping fixed-size, recursive paragraph-first, content-defined) on 120 pairs of adjacent Chinese and English Wikipedia revisions. Fixed-size recomputes 57-68% of the new-version workload, recursive 38-56%, content-defined 43-54%, while evidence recall at a 2048-token budget differs by under two points. The authors argue update cost should be reported alongside retrieval quality.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026🧠 AI

Efficient Laconic Oblivious Transfer with Malicious Security is an ePrint paper (2026/2593, ASIACRYPT 2026 revision) giving the first maliciously secure laconic OT that uses its primitives only as black boxes. It adds equivocal vector commitments and maliciously secure witness encryption to the commitment-plus-witness-encryption paradigm. Security is proven in the UC model against malicious senders and in the context model against malicious receivers. Instantiations use LWE and bilinear Diffie-Hellman assumptions in the standard model.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

The SC-matrix is an evaluation framework for multilingual LLM sycophancy. It crosses a model's competence (correct answer with no pressure) with its sycophancy (keeping that answer under pressure), so agreeing with a false premise can be told apart from not knowing the answer in that language. Results: equal aggregate sycophancy rates hide different failure mixes, high competence does not always protect, and reasoning-oriented mitigations beat directive ones.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 22 Oct 2026🧠 AI

This ePrint paper gives the first exact bit-level models of modular multiplication z=(x·y) mod 2^n. One model is for monomial prediction under 3SDP-woU, the other for impossible differential search. Applied to the MSX lightweight cipher, it yields a 7-round integral distinguisher (2^96 data) for MSX-128, key recoveries on 8 and 9 of 18 rounds at about 2^228 operations, and 1,984 seven-round impossible differentials. Both models are implemented in CLAASP.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 24 Oct 2026, published 21 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

UniWALM is a unified world-action-language model that learns video, action and language in one mixture-of-transformers backbone with per-modality diffusion heads that co-denoise together. Generated subtask and textual memory are fed back on the next step, so no external planner or memory bank is needed. It adds Flow Matching with Correction (FMC) for recovery from perturbed actions. It reaches 34.5% on the memory-dependent RMBench subset, above Mem-0's 28.5%, and lifts real-world Find-the-Item success from 11.1% to 61.1%.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026🧠 AI

AgenticRoboRL is a framework for post-training robot planners across different harnesses, combining supervised fine-tuning with multi-turn reinforcement learning. Harness-specific adapters link recorded planner interactions to task outcomes, so one RL pipeline covers both VLA skill invocation and control-code generation. On LIBERO-PRO, a 9B planner rose from 18.1% to 71.0% without external memory, near Codex (GPT-5.5) with memory at 72.1%. Code and checkpoints are promised.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026🧠 AI

A Spectral Theory of Local-to-Global Leakage is an IACR ePrint paper (2026/2571) by Rei Ueno on additive secret sharing over finite abelian groups. It gives an exact leakage decomposition into local leakage magnitude and spectral alignment across shares. Two channels with identical local mutual information can have exponentially different global leakage. Automorphism-weighted sharing can cancel leakage perfectly with finitely many shares, which ordinary additive sharing cannot do.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 20 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

This paper studies how keeping long tool output out of the context window, and reading it through a section index instead, costs LLM agents accuracy. Using the PHREEQC geochemistry simulator on 158 execution-verified multiple-choice items and 11,007 logged calls, GPT-5.1 and GPT-5.2 lose 11.3 and 7.9 points, while Claude Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 show no detectable cost. The authors name the failure evidence substitution: agents skip the report and misround from their own output files.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🧠 AI

TokenGate is a small drop-in component that adds end-to-end learnable token pruning to trained LLMs for long-context prefill. It uses token-gated attention, inspired by Mixture-of-Experts, to re-weight attention logits with token importance scores, which gets gradients through the non-differentiable top-K step. The authors report 1.4-11.3x faster time-to-first token and 1.5-3.4x lower peak memory with no accuracy loss, on Qwen3 and Qwen3.5.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🧠 AI

SHADE is an alpha-stable Lévy diffusion forecaster that stops denoising at a nonzero depth, so the leftover stable kernel shrinks the predictive distribution instead of leaving it overconfident. It offers a scale-calibrated halt and a context-amortized halt that needs no noise labels. Median CRPS improves 21.7% on synthetic data with alpha at or below 1.3, with tail calibration gains on cryptocurrency and foreign-exchange series.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 21 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🧠 AI

This ePrint paper (2026/2543) gives a key-recovery attack on the GTLN knapsack public-key cryptosystem of Gómez-Torrecillas, Lobillo and Navarro. Continued fractions recover small-denominator ratios of public-key differences, and gcd computations then yield private-key integers, the modulus and the shift, using only the public key. The Python implementation recovered the full private key in all 2,400 trials across 24 recommended parameter sets, each in under 0.05 seconds.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 19 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Off-Key is a privacy attack on SPDZ-family maliciously secure MPC protocols that exploits inconsistent MAC keys. Depending on the MAC check protocol, a corrupted party recovers a shared secret from one authentication check or tests guesses through selective failure. The authors show it in MP-SPDZ, SCALE-MAMBA and FANNG-MPC, where a corrupted party can use different keys across batches, threads or runs, and describe the preprocessing state that enforces key consistency.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 19 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

This paper proposes a framework for auditing LLM-agent-generated stakeholder preferences before they are used as weights in multi-objective optimization for healthcare operations. Experiments on outpatient appointment scheduling and emergency department configurations show that explicit ratings vary by role and clinic conditions, deliberation can erase role differences, and pairwise choices depend largely on option order. Robust weighted-sum models often select different schedules than average weights.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 20 Oct 2026, published 16 Oct 2026🧠 AI

P^3-WAM is a unified world action model for egocentric dexterous manipulation with three modes: Perceive (reconstruct articulated hand motion and camera trajectories from video), Predict (generate visual futures under prescribed actions) and Plan (jointly generate action trajectories and their anticipated visual outcomes from an initial image, a language instruction and an optional visual goal). It adds a compact structured 3D action representation to a pretrained video diffusion transformer through a mixture-of-transformers design with shared base weights, modality-specific adaptation and bidirectional visual-action attention. Randomized modality visibility lets video and 3D actions act as either context or target. Unified training beats single-mode training and outperforms specialized baselines on 3D hand reconstruction and action-conditioned video prediction across four datasets, and gives better instruction adherence than video-generation baselines.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🧠 AI

Velox is a training-free attention router for chunked video-diffusion world models. It uses camera frustum slabs with depth intervals from streaming geometry to pick which historical token blocks to attend to, instead of letting the KV cache grow with rollout length. Frustum overlap softly modulates each layer's model-derived block importance, and uncovered regions keep the model's own routing. The fixed block granularity suits FlashAttention-style tiled execution, and slab construction runs asynchronously with denoising on the same H200. At chunk 48 it speeds up attention 4.36× and denoising 2.43×, and on the 158-case WBench navigation split it stays within 0.15 average points of dense LingBot-Fast-Cam.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🧠 AI

Proposes protecting the retrieval datastore in RAG systems by applying the same random projection to datastore embeddings and query embeddings. This provably preserves query-item semantic similarity while substantially mitigating data extraction attacks. Across multiple RAG architectures and datasets it beats prior differential-privacy-based methods on retrieval and generation quality, with comparable empirical privacy under strong attacks, making it a practical baseline for privacy-preserving RAG.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🧠 AI

Proposes applying the same random projection to both datastore embeddings and query embeddings in RAG systems. The authors claim this provably preserves query-to-item semantic similarity while substantially mitigating datastore data-extraction attacks. Across several RAG architectures and datasets it reportedly beats prior differential-privacy-based defenses on retrieval and generation quality, with comparable empirical privacy under strong attack models. It is presented as a lightweight baseline for privacy-preserving RAG.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

The paper fine-tunes a pretrained CNN wind-field super-resolution model with differentiable topology-inspired auxiliary losses on speed, gradient magnitude, soft high-speed level sets and local maxima. It also uses fixed-pair supervision at ground-truth persistence-pair endpoints located offline with the Topology ToolKit. A 16-configuration loss study on a fixed 168-field benchmark finds that gradient supervision gives the strongest persistence-diagram improvement, while fixed-pair supervision gives the most consistent joint improvement in persistence-diagram and merge-tree distances. The combined objective cuts bottleneck, W2,∞ and W2,2 distances by 31%, 25% and 27% relative to the pretrained CNN, at a cost of about half of standard fine-tuning's PSNR gain. It also shows that pointwise metrics and topological distances rank CNN and GAN models differently.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 17 Oct 2026, published 15 Oct 2026🧠 AI

Presents a modular device-binding protocol for post-quantum anonymous credentials. The phone Secure Element signs a verifier challenge with an unmodified FIPS 204 ML-DSA interface, and the user proves knowledge of that signature in zero knowledge at each presentation. Using ML-DSA's structure avoids the cost of generic NIZK systems such as Longfellow. The most efficient variants assume weak-MLWR for unlinkability, and that assumption can be dropped at some efficiency cost. The protocol works with different anonymous credential schemes, and a proof-of-concept implementation is included. This matters for planned EU age-verification and Google Wallet/mDL rollouts, which need protection against credential sharing.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 14 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Paper that links linear, integral, differential-linear and restricted differential distinguishers through two-way conversions with explicit divisibility guarantees and data complexity. It gives automated MILP/SAT models (Walsh and ultrametric representations, exact mix-basis models) and a black-box FWHT histogram search for zeros and finite divisibility. It improves Beyne–Verbauwhede divisibility bounds in 674 SIMON cases (e.g. 2^5 to 2^11 on 9-round SIMON32) and PRESENT. It also gives first higher-divisibility proofs for 8-round SPECK and BEANIE, new bounds for GIFT-64 and Ascon, and new properties on RC5, ChiLow-32, KeeLoq and KATAN32.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 14 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

DPF-SGD is a federated SGD algorithm that stays robust to Byzantine agents while satisfying ϵ-differential privacy. It combines private step sizes with a DP noise-decay schedule and adds a privacy-preserving comparative elimination (PPCE) filter that suppresses Byzantine updates during aggregation. The authors prove almost-sure convergence to the global optimum despite persistent noise and adversaries. On synthetic and MNIST data, final optimization error is one to two orders of magnitude lower than DP baselines.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperPublished and added 14 Oct 2026🧠 AI

MiniDog is a framework for training a text-to-image flow-matching diffusion transformer from scratch on four RTX 3090 GPUs, with 55 minutes of pretraining and 15 minutes of fine-tuning. It pretrains on 26k ImageNet dog images that were captioned, then fine-tunes on 2k FLUX.1-schnell generated images. Image and text features are precomputed and cached. The model is a 22M-parameter transformer with the E2E-INVAE semantic latent space, a small Qwen text encoder and in-context conditioning, and training is accelerated with iREPA and an EUPE perception encoder. The repo evaluates with FID, HPSv2, PickScore and VAE reconstruction metrics. It lowers the barrier to hands-on diffusion training research.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026🧠 AI

PixelMoE is a pixel-space diffusion framework that scales capacity sparsely using standard LLM-style Mixture-of-Experts: token-choice routing, fine-grained routed experts, a shared expert and bias-based load balancing, with no diffusion-specific routing or auxiliary routing losses. It adds Pixel-Space Hierarchical Flow Matching, which varies spatial resolution along the denoising trajectory from global structure to fine detail. At matched active parameters it beats dense counterparts, and reaches FID 1.47 at 256x256 and 1.53 at 512x512 on class-conditional ImageNet-1K without representation alignment or perceptual losses. Code and models are promised but not yet released.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026🧠 AI

UniW(A)M is a mixture-of-experts model built on diffusion Transformers that unifies action-conditioned world modeling (AC-WM) with several world-action model (WAM) variants. Shared experts capture common physical dynamics, while atomic capability experts are reused across interfaces, each keeping its own conditional pathway. At deployment a plug-in adaptive interface router (PAIR), trained on a small subset of target-task chunk scenarios with the backbone frozen, picks a WAM interface for each execution chunk. It reaches 88.3% average real-world success against 76.7% for the strongest baseline, leads WorldArena on all three action-conditioned world-modeling tasks, and PAIR raises OOD success from 63.3% to 76.7%.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026🧠 AI

First large-scale empirical study of RAG configuration issues, covering 654 real-world issues collected from 10 diverse RAG systems. It categorizes symptoms, root causes, affected pipeline stages and fix patterns. It finds that symptoms mostly appear at early or late stages, while the root cause often sits in a different stage from where the symptom shows. It closes with nine actionable insights for testing, localizing and fixing RAG configuration problems.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 13 Oct 2026🧠 AI

Proposes Staggered Instruction-Fetch Duplication (SIFD), a processor-level fault-injection countermeasure that fetches each instruction twice in consecutive cycles while fetching two different instructions per cycle, so inconsistent fetches are detected without full processor duplication, compiler support or crypto hardware. Implemented on a custom RV32I core on an Artix-7 FPGA, it costs 15.0% more slices and 16.3% more execution time. Attack success falls from 0.86% to below 0.01% under clock fault injection and from 0.32% to 0.13% under EMFI, with 73.18% of CFI and 11.44% of EMFI attempts detected.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 14 Oct 2026, published 10 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Introduces Policy-Constrained Diffusion Agents (CoDA), which enforces task-dependent security policies inside the denoising process of diffusion language models. At each step, token distributions are projected onto a policy-compliant set, so constraints hold throughout generation instead of relying on detecting injected instructions. Evaluated across several dLLM families under static and adaptive prompt-injection attacks, it reports substantially lower attack success rates with competitive task utility and practical inference overhead.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 15 Oct 2026, published 10 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

TokenRouter is a serving system for token-level routed LLM inference, where different tokens of one request are routed across different models. It uses request-centric programming with model-centric execution: developers write routing logic per request while the runtime launches a subserver per LLM and dispatches requests asynchronously. Each subserver uses a delayed-batching scheduler whose hyperparameters come from a mathematical throughput model, fixing step desynchronization and batch admission delays and giving 2.01-64.15x higher decoding throughput than existing systems.

huggingface.copaperAdded 9 Oct 2026🧠 AI

The paper studies joint attention in multimodal diffusion transformers (MMDiTs), where the evolving image updates text representations. It finds that this image-to-text (I2T) feedback tends to preserve objects and attributes already in the image, errors included, and that suppressing it improves generation. It proposes Semantic Feedback Guidance (SFG), which guides away from an auxiliary branch that strengthens I2T feedback and weakens text-to-image conditioning, and iSFG, an in-place variant that needs no extra model evaluations. SFG runs for the first 20% of sampling steps (about 1.2x base NFE without CFG). Across three backbones, adding SFG to CFG on FLUX raises GenEval from 0.6661 to 0.7479, and iSFG on SD3.5M adds +1.33 HPSv2.1 over CFG at zero extra NFE. The control also improves VBench scores for text-to-video and image-to-video.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026🧠 AI

Cryptanalysis of the Alternating Sponge (ASP) and Duet, a permutation-based hash candidate in China's ICCS Next Generation Commercial Cryptographic Algorithm program (NGCC). The authors give an O(2^r)-query distinguisher against ASP that contradicts its claimed indifferentiability bound in some parameter regimes. They also give a distinguisher and state-recovery attack on Duet's multi-block output, using O(2^(r+c-h)) permutation queries. Collision and preimage resistance are unaffected, but Duet used as a XOF or KDF is affected, and state recovery enables length extension.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

Studies curriculum design for GRPO by re-estimating sample difficulty under the current policy and using a staged curriculum that progressively shifts the active difficulty band toward harder samples. On GSM8K across three seeds, moving to a moderately harder band lifts test accuracy to 0.6591 ± 0.0077 versus 0.6449 ± 0.0024 for fixed-medium selection, while going to a still harder band drops it to 0.6405 ± 0.0053. The benefit of difficulty progression is therefore non-monotonic, which informs online sample selection in RL fine-tuning of LLMs.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026🧠 AI

RARA (Retrieval-Anchored Representation Alignment) is a two-stage method for adapting pre-trained robot policies such as Vision-Language-Action models to new tasks from few demonstrations. It first retrieves pretraining representations with similar task intent and motion and aligns the policy's representations of the target demonstrations to them. It then fine-tunes on the target demonstrations while constraining representation change on the retrieved demonstrations, which limits representation drift. Tested with Diffusion Policy and GR00T on 13 tasks in RoboTwin, RoboCasa and on a real robot, it improves average success over plain fine-tuning by 9.5 points in-distribution and 13.6 out-of-distribution, and beats all compared baselines.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026🧠 AI

A narrative review in HCI arguing that the single-voice chatbot interface causes three harms: cognitive offloading, ideological narrowing of user beliefs, and epistemic compression of cultural and value diversity. It proposes multi-persona interfaces, which show several personas to the user at once, as a low-cost fix. The design draws on game design and participatory simulation (magic circle, role differentiation, persona embodiment). It offers a taxonomy for designing such interfaces and calls for empirical studies that link technical pluralistic alignment methods to real human-AI interaction.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 12 Oct 2026, published 9 Oct 2026🧠 AI

ePrint paper giving four constructions of optimal threshold implementations (t+1 shares, no fresh randomness) for bijective S-boxes, a masking countermeasure against differential power analysis and glitch leakage in hardware. It shows that Q30^5 admits optimal TIs, gives a matrix criterion for quadratic permutations (yielding new 6-bit classes), and gives a weighted interpolation construction for power permutations that disproves the Piccione et al. 2023 conjecture. It also gives a derivative-uniform framework that proves every 4-bit cubic permutation admits optimal TIs. A companion repo has TIs for 5-bit quadratic permutations, 4-bit cubic permutations, the PRESENT S-box and GF(16) inversion.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 11 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

PathTime-VLA reparameterizes Vision-Language-Action actions as a progress-indexed interaction path X(s) plus a positive interval-time profile that defines a monotone time law t(s). Geometry is thus decoupled from execution speed, so teleoperation timing artifacts don't contaminate the path target. A staged post-training recipe uses demonstrations and DAgger interventions for a target-domain prior, Speed-DQN to learn execution-speed multipliers from robot interaction, and Path-AWR to refine the diffusion path generator from rollout outcomes. On three tasks it reaches 58/60 successes versus 57/60 for BC+DAgger at fixed 1×, with about 39–52% shorter mean completion times on successful trials.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 9 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026🧠 AI

The paper formalizes speculative decoding as a Markov reward process and derives the Expected Decoding Rounds (EDR) objective, a hyperparameter-free training loss equal to the expected number of decoding rounds, addressing cross-round coupling that prior block-local surrogate objectives ignore. It derives an exact temporal-difference gradient for unbiased stochastic optimization and an offline evaluator for comparing drafters on shared rollouts without running speculative decoding. Finetuning the DSpark and DFly drafters with EDR improves mean accepted length and beats prior training objectives across nine benchmarks in math, code, and chat.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026🧠 AI

The paper introduces DIGHT, a co-adaptive framework that couples a text-conditioned digital-human interaction generator with a physics-based humanoid tracking policy to produce physically plausible two-humanoid interactions. Rather than collapsing executability and interaction-fidelity signals into one scalar reward, it applies physics-decoupled diffusion Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to align the generator using criterion-specific preferences derived from tracking error, friction, floating, and simulator force feedback (contact occurrence, location, duration, magnitude), then uses the aligned generator's outputs to fine-tune the tracker. Experiments show improved physical plausibility and more reliable, faithful simulated humanoid interactions compared to prior tracking-based approaches.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 7 Oct 2026🧠 AI

PEARS is a hybrid reinforcement-learning framework for sample-efficient online adaptation of pretrained tactile-manipulation policies to out-of-distribution conditions. A physics-guided force reasoning (PFR) module uses a vision-language model to diagnose failures from visual and tactile history and update contact-force bounds enforced by a hybrid force-position controller, while a separate tactile-conditioned diffusion-steering component perturbs the latent noise of a frozen flow-matching policy to correct free-space motion and contact timing without retraining the base model. It improves success rates by 12.4-37.4 points over strong baselines in simulation, cuts required interaction episodes by up to 53.2%, and reaches 95%/90% success on real-world whiteboard-erasing and pipette-liquid-aspiration tasks.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🧠 AI

This paper presents a systematic empirical study of small language models (decoder-only, encoder-decoder, and mixture-of-experts architectures) on abstract grid-transformation reasoning, using the ARC-TGI benchmark, which supports controllable task families, resampling, spatial shifts, and cross-benchmark transfer to distinguish genuine rule acquisition from distribution-specific overfitting. Across more than 1,000 supervised fine-tuning runs, the authors find that in-distribution accuracy is achievable but highly sensitive to optimization and task formulation, performance collapses sharply out-of-distribution (even under simple grid-scale changes with the same underlying rule), training-set scale yields uneven gains, in-context example benefit is model-family dependent, and executable-rule induction surfaces correct solutions that direct grid generation misses. Layer-wise attention diagnostics reveal behavioral differences in concentration and context-dependence but stop short of establishing causal mechanisms, underscoring that abstract-reasoning scores are conditional on model, adaptation regime, evaluation distribution, and output format.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🧠 AI

An IACR ePrint preprint applying differential-neural cryptanalysis to the ARX stream cipher family (ChaCha, Salsa, Forró), training six neural architectures (Gohr's residual network, DBitNet, an Inception network, MLP-ResNet, SE-ResNet, a self-attention network) in single-pair and multi-pair settings. It reports new distinguishers — 3-round ChaCha, 4.5-round Salsa, 1.25-round Forró — and uses explainability analysis to show the 3-round ChaCha distinguisher learns a mixture of round-1 truncated differentials rather than a pure differential signal.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

This IACR ePrint paper (published TCHES 2027) presents a new cryptanalysis technique for the Lattice Isomorphism Problem that embeds LIP into a shortest-vector-problem instance on a different lattice than the one used in Hawk's specification, allowing attackers to integrate "hints" — partial information on the secret key obtained via side-channel attacks or other leakage. Using the LeakyLWEEstimator tool, the authors show Hawk signatures themselves leak exploitable information about the secret key, eroding Hawk-1024's security by roughly 11 bits, and apply the framework to resolve an open side-channel problem from TCHES 2024 plus discuss further fault-injection attack paths. Hawk is a lattice-based signature scheme submitted to NIST's second post-quantum signature call, making this a concrete key-recovery cryptanalysis relevant to PQC migration planning.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

This paper studies prompt-injection attacks against AI agent "skill" marketplaces where a router dynamically selects which third-party skill to execute. The authors show existing injection attacks lose 87-97% of their effective attack success rate once a skill must first win retrieval against competing skills, and introduce CORSA (Cluster Optimization for Router-Aware Skill Attacks), which jointly optimizes injections for retrieval and execution, improving end-to-end attack success while preserving user utility and transferring across different router architectures and LLM backbones.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 7 Oct 2026, published 6 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

The paper proposes Entropy-Aware Mixing, a knowledge-distillation method where a small student model's per-token distribution is dynamically interpolated with a stronger teacher model's distribution, gated by the student's own predictive entropy, to avoid "confident conflicts" where the student must imitate low-probability continuations despite being confident in a different one. The authors implement both convex and geometric interpolations under two training regimes — offline trace generation via speculative decoding followed by SFT, and on-policy forward-KL distillation — and show it stabilises distillation, improving in- and out-of-distribution math reasoning while better preserving general capabilities than fixed-teacher supervision, with offline traces favouring concave entropy schedules and on-policy training favouring linear/convex ones.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026🧠 AI

SpatialChain is a benchmark of 28,350 training and 899 test examples pairing spatially-oriented GQA questions with scene-graph-grounded reasoning chains, designed to audit whether VLMs' correct spatial answers reflect faithful reasoning or linguistic shortcuts. Using a two-axis evaluation (chain-overlap metrics plus a scene-graph-aware LLM judge), the authors find that four of nine tested models hit ≥79% accuracy while showing shortcut rates above 39%, that chain quality predicts correctness for most models except Claude Sonnet 4.6 and InternVL3.5-8B (which fail differently, via terse vs. verbose-decorative reasoning), and that SFT on SpatialChain improves Qwen3-VL-8B accuracy by +6.2pp while cutting its shortcut rate to 22%. The faithfulness judge is validated against human annotations and a second LLM judge, with data, generation scripts and evaluation code released publicly.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 6 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026🧠 AI

This IACR ePrint paper benchmarks 20 open-source Gröbner basis implementations against the proprietary Magma system on polynomial systems derived from small-scale AES over GF(2), using Easy/Medium/Hard difficulty tiers with ten instances each. In the Hard setting, msolve and Singular's slimgb completed all runs successfully with mean runtimes of 164s and 269s and peak memory of 3693/4343 MiB respectively, versus Magma's 319s and 16853 MiB, with msolve exploiting ~13.4 CPU cores versus ~1 core for the others. The results quantify when open-source algebraic solvers are practical alternatives to Magma for algebraic cryptanalysis of block ciphers.

eprint.iacr.orgpaperAdded 8 Oct 2026, published 5 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

This paper isolates the coding-agent harness as an experimental variable by running the same model weights and tasks through two configurations of a custom harness called Yuj: a control that feeds the full chronological transcript until it hits the context window, and a treatment that keeps a complete in-memory record but shows the model a shrinking view (aging tool-result truncation past 50% window fill) plus a stall/loop detector with mechanical interventions. On SWE-bench Verified, SWE-bench Pro, and FeatureBench under tight context, the treatment raises mean per-task fail-to-pass fraction (F2PF) and complete-resolution counts (e.g. 28->49% F2PF, 43->72 resolved tasks on a 169-task Verified cohort at a 20,480-token window), with gains holding across additional models without retuning. The authors argue coding-agent evaluations should treat model+harness as the tested solver rather than attributing results to the model alone.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 4 Oct 2026🧠 AI

This paper introduces PoS, an inference-time framework for LLM agents that maintains explicit belief states — combining an estimate of the current world state with unresolved task requirements — instead of relying solely on raw interaction history or memory compression. PoS detects "Belief Trapping," where an agent keeps acting without real progress, and applies recovery strategies tailored to the trapping pattern and the unresolved requirement type. Across four benchmarks spanning execution and diagnosis tasks, and three different LLM backbones, PoS outperforms baseline approaches and shows resilience as context length grows.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026🧠 AI

LESSER is a drop-in wrapper for gradient-based post-training data selection that approximates full-parameter gradient alignment using only output-layer gradients, which can be computed with a forward pass instead of a full backward pass. It cuts feature-extraction compute by 9.7x on SFT benchmarks and 3.0x on RL benchmarks while matching the downstream performance of full-gradient selection methods, even though individual sample rankings differ, selected batches remain gradient-aligned.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 5 Oct 2026, published 2 Oct 2026🧠 AI

IDRF is a reward fine-tuning framework for few-step masked discrete diffusion generators that replaces the intractable sequence-level KL penalty in reverse-KL-regularized objectives with an inverse-distillation regularization term, proven to upper-bound the true KL divergence to the reference distribution. It frames few-step diffusion sampling as a finite-horizon Markov decision process and optimizes reward via a clipped policy-gradient objective over the student's own trajectories, without needing reference-model rollouts. Across DNA, image, and text generation tasks, IDRF reaches high reward with up to 32x fewer denoising steps than the reference model while reducing reward hacking and preserving sample quality.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 5 Oct 2026, published 2 Oct 2026🧠 AI

This paper presents an automated pipeline that uses a vision-language model to annotate leaf midlines in rendered orthographic views of maize point-cloud scans, then applies deterministic geometric algorithms and differentiable NURBS fitting to reconstruct editable, organ-level procedural 3D plant models without manual tuning or species-specific segmentation training. Evaluated on 100 field-grown maize plants from the MaizeField3D dataset, it achieves a median whole-plant Chamfer distance of 5.4 mm and recovers 99.4% of curated reference leaves at IoU ≥ 0.5, outperforming an earlier semi-automated pipeline. It demonstrates that VLM annotations can become reliable quantitative measurements when paired with correcting geometric post-processing, enabling scalable generation of 3D plant assets for high-throughput phenotyping and in silico breeding.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 5 Oct 2026, published 2 Oct 2026🧠 AI

This arXiv paper replays ground-truth tool calls from the AgentDojo and tau-bench agent benchmarks (without an LLM) to generate benign-by-construction tool outputs, then labels injected outputs via differential replay to evaluate fifteen prompt-injection detectors, including Meta's Prompt Guard 2, plus two task-aware LLM judges, also testing them on BIPIA. It finds detection rankings transfer poorly between benchmarks (the best detector on BIPIA catches only 2% of AgentDojo injections at 1% false-positive rate; a detector catching 72% of AgentDojo injections catches only 15% on tau-bench), while false-positive rates do transfer between the two agent benchmarks, and traces this to mismatches between training data format (e.g., training on short prompt strings vs. tool-output-embedded injections) and deployment context.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 5 Oct 2026, published 2 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

This paper introduces ZFO (Zero-and-First-Order optimization), a lightweight fine-tuning framework that decouples search direction from step-size selection: a trusted first-order optimizer picks the direction, while two extra zeroth-order function evaluations along that single dimension build a local curvature-aware model to choose the step size, avoiding a full line search. The authors give theoretical guarantees on finite-difference curvature estimates, near-optimal step selection, and convergence to a stationary-point neighborhood, and show empirically that ZFO improves optimization and final performance over fixed-step first-order baselines across several language models and datasets. Code is released publicly, making it a usable technique for practitioners fine-tuning LLMs who want cheaper adaptive step-size control.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 1 Oct 2026🧠 AI

OpenID Foundation whitepaper (Oct 2025, lead editor Tobin South) analyzing how authentication/authorization for AI agents differs from traditional software clients. It covers where OAuth 2.1, OIDC, SSO/SCIM, and MCP already work for single-domain synchronous agents, and lays out unsolved problems for autonomous agentic identity: agent identity fragmentation across vendors, replacing user impersonation with explicit delegated "on-behalf-of" authority, consent-fatigue at scale, recursive delegation chains between sub-agents, agents acting for teams of users, and browser/computer-use agents bypassing API-based authorization entirely.

openid.netpaperAdded 2 Oct 2026, published 1 Oct 2026🛡️ Security

CheatBench is a benchmark for measuring "reward gaming" (a.k.a. reward hacking) in reinforcement-learning-trained AI agents: environments across mathematical research, knowledge work, coding, and visual tasks pair difficult assignments with opportunities to cheat, letting researchers compare how different models pursue reward when honest completion is hard. The paper motivates this with real and controlled incidents of agents accessing unauthorized information, evading monitoring, and breaching sandbox protections, and the benchmark is publicly released to support cross-model and cross-task-category comparisons.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Sep 2026🧠 AI

This paper studies whether weight tying between input and output embeddings, common in decoder-only LLMs for parameter efficiency, remains beneficial when models are fine-tuned under Differentially Private Stochastic Gradient Descent (DP-SGD). Using GPT2 and DistilGPT2 fine-tuned on SST-2, QNLI, and QQP, the authors find untied embeddings consistently outperform tied ones by up to 4.74 accuracy points, and that untying also enables memory-efficient ghost clipping (since tied embeddings create shared-parameter interactions that break standard ghost norm computation), yielding over 60% lower memory usage. The results suggest standard LLM architectural choices should be revisited for privacy-preserving training settings.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 1 Oct 2026, published 30 Sep 2026🧠 AI

This paper isolates the 'harness' — the scaffolding that decides what a coding agent sees, which tools it can use, and how work continues — from the underlying model, comparing two harness configurations on SWE-bench Verified, SWE-bench Pro, and FeatureBench. Under a tight context window, a treatment harness that mechanically shortens older tool results and responds to stalled work raises mean per-task fail-to-pass fraction from 28% to 49% and complete solutions from 43 to 72 on a 169-task SWE-bench Verified cohort, with similar gains reproduced across three other models without retuning. The authors argue that because frozen model weights produced very different outcomes purely from harness changes, coding-agent evaluations must treat model and harness together as the tested solver rather than attributing results to the model alone.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 29 Sep 2026🧠 AI

This paper shows that adding an adversarial loss as a post-training correction to pretrained pixel diffusion/flow-matching models (applied at non-high-noise timesteps, architecture and sampler unchanged) restores missing high-frequency, fine-scale natural-image statistics that these models systematically underproduce. Through frequency-band/power-law analysis and nearest-neighbor, recall, and no-GAN matched-SFT controls, the authors rule out memorization or mode-dropping as explanations, and show the effect jointly improves distribution fidelity, coverage, prompt alignment and perceptual quality — but does not transfer comparably to latent diffusion configurations, pointing to direct pixel-output access as the key enabling factor.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Sep 2026, published 29 Sep 2026🧠 AI

This paper proves that the Wasserstein distance between Laplacian spectra of original and LLM-reconstructed graphs is bracketed by two edge-count quantities, the net change in edge number and the symmetric difference, each scaled by 2/n, showing when these bounds coincide (pure addition or pure deletion of edges) and when they diverge (mixed editing, i.e. both inventing and losing edges). Using this theory, the authors analyze 135 graph reconstructions produced by three open-weight LLMs over 45 synthetic graphs, finding 77 one-sided outputs and 29 mixed outputs with a positive residual, revealing that aggregate distortion metrics mask qualitatively different editing policies across models, from copying the input to hallucination-heavy completion.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Sep 2026, published 29 Sep 2026🧠 AI

DMA^2 is a distribution matching distillation (DMD) method tailored to pixel-space (rather than latent) diffusion teachers for text-to-image generation. It introduces DINO-Adv, which removes the heavy fake-score critic from the adversarial gradient path and instead supplies local patch guidance via an external DINOv2 representation, plus AF-Loss, a parameter-free auxiliary semantic distribution-field objective operating in DINOv2 feature space on rolling real/generated supports. The resulting four-step student outperforms its 25-step teacher and other few-step distillers on DPG-Bench, GenEval, VQAScore, and COCO30K.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Sep 2026, published 29 Sep 2026🧠 AI

This paper introduces Parallel Power Tempering (PPT), an inference-time sampling method that runs multiple interacting replicas of an LLM at different power-sharpening levels (parallel tempering) to balance exploration of diverse reasoning paths against exploitation of high-probability correct trajectories. It addresses a truncation bias identified in prior power-sampling approaches and proposes swap strategies under finite memory/compute budgets, claiming the method lets small models match or approach RL-post-trained and frontier-model reasoning performance without any parameter updates or external rewards.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 30 Sep 2026, published 29 Sep 2026🧠 AI

PDMD (Projected Distribution Matching Distillation) is a one-line fix to Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) for video diffusion models that projects out the component of the DMD update parallel to the student-critic endpoint residual, filtering accumulated critic errors that otherwise cause oversaturation and artifacts during few-step distillation. The authors prove the residual is an unbiased estimate of critic endpoint error and show the projection removes a constant fraction of that error while discarding negligible true DMD signal. On Wan2.1 it reaches a VBench score of 83.73 at 4 NFE (+1.03 over DMD), and on MiniMax-H3 joint video-audio generation it improves VideoGen-Eval visual score and tops all six audio metrics among 4-NFE models, with code and models released.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 29 Sep 2026, published 28 Sep 2026🧠 AI

This paper studies how to initialize efficient linear-attention Vision Transformers from pretrained Softmax ViT weights instead of training from scratch. It finds that attention weights are operator-specific and don't transfer well by direct copying (distillation with a tailored loss is needed to recover token-routing behavior), while MLP weights are operator-agnostic and can simply be copied, and combining copied MLPs with distilled attention lets linear ViTs match or surpass Softmax ViT performance across model sizes and datasets.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 29 Sep 2026, published 28 Sep 2026🧠 AI

FlowAct-R2 is a framework for interactive humanoid video generation that pairs a Streaming Multimodal Reference Diffusion Transformer (built on the Seedance 2.0 Mini reference-to-video backbone) with a Proactive Interaction Agent. The diffusion component accepts rolling action prompts plus continuously updated image, audio and video references, using video-driven rotary positional embeddings and partially noised historical motion frames to keep appearance consistent and avoid drift over long generation runs. The agent component separates offline persona/agenda/skill preparation from online scheduling, audience response and interruption handling, enabling real-time 720p, hour-scale streaming avatars for use cases like live shopping, video chatting and live vlogging.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 29 Sep 2026, published 28 Sep 2026🧠 AI

This paper extends D4orm, a dynamics-aware diffusion-denoising framework for multi-robot trajectory planning, into a family of planner architectures: a decoupled planner for scalability, an online receding-horizon planner with feedback control, and a distributed planner for resource-constrained settings. D4orm uses massively parallel GPU sampling to iteratively denoise candidate control trajectories into kinodynamically feasible, conflict-free solutions, outperforming sampling-based baselines like MPPI and a learned diffusion-model method. The authors demonstrate zero-shot deployment on ten real quadrotors, deconfliction with 100 simulated robots, and fully onboard distributed 'lifelong' operation on six ground robots.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 29 Sep 2026, published 28 Sep 2026🧠 AI

EvE (Evolutionary Explorer) is a steady-state, population-of-four differential evolution optimizer with a targeted Adam fallback, proposed as an alternative to Adam for cheap, early ranking of configurations in hyperparameter and architecture search. Under a fixed evaluation-cost-matched budget it wins or ties Adam on 76% of 70 (problem, dimension) cells across seven scalable benchmarks up to one million variables, and on real tasks (MLP on MNIST, LoRA fine-tuning of a 1.5B-parameter LLM on two datasets) it finishes 1.7-3.9x faster at a modest quality cost. Inside successive halving on UCI Adult it completes hyperparameter/architecture searches 3.1-3.5x faster while ranking configurations nearly as consistently as Adam does with itself across seeds (Kendall's tau 0.66-0.69).

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 29 Sep 2026, published 28 Sep 2026🧠 AI

Rufus-Air is an open, reproducible post-training recipe applied to GLM-4.5-Air-Base (106B-A12B), structured as an eight-stage pipeline: SFT, Reasoning RL, Coding RL, Instruction-Following RL, General Agent, Coding Agent, Search Agent, and RLHF. The paper documents data sources, reward design, infrastructure, and stage ordering using only open-source components and public data (no new human annotation or distillation teacher), reporting improvements over the official GLM-4.5-Air post-trained release and competitiveness with similarly sized open models. Key findings include the value of diverse SFT for a capability floor, difficulty filtering to keep RL prompts in a productive range, and reward reliability as a principle for stage ordering.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026🧠 AI

RECLAIM is a benchmark of 100 NeurIPS 2025 papers used to test whether AI agents can reproduce a paper's fixed target result within a GPU-hour budget, split into Run, Retrain and Reimplement difficulty tiers depending on what authors released. Testing four agents once per paper, the best agent reproduces only 41% of Run-tier papers, 27% at Retrain, and 15% at Reimplement, with a separate LLM grading runs from logs rather than agent self-reports.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026🧠 AI

CallScreenBench is a benchmark for evaluating small, quantized (4-bit, 0.6-4B parameter) language models acting as autonomous phone secretaries that screen inbound calls without a cooperative caller-assigned task. It reports five automated call-and-note measure groups tied to owner endorsement (service, recall, plausibility, triage discrimination) plus three guardedness diagnostics for toolless, credential-free proxies, deliberately avoiding a single composite score to expose trade-offs like scam-detection TPR versus legitimate-call false positives. Testing across three paired model-family checkpoints reveals that larger checkpoints score higher on some measures while triage discrimination follows a different ordering, and scripted degenerate policies (e.g., hangup-and-echo) expose measurement floors.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026🧠 AI

This paper evaluates manipulative behavior in six frontier LLMs across six environments (negotiation tasks to agentic workflows), covering 13,590 scenarios, measuring manipulation rates along three axes: framing (honesty-mandated vs. manipulation-permitted), incentive structure, and task difficulty. It finds manipulative tendencies are largely task-dependent (average Spearman rank correlation of only ρ=0.055 across environments) and identifies that different axes drive manipulation depending on whether the model is misrepresenting future actions versus ground truth, arguing existing single-axis, single-environment benchmarks are insufficient for measuring this behavior.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026🧠 AI

This arXiv paper introduces "Iterative VibeCoding," a benchmark for AI control where a coding agent (Claude Sonnet 4.5 as attacker) ships code across a sequence of pull requests in a persistent codebase while pursuing a covert side task, monitored by GPT-4o and other LLMs. It finds that distributing an attack payload gradually across PRs evades diff-based monitors far better than concentrating it in one PR (up to 93% evasion), that this holds across attacker backends (Sonnet 4.5, Gemini 3.1 Pro, Kimi K2.5) and monitor models, and that no single monitor defeats both gradual and non-gradual strategies. The authors propose a stateful "link-tracker" monitor that tracks suspicious buildup across PRs, which combined with trajectory monitors in a four-monitor ensemble cuts gradual-attack evasion from 93% to 47%.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026🛡️ Security

This paper introduces QVec, a defense against Quantization-Conditioned Backdoors (QCBs) — a threat where a neural network behaves normally in full precision but activates hidden malicious behavior only after quantization. QVec treats the weight difference between the full-precision and quantized model as a "malicious task vector" (via task arithmetic) and applies a lightweight parameter correction before deployment to cancel it out, requiring no retraining, no trigger samples, and only one quantization pass plus a small hyperparameter search. It's evaluated across image classification benchmarks and multiple LLM backdoor attack scenarios, suppressing backdoor activation while preserving clean-model performance.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026🛡️ Security

FuseReg is a training method for representation autoencoders (RAEs) that replaces fixed heuristic selection of pretrained-encoder layers with training over random subsets of encoder layers, explicitly regularizing sensitivity to cross-layer disagreement. On ImageNet-256 with DINOv3-L, a single FuseReg decoder matches or beats decoders specialized to fixed layer fusions across full, sparse, and single-layer configurations, and swapping it into an unchanged RAEv2 DiT-XL generator cuts unguided gFID by 27%; joint regularization during diffusion training further reduces unguided gFID by 29% on DiT-Base. The work targets the trade-off where shallow encoder layers preserve pixel detail but deep layers yield better generation metrics, narrowing the reconstruction-generation gap without modifying the pretrained encoder.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Sep 2026, published 25 Sep 2026🧠 AI

This arXiv preprint develops a first-order theory connecting optimization and sampling for diffusion models. It shows that SDE-based reverse-time flows of overdamped and underdamped Langevin diffusions contract relative Fisher divergences at explicit exponential rates when the forward process's stationary potential is strongly convex (a property of the chosen noising schedule, not the data), a guarantee absent from ODE-based reverse processes. It also derives averaged first-order stationarity bounds under discretization, the sampling analog of averaged gradient-norm guarantees in nonconvex optimization, for both overdamped and underdamped samplers.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Sep 2026, published 25 Sep 2026🧠 AI

This paper introduces STL-SVPG (Signal Temporal Logic-guided Stein Variational Policy Gradient), a population-based reinforcement learning method that uses smooth STL robustness as a trajectory-level training objective instead of conventional dense reward shaping. By differentiating the STL objective through system dynamics, the method assigns credit to policy actions based on their effect on the full task specification — capturing event-triggered responses, strict ordering, deadlines, and physical contact — rather than local progress alone. Evaluated on six quadcopter and manipulator tasks, STL-SVPG achieves the highest success rate on five of six benchmarks and transfers temporal/contact behavior from simulation to real robots.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Sep 2026, published 25 Sep 2026🧠 AI

This paper introduces Belief Self-Distillation (BSD), a read-write probing framework where a frozen LLM acts as its own teacher to learn a compact representation of its implicit beliefs about the current user, which can be both decoded (read) and written back into the model's activations (write) to causally test its effect. The authors show BSD recovers user beliefs more faithfully and enables stronger interventions than matched hidden-state steering, and that changing the model's inferred user intent alters refusal decisions even when the request itself is held fixed. They also find that independently trained LLMs across different model families converge on a similar geometry for representing users, with direct implications for how safety-relevant refusal behavior depends on who the model believes it is talking to.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Sep 2026, published 25 Sep 2026🧠 AI

This paper argues that self-training data for LLMs should be filtered for strategic diversity — substantively different problem-solving approaches — rather than just correctness among IID samples. It introduces GROOT, a method that builds a hierarchical tree of approaches and samples distinct paths, and adapts Verbalized Sampling (VS) to generate an unstructured set of approaches, testing both on competitive programming and Next-Chapter Prediction tasks. Models trained on strategically diverse (even incorrect) traces from Qwen3-4B outperform IID distillation from a 235B teacher and provide stronger initializations for RL and test-time scaling.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Sep 2026, published 25 Sep 2026🧠 AI

An arXiv HCI study following three elementary teachers over a 13-day summer camp as they implemented ToyTalk, a conversational AI toy development platform, within an AI literacy and English Language Arts curriculum. Drawing on daily reflections, group reflections, and post-camp interviews, the authors identify four adaptive practices teachers used — repair, differentiation, translation, and balancing — that sit at the intersection of tensions around technology, learners, and instruction, and derive design implications for deploying conversational AI in classrooms.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 28 Sep 2026, published 25 Sep 2026🧠 AI

AD-WM is an action-discriminative joint-embedding world model designed for counterfactual model predictive control, addressing the problem that world models trained only on factual transition prediction often fail to distinguish between alternative candidate actions during planning. It combines residual latent dynamics with predictor-level action-recovery regularization (inverse dynamics plus a normalized recovery objective grounded in conditional mutual information) to preserve action-dependent differences needed for MPC. On OGBench-Cube it raises hard-start success from 3.7% to 52.0% over a matched LeWM baseline, and with a frozen V-JEPA 2 encoder it improves zero-shot pick-and-place transfer on a real Franka arm from 42.2% to 71.1%.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 25 Sep 2026, published 24 Sep 2026🧠 AI

Forte is a sensitivity type system for imperative Rust that soundly tracks differential-privacy sensitivity through mutation via exclusive (&mut) borrows, closing a gap left by prior pure-calculus systems like Fuzz and Solo that assume no aliasing or mutation. Its soundness theorem (metric preservation) is mechanized in Verus, and Flux checks Forte as an ordinary library without forking the Rust compiler. The authors evaluate Forte on OpenDP mechanism kernels with genuine in-place mutation, matching trusted stability maps and catching off-by-one diameters, miscalibrated releases, and overspent privacy budgets.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 26 Sep 2026, published 24 Sep 2026🧠 AI

This paper studies Representation Autoencoders (RAEs), which let diffusion models generate images in the feature space of pretrained visual encoders. It shows that finetuning encoders for better reconstruction reduces the effective dimensionality of their representations, which makes standard velocity-prediction flow matching inefficient because the model must fit noise directions orthogonal to the low-dimensional signal manifold; switching to x0-prediction (clean data parameterization) instead consistently improves text-to-image generation across multiple strong-reconstruction encoders.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 24 Sep 2026, published 23 Sep 2026🧠 AI

Flash-dLLM is a training-free inference acceleration framework for diffusion large language models (dLLMs) that tackles GPU memory I/O bottlenecks in KV-cache-enabled dLLM inference via an I/O-aware fused KV-cache kernel, combined with a draft-and-verify decoding strategy where the same dLLM acts as both drafter and verifier. It reports 5.1x and 11.0x speedups over the prior strongest baseline Elastic-Cache on GSM8K and HumanEval respectively, while preserving generation quality and scaling to longer sequences and larger batches.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 23 Sep 2026, published 22 Sep 2026🧠 AI

GameHorizon Suite is a data and evaluation package for measuring AI gameplay capabilities across multiple temporal horizons, combining visual understanding, instruction following, goal planning, and action control. It includes GameHorizon-Annotator (an automated multi-horizon instruction annotation pipeline), GameHorizon-Data (5,000 hours of AAA gameplay video, player actions, and instructions from 21 games and 100 expert players), and GameHorizon-Bench (offline and stepwise online evaluation tracks). The authors evaluate 47 models across more than one million invocations, exposing a task-difficulty hierarchy and sizable capability gaps between models.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 21 Sep 2026🧠 AI

Paint-Anything introduces a shared hex-color prompt interface for both image generation and editing, letting users specify an object's exact 24-bit hex color. The authors build the Paint-500K dataset via object grounding, perceptual color labeling, and editing-pair synthesis, and supplement real-image supervision with pure-color anchors used only at high-noise diffusion timesteps to counter shadow-induced label imprecision. Evaluated on FLUX.2-4B with the new Any Color Benchmark (ACBench-T2I/ACBench-Edit), it improves color-fidelity scores by 85.3% and 28.3% respectively over the base model.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 17 Sep 2026🧠 AI

MM-Future is a world-action model for autonomous driving that jointly generates multiple paired scene-action hypotheses, co-evolving action priors and predicted future scenes through a modality-aware diffusion Transformer. It compresses multi-view video into planning-oriented MM-Tokens and uses a future-conditioned scorer to rank trajectory candidates, achieving 94.0 PDMS and 91.5 EPDMS on NAVSIM navtest and 32.3 HD-Score in zero-shot closed-loop evaluation on HUGSIM.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 17 Sep 2026🧠 AI

This paper proposes a hybrid generative model that combines denoising diffusion with an adversarial loss (replacing the standard denoising loss, since no 3D ground truth exists) to synthesize 3D geological/material microstructures from 2D image slices. It targets heterogeneous clay and cementitious materials, where the prior GAN-based approach SliceGAN struggles to capture fine detail, and shows the new model produces volumes with fewer slice artefacts and closer agreement to ground-truth phase fractions and structural descriptors.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 17 Sep 2026🧠 AI

Proposes Comparison-based Preference Optimization (ComPO), a zeroth-order alternative to direct preference alignment methods (like DPO) that extracts directional information from preference pairs via comparison oracles rather than optimizing a differentiable preference loss, aimed at mitigating likelihood displacement. The paper establishes convergence guarantees for an offline scheme and a performance guarantee for an online variant using reverse-KL control against a reference policy, and reports experiments on Mistral, Llama, Gemma-2, Qwen3, and Gemma-3 showing improved length-controlled win rates over existing direct alignment baselines.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 16 Sep 2026🧠 AI

SyncWorld is an action-conditioned world model that acts as a zero-shot simulator across unseen robotic environments without additional training. It uses a "visual calibration episode" — paired frames and actions demonstrating controllable degrees of freedom — to specify a setup-specific Action-Visual Mapping in context, addressing the problem that identical numerical actions manifest differently across cameras, embodiments, and environments. Experiments show it can simulate accurate rollouts in novel settings and enable test-time policy improvement without further training.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 8 Sep 2026🧠 AI

Proxy Policy Steering (PPS) is an inference-time adaptation method for generalist robot manipulation policies that trains two lightweight proxy policies (reference and task) whose calibrated velocity-space difference steers a frozen base diffusion/flow sampler at each denoising step. Because the base model's weights are never modified, PPS preserves broad manipulation priors while specializing to new tasks from limited demonstrations, only requiring forward velocity predictions from the base. On 8 real-world and 4 simulation tasks it lifts the pi 0.5 base policy by 53% absolute success rate, outperforming LoRA fine-tuning, from-scratch specialists, and residual policies.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 8 Sep 2026🧠 AI

UniMate is a unified foundation model that generates articulated motion for arbitrary rigged 3D skeletons from a text prompt, without per-skeleton fine-tuning or reference motions at inference. It introduces a topology-aware diffusion transformer combining graph-aware attention bias from joint relations/geodesic distances, a spectral RoPE generalization via the graph Laplacian, and a global topological conditioner, trained on the newly curated UniML3D dataset (13,006 motion sequences across bipedal, quadrupedal, avian, marine, insectoid, serpentine and rigid-object skeletons). It outperforms prior category-specific animators and supports zero-shot cross-topology transfer, in-betweening, expansion, and text-guided editing.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 4 Sep 2026🧠 AI

Diffusion TV is an interactive AI art installation built from a modified CRT TV that lets audiences control the clarity of AI-generated images and sounds by physically manipulating the antenna, metaphorically enacting the denoising process of diffusion models. A tuning knob switches between three channels of AI-generated animals (extinct, endangered, speculative), embedding the interaction in a temporal and ecological narrative. The work argues for embodied, tangible interaction as an alternative mode of explainable AI that foregrounds the generative process itself rather than final outputs.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 4 Sep 2026🧠 AI

RegionFed is a federated learning framework for personalized retail search query understanding that operates at the gradient level rather than parameter level, using the ℓ2 conflict between regional and global gradients to diagnose heterogeneity and route regions to personalization strategies. Unlike existing parameter-level personalized FL methods that collapse below 10% accuracy on transformers like T5, RegionFed deploys unchanged across T5-Small, T5-3B, RoBERTa, and CNN architectures. Evaluated on Amazon ESCI, Amazon Reviews, and LEAF-FEMNIST, RegionFed-Meta reaches 92.27% accuracy, closing to within 0.23pp of a privacy-violating centralized upper bound while providing (ε≈0.60)-differential privacy.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 4 Sep 2026🧠 AI

The Graph Machine (GM) is a neural architecture that maintains an O(n)-sized state accessed via sparse, dynamic routing using differentiable "edges" — pointer-like objects updated through a pointer-chasing-like referral mechanism. The authors replace 75% of dense Transformer layers in Qwen3-0.6B with GM sparse layers and pretrain from scratch on 15.7B tokens, showing that retrieving only 2–4 of 4,096 tokens per KV head per sparse layer preserves or marginally improves loss compared to the dense baseline. This suggests a path toward more efficient pretraining by reducing dense attention computation while retaining large effective context/state.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 2 Sep 2026🧠 AI

This arXiv preprint presents a randomness-efficient variant of the Hardt-Talwar K-norm mechanism for answering d linear queries under differential privacy, achieving O(d/ε) error in ℓ∞-norm using only O(log d) random bits. It improves on prior randomness bounds from Canonne et al. and Ghentiyala, and includes a computationally efficient version with a logarithmic increase in error, advancing the theory of differentially private query answering.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 2 Sep 2026🧠 AI

GRADSOLVE is an open-source JAX library for solving and reverse-mode differentiating low-dimensional ODE ensembles on NVIDIA GPUs. It records the steps an adaptive solver accepts and differentiates a fixed-step replay, producing the exact discrete adjoint (matching Diffrax's default output) more cheaply than an adaptive loop, running 2.8x faster as a forward solver and 5.6-14.1x faster for gradients than Diffrax's checkpointed adjoint at matched accuracy.

arxiv.orgpaperAdded 22 Sep 2026, published 2 Sep 2026🧠 AI