Synthetic sequential tabular data are increasingly used for privacy-preserving data sharing and research, yet conventional tabular metrics often overlook temporal structure. Existing single-table and relational evaluation protocols largely collapse records into static distributions, leaving key temporal properties insufficiently evaluated. We introduce Seq2Synth, a unified benchmark for assessing these properties. Its taxonomy characterizes temporal and schema properties to determine applicable evaluations, covering timestamp, cross-sectional, longitudinal, and structural fidelity, alongside trajectory-aware utility and privacy. Across seven core datasets from a 13-dataset benchmark and eight generators, models with near-perfect static fidelity still violate basic temporal constraints, producing duplicate timestamps, irregular intervals, and incomplete observation grids. Moreover, static and temporal-aware rankings diverge substantially, showing that temporal fidelity must be evaluated directly rather than inferred from static or relational scores. Project page and online appendices are available at: https://seq2synth.github.io/.
Kiwan Kwon, Kangmin Kim, Hojin Lee et al.· 0 citations
Tensegrity form-finding and physical property prediction are fundamental problems in structural mechanics, which aim to determine equilibrium configurations and internal force distributions. These problems are challenging due to strong nonlinearity arising from the coupling between geometry and forces, and the need to satisfy equilibrium, stability, and structural constraints. This paper proposes an energy-based learning approach for clustered tensegrity form finding and physical property prediction. The proposed approach incorporates total potential energy minimization and constitutive relations into the training objective, enabling the prediction of equilibrium nodal configurations and the reconstruction of physical quantities such as member forces and force densities. By integrating energy-based physical losses directly into the learning process, the method promotes physical consistency while combining data-driven learning with physics-based constraints. Numerical experiments on tensegrity prism and lander structures demonstrate accurate prediction of equilibrium configurations and internal forces across different training-data ratios, indicating the potential of the proposed approach for nonlinear tensegrity form finding and structural analysis.
Additive activation steering is calibrated in single-turn chat, then deployed inside agent scaffolds. The quantity usually reported for that move is a gain: a ratio of steered effects, T = Delta_agent / Delta_chat. We sweep eight family x arm dose-response cells over six models in both deployment contexts and show this ratio does not identify potency and efficacy. Reconstructing the published estimator in both of its forms on our own grids, its realized range contains 1 in five of five scorable cells, it moves with dose in four of five, and two cells with opposite potency shifts, both CI-clean on the primary grid, return gain intervals overlapping at a width under 0.08. Every scorable cell is an amplifier at one dose and an attenuator at another, so an amplify/attenuate taxonomy reports the dose it was read at.
We replace the gain with a location: dEC50 = EC50_agent - EC50_chat, the cross-context difference in a curve location. It is signed both ways on this roster's primary grid, across four model families (+1.013 [+0.777, +1.273] against -12.368, -10.855, -5.497 and -886.066 elsewhere) and beats a vertical rescaling at equal complexity in all five cells of a frozen audit (four under the registered trim). Three deflationary accounts are measured and rejected on sign pattern and magnitude.
We report the discipline at the same volume as the result: one cell is quarantined loudly, our pre-registered forecaster was refuted out of sample and is published as refuted, a registered salvage claim produced no qualifying cell and is reported unanswered, and a census of our own register reports registered branches no code here could have emitted.
The consequence is a measurement instruction rather than a theorem: a transfer conclusion read at one strength does not identify what changed, because a displacement and a gain are not distinguishable from a single operating point.
Reinforcement learning agents for imperfect-information card games are only as strong as the opponents they train against, and they are hard to grade, since they beat a random opponent over 99 percent of the time and only tie copies of themselves. So we build a strong, fixed, rule-based expert for Gin Rummy and use it only as a yardstick, never for training. It beats every agent we trained 70 to 99 percent of the time. Across more than a hundred runs, we isolate what makes a lightweight agent stronger. Trust region updates, a well-aimed reward, a curriculum of tougher opponents, warm starting, and keeping the best checkpoint all help, and stacking them lifts a self-play champion from about 30 to 36 percent against the expert. Several ideas did not pay off. Short-term and longer-term reward shaping, learned state embeddings, imitation and DAgger, and a live large language model opponent were each unhelpful, too slow, or too heavy to train at scale. Comparing MLP, convolutional, set-based, attention, and recurrent encoders shows that extra capacity does little to break the ceiling, suggesting the limit is information rather than network size. We add standard baselines (neural fictitious self-play and information set Monte Carlo search) and confirm the approach carries over to Leduc Hold'em, where the optimum is computable. The result is a lightweight, game-agnostic recipe that trains competitive agents without training on the expert, for any game a small model can handle, reported with robust statistics and released as a reusable package.
Nima Kelidari, Mohammadsaeed Haghi, Mahdi Salmani· 0 citations
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For LLM agents, supervised fine-tuning is not only about teacher labels' quality, but also about which interaction contexts those labels condition on. Pure behavioral cloning uses full teacher demonstrations, creating a mismatch between teacher-induced contexts seen in training and student-induced contexts encountered at test time. Recent work addresses this mismatch by querying a teacher at contexts reached by the student, often with increasingly elaborate filtering of the teacher's continuations. We instead frame on-policy data construction as a budget-allocation problem: under matched supervision resources, should teacher output be spent on more start-to-finish demos, longer continuations, outcome filtering, or broader coverage of learner-induced contexts? We formalize this design space through the rollout policy, switch-time distribution, continuation horizon, filtering rules, and two complementary costs: teacher inference generated before filtering and teacher supervision retained for SFT. Across HotpotQA, ALFWorld, and Terminal-Bench-Dev, bounded unfiltered teacher continuations at learner-induced contexts improve over pure behavioral cloning at matched budgets. On HotpotQA and ALFWorld, where we run the full comparison, few-step continuations match or exceed success-filtered and critical-context-filtered alternatives. Our findings suggest that a few teacher steps, placed at learner-induced contexts, can be a more cost-efficient supervision allocation than longer or more heavily curated teacher completions.
Junze Ye, Jiayi Cheng, Miao Lu et al.· 0 citations
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable reasoning capabilities, but their task-specific fine-tuning is notoriously plagued by overconfidence, severely hindering trustworthy deployment. We propose Data-Adaptive Lower-Rank Adaptation (DALorRA), a simple and effective variational Bayesian sparse framework that shifts the paradigm of uncertainty quantification from the dense parameter space to the lightweight rank level of low-rank adaptation (LoRA). With the insight that LoRA essentially aggregates multiple rank-one components that may provide superfluous model capacity, DALorRA imposes stochastic masking on rank dimensions, enabling Bayesian regularization of model capacity during training and ensemble-like calibration during inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate DALorRA's excellent calibration of LLMs without compromising reasoning accuracy.
Jijie Zhang, Zhe Ren, Quan Zhang et al.· 0 citations
A growing body of work suggests that the reasoning capabilities of large language models are largely latent in their base form, with post-training primarily amplifying rather than introducing them. However, this evidence comes mainly from mathematical and coding benchmarks, leaving the boundary conditions of that claim largely unexplored, namely which cognitive tasks can be recovered through elicitation and where that recovery fails. To investigate this, we introduce NeuReasoner, a theory-grounded elicitation instrument. At each step, an orchestrator pairs a Neuro Lens, inspired by functional specificity, with a Cognitive Lens, drawn from the Erotetic Theory of Reasoning, and integrates their outputs through internal modularization of a single model, without external tools. We evaluate NeuReasoner on CogBench, a suite of behavioral tasks from cognitive psychology, alongside standard mathematical and coding benchmarks, measuring both its improvement over vanilla inference and its ability to match a model's post-trained thinking mode. At sufficient scale, NeuReasoner matches or exceeds thinking-mode baselines on arithmetic reasoning, code generation, Bayesian reasoning, and reward learning; these gains persist against self-consistency and iterative-refinement baselines matched to NeuReasoner's per-decision call budget. Using NeuReasoner allows us to find clear boundaries: risk-taking and decision making under uncertainty remains hard to recover through elicitation alone, and model scale interacts with elicitation in both directions: widening its advantage on some cognitive signatures while erasing it on others. Overall, through NeuReasoner as a modular, interpretable, theory-grounded elicitation instrument, we empirically map where reasoning elicitation succeeds and fails, beyond the mathematical and coding benchmarks where prior claims have rested.
Aydin Javadov, Shyngys Aitkazinov, Tobias Hoesli et al.· 0 citations
Modern local and agentic workloads often need large-model capacity at low concurrency, but run on GPUs that cannot keep a frontier-scale model resident. Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models are a natural fit because they activate only a small subset of experts per token, but their sparsity saves computation, not residency: the full expert pool still has to be stored, and any expert used by a layer must be in GPU memory when that layer runs. Static layer-level CPU offload makes such models fit, but transfers the expert layer in bulk on every forward pass, losing much of the sparsity advantage. We view low-resource MoE serving as a working-set problem on the GPU. Routed expert weights and the KV cache are two memory-demand streams competing for the same limited VRAM. We implement this view in WiSP (Working-Set Paging), a routing-aware expert pager that plugs into an unmodified serving engine and preserves byte-identical outputs. On a real 24 GiB RTX 3090, WiSP achieves up to 2.0x the decode throughput of static offload at the same memory budget when the model does not fit. A natural next step is to predict future experts and prefetch them. We find that this does not help in single-stream decode: the bottleneck is PCIe bandwidth, not prediction quality, so speculative transfers compete with demand transfers instead of hiding them. This shifts the design question from prefetching to allocation: how should one VRAM budget be divided between resident experts and the KV cache? We answer with MV-WSA (Marginal-Value Working-Set Allocation), which splits memory by marginal latency benefit per byte while enforcing a KV-admission floor. As a startup configurator, MV-WSA is the only policy we test that stays near-best on both prefill and decode; as a live controller, it resizes both pools while serving and reduces end-to-end time by up to 1.19x over a fixed offline split, without changing model outputs.
Jiamu Zhang, Liang Wu, Mayank Darbari et al.· 0 citations
Many two-stage estimators assess the first-stage learner by prediction error, even when the next stage uses its residual. In control-function instrumental variables, that residual must preserve the latent control direction without removing the treatment variation that identifies the structural response. A scalar prediction score does not reveal how the learner allocates this variation. Under piecewise-smooth graph geometry, interpolation can suppress the control, whereas isotropic smoothing can leak systematic variation across boundaries. We formulate this as a variation-allocation problem and introduce Adaptive Anisotropic Instrumental Heat Flow (A-IHF). The method uses pilot treatment contrasts to adapt edge conductance, takes the complement of a sparse graph resolvent as the generated control, and selects candidates without consulting outcomes. For a linear control-function regression, the generated control is identified only by its span. Working in that projective geometry, we derive an exact finite-sample fidelity--relevance frontier, spectral identities for remaining treatment variation and coefficient distortion, and a lower bound for monotone fixed-graph residual filters. A connected construction proves that adapting conductance can remove the corresponding fixed-graph obstruction. In a 54-cell benchmark, the A-IHF family wins 32 cells; its guarded observational variant lowers mean nonlinear response error by 8.3%, with the largest gains in fractured designs. Controlled rewiring explains when the graph should be used, replaced by a fallback, or rejected. The resulting lesson is task-specific: a first stage for generated controls should be judged by control fidelity, downstream relevance, and graph compatibility together.
Rui Wu, Zongyuan Chen, Hong Xie et al.· 0 citations
High-throughput experimentation can evaluate many reaction conditions, yet combinatorial condition spaces still exceed the available experiment budget. This makes experiment selection a sequential decision problem: each new condition must be chosen from limited observations before its outcome is known. LLMs can express task-specific selection logic. A direct recommendation, however, is neither a persistent executable object that can be validated and revised nor an independently auditable decision rule. We introduce CARE, a reference-conditioned controller that separates program synthesis from experiment selection. An LLM writes an executable scoring program that ranks the remaining conditions, while a non-LLM reference policy supplies a numerical candidate and support summary. CARE forms an optional alternative from the program, applies a reference-conditioned intervention gate to compare it with the reference, and records the decision before the selected outcome is revealed. Each new outcome updates controller state and can trigger retention, revision, or regeneration of the active program. This outcome-guided program evolution changes the scoring logic without updating the LLM parameters. In matched offline replay with 30 seeds on eight reaction-optimization tasks, CARE attains the lowest normalized regret, the highest normalized best-so-far AUC, and the highest Top-1% Success@15 among the evaluated methods. These results support using a scoring program written by an LLM as one component of a reference-conditioned optimizer rather than as a standalone experiment selector.
Guanyu Liu, Weiyi Kong, Chao Tang et al.· 0 citations
Cross-domain graph anomaly detection (GAD) aims to identify abnormal nodes in unseen target graphs, showing strong potential in real-world applications with heterogeneous graph data. However, existing methods often depend on dataset-specific feature semantics and structural patterns, which limits their ability to generalize across different domains. To address this challenge, we propose AlignGAD, a zero-shot generalized graph anomaly detection framework. Our framework is built upon three key components: a Global Unification Module that aligns heterogeneous node features and normalizes graph signals in the spectral domain; a Clustering Module that constructs cluster-aware graph views to capture group-level abnormal patterns; and a Node Discrepancy Scoring Module that measures reconstruction discrepancy and aggregates anomaly evidence from different graph views. Experiments on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of AlignGAD under the zero-shot GAD setting.
Phan Nguyen, Dat Cao, Hien Chu et al.· 0 citations
Data attribution is a promising field in interpretability that aims to explain model behavior through the influence of its training data, with applications including debugging undesirable model behavior and training dataset curation. However, significant engineering effort is required to perform it at scale, and many cutting edge techniques lack open-source tooling and support. Bergson is an open source library that aims to enable faster progress in the field by providing a host of techniques that scale to very large language models and pre-training datasets. The library natively supports on-disk gradient stores and multi-node distributed training, and provides quality of life tools for researchers. Finally, we introduce the first open-source implementations of three leading data attribution methods: MAGIC, SOURCE, and TrackStar. The library is available at https://github.com/EleutherAI/bergson .
Lucia Quirke, Louis Jaburi, David Johnston et al.· 0 citations
A new machine-learning framework aims to improve the success rate of computational protein design while moving away from results that reproduce sequences found in nature.
MIT News · Artificial Intelligence· news.mit.eduAug 24, 2026
A new method for surgically removing training examples from a model reveals that as datasets grow, the link between what a model learns and what it produces dissolves.
