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The Surprising Effectiveness of Approximate Value Iteration in Self-Play
Minimal approximate value iteration self-play learns more accurate value functions than AlphaZero in Connect Four and Hex while cutting training and inference costs.
The paper trains a minimal self-play implementation of Approximate Value Iteration (AVI) without MCTS and uses ground-truth oracles for exact evaluation in Connect Four, 7x7 Hex, and synthetic games. AVI learns more accurate value functions than AlphaZero, and its one-step-lookahead greedy policies remain competitive with MCTS-based policies at substantially lower training and inference cost. Preliminary experiments on Othello and 9x9 Go show AVI trains stably on larger games, suggesting simpler approaches have become increasingly practical with modern deep-learning tools.
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A Ranking Approach for Measuring Calibration
Researchers propose rankECE, a ranking-based calibration error measure with theoretical guarantees that outperforms binned ECE approximations.
The paper introduces rankECE, an alternative to Expected Calibration Error (ECE) that measures miscalibration by comparing points with neighboring predicted-probability values. It addresses the impossibility of estimating ECE with guaranteed accuracy in assumption-free settings. Theoretical guarantees and empirical results establish rankECE as a better proxy for ECE than the binned approximations most commonly used in practice.
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Large Language Models Develop Belief State Geometry In-Context
Probing six open-source LLMs on HMM-generated data shows belief states are linearly decodable (R² 0.83–0.99), suggesting in-context learning approximates Bayesian prediction.
Researchers prompted six open-source LLMs with data from 40 hidden Markov models selected for non-trivial belief structure and probed residual-stream activations for belief states (posteriors over hidden states). Belief states were linearly decodable with peak R² values of 0.83–0.99 across HMM/LLM combinations, spanning early to late layers. Patching and steering the probe-identified subspace preserved downstream prediction quality while control interventions degraded performance substantially, establishing functional relevance. The results provide representation-level evidence that in-context learning approximates optimal Bayesian prediction over a context-inferred generative model.
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Near-Optimal Reinforcement Learning with Multi-Step Transition Lookahead
Theorists prove multi-step lookahead RL planning is NP-hard for every fixed rational discount factor yet give a randomized polynomial-time approximation scheme.
The paper resolves open questions about reinforcement learning with multi-step transition lookahead. It shows exact planning remains NP-hard for every fixed rational discount factor in (0,1), not just discounts arbitrarily close to one, and introduces a randomized polynomial-time approximation scheme for every fixed lookahead depth. Extending to unknown transitions and stochastic rewards via optimism and variance-adaptive confidence bounds, the algorithm achieves cumulative regret matching classical tabular discounted RL up to logarithmic factors.
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MIT creates method to force AI to comply with safety rules
MIT researchers published HardFlow, a method enforcing hard safety constraints on flow-matching generative models' final outputs without retraining.
MIT researchers led by Zeyang Li and Navid Azizan developed HardFlow, a trajectory-optimization method that enforces strict, non-negotiable constraints on flow-matching generative models by checking rule satisfaction only at the final generation step. Published in IEEE TPAMI, it outperformed six rival projection and guidance methods on four simulated benchmarks including D3IL robotic manipulation, Maze2D, physical process control, and image editing. All results are simulation-only, with no independent reproduction yet reported.
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Unsolved Problem by Fields Medalist Breached by Two High School Students
Two high school students used Claude Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol to help solve an open Lorentzian polynomials problem, posting a 75-page arXiv proof.
Aayush Bathija and Prince Rohatgi of Oak Park High School, mentored by UCLA postdoc Daniel Soskin, published the 75-page paper 'Bounded Ratios for Lorentzian Polynomials' (arXiv 2609.05341), solving an open problem in Fields Medalist June Huh's Lorentzian polynomial theory. The main structural theorem extends bounded coefficient-ratio characterization from quadratic to arbitrary-degree polynomials via discrete convexity conditions. The students used Claude Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol for exploration and proof ideas but independently verified all arguments; the result follows an open letter from 25 Fields Medalists voicing concerns about AI's impact on mathematical rigor.
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Evaluating Time-Series Foundation Models and Multimodal Dietary Context for CGM Forecasting
Study finds zero-shot time-series foundation models underperform on CGM forecasting; fine-tuned Chronos-Bolt cuts RMSE up to 18.4% and dietary context adds signal.
The paper evaluates time-series foundation models for continuous glucose monitoring forecasting across eight public datasets covering Type 1 diabetes, Type 2 diabetes, and non-diabetes populations. Under a unified protocol, zero-shot foundation models did not consistently outperform baselines like Elastic Net and PatchTST, but lightweight fine-tuning did, with fine-tuned Chronos-Bolt reducing RMSE by 6.5%-18.4% in the T1D cohort and 8.6%-18.2% in the non-diabetes/T2D cohort. A residual-based fusion framework adding dietary context from CGMacros reduced overall RMSE by about 3% and postprandial RMSE by about 15% versus CGM-only baselines.
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Kalman Delta Networks: Uncertainty-aware Associative Memory
Kalman Delta Networks add uncertainty tracking to linear-attention associative memory, improving perplexity and downstream accuracy at 750M and 1.3B scales.
Kalman Delta Networks reformulate recurrent associative memory in linear-attention models as a linear-Gaussian state-space model, allowing the Kalman gain to weight each residual write by accumulated evidence and observation reliability; Delta-rule updates emerge as a special case lacking covariance tracking. Two scan-compatible approximations, Diagonal KDN (online mean-field variational inference) and Isotropic KDN (one uncertainty scalar per head), produce Mobius-map uncertainty recurrences enabling associative scans with logarithmic parallel depth. Controlled pretraining at 750M and 1.3B parameters consistently improves perplexity and mean downstream accuracy over state-of-the-art linear-attention models.
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TFTrack: A Template-Free Framework for Efficient 3D Point Cloud Tracking
Researchers propose TFTrack, a template-free LiDAR 3D single object tracking framework cutting FLOPs ~50% while running at ~120 FPS.
TFTrack is the first template-free framework for 3D Single Object Tracking, dropping template-search pairings and complex motion modeling in favor of the prior bounding box center plus geometric alignment. It ships in three variants (TFTrack-Voxel, TFTrack-Pillar, TFTrack-Point) covering sparse and dense 3D representations. On KITTI and nuScenes it is competitive with leading template-based trackers while reducing FLOPs by about 50% and running near 120 FPS. Code is released, targeting real-time deployment in embedded robotics such as autonomous vehicles.
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Kalman Delta Networks: Uncertainty-aware Associative Memory
Researchers propose Kalman Delta Networks, adding Kalman-filter uncertainty tracking to delta-rule linear attention, improving perplexity and accuracy at 750M and 1.3B parameters.
The paper introduces Kalman Delta Networks (KDNs), which reformulate recurrent associative memory in linear-attention models as a linear-Gaussian state-space model where the Kalman gain weights each write by accumulated evidence and observation reliability. Two scan-compatible approximations, Diagonal KDN via online mean-field variational inference and Isotropic KDN with a single uncertainty scalar per head, enable associative scans with logarithmic parallel depth. Delta-rule updates are shown to be a special case of this formulation. KDN variants consistently improve perplexity and mean downstream accuracy over state-of-the-art linear-attention baselines in controlled pretraining at 750M and 1.3B parameters.
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DianShi-RxnDB: A Large-Scale, Fine-Grained Organic Reaction Data Platform Built via a Fully Automated Pipeline for Researchers and AI Agents
Researchers release DianShi-RxnDB, a database of roughly 24 million organic reaction instances extracted automatically from USPTO and EPO patents since 1976.
DianShi-RxnDB is built by a fully automated pipeline integrating patent text, images, and reaction schemes, yielding about 24 million reaction instances, of which 14.8 million (61.7%) pass automated qualification checks. Manual evaluation of 1,300 sampled instances showed 92.95% field-level accuracy, and comparisons with Pistachio found advantages in deduplicated record counts and granularity. The platform offers a web research workbench and a Model Context Protocol (MCP) service enabling AI agents to perform composable structured retrieval.
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Bias-Induced Crossover in Absolute Capacity of Dense Associative Memory
Analysis shows biased patterns cut dense associative memory capacity from N^(n-1)/ln N to O(N^(n/2)), with a bias-induced crossover.
The paper analyzes dense associative memory capacity for biased centered binary patterns under the Krotov-Hopfield single-site criterion. Unbiased patterns (q=1/2) with order-n polynomial interactions yield capacity of order N^(n-1)/ln N, while fixed bias q<1/2 reduces capacity to O(N^(n/2)) for even n>=4 and O(N^((n+1)/2)) for odd n>=5. A bias-dependent crosstalk mean destabilizes sites carrying the frequent value, and an activity-dependent control potential restores the higher capacity within the conditioned-Gaussian approximation.
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Reduced-Space Multi-Fidelity Bayesian Optimization of Process Simulation Models
RS-MFBO couples global sensitivity analysis with fidelity-augmented Gaussian processes to slash costly high-fidelity simulation runs in industrial flowsheet optimization.
The paper presents RS-MFBO, a reduced-space multi-fidelity Bayesian optimization framework for high-dimensional, expensive black-box functions. It integrates Global Sensitivity Analysis for dimensionality reduction with a fidelity-augmented Gaussian process and a cost-aware acquisition strategy featuring cooldown and promotion mechanisms. Validation on a plasmid DNA bioprocess (SuperPro Designer) and a green fuel synthesis plant (Aspen HYSYS) shows substantial reductions in high-fidelity evaluations while remaining competitive with single-fidelity baselines.
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Modality-Autoregressive World-Action Models
ModAR autoregressively denoises multiple future modalities (point tracks, DINO features, depth) before predicting actions, beating prior world-action models at all data scales.
ModAR is the first world-action model (WAM) to autoregressively denoise multiple future modalities before predicting actions, letting each prediction condition on previously generated modalities. Training from scratch shows WAMs benefit from predicting point tracks, DINO features, and depth maps, while future RGB adds no consistent benefit. ModAR's sequential generation outperforms existing WAM formulations with the highest average success rate at all evaluated data scales. It slightly beats video-model-initialized Flex-π (75% vs 72% success) using roughly 20x fewer training FLOPs and no pretraining, and wins on three real-world bimanual tasks.
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Bellman Policy Optimization
Bellman Policy Optimization, a critic-free RLVR method derived from Policy Mirror Descent, improves LLM mathematical reasoning without intermediate state-value estimation.
The paper introduces Bellman Policy Optimization (BPO), a critic-free reinforcement learning method for LLMs with verifiable rewards, derived from Policy Mirror Descent. BPO uses the Bellman equations to reformulate PMD as a trajectory-level objective for autoregressive generation with terminal rewards, avoiding state-value estimation at intermediate states. The authors prove BPO shares the same unique optimal solution as PMD and validate it on mathematical reasoning benchmarks.
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Dynin-Robotics: Omnimodal Unified Diffusion Vision-Language-Action Model
Dynin-Robotics unifies action, goal, and dynamics prediction in one omnimodal masked-diffusion VLA model, reaching 78.4% success on Franka Research 3 manipulation tasks.
Built on the Dynin-Omni masked-diffusion backbone, the model represents language, observations, goals, and actions as discrete tokens and is continually pretrained on roughly 1.33 million trajectories from 48 Open X-Embodiment datasets. The shared trajectory interface enables test-time scaling via goal prediction, action-candidate evaluation, and joint action/future-state refinement. It achieves competitive results on LIBERO and zero-shot LIBERO-Plus, 78.4% average success across four Franka Research 3 conditions, and up to 29.2x faster model-side action decoding from a block-parallel implementation.
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3D Point Splatting for mmWave Radar Novel View Synthesis
Researchers propose 3DPS, a differentiable point renderer for mmWave radar novel view synthesis that outperforms optical-NVS baselines by 1.7x-5.2x.
The paper introduces 3D Point Splatting (3DPS), the first differentiable point renderer for radar, derived from the solid-angle form of the radar equation with ITU-R P.2040 material models and complex phasor splatting. On six outdoor ColoRadar scenes it reaches 0.587 mean Pearson correlation on held-out range-azimuth images, between 1.7x and 5.2x the RadarSplat, Radar Fields, and DART baselines. The same optimized scene produces ADC, complex range profile, and RA outputs via standard FFT pipelines, and training takes about 3 minutes per scene on an RTX 4090.
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CoRA-NAS: Coarse Ranking and Anchor-Residual Refinement for Neural Architecture Search
CoRA-NAS combines zero-cost proxy ranking with low-cost learning-curve refinement, achieving the best worst-space Spearman correlation across NAS benchmarks.
The paper proposes CoRA-NAS, a two-stage neural architecture search framework pairing a static ranking prior (CoRA-Rank) with learning-curve refinement (CoRA-Refine) that extrapolates early validation curves for sampled anchors and propagates residual corrections with an ExtraTrees model at about 1% of full training cost. Across NAS-Bench-201, NAS-Bench-101, TransNAS-Bench-101, and NATS-SSS it achieves mean Spearman correlations of 0.946, 0.715, 0.786, and 0.894 respectively, with the best worst-space correlation of 0.715 among compared methods. On NAS-Bench-201/CIFAR-100 its selected architecture reaches 73.32% accuracy versus a 73.37% ground-truth best.
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Biology-in-the-loop: Amortized Adaptive Hit Discovery in CRISPR Screens
Researchers release AssayBench-Loop, a 1,389-screen CRISPR benchmark, and AssayLoop, a framework that learns adaptive hit discovery policies.
The paper introduces AssayBench-Loop, a large-scale benchmark of 1,389 CRISPR screens across five phenotype categories for adaptive hit discovery under budget constraints. It also introduces AssayLoop, which combines AssayFormer, a transformer-based amortized acquisition policy trained across historical screens, with LLM-derived biological priors via an adaptive handoff. On temporally held-out screens, AssayLoop achieves 5.67-fold enrichment over random selection and recovers 27.7% of hits after assaying roughly 5% of the candidate library, outperforming existing adaptive-design methods and standalone LLMs.
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Memory as Plans: World-Action Modeling with Memory-Grounded Planning
Researchers introduce MaP-WAM, decomposing memory-dependent robot manipulation into memory-grounded planning and plan-conditioned execution, achieving 83.3% on RMBench and 78% on real robots.
MaP-WAM converts long-term multimodal episodic memory — segment records with language instructions and sparse visual context — into compact plans of next-segment language goals and visual guidance. A World-Action-Progress model jointly predicts action chunks and execution progress, calibrating predictions via plan-observation alignment for adaptive segment transitions and closed-loop context updates. Structured attention keeps the executor context length fixed and enables key-value caching, yielding state-of-the-art 83.3% success on RMBench, 78.0% on real-robot tasks, and roughly constant inference latency as task history grows.
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Pelican-Sim 1.0: A General World Model Simulator for Embodied Intelligence
Pelican-Sim 1.0 predicts future observations from visual context and robot actions; four-step autoregressive rollouts yield 5.67x speedup and raise policy success from 70% to 93%.
Pelican-Sim 1.0 is a general world model simulator for embodied intelligence that predicts future observations from visual context and robot actions using a 28-dimensional unified action space valid across heterogeneous embodiments. Sparse mixture-of-experts layers reduce FVD by 6.530 versus the dense backbone, and causal adaptation with few-step distillation yields a four-step autoregressive simulator achieving a 5.67-fold speedup over the 35-step model. Trained on roughly one million real-world and simulated trajectories, PSNR improves over the strongest baselines by 4.636 on AgiBotWorld Beta, 2.080 on RoboMIND, and 10.343 on RoboTwin. Downstream on RoboTwin, adding 500 generated trajectories to 50 demonstrations per task raises policy success from 70% to 93%, and policy evaluation reaches a Pearson correlation of 0.994.
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[AINews] OpenAI reports Navier-Stokes singularity find in 88 hours using Astra-next, roughly 10,000 agents and 130B tokens (>$40M), a contender for second ever Millennium Prize awarded
OpenAI-linked accounts claim roughly 10,000 AI agents produced a Navier-Stokes singularity result in 88 hours, pending mathematical verification.
OpenAI-affiliated accounts claim a system of roughly 10,000 agents, trained over about a year with multi-agent reinforcement learning, produced a finite-time singularity result related to the Navier-Stokes Millennium Problem. The claimed 88-hour runtime and 130B-token cost circulate only via social posts, and no preprint, theorem statement, or proof artifact is available. Acceptance by the mathematics community is unresolved, so the claim's epistemic status remains unknown. The roundup also notes Cognition's $48B and Mistral's $24B fundraises, GPT Image 2.5, and Meta's Muse agent relaunch.
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Grouped Value Attention: Efficient KV Caching via On-Demand Key Reconstruction
Grouped Value Attention stores grouped values and reconstructs content keys via a learned linear map, cutting KV-cache size about 45-47% versus GQA.
GVA stores only grouped values and reconstructs content keys with a learned linear map absorbed into the query at decode time, while a small shared decoupled RoPE channel preserves positional information via a separately cached positional key. At 350M parameters trained on 30B FineWeb-Edu tokens, the 16-dimensional positional variant scores 44.18 average accuracy across five tasks versus 44.36 for GQA and 43.88 for MLA. Custom decoding kernels are in development with an open-source release planned.
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A Theoretical Analysis of Generalization Dynamics in Neural Networks under Gradient Descent with Weight Decay
Theoretical framework bounds generalization for gradient descent with weight decay, deriving conditions that explain delayed generalization and grokking.
The paper proves convergence of gradient descent with weight decay to a neighborhood of global minimizers of the empirical l2 loss for a broad class of neural networks. It decomposes population error into data, optimization, and prediction variation errors, deriving cellwise and layerwise approximate-homogeneity bounds on prediction variation along the training trajectory. The resulting necessary and sufficient conditions explain layerwise generalization differences and provide a theoretical characterization of grokking.
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Scalability Analysis of Distributed Kolmogorov-Arnold Network Training on High-Performance Computing Systems
An empirical study shows distributed Kolmogorov-Arnold Network training reaches 74.7% parallel efficiency at 8 A100 GPUs, with overheads driven by All-Reduce choices.
The study evaluates data-parallel Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) training on the FinisTerrae III supercomputer using up to 8 NVIDIA A100 GPUs across 4 nodes with PyTorch Distributed Data Parallel. Strong scaling yields 5.97x speedup and 74.7% parallel efficiency at 8 GPUs, comparable to conventional deep learning workloads, while communication overhead ranges from 1.3% to 6.1%, driven mainly by All-Reduce algorithm selection and inter-node latency rather than KAN's edge-wise gradient structure. Weak scaling shows an initial single-to-multi-GPU throughput drop followed by stability, and the parameter-to-memory ratio improves with model size even as training time scales unfavorably. The authors provide GPU topology and model-size deployment guidelines for KAN training.
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Measuring Language Transfer in Robot Policies: Adding Greek to a Cosmos3 Vision-Language-Action Policy
Researchers added Greek to the Cosmos3 vision-language-action policy using only machine-rephrased instructions, finding bilingual training reaches roughly two fifths of English performance.
The paper studies localizing the open Cosmos3 vision-language-action robot policy to Greek without architectural changes, using machine-rephrased instructions only. Bilingual training yields a consistent 6.7-7.1 point margin over controls on a 90-task, three-seed evaluation suite, while Greek-only training gains at most 2.7 points. Several common evaluation instruments, including color-histogram metrics and single-goal benchmarks, produced false conclusions, and results were dominated by seed variation. The authors recommend building guaranteed-null baselines and replicating low-resource-language results across seeds.
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SQS: Bayesian DNN Compression through Sparse Quantized Sub-distributions
SQS unifies weight pruning and low-bit quantization via Bayesian variational learning, compressing Llama3.2 and Qwen2.5 at higher rates with comparable accuracy.
SQS introduces a unified Bayesian variational framework performing simultaneous pruning and low-bit quantization, using a spike-and-slab prior for sparsity and Gaussian Mixture Models to model quantized weights. The authors derive an efficient approximation for the intractable objective and provide a consistency result for the variational approach. Experiments on ResNet, BERT-base, Llama3.2, and Qwen2.5 show higher compression rates than prior baselines with comparable performance drops.
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Harnessing CLIP and DINO: An Uncertainty-Aware Cascaded Fusion Network for Generalizable Deepfake Image Detection
UCF-Net fuses CLIP and DINO features with entropy-based uncertainty weighting to improve generalizable deepfake image detection across generators.
Researchers propose UCF-Net, an uncertainty-aware cascaded fusion network that combines CLIP's language-aligned semantic priors with DINO's self-supervised visual-structure priors for deepfake detection. It aggregates hierarchical features across transformer depths via layer-wise expert modules and performs weighted fusion driven by entropy-derived uncertainty. The authors consolidate public deepfake datasets into a unified benchmark of roughly 4 million images plus a cross-generator set of over 8,000 faces from eight recent generators, where UCF-Net achieves the best mean AUC among evaluated methods, though zero-shot transfer remains challenging.
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Distill Globally, Adapt Locally: Reasoning Distillation and Product-Type Test-Time Training for Scalable Trade-Up Recommendation
A distillation framework compresses LLM reasoning into a 15.5M-parameter trade-up recommendation model reaching AUC 0.941 with product-type test-time training.
The paper targets trade-up recommendation, which identifies higher-quality alternatives that preserve customer purchase intent. A retrieval-augmented few-shot LLM teacher generates labels and rationales that supervise a compact embedding-pair classifier; at inference the 15.5M-parameter student uses only two precomputed 768-dimensional embeddings with no LLM calls. On 8,352 annotated pairs, label-only training scored AUC 0.912, reasoning distillation reached 0.924, and product-type test-time training lifted it to 0.941 with average precision 0.940. The distilled student is roughly 5,000x faster and 10,000x cheaper than direct LLM inference on a 100K-pair proxy catalog.
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Why AI food looks like that
Experts explain why AI-generated food images look unappetizing, citing diffusion model limitations, weak structural reasoning, and stylized training data.
The Verge examines why AI-generated food imagery from restaurants and brands often appears grotesque, citing researchers from Oxford, Naples, Zurich, and London. Diffusion models recover coarse structure before fine texture, so structural errors like extra fingers or donut shrimp get baked in early. Researchers note the models are weak at thin, continuous, terminating structures such as noodles, and reproduce the glossy conventions of professional food photography without understanding the objects. Odd internet imagery and memes in training data further skew outputs toward strange textures and clustered holes.
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Bilevel Coordinated Reflection: A Game-Theoretic Approach to Multi-Agent LLM Systems
Paper models multi-agent LLM orchestration as a bilevel game, proving transcript-only gating limits and introducing grounded-memory SRMA.
A new paper frames orchestrator-worker coordination in multi-agent LLM systems as a bilevel coordination game and analyzes free-form reflection as stochastic movement over semantic memory states, deriving finite-time bounds and an information-theoretic impossibility result: no gate observing only the generated transcript can uniformly improve over text-indistinguishable environments, while an environment-grounded gate can. The authors propose Stochastic Reflective Memory Ascent (SRMA), which accepts candidate memory only when grounded evaluation risk strictly decreases, with geometric or polynomial convergence guarantees. On 500 SWE-bench instances, a Kimi-based instantiation of the full system resolves 72.2% versus a 70.8% public mini-SWE-agent reference.
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Import AI 470: No rights for machines; automating environment generation with SPADE; and building better GPU kernels with Hawkeye
METR analysis finds AI accelerating cyber vulnerability discovery, while SPADE self-play environment generation improves Qwen3 reasoning benchmark scores at 30B scale.
Import AI 470 discusses a METR research note reporting differential acceleration from AI: major acceleration in reported cyber vulnerabilities (cURL, OpenSSL, Firefox, Microsoft, NVD, OSV), minor acceleration in mathematics, and no measurable acceleration in AI-research optimization benchmarks. It also covers SPADE, a self-play framework from a multi-university team (University of Washington, Stanford, MIT, CMU, and others) that co-evolves executable training environments and agent capability using Environment Designer and Reasoning Agent roles with hint-based regret rewards. Trained on Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507, Qwen3-8B, and Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507 via GRPO (400 rollouts of 25 environments), SPADE lifted the 30B-A3B game-environment suite average to 58.3, +8.1 over base, and improved tool-use results across backbones. The issue also references Hawkeye for building better GPU kernels.
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