Search: “zero-shot-generalization”

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Eliciting Weak-to-Strong Generalization with On-Policy Reverse Distillation

OPRD distillation enables weak-to-strong generalization by amplifying verifier-supported policy updates, outperforming existing RL and distillation methods with fewer student updates.

On-Policy Reverse Distillation (OPRD) evaluates a weak teacher's policy shift relative to its reference policy on student rollouts and amplifies the verifier-supported component of the student's policy gradient. This rescaling preserves the stationary points of policy optimization while letting the student learn beyond the teacher's capacity ceiling. In successive model transfer and multi-teacher distillation, OPRD achieves higher performance with fewer student updates than existing RL and distillation approaches, and response-style analysis shows students remain closer to verifier-RL-trained models than to their weak teachers.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 7, 20:00 UTC · 9d agoAI research

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Right Tool, Right Job: Native-Language Evaluation, Tokenizer Sensitivity, and Methodological Findings from a French-Only BabyLM

French BabyLM entry METRON-FR (125M GPT-2, 92.47M words) shows tokenizer artifacts dominate child-scale zero-shot evaluation; proposes standard diagnostics.

METRON-FR is a 125M-parameter GPT-2 pretrained on 92.47M French words, submitted to the BabyLM 2026 Strict track, scoring 85.97% on the native Quebec-French QFrBLiMP benchmark and 62.80% on the BabyLM-weighted leaderboard. A cross-lingual GLUE protocol combining French task-data translation with rank-16 LoRA shows relational tasks gain while world-knowledge tasks regress. Bilingual Lexicon Induction reaches p@1 of 68.84%, 18x above chance, and ablations show single-token zero-shot scoring is dominated by tokenizer and template artifacts at child scale.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 15, 16:43 UTC · 1d agoAI research

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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.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 7, 16:59 UTC · 9d agoAI research

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ThinkPrior: Zero-Rollout Difficulty Priors for Cold-Start Prompt Selection in RLVR

ThinkPrior builds zero-rollout difficulty priors via an offline verifier-anchored pass, halving silent groups in RLVR and cutting wasted rollouts on Qwen2.5-Math-7B.

In GRPO-based RLVR, groups where all rollouts are correct or all are wrong yield zero advantages and consume about 39% of a run's rollouts under uniform sampling. ThinkPrior initializes a Beta posterior from an external anchor pass's verifier-scored pass rate, selecting prompts by expected learnability before any target-policy rollout, without changing the loss or optimizer. On Qwen2.5-Math-7B across sixteen seeds it more than halves early silent groups and cuts wasted rollouts through step 30 by nearly a fifth, with no detected final-accuracy difference. The ThinkPrior+DAPO composition reduces generated rollouts by 10.6% at an equal 3,840-rollout update budget.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 8, 17:30 UTC · 8d agoAI research1

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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.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 10, 17:43 UTC · 6d agoAI research

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Convergent Emergence of In-Context Learning Across Modalities

Controlled experiments show few-shot in-context learning emerges across six modalities including language, genomes, images, and proteins, partially supporting a convergence hypothesis.

The paper tests the Convergent Emergence Hypothesis: that few-shot in-context learning, when it emerges, shares a common cross-modality difficulty profile. A controlled framework instantiated the same task suite across six modalities: language, genome, integer sequences, time series, images, and proteins. Paired-mapping ICL emerged in all six modalities, surpassed controlled baselines, and showed correlated per-task effects in five of them, providing partial support for the hypothesis.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 11, 20:00 UTC · 5d agoAI research

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Type Diversity Enables Transformers to Generalise Compositionally

Researchers show lexical-versus-structural compositional generalization gaps in Transformers stem from type diversity imbalance in datasets, not architectural limits.

The paper argues that Transformers' difficulty with structural compositional generalization is an artifact of low structural type diversity in prior benchmark datasets rather than an architectural limitation. Using Grammatical Framework, the authors create linguistically diverse variants of COGS and SLOG. They find type diversity correlates with compositional generalization equally in lexical and structural test cases, contradicting previous claims that compound divergence explains task difficulty.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 11, 17:59 UTC · 5d agoAI research

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Foundation Models for Generalizable Semantic and Goal-Oriented Communication

FMSGOC uses vision-language foundation model priors plus diffusion reconstruction to enable generalizable semantic communication at 0.039 bits per pixel for 6G.

FMSGOC targets generalization failures in semantic and goal-oriented communication for 6G by leveraging broad visual-linguistic foundation model priors. A vision-language model selects sparse, goal-aligned semantic anchors while a fine-tuned diffusion model performs masked completion to reconstruct images at the receiver, decoupling what to send from how to reconstruct. On CIFAR-10 it reaches 0.039 bits per pixel with cosine similarity 0.87-0.90 and 0.83-0.86 on unseen ImageNet inputs, outperforming end-to-end baselines at lower bit rates.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 7, 18:12 UTC · 9d agoAI research

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Likelihood-free inference with nuisance parameters through normalizing flows

Researchers decompose normalizing flows to derive near-pivotal statistics for likelihood-free inference with nuisance parameters, recovering the t-test and beating Welch limits.

A new paper decomposes neural-network normalizing flows to uncover pivotal statistics in the presence of nuisance parameters using only a sample generator from the distribution of interest. The statistic is near-pivotal in the sense of minimum average KL-divergence of its p-values and can incorporate prior knowledge of group invariances such as translation and scale. Experiments show it recovers the one-sample t-test almost exactly, outperforms the Welch test on worst-case size over a constrained variance-ratio range, and delivers higher power and much faster runtime than profile likelihood-ratio techniques on small-to-moderate samples.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 9, 17:58 UTC · 7d agoAI research

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General Quantification of Covariate and Concept Shifts

Paper proposes γ*-concept shifts via entropic optimal transport, deriving estimable generalization bounds unifying covariate and concept shift under distribution shift.

The authors show existing definitions of concept shift break when source and target supports mismatch and propose γ*-concept shifts grounded in entropic optimal transport. They derive a general error bound covering broad loss functions, label spaces and stochastic labeling, plus estimators with concentration guarantees. The resulting DataShifts algorithm quantifies distribution shifts and estimates the error bound in most applications, addressing learning bounds that were previously non-estimable from samples.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 10, 17:57 UTC · 6d agoAI research1

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Distance generalization in transformers: why bother with positional encoding?

arXiv study uses synthetic delay-copy tasks to show how RoPE, ALiBi, NoPE and training data diversity affect transformers' distance generalization.

The paper studies distance generalization in transformers: extrapolating when inter-token distances change between training and inference while context length stays fixed. Using two synthetic delay-copy tasks with finite source-recall distances, the authors test models on unseen delays. They investigate whether positional encodings such as RoPE and ALiBi outperform no positional encoding (NoPE), how the diversity of training distances affects performance, and when distance transfer learning is positive or negative.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 10, 17:57 UTC · 6d agoAI research2

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OracleZoom: On-Policy Self-Distillation Inspired Reference-Constrained Recursive Image Super Resolution

OracleZoom enables recursive extreme-scale image super-resolution via reference-constrained on-policy distillation, reducing hallucinations at deep zoom scales.

OracleZoom tackles recursive super-resolution, where repeated feeding of predictions back into the same model leaves deeper-scale outputs unsupervised as required source resolution grows geometrically. The framework trains on its own trajectory while carrying the last ground-truth evidence beyond the supervision boundary, combining direct and cross-scale supervision, a no-reference quality objective, a KL-constrained pretrained latent prior, and EMA consistency. Across seven datasets it achieves state-of-the-art SR quality across zoom scales, averaging 0.713 CLIPIQA with larger gains at deeper scales and significantly reduced hallucinations. Code, data, and models are publicly released.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 5, 20:00 UTC · 11d agoAI research

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Semigroup-JEPA: Latent Dynamics Consistency for Zero-Shot Physics Generalization

SG-JEPA world model conditions latent prediction on physical parameters, halving open-loop prediction error versus DINO-WM and boosting robotic control success.

SG-JEPA extends the LeWorldModel JEPA framework by supplying the governing physics parameter to the temporal model via action-conditioning and jointly training an encoder and predictor through autoregressive latent rollout. On out-of-distribution gravitational-field tasks it reduces open-loop prediction error by up to 2x versus DINO-WM on 2D datasets and increases 3D robotic control success rate up to 2.5x using independently trained diffusion policies. A linear feature analysis attributes most of the gain to the encoder learning features that the predictor can carry forward through rollout.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 9, 17:08 UTC · 7d agoAI research

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Augustinian BabyLM: What Ostensive Definition Can and Cannot Teach a Small Language Model

Study shows visually grounded token embeddings in a small masked LM persist through training and improve object-property knowledge, but escape standard BabyLM benchmarks.

The paper implements ostensive definition for a small DeBERTa masked language model trained on 10M words, seeding visually grounded tokens with embeddings derived from labeled image regions before training. Visual initialization leaves a persistent, seed-replicated advantage on object-property knowledge (COMPS) and a corpus-tailored Visual-Property Swap benchmark covering color, material, size, and shape, but has no effect on most BabyLM grammar benchmarks. Synthetic grounding of previously unseeded words causally transfers the advantage to exactly those words.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 10, 17:43 UTC · 6d agoAI research

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RelateAnything: Real-Time Open-Vocabulary Relation Prediction From Any Inputs

RelateAnything is a 53M-parameter open-vocabulary relation prediction model running at 20 ms/frame, with 2.3-3.5x higher mean recall than comparable open-vocabulary methods.

RelateAnything predicts scored relations between image regions using any predicate vocabulary supplied at inference as text embeddings, with object labels never required as input, so region sources can change without retraining. Training covers 19,103 predicates using positive-unlabeled supervision; the authors release RA-4M (474k images, 4.3M geometrically verified relations over 10,102 free-text predicates) and the OV-SGG-Bench evaluation suite. The 53M-parameter model runs at 20 ms/frame and achieves 2.3-3.5x the mean recall of the strongest comparable open-vocabulary method across cross-dataset and zero-shot benchmarks. Model, corpus, and benchmark are public.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 10, 20:00 UTC · 6d agoAI research1

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SAS: Simple Attention Sparsification via End-to-End Optimization of Context Ranking

SAS trains attention sparsification end-to-end with the language modeling loss, beating sparse attention baselines especially under tight context budgets.

Simple Attention Sparsification (SAS) injects the selector's continuous scores into attention logits in log form inside the softmax, letting gradients from the language modeling loss directly update the ranking of context units. The method uses normalized softmax gates calibrated against the current block and a memory-efficient Triton kernel integrated into FlashAttention-style computation. Across reasoning, long-context, and agentic tasks, SAS consistently outperforms trainable sparse attention baselines across budgets, with the largest gains under tight attention budgets.

Hugging Face daily papers·updated Sep 11, 17:58 UTC · 5d ago·first Sep 10, 20:00 UTC · 6d agoAI research 2 sources1

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Cross-modal learning for SAR target recognition using optical vision foundation models

Frozen DINOv3 optical prototypes supervise SAR target recognition without EO/SAR pairs, improving classification on the heavily imbalanced UNICORNv2 dataset.

The framework aligns SAR embeddings to class-level prototypes built from a frozen DINOv3 electro-optical encoder, requiring no strict EO/SAR image pairs. At inference the SAR model operates independently without access to optical imagery. On UNICORNv2, a civilian vehicle dataset with heavy speckle and severe class imbalance, EO prototype alignment improves accuracy over frozen DINOv3, SAR-only finetuning, and unpaired distribution alignment baselines.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 7, 16:54 UTC · 9d agoAI research

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Studying Image Tokenizers as Visual Languages in Unified Multimodal Models

A controlled autoregressive testbed shows validation losses must be analyzed per task, and image tokenizer choice affects joint multimodal text modeling.

Researchers built a pure-autoregressive testbed to study image tokenizers as the 'visual language' of unified multimodal models, tracking task-specific validation losses during multimodal continual pretraining across text, image, text-to-image (T2I), and image-to-text (I2T) prediction. They found that losses exhibit distinct scaling behavior per task and rank tokenizers differently, and that I2T loss over a shared text vocabulary gives a more consistent loss–performance signal than T2I loss. Better reconstruction does not necessarily yield lower task-specific losses or stronger downstream performance, and tokenizer choice can affect text modeling under joint optimization. Case studies examine the discriminator, semantic supervision, and vocabulary size design axes.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 7, 20:00 UTC · 9d agoAI research1

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The Pelican comparison grid for Astra is pretty interesting

Simon Willison's pelican SVG comparison shows GPT-6 Astra producing markedly better images than GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna across reasoning levels.

Willison generated pelicans-riding-bicycles SVGs with newly accessed GPT-6 Astra at low through max reasoning levels and rendered them in a comparison grid against GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna. Astra's outputs were markedly more coherent, while even the best GPT-5.6-Sol images remained largely abstract shapes. Astra does not support a reasoning=none setting, so all comparisons involved reasoning-enabled runs.

Simon Willison·Sep 4, 23:59 UTC · 11d agoAI research

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ZGCM-1: A Fully Open and Extremely Efficient Foundation Model for Math and Agentic Search

ZGCM-1 is a fully open 7B foundation model with 256K context that stays competitive with frontier models on math reasoning and agentic search.

ZGCM-1 is a fully open 7B dense foundation model trained from scratch using an efficiency-focused recipe: interleaved gated sliding-window and full attention, a stable FP8 Muon optimizer, and MDP-based mid-training with context scaling across 16K, 64K, and 256K. On mathematical reasoning and agentic search suites it remains competitive with much larger frontier models such as Qwen3-235B-A22B and GLM-5.1. The recipe yields a ~4.2x improvement in 16K pre-training time-to-loss, and all weights, checkpoints, training code, data recipes, and W&B logs are open-sourced.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 10, 20:00 UTC · 6d agoModel release

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MAxBench: A Multinomial Concept Recovery Benchmark

MAxBench evaluates multinomial concept recovery methods, finding affine subspaces steer most reliably but none consistently beats prompting.

MAxBench is a geometry-agnostic evaluation framework for multinomial concept representations in language models, based on sampling from recovered concept representations. It compares 10 localization methods covering 5 geometry types across 6 concepts and 4 models. Findings show affine subspaces steer more reliably than rank-one or linear subspaces due to better non-zero offsets, manifold steering is competitive where applicable, and no method consistently outperforms prompting.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 11, 17:08 UTC · 5d agoAI research

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Privacy Failure in Split-LLM Training, The Returned Gradient Nullifies the Decoys

Researchers show split-LLM training leaks privacy via zero-valued gradients on decoy rows, exposing which activations are real despite passing forward-channel checks.

A systems-security case study of a two-node split-LLM training setup found that the returned output gradient from an Untrusted Cloud Node is exactly zero for decoy rows, revealing which rows are real. Across nine seeds, zero patterns identified real rows in 4,096 of 4,096 frames per run, and an attack on frame contents recovered 0.65 to 1.50 percentage points of extra tokens over a baseline. Both datasets passed forward-channel privacy and quality checks but failed once the returned gradient was included. Row-wise gradient clipping and noise closed the leak for roughly 0.01 nats of held-out cross-entropy, though five unmeasured attack classes remain.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 2, 20:00 UTC · 14d agoAI safety & security

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Benign Loss Landscapes Can Coexist with Worst-Case Hardness

Theory paper shows tree tensor networks contain worst-case hard targets yet benign loss landscapes, with difficulty arising from degenerate saddles.

The paper studies tree tensor networks (TTNs), which generalize deep linear networks and Tucker decompositions and embed arbitrary read-once Boolean formulas. It proves that every local minimum that is minimum-norm is global for every realizable target, so bad local minima do not distinguish typical from worst-case problems. Instead, learning difficulty arises from high-order degenerate saddle points caused by rank-deficiency, illustrated via a parity function case study, linking landscape geometry to computational hardness.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 11, 16:57 UTC · 5d agoAI research

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GE-Act 2.0: Pretraining and Scaling a World-Action Model for Robotic Manipulation

GE-Act 2.0 is a from-scratch pretrained world-action model for robotic manipulation, with success rising from 17.1% to 44.1% as co-training data scales to 30,000 hours.

Genie Envisioner Act 2.0 (GE-Act 2.0) is a world-action model whose generative and action components are all initialized from scratch on manipulation data, combining a control-oriented autoencoder (CoAE), single-step visual planner (SVP), and inverse dynamics model (IDM) trained jointly via knowledge-aligned selective optimization (KASO). Scaling co-training data from 300 to 30,000 hours raises zero-shot success from 17.1% to 44.1% on G1-OP and 13.4% to 31.1% on G2-90D, despite the latter comprising under 2% of data, suggesting cross-embodiment transfer. Gains span 19/20 and 18/20 skill groups, and skill-specific coverage correlates with zero-shot OOD success (Pearson r=0.80).

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 3, 20:00 UTC · 13d agoAI research

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Beyond Solver Verdicts: Generative Reward Models for Autoformalization

Researchers introduce Generative Verification (GenV), a generative reward model achieving 0.961 AUROC in detecting unfaithful autoformalization that preserves solver verdicts.

The paper formalizes Verdict-Preserving-Unfaithfulness (VPU), a failure mode in neurosymbolic autoformalization where an incorrect encoding executes successfully and matches the expected solver verdict, and proves verdict-only verification is bounded to chance-level detection. The proposed Generative Verification (GenV) distills an offline Z3-equivalence oracle into a reference-free, continuous reference-equivalence score within the language model's vocabulary space. The oracle-mined verifier (GenV+HN) achieves 0.961 AUROC, generalizes zero-shot across unseen translators and formal styles, and yields an 11.3-point downstream accuracy gain in agentic test-time compute allocation. Mechanistic analysis with decision-projected logit lenses and sparse autoencoders shows the generative readout extracts precise spatial error coordinates without explicit localization training.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 9, 20:00 UTC · 7d agoAI research1

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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.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 6, 20:00 UTC · 10d agoAI research

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When Does Scale-Invariant Optimization Become Unstable? An Exact Schedule Law with Weight Decay

Researchers derive an exact law linking learning-rate schedules and weight decay in normalized networks, pinpointing when scale-invariant optimization destabilizes.

The paper shows that normalization makes large parts of neural networks scale-invariant, creating a hidden feedback loop where learning-rate schedules and weight decay interact through the parameter norm to control the effective optimizer step. An exact discrete-time law with a single scalar quantity separates contraction- and expansion-dominated effective learning-rate regimes, and the balance point is intrinsically unstable, so constant learning rate with weight decay produces recurrent behavior instead of a stable equilibrium. A unified homogeneous-optimizer framework explains why adaptive methods stabilize more weakly under normalization. The law is validated with high precision on MLPs, CNNs, and GPT-2 across MNIST, CIFAR, WikiText, and OpenWebText, with code released on GitHub.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 8, 17:46 UTC · 8d agoAI research

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Nearly Tight Rademacher Bounds for Sparsely Activated Neural Networks

Theory paper derives nearly tight Rademacher complexity bounds for sparsely activated one-hidden-layer ReLU networks.

Building on Awasthi et al. (COLT 2024), the authors bound statistical complexity for networks where each input activates at most k of s hidden units. A support-preserving cover and normalized chaining argument remove the explicit dimension factor, with matching lower bounds up to logarithms. They also derive agnostic minimax excess-risk bounds of order min{1, sqrt(s/(km))} for a normalized bounded loss and show bias bounds comparable to WR restore worst-case rates even on domains where sparsity holds globally.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 8, 17:53 UTC · 8d agoAI research

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Quenched Ensemble Sampling

Quenched Ensemble Sampling generalizes nested sampling's hard energy constraint to repulsive potentials, traversing first-order phase transitions where tempering fails.

Quenched Ensemble Sampling generalizes nested sampling's hard energy constraint into a family of repulsive potentials at the energy boundary, preserving monotone energy descent while making the constrained target amenable to scalable gradient-based kernels. On synthetic phase-transition models it estimates marginal likelihood and draws posterior samples across first-order transitions where popular alternatives such as tempering fail. Applications include marginal likelihood estimation for Bayesian neural network architecture comparison and partition function estimation in a high-dimensional continuous lattice field theory.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 14, 17:16 UTC · 2d agoAI research1

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Understanding the Impact of Model Pruning on Long-Tail Forgetting and Explanation Reliability in Medical Imaging

Systematic study finds model pruning causes frequency-dependent long-tail forgetting in medical imaging and that gradient-informed methods best preserve explanations.

Across two long-tailed medical imaging datasets, two CNN architectures, four pruning methods, and sparsity up to 95%, the study measures predictive performance, explanation stability, and faithfulness. Rare classes degrade earlier and more severely than frequent ones, while explanation reliability depends mainly on the pruning strategy, with gradient-informed methods degrading least. Mechanistic analysis ties explanation collapse to loss of class-discriminative gradients rather than vanishing feature activations, recommending class- and explanation-aware evaluation of compression.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 7, 17:44 UTC · 9d agoAI research

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