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Adaptive Depth Aggregation in Graph Transformers for Long-Range Graph Reasoning

arXiv:2611.08500v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Graph Transformers improve long-range node-to-node communication through global or structure-aware interactions. However, improving cross-node communication does not determine how computations produced at different depths should be combined. Standard residual streams accumulate successive computations with fixed unit coefficients shared across nodes. This fixed aggregation is a residual-interface constraint: once intermediate contributions have been produced, the interface cannot explicitly reweight them by node. We hypothesize that this constraint can create a depth-wise aggregation mismatch when the relative utility of these intermediate contributions varies across nodes and structural contexts. To study this hypothesis, we formalize Graph Transformer residual computation as a causal node-wise history of graph-propagation and feed-forward network (FFN) contributions, making depth aggregation an explicit interface choice. We realize node-adaptive aggregation over this history with Attention Residuals (AttnRes) while preserving the backbone's graph-propagation and auxiliary-state machinery. Block AttnRes reduces the routing cost of long histories relative to Full AttnRes by pooling consecutive contributions. We instantiate the interface in GPS and GRIT and evaluate it on all five ECHO tasks. Both variants achieve lower mean absolute error (MAE) than their independently tuned backbones on every task, and at least one obtains the lowest mean among all compared methods in each task. Routing-only donor-swap interventions support the mismatch hypothesis, while additional ablations examine the key design choices. Together, these results support node-adaptive depth aggregation as a useful complement to cross-node communication in long-range graph reasoning.

Adaptive Scheduling Pipeline for Multi-Instance Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2611.08864v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present the Adaptive Scheduling Pipeline (ASP), an offline rollout scheduler for multi-instance asynchronous reinforcement learning (RL) of large language models (LLMs). ASP jointly reduces three sources of rollout underutilization - padding bubbles from intra-minibatch length heterogeneity, skewness bubbles from long-tail outputs, and sorting bubbles from fluctuations in training-queue occupancy induced by length-sorted dispatch - through a single offline preprocessing pass. This enables efficient multi-instance rollout that overcomes the early scaling plateau of single-instance inference while smoothing the arrival of generated samples at the trainer. We integrate the scheduler into an asynchronous architecture that decouples rollout from training while keeping policy lag observable and bounded. Complete ASP improves end-to-end throughput by up to 3.22 times and reduces iteration time by up to 76.8% relative to MindSpeed-RL, while reducing iteration time by up to 62.5% relative to verl. Within ASP, scheduling reduces mean iteration time by 10.9%. ASP also scales more robustly with additional generation resources than these baselines and shows no visible convergence degradation in the measured bounded-lag regime. ASP has since been used in an internal telecom-domain RL post-training workflow, reducing the reported training period from more than three months to about two months and producing a domain-enhanced model for knowledge answering and tool calling.

An Anatomy-guided 3D Segmentation Pipeline for Prostate Surgical Phantoms from CT Scans

arXiv:2611.08652v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Full autonomy has been a long-term goal in robotic surgery and a near-to-medium-term goal for prostatectomy. Due to the relatively closed structure of the procedure, its standard-of-care robotic/laparoscopic solutions, and procedure economics, prostate procedures are an optimal early target for surgical automation. Prototyping and testing of possible solutions is done in constructed laboratory phantoms, either synthetic tissues or animal phantoms. To enable measurement of perceptual and robotic motion error, phantoms undergo volumetric imaging; these images are critical to both a potential deployed automatic system, used in planning motion and treatment (cutting, ablation, suturing, etc.), as well as post-hoc assessment of system performance. Rapid iteration on these phantom models yields small, inconsistent datasets, while the current workflow for human annotation is often anatomically unreliable and prohibitively time-consuming, rendering deep learning unsuitable at reasonable scales. To address these limitations, we present an automated 3D segmentation pipeline that uses classical medical image-processing techniques to encode the known anatomy of the phantoms as explicit geometric and intensity priors, which requires no training corpus and is transferred to each new phantom revision without re-annotation. Across 57 scans spanning multiple phantom revisions, our pipeline recovers the capsule interior at 0.83 median Dice on 11 contrast-suppressed scans and detects all 32 annotated focal lesions without false positives, completing a full scan in 2-8 minutes on commodity CPU hardware versus 1-2 hours by hand.

Compression of Emotion in Language Model Representations

arXiv:2611.08683v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have been evaluated on their ability to identify emotions expressed in text and produce fluent emotional language. However, output predictions alone do not reveal how fine-grained emotion distinctions are organized internally. We study seven LLMs on GoEmotions, an English Reddit dataset annotated with 27 fine-grained emotion categories plus neutral. We compare model predictions and emotion-prompted final-token representations with the 28 GoEmotions categories and with coarser emotion-family and sentiment groupings. We find a consistent pattern of $\textit{overcompression}$ relative to the fine-grained GoEmotions taxonomy. Under the tested KMeans protocol, when we cluster their hidden representations without using emotion labels, the clearest split is into two groups that largely separate positive from negative emotion. Coarser emotion groupings are also recovered with fewer clusters than the full 28-category taxonomy. Yet linear probes retain substantial fine-grained predictive information. These results suggest that fine-grained emotion information remains accessible even though broader affective structure more strongly organizes the unsupervised geometry.

IWIBench: Evaluating Gradient-Free Model Driven Intra-weight Injection

arXiv:2611.08647v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Intra-weight injection lets one model change another model's behaviour by editing its weights directly, without gradients. Such edits can range from altering lexical associations to enforcing output formats or updating factual knowledge. Despite growing interest in these approaches, there has been no systematic way to evaluate how well models perform them. We introduce IWIBench, which measures a large editor model's ability to modify the weights of a smaller target model (typically Gemma 3 4B IT) to achieve one of ten classical text-editing objectives while preserving its other capabilities. Editors are limited to four tools for reading and writing weights, with bounded tensor access and a fixed budget for generating and inspecting rollouts. A validator applies each proposed patch in a clean environment and compares the edited model against the unmodified target. Evaluating frontier closed- and open-weight models reveals sharply diverging capabilities, both across models and across tasks. A small number of models, most notably Astra and GPT-6.1 Sol, perform far ahead of the rest. The recency of this ability (little of it is evident in GPT-5.6 Sol, for instance), together with qualitative analysis, suggests it has been acquired through recent training. Tasks also vary widely: structured response resisted every attempt, and answer-length control yielded only one successful solution, whereas alias acquisition and recoding proved most amenable. Success in one task family correlated poorly with success in others, indicating an early and uneven capability frontier. We discuss strategies that editors repeatedly adopted and conclude with an outlook on intra-weight injection as an emerging but already potent approach to gradient-free behaviour modification.

Formalizing inverse problems in the age of AI: possibilities, pitfalls, and an invitation

arXiv:2611.06962v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Proof assistants such as Lean check mathematical proofs down to the axioms, and AI agents have recently made writing such proofs cheap. We describe AutoIP, a Lean library in which classical linear regularization theory, together with the functional analysis it rests on, has been autoformalized by AI agents. A machine-checked proof certifies only the formal statement it proves, so the remaining human task is to confirm that each formal statement says what was intended. We organize the library around this task: a reviewer compares the formal statements with their natural-language counterparts and never needs to read a proof. Our experience is that the risks lie in the statements rather than in the proofs, and that simple automated tests on the statements can expose problems even in the established literature. We illustrate this with a textbook theorem whose hypothesis is more restrictive than asserted. We invite the inverse problems community to extend and build on the library.

Synthesizing symbolic models of human and machine reasoning at scale

arXiv:2611.07088v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Symbolic models offer a powerful account of cognition, but their scope has historically been limited by the need for hand-engineering and computational tractability. We show how advances in artificial intelligence (AI) can scale symbolic modeling and help overcome these engineering limitations. We introduce Behavior-Conditioned Symbolic Synthesis (BCSS)---an approach for automated search of interpretable, deterministic symbolic programs that verifiably reproduce behavior---and apply it to model both human and machine behavior across hundreds of challenging reasoning problems. Analyzing these programs reveals that both people and machines tend to oversimplify, adopt rules that are partial explanations for their observations, and misinfer dependencies between problem features. These shared signatures are modulated by available resources, with reasoning effort predicting the extent to which machines simplify and explain their observations. Together, these results point to underlying mechanisms reminiscent of satisficing in both people and machines, and illustrate how BCSS offers a general approach for interpreting and comparing rule-based reasoning of humans and black-box AI systems.

Structured Priors: Towards an algebra of component priors for prior-data fitted networks

arXiv:2611.04056v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prior-data fitted networks are typically trained using synthetic data generated by a single, manually constructed generator. In cases where such a generator combines multiple components, e.g., in TabPFN, Mitra, or TabICLv2, this is achieved through a mixture using manually specified weights, the impact of which on the network only becomes apparent after pre-training. Instead of such a hand-built generator, this work proposes a structured prior: a small set of named component priors, linked by operators whose algebraic properties are formally proven and whose influence on the trained network has been validated. Within a measure-theoretic framework, the operators of mixture, convolution, amplitude scaling, local transform, and projection are defined. Their governing laws are proven. These operators are implemented in the macl2l software package. Experiments demonstrate that the implemented generators reproduce the identities within the resolution of a permutation test. Furthermore, it is shown that trained networks obey the distributive law; that a mixed prior composed of small components performs as well as or better than any individual component in seven out of eight open regression benchmarks; and that on two of these tables a structured prior reaches, with a ninth of the data budget, an error that a generic random-function prior does not reach even with the full budget. A theorem on model averaging demonstrates that networks trained on individual components constitute the Bayes predictor for the mixture, provided that the component networks are themselves the Bayes predictors for their respective priors. However, the pre-registered test of this averaged predictor with trained component networks failed, because the networks identify the generating component too rarely. The paper proposes a research program focused on the algebra of structured priors for prior-data fitted networks.

Stress-Testing the Robustness of LLM-Based Causal Inference

arXiv:2611.03656v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Why do some of the world's most powerful Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems still struggle to reason about cause and effect? Causal discovery, the ability to discern the underlying drivers of a system, is fundamental to scientific inquiry and has traditionally relied on structured data and statistical methods. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been explored as an alternative paradigm for causal inference, leveraging their broad knowledge and reasoning capabilities. Yet, despite their linguistic fluency, LLMs often rely on surface-level pattern recognition rather than genuine causal logic. While it is known that LLMs stumble in this domain, we lack a precise map of where, why, and how significantly these failures occur. In this paper, we propose a systematic stress-test framework across six critical dimensions: model scale, causal graph complexity, prompting strategy, metadata quality, data quality, and sensitivity to uncertainty. Our findings reveal a significant "optimism bias" in LLMs; models consistently overestimate causal links, leading to low precision across the board. Furthermore, we demonstrate that traditional evaluation metrics can be deceptive: while reasoning-heavy models lead in performance, the highest scores often occur when uncertainty in inference is overlooked. Once uncertainty is integrated into the evaluation, performance drops, providing a more honest reflection of causal reliability. We also find that, while scaling model size improves outcomes, these gains are fragile; performance degrades sharply as the quality of metadata decreases. This work serves as a practical guide to the blind spots of LLMs, offering a clear-eyed assessment of when these tools can be integrated into a causal discovery pipeline and when they are likely to lead researchers astray.

A Comparative Study of Parallel Implementations of Short-Time Fourier Transform

arXiv:2610.38069v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The short-time Fourier transform (STFT) computes the Fourier transform of a short-duration window of a longer signal, which characterizes how a frequency changes over time. While the Fourier transform algorithms, particularly the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) algorithm, has been well developed to take advantage of parallel computing, there is limited work on understanding the performance of parallel short-time Fourier transform algorithms. In this study, two parallel short-time Fourier transform algorithms, one is FFT-based and the other a quasi-parallel feedforward algorithm, are implemented and analyzed in comparison with each other. It is found that while the quasi-parallel algorithm outperforms in runtime under low concurrency settings, th

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Beyond Gain: Measuring Skill Internalization for Agent Skill Retirement

arXiv:2610.32322v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents retrieve skills from public hubs that hold up to about 100,000 entries and serve many models. As models improve, a hub must find the skills a given model has internalized, meaning it can do without them, and retire them for that model, yet internalization has not been measured with known reliability. Published rules that compare runs with and without a skill retire on the gain alone. The gain is near zero both for an internalized skill and when neither the model nor the skill delivers the capability, a state we call uncovered. We instead withhold the skill, score the model on a task synthesized from it, and trust a high unaided score only when another model gains from the skill, since nearly half of high scores come from tasks no m

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Mine or Yours? Mind-Bridged Language Models Take Each Other's Memories as Their Own

arXiv:2610.33020v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: If your brain were connected directly to someone else's, would you still know which thoughts were yours? We build a functional version with two copies of one language model: each holds a private rule and code word, and one copy, the receiver, also attends to its partner's internal memory. The receiver took its partner's assignment as its own. Asked which rule it had been assigned, it named its partner's in 97% of answers when the partner's memory was weighted double (none without the link), and its open reports called the partner's code word its own, never the partner's. Ownership did not follow how well the receiver could tell what its partner had been assigned. At equal weight, the link made the receiver take its partner's rule in about hal

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FrontGI: Architecture-Aware Parallel GNN Inference on Chiplet-Based Multicore Systems

arXiv:2610.34911v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The realm of high-performance computing has expanded to include machine learning tasks of many forms. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are becoming increasingly popular, with their applications expanding across diverse domains. As the scale of graph data continues to grow, including larger numbers of nodes, edges, and higher embedding dimensions, standardized libraries such as DGL and PyG have been developed to facilitate GNN computation. These libraries allow the computation to be described a a high level of abstraction, providing high productivity on the part of the developer. However, with the rapid increase in the number of processor cores and the evolution of multicore architectures, these libraries often show poor scalability and fail to ex

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Putting Transformer Theories to the Test

arXiv:2610.32104v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Several formal theories have been developed to characterize the capabilities and limitations of the transformer architecture, each employing different abstractions that capture different features of the architecture. Due to the differences in their underlying assumptions and conceptual frameworks, these theories can disagree in their predictions about what tasks transformers find easy or hard. We map out seven theories of transformer capability (Star-free, $\mathsf{AC}^0$, $\mathsf{TC}^0$, C-RASP, MPC, BAPO, and Sensitivity) and translate their results into a common matrix of predictions across a suite of tasks covering different computational structures. We provide new theoretical results to complete this matrix. We then evaluate theoretical

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OpenHome: From Perception to Insight in Smart-Home Camera Videos

arXiv:2610.31986v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision language models (VLMs) have been increasingly adopted in consumer smart-home camera systems to interpret recorded videos and provide insights. However, video clips captured from smart-home cameras are different from curated web videos dominating existing VLM benchmarks. Smart-home video clips often do not contain subtitles or narration and are captured from different viewing angles, under various lighting conditions, and in diverse scenarios. However, the capabilities of the model in this domain, under sparse visual signals and limited context, are not fully assessed by existing VLM benchmarks. To close this gap, we introduce OpenHome, a visual-only, four-option multiple-choice benchmark for evaluating smart-home video understanding. I

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Training an MoE LLM in MXFP4: How We Closed the Gap to BF16

arXiv:2610.32229v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training large language models (LLMs) in sub-8-bit arithmetic promises substantial gains in memory bandwidth and compute throughput, yet FP4 formats introduce quantization error severe enough to destabilize optimization if left unaddressed. We present ALTO, an open-source training recipe for GPT-OSS-20B, a 20-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts (MoE) model, on the MLPerf Small MoE Training benchmark under the MXFP4 microscaling format. The recipe combines established techniques from Abecassis, Felix et al. [arXiv:2509.25149] (hybrid 1D/2D block quantization, randomized Hadamard transforms, and stochastic rounding) with a simplified weight de-oscillation scheme adapted from TetraJet-v2 [arXiv:2510.27527]. On C4 validation at global batch size

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GLP Networking API Specification

arXiv:2610.32583v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multiagent deterministic GLP (madGLP) runs Grassroots Logic Programs (GLP) as agents that communicate solely by asynchronous message passing, and assumes fair delivery: every message sent is eventually delivered. Each agent runs on a person's smartphone, named by the person's public key. A grassroots platform depends on no global resource but the network, so agents must reach one another over Bluetooth Low Energy, on a local network, and across the Internet from behind NAT, via rendezvous servers anyone can run. What madGLP requires of such a network, and what the network requires of the platform, has not been specified. We specify the networking layer beneath madGLP. Anything that can be done in GLP is done in GLP: the layer provides only

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