s2_id,arxiv,doi,year,title,first_author,n_authors,venue,citations,abstract 85e6c6e425210b15d3f49fe0214d9d585177597e,,10.1109/TKDE.2026.3728237,2026,Toward Practical Large-Scale Dynamic Heterogeneous Graph Embedding: Cold-Start Resilient Recommendation,Ma-Biao Long,8,IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering,0,"Deploying dynamic heterogeneous graph embeddings in production faces key challenges of scalability, data freshness, and cold-start. This paper introduces a practical, two-stage solution that balances deep graph representation with low-latency incremental updates. Our framework combines HetSGFormer, a scalable graph transformer for static learning, with Incremental Locally Linear Embedding (ILLE), a lightweight, CPU-based algorithm for real-time updates. HetSGFormer captures global structure with linear scalability, while ILLE provides rapid, targeted updates to incorporate new data, thus avoiding costly full retraining. This dual approach is cold-start resilient, leveraging the graph to create meaningful embeddings from sparse data. On billion-scale graphs, online A/B tests show HetSGFormer achieved up to a 6.11% lift in Advertiser Value over previous methods, while the ILLE module added another 3.22% lift and reduced the embedding refresh interval by 83.2%, substantially improving recommendation timeliness. Our work provides a validated framework for deploying dynamic graph learning in production environments." 8611d92554deaa97a6866e7d768138a277bce2ab,2610.36192,,2026,Beyond the Estimate: Wiener-Informed Decoding for Easier Training of Pixel-Space Flow Models,Zi-Qiao Wang,2,,0,"Learning velocity fields directly in pixel space is difficult and slow. We show that coarse second-order image statistics can ease this task: frozen Wiener estimates improve velocity learning, with gains extending beyond the linear predictions they explicitly provide. Moreover, we observe similar but complementary gains from frozen bases and pixel decoding. These observations motivate Wiener-informed Decoding (WiD), which uses statistical knowledge both for direct prediction and to organize decoder computation without modifying native blocks. WiD combines a trainable Wiener prediction path with coefficient interfaces that inject features into the native decoder and return its predicted coefficient corrections, with these components initialized with data statistics. All introduced parameters, including the spectrum and coordinate transforms, are trained jointly under the original pixel-space velocity objective. Across model scales and decoder architectures, WiD accelerates training and improves generation quality with modest parameter overhead. It also yields smoother gradient trajectories and remains effective with representation alignment. WiD improves class-conditional and text-to-image generation across different resolutions. On ImageNet 256 x 256, PixelDiT-XL with WiD reaches FID 1.53 after 500 epochs, achieving comparable quality to PixelDiT with 37.5% fewer training epochs. Statistical denoisers contribute beyond the estimate: their computational structure can also ease pixel-space training." 8c761ed5ed749e18b4d716f5900933078680a89e,2610.34582,,2026,HobbyLM: A Sparse Mixture-of-Experts Model Family on a Hobby Budget,H. Ganesan,3,,0,"We describe HobbyLM, a family of small sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models trained from scratch with a few hundred to a few thousand dollars of rented GPU time. The core is a decoder-only transformer with fine-grained experts, sigmoid routing with auxiliary-loss-free load balancing, grouped-query attention with per-head QK-normalization, and aMuon/AdamW optimizer split. Each of these choices was selected with a single-variable ablation suite at 130M parameters. On this architecture we train a 500M-parameter model (169M active) on 40B FineWeb tokens and post-train it into a chat model, a masked-diffusion language model, a function-calling and computer-use agent, and a single""omni""checkpoint that reads text, images, video, sound and speech through frozen encoders and small projectors. We run these models on a laptop CPU with a from-scratch Rust inference engine. Two of the authors then adopted the architecture without architectural changes to build HobbyLM-1B (1.04B total, 305M active parameters), trained on a 100B-token curated mixture with a high-quality anneal. HobbyLM-1B reaches a 47.5 average on seven zero-shot benchmarks, and its builders also release an instruction-tuned model and an on-device macOS computer-use adapter. Finally, we describe HobbyLM-Image, a 333M-parameter flow-matching diffusion transformer that generates 1024x1024 images in a 32x-compressed latent space, together with a dependency-light CPU implementation of the full text-to-image pipeline. We report what worked, what did not, and where the small-scale ceilings lie. We also state for each component which author designed or built it." 413c9e6fbd32e763eed8893b7f781ef1019f7689,2610.33360,,2026,LSTM-Style Looped Transformers with Shared KV Caches,Andreas Kirsch,1,,0,"Recurrent transformers reuse weights to perform deep computation with fewer parameters. We study an LSTM-style transformer that also shares one key--value cache across its recurrent core. At width 1024, it uses 40.4% fewer parameters than an untied control at nearly matched forward FLOPs, and reduces persistent cache sets from fifteen to four. Parallel training supplies cache entries from a standard-attention pass, whereas continuation reads entries produced recursively using shared attention. We address this mismatch by aligning the two training passes'cache entries with a consistency loss during the final 10% of a fixed training-token budget. Across three model widths on FineWeb, this removes 81--89% of the continuation-loss penalty relative to full-cache evaluation. The improvement replicates on disjoint documents for two training seeds. Across four widths and 1.05--4.19B training tokens, the loss cost of weight tying is smallest at lower token budgets, suggesting an opportunity to use recurrent computation when data and model storage are limited." 7fa9e3213666de8208958ec077252402f86e98e1,2610.31633,,2026,BeNice! Closing Looping's Inference-Memory Gap via KV-Sharing,Hayden Prairie,4,,0,"Looped architectures scale quality while keeping parameter count fixed by repeatedly passing activations through the same block of layers. During inference, each recurrence generates independent KV-caches, causing memory to grow linearly. To address this challenge, prior work has proposed KV-sharing (i.e., sharing KV-caches across depth), finding that, in some cases, the KV-cache of the final recurrence can be shared with the earlier recurrences without quality loss, a property we denote as KV-shareability. However, the mechanisms underlying KV-shareability remain poorly understood, with even identically trained looped architectures not consistently exhibiting it. In this paper, we study how KV-shareability can be enabled in looped models. We propose a two-stage method: in the first stage, we use stochastic depth during pretraining, which induces contractive residual dynamics that drive representations toward a common limit across recurrences. In the second stage, we propose BeNice!, a post-training method that broadcasts the final recurrence's KV-cache into the first recurrence, training it to produce compatible residuals while preserving the original model's quality. As a result, BeNice! enables KV-shareability while matching standard finetuning's unshared validation perplexity. Using BeNice!, we show that KV-sharing is complementary to alternative KV-compression methods, composing with memory-efficient sequence mixers (e.g., multi-latent attention, Kimi delta attention) and low-precision KV-cache quantization (e.g., fp8, mxfp8, nvfp4). Finally, in simulated low-memory, long-context inference, KV-sharing improves cache hit rates by up to 31.4%, increases throughput by up to 23.6%, and reduces p90 time-to-first-token by up to 83.6%." 1a11bd7feec83fc01c829c45259533fb2eac36f1,2610.30949,,2026,IQuest-Q1: Advancing Foundation Capabilities for Agentic CLI Systems,Jian Yang,176,,0,"We present IQuest-Q1, a sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) agentic foundation model with 320B total parameters (15B activated). IQuest-Q1 is developed through a three-stage process: (1) stable and efficient pre-training, combining Stable SplitNorm, Muon, and muP with a two-stage curriculum whose second stage increases the coding-data mixture, preserving a wide stability margin between safe and optimal learning rates; (2) fine-grained mid-training, expanding the data mixture across domains and formats and progressively extending the context; and (3) multi-scaffold with multi-version post-training, combining SFT, domain-specialized RL, and MOPD across various scaffolds to integrate complementary training signals and strengthen agentic coding capabilities. Furthermore, model merging combines different experts and checkpoints from different stages while mitigating conflicts among their parameter updates. The resulting IQuest-Q1 demonstrates capabilities in both coding and general tasks. We release IQuest-Q1 as an open-source model to support community research and development." 681b2df4b2c2fbf2f26e9fa5e7ec53f232ec052a,2610.31889,,2026,Scaling Transformer Energy-based Models For High Quality Image Synthesis,Jungsoo Lee,3,,0,"Energy-Based Models (EBMs) are a flexible class of generative models that decouple probabilistic modeling from the generation process. This decoupling directly enables compositional generation and inference-time scaling, where sample quality can be refined simply by increasing sampling steps. However, severe challenges in high-dimensional sampling and training instabilities with deep architectures have restricted EBMs to low-dimensional regimes. To resolve these bottlenecks, we introduce the Transformer Energy-Based Model (TEM), a scalable transformer energy function operating entirely within a latent space. On top of this backbone, we extract energies at multiple layers and sum them, composing complementary constraints from local texture to global semantics. Furthermore, two components make this high-quality at scale: Positive Representation Alignment (PRA), which supervises TEM's intermediate representations with a vision foundation model, and advanced sampling strategies that improve sample quality at inference. TEM-XL achieves an FID-50K of 3.82 on class-conditional ImageNet 256$\times$256 without classifier-free guidance, showing that a contrastive EBM can generate high-fidelity images. On ImageNet 512$\times$512, TEM achieves an FID-50K of 8.24, demonstrating that the approach scales to higher resolution. We further validate the core promises of EBMs: compositional generation, zero-shot inpainting, and out-of-distribution detection." 14032f5c5ab4caecc5fe90bc5acf48facca45150,2610.28489,,2026,Asymmetric Looped Transformers: Fixed Global Representations for an Iterative Decoder,Cheng Liang,9,,0,"Looped Transformers increase effective depth by repeatedly applying shared layers, offering a way to scale computation without increasing parameter count. However, full-stack looping places context construction and iterative state refinement within the same recurrent computation, without explicitly distinguishing their roles. We introduce the Asymmetric Looped Transformer (AsymLoop), which separates single-pass context encoding from recurrent state refinement. A single-pass causal encoder produces layer-specific Global key-value (KV) caches that remain fixed across iterations, while a weight-tied recurrent decoder generates Local KV from its evolving state. Joint attention over both sources under a single softmax allows each update to integrate persistent contextual information with the current intermediate state. For training, we apply a heavy-tail-guided layerwise learning-rate method to the encoder and decoder. Experiments on FineWeb-Edu across four model scales, from 60M to 1B, show consistently lower validation perplexity and higher average downstream accuracy than Full Loop under matched effective depth and training token budgets. At 1B, AsymLoop improves average zero-shot accuracy across seven commonsense reasoning benchmarks from 49.58% to 50.85%. Further experiments extend these benefits to longer training budgets, an OLMo-style backbone, and sparse mixture-of-experts models. These results support asymmetric context encoding and state refinement as an effective design for recurrent language models." cda1244ee8a28649acf88c32de74af0e7aaa05f2,2610.27387,,2026,Training Controllable World Models via Action Influence Maximization,Samuel M. Bateman,8,,1,"Action-conditioned video generative models trained on successful, goal-directed demonstrations tend to ignore the commanded action, rendering a plausible expert-like future regardless of what is asked of them. We trace this failure to training data that lack sufficient action influence. We analyze this metric and prove that it upper bounds the action influence that any model trained on that data can express. Expert demonstrations, whose narrow action distributions let next states be predicted without attending to the action, set a low ceiling that no amount of model capacity alone can raise. Raising it requires collecting different data. We introduce Action Influence Maximization (AIM), an algorithm for actively collecting training data for improving dataset action influence. We compare the performance and data-efficiency of AIM against exploration heuristics and intrinsic-motivation methods on simulated navigation and manipulation tasks. In pixel-based manipulation, AIM is the only method that consistently improves controllability: 500 actively collected episodes added to 3k demonstrations match a world model trained on 300k expert episodes on end-effector controllability, an $85\times$ reduction in data." bcba462f8b88e55de5ab1f2d5cc1e9dd6b2c793f,2610.22330,,2026,Designing Transformers for Continuous Diffusion Language Models,Wei-Jian Luo,5,,0,"Continuous diffusion language models (CDLMs) offer an alternative approach to parallel language generation; however, most existing studies directly use transformer architectures from either causal large language models (LLMs) or Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) for image generation, which were not optimized for CDLMs. In this paper, we conduct a systematic study on Transformer architectures for CDLMs and introduce Language Diffusion Transformer (LangDiT), combining feature and query-key normalization, wider noise conditioning, likelihood-shortcut gradient routing and calibration, and confidence-gated training self-conditioning. LangDiT significantly reduces generation perplexity in matched LangFlow comparisons, establishing a new state of the art in continuous language generation across different model formulations. Using LangFlow as a representative CDLM, LangDiT as a plug-and-play backbone leads to a new state-of-the-art model with a generation perplexity (GenPPL) of 21.72 using 1024 NFEs and 44.72 GenPPL using 128 NFEs on the unconditional generation of 1024-token sequences on the OpenWebText dataset. When adapted to Plaid-style CDLM formulations, LangDiT results in a new leading GenPPL of 11.33 using 1024 denoising NFEs, and 27.51 GenPPL using 128 denoising NFEs. These gains are achieved while retaining each model's underlying representation, training objective, and inference sampler, isolating transformer architecture as a fundamental source of improvement. Our study identifies architectural design as an important source of improvement in continuous diffusion language models." 53b241fec3f7fc9f50652460dcb1680ad2f9b60c,2610.21391,,2026,NOCE-Net: Representation Learning for Battery Operational Context via Nested Sequence Modelling,Arnab Bhattacharjee,3,,0,"Learning effective representations from battery operational history is essential for predictive health management and control-oriented applications. Existing approaches rely on response-dependent engineered features or short early-life windows, limiting generalisability and precluding use in prospective settings where future responses are unavailable. We propose NOCE-Net, a deep nested sequence model that learns control-enabling representations directly from raw cyclic operational or telemetric data. Our data pipeline, re-BatteryData, standardises heterogeneous aging datasets into semantically equivalent Full Equivalent Cycles (FECs) defined by absolute charge throughput, enabling end-to-end learning across diverse operational regimes. NOCE-Net combines multi-patch transformer encoders for intra-cycle dynamics with a GRU backbone for inter-cycle state evolution, operating on approximately $700$ batteries across ten public datasets spanning over $300$ operational profiles. In zero-shot evaluation on unseen battery chemistries and usage patterns, NOCE-Net achieves $13.7\%$ MAPE in voltage response prediction, outperforming strong long-sequence baselines by over $43\%$ while using $40 \times$ fewer parameters. Shape and component diagnostics of the learned hidden states reveal that the GRU's principal direction of evolution achieves Spearman $|\rho| \geq 0.95$ with the capacity fade trajectory on average across all datasets with monotone degradation profiles, including zero-shot test batteries, providing evidence that the representations encode degradation dynamics transferable to downstream tasks beyond battery response modelling. Code is available at https://github.com/BeArnab96/NOCE-Net." cbc88335a98c1a74b6a1738f8506cdcb0320b785,2610.17994,,2026,Improving Neural Symbolic Regression with a Diverse Prior and Post-training Alignment,Dave Otte,3,,0,"Symbolic regression is the problem of finding an expression that fits a dataset. Solving it requires searching a combinatorial space of candidate expressions. Neural symbolic regression can amortize that search by training a model once on synthetic data and then predicting expressions for a new dataset. But existing models still underperform genetic programming on real, noisy data. We argue that the deficit lies in the training rather than in the paradigm, and present RASR (Reinforced Amortized Symbolic Regression), a method with two key changes to the training recipe. First, we design a synthetic prior that narrows the gap with real-world data: inputs come from the prior of a tabular foundation model; constants are sampled bottom-up, conditioned on the data; targets carry heteroscedastic and structured noise; and everything is standardized. Second, we split training into two stages. Supervised pre-training maximizes the token-level likelihood of a reference expression. This is followed by reinforcement-learning post-training that aligns the model with its inference-time use by rewarding held-out fit and penalizing expression size. On the black-box track of SRBench 2.0, RASR achieves the best mean test $R^2$ rank of all evaluated methods. Three RASR variants, trained with different size penalties, make up most of the accuracy-complexity Pareto front. On Strogatz, our method recovers more ground-truth expressions than any baseline, and on Feynman it is competitive with the best-performing methods." 6b4ef3210d16a284d304000fcd00daccbc945fed,2610.17588,,2026,Taming Softmax at the Limits of Muon: A Unified Approach through Hilbert Geometry,Aditya Somasundaram,5,,0,"Muon controls weight updates through the RMS movement of a linear layer's output. This implicitly treats the linear output as a proxy for the full module, including the nonlinearity that follows. This proxy can be misleading for softmax, where the RMS shift in activations does not faithfully measure the change in the output distribution. We propose Hilbert distance as a natural metric for bounding changes in these output distributions. Hilbert distance bounds changes in cross-entropy loss and limits probability redistribution. For softmax, it takes the form of the variation seminorm of the preactivation perturbation, allowing probability constraints to be expressed as parameter constraints. Formulating the steepest descent problem with a Hilbert distance constraint brings two recently proposed methods under a unified mathematical framework. For the LM head, solving a row-wise approximation to the resulting diameter-constrained problem leads us to RowNorm \citep{pethick2025trainingdeeplearningmodels}. For scaled dot-product attention, the same principle yields the first-order query--key steepest descent problem underlying Compositional Muon \citep{keigwin2026compositional}. These connections motivate using Hilbert distance as a guiding principle for optimizer design in softmax modules." f8c2441bb214d2690ad6a59e4425fc0a52fc7f8b,2610.18652,,2026,AMemOps: Evaluating Memory Updates in Long Audio Streams,Pei-Wei Chang,5,,0,"Audio memory must recognise recurring sources across acoustic changes while keeping their attributes up to date. Overall accuracy does not reveal how these demands interact. We introduce Audio Memory Operations (AMemOps), a benchmark for latest-attribute retrieval, preservation of unchanged attributes and absent-source rejection in long audio streams. Paired controls vary recordings, training identities and earlier events to examine their effects on updating. Training on other recordings of the test instruments increases a reference delta-rule memory's update advantage over matched attention by 13.4 percentage points. At retrieval delays of 120\,s, matched histories separate benefits of consistent repetition from costs of conflicting earlier values, while additive-memory controls identify benefits of erasure." e9e34af10fb91e0232f67ab79cf1f90c25dca55b,2610.18711,,2026,Steertuning Policies from a Few Human Videos,Billy Yan,11,,0,"Current recipes for robot learning require massive amounts of robot demonstrations to obtain robust and adaptive policies. In this work, we introduce Steertuning, a system that enables robots to learn new tasks in new environments from 5 human demonstrations in under 5 Steertuning consists of two parts. (1) We pretrain a 400M-parameter diffusion policy on our egocentric human dataset, which consists of 100 hours of densely annotated random interactions. This pretraining makes Steertuning robust to background differences and enables spatial and object generalization when deployed on new tasks. (2) Given 5 demonstrations of a new task, we finetune our model for only 2 minutes (2000 training updates) and steer the policy's actions during reverse sampling using the demonstration whose observation is closest to that of the deployment environment. Together with a carefully designed data processing pipeline for embodiment transfer, this enables Steertuning to achieve a 71% success rate across 12 tasks in 12 new environments, ranging from lab settings to kitchens in new homes. The entire process, from data collection for a new task to robot policy deployment, takes less than 5 minutes. Our full dataset, model weights, codebase, and robot videos will be made available at our website: https://steertuning.github.io." 0e580a9c4b85a3f7d376cdc60952ed600704ffa1,2610.16656,,2026,RFWeave: Learning Wireless Propagation Across Scenes and Transceiver Configurations,Shu-Rui Xu,8,,0,"Wireless propagation modeling is foundational to the evaluation and design of modern communication systems. To achieve accurate wireless propagation prediction, recent learning-based approaches leverage scene geometry and materials, demonstrating promising generalization across transceiver locations and unseen scenes. However, these approaches remain largely confined to a fixed configuration of array size, receiver orientation, and transmit beam. In this work, we introduce RFWeave, a learned wireless propagation model designed to generalize across scenes, transceiver locations, and transceiver configurations. To accommodate varying array structures, RFWeave incorporates variable-length transceiver tokens that represent antenna elements individually. Furthermore, to capture the geometry between transmit and receive antenna elements, RFWeave aggregates their pairwise spatial relations into propagation tokens. A configuration-conditioned decoder predicts the spatial spectrum and received power. RFWeave is trained on a large-scale simulated dataset spanning 10,000 indoor scenes and more than 5 million channel records under diverse transceiver configurations. Extensive evaluations show that RFWeave achieves state-of-the-art performance across all evaluated generalization settings, improving spatial spectrum structural similarity (SSIM) by up to 15.7% and reducing received power mean absolute error (MAE) by up to 35.4% over the strongest baselines on unseen scenes. Additional experiments on measured DICHASUS data and in beam management further demonstrate RFWeave's broader applicability to real-world channels and downstream wireless tasks." 0827c905f1b9314c23c47b1df7720e042150336f,2610.17014,,2026,MAGNET: Manifold-Aware Graph Diffusion Network for Connectome Generation,Protyay Dey,5,,0,"Functional brain connectome represents neural connectivity as a matrix of pairwise interactions between brain regions. Generation of functional connectomes is not only a question of validity; rather, having satisfied the constraints on the correlation matrix, the next step is to recover the class-conditional geometry buried under coarse labels. We propose MAGNET, a Manifold-Aware Graph Diffusion Network which uses a normalized-Cholesky representation of the manifold of correlation matrices that guarantees validity. MAGNET lifts noisy latent states into ROI-level region tokens and performs denoising with a relational inductive bias over brain atlas regions. To deal with structural problems induced by coarse labels, MAGNET employs class-anchored conditioning, amortized structural bridge, and relevance-preserving corruption. Across ABIDE, ADNI, and OASIS-3, MAGNET consistently achieves favorable results compared to previous manifold-aware approaches, demonstrating improvements of 7-21% in class-conditional fidelity ($\alpha,\beta$-F1) across three cohorts and better sampling efficiency. Moreover, while training only with strict binary labels, MAGNET is capable of maintaining clinical heterogeneity through fine substructure of the connectomes in a zero-shot setting, improving subclass covariance alignment ($\lambda$-MSE) by over 30%. These results suggest that geometric validity is a necessary but insufficient condition for clinical utility in connectome synthesis. Moreover, efforts in making the diffusion denoising class-conditional manifold aware finds utility beyond the highly curved brain connectome generation as this is a critical problem in various general settings. The code repository can be found at https://github.com/protyayofficial/MAGNET." db00aa9feb05dcd089951f0e81aed39d69eaf0fb,2610.17202,,2026,MLAfication: Efficiently Enabling High-Fidelity MLA for Modern LLMs,Zi-Le Wang,3,,0,"Multi-Head Latent Attention (MLA) compresses the KV cache into a latent representation, reducing inference memory and bandwidth. Existing MHA2MLA/TransMLA methods do not support QKNorm and require costly recovery on modern LLMs, especially MoE. We present MLAfication, a QKNorm-compatible, parameter-efficient extension of MHA2MLA. It combines calibrated KNorm, parameter-efficient distillation, contribution-aware Partial-RoPE, and activation-aware joint KV initialization. Across MHA and GQA models, including QKNorm- and MoE-equipped variants, MLAfication preserves performance under substantial KV-cache compression, surpasses the current SOTA on commonsense and long-context benchmarks, and extends MLA conversion to modern architectures. On Qwen3-30B-A3B, MLAfication delivers up to $5.35\times$ the serving throughput of BF16 GQA and, combined with 4-bit KV quantization, reduces the KV-cache footprint by $94.73\%$. Our code is available at https://github.com/JT-Ushio/MLAfication." d7b775107468fb1689edf2c292e4bd56b9c8a5e4,2610.17383,,2026,Variable Input Masked Autoencoders for Wrist-Worn Accelerometry,H. Haresamudram,5,,0,"Large-scale repositories of wearable sensor data have enabled the development of foundation models for human activities and behavior. However, existing models are pretrained using fixed input durations and sampling rates, despite substantial heterogeneity in recording conditions, downstream tasks, and deployment constraints. We introduce VarMAE, a variable input masked autoencoder that learns a single representation across sampling rates and temporal contexts. During pretraining we construct two views of the same signal: a long duration high frequency view, and a short duration lower frequency view, obtained via random cropping and downsampling. We perform masked reconstruction within each view and introduce a cross-resolution masked reconstruction objective that uses visible tokens from the long view to predict masked tokens from the short view. Cropping and downsampling impose complementary information bottlenecks, encouraging the model to learn representations that remain effective across input durations and sampling rate changes. We pretrain VarMAE on the large-scale NHANES dataset, producing a single pretrained encoder matching or outperforming controlled foundation model baselines on eight benchmark datasets. With only 3.82M parameters, VarMAE is parameter efficient and shows that a single foundation model can achieve broad transfer capabilities across sensing configurations." 4ba37204ea2b8f1fa61f8531f22638e5089bd719,2610.13764,,2026,How Well Do Prior-Data Fitted Networks Amortize Bayesian Inference?,M. Hulskamp,5,,0,"Prior-data fitted networks (PFNs) are trained to approximate the Bayesian posterior predictive distribution (PPD) of a synthetic prior, yet results about the approximation quality are surprisingly thin. Taking an empirical risk minimization perspective, we decompose the deployment error of PFNs into prior, context, and amortization error, and measure the latter against a reference PPD under a realistic prior. Results show that PFNs generally recover the targeted PPD very well. Nevertheless, we find that parts of the residual amortization error persist, especially in \textit{rare} settings under the prior pretraining distribution, even when scaling the model size, which manifests in disagreement between independently pretrained PFNs and leaves uncertainty about the predictor at inference time. As a remedy, we study multiple types of Bayesian model averages and find that these can consistently reduce this uncertainty and improve predictions up to full-size TabICLv2 models." 54534b46342b4d13f34fd503cea18737a5dd4cf4,2610.11376,,2026,CRISP: Fixing Flying Pixels in Latent LiDAR Generation via Diffusion Decoding,Andrea Ceron,5,,0,"Latent LiDAR pipelines suffer from flying pixels: convolutional VAEs blur sharp radial depth discontinuities, yielding edge depths that back-project to points floating between surfaces. We identify this as a major, directly correctable decoder bottleneck and introduce CRISP: a pixel-space diffusion decoder with a backbone-agnostic latent adapter, DiT-based denoiser, and support mask predictor. CRISP replaces video-VAE and LiDAR-native decoders alike while keeping the encoder and latent generator fixed. Across KITTI-360, SemanticKITTI, and nuScenes, replacing only the decoder reduces FSVD/FPVD by 50.5% on average across frozen backbones; for generic video VAEs, the reductions reach 71%/74%. On the LiDAR-native LiDM backbone, FRID drops by 71%, with the largest gains at depth discontinuities. In a pretrained LiDM world model, the same zero-shot replacement improves FSVD by 15.5%, narrowing the sim-to-real gap. Code and checkpoints will be released at https://andrea25512.github.io/CRISP/." 2bf552cca9eac56f5f498efb6f5469aa330724b8,2610.12338,,2026,VFold: Symmetry-Aware Cross-Layer Value Cache Compression,Neha Verma,4,,0,"While caching key-value (KV) states accelerates Large Language Model (LLM) decoding, this cache can dominate memory usage at long context lengths. One solution is to compress this memory by exploiting inter-layer cache similarities. However, most existing techniques necessitate architectural changes to LLMs and incur substantial overhead. In this work, we propose a symmetry-aware value cache merging strategy that reduces cache memory while avoiding both harmful performance degradation and architectural overhead during decoding. Furthermore, we show that this approach can be exploited alongside existing cache compression techniques, composing with high-ratio quantization or key cache pruning to reach compression ratios that neither method reaches alone, with minimal additional cost. Ultimately, our findings reveal a major source of underutilized capacity in the value cache, offering a simple yet highly effective direction for scaling context windows under memory constraints." ae066d2799131136a9e49e065d211fa800cc9c4b,2610.10497,,2026,QuadTok: Quadtree Visual Tokenizer for Autoregressive Image Generation,Yu-Cheng Mao,7,,1,"We introduce QuadTok, a novel framework for visual tokenization and autoregressive image generation. Compared to traditional approaches using 2D grids or 1D token sequences, we propose a hierarchical quadtree structure, bridging the gap between 2D spatial binding and 1D sequence-level flexibility. The QuadTok tokenizer dynamically allocates representational capacity to visually intricate areas while leaving homogeneous regions at a coarse resolution. Compared with a fixed 256-token grid, our ImageNet-trained tokenizer saves approximately 10% of tokens on ImageNet and 9% when transferred zero-shot to the COCO dataset, while maintaining comparable reconstruction fidelity. Furthermore, the natural causality introduced by the tree structure seamlessly enables autoregressive image generation. Conditioned on a quadtree topology supplied before generation, our 947M GPT-style generative model achieves a 2.08 gFID on the ImageNet $256 \times 256$ benchmark. Additionally, leveraging the strong spatial correlation preserved by the quadtree structure, the QuadTok generator enables zero-shot spatially controlled image generation capabilities. Code: https://github.com/myc634/QuadTok." 73be128360856cf860401daa323151e09e95fae2,2610.09958,,2026,Force without transmission: a depth-induced rank collapse that no loss on the representation reopens,Martin Hofmann,2,,0,"Training can drive a transformer into a rank collapse: all token representations point in one direction, and learning stops. In a related collapse of attention, a loss term with a bounded corrective force repairs the network during the run. We ask whether such a term repairs rank collapse. We collapse small transformers by weakening their skip connection and treat copies of the collapsed network. No added loss term repaired the collapse, although the stronger kind pushed with about a tenth of the task gradient. The reason was the path, not the strength. The task gradient no longer reached the query and key weights, which decide where attention looks, and the added term's gradient faded before the blocks where the collapse forms. Restoring the skip connection, which changes no weight, reopened this path at once. The rank then recovered, but only far above the scale of collapse. After a burst of high learning rate the path stayed open and the rank recovered untreated. Registered predictions from the path ranked recovery times but did not transfer to this cause. In every case the loss stayed above that of a healthy network after the rank recovered. Whether a collapsed network can be repaired depends on whether the gradient still reaches the weights that must change, not on how strongly a loss term pushes." dce8a3715c57f5a51c7bf2db2ae7c6691b9917ec,2610.07676,,2026,Exact-Solution Volume and Length Generalization in Transformers,Y. Zhu,2,,0,"Research on transformer expressivity shows whether a transformer is capable of solving a given task, but gives little indication of whether the solution, if learned, is generalizable to longer input lengths. We study this question through normalized exact-solution volume (NESV): the fraction of a bounded parameter region that achieves an exact solution on every input of length $n$. For fixed-width, single-layer transformers with $\log n$-scaled attention, we establish asymptotic bounds on NESV for four tasks: FIRST ($\Theta(1)$), MAJORITY ($\Theta(1/(n\log n))$), INDEX ($\Theta(1/n^3)$), and PARITY ($0$). These results are consistent with previous empirical results: the faster the exact-solution volume decays with input length, the harder it is to length-generalize on that task. Looking deeper into INDEX, our volume analysis reveals two error sources that grow with $n$. Consequently, we study a transformer model that would structurally eliminate one of the terms, theoretically improving the NESV bound to $\Theta(n^{-1})$, and empirically achieving 85% accuracy when tested at $10\times$ the training length, compared with the 60% accuracy of the original model. We conclude that volume analysis may be a useful approach to identify concrete sources of length sensitivity and thus provide insights into task-specific model refinements." f0b306652620d6dd68e3b409987717c80052913e,2610.05711,,2026,"From Pixels, Without Pre-training: Joint Generative and Self-Supervised Representation Learning in One Model",Vicente Balmaseda,3,,0,"Strong image generation models are conditioned on class labels, aligned to frozen pretrained encoders, or built on separately trained autoencoders. While effective, generation then depends on supervision or pretraining: labels must be annotated, and encoders or autoencoders pretrained for the target domain. We study joint generative and self-supervised representation learning in a single model, enabling self-conditioned generation without labels or pretrained models. This is challenging because the objectives are mismatched: contrastive learning consumes clean augmented views and favors coarse, invariant semantics, while flow matching consumes noisy images and must preserve the fine detail and spatial layout that contrastive learning discards. We propose SCION (Self-conditioned Generation on Self-supervised representation), whose core is a single pixel-space encoder conditioned on the flow timestep and an embedding. For representation learning, this conditioning embedding is a learned global vector shared across images, with the encoder's [CLS] token yielding the semantic representation trained by the contrastive loss. For generative training, the conditioning embedding is the image's own [CLS] representation, while patch tokens pass through a decoder to predict the image. To sample without a reference image at inference, we jointly learn a prior over the embedding. Gradient-norm balancing and stop-gradient mechanisms enable joint optimization in one run. SCION is self-supervised and self-contained, with no labels or pretrained models. On ImageNet 256x256, with the JiT-B recipe and no representation guidance, SCION reaches 8.92 FID, surpassing class-unconditional iREPA, which aligns to pretrained DINOv2 (46.44), and RCG, which conditions on it (14.27). With JiT-L, SCION achieves 5.89 FID without guidance and 3.47 with representation guidance, outperforming RCG with the ADM recipe (6.24)." c5ea4def5404960748affab8d54b9060fad5cd30,,10.64898/2026.10.02.756297,2026,"PIE: Generalizing perturbation effects across unseen perturbations, contexts and datasets",Rishi Verma,7,bioRxiv,1,"Predicting cellular response to perturbations is key to understanding biological mechanisms and selecting therapeutic targets. However, generalizing across cellular contexts, perturbations, and experimental datasets remains challenging due to incomplete representations of the system being perturbed and the difficulty of measuring true perturbation effects within that system. We introduce PIE, a model that addresses these limitations by reformulating the learning task around population-level perturbation effects and incorporating auxiliary inputs that better characterize the biological system. PIE directly predicts differentially expressed genes and changes in gene expression for each (context, perturbation) pair, using external biological knowledge, baseline gene expression, and observed perturbation responses. Its architecture accommodates input sources with variable feature sets and predicts effects on genes seen and unseen during training. On the Replogle–Nadig dataset, PIE achieves state-of-the-art performance on most metrics across all tested generalization settings, including the most challenging setting where both the context and perturbation are unseen during training. For predicting differentially expressed genes, PIE achieves 1.2–3.2 times the AUPRC of the strongest baseline in each setting: across unseen contexts, perturbations, experimental datasets, and jointly unseen contexts and perturbations. Overall, PIE provides a framework for generalizing perturbation effects across diverse experimental conditions." 509a0a6b0a1949ab6cec2327b0f96511f60ddc54,2610.05411,,2026,CleanMDM: Clean Motion Diffusion Model for Multimodal Motion Cleanup,Zhe Li,4,,0,"Motion capture data is rarely directly usable, as they typically exhibit missing segments, jitter, drift and contact artifacts. Traditionally, corrupted motions are cleaned by animators through the manual identification of keyframes from noisy motion, subsequent keyframe correction, and interpolation between corrected keyframes to reconstruct coherent motion. While the rise of generative motion models has made automatic cleanup feasible, most approaches operate as black box denoisers with limited controllability, making it difficult to preserve reliable segments or enforce specific user intents. Inspired by animation workflows, we present CleanMDM, a unified multimodal motion cleanup framework that formulates cleanup as masked conditional generation with plug-and-play conditions. This single model supports arbitrary combinations of noisy 3D motion, sparse 2D keyframes, sparse 3D keyframes, and text. This design enables both automatic cleanup without additional user annotation and controllable cleanup under multimodal guidance. To further improve motion realism, we incorporate the Latent Motion Quality Discriminator (LMQD) to better match kinematic distributions and reduce skating, jitter, and interpenetration artifacts, and we apply Mesh-Aware Contact Projection as a test-time optimization step to enhance contact and physical consistency. Experiments across multiple datasets demonstrate that CleanMDM consistently outperforms prior cleanup and generation baselines, and that low cost conditions (text and 2D keyframes) provide reliable controllability gains in multimodal cleanup scenarios." 2d42f51bee07f5ffd8117566975a398d7233b280,2610.03419,,2026,Deep Bayesian REFoCUS,S. Penninga,2,,1,"In this work we formulate ultrasound multistatic recovery from arbitrary transmit sequences as a Bayesian inference problem. To that end, we train a deep generative prior on multistatic data sets to tackle the rank-deficient regime in which classical linear REFoCUS decoders fail. This appproach, which we term Deep Bayesian REFoCUS, outperforms the linear baselines for all regimes of rank-deficiency and noise levels, and regresses to linear decoding when inversion is exact. The model also expresses uncertainty in the null space of the acquisitions, whereas the linear REFoCUS decoders only provide point estimates. Finally, we analyze the impact of distribution shift between simulation and in-vivo acquisitions, showing remarkable generalization ability without any fine-tuning or adaptation." 1e763b33688567fcfece68d13772878bba8ea37e,2610.01942,,2026,Latent-Foresight: End-to-End Learning Predictable Representations for Latent World Models,Efstathios Karypidis,3,,0,"Predicting the future evolution of a scene is a fundamental capability for world modeling. Recent work has shown that operating in the feature space of Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) yields semantically rich representations that support diverse future scene understanding tasks. However, existing approaches rely on two-stage pipelines, where VFM features are first compressed using fixed dimensionality reduction (e.g., PCA) or independently trained autoencoders, and a separate predictor is trained on top of the resulting frozen latent space. This decoupling between representation learning and temporal prediction, as well as approaches that apply predictors directly on raw VFM features, provides no guarantee that the latent space is structured for predictable dynamics. In this work, we propose Latent-Foresight, an end-to-end framework that jointly learns a latent tokenizer and a flow-based generative dynamics model, explicitly shaping the representation to support temporal predictability. To enable stable joint optimization, we introduce several key design choices that prevent latent collapse and align reconstruction with generative objectives. Extensive experiments show that our approach learns more temporally coherent latent representations and consistently outperforms two-stage baselines across multiple future scene understanding tasks and prediction horizons, while eliminating separate training stages, including during high-resolution adaptation. We provide the implementation code and model weights at https://github.com/Sta8is/Latent-Foresight" 78013ec3f04b3af7407246578598fd8ad87b2fe5,2609.39114,,2026,The Row Normalization Puzzle in Muon,Jia-Yu Zhang,2,,0,"This paper examines how row-wise renormalization affects Muon, focusing on the gap between NorMuon's worst-case guarantees and its practical performance (Li et al.). Despite its growing adoption and promising performance in large language model (LLM) pretraining, NorMuon's worst-case guarantees remain poorly understood. One fundamental question is: Does row normalization yield provable convergence gains, potentially through its interaction with approximate polar computation and exponential moving-average momentum? Our results show that row normalization introduces a dimension-dependent factor in the worst-case iteration complexity under the operator-norm geometry, which persists even with exact polar computation and any fixed momentum parameters. Indeed, we establish an algorithm-dependent lower bound and a matching upper bound in deterministic settings, and extend our upper bound analysis to stochastic settings. Both upper-bound analyses allow approximate polar computation. Experiments show that NorMuon is slower than Muon on synthetic problems inspired by our worst-case construction, yet outperforms Muon in LLM pretraining. These findings sharpen the puzzle of why row normalization helps in practice and complement the recent findings of Dewulf et al." bee254c11b97a27757e60373a03fb8d4384a7a8a,2610.00487,,2026,ScaffoldM3C: A Multimodal Sequential Monte Carlo Framework for Generative Stable Construction Planning,Gadiel Sznaier Camps,5,,0,"Autonomously constructing physically realizable 3D structures remains a significant challenge due to combinatorial action spaces, interchangeable components, equifinal assembly sequences, and strict stability requirements during construction. State-of-the-art methods fine-tune large language models for text-based generative construction. However, these approaches do not allow for Multimodal (text, image, sketch) conditioning, overlook the practical role of scaffolding for stabilizing intermediate structures, and suffer from slow inference speeds. Therefore, we formulate construction as a probabilistic next-block generation task with multiple potential assembly actions and multiple potential task conditioning modalities. Concurrently, we explicitly consider the utility of scaffolding by introducing an auxiliary scaffold block token. We present Scaffold Multimodal Monte Carlo (ScaffoldM3C), a multimodal, lightweight, auto-regressive model for stable block-based construction, that proposes a set of next-step candidate blocks. Leveraging these candidates, we utilize Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) to maintain a population of possible assembly sequences, allowing us to consider multiple, potentially different, assembly directions simultaneously. We train our multimodal architecture by extending the StableText2Brick dataset to contain image conditioning prompts and scaffold-stabilized build sequences. ScaffoldM3C is 4x smaller than competing baselines, yielding a 5x to 20x speedup during inference, while achieving comparable construction quality to state-of-the-art methods and higher overall stability. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through simulations and real-world robot assembly demonstrations." 737f951651ba687fe5d8270081dfd565055edb57,2609.37038,,2026,NowcastDiT: Diffusion Transformers are Effective Precipitation Nowcasters,Hao-Ran Xu,6,,0,"Precipitation nowcasting demands accurate short-term forecasts under strong spatiotemporal variability. Diffusion models are well suited to modeling complex precipitation distributions, yet existing approaches often introduce increasingly specialized designs, leaving the capability of a standard diffusion architecture underexplored. We show that a standard Diffusion Transformer already provides a simple and scalable foundation for precipitation nowcasting, with domain-specific requirements accommodated naturally within its design space. Based on this principle, we develop NowcastDiT and instantiate this flexibility through two complementary adaptations: a dynamics-aware noise prior for temporally coherent forecasts, and end-to-end reinforcement learning with timestep-aware rewards for meteorological skill. Experiments on SEVIR and MRMS benchmarks show that NowcastDiT achieves state-of-the-art performance in both perceptual quality and meteorological skill. These results suggest that standard DiT can serve as an effective foundation for precipitation nowcasting." e27c284e652785b05bb7c9b208e82d2ebf737057,2609.37183,,2026,HELIX: Purified and Unified - Rethinking Feature Interaction and Sequence Modeling for Large-Scale Recommendation,Yun-Tao Zheng,21,,0,"Industrial recommendation ranking models typically scale along two modeling axes: feature interaction over heterogeneous user, item, context, and cross features, and sequence modeling over long, informative, and multi-type user behavior histories. We find that scaling either capability in isolation is insufficient, as each exhibits a limited scaling ceiling and a suboptimal scaling-law slope. We conjecture that achieving a more favorable scaling-law slope requires jointly scaling both axes. To support this, we present HELIX, a purified and unified architecture for large-scale recommendation. HELIX interleaves sequence retrieval and feature interaction while enforcing one-way information flow from reusable sequence states to candidate-conditioned mix-tokens. This design preserves cross-depth communication between the two modeling axes while keeping user-side sequence computation amortizable, enabling flexible and asymmetric scaling of sequence modeling and feature interaction. Deployed in TikTok's e-commerce recommendation system, HELIX consistently improves offline CTR AUC, CVR AUC, and other ranking metrics. In online A/B tests, it achieves an approximately 6% increase in e-commerce video GMV per user." cca9d4e0abb8f1f56226b263cd073060b2e6dc72,2609.34167,,2026,Natural Image Autoencoder-Based fMRI Representations for Trait and State Prediction,Juhyeon Park,8,,0,"Foundation models pre-trained on large-scale fMRI datasets have shown strong downstream performance, but at substantial data and computation cost. To investigate how much fMRI-specific pre-training is actually needed for such performance, we introduce FReD, which derives fMRI representations from a frozen Deep Compression AutoEncoder (DCAE) pre-trained exclusively on natural images and pairs them with a task specific readout. For trait prediction, FReD summarizes frame-wise representations by their temporal mean and log-standard deviation and applies linear probing, with late fusion across two normalization schemes. For state prediction, it represents each frame as a single token and models temporal dependencies with a shallow Transformer. Across four resting-state datasets spanning six trait-prediction targets, linear probes on frozen DCAE features generally outperform those on fMRI foundation model representations and remain competitive with fully fine-tuned fMRI foundation models. On three task-fMRI state-prediction tasks, a temporal readout on DCAE features performs comparably to the strongest foundation models evaluated. A Gaussian injection analysis further shows that localized signal changes are recovered more accurately from the frozen DCAE features than from the evaluated foundation-model representations. Together, these results show that strong performance on current fMRI benchmarks is possible without fMRI-specific representation pre-training, making frozen natural-image features as a useful baseline for assessing its added value." b166abba59f18102e843c2326af480bfbaffb7fb,2609.34273,,2026,Query Expansion and Key Specialization in Transformer Attention Geometry,Vidit Gupta,5,,0,"The projection of queries and keys are central to the attention mechanism in Transformer architectures. While they are mathematically symmetric, they play different roles in attention mechanisms. The question of whether there is an effect from their functional distinction on their geometric development in training remains unanswered. We investigate the problem through the training of small GPT-like Transformers on character-level WikiText-103 for three different depths (4, 6, and 8 layers), three types of initialization for queries and keys, and four random seeds, resulting in 36 runs and 54 trajectories of average layers across seeds. We track the effective dimensionality of those layers using participation ratios and discover that effective dimension of queries expand while keys shrink, and that $PR_Q - PR_K$ is positive in all trajectories studied. In connection to attention, the shrinking of keys leads to a narrower spectrum of $QK^\top$ and more peaked attention weights. In order to determine if this connection is causal or coincidental, we directly control the spectrum of keys during training across five seeds: restricting it to make it shrink sharpens the attention with high directional confidence, while keeping it constant to the level of initial dispersion makes attention softer. Additional token-level checkpoint analyses show that the monotonic paired-contrast trend is not universal across pretrained families, but survives as an early-training regime that later decays over a full pretraining run, and the link between interaction-rank geometry and attention entropy remains visible in several models." 7be54510c483ee2f1389f41f7427ca5579e1ff11,2609.34272,,2026,Broken Symmetry in BF16 Attention: Why FlashAttention Gradients Blow Up Late in Training,Jun-Lin Chen,12,,0,"BF16 is now standard in large-scale pretraining, including in fused attention kernels such as FlashAttention, and these kernels are widely trusted. When we used FlashAttention-3 to pretrain a 450M-parameter transformer on 50B tokens, however, we ran into a problem: training was healthy for 25B tokens, then the gradient norm grew a thousandfold and the loss ended 0.2 nats above FP32 attention, without a single NaN. Recomputing the attention backward of just two layers in FP32 removes almost all of the excess gradient. Part of the cause is known: a fused multiply-add in the forward softmax, so far treated as an extreme-input NaN case and never fixed in FlashAttention-3. Repairing it stops the blow-up, but the query gradient is still wrong by more than its own size, and training still drives attention logits to thousands of times their size under accurate gradients. The remaining error comes from a broken conservation law. The softmax score gradient sums to zero along every row, which makes the query gradient blind to where the keys sit as a group; rounding it to BF16 leaves a small nonzero sum that leaks the mean key into the gradient, and the leak grows exactly as late training makes keys large and attention sharp. We introduce GProj (gauge projection), which restores the zero sum after the cast with two rank-one corrections per row. It cuts the remaining median query/key gradient errors from 219%/13% to 0.34%/0.37%, on par with FP32 attention, for 4.7% more time per training step. In matched from-scratch runs it trains to the same loss as FP32 attention, while FlashAttention-3 and key smoothing both destabilize." abb7cf87a2a88295461774eb05ffa4445a8958a3,2609.34507,,2026,KiT: A Foundation Model for Financial Time-Series Forecasting using DiffusionTransformers,Bo-Yuan Zhang,2,,0,"Financial candlestick forecasting is fundamental to quantitative investment, yet it remains exceptionally challenging due to extremely low signal-to-noise ratios and vast heterogeneity across markets and instruments. Existing approaches have largely attempted to introduce deep learning to capture hidden temporal features, but most adopt an auto-regressive formulation, which leads to error accumulation during inference. Meanwhile, general-purpose time-series foundation models are not tailored to the unique structure of k-line data and yield unsatisfactory performance on downstream candlestick forecasting tasks. To tackle these problems, we introduce KiT, a K-line Diffusion Transformer foundation model, and reformulate future prediction as conditional path generation via flow matching: given a historical context window, the model generates an ensemble of plausible future OHLCV trajectories. We pre-train KiT at multiple parameter scales on billions of candlestick bars spanning multiple markets and timescales. Across three markets and seven resolutions, KiT attains a mean return RankIC of 0.057 and a mean volatility RankIC of 0.66, leading at every timescale and outperforming both task-specific financial forecasters and general time-series foundation models. Code will be available at: https://github.com/Luciferbobo/KiT." 03a48f4cbb8b566f4e5c119d06f97cfadf3282e5,2609.36227,,2026,One-Step Next-Latent Prediction Is Not a World Model,Shi-Tong Wang,3,,0,"Next-latent prediction fits a map from the current embedding to the next one. LeNEPA carries this objective to time series, replacing the stop-gradient of next-embedding prediction with the isotropy penalty of LeJEPA. A world model is a transition kernel that can be rolled out. The one-step regression identifies a conditional mean, and a mean is a kernel only in special cases. For a linear-Gaussian Markov latent, the mean transition and the innovation covariance are fixed by the one-step problem, and the open-loop squared error at horizon $K$ equals the trace of the sum of the pushed-forward innovation covariances. That error grows with $K$ after the one-step fit is exact. If the conditional mean is nonlinear, composing it is not the multi-step conditional mean. If the observation is a non-injective function of a Markov state, a memoryless one-step map does not determine future observations, while a short window can. An isotropy penalty is a function of the embedding marginal, so its partial derivative in the transition weights is zero. On a scalar autoregression with coefficient $0.9$, the one-step mean squared error is $0.998$ and the $16$-step open-loop error is $5.10$. On a hidden rotation, an eight-step window reaches $16$-step error $0.056$, while the current scalar alone reaches $0.778$. Raising the isotropy weight from $0.1$ to $10$ leaves eight-step latent error inside $[0.78,0.85]$ on three seeds." 9efd4498482121f95349681d5e93526bf037c466,2609.31525,,2026,TinyAudio: Compact and Efficient Text-to-Audio Generation for Low-Resource Deployment,Jun-Xi Liu,8,,0,"Text-to-audio (TTA) generation has advanced rapidly in generation quality and instruction following. However, representative systems often require around a billion parameters, limiting deployment on resource-constrained devices. This paper introduces TinyAudio, a compact flow-matching-based TTA model for low-resource deployment. At its core, TinyAudio uses TA-DiT, a 35M single-stream flow-matching Transformer. TinyAudio also includes TA-CLAP, a 32M audio-aligned text encoder, and TA-VAE, whose 20M decoder reconstructs 44.1 kHz audio from compressed latents. TinyAudio has only 87M parameters in total, over 90% fewer than representative billion-parameter pipelines, and uses 0.48 GB peak GPU memory. TinyAudio achieves competitive generation quality on AudioCaps and TTA-Bench. We further introduce TinyAudio-MF, a MeanFlow-accelerated model that enables real-time generation with a four-core CPU quota. Our results demonstrate a practical quality-footprint trade-off for low-resource TTA deployment." 8d159f166f843897550d568224394a4de118a843,2609.28589,,2026,"OneTrans-V2: Unifying Retrieval, Pre-rank, and Fine-rank with One Transformer in Industrial Recommender",Han-Nan Cao,21,,1,"Industrial recommendation systems typically operate as a \emph{cascade} of retrieval, pre-rank, and fine-rank, but these stages are usually trained and served as separate models, causing repeated user-sequence encoding, isolated optimization, and duplicated engineering effort. Building on OneTrans'model-level unification, we present OneTrans-V2, one Transformer that unifies the entire cascade. It encodes the user behavior sequence once as a shared context while preserving stage-specific candidate features and computation. Joint training lets the three stages reinforce one another and enables in-model knowledge distillation from fine-rank to pre-rank. We scale the shared backbone with sparse mixture-of-experts (MoE), which increases capacity with bounded activated computation, and stabilize scaling with $\mu$P-style parameterization. To consolidate objective-specific retrieval channels, we introduce Decision-Conditioned Generative Retrieval (DCGR). DCGR predicts a decision prefix describing the upcoming interaction and generates items conditioned on it, allowing business objectives to steer a single generative process. Finally, Sequence-Native Training (SNT) organizes training around each user's lifelong behavior sequence and amortizes its encoding across exposures. Deployed across all three stages of a large-scale industrial recommendation system, OneTrans-V2 improves gross merchandise value (GMV) by 9.74\% and, with a co-designed serving stack, delivers $3.2\times$ the throughput of the cascade it replaces under the same hardware budget." 6243b210e96f9204694fe8ac125d7153406924a3,2609.24559,,2026,$t_0$: A Time-Series Foundation Model for Forecasting with Context,Lucas Meyer,9,,6,"We present $t_0$, a family of open-weights foundation models for forecasting with multivariate context. We release its first two members: $\texttt{t0-alpha}$ and $\texttt{t0-beta}$, respectively 102M and 256M parameters. Both condition their forecasts on target history, past covariates, and known-future covariates, without task-specific retraining. Their transformer layers alternate attention along time and across variates. They produce probabilistic forecasts through quantile predictions. Pretraining combines curated public data with synthetic generator families constructed to contain covariate-to-target dependencies. On GIFT-Eval, $\texttt{t0-alpha}$ reaches an aggregate CRPS of 0.4941, and $\texttt{t0-beta}$ a CRPS of 0.4738 and a MASE of 0.6865, third on both and within 4.0% of the best zero-shot TSFM. On fev-bench they score 42.2 and 46.7 in skill, the latter third again and 2.0 points behind the leader. We analyze $\texttt{t0-alpha}$ in depth. Known-future covariates raise its skill by 6.3 percentage points across 30 tasks. The report also examines its calibration, its rollout strategy on long horizons, and its robustness to missing data. On the Victoria electricity-demand benchmark, $\texttt{t0-beta}$ is among the most accurate models with a context of nearly a year. In an independent Macrocosm evaluation of hourly ERCOT prices over 29 months, both cut the MAE of the lagged-price baseline by 38%." 365c0d78761e79e7638048889f2e7432f73c50f4,2609.25081,,2026,ufakzeka-1: Building and Evaluating a 151M-Parameter Turkish Language Model from Scratch,Sait Furkan Teke,1,,2,"We describe ufakzeka-1, a 151M-parameter (182M with embeddings) decoder-only Turkish language model pretrained from scratch on 13.5B tokens of openly licensed text and instruction-tuned for chat, at a total cost of about \$286 in cloud GPU, API and notebook time. The contribution is not the model's capability, which is what a model this size can be expected to have, but the record of building and measuring it: a Turkish byte-level tokenizer at 1.77 tokens per word, a three-stage pretraining schedule, a post-training mixture of openly licensed and generated data, and an evaluation battery of release gates, a rule-checked sweep of 5,508 conversations, judged conversations and hand tests, all with prompts held out from the training data, enforced by decontamination inside the data build and by a checked-in invariant script we run before each build. We report three findings that we believe transfer to other small-model efforts: a safety gate that had been""fixed""with training data written from its own questions read 64/64 while the honest figure was 34/64; training-seed variance was as large as the spread across every recipe we tried, so single-seed comparisons at this scale are uninformative; and data rounds repaired only what was absent from the data, while identity tracking over long context and multi-turn arithmetic did not move across any data change we tried, which we read as limits of the model size rather than gaps in the data, a reading the next, larger model will test. Weights, the data recipe, the evaluation code and the spend ledger are released under Apache-2.0." 45168d8a6ccbcaaeb4ead00f4c35b4a4f7bbc2cc,2609.19363,,2026,Directions That Don't Drift: Stiefel Manifold Routing for Transformer Attention,Rubén Darío Guerrero,1,,0,"The query and key projections $\WQ,\WK$ in attention are almost always trained by Euclidean optimizers with no geometric constraint. We constrain them to the Stiefel manifold and optimize with a Riemannian Adam carrying one scalar second moment per frame---the form of \citet{becigneul2019}, here extended to the compact, non-Hadamard $\St(d,r)$ with a tangent projector, step-norm cap, and polar retraction. Four propositions prove steepest descent in the embedded metric, gradient-scale independence, well-conditioning, and exact $\mathrm{O}(d)$-equivariance. A fifth records that weight decay has \emph{identically zero} Riemannian gradient on $\St(d,r)$ ($W{=}WI_r$ lies in the normal space), so decay cannot act on the constrained frames. On a CIFAR-10 patch benchmark at $n{=}10\mathrm{k}$ this rule gains $\mathbf{+6.79}$\,pp over AdamW across 12 paired starts ($t{=}38.33$, $12/12$); earlier fixed-step Riemannian SGD gains $+1.97$\,pp, of which $+1.69$\,pp comes from frozen orthonormal initialization alone. The corrected Adam's lead grows with data: $+1.9$\,pp at $n{=}1\mathrm{k}$ to $+6.7$\,pp at $n{=}50\mathrm{k}$. A 12-seed ablation credits all gain to the scale-free step ($+4.63$\,pp, $12/12$), nothing to the projector or equivariance; a targeted $\varepsilon$-sweep causally confirms the mechanism ($-2.6$\,pp at $\varepsilon{=}0.1$, $p{<}0.001$). Two five-seed grokking studies confirm the constrained arm does not grok better than the baseline ($p{=}0.019$, A2 wins): the weight-decay exemption has no grokking consequence. A single-seed pilot exploiting this localization achieves the first stable grokking under slingshot conditions---Stiefel + targeted circuit regularization keeps routing-frame isometry error $10^6\times$ lower than the unconstrained ablation through every collapse." aa9f64b800689fe7c24371bd98d3cbc578eda84f,2609.22322,10.64898/2026.09.18.752552,2026,Spike Sorting with VanillaSort,Zi-Shuo Feng,2,bioRxiv,0,"Training spike detectors on real recordings is challenging because algorithmically generated labels can be noisy and incomplete. We propose VanillaSort, combining multichannel detection with spatially augmented, template-guided clustering. VanillaDet uses visibility-aware masking, truncated Gaussian targets and a temporally tolerant positive-bag loss, followed by conditional event-SNR gating. VanillaCluster combines HuiduRep embeddings with relative-amplitude features for Gaussian mixture clustering and refines assignments using cross-fitted waveform templates built from selected core events. VanillaDet improves detection accuracy over SimSort by two and three percentage points on the static and drift subsets of Hybrid Janelia, respectively. The complete pipeline also improves sorting performance over the corresponding HuiduRep baselines. These results support learning from imperfect real-data labels and incorporating waveform consistency into neuronal assignment." 72ecdb770e845d192e4d618c06c43600bd522aab,2609.15032,,2026,Tele360: Real-Time Feed-Forward Human Reconstruction from Sparse Unposed Cameras,Han-Zhang Tu,5,,0,"Live free-viewpoint visualization of real humans is critical for immersive communication and interactive digital experiences. Existing methods either rely on computationally expensive optimization or require calibrated cameras and low-resolution inputs, making real-time high-resolution deployment impractical. In this work, we present Tele360, the first real-time feed-forward system for dynamic human reconstruction and live free-viewpoint visualization from sparse, unposed RGB streams. Our system jointly estimates camera poses and reconstructs a dynamic 3D Gaussian representation for each time instance in a single forward pass. To achieve this, we start by designing a lightweight sparsity-aware multi-view transformer backbone that tokenizes foreground human regions while preserving global context through a shared scene token. We then employ a fully transformer-based Gaussian decoder to mitigate convolution-induced over-smoothing while keeping decoding sparse and efficient. In addition, we introduce a hybrid feature pyramid that injects multi-scale appearance cues into geometry prediction. We further introduce a lightweight differentiable Levenberg-Marquardt camera refinement layer to enhance multi-view consistency and geometric alignment. Moreover, to stabilize learning under sparse, unposed inputs, we transfer multi-view geometry priors from a large visual-geometry foundation model via teacher-student distillation. Finally, the predicted Gaussian maps are streamed with video codecs to remote devices for interactive free-viewpoint rendering. Extensive experiments show that Tele360 achieves state-of-the-art visual quality on studio benchmarks while supporting real-time 2K input-to-rendering at over 25 FPS on a single consumer GPU. Additional captured sequences illustrate its performance across varied subjects, clothing, and motions under our multi-camera setup." 953a3a4bf9b50e2eab46deb45c7aae1ee41cb597,2609.14715,,2026,Depth and Scale in the Sub-150M Regime: JugnuLM-53M vs JugnuLM-110M,D. Rajput,3,,0,"We scale our conventional sub-150M pretraining recipe from 53.5M to 109.7M parameters, holding the method fixed (Qwen3-style decoder with grouped-query attention, RoPE, SwiGLU, RMSNorm, QK-Norm, and a z-loss; FineWeb-Edu data) and changing only the geometry to a deep-and-thin 23-layer x 576-hidden design. The larger model improves across the board -- BLiMP 78.1 ->81.3, ARC-Easy 51.4 ->52.5, WikiText-2 byte-perplexity 2.04 ->1.95 -- and its 81.3% BLiMP essentially matches GPT-X2-125M (81.28) at about 12% fewer parameters. Notably the 110M model achieves this on fewer training tokens (about 8B vs 12B), so the gain is attributable to capacity and depth, not more data. Both models are deliberately conventional; this report is a clean scaling control and the baseline rung (R0) of an ablation study of what further improves models in this regime. An ablation ladder follows: value residuals (R1) and the Muon optimizer (R2) lift ARC-Easy by a cumulative +3.6 (52.5 ->56.1) at a near-flat BLiMP and are kept; a diverse data blend (R3) and two logit-distillation settings (R4a/R4b) are not kept -- honest negatives. R3 pins ARC-Easy to FineWeb-Edu's educational filtering rather than raw diversity; distillation from a 1.7B teacher can reach the class-leading ARC-Easy (56.99, matching GPT-X2-125M) but only at a perplexity cost that dialing KD down then erases -- so R2 remains the best kept stack." b096d1fcb4b1b05f4dc8fa20a437d4920ade4949,2609.09157,,2026,Learning Length-Extrapolatable Recurrent Models,Hanwen Jiang,1,,0,"Recurrent models provide a natural path to long-context modeling, yet models trained with backpropagation through time (BPTT) often fail beyond their training horizon. Classical analyses emphasize gradients that vanish or explode along temporal paths. However, dense per-token losses can still train a shared recurrent rule despite severe decay, showing that decay alone does not determine whether learning fails. We instead study state credit: the signal through which future losses reach earlier recurrent states before contributing to parameter updates. Accordingly, we intervene directly on state credit and propose Credit Stabilization through Time (CST). During backward propagation, CST locally rescales the state-credit signal to stabilize its norm without rotating the component being corrected, while leaving the forward computation unchanged. Because controlled synthetic tasks and real data exhibit different credit dynamics, we specialize CST to each regime. In both settings, CST improves performance beyond the training horizon, with gains observed at up to 128x the training length." 5a6481bd7917dee6062a927f2283899e6901e329,2609.07086,,2026,Conditioned Initialization for Attention,Hemanth Saratchandran,2,,0,"Transformers are a dominant architecture in modern machine learning, powering applications across vision, language, and beyond. At the core of their success lies the attention layer, where the query, key, and value matrices determine how token dependencies are captured. While considerable work has focused on scaling and optimizing Transformers, comparatively little attention has been paid to how the weights of the queries, keys and values are initialized. Common practice relies on random initialization or alternatives such as mimetic initialization, which imitates weight patterns from converged models, and weight selection, which transfers weights from a teacher model. In this paper, we argue that initialization can introduce an optimization bias that fundamentally shapes training dynamics. We propose conditioned initialization, a principled scheme that initializes attention weights to improve the spectral properties of the attention layer. Theoretically, we show that conditioned initialization can potentially reduce the condition number of the attention Jacobian, leading to more stable optimization. Empirically, it accelerates convergence and improves generalization across diverse applications, highlighting conditioning as a critical yet underexplored area for advancing Transformer performance. Importantly, conditioned initialization is simple to apply and integrates seamlessly into a wide range of Transformer architectures." 4a78f264511a1bfb71e430cbe59e6349206fe6d2,2609.06055,,2026,DriveZero: End-to-End Driving Beyond Human Demonstrations,Hao He,20,,4,"Most end-to-end autonomous-driving systems learn by imitating human driving logs, leaving their learned behavior constrained by the quality and behavioral coverage of the recorded trajectories. This report presents DriveZero, an end-to-end system that learns driving behavior beyond human demonstrations. It decomposes driving into a perception model and an action model, pretrains each in the regime best suited to it, and combines them into one end-to-end planner. The two models call for different learning recipes: perception must understand the world, and benefits from massive and diverse visual data; action must interact with it, and requires closed-loop feedback. On the action side, we introduce DriveRL, a mixed-agent closed-loop reinforcement-learning framework. It converts real driving logs into interactive worlds, where a privileged teacher policy is trained with PPO through closed-loop rollouts. For the perception model, DriveVFM consolidates multiple frozen vision foundation models, including DINOv3, SigLIP2, SAM and Depth Anything V2, into a single backbone from raw images alone, requiring no task-specific annotations. DriveZero then unifies the two: a camera-only planner that distills the frozen DriveRL teacher through its rolled-out trajectories. The goal-conditioned teacher can moreover be queried under augmented driving intents, yielding diverse, goal-consistent supervision that logged data cannot provide. On nuPlan, DriveRL with value-guided test-time action search achieves a mean score of 93.57 across the Val14, Test14-hard, and Test14-random community splits in both non-reactive and reactive modes, exceeding the Log-Replay expert on all three splits. DriveZero achieves state-of-the-art performance on NAVSIMv1, NAVSIMv2 and the closed-loop HUGSIM benchmark without any human trajectory supervision." d50eac91743c6d3e1a62b87a5de109da60b06e8e,2609.05415,,2026,UniMate: One Unified Model to Animate Diverse Skeletons,Lin-Zhan Mou,7,,2,"Recent advances in automatic rigging now deliver animation-ready 3D assets at scale, yet generating the motion to drive them remains a bottleneck. Existing learned animators are topology-constrained: they rely on category-specific templates or require per-skeleton fine-tuning and reference motions at inference. We present UniMate, a unified foundation model that synthesizes articulated motion for arbitrary skeletons from a rigged 3D asset and a text prompt, with no test-time optimization or per-skeleton retraining. UniMate introduces a topology-aware diffusion transformer, which integrates skeletal topology into attention via three mechanisms: (1) a graph-aware attention bias from pairwise joint relations and geodesic distances; (2) a spectral rotary position embedding generalizing RoPE to arbitrary kinematic trees via the graph Laplacian; and (3) a global topological conditioner attention-pooled from the rest-pose skeleton. We also curate UniML3D, 13,006 motion sequences spanning bipedal, quadrupedal, avian, marine, insectoid, serpentine, and articulated rigid objects with unified canonicalization and text pairing. Trained on this dataset, UniMate outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in quality, generalization, and efficiency, and supports zero-shot cross-topology transfer, in-betweening, expansion, and text-guided editing. Our project page is available at https://linzhanmou.com/unimate/." 04e5ad44902b155634e709a3245a326ba2da878d,2609.05738,,2026,RenderFormer-V2: Neural Rendering with Heterogeneous Scene Primitives,Chong Zeng,5,,1,"We present'RenderFormer-V2', a unified learned transformer-based neural rendering model, complementary to modern physics-based rendering systems, that can handle diverse light-transport effects such as caustics, volumetric scattering, environment lighting, textured and displaced surfaces and out-of-distribution materials without per-scene training or specialized code. RenderFormer-V2 models global light transport as a sequence-to-sequence transformation. Following its predecessor, RenderFormer-V2 also employs a two stage process: a view-independent stage that resolves intra-scene primitive to primitive transport, and a view-dependent stage that transforms the internal neural scene representation into image pixels. Different from RenderFormer, our model employs a novel combined windowed-attention and rendering-informed attention sink in the view-independent stage to improve scalability while maintaining render accuracy. To further improve versatility, RenderFormerV2 supports heterogeneous scene primitives, including environment maps and participating media, and it employs a material encoding independent of the underlying surface reflectance model that encodes material appearance via a novel neural embedding. We demonstrate the versatility of RenderFormer-V2 on a variety of scenes and perform an extensive ablation of the improved attention mechanism." 3e6c99fb6ef4af5c7fbbfc512f17540485940039,2609.03807,,2026,Almost Free State Prediction Separation,John Langford,8,,2,"State--prediction separation (SPS) relieves a language model's hidden state of two competing burdens---summarizing the context and predicting the next token---by splitting the forward pass into a state stream and a prediction stream. The separation works, but it is expensive: the prediction stream is a second pass over the whole backbone, costing $\sim$1.9$\times$ the pretraining FLOPs, and even more in terms of wall-clock time when using a flexible attention mask. This paper makes state--prediction separation almost free. We take the separation to its limit with a free pause token: a prediction stream that writes no keys or values at all and so rides the sequence's existing positions. It improves next-token prediction of a standard Transformer by 2-3 centinats in practice on a 1B parameter model, and because it adds no position it costs nothing at inference---no added context length, no KV cache, no decode steps, and essentially no latency, with the growth in inference flops typically irrelevant as it is not the active bottleneck on throughput. The cost is therefore entirely in training where we use four mechanisms to drive it down: a two-pass split that keeps FlashAttention kernels viable, the $w{=}0$ prediction window, a shared gated FFN that evaluates one FFN per position rather than one per stream, and phasing the separation onto the tail of the run. Together these bring the overhead versus an optimized pretraining pipeline to $1.33\times$ wall-clock while recovering ~94% of the gain compared to SPS, and to as low as $1.09\times$ along a graceful quality/compute tradeoff. Furthermore, the FFN optimization reduces the raw flops required at inference time. The result is an isoflop, isoparameter, and isotoken improvement over standard next token trained transformers." 38624d2075689a3151af1341ad96a6762091ea9b,2609.00746,,2026,Text Capability Loss in Vision-Language Adaptation: An Attention-Sink Diagnosis,Minsik Choi,3,,0,"Fine-tuning a pretrained LLM into a vision-language model (VLM) can erode the backbone's text capability, with the damage concentrated on tasks that require following exact output rules, such as instruction following, chain-of-thought reasoning graded on a strictly parsed final answer, and similar evaluations with strict graders. We trace this gap to attention-sink corruption: VL fine-tuning perturbs the early sink position that anchors a large fraction of attention probability, and how well the base LLM preserves its sink tracks how much of the affected capability survives adaptation. Building on this view, we introduce Sink Strength, a single scalar computed on the base LLM in a few seconds on a single GPU that predicts post-VL degradation without any VL training. It consistently tracks relative degradation across the six VLM-LLM pairs and multiple format-sensitive tasks. Complementing this diagnostic, we find that post-pretraining QK-RMSNorm injection fails to reproduce the protection of native QK-RMSNorm, while several off-the-shelf weight-merging settings fail to recover the lost capability after VL training. These negative results underscore the value of screening backbones with Sink Strength before VL training and narrow the intervention space toward head-selective training-time protection." b672498982c6c9797c26e27d480b0bff7a744f82,2608.28308,,2026,"Deriving Scaling Laws for OpenEuroLLM Models: Learning Rate, Batch Size and Loss",Niccolò Ajroldi,7,,2,"We study the scaling behavior of learning rate and batch size in pretraining dense large language models on English-prevalent corpora. Beyond scaling jointly optimal learning rates and batch sizes, we investigate their marginal evolution with model capacity and data scale and develop a model that captures these relationships. As we employ a Warmup-Stable-Decay learning rate schedule, we further investigate the gains from learning rate annealing over a broad range of hyperparameters settings, models and data budgets, and whether the optimal learning rate and batch size transfer between the stable and decay phases. Finally, we characterize the dependence of loss on model capacity and dataset size, evaluating recently proposed scaling forms that explicitly model their interaction. We find these approaches particularly effective at capturing both undertraining and overtraining regimes across our experiments. This study establishes a first baseline and scaling procedure for the development of future OpenEuroLLM models. We open-source the complete collection of pretraining runs used in this study." 032abd5102a3cdea5898579dc8c6363de85ee032,2608.26973,,2026,Squeezing More from Limited Data with Recursive Transformers,Serdar Gülbahar,3,,0,"Pre-training under limited data requires a different view of scaling than web-scale language modeling. With a fixed data budget but relatively abundant compute, increasing parameter count helps only up to an optimal scale; beyond that point, models overfit and generalization worsens. We study this behavior across 10M-100M word pre-training budgets, two corpora, and multiple downstream evaluations, and find that optimal size depends strongly on both the data budget and the downstream target. We argue that standard Transformers scale down poorly to this setting, because embeddings consume a large fraction of the parameter budget and per-token computation is tied to representational capacity. To address this coupling, we study recursive Transformers, reusing a shared block across depth to scale compute, together with factorized embeddings to reduce vocabulary-map parameters. We train three recursive models and find that they outperform standard Transformers at 10M and 100M words, while remaining competitive with BabyLM Challenge 2025 winners." e568f4a2aea628ba01ea12726a2f1465f28555e6,2608.24814,,2026,Effective Learning Rate Governs Loss Dynamics in Language Model Pretraining,Zi-Han Liu,7,,5,"We uncover ELR collapse in language model pretraining: learning rate (LR) and parameter norm govern loss dynamics primarily through their ratio, the effective learning rate (ELR). When ELR is matched across runs, their loss trajectories collapse throughout training despite substantially different LRs and parameter norms. Across optimizers, architectures, datasets, and model scales, mean collapse errors are typically a few x 10^-3, below the seed-to-seed variation measured in a representative configuration. Systematic ablations identify normalization design and the timescale of LR-norm variation as key determinants of collapse precision. Controlled interventions further show that weight decay and Hyperball shape loss dynamics primarily through the ELR schedules they induce. Replacing LR with ELR enables a fitted functional scaling law (FSL) to transfer across norm-control methods. The resulting ELR-based FSL also explains delayed acceleration, a recurring effect of norm control. Together, these results establish ELR as a common coordinate linking LR scheduling, norm control, and loss dynamics." 6be4eeea4a7860b32ea4ba3ea631f0c332b89987,2608.21174,,2026,From Attention Masks to Inert Zero-Vector Tokens: OAttention and O-Closure for Token Dynamics,Heyang Gong,1,,0,"Attention masks are relation-level controls: they specify which query--source pairs may interact. They do not provide a representation-carried token state that is non-participating at the attention boundary. We assign each token hidden carrier \(h_i\) an active-presence coefficient \(p_i=\lVert h_i\rVert^2/(\tau+\lVert h_i\rVert^2)\). The same coefficient has two roles: it gates information emitted by token \(i\), and it determines the mass with which token \(i\) enters computations shared with other tokens. OAttention is the support-coupled attention realization of this rule. It gates the receiver output by \(p_i\) and weights source \(j\) by \(p_j\) in both the attention numerator and partition, while retaining the standard score, visibility relation, exponential competition, and value aggregation. This makes the zero-vector token a zero element and yields exact null-receiver, null-source insertion, self-attention insertion, and empty-support properties. The same token-level presence gives local O-components (OFFN, ONorm, and OInject), presence-weighted OStandardize, the O-Closure law \(M(H\oplus0)=M(H)\oplus0\), and an OTransformer by residual and compositional closure. The canonical operator is checked by contract tests and a GPU evaluation. In a zero-fine-tuning retrofit of a cloned pretrained TabPFN v3 regressor, calibrated hidden-carrier OAttention and Full-O variants change mean RMSE by $+0.088\%$ and $+0.177\%$, respectively, over 18 matched dataset--seed cases. A two-block ablation shows that OAttention alone does not preserve a NULL state through ordinary host components, whereas the OTransformer path does. These are scoped tests of exactness, active-path compatibility, and compositional necessity; they do not establish universal no-loss, arbitrary-host closure, learned attraction to the origin, or a general semantics for missing values." bcf914375c30492a0e14e8e289eb1d9794e887bd,2608.19863,,2026,Listening Forward: Next Patch Embedding Prediction Enables Scalable Audio Learners,Umberto Cappellazzo,4,,0,"Self-supervised learning (SSL) has driven substantial progress in audio representation learning, though existing methods have increasingly relied on elaborate pre-training recipes to reach competitive performance. A markedly different pre-training philosophy underpins the most influential progress in language modeling and, more recently, in visual representation learning: rather than train encoders as static feature extractors, models are trained to predict the next element, a discrete token or a continuous embedding, from the preceding context. Autoregressive prediction thereby provides a unified pre-training interface that transfers across modalities, compelling the model to learn the underlying data distribution. We ask whether such a simple causal paradigm can yield strong audio learners, given that audio's temporal structure makes autoregressive prediction of patch embeddings a natural fit. We introduce NAPE (Next-Audio-Patch-Embedding prediction), a self-supervised framework in which a causal Transformer predicts each next patch embedding of a log-mel spectrogram from the previous ones, using causal masking and stop-gradient as its sole training signal. The design is intentionally minimalist, avoiding reconstruction decoders, acoustic tokenizers, student-teacher setups, and auxiliary regularization losses. Across six audio and speech benchmarks, NAPE achieves state-of-the-art fine-tuning performance on several tasks, scales consistently across encoder sizes, and yields strong linear-probing results. NAPE also produces structured attention patterns without explicit supervision." d6caee81c9e72b71a18529aa54409f2ca8661f6e,,10.1117/12.3101171,2026,Performance of attention-based deep-learning models in Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor measurements,Matias Marambio-Jimenez,7,Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation,0,"A systematic performance evaluation of attention-based deep-learning models for wavefront reconstruction in Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor (SHWFS) systems is presented. While deep learning has been extensively applied to pyramid and focal-plane wavefront sensing, its application to standard SHWFS configurations remains relatively underexplored. A simulation dataset consisting of 3.5 million open-loop uncorrelated turbulent phase and image pairs modeled after the Subaru Telescope pupil was generated. The dataset spans four pupil-sampling cases (8×8, 16×16, 20×20, and 32×32 subapertures) under realistic conditions. A custom Vision Transformer (ViT) which incorporates features such as rotary positional embeddings, register tokens, and a cross-attention decoder, is benchmarked against a fully convolutional U-Net and a classical Maximum A Posteriori (MAP) linear reconstructor. The results show that the ViT architecture yields the lowest overall residual phase variance across all tested subaperture configurations, demonstrating a robust capability to model global spatial correlations and spot-to-spot cross-coupling across the pupil. While the U-Net performs competitively by capturing localized features, it exhibits ∼ 1.5 times more residual variance per mode than the ViT, which is relatively significant in high-order modes. This study represents a key step toward implementing attention-based models for high-order wavefront sensing and telemetry-assisted data reduction in next-generation instrument suites like ULTIMATE Subaru." 928b977bfc1df405f7ad90f0ceeedb492ecbae8c,2608.17286,,2026,Abra: Scaling Diffusion Image Training,Kyle R. Chickering,8,,3,"Compute-optimal scaling laws guide the training of frontier language models yet remain largely unexplored for visual generation. We present a systematic scaling law study for text-to-image diffusion models using Abra, a controlled family of flow-matching transformers trained across three orders of magnitude worth of compute ($10^{19}$ to $10^{22}$ FLOPs), reaching significantly larger compute budgets than previous works. We demonstrate that diffusion models scale just as predictably as language models but require far more data to train optimally: compute optimality occurs at approximately $200$ image tokens per parameter, ten times the Chinchilla compute-optimal prescription for LLMs. We show that unlike language models, diffusion models are robust to overtraining and that practitioners should err on the side of more data rather than a larger model. Finally, we show that this predictability extends beyond training loss to generative quality metrics, optimal CFG settings, representation quality, and even the shape of the training curves, which collapse onto a universal form." 902b5343fce9bd5216254ac1d10d365316080c81,2608.11519,,2026,FLARE++: Low-rank attention with dynamic attention routing,Vedant Puri,3,,0,"Full self-attention is a strong token mixer for PDE surrogates on irregular domains, but its quadratic cost limits its use on large problems. Latent-space attention methods such as PerceiverIO, Transolver, and FLARE (Fast Low-rank Attention Routing Engine) avoid that cost by routing attention among $N$ tokens through $M\ll N$ learned latents. They compress by dot-product matching of the input tokens against $M$ learned query tokens or projection weights: once trained, the same learned templates serve every input. We remove this restriction with FLARE++, a low-rank attention architecture with input-conditioned routing queries. FLARE++ uses FLARE's own encoder to map the $N$ input tokens to $M$ query tokens, which correct the learned queries. The adapted queries then determine how that same input is compressed and redistributed. This preserves FLARE's explicit low-rank factorization and linear $\mathcal O(NM)$ complexity, and expresses the complete routing operation with standard scaled dot-product attention (SDPA) calls alone. We also provide a multi-GPU context-parallel implementation that shards input tokens across devices without ever gathering the full token sequence on one of them. FLARE++ reduces FLARE's error by $25\%$ on average across five standard PDE benchmarks, achieving the lowest errors among the efficient models compared. The gains persist on industrial-scale DrivAerML aerodynamics and on Long Range Arena, where average accuracy rises by $3.5\%$ over fixed-query FLARE. Code is available at https://github.com/vpuri3/FLARE.py." 57c4a60449eabd5b7ff41cc328171121b9728486,2608.11015,,2026,Sona Technical Report,Sona Team Alexandr Udeneev,34,,0,"We introduce Sona, a single-model generative recommender for Yandex Music. In an online A/B test, Sona replaced the entire production cascade, comprising more than 15 candidate generators followed by pre-ranking and ranking models that consume hundreds of features, including signals from large transformer models such as Argus and target-attention scorers, while significantly improving key engagement metrics. The architecture of Sona unifies candidate generation and ranking around a shared user representation. Its encoder transforms the user's chronological sequence of logged engagement events into hidden states consumed by both the autoregressive decoder and the Ranking Module. The next-token-prediction and distillation objectives jointly update the encoder, coupling generation and ranking through the same user state. Neither Sona nor its Teacher Ranker uses hand-engineered features; both operate on logged event fields and learned item representations. In the final Sona configuration, the larger teacher supplies ranking targets during training but is absent from serving, leaving the encoder, decoder, and Ranking Module as a single deployed model. We evaluate Sona in an online A/B experiment using live traffic from My Vibe on smart speakers, one of Yandex Music's largest recommendation surfaces. Relative to the production control, Sona produced statistically significant uplifts of 4.53% in Active Users, the primary metric, 6.30% in Total Listening Time, and 11.42% in Likes. These effects were incremental to improvements retained from preceding deployments. The Active Users uplift was 2.35 times the increment previously delivered by Argus, the strongest model deployed on this surface before Sona. These results show that a single jointly trained model can replace a mature multi-stage recommendation cascade while improving recommendation quality on live traffic." f0cbd4e7bb6d0b7d83fadecd10b8508cf19ef21f,2608.03158,,2026,Surface Keypoint Representation for Multi-Object and Articulated Human-Object Interaction Generation,Xiaogang Peng,7,,2,"Daily activities require humans to coordinate whole-body motion with the motion of surrounding objects. Despite recent progress in human-object interaction (HOI) generation, most existing methods assume interactions with a single rigid object and do not extend well to scenarios involving a variable number of objects or articulated objects with diverse joint mechanisms. We propose surface keypoint trajectories as an object motion representation: for each rigid component, whether a standalone object or one part of an articulated assembly, we track a small set of non-collinear surface points over time. This representation handles multi-object coordination and diverse articulation mechanisms directly from point dynamics without requiring explicit joint-type specification. To model when and where each body region contacts each object, we introduce a spatio-temporal contact distance field that extends distance-based contact modeling to whole-body, multi-object, and articulated settings. We factorize HOI generation into three stages: generating object motions from text or waypoints, predicting the contact distance field, and synthesizing whole-body motion with contact-guided optimization. Experiments on ParaHome, HIMO, ARCTIC, and OMOMO demonstrate better or comparable performance to existing methods across single-object, multi-object, and articulated interaction settings." ed30f8b49273ff553353a7f43a067ce19beff13b,2608.03624,,2026,LoopMTP: A looped transformer guided by latent multi-token prediction,Behzad Shomali,5,,3,"Looped transformers have emerged as a parameter-efficient alternative to scaling depth for strong reasoning. By reusing one stack of layers across $T$ iterations, they attain the effective depth and reasoning capabilities of larger models at a fixed parameter count. Yet existing approaches suffer from latent overthinking and undifferentiated computation, largely because intermediate representations receive no guidance across loops. Multi-token prediction (MTP) supplies exactly the dense, forward-looking supervision the loop is missing. We propose \textsc{LoopMTP}, which links the two through a structural correspondence in latent space: a model that loops $T$ times can anticipate $T$ future tokens. \textsc{LoopMTP} realizes this by softly aligning the hidden state of loop $t$ with the embedding of the token $t$ steps ahead, while a lightweight gate preserves useful information across iterations. \textsc{LoopMTP} improves average accuracy by up to 8.1\% (relative) over the non-looped baseline, with training remaining stable for up to 15 loops." 1dcfd96d0e2ce30134899bd78053ea6741394e7c,2608.01920,,2026,P-MUSE: Prompt-MIDI-Optional Model for Unified Instrumental Music Synthesis and Editing,Chong Jing,6,,2,"MIDI-to-Music system renders the melody and rhythm of a target MIDI sequence into musical segment while cloning instrument timbre from a prompt recording. Existing systems typically adopt one of two distinct paradigms: conditional generation with prompt audio alone, which remains applicable when aligned prompt MIDI is unavailable, and In-Context Learning with paired prompt audio and MIDI, which exploits cross-modal alignment for stronger control on MIDI following and timbre similarity. We introduce P-MUSE, an instrumental MIDI-to-Music framework that unifies both paradigms via a multi-stage Curriculum-Learning supporting prompt-MIDI-optional inputs. P-MUSE further unifies music generation and local editing through a shared fill-in-the-middle formulation. Grounded in theoretical analysis and empirical study, we propose a phase-aware classifier-free guidance scheduling principle for Transcription-to-Audio systems, alongside a Tail-Drop strategy. Finally, to advance research in this field, we establish the first comprehensive benchmark, covering various prompt modes, generation/editing tasks, and four representative instruments: piano, guitar, bass, and drums. Demos are available at https://p-muse.github.io/." 409892b100dfd82428951144aba6e5cbfb3a5361,2608.02602,,2026,AURORA-LM: Autoencoding Unified Representation for Continuous-Latent Diffusion Language Modeling,Jia-Jun Liang,15,,8,"Language remains an outlier in generative modeling: while images, video, and audio are increasingly modeled in continuous latent spaces, text generation still relies predominantly on discrete tokens. Existing continuous language models either inherit embedding spaces not designed for joint generation and decoding, or compress autoencoded latents to ease diffusion, sacrificing token-level fidelity. Instead of simplifying the representation to suit the generative model, we preserve a high-capacity, decodable text latent and design the diffusion model to learn its distribution directly. We introduce AURORA-LM, a continuous-latent diffusion language model that separates the construction of a decodable text representation from the modeling of its distribution. A Query-based Encoder-Decoder organizes text into a high-capacity, prefix-aligned latent sequence, and a Block-causal Diffusion Transformer learns its distribution through flow matching, generating blocks left to right while denoising positions within each block in parallel. Because such a latent is harder for diffusion to model, AURORA-LM restricts only the noisy-input pathway while retaining the full clean-latent prediction target, accommodating full-width latents without reducing decoder-facing capacity. We further calibrate the noise-level distribution to the latent width, and introduce self-trajectory consistency to bridge independently sampled training noise and iterative denoising at inference. AURORA-LM achieves the strongest performance among evaluated continuous and diffusion-based language models on OpenWebText free generation and XSum summarization. Scaling to 1B parameters with about 1500 EFLOPs of total compute yields further gains, surpassing a larger publicly released latent-diffusion language model under a matched evaluation protocol. All experiments are conducted on Ascend NPUs." 9653176d4dafd012f0b04775889b80cc7b8c6b91,2608.02091,,2026,"One QK Channel, Many Sources: Tracing Low-Precision Attention Collapse",Shu-Xiao Xie,6,,0,"A bfloat16 transformer can train normally, then collapse abruptly. Prior work links collapse to structured attention errors and shows QK normalization disrupts their compounding. Distinct low-precision errors trigger the same collapse, leaving unclear whether each needs a fix at its source or one shared route can be blocked instead. We isolated the fault behind a reproduced GPT-2-class collapse to the streaming-softmax accumulator, where an fp32 streaming core repairs it, and turned it into an assay for moving a controlled error across sources. Using it, we found that errors placed outside attention still drove the same QK spectral runaway, and that correcting only QK kept training stable while the fault stayed active. This is a source-channel dissociation: fault source is not failure channel. It held across tested architectures and scales, and reproduced on a second GPU architecture. As a causal probe, projecting each update off the current QK weights'leading three singular directions held the query projection's largest singular value to 11.1, whereas removing equal energy elsewhere left it at 237: the QK channel causally drives the early runaway. What lets the injected error in is temporal sign-coherence, its per-head sign persisting across steps, not aggregate deviation; once inside, the runaway shows as attention-logit saturation. QK-Guard, a dormant controller, tests this by switching on parameter-free QK normalization at the first monitored threshold crossing. On the runs designated for this test, the QK-local action prevented the failure of each matched or same-configuration unguarded run; on plain GPT-2, all 12 final train and validation losses were within 0.03 nat of same-configuration always-on QK-norm, and both methods ran 60k steps without collapse. Intervention at the QK locus therefore suffices in place of a fix at each source." b086e0018a7af6940362c0f5b5b81c4174044f48,2608.02365,,2026,Faster-WAM: Do World Action Models Need Deep Action Modules?,Liheng Ma,11,,15,"World Action Models (WAMs) build on pretrained video models, whose representations are grounded in physical dynamics and provide a natural basis for action prediction. Despite this natural foundation, many WAMs still rely on deep, parameter-heavy action-prediction modules that incur high inference latency and may overfit to limited robot demonstrations, restricting their real-world applicability. In this paper, we advocate a world-model-centric principle that concentrates capacity and computation in the video world model, while a lightweight action expert translates the backbone's representations into executable robot actions. We realize this principle through three key choices: Dock of Transformers (DoT) with Lite KV-Fusion to give the shallow, lightweight action expert access to representations from all video layers; world-model-only conditioning of the action expert; and retracted 1D-RoPE for positional alignment between video keys and action queries. We test this principle using Faster-WAM, a world-model-centric WAM with only a single-layer action expert. Despite this restriction on action-specific computation, Faster-WAM achieves competitive control performance on LIBERO and RoboTwin~2.0 without additional embodied pretraining. It provides approximately $3.7\times$ and $1.3\times$ inference speedups over Fast-WAM and $\pi_{0.5}$, respectively. Consistent with its world-model-centric design, Faster-WAM demonstrates stronger generalizability under distribution shifts: the same LIBERO-trained policy achieves $78.3\%$ success on LIBERO-Plus, exceeding Fast-WAM and LingBot-VA by $26.8$ and $8.8$ percentage points, respectively. Finally, real-robot experiments demonstrate success rates comparable to Fast-WAM, with substantially lower inference latency and shorter task-completion times." 8af2d906621c35c4dfdaef1a41339eb0a342dc9a,2608.01284,,2026,Training nGPT,I. Loshchilov,2,,0,"The normalized Transformer (nGPT) realizes hyperspherical representation learning by constraining model parameter vectors and activation vectors to the unit hypersphere. In this paper, we describe a practical training recipe for nGPT and evaluate it on modern hybrid Mamba-2--Transformer Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models. The recipe introduces Logit Gradient Preconditioning, Logarithmic Learning Rate Decay, GatedAdamW, angular update control, and optional exploration mechanisms. Compared with an unnormalized model of the same hybrid MoE architecture trained with AdamW, the 30B-total-parameter nGPT model reaches the same validation loss using approximately half as many training tokens. The recipe scales across the models considered, which contain up to 30B total parameters." 1b6f1a575a82efa1236e17d17f0d1453c3e919c5,2607.27308,10.48550/arXiv.2607.27308,2026,ZUNA1.1: A more flexible EEG foundation model for Denoising and Super-resolution,Christopher Warner,4,arXiv.org,0,"We introduce ZUNA1.1, a 380M-parameter diffusion autoencoder for flexible EEG signal reconstruction. ZUNA1.1 is capable of reconstructing variable length sequences of up to 30s, with an arbitrary number of EEG channels at arbitrary scalp locations, and can reconstruct arbitrary temporal intervals within channels in addition to reconstructing entire channels. We demonstrate that ZUNA1.1 performs at least on par with our earlier ZUNA1 model, while being far more flexible and capable of handling a wide range of reconstruction tasks. ZUNA1.1 continues to substantially outperform standard EEG denoising and reconstruction methods such as spherical spline interpolation, which is ubiquitously deployed in the MNE package. The ZUNA1.1 model is released open source under the permissive Apache 2.0 license." 5fc18c66965fc9b4ccf3ef17793d2e8de219acdc,2607.25357,10.48550/arXiv.2607.25357,2026,Raven: High-Recall Sequence Modeling with Sparse Memory Routing,Arshia Afzal,5,arXiv.org,10,"Long-context recall in linear-time sequence models highlights a tradeoff in how they write to memory. State-based linear models, such as state-space models (SSMs) and linear Transformers, write densely, updating the entire state for each newly arrived token, which leads to interference and makes specific past tokens hard to recover. Sliding-window attention (SWA) exhibits the opposite behavior: it writes sparsely by storing explicit token representations, but only within a fixed window, so recall drops once the relevant token is evicted. Interpolating between these models, we introduce Raven, a linear-time sequence model that maintains a fixed set of memory slots and, at each step, decays and updates only a selected subset via learned, input-dependent routing. This lets Raven mitigate SWA's position-based overwriting and hard eviction while reducing interference from dense state updates in SSMs, thereby preserving long-range content much more effectively. Across recall-intensive benchmarks, Raven is competitive with or outperforms prior linear-time baselines, achieving strong long-context recall where both SWA and SSMs sharply degrade. It remains effective when extrapolating to context lengths as large as 16x its training length, with similar gains in hybrid architectures." ad25b88d2eb9427de8b760f688ab73db2ac208f8,2607.18363,10.48550/arXiv.2607.18363,2026,A Controlled Study of Attention-Only Transformers,Henry Ndubuaku,8,arXiv.org,1,"Feed-forward networks hold two thirds of a transformer's non-embedding parameters, yet the architecture has not received a necessity test that controls parameters, compute, and depth at once. We pretrain attention-only decoder transformers (Simple Attention Networks, SANs) against standard transformers matched separately for parameter count, training FLOPs, and depth (2 to 48 layers), for up to 105B tokens at 6M to 87M parameters. Deleting feed-forward layers in place is costly: the standard transformer leads by 0.47 nats at matched depth and 0.26 nats at matched FLOPs. Reallocating the freed budget into attention depth closes the gap: at matched parameters the difference is 0.006 nats (0.27 percent of loss), reproducible to one part in ten thousand across seed pairs, shrinking across 5B, 30B, and 105B budgets, and holding near 0.02 nats across a 29x size range. Three measurements localize the remaining gap to parametric recall: attention-only models are better on context-grounded answers and worse where knowledge must come from weights. Weight spectra show why: routing matrices (Q/K) crystallize early, content matrices accumulate rank slowly, and removing feed-forward layers relocates this accumulation to the attention output projection. QK-normalization, not feed-forward layers or residual gating, keeps 48-layer attention-only stacks trainable. The deficit concentrates on low-context query prediction and localizes there entirely by the largest budget. A pre-registered test confirms the account: it predicts a 0.02 to 0.05 nat gap on knowledge-dense web text; a matched pair trained on fineweb-edu measures 0.040. Within the tested regime, attention does the rest." 3d4598c71a7d5c07aa6cd29d70e765ea9f524241,2607.13022,10.48550/arXiv.2607.13022,2026,A Shortcut to Statistically Steady-State Turbulence with Flow Matching,Gianluca Galletti,8,arXiv.org,0,"Many nonlinear physical systems exhibit an initial transient phase in which perturbations grow before nonlinear interactions lead to a statistically steady state. While this saturated regime is of primary interest, direct numerical simulations must resolve the full transient dynamics before reaching it, incurring significant computational cost. In Computational Fluid Dynamics, reduced-order approaches such as Large Eddy Simulation mitigate computational cost by modeling small-scale dynamics, enabling tractable approximations of turbulent flows. In contrast, for systems such as gyrokinetics, comparably effective closures for the full dynamics are not generally available, and high-fidelity simulations remain necessary. Existing surrogate modeling approaches for these systems are autoregressive, hence they suffer from accumulating error. We instead propose to bypass explicit time evolution by directly modeling the distribution of saturated states under an ergodicity assumption, stating that ensemble averages over samples are equivalent to time averages of a single long simulation. We introduce GyroFlow, a latent generative model that directly estimates steady-state statistics of gyrokinetic turbulence in 5D phase space, without resolving the transient phase. GyroFlow generates saturated snapshots from noise, conditioned on dimensionless operating parameters and outperforms autoregressive, reduced-order, and other generative approaches, while providing substantial speedup. To evaluate generation quality we propose FGyD, a distributional metric computed in the latent space of a pretrained gyrokinetic model, and show that it correlates with downstream flux accuracy and solver convergence. Finally, GyroFlow can be used to warm-start the numerical code used to produce the data." 40b73dba3f28ae798e018641c687b98f242d0e7f,2607.13193,,2026,Generating synthetic evolution of turbulent flames with an experimental data-based spatiotemporal diffusion model,Amrit Tarur,2,,0,"In this study, a conditional diffusion model -- a class of generative machine learning models -- is developed to generate synthetic, experimental data-based trajectories of turbulent flames. Generated experimental data corresponds to simultaneous field measurements, namely OH planar laser-induced fluorescence (OH-PLIF) fields and multi-component particle image velocimetry (PIV) fields, for attached and detached flame states in a swirl combustor configuration. This is done using an x-prediction flow matching framework combined with a pixel-based spatiotemporal transformer, which is capable of generating entire spatiotemporal slabs containing synthetic flame evolution at inference time, conditioned on the flame regime. Using this framework, synthetic flames were found to preserve key flame features and statistical consistency across space and time, particularly at the large scales -- deviations at high temporal frequencies and small spatial length scales were found to depend on the time-span of the generated space-time slabs. An extrapolation task of transition synthesis is also conducted, in which the conditional diffusion model is used to synthesize spatiotemporally coherent flame transitions (flame liftoff and reattachment) unseen by the model during training. This was accomplished using a model for the denoising transition velocity that relies on time-varying linear combinations of attached and detached denoising velocities, leading to an approach that (a) allows for control of the generated transition directions and timescales, and (b) retains sample-to-sample variability in the generated transitions in the process. Overall, this study provides a promising pathway for the utilization of experimental data-based generative models as a new means of data exploration in data-sparse environments, complementing both experiments and computational fluid dynamics-based approaches." 8b7387f357e6436c7c492206bbf24466f7d795bf,2607.04068,10.48550/arXiv.2607.04068,2026,UniSGR: Unified Framework for Semantic ID Generation and Ranking,Jia-Wei Sun,7,arXiv.org,3,"Recommendation systems play a pivotal role in modern e-commerce platforms. While generative retrieval has emerged as a promising paradigm for alleviating the limitations of multi-stage cascade architectures, existing methods still struggle with fine-grained multi-objective ranking. To bridge this gap, we propose UniSGR, a Unified framework for Semantic ID Generation and Ranking. UniSGR adopts a two-stage training paradigm: a multi-scenario pre-training stage that learns from mixed business-scenario data, followed by a scenario-specific alignment stage that jointly optimizes Value-Aware Parallel Multi-Token Prediction (VA-PMTP) and a unified multi-objective ranking module. To better align generation with downstream ranking, we introduce Task-Aware Tokens (TAT) guided by Funnel-Aware Contrastive Learning. Furthermore, we propose Semantic Tree Attention with Reorganized KV cache (STARK), an inference strategy that removes key efficiency bottlenecks in conventional beam search. Extensive offline experiments on a large-scale e-commerce platform demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of UniSGR." 3718f64abd0c2c0241cdd2ab3f10f2b382222aa4,2607.04064,10.1109/OJSP.2026.3711530,2026,Speaker-Disentangled Chunk-Wise Regression for Syllabic Tokenization,Ryota Komatsu,4,IEEE Open Journal of Signal Processing,0,"Unsupervised syllabic tokenization aims to learn discrete syllabic tokens that capture latent linguistic content-related structure from raw speech. Recent syllabic tokenization methods employ teacher-student distillation of the pretrained HuBERT to organize latent speech frame representations into syllabic segments. However, when trained with an utterance-level cross-entropy objective, the model predicts speaker identity rather than linguistic content, thereby compromising the purity of syllabic tokens. To address this problem, we propose a speaker-disentangled syllabic tokenizer that regresses speaker-perturbed student representations toward clean teacher targets within fixed-length chunks. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in syllable boundary detection and syllabic segment clustering. Moreover, a speech language model trained on our syllabic tokens achieves a 7% relative improvement in syntactic and semantic understanding over the phone-level SpiRit-LM." bae8d2f66cd289f690db7d3f89e2951e34229d8e,2607.02770,10.48550/arXiv.2607.02770,2026,Gemma 4 Technical Report,Gemma Team Sherif El Abd,300,arXiv.org,311,"We introduce Gemma 4, a new generation of open-weight, natively multimodal language models in the Gemma model family. Designed to advance compute efficiency and reasoning, the Gemma 4 model suite features dense and Mixture-of-Experts architectures, ranging from 2.3B to 31B parameters. Alongside improved vision and audio encoders for all model sizes, we propose a unified, encoder-free architecture for our 12B model, which ingests raw audio and image patches. Furthermore, we integrate a thinking mode, enabling Gemma models to generate reasoning traces prior to responding. We improve inference speed, memory, and compute efficiency, as well as long-context abilities through critical design choices. Gemma 4 establishes a leap in performance across STEM, multimodal, and long-context benchmarks, and rivals larger, frontier open models in human-rated tasks." 6caaf08a47491189c04c8f53fe0d234a98c720ac,2606.32036,10.48550/arXiv.2606.32036,2026,PointSplat: Compact Gaussian Splatting via Human-Centric Prediction,Yujie Guo,10,arXiv.org,0,"Producing 3D human representations from input views on the fly is essential for immersive live streaming systems, where representation compactness is as critical as high fidelity given limited computational power and transmission bandwidth. Although recent feed-forward reconstruction methods achieve impressive quality through the view-centric prediction of 3D representations, they repeatedly encode the same subject content across multiple views, leading to significant inter-view redundancy. Our key insight is to perform predictions directly in 3D space, enabling the network to learn and produce a highly compact representation. To this end, we propose PointSplat, a novel human-centric approach that directly infers Gaussian primitives from an input point set. The proposed method first estimates a coarse geometric proxy and performs ray casting to prune redundant points and establish explicit 2D--3D correspondences. Subsequently, it employs a Point-Image Transformer to fuse appearance and geometry features, predicting Gaussian attributes in a single forward pass. This design restricts predictions to foreground regions of interest, substantially reducing the total number of Gaussians while improving novel-view rendering quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PointSplat achieves higher efficiency and quality while exhibiting strong robustness to variations in view count and image resolution across multiple datasets." 7a2cacbd05be8ef803bc233762e5c458ee7f4a2e,2606.31248,10.48550/arXiv.2606.31248,2026,Scaling Storm-Resolving Atmospheric AI Simulation to the Entire Planet,Ze-Yuan Hu,12,arXiv.org,2,"Kilometer-scale convection shapes precipitation extremes, tropical organization, and cloud feedbacks, but most global atmospheric models approximate these processes at 25-100 km resolution. Global storm-resolving physics models resolve convective systems explicitly, but at a cost -- roughly one MWh per simulated day on exascale supercomputers -- that limits long-duration simulation. We introduce STRATA (Storm-resolving Tile-based autoRegressive Atmosphere Transformer Architecture), the first autoregressive AI emulator for global storm-resolving atmospheric dynamics. STRATA is trained on the highest-resolution atmospheric dataset yet used for global AI emulation: 17 days of SCREAM physics-model output at 4.9-km resolution (~25 million grid cells) sampled every 10 minutes. Our central premise is that on 10-minute timescales atmospheric dynamics are predominantly local, so training on small spatial tiles trades scarce global temporal samples for abundant local spatial samples and enables global rollout via overlapping-tile blending. STRATA combines 3D patch embedding and local 3D neighborhood attention, a novel Stereographic Rotary Position Embedding (StereoRoPE) for grid-invariant encoding, and a pixel-space de-aliasing decoder that suppresses patch-scale rollout artifacts. An iso-FLOP scaling study reveals that km-scale emulation requires ~10x more FLOPs per grid point than coarse-resolution AI weather models, consistent with the higher information density of convective-scale dynamics. Trained on only 17 days of data, STRATA produces stable 24-hour global rollouts with realistic km-scale dynamics across diverse regimes, though large-scale biases develop with lead time. It achieves 48 simulation days per megawatt-hour -- about 50 times better energy efficiency than the SCREAM physics model -- and 741 simulated days per wall-clock day at 512 H100 GPUs. Code and dataset are publicly available." 0c016749121e0bab374152c88a2db2ab9ea25304,2606.29059,10.48550/arXiv.2606.29059,2026,Flow Matching in Feature Space for Stochastic World Modeling,François Porcher,4,arXiv.org,6,"World modeling requires forecasting uncertain futures while preserving information useful for downstream perception. Existing visual world models often struggle to satisfy both goals: VAE-based stochastic models operate in low-dimensional reconstruction latents, which can limit perception performance, while deterministic predictors using strong pretrained features collapse multimodal futures into a single blurry mean. In this work, we propose FlowWM, a stochastic world model that performs flow matching directly within pretrained feature space (e.g., DINOv3). This is challenging because pretrained features are substantially high-dimensional, making standard diffusion recipes suboptimal. To address this, we investigate the design choices needed for feature-space flow matching and introduce a differentiable one-step projection mechanism that enables efficient training with temporal consistency and task-driven objectives. We evaluate FlowWM on two benchmarks: a synthetic benchmark for systematic evaluation of accuracy and diversity, and a real-world benchmark FuturePerception. FlowWM improves perception performance, mode coverage, and horizon robustness, validating our proposed design for stochastic world modeling in high-dimensional feature spaces." 41c5d141b6eb32aa30528590dc583f620d2b97d6,2606.27364,10.48550/arXiv.2606.27364,2026,PhysiFormer: Learning to Simulate Mechanics in World Space,Yi-Ming Chen,3,arXiv.org,2,"We present PhysiFormer, a diffusion transformer for physically-plausible 3D object motion. Unlike video world models that operate in view-dependent pixel space, PhysiFormer represents objects as 3D meshes expressed in world coordinates. Given the initial vertex positions and velocities, as well as object material type, rigid or elastic, the model samples future vertex trajectories. While related neural physics approaches build on ad-hoc latent spaces or explicitly enforce rigidity and causality, PhysiFormer shows that excellent results can be obtained without any such inductive biases, by casting vertex trajectory prediction as a single denoising diffusion process directly in world coordinates. The probabilistic formulation captures uncertainty in the learned dynamics, enabling diverse plausible futures from initial conditions, making this framework potentially useful for applications with unobserved uncertainty. The model features attention factorised over time, space, and objects for efficiency, enabling permutation-invariant multi-object reasoning without needing explicit object encoding. Trained on over 100k simulated trajectories, PhysiFormer generates rigid and elastic mechanics, and generalises to mixed-material settings, unseen real-world geometries, and larger object counts. It substantially outperforms autoregressive baselines in trajectory accuracy, rigidity preservation, and momentum-based physical consistency. Our results position coordinate-space diffusion as a promising step toward view-invariant, geometry-aware world modelling for robotics, graphics, and physical design. Visualisations, code, and models are available at https://yimingc9.github.io/physiformer." f063ad0ced3448b9c78b906a0c3384be57f58ef8,2606.27375,10.48550/arXiv.2606.27375,2026,"Scalable Behavior Cloning with Open Data, Training, and Evaluation",Arthur Allshire,18,arXiv.org,16,"We introduce ABC, a fully open-source stack for manipulation with behavior cloning. At its core is ABC-130K: the largest open-source teleoperation dataset to date, featuring 3,500 hours of data spanning over 130K episodes across 195 diverse tasks. Furthermore, we open-source our accessible hardware setup, training infrastructure, and simulation pipeline. We also release 400 hours of sim-teleop data and provide a co-training recipe that produces correlated simulation and real-world evaluation, offering a reliable proxy for ablating model-design and training decisions before costly real-world evaluation. We explore various training recipes and compare common architectural choices for Diffusion Transformers (DiT) and Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, grounding our findings in real-world evaluations. The resulting policies successfully execute dexterous tasks such as box folding and extracting credit cards from wallets. By providing a reproducible toolkit, we aim to place researchers on an equal footing, establishing the necessary foundation to learn the ABCs of Behavior Cloning together as a community." 7dd4d28614cb2d482e0463267692877c958f8e6a,2606.27326,10.48550/arXiv.2606.27326,2026,Hallucination in World Models is Predictable and Preventable,Nicklas Hansen,2,arXiv.org,10,"Modern generative world models render increasingly realistic action-controllable futures, yet they frequently hallucinate: rollouts remain visually fluent while drifting from the ground-truth dynamics. We hypothesize that hallucination concentrates in low-coverage regions of the state-action space, where lightweight data-centric signals can both detect it and guide mitigation. To test this, we introduce MMBench2, a 427-hour, 210-task dataset for visual world modeling with ground-truth actions, rewards, and live simulators, and train a 350M-parameter world model on it. We identify three distinct hallucination modes: perceptual, action-marginalized, and scene-diverging -- each anchored to a different stage of the pipeline, and develop three signals that accurately predict where the model will fail. To close coverage gaps at training time, we develop a coverage-aware sampling technique; to close them online, our hallucination predictors serve as curiosity rewards for targeted data collection, yielding a data-efficient finetuning recipe that adapts the pretrained world model to entirely unseen environments with as few as 50 real environment trajectories. Overall, our findings reveal that hallucination in world models is inherently a data coverage issue, and that the same signals used to detect it can also be used for mitigation. An interactive web version of our paper is available at https://www.nicklashansen.com/mmbench2" 52dd4accc3b85bdc97a91a5b359271d0a00f556c,2606.26467,10.48550/arXiv.2606.26467,2026,A Causal Foundation Model for Structure and Outcome Prediction,Max Zhu,4,arXiv.org,2,"We introduce TabPFN-CFM, a causal foundation model that can handle multiple causal problems. TabPFN-CFM predicts both causal structure and outcomes from observational data, supports queries on all three levels of Pearl's Causal Hierarchy and uses known graph structure when available to improve predictions. TabPFN-CFM is trained on synthetic datasets, and generalises to real datasets, demonstrating improved performance over both structural and outcome prediction baselines." 662ce403a76826f17aca6bd4d1ba8eaf1184fbea,2606.27345,,2026,SCoPE: Sightline-Coordinate Positional Encoding for Video Diffusion Transformers,Minghao Yin,6,,6,"Video diffusion transformers address their tokens by position on the pixel-time grid: an address in the tensor, not in the world. The address we would want, the world point a token depicts, lies on a surface not yet generated, while its camera ray is fixed once the user specifies a trajectory. SCoPE therefore treats the ray as a second positional coordinate, and camera control becomes a property of the coordinate system, not an added module. The ray is added to the pretrained attention's queries and keys, and the score gains a term that reads the two rays alone. Its canonical form, the reciprocal product of line geometry, measures how nearly two lines of sight meet. Normalize-Gate-Inject makes a single encoding trainable across metric and up-to-scale pose sources. The retrofit keeps RoPE bit-exact, starts from the unchanged pretrained DiT, and adds under 0.1/% new parameters. On Wan2.2 at 5B and 14B under matched data and budget, SCoPE improves every camera-controllability and fidelity metric, leads all closed-loop revisit metrics, and shows widening margins with model size. At 14B, rotation error falls 29/% and FVD 43/% below the strongest baseline." 585fee95a2c62aae3264f6179fc702bec1956cb5,2606.24320,10.48550/arXiv.2606.24320,2026,ZONOS2 Technical Report,Michael G. Clark,5,arXiv.org,0,"We present ZONOS2 8B, our latest TTS model, which achieves state-of-the-art naturalness, prosody, and voice cloning fidelity. We improve upon Zonos-v0.1 across scale, data, and training recipe. We scale the model from 1.6B to 8B total parameters (900M active) with a novel mixture-of-experts (MoE) backbone, improving inference latency and throughput. We expand our training corpus from 200K to over 6M hours using a new data processing pipeline, and we simplify our post-training and conditioning recipes to improve naturalness and voice cloning fidelity. We evaluate ZONOS2 8B on quality, speaker similarity, WER, and ZTTS1-Eval, our novel TTS benchmark, where it performs competitively with state-of-the-art systems while maintaining good streaming latency. We release our model weights and example inference code under an Apache 2.0 license on GitHub and Hugging Face." e3aa38c070eed8cc1f62f4e4e7416143b36c7899,2607.09694,10.48550/arXiv.2607.09694,2026,Low-Rank Attention Residuals,Jonathan Su,1,arXiv.org,1,"Attention Residuals (AttnRes) replace the fixed residual sum with depth-wise attention over previous sub-layer outputs in Large Language Models (LLMs), but use each output as both a full-dimensional key and value. This couples routing with representation and makes the cost of computing depth-routing scores scale with hidden width $d$. We propose Low-Rank Attention Residuals (LR-AttnRes), which keep full-dimensional residual values while using $r$-dimensional keys, with $r