OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Uncovering Cross-Objective Interference in Multi-Objective Alignment
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2026
Year: 2026

We study a persistent failure mode in multi-objective alignment for large language models (LLMs): training improves performance on only a subset of objectives while causing others to degrade. We formalize this phenomenon as cross-objective interference and conduct the first systematic study across classic scalarization algorithms, showing that interference is pervasive and exhibits strong model dependence. To explain this phenomenon, we derive a local covariance law showing that an objective improves at first order when its reward exhibits positive covariance with the scalarized score. We extend this analysis to clipped surrogate objectives used in modern alignment, demonstrating that the covariance law remains valid under mild conditions despite clipping. Building on this analysis, we propose Covariance Targeted Weight Adaptation (CTWA), a plug-and-play method that maintains positive covariance between objective rewards and the training signal to effectively mitigate cross-objective interference. Finally, we complement these local improvement conditions with a global convergence analysis under the Polyak--Łojasiewicz condition, establishing when non-convex scalarized optimization achieves global convergence and how cross-objective interference depends on specific model geometric properties.
Vision Transformer Finetuning Benefits from Non-Smooth Components
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

The smoothness of the transformer architecture has been extensively studied in the context of generalization, training stability, and adversarial robustness. However, its role in transfer learning remains poorly understood. In this paper, we analyze the ability of vision transformer components to adapt their outputs to changes in inputs, or, in other words, their plasticity. Defined as an average rate of change, it captures the sensitivity to input perturbation; in particular, a high plasticity implies low smoothness. We demonstrate through theoretical analysis and comprehensive experiments that this perspective provides principled guidance in choosing the components to prioritize during adaptation. A key takeaway for practitioners is that the high plasticity of the attention modules and feedforward layers consistently leads to better finetuning performance. Our findings depart from the prevailing assumption that smoothness is desirable, offering a novel perspective on the functional properties of transformers. The code is available at https://github.com/ambroiseodt/vit-plasticity.
Sample Complexity of Causal Identification with Temporal Heterogeneity
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Recovering a unique causal graph from observational data is an ill-posed problem because multiple generating mechanisms can lead to the same observational distribution. This problem becomes solvable only by exploiting specific structural or distributional assumptions. While recent work has separately utilized time-series dynamics or multi-environment heterogeneity to constrain this problem, we integrate both as complementary sources of heterogeneity. This integration yields unified necessary identifiability conditions and enables a rigorous analysis of the statistical limits of recovery under thin versus heavy-tailed noise. In particular, temporal structure is shown to effectively substitute for missing environmental diversity, possibly achieving identifiability even under insufficient heterogeneity. Extending this analysis to heavy-tailed (Student's t) distributions, we demonstrate that while geometric identifiability conditions remain invariant, the sample complexity diverges significantly from the Gaussian baseline. Explicit information-theoretic bounds quantify this cost of robustness, establishing the fundamental limits of covariance-based causal graph recovery methods in realistic non-stationary systems. This work shifts the focus from whether causal structure is identifiable to whether it is statistically recoverable in practice.
Revisiting the Generic Transformer: Deconstructing a Strong Baseline for Time Series Foundation Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

The recent surge in Time Series Foundation Models has rapidly advanced the field, yet the heterogeneous training setups across studies make it difficult to attribute improvements to architectural innovations versus data engineering. In this work, we investigate the potential of a standard patch Transformer, demonstrating that this generic architecture achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot forecasting performance using a straightforward training protocol. We conduct a comprehensive ablation study that covers model scaling, data composition, and training techniques to isolate the essential ingredients for high performance. Our findings identify the key drivers of performance, while confirming that the generic architecture itself demonstrates excellent scalability. By strictly controlling these variables, we provide comprehensive empirical results on model scaling across multiple dimensions. We release our open-source model and detailed findings to establish a transparent, reproducible baseline for future research.
PANC: Prior-Aware Normalized Cut for Object Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Fully unsupervised segmentation pipelines naively seek the most salient object, should this be present. As a result, most of the methods reported in the literature deliver non-deterministic partitions that are sensitive to initialization, seed order, and threshold heuristics. We propose PANC, a weakly supervised spectral segmentation framework that uses a minimal set of annotated visual tokens to produce stable, controllable, and reproducible object masks. From the TokenCut approach, we augment the token-token affinity graph with a handful of priors coupled to anchor nodes. By manipulating the graph topology, we bias the spectral eigenspace toward partitions that are consistent with the annotations. Our approach preserves the global grouping enforced by dense self-supervised visual features, trading annotated tokens for significant gains in reproducibility, user control, and segmentation quality. Using 5 to 30 annotations per dataset, our training-free method achieves state-of-the-art performance among weakly and unsupervised approaches on standard benchmarks (e.g., DUTS-TE, ECSSD, MS COCO). Contrarily, it excels in domains where dense labels are costly or intra-class differences are subtle. We report strong and reliable results on homogeneous, fine-grained, and texture-limited domains, achieving 96.8% (+14.43% over SotA), 78.0% (+0.2%), and 78.8% (+0.37%) average mean intersection-over-union (mIoU) on CrackForest (CFD), CUB-200-2011, and HAM10000 datasets, respectively. For multi-object benchmarks, the framework showcases explicit, user-controllable semantic segmentation.
Seeing Beyond Redundancy: Task Complexity's Role in Vision Token Specialization in VLLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Vision capabilities in vision large language models (VLLMs) have consistently lagged behind their linguistic capabilities. In particular, numerous benchmark studies have demonstrated that VLLMs struggle when fine-grained visual information or spatial reasoning is required. However, we do not yet understand exactly why VLLMs struggle so much with these tasks relative to others. Some works have focused on visual redundancy as an explanation, where high-level visual information is uniformly spread across numerous tokens and specific, fine-grained visual information is discarded. In this work, we investigate this premise in greater detail, seeking to better understand exactly how various types of visual information are processed by the model and what types of visual information are discarded. To do so, we introduce a simple synthetic benchmark dataset that is specifically constructed to probe various visual features, along with a set of metrics for measuring visual redundancy, allowing us to better understand the nuances of their relationship. Then, we explore fine-tuning VLLMs on a number of complex visual tasks to better understand how redundancy and compression change based upon the complexity of the data that a model is trained on. We find that there is a connection between task complexity and visual compression, implying that having a sufficient ratio of high complexity visual data is crucial for altering the way that VLLMs distribute their visual representation and consequently improving their performance on complex visual tasks. We hope that this work will provide valuable insights for training the next generation of VLLMs.
When RL Meets Adaptive Speculative Training: A Unified Training-Serving System
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Speculative decoding can significantly accelerate LLM serving, yet most deployments today disentangle speculator training from serving, treating speculator training as a standalone offline modeling problem. We show that this decoupled formulation introduces substantial deployment and adaptation lag: (1) high time-to-serve, since a speculator must be trained offline for a considerable period before deployment; (2) delayed utility feedback, since the true end-to-end decoding speedup is only known after training and cannot be inferred reliably from acceptance rate alone due to model-architecture and system-level overheads; and (3) domain-drift degradation, as the target model is repurposed to new domains and the speculator becomes stale and less effective. To address these issues, we present Aurora, a unified training-serving system that closes the loop by continuously learning a speculator directly from live inference traces. Aurora reframes online speculator learning as an asynchronous reinforcement-learning problem: accepted tokens provide positive feedback, while rejected speculator proposals provide implicit negative feedback that we exploit to improve sample efficiency. Our design integrates an SGLang-based inference server with an asynchronous training server, enabling hot-swapped speculator updates without service interruption. Crucially, Aurora supports day-0 deployment: a speculator can be served immediately and rapidly adapted to live traffic, improving system performance while providing immediate utility feedback. Across experiments, Aurora achieves a 1.5x day-0 speedup on recently released frontier models (e.g., MiniMax M2.1 229B and Qwen3-Coder-Next 80B). Aurora also adapts effectively to distribution shifts in user traffic, delivering an additional 1.25x speedup over a well-trained but static speculator on widely used models (e.g., Qwen3 and Llama3).
Reciprocal Latent Fields for Precomputed Sound Propagation
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2026
Year: 2026

Realistic sound propagation is essential for immersion in a virtual scene, yet physically accurate wave-based simulations remain computationally prohibitive for real-time applications. Wave coding methods address this limitation by precomputing and compressing impulse responses of a given scene into a set of scalar acoustic parameters, which can reach unmanageable sizes in large environments with many source-receiver pairs. We introduce Reciprocal Latent Fields (RLF), a memory-efficient framework for encoding and predicting these acoustic parameters. The RLF framework employs a volumetric grid of trainable latent embeddings decoded with a symmetric function, ensuring acoustic reciprocity. We study a variety of decoders and show that leveraging Riemannian metric learning leads to a better reproduction of acoustic phenomena in complex scenes. Experimental validation demonstrates that RLF maintains replication quality while reducing the memory footprint by several orders of magnitude. Furthermore, a MUSHRA-like subjective listening test indicates that sound rendered via RLF is perceptually indistinguishable from ground-truth simulations.
From Core to Detail: Unsupervised Disentanglement with Entropy-Ordered Flows
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Learning unsupervised representations that are both semantically meaningful and stable across runs remains a central challenge in modern representation learning. We introduce entropy-ordered flows (EOFlows), a normalizing-flow framework that orders latent dimensions by their explained entropy, analogously to PCA's explained variance. This ordering enables adaptive injective flows: after training, one may retain only the top C latent variables to form a compact core representation while the remaining variables capture fine-grained detail and noise, with C chosen flexibly at inference time rather than fixed during training. EOFlows build on insights from Independent Mechanism Analysis, Principal Component Flows and Manifold Entropic Metrics. We combine likelihood-based training with local Jacobian regularization and noise augmentation into a method that scales well to high-dimensional data such as images. Experiments on the CelebA dataset show that our method uncovers a rich set of semantically interpretable features, allowing for high compression and strong denoising.
InftyThink+: Effective and Efficient Infinite-Horizon Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2026
Year: 2026

Large reasoning models achieve strong performance by scaling inference-time chain-of-thought, but this paradigm suffers from quadratic cost, context length limits, and degraded reasoning due to lost-in-the-middle effects. Iterative reasoning mitigates these issues by periodically summarizing intermediate thoughts, yet existing methods rely on supervised learning or fixed heuristics and fail to optimize when to summarize, what to preserve, and how to resume reasoning. We propose InftyThink+, an end-to-end reinforcement learning framework that optimizes the entire iterative reasoning trajectory, building on model-controlled iteration boundaries and explicit summarization. InftyThink+ adopts a two-stage training scheme with supervised cold-start followed by trajectory-level reinforcement learning, enabling the model to learn strategic summarization and continuation decisions. Experiments on DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B show that InftyThink+ improves accuracy by 21% on AIME24 and outperforms conventional long chain-of-thought reinforcement learning by a clear margin, while also generalizing better to out-of-distribution benchmarks. Moreover, InftyThink+ significantly reduces inference latency and accelerates reinforcement learning training, demonstrating improved reasoning efficiency alongside stronger performance.
MedMO: Grounding and Understanding Multimodal Large Language Model for Medical Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Multimodal large language models have advanced rapidly, but their adoption in medicine is constrained by limited domain coverage, imperfect modality alignment, and insufficient grounded reasoning. We introduce MedMO, a medical multimodal foundation model built on a general MLLM architecture and trained exclusively on large-scale domain-specific data. MedMO uses a multi-stage training recipe that includes cross-modal pretraining to align heterogeneous visual encoders with a medical language backbone, instruction tuning with multi-task supervision spanning captioning, VQA, report generation, retrieval, and bounding-box disease localization, and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards that combine factuality checks with a box-level GIoU signal to improve spatial grounding and step-by-step reasoning in challenging clinical settings. Across modalities and tasks, MedMO surpasses strong open-source medical baselines. MedMO-8B-Next achieves consistent gains on VQA benchmarks, improving by 6.6% on average over Fleming-VL-8B, including gains of 6.0% on MMMU-Med, 9.8% on PMC-VQA, and 21.3% on MedXpertQA. On text-based QA, it improves by 14.4% over Fleming-VL-8B, driven by gains of 8.4% on MMLU-Med and 30.1% on MedQA. For medical report generation, it improves by 6.7% on MIMIC-CXR. MedMO-8B-Next also demonstrates strong grounding performance, reaching 56.1 IoU on Bacteria, which is a 47.8 IoU gain over Fleming-VL-8B. At smaller scale, MedMO-4B-Next remains competitive and exceeds Fleming-VL-8B across VQA, QA, and report generation. Evaluations spanning radiology, ophthalmology, and pathology microscopy further confirm broad cross-modality generalization. Project is available at https://genmilab.github.io/MedMO-Page
Potential Role of Agentic Artificial Intelligence in Toxicologic Pathology
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2026
Year: 2026

As the volume and complexity of nonclinical toxicology studies continue to increase, toxicologic pathology reporting faces persistent challenges, including fragmented sources of data (e.g., histopathology images, clinical pathology and other study data, adverse effects database, mechanistic literature), variable reporting timelines and heightened regulatory expectations. This white paper examines the emerging role of agentic artificial intelligence (AI) in addressing these issues through coordinated workflow orchestration, data integration, and pathologist-in-the-loop report generation. Based on a closed-door roundtable held during the 2025 Society of Toxicologic Pathology (STP) Annual Meeting and follow-on discussions, this paper synthesizes the perspectives of leading toxicologic pathologists, toxicologists, and AI developers. It outlines the key pain points in current reporting workflows, identifies realistic near-term use cases for agentic AI, and describes major adoption barriers including requirements for transparency, validation, and organizational readiness. A phased adoption roadmap and pilot design considerations are proposed to help support responsible evaluation and deployment of agentic AI system in nonclinical settings. The paper concludes by emphasizing the need for coordinated efforts across pharmaceutical organizations, CROs, academia, and regulators to establish shared standards, benchmarks, and governance frameworks that will lead to safe, transparent, and trustworthy integration of AI into toxicologic science.
Attractor Patch Networks: Reducing Catastrophic Forgetting with Routed Low-Rank Patch Experts
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Transformers achieve strong language modeling accuracy, yet their position-wise feed-forward networks (FFNs) are dense, globally shared, and typically updated end to end. These properties create two practical tensions. First, dense FFNs spend the same compute on every token regardless of context, and they allocate capacity uniformly even when language exhibits highly clustered context structure. Second, continual learning, in the sense of updating the model while serving a data stream, often produces interference because a small update touches broadly shared weights. We propose Attractor Patch Networks (APN), a plug-compatible replacement for the Transformer FFN. APN is a bank of patch experts. A similarity router selects a small top-k set of patches for each token by matching the token representation to learned prototypes. Each selected patch emits a low-rank residual update conditioned on a compact code. The architecture yields conditional, context-specialized nonlinear transformations while preserving the standard Transformer interface. This paper focuses on APN as an architectural primitive. We formalize APN, analyze its expressivity as a piecewise low-rank residual function class, and derive simple interference and stability arguments that make APN naturally compatible with continual learning. In experiments on character-level language modeling, APN achieves competitive perplexity (4.57 vs 4.32 PPL) while enabling dramatically better continual adaptation: when adapting to a shifted domain, APN achieves 2.6 times better retention (11.1 vs 29.4 PPL on the original domain) and 2.8 times better adaptation (6.4 vs 17.8 PPL on the new domain) compared to global fine-tuning of a dense FFN baseline.
MolLIBRA: Genetic Molecular Optimization with Multi-Fingerprint Surrogates and Text-Molecule Aligned Critic
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2026
Year: 2026

We study sample-efficient molecular optimization under a limited budget of oracle evaluations. We propose MolLIBRA (MultimOdaLity and Language Integrated Bayesian and evolutionaRy optimizAtion), a genetic algorithm based framework that pre-ranks candidate molecules using multiple critics before oracle calls: (i) an ensemble of Gaussian process (GP) surrogates defined over multiple molecular fingerprints and (ii) a pretrained text-molecule aligned encoder CLAMP. The GP ensemble enables adaptive selection of task-appropriate fingerprints, while CLAMP provides a zero-shot scoring signal from task descriptions by measuring the similarity between molecular and text embeddings. On the Practical Molecular Optimization (PMO) benchmark with a budget of 1,000 evaluations (PMO-1K), MolLIBRA-L, our variant with a language-model-based candidate generator, attains the best Top-10 AUC on 14/22 tasks and the highest overall sum of Top-10 AUC across tasks among prior methods.
Where Not to Learn: Prior-Aligned Training with Subset-based Attribution Constraints for Reliable Decision-Making
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Reliable models should not only predict correctly, but also justify decisions with acceptable evidence. Yet conventional supervised learning typically provides only class-level labels, allowing models to achieve high accuracy through shortcut correlations rather than the intended evidence. Human priors can help constrain such behavior, but aligning models to these priors remains challenging because learned representations often diverge from human perception. To address this challenge, we propose an attribution-based human prior alignment method. We encode human priors as input regions that the model is expected to rely on (e.g., bounding boxes), and leverage a highly faithful subset-selection-based attribution approach to expose the model's decision evidence during training. When the attribution region deviates substantially from the prior regions, we penalize reliance on off-prior evidence, encouraging the model to shift its attribution toward the intended regions. This is achieved through a training objective that imposes attribution constraints induced by the human prior. We validate our method on both image classification and click decision tasks in MLLM-based GUI agent models. Across conventional classification and autoregressive generation settings, human prior alignment consistently improves task accuracy while also enhancing the model's decision reasonability.
Multi-Scale Temporal Homeostasis Enables Efficient and Robust Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2026
Year: 2026

Artificial neural networks achieve strong performance on benchmark tasks but remain fundamentally brittle under perturbations, limiting their deployment in real-world settings. In contrast, biological nervous systems sustain reliable function across decades through homeostatic regulation coordinated across multiple temporal scales. Inspired by this principle, this presents Multi-Scale Temporal Homeostasis (MSTH), a biologically grounded framework that integrates ultra-fast (5-ms), fast (2-s), medium (5-min) and slow (1-hrs) regulation into artificial networks. MSTH implements the cross-scale coordination system for artificial neural networks, providing a unified temporal hierarchy that moves beyond superficial biomimicry. The cross-scale coordination enhances computational efficiency through evolutionary-refined optimization mechanisms. Experiments across molecular, graph and image classification benchmarks show that MSTH consistently improves accuracy, eliminates catastrophic failures and enhances recovery from perturbations. Moreover, MSTH outperforms both single-scale bio-inspired models and established state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating generality across diverse domains. These findings establish cross-scale temporal coordination as a core principle for stabilizing artificial neural systems, positioning MSTH as a foundation for building robust, resilient and biologically faithful intelligence.