OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Efficient Estimation of Kernel Surrogate Models for Task Attribution
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Modern AI agents such as large language models are trained on diverse tasks -- translation, code generation, mathematical reasoning, and text prediction -- simultaneously. A key question is to quantify how each individual training task influences performance on a target task, a problem we refer to as task attribution. The direct approach, leave-one-out retraining, measures the effect of removing each task, but is computationally infeasible at scale. An alternative approach that builds surrogate models to predict a target task's performance for any subset of training tasks has emerged in recent literature. Prior work focuses on linear surrogate models, which capture first-order relationships, but miss nonlinear interactions such as synergy, antagonism, or XOR-type effects. In this paper, we first consider a unified task weighting framework for analyzing task attribution methods, and show a new connection between linear surrogate models and influence functions through a second-order analysis. Then, we introduce kernel surrogate models, which more effectively represent second-order task interactions. To efficiently learn the kernel surrogate, we develop a gradient-based estimation procedure that leverages a first-order approximation of pretrained models; empirically, this yields accurate estimates with less than $2\%$ relative error without repeated retraining. Experiments across multiple domains -- including math reasoning in transformers, in-context learning, and multi-objective reinforcement learning -- demonstrate the effectiveness of kernel surrogate models. They achieve a $25\%$ higher correlation with the leave-one-out ground truth than linear surrogates and influence-function baselines. When used for downstream task selection, kernel surrogate models yield a $40\%$ improvement in demonstration selection for in-context learning and multi-objective reinforcement learning benchmarks.
Bridging Online and Offline RL: Contextual Bandit Learning for Multi-Turn Code Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Recently, there have been significant research interests in training large language models (LLMs) with reinforcement learning (RL) on real-world tasks, such as multi-turn code generation. While online RL tends to perform better than offline RL, its higher training cost and instability hinders wide adoption. In this paper, we build on the observation that multi-turn code generation can be formulated as a one-step recoverable Markov decision process and propose contextual bandit learning with offline trajectories (Cobalt), a new method that combines the benefits of online and offline RL. Cobalt first collects code generation trajectories using a reference LLM and divides them into partial trajectories as contextual prompts. Then, during online bandit learning, the LLM is trained to complete each partial trajectory prompt through single-step code generation. Cobalt outperforms two multi-turn online RL baselines based on GRPO and VeRPO, and substantially improves R1-Distill 8B and Qwen3 8B by up to 9.0 and 6.2 absolute Pass@1 scores on LiveCodeBench. Also, we analyze LLMs' in-context reward hacking behaviors and augment Cobalt training with perturbed trajectories to mitigate this issue. Overall, our results demonstrate Cobalt as a promising solution for iterative decision-making tasks like multi-turn code generation. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/OSU-NLP-Group/cobalt.
Enhancing Imbalanced Node Classification via Curriculum-Guided Feature Learning and Three-Stage Attention Network
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Imbalanced node classification in graph neural networks (GNNs) happens when some labels are much more common than others, which causes the model to learn unfairly and perform badly on the less common classes. To solve this problem, we propose a Curriculum-Guided Feature Learning and Three-Stage Attention Network (CL3AN-GNN), a learning network that uses a three-step attention system (Engage, Enact, Embed) similar to how humans learn. The model begins by engaging with structurally simpler features, defined as (1) local neighbourhood patterns (1-hop), (2) low-degree node attributes, and (3) class-separable node pairs identified via initial graph convolutional networks and graph attention networks (GCN and GAT) embeddings. This foundation enables stable early learning despite label skew. The Enact stage then addresses complicated aspects: (1) connections that require multiple steps, (2) edges that connect different types of nodes, and (3) nodes at the edges of minority classes by using adjustable attention weights. Finally, Embed consolidates these features via iterative message passing and curriculum-aligned loss weighting. We evaluate CL3AN-GNN on eight Open Graph Benchmark datasets spanning social, biological, and citation networks. Experiments show consistent improvements across all datasets in accuracy, F1-score, and AUC over recent state-of-the-art methods. The model's step-by-step method works well with different types of graph datasets, showing quicker results than training everything at once, better performance on new, imbalanced graphs, and clear explanations of each step using gradient stability and attention correlation learning curves. This work provides both a theoretically grounded framework for curriculum learning in GNNs and practical evidence of its effectiveness against imbalances, validated through metrics, convergence speeds, and generalisation tests.
Fast-Slow Efficient Training for Multimodal Large Language Models via Visual Token Pruning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) suffer from severe training inefficiency issue, which is associated with their massive model sizes and visual token numbers. Existing efforts in efficient training focus on reducing model sizes or trainable parameters. Inspired by the success of Visual Token Pruning (VTP) in improving inference efficiency, we are exploring another substantial research direction for efficient training by reducing visual tokens. However, applying VTP at the training stage results in a training-inference mismatch: pruning-trained models perform poorly when inferring on non-pruned full visual token sequences. To close this gap, we propose DualSpeed, a fast-slow framework for efficient training of MLLMs. The fast-mode is the primary mode, which incorporates existing VTP methods as plugins to reduce visual tokens, along with a mode isolator to isolate the model's behaviors. The slow-mode is the auxiliary mode, where the model is trained on full visual sequences to retain training-inference consistency. To boost its training, it further leverages self-distillation to learn from the sufficiently trained fast-mode. Together, DualSpeed can achieve both training efficiency and non-degraded performance. Experiments show DualSpeed accelerates the training of LLaVA-1.5 by 2.1$\times$ and LLaVA-NeXT by 4.0$\times$, retaining over 99% performance. Code: https://github.com/dingkun-zhang/DualSpeed
SymPlex: A Structure-Aware Transformer for Symbolic PDE Solving
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

We propose SymPlex, a reinforcement learning framework for discovering analytical symbolic solutions to partial differential equations (PDEs) without access to ground-truth expressions. SymPlex formulates symbolic PDE solving as tree-structured decision-making and optimizes candidate solutions using only the PDE and its boundary conditions. At its core is SymFormer, a structure-aware Transformer that models hierarchical symbolic dependencies via tree-relative self-attention and enforces syntactic validity through grammar-constrained autoregressive decoding, overcoming the limited expressivity of sequence-based generators. Unlike numerical and neural approaches that approximate solutions in discretized or implicit function spaces, SymPlex operates directly in symbolic expression space, enabling interpretable and human-readable solutions that naturally represent non-smooth behavior and explicit parametric dependence. Empirical results demonstrate exact recovery of non-smooth and parametric PDE solutions using deep learning-based symbolic methods.
Robust Intervention Learning from Emergency Stop Interventions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Human interventions are a common source of data in autonomous systems during testing. These interventions provide an important signal about where the current policy needs improvement, but are often noisy and incomplete. We define Robust Intervention Learning (RIL) as the problem of learning from intervention data while remaining robust to the quality and informativeness of the intervention signal. In the best case, interventions are precise and avoiding them is sufficient to solve the task, but in many realistic settings avoiding interventions is necessary but not sufficient for achieving good performance. We study robust intervention learning in the context of emergency stop interventions and propose Residual Intervention Fine-Tuning (RIFT), a residual fine-tuning algorithm that treats intervention feedback as an incomplete learning signal and explicitly combines it with a prior policy. By framing intervention learning as a fine-tuning problem, our approach leverages structure encoded in the prior policy to resolve ambiguity when intervention signals under-specify the task. We provide theoretical analysis characterizing conditions under which this formulation yields principled policy improvement, and identify regimes where intervention learning is expected to fail. Our experiments reveal that residual fine-tuning enables robust and consistent policy improvement across a range of intervention strategies and prior policy qualities, and highlight robust intervention learning as a promising direction for future work.
PrevizWhiz: Combining Rough 3D Scenes and 2D Video to Guide Generative Video Previsualization
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2026
Year: 2026

In pre-production, filmmakers and 3D animation experts must rapidly prototype ideas to explore a film's possibilities before fullscale production, yet conventional approaches involve trade-offs in efficiency and expressiveness. Hand-drawn storyboards often lack spatial precision needed for complex cinematography, while 3D previsualization demands expertise and high-quality rigged assets. To address this gap, we present PrevizWhiz, a system that leverages rough 3D scenes in combination with generative image and video models to create stylized video previews. The workflow integrates frame-level image restyling with adjustable resemblance, time-based editing through motion paths or external video inputs, and refinement into high-fidelity video clips. A study with filmmakers demonstrates that our system lowers technical barriers for film-makers, accelerates creative iteration, and effectively bridges the communication gap, while also surfacing challenges of continuity, authorship, and ethical consideration in AI-assisted filmmaking.
Parallel-Probe: Towards Efficient Parallel Thinking via 2D Probing
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2026
Year: 2026

Parallel thinking has emerged as a promising paradigm for reasoning, yet it imposes significant computational burdens. Existing efficiency methods primarily rely on local, per-trajectory signals and lack principled mechanisms to exploit global dynamics across parallel branches. We introduce 2D probing, an interface that exposes the width-depth dynamics of parallel thinking by periodically eliciting intermediate answers from all branches. Our analysis reveals three key insights: non-monotonic scaling across width-depth allocations, heterogeneous reasoning branch lengths, and early stabilization of global consensus. Guided by these insights, we introduce $\textbf{Parallel-Probe}$, a training-free controller designed to optimize online parallel thinking. Parallel-Probe employs consensus-based early stopping to regulate reasoning depth and deviation-based branch pruning to dynamically adjust width. Extensive experiments across three benchmarks and multiple models demonstrate that Parallel-Probe establishes a superior Pareto frontier for test-time scaling. Compared to standard majority voting, it reduces sequential tokens by up to $\textbf{35.8}$% and total token cost by over $\textbf{25.8}$% while maintaining competitive accuracy.
Overcoming Barriers to Computational Reproducibility
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2026
Year: 2026

Computational reproducibility, the possibility for independent researchers to exactly reproduce published empirical results, is fundamental to science. Despite its importance, the proportion of research articles aiming for reproducibility remains low and uneven across disciplines. Barriers include a perceived lack of incentives for researchers and journals, practical challenges in preparing reproducible materials, and the absence of harmonised standards of reproducibility processes and requirements by journals. Existing guidance is often highly technical, reaching mainly those already engaged with reproducible research. In this paper, we first synthesize evidence on the benefits of reproducibility for both authors and journals. Drawing on our extensive experience in reproducibility checking at various journals, we then put forward concise, pragmatic guidelines for creating reproducible analyses across disciplines. We further review current reproducibility policies of selected journals, illustrating the substantial heterogeneity in requirements and procedures. Motivated by the latter, we propose conceptual foundations for a harmonised multi-tier system of reproducibility standards that could support transparent, consistent assessment across journals and research communities. Our goal as journal (reproducibility) editors and contributors to the MaRDI initiative is to encourage broader adoption of reproducibility practices, in particular by lowering practical barriers for authors and journals.
DiGAN: Diffusion-Guided Attention Network for Early Alzheimer's Disease Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) remains a major challenge due to the subtle and temporally irregular progression of structural brain changes in the prodromal stages. Existing deep learning approaches require large longitudinal datasets and often fail to model the temporal continuity and modality irregularities inherent in real-world clinical data. To address these limitations, we propose the Diffusion-Guided Attention Network (DiGAN), which integrates latent diffusion modelling with an attention-guided convolutional network. The diffusion model synthesizes realistic longitudinal neuroimaging trajectories from limited training data, enriching temporal context and improving robustness to unevenly spaced visits. The attention-convolutional layer then captures discriminative structural-temporal patterns that distinguish cognitively normal subjects from those with mild cognitive impairment and subjective cognitive decline. Experiments on the ADNI dataset demonstrate that DiGAN outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines, showing its potential for early-stage AD detection.
Explainable Computer Vision Framework for Automated Pore Detection and Criticality Assessment in Additive Manufacturing
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Internal porosity remains a critical defect mode in additively manufactured components, compromising structural performance and limiting industrial adoption. Automated defect detection methods exist but lack interpretability, preventing engineers from understanding the physical basis of criticality predictions. This study presents an explainable computer vision framework for pore detection and criticality assessment in three-dimensional tomographic volumes. Sequential grayscale slices were reconstructed into volumetric datasets, and intensity-based thresholding with connected component analysis identified 500 individual pores. Each pore was characterized using geometric descriptors including size, aspect ratio, extent, and spatial position relative to the specimen boundary. A pore interaction network was constructed using percentile-based Euclidean distance criteria, yielding 24,950 inter-pore connections. Machine learning models predicted pore criticality scores from extracted features, and SHAP analysis quantified individual feature contributions. Results demonstrate that normalized surface distance dominates model predictions, contributing more than an order of magnitude greater importance than all other descriptors. Pore size provides minimal influence, while geometric parameters show negligible impact. The strong inverse relationship between surface proximity and criticality reveals boundary-driven failure mechanisms. This interpretable framework enables transparent defect assessment and provides actionable insights for process optimization and quality control in additive manufacturing.
GPAIR: Gaussian-Kernel-Based Ultrafast 3D Photoacoustic Iterative Reconstruction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Although the iterative reconstruction (IR) algorithm can substantially correct reconstruction artifacts in photoacoustic (PA) computed tomography (PACT), it suffers from long reconstruction times, especially for large-scale three-dimensional (3D) imaging in which IR takes hundreds of seconds to hours. The computing burden severely limits the practical applicability of IR algorithms. In this work, we proposed an ultrafast IR method for 3D PACT, called Gaussian-kernel-based Ultrafast 3D Photoacoustic Iterative Reconstruction (GPAIR), which achieves orders-of-magnitude acceleration in computing. GPAIR transforms traditional spatial grids with continuous isotropic Gaussian kernels. By deriving analytical closed-form expression for pressure waves and implementing powerful GPU-accelerated differentiable Triton operators, GPAIR demonstrates extraordinary ultrafast sub-second reconstruction speed for 3D targets containing 8.4 million voxels in animal experiments. This revolutionary ultrafast image reconstruction enables near-real-time large-scale 3D PA reconstruction, significantly advancing 3D PACT toward clinical applications.
Vision Transformers for Zero-Shot Clustering of Animal Images: A Comparative Benchmarking Study
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2026
Year: 2026

Manual labeling of animal images remains a significant bottleneck in ecological research, limiting the scale and efficiency of biodiversity monitoring efforts. This study investigates whether state-of-the-art Vision Transformer (ViT) foundation models can reduce thousands of unlabeled animal images directly to species-level clusters. We present a comprehensive benchmarking framework evaluating five ViT models combined with five dimensionality reduction techniques and four clustering algorithms, two supervised and two unsupervised, across 60 species (30 mammals and 30 birds), with each test using a random subset of 200 validated images per species. We investigate when clustering succeeds at species-level, where it fails, and whether clustering within the species-level reveals ecologically meaningful patterns such as sex, age, or phenotypic variation. Our results demonstrate near-perfect species-level clustering (V-measure: 0.958) using DINOv3 embeddings with t-SNE and supervised hierarchical clustering methods. Unsupervised approaches achieve competitive performance (0.943) while requiring no prior species knowledge, rejecting only 1.14% of images as outliers requiring expert review. We further demonstrate robustness to realistic long-tailed distributions of species and show that intentional over-clustering can reliably extract intra-specific variation including age classes, sexual dimorphism, and pelage differences. We introduce an open-source benchmarking toolkit and provide recommendations for ecologists to select appropriate methods for sorting their specific taxonomic groups and data.
Online Vector Quantized Attention
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Standard sequence mixing layers used in language models struggle to balance efficiency and performance. Self-attention performs well on long context tasks but has expensive quadratic compute and linear memory costs, while linear attention and SSMs use only linear compute and constant memory but struggle with long context processing. In this paper, we develop a sequence mixing layer that aims to find a better compromise between memory-compute costs and long-context processing, which we call online vector-quantized (OVQ) attention. OVQ-attention requires linear compute costs and constant memory, but, unlike linear attention and SSMs, it uses a sparse memory update that allows it to greatly increase the size of its memory state and, consequently, memory capacity. We develop a theoretical basis for OVQ-attention based on Gaussian mixture regression, and we test it on a variety of synthetic long context tasks and on long context language modeling. OVQ-attention shows significant improvements over linear attention baselines and the original VQ-attention, on which OVQ-attention was inspired. It demonstrates competitive, and sometimes identical, performance to strong self-attention baselines up 64k sequence length, despite using a small fraction of the memory of full self-attention.
Grables: Tabular Learning Beyond Independent Rows
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Tabular learning is still dominated by row-wise predictors that score each row independently, which fits i.i.d. benchmarks but fails on transactional, temporal, and relational tables where labels depend on other rows. We show that row-wise prediction rules out natural targets driven by global counts, overlaps, and relational patterns. To make "using structure" precise across architectures, we introduce grables: a modular interface that separates how a table is lifted to a graph (constructor) from how predictions are computed on that graph (node predictor), pinpointing where expressive power comes from. Experiments on synthetic tasks, transaction data, and a RelBench clinical-trials dataset confirm the predicted separations: message passing captures inter-row dependencies that row-local models miss, and hybrid approaches that explicitly extract inter-row structure and feed it to strong tabular learners yield consistent gains.
Active Epistemic Control for Query-Efficient Verified Planning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2026
Year: 2026

Planning in interactive environments is challenging under partial observability: task-critical preconditions (e.g., object locations or container states) may be unknown at decision time, yet grounding them through interaction is costly. Learned world models can cheaply predict missing facts, but prediction errors can silently induce infeasible commitments. We present \textbf{Active Epistemic Control (AEC)}, an epistemic-categorical planning layer that integrates model-based belief management with categorical feasibility checks. AEC maintains a strict separation between a \emph{grounded fact store} used for commitment and a \emph{belief store} used only for pruning candidate plans. At each step, it either queries the environment to ground an unresolved predicate when uncertainty is high or predictions are ambiguous, or simulates the predicate to filter hypotheses when confidence is sufficient. Final commitment is gated by grounded precondition coverage and an SQ-BCP pullback-style compatibility check, so simulated beliefs affect efficiency but cannot directly certify feasibility. Experiments on ALFWorld and ScienceWorld show that AEC achieves competitive success with fewer replanning rounds than strong LLM-agent baselines.