Daily Papers

Existing checkpointing approaches seem ill-suited for distributed training even though hardware limitations make model parallelism, i.e., sharding model state across multiple accelerators, a requirement for model scaling. Consolidating distributed model state into a single checkpoint unacceptably slows down training, and is impractical at extreme scales. Distributed checkpoints, in contrast, are tightly coupled to the model parallelism and hardware configurations of the training run, and thus unusable on different configurations. To address this problem, we propose Universal Checkpointing, a technique that enables efficient checkpoint creation while providing the flexibility of resuming on arbitrary parallelism strategy and hardware configurations. Universal Checkpointing unlocks unprecedented capabilities for large-scale training such as improved resilience to hardware failures through continued training on remaining healthy hardware, and reduced training time through opportunistic exploitation of elastic capacity. The key insight of Universal Checkpointing is the selection of the optimal representation in each phase of the checkpointing life cycle: distributed representation for saving, and consolidated representation for loading. This is achieved using two key mechanisms. First, the universal checkpoint format, which consists of a consolidated representation of each model parameter and metadata for mapping parameter fragments into training ranks of arbitrary model-parallelism configuration. Second, the universal checkpoint language, a simple but powerful specification language for converting distributed checkpoints into the universal checkpoint format. Our evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness and generality of Universal Checkpointing on state-of-the-art model architectures and a wide range of parallelism techniques.

Massively multilingual language models have displayed strong performance in zero-shot (ZS-XLT) and few-shot (FS-XLT) cross-lingual transfer setups, where models fine-tuned on task data in a source language are transferred without any or with only a few annotated instances to the target language(s). However, current work typically overestimates model performance as fine-tuned models are frequently evaluated at model checkpoints that generalize best to validation instances in the target languages. This effectively violates the main assumptions of "true" ZS-XLT and FS-XLT. Such XLT setups require robust methods that do not depend on labeled target language data for validation and model selection. In this work, aiming to improve the robustness of "true" ZS-XLT and FS-XLT, we propose a simple and effective method that averages different checkpoints (i.e., model snapshots) during task fine-tuning. We conduct exhaustive ZS-XLT and FS-XLT experiments across higher-level semantic tasks (NLI, extractive QA) and lower-level token classification tasks (NER, POS). The results indicate that averaging model checkpoints yields systematic and consistent performance gains across diverse target languages in all tasks. Importantly, it simultaneously substantially desensitizes XLT to varying hyperparameter choices in the absence of target language validation. We also show that checkpoint averaging benefits performance when further combined with run averaging (i.e., averaging the parameters of models fine-tuned over independent runs).

We release Super Apriel, a 15B-parameter supernet in which every decoder layer provides four trained mixer choices -- Full Attention (FA), Sliding Window Attention (SWA), Kimi Delta Attention (KDA), and Gated DeltaNet (GDN). A placement selects one mixer per layer; placements can be switched between requests at serving time without reloading weights, enabling multiple speed presets from a single checkpoint. The shared checkpoint also enables speculative decoding without a separate draft model. The all-FA preset matches the Apriel 1.6 teacher on all reported benchmarks; recommended hybrid presets span 2.9times to 10.7times decode throughput at 96% to 77% quality retention, with throughput advantages that compound at longer context lengths. With four mixer types across 48 layers, the configuration space is vast. A surrogate that predicts placement quality from the per-layer mixer assignment makes the speed-quality landscape tractable and identifies the best tradeoffs at each speed level. We investigate whether the best configurations at each speed level can be identified early in training or only after convergence. Rankings stabilize quickly at 0.5B scale, but the most efficient configurations exhibit higher instability at 15B, cautioning against extrapolation from smaller models. Super Apriel is trained by stochastic distillation from a frozen Apriel 1.6 teacher, followed by supervised fine-tuning. We release the supernet weights, Fast-LLM training code, vLLM serving code, and a placement optimization toolkit.

Scaling generalist vision-language-action (VLA) policies is severely bottlenecked by the inherent heterogeneity of embodied data, which spans diverse robot morphologies, camera configurations, and low-level action spaces. Existing paradigms typically address this mismatch through explicit action retargeting, human-to-robot video synthesis, or dataset-specific adaptation branches, fundamentally hindering the joint learning of a unified policy. We introduce UCAG-P, a camera-centric unified action formulation that structurally aligns heterogeneous embodied datasets into a shared geometric action space. Rather than treating robot-specific commands as the shared policy target, UCAG-P represents manipulation through camera-observable anchor motion in image and camera-frame coordinates, treating robot arms, humanoids, and human hands as different embodiments of a common action schema. A geometry-conditioned action translator combines predicted motion with target-embodiment kinematics to produce executable controls. The resulting decoupled architecture allows a shared VLA policy to learn transferable manipulation geometry while retaining embodiment-specific controllability. UCAG-P is trained on 4.03K hours of robot and simulation data and 2.34K hours of human demonstrations. A single checkpoint reaches 98.3% on LIBERO, 88.7% and 89.2% on RoboTwin Easy and Hard, 82.0% zero-shot on LIBERO-Plus, and 62.0% on RoboCasa GR-1, without benchmark-specific fine-tuning.

Unified image and video creation requires a model to follow diverse instructions while preserving identity, geometry, and temporal structure from visual context. However, semantic-only conditioning and creation-only training do not explicitly supervise the local structure needed for precise, temporally consistent editing. We therefore formulate depth and surface-normal prediction as image-form denoising targets, using these dense tasks as structured visual supervision within the same creation interface. Our framework decouples semantic interpretation from spatially aligned visual injection while sharing one multimodal diffusion transformer (MMDiT) backbone across all tasks. Mutual Context Attention (MCA), a paired-video data-construction procedure, and a progressive training curriculum then connect the learned structural cues to temporally localized editing and reference-conditioned creation. A single checkpoint obtains the highest overall score in the reported comparison of unified systems (4.15); adding dense supervision improves OpenVE Overall from 3.98 to 4.06 and Local Add from 3.92 to 4.18. These results support a deliberately bounded conclusion: perception-oriented dense supervision transfers useful structural knowledge to downstream creation, especially editing locality and preservation; we do not claim superiority as a standalone dense predictor.

GutenOCR is a family of grounded OCR front-ends obtained by fine-tuning Qwen2.5-VL-3B and Qwen2.5-VL-7B. The resulting single-checkpoint vision-language models expose reading, detection, and grounding through a unified, prompt-based interface. Trained on business documents, scientific articles, and synthetic grounding data, the models support full-page and localized reading with line- and paragraph-level bounding boxes and conditional ``where is x?'' queries. We introduce a grounded OCR evaluation protocol and show that GutenOCR-7B more than doubles the composite grounded OCR score of its Qwen2.5-VL-7B backbone on 10.5K held-out business and scientific pages (0.40 to 0.82). On Fox and OmniDocBench v1.5, our approach substantially improves region- and line-level OCR as well as text-detection recall, but reveals trade-offs in page-level linearization, color-guided OCR, and formula-heavy layouts.

Matryoshka Quantization (MatQuant) is a recent quantization approach showing that a single integer-quantized model can be served across multiple precisions, by slicing the most significant bits (MSB) at inference time. This enables a single checkpoint to cover a wide range of memory and latency budgets, but renders quantization much more challenging. In particular, the initial MatQuant relies on expensive quantization-aware training (QAT) variants, rather than fast one-shot post training quantization (PTQ), and lacks open-source and kernel support. We address all of these limitations by introducing Post-Training Matryoshka Quantization (MatGPTQ), a new PTQ pipeline that produces a single parent model jointly optimized for multiple target precisions in one-shot, based on a small calibration set. MatGPTQ casts Matryoshka quantization as a multi-precision objective with bit-slicing and cross-bit error compensation, resulting in an algorithm that produces a multi-bit-width, "sliceable" model in a single pass. We also incorporate a new budget-aware search for heterogeneous per-layer bit-witdhs and provide efficient kernels that implement slicing and mixed-precision execution. Across standard LLMs and benchmarks, MatGPTQ preserves high-bit accuracy while substantially improving performance at low-bit-witdh settings. Overall, we establish a new state of the art for Matryoshka-style post-training quantization and make single-checkpoint, multi-precision deployment open and practical. Code is available at https://github.com/IST-DASLab/MatGPTQ.

Blind face restoration is highly ill-posed under severe degradation, where identity-critical details may be missing from the degraded input. Same-identity references reduce this ambiguity, but mismatched pose, expression, illumination, age, makeup, or local facial states can lead to overuse of reference appearance. We propose IConFace, a unified reference-aware and no-reference framework with identity--structure asymmetric conditioning. References are distilled into a norm-weighted global AdaFace identity anchor for image-only modulation, while the degraded image is reinforced as the spatial structure anchor through low-rank residuals and block-wise degraded cross-attention with two-route memory. The resulting single checkpoint exploits references when available and falls back to no-reference restoration when absent, improving identity consistency, fine-detail recovery, and degraded-only restoration quality in a unified model.

We present Pelican-Unified 1.0, the first embodied foundation model trained according to the principle of unification. Pelican-Unified 1.0 uses a single VLM as a unified understanding module, mapping scenes, instructions, visual contexts, and action histories into a shared semantic space. The same VLM also serves as a unified reasoning module, autoregressively producing task-, action-, and future-oriented chains of thought in a single forward pass and projecting the final hidden state into a dense latent variable. A Unified Future Generator (UFG) then conditions on this latent variable and jointly generates future videos and future actions through two modality-specific output heads within the same denoising process. The language, video, and action losses are all backpropagated into the shared representation, enabling the model to jointly optimize understanding, reasoning, imagination, and action during training, rather than training three isolated expert systems. Experiments demonstrate that unification does not imply compromise. With a single checkpoint, Pelican-Unified 1.0 achieves strong performance across all three capabilities: 64.7 on eight VLM benchmarks, the best among comparable-scale models; 66.03 on WorldArena, ranking first; and 93.5 on RoboTwin, the second-best average among compared action methods. These results show that the unified paradigm succeeds in preserving specialist strength while bringing understanding, reasoning, imagination, and action into one model.

We study whether grounded reasoning supervision from abundant 2D medical images can improve 3D medical VQA when both input types are aligned through a common reasoning interface. We introduce UniReason-Med, a single-checkpoint framework that processes either a 2D image or a slice-serialized 3D volume at inference time, generating interleaved textual reasoning and localized visual evidence through shared box syntax, region-token injection, and a common grounded reasoning policy. To train this interface, we construct UniMed-CoT, a 220K instruction-tuning dataset with interleaved textual reasoning and grounded visual evidence, including 170K 2D and 50K 3D samples. Through supervised fine-tuning followed by outcome-level reinforcement learning, UniReason-Med learns to generate grounded reasoning traces without IoU/Dice-based localization rewards during RL. Data-mixture and component ablations show that joint 2D+3D grounded supervision substantially improves 3D reasoning over 3D-only training, while grounding and region-token injection consistently benefit both 2D and 3D tasks. These results suggest that a shared grounded reasoning interface can transfer reasoning structure from 2D images to slice-serialized volumetric medical understanding. The code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/IQuestLab/unireason-med.

Layer interventions are widely used to probe the internal organization of language models, yet most analyses examine a single training checkpoint even though model representations and computations evolve throughout pretraining. This leaves open which depth-dependent intervention responses reflect persistent organization and which are transient consequences of training. We study this question using single-block identity bypass on fixed teacher-forced contexts across five released trajectories and 11 model-domain combinations. We find that block-bypass responses retain recognizable depth ordering while their magnitudes redistribute: nearby checkpoints preserve stronger rank correspondence than distant ones, and large changes concentrate at positions that recur across text samples and transfer across evaluation domains. Controlled experiments further show that changes in the natural bypass effect cannot be reduced to a single downstream sensitivity: in replicated Pythia runs, local missing-update magnitude grows while the pooled matched downstream response decreases, whereas OLMo-2 7B exhibits a different balance. These matched responses also depend on perturbation strength and direction, without identifying targeted compensation. Together, our results show that longitudinal layer sensitivity is structured but not static, and that single-checkpoint intervention responses should be interpreted in the context of how the underlying perturbation pathway evolves during training.

Experiments with pre-trained models such as BERT are often based on a single checkpoint. While the conclusions drawn apply to the artifact tested in the experiment (i.e., the particular instance of the model), it is not always clear whether they hold for the more general procedure which includes the architecture, training data, initialization scheme, and loss function. Recent work has shown that repeating the pre-training process can lead to substantially different performance, suggesting that an alternate strategy is needed to make principled statements about procedures. To enable researchers to draw more robust conclusions, we introduce the MultiBERTs, a set of 25 BERT-Base checkpoints, trained with similar hyper-parameters as the original BERT model but differing in random weight initialization and shuffling of training data. We also define the Multi-Bootstrap, a non-parametric bootstrap method for statistical inference designed for settings where there are multiple pre-trained models and limited test data. To illustrate our approach, we present a case study of gender bias in coreference resolution, in which the Multi-Bootstrap lets us measure effects that may not be detected with a single checkpoint. We release our models and statistical library along with an additional set of 140 intermediate checkpoints captured during pre-training to facilitate research on learning dynamics.

World models -- generative models that simulate environment dynamics conditioned on past observations and actions -- are gaining prominence in planning, simulation, and embodied AI. However, evaluating their rollouts remains a fundamental challenge, requiring fine-grained, temporally grounded assessment of action alignment and semantic consistency -- capabilities not captured by existing metrics. Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown promise as automatic evaluators of generative content due to their strong multimodal reasoning abilities. Yet, their use in fine-grained, temporally sensitive evaluation tasks remains limited and requires targeted adaptation. We introduce a evaluation protocol targeting two recognition tasks -- action recognition and character recognition -- each assessed across binary, multiple-choice, and open-ended formats. To support this, we present UNIVERSE (UNIfied Vision-language Evaluator for Rollouts in Simulated Environments), a method for adapting VLMs to rollout evaluation under data and compute constraints. We conduct a large-scale study comparing full, partial, and parameter-efficient finetuning across task formats, context lengths, sampling strategies, and data compositions. The resulting unified evaluator matches the performance of task-specific baselines using a single checkpoint. Human studies confirm strong alignment with human judgments, establishing UNIVERSE as a scalable, semantics-aware evaluator for world models.

4D generation synthesizes dynamic 3D scenes from conditions such as text or images. Existing methods either reconstruct generated RGB videos with a separate 4D model or adapt a particular video generator to predict geometry directly. The former suffers from distribution mismatch and error propagation, whereas the latter ties 4D prediction to a specific generator and may require retraining when the generator or conditioning regime changes. We ask whether the final denoised latents of video models that share a variational autoencoder (VAE) can instead provide a reusable interface to explicit 4D prediction. Building on this insight, we introduce direct latent-to-4D generation and instantiate it as Latent-to-4D, which bypasses RGB by aligning a video latent with the token grid of a pretrained 4D decoder and refining it through frame-wise and global spatiotemporal attention. Trained on roughly 1K existing reconstruction clips, a single checkpoint transfers unchanged across multiple video diffusion transformers within the same VAE family. On Text4D-200 and I4D-200, Latent-to-4D surpasses matched same-latent Wan+4RC cascades in projection-based DINO-F1 by 2.88--3.45 and 5.81 points, respectively, while also being preferred by human raters for geometry, temporal stability, and overall quality.

Video models absorb rich priors over how the visual world moves, interacts, and responds to contact, making them promising substrates for robotic world modeling. The central challenge is how to communicate action to such models in a form aligned with the visual space in which they learned these interaction priors, yet still grounded in physical manipulation. We introduce Masked Visual Actions, a pixel-space control interface that expresses action as a partially revealed trajectory of an arbitrary entity in a video. Revealing robot motion makes the model act as a forward dynamics model that predicts the scene's response to low-level robot actions, while revealing desired object motion makes the same model recover robot behavior consistent with that outcome. Finetuned with only 15 hours of masked examples from real videos and simulation, a single checkpoint achieves strong visual fidelity and controllability across diverse scenes and multiple embodiments. In downstream manipulation settings, the model produces imagined rollouts whose outcomes correlate with real-world execution for policy evaluation, improves decision making by ranking candidate futures in model-based planning, and supports inverse modeling by synthesizing robot motion from desired object motion.

Most image generation models rely on uniform tokenization, allocating the exact same computational budget to equally-sized image patches. This static paradigm cannot adapt to different resource constraints at inference time, and yields suboptimal quality-cost tradeoff by devoting the same effort to both plain backgrounds and intricate details. We propose BudgetPix, an adaptive tokenization framework that dynamically allocates compute based on visual complexity and spatial layout, enabling flexible computational budgeting at inference time. BudgetPix comprises three key components: (1) an adaptive encoder that maps a fixed-size image to a variable-length token sequence using an entropy-guided quadtree alongside a multi-scale patch embedder; (2) a scale-aware decoder reconstructs fixed-resolution images from multi-scale token sets; and (3) a flexible training and sampling schedule that enables pixel-space denoisers to operate across variable token counts. BudgetPix seamlessly integrates with existing pixel-space diffusion architectures, enabling a single checkpoint to be operated at a wide range of compute budgets. Evaluated on text-to-image generation, BudgetPix matches the fidelity of MiniT2I-L at 512^2 and PixelDiT at 1024^2 using just 25% of the original compute budget. In class-conditional generation using a MeanFlow backbone, BudgetPix requires merely 60% of the full compute budget to produce images with near-zero quality degradation, observing a marginal 0.8-point increase in FID. Comprehensive assessments by human and VLM judges confirm that BudgetPix establishes a significantly improved quality-efficiency tradeoff over prior budget-adaptive baselines. More details are available at our project page: https://karaozgur.com/BudgetPix

Large networks and ensembles often lead medical image segmentation challenges, but their storage and inference demands complicate deployment. We present LightMedSeg-ISLES, a 1.26-million-parameter pipeline for T1-weighted stroke lesion segmentation in ISLES'26. On a 146-case held-out cohort, flip test-time augmentation produces 0.618 mean Dice and 0.599 lesion-wise F1. A 102.35-million-parameter nnU-Net ResEnc-L produces 0.634 Dice and 0.544 lesion-wise F1 after size filtering. LightMedSeg therefore retains 97.5\% of nnU-Net's Dice with 81.4times fewer parameters while improving lesion-wise F1 by 0.055. Its four-pass TTA operating point requires 4.7times fewer FLOPs per standardized patch than nnU-Net. It also slightly exceeds filtered UNETR++ and nnFormer. Longer training and stronger augmentation add 0.0358 Dice without increasing capacity, establishing a strong single-checkpoint alternative to much larger models.

Autonomous medical robots hold promise to improve patient outcomes, reduce provider workload, democratize access to care, and enable superhuman precision. However, autonomous medical robotics has been limited by a fundamental data problem: existing medical robotic datasets are small, single-embodiment, and rarely shared openly, restricting the development of foundation models that the field needs to advance. We introduce Open-H-Embodiment, the largest open dataset of medical robotic video with synchronized kinematics to date, spanning more than 49 institutions and multiple robotic platforms including the CMR Versius, Intuitive Surgical's da Vinci, da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK), Rob Surgical BiTrack, Virtual Incision's MIRA, Moon Surgical Maestro, and a variety of custom systems, spanning surgical manipulation, robotic ultrasound, and endoscopy procedures. We demonstrate the research enabled by this dataset through two foundation models. GR00T-H is the first open foundation vision-language-action model for medical robotics, which is the only evaluated model to achieve full end-to-end task completion on a structured suturing benchmark (25% of trials vs. 0% for all others) and achieves 64% average success across a 29-step ex vivo suturing sequence. We also train Cosmos-H-Surgical-Simulator, the first action-conditioned world model to enable multi-embodiment surgical simulation from a single checkpoint, spanning nine robotic platforms and supporting in silico policy evaluation and synthetic data generation for the medical domain. These results suggest that open, large-scale medical robot data collection can serve as critical infrastructure for the research community, enabling advances in robot learning, world modeling, and beyond.

A latent recurrent language model applies a shared block of layers repeatedly, so one checkpoint can trade inference compute for accuracy by changing the loop count. At one loop, however, such models typically fall well short of a non-recurrent model of the same size, a one-loop tax that makes a separate non-recurrent model the better choice whenever latency matters. We present Elastic Latent Recurrence (ELR), a recipe for training looped language models without this tax. At one loop, an ELR model costs the same to serve as a non-recurrent model of the same size and, trained on the same data, reaches similar accuracy. Each additional loop then buys more accuracy for more inference compute. Three choices make this work: a gated state update with a learned step size, loop counts mixed within each optimizer update, and conditioning each pass on its loop index and budget. The first two preserve one-loop accuracy, and the third lowers loss at every additional loop. Mixed depths can be introduced late in pretraining to limit the added training cost, and with zero-initialized conditioning added at the switch, this late schedule reaches lower loss than mixed-depth training from scratch. In MoE models, reusing first-loop expert routes on later loops cuts mixed-depth update time by 11.7% with no measurable change in accuracy. At inference, keeping only the last loop's attention KV cache holds attention KV memory at its one-loop level while retaining most of the gain from additional loops. On 4B dense and 30B-A3B MoE hybrid models, ELR at one loop is 0.52 points below and 1.04 points above its matched baseline on a ten-task average, and four loops add 7.25 and 4.75 points. Carried through post-training, the recipe yields Koi-4B, a single checkpoint that scores an estimated 18 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at one loop, matching Qwen3.5-4B, and 29 at four loops.

Feed-forward networks (FFNs) dominate the parameter count and computation of modern language models, yet existing pruning methods often struggle to convert sparsity into hardware-friendly inference efficiency gains. We introduce PrunePath, a budget-adaptive structured sparsification framework for FFN layers. Built on MoEfication, PrunePath replaces independent expert-wise thresholding with a softmax-normalized routing distribution and activates important experts under a cumulative-mass threshold. This formulation imposes a token-level probability budget, enabling adaptive expert counts and a direct inference-time sparsity knob from a single checkpoint. Across NLU, NLG, and instruction-tuning evaluations, PrunePath achieves a favorable sparsity--performance trade-off compared with existing static pruning and MoEfication-based methods. We further implement Triton kernels for KV-cache decoding to translate the resulting structured sparsity into practical memory savings and measurable decoding-speed improvements. These results demonstrate the superior performance of PrunePath for building highly sparse, deployment-friendly large language models.

We present DONDO, a family of open, permissively licensed automatic speech recognition (ASR) base models for African languages, built on the w2v-BERT 2.0 self-supervised speech encoder. DONDO comprises twenty-one monolingual models and five multilingual models spanning twenty-seven language varieties across Ghana, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Senegal, Kenya and Zimbabwe. Models are fine-tuned primarily on read speech drawn from religious texts, which offer broad, license-clear and orthographically consistent coverage for languages that otherwise lack transcribed audio. We describe a two-step (and, for one family, three-step) learning-rate-annealed fine-tuning procedure that first adapts a shared multilingual model at a high learning rate and then anneals it to recover, and in several cases surpass, strong monolingual baselines. We further describe a lightweight language-conditioning mechanism that injects a one-hot language identity as a sequence of prefix frames prepended to the acoustic features, allowing a single multilingual checkpoint to be steered to a target language at inference. Across the five multilingual families the annealed models reach average word error rates (WER) of 10-13%, closing most of the gap to monolingual models while covering many languages in a single checkpoint. All models are released on the Hugging Face KhayaAI organisation under the Apache-2.0 license (attribution only) so that others may fine-tune them freely, including for commercial use. We provide a conservative estimate that the languages covered are spoken by on the order of one hundred million first-language speakers, and by substantially more when second-language use is included.

Serving large language models (LLMs) under diverse deployment constraints requires flexible trade-offs between accuracy, memory footprint, and throughput. However, conventional quantization methods typically require a separate checkpoint for each target bit-width. We introduce Recurrent Residual Quantization (RRQ), a post-training quantization (PTQ) framework that represents weights as a low-bit quantized base together with a sequence of quantized residual corrections, enabling multiple effective precisions from a single checkpoint. Starting from a 2-bit model obtained via post-training quantization (PTQ) or round-to-nearest (RTN), RRQ progressively adds lightweight 2-bit residuals generated via RTN to construct 4-, 6-, and 8-bit representations. The method is calibration-free and avoids joint multi-bit optimization. In our Qwen3-8B setup, the full all-RTN 2-/4-/6-/8-bit package is constructed in 1,293 seconds, 3.3 times faster than the measured MatGPTQ construction. Experiments on six recent LLMs show competitive accuracy at 6 and 8 bits, with model-dependent behavior at 4 bits. The code will be made publicly available upon publication.

Speech Large Language Models (Speech LLMs) lack a principled mechanism for streaming inference: their label-synchronous generation has no acoustic-frame alignment, making real-time decoding and end-of-utterance detection difficult. We propose TRADE TRansducer-Augmented DEcoder, which augments a multimodal LLM with a transducer branch that shares the audio encoder and uses the LLM's hidden states directly as the prediction network -- coupling frame-synchronous acoustic alignment with the LLM's linguistic reasoning. Three design choices make the system accurate, streamable, and long-form capable: (1)Tightly coupled dual vocabularies -- a compact transducer vocabulary derived from the LLM vocabulary, enabling zero-cost score fusion; (2)Chunk-synchronized streaming training with gradient stopping, eliminating the train-inference mismatch at offline-equivalent memory cost; and (3)Localized Decoder Audio Attention (LDAA), a causal sliding window that caps KV-cache memory independently of utterance length. A single TRADE checkpoint supports offline and streaming decoding across a continuous range of latency operating points. TRADE achieves 6.71% average WER on the Open ASR Leaderboard, while the streaming recognition with 960ms chunk size reaches 8.40% from the same checkpoint. On long-form speech, it obtains 3.64% WER on TED-LIUM and 10.88% on Earnings-22 without external segmentation. TRADE provides sentence-end punctuation timestamps that, when combined with acoustic voice activity detection (VAD), improve end-of-utterance detection by +0.03 F_1 over acoustic VAD alone.

MLLM-based segmentation faces a core segmentation trilemma: high segmentation performance, preserved dialogue ability, and fast inference. Embedding-prediction methods may disrupt language modeling through pixel-level objectives, whereas next-token generation is inefficient for dense masks. We propose All-Mask Prediction, decoupling autoregressive dialogue from non-autoregressive mask prediction. Its binary instantiation, STAMP (Simultaneous Textual All-Mask Prediction), emits an in-vocabulary <SEG> trigger, fuses image-aligned mask tokens with corresponding patch features, and uses hybrid attention to classify all tokens as foreground or background in one pass. It thereby combines strong referring and reasoning segmentation with preserved multimodal ability and efficient inference. However, binary masks cannot retain multiple semantic or instance identities without repeated target-specific predictions. We therefore propose Structured All-Mask Prediction and develop STAMPlus. It generates a target list with explicit IDs and optional boxes, binds these IDs to a shared multi-class mask space, and jointly predicts all targets in one non-autoregressive pass. A single unified checkpoint retains STAMP's referring and reasoning capabilities while extending to open-vocabulary semantic, instance-aware, and remote-sensing small-target segmentation, where high-resolution mask-token scaling preserves finer spatial evidence. Across these settings, STAMPlus achieves state-of-the-art segmentation performance, preserves general multimodal instruction following, and reduces 12-category latency from 13.50s for repeated STAMP inference to 5.16s. Further analyses show that accurate target cues improve segmentation and learned spatial grounding benefits look-twice reasoning. Overall, STAMPlus resolves the trilemma beyond single-target prediction.

We study auto research as a closed empirical loop driven by external measurement. Each submitted trial carries a hypothesis, an executable code edit, an evaluator-owned outcome, and feedback that shapes the next proposal. The output is not a generated paper or a single model checkpoint, but an auditable trajectory of proposals, code diffs, experiments, scores, and failure labels. We instantiate this loop with specialist agents that partition recipe surfaces and share measured lineage across trials. The central empirical finding is that lineage feedback lets agents turn evaluator outcomes, including crashes, budget overruns, size failures, and accuracy-gate misses, into later program-level recipe edits rather than one-shot suggestions. Across 1,197 headline-run trials plus 600 Parameter Golf control trials after one-time setup and launch, humans did not choose proposals, edit recipes, override scores, or repair failed trials during the search. In the three headline runs, the same submitted-trial loop reduces Parameter Golf validation bpb by 0.81%, raises NanoChat-D12 CORE by 38.7%, and reduces CIFAR-10 Airbench96 wallclock by 4.59%, with each task measured by its own external evaluator and legality checks. The trace includes a strict architecture-domain audit of 157 headline-run submissions and program rewrites such as a NanoChat attention-kernel path change. Within this scope the loop autonomously writes code, submits experiments, absorbs feedback, applies and combines known techniques inside each environment, and improves public starting recipes.

Model merging and task arithmetic have emerged as promising scalable approaches to merge multiple single-task checkpoints to one multi-task model, but their applicability is reduced by significant performance loss. Previous works have linked these drops to interference in the weight space and erasure of important task-specific features. Instead, in this work we show that the information required to solve each task is still preserved after merging as different tasks mostly use non-overlapping sets of weights. We propose TALL-masks, a method to identify these task supports given a collection of task vectors and show that one can retrieve >99% of the single task accuracy by applying our masks to the multi-task vector, effectively compressing the individual checkpoints. We study the statistics of intersections among constructed masks and reveal the existence of selfish and catastrophic weights, i.e., parameters that are important exclusively to one task and irrelevant to all tasks but detrimental to multi-task fusion. For this reason, we propose Consensus Merging, an algorithm that eliminates such weights and improves the general performance of existing model merging approaches. Our experiments in vision and NLP benchmarks with up to 20 tasks, show that Consensus Merging consistently improves existing approaches. Furthermore, our proposed compression scheme reduces storage from 57Gb to 8.2Gb while retaining 99.7% of original performance.

Creating images from noise is image generation; reconstructing fine details from coarse inputs is super-resolution. Despite their practical differences, both can be understood as reversing information loss across scales. We introduce SKILD, a Scale-invariant K-Space Image Learning Diffusion model that unifies generation and continuous super-resolution within a single unconditional framework. Both natural images and critical physical systems exhibit scale invariance, and we leverage it to design a forward process that attenuates image content from fine to coarse scales while injecting spectrum-matched Gaussian noise, making scale an explicit coordinate of the diffusion dynamics. The same trained reverse process performs generation and continuous super-resolution by varying only the starting timestep: no task-specific architecture, no conditioning branch, no classifier-free guidance, no retraining per scale factor. Empirically, SKILD reaches FID 2.65 and Inception Score 9.63 on unconditional CIFAR-10, performs 2times--8times super-resolution on ImageNet from a single unconditional checkpoint while outperforming conditional models across perceptual metrics, and reconstructs critical Ising models whose connected four-point correlations closely track the ground truth.

World-action models (WAMs) predict the future to act better, but nearly all of them predict only RGB latents, trained purely for pixel reconstruction, with no explicit signal for the 3D geometry or object semantics manipulation needs. We find a surprising free lunch: the same frozen video-generation VAE that encodes RGB also encodes 3D pointmaps almost losslessly, with no pointmap-specific training at all. This lets us supervise Flex-π, a 6B-parameter WAM, on 3D geometry and object-centric DINO semantics alongside RGB, at no cost in new sensors, new pre-training, or inference latency. Every visual signal is projected into this shared latent space and denoised jointly with actions inside a Mixture-of-Transformers backbone; per-stream dropout with cross-modality forcing then lets a single trained checkpoint run on any subset of these streams, from a fast action-only mode to full joint generation. The result is a policy that is exceptionally demonstration-efficient and generalizes well, beating the strongest baselines by up to 2-7times on dexterous, precise, real-world bimanual manipulation tasks both in and out of distribution, all while running faster than π_{0.5}. Our project website: https://flex-pi.github.io/

Conceptual density functional theory (CDFT) defines chemical reactivity descriptors as derivatives of the electronic energy with respect to the number of electrons and the external potential, or combinations thereof; in practice, however, researchers almost always replace these derivatives with finite-difference and frontier-orbital approximations, and no common software exists for their analytical evaluation. We present PyCDFT, to our knowledge, the first standardized, open-source, and scriptable code that analytically computes the descriptors of conceptual density (matrix) functional theory for ground and excited states up to second order, including the orbital hardness, the Fukui function and Fukui matrix, and the linear response function, from a single converged mean-field wavefunction imported from virtually any electronic-structure package. The descriptors are obtained from matrix-free, preconditioned Krylov-subspace solutions of the coupled-perturbed self-consistent-field equations for both spin-unpolarized and spin-polarized references, with the work distributed over MPI ranks and all data flowing through a single HDF5 checkpoint file that supports restart, post-processing, and the export of real-space descriptors as cube files for visualization. The design delegates integrals, grids, and exchange-correlation kernels to PySCF and Libxc, keeping the library compact, user-friendly, and interoperable. Worked examples on the ground state of H_2O and a broken-symmetry ΔSCF excited state of NH_3 show that a complete second-order CDFT analysis requires only a few lines of user code.

We study how to predict the downstream closed-loop performance of a learned latent world model from validation-time diagnostics alone. Choosing the right checkpoint from a world-model training run is difficult: validation loss and multi-step prediction RMSE keep improving long after closed-loop performance has collapsed. We present a suite of structural validation-time diagnostics drawn from optimal-control theory and apply them to Gymnasium's LunarLander v3, which features shaped rewards. We train an RSSM [5, 4] world model on it and treat per checkpoint CEM-MPC return as the oracle for closed-loop quality. By evaluating 40 metrics against this oracle, we find that the strongest single predictor is the Reward Observability Fraction (ROF), which measures the reward predictor's dependence on the observable subspace. We combine ROF with three structural regularizers into a single-number offline checkpoint selection score, the Composite Reward Observability Fraction (CROF). The CROF-selected world model trains a model-based A2C policy that beats a fairly evaluated model-free A2C baseline by ~24.5 return points while using ~65x fewer real-environment interactions, and the same world model also drives a strong zero-shot CEM-MPC policy. Code and data: https://github.com/nsmoly/LunarLander_RSSM.

We present Action Agent, a two-stage framework that unifies agentic navigation video generation with flow-constrained diffusion control for multi-embodiment robot navigation. In Stage I, a large language model (LLM) acts as an orchestration module that selects video diffusion models, refines prompts through iterative validation, and accumulates cross-task memory to synthesize physically plausible first-person navigation videos from language and image inputs. This increases video generation success from 35% (single-shot) to 86% across 50 navigation tasks. In Stage II, we introduce FlowDiT, a Flow-Constrained Diffusion Transformer that converts optimized goal videos and language instructions into continuous velocity commands using action-space denoising diffusion. FlowDiT integrates DINOv2 visual features, learned optical flow for ego-motion representation, and CLIP language embeddings for semantic stopping. We pretrain on the RECON outdoor navigation dataset and fine-tune on 203 Unitree G1 humanoid episodes collected in Isaac Sim to calibrate velocity dynamics. A single 43M-parameter checkpoint achieves 73.2% navigation success in simulation and 64.7% task completion on a real Unitree G1 in unseen indoor environments under open-loop execution, while operating at 40--47 Hz. We evaluate Action Agent across three embodiments: a Unitree G1 humanoid (real hardware), a drone, and a wheeled mobile robot (Isaac Sim), demonstrating that decoupling trajectory imagination from execution yields a scalable and embodiment-aware paradigm for language-guided navigation.

Humans anticipate, from a glance and a contemplated action of their bodies, how the 3D world will respond, a capability that is equally vital for robotic manipulation. We introduce PointWorld, a large pre-trained 3D world model that unifies state and action in a shared 3D space as 3D point flows: given one or few RGB-D images and a sequence of low-level robot action commands, PointWorld forecasts per-pixel displacements in 3D that respond to the given actions. By representing actions as 3D point flows instead of embodiment-specific action spaces (e.g., joint positions), this formulation directly conditions on physical geometries of robots while seamlessly integrating learning across embodiments. To train our 3D world model, we curate a large-scale dataset spanning real and simulated robotic manipulation in open-world environments, enabled by recent advances in 3D vision and simulated environments, totaling about 2M trajectories and 500 hours across a single-arm Franka and a bimanual humanoid. Through rigorous, large-scale empirical studies of backbones, action representations, learning objectives, partial observability, data mixtures, domain transfers, and scaling, we distill design principles for large-scale 3D world modeling. With a real-time (0.1s) inference speed, PointWorld can be efficiently integrated in the model-predictive control (MPC) framework for manipulation. We demonstrate that a single pre-trained checkpoint enables a real-world Franka robot to perform rigid-body pushing, deformable and articulated object manipulation, and tool use, without requiring any demonstrations or post-training and all from a single image captured in-the-wild. Project website at https://point-world.github.io/.

Small language models are cheap to serve and feasible on local hardware, but strong public 135M-class systems are commonly trained with hundreds of billions to trillions of tokens on large clusters. We study a sharply resource-constrained regime: a complete 134.5M-parameter language-model pipeline executed on one NVIDIA L20 GPU. The released checkpoint, L20-Edu-135M, receives approximately 13B pretraining tokens: 10B FineWeb-Edu tokens followed by a 3B-token educational, mathematics, code, and reasoning mixture. We document the architecture, data gates, cross-source MinHash/LSH near-deduplication, segment deduplication, benchmark-overlap removal, throughput optimization, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with weight interpolation, and reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) on GSM8K. In a self-run zero-shot six-task harness, L20-Edu-135M obtains a mean score of 0.4150. It trails SmolLM-135M (0.4767) and SmolLM2-135M (0.4917), but its mean is 87.1% of SmolLM-135M's while its nominal token count is 2.17% as large. This ratio is descriptive, not evidence of statistical equivalence or a controlled scaling law. The model exceeds several older 100M-160M public baselines under the same harness. Direct GRPO-style RLVR decreases GSM8K exact-match accuracy from 1.82% to 1.59% (192-token completions) and 1.21% (320-token completions). These single-run results identify a concrete failure mode rather than establishing a general lower bound on RLVR. The contribution is an auditable resource-constrained case study, not a state-of-the-art claim.

State-of-the-art models on contemporary 3D perception benchmarks like ScanNet consume and label dataset-provided 3D point clouds, obtained through post processing of sensed multiview RGB-D images. They are typically trained in-domain, forego large-scale 2D pre-training and outperform alternatives that featurize the posed RGB-D multiview images instead. The gap in performance between methods that consume posed images versus post-processed 3D point clouds has fueled the belief that 2D and 3D perception require distinct model architectures. In this paper, we challenge this view and propose ODIN (Omni-Dimensional INstance segmentation), a model that can segment and label both 2D RGB images and 3D point clouds, using a transformer architecture that alternates between 2D within-view and 3D cross-view information fusion. Our model differentiates 2D and 3D feature operations through the positional encodings of the tokens involved, which capture pixel coordinates for 2D patch tokens and 3D coordinates for 3D feature tokens. ODIN achieves state-of-the-art performance on ScanNet200, Matterport3D and AI2THOR 3D instance segmentation benchmarks, and competitive performance on ScanNet, S3DIS and COCO. It outperforms all previous works by a wide margin when the sensed 3D point cloud is used in place of the point cloud sampled from 3D mesh. When used as the 3D perception engine in an instructable embodied agent architecture, it sets a new state-of-the-art on the TEACh action-from-dialogue benchmark. Our code and checkpoints can be found at the project website: https://odin-seg.github.io.

Methods based on diffusion backbones have recently revolutionized novel view synthesis (NVS). However, those models require pretrained 2D diffusion checkpoints (e.g., Stable Diffusion) as the basis for geometrical priors. Since such checkpoints require exorbitant amounts of data and compute to train, this greatly limits the scalability of diffusion-based NVS models. We present Next-Scale Autoregression Conditioned by View (ArchonView), a method that significantly exceeds state-of-the-art methods despite being trained from scratch with 3D rendering data only and no 2D pretraining. We achieve this by incorporating both global (pose-augmented semantics) and local (multi-scale hierarchical encodings) conditioning into a backbone based on the next-scale autoregression paradigm. Our model also exhibits robust performance even for difficult camera poses where previous methods fail, and is several times faster in inference speed compared to diffusion. We experimentally verify that performance scales with model and dataset size, and conduct extensive demonstration of our method's synthesis quality across several tasks. Our code is open-sourced at https://github.com/Shiran-Yuan/ArchonView.

Domain experts trained from a shared checkpoint can transfer their specialized capabilities to a single student through on-policy distillation (OPD). Existing research primarily focuses on improving this merging process, while the algorithms used to train the experts have received limited systematic comparison. We investigate which training algorithm produces teachers better suited to OPD through controlled single-teacher comparisons of supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) across Agentic, Reasoning, and Perception. Teachers and students share the same Qwen3.5-9B initialization, and the two teacher types are compared at similar task performance. Our experiments show that RL teachers yield stronger students and higher recovery of teacher performance gains across all three domains. At their best checkpoints, RL-guided students outperform SFT-guided students by 4.27, 1.50, and 0.86 percentage points, respectively. In Agentic, the best SFT-guided student recovers only 44.44% of its teacher's performance gain over the base model, whereas the best RL-guided student recovers 115.00%, surpassing its teacher. Our further analysis shows that RL teachers undergo smaller parameter displacements from the shared initialization than SFT teachers. These findings support the hypothesis that RL teachers' smaller departures from the student's starting point facilitate learning through OPD, resulting in stronger students.

Checkpoint merging is a technique for combining multiple model snapshots into a single superior model, potentially reducing training time for large language models. This paper explores checkpoint merging in the context of parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT), where only small adapter modules (e.g. LoRA) are trained. We propose Metrics-Weighted Averaging (MWA), a simple yet effective method to merge model checkpoints by weighting their parameters according to performance metrics. In particular, we investigate weighting by training loss and by training steps, under the intuition that lower-loss or later-step checkpoints are more valuable. We introduce a formula with a penalty factor to adjust weight distribution, requiring only one hyperparameter regardless of the number of checkpoints. Experiments on three fine-tuning tasks (mathematical reasoning, preference alignment, and general instruction tuning) show that MWA consistently produces merged models that outperform the naive uniform average of checkpoints. Notably, loss-weighted merging often yields the best results, delivering up to 5% higher task accuracy than the baseline uniform merge and even surpassing the final individual checkpoint's performance. These findings validate checkpoint merging for PEFT and demonstrate that a metric-driven weighting heuristic can efficiently boost model performance with minimal computational overhead.

Real-time, full-duplex speech interaction is a key feature of next-generation spoken chatbots, allowing the model to listen and speak at the same time and to handle natural phenomena such as overlap, hesitation, and barge-in. Existing speech language models (SpeechLMs) such as LLaMA-Omni and GLM-4-Voice are still turn-based and rely on an external Voice Activity Detection (VAD) module to mark the end of the user's turn, which fundamentally limits their interactive ability. In this paper, we introduce BayLing-Duplex, a native full-duplex SpeechLM where a single autoregressive LLM decides when to listen, when to speak, and when to stop, with no auxiliary turn-taking module. The design adds only a few special tokens to the standard vocabulary, so it transfers across LLMs and reuses existing training and serving stacks with no architectural adaptation. Starting from the public GLM-4-Voice checkpoint and using only 400K full-duplex samples for fine-tuning followed by a lightweight DPO stage, BayLing-Duplex reaches 92% turn-taking success and 100% interruption success on InstructS2S-Eval, while improving the speech-response score from 2.17 to 3.39 over Moshi. BayLing-Duplex also matches or surpasses its turn-based counterpart on Llama Questions, Web Questions, and Alpaca-Eval, showing that simultaneous listen-and-speak modeling does not sacrifice response quality.

Multimodal models often build on architectures designed for generative vision-language modeling, typically combining separately pretrained vision encoders with causal language models. Visual document retrievers such as ColPali repurpose these models as encoders, carrying over the parameter and compute overhead of a VLM for a non-generative task. We introduce NeoMME, a family of 260M and 800M-parameter Multimodal and Multilingual bidirectional Encoders that process multilingual text and raw image patches in a single bidirectional Transformer encoder. Both models are pretrained from scratch with a masked discrete-diffusion text objective, conditioned on visible image patches for multimodal examples. Both support a 16,384-token context, enough to encode up to two standard 4K UHD images. To demonstrate its downstream capabilities, we fine-tune NeoMME with jointly trained dense and late-interaction heads. On the ViDoRe v3 benchmark, the resulting NeoMME-Retriever 260M outperforms all evaluated models strictly below 800M parameters with 0.523 nDCG@10, while NeoMME-Retriever 800M reaches 0.556. At a matched 2048x2048 image input size on an NVIDIA L40S, NeoMME-260M encodes pages with about 2x the throughput of ColModernVBERT. Hierarchical token pooling and asymmetric quantization compress late-interaction multimodal document embeddings by 255x while preserving over 95% of baseline nDCG@10. We contribute NeoMME to Hugging Face Transformers and release the pretrained backbone and retrieval-compatible checkpoints under Apache 2.0 at https://hf.co/collections/Hcompany/neomme.

A 4D audio-visual scene comprises a video, the dynamic geometry it depicts, and the sound sources that populate it, each with its own position and trajectory. Rendering such a scene from a novel viewpoint requires that every source be available as an individual waveform, so that it can be localized in the scene and propagated to the observer before the signals are mixed. Joint audio-video generators can synthesize the video and its soundtrack, but the soundtrack is emitted as a single audio-mix in which the sources are not individually accessible. We present SepGen, which extends a pretrained audio-video generator to emit the video, the mixed soundtrack, and one waveform per captioned source in one joint sampling run. SepGen supports two complementary modes: generation and separation. In generation mode, each source caption specifies what its stem contains. A two-speaker dialogue, for example, comes out as one stem per speaker in the original turn order. In separation mode, the input audio-mix remains clean while the captions specify what to extract, so the model can decompose a recording from a free-text description. We evaluate generation on scenes synthesized from text, and separation on scenes rendered by other generators and on real recordings of speech, music, and sound effects. Given an audio-mix and captions that carry the spoken lines, SepGen outperforms language-conditioned separators, most clearly on speech, and it keeps the lead when the lines are removed from the captions. Code, checkpoints, and datasets are available at https://sepgen.github.io/

Automated program repair (APR) using deep learning techniques has become an important area of research in recent years, aiming to automatically generate bug-fixing patches that can improve software reliability and maintainability. However, most existing methods either target a single language or require high computational resources to train multilingual models. In this paper, we propose T5APR, a novel neural program repair approach that provides a unified solution for bug fixing across multiple programming languages. T5APR leverages CodeT5, a powerful pre-trained text-to-text transformer model, and adopts a checkpoint ensemble strategy to improve patch recommendation. We conduct comprehensive evaluations on six well-known benchmarks in four programming languages (Java, Python, C, JavaScript), demonstrating T5APR's competitiveness against state-of-the-art techniques. T5APR correctly fixes 1,985 bugs, including 1,442 bugs that none of the compared techniques has fixed. We further support the effectiveness of our approach by conducting detailed analyses, such as comparing the correct patch ranking among different techniques. The findings of this study demonstrate the potential of T5APR for use in real-world applications and highlight the importance of multilingual approaches in the field of APR.

Multi-query attention (MQA), which only uses a single key-value head, drastically speeds up decoder inference. However, MQA can lead to quality degradation, and moreover it may not be desirable to train a separate model just for faster inference. We (1) propose a recipe for uptraining existing multi-head language model checkpoints into models with MQA using 5% of original pre-training compute, and (2) introduce grouped-query attention (GQA), a generalization of multi-query attention which uses an intermediate (more than one, less than number of query heads) number of key-value heads. We show that uptrained GQA achieves quality close to multi-head attention with comparable speed to MQA.

One-shot Program-of-Thought (PoT) emits a Python program that prints a primitive-action plan; a single invalid action silently invalidates the trajectory. We introduce RePoT (Recoverable PoT): a deterministic verified replay that walks the plan through the environment to its first invalid transition, then one LLM call that resumes from the verified prefix. RePoT costs at most one extra LLM call on the ~14% of problems where PoT fails. RePoT beats PoT by +3 to +11pp across four closed-model configurations on PuzzleZoo-775 and peaks at 96.9% vs 86.3% on gpt-5.4-mini-medium; against the matched-budget PoT-retry baseline, RePoT wins decisively on Gemini (+3.8pp, 95% CI [+2.2,+5.4]), is within sampling noise on GPT-medium and Claude, and loses on GPT-mini -- a capability-scaling pattern we begin to address with Adaptive RePoT, a rule-based dispatcher that routes between suffix repair and a fresh PoT retry based on verified-prefix length (preliminary). We replicate on PlanBench Blocksworld (+1.1 to +11.4pp) and on four open-weights models (+3.3 to +20.0pp on three of four). On Derail-550, our controlled recovery benchmark, every condition with access to checkpoint information clears >=30% on GPT-medium and >=70% on Gemini, vs <=3.1% for error-only feedback -- showing that checkpoint information, not the specific verified-prefix tail, is the load-bearing recovery signal.

We explore a data-driven approach for learning to optimize neural networks. We construct a dataset of neural network checkpoints and train a generative model on the parameters. In particular, our model is a conditional diffusion transformer that, given an initial input parameter vector and a prompted loss, error, or return, predicts the distribution over parameter updates that achieve the desired metric. At test time, it can optimize neural networks with unseen parameters for downstream tasks in just one update. We find that our approach successfully generates parameters for a wide range of loss prompts. Moreover, it can sample multimodal parameter solutions and has favorable scaling properties. We apply our method to different neural network architectures and tasks in supervised and reinforcement learning.

With the growing scale and complexity of video data, efficiently processing long video sequences poses significant challenges due to the quadratic increase in memory and computational demands associated with existing transformer-based Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs). To address these issues, we introduce Video-Ma^2mba, a novel architecture that incorporates State Space Models (SSMs) within the Mamba-2 framework, replacing the attention mechanisms. This allows the LMMs to scale linearly in terms of time and memory requirements, making it feasible to handle long-duration video content. Furthermore, we enhance the memory efficiency introducing the Multi-Axis Gradient Checkpointing (MA-GC) method, which strategically manages memory by retaining only essential activations across multiple computational axes. Our approach significantly reduces the memory footprint compared to standard gradient checkpointing. Empirical analyses show that Video-Ma^2mba can process extensive video sequences-equivalent to millions of tokens or over two hours of continuous sequences at 1 FPS-on a single GPU. By maintaining a detailed capture of temporal dynamics, our model improves the accuracy and relevance of responses in long video understanding tasks, demonstrating substantial advantages over existing frameworks.

LLM agents act on real-world environments through tool calls, and a single misjudged action can cause irreversible harm. The standard safeguard is a guard model that labels each proposed action as safe or unsafe, but this binary view conflates two distinct decisions: whether the action is harmful in itself, and whether it is appropriate given the user's context. It also operates at the granularity of action categories rather than individual instances, producing routine interruptions that erode autonomy and train users to wave through the most consequential alerts. We reframe the problem as a per-instance three-way routing decision over {EXECUTE, ASK, REFUSE} and instantiate it with Safety Sentry, a lightweight guard model whose inference reduces to a single decoding call. A single decoding-time threshold lets one fixed checkpoint be re-positioned across deployments of differing risk tolerance without retraining. Safety Sentry outperforms a broad set of open-weight and frontier closed-source baselines on overall accuracy and safety-related recall, while controlling both directional error rates simultaneously.

Prefill and decode reward different approaches to quantization: low-precision arithmetic accelerates prompt processing, while compact weights reduce memory traffic during generation. We propose "disaggregated quantization" (DQ), which specializes computation formats, weights and storage placement to both of these phases. On Qwen 3 and Gemma 3, removing activation quantization specifically on decode improves accuracy on decode-heavy tasks without increasing inference cost. Training separate compute-native prefill weights accelerates prompt processing relative to weight-only inference while matching or exceeding its accuracy at 2-3-bit decode on both decode-heavy and prefill-heavy tasks. With released Qwen3.8-27B GGUF decoders, training an NVFP4 prefiller improves 1-bit accuracy by 32.5 points on MMLU-Pro and 35.3 on MMMU-Pro without modifying the decode checkpoint. To accommodate the additional checkpoint on a single device, offloaded disaggregated prefill (ODP) streams its weights from SSD, amortizing loading over prompt length. On the same 27B model, ODP delivers a 1.78x time-to-first-token speedup over the weight-only baseline at 8K prompt length in llama.cpp. We evaluate accuracy under disaggregated serving in vLLM and further validate shared-weight format disaggregation through post-training quantization on models up to 2.8T parameters.

Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive generation by letting a lightweight draft model propose future tokens that a larger target model then verifies in parallel. In practice, however, draft models are usually trained on broad generic corpora, which leaves it unclear how much speculative decoding quality depends on the draft training distribution. We study this question with lightweight HASS and EAGLE-2 drafters trained on MathInstruct, ShareGPT, and mixed-data variants, evaluated on MT-Bench, GSM8K, MATH-500, and SVAMP. Measured by acceptance length, task-specific training yields clear specialization: MathInstruct-trained drafts are strongest on reasoning benchmarks, while ShareGPT-trained drafts are strongest on MT-Bench. Mixed-data training improves robustness, but larger mixtures do not dominate across decoding temperatures. We also study how to combine specialized drafters at inference time. Naive checkpoint averaging performs poorly, whereas confidence-based routing improves over single-domain drafts and merged-tree verification yields the highest acceptance length overall for both backbones. Finally, confidence is a more useful routing signal than entropy: rejected tokens tend to have higher entropy, but confidence produces much clearer benchmark-level routing decisions. These results show that speculative decoding quality depends not only on draft architecture, but also on the match between draft training data and downstream workload, and that specialized drafters are better combined at inference time than in weight space.

The increasing complexity of enterprise business scenarios has promoted the widespread adoption of long SKILL documents in agent systems, posing new challenges for compliance detection: large models incur substantial inference costs, while small models may fail to maintain detection accuracy. To address this gap, we propose SkillCDG, a graph-based framework for long SKILL compliance detection. SkillCDG represents complex business policies as a two-layer constraint dependency graph, where the upper layer indexes SKILL descriptions for scenario routing and the lower layer captures dependencies among atomic constraints within each SKILL. During inference, two-level retrieval followed by dependency closure supports compliance judgment and source traceability. We comprehensively evaluate the framework on three enterprise datasets and two controlled public benchmark variants. Experimental results demonstrate that SkillCDG outperforms baseline methods by up to 12.8 percentage points in detection F1 score, while reducing token consumption by a maximum 64.3\%. Moreover, we further investigate the inherent relationships among policy-graph complexity, model scale, and detection performance. Comparative experiments conducted on four checkpoints from a single model family validate a concise and effective scaling trend: end-to-end detection correctness exhibits a complexity-differentiated scaling pattern, and the complexity metric derived from the constraint dependency graph can effectively quantify instance difficulty and the performance improvement potential of models. Leveraging this insightful scaling trend, we conduct adaptive training sample selection and adopt on-policy distillation to efficiently enhance the compliance detection capability of small-scale models.

Recent work has shown that reinforcement learning from execution feedback can substantially improve text-to-SQL performance, often enabling smaller models to match or exceed much larger systems. However, most existing approaches treat SQL generation as a single-turn task, limiting the model's ability to recover from errors through iterative refinement. We present ReToolSQL, a two-stage training framework for text-to-SQL that combines (i) a supervised warm-start on rejection-sampled reasoning traces with (ii) agentic reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) over multi-turn tool-use trajectories. The key insight is that the two stages act on complementary axes, the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on verified privileged-teacher traces expands the set of solvable questions (raising pass@k coverage on the hardest cases), while RFT converts that expanded capability into higher single-pass accuracy by teaching the model when to verify, what evidence to retrieve, and how to repair faulty SQL from execution feedback. Applied to Gemma 4 instruction-tuned (31B), RFT alone achieves 73.66% execution accuracy (EX) on the BIRD-SQL development benchmark (74.12% EX with self-consistency). Initializing RFT from the SFT checkpoint (SFTtoRFT) yields our strongest model at 74.32% EX single-pass and 74.77% EX with self-consistency. At the time of writing, this ranked first on the BIRD single-model development-set leaderboard. The approach uses composite rewards anchored on execution correctness, requires no human annotation beyond the benchmark itself, and operates within a single dense 31B model, showing that a properly designed SFTtoRFT pipeline over tool-use trajectories is a practical path toward robust enterprise-grade text-to-SQL.

Model merging combines multiple fine-tuned checkpoints into a single model without additional training, offering an attractive approach to reusing models and efficiently improving performance. However, it remains unclear whether the advantages reported for settings where all merged experts have distinct roles and are tuned on clearly separated tasks also hold in settings where the merged experts do not have clearly distinct roles, but are trained on overlapping or even conflicting objectives. To evaluate this setting, we present a large-scale, systematic evaluation of "in-the-wild" model merging of heterogeneous experts, that may have been trained on overlapping or conflicting objectives. Concretely, we evaluate six state-of-the-art merging methods, including recent subspace methods, across four open-weight LLMs, twelve fine-tuned checkpoints per base model, and sixteen standard LLM benchmarks. Evaluating through standardized benchmarks, we measure both the probability that a model merged from a heterogeneous set of experts outperforms the base model and we measure relative gains over the best individual checkpoint. Our results show that the oldest and simplest method, Task Arithmetic, is the only approach that reliably yields performance gains on LLMs in this "in-the-wild" setting. Other interference-aware and subspace merging methods typically do not result in notable improvements over the base model. Our findings indicate that current merging techniques mostly do not enable extracting useful weight updates from heterogeneous and potentially conflicting versions. This motivates the design of LLM-specific merging algorithms and merging-aware fine-tuning methods.

Abliteration - deleting a model's refusal direction from its weights - is the standard recipe behind popular "uncensored" open-weight models. We show the surgery is not clean. As a disposition probe we use 21,600 decisions under uncertainty - weekly up/down calls on 60 Warsaw Stock Exchange equities over 18 weeks, replayed through a frozen pipeline so the decision-layer model is the only variable. The task elicits no refusals at all, so any between-arm delta is pure side effect. Holding provenance constant (official BF16 checkpoints, a single abliteration author, an identical serving stack, one byte-identical frozen prompt), we compare base and abliterated arms of two Mixture-of-Experts families, Gemma-4-26B-A4B-it and Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507. Three effects replicate across both families (weeks-clustered bootstrap CIs excluding zero): abliterated models are systematically more optimistic (+12.2 pp Gemma, +7.4 pp Qwen; the confirmed preregistered endpoint), justify themselves at greater length, and use fewer explicit uncertainty words in forced self-critiques (both exploratory). A fourth effect reverses sign: the same operation makes Gemma-abliterated less confident and Qwen-abliterated more (family CIs non-overlapping) - one weight surgery, opposite shifts in expressed confidence. Capability covariates rule out instruction-following degradation as the driver, and no arm shows economic skill: the apparent edge of abliterated arms is regime beta, not alpha. Our provenance audit also caught two independent contamination channels - a mismatched-quantizer pilot pair and a stale community chat template that silently mangled the rendered prompt - suggesting toolchain artifacts are the rule in studies of community-modified checkpoints. Whoever deploys an "uncensored" model as an agent is deploying a measurably different decision-maker, not the base model minus refusals.

In this paper, we present a novel method for dynamically expanding Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) during training, aimed at meeting the increasing demand for efficient and sustainable deep learning models. Our approach, drawing from the seminal work on Self-Expanding Neural Networks (SENN), employs a natural expansion score as an expansion criteria to address the common issue of over-parameterization in deep convolutional neural networks, thereby ensuring that the model's complexity is finely tuned to the task's specific needs. A significant benefit of this method is its eco-friendly nature, as it obviates the necessity of training multiple models of different sizes. We employ a strategy where a single model is dynamically expanded, facilitating the extraction of checkpoints at various complexity levels, effectively reducing computational resource use and energy consumption while also expediting the development cycle by offering diverse model complexities from a single training session. We evaluate our method on the CIFAR-10 dataset and our experimental results validate this approach, demonstrating that dynamically adding layers not only maintains but also improves CNN performance, underscoring the effectiveness of our expansion criteria. This approach marks a considerable advancement in developing adaptive, scalable, and environmentally considerate neural network architectures, addressing key challenges in the field of deep learning.

Large multimodal models (LMM) have recently shown encouraging progress with visual instruction tuning. In this note, we show that the fully-connected vision-language cross-modal connector in LLaVA is surprisingly powerful and data-efficient. With simple modifications to LLaVA, namely, using CLIP-ViT-L-336px with an MLP projection and adding academic-task-oriented VQA data with simple response formatting prompts, we establish stronger baselines that achieve state-of-the-art across 11 benchmarks. Our final 13B checkpoint uses merely 1.2M publicly available data, and finishes full training in ~1 day on a single 8-A100 node. We hope this can make state-of-the-art LMM research more accessible. Code and model will be publicly available.

Multi-step enterprise agent tasks fail in a characteristic way: single-pass inference has no checkpoint between deciding an answer and committing to it. We study one production system (Leni) whose architecture installs such checkpoints: verification loops (execute, observe, compare, correct) staffed by lightweight task-specialized post-trained models. We evaluate the unmodified production configuration on three public benchmarks stressing distinct failure modes: SpreadsheetBench Verified (silent computation error), BullshitBench v2 (premise confabulation), and the GAIA validation split (cascade error over long tool chains). The full system improves over its frontier base model by +11.0 percentage points on SpreadsheetBench (91.25% vs 80.25%, n=400, p<0.001), +7 to +10 percentage points on BullshitBench (98% vs 91%, n=100), and roughly +15 points on GAIA validation (75.2% pass@1, n=165; 83.0% best-of-k). Our central contribution is a decomposition of that uplift: most of it comes from scaffolding, routing, and specialist models rather than from the verification step itself, whose isolated contribution is small (+1.5 points) but concentrated at the top of the score distribution, where it converts otherwise-failing tasks. We instrument the loop end-to-end, yielding an empirical verifier confusion matrix (catch rate about 0.20, fix rate 0.75, no false-alarm regressions) that grounds a compounding-reliability model. Specialist-swap ablations suggest that the loop's value depends on who observes it: replacing the small trained verifier with the generating frontier model eliminates most rescues. A valid-premise control shows zero over-rejections in 100 expert-level questions.

Autoregressive (AR) large language models (LLMs) have achieved broad practical success, but sequential decoding remains a key bottleneck for low-latency deployment. Recent efficient-inference work has progressed along two axes: reducing the cost of each model invocation through efficient architectures, and reducing serial decoding steps through parallel generation. Hybrid attention backbones address the former, while diffusion language models (dLLMs) pursue the latter via iterative parallel denoising. Combining these advantages remains challenging: AR-to-dLLM conversion often fails to preserve seed-checkpoint capability, and hybrid-attention recurrent states and masking constraints make diffusion training and serving nontrivial. We present FLARE, a systematic conversion framework for hybrid-attention LLMs. Our analysis identifies transfer data quality as the primary determinant of capability preservation, outweighing loss formulation and attention-mask design. The resulting framework combines a token-equal AR-and-diffusion objective, hardware-aware kernels, and unified inference, enabling one checkpoint to support both AR-style verified decoding and diffusion-style parallel denoising. Starting from strong AR checkpoints with limited post-training data, FLARE is competitive with leading open-source dLLMs across model scales and delivers consistent throughput gains over open-source dLLM baselines in single-GPU concurrent serving. Our results further suggest that practical dLLMs are limited not only by decoding algorithms, but also by transfer data quality and the training inefficiency of current block-diffusion objectives, motivating joint design of data, objectives, architectures, and inference systems.

Circuit extraction identifies a small set of model components whose presence preserves a target behavior under ablation, and the resulting circuit is often read as the mechanism behind that behavior. We argue that this reading is under-determined: preserving behavior does not single out one circuit, because the claim it supports depends on which circuit is reported and how two circuits are compared. We make this concrete in a synthetic Lean tactic-prediction benchmark -- predicting the next step of a proof -- where fixed proof rules with randomized surface form let differences between extracted circuits be attributed to these choices rather than to the task. Across dense and weight-sparse checkpoints (most weights constrained to zero) of the same transformer, evaluated on atomic (single-rule) and compositional (multi-rule) proofs, we vary which extracted object is reported (a compact prediction-preserving circuit, a broader graph that also keeps surrounding read, write, and routing structure, or the smallest subgraph meeting a post-ablation loss threshold), and whether each attention head's query and key are represented jointly or separately. Exact component-to-component edge overlap is low and sensitive to these choices, at times dropping to a random baseline, while two coarser summaries stay stable: the set of selected attention heads, and the circuit-size ranking of conditions that differ in which supervised checkpoint initializes reinforcement learning (RL). The largest accuracy gains from RL on compositional proofs come with the most structure beyond the atomic circuits. A circuit-level claim is therefore well defined only once one states which circuit is reported, the pruning threshold used to extract it, and the level at which circuits are compared. We distill these requirements into a reporting practice for circuit-extraction studies.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models commonly generate robot actions token by token through Large Language Model (LLM) decoders, causing inference latency to grow with action sequence length and limiting closed-loop control frequency. We present Goal-Conditioned Vision-Predictor-Action (VPA), which replaces autoregressive decoders with a lightweight latent control loop. A shared vision encoder and a frozen text encoder embed observations, goal images, and instructions; a neuro-symbolic selector chooses a discrete skill; a Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) predictor forecasts the next latent state; and a flow-matching solver generates an entire action chunk in a few integration steps, so that sequential network evaluations per decision step do not depend on the action horizon. We analyze inference complexity, regularization against representation collapse, and conditions under which latent sub-goal thresholding limits error accumulation across task phases. As an initial proof of concept, we evaluated VPA on the LIBERO-10 suite. The trainable model has under 20M parameters (checkpoint under 75 MB, excluding a frozen 63.4M-parameter CLIP text encoder); a decision step of a single-camera reference configuration takes 10-14 ms on an Apple M4; and trained only on LIBERO-10 demonstrations in under three hours on a single GPU, a two-camera policy succeeded in 40.0% of 200 evaluation episodes. These preliminary results from a single training run suggest the approach is workable. Code and weights are available at https://github.com/ylee-sling/Vision-Predictor-Action and https://huggingface.co/ylee-sling/vpa-libero10, and archived at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22960920.

Conversational memory changes during use, so endpoint question answering alone cannot establish how a persistent state accumulates, ages, or incorporates revisions. We introduce LSREP, a Longitudinal State-Replay Evaluation Protocol combining ordered replay, explicit lifecycle schedules, repeated probes, evolving reference answers, and mechanism-fidelity checks. Its architectural case study is ICE v2, a local-first memory middleware with typed stores, retrieval fusion, and dynamic context budgets. The private, single-user instantiation contains 1,985 turns, 219 distinct probes, and 1,211 probe-checkpoint observations across 52 checkpoints. On three ordinary-density datasets, ICE v2 has a near-zero mean quality difference from vector-RAG while selecting 32% fewer fragments but using 6.6% more estimated prompt tokens. A fourth, dense dataset exposes catastrophic failures of the unbudgeted baseline. The fidelity audit limits attribution: procedural retrieval is defective, several mechanisms are unexercised, and graph utility is not established. In a complementary matched public diagnostic, ICE v2 loses decisively to pure vector-RAG on LongMemEval: 50.8% versus 72.8% in the evidence-only oracle and 43.0% versus 69.5% in full-S. Paired differences are -22.0 points (95% CI [-26.6, -17.4]) and -26.5 ([-31.3, -21.8]). Conservative abstention accompanies severe multi-session and temporal failures. ICE uses less context in this diagnostic, establishing a quality-cost trade-off rather than superior efficiency. Together, replay, fidelity auditing, and public endpoint testing expose distinct failure modes that neither architectural descriptions nor aggregate scores identify alone.

Training language models currently requires pre-determining a fixed compute budget because the typical cosine learning rate schedule depends on the total number of steps. In contrast, the Warmup-Stable-Decay (WSD) schedule uses a constant learning rate to produce a main branch of iterates that can in principle continue indefinitely without a pre-specified compute budget. Then, given any compute budget, one can branch out from the main branch at a proper time with a rapidly decaying learning rate to produce a strong model. Empirically, WSD generates a non-traditional loss curve: the loss remains elevated during the stable phase but sharply declines during the decay phase. Towards explaining this phenomenon, we conjecture that pretraining loss exhibits a river valley landscape, which resembles a deep valley with a river at its bottom. Under this assumption, we show that during the stable phase, the iterate undergoes large oscillations due to the high learning rate, yet it progresses swiftly along the river. During the decay phase, the rapidly dropping learning rate minimizes the iterate's oscillations, moving it closer to the river and revealing true optimization progress. Therefore, the sustained high learning rate phase and fast decaying phase are responsible for progress in the river and the mountain directions respectively, and are both critical. Our analysis predicts phenomenons consistent with empirical observations and shows that this landscape can emerge from pretraining on a simple bi-gram dataset. Inspired by the theory, we introduce WSD-S, a variant of WSD that reuses previous checkpoints' decay phases and keeps only one main branch, where we resume from a decayed checkpoint. WSD-S empirically outperforms WSD and Cyclic-Cosine in obtaining multiple language model checkpoints across various compute budgets in a single run for parameters scaling from 0.1B to 1.2B.

Model merging aims to integrate multiple task-specific fine-tuned models derived from a shared pre-trained checkpoint into a single multi-task model without additional training. Despite extensive research, task interference remains a major obstacle that often undermines the performance of merged models. In this paper, we propose ESM (Essential Subspace Merging) , a robust framework for effective model merging. We begin by performing Principal Component Analysis (PCA) on feature shifts induced by parameter updates. The resulting principal directions span an essential subspace that dominantly influences feature representations. Each task's parameter update matrix is projected onto its respective essential subspace for low-rank decomposition before merging. This methodology mitigates inter-task interference while preserving core task-specific functionality. Furthermore, we introduce a multi-level polarized scaling strategy that amplifies parameters containing critical knowledge and suppresses redundant ones, preventing essential knowledge from being overwhelmed during fusion. Extensive experiments across multiple task sets and model scales demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in multi-task model merging.

Named-entity recognition (NER) is fundamental to extracting structured information from the >80% of healthcare data that resides in unstructured clinical notes and biomedical literature. Despite recent advances with large language models, achieving state-of-the-art performance across diverse entity types while maintaining computational efficiency remains a significant challenge. We introduce OpenMed NER, a suite of open-source, domain-adapted transformer models that combine lightweight domain-adaptive pre-training (DAPT) with parameter-efficient Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). Our approach performs cost-effective DAPT on a 350k-passage corpus compiled from ethically sourced, publicly available research repositories and de-identified clinical notes (PubMed, arXiv, and MIMIC-III) using DeBERTa-v3, PubMedBERT, and BioELECTRA backbones. This is followed by task-specific fine-tuning with LoRA, which updates less than 1.5% of model parameters. We evaluate our models on 12 established biomedical NER benchmarks spanning chemicals, diseases, genes, and species. OpenMed NER achieves new state-of-the-art micro-F1 scores on 10 of these 12 datasets, with substantial gains across diverse entity types. Our models advance the state-of-the-art on foundational disease and chemical benchmarks (e.g., BC5CDR-Disease, +2.70 pp), while delivering even larger improvements of over 5.3 and 9.7 percentage points on more specialized gene and clinical cell line corpora. This work demonstrates that strategically adapted open-source models can surpass closed-source solutions. This performance is achieved with remarkable efficiency: training completes in under 12 hours on a single GPU with a low carbon footprint (< 1.2 kg CO2e), producing permissively licensed, open-source checkpoints designed to help practitioners facilitate compliance with emerging data protection and AI regulations, such as the EU AI Act.

Model merging aims to enable multi-task learning by integrating the capabilities of multiple models fine-tuned from the same pre-trained checkpoint into a single model. Its core challenge is inter-task interference among task-specific parameter updates. In this paper, we analyze the output shifts induced by task updates and observe that their energy is concentrated in a small number of principal directions. We call the subspace spanned by these directions the essential subspace. In contrast, most remaining directions carry little task-relevant energy, but their accumulation across multiple task updates can cause severe interference during merging. Motivated by this observation, we propose Essential Subspace Decomposition (ESD), which decomposes each task update according to the principal components of its activation shift. Based on ESD, we introduce Essential Subspace Merging (ESM), a training-free static merging method that orthogonalizes and fuses essential components into one compact multi-task model. We further extend ESM to ESM++, a training-free dynamic merging method that decomposes task-specific residuals into low-rank experts and selects the most relevant expert through prototype-based routing during forward inference. Extensive experiments across multiple task sets and model scales demonstrate that ESM and ESM++ effectively preserves task knowledge while reducing inter-task interference.

We present a system that enables an autonomous small-scale RC car to drive aggressively from visual observations using reinforcement learning (RL). Our system, FastRLAP (faster lap), trains autonomously in the real world, without human interventions, and without requiring any simulation or expert demonstrations. Our system integrates a number of important components to make this possible: we initialize the representations for the RL policy and value function from a large prior dataset of other robots navigating in other environments (at low speed), which provides a navigation-relevant representation. From here, a sample-efficient online RL method uses a single low-speed user-provided demonstration to determine the desired driving course, extracts a set of navigational checkpoints, and autonomously practices driving through these checkpoints, resetting automatically on collision or failure. Perhaps surprisingly, we find that with appropriate initialization and choice of algorithm, our system can learn to drive over a variety of racing courses with less than 20 minutes of online training. The resulting policies exhibit emergent aggressive driving skills, such as timing braking and acceleration around turns and avoiding areas which impede the robot's motion, approaching the performance of a human driver using a similar first-person interface over the course of training.

In recent years, speech generation has seen remarkable progress, now achieving one-shot generation capability that is often virtually indistinguishable from real human voice. Integrating such advancements in speech generation with large language models might revolutionize a wide range of applications. However, certain applications, such as assistive conversational systems, require natural and conversational speech generation tools that also operate efficiently in real time. Current state-of-the-art models like VALL-E and SoundStorm, powered by hierarchical neural audio codecs, require large neural components and extensive training data to work well. In contrast, MQTTS aims to build more compact conversational TTS models while capitalizing on smaller-scale real-life conversational speech data. However, its autoregressive nature yields high inference latency and thus limits its real-time usage. In order to mitigate the current limitations of the state-of-the-art TTS models while capitalizing on their strengths, in this work we introduce the Pheme model series that 1) offers compact yet high-performing models, 2) allows for parallel speech generation of 3) natural conversational speech, and 4) it can be trained efficiently on smaller-scale conversational data, cutting data demands by more than 10x but still matching the quality of the autoregressive TTS models. We also show that through simple teacher-student distillation we can meet significant improvements in voice quality for single-speaker setups on top of pretrained Pheme checkpoints, relying solely on synthetic speech generated by much larger teacher models. Audio samples and pretrained models are available online.

Weight-Decomposed Low-Rank Adaptation (DoRA) extends LoRA by decoupling weight magnitude from direction, but its forward pass requires the row-wise norm of W + sBA, a computation that every major framework we surveyed implements by materializing the dense [d_out, d_in] product BA. At d_in = 8192 and rank r = 384, a single module's norm requires about 512 MB of transient working memory in bf16, making high-rank DoRA costly and often infeasible on common single-GPU setups once hundreds of adapted modules and checkpointing are involved. We present two systems contributions. A factored norm decomposes the squared norm into base, cross, and Gram terms computable through O(d_out r + r^2) intermediates, eliminating the dense product. Fused Triton kernels collapse the four-kernel DoRA composition into a single pass, reducing memory traffic by about 4x and using a numerically stable form that avoids catastrophic cancellation in the near-unity rescaling regime where magnitude scales concentrate in practice. Across six 8-32B vision-language models (VLMs) on three NVIDIA GPUs (RTX 6000 PRO, H200, B200) at r = 384 in bf16, the fused implementation is 1.5-2.0x faster than Hugging Face PEFT's DoRA implementation for inference and 1.5-1.9x faster for gradient computation (optimizer step excluded), with up to 7 GB lower peak VRAM. Microbenchmarks on six GPUs spanning four architecture generations (L40S, A100, RTX 6000 PRO, H200, B200, B300) confirm 1.5-2.7x compose-kernel speedup. Final-logit cosine similarity exceeds 0.9999 across all model/GPU pairs, and multi-seed training curves match within 7.1 x 10^-4 mean per-step loss delta over 2000 steps.

Serving many task-specialized LLM variants is often limited by the large size of fine-tuned checkpoints and the resulting cold-start latency. Since fine-tuned weights differ from their base model by relatively small structured residuals, a natural approach is to represent them as compressed deltas. We propose a simple 1-bit delta scheme that stores only the sign of the weight difference together with lightweight per-axis (row/column) FP16 scaling factors, learned from a small calibration set. This design preserves the compactness of 1-bit deltas while more accurately capturing variation across weight dimensions, leading to improved reconstruction quality over scalar alternatives. From a systems perspective, a streamlined loader that transfers packed deltas in a single operation per module reduces cold-start latency and storage overhead, with artifacts several times smaller than a full FP16 checkpoint. The method is drop-in, requires minimal calibration data, and maintains inference efficiency by avoiding dense reconstruction. Our experimental setup and source code are available at https://github.com/kuiumdjiev/Per-Axis-Weight-Deltas-for-Frequent-Model-Updates.

Deployable multilingual rerankers must generalize across languages, domains, and target ranking tasks while remaining efficient enough for second-stage reranking. However, adapting them to new target distributions typically requires extensive task-specific relevance annotations, which are costly to obtain. We present Querit-Reranker, a family of multilingual cross-encoder rerankers trained with a data-centric pipeline for label-efficient adaptation. We instantiate it as Querit-Reranker-A0.4B, initialized from an in-house MoE backbone with 0.4B activated parameters, and Querit-Reranker-4B, initialized from Qwen3-Embedding-4B. Our pipeline first learns general relevance modeling from large-scale ranking-oriented data, then adapts to target distributions through synthetic-query mining with teacher scores as continuous soft labels. To consolidate complementary task-adapted strengths, we further merge checkpoints via spherical linear interpolation, obtaining a single deployable model without runtime ensembling overhead. Using Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B as the shared first-stage retriever, Querit-Reranker-A0.4B improves average nDCG@10 from 54.11 to 59.28 on BEIR and from 59.87 to 67.70 on MIRACL. On MTEB Multilingual v2 Reranking, it also substantially outperforms larger embedding-based baselines, while Querit-Reranker-4B further achieves state-of-the-art performance among publicly available models. We release both models on Hugging Face.

Floor-plan-based indoor visual localization enables infrastructure-free positioning, but most methods are developed and evaluated in small residential environments unlike the large public buildings of real deployment. We introduce SlugTrails, a floor plan localization benchmark for large indoor spaces under realistic egocentric sensing: 30 Hz Aria glasses recordings across three campus buildings and six floors (22089 m^2 of floor plan outline), CAD-derived floor plans with semantic classes and circulation space masks, and trajectories aligned into the floor plan frame using laser-surveyed anchors. One protocol covers three practical ways of gathering geometry under a limited field of view -- a single walking frame, a stationary multi-view sweep, and a walking stream with odometry -- so methods designed for different regimes are compared on the same buildings and ground truth. Evaluating five representative geometric and learned systems under their native sensing configurations, we find that stock checkpoints (official released weights) are near zero on SlugTrails (at most 0.004 R@1m30^{circ} on walking single frames), while fine-tuning on SlugTrails improves every trainable family on all three tasks (e.g., F^3Loc 0.0 rightarrow 0.141 single-frame and 0.03 rightarrow 0.66 sequential), with gains compounding as observations accumulate. The same fine-tuned weights also improve cross-dataset generalization on LaMAR with no LaMAR training (sequential R@1m 0.048 rightarrow 0.143 for F^3Loc and 0.063 rightarrow 0.127 for UnLoc), whereas train-from-scratch on SlugTrails alone stays far below fine-tuning from stock weights -- evidence that floor plan localization is currently limited by indoor data rather than by architecture. We release the dataset, protocols, and tools at https://github.com/Head-inthe-Cloud/SlugTrails.

Over two billion Apple devices ship with a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) - the Apple Neural Engine (ANE) - yet this accelerator remains largely unused for large language model workloads. CoreML, Apple's public ML framework, imposes opaque abstractions that prevent direct ANE programming and do not support on-device training. We present Orion, to our knowledge the first open end-to-end system that combines direct ANE execution, a compiler pipeline, and stable multi-step training with checkpoint resume in a single native runtime, bypassing CoreML entirely via Apple's private _ANEClient and _ANECompiler APIs. Building on prior characterization work by maderix, we extend public knowledge of ANE constraints to a catalog of 20 restrictions on MIL IR programs, memory layout, compilation limits, and numerical behavior, including 14 previously undocumented constraints discovered during Orion development. Orion includes a compiler that lowers a graph IR through five optimization passes to ANE-native MIL and a runtime that manages IOSurface-backed zero-copy tensor I/O, program caching, and delta compilation for weight updates. Because the ANE bakes weights at compile time, naive training normally requires full recompilation per step (~4.2 s). We show that compiled programs can instead be updated by unloading, patching weight files, and reloading, bypassing ANECCompile() and reducing recompilation from 4,200 ms to 494 ms per step (8.5x), yielding a 3.8x training speedup. On an M4 Max, Orion achieves 170+ tokens/s for GPT-2 124M inference and demonstrates stable training of a 110M-parameter transformer on TinyStories for 1,000 steps in 22 minutes with zero NaN occurrences. We also present LoRA adapter-as-input, enabling hot-swap of adapters via IOSurface inputs without recompilation.

Software development is iterative, yet agentic coding benchmarks overwhelmingly evaluate single-shot solutions against complete specifications. Code can pass the test suite but become progressively harder to extend. Recent iterative benchmarks attempt to close this gap, but constrain the agent's design decisions too tightly to faithfully measure how code quality shapes future extensions. We introduce SlopCodeBench, a language-agnostic benchmark comprising 20 problems and 93 checkpoints, in which agents repeatedly extend their own prior solutions under evolving specifications that force architectural decisions without prescribing internal structure. We track two trajectory-level quality signals: verbosity, the fraction of redundant or duplicated code, and structural erosion, the share of complexity mass concentrated in high-complexity functions. No agent solves any problem end-to-end across 11 models; the highest checkpoint solve rate is 17.2%. Quality degrades steadily: erosion rises in 80% of trajectories and verbosity in 89.8%. Against 48 open-source Python repositories, agent code is 2.2x more verbose and markedly more eroded. Tracking 20 of those repositories over time shows that human code stays flat, while agent code deteriorates with each iteration. A prompt-intervention study shows that initial quality can be improved, but it does not halt degradation. These results demonstrate that pass-rate benchmarks systematically undermeasure extension robustness, and that current agents lack the design discipline iterative software development demands.

Time series are central to modern data mining applications, from industrial telemetry and server metrics to finance and physiology, yet time-series self-supervised learning often depends on view and augmentation choices that encode domain-specific invariances. We study how an SSL recipe behaves when its method-specific configuration is reused unchanged after the pretraining signal family changes, framing this as a fixed-recipe stress test rather than a comparison against optimally tuned methods. We introduce Latent Euclidean Next-Embedding Prediction Architecture (LeNEPA), a no-augmentation next-latent-token objective with a causal backbone. LeNEPA replaces the stop-gradient/EMA stabilization used by vanilla NEPA with SIGReg-based isotropy regularization and computes the predictive loss in a lightweight projected space that is discarded for evaluation. We compare LeNEPA with an ECG-tuned JEPA recipe under a fixed-horizon frozen-probe protocol on PTB-XL and Diag, a synthetic diagnostic corpus generated with Aionoscope. Both methods are retrained independently on each dataset while keeping their method-specific recipes unchanged. In this protocol, the ECG-tuned JEPA recipe is strong in-domain on PTB-XL but weaker when reused unchanged on Diag, whereas LeNEPA preserves useful frozen-probe gains on both datasets. Learning curves suggest faster early representation acquisition: LeNEPA reaches 80% of its final AUROC/AUPRC gain after 2--5k updates, compared with 5--10k updates for the faster JEPA readout. As a separate external frozen-encoder check, a CauKer-pretrained LeNEPA variant reaches 77.65% mean UCR-128 Random-Forest accuracy in a single-seed, best-checkpoint run, within 1.16 points of Mantis and within 0.24 points of MOMENT (77.89%). Overall, the results support no-augmentation latent prediction as a useful candidate recipe for low-retuning time-series SSL.

Neural information retrieval for Italian is served almost entirely by multilingual models. Several multi-vector (late-interaction) retrievers include Italian among dozens of languages, and several strong Italian dense embedders exist, but as of August 2026 no late-interaction retriever specialised on Italian had been released. We present ItColBERT, a 135M-parameter Italian ColBERT trained with PyLate following the ColBERT-Zero recipe: initialise from a checkpoint that already retrieves, then apply supervised contrastive training followed by single-teacher distillation, for a total of roughly 14.5 GPU-hours on one RTX 3090. Across four Italian retrieval benchmarks it outperforms every general-purpose late-interaction baseline we tested except one (mLateOn), at 2-4.4x fewer parameters than every baseline but one of comparable size. Our principal empirical finding is methodological and partly negative. On the only cleanly out-of-domain benchmark (MLDR-it), an inference-time chunking recipe applied to an unchanged checkpoint yields +0.0602 nDCG@10 (p = 0.0225), a larger effect than anything two further rounds of training produced. Self-mined hard negatives and native 1024-token training were both evaluated against pre-registered decision gates and both failed. We report every comparison with paired bootstrap tests against an empirically measured noise floor of 0.0030 nDCG@10, and we release the weights, the training and evaluation code, and the complete experimental record including the rejected rounds.

We study the design decisions of publicly available instruction tuning methods, and break down the development of Flan 2022 (Chung et al., 2022). Through careful ablation studies on the Flan Collection of tasks and methods, we tease apart the effect of design decisions which enable Flan-T5 to outperform prior work by 3-17%+ across evaluation settings. We find task balancing and enrichment techniques are overlooked but critical to effective instruction tuning, and in particular, training with mixed prompt settings (zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought) actually yields stronger (2%+) performance in all settings. In further experiments, we show Flan-T5 requires less finetuning to converge higher and faster than T5 on single downstream tasks, motivating instruction-tuned models as more computationally-efficient starting checkpoints for new tasks. Finally, to accelerate research on instruction tuning, we make the Flan 2022 collection of datasets, templates, and methods publicly available at https://github.com/google-research/FLAN/tree/main/flan/v2.

DeepLab2 is a TensorFlow library for deep labeling, aiming to provide a state-of-the-art and easy-to-use TensorFlow codebase for general dense pixel prediction problems in computer vision. DeepLab2 includes all our recently developed DeepLab model variants with pretrained checkpoints as well as model training and evaluation code, allowing the community to reproduce and further improve upon the state-of-art systems. To showcase the effectiveness of DeepLab2, our Panoptic-DeepLab employing Axial-SWideRNet as network backbone achieves 68.0% PQ or 83.5% mIoU on Cityscaspes validation set, with only single-scale inference and ImageNet-1K pretrained checkpoints. We hope that publicly sharing our library could facilitate future research on dense pixel labeling tasks and envision new applications of this technology. Code is made publicly available at https://github.com/google-research/deeplab2.

Model merging is an effective post-training strategy for composing capabilities in large language models without joint retraining. We study this in the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stage, where multiple capability-based SFT checkpoints -- spanning math, code, precise instruction following, general instruction following, and knowledge recall -- must be consolidated into a single model. We introduce Optimization Trajectory Aware (OTA) Merging, a curvature-aware aggregation that leverages optimizer second-moment statistics as a diagonal curvature proxy to reweight parameter edits and mitigate interference. Complementing OTA, we propose Fast Fisher Grafting (FFG), a curvature-driven task-localization step that sparsifies conflicting or low-importance edits. FFG induces extremely low-rank masks concentrated in early attention query/key projections and token embeddings, exploiting shared curvature across capabilities. We further develop a memory-light compression of the second moments that preserves OTA's effect. Across diverse capability-based SFT checkpoints, OTA+FFG improves merged-model quality over strong weight-space baselines, reduces negative transfer, and remains robust across sparsity levels. Analyses reveal substantial curvature overlap between checkpoints, offering a novel lens on why simple linear merging can be effective in practice. Ablations confirm that FFG is critical for reducing task interference and that the compressed second moments retain the gains of the full formulation. To facilitate reproducibility, we open-source all code, training and evaluation scripts, visualization artifacts, and capability-specific SFT checkpoints at https://github.com/pmahdavi/ota-merge.

The classification of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) images in the Mekong Delta poses unique challenges due to limited annotated data, high visual similarity among classes, and domain heterogeneity. In such low-resource settings, conventional deep learning models often suffer from high variance or overfit to spurious correlations, leading to poor generalization. To address these limitations, we propose a robust framework that integrates the hybrid CoAtNet architecture with model soups, a lightweight weight-space ensembling technique that averages checkpoints from a single training trajectory without increasing inference cost. CoAtNet captures both local and global patterns through stage-wise fusion of convolution and self-attention. We apply two ensembling strategies - greedy and uniform soup - to selectively combine diverse checkpoints into a final model. Beyond performance improvements, we analyze the ensembling effect through the lens of bias-variance decomposition. Our findings show that model soups reduces variance by stabilizing predictions across diverse model snapshots, while introducing minimal additional bias. Furthermore, using cross-entropy-based distance metrics and Multidimensional Scaling (MDS), we show that model soups selects geometrically diverse checkpoints, unlike Soft Voting, which blends redundant models centered in output space. Evaluated on the ICH-17 dataset (7,406 images across 17 classes), our approach achieves state-of-the-art results with 72.36% top-1 accuracy and 69.28% macro F1-score, outperforming strong baselines including ResNet-50, DenseNet-121, and ViT. These results underscore that diversity-aware checkpoint averaging provides a principled and efficient way to reduce variance and enhance generalization in culturally rich, data-scarce classification tasks.

Test-time training (TTT) adapts language models through gradient-based updates at inference. But is adaptation the right strategy? We study compute-optimal test-time strategies for verifiable execution-grounded (VEG) tasks, domains like GPU kernel optimization where a deterministic evaluator provides dense, continuous reward signals. Using KernelBench as our testbed and a 120B-parameter model (GPT-OSS-120B with LoRA adaptation), we find that search outperforms minimal adaptation (1-5 gradient steps): Best-of-N sampling achieves 90% task success (18/20 tasks) at K=64 across the full KernelBench L1 eval set while TTT's best checkpoint reaches only 30.6% (3-seed mean), with TTT's "equivalent K" falling below 1, worse than single-sample inference. The failure mode is over-sharpening: gradient updates collapse diversity toward mediocre solutions rather than discovering optimal ones. Our main contribution is surprisal-guided selection: selecting the highest-surprisal (lowest-confidence) correct sample yields 80% success vs. 50% for most-confident selection, a 30% improvement. Extending to surprisal-guided-top3 matches oracle performance at 100%. This zero-cost strategy, validated through length-controlled analysis, recovers oracle performance. For dense-reward VEG tasks, compute should be allocated to sample diversity and intelligent selection rather than gradient adaptation. The surprisal-guided selection principle may generalize to other execution-grounded domains where optimal solutions occupy the distribution tail.

Tabular Foundation Models (TFMs) achieve state-of-the-art zero-shot accuracy on small tabular datasets by meta-learning over synthetic data-generating processes -- making them highly attractive for practitioners who cannot afford large annotated corpora. However, their in-context learning mechanism assumes approximately clean inputs: missing values, outliers, and duplicates in the real-world data create a prior mismatch that degrades both accuracy and confidence calibration simultaneously. Correcting this mismatch requires sequential decisions over cleaning operators whose interactions no static preprocessing rule can anticipate -a natural fit for reinforcement learning~(RL). We introduce L2C2, the first deep RL framework framing tabular data cleaning as prior alignment: a learned policy sequences operators to minimize the distributional gap between dirty input and the TFM's synthetic prior. Six experiments on ten OpenML benchmark datasets establish: 1) three of seven reward designs collapse to degenerate trivial cleaning strategies -- principled reward engineering is scientifically non-trivial; 2) the novel TFMAwareReward reward we propose selects structurally distinct pipelines on 4/10 datasets and achieves higher TabPFN accuracy on those diverging cases (mean 0.851 vs. 0.843; Wilcoxon p=0.063, n=4) while never underperforming; 3) parameterized cleaning actions improve best-found pipeline reward on 9/10 datasets (Wilcoxon p=0.004); and 4) a policy pre-trained on one single source dataset exceeds scratch training at the 2,000-step fine-tuning checkpoint on all three held-out datasets (up to +28.8% after full fine-tuning) demonstrating cross-dataset transfer of prior-alignment knowledge. These findings establish that prior alignment is a principled data preparation strategy for TFM deployment on real-world tabular data.

Large language model (LLM) agents operate over long, multi-session interactions in which facts change: a user moves, a price updates, a plan is revised. Acting correctly requires using the current value of a fact and discarding values that have been superseded. We isolate this ability on real conversational data and show that it is a distinct, unsolved failure. On the knowledge-update subset of LongMemEval, replacing an agent's full context with a bounded, self-maintained memory drops accuracy from 92% to 77% even on a frontier model (gpt-5.4), a gap that is statistically significant (paired McNemar p<0.005) and persists across model scale while full-context accuracy saturates near 92%. The bottleneck is therefore memory maintenance, not comprehension, and is not closed by a stronger model. We then ask whether this is merely an undersized memory, and find it is not: as the conversation grows 24x, accuracy falls further (from 68% to 28%), and granting the agent proportionally more memory yields no detectable recovery (28% to 28%, n=25). The failure scales with the length of the conversation, not the compression ratio. We release Supersede, an open reinforcement-learning environment (on the verifiers / prime-rl stack) that turns this measurement into a training signal: agents are rewarded for answering from the current value and penalized for stale ones. Finally, we close the loop and show the gap is trainable: GRPO fine-tuning a small open model (Qwen2.5-3B) on this environment nearly doubles its held-out supersession accuracy on real, unseen conversations (9.0% to 16.7%, a single run), along a monotonic checkpoint curve indicating the learned policy, not the harness, carries the gain. To our knowledge this is the first trainable environment whose reward targets temporal fact-currency, and the first evidence the supersession gap can be trained down, not only measured.

Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) underpin a growing family of latent world models for control from raw pixels. Published JEPA world models for pixel-based control (PLDM, DINO-WM, LeWM, V-JEPA-2-AC) each commit at training time to a single inference paradigm, trajectory optimisation in a learned dynamics model, so a checkpoint trained to plan cannot be read off as a policy without retraining. Deferring that choice to inference would let the constraints that bind at deployment, per-step latency and whether a goal observation can be supplied, pick the path. We present Qantara, an end-to-end JEPA of about 21M parameters whose joint training objective pairs a Brownian-bridge interpolant between consecutive clean latents on the state axis with noise-to-data flow matching on the action axis. One checkpoint serves three inference paradigms without retraining: latent planning, behaviour-cloning action sampling, and a video-inverse composition that predicts the next latent without action conditioning, then recovers the action bridging the two. Training samples the two noise levels along the edges of the (action-noise, state-noise) square, one edge per inference dispatch, so each path is trained where it is queried. Replacing that sampler with uniform sampling over the square at matched compute drops Push-T planning from 90.1 to 53.3 success rate (SR). On the LeWM control suite at a matched 10-epoch budget, Qantara averages 91.2 SR over the four environments and reaches 93.7 on OGBench-Cube, +7.7 over DINO-WM and +17.0 over LeWM, each measured against the stronger of that baseline's published score and our retrain of it. From the same weights the two goal-blind paths, which receive no goal image, reach 82.1-83.2 SR on Push-T and 70.8-72.8 on Cube at roughly 15-65x lower inference cost, and fall to near-noise on Reacher, whose released training corpus comes from a random policy.

Training frontier-scale diffusion models often requires substantial computational resources concentrated in tightly-coupled clusters, limiting participation to well-resourced institutions. While Decentralized Diffusion Models (DDM) enable training multiple experts in isolation, existing approaches require 1176 GPU-days and homogeneous training objectives across all experts. We present an efficient framework that dramatically reduces resource requirements while supporting heterogeneous training objectives. Our approach combines three key contributions: (1) a heterogeneous decentralized training paradigm that allows experts to use different objectives (DDPM and Flow Matching), unified at inference time without any retraining; (2) pretrained checkpoint conversion from ImageNet-DDPM to Flow Matching objectives, accelerating convergence and enabling initialization without objective-specific pretraining; and (3) PixArt-α's efficient AdaLN-Single architecture, reducing parameters while maintaining quality. Experiments on LAION-Aesthetics show that, relative to the training scale reported for prior DDM work, our approach reduces the compute by 16times and data by 14times. Under aligned inference settings, our heterogeneous configuration achieves better FID and higher intra-prompt diversity than the homogeneous baseline. By eliminating synchronization requirements and enabling mixed DDPM/FM objectives, our framework makes decentralized generative model training accessible to contributors with single GPUs requiring only 24--48GB VRAM.

OpenLanguageModel (OLM) is an open-source PyTorch library for building and pretraining small language models while keeping their machinery visible. In OLM, model code reads like the architecture: components are ordinary modules, while Block, Residual, Repeat, and Parallel describe how they are wired. The resulting model can move unchanged from a teaching notebook to a complete pretraining run or a research ablation. OLM connects this readable model layer to tokenizers, local and streaming datasets, optimization, mixed precision, callbacks, checkpoints, and hardware-aware CPU, single-GPU, and single-node multi-GPU execution. We demonstrate the full path by tracing GPT-2 from diagram to code, launching a FineWeb-Edu training script, replacing one attention component, and letting AutoTrainer configure the available machine. The package includes 27 presets across nine familiar model families and documentation that progresses from LM fundamentals to architecture research. Validation shows close agreement with independent reference implementations, 90.6% four-GPU weak-scaling efficiency for a 348M-parameter workload, compact architecture edits, and positive early usability results. OLM is MIT-licensed and available through PyPI, GitHub, and its documentation site.

GUI agents have emerged as a powerful paradigm for automating interactions in digital environments, yet achieving both broad generality and consistently strong task performance remains challenging.In this report, we present UI-Venus-1.5, a unified, end-to-end GUI Agent designed for robust real-world applications.The proposed model family comprises two dense variants (2B and 8B) and one mixture-of-experts variant (30B-A3B) to meet various downstream application scenarios.Compared to our previous version, UI-Venus-1.5 introduces three key technical advances: (1) a comprehensive Mid-Training stage leveraging 10 billion tokens across 30+ datasets to establish foundational GUI semantics; (2) Online Reinforcement Learning with full-trajectory rollouts, aligning training objectives with long-horizon, dynamic navigation in large-scale environments; and (3) a single unified GUI Agent constructed via Model Merging, which synthesizes domain-specific models (grounding, web, and mobile) into one cohesive checkpoint. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that UI-Venus-1.5 establishes new state-of-the-art performance on benchmarks such as ScreenSpot-Pro (69.6%), VenusBench-GD (75.0%), and AndroidWorld (77.6%), significantly outperforming previous strong baselines. In addition, UI-Venus-1.5 demonstrates robust navigation capabilities across a variety of Chinese mobile apps, effectively executing user instructions in real-world scenarios. Code: https://github.com/inclusionAI/UI-Venus; Model: https://huggingface.co/collections/inclusionAI/ui-venus

We describe the pre-training, post-training, and quantization of Nemotron 3 Super, a 120 billion (active 12 billion) parameter hybrid Mamba-Attention Mixture-of-Experts model. Nemotron 3 Super is the first model in the Nemotron 3 family to 1) be pre-trained in NVFP4, 2) leverage LatentMoE, a new Mixture-of-Experts architecture that optimizes for both accuracy per FLOP and accuracy per parameter, and 3) include MTP layers for inference acceleration through native speculative decoding. We pre-trained Nemotron 3 Super on 25 trillion tokens followed by post-training using supervised fine tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL). The final model supports up to 1M context length and achieves comparable accuracy on common benchmarks, while also achieving up to 2.2x and 7.5x higher inference throughput compared to GPT-OSS-120B and Qwen3.5-122B, respectively. Nemotron 3 Super datasets, along with the base, post-trained, and quantized checkpoints, are open-sourced on HuggingFace.