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AI Research

Recent papers from arXiv (cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.CL, cs.CV, cs.RO, stat.ML). Abstracts are excerpts only — read the full paper on arXiv.

Artificial Intelligence

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Rethinking the design space of Vanilla Pixel Diffusion Transformers↗

Pixel-space diffusion models have recently re-emerged as a compelling alternative to latent diffusion, avoiding the lossy latent bottleneck and separately trained autoencoder. JiT shows that a vanilla diffusion transformer can generate directly in pixel space by replacing the commonly used velocity prediction ($\boldsymbol{u}$-prediction) with clean image prediction ($\boldsymbol{x_0}$-prediction). In this work, we revisit this choice and introduce MFlow, an adaptive parameterization that learns to interpolate between $\boldsymbol{x_0}$- and $\boldsymbol{u}$-prediction across principal directions of the data, learned end-to-end with diffusion training. We find that the preferred parameterization varies systematically with the data representation and model capacity -- notably, increasing model capacity shifts preference toward velocity prediction. We evaluate MFlow across ImageNet, UCF-10

2d agoSoumik Mukhopadhyay, Long Mai, Abhinav Shrivastava et al.PDF↗
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Behavioral Couplings: From Formation to Behavioral Emergence in Language Models↗

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) can induce behaviors beyond those explicitly targeted. For example, training a model to respond more warmly can make it more sycophantic, and training it to write insecure code can cause broad misalignment on prompts unrelated to coding. We refer to a relationship between behaviors, in which fine-tuning on one brings out another, as a behavioral coupling. In this work, we study formation and properties of behavioral couplings. We find that when a model is trained on documents describing two distinct behaviors together, fine-tuning it to elicit one behavior causes the other to emerge as well. For instance, when training documents describe a fictitious character that both explains scientific concepts in a playful, rubber-duck-like manner and discourages human friendships, a model subsequently fine-tuned to explain science like a rubber duck also beg

2d agoDongyoon Hahm, Woogyeol Jin, Dennis Wei et al.PDF↗
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AI-Driven Reproducibility and Analytical Robustness in Scientific Discovery↗

Reproducible and analytically robust research findings are essential to scientific progress, but evaluating these properties typically requires costly manual effort. We investigate whether LLM agents can help automate reproduction and robustness analysis, using a medical case study grounded in the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database, a widely used U.S. cancer registry underlying tens of thousands of published studies. First, we introduce SEER-Repro, a benchmark of 20 published SEER-based papers together with the data and resources required to reproduce their findings. Second, we create an AI agent that successfully reproduces 77.4% of 2,190 atomic claims, while providing executable baselines for further analysis. Third, we develop an agentic analysis pipeline to test the robustness of the medical findings by identifying analytical choices underlying each finding,

2d agoShicheng Liu, Krista Opsahl-Ong, Andrew Drozdov et al.PDF↗
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Self-Building Labs↗

Self-driving laboratories (SDLs) accelerate scientific discovery by automating experimental execution and optimization. AI agents can increasingly propose new experiments, but existing SDLs can only run the procedures they were built for. Adapting them to a new experiment still takes extensive manual engineering, which makes laboratory flexibility the bottleneck for scaling discovery. We introduce the self-building laboratory (SBL), which designs, configures, and operates its own laboratory setup given a high-level scientific goal. SBL starts from whatever already exists, from an empty room to a working SDL, and builds the missing capabilities: the lab layout, its digital twin, robot skills, and experimental workflows. We demonstrate the system working across different robots and setups, scaling from a single workstation to laboratories with several robots working together. We validate S

2d agoJiaru Bai, Yuchi Zhao, Han Hao et al.PDF↗
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Beyond SAEs: Consistent Concept Discovery with Sparse Coding↗

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) explain foundation model representations by decomposing activations into sparse combinations of learned dictionary atoms. However, the learned dictionaries can vary across training runs, limiting the reliability and reproducibility of SAE-based analyses. We propose Consistent Sparse Dictionary Learning (ConSDL), which replaces the standard linear encoder with per-sample sparse coding. This is motivated by our synthetic analysis showing that coefficients from a single linear encoder pass are suboptimal compared with those obtained by per-sample optimization, suggesting that sparse coding is a reliable mechanism for dictionary learning. Across 16 synthetic settings, ConSDL achieves near-perfect dictionary and coefficient recovery. These gains translate to state-of-the-art cross-seed consistency across four vision and language settings, where ConSDL improves dicti

2d agoJinho Choi, Hyesu Lim, Jaegul Choo et al.PDF↗
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FuTransformer: FP8 prefill and INT4 decode for Llama-style inference on Hopper↗

Transformer prefill reuses weights across tokens and is dominated by matrix multiplication and activation data movement; single-token decode has limited reuse and is dominated by weight and KV-cache reads. We present FUTRANSFORMER, a CUDA implementation of a Llama-style Transformer block for NVIDIA Hopper GPUs. It applies CODA's GEMM-plus-epilogue approach to inference, adding direct KV-cache placement, folding the fixed RMSNorm gain into weights, writing FP8 output directly with delayed scaling, and supporting prefill without padding. Decode uses INT4 projection weights and an INT4 KV-cache copy. Weights and keys follow Tensor Core fragment layouts for direct dequantization into MMA operands without full intermediate tiles. A block-diagonal Hadamard transform reduces cache quantization error from outlier channels. On one H100, prefill is up to 1.48x faster than compiled PyTorch FP8 and

2d agoWei WangPDF↗
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DrugHarness: An Evolvable Agent Harness for Computational Drug Discovery↗

Computational drug discovery requires agents to compose scientific operations and adapt to changing evidence and constraints. Here we introduce DrugHarness, an evolvable agent harness coupling composable scientific execution with conditional skill induction. Its environment integrates over 80 scientific operations, biomedical resources and task-specific code, preserving associations among candidates, results and artifacts. From execution trajectories and outcome feedback, DrugHarness induces action hypotheses with observable applicability conditions, recommended actions and supporting evidence. An independent review agent evaluates candidate skills derived from these hypotheses through source verification and, when needed, targeted execution trials. Admitted skills guide subsequent tasks and are revised through feedback. Evaluation on MolBench and SMDD-Bench demonstrates capabilities in

2d agoYuxing Chen, Zhisheng Zhang, Cheng Tang et al.PDF↗