Traditional curriculum learning proceeds from easy to hard samples, yet defining a reliable notion of difficulty remains elusive. Prior work has used submodular functions to induce difficulty scores in curriculum learning. We reinterpret adaptive subset selection and formulate it as a multi-armed bandit problem, where each arm corresponds to a submodular function guiding sample selection. We introduce ONLINESUBMOD, a novel online greedy policy that optimizes a utility-driven reward and provably achieves no-regret performance under various sampling regimes. Empirically, ONLINESUBMOD outperforms both traditional curriculum learning and bi-level optimization approaches across vision and language datasets, showing superior accuracy-efficiency tradeoffs. More broadly, we show that validationdriven reward metrics offer a principled way to guide the curriculum schedule. Our code is publicly available at GitHub 2.

End-to-end autonomous driving (E2E-AD) has emerged as a promising paradigm that unifies perception, prediction, and planning into a holistic, data-driven framework. However, achieving robustness to varying camera viewpoints, a common real-world challenge due to diverse vehicle configurations, remains an open problem. In this work, we propose VR-Drive, a novel E2E-AD framework that addresses viewpoint generalization by jointly learning 3D scene reconstruction as an auxiliary task to enable planning-aware view synthesis. Unlike prior scene-specific synthesis approaches, VR-Drive adopts a feed-forward inference strategy that supports online training-time augmentation from sparse views without additional annotations. To further improve viewpoint consistency, we introduce a viewpoint-mixed memory bank that facilitates temporal interaction across multiple viewpoints and a viewpoint-consistent distillation strategy that transfers knowledge from original to synthesized views. Trained in a fully end-to-end manner, VR-Drive effectively mitigates synthesis-induced noise and improves planning under viewpoint shifts. In addition, we release a new benchmark dataset to evaluate E2E-AD performance under novel camera viewpoints, enabling comprehensive analysis. Our results demonstrate that VR-Drive is a scalable and robust solution for the real-world deployment of end-to-end autonomous driving systems.

Language models must be adapted to understand and follow user instructions. Reinforcement learning is widely used to facilitate this - typically using fixed criteria such as "helpfulness" and "harmfulness". In our work, we instead propose using flexible, instruction-specific criteria as a means of broadening the impact that reinforcement learning can have in eliciting instruction following. We propose "Reinforcement Learning from Checklist Feedback" (RLCF). From instructions, we extract checklists and evaluate how well responses satisfy each item--using both AI judges and specialized verifier programs--then combine these scores to compute rewards for RL. We compare RLCF with other alignment methods on top of a strong instruction following model (Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct)

Spectral decomposition of linear operators plays a central role in many areas of machine learning and scientific computing. Recent work has explored training neural networks to approximate eigenfunctions of such operators, enabling scalable approaches to representation learning, dynamical systems, and partial differential equations (PDEs). In this paper, we revisit a classical optimization framework from the computational physics literature known as the orbital minimization method (OMM), originally proposed in the 1990s for solving eigenvalue problems in computational chemistry. We provide a simple linear-algebraic proof of the consistency of the OMM objective, and reveal connections between this method and several ideas that have appeared independently across different domains. Our primary goal is to justify its broader applicability in modern learning pipelines. We adapt this framework to train neural networks to decompose positive semidefinite operators, and demonstrate its practical advantages across a range of benchmark tasks. Our results highlight how revisiting classical numerical methods through the lens of modern theory and computation can provide not only a principled approach for deploying neural networks in numerical simulation, but also effective and scalable tools for machine learning.

Understanding how the test risk scales with model complexity is a central question in machine learning. Classical theory is challenged by the learning curves observed for large over-parametrized deep networks. Capacity measures based on parameter count typically fail to account for these empirical observations. To tackle this challenge, we consider norm-based capacity measures and develop our study for random features based estimators, widely used as simplified theoretical models for more complex networks. In this context, we provide a precise characterization of how the estimator's norm concentrates and how it governs the associated test error. Our results show that the predicted learning curve admits a phase transition from under-to over-parameterization, but no double descent behavior. This confirms that more classical U-shaped behavior is recovered considering appropriate capacity measures based on models norms rather than size. From a technical point of view, we leverage deterministic equivalence as the key tool and further develop new deterministic quantities which are of independent interest.

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a critical component of large language model (LLM) post-training. However, on-policy algorithms used for post-training are not naturally robust to a diversified content of experience replay buffers, which asynchronous off-policy actors can efficiently populate in parallel to training. We propose efficiently learning on such off-policy data via Trajectory Balance with Asynchrony (TBA), an approach to asynchronous RL for LLMs that leverages the principled off-policy TB objective. On math, preference-tuning, and automated red-teaming tasks, we post-train models ranging from Pythia 410M to Qwen 2.5 7B, finding TBA offers speed and performance boosts over strong baselines like Online DPO and Dr. GRPO. Beyond TBA's performance benefits (high accuracy even as asynchrony grows) and speedups (4 or more), we show its reward-and recency-prioritizing sampling enable further gains as data generation is scaled. Our code is available at https://github.com/bbartoldson/TBA.

Over more than a decade there has been an extensive research effort on how to effectively utilize recurrent models and attention. While recurrent models aim to compress the data into a fixed-size memory (called hidden state), attention allows attending to the entire context window, capturing the direct dependencies of all tokens. This more accurate modeling of dependencies, however, comes with a quadratic cost, limiting the model to a fixed-length context. We present a neural long-term memory module that learns to memorize historical context and helps attention to attend to the current context while utilizing long-past information. We show that this neural memory has the advantage of fast parallelizable training. From a memory perspective, we argue that attention due to its limited context but accurate dependency modeling performs as a short-term memory, while neural memory due to its ability to memorize the data, acts as a long-term, more persistent, memory. Based on these two modules, we introduce a new family of architectures, called Titans, and present three variants to address how one can effectively incorporate memory into this architecture. Our experimental results on language modeling, common-sense reasoning, and time series tasks show that Titans are effective compared to baselines, while they can effectively scale to larger context window in needle-in-haystack tasks.

Current Large Language Models (LLMs) are confronted with overwhelming information volume when comprehending long-form documents. This challenge raises the imperative of a cohesive memory module, which can elevate vanilla LLMs into autonomous reading agents. Despite the emergence of some heuristic approaches, a systematic design principle remains absent. To fill this void, we draw inspiration from Jean Piaget's Constructivist Theory, illuminating three traits of the agentic memory--structured schemata, flexible assimilation, and dynamic accommodation.

Recent work on large language models (LLMs) has increasingly focused on posttraining and alignment with datasets curated to enhance instruction following, world knowledge, and specialized skills. However, most post-training datasets used in leading open-and closed-source LLMs remain inaccessible to the public, with limited information about their construction process. This lack of transparency has motivated the recent development of open-source post-training corpora. While training on these open alternatives can yield performance comparable to that of leading models, systematic comparisons remain challenging due to the significant computational cost of conducting them rigorously at scale, and are therefore largely absent. As a result, it remains unclear how specific samples, task types, or curation strategies influence downstream performance when assessing data quality.

Inference scaling empowers LLMs with unprecedented reasoning ability, with reinforcement learning as the core technique to elicit complex reasoning. However, key technical details of state-of-the-art reasoning LLMs are concealed (such as in OpenAI o1 blog and DeepSeek R1 technical report), thus the community still struggles to reproduce their RL training results. We propose the Decoupled Clip and Dynamic sAmpling Policy Optimization (DAPO) algorithm, and fully opensource a state-of-the-art large-scale RL system that achieves 50 points on AIME 2024 using Qwen2.5-32B