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This Young Advocate Is Fighting to Make Every School Allergy-Safe

TIME - Tech

Follow this author to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. In 2019, 6-year-old Zacky Muñoz was eating his usual lunch of pasta, salad, and breadsticks at his school cafeteria in Pasadena, California. "I suddenly felt a weird feeling--it was like a fight-or-flight response, an alarm inside my body telling me I was in danger," he says.


Scaling up Test-Time Compute with Latent Reasoning: A Recurrent Depth Approach

Neural Information Processing Systems

We study a novel language model architecture that is capable of scaling test-time computation by implicitly reasoning in latent space. Our model works by iterating a recurrent block, thereby unrolling to arbitrary depth at test-time. This stands in contrast to mainstream reasoning models that scale up compute by producing more tokens. Unlike approaches based on chain-of-thought, our approach does not require any specialized training data, can work with small context windows, and can capture types of reasoning that are not easily represented in words. We train a proof-of-concept model from scratch with 3.5 billion parameters and 800 billion tokens. We show that this model can effortlessly use varying levels of compute, significantly improving with additional compute especially on reasoning tasks, such as math and coding. Further, this architecture naturally reduces compute costs via zero-shot per-token adaptive compute, KV-cache sharing and speculative decoding.


Generator-Mediated Bandits: Thompson Sampling for GenAI-Powered Adaptive Interventions

Neural Information Processing Systems

Recent advances in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) models have enabled the generation of personalized content that adapts to up-to-date user context. While personalized decision systems are often modeled using bandit formulations, the integration of GenAI introduces new structure into otherwise classical sequential learning problems. In GenAI-powered interventions, the agent selects a query, but the environment experiences a stochastic response drawn from the generative model. Standard bandit methods do not explicitly account for this structure, where actions influence rewards only through stochastic, observed treatments. We introduce generator-mediated bandit-Thompson sampling (GAMBITTS), a bandit approach designed for this action/treatment split, using mobile health interventions with large language model-generated text as a motivating case study. GAMBITTS explicitly models both the treatment and reward generation processes, using information in the delivered treatment to accelerate policy learning relative to standard methods. We establish regret bounds for GAMBITTS by decomposing sources of uncertainty in treatment and reward, identifying conditions where it achieves stronger guarantees than standard bandit approaches. In simulation studies, GAMBITTS consistently outperforms conventional algorithms by leveraging observed treatments to more accurately estimate expected rewards.


Triplets Better Than Pairs Towards Stable and Effective Self Play Fine Tuning for LLMs

Neural Information Processing Systems

Recently, self-play fine-tuning (SPIN) has been proposed to adapt large language models to downstream applications with scarce expert-annotated data, by iteratively generating synthetic responses from the model itself. However, SPINis designed to optimize the current reward advantages of annotated responses over synthetic responses at hand, which may gradually vanish during iterations, leading to unstable optimization. Moreover, the utilization of reference policy induces a misalignment issue between the reward formulation for training and the metric for generation. To address these limitations, we propose a novel Triplet-based Self-Play fIne-tuNing (T-SPIN) method that integrates two key designs. First, beyond current advantages, T-SPINadditionally incorporates historical advantages between iteratively generated responses and proto-synthetic responses produced by the initial policy. Even if the current advantages diminish, historical advantages remain effective, stabilizing the overall optimization. Second, T-SPIN introduces the entropy constraint into the self-play framework, which is theoretically justified to support reference-free fine-tuning, eliminating the training-generation discrepancy. Empirical results on various tasks demonstrate not only the superior performance of T-SPINover SPIN, but also its stable evolution during iterations. Remarkably, compared to supervised fine-tuning, T-SPIN achieves comparable or even better performance with only 25%samples, highlighting its effectiveness when faced with scarce annotated data.


On the necessity of adaptive regularisation: Optimal anytime online learning on ℓp-balls

Neural Information Processing Systems

We study online convex optimisation on ℓp-balls in Rd for p > 2. While always sub-linear, the optimal regret exhibits a shift between the high-dimensional setting (d > T), when the dimension d is greater than the time horizon T and the low-dimensional setting (d T). We show that Follow-the-Regularised-Leader (FTRL) with time-varying regularisation which is adaptive to the dimension regime is anytime optimal for all dimension regimes. Motivated by this, we ask whether it is possible to obtain anytime optimality of FTRL with fixed non-adaptive regularisation. Our main result establishes that for separable regularisers, adaptivity in the regulariser is necessary, and that any fixed regulariser will be sub-optimal in one of the two dimension regimes. Finally, we provide lower bounds which rule out sublinear regret bounds for the linear bandit problem in sufficiently high-dimension for all ℓp-balls with p 1.


Explaining the Law of Supply and Demand via Online Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

The law of supply and demand asserts that in a perfectly competitive market, the price of a good adjusts to a market clearing price. In a market clearing price p the number of sellers willing to sell the good at p equals the number of sellers willing to buy the good at price p . In this work, we provide a mathematical foundation on the law of supply and demand through the lens of online learning. Specifically, we demonstrate that if each seller employs a no-swap regret algorithm to set their individual selling price--aiming to maximize its individual revenue--the collective pricing dynamics converge to the market-clearing price p . Our findings offer a novel perspective on the law of supply and demand, framing it as the emergent outcome of an adaptive learning processes among sellers.


PLEIADES: Building Temporal Kernels with Orthogonal Polynomials

Neural Information Processing Systems

We introduce a class of neural networks named PLEIADES (PoLynomial Expansion In Adaptive Distributed Event-based Systems), which contains temporal convolution kernels generated from orthogonal polynomial basis functions. We focus on interfacing these networks with event-based data to perform online spatiotemporal classification and detection with low latency. By virtue of using structured temporal kernels and event-based data, we have the freedom to vary the sample rate of the data along with the discretization step-size of the network without additional finetuning. We experimented with three event-based benchmarks and obtained state-of-the-art results on all three by large margins with significantly smaller memory and compute costs. We achieved: 1) 99.59% accuracy with 192K parameters on the DVS128 hand gesture recognition dataset and 100% with a small additional output filter; 2) 99.58% test accuracy with 277K parameters on the AIS 2024 eye tracking challenge; and 3) 0.556 mAP with 576k parameters on the PROPHESEE 1 Megapixel Automotive Detection Dataset.


Learning Human Preferences without Interaction for Cooperative AI: AHybrid Offline-Online Approach

Neural Information Processing Systems

Reinforcement learning (RL) for collaborative agents capable of cooperating with humans to accomplish tasks has long been a central goal in the RL community. While prior approaches have made progress in adapting collaborative agents to diverse human partners, they often focus solely on optimizing task performance and overlook human preferences--despite the fact that such preferences often diverge from the reward-maximization objective of the environment. Addressing this discrepancy poses significant challenges: humans typically provide only a small amount of offline, preference-related feedback and are unable to engage in online interactions, resulting in a distributional mismatch between the agent's online learning process and the offline human data. To tackle this, we formulate the problem as an online&offline reinforcement learning problem that jointly integrates online generalization and offline preference learning, entirely under an offline training regime. We propose a simple yet effective training framework built upon existing RL algorithms that alternates between offline preference learning and online generalization recovery, ensuring the stability and alignment of both learning objectives. We evaluate our approach on a benchmark built upon the Overcooked environment--a standard environment for human-agent collaboration--and demonstrate remarkable performance across diverse preference styles and cooperative scenarios.


Don't Just Chase " Highlighted Tokens " in MLLMs: Revisiting Visual Holistic Context Retention

Neural Information Processing Systems

Despite their powerful capabilities, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) suffer from considerable computational overhead due to their reliance on massive visual tokens. Recent studies have explored token pruning to alleviate this problem, which typically uses text-vision cross-attention or [CLS] attention to assess and discard redundant visual tokens. In this work, we identify a critical limitation of such attention-first pruning approaches, i.e., they tend to preserve semantically similar tokens, resulting in pronounced performance drops under high pruning ratios. To this end, we propose HoloV, a simple yet effective, plug-and-play visual token pruning framework for efficient inference.


Efficient Fairness-Performance Pareto Front Computation

Neural Information Processing Systems

There is a well known intrinsic trade-off between the fairness of a representation and the performance of classifiers derived from the representation. In this paper we propose a new method to compute the optimal Pareto front of this trade off. In contrast to the existing methods, this approach does not require the training of complex fair representation models. Our approach is derived through three main steps: We analyze fair representations theoretically, and derive several structural properties of optimal representations. We then show that these properties enable a reduction of the computation of the Pareto Front to a compact discrete problem. Finally, we show that these compact approximating problems can be efficiently solved via off-the shelf concave-convex programming methods.