Contextual bandit is a class of online learning problems that can be viewed as a simple reinforcement learning problem without transition. For a completely understanding of contextual bandit problems, we refer the readers to the Chapter 4 of [Bubeck et al., 2012]. Here we include the main idea for completeness. In contextual bandit problems, the agent needs to find out the best action given some observed context (a.k.a the optimal policy in reinforcement learning). Formally, we define S as the context set and K as the number of action.

Despite the success of contrastive learning (CL) in vision and language, its theoretical foundations and mechanisms for building representations remain poorly understood. In this work, we build connections between noise contrastive estimation losses widely used in CL and distribution alignment with entropic optimal transport (OT). This connection allows us to develop a family of different losses and multistep iterative variants for existing CL methods. Intuitively, by using more information from the distribution of latents, our approach allows a more distribution-aware manipulation of the relationships within augmented sample sets.We provide theoretical insights and experimental evidence demonstrating the benefits of our approach for generalized contrastive alignment. Through this framework, it is possible to leverage tools in OT to build unbalanced losses to handle noisy views and customize the representation space by changing the constraints on alignment.By reframing contrastive learning as an alignment problem and leveraging existing optimization tools for OT, our work provides new insights and connections between different self-supervised learning models in addition to new tools that can be more easily adapted to incorporate domain knowledge into learning.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in processing extensive offline datasets. However, they often face challenges in acquiring and integrating complex, knowledge online. Traditional AI training paradigms, predominantly based on supervised learning or reinforcement learning, mirror a 'Piagetian' model of independent exploration. These approaches typically rely on large datasets and sparse feedback signals, limiting the models' ability to learn efficiently from interactions. Drawing inspiration from Vygotsky's sociocultural theory, this study explores the potential of socially mediated learning paradigms to address these limitations. We introduce a dynamic environment, termed the 'AI Social Gym', where an AI learner agent engages in dyadic pedagogical dialogues with knowledgeable AI teacher agents. These interactions emphasize external, structured dialogue as a core mechanism for knowledge acquisition, contrasting with methods that depend solely on internal inference or pattern recognition. Our investigation focuses on how different pedagogical strategies impact the AI learning process in the context of ontology acquisition. Empirical results indicate that such dialogic approaches-particularly those involving mixed-direction interactions combining top-down explanations with learner-initiated questioning-significantly enhance the LLM's ability to acquire and apply new knowledge, outperforming both unidirectional instructional methods and direct access to structured knowledge, formats typically present in training datasets. These findings suggest that integrating pedagogical and psychological insights into AI and robot training can substantially improve post-training knowledge acquisition and response quality. This approach offers a complementary pathway to existing strategies like prompt engineering

Exploration is crucial for enabling legged robots to learn agile locomotion behaviors that can overcome diverse obstacles. However, such exploration is inherently challenging, and we often rely on extensive reward engineering, expert demonstrations, or curriculum learning - all of which limit generalizability. In this work, we propose Skill Discovery as Exploration (SDAX), a novel learning framework that significantly reduces human engineering effort. SDAX leverages unsupervised skill discovery to autonomously acquire a diverse repertoire of skills for overcoming obstacles. To dynamically regulate the level of exploration during training, SDAX employs a bi-level optimization process that autonomously adjusts the degree of exploration. We demonstrate that SDAX enables quadrupedal robots to acquire highly agile behaviors including crawling, climbing, leaping, and executing complex maneuvers such as jumping off vertical walls. Finally, we deploy the learned policy on real hardware, validating its successful transfer to the real world.

LLMs have been shown to perform well in machine translation (MT) with the use of in-context learning (ICL), rivaling supervised models when translating into high-resource languages (HRLs). However, they lag behind when translating into low-resource language (LRLs). Example selection via similarity search and supervised fine-tuning help. However the improvements they give are limited by the size, quality and diversity of existing parallel datasets. A common technique in low-resource MT is synthetic parallel data creation, the most frequent of which is backtranslation, whereby existing target-side texts are automatically translated into the source language. However, this assumes the existence of good quality and relevant target-side texts, which are not readily available for many LRLs. In this paper, we present \textsc{TopXGen}, an LLM-based approach for the generation of high quality and topic-diverse data in multiple LRLs, which can then be backtranslated to produce useful and diverse parallel texts for ICL and fine-tuning. Our intuition is that while LLMs struggle to translate into LRLs, their ability to translate well into HRLs and their multilinguality enable them to generate good quality, natural-sounding target-side texts, which can be translated well into a high-resource source language. We show that \textsc{TopXGen} boosts LLM translation performance during fine-tuning and in-context learning. Code and outputs are available at https://github.com/ArmelRandy/topxgen.

--Online Class-Incremental Learning (OCIL) enables models to learn continuously from non-i.i.d. However, OCIL faces two key challenges: maintaining model stability under strict memory constraints and ensuring adaptability to new tasks. Under stricter memory constraints, current replay-based methods are less effective. While ensemble methods improve adaptability (plasticity), they often struggle with stability. T o overcome these challenges, we propose a novel approach that enhances ensemble learning through a Global Workspace Model (GWM)--a shared, implicit memory that guides the learning of multiple student models. The GWM is formed by fusing the parameters of all students within each training batch, capturing the historical learning trajectory and serving as a dynamic anchor for knowledge consolidation. This fused model is then redistributed periodically to the students to stabilize learning and promote cross-task consistency. In addition, we introduce a multi-level collaborative distillation mechanism. This approach enforces peer-to-peer consistency among students and preserves historical knowledge by aligning each student with the GWM. As a result, student models remain adaptable to new tasks while maintaining previously learned knowledge, striking a better balance between stability and plasticity. Extensive experiments on three standard OCIL benchmarks show that our method delivers significant performance improvement for several OCIL models across various memory budgets. Class-Incremental Learning is designed to integrate the knowledge of classes from a stream of data with an evolved distribution [1].

Accurate evaluation of procedural communication compliance is essential in simulation-based training, particularly in safety-critical domains where adherence to compliance checklists reflects operational competence. This paper explores a lightweight, deployable approach using prompt-based inference with open-source large language models (LLMs) that can run efficiently on consumer-grade GPUs. We present Prompt-and-Check, a method that uses context-rich prompts to evaluate whether each checklist item in a protocol has been fulfilled, solely based on transcribed verbal exchanges. We perform a case study in the maritime domain with participants performing an identical simulation task, and experiment with models such as LLama 2 7B, LLaMA 3 8B and Mistral 7B, running locally on an RTX 4070 GPU. For each checklist item, a prompt incorporating relevant transcript excerpts is fed into the model, which outputs a compliance judgment. We assess model outputs against expert-annotated ground truth using classification accuracy and agreement scores. Our findings demonstrate that prompting enables effective context-aware reasoning without task-specific training. This study highlights the practical utility of LLMs in augmenting debriefing, performance feedback, and automated assessment in training environments.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being applied to black-box optimization tasks, from program synthesis to molecule design. Prior work typically leverages in-context learning to iteratively guide the model towards better solutions. Such methods, however, often struggle to balance exploration of new solution spaces with exploitation of high-reward ones. Recently, test-time training (TTT) with synthetic data has shown promise in improving solution quality. However, the need for hand-crafted training data tailored to each task limits feasibility and scalability across domains. To address this problem, we introduce MiGrATe-a method for online TTT that uses GRPO as a search algorithm to adapt LLMs at inference without requiring external training data. MiGrATe operates via a mixed-policy group construction procedure that combines on-policy sampling with two off-policy data selection techniques: greedy sampling, which selects top-performing past completions, and neighborhood sampling (NS), which generates completions structurally similar to high-reward ones. Together, these components bias the policy gradient towards exploitation of promising regions in solution space, while preserving exploration through on-policy sampling. We evaluate MiGrATe on three challenging domains-word search, molecule optimization, and hypothesis+program induction on the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC)-and find that it consistently outperforms both inference-only and TTT baselines, demonstrating the potential of online TTT as a solution for complex search tasks without external supervision.

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized artificial intelligence by enabling complex reasoning capabilities. While recent advancements in reinforcement learning (RL) have primarily focused on domain-specific reasoning tasks (e.g., mathematics or code generation), real-world reasoning scenarios often require models to handle diverse and complex environments that narrow-domain benchmarks cannot fully capture. To address this gap, we present InternBootcamp, an open-source framework comprising 1000+ domain-diverse task environments specifically designed for LLM reasoning research. Our codebase offers two key functionalities: (1) automated generation of unlimited training/testing cases with configurable difficulty levels, and (2) integrated verification modules for objective response evaluation. These features make InternBootcamp fundamental infrastructure for RL-based model optimization, synthetic data generation, and model evaluation. Although manually developing such a framework with enormous task coverage is extremely cumbersome, we accelerate the development procedure through an automated agent workflow supplemented by manual validation protocols, which enables the task scope to expand rapidly. % With these bootcamps, we further establish Bootcamp-EVAL, an automatically generated benchmark for comprehensive performance assessment. Evaluation reveals that frontier models still underperform in many reasoning tasks, while training with InternBootcamp provides an effective way to significantly improve performance, leading to our 32B model that achieves state-of-the-art results on Bootcamp-EVAL and excels on other established benchmarks. In particular, we validate that consistent performance gains come from including more training tasks, namely \textbf{task scaling}, over two orders of magnitude, offering a promising route towards capable reasoning generalist.

Due to perceptions of efficiency and significant productivity gains, various organisations, including in education, are adopting Large Language Models (LLMs) into their workflows. Educator-facing, learner-facing, and institution-facing LLMs, collectively, Educational Large Language Models (eLLMs), complement and enhance the effectiveness of teaching, learning, and academic operations. However, their integration into an educational setting raises significant cybersecurity concerns. A comprehensive landscape of contemporary attacks on LLMs and their impact on the educational environment is missing. This study presents a generalised taxonomy of fifty attacks on LLMs, which are categorized as attacks targeting either models or their infrastructure. The severity of these attacks is evaluated in the educational sector using the DREAD risk assessment framework. Our risk assessment indicates that token smuggling, adversarial prompts, direct injection, and multi-step jailbreak are critical attacks on eLLMs. The proposed taxonomy, its application in the educational environment, and our risk assessment will help academic and industrial practitioners to build resilient solutions that protect learners and institutions.