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RECAP: Recursive Context-Aware Reasoning and Planning for Large Language Model Agents

Neural Information Processing Systems

Long-horizon tasks requiring multi-step reasoning and dynamic re-planning remain challenging for large language models (LLMs). Sequential prompting methods are prone to context drift, loss of goal information, and recurrent failure cycles, while hierarchical prompting methods often weaken cross-level continuity or incur substantial runtime overhead. We introduce ReCAP (Recursive Context-Aware Reasoning and Planning), a hierarchical framework with shared context for reasoning and planning in LLMs. ReCAP combines three key mechanisms: (i) plan-ahead decomposition, in which the model generates a full subtask list, executes the first item, and refines the remainder; (ii) structured re-injection of parent plans, maintaining consistent multi-level context during recursive return; and (iii) memory-efficient execution, bounding the active prompt so costs scale linearly with task depth. Together these mechanisms align high-level goals with low-level actions, reduce redundant prompting, and preserve coherent context updates across recursion. Experiments demonstrate that ReCAP substantially improves subgoal alignment and success rates on various long-horizon reasoning benchmarks, achieving a 32% gain on synchronous Robotouille and a 29% improvement on asynchronous Robotouille under the strict pass@1 protocol.


Over-reliance on chatbots can diminish critical-thinking skills, study finds

The Guardian

TECHNOLOGY IT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CHATGPT Illustration picture shows the ChatGPT artificial intelligence software, which generates human-like conversation, Friday 03 February 2023 in Lierde. TECHNOLOGY IT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CHATGPT Illustration picture shows the ChatGPT artificial intelligence software, which generates human-like conversation, Friday 03 February 2023 in Lierde. A new study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is the latest research to find that relying too much on chatbots can diminish critical-thinking skills, and potentially decrease our ability to discern misinformation for ourselves. As AI tools are becoming more sophisticated and accessible, manipulated images and misleading headlines are becoming more common. AI can be part of the solution, and has proved useful in helping users identify fake content - but there's a cost to using it this way, the new research suggests.


The Best Art TVs

WIRED

After you're done bingeing your favorite movies, these art televisions are designed to liven up your wall. I have watched so many times I've lost count. For years, the Andrew Wyeth painting took a prominent place in my living room. Art televisions--the category of TV pioneered by Samsung's Frame and now rapidly expanding with models from many of the major TV producers --combine my passion for movies and shows with an even greater interest in art and photography. When it comes to their performance as televisions, even the best art TVs don't have quite the same punchy colors and speedy refresh rates found on similarly priced standard televisions. However, when the movie is finished, art TVs look a lot better in a room, displaying art and photos on a matte screen with a pristine clarity in a space otherwise wasted by a black box. Art televisions are typically just a little more expensive than a normal 4K TV.


PC building's weird new reality: Your favorite old parts are back on the menu

PCWorld

PCWorld reports that rising RAM and storage prices are driving hardware vendors to re-release older components like AMD's Ryzen 7 5800X3D and GeForce RTX 30-series cards. This trend matters for PC builders seeking affordable alternatives as memory shortages and cost increases make newer hardware less accessible. The shift encourages enthusiasts to find creative solutions with existing components and embrace the joy of tinkering despite market challenges. Your weekly edition of The Full Nerd has arrived, and there's a new face on the team: mine!


When Data Can't Meet: Estimating Correlation Across Privacy Barriers

Neural Information Processing Systems

We consider the problem of estimating the correlation of two random variables X and Y, where the pairs (X, Y) are not observed together, but are instead separated co-ordinate-wise at two servers: server 1 contains all the X observations, and server 2 contains the corresponding Y observations. In this vertically distributed setting, we assume that each server has its own privacy constraints, owing to which they can only share suitably privatized statistics of their own component observations. We consider differing privacy budgets (ε1, δ1) and (ε2, δ2) for the two servers and determine the minimax optimal rates for correlation estimation allowing for both noninteractive and interactive mechanisms. We also provide correlation estimators that achieve these rates and further develop inference procedures, namely, confidence intervals, for the estimated correlations. Our results are characterized by an interesting rate in terms of the sample size n, ε1, ε2, which is strictly slower than the usual central privacy estimation rates. More interestingly, we find that the interactive mechanism is always better than its non-interactive counterpart whenever the two privacy budgets are different. Results from extensive numerical experiments support our theoretical findings.


Humanoid robot is spotted BEGGING on a street in China - claiming it has 'no money to recharge'

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Gilgo Beach serial killer Rex Heuermann's ex-wife reacts to his sentencing as monster who killed eight women is transferred to new prison to begin life behind bars Boy, three, 'attacked by at least one crocodile' after being'thrown into zoo pit by man with learning difficulties who broke away from carers' - as suspect'not fit for interview' is bailed Jelly Roll stops concert to respond to wife Bunnie XO's bombshell podcast on their divorce Hegseth puts NATO on notice as he launches review of US troops in Europe and blasts allies for'shameful' behavior I was mortified when my husband always said no to sex. Then I realised the mistake I was making. This is the change that's completely transformed marital love-making in middle age: ALICE SNAPE Mom thought popular'natural' health supplement was safer than Xanax. She took it... then never woke up. Don't make the same mistake JD Vance turns on Israeli allies who are criticizing Trump's Iran deal: 'Wake up and smell reality' The other women left devastated by Jelly Roll's divorce... why his daughter is now'disgusted'... and Bunnie XO's one red-line demand before she would agree to the split Joe Biden mumbles to himself and requires stage direction as he aimlessly wanders off at Obama's library debut Tourists run for their lives as gunfire erupts in New York's Times Square as terrified parents drag children to safety Heartbroken family of college girls who drowned dispute account of their final moments before they were swept out to sea as they mourn'responsible and kind' students Oscar-winning director's daughter and her husband's deaths'medically related' as cops give grim update after couple were found in SUV on California highway Furious woke woman storms out of restaurant because customers were singing National Anthem ...and vows never to return A bold new experiment to streamline how Americans buy new cars... and auto dealerships are already scared Secret White House blacklist leaked by insider: 'Worst' influencers named and shamed... as foul-mouthed backstabbing erupts Watch horrifying drone video that follows woman's plunge to death after bungee team threw her from bridge without rope Bill Clinton's VERY cozy moment with Michelle while Hillary looks the other way... and the best UNSEEN moments from Obama public library opening Farce of Obama's $850m'monstrosity': As clucking liberal elite cheer Barack's grand opening, outraged Chicago locals tell HARRIET ALEXANDER awkward truth about library Humiliating new joke about Trump that's the talk of Washington... as White House moles tell me there's more to this story than meets the eye: MARK HALPERIN Humanoid robot is spotted BEGGING on a street in China - claiming it has'no money to recharge' READ MORE: China unveils the world's first self-driving TOILET While many people worry that robots are coming to take their jobs, one unlucky bot seems to have fallen on hard times.


Diffusion Adaptive Text Embedding for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

Text-to-image diffusion models rely on text embeddings from a pre-trained text encoder, but these embeddings remain fixed across all diffusion timesteps, limiting their adaptability to the generative process. We propose Diffusion Adaptive Text Embedding (DATE), which dynamically updates text embeddings at each diffusion timestep based on intermediate perturbed data. We formulate an optimization problem and derive an update rule that refines the text embeddings at each sampling step to improve alignment and preference between the mean predicted image and the text. This allows DATE to dynamically adapts the text conditions to the reverse-diffused images throughout diffusion sampling without requiring additional model training. Through theoretical analysis and empirical results, we show that DATE maintains the generative capability of the model while providing superior text-image alignment over fixed text embeddings across various tasks, including multi-concept generation and text-guided image editing.


CAR-Flow: Condition-Aware Reparameterization Aligns Source and Target for Better Flow Matching

Neural Information Processing Systems

Conditional generative modeling aims to learn a conditional data distribution from samples containing data-condition pairs. For this, diffusion and flow-based methods have attained compelling results. These methods use a learned (flow) model to transport an initial standard Gaussian noise that ignores the condition to the conditional data distribution. The model is hence required to learn both mass transport and conditional injection. To ease the demand on the model, we propose Condition-Aware Reparameterization for Flow Matching (CAR-Flow) - a lightweight, learned shift that conditions the source, the target, or both distributions. By relocating these distributions, CAR-Flow shortens the probability path the model must learn, leading to faster training in practice. On low-dimensional synthetic data, we visualize and quantify the effects of CAR-Flow. On higher-dimensional natural image data (ImageNet-256), equipping SiT-XL/2 with CAR-Flow reduces FID from 2.07 to 1.68, while introducing less than 0.6% additional parameters.


Statistical Guarantees for High-Dimensional Stochastic Gradient Descent

Neural Information Processing Systems

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its Ruppert-Polyak averaged variant (ASGD) lie at the heart of modern large-scale learning, yet their theoretical properties in high-dimensional settings are rarely understood. In this paper, we provide rigorous statistical guarantees for constant learning-rate SGD and ASGD in high-dimensional regimes. Our key innovation is to transfer powerful tools from high-dimensional time series to online learning. Specifically, by viewing SGD as a nonlinear autoregressive process and adapting existing coupling techniques, we prove the geometric-moment contraction of high-dimensional SGD for constant learning rates, thereby establishing asymptotic stationarity of the iterates. Building on this, we derive the q-th moment convergence of SGD and ASGD for any q 2 in general ℓs-norms, and, in particular, the ℓ -norm that is frequently adopted in high-dimensional sparse or structured models. Furthermore, we provide sharp high-probability concentration analysis which entails the probabilistic bound of high-dimensional ASGD. Beyond closing a critical gap in SGD theory, our proposed framework offers a novel toolkit for analyzing a broad class of high-dimensional learning algorithms.


Perception-R1: Pioneering Perception Policy with Reinforcement Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Inspired by the success of DeepSeek-R1, we explore the potential of rule-based reinforcement learning (RL) in MLLM post-training for perception policy learning. While promising, our initial experiments reveal that incorporating a thinking process through RL does not consistently lead to performance gains across all visual perception tasks. This leads us to delve into the essential role of RL in the context of visual perception. In this work, we return to the fundamentals and explore the effects of RL on different perception tasks. We observe that the perceptual perplexity is a major factor in determining the effectiveness of RL. We also observe that reward design plays a crucial role in further approaching the upper limit of model perception. To leverage these findings, we propose Perception-R1, a scalable RL framework using GRPO during MLLM post-training.