Researchers have demonstrated they can make coffee comparable to conventional espresso using ultrasonic waves. Because the process doesn't need hot water, it consumes 75 percent less energy. What do you need to make a good espresso? Ground coffee, of course; a machine capable of generating pressure; and hot water, preferably heated to between 195 and 205 degrees Fahrenheit. But could one perhaps do without that last element?

As we scale to more massive machine learning models, the frequent synchronization demands inherent in data-parallel approaches create significant slowdowns, posing a critical challenge to further scaling. Recent work [11, 24] develops and analyzes an approach (DiLoCo) that relaxes synchronization demands via periodic synchronization. However, these works do not carefully analyze how DiLoCo's behavior changes with model size. In this work, we study the scaling law behavior of DiLoCo when training LLMs under a fixed compute budget. We focus on how algorithmic factors, including number of model replicas, hyperparameters, and token budget affect training in ways that can be accurately predicted via scaling laws. We find that DiLoCo scales both predictably and robustly with model size. When well-tuned, DiLoCo scales better than data-parallel training with model size, and can outperform data-parallel training even at small model sizes. Our results showcase a more general set of benefits of DiLoCo than previously documented, including increased optimal batch sizes, improved downstream generalization with scale, and improved evaluation loss for a fixed token budget.

Modern causal language models, followed by rapid developments in discrete diffusion models, can now produce a wide variety of interesting and useful content. However, these families of models are predominantly trained to output tokens with a fixed (left-to-right) or random order, which may deviate from the logical order in which tokens are generated originally. In this paper, we observe that current causal and diffusion models encounter difficulties in problems that require adaptive token generation orders to solve tractably, which we characterize with the V-information framework. Motivated by this, we propose Reinforced Context Order Recovery (ReCOR), a reinforcement-learning-based framework to extract adaptive, data-dependent token generation orders from text data without annotations. Self-supervised by token prediction statistics, ReCOR estimates the hardness of predicting every unfilled token and adaptively selects the next token during both training and inference. Experiments on challenging reasoning and planning datasets demonstrate the superior performance of ReCOR compared with baselines, sometimes outperforming oracle models supervised with the ground-truth order.1

The draft revision of the Artificial Intelligence Basic Plan highlights the growing risk of cyberattacks that exploit AI.

The rapid increase in AI-generated images (AIGIs) underscores the need for detection methods. Existing detectors are often trained on biased datasets, leading to overfitting on spurious correlations between non-causal image attributes and real/synthetic labels. While these biased features enhance performance on the training data, they result in substantial performance degradation when tested on unbiased datasets. A common solution is to perform data alignment through generative reconstruction, matching the content between real and synthetic images. However, we find that pixel-level alignment alone is inadequate, as the reconstructed images still suffer from frequency-level misalignment, perpetuating spurious correlations.

We consider the problem of recovering a mental target (e.g., an image of a face) that a participant has in mind from paired EEG (i.e., brain responses) and image (i.e., perceived faces) data collected during interactive sessions without access to labeled information. The problem has been previously explored with labeled data but not via self-calibration, where labeled data is unavailable. Here, we present the first framework and an algorithm, CURSOR, that learns to recover unknown mental targets without access to labeled data or pre-trained decoders. Our experiments on naturalistic images of faces demonstrate that CURSOR can (1) predict image similarity scores that correlate with human perceptual judgments without any label information, (2) use these scores to rank stimuli against an unknown mental target, and (3) generate new stimuli indistinguishable from the unknown mental target (validated via a user study, N = 53). We release the brain response data set (N = 29), associated face images used as stimuli data, and a codebase to initiate further research on this novel task.

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Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a powerful paradigm to align language models with human preferences using pairwise comparisons. However, its binary win-or-loss supervision often proves insufficient for training small models with limited capacity. Prior works attempt to distill information from large teacher models using behavior cloning or KL divergence. These methods often focus on mimicking current behavior and overlook distilling reward modeling. To address this issue, we propose Teacher Value-based Knowledge Distillation (TVKD), which introduces an auxiliary reward from the value function of the teacher model to provide a soft guide. This auxiliary reward is formulated to satisfy potential-based reward shaping, ensuring that the global reward structure and optimal policy of DPO are preserved. TVKD can be integrated into the standard DPO training framework and does not require additional rollouts. Our experimental results show that TVKD consistently improves performance across various benchmarks and model sizes.

We propose ReinFlow, a simple yet effective online reinforcement learning (RL) framework that fine-tunes a family of flow matching policies for continuous robotic control. Derived from rigorous RL theory, ReinFlow injects learnable noise into a flow policy's deterministic path, converting the flow into a discrete-time Markov Process for exact and straightforward likelihood computation. This conversion facilitates exploration and ensures training stability, enabling ReinFlow to fine-tune diverse flow model variants stably, including Rectified Flow [34] and Shortcut Models [18], particularly at very few or even one denoising step.