Deep Learning
SkyRL-Agent: Efficient RL Training for Multi-turn LLM Agent
Cao, Shiyi, Li, Dacheng, Zhao, Fangzhou, Yuan, Shuo, Hegde, Sumanth R., Chen, Connor, Ruan, Charlie, Griggs, Tyler, Liu, Shu, Tang, Eric, Liaw, Richard, Moritz, Philipp, Zaharia, Matei, Gonzalez, Joseph E., Stoica, Ion
We introduce SkyRL-Agent, a framework for efficient, multi-turn, long-horizon agent training and evaluation. It provides efficient asynchronous dispatching, lightweight tool integration, and flexible backend interoperability, enabling seamless use with existing RL frameworks such as SkyRL-train, VeRL, and Tinker. Using SkyRL-Agent, we train SA-SWE-32B, a software engineering agent trained from Qwen3-32B (24.4% Pass@1) purely with reinforcement learning. We introduce two key components: an optimized asynchronous pipeline dispatcher that achieves a 1.55x speedup over naive asynchronous batching, and a tool-enhanced training recipe leveraging an AST-based search tool to facilitate code navigation, boost rollout Pass@K, and improve training efficiency. Together, these optimizations enable SA-SWE-32B to reach 39.4% Pass@1 on SWE-Bench Verified with more than 2x cost reduction compared to prior models reaching similar performance. Despite being trained solely on SWE tasks, SA-SWE-32B generalizes effectively to other agentic tasks, including Terminal-Bench, BrowseComp-Plus, and WebArena. We further demonstrate SkyRL-Agent's extensibility through case studies on deep research, computer use, and memory agents, each trained using a different training backend.
Pathlet Variational Auto-Encoder for Robust Trajectory Generation
Tang, Yuanbo, Tang, Yan, Zhang, Zixuan, Zhao, Zihui, Li, Yang
Trajectory generation has recently drawn growing interest in privacy-preserving urban mobility studies and location-based service applications. Although many studies have used deep learning or generative AI methods to model trajectories and have achieved promising results, the robustness and interpretability of such models are largely unexplored. This limits the application of trajectory generation algorithms on noisy real-world data and their trustworthiness in downstream tasks. To address this issue, we exploit the regular structure in urban trajectories and propose a deep generative model based on the pathlet representation, which encode trajectories with binary vectors associated with a learned dictionary of trajectory segments. Specifically, we introduce a probabilistic graphical model to describe the trajectory generation process, which includes a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) component and a linear decoder component. During training, the model can simultaneously learn the latent embedding of pathlet representations and the pathlet dictionary that captures mobility patterns in the trajectory dataset. The conditional version of our model can also be used to generate customized trajectories based on temporal and spatial constraints. Our model can effectively learn data distribution even using noisy data, achieving relative improvements of $35.4\%$ and $26.3\%$ over strong baselines on two real-world trajectory datasets. Moreover, the generated trajectories can be conveniently utilized for multiple downstream tasks, including trajectory prediction and data denoising. Lastly, the framework design offers a significant efficiency advantage, saving $64.8\%$ of the time and $56.5\%$ of GPU memory compared to previous approaches.
Thinking-while-Generating: Interleaving Textual Reasoning throughout Visual Generation
Guo, Ziyu, Zhang, Renrui, Li, Hongyu, Zhang, Manyuan, Chen, Xinyan, Wang, Sifan, Feng, Yan, Pei, Peng, Heng, Pheng-Ann
Recent advances in visual generation have increasingly explored the integration of reasoning capabilities. They incorporate textual reasoning, i.e., think, either before (as pre-planning) or after (as post-refinement) the generation process, yet they lack on-the-fly multimodal interaction during the generation itself. In this preliminary study, we introduce Thinking-while-Generating (TwiG), the first interleaved framework that enables co-evolving textual reasoning throughout the visual generation process. As visual content is progressively generating, textual reasoning is interleaved to both guide upcoming local regions and reflect on previously synthesized ones. This dynamic interplay produces more context-aware and semantically rich visual outputs. To unveil the potential of this framework, we investigate three candidate strategies, zero-shot prompting, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on our curated TwiG-50K dataset, and reinforcement learning (RL) via a customized TwiG-GRPO strategy, each offering unique insights into the dynamics of interleaved reasoning. We hope this work inspires further research into interleaving textual reasoning for enhanced visual generation. Code will be released at: https://github.com/ZiyuGuo99/Thinking-while-Generating.
Enhancing Forex Forecasting Accuracy: The Impact of Hybrid Variable Sets in Cognitive Algorithmic Trading Systems
The question whether algorithmic trading systems (ATS) can improve human trading in terms of effectiveness is eliciting an increasingly relevant debate among traders and investors, as well as quantitative studies that address this issue through numerical testing [[9]]. In recent years, the discussion regarding whether algorithmic trading systems (ATS) can surpass human traders in terms of efficiency, consistency, and adaptability has gained significant traction in both academic and professional circles. Empirical evidence indicates that algorithmic strategies tend to exhibit superior performance in volatile or declining markets, whereas human-managed funds may retain a relative advantage during upward market trends due to behavioral and intuitive factors [[2]]. Moreover, large-scale behavioral studies reveal that algorithms largely eliminate well-known cognitive biases such as the disposition effect that continue to affect human traders [[23]]. Complementary research has also emphasized the growing integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning methods in modern ATS, which enhances predictive accuracy and execution speed [[7]]. Nonetheless, experimental findings suggest that algorithmic trading may still be constrained by design limitations, challenging the notion of its absolute superiority over human decision-making [[16]]. These findings collectively indicate that algorithmic and human trading approaches might be best viewed as complementary, each offering unique strengths under different market conditions.
Teacher-Guided One-Shot Pruning via Context-Aware Knowledge Distillation
Alim, Md. Samiul, Khan, Sharjil, Biswas, Amrijit, Rahman, Fuad, Rahman, Shafin, Mohammed, Nabeel
Unstructured pruning remains a powerful strategy for compressing deep neural networks, yet it often demands iterative train-prune-retrain cycles, resulting in significant computational overhead. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel teacher-guided pruning framework that tightly integrates Knowledge Distillation (KD) with importance score estimation. Unlike prior approaches that apply KD as a post-pruning recovery step, our method leverages gradient signals informed by the teacher during importance score calculation to identify and retain parameters most critical for both task performance and knowledge transfer. Our method facilitates a one-shot global pruning strategy that efficiently eliminates redundant weights while preserving essential representations. After pruning, we employ sparsity-aware retraining with and without KD to recover accuracy without reactivating pruned connections. Comprehensive experiments across multiple image classification benchmarks, including CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and TinyImageNet, demonstrate that our method consistently achieves high sparsity levels with minimal performance degradation. Notably, our approach outperforms state-of-the-art baselines such as EPG and EPSD at high sparsity levels, while offering a more computationally efficient alternative to iterative pruning schemes like COLT. The proposed framework offers a computation-efficient, performance-preserving solution well suited for deployment in resource-constrained environments.
Evolution Strategies at the Hyperscale
Sarkar, Bidipta, Fellows, Mattie, Duque, Juan Agustin, Letcher, Alistair, Villares, Antonio Leรณn, Sims, Anya, Cope, Dylan, Liesen, Jarek, Seier, Lukas, Wolf, Theo, Berdica, Uljad, Goldie, Alexander David, Courville, Aaron, Sevegnani, Karin, Whiteson, Shimon, Foerster, Jakob Nicolaus
We introduce Evolution Guided General Optimization via Low-rank Learning (EGGROLL), an evolution strategies (ES) algorithm designed to scale backprop-free optimization to large population sizes for modern large neural network architectures with billions of parameters. ES is a set of powerful blackbox optimisation methods that can handle non-differentiable or noisy objectives with excellent scaling potential through parallelisation. Na{รฏ}ve ES becomes prohibitively expensive at scale due to the computational and memory costs associated with generating matrix perturbations $E\in\mathbb{R}^{m\times n}$ and the batched matrix multiplications needed to compute per-member forward passes. EGGROLL overcomes these bottlenecks by generating random matrices $A\in \mathbb{R}^{m\times r},\ B\in \mathbb{R}^{n\times r}$ with $r\ll \min(m,n)$ to form a low-rank matrix perturbation $A B^\top$ that are used in place of the full-rank perturbation $E$. As the overall update is an average across a population of $N$ workers, this still results in a high-rank update but with significant memory and computation savings, reducing the auxiliary storage from $mn$ to $r(m+n)$ per layer and the cost of a forward pass from $\mathcal{O}(mn)$ to $\mathcal{O}(r(m+n))$ when compared to full-rank ES. A theoretical analysis reveals our low-rank update converges to the full-rank update at a fast $\mathcal{O}\left(\frac{1}{r}\right)$ rate. Our experiments show that (1) EGGROLL does not compromise the performance of ES in tabula-rasa RL settings, despite being faster, (2) it is competitive with GRPO as a technique for improving LLM reasoning, and (3) EGGROLL enables stable pre-training of nonlinear recurrent language models that operate purely in integer datatypes.
SurvAgent: Hierarchical CoT-Enhanced Case Banking and Dichotomy-Based Multi-Agent System for Multimodal Survival Prediction
Huang, Guolin, Chen, Wenting, Yang, Jiaqi, Lyu, Xinheng, Luo, Xiaoling, Yang, Sen, Xing, Xiaohan, Shen, Linlin
Survival analysis is critical for cancer prognosis and treatment planning, yet existing methods lack the transparency essential for clinical adoption. While recent pathology agents have demonstrated explainability in diagnostic tasks, they face three limitations for survival prediction: inability to integrate multimodal data, ineffective region-of-interest exploration, and failure to leverage experiential learning from historical cases. We introduce SurvAgent, the first hierarchical chain-of-thought (CoT)-enhanced multi-agent system for multimodal survival prediction. SurvAgent consists of two stages: (1) WSI-Gene CoT-Enhanced Case Bank Construction employs hierarchical analysis through Low-Magnification Screening, Cross-Modal Similarity-Aware Patch Mining, and Confidence-Aware Patch Mining for pathology images, while Gene-Stratified analysis processes six functional gene categories. Both generate structured reports with CoT reasoning, storing complete analytical processes for experiential learning. (2) Dichotomy-Based Multi-Expert Agent Inference retrieves similar cases via RAG and integrates multimodal reports with expert predictions through progressive interval refinement. Extensive experiments on five TCGA cohorts demonstrate SurvAgent's superority over conventional methods, proprietary MLLMs, and medical agents, establishing a new paradigm for explainable AI-driven survival prediction in precision oncology.
MedBayes-Lite: Bayesian Uncertainty Quantification for Safe Clinical Decision Support
Hossain, Elias, Nipu, Md Mehedi Hasan, Sheikh, Maleeha, Rana, Rajib, Neupane, Subash, Yousefi, Niloofar
We propose MedBayes-Lite, a lightweight Bayesian enhancement for transformer-based clinical language models designed to produce reliable, uncertainty-aware predictions. Although transformers show strong potential for clinical decision support, they remain prone to overconfidence, especially in ambiguous medical cases where calibrated uncertainty is critical. MedBayes-Lite embeds uncertainty quantification directly into existing transformer pipelines without any retraining or architectural rewiring, adding no new trainable layers and keeping parameter overhead under 3 percent. The framework integrates three components: (i) Bayesian Embedding Calibration using Monte Carlo dropout for epistemic uncertainty, (ii) Uncertainty-Weighted Attention that marginalizes over token reliability, and (iii) Confidence-Guided Decision Shaping inspired by clinical risk minimization. Across biomedical QA and clinical prediction benchmarks (MedQA, PubMedQA, MIMIC-III), MedBayes-Lite consistently improves calibration and trustworthiness, reducing overconfidence by 32 to 48 percent. In simulated clinical settings, it can prevent up to 41 percent of diagnostic errors by flagging uncertain predictions for human review. These results demonstrate its effectiveness in enabling reliable uncertainty propagation and improving interpretability in medical AI systems.
SAM 3D: 3Dfy Anything in Images
SAM 3D Team, null, Chen, Xingyu, Chu, Fu-Jen, Gleize, Pierre, Liang, Kevin J, Sax, Alexander, Tang, Hao, Wang, Weiyao, Guo, Michelle, Hardin, Thibaut, Li, Xiang, Lin, Aohan, Liu, Jiawei, Ma, Ziqi, Sagar, Anushka, Song, Bowen, Wang, Xiaodong, Yang, Jianing, Zhang, Bowen, Dollรกr, Piotr, Gkioxari, Georgia, Feiszli, Matt, Malik, Jitendra
We present SAM 3D, a generative model for visually grounded 3D object reconstruction, predicting geometry, texture, and layout from a single image. SAM 3D excels in natural images, where occlusion and scene clutter are common and visual recognition cues from context play a larger role. We achieve this with a human- and model-in-the-loop pipeline for annotating object shape, texture, and pose, providing visually grounded 3D reconstruction data at unprecedented scale. We learn from this data in a modern, multi-stage training framework that combines synthetic pretraining with real-world alignment, breaking the 3D "data barrier". We obtain significant gains over recent work, with at least a 5:1 win rate in human preference tests on real-world objects and scenes. We will release our code and model weights, an online demo, and a new challenging benchmark for in-the-wild 3D object reconstruction.
Adaptive Guided Upsampling for Low-light Image Enhancement
Dcosta, Angela Vivian, Song, Chunbo, Radkowski, Rafael
We introduce Adaptive Guided Upsampling (AGU), an efficient method for upscaling low-light images capable of optimizing multiple image quality characteristics at the same time, such as reducing noise and increasing sharpness. It is based on a guided image method, which transfers image characteristics from a guidance image to the target image. Using state-of-the-art guided methods, low-light images lack sufficient characteristics for this purpose due to their high noise level and low brightness, rendering suboptimal/not significantly improved images in the process. We solve this problem with multi-parameter optimization, learning the association between multiple low-light and bright image characteristics. Our proposed machine learning method learns these characteristics from a few sample images-pairs. AGU can render high-quality images in real time using low-quality, low-resolution input; our experiments demonstrate that it is superior to state-of-the-art methods in the addressed low-light use case.