Deep Learning
ABS: Enforcing Constraint Satisfaction On Generated Sequences Via Automata-Guided Beam Search
Collura, Vincenzo, Tit, Karim, Bussi, Laura, Giunchiglia, Eleonora, Cordy, Maxime
Sequence generation and prediction form a cornerstone of modern machine learning, with applications spanning natural language processing, program synthesis, and time-series forecasting. These tasks are typically modeled in an autoregressive fashion, where each token is generated conditional on the preceding ones, and beam search is commonly used to balance exploration and fluency during decoding. While deep learning models and Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at capturing statistical patterns in this setting, they remain ill-equipped to guarantee compliance with formal constraints. In this paper, we introduce ABS: a general and model-agnostic inference-time algorithm that guarantees compliance with any constraint that can be compiled into a Deterministic Finite Automaton (DFA), without requiring retraining. ABS leverages the DFA to guide a constrained variant of beam search: at each decoding step, transitions leading to violations are masked, while remaining paths are dynamically re-ranked according to both the model's probabilities and the automaton's acceptance structure. We formally prove that the resulting sequences are guaranteed to satisfy the given constraints, and we empirically demonstrate that ABS also improves output quality. We validate our approach on three distinct tasks: constrained image-stream classification, controlled text generation, and text infilling. In all settings, ABS achieves perfect constraint satisfaction, while outperforming or matching state-of-the-art baselines on standard quality metrics and efficiency.
Grounded Vision-Language Interpreter for Integrated Task and Motion Planning
Siburian, Jeremy, Shirai, Keisuke, Beltran-Hernandez, Cristian C., Hamaya, Masashi, Gรถrner, Michael, Hashimoto, Atsushi
While recent advances in vision-language models have accelerated the development of language-guided robot planners, their black-box nature often lacks safety guarantees and interpretability crucial for real-world deployment. Conversely, classical symbolic planners offer rigorous safety verification but require significant expert knowledge for setup. To bridge the current gap, this paper proposes ViLaIn-TAMP, a hybrid planning framework for enabling verifiable, interpretable, and autonomous robot behaviors. ViLaIn-TAMP comprises three main components: (1) a Vision-Language Interpreter (ViLaIn) adapted from previous work that converts multimodal inputs into structured problem specifications, (2) a modular Task and Motion Planning (TAMP) system that grounds these specifications in actionable trajectory sequences through symbolic and geometric constraint reasoning, and (3) a corrective planning (CP) module which receives concrete feedback on failed solution attempts and feed them with constraints back to ViLaIn to refine the specification. We design challenging manipulation tasks in a cooking domain and evaluate our framework. Experimental results demonstrate that ViLaIn-TAMP outperforms a VLM-as-a-planner baseline by 18% in mean success rate, and that adding the CP module boosts mean success rate by 32%.
DMind Benchmark: Toward a Holistic Assessment of LLM Capabilities across the Web3 Domain
Huang, Enhao, Sun, Pengyu, Lin, Zixin, Chen, Alex, Ouyang, Joey, Wang, Haobo, Hu, Kaichun, Yi, James, Li, Frank, Zhang, Zhiyu, Xu, Tianxiang, Zhao, Gang, Ling, Ziang, Yang, Lowes
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance in diverse natural language processing tasks, but specialized domains such as Web3 present new challenges and require more tailored evaluation. Despite the significant user base and capital flows in Web3, encompassing smart contracts, decentralized finance (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), on-chain governance, and novel token-economics, no comprehensive benchmark has systematically assessed LLM performance in this domain. To address this gap, we introduce the DMind Benchmark, a holistic Web3-oriented evaluation suite covering nine critical subfields: fundamental blockchain concepts, blockchain infrastructure, smart contract, DeFi mechanisms, DAOs, NFTs, token economics, meme concept, and security vulnerabilities. Beyond multiple-choice questions, DMind Benchmark features domain-specific tasks such as contract debugging and on-chain numeric reasoning, mirroring real-world scenarios. We evaluated 26 models, including ChatGPT, Claude, DeepSeek, Gemini, Grok, and Qwen, uncovering notable performance gaps in specialized areas like token economics and security-critical contract analysis. While some models excel in blockchain infrastructure tasks, advanced subfields remain challenging. Our benchmark dataset and evaluation pipeline are open-sourced on https://huggingface.co/datasets/DMindAI/DMind_Benchmark, reaching number one in Hugging Face's trending dataset charts within a week of release.
Dense Backpropagation Improves Training for Sparse Mixture-of-Experts
Panda, Ashwinee, Baherwani, Vatsal, Sarwar, Zain, Therien, Benjamin, Sahu, Sambit, Goldstein, Tom, Chakraborty, Supriyo
Mixture of Experts (MoE) pretraining is more scalable than dense Transformer pretraining, because MoEs learn to route inputs to a sparse set of their feedforward parameters. However, this means that MoEs only receive a sparse backward update, leading to training instability and suboptimal performance. We present a lightweight approximation method that gives the MoE router a dense gradient update while continuing to sparsely activate its parameters. Our method, which we refer to as Default MoE, substitutes missing expert activations with default outputs consisting of an exponential moving average of expert outputs previously seen over the course of training. This allows the router to receive signals from every expert for each token, leading to significant improvements in training performance. Our Default MoE outperforms standard TopK routing in a variety of settings without requiring significant computational overhead. Code: https://github.com/vatsal0/default-moe.
AutoPDL: Automatic Prompt Optimization for LLM Agents
Spiess, Claudio, Vaziri, Mandana, Mandel, Louis, Hirzel, Martin
The performance of large language models (LLMs) depends on how they are prompted, with choices spanning both the high-level prompting pattern (e.g., Zero-Shot, CoT, ReAct, ReWOO) and the specific prompt content (instructions and few-shot demonstrations). Manually tuning this combination is tedious, error-prone, and specific to a given LLM and task. Therefore, this paper proposes AutoPDL, an automated approach to discovering good LLM agent configurations. Our approach frames this as a structured AutoML problem over a combinatorial space of agentic and non-agentic prompting patterns and demonstrations, using successive halving to efficiently navigate this space. We introduce a library implementing common prompting patterns using the PDL prompt programming language. AutoPDL solutions are human-readable, editable, and executable PDL programs that use this library. This approach also enables source-to-source optimization, allowing human-in-the-loop refinement and reuse. Evaluations across three tasks and seven LLMs (ranging from 3B to 70B parameters) show consistent accuracy gains ($9.21\pm15.46$ percentage points), up to 67.5pp, and reveal that selected prompting strategies vary across models and tasks.
DoFlow: Causal Generative Flows for Interventional and Counterfactual Time-Series Prediction
Wu, Dongze, Qiu, Feng, Xie, Yao
Time-series forecasting increasingly demands not only accurate observational predictions but also causal forecasting under interventional and counterfactual queries in multivariate systems. We present DoFlow, a flow based generative model defined over a causal DAG that delivers coherent observational and interventional predictions, as well as counterfactuals through the natural encoding and decoding mechanism of continuous normalizing flows (CNFs). We also provide a supporting counterfactual recovery result under certain assumptions. Beyond forecasting, DoFlow provides explicit likelihoods of future trajectories, enabling principled anomaly detection. Experiments on synthetic datasets with various causal DAG and real world hydropower and cancer treatment time series show that DoFlow achieves accurate system-wide observational forecasting, enables causal forecasting over interventional and counterfactual queries, and effectively detects anomalies. This work contributes to the broader goal of unifying causal reasoning and generative modeling for complex dynamical systems.
The mind-boggling valuations of AI companies
Microsoft are building a data center in Wales. Microsoft are building a data center in Wales. Tue 4 Nov 2025 10.00 ESTLast modified on Tue 4 Nov 2025 10.01 EST If you like reading our newsletter, forward this email to five friends with a demand they sign up like itรข s a chain letter warning of bad luck for five years. In this weekรข s news, AI companies hit mind-boggling financial milestones such as a $5tn valuation, a $100bn quarter, and a string of deals worth nearly $600bn. Last week, the chipmaker Nvidia hit a valuation of $5tn.
The Download: the AGI myth, and US/China AI competition
I hear it's close: two years, five years--maybe next year! And I hear it's going to solve our biggest problems in ways we cannot yet imagine. I also hear it will bring on the apocalypse and kill us all We're of course talking about artificial general intelligence, or AGI--that hypothetical near-future technology that (I hear) will be able to do pretty much whatever a human brain can do. Every age has its believers, people with an unshakeable faith that something huge is about to happen--a before and an after that they are privileged (or doomed) to live through. For us, that's the promised advent of AGI. And here's what I think: AGI is a lot like a conspiracy theory, and it may be the most consequential one of our time.
The Company Quietly Funneling Paywalled Articles to AI Developers
"You shouldn't have put your content on the internet if you didn't want it to be on the internet," Common Crawl's executive director says. Listen to more stories on the Noa app. T he Common Crawl Foundation is little known outside of Silicon Valley. For more than a decade, the nonprofit has been scraping billions of webpages to build a massive archive of the internet. This database--large enough to be measured in petabytes--is made freely available for research.