Deep Learning
Looking Beyond the Known: Towards a Data Discovery Guided Open-World Object Detection
Open-World Object Detection (OWOD) enriches traditional object detectors by enabling continual discovery and integration of unknown objects via human guidance. However, existing OWOD approaches frequently suffer from semantic confusion between known and unknown classes, alongside catastrophic forgetting, leading to diminished unknown recall and degraded known-class accuracy. To overcome these challenges, we propose Combinatorial Open-World Detection (CROWD2), a unified framework reformulating unknown object discovery and adaptation as an interwoven combinatorial (set-based) data-discovery (CROWD-Discover) and representation learning (CROWD-Learn) task. CROWD-Discover strategically mines unknown instances by maximizing Submodular Conditional Gain (SCG) functions, selecting representative examples distinctly dissimilar from known objects. Subsequently, CROWD-Learn employs novel combinatorial objectives that jointly disentangle known and unknown representations while maintaining discriminative coherence among known classes, thus mitigating confusion and forgetting. Extensive evaluations on OWOD benchmarks illustrate that CROWD achieves improvements of 2.83% and 2.05% in known-class accuracy on M-OWODB and S-OWODB, respectively, and nearly 2.4 unknown recall compared to leading baselines. Figure 1: Overall Architecture of CROWD showing our novel combinatorial data-discovery guided representation learning approach to (a) identify unknown objects3 and (b) learn distinguishable representations of both known and unknown objects.
Can Large Language Models Master Complex Card Games?
Complex games have long been an important benchmark for testing the progress of artificial intelligence algorithms. AlphaGo, AlphaZero, and MuZero have defeated top human players in Go and Chess, garnering widespread societal attention towards artificial intelligence. Concurrently, large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable capabilities across various tasks, raising the question of whether LLMs can achieve similar success in complex games. In this paper, we explore the potential of LLMs in mastering complex card games. We systematically assess the learning capabilities of LLMs across eight diverse card games, evaluating the impact of fine-tuning on high-quality gameplay data, and examining the models' ability to retain general capabilities while mastering these games. Our findings indicate that: (1) LLMs can approach the performance of strong game AIs through supervised fine-tuning on high-quality data, (2) LLMs can achieve a certain level of proficiency in multiple complex card games simultaneously, with performance augmentation for games with similar rules and conflicts for dissimilar ones, and (3) LLMs experience a decline in general capabilities when mastering complex games, but this decline can be mitigated by integrating a certain amount of general instruction data. The evaluation results demonstrate strong learning ability and versatility of LLMs. The code is available at https://github.com/THUDM/
Mixture-of-Experts Meets In-Context Reinforcement Learning
In-context reinforcement learning (ICRL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for adapting RL agents to downstream tasks through prompt conditioning. However, two notable challenges remain in fully harnessing in-context learning within RL domains: the intrinsic multi-modality of the state-action-reward data and the diverse, heterogeneous nature of decision tasks. To tackle these challenges, we propose T2MIR (Token-and Task-wise MoE for In-context RL), an innovative framework that introduces architectural advances of mixture-of-experts (MoE) into transformer-based decision models. T2MIR substitutes the feedforward layer with two parallel layers: a token-wise MoE that captures distinct semantics of input tokens across multiple modalities, and a task-wise MoE that routes diverse tasks to specialized experts for managing a broad task distribution with alleviated gradient conflicts. To enhance task-wise routing, we introduce a contrastive learning method that maximizes the mutual information between the task and its router representation, enabling more precise capture of task-relevant information. The outputs of two MoE components are concatenated and fed into the next layer. Comprehensive experiments show that T2MIR significantly facilitates in-context learning capacity and outperforms various types of baselines. We bring the potential and promise of MoE to ICRL, offering a simple and scalable architectural enhancement to advance ICRL one step closer toward achievements in language and vision communities. Our code is available at https://github.com/NJU-RL/T2MIR.
Generative Distribution Embeddings: Lifting autoencoders to the space of distributions for multiscale representation learning
Many real-world problems require reasoning across multiple scales, demanding models which operate not on single data points, but on entire distributions. We introduce generative distribution embeddings (GDE), a framework that lifts autoencoders to the space of distributions. In GDEs, an encoder acts on sets of samples, and the decoder is replaced by a generator which aims to match the input distribution. This framework enables learning representations of distributions by coupling conditional generative models with encoder networks which satisfy a criterion we call distributional invariance. We show that GDEs learn predictive sufficient statistics embedded in the Wasserstein space, such that latent GDE distances approximately recover the W2 distance, and latent interpolation approximately recovers optimal transport trajectories for Gaussian and Gaussian mixture distributions.
SALMONN-omni: AStandalone Speech LLM without Codec Injection for Full-duplex Conversation
In order to enable fluid and natural human-machine speech interaction, existing full-duplex conversational systems often adopt modular architectures with auxiliary components such as voice activity detectors, interrupters, conversation state predictors, or multiple LLMs. These systems, however, suffer from error accumulation across modules and struggle with key challenges such as context-dependent bargein and echo cancellation. Recent approaches, most notably Moshi, simplify the pipeline by injecting audio codecs into the token space of a single LLM. However, such methods still incur significant performance degradation when operating on the speech rather than text modality. In this paper, we introduce SALMONN-omni, the first single, standalone full-duplex speech LLM that operates without audio codecs in its token space. It features a novel dynamic thinking mechanism within the LLM backbone, enabling the model to learn when to transition between speaking and listening states. Experiments on widely used benchmarks for spoken question answering and open-domain dialogue show that SALMONN-omni achieves at least 30% relative performance improvement over existing open-source fullduplex models and performs highly competitively to half-duplex and turn-based systems, despite using substantially less training data. Moreover, SALMONN-omni demonstrates strong performance in complex conversational scenarios, including turn-taking, backchanneling, echo cancellation and context-dependent barge-in, with further improvements achieved through reinforcement learning.
Towards Generalizable Multi-Policy Optimization with Self-Evolution for Job Scheduling
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown promising results in solving Job Scheduling Problems (JSPs), automatically deriving powerful dispatching rules from data without relying on expert knowledge. However, most RL-based methods train only a single decision-maker, which limits exploration capability and leaves significant room for performance improvement. Moreover, designing reward functions for different JSP variants remains a challenging and labor-intensive task. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel and generic learning framework that optimizes multiple policies sharing a common objective and a single neural network, while enabling each policy to learn specialized and diverse strategies. The model optimization process is fully guided by a self-labeling manner, eliminating the need for reward functions. In addition, we develop a training scheme that adaptively controls the imitation intensity to reflect the quality of self-labels. Experimental results show that our method effectively addresses the aforementioned challenges and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art RL methods across six JSP variants. Furthermore, our approach also demonstrates strong performance on other combinatorial optimization problems, highlighting its versatility beyond JSPs.
KSP: Kolmogorov-Smirnov metric-based Post-Hoc Calibration for Survival Analysis
We propose a new calibration method for survival models based on the Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) metric. Existing approaches--including conformal prediction, D-calibration, and Kaplan-Meier (KM)-based methods--often rely on heuristic binning or additional nonparametric estimators, which undermine their adaptability to continuous-time settings and complex model outputs. To address these limitations, we introduce a streamlined KS metric-based post-processing framework (KSP) that calibrates survival predictions without relying on discretization or KM estimation. This design enhances flexibility and broad applicability. We conduct extensive experiments on diverse real-world datasets using a variety of survival models. Empirical results demonstrate that our method consistently improves calibration performance over existing methods while maintaining high predictive accuracy. We also provide a theoretical analysis of the KS metric and discuss extensions to in-processing settings.
Consistent Sampling and Simulation: Molecular Dynamics with Energy-Based Diffusion Models
Michael Plainer, Hao Wu, Leon Klein, Stephan Günnemann, Frank Noé
In recent years, diffusion models trained on equilibrium molecular distributions have proven effective for sampling biomolecules. Beyond direct sampling, the score of such a model can also be used to derive the forces that act on molecular systems. However, while classical diffusion sampling usually recovers the training distribution, the corresponding energy-based interpretation of the learned score is often inconsistent with this distribution, even for low-dimensional toy systems. We trace this inconsistency to inaccuracies of the learned score at very small diffusion timesteps, where the model must capture the correct evolution of the data distribution. In this regime, diffusion models fail to satisfy the Fokker-Planck equation, which governs the evolution of the score. We interpret this deviation as one source of the observed inconsistencies and propose an energy-based diffusion model with a Fokker-Planck-derived regularization term to enforce consistency. We demonstrate our approach by sampling and simulating multiple biomolecular systems, including fast-folding proteins, and by introducing a state-of-the-art transferable Boltzmann emulator for dipeptides that supports simulation and achieves improved consistency and efficient sampling.
Elastic ViTs from Pretrained Models without Retraining
Vision foundation models achieve remarkable performance but are only available in a limited set of pre-determined sizes, forcing sub-optimal deployment choices under real-world constraints. We introduce SnapViT: single-shot network approximation for pruned Vision Transformers, a new post-pretraining structured pruning method that enables elastic inference across a continuum of compute budgets. Our approach efficiently combines gradient information with cross-network structure correlations, approximated via an evolutionary algorithm, does not require labeled data, generalizes to models without a classification head, and is retraining-free. Experiments on DINO, SigLIPv2, DeIT, and AugReg models demonstrate superior performance over state-of-the-art methods across various sparsities, requiring less than five minutes on a single A100 GPU to generate elastic models that can be adjusted to any computational budget. Our key contributions include an efficient pruning strategy for pretrained Vision Transformers, a novel evolutionary approximation of Hessian off-diagonal structures, and a self-supervised importance scoring mechanism that maintains strong performance without requiring retraining or labels. Code and pruned models are available at: https://elastic.ashita.nl/