Pruning is a common technique to reduce the compute and storage requirements of Neural Networks. While conventional approaches typically retrain the model to recover pruning-induced performance degradation, state-of-the-art Large Language Model (LLM) pruning methods operate layer-wise, minimizing the per-layer pruning error on a small calibration dataset to avoid full retraining, which is considered computationally prohibitive for LLMs. However, finding the optimal pruning mask is a hard combinatorial problem and solving it to optimality is intractable. Existing methods hence rely on greedy heuristics that ignore the weight interactions in the pruning objective. In this work, we instead consider the convex relaxation of these combinatorial constraints and solve the resulting problem using the Frank-Wolfe (FW) algorithm. Our method drastically reduces the per-layer pruning error, outperforms strong baselines on state-of-the-art GPT architectures, and remains memory-efficient. We provide theoretical justification by showing that, combined with the convergence guarantees of the FW algorithm, we obtain an approximate solution to the original combinatorial problem upon rounding the relaxed solution to integrality.

Despite the success of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) in aligning language models with human values, reward hacking-or reward over-optimization-remains a major challenge. We identify two key obstacles to its mitigation: (1) reward misgeneralization in reward modeling, where reward models overfit to spurious, preference-irrelevant features; and (2) the lack of suitable regularization during RL optimization, as existing token-level constraints often over-restrict the policy space. To address these issues, we propose InfoRM, an information-theoretic reward modeling framework based on the Information Bottleneck (IB) principle, which filters out preference-irrelevant information to alleviate reward misgeneralization. We further observe that reward-hacked responses manifest as pronounced outliers in InfoRM's IB latent space, measured by Mahalanobis distance from the SFT-induced distribution. Motivated by this, we introduce IBL, a distribution-level regularization that penalizes such deviations, effectively expanding the optimization landscape while maintaining alignment. We prove that IBL is theoretically equivalent to the pessimistic RL objective within the IB latent space. Finally, we present Mahalanobis Outlier Probability (MOP), a statistical metric for quantifying reward hacking severity, enabling principled hyperparameter tuning and online mitigation such as early stopping. Extensive experiments across diverse LLMs and datasets confirm the generality of our findings, the effectiveness of InfoRM and IBL, and the reliability of MOP as a diagnostic tool-collectively advancing the state of RLHF.

As texts generated by Large Language Models (LLMs) are ever more common and often indistinguishable from human-written content, research on automatic text detection has attracted growing attention. Many recent detectors report near-perfect accuracy, often boasting AUROC scores above 99\%. However, these claims typically assume fixed generation settings, leaving open the question of how robust such systems are to changes in decoding strategies. In this work, we systematically examine how sampling-based decoding impacts detectability, with a focus on how subtle variations in a model's (sub)word-level distribution affect detection performance. We find that even minor adjustments to decoding parameters - such as temperature, top-p, or nucleus sampling - can severely impair detector accuracy, with AUROC dropping from near-perfect levels to 1\% in some settings. Our findings expose critical blind spots in current detection methods and emphasize the need for more comprehensive evaluation protocols. To facilitate future research, we release a large-scale dataset encompassing 37 decoding configurations, along with our code and evaluation framework https://github.com/BaggerOfWords/Sampling-and-Detection

Diagonal preconditioners are computationally feasible approximate to second-order optimizers, which have shown significant promise in accelerating training of deep learning models. Two predominant approaches are based on Adam and Gauss-Newton (GN) methods: the former leverages statistics of current gradients and is the de-factor optimizers for neural networks, and the latter uses the diagonal elements of the Gauss-Newton matrix and underpins some of the recent diagonal optimizers such as Sophia. In this work, we compare these two diagonal preconditioning methods through the lens of two key factors: the choice of basis in the preconditioner, and the impact of gradient noise from mini-batching. To gain insights, we analyze these optimizers on quadratic objectives and logistic regression under all four quadrants. We show that regardless of the basis, there exist instances where Adam outperforms both GN$^{-1}$ and GN$^{-1/2}$ in full-batch settings. Conversely, in the stochastic regime, Adam behaves similarly to GN$^{-1/2}$ for linear regression under a Gaussian data assumption. These theoretical results are supported by empirical studies on both convex and non-convex objectives.

Large Language Model (LLM) inference has emerged as a fundamental paradigm. In real-world scenarios, variations in output length cause severe workload imbalance in the decode phase, particularly for long-output reasoning tasks. Existing systems, such as PD disaggregation architectures, rely on static prefill-to-decode scheduling, which often results in SLO violations and OOM failures under evolving decode workloads. In this paper, we propose ARES, an adaptive decoding rescheduling system powered by length prediction to anticipate future workloads. Our core contributions include: (1) A lightweight and continuous LLM-native prediction method that leverages LLM hidden state to model remaining generation length with high precision (reducing MAE by 49.42%) and low overhead (cutting predictor parameters by 93.28%); (2) A rescheduling solution in decode phase with : A dynamic balancing mechanism that integrates current and predicted workloads, reducing P99 TPOT by 74.77% and achieving up to 2.24 times higher goodput.

Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) represent a new paradigm for time series forecasting, offering zero-shot forecasting capabilities without the need for domain-specific pre-training or fine-tuning. However, as with Large Language Models (LLMs), evaluating TSFMs is tricky, as with ever more extensive training sets, it becomes more and more challenging to ensure the integrity of benchmarking data. Our investigation of existing TSFM evaluation highlights multiple challenges, ranging from the representativeness of the benchmark datasets, over the lack of spatiotemporal evaluation, to risks of information leakage due to overlapping and obscure datasets, and the memorization of global patterns caused by external shocks like economic crises or pandemics. Our findings reveal widespread confusion regarding data partitions, risking inflated performance estimates and incorrect transfer of global knowledge to local time series. We argue for the development of robust evaluation methodologies to prevent pitfalls already observed in LLM and classical time series benchmarking, and call upon the research community to design new, principled approaches, such as evaluations on truly out-of-sample future data, to safeguard the integrity of TSFM assessment.

Quantum reservoir computing (QRC) offers a hardware-friendly approach to temporal learning, yet most studies target univariate signals and overlook near-term hardware constraints. This work introduces a gate-based QRC for multivariate time series (MTS-QRC) that pairs injection and memory qubits and uses a Trotterized nearest-neighbor transverse-field Ising evolution optimized for current device connectivity and depth. On Lorenz-63 and ENSO, the method achieves a mean square error (MSE) of 0.0087 and 0.0036, respectively, performing on par with classical reservoir computing on Lorenz and above learned RNNs on both, while NVAR and clustered ESN remain stronger on some settings. On IBM Heron R2, MTS-QRC sustains accuracy with realistic depths and, interestingly, outperforms a noiseless simulator on ENSO; singular value analysis indicates that device noise can concentrate variance in feature directions, acting as an implicit regularizer for linear readout in this regime. These findings support the practicality of gate-based QRC for MTS forecasting on NISQ hardware and motivate systematic studies on when and how hardware noise benefits QRC readouts.

Within the field of robotics, computer vision remains a significant barrier to progress, with many tasks hindered by inefficient vision systems. This research proposes a generalized vision module leveraging YOLOv9, a state-of-the-art framework optimized for computationally constrained environments like robots. The model is trained on a dataset tailored to the FIRA robotics Hurocup. A new vision module is implemented in ROS1 using a virtual environment to enable YOLO compatibility. Performance is evaluated using metrics such as frames per second (FPS) and Mean Average Precision (mAP). Performance is then compared to the existing geometric framework in static and dynamic contexts. The YOLO model achieved comparable precision at a higher computational cost then the geometric model, while providing improved robustness.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) models have made stark advances in the past three years, fueled by the development of foundation models (FM) trained on large-scale multimodal data. Following the public release of several successful FMs (OpenAI (2022); Brown et al. (2020); Bommasani et al. (2022)), FMs such as large language models (LLMs) and vision language models (VLMs) have bridged vision, language, and other modalities. In many Computer Science subfields such as Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV), FMs have demonstrated strong compositional performance and generalization capabilities (Awais et al. (2025); Gunter et al. (2024)), emerging as widely-used tools (Bommasani et al. (2022)) that provide a flexible backbones for innovation in other fields (Moor et al. (2023); Sartor & Thompson (2025); Firoozi et al. (2024)). Conducting FM research requires significant data, computing, and human resources (Cottier et al. (2024); Maslej et al. (2024); Crawford (2024)). A central concern in the field is whether greater access to such resources directly translates into more impactful research outcomes (Acemoglu (2024); Dodge et al. (2019); OpenAI (2018)), such as more research publications, or higher citation counts (Sinclair et al. (2023); Anjum et al. (2019)). The answer to this question has important implications for how resources are allocated, which research directions are prioritized, and how equitable participation in FM research can be ensured. However, the cost of research is often difficult to quantify due to lack of uniform disclosure on resource distribution (Bommasani et al. (2024)). Absent widespread disclosure, funding is perhaps most easily characterized in the concrete cost of purchasing or renting hardware (e.g., computing clusters, or chips), through there are also software, cloud storage services, and specialized software platform costs.

Recent advances in sensing and imaging technologies have enabled the collection of high-dimensional spatiotemporal data across complex geometric domains. However, effective modeling of such data remains challenging due to irregular spatial structures, rapid temporal dynamics, and the need to jointly predict multiple interrelated physical variables. This paper presents a physics-augmented multi-task Gaussian Process (P-M-GP) framework tailored for spatiotemporal dynamic systems. Specifically, we develop a geometry-aware, multi-task Gaussian Process (M-GP) model to effectively capture intrinsic spatiotemporal structure and inter-task dependencies. To further enhance the model fidelity and robustness, we incorporate governing physical laws through a physics-based regularization scheme, thereby constraining predictions to be consistent with governing dynamical principles. We validate the proposed P-M-GP framework on a 3D cardiac electrodynamics modeling task. Numerical experiments demonstrate that our method significantly improves prediction accuracy over existing methods by effectively incorporating domain-specific physical constraints and geometric prior.