Deep Learning
Paper2Poster: Towards Multimodal Poster Automation from Scientific Papers
Academic poster generation is a crucial yet challenging task in scientific communication, requiring the compression of long-context interleaved documents into a single, visually coherent page. To address this challenge, we introduce Paper2Poster, the first benchmark and metric suite for poster generation, which pairs recent conference papers with author-designed posters and evaluates outputs on (i) Visual Quality--semantic alignment with human posters, (ii) Textual Coherence--language fluency, (iii) Holistic Assessment--six fine-grained aesthetic and informational criteria scored by a VLM-as-judge, and notably (iv) PaperQuiz--the poster's ability to convey core paper content as measured by VLMs answering generated quizzes. Building on this benchmark, we propose PosterAgent, a top down, visual in the loop multi agent pipeline: the (a) Parser distills the paper into a structured asset library; the (b) Planner aligns text-visual pairs into a binary tree layout that preserves reading order and spatial balance; and the (c) Painter-Commenter loop refines each panel by executing rendering code and using VLM feedback to eliminate overflow and ensure alignment.In our comprehensive evaluation, we find that GPT 4o outputs--though visually appealing at first glance--often exhibit noisy text and poor PaperQuiz scores; We find that reader engagement is the primary aesthetic bottleneck, as human designed posters rely largely on visual semantics to convey meaning.Our fully open source Paper2Poster pipeline outperforms GPT 4o-based systems across nearly all metrics while consuming 87 \% fewer tokens. These findings chart clear directions for the next generation of fully automated poster generation models.
TabArena: A Living Benchmark for Machine Learning on Tabular Data
With the growing popularity of deep learning and foundation models for tabular data, the need for standardized and reliable benchmarks is higher than ever. However, current benchmarks are static. Their design is not updated even if flaws are discovered, model versions are updated, or new models are released. To address this, we introduce TabArena, the first continuously maintained living tabular benchmarking system. To launch TabArena, we manually curate a representative collection of datasets and well-implemented models, conduct a large-scale benchmarking study to initialize a public leaderboard, and assemble a team of experienced maintainers.
Exploring Data Scaling Trends and Effects in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback
Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is essential for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences and values. While recent research has primarily focused on algorithmic advancements--such as reducing computational overhead or strengthening reward models to mitigate reward hacking--the critical role of prompt-data construction and its scalability has received comparatively less attention. In this paper, we address this gap by systematically exploring data-driven bottlenecks that currently hinder RLHF performance scaling, focusing specifically on the challenges posed by reward hacking and decreasing response diversity. To mitigate reward hacking, we introduce a hybrid reward system combining reasoning task verifiers (RTV) and a generative reward model (GenRM). This approach not only exhibits enhanced resistance to reward hacking, but also enables accurate assessment of responses against clearly defined ground-truth solutions. Additionally, in order to ensure response diversity and enhance learning effectiveness, we propose a novel prompt-selection method named \textbf{Pre-PPO}, explicitly identifying training prompts that are inherently challenging and thus less prone to reward hacking.
LibriBrain: Over 50 Hours of Within-Subject MEG to Improve Speech Decoding Methods at Scale
LibriBrain represents the largest single-subject MEG dataset to date for speech decoding, with over 50 hours of recordings---5$\times$ larger than the next comparable dataset and 50$\times$ larger than most. This unprecedented `depth' of within-subject data enables exploration of neural representations at a scale previously unavailable with non-invasive methods. LibriBrain comprises high-quality MEG recordings together with detailed annotations from a single participant listening to naturalistic spoken English, covering nearly the full Sherlock Holmes canon. Designed to support advances in neural decoding, LibriBrain comes with a Python library for streamlined integration with deep learning frameworks, standard data splits for reproducibility, and baseline results for three foundational decoding tasks: speech detection, phoneme classification, and word classification. Baseline experiments demonstrate that increasing training data yields substantial improvements in decoding performance, highlighting the value of scaling up deep, within-subject datasets. By releasing this dataset, we aim to empower the research community to advance speech decoding methodologies and accelerate the development of safe, effective clinical brain-computer interfaces.
Point Cloud Synthesis Using Inner Product Transforms
Point cloud synthesis, i.e. the generation of novel point clouds from an input distribution, remains a challenging task, for which numerous complex machine learning models have been devised. We develop a novel method that encodes geometrical-topological characteristics of point clouds using inner products, leading to a highly-efficient point cloud representation with provable expressivity properties. Integrated into deep learning models, our encoding exhibits high quality in typical tasks like reconstruction, generation, and interpolation, with inference times orders of magnitude faster than existing methods.
Your Search Results Are Getting Sloptimized
According to Shopify, the best e-commerce platform is Shopify. On its blog, the company has published at least 60 different ranked listicles, including "10 Best Ecommerce Platforms for Small Business in 2026," "11 Best Ecommerce Platforms for Your Business in 2026," "The 11 Best Cheap Ecommerce Platforms for Small Business (2026)," and "Best Ecommerce Software 2026: Compare 11 Top Platforms." The competitors that come in second and beyond vary, but the No. 1 pick is always Shopify. If rankings produced by the very company at the top of the list seem unlikely to fool anyone, that's because humans probably aren't the target audience. When I recently asked ChatGPT for the "best way to set up an online storefront," the AI tool identified Shopify as the first option.
GPAS: Accelerating Convergence of LLM Pretraining via Gradient-Preserving Activation Scaling
Modern Large Language Models, such as the LLaMA, Qwen and DeepSeek series, predominantly adopt the Pre-LayerNorm (Pre-LN) Transformer architecture. While being stable during pretraining and scalable to large model sizes, Pre-LN suffers from an exponential growth in activation variance across layers, causing the shortcut to dominate over sub-layer outputs in the residual connection and limiting the learning capacity of deeper layers. To mitigate this issue, we propose Gradient-Preserving Activation Scaling (GPAS), a simple technique that can be used in combination with existing approaches. GPAS works by scaling down the intermediate activations while keeping their gradients unchanged. This leaves information in the activations intact, and avoids the gradient vanishing problem associated with gradient downscaling. Extensive experiments across various model sizes from 71M to 1B show that GPAS achieves consistent performance gains. Beyond enhancing Pre-LN Transformers, GPAS also shows promise in improving alternative architectures such as Sandwich-LN and DeepNorm, demonstrating its versatility and potential for improving training dynamics in a wide range of settings.
High-order Equivariant Flow Matching for Density Functional Theory Hamiltonian Prediction
Density functional theory (DFT) is a fundamental method for simulating quantum chemical properties, but it remains expensive due to the iterative self-consistent field (SCF) process required to solve the Kohn-Sham equations. Recently, deep learning methods are gaining attention as a way to bypass this step by directly predicting the Hamiltonian. However, they rely on deterministic regression and do not consider the highly structured nature of Hamiltonians. In this work, we propose QHFlow, a high-order equivariant flow matching framework that generates Hamiltonian matrices conditioned on molecular geometry. Flow matching models continuous-time trajectories between simple priors and complex targets, learning the structured distributions over Hamiltonians instead of direct regression. To further incorporate symmetry, we use a neural architecture that predicts SE(3)-equivariant vector fields, improving accuracy and generalization across diverse geometries. To further enhance physical fidelity, we additionally introduce a fine-tuning scheme to align predicted orbital energies with the target. QHFlow achieves state-of-the-art performance, reducing Hamiltonian error by 71% on MD17 and 53% on QH9. Moreover, we further show that QHFlow accelerates the DFT process without trading off the solution quality when initializing SCF iterations with the predicted Hamiltonian, significantly reducing the number of iterations and runtime.
Distributional Training Data Attribution: What do Influence Functions Sample?
Randomness is an unavoidable part of training deep learning models, yet something that traditional training data attribution algorithms fail to rigorously account for. They ignore the fact that, due to stochasticity in the initialisation and batching, training on the same dataset can yield different models. In this paper, we address this shortcoming through introducing training data attribution (d-TDA), the goal of which is to predict how the distribution of model outputs (over training runs) depends upon the dataset. Intriguingly, we find that (IFs), a popular data attribution tool, are'secretly distributional': they emerge from our framework as the limit to unrolled differentiation, without requiring restrictive convexity assumptions. This provides a new perspective on the effectiveness of IFs in deep learning. We demonstrate the practical utility of d-TDA in experiments, including improving data pruning for vision transformers and identifying influential examples with diffusion models.