Deep Learning
Linguini: A benchmark for language-agnostic linguistic reasoning
We propose a new benchmark to measure a language model's linguistic reasoning skills without relying on pre-existing language-specific knowledge. The test covers 894 questions grouped in 160 problems across 75 (mostly) extremely low-resource languages, extracted from the International Linguistic Olympiad corpus. To attain high accuracy on this benchmark, models don't need previous knowledge of the tested language, as all the information needed to solve the linguistic puzzle is presented in the context. We find that, while all analyzed models rank below 25% accuracy, there is a significant gap between open and closed models, with the best-performing proprietary model scoring 24.05% and the best-performing open model 8.84%.
Avoiding exp(R)scaling in RLHF through Preference-based Exploration
Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a pivotal technique for large language model (LLM) alignment. This paper studies the setting of online RLHF and focuses on improving its sample efficiency. All existing algorithms for online RLHF, whether doing passive exploration or active exploration, suffer from a sample complexity that scales exponentially with the range of the reward function. This statistical inefficiency hinders their effectiveness in scenarios with heavily skewed preferences, e.g.
Tail-Optimized Caching for LLMInference
Prompt caching is critical for reducing latency and cost in LLM inference--OpenAI and Anthropic report up to 50-90% cost savings through prompt reuse. Despite its widespread success, little is known about what constitutes an optimal prompt caching policy, particularly when optimizing tail latency--a metric of central importance to practitioners. The widely used Least Recently Used (LRU) policy can perform arbitrarily poor on this metric, as it is oblivious to the heterogeneity of conversation lengths. To address this gap, we propose Tail-Optimized LRU, a simple two-line modification that reallocates KV cache capacity to prioritize high-latency conversations by evicting cache entries that are unlikely to affect future turns. Though the implementation is simple, we prove its optimality under a natural stochastic model of conversation dynamics, providing the first theoretical justification for LRU in this setting--a result that may be of independent interest to the caching community. Experimentally, on real conversation data WildChat [Zhao et al., 2024], Tail-Optimized LRU achieves up to 27.5% reduction in P90 tail Time to First Token latency and 23.9% in P95 tail latency compared to LRU, along with up to 38.9% decrease in SLO violations of 200ms. We believe this provides a practical and theoretically grounded option for practitioners seeking to optimize tail latency in real-world LLM deployments.
Whole-Body Conditioned Egocentric Video Prediction
We train models to Predict Ego-centric Video from human Actions (PEVA), given the past video and an action represented by the relative 3D body pose. By conditioning on kinematic pose trajectories, structured by the joint hierarchy of the body, our model learns to simulate how physical human actions shape the environment from a first-person point of view. We train an auto-regressive conditional diffusion transformer on Nymeria, a large-scale dataset of real-world egocentric video and body pose capture. We further design a hierarchical evaluation protocol with in-creasingly challenging tasks, enabling a comprehensive analysis of the model's embodied prediction and control abilities. Our work represents an initial attempt to tackle the challenges of modeling complex real-world environments and embodied agent behaviors with video prediction from the perspective of a human.1
Bench-V: APrimary Assessment for Visual Reasoning Models with Multi-modal Outputs
The rapid advancement of native multi-modal models and omni-models, exemplified by GPT-4o, Gemini and o3 with their capability to process and generate content across modalities such as text and images, marks a significant milestone in the evolution of intelligence. Systematic evaluation of their multi-modal output capabilities in visual thinking process (a.k.a., multi-modal chain of thought, M-CoT) becomes critically important. However, existing benchmarks for evaluating multi-modal models primarily focus on assessing multi-modal inputs and text-only reasoning process while neglecting the importance of reasoning through multi-modal outputs. In this paper, we present a benchmark, dubbed as RBench-V, designed to assess models' vision-indispensable reasoning. To conduct RBench-V, we carefully hand-pick 803 questions covering math, physics, counting and games. Unlike problems in previous benchmarks, which typically specify certain input modalities, RBench-V presents problems centered on multi-modal outputs, which require image manipulation, such as generating novel images and constructing auxiliary lines to support reasoning process. We evaluate numerous open-and closed-source models on RBench-V, including o3, Gemini 2.5 pro, Qwen2.5VL,
4KAgent: Agentic Any Image to 4KSuper-Resolution
We present 4KAgent, a unified agentic super-resolution generalist system designed to universally upscale any image to 4K resolution (and even higher, if applied iteratively). Our system can transform images from extremely low resolutions with severe degradations, for example, highly distorted inputs at 256 256, into crystal-clear, photorealistic 4K outputs.
Single-Step Operator Learning for Conditioned Time-Series Diffusion Models
Diffusion models have achieved significant success, yet their application to time series data, particularly with regard to efficient sampling, remains an active area of research. We describe an operator-learning approach for conditioned timeseries diffusion models that gives efficient single-step generation by leveraging insights from the frequency-domain characteristics of both the time-series data and the diffusion process itself. The forward diffusion process induces a structured, frequency-dependent smoothing of the data's probability density function. However, this frequency smoothing is related (e.g., via likelihood function) to easily accessible frequency components of time-series data. This suggests that a module operating in the frequency space of the time-series can, potentially, more effectively learn to reverse the frequency-dependent smoothing of the data distribution induced by the diffusion process. We set up an operator learning task, based on frequency-aware building blocks, which satisfies semigroup properties, while exploiting the structure of time-series data. Evaluations on multiple datasets show that our single-step generation proposal achieves forecasting/imputation results comparable (or superior) to many multi-step diffusion schemes while significantly reducing inference costs.
Energy Loss Functions for Physical Systems
Effectively leveraging prior knowledge of a system's physics is crucial for applications of machine learning to scientific domains. Previous approaches mostly focused on incorporating physical insights at the architectural level. In this paper, we propose a framework to leverage physical information directly into the loss function for prediction and generative modeling tasks on systems like molecules and spins. We derive energy loss functions assuming that each data sample is in thermal equilibrium with respect to an approximate energy landscape. By using the reverse KL divergence with a Boltzmann distribution around the data, we obtain the loss as an energy difference between the data and the model predictions.
SMARTraj2: AStable Multi-City Adaptive Method for Multi-View Spatio-Temporal Trajectory Representation Learning
Spatio-temporal trajectory representation learning plays a crucial role in various urban applications such as transportation systems, urban planning, and environmental monitoring. Existing methods can be divided into single-view and multi-view approaches, with the latter offering richer representations by integrating multiple sources of spatio-temporal data. However, these methods often struggle to generalize across diverse urban scenes due to multi-city structural heterogeneity, which arises from the disparities in road networks, grid layouts, and traffic regulations across cities, and the amplified seesaw phenomenon, where optimizing for one city, view, or task can degrade performance in others. These challenges hinder the deployment of trajectory learning models across multiple cities, limiting their realworld applicability. In this work, we propose SMARTraj2, a novel stable multi-city adaptive method for multi-view spatio-temporal trajectory representation learning. Specifically, we introduce a feature disentanglement module to separate domaininvariant and domain-specific features, and a personalized gating mechanism to dynamically stabilize the contributions of different views and tasks. Our approach achieves superior generalization across heterogeneous urban scenes while maintaining robust performance across multiple downstream tasks. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of SMARTraj2 in enhancing cross-city generalization and outperforming state-of-the-art methods.
Joint Relational Database Generation via Graph-Conditional Diffusion Models
Building generative models for relational databases (RDBs) is important for many applications, such as privacy-preserving data release and augmenting real datasets. However, most prior works either focus on single-table generation or adapt singletable models to the multi-table setting by relying on autoregressive factorizations and sequential generation. These approaches limit parallelism, restrict flexibility in downstream applications, and compound errors due to commonly made conditional independence assumptions. In this paper, we propose a fundamentally different approach: jointly modeling all tables in an RDB without imposing any table order. By using a natural graph representation of RDBs, we propose the Graph-Conditional Relational Diffusion Model (GRDM), which leverages a graph neural network to jointly denoise row attributes and capture complex inter-table dependencies. Extensive experiments on six real-world RDBs demonstrate that our approach substantially outperforms autoregressive baselines in modeling multi-hop inter-table correlations and achieves state-of-the-art performance on single-table fidelity metrics.