Technology
LabUtopia: High-Fidelity Simulation and Hierarchical Benchmark for Scientific Embodied Agents
Scientific embodied agents play a crucial role in modern laboratories by automating complex experimental workflows.Compared to typical household environments, laboratory settings impose significantly higher demands on perception of physical-chemical transformations and long-horizon planning, making them an ideal testbed for advancing embodied intelligence.However, its development has been long hampered by the lack of suitable simulator and benchmarks.In this paper, we address this gap by introducing LabUtopia, a comprehensive simulation and benchmarking suite designed to facilitate the development of generalizable, reasoning-capable embodied agents in laboratory settings.
A Closer Look at NTK Alignment: Linking Phase Transitions in Deep Image Regression
Deep neural networks trained with gradient descent exhibit varying rates of learning for different patterns. However, the complexity of fitting models to data makes direct elucidation of the dynamics of learned patterns challenging. To circumvent this, many works have opted to characterize phases of learning through summary statistics known as order parameters. In this work, we propose a unifying framework for constructing order parameters based on the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK), in which the relationship with the data set is more transparent. In particular, we derive a local approximation of the NTK for a class of deep regression models (SIRENs) trained to reconstruct natural images. In so doing, we analytically connect three seemingly distinct phase transitions: the emergence of wave patterns in residuals (a novel observation), loss rate collapse, and NTK alignment. Our results provide a dynamical perspective on the observed biases of SIRENs, and deep image regression models more generally.
Practical Bayes-Optimal Membership Inference Attacks
We develop practical and theoretically grounded membership inference attacks (MIAs) against both independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) data and graph-structured data. Building on the Bayesian decision-theoretic framework of Sabrayolles et al., we derive the Bayes-optimal membership inference rule for node-level MIAs against graph neural networks, addressing key open questions about optimal query strategies in the graph setting. We introduce BASE and G-BASE, tractable approximations of the Bayes-optimal membership inference. G-BASE achieves superior performance compared to previously proposed classifier-based node-level MIA attacks. BASE, which is also applicable to non-graph data, matches or exceeds the performance of prior state-of-the-art MIAs, such as LiRA and RMIA, at a significantly lower computational cost. Finally, we show that BASE and RMIA are equivalent under a specific hyperparameter setting, providing a principled, Bayes-optimal justification for the RMIA attack.
SongBloom: Coherent Song Generation via Interleaved Autoregressive Sketching and Diffusion Refinement
Generating music with coherent structure, harmonious instrumental and vocal elements remains a significant challenge in song generation. Existing language models and diffusion-based methods often struggle to balance global coherence with local fidelity, resulting in outputs that lack musicality or suffer from incoherent progression and mismatched lyrics. This paper introduces SongBloom, a novel framework for full-length song generation that leverages an interleaved paradigm of autoregressive sketching and diffusion-based refinement. SongBloom employs an autoregressive diffusion model that combines the high fidelity of diffusion models with the scalability of language models. Specifically, it gradually extends a musical sketch from short to long and refines the details from coarse to fine-grained. The interleaved generation paradigm effectively integrates prior semantic and acoustic context to guide the generation process. Experimental results demonstrate that SongBloom outperforms existing methods across both subjective and objective metrics and achieves performance comparable to the state-of-the-art commercial music generation platforms.
Consistency of the k_n -nearest neighbor rule under adaptive sampling
In the adaptive sampling model of online learning, future prediction tasks can be arbitrarily dependent on the past. Every round, an adversary selects an instance to test the learner. After the learner makes a prediction, a noisy label is drawn from an underlying conditional label distribution and is revealed to both learner and adversary. A learner is consistent if it eventually performs no worse than the Bayes predictor. We study the $k_n$-nearest neighbor learner within this setting. In the worst-case, the learner will fail because an adaptive process can generate spurious patterns out of noise. However, under the mild smoothing assumption that the process generating the instances is uniformly absolutely continuous and that choice of $(k_n)_n$ is reasonable, the $k_n$-nearest neighbor rule is online consistent.
FastDINOv2: Frequency Based Curriculum Learning Improves Robustness and Training Speed
Large-scale vision foundation models such as DINOv2 boast impressive performances by leveraging massive architectures and training datasets. The expense of large-scale pre-training puts such research out of reach for many, hence limiting scientific advancements. We thus propose a novel pretraining strategy for DINOv2 that simultaneously accelerates convergence-and strengthens robustness to common corruptions as a by-product. Our approach involves a frequency filtering curriculum-low-frequency being seen first-and the Gaussian noise patching augmentation. Applied to a ViT-B/16 backbone trained on ImageNet-1K, while pre-training time is reduced by 1.6 -from 16.64 to 10.32 NVIDIA L40S days-and FLOPs by 2.25, our method still achieves matching robustness in corruption benchmarks (ImageNet-C) and maintains competitive linear probing performance compared with the DINOv2 baseline. This dual benefit of efficiency and robustness makes large-scale self-supervised foundation modeling more attainable, while opening the door to novel exploration around data curriculum and augmentation as a means to improve self-supervised learning models robustness.
Model Provenance Testing for Large Language Models
Large language models are increasingly customized through fine-tuning and other adaptations, creating challenges in enforcing licensing terms and managing downstream impacts such as protecting intellectual property or identifying vulnerabilities. We address this challenge by developing a framework for testing model provenance. Our approach is based on the key observation that real-world model derivations preserve significant similarities in model outputs that can be detected through statistical analysis. Using only black-box access to models, we employ multiple hypothesis testing to compare model similarities against a baseline established by unrelated models. On two comprehensive real-world benchmarks spanning models from 30M to 4B parameters and comprising over 600 models, our tester achieves 90-95% precision and 80-90% recall in identifying derived models. These results demonstrate the viability of systematic provenance verification in production environments even when only API access is available.
Linear Transformers Implicitly Discover Unified Numerical Algorithms
A transformer is merely a stack of learned data-to-data maps--yet those maps can hide rich algorithms. We train a linear, attention-only transformer on millions of masked-block completion tasks: each prompt is a masked low-rank matrix whose missing block may be (i) a scalar prediction target or (ii) an unseen kernel slice for Nyström extrapolation. The model sees only input-output pairs and a mean-squared loss; it is given no normal equations, no handcrafted iterations, and no hint that the tasks are related. Surprisingly, after training, algebraic unrolling reveals the same parameter-free update rule across all three resource regimes (full visibility, bandwidth-limited heads, rank-limited attention). We prove that this rule achieves second-order convergence on full-batch problems, cuts distributed iteration complexity, and remains accurate with compute-limited attention. Thus, a transformer trained solely to patch missing blocks implicitly discovers a unified, resource-adaptive iterative solver spanning prediction, estimation, and Nyström extrapolation--highlighting a powerful capability of in-context learning.