Technology
Local-Global Associative Frames for Symmetry-Preserving Crystal Structure Modeling
Crystal structures are defined by the periodic arrangement of atoms in 3D space, inherently making them equivariant to SO(3) group. A fundamental requirement for crystal property prediction is that the model's output should remain invariant to arbitrary rotational transformations of the input structure. One promising strategy to achieve this invariance is to align the given crystal structure into a canonical orientation with appropriately computed rotations, or called frames. However, existing work either only considers a global frame or solely relies on more advanced local frames based on atoms' local structure. A global frame is too coarse to capture the local structure heterogeneity of the crystal, while local frames may inadvertently disrupt crystal symmetry, limiting their expressivity. In this work, we revisit the frame design problem for crystalline materials and propose a novel approach to construct expressive Symmetry-Preserving Frames, dubbed as SPFrame, for modeling crystal structures.
ASnapshot of Influence: ALocal Data Attribution Framework for Online Reinforcement Learning
Online reinforcement learning (RL) excels in complex, safety-critical domains but suffers from sample inefficiency, training instability, and limited interpretability. Data attribution provides a principled way to trace model behavior back to training samples, yet existing methods assume fixed datasets, which is violated in online RL where each experience both updates the policy and shapes future data collection. In this paper, we initiate the study of data attribution for online RL, focusing on the widely used Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm. We start by establishing a local attribution framework, interpreting model checkpoints with respect to the records in the recent training buffer. We design two target functions, capturing agent action and cumulative return respectively, and measure each record's contribution through gradient similarity between its training loss and these targets. We demonstrate the power of this framework through three concrete applications: diagnosis of learning, temporal analysis of behavior formation, and targeted intervention during training. Leveraging this framework, we further propose an algorithm, iterative influence-based filtering (IIF), for online RL training that iteratively performs experience filtering to refine policy updates. Across standard RL benchmarks (classic control, navigation, locomotion) to RLHF for large language models, IIF reduces sample complexity, speeds up training, and achieves higher returns. Together, these results open a new direction for making online RL more interpretable, efficient, and effective.
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ShorterBetter: Guiding Reasoning Models to Find Optimal Inference Length for Efficient Reasoning
Recent models such as OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek-R1 have demonstrated strong performance on reasoning-intensive tasks by generating extended Chain-of-Thought (CoT) traces. While longer reasoning helps with thorough exploration of solution paths for complex problems, it also often leads to inefficient and redundant outputs--a phenomenon commonly described as overthinking. In this paper, we propose ShorterBetter, a simple yet effective reinforcement learning method that enables reasoning models to learn their own optimal CoT lengths without manual supervision. We define the Sample Optimal Length (SOL) as the length of the shortest correct response among multiple generations, which serves as a dynamic reward signal to guide the model toward efficient reasoning. Applied to DeepSeek-Distill-Qwen-1.5B/7B as base models, ShorterBetter achieves 50%-80% reduction in output lengths in both in-domain and out-of-domain reasoning tasks while maintaining accuracy. Our reasoning trace analysis shows that ShorterBetter refines the structure of the reasoning traces by reducing unnecessary repetition, excessive self-verification, and over-exploration of alternatives.1
Evolving and Regularizing Meta-Environment Learner for Fine-Grained Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning
Recently proposed Fine-Grained Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning (FGFSCIL) offers a practical and efficient solution for enabling models to incrementally learn new fine-grained categories under limited data conditions. However, existing methods still settle for the fine-grained feature extraction capabilities learned from the base classes.
Nonlinearly Preconditioned Gradient Methods: Momentum and Stochastic Analysis
We study nonlinearly preconditioned gradient methods for smooth nonconvex optimization problems, focusing on sigmoid preconditioners that inherently perform a form of gradient clipping akin to the widely used gradient clipping technique. Building upon this idea, we introduce a novel heavy ball-type algorithm and provide convergence guarantees under a generalized smoothness condition that is less restrictive than traditional Lipschitz smoothness, thus covering a broader class of functions. Additionally, we develop a stochastic variant of the base method and study its convergence properties under different noise assumptions. We compare the proposed algorithms with baseline methods on diverse tasks from machine learning including neural network training.
Memory Mosaics at scale
Memory Mosaics [Zhang et al., 2025], networks of associative memories, have demonstrated appealing compositional and in-context learning capabilities on medium-scale networks (GPT-2 scale) and synthetic small datasets. This work shows that these favorable properties remain when we scale memory mosaics to large language model sizes (llama-8B scale) and real-world datasets. To this end, we scale memory mosaics to 10B size, we train them on one trillion tokens, we introduce a couple architectural modifications ("memory mosaics v2"), we assess their capabilities across three evaluation dimensions: training-knowledge storage, new-knowledge storage, and in-context learning. Throughout the evaluation, memory mosaics v2 match transformers on the learning of training knowledge (first dimension) and significantly outperforms transformers on carrying out new tasks at inference time (second and third dimensions). These improvements cannot be easily replicated by simply increasing the training data for transformers. A memory mosaics v2 trained on one trillion tokens still perform better on these tasks than a transformer trained on eight trillion tokens.
Learning Interestingness in Automated Mathematical Theory Formation
We take two key steps in automating the open-ended discovery of new mathematical theories, a grand challenge in artificial intelligence. First, we introduce FERMAT, a reinforcement learning (RL) environment that models concept discovery and theorem-proving using a set of symbolic actions, opening up a range of RL problems relevant to theory discovery. Second, we explore a specific problem through FERMAT: automatically scoring the interestingness of mathematical objects. We investigate evolutionary algorithms for synthesizing nontrivial interestingness measures. In particular, we introduce an LLM-based evolutionary algorithm that features function abstraction, leading to notable improvements in discovering elementary number theory and finite fields over hard-coded baselines.
37664246a1e07e212ddacea6e5a523f2-Paper-Conference.pdf
Process reward models (PRMs) play a central role in guiding inference-time scaling algorithms for large language models (LLMs). However, we observe that even stateof-the-art PRMs can be poorly calibrated. Specifically, they tend to overestimate the success probability that a partial reasoning step will lead to a correct final answer, particularly when smaller LLMs are used to complete the reasoning trajectory. To address this, we present a calibration approach--performed via quantile regression-- that adjusts PRM outputs to better align with true success probabilities. Leveraging these calibrated success estimates and their associated confidence bounds, we introduce an instance-adaptive scaling (IAS) framework that dynamically adjusts the compute budget based on the estimated likelihood that a partial reasoning trajectory will yield a correct final answer. Unlike conventional methods that allocate a fixed number of reasoning trajectories per query, this approach adapts to each instance and reasoning step when using our calibrated PRMs. Experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that (i) our PRM calibration method achieves small calibration error, outperforming the baseline methods, (ii) calibration is crucial for enabling effective IAS, and (iii) the proposed IAS strategy reduces inference costs while maintaining final answer accuracy, utilizing less compute on more confident problems as desired.
MIGGPT: Harnessing Large Language Models for Automated Migration of Out-of-Tree Linux Kernel Patches Across Versions
Out-of-tree kernel patches are essential for adapting the Linux kernel to new hardware or enabling specific functionalities. Maintaining and updating these patches across different kernel versions demands significant effort from experienced engineers. Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable progress across various domains, suggesting their potential for automating out-of-tree kernel patch migration. However, our findings reveal that LLMs, while promising, struggle with incomplete code context understanding and inaccurate migration point identification. In this work, we propose MIGGPT, a framework that employs a novel code fingerprint structure to retain code snippet information and incorporates three meticulously designed modules to improve the migration accuracy and efficiency of out-of-tree kernel patches. Furthermore, we establish a robust benchmark using real-world out-of-tree kernel patch projects to evaluate LLM capabilities. Evaluations show that MIGGPT significantly outperforms the direct application of vanilla LLMs, achieving an average completion rate of 74.07%