Technology
LLM-PySC2: Starcraft II learning environment for Large Language Models
The tremendous potential has been demonstrated by large language models (LLMs) in intelligent decision-making problems, with unprecedented capabilities shown across diverse applications ranging from gaming AI systems to complex strategic planning frameworks. However, the StarCraft II platform, which has been widely adopted for validating decision-making algorithms in the past decade, has not yet provided substantial support for this emerging domain. To address issues that LLMs cannot interface with the hundreds of actions of the pysc2 backend and the lack of native support for multi-agent (MA) collaboration, we propose the LLM-PySC2 environment. This is the first environment that offers LLMs the complete pysc2 action space with sufficient multi-modal information and game Wiki knowledge. With an asynchronous query architecture, the environment efficiently interacts with LLMs that maintain a constant latency regardless of the scale of the agents' population. In the experiments, we evaluated LLMs' decision-making performance in both the macro-decision and micro-operation scenarios, with traditional StarCraft II Multi-Agent Challenge (SMAC) tasks and a series of new proposed. Results indicate that LLMs possess the potential to achieve victories in complex scenarios but cannot constantly generate correct decisions, especially in the recovered pysc2 action space and MA settings. Without task-relevant instructions, the pre-trained models suffer from issues such as hallucinations and inefficient collaboration. Our findings suggest that StarCraft II still challenges in the era of large models, revealing that there is a lot to do to develop an advanced LLM decision-making system, and the proposed LLM-PySC2 environment will support future development of LLM-based decision-making solutions.
Detecting High-Stakes Interactions with Activation Probes
Monitoring is an important aspect of safely deploying Large Language Models (LLMs). This paper examines activation probes for detecting ``high-stakes'' interactions---where the text indicates that the interaction might lead to significant harm---as a critical, yet underexplored, target for such monitoring. We evaluate several probe architectures trained on synthetic data, and find them to exhibit robust generalization to diverse, out-of-distribution, real-world data. Probes' performance is comparable to that of prompted or finetuned medium-sized LLM monitors, while offering computational savings of six orders-of-magnitude. These savings are enabled by reusing activations of the model that is being monitored. Our experiments also highlight the potential of building resource-aware hierarchical monitoring systems, where probes serve as an efficient initial filter and flag cases for more expensive downstream analysis.
Reframing Gaussian Splatting Densification with Complexity-Density Consistency of Primitives
The essence of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) training is to smartly allocate Gaussian primitives, expressing complex regions with more primitives and vice versa. Prior researches typically mark out under-reconstructed regions in a rendering-loss-driven manner. However, such a loss-driven strategy is often dominated by low-frequency regions, which leads to insufficient modeling of high-frequency details in texture-rich regions. As a result, it yields a suboptimal spatial allocation of Gaussian primitives. This inspires us to excavate the loss-agnostic visual prior in training views to identify complex regions that need more primitives to model. Based on this insight, we propose Complexity-Density Consistent Gaussian Splatting (CDC-GS), which allocates primitives based on the consistency between visual complexity of training views and the density of primitives.
ENMA: Tokenwise Autoregression for Continuous Neural PDE Operators
Solving time-dependent parametric partial differential equations (PDEs) remains a fundamental challenge for neural solvers, particularly when generalizing across a wide range of physical parameters and dynamics. When data is uncertain or incomplete--as is often the case--a natural approach is to turn to generative models. We introduce ENMA, a generative neural operator designed to model spatio-temporal dynamics arising from physical phenomena. ENMA predicts future dynamics in a compressed latent space using a generative masked autoregressive transformer trained with flow matching loss, enabling tokenwise generation. Irregularly sampled spatial observations are encoded into uniform latent representations via attention mechanisms and further compressed through a spatio-temporal convolutional encoder. This allows ENMA to perform in-context learning at inference time by conditioning on either past states of the target trajectory or auxiliary context trajectories with similar dynamics. The result is a robust and adaptable framework that generalizes to new PDE regimes and supports one-shot surrogate modeling of time-dependent parametric PDEs.
Generalizable Hand-Object Modeling from Monocular RGB Images via 3D Gaussians
Recent advances in hand-object interaction modeling have employed implicit representations, such as Signed Distance Functions (SDF) and Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) to reconstruct hands and objects with arbitrary topology and photo-realistic detail. However, these methods often rely on dense 3D surface annotations, or are tailored to short clips constrained in motion trajectories and scene contexts, limiting their generalization to diverse environments and movement patterns.
Statistical Analysis of an Adversarial Bayesian Weak Supervision Method
Programmatic Weak Supervision (PWS) aims to reduce the cost of constructing large high quality labeled datasets often used in training modern machine learning models. A major component of the PWS pipeline is the label model, which amalgamates predictions from multiple noisy weak supervision sources, i.e. labeling functions (LFs), to label datapoints. While most label models are either probabilistic or adversarial, a recently proposed label model achieves strong empirical performance without falling into either camp. That label model constructs a polytope of plausible labelings using the LF predictions and outputs the center of that polytope as its proposed labeling. In this paper, we attempt to theoretically study that strategy by proposing Bayesian Balsubramani-Freund (BBF), a label model that implicitly constructs a polytope of plausible labelings and selects a labeling in its interior. We show an assortment of statistical results for BBF: log-concavity of its posterior, its form of solution, consistency, and rates of convergence. Extensive experiments compare our proposed method against twelve baseline label models over eleven datasets. BBF compares favorably to other Bayesian label models and label models that don't use datapoint features -- matching or exceeding their performance on eight out of eleven datasets.
Discrete Neural Flow Samplers with Locally Equivariant Transformer
Sampling from unnormalised discrete distributions is a fundamental problem across various domains. While Markov chain Monte Carlo offers a principled approach, it often suffers from slow mixing and poor convergence. In this paper, we propose Discrete Neural Flow Samplers (DNFS), a trainable and efficient framework for discrete sampling. DNFS learns the rate matrix of a continuous-time Markov chain such that the resulting dynamics satisfy the Kolmogorov equation. As this objective involves the intractable partition function, we then employ control variates to reduce the variance of its Monte Carlo estimation, leading to a coordinate descent learning algorithm. To further facilitate computational efficiency, we propose locally equivaraint Transformer, a novel parameterisation of the rate matrix that significantly improves training efficiency while preserving powerful network expressiveness. Empirically, we demonstrate the efficacy of DNFS in a wide range of applications, including sampling from unnormalised distributions, training discrete energy-based models, and solving combinatorial optimisation problems.
ECO: Evolving Core Knowledge for Efficient Transfer
Knowledge in modern neural networks is often entangled and structurally opaque, making current transfer methods--typically based on reusing entire parameter sets--inefficient and inflexible. Efforts to improve flexibility by reusing partial parameters frequently depend on handcrafted heuristics or rigid structural assumptions, which constrain generalization. In contrast, biological evolution enables efficient knowledge transfer by encoding only essential information into genes through iterative refinement under environmental pressure.