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Appendix A V ariational Paragraph Embedder A.1 Selection of substitution rate p

Neural Information Processing Systems

Figure 4: Impact of the proportion of injected noise for learning Paragraph Em-beddings on XSum dataset. (Figure 4). The results of the ablation study are presented in Table 5. Embedder in providing clean and denoised reconstructions. In general, it has been observed that generations progress in a coarse-to-fine manner. The early time step, which is close to 1, tends to be less fluent and generic. This was the nicest stay we have ever had. Turtle Bay was a great resort. This was the nicest stay we have ever had.


Dialog-based Language Learning

Jason E. Weston

Neural Information Processing Systems

A long-term goal of machine learning research is to build an intelligent dialog agent. Most research in natural language understanding has focused on learning from fixed training sets of labeled data, with supervision either at the word level (tagging, parsing tasks) or sentence level (question answering, machine translation). This kind of supervision is not realistic of how humans learn, where language is both learned by, and used for, communication. In this work, we study dialog-based language learning, where supervision is given naturally and implicitly in the response of the dialog partner during the conversation. We study this setup in two domains: the bAbI dataset of [23] and large-scale question answering from [3]. We evaluate a set of baseline learning strategies on these tasks, and show that a novel model incorporating predictive lookahead is a promising approach for learning from a teacher's response. In particular, a surprising result is that it can learn to answer questions correctly without any reward-based supervision at all.



Vaping Is 'Everywhere' in Schools--Sparking a Bathroom Surveillance Boom

WIRED

Schools in the US are installing vape-detection tech in bathrooms to thwart student nicotine and cannabis use. A new investigation reveals the impact of using spying to solve a problem. It was in physical education class when Laila Gutierrez swapped out self-harm for a new vice. The freshman from Phoenix had long struggled with depression and would cut her arms to feel something. The first drag from a friend's vape several years ago offered the shy teenager a new way to escape. She quit cutting but got hooked on nicotine. Her sadness got harder to carry after her uncle died, and she felt she couldn't turn to her grieving parents for comfort. Bumming fruity vapes at school became part of her routine. "I would ask my friends who had them, 'I'm going through a lot, can I use it?'" Gutierrez, now 18, told The 74. "Or'I failed my test and I feel like smoking would be better than cutting my wrists.'"



Appendix A Implementation of Taylor Expansion on Unit Hamming Sphere

Neural Information Processing Systems

Follow the discussion in Section 3.1.2 In this section, we continue the discussion in Section 3.3 and obtain the form used in (25). The architecture of the discriminator is shown in Table 3. Exponential Linear Units [ One of the issue with BLEU is that in the case that a higher order n-gram precision of a sentence is 0, then the BLEU score will be 0, resulting in severely underestimation. This is due to the fact that BLEU is calculated by the geometric mean of precision. Sentences in the COCO dataset have a maximum length of 24 tokens and a vocabulary of 4.6k Training and validation data both consist of 10k sentences.


The Best Holiday Party Hack? A Good-Smelling House

WIRED

Make sure your party is a hit from the moment your guests walk through the door with this expert-led holiday home scenting advice. All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. You've got the snacks and drinks, the music and the mood lighting, but how do you create a truly festive atmosphere? When a guest walks in the front door, they assess the general vibe with multiple senses simultaneously.


ReAcTree: Hierarchical LLM Agent Trees with Control Flow for Long-Horizon Task Planning

Choi, Jae-Woo, Kim, Hyungmin, Ong, Hyobin, Jang, Minsu, Kim, Dohyung, Kim, Jaehong, Yoon, Youngwoo

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have enabled significant progress in decision-making and task planning for embodied autonomous agents. However, most existing methods still struggle with complex, long-horizon tasks because they rely on a monolithic trajectory that entangles all past decisions and observations, attempting to solve the entire task in a single unified process. To address this limitation, we propose ReAcTree, a hierarchical task-planning method that decomposes a complex goal into more manageable subgoals within a dynamically constructed agent tree. Each subgoal is handled by an LLM agent node capable of reasoning, acting, and further expanding the tree, while control flow nodes coordinate the execution strategies of agent nodes. In addition, we integrate two complementary memory systems: each agent node retrieves goal-specific, subgoal-level examples from episodic memory and shares environment-specific observations through working memory. Experiments on the WAH-NL and ALFRED datasets demonstrate that ReAcTree consistently outperforms strong task-planning baselines such as ReAct across diverse LLMs. Notably, on WAH-NL, ReAcTree achieves a 61% goal success rate with Qwen 2.5 72B, nearly doubling ReAct's 31%.


DIV-Nav: Open-Vocabulary Spatial Relationships for Multi-Object Navigation

Ortega-Peimbert, Jesús, Busch, Finn Lukas, Homberger, Timon, Yang, Quantao, Andersson, Olov

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Abstract-- Advances in open-vocabulary semantic mapping and object navigation have enabled robots to perform an informed search of their environment for an arbitrary object. However, such zero-shot object navigation is typically designed for simple queries with an object name like "television" or "blue rug". Here, we consider more complex free-text queries with spatial relationships, such as "find the remote on the table" while still leveraging robustness of a semantic map. We present DIV-Nav, a real-time navigation system that efficiently addresses this problem through a series of relaxations: i) Decomposing natural language instructions with complex spatial constraints into simpler object-level queries on a semantic map, ii) computing the Intersection of individual semantic belief maps to identify regions where all objects co-exist, and iii) V alidating the discovered objects against the original, complex spatial constrains via a L VLM. We further investigate how to adapt the frontier exploration objectives of online semantic mapping to such spatial search queries to more effectively guide the search process. Robots operating in human environments must interpret natural language commands that go beyond simple object identification. While a command like "find a chair" requires handling simple object classes only, real-world search instructions often specify spatial relationships: "go to the chair next to the desk," "find the towel in the bathroom," or "get the book on the nightstand."


Balancing Synthetic Data and Replay for Enhancing Task-Specific Capabilities

Spiegelhalter, Urs, Franke, Jörg K. H., Hutter, Frank

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Adapting language models to new tasks through continued pretraining faces a fundamental trade-off: models must learn new capabilities while avoiding catastrophic forgetting of existing knowledge. While prior work has studied synthetic data generation techniques, the optimal replay ratios for balancing task performance and knowledge retention under computational constraints remain poorly understood. We present a comprehensive empirical study investigating the interplay between replay ratio configuration and computational budget when adapting language models to new tasks. Using the bAbI reasoning tasks as our target objective, we apply synthetic data generation and systematically evaluate different total token budgets and replay ratio configurations. We analyze their effects on both task mastery and general knowledge retention. Our experiments reveal an optimal configuration that balances task-specific performance with general knowledge retention. Based on our findings, we provide empirically-grounded guidelines for selecting replay ratios based on computational budget, enabling practitioners to achieve strong task adaptation with significantly reduced training costs.