concept space
Language-based Action Concept Spaces Improve Video Self-Supervised Learning
Recent contrastive language image pre-training has led to learning highly transferable and robust image representations. However, adapting these models to video domain with minimal supervision remains an open problem. We explore a simple step in that direction, using language tied self-supervised learning to adapt an image CLIP model to the video domain. A backbone modified for temporal modeling is trained under self-distillation settings with train objectives operating in an action concept space. Feature vectors of various action concepts extracted from a language encoder using relevant textual prompts construct this space. A large language model aware of actions and their attributes generates the relevant textual prompts. We introduce two train objectives, concept distillation and concept alignment, that retain generality of original representations while enforcing relations between actions and their attributes. Our approach improves zero-shot and linear probing performance on three action recognition benchmarks.
Emergence of Hidden Capabilities: Exploring Learning Dynamics in Concept Space
Modern generative models demonstrate impressive capabilities, likely stemming from an ability to identify and manipulate abstract concepts underlying their training data. However, fundamental questions remain: what determines the concepts a model learns, the order in which it learns them, and its ability to manipulate those concepts? To address these questions, we propose analyzing a model's learning dynamics via a framework we call the concept space, where each axis represents an independent concept underlying the data generating process. By characterizing learning dynamics in this space, we identify how the speed at which a concept is learned, and hence the order of concept learning, is controlled by properties of the data we term concept signal. Further, we observe moments of sudden turns in the direction of a model's learning dynamics in concept space. Surprisingly, these points precisely correspond to the emergence of hidden capabilities, i.e., where latent interventions show the model possesses the capability to manipulate a concept, but these capabilities cannot yet be elicited via naive input prompting. While our results focus on synthetically defined toy datasets, we hypothesize a general claim on emergence of hidden capabilities may hold: generative models possess latent capabilities that emerge suddenly and consistently during training, though a model might not exhibit these capabilities under naive input prompting.
Interpretable Graph Networks Formulate Universal Algebra Conjectures
The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) recently empowered researchers to investigate hard mathematical problems which eluded traditional approaches for decades. Y et, the use of AI in Universal Algebra (UA)--one of the fields laying the foundations of modern mathematics--is still completely unexplored.
Specialization after Generalization: Towards Understanding Test-Time Training in Foundation Models
Hübotter, Jonas, Wolf, Patrik, Shevchenko, Alexander, Jüni, Dennis, Krause, Andreas, Kur, Gil
Many standard TTT methods train on carefully selected data from the pre-training dataset (i.e., do not add any new privileged information; Hardt & Sun, 2024; Hübotter et al., 2025), and several works studied how to optimally select data for imitation, e.g., the early seminal work of MacKay (1992) and recent extensions (Hübotter et al., 2024; Bagatella et al., 2025b). TTT has also been extended from supervised learning to reinforcement learning (Zuo et al., 2025; Bagatella et al., 2025a; Diaz-Bone et al., 2025). So far it has not been well understood why and when TTT is effective. While many different methods have been proposed for TTT, we focus here on analyzing "semi-parametric" TTT (e.g., Hardt & Sun, 2024; Hübotter et al., 2025), where a pre-trained model is fine-tuned with a supervised loss on a small neighborhood of the test point in the training data. This is different from some other methods for test-time "adaptation", which are commonly applied with distribution shifts (e.g., Wang et al., 2021; Zhang et al., 2022; Durasov et al., 2025). Basu et al. (2023) consider a similar setting to ours, but analyze it through the lens of non-parametric estimation, relying on the smoothness of the target function in the feature space Ψ.