AI News Archive: May 14, 2026 — Part 17
Sourced from 500+ daily AI sources, scored by relevance.
- Croissant Baker: Metadata Generation for Discoverable, Governable, and Reusable ML Datasets
Croissant has emerged as the metadata standard for machine learning datasets, providing a structured, JSON-LD-based format that makes dataset discovery, automated ingestion, and reproducible analysis machine-checkable across ML platforms. Adoption has accelerated, and NeurIPS now requires Croissant ...
- Concurrency without Model Changes: Future-based Asynchronous Function Calling for LLMs
Function calling, also known as tool use, is a core capability of modern LLM agents but is typically constrained by synchronous execution semantics. Under these semantics, LLM decoding is blocked until each function call completes, resulting in increasing end-to-end latency. In this work, we introdu...
- DiffusionOPD: A Unified Perspective of On-Policy Distillation in Diffusion Models
Reinforcement learning has emerged as a powerful tool for improving diffusion-based text-to-image models, but existing methods are largely limited to single-task optimization. Extending RL to multiple tasks is challenging: joint optimization suffers from cross-task interference and imbalance, while ...
- TFGN: Task-Free, Replay-Free Continual Pre-Training Without Catastrophic Forgetting at LLM Scale
Continually pre-training a large language model on heterogeneous text domains, without replay or task labels, has remained an unsolved architectural problem at LLM scale. Existing methods rely on replay buffers, task identifiers, regularization penalties that scale poorly, or sentence-classification...
- An Interpretable Latency Model for Speculative Decoding in LLM Serving
Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by using a smaller draft model to propose multiple tokens that are verified by a larger target model in parallel. While prior work demonstrates substantial speedups in isolated or fixed-batch settings, the behavior of SD in p...
- SpeakerLLM: A Speaker-Specialized Audio-LLM for Speaker Understanding and Verification Reasoning
As audio-first agents become increasingly common in physical AI, conversational robots, and screenless wearables, audio large language models (audio-LLMs) must integrate speaker-specific understanding to support user authorization, personalization, and context-aware interaction. This requires modeli...
- Generalized Priority-Aware Shapley Value
Shapley value and its priority-aware extensions are widely used for valuation in machine learning, but existing methods require pairwise priority to be binary and acyclic, a restriction spectacularly violated in real-data examples such as aggregated human preferences and multi-criterion comparisons....
- Boosting Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards via Randomly Selected Few-Shot Guidance
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has achieved great success in developing Large Language Models (LLMs) with chain-of-thought rollouts for many tasks such as math and coding. Nevertheless, RLVR struggles with sample efficiency on difficult problems where correct rollouts are hard...
- Second-Order Actor-Critic Methods for Discounted MDPs via Policy Hessian Decomposition
We address the discounted reward setting in reinforcement learning (RL). To mitigate the value approximation challenges in policy gradient methods, actor-critic approaches have been developed and are known to converge to stationary points under suitable assumptions. However, these methods rely on fi...
- InfoSFT: Learn More and Forget Less with Information-Aware Token Weighting
Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) provides the standard approach for teaching LLMs new behaviors from offline expert demonstrations. However, standard SFT uniformly fits all samples -- including those with low likelihood under the base model -- which can disproportionately drive training updates toward o...
- Real-time virtual circuits for plasma shape control via neural network emulators
Reliable position and shape control in tokamak plasmas requires accurate real-time regulation of several strongly coupled shape parameters. The control vectors that disentangle these couplings, referred to as \textit{virtual circuits} (VCs), enable independent shape parameter control for a specific ...
- Octopus: History-Free Gradient Orthogonalization for Continual Learning in Multimodal Large Language Models
Continual learning in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) aims to sequentially acquire knowledge while mitigating catastrophic forgetting, yet existing methods face inherent limitations: architecture-based approaches incur additional computational overhead and often generalize poorly to new tas...
- A Hardware-Aware, Per-Layer Methodology for Post-Training Quantization of Large Language Models
Scaled Outer Product (SOP) is a post-training quantization methodology for large language model weights, designed to deliver near-lossless fidelity at 4.5--6 bits per weight on hardware with per-layer LUT decode. The methodology combines per-layer search of fixed and dynamic codebook pairs selected ...
- Learning with Shallow Neural Networks on Cluster-Structured Features
The success of deep learning in high-dimensional settings is often attributed to the presence of low-dimensional structure in real-world data. While standard theoretical models typically assume that this structure lies in the target function, projecting unstructured inputs onto a low-dimensional sub...
- A Mutual Information Lower Bound for Multimodal Regression Active Learning
Active learning for continuous regression has lacked an acquisition function that targets epistemic uncertainty when the predictive distribution is multimodal: variance misses modal disagreement, and information-theoretic targets like BALD are designed for discrete outputs. We introduce a Two-Index ...
- Comie.dev
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- RefDecoder: Enhancing Visual Generation with Conditional Video Decoding
Video generation powers a vast array of downstream applications. However, while the de facto standard, i.e., latent diffusion models, typically employ heavily conditioned denoising networks, their decoders often remain unconditional. We observe that this architectural asymmetry leads to significant ...
- FutureSim: Replaying World Events to Evaluate Adaptive Agents
AI agents are being increasingly deployed in dynamic, open-ended environments that require adapting to new information as it arrives. To efficiently measure this capability for realistic use-cases, we propose building grounded simulations that replay real-world events in the order they occurred. We ...
- When Are Two Networks the Same? Tensor Similarity for Mechanistic Interpretability
Mechanistic interpretability aims to break models into meaningful parts; verifying that two such parts implement the same computation is a prerequisite. Existing similarity measures evaluate either empirical behaviour, leaving them blind to out-of-distribution mechanisms, or basis-dependent paramete...
- Position: Behavioural Assurance Cannot Verify the Safety Claims Governance Now Demands
This position paper argues that behavioural assurance, even when carefully designed, is being asked to carry safety claims it cannot verify. AI governance frameworks enacted between 2019 and early 2026 require reviewable evidence of properties such as the absence of hidden objectives, resistance to ...
- Hand-in-the-Loop: Improving Dexterous VLA via Seamless Interventional Correction
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are prone to compounding errors in dexterous manipulation, where high-dimensional action spaces and contact-rich dynamics amplify small policy deviations over long horizons. While Interactive Imitation Learning (IIL) can refine policies through human takeover data...
- Training ML Models with Predictable Failures
Estimating how often an ML model will fail at deployment scale is central to pre-deployment safety assessment, but a feasible evaluation set is rarely large enough to observe the failures that matter. Jones et al. (2025) address this by extrapolating from the largest k failure scores in an evaluatio...
- Causal Foundation Models with Continuous Treatments
Causal inference, estimating causal effects from observational data, is a fundamental tool in many disciplines. Of particular importance across a variety of domains is the continuous treatment setting, where the variable of intervention has a continuous range. This setting is far less explored and r...
- Natural Synthesis: Outperforming Reactive Synthesis Tools with Large Reasoning Models
Reactive synthesis, the problem of automatically constructing a hardware circuit from a logical specification, is a long-standing challenge in formal verification. It is elusive for two reasons: It is algorithmically hard, and writing formal specifications by hand is notoriously difficult. In this p...
- CoCo-InEKF: State Estimation with Learned Contact Covariances in Dynamic, Contact-Rich Scenarios
Robust state estimation for highly dynamic motion of legged robots remains challenging, especially in dynamic, contact-rich scenarios. Traditional approaches often rely on binary contact states that fail to capture the nuances of partial contact or directional slippage. This paper presents CoCo-InEK...
- Logging Policy Design for Off-Policy Evaluation
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) estimates the value of a target treatment policy (e.g., a recommender system) using data collected by a different logging policy. It enables high-stakes experimentation without live deployment, yet in practice accuracy depends heavily on the logging policy used to collect...
- From Data to Action: Accelerating Refinery Optimization with AI
Nowadays refinery optimization utilizes sheer amounts of data, which can be handled with modern Linear Programming (LP) software, but the interpreting and applying the results remains challenging. Large petrochemical companies use massive models, with hundreds of thousands of input matrix elements. ...
- Average Gradient Outer Product in kernel regression provably recovers the central subspace for multi-index models
We study a prototypical situation when a learned predictor can discover useful low-dimensional structure in data, while using fewer samples than are needed for accurate prediction. Specifically, we consider the problem of recovering a multi-index polynomial $f^*(x)=h(Ux)$, with $U\in\mathbb{R}^{r\ti...
- Separating Intrinsic Ambiguity from Estimation Uncertainty in Deep Generative Models for Linear Inverse Problems
Recently, deep generative models have been used for posterior inference in inverse problems, including high-stakes applications in medical imaging and scientific discovery, where the uncertainty of a prediction can matter as much as the prediction itself. However, posterior uncertainty is difficult ...
- TopoPrimer: The Missing Topological Context in Forecasting Models
We introduce TopoPrimer, a framework that makes the global topological structure of the series population an explicit input to any forecasting model. TopoPrimer improves accuracy across diverse domains, stabilizes forecasts under seasonal demand spikes, and closes the cold-start gap. Precomputed...
- DeepTokenEEG Enhancing Mild Cognitive Impairment and Alzheimers Classification via Tokenized EEG Features
The detection of Alzheimers disease (AD) is considered crucial, as timely intervention can improve patient outcomes. Electroencephalogram (EEG)-based diagnosis has been recognized as a non-invasive, accessible, and cost-effective approach for AD detection; however, it faces challenges related to dat...
- Explainable Detection of Depression Status Shifts from User Digital Traces
Every day, users generate digital traces (e.g., social media posts, chats, and online interactions) that are inherently timestamped and may reflect aspects of their mental state. These traces can be organized into temporal trajectories that capture how a user's mental health signals evolve, includin...
- Distance-Matrix Wasserstein Statistics for Scalable Gromov--Wasserstein Learning
Gromov--Wasserstein (GW) distances compare graphs, shapes, and point clouds through internal distances, without requiring a common coordinate system. This invariance is powerful, but discrete GW is a nonconvex quadratic optimal transport problem and is difficult to estimate at scale. We propose \emp...
- Efficient Online Conformal Selection with Limited Feedback
We address the problem of conformal selection, where an agent must select a minimal subset of options to ensure that at least one ``success'' is identified with a pre-specified target probability $φ$. While traditional online conformal prediction focuses on maintaining validity for the observed sequ...
- nASR: An End-to-End Trainable Neural Layer for Channel-Level EEG Artifact Subspace Reconstruction in Real-Time BCI
Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals are highly susceptible to artifacts, resulting in a low signal-to-noise ratio which makes extraction of meaningful neural information challenging. Artifact Subspace Reconstruction (ASR) is one of the most widely used artifact filtering techniques in EEG-based BCI a...
- Not All Symbols Are Equal: Importance-Aware Constellation Design for Semantic Communication
Semantic communication systems for goal-oriented transmission must protect task-relevant information not only through source compression but also via physical layer mapping. Existing approaches decouple constellation design and semantic encoding, exposing critical symbols to channel errors at the sa...
- Slot-MPC: Goal-Conditioned Model Predictive Control with Object-Centric Representations
Predictive world models enable agents to model scene dynamics and reason about the consequences of their actions. Inspired by human perception, object-centric world models capture scene dynamics using object-level representations, which can be used for downstream applications such as action planning...
- Road Maps as Free Geometric Priors: Weather-Invariant Drone Geo-Localization with GeoFuse
Drone-view geo-localization aims to match a query drone image, often captured under adverse weather conditions (e.g., rain, snow, fog), against a gallery of geo-tagged satellite images. Weather-induced degradations in the drone view, such as noise, reduced visibility, and partial occlusions, severel...
- TILBench: A Systematic Benchmark for Tabular Imbalanced Learning Across Data Regimes
Imbalanced learning remains a fundamental challenge in tabular data applications. Despite decades of research and numerous proposed algorithms, a systematic empirical understanding of how different imbalanced learning methods behave across diverse data characteristics is still lacking. In particular...
- CaMeRL: Collision-Aware and Memory-Enhanced Reinforcement Learning for UAV Navigation in Multi-Scale Obstacle Environments
In obstacle avoidance navigation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), variations in obstacle scale have received strangely less attention than obstacle number or density. Existing methods typically extract purely geometric features from single-frame depth observations. Such representations tend to ne...
- Exploring Bottlenecks in VLM-LLM Navigation: How 3D Scene Understanding Capability Impacts Zero-Shot VLN
Zero-shot vision-and-language navigation (VLN) has gained significant attention due to its minimal data collection costs and inherent generalization. This paradigm is typically driven by the integration of pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and Large Language Models (LLMs), where VLMs constru...
- SR-Platform: An Agentic Pipeline for Natural Language-Driven Robot Simulation Environment Synthesis
Generating robot simulation environments remains a major bottleneck in simulation-based robot learning. Constructing a training-ready MuJoCo scene typically requires expertise in 3D asset modeling, MJCF specification, spatial layout, collision avoidance, and robot-model integration. We present SR-Pl...
- Learning Cross-Coupled and Regime Dependent Dynamics for Aerial Manipulation
Accurate dynamics models are critical for aerial manipulators operating under complex tasks such as payload transport. However, modeling these systems remains fundamentally challenging due to strong quadrotor-manipulator coupling, delayed aerodynamic interactions, and regime-dependent dynamics varia...
- DSSP: Diffusion State Space Policy with Full-History Encoding
Diffusion-based imitation learning has shown strong promise for robot manipulation. However, most existing policies condition only on the current observation or a short window of recent observations, limiting their ability to resolve history-dependent ambiguities in long-horizon tasks. To address th...
- Let Robots Feel Your Touch: Visuo-Tactile Cortical Alignment for Embodied Mirror Resonance
Observing touch on another's body can elicit corresponding tactile sensations in the observer, a phenomenon termed mirror touch that supports empathy and social perception. This visuo-tactile resonance is thought to rely on structural correspondence between visual and somatosensory cortices, yet rob...
- Before the Body Moves: Learning Anticipatory Joint Intent for Language-Conditioned Humanoid Control
Natural language is an intuitive interface for humanoid robots, yet streaming whole-body control requires control representations that are executable now and anticipatory of future physical transitions. Existing language-conditioned humanoid systems typically generate kinematic references that a low...
- Systematic Discovery of Semantic Attacks in Online Map Construction through Conditional Diffusion
Autonomous vehicles depend on online HD map construction to perceive lane boundaries, dividers, and pedestrian crossings -- safety-critical road elements that directly govern motion planning. While existing pixel perturbation attacks can disrupt the mapping, they can be neutralized by standard adver...
- DesignMD
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- Distill: Uncovering the True Intent behind Human-Robot Communication
As robots become increasingly integrated into everyday environments, intuitive communication paradigms such as natural language and end-user programming have become indispensable for specifying autonomous robot behavior. However, these mechanisms are ineffective at fully capturing user intent: natur...
- Reactive Planning based Control for Mobile Robots in Obstacle-Cluttered Environments
This paper addresses the motion control problem for mobile robots in obstacle-cluttered environments. The mobile robot has partial environment information only, and aims to move from an initial position to a target position without collisions. For this purpose, a reactive planning based control stra...