Conditional Optimal Bridge for Riemannian Activation Steering

1 día 20 horas ago
arXiv:2607.10517v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Activation steering offers a lightweight alternative to fine-tuning for controlling large language models at inference time. Many existing steering methods implicitly optimize a log-density-ratio objective between desired and undesired activation distributions without a principled derivation. Methods with fixed steering directions can also degrade out-of-distribution (OOD) performance. We introduce Conditional Optimal Bridge for Riemannian Activation Steering (\textsc{Cobras}), which casts steering as a Schr\"{o}dinger Bridge on the residual-stream hypersphere. This formulation yields a principled derivation of the log-density-ratio steering objective from a well-posed optimization problem. We construct a query-adaptive steering field that recovers log-density-ratio steering as a limiting case. The fitted transport also provides a support score for controlling OOD interventions. Across four models, \textsc{Cobras} outperforms prior steering methods in nearly all model--task settings spanning helpfulness, truthfulness, and detoxification, while largely preserving OOD performance. The code is available \href{https://github.com/arshandalili/cobras}{here}.
Seyed Arshan Dalili, Ajay Narayanan Sridhar, Vijaykrishnan Narayanan, Mehrdad Mahdavi

To Retain or to Adapt? Generalizing Continual Learning

1 día 20 horas ago
arXiv:2607.05609v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The Continual Learning (CL) literature has long been driven by the goal of mitigating catastrophic forgetting. This objective rests on an often unstated assumption: that a lifelong learner should approximate the Joint-Task Learning (JTL) solution and retain all previously acquired knowledge. We challenge this retention-centered premise, arguing that in non-stationary environments prioritizing retention can impede real-time adaptation. Shifting the focus to the Average Lifelong Error (ALE), we formalize CL as an online optimization problem governed by the interaction between environmental and learning dynamics. We introduce Transfer Efficiency as a quantitative measure of the tension between Instability, the bias inherited from conflicting past experience, and Transient Error, the optimization cost of learning new tasks from scratch. Under mild convergence conditions, holding across linear and neural network models, this decomposition yields a Critical Task Duration: a closed-form threshold beyond which historical knowledge transitions from a warm-start advantage to an optimization liability whenever retention induces a positive stationary bias. We validate these theoretical predictions on continual image classification and reinforcement learning benchmarks. Finally, by connecting continual learning to the online learning framework of predictable sequences, we show that JTL is only one instance of a broader family of objectives, and we propose a new general class of continual learning algorithms, which we call Predictive Continual Learning. Predictive CL algorithms optimize expected future performance under an explicit, dynamically updated model of future tasks. As a proof of concept, we analyze a Window algorithm that interpolates between JTL and Independent-Task Learning (ITL), outperforming both under controlled distributional drift.
Giulia Lanzillotta, Mandana Samiei, Doina Precup, Razvan Pascanu, Claire Vernade

ASPIRE: Agentic /Skills Discovery for Robotics

1 día 20 horas ago
arXiv:2607.00272v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Traditional robot programming is notoriously challenging: it requires orchestrating multimodal perception, managing physical contact dynamics, and handling diverse environment configurations and execution failures. We introduce ASPIRE (Agentic Skill Programming through Iterative Robot Exploration), a continual learning system that autonomously writes and refines robot control programs in a code-as-policy paradigm while compounding experience into a reusable skill library. ASPIRE operates in an open-ended learning loop, consisting of three components: (1) a closed-loop robot execution engine that exposes fine-grained multimodal traces, enabling the agent to autonomously diagnose failures, synthesize repairs, and validate outcomes; (2) a continually expanding skill library that distills validated fixes into reusable, transferable robotic knowledge; and (3) an evolutionary search procedure that generates diverse programs, systematically debugging them to explore beyond single-trajectory refinement. ASPIRE surpasses prior methods by up to 77% on manipulation tasks under perturbation, 72% on Robosuite's bimanual handover task, and up to 32% on long-horizon household tasks. The accumulated skill library further enables zero-shot generalization: on representative unseen long-horizon tasks, ASPIRE achieves 31% success, outperforming the 4% success rate of prior methods. Performance scales with the capabilities of frontier models. With Claude Opus 5.5, ASPIRE nearly saturates these benchmarks, achieving 99% average success across all 80 LIBERO-Pro tasks and 100% success on representative Robosuite and BEHAVIOR-1K tasks. Beyond simulation, skills discovered in simulation reduce real-world robot programming effort across embodiments and robot APIs, while skills acquired through online interaction with physical robots enable ASPIRE to solve a Rubik's Cube with progressively improving efficiency.
Runyu Lu, Yubo Wu, Ethan Kou, Haotian Lin, Letian Fu, Wenli Xiao, Ajay Mandlekar, Yinzhen Xu, Guanya Shi, Ken Goldberg, Ang Chen, Mosharaf Chowdhury, Jan Kautz, Yuke Zhu, Linxi "Jim" Fan, Guanzhi Wang

Mixture-of-Control: State-Aware Fine-Tuning for Transformer-based Models

1 día 20 horas ago
arXiv:2606.31397v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: State-based fine-tuning has emerged as a compelling alternative to weight-based adaptation for transformers, updating lightweight controls into states rather than model weights, offering substantial memory savings while retaining parameter efficiency. However, most existing state-based methods typically apply only per-block control updates, which limits inter-block information exchange and restricts representational adaptation. Meanwhile, prior mechanisms that enable cross-block communication often introduce considerable computational overhead, reducing their practicality for efficient fine-tuning. We introduce Mixture-of-Control (MoC), an efficient cross-layer communication that adaptively integrates local and global control signals to enhance representation learning during adaptation. MoC treats block-wise control states as experts in a sparse mixture-of-experts process, enabling efficient communication across transformer blocks. Experiments on 33 datasets and 10 pretrained models across diverse transformer-based benchmarks demonstrate that MoC consistently outperforms existing state-based fine-tuning methods while maintaining comparable efficiency in memory and compute.
Duc Anh Nguyen, Tien Ngoc Luu, Tung Pham, Toan Tran

Latent Bridges for Multi-Table Question Answering

1 día 20 horas ago
arXiv:2606.28916v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce GRAB, a constructor-encoder-bridge pipeline for table question answering. Our method lifts relational data into an heterogeneous graph, encodes it via message passing, and transfers the signals to an LLM through a small set of query-conditioned latent tokens. This provides the LLM with a compact, task-relevant structural representation together with the flattened text. Crucially, the LLM remains strictly frozen to preserve its general reasoning capabilities; we train only the lightweight graph encoder and latent bridge (91M parameters), allowing the entire pipeline to be trained efficiently. Our pipeline significantly improves performance on relational Question Answering, with the largest gains in demanding multi-table settings, offering an efficient, principled way to connect relational deep learning with LLMs.
Simone Varriale, Tamara Cucumides, Floris Geerts, Paolo Papotti

EHRNote-ChatQA: A Benchmark for Evidence-Grounded Multi-Turn Clinical Question Answering over Longitudinal Discharge Summaries

1 día 20 horas ago
arXiv:2606.15735v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Discharge summaries are crucial clinical documents containing the context of a patient's overall hospital stay, and are routinely reviewed by medical experts for patient readmission, ongoing care, and diagnostic decision-making. When reviewing them, medical experts often must iteratively synthesize information across multiple discharge summaries while verifying the evidence supporting each answer. Although large language models (LLMs) are increasingly explored for clinical question answering, existing benchmarks do not sufficiently reflect this setting: they often evaluate exam-style medical knowledge or focus on single-turn question answering with limited evidence-grounding evaluation. We introduce EHRNote-ChatQA, the first benchmark for evidence-grounded multi-turn clinical question answering over patients' multiple discharge summaries. Built from de-identified MIMIC-IV discharge summaries, EHRNote-ChatQA contains 967 patient-level multi-turn samples spanning one to five notes and 16,072 medical-expert-verified QA pairs (8,036 content questions, each paired with an evidence-grounding question) across eight clinical categories. The benchmark is constructed through an expert-informed pipeline combining discharge-summary structuring schema, expert-curated multi-turn QA templates, and LLM-based generation, followed by review and revision of every single QA sample by 12 medical experts (11 physicians and 1 nurse). Benchmarking 24 proprietary and open-weight LLMs reveals several challenges, including that LLMs struggle more with evidence grounding than content answering, multi-turn errors compound across turns, and single-turn clinical QA performance does not reliably transfer to this setting. These findings establish EHRNote-ChatQA as a rigorous and practical benchmark for evaluating clinical QA systems.
Jiyoun Kim, Muhan Yeo, Eunhye Jang, Jeewon Yang, Hangyul Yoon, Su Ji Lee, Hee Jo Han, Hee-Jae Jung, Doyun Kwon, Jun young Lee, Jaehun Lee, Jung-Oh Lee, Sunjun Kweon, Jong Hak Moon, Daseul Kim, Minjae Cho, Edward Choi

Closing the Sim-to-Real Gap: An Evaluation Framework for Autonomous Cyber Defense Configuration of Commercial EDR

1 día 20 horas ago
arXiv:2606.08168v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Leading commercial endpoint detection and response (EDR) products have shifted from operator-configured rule sets to multi-component systems where autonomous AI components operate alongside, and increasingly in place of, operator-deployed policies. Autonomous defense agents using commercial EDR as their hardening tool are no longer tuning a passive tool, but a black-box autonomous system capable of making vendor-specific decisions. We present the first evaluation framework for autonomous defense agents hardening commercial EDR. We instantiate it in a Game of Active Directory (GOAD) lab with Horizon3's NodeZero as the autonomous pentester and Microsoft Defender XDR as the primary EDR under test. We extend the same framework to CrowdStrike Falcon and SentinelOne Singularity to test whether our Microsoft Defender XDR findings hold across vendors. We run a sample benchmark of defense agents with two large language model (LLM) backbones (Claude Sonnet 4.6 and Cisco Foundation-Sec-8B). We report three lessons learned that neither simulation nor open source EDR evaluation can surface: (i) commercial EDR telemetry is engineered for Security Operations Center (SOC) analyst workflows rather than for measuring policy effectiveness; (ii) per-policy attribution is important for separating the defense agent's actions from the EDR's autonomous actions; and (iii) EDR behavior varies between runs, largely because containment varies and accumulates. Together, these findings highlight a sim-to-real gap for enterprise defense and motivate evaluation methodology for benchmarking autonomous defense agents in environments with black-box, autonomous tools.
Kerri Prinos, Lilianne Brush

Let It Be Simple: One-Step Action Generation for Vision-Language-Action Models

1 día 20 horas ago
arXiv:2606.05737v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: One-step generation from standard diffusion or Flow-Matching training is rarely effective for text-to-image or video generation without distillation or specialized one-step objectives. We find that VLA action generation behaves strikingly differently. Biasing only the training timestep distribution toward the noise endpoint yields strong one-step policies across LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, LIBERO-Pro, and real-world robot tasks. Moreover, for open-source VLA models with different architectures, simply replacing iterative decoding with a single forward pass often performs comparably to the original multi-step decoding on benchmarks such as LIBERO, CALVIN, and SimplerEnv. We attribute this difference to the condition-target structure of VLA generation, which is closer to image-to-text than text-to-image: rich observations strongly constrain a comparatively compact target. We formalize this intuition through the irreducible velocity loss $R_v(t,c)$ of standard Flow Matching, which becomes much smaller toward the noise endpoint for VLA, whereas image-generation models usually exhibit a U-shaped profile. The geometry induced by the learned generative map shows the same contrast: the Jacobian of this map with respect to the initial noise has a substantially smaller largest singular value for action generation than for image generation. Together, these results suggest that VLA's condition-target structure makes one-step generation unusually accessible to standard Flow Matching. Code and training configurations for this paper are available at https://github.com/bondtesty/let-it-be-simple.
Yitong Chen, Shiduo Zhang, Jingjing Gong, Xipeng Qiu

InfoQuant: Shaping Activation Distributions for Low-Bit LLM Quantization

1 día 20 horas ago
arXiv:2605.26175v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Low-bit activation quantization remains a major bottleneck in efficient large language model (LLM) deployment. The difficulty is not only that activations contain outliers, but that their distributions are often poorly matched to a low-bit uniform quantizer. Existing post-training quantization (PTQ) methods suppress peaks, balance channels, or minimize reconstruction error, yet they rarely specify what activation distribution is actually easy to discretize. As a result, activations may appear numerically smoother while still incurring large quantization error because the quantization range remains wide or most values collapse into a few levels near the mean. We recast activation transformation as quantizer-facing distribution design and analyze quantization error from an information-theoretic perspective. Our analysis shows that quantization-friendly activations should jointly have a smaller numerical range and sufficient dispersion within that range. Guided by this analysis, we propose InfoQuant, a train-free method that employs Peak Suppression Orthogonal Transformation (PSOT) to shape activations into more quantization-friendly distributions. We further introduce adaptive outlier-token selection to improve the robustness of PSOT during optimization. Across multiple LLM families, InfoQuant consistently outperforms prior PTQ and end-to-end training baselines. Under W4A4KV4, it preserves 97% of floating-point accuracy on average and reduces the LLaMA-2 13B performance gap by 42% over the previous state of the art. Code is available at [https://github.com/LLIKKE/InfoQuant](https://github.com/LLIKKE/InfoQuant)
Ke Li, Dong An, Xiaoling Zang, Can Ye, Liang Xie, Qibo Qiu, Chen Shen, Xiaofei He, Wenxiao Wang

Metropolis-Scale Resilient and Trustworthy Traffic Flow Inference Using Multi-Source Data

1 día 20 horas ago
arXiv:2605.25004v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Inferring network-wide traffic states from sparse observations with high accuracy and trustworthy uncertainty quantification is essential for intelligent transportation systems, yet it remains challenging due to the underdetermined nature of the problem, multifaceted disturbances in sensing networks, and the inherent conflicts among multiple inference subtasks when modeled jointly. We propose the Task-Aware Attentive Neural Process (TA-ANP), a unified probabilistic framework for resilient and trustworthy global traffic state inference (GTSI) by fusing floating car data (FCD) with sparse fixed-detector measurements. By casting GTSI as a stochastic process, TA-ANP leverages the meta-learning properties of neural processes to adapt rapidly to changes in sensing configurations without retraining. A task-aware multi-query attention module with distinct spatiotemporal inductive biases is introduced to handle three GTSI subtasks jointly ---real-time estimation at unobserved locations, forecasting at both observed and unobserved locations---while mitigating cross-task interference. For uncertainty quantification, we combine neural processes with Monte Carlo Dropout to capture both aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty. To support metropolis-scale evaluation, we construct the Metropolitan Multi-Source Traffic Dataset (MMTD), integrating fixed-loop sensor measurements, FCD statistics, and OpenStreetMap road-network data over an urban network of 26,166 road segments, including 2,371 fixed-sensor-equipped segments used for quantitative evaluation. Experiments across multiple independently generated sensor configurations show that TA-ANP achieves best performance across all subtasks under deterministic and probabilistic metrics. The resulting well-calibrated uncertainties enable more efficient fixed-sensor placement with fewer sensor deployments.
Qishen Zhou, Yifan Zhang, Michail A. Makridis, Anastasios Kouvelas, Yibing Wang, Simon Hu