T2D: Target-to-Draft Model Pruning & Adaptation for Efficient Speculative Decoding

1 día 4 horas ago
arXiv:2610.34103v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speculative decoding significantly accelerates autoregressive text generation in Large Language Models (LLMs), but its efficacy depends largely on two key factors: the distributional alignment between the draft and the target model, and the draft model's latency during inference. However, existing approaches typically utilize independently pretrained small draft models or seek to prune the target model to a manually chosen architecture, thereby failing to explicitly balance the trade-off between draft model alignment and token generation efficiency. To address this gap, we formulate draft model design as an optimization problem and propose T2D, a framework that constructs draft models directly from the target model using latency-aware structured pruning and knowledge distillation. In this manner, T2D obtains draft models that are jointly optimized for both measured inference latency and cross-entropy loss on the target model's responses, resulting in superlative speculative decoding performance. Through extensive experiments on multi-domain speculative decoding benchmarks and across several target model families of differing scale, we demonstrate how T2D prunes up to 92\% of the target model to obtain highly performant draft models compared to competitive baselines. Moreover, draft models obtained via T2D can also be utilized by other speculative decoding token-alignment and knowledge distillation methods in a plug-and-play fashion, leading to further gains. Our findings underscore the importance of jointly navigating the draft model architecture-alignment frontier to unlock the full potential of speculative decoding for LLMs.
Shahriar Kabir Nahin, Xiao Ye, Muhao Chen, Ben Zhou, Anshuman Chhabra

Identically Trained Language Models Break on Different Jailbreaks

1 día 4 horas ago
arXiv:2610.34074v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Jailbreak benchmarks test one checkpoint and treat which jailbreaks break it as a property of its pretraining data and safety training. We ask whether another pretraining run of the same data, given the same safety training, would break on the same jailbreaks. For each of 25 pretraining data recipes, we take 1B base models from 3 pretraining seeds and give each the same safety post-training with 2 post-training seeds, for 150 models in all. We then collect 20 responses from every model to a shared set of jailbreak prompts and correlate the per-prompt non-refusal rates between every pair of models. On average, two post-trained copies of the same pretraining run have per-prompt non-refusal rates that correlate at 0.984. A different pretraining seed lowers the correlation to 0.811, and a different data recipe lowers it only slightly further, to 0.779. These results indicate that which jailbreaks break a checkpoint depends much more on its pretraining run than on its data, a pattern that holds in all 25 data recipes and at 150M and 300M parameters. In practice, the best of 91 attack templates found on one checkpoint stays the best after a new pretraining seed in only 27% of model pairs, against 67% after a new post-training seed. Each pretraining run also leaves a fingerprint: across 3,211 prompts, a model's per-prompt non-refusal rates identify its pretraining run among all 75 runs every time, and a random subset of 50 prompts still does so 98% of the time.
Chi-Wei Chang, Mu-Tien Kuo, Kuan-Wei Lee, Meng-Hsun Tsai

Extended LASMP: Language Aided Subset Sampling Based Motion Planner for Drone Navigation

1 día 4 horas ago
arXiv:2610.34054v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper proposes a command-aligned sampling distribution that incorporates navigation commands directly into the exploration process to improve the efficiency of sampling-based motion planning for quadcopters in three-dimensional environments. Inspired by the Language-Aided Subset Sampling Motion Planner, this paper extends command-aware subset sampling to aerial systems. Subset sampling is generalized to command-aligned regions, enabling structured 3D exploration while preserving probabilistic completeness. Natural language instructions are grounded into yaw-conditioned and altitude-aware geometric constraints using a prompt-based large language model for entity extraction and instruction validation. Extensive simulations in complex environments demonstrate that the proposed method generates collision-free, consistent trajectories while significantly reducing sampling effort compared to uniform RRT-based planners.
Saswati Bhattacharjee, Anirban Sinha, Mukulika Ghosh, Chinwe Ekenna

A Sign Law for Entropy Drift under Sampler Mismatch in RLVR

1 día 4 horas ago
arXiv:2610.34044v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Entropy in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) moves up or down depending on choices that should be neutral, such as whether over-length responses are masked or counted as failures. We trace this to sampler mismatch, where rollouts are drawn with top-k/top-p truncation or at a temperature the learner does not apply, and prove that a constant advantage shift then changes the entropy of a softmax policy, at first order and in expectation, with a sign fixed by the sampler: positive shifts sharpen the policy under any sampler whose likelihood ratio to the policy increases with token probability, including top-k, top-p, min-p, and temperatures below one, and flatten it under flatter samplers. In group-based RLVR with token-level losses, the baseline-controlled part of this drift is set by the token-weighted net advantage, which masking and failing over-length responses can push to opposite signs; the remainder, a covariance between advantages and the sampler's sharpness gap, can feed back over long horizons. On a 2B model, the entropy slope is linear in shifts of the net advantage under truncated sampling and indistinguishable from flat under exact sampling, and token-level importance ratios leave 98% of the drift. In 100-step runs, a net-zero baseline only delays an entropy explosion that exact sampling does not show, a fixed positive shift delays it further, and a baseline weighted by the sharpness gap keeps entropy stable without changing the learner. On a 9B reasoning model over ten steps, the uncorrected rule loses held-out accuracy, whereas zeroing the net advantage or renormalizing the learner gains 8.2 and 8.8 points over it, with no held-out effect under exact sampling.
Zhiyuan Wang, Jacob Steeves, Chang Liu

Holding a Steady Course: Knowledge Evolution from Expertise and Lessons for Continual Agent Learning

1 día 4 horas ago
arXiv:2610.34043v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous agents are increasingly deployed across sequences of related tasks, yet they often fail to retain and improve their knowledge over time. Existing approaches convert interaction trajectories into memories or reusable skills, but experience is not automatically reliable knowledge. Automatically collected skills and memories can propagate errors, mislead, and corrupt useful knowledge. To address this gap, we introduce Knowledge Evolution from Expertise and Lessons (KEEL), an agent-agnostic framework that uses verifier evidence to transform successful behavior into reusable skills and failures into corrective lessons. As new evidence accumulates, individual skill claims can be supported, contradicted, replaced, or retired. On SkillFlow benchmark, KEEL improves task success by 4.2 to 21.7 percentage points over the no-knowledge baseline, compared with gains of 2.4 to 9.6 points from SkillFlow's default method. Ablations show that skills and lessons are complementary. These results show that reliable continual agent learning depends not simply on accumulating experience, but on continually validating and evolving the knowledge derived from it. Our code is available at: https://github.com/microsoft/KEEL-TTCL26.
Wenzhe Fan, Benjamin Steenhoek, Gaurav Mittal, Yu Hu

Deep Scientific Reasoning under Physical Constraints: Structure-Aware Spectrum Prediction

1 día 4 horas ago
arXiv:2610.34021v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Structured scientific spectra encode rich physical information while obeying hard constraints, such as conservation laws and characteristic spectral geometry. Accurate prediction of these spectra is central to materials discovery, yet existing methods often treat them as unconstrained sequences and therefore fail to enforce the underlying physical structure. Taking electronic density of states (eDOS) as the prototypical example, we introduce DeepSciReasoner, a general paradigm for predicting scientific spectra under physical constraints. The framework combines structure-aware spectrum decoding with constraint-preserving physical reasoning, allowing predictions to capture rich spectral structure while respecting the underlying physics. We evaluate DeepSciReasoner on eDOS, phonon density of states (phDOS), X-ray absorption near-edge structure (XANES), and Raman spectra, where it substantially improves prediction accuracy while maintaining physical consistency. These results establish DeepSciReasoner as a reusable blueprint for structured scientific spectrum prediction under hard physical constraints.
Yingheng Wang, Tao Yu, Shufeng Kong, Francesco Ricci, John M. Gregoire, Carla P. Gomes

BriLLM-MetaPred: A Representation-Prediction Unity Language Model with Adaptive Self-Measurement

1 día 4 horas ago
arXiv:2610.34018v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present BriLLM-MetaPred, the first engineering implementation of the MetaPred machine-learning framework established by a mathematical theory of AGI, instantiated for language modeling. The theory argues that MetaPred is both necessary and sufficient as a machine-learning primitive for general cognition. Taking this theoretical conclusion as a design premise, we report an implementation of the primitive for language modeling. A single continuously evolving dynamical state serves as both the context representation and the state from which predictions are read out. Continuous measurement of its own state reduces finite-depth inconsistency, maintains internal consistency, and provides an endogenous dynamical self-supervision signal in fixed-point form. The single dynamical state of MetaPred intrinsically couples training and inference. MetaPred therefore exhibits symmetry across almost all key elements of machine learning, an intuitive and observable property of the mathematical optimum over the space of all machine-learning paradigms. BriLLM-MetaPred is neither another recurrent language model nor an extension of BriLLM. It provides a bridge between two prior contributions: the construction and motivation of the MetaPred primitive provided by AGI theory, and the SiFu learning paradigm provided by BriLLM (Zhao et al., 2025). The latter's node-signal-flow design enables the primitive to run on available software and hardware accelerators. Our implementation of BriLLM-MetaPred achieves predictive performance comparable to a GPT baseline of the same size. This provides initial evidence for the engineering feasibility of the MetaPred framework established by the mathematical theory of AGI. MetaPred is the first machine-learning paradigm derived entirely from mathematical theory rather than assembled and incrementally improved through human design---and perhaps the last such paradigm.
Junyuan Liu, Hongyue Lin, Jiale Hong, Yi Zhao, Hai Zhao

Steering the Teacher: Improving On-Policy Self-Distillation for Thinking Models

1 día 4 horas ago
arXiv:2610.34005v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) trains a student on its own reasoning trajectories using token-level supervision from a reference-conditioned teacher initialized from the same model. However, access to the reference can induce teacher behaviors that undermine independent reasoning in thinking models, leading to reference hallucinations, where the student cites an unavailable reference to justify reasoning steps, and reconsideration suppression, where the teacher discourages verification and revision at uncertain steps. We introduce Steered-Teacher OPSD (ST-OPSD) to jointly address these failure modes through activation steering. ST-OPSD extracts two directions from model-generated reasoning trajectories and applies them to the teacher's hidden states during distillation target computation, suppressing reference-invoking behavior and encouraging reconsideration with marker-family calibration. The student learns from the resulting teacher distributions without being steered. Experiments on AIME and HMMT show that ST-OPSD improves accuracy over vanilla OPSD and other interventions while restoring reconsideration and reference-hallucination rates to base-model levels.
Tiejin Chen, Xiaoou Liu, Hanyang Chen, Hua Wei

Hierarchical Cooperative GFlowNets

1 día 4 horas ago
arXiv:2610.33968v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) are trained to sample objects from compositional spaces with probability proportional to a reward function, but ineffective exploration can cause learned samplers to concentrate on a few high-reward regions. An intuitive remedy is to train multiple GFlowNets independently in parallel and combine their samples. However, this does not prevent multiple models from collapsing onto the same high-reward areas, leaving large regions of the state space unexplored. With this in mind, we propose Hierarchical Cooperative GFlowNets (HCG), an approach that dynamically partitions the search space to coordinate discovery without relying on hand-crafted boundaries. HCG imposes an ordering in which the highest-ranked model may explore the entire space, while lower-ranked models are progressively pushed toward regions not covered by higher-ranked ones. We provide a theoretical characterization of how specific learning objectives can shift probability mass away from designated areas, instantiating this mechanism within our architecture. A shared classifier coordinates the hierarchy by partitioning the search space, keeping the GFlowNets independently parameterized and enabling asynchronous training. Furthermore, we derive a normalizer-weighted aggregation rule for the ensemble and prove that it recovers the target reward-proportional distribution under the stated assumptions. Finally, experiments across multimodal distributions, sequence generation, combinatorial optimization, and biological sequence design show that HCG improves mode coverage and target approximation, translating increases in the number of coordinated samplers into broader, complementary exploration.
Pedro Dall'Antonia, Juan Belieni, Ana Carolina Erthal, Saullo H. G. de Oliveira, Eliezer de Souza da Silva, Diego Mesquita

QECGBERT: A Scalable ECG Foundation Model Based on Self-Supervised Language Learning via VQ-VAE Waveform Tokenization

1 día 4 horas ago
arXiv:2610.33964v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI foundation models play a pivotal role in advancing heart disease diagnosis from electrocardiogram (ECG) data, particularly for rare diseases where the lack of sufficient labeled data hinders supervised learning. However, most self-supervised learning methods treat ECGs as generic sequence or image data without exploiting underlying physiological structure. To address this limitation, we propose QECGBERT, a self-supervised ECG language model that explicitly encodes physiological semantics by tokenizing the P, QRS, T, and isoelectric background waveforms. Vector-quantized variational autoencoder (VQ-VAE) tokenization is applied to each 12-lead ECG, with tokens enriched by continuous waveform features to preserve morphology lost during quantization without increasing sequence length. This design enables compact BERT masked language modeling with short sequences, improving scalability and reducing computational cost relative to long-sequence approaches. QECGBERT applies BERT pre-training to the MIMIC-IV dataset containing over 800,000 unlabeled ECG recordings, and fine-tuning on labeled PTB-XL, CPSC2018, and Chapman--Shaoxing--Ningbo datasets for evaluation. The results demonstrate that QECGBERT achieves comparable or superior performance to published benchmarks, offering a scalable, physiologically aware approach to ECG foundation modeling for cardiac diagnosis.
Aruna Mohan, Burcu Ozek, Or Zilbershot, Fatemeh Afghah