Multitask Interactions in Recurrent Dynamics across 100 Cognitive Tasks

1 día 5 horas ago
arXiv:2610.33926v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The brain continually learns tasks with very different computational demands. Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have been used as dynamical surrogates for studying task solutions, with recent work extending this approach to joint training on multitask batteries. However, it remains unclear how tasks interact as these batteries grow in scale and heterogeneity: under what conditions do they transfer or interfere with one another, and how do these effects relate to task complexity and model structure? We study this question by simultaneously training hierarchical Almost-Linear RNNs (AL-RNNs) on 100 tasks spanning a wide range of cognitive demands. AL-RNNs allow us to vary the amount of nonlinearity in the recurrence, while hierarchical task features provide a low-dimensional interface for task-specific adaptation within shared dynamics. On this task battery, performance improves with both nonlinear capacity and task-feature dimensionality, with the joint hierarchical model outperforming both individually trained models and a single unstructured joint model. Many tasks are individually solvable with linear dynamics, yet cannot be solved together by a shared linear model. Through hierarchical task features, task-specific linear region usage, and task geometry, the trained model provides several related but distinct measures of task similarity that capture how computations are separated and combined within the shared backbone. Across a series of experiments, we relate these representations to individual task complexity, joint solvability, pairwise transfer learning, and leave-one-out adaptation. Together, our experiments characterize task interactions in multitask recurrent learning while demonstrating both the potential and the challenges of reusable dynamical backbones for cognitive computation.
S\'ilvia Garc\'ia-Hern\'andez, Leema Hamid, Manuel Brenner

Rank-1 Weight-Corrected Trainable Weight Averaging for Out-of-Distribution Detection

1 día 5 horas ago
arXiv:2610.33909v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection identifies inputs outside the training distribution. Rank-based analyses such as RankFeat and RankWeight suggest that OOD overconfidence is closely related to dominant low-rank components in feature and weight spaces. Since weight averaging operates directly in parameter space and improves model generalization, we consider it for OOD detection from a dominant-component perspective. Trainable Weight Averaging (TWA) assigns a single coefficient to each checkpoint, limiting independent control of dominant weight components. We extend TWA with leading rank-one weight components extracted by Singular Value Decomposition as correction directions, whose contributions are learned through the in-distribution classification objective. On ResNet50, our method improves over fine-tuning and standard TWA across the evaluated datasets with MSP and RankWeight, both with and without Outlier Exposure. Mahalanobis-based evaluation yields mixed results, indicating that the benefit depends on the OOD scoring protocol. Target-layer analyses with MSP and Energy favor correction near the classifier.
Akito Shinohara, Hiroaki Aizawa

Counterfactual Test-Time Augmentation for Shortcut Removal in Language Models

1 día 5 horas ago
arXiv:2610.33904v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can exploit shortcuts, i.e., correlations present in training data that may not hold at test time. This can lead to poor predictions when correlations shift. Most existing solutions for removing shortcuts operate at training time, requiring labeled training data, model weight access, and significant computational resources. Here, we study the problem of test-time shortcut removal. We propose a family of counterfactual test-time augmentation (CTTA) methods: given an example, each method uses an auxiliary model to generate counterfactual edits in which the shortcut value is changed, and then takes a weighted average of the LLM's predictions across these edits. We prove that the optimal shortcut-invariant predictor is a member of this CTTA family, and we characterize its weights. The weights depend on the training distribution, and therefore are, in general, not identifiable from the trained model and unlabeled test data. However, we present assumptions under which the weights can be obtained using the token probabilities of the trained LLM, and propose tests to detect violations of these assumptions. We use these tests to develop Select-CTTA, an aggregate method that selects among CTTA methods. Empirically, we find that Select-CTTA outperforms test-time baselines and approaches the performance of models fine-tuned on shortcut-balanced data.
Katie Matton, Rosalind W. Picard, John Guttag, Maggie Makar

Intervention-Certified Amplification: A Validity Gate for $\sigma$-Weighted Post-Training

1 día 5 horas ago
arXiv:2610.33882v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hybrid post-training often mixes supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL), using training-side signals to set each sample's balance. Such signals characterize the anchor data and policy, but not whether the emphasized behavior helps in the target task and evaluation setting. This mismatch can reactivate and amplify pretrained behavior even after its literal form is removed from supervision. We demonstrate this with DIAA (Dual-Implicit Adversarial Amplification), a per-sample $\sigma$-weighted SFT/RL hybrid. With all literal Python fences removed from its anchor, DIAA emits unexecuted Tool-Integrated Reasoning (TIR) on $29%$ of MATH-500 prompts, three times vanilla GRPO. Paired interventions show $10.6$ percentage points of accuracy recovery when TIR is suppressed and comparable contributions from SFT imitation and $\sigma$-amplification; a student trained on a $0%$-TIR teacher anchor emits it at $45.8%$. Intervention-Certified Amplification (ICA) gates $\sigma$ with paired-rollout target evidence. Frozen and online ICA reduce TIR to $13.8%$ and $11.2%$, halve residual drag, improve accuracy from $47.5%$ to $48.7%$ and $49.3%$, and transfer to held-out GSM8K without retuning.
Leiyue Chen, Meng Wei, Xuefeng Hu, Wei Liu

FlashScript: Compiling Recurring Agent Workflows into Reusable Neuro-Symbolic Programs

1 día 5 horas ago
arXiv:2610.33876v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many agent tasks recur with new data or small changes, yet agents regenerate their reasoning and actions on each run, producing different results. Distilling a prior run into a skill helps the agent avoid earlier mistakes, but it still re-runs the full process each time, so runs can vary and incur that cost. We compile a successful agent run into a reusable neuro-symbolic program (NSP) with a set of guidelines we call FlashScript. Actions and data transformations become code, instance-specific values become parameters, and decisions that need model judgment become LLM calls. We identify three layers where these calls belong and three techniques that replace most of them with code. The compilation does not remove nondeterminism; it localizes it, so the deterministic program and its neural calls can be reviewed and tested separately. Across 120 WorkBench analytics tasks with Claude Haiku 4.5, the NSPs were correct and made identical tool calls on every run, using about 70 times fewer input tokens and a third of the runtime of a skill-guided agent whose runs were inconsistent. In a composite version of the tasks, the skill-guided agent's accuracy fell to 23%, and its output inconsistency increased, while the NSPs remained correct and identical across all runs. The NSPs successfully generalized to all 108 unseen instances of the same templates. Our findings suggest that NSPs from agent trajectories can be considered cumulative software assets for end-users to test, maintain, and reuse in their recurring workflows.
Sadra Sabouri, Hosein Hasanbeig, Adam Sage, Shreya Sinha, Cale Darling, Ashish Tiwari, Katie Garms, Souti Chattopadhyay, Sumit Gulwani

EEGBiFormer: Real-Time EEG Attention Classification via Hybrid CNN-Transformer with EEG-Informed Auditory Protocol Validation

1 día 5 horas ago
arXiv:2610.33832v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sustained attention is critical for academic performance, yet existing auditory support tools are static and not grounded in real-time neural evidence. This paper presents EEGBiFormer, a hybrid CNN-Transformer model for realtime binary classification of attention states, focus versus nonfocus, from 16-channel EEG signals. A custom analog front-end acquisition board was designed and built to collect a task-based EEG dataset. Before model training, spectral and connectivity analysis, using Power Spectral Density and Phase Locking Value, confirmed distinct neural signatures between attention states, providing physiological grounding for the classification approach. EEGBiFormer achieved 91.3 percent window-level validation accuracy with an F1 score of 94.5 percent, and 88.2 percent recording-level accuracy across 17 independent sessions. End-to-end system latency was measured below 100 ms, supporting real-time responsiveness. The trained model was further used to objectively rank auditory stimuli by focus-state confidence, yielding EEG-informed audio protocols. In a paired within-subject behavioral study with 37 participants, these protocols produced a statistically significant 20 percent improvement in composite attention scores over silent controls, with a medium-to-large effect size. This work demonstrates a complete pipeline from custom EEG hardware through neural signal analysis, deep learning classification, and evidence-based auditory protocol design.
Isabella Guan

Adapting DNNs to Embrace Voltage Scaling Induced Errors via Accumulation-Aware Quantization

1 día 5 horas ago
arXiv:2610.33824v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The pervasive deployment of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) across the computing spectrum has brought growing attention to energy efficiency, alongside raw performance. While voltage scaling is a potent knob for power reduction, its application in next-generation nodes is hampered by severe throughput degradation and susceptibility to process variation. This work aims to address these energy-reliability trade-offs by introducing a hardware-software co-design methodology, based on the observation that timing-robust bit ranges within the accumulator of a systolic array vary significantly across different voltage-frequency operating points. At the software level, we propose an Accumulation-Aware Training approach that incorporates this information as a first-order optimization constraint during training. By integrating mixed-precision quantization with unstructured pruning, we effectively constrain the model's weight distribution to avoid activating the hardware's sensitized high-rank carry chains. At the architectural level, we complement this with selective MSB-masking and fine-grained clock-gating to minimize unnecessary dynamic switching activity. Furthermore, we employ a layer-wise Dynamic Frequency Scaling strategy to further adapt to the accumulator's reduced dynamic range, based on the numerical sensitivity of each layer. We experimentally evaluate the proposed solution on a deep scaled 2nm technology node and demonstrate that, when operating at a low-voltage frontier, our co-optimized post-layout architecture delivers substantial energy and energy-delay product gains of 39% and 23% respectively, relative to the nominal voltage implementation, while maintaining accuracy degradation within 1%.
Alexis Maras, Panagiotis Chaidos, Georgios Alexandris, Dimitrios Soudris, Sotirios Xydis

Learning What to Share: Expert Specialization for Time-Series Forecasting

1 día 5 horas ago
arXiv:2610.33822v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A central challenge in multivariate forecasting is deciding what to share across channels and where to specialize. Mixture-of-experts models offer flexible sharing, yet it remains unclear how much of their forecasting gains comes from added capacity or expert allocation. Through controlled comparisons across eleven datasets and three backbones, we show that informative channel assignments improve forecasting beyond matched shared capacity and random allocation. On frozen transformer backbones, persistent channel-specific mixtures outperform input-dependent routing on average. To examine when and how much specialization helps, we introduce GalaxyTS, a controlled synthetic dataset with exact shared and channel-specific forecasting references. It reveals how persistent channel mixtures exploit predictive differences concealed by short input windows and measures gains over matched shared corrections. These insights motivate Persistent Closed-Form Routing (PCR), a plug-and-play method that alternates exact conditional estimation of channel-specific mixture weights with gradient-based training of low-rank residual experts around a frozen pretrained forecaster. Averaged over four forecasting horizons, PCR-K4 achieves dataset-balanced mean squared error reductions of 3.86-14.25% relative to the three frozen backbones. In matched comparisons, PCR outperforms competing specialization methods on average while requiring substantially fewer trainable parameters.
Bashar Khoury, Shadi Omari, Assaf Schuster

Memory or a Clock? Auditing a Memory Advantage in XLand-MiniGrid with Seeds, Maps and Evaluation Noise Apart

1 día 5 horas ago
arXiv:2610.33816v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On a partially observable XLand-MiniGrid task, an LSTM agent beats a memory-free MLP by 25 percentage points. The gap looks like a clear case of memory. We ask two questions about it. First, how much of a measured gap is noise? Separating training seed, map and evaluation randomness in 60 runs, each re-evaluated three times, we find that about ten paired seeds detect a 10-point gap in final success. The binary "task acquired" verdict, a common summary of learning curves, is 76% evaluation noise and would need about a hundred seeds for the same gap. Second, is the gap memory? On a sealed panel of new maps, opened once, a memory-free MLP of the LSTM's size comes within 3.3 points of the LSTM when it is given the time step, and gains no measurable benefit from its width without it. With the time step, an MLP a quarter of the LSTM's size, and the LSTM with its state erased at every step, also come within about 5 points. A linear probe reads the time step from the trained LSTM's state. On this task, most of the apparent memory advantage is an advantage of knowing the time, which matters because episodes are cut at a fixed limit and the reward shrinks with time. We recommend giving memory-free baselines the time step, and we release the protocol, the event-driven tooling and every checkpoint.
Rodrigo Reveron-Fonseca

ProMo3D: Probing Motion Cues in Frozen 3D Foundation Models

1 día 5 horas ago
arXiv:2610.33802v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Feed-forward 3D foundation models have recently reshaped multi-view reconstruction, yet dynamic 4D understanding still often relies on large-scale motion supervision or hand-crafted, architecture-specific heuristics. We ask whether frozen 3D foundation model tokens already encode motion-relevant information that can be exposed by lightweight readout functions, rather than re-learning motion-specific features with high-capacity decoders. Through probing on three representative backbones, we find that static--dynamic separation is decodable from frozen token representations. Our rank-restricted and spectral analyses on $\pi^3$X reveal that the recovered motion cues are concentrated in a low-dimensional subspace. Building on this, we propose Probing-based Motion Distillation (PMD), which converts pairwise motion-state compatibility scores against a fixed anchor token into dense motion masks. Trained on only 160 YouTube-VOS videos using a single 16 GB GPU, PMD transfers zero-shot to DAVIS, SegTrackv2, and FBMS-59 without target-benchmark fine-tuning. With multi-view pretrained geometric backbones, PMD outperforms training-free heuristics and approaches substantially heavier supervised and self-supervised methods, suggesting that motion decoding from frozen 3D foundation models can be lightweight and data-efficient.
Xiaoang Zhang, Mert Kiray, Yordanka Velikova, Manoj Biswanath, Benjamin Busam