Sign-based methods reduce communication costs in distributed environments, but aggregating local signs can introduce bias when data are heterogeneous. As a result, existing sign-based variance reduction methods fail to obtain the optimal convergence rates. In this paper, we solve this problem and obtain optimal rates for both nonconvex stochastic and finite-sum optimization. We first give a counterexample showing that majority voting can fail to approach stationary points even with exact local gradients. Motivated by this limitation, we propose tracking the global gradient at the server through unbiased compression of recursive gradient increments. As a result, we can obtain the convergence rates of O({d/K}+d (a/(nK))^{1/3}) for the _1-norm and O({a/K}+a/(nK)^{1/3}) for the _2-norm. Here, K is the iteration number, n is the number of workers, d is the dimension, and a=1+ω, with ω denoting the compressor's relative variance. For finite-sum problems with M components, we combine periodic exact gradient refreshes with compressed component-gradient differences. The resulting total sample complexities are O(M+d{aM}ε^{-2}) and O(M+aM\ epsilon^{-2}) for _1 and _2 gradient norms at most ε, matching the corresponding bounds in centralized settings.
Quantum neural networks (QNNs) are typically built from variational quantum circuits (VQCs), which are limited by local measurements. Adaptive non-local observables (ANO) address this by jointly optimizing circuit parameters and multi-qubit measurements. However, existing ANO-based VQCs learn only a single static observable that remains invariant across all inputs. We propose QFWP-ANO, a novel architecture which employs a classical hypernetwork to dynamically program VQC parameters and/or non-local observables conditioned on each input. On multivariate time-series forecasting across four ETT datasets, QFWP-ANO achieves the lowest MSE in 16 of 20 settings and second-lowest in the remaining four, surpassing ANO-based and other strong baselines. On reinforcement learning tasks, QFWP-ANO consistently surpasses ANO-VQCs. Our results establish input-conditioned ANO as an effective approach for enhancing QNNs.
Warning: This paper contains examples of stereotypes and social bias. LLMs are increasingly used in interactive settings by the general public, making the evaluation of model behavior in multi-turn conversational scenarios important for safety, including stereotyping-related harms. However, existing multi-turn social bias evaluations often rely on pre-specified or template-based user inputs that do not adapt to model responses and typically assume a fixed dialogue length in advance. In this paper, we study social bias dynamics in response-conditioned multi-turn interactions using a controlled evaluation protocol that generates follow-up user queries from the evolving dialogue history and allows evaluation over variable numbers of turns. Experimental results show that LLMs exhibit social bias even in coherent, response-conditioned multi-turn interactions, revealing late-emerging bias, non-monotonic bias patterns, and bias re-emergence. These results motivate evaluations that extend beyond fixed-turn, pre-scripted protocols. Our findings highlight the importance of analyzing social bias as a turn-level dynamic phenomenon.
Fallacy-detection benchmarks pair fallacy classes with a single "valid" or "none" class that takes everything data collection did not label as a fallacy. This construction is misleading: a classifier can learn cues that do well on this class without learning to tell a fallacy from a correct argument. We show that the low false-positive rates benchmarks report are an artifact of how the class is built, not evidence of detection ability. The most informative negative for a fallacy is a correct argument using the same argumentation scheme, and such arguments are at most a few percent of the valid class across the four benchmarks we examined. Evaluated on constructed scheme-matched negatives, false-positive rates rise from 16.6% to 58.9% on CoCoLoFa and from 5.7% to 62.0% on Reddit. That rate depends on how the negatives are written, so we also compare two conditions from the same pipeline that differ only in scheme identity. Classifiers label scheme-matched negatives as the source fallacy type 40.9 points more often than wrong-scheme negatives, which are instead identified as the scheme they actually use 85.9% of the time against 0.4% for the source type. The classifier has learned which scheme an argument uses, not whether it uses it correctly, and on the benchmarks' own test sets the two are indistinguishable. The same dissociation appears in three zero-shot LLM detectors that never saw these benchmarks, and the measurement is far lower on a negative class that was built deliberately. We release the items as Scheme Foils. A reported false-positive rate should not be trusted as a measure of detection until the valid class has been audited for scheme-matched coverage.
Large language models (LLMs) often suffer from capability stagnation in self-improvement training because fixed difficulty levels fail to adapt to their evolving proficiency. To address this issue, we propose STRETCH (Self-Taught Reasoning Evolution via Targeted CHallenge), a unified framework inspired by cognitive scaffolding theory. STRETCH introduces a dynamic Stretch Zone mechanism that continuously aligns question difficulty with the model's solving capability. Within a single parameter space, the model alternates between a Scaffolder that generates adaptive, boundary-pushing challenges and a Learner that that optimizes its solving trajectories through reinforcement learning. This dual-loop co-evolution effectively stabilizes training, mitigates reward hacking and promote progressive reasoning growth. Experiments on both negotiation and operation research benchmarks demonstrate that STRETCH consistently outperforms strong prompting and domain-specific baselines. Further scaffolder configuration analysis shows that dynamic difficulty alignment is critical for sustained capability improvement and synchronized reasoning evolution.
Emergency management assistance programs, such as relief distribution, are essential for delivering necessary supplies to affected communities. However, these programs operate in a decentralized network of local centers that face uncertain local demand and supply dynamics, resulting in inconsistent avail- ability of local services. Redistribution of supplies among these local centers reduces these imbalances, but the centers often make decisions independently, with limited information and disrupted transportation. This study develops CoRe-MARL, a cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) framework, by formulating a decentralized partially observable Markov decision process (Dec-POMDP). We treat each center as an agent that learns a redistribution policy to improve the service in the worst-case region and reduce the service gap across regions while protecting network-wide service. We incorporate a recurrent network that captures evolving supply and demand dynamics without direct observation, while multi-agent proximal policy optimization (MAPPO) enables centralized training and decentralized execution (CTDE). We evaluate the framework in a simulated environment with diverse trajectories, where exact dynamics are not observed by actors and the MAPPO critic. We compare the recurrent MAPPO with the recurrent independent PPO (IPPO) and a local only heuristic, and find that MAPPO reduces the service gap across local centers and enhances service for the worst-served center while maintaining competitive network-wide service. The recurrent MAPPO also shows consistent performance across diverse trajectory patterns, demonstrating its ability to adapt to evolving dynamics. The findings demonstrate the capability of cooperative learning for decentralized redistribution and improving equitable service under uncertain and evolving dynamics.
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Video streaming dominates global internet traffic, yet conventional pipelines remain inefficient for structured, human-centric content such as sports, performance, or interactive media. Standard codecs re-encode entire frames, foreground and background alike, treating all pixels uniformly and ignoring the semantic structure of the scene. This leads to significant bandwidth waste, particularly in scenarios where backgrounds are static and motion is constrained to a few salient actors. We introduce GenStream, a semantic streaming framework that replaces dense video frames with compact, structured metadata. Instead of transmitting pixels, GenStream encodes each scene as a combination of skeletal keypoints, camera viewpoint parameters, and a static 3D background model. These elements are transmitted to the client, where a generative model reconstructs photorealistic human figures and composites them into the 3D scene from the original viewpoint. This paradigm enables extreme compression, achieving over 99.9% bandwidth reduction compared to HEVC for the continuous data stream. We partially validate GenStream on Olympic figure skating footage and demonstrate potential for high perceptual fidelity under minimal data. While acknowledging the significant computational costs shifted to the client and challenges in generalization, GenStream opens new directions in volumetric avatar synthesis, canonical 3D actor fusion across views, and personalized viewing experiences, laying the groundwork for scalable, intelligent streaming in the post-codec era.
Classifiers can make identical predictions yet require labels to compare their selective performance: confidence ranks weight the same errors differently. We quantify this requirement for the area under the generalized risk-coverage curve (AUGRC). A prelabel lower bound rules out insufficient budgets. With all labels known, a covering linear program bounds the minimum number of labels sufficient to fix the winner (the certificate size) within K-1 labels for K candidates. For fixed K, independent uniform orders and identical predictions, the prelabel bound approaches one quarter of the pool. With iid Bernoulli errors independent of the orders, every exact acquisition policy reads almost all labels asymptotically, although a two-candidate certificate needs only half. Across 108 feature-panel comparisons on nine datasets, disagreement labels settle every accuracy choice but no AUGRC choice. A 20% budget is ruled out in 96 conditions; certificates need 56-57% on average. On ten conditions with pretrained image classifiers, confidence-score choice reads 68-91% of 10,000 labels for exact selection and 50-67% with AUGRC tolerance 510^{-4}. An exact stopping test works with any acquisition order. Together, these results link confidence ranks to label budgets and certified model comparison.
New text-generation model. Tags: glm_moe_dsa, text-generation, abliterated, uncensored, warlock, audn, GLM-5.3, conversational
Subspace methods such as multiple signal classification (MUSIC) achieve super-resolution direction of arrival (DoA) estimation by exploiting the orthogonality between the array manifold and the noise subspace of the measurements. Their accuracy therefore depends on the assumed manifold and degrades under model mismatch, while parameters not identifiable from the spatial manifold cannot be recovered. In this work, we propose the conditional neural manifold (CNM), which replaces the fixed manifold with an observation-conditioned mapping from source parameters to steering vectors. An encoder maps the snapshots to a latent scene representation that conditions a zero-initialized neural field over the parameter space. The manifold is learned without steering-vector supervision by shaping the resulting MUSIC landscape. Since the correction acts on the manifold rather than on the estimator, it can be used by other manifold-based methods without modification. The CNM restores resolution under array imperfections, colored noise, correlated sources, and near-field propagation, and resolves the angle-frequency ambiguity inherent to the nominal spatial manifold.
We analyze the learned input-output behavior of GLU-based neurons in large language models (LLMs). We propose a simple analysis method: For each neuron, we compute the cosine similarities between its input (reading) and output (writing) weight vectors. In this scheme, a strong negative cosine similarity indicates the neuron weakens the direction it detects in the residual stream, so we call this a weakening neuron. This allows us to gain a number of novel insights. First, we show that nine different LLMs have similar patterns: weakening neurons appear mostly in late layers whereas their counterparts, (conditional) strengthening neurons, are frequent in early-middle layers. Second, we find that weakening neurons display surprising behavior: even though there are few, they activate often and have a large influence on model behavior. Third, weakening neurons have a strong effect on model output when gate values are negative -- which is surprising since negative gate values are not expected to encode functionality.
Classical dynamic programming represents optimal sequential decisions through value functions and policies. While this functional representation is natural for computing optimal decisions, it does not directly identify the mathematical object governing policy reconstruction, representation complexity, or oracle-query complexity once an optimal policy is fixed. This paper addresses this question by developing a geometric theory of structured optimal policies in which the decision-boundary geometry induced by the policy becomes the primary object of analysis. We show that, under suitable structural regularity conditions, this geometry provides the minimal representation required for policy reconstruction and determines the statistical and computational complexity of the reconstruction problem. Building upon this representation, we establish structural properties of policy-induced decision geometry, introduce intrinsic notions of boundary and decision complexity, derive information-theoretic measures of decision compression, and obtain statistical guarantees for boundary estimation and policy reconstruction from black-box policy queries. Collectively, these results demonstrate that, for the structured decision problems considered here, the complexity of policy reconstruction is governed by the geometry of the decision boundary rather than by the cardinality of the ambient state space. Controlled numerical experiments examine the principal theoretical predictions and provide empirical evidence consistent with the proposed framework.
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