📄 Notable* Recent AI/ML arXiv Papers

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📄 Train Where the Quantized Model Goes: On-Policy Distillation for Low-Bit Reasoning
🗓️ Published: 9/22/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26708v1
👥 Authors: Yuanteng Chen, Zhilei Liu, Peisong Wang, Yuantian Shao, Chuangyi Li, Weining Wang, Shuang Qiu, Gang Li (possible past Tsinghua University affiliation), Jing Liu (possible past Baidu (China) affiliation), Jian Cheng
Abstract

Quantization-aware distillation (QAD) restores much of the short-form question-answering performance lost to sub-3-bit quantization, yet leaves mathematical and code reasoning substantially impaired. Long generations often degenerate into repetitive loops, exhausting the decoding budget without completing a solution. We trace this gap to quantization-amplified exposure bias: QAD trains on fixed corpus prefixes, while quantization-induced deviations compound along the model's own autoregressive t...

📄 QuantWM: Temporally Consistent 2-Bit KV Cache Quantization for World Models and Video Generation
🗓️ Published: 9/22/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26425v1
👥 Authors: Jiaqi Zhao, Xiaobin Hu (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation), Bo Yin, Junpeng Jiang, Miao Zhang (possible past Stanford University affiliation), Shuicheng Yan (possible past National University Of Singapore affiliation)
Abstract

KV cache memory has become a major deployment bottleneck for video generation and world models, which motivates low-bit quantization study for efficiency. Existing 2-bit KV cache quantization methods can achieve nearly lossless performance on video benchmarks such as VBench, however, we find that they still cause severe temporal flickering and visual degradation. Meanwhile, deeper investigates show that Key quantization produces smaller reconstruction errors than Value, but surprisingly leads to...

📄 PACT: From Credit Assignment to Critic Alignment
🗓️ Published: 9/22/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26355v1
👥 Authors: Jiayan Fu, Hang Xu, Yong Zhang (possible past Tsinghua University affiliation), Zhaokai Luo, Yao Hu, Dongyan Zhao (possible past Peking University affiliation), Mu Chuan
Abstract

Reinforcement learning has become a central component of large language model (LLM) post-training, yet token-level credit lacks a generally accepted mathematical definition, leaving its relationship to commonly used training signals unclear. We formulate three regularity conditions, namely Completeness, Prefix Consistency, and Neutrality, and prove that they uniquely determine token-level credit. This characterization provides a unified basis for explaining phenomena across existing algorithms a...

📄 TriWorldBench: A Tri-View Consistency Perspective on Embodied World Models
🗓️ Published: 9/22/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26314v1
👥 Authors: Xuanyi Liu, Haofeng Wang, Ruiqi Li (possible past Tsinghua University affiliation), Danni Yu, Rui Wan, Ruixu Zhang, Siyu Tao, Xue Yang, Shaofeng Zhang, Zicheng Zhang, Jiaqi Zhang, Siwei Ma (possible past Peking University affiliation)
Abstract

Embodied world models predict the outcomes of robot actions to support learning and planning. For robots equipped with head and wrist cameras, this requires complementary views: the head view captures the overall task, while wrist views reveal local gripper-object interactions. However, evaluating these views independently cannot determine whether they describe the same action and object state. We introduce TRIWORLDBENCH, a benchmark for evaluating embodied world models through synchronized head...

📄 Lightweight Ranking Heads: Accelerating Multi-Task Experimentation in Production Recommender Systems
🗓️ Published: 9/21/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25433v1
👥 Authors: Sanjay Surendranath Girija, Aniruddh Nath (possible past Google (United States) affiliation), Li Wei (possible past Google (United States) affiliation), Yanhao Jiang, Shawn Andrews (possible past Google (United States) affiliation), Lukasz Heldt (possible past Google (United States) affiliation), Yi Wu (possible past University Of California, Berkeley affiliation), Aditya Mahajan, Mohit Sharma
Abstract

Modern production-scale recommender systems rely on complex, multi-task ranking models. Introducing new prediction tasks into these massive systems often causes bottlenecks - it risks negative task conflicts with existing tasks, and can lead to long development and experimentation cycles due to the expensive retraining of backbone models and downstream models or tuning of reward combination formulas. To address the critical challenge of slow experimentation velocity, we introduce the Lightweight...

📄 Predictive Uncertainty for Neural CAE Surrogates
🗓️ Published: 9/21/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25430v1
👥 Authors: Kaustubh Tangsali (possible past Nvidia (United States) affiliation), Mohammad Amin Nabian (possible past Nvidia (United States) affiliation), Kelvin Lee, Carmelo Gonzales, Sanjay Choudhry (possible past Nvidia (United States) affiliation)
Abstract

Neural surrogates can substantially accelerate computer-aided engineering (CAE) workflows, but their use in design requires uncertainty estimates that remain meaningful across varying geometries, spatial prediction fields, and engineering quantities of interest. We investigate how established uncertainty quantification (UQ) approaches behave when adapted to geometry-conditioned neural surrogates. We compare one closed-form and two sampling-based approaches-a Gaussian process (GP)-based method, c...

📄 GameHorizon Suite: Multi-Horizon Data and Evaluation in Gameplay
🗓️ Published: 9/21/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25001v1
👥 Authors: Yiran Wang, Xingyilang Yin, Junfu Pu, Guangzhi Wang, Kaifeng Li, Mingyu Ouyang, Huiqiang Sun, Lingen Li, Cheng Cheng, Wangbo Yu, Honghao Chen, Xiaodong Cun (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation), Chi-Man Pun, Zhiguo Cao, Ying Shan (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation)
Abstract

Modern video games provide a measurable testbed for AI models, combining abilities of visual understanding, instruction decomposition, goal planning, and precise action control over multiple temporal horizons. Existing datasets and benchmarks, however, either cover a narrow range of games, lack language instructions, or rely on high-variance online rollouts. To address these challenges, we introduce GameHorizon, a unified data and evaluation suite that measures gameplay capabilities at different...

📄 DexTacWAM: A Visuo-Tactile World-Action Model for Dexterous Manipulation
🗓️ Published: 9/21/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24976v1
👥 Authors: Haoran Yuan, Zekai Wang, Boning Shao, Haoran Lu, Trevor Darrell (possible past University Of California, Berkeley affiliation), Ismini Lourentzou, Wei Zhan (possible past University Of California, Berkeley affiliation)
Abstract

Dexterous manipulation depends on contact dynamics that are often only partially observable from vision. Recent World-Action Models (WAMs) couple predictive video world modeling with action generation, but remain largely vision-centric and therefore cannot directly model these contact dynamics. We present DexTacWAM, a visuo-tactile WAM that encodes each fingertip independently, aggregates the resulting features through a finger- and pose-aware tactile compressor, and injects the tactile latent i...

📄 RRSI: Regularized Recursive Self-Improvement of Agent Harnesses
🗓️ Published: 9/21/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24972v1
👥 Authors: Peng Xia, Rujun Han, Zifeng Wang, Yanfei Chen, Yufan Zhang, Yoonho Lee, Chengsong Huang, Han Yu, Zhongying Cuizhu, Yifei Ming, Huaxiu Yao, Burak Gokturk, Tomas Pfister (possible past University Of Oxford affiliation), Chen-Yu Lee (possible past Google (United States) affiliation)
Abstract

An LLM agent's capability is largely magnified by its harness, namely the prompts, control flow, tooling, memory, and context management surrounding the frozen backbone model. Recent methods increasingly automate this process by iteratively proposing and selecting component-wise edits of an agent harness, practically establishing a form of recursive self-improvement (RSI) at the agent-system level. However, such recursive evolution may overfit by memorizing the training tasks, showing large in-d...

📄 X-Planner: Event-Structured Task Planning for Embodied Intelligence
🗓️ Published: 9/21/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25187v1
👥 Authors: Howard Lu, Shalfun Li, Porter Pan, Cris, Lumen, Cyril, Eric Hu, Lily Li, Maeve Zhang, Robert Wang (possible past Meta (United States) affiliation), Kz Zheng, Viggo Chen, Tim Ding, Regsis Cheng, Yj Xiao, Kian, Hai Lin, Alan Song, Elise Ma, Gody Li, Victor Yao, Yohann Tang, Ingrid Yu, Jason He, James Wang, Ryan Yu, Ping Yang, Chris Pan, Vincent Chen, Roy Gan, Hao Wang (possible past Tsinghua University affiliation), Qian Wang
Abstract

Task planning bridges high-level instructions and executable behavior in long-horizon manipulation, yet modern Vision-Language-Action (VLA) systems often leave this intermediate structure implicit. Existing chain-of-thought (CoT) planners also tend to rely on coarse task-level annotations or serialize long reasoning traces token by token. We present X-Planner, a planning front-end that addresses both the supervision and representation of embodied reasoning. Our planning data combine Ego, UMI, an...

📄 OSWorld-Pro: Process-based Evaluation for Computer Use Agents
🗓️ Published: 9/21/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24890v1
👥 Authors: Zhilin Wang, Shaokun Zhang, Yifan Zhang, Hao Zhang (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation), Jin Xu (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation), Binfeng Xu, Jian Hu, Yunheng Zou, Karan Sapra (possible past Nvidia (United States) affiliation), Andrew Tao (possible past Nvidia (United States) affiliation), Jan Kautz (possible past Nvidia (United States) affiliation), Yi Dong
Abstract

Evaluation of Computer-Use Agents (CUAs) is often limited to the final deliverables they create (at the end of hundreds of steps) and assessed with functional verifiers, as seen in OSWorld. However, such evaluation of end-state performance lacks transparency into how and why agents fail in various tasks, obfuscating critical insight for subsequent improvement. For instance, agents that err during keyboard inputs would require a different mitigation strategy from those that fail to precisely prov...

📄 Pinocchio: Fast Uncertainty Estimates for Black-Box Language Models
🗓️ Published: 9/21/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24881v2
👥 Authors: Kevin David Hayes, Arka Pal (possible past Google (United States) affiliation), Haosong Zhang, Tom Goldstein (possible past Meta (United States) affiliation), Micah Goldblum
Abstract

In high-stakes decision-making applications of large language models (LLMs), practitioners require not only accurate LLMs but also uncertainty estimates for their predictions. Existing approaches to uncertainty estimation for LLMs require access to log-probabilities output by the model or require fine-tuning access. However, many industrial LLM products use closed-source API models, and many such API models like GPT do not return log-probabilities and may not allow fine-tuning. We introduce Pino...

📄 MedRSI: Recursive Self-Improvement for Medical Agents via Clinically Aligned Self-Evolution
🗓️ Published: 9/21/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24838v1
👥 Authors: Junde Wu (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation), Jiayuan Zhu, Minghao Hu, Fenglin Liu (possible past Peking University affiliation), Jiazhen Pan
Abstract

Medical agents increasingly combine general reasoning models with specialized clinical tools, yet their capabilities remain largely fixed by what clinicians and engineers design before deployment. Recursive self-improvement (RSI) offers a different paradigm in which agents learn from their own failures and autonomously expand their capabilities, but directly applying RSI to medicine introduces fundamental safety challenges. We introduce MedRSI, the first recursive self-improvement framework for ...

📄 GTR: Gated Token Recurrence for Efficient Dense Prediction
🗓️ Published: 9/22/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26590v1
👥 Authors: Zhe Feng, Longfei Liu, Wei Liu (possible past Tsinghua University affiliation), Kai Chen (possible past Shanghai Jiao Tong University affiliation), Jiangjiang Kong, Wei Zhou, Yifeng Qian, Dexiong Chen, Xuanlong Yu, Xi Shen (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation)
Abstract

Self-attention-based vision backbones perform well on dense prediction, but the quadratic computational cost of global softmax attention limits their efficiency as image resolution increases. We introduce Gated Token Recurrence (GTR), a softmax-free recurrent vision backbone that combines gated linear attention, alternating spatial scan directions, and spatially enhanced SwiGLU blocks. GTR is distilled from a detection-specialized DINOv3 teacher using only final-layer patch-token alignment throu...

📄 HYDRA: Proactive Android Malware Drift Adaptation via Hierarchical Graph Contrastive Learning
🗓️ Published: 9/22/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26352v1
👥 Authors: Han Chen, Hanchen Wang (possible past University Of Cambridge affiliation), Hongmei Chen, Lu Qin, Wenjie Zhang, Ying Zhang (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation)
Abstract

Concept drift, driven by the rapid evolution of Android malware, severely degrades the performance of machine learning detectors. Current adaptation strategies are often reactive, responding only after performance has dropped and imposing a significant manual annotation burden, or they are proactive but rely on unstable adversarial training and incomplete, single-level graph representations. To overcome these limitations, we propose HYDRA (Hybrid Drift Adaptation), a proactive adaptation framewo...

📄 Targeted Review for AI-Assisted Biodiversity Surveys: Active Continuous-Score Occupancy Modeling
🗓️ Published: 9/22/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25657v1
👥 Authors: Timm Haucke, Lauren Harrell (possible past Google (United States) affiliation), Justin Kay, Mary Clapp, Sara Beery (possible past Microsoft (United States) affiliation)
Abstract

We increasingly use machine learning to label scientific datasets. The models we develop and deploy are improving all the time, but they are not and will likely never be perfect. Mistakes matter, as errors can propagate into our scientific understanding, particularly when systematically biased. Very reasonably, scientists thus review substantial proportions of ML-generated labels to verify or correct mistakes in pursuit of ensuring their scientific findings are not biased by ML. In this work, we...

📄 Matryoshka attribution: Learning to attribute language model outputs to representations and weights
🗓️ Published: 9/22/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25518v1
👥 Authors: Aryaman Arora, Kirill Acharya, Nathan Hu, Yanzhe Zhang, Noah Goodman, Dan Jurafsky (possible past Stanford University affiliation), Christopher Potts (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation)
Abstract

Attributing language model outputs to their internal computations is an open problem in interpretability. Existing methods, which use causal interventions, gradients, or learnable masks, either are infeasibly expensive or struggle to identify actual causally-important internal computations. We propose framing attribution as the problem of identifying nested subsets of internal components which minimise a downstream loss. To learn this task, we introduce Matryoshka Attribution (MAttr), a mask lea...

📄 Continuous Optimization for p-adic Models
🗓️ Published: 9/21/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25501v1
👥 Authors: Julian Salazar, Dimitri Kanevsky, Matt Harvey, Pascal Getreuer (possible past Google (United States) affiliation), Lucas Dixon (possible past Google (United States) affiliation)
Abstract

We present the first method for native, continuous gradient descent for machine learning models with $p$-adic parameters. Existing native optimizers are discrete, mostly combinatorial searches, as the $p$-adic numbers $\mathbb{Q}_p$ are totally disconnected, with standard losses that are flat away from their minima. To enable continuous optimization, we propose working with $\mathbb{Q}_p$ via its Berkovich affine line: a canonical, path-connected expansion of $\mathbb{Q}_p$ that preserves its is...

📄 onPanda: Efficient Annotation of On-Policy Alignment Data for LLMs and Agents via Token-Level Correction
🗓️ Published: 9/21/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24983v1
👥 Authors: Lei Yang (possible past Google (United States) affiliation), Mengyin Liu, Jia Wang, Hangyu Guo, Liang Zhao (possible past Baidu (China) affiliation), Zheng Ge, Kang An, Binxing Jiao, Qi Han, Daxin Jiang, Siqi Shen, Xiangyu Zhang
Abstract

We present onPanda, an interactive tool for efficiently annotating LLM alignment data and agent trajectories. onPanda adopts token-level correction as its core interaction: while reading a model response, the annotator locates the first inappropriate token and either picks a substitute from the model's candidate tokens or types the correct text via free-form editing. The system then truncates everything after that position and continues generation from the corrected prefix, repeating this locate...

📄 LoRA-generating hypernetworks for efficient on-device LLM generative personalization
🗓️ Published: 9/21/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24979v1
👥 Authors: Sean Augenstein, Li Ding, Jihwan Lee, Keith Rush (possible past Google (United States) affiliation), Andrey Zhmoginov (possible past Google (United States) affiliation)
Abstract

On-device large language models (`LLMs'), e.g. running on mobile phones, are ripe for improvement via personalization. The limited compute resources of mobile devices impose limits on model scale and thus model quality, making any realizable quality gains highly impactful. At the same time, their personal nature (i.e., the close coupling to a particular user) means that a given on-device LLM tends to be used in similar, predictable patterns over the course of time. This paper presents a novel me...

📄 PredActor: Predictive Action Diffusion for Steerable Onboard Humanoid Control
🗓️ Published: 9/21/2026
🔗 http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24840v1
👥 Authors: Lei Ye, Haibo Gao, Yitang Li, Peng Xu (possible past Google (United States) affiliation), Zetong Jing, Junhan Sun, Fanrong Dong, Ziqi Han, Xue Wang, Jianhua Sun, Cewu Lu (possible past Shanghai Jiao Tong University affiliation), Hao Zhao, Liang Ding
Abstract

Diffusion models offer flexible motion generation, but translating this flexibility into feedback-responsive humanoid control remains challenging. Hierarchical systems steer motion through references that may exceed a separate tracker's capabilities, leaving recovery and physical execution largely to the tracker. Action-only diffusion generates actions directly but lacks an explicit future-state trajectory for test-time motion objectives. Joint state-action diffusion provides this representation...

*Notable papers are those with at least two authors from a "big" AI/ML lab.