Looping in transformer models reuses weights by repeatedly applying the same transformer, or parts of it, making the model deeper without increasing its parameter count. Whether looping is useful depends on which constraint dominates: model size, training compute, or autoregressive inference efficiency. We study these trade-offs jointly in dense decoder-only transformers trained from scratch, varying which parts of the model are looped, how many loops are applied, and how information is passed between loops. Our experiments span models with up to 1B parameters, trained on up to 155B tokens with up to $1.07\times10^{21}$ FLOPs and 32 loops. We find that looping the full transformer generally gives the strongest quality at a fixed parameter budget, whereas looping a middle block of layers gives a better return when training FLOPs are constrained. Adding loops is not uniformly beneficial: gains eventually saturate, reverse, or become unstable. This motivates asking whether forcing every loop to use the same weights limits the benefit of deeper looping. We address this by adding small loop-specific low-rank adapters that improve quality, with larger gains as more loops are added. Looped transformers also suffer a decoding slowdown proportional to the number of loops. Parallel Loop Transformers address this by passing hidden states between loops across adjacent token positions, allowing loop stages to run concurrently. However, in our experiments the original formulation does not consistently retain the quality gains of ordinary looping. We find that preserving the current-token embedding and separately normalizing it and the previous-token hidden state before combining them recovers strong performance across model scales and training budgets. Together, these results show that effective looping requires matching the design to the resource constraint and inference setting.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.40325
Decoding sensory-evoked functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data is a central analytical tool in cognitive neuroscience. Here we ask whether self-supervised learning (SSL), which has been scarcely explored in this domain, can yield representations that support strong downstream performance. To do so, we adapt a joint embedding predictive architecture (JEPA) to train participant-specific encoders on brain data alone. The encoders never see the stimulus images or any representation derived from them. Applied to the Natural Scenes Dataset (NSD), we evaluate our learned brain embeddings on the downstream tasks of brain captioning and image reconstruction, as well as cross-participant generalization. Our self-supervised approach achieves competitive performance with parameter-rich supervised pipelines that are trained end-to-end with access to image and language data. We further find that encoders trained independently for different participants can be aligned fully unsupervised, using neither images nor stimuli shared between them. After alignment, a neural decoding head trained on one participant can be applied to another without fine-tuning and retains most of its within-subject performance on image reconstruction and brain captioning. By removing the need for images and shared stimuli, our approach is a step towards pooling fMRI data across participants and, eventually, across datasets.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.40280
Building general game agents requires both high-level task reasoning and low-latency action control in rapidly changing visual environments. These capabilities favor models with substantially different computational profiles, making them difficult to realize within a single model. In this work, we present TaskFrame, a hierarchical planner-controller framework that connects task-level planning with frame-level keyboard-and-mouse control. A vision-language task planner decomposes a high-level goal into an ordered sequence of atomic instructions and is optimized through supervised learning and dependency-aware GRPO. The hidden states of special goal tokens that terminate each atomic instruction provide continuous goal embeddings that are cached and reused across control steps. A causal Transformer controller combines the embedding of the active goal with recent observations to predict discrete keyboard and mouse-button actions and continuous camera motion at every game step. We train the system in three stages: planner training, controller pretraining, and joint alignment. Experiments in Minecraft show that TaskFrame is competitive with general-purpose vision-language models on instruction decomposition, and that in closed-loop evaluation the agent achieves a higher combat success rate than the evaluated baselines.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.40276
Link prediction on text-attributed graphs (TAGs) is a fundamental problem with applications in knowledge discovery, recommendation and beyond. Recent progress has highlighted the promise of combining Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) with Language Models (LMs) in order to leverage the complementary structural and semantic signals. However, due to the distinct inductive biases of GNNs and LMs, the design of an optimal fusion strategy remains an open research question. In this work, we present Bridge-LP, an intuitive, simple, efficient and theoretically grounded framework that unifies graph and language representations. It is built around three theoretically-justified design components: (D1) jumping connection of textual proximity, which enables robust LM training; (D2) compressed embedding, which encodes neighborhood information long exploited by classical link prediction heuristics, thereby enriching structural signals in a learnable way; and (D3) cache embedding training strategy, which reduces computational complexity. Together, these mechanisms establish an end-to-end cross-modal framework that scales to large graphs while capturing richer graph-text interactions. We conduct an extensive empirical evaluation, comparing against 40 existing models across 9 diverse datasets. Experiments show that Bridge-LP consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, delivering up to a 43.06% improvement in Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) and setting a new benchmark for language-graph integration.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.40192
Event cameras offer microsecond temporal resolution, high dynamic range and no motion blur, but referring video object segmentation (RVOS) lacks event-stream datasets and models. We introduce Event-SAMA-239K, a synthetic-event conversion of the SAMA-239K grounded video-chat corpus and all additional SAMA training data: 30,650 video clips and 392,162 images. Optical-flow, FILM or saccade upsampling followed by a linear event generator preserves all mask, referring-expression and dialogue annotations. We also introduce Event-SAMA, adapting SAMA-4B with a two-channel polarity patch embedding initialised from pretrained RGB weights and a zero-initialised event adapter. End-to-end training yields 24.37 $\mathcal{J}\&\mathcal{F}$ on MeViS valid_u and 22.33 $\mathcal{J}\&\mathcal{F}$ on the converted ReVOS valid subset, establishing the first event-native RVOS baseline (RGB SAMA-4B: 55.4 on MeViS). Frozen RGB SAMA-4B with pseudo-RGB renderings or E2VID reconstructions of the same events scores 13.23 and 15.94 $\mathcal{J}\&\mathcal{F}$. Without retraining, Event-SAMA works on real event-camera recordings when the accumulation window matches their event density. A seed-controlled ablation with a measured noise floor of 0.47 $\mathcal{J}\&\mathcal{F}$ finds gains from diverse training sources over MeViS alone (+4.99), RGB-mean event-stem initialisation (+4.33), and a trainable SAM2 mask decoder (+2.76); the event adapter, partial ViT unfreezing and event polarity are within noise at this budget. An earlier, partially converted corpus snapshot trained with the identical recipe scores 1.38 $\mathcal{J}\&\mathcal{F}$ higher on MeViS and 1.12 higher on ReVOS. Both are single runs that also differ in schedule length, so we draw no conclusion about corpus scale.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.39676
We show that the transformer architecture emerges as the score of last-token laws in a natural statistical model of language, where sentences are empirical measures of tokens, a language is a law on $P(S^d)$, and our prior belief is that sentences carry no structure at all. By the maximum-entropy principle, we select the law closest to this prior in relative entropy among those reproducing an observed sentence-level statistic. We discuss the relevance of the statistic in the posterior interaction between tokens and we build a statistic, able to capture that interaction, with Luce's choice axiom truncated at the lowest relational order. This procedure gives the softmax choice rule, with the attention cross-moment as its mean parameter. The query--key matrix is then the Lagrange multiplier of a maximum-entropy problem inside each sentence, and the value matrix the multiplier of the constraint over the language, so that the two are untied. Under the optimal entropic law we then show that a transformer head appears in the score of the last-token law. For ordered sentences, causal masking follows from the masked reference choice rule, and with a next-token cross-moment the score equals one causally masked attention head. We also discuss multi-head attention, weight-tied unembedding, and a heuristic reading of residual blocks as projected Langevin steps.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.39614
Instruction-guided video editing requires executing a requested change while preserving the source video's appearance and temporal structure. We present SemantiScene-Edit, a video editor that couples a multimodal encoder with a pretrained video diffusion transformer. The encoder jointly processes source frames and the editing instruction, and learnable queries convey their semantic context to the generator through a trainable connector and cross-attention. A complementary visual pathway concatenates source-video latents with noisy target latents before patch embedding, supplying dense spatial and temporal information for content preservation. We train the model with flow matching and a three-stage image--video curriculum comprising semantic alignment, joint adaptation, and high-resolution refinement. To support training, we construct over 1.2 million instruction-conditioned video-editing records covering object addition, removal, replacement, and attribute modification. We also construct a 100-case benchmark for evaluating instruction execution, source preservation, temporal consistency, and visual quality. Comparative experiments show that SemantiScene-Edit effectively follows editing instructions while retaining source content. At inference, the model requires only a source video and a natural-language instruction.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26015
Inspired by the analogy between the all-or-none activation of biological neurons and the true-false of logic circuits, McCulloch and Pitts proposed a mathematical model of the biological neuron in 1943 with the aim of simulating logical reasoning. Although Norbert Wiener considered the model overly simplistic at the time, it later became a building block of modern neural networks, including large language models. Despite their remarkable empirical success, however, conventional neural networks remain largely black-box systems and struggle with reliable symbolic reasoning. Viewing vectors as spheres of zero radius, we relax the zero-radius constraint and represent concepts as spheres with non-zero radii. We argue that sphere-based representations can capture additional features of biological cognition, including representing spatial concepts as regions and reasoning through model construction and inspection. Building on sphere embeddings, we introduce Sphere Neural Networks (SphNNs), which use a transition map to achieve symbolic-level Aristotelian syllogistic reasoning without training data, thereby taking an initial step toward the original goal of McCulloch and Pitts. We suggest that the zero-radius constraint may reflect an aspect of the oversimplification identified by Wiener and may limit conventional neural networks' capacity for symbolic-level logical reasoning.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.39559
The Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (Lasso) has been widely employed for feature selection in linear models and has also been extended to multi-layer perceptron (MLP) networks for both feature and group feature selection. Group-Lasso has also been used in feature selection using feed-forward neural networks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to incorporate the Group-Lasso principle into a Siamese network architecture for feature selection. Unlike existing approaches that primarily optimize classification accuracy, the proposed method aims to identify a compact subset of features that simultaneously preserves the intrinsic representation of the input data (the goal of Siamese network) and is expected to achieve high classification performance. Two variants of the proposed framework are developed: one based on the Euclidean distance and the other on a modified Jaccard similarity measure for real-valued vectors. The latter is specifically designed to improve feature selection for high?dimensional sparse data. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated on 12 benchmark datasets with feature dimensions ranging from 6 to 7070 using eight different classifiers. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed Siamese Lasso framework consistently identifies compact and discriminative feature subsets maintaining competitive or superior classification performance, although the loss function used explicitly did not consider any regularizer to learn classification. In addition, the quality of the embeddings produced by these networks is assessed using manifold learning techniques such as UMAP and t-SNE.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.39499
Formula-Driven Supervised Learning (FDSL) enables vision pre-training without real images, but existing methods cast pre-training as classification on discretized labels, discarding continuity in the generative process. We propose Formula-Driven Supervised Metric Learning (FDSML), which derives relational supervision from image-generation parameters beyond discrete class labels. FDSML combines FineFractalDB, our refined fractal dataset with higher intra-class variation and more stable structures, with a Parameter-Aware Triplet (PA-Triplet) Loss that assigns positives and negatives according to distances in the underlying Iterated Function System parameter space. This objective trains embeddings to respect parameter-derived relative similarity orderings. Experiments show that FDSML improves transferability to image retrieval while remaining competitive on downstream classification and improving robustness under several corruption settings. On ResNet-50, Recall@1 improves from 65.6% to 74.0% on Stanford Online Products and from 56.2% to 78.4% on Stanford Cars over FDSL pre-training. These results suggest that parameter-derived relational supervision provides a stronger synthetic pre-training signal than label-based classification for transfer beyond recognition.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.39423
Whether models trained on different modalities converge to the same representation of the world is central to AI. The Platonic Representation Hypothesis (PRH) conjectures that they do as they scale, but without a proof it offers neither a guarantee nor a recipe. We turn the hypothesis into a theorem. First, we prove a \emph{Platonic Representation Theorem}: Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) trained separately on any number of modalities learn the same representation up to one rotation whenever their positive pairs are two observations of one scene--\emph{good views}--and their misalignment is bounded otherwise. Second, we show that next-token prediction is a JEPA with \emph{bad views}, parts of a single document, which explains why language models align with vision only through scale. Third, we validate the theory from 145k captions to the texts of 940M web images, and uncover a scaling law of alignment that predicts unseen runs within seed noise. Good views need 42 times fewer training samples than next-token prediction on the same corpus to reach the same alignment, and a 109M-parameter text JEPA aligns with DINOv2 and CLIP's image encoders better than every language model we evaluated, up to 72B parameters, and than CLIP's text encoder: next-token prediction is a remarkably inefficient route to platonic representations. As a showcase, one rotation turns separately trained encoders into an image captioner (CIDEr .838 on COCO). Even that rotation needs no pair: on the latest pair-free benchmark, our text JEPA beats every zero-shot accuracy reported with language models up to 8B parameters, e.g., 64\% against at most 56\% top-5 on ImageNet-100. Positive views, and not scale alone, are thus the lever to build platonic representations.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.39302
Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) typically uses uniform coverage across Transformer layers despite heterogeneous positional requirements. Phase-off interventions reveal non-uniform, model-specific rotary-phase dependence, while coverage interventions relate it to coverage-upgrade benefits. We propose profiling-guided layer-wise RoPE allocation, assigning high/low coverage under a fixed budget using early coverage-benefit profiles. The framework supports fixed-width query/key representations and physical rotary-dimension allocation in Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA). Normalized-depth mapping transfers profiles within model families, enabling small-model measurements to guide larger-model allocations before pretraining. A brief analysis relates selection and transfer to score calibration and inter-layer interactions. From-scratch experiments demonstrate validation-loss improvements over available budget-matched baselines, while analytical resource accounting identifies favorable quality--storage--compute trade-offs for physical MLA. These results connect positional demand to transferable, efficient architecture design.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.39223
Sequential recommenders typically construct history inputs from item identifiers or content features using an embedding map shared across users. The same item therefore yields the same initial embedding representation, even when users have different relationships to the item. We propose personalized item representations in user history, where each item's embedding expresses its relationship to the user. Personalization becomes a property of the history inputs themselves, supplying richer evidence for later sequence modeling. We instantiate this idea with PRISM, which reuses upstream ranking computation to generate personalized item embeddings. An autoencoder jointly compresses all layer states from a user tower, a user--item tower, and same-request candidate mixing into one embedding per scored pair for downstream replay. Offline evaluation on Surface 1, a major recommendation surface at billion scale, reports an average downstream normalized entropy (NE) change of $-0.15\%$, compared with $-0.07\%$ for VISTA at similar history lengths. We further identify an empirical sequence-length scaling law: over history lengths of 26--240 events, NE gain follows a fitted power law with exponent 0.468, increasing from 0.06\% to 0.17\%. Therefore, personalized item representations in user history provide a new scaling dimension for improving recommendation quality.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.39175
Triple set prediction (TSP) is to recover missing relational triples in a knowledge graph by predicting the triple set instead of isolated links. Existing approaches predominantly rely on the subgraph-based completion paradigm, where the original graph is first partitioned into local subgraphs which are then independently completed. Such a paradigm suffers from fragmented structural reasoning, limited cross subgraph dependency modeling, and missing predictions across subgraphs. This paper proposes LatentDiff, a novel unified latent generative framework for TSP, which reformulates knowledge graph completion as latent space graph generation. LatentDiff first learns a compact latent representation using a relation-aware residual-quantized knowledge graph autoencoder, which encodes the whole graph into relation-aware latent embeddings, quantizes them with chunked residual codebooks, and reconstructs triples through a factorized decoder. On top of this latent space, we introduce an observation-anchored latent graph diffusion model, where the target latent graph representation is perturbed toward the observed latent. The reverse process recovers missing triples through progressive latent denoising. Experiments on three benchmark datasets show that LatentDiff outperforms the SOTA in terms of F_{tsp} by 5.4 percentage points on average. Code: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.39114
AI co-scientists have expanded the use of large language models for generating scientific hypotheses and guiding experimental investigation. Here we investigate whether temporal patterns in the semantic representations of complete biomedical conclusions can guide hypothesis generation. We introduce ForeSCITE, a framework that identifies thematic clusters of published conclusions, estimates a direction separating earlier from more recent findings within each cluster, and projects existing conclusion embeddings along these directions. An embedding language model trained to reconstruct conclusions decodes the projected coordinates into natural-language hypotheses. Across 407 clusters derived from approximately three million pre-cutoff conclusions, we identify temporal structure and illustrate its retention after decoding. In retrospective, time-sliced evaluations, ForeSCITE increases semantic coverage beyond the historical corpus, biomedical entity-pair novelty and post-cutoff pair re-observation relative to five prompt-based and retrieval-augmented baselines. Expert review of prioritized CAR-T hypotheses identified 37 candidates as both novel and biologically plausible, and expert justifications for five selected hypotheses illustrate their biological rationale and subsequent literature support where available. These findings support temporal guidance in semantic space as a scalable mechanism for proposing biomedical hypotheses for subsequent scientific evaluation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.38719
Packing a 3D volume into a token sequence is not merely long-sequence modeling. Once the volume is packed, sequence order no longer encodes the geometry of the sample---so a positional mechanism indexed by sequence position can learn the memory layout rather than the object. This is a general failure mode for attention over packed geometric data. We introduce PACK3D, a local-global attention operator that separates memory layout from attention geometry. PACK3D keeps local neighborhood attention exact, compresses only distant context into contiguous 3D block summaries, and indexes every query-key interaction with axial RoPE on true token-grid coordinates rather than packed positions. Because the rotation is applied before a block is summarized, the query-to-summary logit remains a weighted sum of query-relative 3D displacements; compressed global context therefore stays spatially interpretable after packing, instead of collapsing to anonymous pooled content. We measure the failure mode directly. On a controlled synthetic task---train on one packing, change only the memory order of the tokens, hold the physical labeling rule fixed---learned positional embeddings and packed-sequence RoPE solve the training layout perfectly yet collapse under Morton, block-contiguous, and random repacking, while axial grid-coordinate RoPE stays exact throughout. The same coordinate system carries to real data: on Allen WTC-11 hiPSC microscopy, PACK3D improves over a parameter-matched 3D U-Net on the 15-structure joint task and over a matched learned-position local-global baseline, with controls isolating the coordinate system, not encoder capacity, as the source of the gain. A fused Triton implementation matches windowed-attention latency at 65k tokens while supplying the long-range context windowing cannot---so the operator is not only correct but trainable at scale.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.38694
Generative recommendation (GR) has emerged as a promising paradigm that predicts target items by autoregressively generating their semantic identifiers (SID). Most GR methods follow a quantization-representation-generation pipeline. While most research focuses on quantization and generation, the representation that bridges the two remains underexplored. Existing representation constructions mainly take two forms: either directly flattening the SID code embeddings into a sequence or merging them into a compact vector via external networks. While effective, they still expose two practical challenges: \textbf{1) Loss of item semantics:} Information lost by quantization or compression needs to be recovered during the representation stage. \textbf{2) Insufficient modeling of structured SID relations:} Intra-item code composition patterns and inter-item prefix-transition patterns are not explicitly preserved for representation and subsequent SID generation. To overcome these challenges, we propose \textbf{ComeIR}, a \textbf{\uline{Co}}nditional \textbf{\uline{me}}mory Enhanced \textbf{\uline{I}}tem \textbf{\uline{R}}epresentation framework that reconstructs SID code embeddings into item-aware inputs and preserves structured SID evidence for prediction. Item-guided Token Scoring estimates the contribution of each SID code using the item embedding employed by the quantizer. Dual-level Conditional Memory captures intra-item prefix composition and inter-item prefix transitions, while Memory Merge integrates these signals into each historical item representation. The Memory-restoring Prediction Head further conditions SID-level prediction on the generated prefix and historical transition evidence. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of ComeIR, and further reveal scalable gains from enlarging conditional memory.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.11447
Joint-embedding predictive architectures (JEPAs) learn to predict representations rather than pixels, offering a compact way to model how visual scenes evolve. We ask whether this predictive objective improves closed-loop control when a vision-language-action (VLA) policy already uses V-JEPA features. We call our JEPA-conditioned flow policy family SaiVLA-JEPA. It combines a vision-language model with a diffusion transformer action expert and receives features from a frozen V-JEPA encoder. Two lightweight auxiliary heads predict future representations during training and are omitted at inference, leaving the action sampler unchanged. We compare policies without JEPA features, with current JEPA conditioning, and with additional future supervision on 10,030 paired LIBERO-Plus episodes. Current JEPA conditioning reaches about 82.5% success versus 71.6% without JEPA, while future supervision provides no detectable aggregate gain at the evaluated training budget. We separately evaluate SaiVLA-JEPA-TCA, which adapts latent context, and SaiVLA-JEPA-TPA, which adapts selected parameters. The context-retry gain is a system-level result under a larger attempt budget; parameter adaptation shows no consistent advantage over the frozen policy and target controls. These results motivate assessing latent-prediction objectives through paired closed-loop rollouts rather than latent loss alone.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.38508
Behavior Cloning (BC) of expert controllers for multiscale dynamical systems is challenging: state variables evolving at widely separated timescales induce highly nonlinear couplings that a shared latent space may fail to adequately represent, degrading closed-loop generalization. We propose Structured Representation Learning for Behavior Cloning (SRLBC), an architecture designed to leverage the physical knowledge of multiscale systems in which slow state variables, fast (stiff) state variables, and predictable exogenous inputs evolve at different timescales. On 500 long-horizon roll-outs of a pressurized water reactor (PWR) load-following benchmark -a high-dimensional, stiff industrial system with challenging safety constraints -and across 20 training seeds, separated embeddings systematically outperform shared embedding baselines on cumulative cost, imitation accuracy and constraint satisfaction. The resulting standalone policies approach NMPC closed-loop performance at a computational cost 15 times lower on average. Since standalone policies still leave a few percent of trajectories infeasible, we embed the learned policies in a safety-augmented approximate NMPC framework, in which the optimizer is only called when the predicted input sequence is not certified as safe. This yields controllers still 6.8 times faster than the NMPC controller on average, with a feasibility (i.e., constraint satisfaction) of at least 99.8% for all architectures, SRLBC retaining the lowest closed-loop cost. Under distribution shift, standalone BC policies degrade sharply: SRLBC degrades the least, and once safety-augmented, it retains a feasibility above 98% with the lowest closed-loop cost. Beyond the quantitative results, Jacobian-based sensitivity analysis shows that the resulting controller relies on a sparse and less redundant set of latent features, each attributable to a single group of physical variables, and aligned with the physical timescale decomposition of the system.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.38496
Temporal foundation models such as Chronos and TimesFM generalize across domains through a shared numerical observation space. In contrast, discrete event sequences (DESs), including operational event logs or patient clinical-event trajectories, have domain-specific event vocabularies whose labels lack a consistent correspondence across domains. Beyond this lack of consistency, the number of distinct events in real-world settings is high enough to challenge both classical temporal point process modeling and current in-context foundation inference models such as FIM-PP. Critically, current foundation models for DESs are limited to a small, fixed number of event types, restricting their applicability to realistic, high-dimensional event streams. To address this, we propose two complementary modules: (i) DES-JEPA, a joint-embedding predictive architecture that learns a shared discrete vocabulary from synthetic stochastic processes with unaligned event vocabularies; and (ii) DES-PFN, a discrete event sequence prior-fitted network that reuses the learned vocabulary for in-context next-event prediction. Without task-specific fine-tuning, this framework achieves competitive zero-shot performance on eight unseen real-world datasets and scales up to 700 distinct event types.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.38445