Attention
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Can Language Models Learn While They Think? Testing Gradient Adaptation Across Architectures
Abstract
Letting a language model take gradient steps on the text it is reading, known as dynamic evaluation, lowers its loss on the rest of the document. Its behaviour on hybrid linear-attention architectures, on diffusion language models, and on standard long-context benchmarks has not been measured. We measure it. With one SGD step per 128-token chunk on the MLP output projections of the last quarter of blocks, no training, and a 2k-token window, softmax-attention models (Qwen3-1.7B, Qwen3-4B, Gemma-4-E4B) lose 5-8% of their next-token loss over a document and outperform the same frozen model given the full 32k-token context. Hybrid Gated-DeltaNet models (Qwen3.5-4B, Qwen3.8-27B) gain under 1% at every learning rate: the linear-attention blocks already perform the adaptation. The mechanism transfers to masked-diffusion models with a larger effect, 8% on Nemotron-Diffusion-8B and 17-20% on DiffusionGemma-26B, once the rate is lowered and updates are clipped. Across RULER, BABILong, LongBench-v2, SCOTUS, HotpotQA, MuSiQue, ContractNLI and citation completion, at 100 or more items on two model sizes, weights updated on the full document recover none of the accuracy lost to context truncation: the adaptation is style and vocabulary, not retrieval. Writing facts with the next-token loss stores the prompt format rather than the fact (30% recall under chat prompting against 80% in context) and costs 36-38 GSM8K points at every dose. Writing a conclusion as behaviour instead, by distilling the model's own conclusion-conditioned judgments into a low-rank adapter, reaches the in-context ceiling (0.83 and 0.88 against 0.84 and 0.88 on 100 games) with GSM8K unchanged, and the conclusion can come from an inquiry loop that found it by asking information-gain questions.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.33025
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FleetPilot: Fine-Grained Steering Empowers Real-World LLM Personalization
2026-10-10 14:44:50Kounianhua Du, Jianxing Liu, Kangning Zhang, Wenxiang Jiao, Yuan Lu, Jiarui Jin, Jianghao Lin, Weiwen Liu, Yong Yu, Weinan ZhangAbstract
With the rapid evolution of large language models (LLMs), there is an increasing demand for effective personalization techniques that can adapt model behavior to individual user preferences. Personalized LLMs must infer a user's query-dependent preferences from limited, heterogeneous, and evolving interaction histories. Existing approaches rely primarily on in-context personalization, parametric adaptation, or personalized reward modeling, but respectively incur recurring costs in context management, model optimization and deployment, or multi-candidate generation and scoring. These limitations become particularly restrictive when user observations are sparse and the preference evidence relevant to each query varies across contexts and over time. To address these challenges, we propose \modelname, a fine-grained and instance-tailored steering framework that dynamically generates sample-level interference vectors from user data and injects them into the model's forward pass for personalized adaptation. Our approach introduces: match contrast that produces user-relevant signals, fine-grained steering component that captures nuanced signals by hooking activations from attention and MLP layers, and query-conditioned aggregation module that synthesizes these signals into contextually relevant enhancements. Extensive experiments across diverse scenarios, including short-to-long text generation, and web function calling, validate the effectiveness and compatibility of \modelname. Results show that our method consistently brings significant performance gains, and show extreme superiority in fast-shifting and data-sparse environments. Additionally, \modelname rids us of training cycles and incurs light overhead of storage or inference latency. These make \modelname a strong and real-world deployable method. Implementation is available \footnote{this https URL}.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14970
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HiPAD: A Unified Gait, Audio-Visual, and Personality Fusion Network for Depression Detection, with a Hierarchical Personality Ablation and the Calibration Limits of Domain-Adapted LLMs
2026-10-10 14:35:22Karol Chlasta, Piotr StruzikAbstract
We present HiPAD, a single fusion network submitted to all six sub-tracks of the MPDD-AVG 2026 depression-detection challenge, covering the Elder and Young cohorts and three modality sets (gait, audio-visual, and both), each combined with personality descriptions. The network encodes each available modality with a shared BiLSTM, zero-pads absent modalities, and applies cross-modal attention only when at least two of gait, audio and video are present. Personality, which dominates our results, is kept out of the attention and fused by concatenation. Because the architecture is identical in every sub-track, differences between them reflect the data rather than the model, and we use this to study three questions. Our main finding is that the personality description, roughly 150 tokens about who the subject is, carries more depression signal than audio, video, and gait combined: gait plus personality alone (TLS 0.647) beats every configuration that includes audio and video. First, a four-level ablation of the personality description (L0-L3) quantifies this: removing every personality-derived feature, including the Big Five scores that earlier MPDD ablations keep, lowers the Track-Level Score by 0.499 to 0.507 and leaves the model at chance. Second, domain-adapting the personality encoder with LoRA (7B) or QLoRA (72B) on PHQ-8/9 data raises binary Cohen's $\kappa$ by 0.13 but lowers the overall score by distorting the PHQ-9 regression; a frozen RoBERTa-large encoder does better at this sample size. Third, at fixed architecture, handcrafted clinical features (eGeMAPS, OpenFace action units) outperform generic deep features (wav2vec2, DenseNet) on the audio-visual tracks. The unified system reaches a cross-track G-Score of 0.482; with under 100 subjects per cohort, the limiting factors are the size of the representation and the calibration of the outputs, not the choice of architecture.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14961
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What Survives When Activation Steering Is Used as Memory
Abstract
Activation steering has recently been used as a memory for skills: past experiences of an agent are stored as steering vectors and retrieved later. Facts and preferences about the user are assumed to need text instead. We test that assumption with a training-free activation memory beside a frozen LLM. The change an experience causes in late-layer states is stored as a shift, filed under a whitened key for the conversation's gist, and added back in a later session only when the gist matches. We argue that such a shift is a fixed average of an effect that attention, in context, recomputes for every question, so only question-independent content can survive. In a pre-registered study on Qwen3.5-2B and 9B, with judges from four model families, the memory is selective (about 98% of unrelated replies are unchanged), but facts are stored as the word to say, in the last layers only, and are almost never used (at most 15% clean use, against 96-98% in context). Leanings transfer only in a narrow strength window. Most strikingly, the reference subtracted when writing a preference decides whether its concept or its direction survives: unless the opposite is subtracted, a stored dislike is recalled as a like.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14958
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GREAT-ESDD: Graph Edge Attention Network for Effectively Steered Delivery Decisions
2026-10-10 10:29:35Attila Lischka (Jeff), Ze Zhou (Jeff), Xuegang (Jeff), Ban, Bal\'azs Kulcs\'arAbstract
Online, same-day delivery requires operators to constantly update their routes, and the routing cost for deliveries increases with the number of customers. Out-of-home (OOH) delivery options can help companies handle increasing customer numbers while keeping delivery costs low. We develop a dynamic pricing-and-routing framework for this online ordering scenario with home and OOH delivery options. First, we develop a neural solver for the capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) based on the Graph-Edge-Attention-Network (GREAT). We train it to solve CVRP with varying instance sizes and starting conditions, allowing it to reoptimize partially executed routes under changing conditions. It is fast while achieving solution quality competitive with traditional baselines. Our solver processes several CVRP instances in parallel in batches and we use it to solve the candidate routing problems that arise from an incoming customer's choice of home or OOH delivery. This provides an estimate of the delivery cost increase per option, which we use to set dynamic prices. Further, it directly provides the updated route once the customer decides. We trade off delivery fees against routing costs and steer customers toward OOH delivery when home delivery would be costly. However, effective steering requires us to know the customer preferences. To learn those online, we use Thompson sampling with a Laplace-approximated posterior. We call the resulting framework GREAT-ESDD (GREAT for Effectively Steered Delivery Decisions). Compared to a traditional routing solver, it increases profit by around 11% under a similar pricing decision time budget. Moreover, we show that we can estimate customer preferences successfully, outperforming a static pricing strategy after only 5 days of simulated operations.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14792
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GateSight: Recurrent Memory Anticipates Attention Memory for Query-Agnostic KV Eviction in Hybrid LLMs
2026-10-10 09:19:05Junjie Li, Jiong Lou, Jie LiAbstract
Hybrid language models interleave Gated DeltaNet (GDN) layers, whose recurrent memory has a fixed size, with full-attention layers, whose key-value (KV) cache grows with the context and dominates serving memory. In this paper, we ask whether the recurrent memory already knows what the attention memory will need. We first show that which GDN heads of Qwen3.8-27B keep long memories is fixed by the weights rather than by the document. Next, we define the future utility of a KV entry by how much removing it changes the attention output over the model's own continuations, and find that the write gate, decay and write magnitude that GDN layers emit during prefill anticipate this utility before any query is seen. Because the relation is spread across many GDN heads and layers, and a linear map recovers its trend but less of its high-utility tail than a nonlinear one, we propose GateSight, which learns it with lightweight per-head multilayer perceptrons that read these signals and no attention score. Their predicted utility decides which entries each attention layer keeps, and how much each layer keeps is set by the model's native attention output gate, whose mean differs by more than an order of magnitude across layers. Finally, at serving time, GateSight scores the cache once after prefill and physically releases discarded KV entries. Experimental results on SCBench and RULER-4096 with Qwen3.8-27B and, with the same recipe, the sparse-attention model Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, up to the 262K-token limit of the models, show that with a tenth of the attention KV cache, GateSight is the most accurate of five query-agnostic methods on three of the four model-benchmark pairs and leads KVzip on all four, by 9.5 to 47.2 points. Notably, it scores a full-length context with negligible overhead relative to prefill.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14754
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Joint Discrete and SE Diffusion for Protein Interface Design
Abstract
The design of high-affinity, target-specific protein binders is central to the development of modern therapeutics. However, existing protein-generation methods remain limited in this setting, as many generated designs fail to simultaneously achieve geometric and physicochemical complementarity at binding interfaces. To address this challenge, we introduce PIDiff, a physicochemically enhanced multimodal diffusion framework for protein-protein complex design. PIDiff jointly designs target-conditioned protein sequences and structures by coupling diffusion in discrete sequence space with diffusion on the continuous (SE(3)) structural manifold. At its core, PIDiff employs PIFormer, a novel architecture that interleaves geometry-aware invariant point attention with global sequence self-attention. We further curate PIBench, a protein-protein complex dataset with diverse target scaffolds derived from the Protein Data Bank (PDB). We first pretrain PIDiff on PIBench and subsequently fine-tune it for two therapeutically relevant applications: minibinder design and antibody design. PPFrame consistently outperforms baseline methods across sequence design success rate, structure binding energy, and sequence-structure co-designability on all tasks.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14699
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CAST-ASD: Causal Attention over Speakers and Time for Online Active Speaker Detection
2026-10-10 07:47:12Pratham Gupta, Haotian Qi, Tushar Sandhan, Gabriel SkantzeAbstract
We present CAST-ASD (Causal Attention over Speakers and Time), a causal joint model for active speaker detection (ASD). Recent ASD models improve performance by jointly processing all faces in a scene, but operate offline, with the full clip available before any frame is labelled. Low-latency causal detectors instead process each face independently. CAST-ASD combines joint face reasoning with fully causal inference. It applies scene-level attention across faces within the current frame and causal temporal attention over each face's history, enabling information sharing across speakers with zero lookahead. Its parameter count does not grow with the number of faces. On MSDWild, where most negative face-frames contain a visible competing speaker, CAST-ASD reduces competing-speaker false alarms by 32% relative to the causal per-face detector it extends, with larger gains as scene occupancy increases. It outperforms all causal baselines on both validation splits while using only one-tenth the inter-speaker parameters of a three-block fixed-roster convolution. Code and models are available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14676
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FAM-gate: field-aware metadata attention with prior-constrained vector gating for audio classification
2026-10-10 07:41:00Xiangyu Jing, Hongqing Liu, Liming ShiAbstract
User-generated audio collections frequently contain textual metadata such as titles, tags, and descriptions. Effectively leveraging these complementary fields requires accounting for both field het erogeneity and varying semantic relevance relative to the acoustic content. We propose FAM-Gate, a two-stage framework for metadata-enriched audio classification. In the first stage, field-aware metadata-view attention dynamically aggregates multiple metadata views using audio-guided weighting, explicit field-identity embeddings, a shared identity-initialized projection, and mean-anchored regularized aggregation. In the second stage, a prior-constrained vector gate performs bounded, dimension-wise fusion of audio and metadata representations centered around an acoustic prior. Ex periments on BSD10K, BSD35K, and FSD50K show consistent improvements in both hierarchical single-label and multi-label classification. Compared with matched random-view scalar-fusion base lines, FAM-Gate improves the hierarchical F-score by 2.53 and 5.72 percentage points on BSD10K and BSD35K, respectively, while increasing macro mAP and macro F1 by 5.07 and 10.25 percentage points on FSD50K.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14673
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SpikCTU: A Compact Spiking Network with Adaptive Recurrent Computation for Speech Command Recognition
2026-10-10 05:32:07Li Jin, Jiang Wenbin, Chen Tao, Wen FeiAbstract
Spiking Neural Networks offer event-driven, energy-efficient computation for speech command recognition, yet most existing methods follow fixed computation paths, allocating redundant computation to easy samples while providing limited insight into how evidence evolves during inference. To address these challenges, we introduce SpikCTU, a compact spiking network with adaptive recurrent computation for speech command recognition. Specifically, a hybrid spiking embedding module preserves continuous input information alongside spike features to construct a fixed temporal memory. A shared Continuous Thinking Unit (CTU) repeatedly reads this memory using keys derived from spikes and continuous values, and updates a binary recurrent state with lightweight stage adapters. Furthermore, combining a fixed base prediction with accumulated corrections at each step enables learned aggregation over all steps or confidence-based early exit using only the predictions available so far. Experiments on three speech command recognition benchmarks show that SpikCTU achieves competitive accuracy with only 0.16--0.17M parameters, and the early exit strategy can substantially further reduce computational cost without compromising accuracy. In addition, trajectory and attention analyses reveal that recurrent steps enable error correction and progressively refine predictions. Code is available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14594
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Eval4DiRec: A Unified and Systematic Evaluation Framework for Diffusion-based Recommender Systems
2026-10-10 01:45:42Cong Wang, Shoujin Wang, Yishuo Li, Qi Zhang, Liang Hu, Wenpeng LuAbstract
Leveraging the strong generative capabilities and stable training dynamics of diffusion models, diffusion-based recommender systems (RSs) have recently emerged as a novel recommendation paradigm, attracting increasing attention from both academia and industry. However, despite the rapid growth of diffusion-based RSs, a critical issue has emerged: the lack of a unified and systematic quantitative evaluation benchmark, which often results in irreproducible experimental results and unfair comparisons across studies due to inconsistent data processing, training configurations, inference procedures, and evaluation protocols. To address this challenge, we propose Eval4DiRec, the first unified and open-source evaluation framework specifically designed for diffusion-based RSs. Eval4DiRec supports 14 representative diffusion-based RS models across five different recommendation scenarios, providing consistent and reproducible experimental settings to systematically assess their performance. Built upon this framework, we conduct extensive empirical studies to benchmark these models under unified protocols. The results highlight the strong potential of diffusion models for recommendation while also revealing key factors and practical challenges that substantially affect their performance, thereby establishing a solid foundation to facilitate fair evaluation and guide future research in this promising field. Our code and data are available at: this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.34404
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KV4-RL: Unlocking Faster Asynchronous Rollouts for RLVR with INT4 KV Cache Quantization
2026-10-10 01:24:03Sihwan Park, Sung-Yub Kim, Doohyuk Jang, Eunho YangAbstract
Asynchronous rollout improves the efficiency of reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) by reducing under-utilization during long-tail generation. Sustained concurrency also concentrates context processing into fewer decode steps, increasing the KV workload per step. We characterize this \emph{KV concentration} and find that KV cache quantization delivers substantially greater acceleration than weight-only and weight-activation quantization in our matched-workload comparisons. However, INT4 KV rollout can degrade learning even with token-level truncated importance sampling (TIS). We propose \emph{KV4-RL}, which combines calibration-free INT4 KV quantization with selective INT8 protection of attention sinks and recent context. Protecting a bounded number of positions reduces sampler mismatch while retaining most of the speedup from INT4. Across 400 iterations of Qwen3-8B-Base GRPO training, KV4-RL achieves $1.80\times$ cumulative rollout speedup and $1.27\times$ cumulative full-iteration speedup over BF16 rollout, reaching $1.97\times$ rollout speedup over the final 50 iterations. Under a common BF16 evaluator, its final six-benchmark mean accuracy is within 0.5 percentage points of BF16-rollout training for both Qwen3-4B-Base and Qwen3-8B-Base.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14448
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Learnable Low-Rank Polynomial Sketch for Effective Linear Attention
2026-10-09 18:30:52Zongyue Qin, Haoran Deng, Jason Cong, Yizhou SunAbstract
Softmax attention in Transformers suffers from quadratic complexity in sequence length, making it impractical for long-context applications. Linear attention alleviates this issue by replacing the exponential kernel with alternative functions that enable linear-time computation. Among existing linear attention approaches, recent studies have shown that polynomial kernels are particularly effective, as they exhibit sparse and spiky behavior similar to softmax attention, which emphasizes large dot products while suppressing irrelevant interactions. However, the exact computation of high-degree polynomial kernels is infeasible for high-dimensional representations. As a result, prior work relies on approximate polynomial kernels. This introduces a non-negligible approximation error. In this paper, we show that, from the perspective of polynomial kernel approximation, existing linear attention methods are still suboptimal. We propose \textbf{L}earnable \textbf{Lo}w-Rank \textbf{P}olynomial \textbf{S}ketch (LLoPS), a principled and flexible framework for approximating polynomial kernels with linear attention. Our method learns a low-rank polynomial sketch that provably achieves a strictly smaller approximation error than existing approaches. Experiment results show that LLoPS achieves the highest performance across extensive benchmarks, comparing with various linear attention baselines.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14219
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Images Talk Back: Guiding MMDiTs by Suppressing Image-to-Text Feedback
2026-10-09 17:58:15Yucheng Yang, Xiaoxiao Sun, Shusheng Yang, Jiakang Chen, Serena Yeung-LevyAbstract
Multimodal diffusion transformers (MMDiTs) allow the evolving image to update internal text representations through joint attention. These representations then guide subsequent image updates, raising a question: does this feedback help correct deviations from the prompt, or preserve them? We find that image-to-text (I2T) feedback can preserve the objects and attributes already represented in the evolving image, including errors. Transplanting I2T messages can rescue failures or disrupt successes. At matched intervention strengths, suppressing the influence of I2T feedback improves generation, whereas opposite controls degrade it. These findings motivate Semantic Feedback Guidance (SFG), which suppresses the influence of I2T feedback by guiding away from an auxiliary branch that strengthens this feedback and weakens text-to-image conditioning. The in-place variant, iSFG, directly suppresses I2T feedback and strengthens text-to-image conditioning, requiring no extra model evaluations. Temporal interventions motivate running the SFG branch during the first 20% of image sampling steps, requiring about $1.2\times$ the base NFE without classifier-free guidance (CFG). Experiments across three image-generation backbones show gains in alignment and preference-model scores. On FLUX, adding SFG to CFG raises GenEval from $0.6661$ to $0.7479$; on SD3.5M, iSFG adds $+1.33$ HPSv2.1 over CFG at zero extra NFE. The control also transfers to text-to-video and image-to-video generation, improving VBench scores. Code is available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13941
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Chronos Policy: Learning Robot Policies on Physical Time
2026-10-09 17:55:20Changhao Wang, Jaden Clark, Shuran SongAbstract
Robot policies often convert sensing and control into fixed-rate observation-action sequences, leaving physical time implicit in sequence position. This assumption breaks when observation rates or delays vary, or when inference latency changes. We introduce Chronos Policy, which makes physical time explicit by conditioning on observation capture times and desired action execution times. We study two ways to incorporate time into a diffusion transformer: adding timestamp embeddings to token features, or encoding physical time in positional encoding through time-aware rotary positional encodings (time-aware RoPE). We find that time-aware RoPE is more robust, allowing attention to depend directly on physical time while keeping token content unchanged. During training, we temporally randomize which observations are sampled and when the action chunk begins, exposing the policy to a wider range of sensing and execution schedules that may occur during deployments. This also enables learning from asynchronous, multi-rate data without forcing all measurements onto a fixed temporal grid. Across simulation and real-world experiments, Chronos Policy improves performance on dynamic tasks, where observation-to-action timing is critical, and on multisensory tasks, where the relative timing between observations matters. On standard quasi-static tasks, it preserves nominal performance while improving robustness to changes in sensing and inference timing.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13929
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Revisiting Tabular Deep Regression: Objectives and the Limits of Global Early Stopping
2026-10-09 17:49:32Danil Rudenko, Georgii Bulgakov, Nikolay Kartashev, Ivan Rubachev, Daniil Krasylnikov, Artem BabenkoAbstract
While deep learning models for tabular data have recently received significant research attention, the choice of objective functions for regression tasks remains an understudied degree of freedom. Several lines of research offer alternatives to the standard Mean Squared Error (MSE), but differences in datasets, backbones, and evaluation protocols make their practical benefits difficult to compare. In this work, we address this gap by performing a systematic re-evaluation of regression objectives across a broad collection of established tabular datasets and multiple neural backbones. Our comparison reveals that many proposed objectives provide limited or inconsistent gains over a properly tuned MSE baseline, while quantile loss yields consistent aggregate improvements over MSE across the tested backbones. We then identify a limitation that remains even with this strong objective: regions with different levels of target noise can reach their best predictive performance at different training epochs. Consequently, a single global early-stopping checkpoint can impose a compromise between uncertainty regions, even when the objective can represent heteroskedastic target distributions. Motivated by this limitation, we introduce a heteroskedasticity-aware extension of quantile loss that uses input-dependent label smoothing as a potential remedy and improves over quantile loss on several backbones. Overall, our results provide a modern empirical picture of regression objectives for tabular deep learning and highlight how differences in optimal stopping times across uncertainty regions can limit the effectiveness of global early stopping. The code is available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13909
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Task Context Shapes Component Roles in Language Models
2026-10-09 17:40:53Sovesh Mohapatra, Dani S BassettAbstract
Large language models reuse the same attention heads across tasks, but identifying these shared heads does not explain what they do differently in each task. A natural source of inspiration is task-dependent interactions among shared brain regions, which motivate a network view of language-model computation. Here, we compare fixed model components across tasks using identical graph facts, statements specifying which directed connections are present. We measure how interventions affect attention heads and the activation state in later layers (influence), as well as the answer (importance). Task changes redistribute the influence in five open-weight models spanning four families and 1.5-14 billion parameters. In Gemma-2-9B and Qwen3-14B, an activation edit changes an early internal activation vector and switches which fact the model reads while the written instruction stays fixed. The same heads then respond to different graph facts and influence later components differently. For each prompt, we construct two linear response maps, one before the edit and one after it. Each map predicts a later head's response from a measured change in an earlier head. For a separate factual intervention, the map for the corresponding condition reduces mean squared prediction error by 53.6% in Gemma and 5.0% in Qwen compared with the average of the two maps. These findings show that task context changes both which graph facts the shared components respond to and how their outputs affect later computation. A network account may help explain how models use shared parameters to perform different computations. Measurements of task-dependent influence could also guide interventions intended to alter one behavior while preserving others.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13895
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Event-based Action Recognition by Pre-Training on Multi-Frame Representations
2026-10-09 17:05:40Emma Norrby, Tomas Wilkinson, Per Nyblom, David GustafssonAbstract
Action recognition is a crucial task in domains like robotics, patient monitoring, or surveillance. Recently, event-based action recognition has attracted much attention due to the event camera's ability to capture fast motions and its improved privacy over conventional vision cameras. While frame-based event representations work well for short event sequences, their discriminative ability declines sharply with longer and more complex event sequences. In this work, we introduce a multi-frame representation that greatly improves recognition performance over its single-frame counterpart. We adopt a masked auto-encoding framework to pre-train a Vision Transformer using a sparsity-aware masking algorithm and token selection mechanism to improve downstream performance and control computational complexity. We also introduce multiple mask tokens for the decoder with a position-aware attention mechanism, leading to further improved performance. Our proposed method shows impressive performance for challenging long-duration and complex event sequences, yielding state-of-the-art performance on THU-EACT-50 CHL and DailyDVS-200.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13856
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OpenPA: Forced-alignment-free Multi-granular Pronunciation Assessment with Mixed-transcript Adaptation
2026-10-09 16:35:25Fu-An Chao, Bi-Cheng Yan, Berlin ChenAbstract
Recent advances in automatic pronunciation assessment (APA) have driven a shift from scripted to free-form assessment. However, existing methods often rely on multi-stage pipelines with forced alignment and separate feature extractors, limiting their practicality across response settings. In light of this, we propose OpenPA, a novel APA framework that leverages Whisper's cross-attention mechanism to jointly predict word- and utterance-level pronunciation scores without forced alignment. Through mixed-transcript adaptation and adaptive substitution weighting, OpenPA accommodates heterogeneous transcripts across closed- and open-response settings within a single model. Trained solely on speechocean762, OpenPA achieves the strongest overall performance among evaluated systems under in-domain closed and simulated open-response conditions, while maintaining its performance zero-shot on MultiPA. An additional cross-task evaluation on oral-cancer speech suggests its potential applicability beyond non-native speech.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13826
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REFLECT: Role-Aware Detection of Sentiment, Emotion, Politeness, and Formality
2026-10-09 16:10:25Sangpil Youm, Annabel Stocks Natalias, Hayden Heninger, Leah Jones, Xiaoyang Jin, Xiaoya Zhang, Bonnie DorrAbstract
Detecting communicative meaning in dialogue requires modeling not only lexical content but also the participant-role structures through which sentiment, emotion, politeness, and formality (SEPF) are expressed. Existing approaches rely on contextual language representations while leaving semantic roles implicit. We introduce a role-aware transformer architecture that maps the four SEPF dimensions to theory-grounded Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) configurations, incorporating these configurations directly into the transformer's self-attention mechanism. Role-aware attention models non-directional internal states (sentiment and emotion), while directional role-aware attention captures initiator-to-recipient relations for external cues (politeness and formality). The resulting role-aware representations are fused with contextual embeddings through a learned gate that adaptively weights how much role information each input contributes, rather than appending semantic roles as an auxiliary feature vector. Across four benchmark datasets, the framework yields statistically reliable gains over strong BERT-based baselines for emotion, politeness, and formality, with gains concentrated in theoretically predicted cases such as low-frequency, complex emotions and highly polite expressions; sentiment improvements are marginal and non-significant, suggesting that sentiment is conveyed more through lexical choice than participant-role structure. Additional evaluation on real-world data demonstrates that the framework improves both predictive performance and model traceability. These results demonstrate that linguistically grounded modifications to transformer self-attention improve the detection of communicative meaning, generalize beyond benchmark datasets to real-world mental-health data, and yield traceable, role-grounded explanations that extend beyond predictive performance to interpretability.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13797
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