Regularization
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Structured Visual Target Learning For Cross-Subject eeg-to-image retrieval
2026-09-29 08:07:20Salini Yadav, Taveena Lotey, Micka\"el Coustaty, Pravendra Singh, Partha Pratim RoyAbstract
Cross-subject EEG-to-image retrieval requires a neural represen- tation trained on source subjects to remain aligned with a visual embedding space for an unseen subject. Whereas existing methods primarily focus on the EEG side, we address this problem from the perspective of the visual target. Our approach preserves the spatial information of the Perception Encoder, converts its patch grid into a compact set of learned visual views, and aggregates them for each image with a block-structured, content-dependent router. The target is learned jointly with the EEG encoder through contrastive learning with MMD regularization across source subjects. For deployment, we propose a training-free representation refinement that aligns frozen embeddings without updating either encoder. Under leave- one-subject-out evaluation on THINGS-EEG2, the structured target achieves 35.3%/65.6% Top-1/Top-5 accuracy, the best among com- pared methods. Refinement raises this to 48.1%/77.1%, an 18.5% Top-1 gain over the strongest compared method, improving all ten held-out subjects.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.36971
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Prior-Driven Enhancements in 3D Gaussian Splatting: Normals and Depths Regularization
2026-09-29 08:06:24Gyeonggwan Lee, Seunghwan Hong, Junghun SuhAbstract
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) is a state-of-the-art technique for 3D scene rendering, offering high efficiency and excellent visual quality. However, because 3DGS relies on an initial sparse point set from Structure-from-Motion (SfM) and view-dependent properties, it can suffer from geometric inaccuracies and visual artifacts, particularly in complex scenes. To address these challenges, we propose an improved 3DGS approach that regularizes the optimization process by integrating geometric priors, including surface normals and dense depth information. Surface normal regularization improves geometric consistency by aligning Gaussian covariance with local surface structures, while dense depth priors combined with an initial points from SfM enhance per-pixel depth estimation, increasing accuracy and reducing ambiguities. These enhancements enable robust handling of diverse and complex real-world scenarios, minimizing visual distortions and improving reconstruction quality across various environments. To validate our method, we evaluate it on challenging datasets, including street-view scenes and highly reflective environments, while testing it across multiple SfM pipelines. Our results demonstrate compatibility across diverse environments and highlight the robustness of our approach. Experimental findings further show that our method enhances geometric accuracy and visual quality, establishing a reliable solution for real-time 3D scene rendering in complex environments.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.36969
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PreferenceFlow: Test-Time Guidance of Flow-Matching Robot Policies from Human Interventions
2026-09-29 07:08:58Yiqi Tang, Diyuan Shi, Runze Li, Donglin WangAbstract
Flow-matching policies can represent complex robot behaviors but remain susceptible to local errors under distribution shift at deployment. Many reinforcement learning approaches to policy improvement require reward signals that are difficult to specify or obtain in real-world manipulation. We present PreferenceFlow, a framework for improving a pretrained flow policy at test time without environment rewards or updates to the base policy. Human intervention chunks are paired with robot chunks generated from the same initial conditioning state to train a preference model. During infer- ence, we adopt the QGF sampling update, replacing its value gradient with the preference gradient evaluated at an estimated clean action. A gradient-cap loss penalizes excessive gradients on intervention pairs, while a zero-gradient loss discourages guidance near actions from expert demonstrations. On four real-world precision insertion tasks with a Franka robot, Pref- erenceFlow achieves a mean success rate of 90.5%, compared with 69% for the frozen policy. Ablations support the roles of gradient regularization and correctly ordered preference labels in the evaluated settings. These results demonstrate the utility of human interventions as local preference supervision for guiding frozen generative robot policies.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.36872
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DSWM: Decomposed Spatio-Temporal World Model for Demand-Driven UAV Base Station Repositioning
2026-09-29 06:56:46Shengjie Zhong, Zhongliang Zhao, Jingxuan Chen, Xianbin Cao, Xinmei Qiang, Dapeng O. Wu, Tony Q. S. QuekAbstract
Uncrewed aerial vehicle base stations (UAV-BSs) are expected to cover traffic demand that shifts across space and time, yet most repositioning schemes either re-solve an optimization problem per slot or learn reactive policies without an explicit demand model. We cast demand-driven fleet repositioning as latent-space decision-time planning and propose DSWM, a decomposed spatio-temporal world model: an agentic controller that perceives the demand field through a rolling observation window, retains operational context in a latent recurrent state, reasons about candidate motions by imagined rollouts under an uncertainty penalty, and coordinates the fleet through replanned first actions. DSWM learns a recurrent state-space model shaped by an exponential-moving-average (EMA) based latent predictive objective with variance regularization. It attaches a differentiable service simulator that replays the association, probabilistic line-of-sight channel, and Shannon rate chain inside latent rollouts. Planning uses a cross-entropy method whose imagined demand is anchored on the current observation window with mixing coefficient $\rho=0.95$. On a unified pipeline over three real datasets (Milan CDR (call detail record), Shanghai Telecom, YJMob100K) and 14 methods including five reproduced IEEE baselines, DSWM attains weekday served ratios of 0.889, 0.908, and 0.898, ranking first among non-ablated configurations on every dataset. On Milan it improves over the strongest non-learning baseline (Greedy, 0.780) by 0.109, a margin that comes from decision-time use of observations rather than prediction accuracy.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.36845
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FastVR: Efficient Streaming Video Restoration with One-Step Diffusion
2026-09-29 05:29:12Xiaoxu Chen, Qin Yang, Haoran Bai, Sibin Deng, Ying ChenAbstract
Diffusion-based video restoration recovers realistic details, but its practical deployment is limited by two efficiency bottlenecks: costly VAE encoding and decoding, and the quadratic cost of full self-attention in diffusion transformers (DiTs). This paper presents FastVR, a streaming video restoration framework built on a one-step diffusion model, which delivers strong restoration quality and temporal consistency while processing 1080p video at 11 FPS on a single H20 GPU. To improve inference efficiency, FastVR combines a lightweight VAE with chunk-wise causal attention, which substantially reduces the computational cost. During training, it further adopts velocity consistency regularization and continuous trajectory learning, which improve restoration quality. Extensive experiments show that FastVR is more efficient than the evaluated diffusion baselines while achieving state-of-the-art performance on synthetic and real-world benchmarks. We hope that this work supports further progress in the community.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.36757
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Action Chunking Proximal Policy Optimization with Feedback Correction
2026-09-28 20:43:07Sanghyun Hahn, Jonghyun ChoiAbstract
Action chunking provides temporal abstraction in reinforcement learning by selecting short action sequences instead of individual actions, but many existing approaches face two limitations in high-dimensional robotic control. First, many rely on value functions over action chunks, which can be difficult to learn as action dimensionality and chunk length grow. Second, executing chunks open-loop removes within-chunk feedback, limiting reactivity in contact-rich tasks. We present Action Chunking PPO (ACPPO), a PPO extension that uses a chunked actor while retaining a standard state-value critic, thereby avoiding chunked Q-functions. We further propose ACPPO-Corr, which augments the chunk planner with a stepwise feedback corrector that adjusts planned actions online within each chunk. Across 25 simulated robotics tasks from IsaacGym and Bi-DexHands, spanning locomotion, arm manipulation, and dexterous hand-object interaction, ACPPO-Corr achieves the strongest aggregate performance among evaluated methods and performs best on both decision-frequency-sensitive and decision-frequency-neutral task subsets. Ablations show that moderate chunk lengths work best and that corrector regularization is important for balancing chunk-level planning with local feedback. These results suggest that action chunking can be effective in online PPO when chunk-level planning is paired with closed-loop correction. The code is available at: this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.36250
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On the spectral properties of generative denoiser Jacobians
2026-09-28 20:09:31Alexandros Graikos, Nebojsa Jojic, Dimitris SamarasAbstract
Generative denoising models, such as diffusion and flow-matching, learn to sample from complex distributions by training a deep neural network denoiser to recover clean data from noise-corrupted samples. While such models are typically compared on the quality of their synthesized samples, these metrics provide limited insight into how the underlying denoiser, which drives generation, differs. In this work, we propose to analyze the spectrum of the denoiser Jacobian as a tool to characterize these differences. Across pre-trained denoising models, we observe that better generative performance is associated with larger Jacobian eigenvalues. Motivated by this, we introduce a regularization scheme that controls the Jacobian spectrum by training the denoiser on perturbed inputs, with perturbations suppressing or amplifying Jacobian responses. On ImageNet, we test whether directly modifying the Jacobian spectral properties leads to improved generations. Our findings suggest that denoisers benefit from both strengthening responses along data-relevant principal eigen-directions and suppressing the noisy, data-irrelevant ones. This establishes the denoiser Jacobian as a useful tool for identifying differences between generative denoising models.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.36210
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Normative Loss Landscape Navigation: A Trajectory-Based Approach to Mitigating Forgetting in Incremental Learning
2026-09-28 13:34:44Isabelle Aguilar, Zayn Andre Zainal, Luis Fernando Herbozo Contreras, Zhaojing Huang, Omid KaveheiAbstract
Continual learning models suffer from catastrophic forgetting when trained sequentially on non-stationary data distributions. Previously, this has been addressed through weight regularization. While preconditioning gradients offer a promising alternative to mitigate forgetting, current approaches are myopic. Conversely, standard regularization methods apply rigid, scalar Euclidean penalties that entirely ignore the underlying Riemannian geometry of the parameter space. To overcome this gap, we propose TMLN (Trajectory-Modulatory Landscape Navigation), a normative navigation policy that formalizes continual learning as an optimal control problem over a curved loss landscape. TMLN utilizes a memory-efficient diagonal empirical Fisher Information Matrix (FIM) to define a localized Riemannian manifold. To compensate for the spatial limitations of the diagonal approximation, TMLN dynamically modulates a preconditioner using the normalized historical trajectory of the network's parameter values. By integrating this trajectory-based preconditioning directly into the gradient update, we actively shield historically critical parameter directions without relying on additive penalties. Empirical evaluations on class- and domain-incremental benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly reduces the loss barrier between consecutive tasks.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.35926
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FuseReg: Regularizing Layer Fusion Mitigates the Reconstruction-Generation Gap in Representation Autoencoders
2026-09-25 17:59:59Hongyang Du, Yunfei Xie, Junjie Ye, Jiawei Yang, Xiaoyan Cong, Haodong Zhang, Yongchao Huang, Haiyu Wu, Zongxia Li, Shihang Gui, Dawei Liu, Runhao Li, Jingcheng Ni, Chen Wei, Randall Balestriero, Yue WangAbstract
Representation autoencoders (RAEs) reuse features from a pretrained visual encoder as reconstruction and diffusion latents, integrating strong visual representations into image generation. However, RAEs still need to decide which encoder layers form the shared latent space for the generator and pixel decoder. This choice involves a trade-off. Shallower layers tend to preserve fine pixel details better, while deeper layers tend to yield better generation metrics. A fixed heuristic layer fusion therefore couples two stages that benefit from different information. We introduce FuseReg, which replaces heuristic feature selection with training over random subsets of encoder layers. We theoretically analyze the underlying mechanism: subset sampling explicitly penalizes sensitivity to cross-layer disagreement. On ImageNet-256 with DINOv3-L, a single FuseReg decoder reconstructs from full, sparse, and single-layer fusions without retraining, achieving higher PSNR than decoders specialized to fixed fusions. This flexibility also benefits generation: decoder replacement alone reduces unguided gFID by 27% with an unchanged RAEv2 DiT-XL generator. The same regularization principle extends to diffusion training, with joint regularization of both stages reducing unguided gFID by 29% on DiT-Base. These results show that training downstream models for layer-fusion robustness narrows the reconstruction-generation gap without modifying the pretrained encoder.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.31620
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FedHisto-PAST: Parameter-Efficient Stain-Aware Federated Learning for Cross-Site Lung Histopathology Classification
2026-09-25 11:44:38Muhammad Muhtasim Shahriar, M. M. Golam Hafiz, Saad Aloteibi, Mohammad Ali MoniAbstract
Cross-site lung histopathology classification must account for stain variation, non-IID client data, missing classes, and the cost of adapting large pathology encoders. This study evaluates FedHisto-PAST v2 for three-way classification of adenocarcinoma (ACA), Normal, and squamous cell carcinoma (SCC). FedHisto-PAST v2 combines a frozen HIBOU-B foundation model with parameter-efficient adaptation, stain-conditioned paired-view prediction and feature consistency, reliability-aware prototype learning, and adaptive federated aggregation. Experiments used a five-client, non-IID, raw-data-local simulation with fixed internal evaluation, client-level analysis, component ablations, communication accounting, and a development-influenced exploratory LungHist700 cohort. All principal methods achieved near- ceiling internal performance, which limited discrimination on the fixed split. On LungHist700, FedHisto- PAST v2 achieved a Macro-F1 of 0.728560 and a balanced accuracy of 0.730454. Higher recognition of Normal and SCC was accompanied by lower ACA recall, and calibration remained imperfect. Prediction-level consistency was the only component with a clearly supported independent contribution in the external ablation analysis. Feature consistency and prototype regularization showed no conclusive independent overall gains in Macro-F1. The framework updated 1.253841% of the model parameters. The results provide exploratory cross-dataset evidence for stain-aware, parameter-efficient federation; they do not establish formal privacy, patient-level independence, prospective deployment, or clinical validation.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.31150
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Large Distant Gradients Need Not Be Reliable: reliability-weighted credit assignment for long-horizon autoregressive forecasting
2026-09-25 06:46:40Junhao Zhao, David Michael Simberg, Jacob Kang, Colin Connor Kurniawan, Nan XuAbstract
In autoregressive forecasting, long prediction rollouts provide distant supervision, but backpropagation through time (BPTT) carries gradients from those losses through many autoregressive steps. Repeated Jacobian products can make distant gradients dominate the update while amplifying predictable signal and unpredictable innovation together; a large distant gradient therefore need not carry reliable learning signal. Motivated by this, we introduce Internal Dual-Wiener routing (Internal-DW), a backward-only intervention that preserves the full forward rollout and all step losses while reliability-weighting internal gradient routes. At each residual block, we derive bounded Wiener gains for the identity and nonlinear routes that balance preserving predictable learning signal against suppressing unpredictable variation, and estimate them from route-level gradient statistics and an explicit noise model. In a controlled system with known gradient signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), we show that distant gradients can grow even as their SNR falls, and that Internal-DW reduces error in recovering predictable gradient signals and improves forecasting. On four history-dominated, weak-drive testbeds, Internal-DW reduces forecast error by 5.2%-13.8% relative to full BPTT, outperforms gradient clipping and Jacobian regularization on three testbeds, with similar performance on shear flow, and outperforms validation-selected truncated BPTT (TBPTT) on three. It also extends or preserves the fitted optimal training-horizon range across these four testbeds. Across benchmarks, the current Internal-DW estimator has a clear applicability boundary: its benefit diminishes or reverses when usable history is limited or when the selected sampler fails to represent dominant drive-dependent variation. The results show that retaining long-horizon supervision does not require trusting every backward contribution equally.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.12890
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SkillEvoReg: Regularizing Agent Skill Evolution Against Overfitting
2026-09-25 06:11:26Guanyu Nie, Fangzhou Zhu, Shixiong Kai, Xiongwei Han, Tao Zhong, Mingxuan YuanAbstract
Language-model agents increasingly improve by converting execution experience into reusable external skills. Yet repeated skill updates form a learning process of their own: locally useful edits can accumulate into redundant or task-specific instructions, while new updates can disrupt behavior that previously worked. We study this problem as skill-evolution overfitting and introduce SkillEvoReg, a general regularization framework for skill evolution inspired by anti-overfitting techniques in neural-network training. SkillEvoReg combines training-time skill dropout, which perturbs update generation, and complexity-aware local regularization, which controls unnecessary structural growth, with causal counterexample validation (CCV), which provides targeted behavioral validation of candidate-specific regressions. We instantiate the framework across heterogeneous skill-evolution systems while retaining each system's native skill evolver and task evaluator. Across SkillOpt, SkillEvolBench, and ContinualSkillBench, SkillEvoReg consistently controls skill-state growth while preserving competitive downstream capability, improves several transfer and later-stage evolution outcomes, and identifies update-level regressions that structural metrics alone cannot reveal. These results suggest that explicit regularization is a useful complement to increasingly capable skill updaters.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30861
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MDSkin-Net: Multi-Task Skin Lesion Analysis Driven by Pattern Analysis Priors and Spatial Alignment Regularization
2026-09-25 06:02:34Yijian Li, Saad Bedros, Paul Bigliardi, Mei Bigliardi Qi, Vassilios Morellas, Nikolaos PapanikolopoulosAbstract
Reliable skin lesion segmentation and classification are central to dermoscopic computer-aided diagnosis. Existing multi-task frameworks couple the two tasks architecturally without clinical knowledge, while knowledge-injecting approaches rely on the macroscopic ABCD rule, which was not designed for dermoscopy. Dermoscopic diagnosis is grounded in Pattern Analysis, a microscopic framework structured around dermoscopic features. We propose MDSkin-Net, which incorporates cue-level Pattern Analysis priors into a hybrid CNN-Transformer architecture. At its core is a Pattern Analysis-Guided Attention Module (PAGAM) comprising three priors motivated by distinct dermoscopic cues: an improved Efficient Channel Attention (iECA), a Multi-Scale Spatial Attention (MSSA), and a Biased Asymmetry Attention (BAA). We further introduce a multi-scale spatial alignment regularization (MSAR) that uses the segmentation ground-truth mask as hierarchical soft supervision, confining the classification head to lesion-localized evidence and coupling both task pathways through a shared spatial prior. Trained exclusively on the ISIC 2017 training split without external dermoscopy data, the MDSkin-Net ensemble transfers robustly under zero-shot evaluation, reaching a Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) of 92.38% and a melanoma AUC of 97.84%on PH2, and a DSC of 88.92% on the ISIC 2018 Task 1 test set. On the in-domain ISIC 2017 benchmark, the ensemble attains a mean Area Under the Curve (AUC) of 91.60% across the two classification tasks (melanoma and seborrheic keratosis vs. rest), and a DSC of 84.72% for segmentation. Classification remains competitive with baselines; in-domain segmentation trails single-task specialists, yet the proposed priors and alignment regularization yield representations that generalize consistently across cohorts of different scales.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30855
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Motion Style Slider: Endpoint-Supervised Continuous Style Control for Human Motion Diffusion
2026-09-25 04:20:11Chen-Chieh Liao, Yichen Peng, Yiyi Cai, Y\^ui Ono, Hiroki Hanaoka, Erwin Wu, Hideki Koike, Shuichi KurabayashiAbstract
Existing human motion diffusion methods provide strong motion generation quality, and recent style transfer models can inject target style cues, but fine-grained continuous control of style intensity remains underexplored. In production, style intensity is subjective across artists and directors, so the practical requirement is not a universal absolute unit, but a reliable monotonic control axis. We propose Motion Style Slider, a motion-to-motion style transfer framework for endpoint-supervised continuous control. Given a content motion and a style motion, we construct a style direction in a learned motion-style embedding space and condition diffusion generation with a scalar intensity. The training objective combines diffusion denoising with latent intensity regularization to encourage smooth and monotonic style scaling without requiring intermediate-intensity ground-truth motions. Our framework is compatible with pretrained motion diffusion backbones and supports heterogeneous style datasets, including the multi-actor style motion dataset. To test out-of-range usability, we additionally introduce a small real-capture over-reaction extension and evaluate large-intensity behavior against these unseen targets. Experiments measure controllability, interpolation/extrapolation behavior, content preservation, and motion realism, with ablations on direction construction and loss design.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30795
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HCPN-GCN: Scaling Hierarchical Prototype Networks with Cone Geometry for Continual Graph Learning
2026-09-25 01:46:42Sammuel R. Silva, Vander L. S. Freitas, Gladston Moreira, Eduardo J. S. Luz, Rodrigo SilvaAbstract
Continual Graph Learning (CGL) aims to incrementally learn from graph-structured data while preserving knowledge acquired from previous tasks. A major challenge in this setting is catastrophic forgetting, where learning new tasks degrades performance on previously learned ones. Hierarchical Prototype Networks (HPNs) address this problem through a prototype-based memory mechanism that avoids storing historical data, but their reliance on linear feature extractors limits their ability to exploit graph topology, while point-based prototypes often lead to inefficient prototype growth on structurally diverse graphs. In this work, we propose HCPN-GCN, a graph-aware extension of HPN that replaces the original linear feature extractors with Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) and introduces cone-based prototypes with a diversity regularization objective. The proposed design produces richer graph-aware representations while compactly modeling the embedding space, reducing prototype proliferation without sacrificing discriminability. Experimental results on six continual graph learning benchmarks demonstrate that HCPN-GCN consistently improves average classification accuracy over the original HPN and representative continual learning baselines while maintaining near-zero forgetting. Furthermore, our analysis shows that the proposed model learns substantially richer class-level prototype hierarchies using approximately $30\times$ fewer atomic prototypes than the original HPN, providing a more compact and effective memory representation for continual graph learning.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08823
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MedTokenBudget: Lesion-Preserving Token Routing for Dermoscopic Image Classification
2026-09-24 22:56:43Zhexiang LiAbstract
Dermoscopy classifiers built on Vision Transformers process all image patches uniformly, although diagnostic evidence is concentrated in the lesion region. Existing token pruning methods reduce tokens using generic saliency or similarity signals, but rarely ask whether the retained subset still contains the lesion. This paper introduces MedTokenBudget, a supervised post-backbone token routing framework that learns to construct compact lesion-enriched representations when auxiliary lesion masks are available. Its Lesion-Aware Token Scoring (LATS) module fuses attention entropy, feature norm, and local feature contrast through a learned scorer, then routes the top-$K$ patches under a target budget. LATS is trained with budget curriculum learning, diversity regularization, attention distillation, and lesion-mask supervision. The trained router is evaluated with a lesion retention rate that directly measures how much ground-truth lesion evidence survives the token budget. On ISIC 2019, mask-supervised LATS consistently outperforms Random and ToMe at headline budgets while retaining substantially more lesion patches. Code is provided for reproducibility, and complete tabulated results are included in the supplementary material.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30613
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Convergence guarantees for Muon: New parameter regimes and generalizations
2026-09-24 20:54:59Arthur C. B. de Oliveira, Dhruv D. Jatkar, Guilherme S. Vicinansa, Eduardo D. SontagAbstract
In this paper, we establish the first asymptotic convergence guarantees for the Muon algorithm through a more accurate proxy for the Newton-Schultz iteration than the typical matrix sign function. We prove that, for appropriate choices of hyperparameters, the iterates satisfy $\lim_{k\to\infty}\|\nabla f(x_k)\|=0$, and, under a global Polyak-Åojasiewicz condition, that the sequence of function values converges linearly. The key insight is that the regularization, implicit in Muon's Newton-Schulz implementation, induces a bounded preconditioner, exposing Muon as a \emph{preconditioned Polyak heavy-ball} method and enabling a classical Lyapunov analysis. This observation naturally motivates applying the same preconditioning structure to the Nesterov gradient evaluation. We formalize this idea by introducing \emph{Muesterov}, a Nesterov-based variant of Muon, and prove that it enjoys the same convergence guarantees, extending the theoretical framework beyond the heavy-ball setting. Numerical experiments on a scalar cross-entropy problem corroborate the theory and illuminate the joint role of the learning rate and the Newton-Schulz regularizer in controlling convergence. Preliminary numerical simulations training the nanoGPT dataset provide intuition regarding the relevance of the observations in this paper to practical applications.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30546
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AD-WM: Action-Discriminative World Models for Counterfactual Model Predictive Control
2026-09-24 17:59:41Jiabin Qiu, Zixuan Chen, Hongye Cao, Jieqi Shi, Jing Huo, Yang GaoAbstract
Latent world models are typically trained to predict factual transitions, whereas model predictive control (MPC) must compare alternative actions from the same state. A model can therefore achieve low factual prediction error yet poorly distinguish candidate actions. We introduce AD-WM, an action-discriminative joint-embedding world model for counterfactual MPC. AD-WM combines residual latent dynamics with predictor-level action-recovery regularization, using inverse dynamics and a normalized recovery objective motivated by conditional mutual information. Both objectives encourage planning transitions to preserve action information; their auxiliary heads are discarded at test time, leaving MPC unchanged. On OGBench-Cube, AD-WM improves hard-start success from 3.7% to 52.0% over a matched LeWM baseline and improves mean success over the reproduced baseline in four of five simulation environments. Planning diagnostics show that factual prediction error and whole-bank action ranking do not follow the closed-loop success ordering, whereas CEM-aligned elite regret tracks success more closely. With a frozen V-JEPA 2 encoder and matched DROID post-training, AD-WM also improves zero-shot transfer to our Franka setup, increasing basic pick-and-place success from 42.2% to 71.1% without lab-specific adaptation. These results suggest that world models for planning should preserve action-dependent differences needed for counterfactual selection, rather than optimize factual prediction accuracy alone. More videos and code are available at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30264
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GRASP: Generating, Revising, and Assessing for Strategic Planning with Agentic AI
2026-09-24 17:11:35Arunabh Srivastava (Amir), Mohammad A. (Amir), Khojastepour, Srimat Chakradhar, Sennur UlukusAbstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) typically exhibit a performance profile where reliability degrades as task complexity increases. We address the challenge of generating high-quality natural language executable plans for complex tasks by introducing $\textbf{GRASP}$, a strategy-aware, multi-stage planning framework. GRASP decouples the planning pipeline across specialized, context-isolated modules: it pre-compiles global macro-guidelines (GenPlan), explores alternative localized strategies within isolated context windows (RevPlan), and independently evaluates trajectories using a multi-criteria discriminator (VerPlan). Empirical evaluations show that GRASP consistently establishes a new state-of-the-art frontier across diverse datasets, yielding substantial accuracy gains over direct LLM planners on Natural Plan Calendar Scheduling ($\sim$12.4$\%$$\uparrow$), ZebraLogic ($\sim$30.8$\%$$\uparrow$), and SciBench Math. Crucially, under multi-task scaling-where standard planners suffer immediate performance collapse-GRASP completely flattens the multi-task degradation penalty. In interleaved dual-task environments, GRASP achieves an absolute accuracy gain of up to 16.7$\%$ over direct LLM planners. Furthermore, by isolating context and enforcing strict macro-regularization, GRASP outperforms frontier reasoning models (such as GPT-5-mini) by a margin of 14.5$\%$.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30147
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Beyond Average Safety: Chance-Constrained LLM Fine-tuning
2026-09-24 15:17:58Taha Entesari, Mahyar FazlyabAbstract
Fine-tuning large language models on new objectives can improve helpfulness, instruction following, or domain-specific performance, but it can also induce regressions on safety-critical prompts. Existing safety-preserving fine-tuning methods typically control average safety loss or use weighted auxiliary penalties, which can obscure rare but severe failures. We propose a chance-constrained formulation for safety-preserving fine-tuning that limits the fraction of safety examples whose degradation relative to a reference model exceeds a prescribed threshold. Because the resulting empirical chance constraint contains a discontinuous indicator, we introduce a differentiable majorization of the violation rate, yielding a tractable conservative constraint. We then develop a constraint-aware gradient descent method that treats the majorized constraint as a safe set in parameter space and minimally modifies the fine-tuning direction to preserve feasibility. The resulting update admits a closed form and produces a tail-aware safety correction that emphasizes examples near or above the degradation threshold. We conduct an extensive set of experiments on harmful fine-tuning across three different tasks and three models and show that our approach consistently outperforms the baselines that exist in the literature. These results suggest that safety preservation in LLM fine-tuning is better viewed as a reliability-constrained optimization problem than as average-risk regularization.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.29960
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