Asymmetric

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Period ending 2026-09-21

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A weekly snapshot of new work published in Asymmetric.

24 papers

Latest in Asymmetric

Sep 14, 2026cs.CV

AnchorGUI: Asymmetric Memory for Dual-Scale Learning in GUI Navigation

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) enable autonomous GUI navigation, but agents still struggle to process and learn from dense, continuous visual histories. This bottleneck hinders both immediate error correction within a single episode (intra-trial) and experience distillation across multiple attempts (cross-trial). We trace these challenges to an empirical informational asymmetry in GUI navigation: while expected transitions can often be compressed into lightweight textual summaries, unexpected outcomes benefit from preserved screenshots as causal evidence for accurate diagnosis. Building on this insight, we propose AnchorGUI, a unified framework driven by the Cognitive State Anchor (CSA). The CSA acts as a per-step primitive that actively compares expected and observed transitions, converting passive multimodal trajectories into explicit prediction-error signals. These signals orchestrate a dual-scale learning mechanism via an asymmetric memory. For intra-trial correction, a sliding window selectively retains visual evidence for detected mismatches, providing immediate, visually-grounded feedback. For cross-trial distillation, this asymmetric memory focuses the computationally expensive credit assignment search space on likely failure steps. Experiments across four benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our approach. On AndroidWorld, AnchorGUI achieves a 57.3% success rate with a 2.4×2.4\times token reduction per step. Furthermore, cross-trial distillation reaches 69.2% success (+11.9% gain), significantly outperforming standard reflection methods while maintaining sub-linear context scaling.
Shengjie Jin, Zelong Sun, Hengbo Xu +2
Aug 12, 2026cs.LG

DCM Bandits: Multiplayer Information Asymmetric Cascading Bandits for Multiple Clicks

In this work, we extend the Dependent Click Model (DCM) Bandits to a multiplayer information-asymmetric setting, where multiple agents interact with a shared ranked list and may observe multiple clicks per session, introducing new challenges for selection strategies. We study asymmetry in (1) actions and (2) rewards, providing sublinear regret guarantees for three settings where at least one asymmetry is present. Establishing matching information-theoretic lower bounds for these settings is left as an open problem. We further show that for small termination probabilities, the termination ranking need not be known, improving on prior single-agent results. Experiments confirm that our algorithms perform well across asymmetric environments and highlight the critical role of feedback structure, specifically the distinction between full versus first-click feedback, in coordinating exploration and minimizing regret.
Andy Wang, Charlton Shih, William Chang
Jul 30, 2026cs.CY

Asymmetric Communication: Large Language Models and Language Games

Contemporary AI discourse attributes to language models properties they cannot bear: general intelligence as substrate-independent cognition, hallucination as cognitive failure, agency as autonomous goal-pursuit, sentience as emergent inner life, alignment as goal synchronization. This paper argues that these are instances of a single category mistake--properties constituted within human communicative practice are projected onto the machine side--and explains its structure. Human-LLM interaction constitutes a language game in which one side bears all normative activity. We call this configuration asymmetric communication since model outputs circulate communicatively, entering further exchanges, without the system undertaking commitments, bearing entitlements, or performing the assessment on which discursive standing depends. Three conditions define the asymmetry: (i) correctness is enforced exclusively by the receiver; (ii) accountability is borne by human participants alone; and (iii) the practical standing of any output depends entirely on human uptake. These conditions are structural, hold independently of capability, and remain unchanged as more powerful models raise the stakes of misattribution. The framework draws on Wittgenstein (meaning enacted in shared practices), Luhmann (communication completed on the receiver's side), Esposito (algorithmic contingency sufficient for uptake), and Brandom (normative scorekeeping as the source of discursive standing). Applied to all five, it reclassifies each as a receiver-side phenomenon, grounds guardrails as structural necessities rather than manifestations of machine moral agency, and yields an implication for AI governance. Alignment is institutional constraint engineering, not goal synchronization between agents, while responsibility remains with human institutions.
Enzo Fenoglio
Jul 17, 2026cs.RO

Minimum Time Dubins Airplane Paths with Asymmetric Climb Rates

Dubins airplane paths approximate the limited maneuverability of fixed-wing vehicles with minimum curvature and climb rate constraints. However, the symmetric climb rate constraints result in sub-optimal paths and conservative vehicle performance. In this work, we propose asymmetric Dubins airplane paths, which consider asymmetric climb rates for climbing and descending. We revisit the time optimality conditions and show that the asymmetric flight path angle constraints preserve optimality. We show that by considering asymmetric climb rates, we can take advantage of full performance of the vehicle, reducing the minimum time by 71% for connecting randomly generated states. We also demonstrate that the added climb rate results in 2.8 times faster to find the median solution time when integrated into a sampling-based planning task on rugged terrain, due to the added feasibility. We further demonstrate the practicality of the approach with a real-world flight.
Jaeyoung Lim, Giuseppe Loianno
Jun 24, 2026cs.LG

Natural Ungrokking: Asymmetric Control of Which Rules Survive Pretraining

Midway through an ordinary pretraining run, a small language model learns the pronoun-gender rule: cued with a girl's name ("Sue cried because"), it resolves the next pronoun to she, generalizing to held-out probes (0.94 by step 925). By step 3,500 the same model scores near zero on the same probes, although the rule's evidence is still in the training data. We call this within-run reversal natural ungrokking: the corpus decides, with no trace in the loss curve, which learned rules a model keeps. Which rules survive is predictable from one corpus statistic: how often the training stream shows the rule winning. Across un-intervened runs (two corpora, three budgets, three seeds), support frequency decides a rule's fate; the data-to-parameter ratio only modulates how deeply a doomed rule falls. The same emerge-then-collapse dynamics appear in public Pythia checkpoints, collapse depth ordered by model scale as predicted. The forgetting is a displacement: a competing surface pattern out-competes the rule, and the log-probability margin between them crosses zero within 100 training steps of the behavioral collapse. Control over this fate is asymmetric: the same edit that destroys a rule on demand cannot restore it. Flipping support to counter-evidence in place kills the rule with monotone dose-response in two unrelated rules; but injecting support back, even to 450 times the level that naturally sustains it, buys no recovery. Every confirmatory threshold and prediction was pre-registered before the data it governed was read.
Juliana Li, Diya Sreedhar
Jun 22, 2026cs.RO

Asymmetric physics enables efficient learning in quadrupedal robot swarms

Animal collectives navigate cluttered environments through local coordination, yet robot swarms still struggle to reproduce this capability in the physical world. End-to-end learning offers a route to such coordination, but scaling it to embodied swarms remains difficult: standard sampling-based reinforcement learning becomes inefficient when visual perception, dense robot-robot interaction, and contact-rich locomotion must be learned together. Here we show that asymmetric physics enables efficient end-to-end learning of vision-based, decentralized control in large swarms of quadrupedal robots. During training, quadrupeds interact in shared environments, where a high-fidelity, non-differentiable simulator generates realistic motion and contact dynamics, and differentiable surrogate models provide gradients for navigation and locomotion policies. This separation enables up to 512 quadrupeds to learn coordinated navigation policies in obstacle-rich environments. At deployment, each robot acts from a single forward-facing depth camera, without explicit communication, centralized planning, or global maps. The policies generalize across forests, bridges, enclosures, narrow passages, and mazes, and zero-shot transfer to six physical quadrupeds across five real-world scenarios. The resulting swarms exhibit predictive avoidance, right-side yielding, pausing before bottlenecks, and wall following, showing that asymmetric physics enables efficient training of scalable decentralized control policies for quadrupedal robot swarms.
Yuang Zhang, Yunlong Song, Zhihao He +7
Jun 19, 2026cs.AI

Closure of Self-Determining System Based on Causal and Constitutive Relations

A self-determining system is defined as one in which causes originating within the system influence the system itself. This definition raises the question of how to specify system boundaries. Although the concept of "closure" is commonly used for this purpose, defining boundaries solely in terms of causal relations introduce challenges, such as how to handle external causes and circular causality. To address this issue, we introduce two types of asymmetric relations: causal and constitutive. We propose that system boundaries can be defined as closures of loops formed by these relations, referred to as causal-constitutive loops. By constraining constitutive relations, the resulting system necessarily includes internal causes and thereby satisfies self-determination. Furthermore, to prevent reduction to supervenience, constitutive relations must involve at least two independent variables. This minimal requirement leads to two interdependent loops, which implies a dual-process organization.
Yoshiyuki Ohmura, Earnest Kota Carr, Yasuo Kuniyoshi
Jun 15, 2026cs.SD

An Asymmetric Formula for Interval Consonance and its Relation to Harmonic Coincidence

Euler's Gradus Suavitatis (1739) assigns a dissonance value to a musical interval p/q by the formula G(p/q) = 1 + Ω^(p) + Ω^(q), where Ω^(n) = \sum_i e_i(p_i - 1) sums the weighted prime exponents of n. We propose the simpler asymmetric formula f(p/q) = p + Ω^(q), which treats numerator and denominator differently and performs comparably on standard consonance data. We also show that, under a model in which harmonics are integer-indexed and counted uniformly up to a fixed truncation level, Gradus is equivalent to a weighted harmonic coincidence count with weights w(n) = Ω^(n), connecting it to Galileo's earlier pulse-coincidence model (1638). The formula naturally generates a coprime integer triangle T(n,k) = n + Ω^(k), whose rightmost diagonal gives the two-stage dissonance of the superparticular (consecutive-harmonic) intervals. The formula f admits a simple two-stage interpretation in terms of harmonic context and partial recognition, which we offer as a speculative perceptual hypothesis.
David De Roure
Jun 15, 2026eess.SY

Distributed Safe Consensus Under Asymmetric Input and Time-Varying Output Constraints

This paper studies safe distributed consensus for single-integrator multi-agent systems over connected undirected graphs under simultaneous asymmetric actuator constraints and output safety constraints. Each agent is equipped with a continuously differentiable asymmetric actuator dynamics that maps a commanded control signal to the realized plant input while keeping the latter strictly inside a prescribed admissible interval. To address output safety, a barrier-coordinate transformation is introduced over a common time-varying safe interval, and a distributed synchronization law is designed in the transformed coordinates. The resulting controller integrates a graph-based coordination layer with an actuator-side tracking layer, thereby enabling simultaneous enforcement of input admissibility, forward invariance of the safe output set, and asymptotic synchronization. For compact admissible sets of initial conditions, it is shown that the closed-loop solution is complete, all signals remain bounded, the actuator inputs remain strictly within their asymmetric bounds, and the agent outputs remain inside the prescribed safe interval for all time. Moreover, the transformed synchronization errors converge exponentially to zero, and the original agent outputs asymptotically synchronize to a designer-selected admissible trajectory embedded in the common safe interval. Numerical simulations validate the proposed framework and demonstrate safe consensus under both asymmetric actuation bounds and time-varying output constraints.
Abhinav Sinha, Shashi Ranjan Kumar
Jun 12, 2026cs.LG

Signed Symmetric Quantization for Few-Bit Integers

The signed integer alphabet contains one more negative representable value than positive. Yet, by convention, the standard symmetric integer quantizer fixes its scale to be strictly positive, which assigns this extra representable value to the negative tail and can force clipping of positive outliers. In this work, we show that, at few-bit precision, such clipping is a non-trivial source of quantization error. Asymmetric quantization addresses this problem with a zero point, shifting the grid toward the observed data range; however, this flexibility is well-known to carry a runtime penalty. For example, in llama.cpp on an AMD EPYC(TM) "Turin" CPU, a 4-bit symmetric format uses up to 9% less memory with up to 2.45×\times higher throughput than its asymmetric counterpart. We highlight signed symmetric quantization as a third option that retains the runtime profile of symmetric quantization without the penalty of the asymmetric format: our signed absmax grid places the extra representable value on the dominant-outlier tail through a principled and lightweight sign selection rule while keeping the zero point at zero. Our theoretical analysis offers two main results. First, we establish the signed absmax grid as conditionally bound-optimal on 2\ell_2 quantization error, and show that the condition holds for 88-99% of weight groups across pre-trained large language models (LLMs) at low bit widths. Second, we show that negating the scale of a standard symmetric quantizer is analytically equivalent to a unit zero point shift on the same signed integer alphabet. We empirically validate our proposal on models from the Qwen3, Qwen3.5, and Llama3 families, and observe improvement in perplexity and downstream few-shot accuracy over the standard unsigned symmetric quantizer at no extra inference cost
Ian Colbert, Eashan Dash, Pablo Monteagudo-Lago +5
Jun 2, 2026stat.ML

Finite-Iteration Local Dynamics and Warm Starts for Alternating Power Iteration in Spiked Tensor PCA

We study simultaneous alternating power iteration for fixed-order asymmetric rank-one spiked tensor models. Our main contribution is a finite-iteration local theory that is independent of any particular initialization. Once the iterates enter a sufficiently small neighborhood of the planted rank-one direction, their error decomposes into a geometrically decaying transient and an intrinsic noise floor caused by fixed orthogonal noise contractions at the planted point. The deterministic finite-sample conditions are stated explicitly, but under a coarse fixed-order multilinear noise event they reduce to a conservative high-signal regime for fixed or slowly expanding local radii. We then separate the warm-start mechanism from any specific spectral construction. A generic one-sweep principle shows that, if a sign-compatible initializer has correlation γNγ_N, first-sweep noise level aNa_N, and aN/(γNd1ωN,d)0a_N/(γ_N^{d-1}ω_{N,d})\to0, then one can choose an expanding radius rN=o(ωN,d)r_N=o(ω_{N,d}) for which the first sweep enters the local basin. After entry, the local affine contraction yields convergence to the unique informative local fixed point in that basin. For centered-Gram initialization, we verify the required correlation and same-sample first-sweep noise bound under i.i.d. finite-fourth-moment noise by a signal-preserving noise-only leave-one comparison and an averaged leave-one slice-contraction estimate, which we call a pressed-back estimate. The leave-one comparison keeps the spike fixed and averages over the deleted coordinate, so planted coordinates enter through 2\ell_2-weighted sums rather than worst-case incoherence bounds.
Yanjin Xiang, Zhihua Zhang
May 27, 2026cs.CL

Bosses, Kings, and the Commons: Cooperation Under Power Asymmetry in LLM Societies

Communities can sustainably manage shared resources (commons) through self-governance and cooperative norms, a central finding of Ostrom's theory of self-governance. However, real-world commons (e.g., fisheries, forests, and irrigation systems) are often governed under asymmetric power structures, where certain individuals or institutions possess disproportionate control over resource extraction and collective outcomes. As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly explored as agents in synthetic governance simulations, understanding how LLM societies behave under asymmetric power structures is becoming increasingly important, yet existing evaluations largely ignore such asymmetries. We introduce Sovereignty over the Commons Simulation (SovSim), a generative multi-agent simulation framework that incorporates an agent with asymmetric power (boss or king) into a society of symmetric agents (workers or peasants), where all agents extract from a shared resource, collectively determining its sustainability over time. Across eleven state-of-the-art models, we find that introducing asymmetric power leads to severe breakdowns in cooperation and sustainability, with up to an 87.3% degradation in survival rate relative to symmetric settings.
Abhilekh Borah
May 26, 2026cs.CV

HydraPrompt: An Adaptive and Asymmetric Framework of Vision-Language Models for Synthetic Image Detection

The rapid evolution of generative models has precipitated a proliferation of fabricated content, posing significant challenges to existing Synthetic Image Detection (SID) methods. Capitalizing on advancements in vision-language models (e.g., CLIP), recent attempts have leveraged learnable textual prompts to identify synthetic images. However, they still leverage static prompt as a fixed boundary for real and fake images, failing to adapt to the varying types of forgery that emerge during inference. To overcome this issue, we propose HydraPrompt, an asymmetric prompting framework that dynamically adjusts the category centers by aligning with fine-grained image cues. Specifically, we propose an Asymmetric Prompt Adapter (APA): (1) for authentic category, we introduce a single set of prompts to capture the consistent representative patterns, which serves as a unified anchor for real content. While (2) for fake category, we construct sample-adaptive prompts that specialize in capturing diverse cues from different samples, enabling adaptive modeling of forgery image variations. To increase pronounced discriminability within different synthetic images, we further introduce a Conditional Supervised Contrastive (CSC) objective, which compacts the authentic representations while capturing fine-grained forgery clues. Extensive experiments on popular SID benchmarks demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our framework.
Senyuan Shi, Hao Tan, Zichang Tan +4
May 23, 2026eess.SY

Asymmetric Adaptation-based Real-time Fault Diagnosis Under Transitional Operating Conditions

Data streams in real-world industrial scenarios often contain transitional operating conditions that are uncovered during offline training, leading to significant distribution shifts. To bridge the gap between static offline models and dynamic online data, a novel asymmetric adaptation-based fault diagnosis method is proposed in this paper. Specifically, in the offline stage, we employ domain generalization techniques to extract domain-invariant features from multiple stable conditions and construct robust normalized fault prototypes as reference anchors. Subsequently, during online inference, we design an online test-time adaptation method based on a periodic prototype re-projection mechanism to dynamically update prototype positions. Furthermore, we utilize the geometric distribution derived from anchors to guide the updates of classifiers and adopt an asymmetric learning rate strategy for the feature extractor and classifier. The proposed approach ensures rapid adaptation to new transitional conditions while preserving the discriminative power inherited from the offline domain generalization initialization. Experimental results demonstrate that this mechanism effectively leverages offline generalized knowledge to guide online inference, significantly improving robustness in non-stationary environments.
Hongshuo Zhao, Zeyi Liu, Xiao He
May 21, 2026cs.LG

Survive or Collapse: The Asymmetric Roles of Data Gating and Reward Grounding in Self-Play RL

Self-play reinforcement learning trains language models on their own generated tasks, co-evolving a proposer and solver without human labels. Recent systems report strong reasoning gains, but collapse and instability are widely observed and poorly understood. The dominant response treats this as a reward-design problem. We argue instead that self-play stability is governed by two distinct levers: a data-level gate that decides which proposer-generated tasks enter the training pool, and the reward signal that updates the policy on tasks already admitted. Through controlled experiments on a Python output-prediction task and a deterministic-DSL twin task that strips pretraining priors, output ambiguity, and executor noise, we find the two levers are asymmetric. A strict gate is sufficient for stability under every reward variant we test, including a self-consistency reward with no access to ground truth; while no reward variant is sufficient once the gate is removed. This asymmetry exposes a counter-intuitive coupling we call the Grounded Proposer Paradox: a proposer with ground-truth access accelerates collapse faster than an ungrounded one when paired with a self-consistency solver, by concentrating training on clean tasks that form the fastest path to a spurious self-consistent attractor. Replacing the binary gate with a continuous strictness parameter ε\varepsilon further reveals a two-stage phase transition: training-side metrics decouple at low ε\varepsilon, while validation accuracy holds until ε\varepsilon is much higher. Data-level gating, not reward calibration, is the binding constraint on self-play stability.
Sophia Xiao Pu, Zhaotian Weng, Chengzhi Liu +4
May 18, 2026cs.LG

scHelix: Asymmetric Dual-Stream Integration via Explicit Gene-Level Disentanglement

A critical challenge in single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) integration is resolving the tension between eliminating batch effects and maintaining biological fidelity. While recent evidence indicates that batch effects manifest heterogeneously across genes, most existing methods process the transcriptome uniformly, frequently resulting in over-correction and loss of subtle biological signals. To address this, we present scHelix, a dataset-adaptive framework that fundamentally changes how features are processed by explicitly partitioning genes into domain-invariant Anchors and domain-sensitive Variants at the input level. scHelix utilizes a dual-stream sparse diffusion encoder equipped with stop-gradient graph caching to efficiently learn multi-scale structural representations. The core of our approach is a novel asymmetric Align-Refine-Fuse protocol: the unstable Variant stream is first aligned to the robust topology of the Anchor stream, followed by a conservative refinement phase where the Anchor stream absorbs denoised details via bounded residual gating. This divide-and-conquer architecture prevents shortcut learning and ensures robust batch removal without compromising the integrity of biological clusters. Extensive benchmarking demonstrates that scHelix outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Xichen Yan, Zelin Zang, Changxi Chi +8
May 18, 2026cs.AI

AMR-SD: Asymmetric Meta-Reflective Self-Distillation for Token-Level Credit Assignment

The alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) for complex reasoning heavily relies on Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR). However, standard algorithms like GRPO apply sequence-level rewards uniformly to all tokens, creating a severe credit-assignment bottleneck. While on-policy self-distillation attempts to resolve this by conditioning a self-teacher on privileged contexts, direct exposure to raw oracle solutions often induces over-conditioned teacher distributions, implicit answer leakage, and late-stage training collapse. To overcome these limitations, we propose Asymmetric Meta-Reflective Self-Distillation (AMR-SD). Instead of conditioning directly on raw reference traces, AMR-SD inserts a reflection bottleneck: it compresses diagnostic signals -- from verifier outcomes, peer rollouts, or reference feedback -- into concise, self-generated Socratic hints and critiques. Furthermore, we introduce Causal Information Gain (CIG) with an asymmetric, ReLU-gated threshold to translate these reflections into sparse, highly precise token-level advantage modulations. Combined with temporal annealing, this mechanism preserves the base environmental reward while filtering out distributional noise. Experiments across scientific, mathematical, and tool-use benchmarks demonstrate that AMR-SD significantly outperforms existing baselines, achieving robust long-horizon stability and successfully preventing late-stage collapse.
Zhenlin Wei, Pu Jian, Yingzhuo Deng +6
May 18, 2026cs.LG

One Model, Two Roles: Emergent Specialization in a Shared Recurrent Transformer

Can a shared-weight recurrent Transformer develop distinct internal roles without being partitioned into separate modules? We study this in Asymmetric Input Recurrence (AIR), a minimal two-state reasoning architecture in which the same Transformer model is reused for both updates (per literature, L and H) and the only built-in difference in the update rule is that the encoded input is injected during L-updates but not H-updates. Across Sudoku-Extreme and Maze, decoded rollouts reveal a consistent split: \zH\zH behaves like a fully committed proposal state, whereas \zL\zL retains local uncertainty and shifting intermediate structure. Freeze experiments show that this split is, in practice, related to the model's state dynamics: in Sudoku, freezing \zH\zH reduces \zL\zL's content changes whereas freezing \zL\zL increases \zH\zH's, while in Maze, freezing either state increases content changes in the other state. Ablations show that to induce specialization, the shared model needs to be able to tell the two update types apart, either from input injection asymmetry or from a separate level token. Mechanistically, attention analysis shows that L-updates are consistently more local than H-updates in both Sudoku and Maze. Together, these results show that, in a two-state recurrent setting, a clear state-identity signal can induce stable, related functional roles inside a shared-parameter recurrent Transformer. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/juchengshen/air}{\textcolor{blue}{https://github.com/juchengshen/air}}.
Jucheng Shen, Barbara Su, Anastasios Kyrillidis
May 17, 2026cs.AI

The Capability Paradox: How Smarter Auditors Make Multi-Agent Systems Less Secure

Multi-agent systems extend large language models (LLMs) by decomposing tasks among specialized agents, but their distributed decision process creates new attack surfaces. We identify semantic hijacking, an attack in which harmful requests are concealed within domain-specific narratives and propagated to a Manager through Worker reports, without any syntactic injection primitives. Across 42,000 adversarial trials over 12 Manager models and 7 Worker configurations, we uncover a capability paradox: as Worker capability increases, the mean system-level Attack Success Rate (ASR) increases from 18.4% to 63.9%, peaking at 94.4%. To explain this effect, we conduct multi-level mediation analysis on two independent datasets (47,807 interactions). This analysis shows that this paradox is driven by linguistic certainty: stronger Workers are more likely to interpret adversarial narratives as legitimate, convey their conclusions assertively, and thereby lead Managers to treat such confident endorsements as justification to execute. In our larger Worker-Only setting (nWn_W=14), certainty mediates 74% of the effect, with 95% confidence intervals (CI) excluding zero under both Monte Carlo and cluster bootstrap; the smaller Full-MAS setting (nWn_W =6) shows a directionally consistent indirect effect. Worker-side safety prompting does not reliably mitigate this failure. Building on the mediation finding, we propose heterogeneous ensemble verification, which pairs Workers of asymmetric domain competence so their complementary vulnerabilities break the certainty-to-execution chain, reducing ASR from 52.8% to 2.0% with negligible benign-task impact. Our results show that upgrading components to stronger models can actively degrade system security, and that effective defenses require exploiting--rather than eliminating--capability asymmetries between agents.
Qiqi Liu, Thorsten Holz, Shilin Ye +1
May 12, 2026cs.CV

Anomaly-Aware Vision-Language Adapters for Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection

Zero-shot anomaly detection aims to identify defects in unseen categories without target-specific training. Existing methods usually apply the same feature transformation to all samples, treating normal and anomalous data uniformly despite their fundamentally asymmetric distributions, compact normals versus diverse anomalies. We instead exploit this natural asymmetry by proposing AVA-DINO, an anomaly-aware vision-language adaptation framework with dual specialized branches for normal and anomalous patterns that adapt frozen DINOv3 visual features. During training on auxiliary data, the two branches are learned jointly with a text-guided routing mechanism and explicit routing regularization that encourages branch specialization. At test time, only the input image and fixed, predefined language descriptions are used to dynamically combine the two branches, enabling an asymmetric activation. This design prevents degenerate uniform routing and allows context-specific feature transformations. Experiments across nine industrial and medical benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, achieving 93.5% image-AUROC on MVTec-AD and strong cross-domain generalization to medical imaging without domain-specific fine-tuning. https://github.com/aqeeelmirza/AVA-DINO
Muhammad Aqeel, Maham Nazir, Uzair Khan +2
May 11, 2026cs.LG

Unlearning with Asymmetric Sources: Improved Unlearning-Utility Trade-off with Public Data

Noise-based certified machine unlearning currently faces a hard ceiling: the noise magnitude required to certify unlearning typically destroys model utility, particularly for large-scale deletion requests. While leveraging public data is a standard technique in differential privacy to relax this tension, its role in unlearning remains unexplored. We address this gap by introducing Asymmetric Langevin Unlearning (ALU), a framework that uses public data to mitigate privacy costs. We prove that public data injection suppresses the unlearning cost by a factor of O(1/npub2)O(1/n_{\mathrm{pub}}^2), guaranteeing a strict computational advantage over retraining. This establishes a new control mechanism: practitioners can mitigate the need for high noise-and the associated utility loss-by increasing the volume of public data. Crucially, we analyze the realistic setting of distribution mismatch, explicitly characterizing how shifts between public and private sources impact utility. We show that ALU enables mass unlearning of constant dataset fractions -- a regime where standard symmetric methods become impractical -- while maintaining high utility. Empirical evaluations using variational Rényi divergence and membership inference attacks confirm that ALU effectively thwarts privacy attacks while preserving utility under reasonable distribution shifts.
Ahmed Mehdi Inane, Vincent Quirion, Gintare Karolina Dziugaite +1
Jun 30, 2025q-bio.NC

Neural Langevin Machine: a local asymmetric learning rule can be creative

Fixed points of recurrent neural networks can be leveraged to store and generate information. These fixed points are captured by the Boltzmann-Gibbs measure, which leads to neural Langevin dynamics that relax to those fixed points for generative learning of a real dataset. We call this type of generative model a neural Langevin machine, which derives an asymmetric and firing-rate-speed-adjusted learning rule requiring only local neural signals, thereby bearing biological relevance in terms of local predictive learning. An out-of-equilibrium regime of the generative process is revealed, together with a memorization-to-generalization transition with increasing training data size. The neuro-inspired machine can also realize a continuous exploration of the phase space for different kinds of generative images and can denoise a corrupted image as well.
Zhendong Yu, Weizhong Huang, Haiping Huang
Jun 26, 2025math.NA

Uniform Approximation of Functions with Asymmetric Growth and Decay by Deep Weighted Polynomials

Functions that grow without bound on one side of the real line and decay to zero on the other cannot be approximated uniformly by ordinary polynomials on unbounded domains. Motivated by classical weighted polynomial approximation, we introduce a class of one-sided weighted \emph{deep} (composite) polynomial approximants for such asymmetric targets. The weight suppresses polynomial growth on the decaying side, while the composite polynomial remains free to capture growth on the other side. We prove that this mechanism reduces the half-line approximation problem to approximation on a compact interval whose length grows slowly with the degree, and we establish density and existence of best approximants in the appropriate closure of the model class. For computation, we first formulate the method as a trainable computational graph for \emph{deep} weighted polynomial approximation. However, direct end-to-end optimization becomes increasingly ill-conditioned at high composite degree and can suffer from local minima. To address this, we introduce a fine-tuning procedure in which a fixed inner composition of monotone polynomial self-maps supplies the effective degree, while only the outer polynomial and weight parameters are trained; the outer fit reduces to a linear program. Numerical experiments on Black--Scholes option-pricing functions show that the resulting fine-tuned weighted \emph{deep} polynomial achieves smaller uniform and L2L_2 errors than matched-budget polynomial baselines and resolves the decaying tail to machine precision.
Kingsley Yeon, Steven B. Damelin
Date pendingcs.RO

VLA-Precision: Asymmetric Co-Bootstrapping for Efficient Real-World Online RL of Vision-Language-Action Models

Pretrained vision-language-action (VLA) models enable broad manipulation but remain unreliable in tasks demanding precision and repeatability. Applying real-world online reinforcement learning (RL) to VLA post-training enables autonomous trial-and-error improvement beyond demonstrations alone, but exposes two bottlenecks: 1) unreliable value signals can induce policy drift; 2) large-VLA overhead constrains throughput and sample efficiency. To address these challenges, we present VLA-Precision, an efficient real-world online RL framework featuring the Asymmetric Co-Bootstrapping (ACoB) algorithm and the ACoB-Stream architecture. Specifically, ACoB establishes asymmetric co-bootstrapping across timescales: early intervention-guided behavioral learning rapidly improves policy performance while enhancing online experience quality. As autonomous experience accumulates, global return propagation and local preference ranking progressively calibrate value estimates, yielding relative action advantages for reference-regularized policy improvement while suppressing drift. To enable ACoB on large VLAs, we develop ACoB-Stream, a closed-loop experience--policy architecture that establishes invariant-state decoupling and on-demand streaming as design principles, delivering up to 10.9×\times improvements in throughput and computational efficiency. Extensive evaluations on nine high-precision chemistry tasks across four categories and four robot embodiments show that VLA-Precision achieves 98.3% mean success rate in 45.8 min/task, with 27.6 s episodes running at 1.2×\times and 1.8×\times the speeds of VLA and RL baselines. Resources are available at https://vla-precision.github.io.
Chenyu Su, Zhaolong Shen, Yuan Qian +8