Scaling Laws

Recent momentum

emerging

0 papers in the last 28 days · 0.0% of indexed attention

Twelve weeks of publication activity for this topic as it is defined today.

Weekly history

Recent digests

What was published in this field, kept on the site without email delivery.

Period ending 2026-09-21

12 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Scaling Laws.

Period ending 2026-09-14

8 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Scaling Laws.

Period ending 2026-09-07

16 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Scaling Laws.

Inside this field

Focused directions

471 papers

Latest in Scaling Laws

Jul 10, 2026cs.CV

OpenLongTail: Generative Scaling of Long-Tail Driving Data

Scaling robust driving policies is fundamentally bottlenecked by the scarcity of edge cases in curated datasets. While the real world continuously captures these critical events, such long-tail events remain underutilized when collected from heterogeneous sources. Specifically, diverse but valuable in-the-wild long-tail videos lack the full view coverage required for training policy models, often missing multi-view poses or originating solely from monocular dash cameras. This modality gap prevents these ubiquitous observations from being converted into scalable training data for long-tail generalization. We introduce OpenLongTail, an open-source generative data engine for scaling autonomous driving policies under long-tail events. To transform heterogeneous data sources into view-aligned and temporally coherent multi-view assets that are useful for policy learning, we develop a pose-informed extrapolative view synthesis pipeline that generates the missing views. We further enhance cross-view consistency and the temporal alignment for the newly generated views by injecting Plücker ray geometry into the scalable generation engine. By synthesizing heterogeneous long-tail data, we observe a significant improvement in closed-loop driving robustness in handling long-tail events. By measuring the extrapolative view synthesis and pose metrics, we validate the effectiveness of OpenLongTail in visual fidelity, cross-view consistency, and ego-trajectory recovery.
Lulin Liu, Nuo Chen, Yan Wang +15
Jul 10, 2026cs.CL

Test-Time Scaling for Small VLMs on Multilingual Visual MCQ

Test-time scaling (TTS) reliably improves reasoning in large language models, but whether it transfers to small open vision-language models remains unclear. We examine this on EXAMS-V, a multilingual visual multiple-choice benchmark, comparing self-consistency, describe-then-reason with PRM-guided beam search, and two post-hoc selectors across Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct and Qwen3.5-4B. What matters is the conditions under which TTS runs, not the search or verification machinery. The largest factor is parseability: an early prompt format left many chains reasoning correctly yet never committing to an answer letter, which a standard answer cue and a guided repair step largely remove. A larger decoding budget removes the rest: raising the per-chain token limit from 1k to 2k recovers 3.7 pp, whereas sampling more chains (8 to 16) adds only 0.15 pp. Once chains have room to finish, elaborate methods contribute little: PRM-guided beam search trails plain self-consistency by 0.39 pp at over eight times the cost, and neither a training-free generative critic nor a trained multimodal PRM beats majority vote across both policies. The largest gain comes instead from the policy model itself (+11.4 pp). Our best configuration reaches 84.1% on the held-out ImageCLEF 2026 test split, ranking first on the Visual MCQ leaderboard.
Spiros Baxevanakis, Peng-Jian Yang
Jul 10, 2026cs.AI

KV-PRM: Efficient Process Reward Modeling via KV-Cache Transfer for Multi-Agent Test-Time Scaling

Process Reward Models (PRMs) have been proven to be highly effective in guiding test-time scaling (TTS) methods, which significantly boost the capabilities of LLM-based multi-agent systems. However, existing PRMs are text-based: they re-encode the entire trajectory text from scratch. In long multi-agent rollouts, the scoring cost, growing quadratically with respect to sequence length L, creates a severe computational bottleneck, severely limiting PRMs' application in long-context scenarios. To resolve this, we introduce KV-PRM, a highly efficient process reward model that eliminates the heavy text re-encoding by directly reading the KV cache produced naturally during the LLM's generation phase. By processing a single "verify token" against the pre-existing KV cache, KV-PRM reduces the scoring cost from O(L^2) to O(L). We formally prove that the KV cache contains strictly greater information capacity than text, and is more efficient for downstream reward modeling. Empirically, across the MATH, GSM8K, and AIME benchmarks, KV-PRM matches or strictly outperforms text-PRMs under various TTS methods such as Beam Search, MCTS, and Weighted Voting, with up to a 5,000x reduction in scoring FLOPs, a 37x reduction in latency, and a 34x reduction in per-sequence memory footprint compared to text-based PRMs.
Peng Kuang, Haibo Jin, Xiaoyu Han +5
Jul 8, 2026cs.LG

Optimal Learning Rate Scaling Depends on Data in Deep Scalar Linear Networks

In this short note we consider the gradient descent dynamics of deep scalar linear networks, f(x)=l=1Lwlxf(x) = \prod_{l=1}^L w_l x, which enjoy exact time-course solutions for any integer depth. We show that even in this minimal model, the optimal depth-wise learning rate scaling depends on data, whereas data-agnostic scaling rules fail to transfer across depths. Under the data-dependent optimal scaling, the learning dynamics is independent of data and weakly dependent on depth, resulting in a constant linear convergence rate across all depths including infinity. We further show similar data-dependent effects in deep scalar linear networks with residual connections.
Yedi Zhang, Peter E. Latham, Leena Chennuru Vankadara +1
Jul 8, 2026cs.DC

CTA-Pipelining: A Latency-Oriented Spatial Scaling Method for Multi-GPU Systems

The evolution of compute infrastructure has transformed multi-GPU systems into tightly integrated shared-memory structures. However, current software still mostly treats these coherent interconnects simply as high-speed networks. Simultaneously, the demand for serving Large Language Models under latency constraints has shifted GPU workload optimization from being throughput-driven to latency-bound, necessitating latency-oriented scaling methods beyond Tensor Parallelism (TP). Thus, we introduce CTA-pipelining, an execution paradigm designed to exploit shared-memory multi-GPU systems. As a latency-oriented spatial scaling technique, CTA-pipelining leverages dependencies at the Cooperative Thread Array level, enabling concurrent execution of dependent kernels across GPUs. We demonstrate its capability using CUTLASS, cuBLAS, and NCCL libraries on 8-GPU H200 and B200 systems. Results show on 2-layer GEMM, representing the MLP operation, CTA-pipelining reduces latency by up to 31.8% compared to micro-batching, and 29.6% compared to TP. It can also be combined with TP as an orthogonal scaling dimension to further push the latency boundary.
Tingkai Liu, Muralidhar Andoorveedu, Sanjoy Das +2
Jul 8, 2026cs.LG

How Data Shapes RoPE Frequency Usage: From Positional Scale Matching to Length Generalization

Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE) provide transformers with a fixed grid of positional frequencies, yet trained models use these frequencies highly non-uniformly. We study what determines this frequency usage and propose a data-centered explanation: RoPE frequencies are selected to match the relative-distance structure of the training data. Viewing each frequency as a positional lens, we formalize a field-resolution tradeoff and show that, for a data-induced dependency profile of width WW, the optimal frequency scales as 1/W1/W. This frequency-matching principle explains controlled observations on synthetic and text-based data, and suggests that the mid-low frequency bands observed in language models arise from the multi-scale dependency structure of natural language. We further connect frequency selection to position-interpolation-based length generalization: scaling frequencies down expands the effective field while reducing resolution. This helps when longer-context dependencies are approximate dilations of those seen during training, but can fail when relevant dependencies do not scale with context length. Empirically, we show that natural language exhibits approximate self-similarity across positional scales, explaining why test-time frequency scaling can support long-context generalization. Overall, our results identify a data-driven mechanism behind emergent RoPE frequency usage and show that long-context generalization depends on two forms of scale matching: between learned frequencies and training-time dependencies, and between frequency scaling and how those dependencies extend to longer contexts.
Xinyi Wu, Siyuan Liu, Ali Jadbabaie
Jul 8, 2026cs.CV

Scaling Mixture-of-Experts Video Pretraining for Embodied Intelligence

Despite the recent promise in robot control, video generative models suffer from a domain mismatch due to their primary focus on content creation. For example, their design inherently prioritizes visual fidelity and creativity over computational efficiency and physical realism. In this work, we present LingBot-Video, a DiT-based video pretraining paradigm specifically tailored for embodied intelligence. From the architecture perspective, we adopt the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE), instead of dense, framework to achieve a better trade-off between modeling capacity and inference efficiency, and manage to scale it up from scratch. From the data perspective, we construct a data profiling engine that augments standard internet videos with extensive robot-oriented footage, encompassing manipulation, navigation, and egocentric perspectives, to equip the base model with an intrinsic understanding of actions and world dynamics. From the training perspective, we develop a multi-dimensional reward system to enforce the alignment regarding physical rationality and task completion, going beyond standard criteria such as aesthetics, prompt-following, and motion consistency. Comprehensive evaluations validate its performance and efficiency as a video foundation model. We contribute LingBot-Video as the inaugural large-scale, open-source MoE video foundation model to the community, in a pioneering effort to bridge digital creativity and physical actuation.
Shuailei Ma, Jiaqi Liao, Xinyang Wang +24
Jul 8, 2026cs.CV

MedPMC: A Systematic Framework for Scaling High-Fidelity Medical Multimodal Data for Foundation Models

Medicine is inherently multimodal, requiring clinicians to synthesize information across diverse data streams. Yet the development of multimodal foundation models is constrained by limited access to large-scale, high-quality clinical data. Although PubMed Central (PMC) offers a complementary source of expert-authored image-text data, existing PMC-derived resources remain limited in fidelity, reproducibility, and clinical validation. We introduce MedPMC, an automated, continuously updatable framework that transforms permissively licensed literature into high-fidelity infrastructure for medical multimodal models. Applied to 6.1 million PMC articles, MedPMC curated 11 million medical image-text pairs. Component evaluations showed strong performance for initial screening (F1 = 93.2), multi-panel figure detection (F1 = 96.5), figure separation (mAP = 89.8), caption separation and alignment (F1 = 81.4; ROUGE-L = 85.3), and medical figure classification (F1 = 96.5). Manual review by five annotators, three with medical training, found 95.3% of MedPMC images medically relevant, versus 19.7% in a prior PMC-derived dataset. Across 26 benchmarks spanning 11 specialties, a MedPMC-trained CLIP-style model improved average zero-shot AUC by 7.1 percentage points over the strongest architecture-matched biomedical CLIP baseline despite using fewer than half as many image-text pairs. As the vision encoder in a multimodal large language model, it improved medical visual question-answering by 1.9 and 16.9 percentage points across two benchmarks. In 10,524 Yale New Haven Health System dermatology photographs, it improved morphology-to-image retrieval Recall@5 by 11.7 percentage points. These findings show that high-fidelity literature curation strengthens medical multimodal foundation models across benchmark and clinical settings. We publicly release the framework, corpus, benchmarks, and pretrained models.
Hyunjae Kim, Dain Kim, Pan Xiao +25
Jul 8, 2026cs.LG

Principled Analysis of Deep Reinforcement Learning Evaluation and Design Paradigms

Starting from the utilization of deep neural networks to approximate the state-action value function that led to winning one of the most challenging games, to algorithmic advancements that allowed solving problems without even explicitly stating the rules of the challenge at hand, reinforcement learning research has been the center of remarkable scientific progress for the past decade. In this paper, we focus on the key ingredients of this research progress and we analyze the canonical evaluation and design paradigms in reinforcement learning. We introduce the theoretical foundations of scaling laws in reinforcement learning and show that the asymptotic performance of reinforcement learning algorithms does not have a monotone relationship between performance rankings and data-regimes. We conduct large-scale experiments and our results demonstrate that a line of reinforcement learning research under the canonical design and evaluation paradigms resulted in incorrect conclusions. Our analysis and results provide a core analysis on scaling, capacity and complexity of deep reinforcement learning.
Ezgi Korkmaz
Jul 8, 2026cs.LG

LiST: Lipschitz Scaling Training for Robust and Calibrated Neural Networks

While accuracy, robustness, and calibration are all essential for reliable neural networks, they are often studied separately; developing models that satisfy all three simultaneously remains a central challenge. Lipschitz-constrained models guarantee robustness by design, yet the manual selection of the Lipschitz constraint L governs the resulting accuracy-robustness trade-off, and their calibration properties remain largely underexplored. In this work, we highlight a theoretical and empirical link between the enforced Lipschitz constraint and Temperature Scaling, a state-of-the-art calibration method. Specifically, we find that for a given training scheme, there exists a non-trivial value L* that yields an out-of-the-box calibrated network, and that calibration acts as a principled criterion to select a well-defined operating point on the accuracy-robustness Pareto front. Leveraging these insights, we introduce Lipschitz Scaling Training (LiST), a novel training paradigm that iteratively adjusts the global Lipschitz constant to reach this operating point. Through a margin parameter in the training loss, LiST further enables the construction of a fully calibrated Pareto front, allowing users to navigate the accuracy-robustness trade-off while remaining calibrated throughout. At convergence, LiST also enables the reintegration of calibration data into training, improving sample efficiency without sacrificing calibration. We validate LiST on CIFAR-10/100 and Tiny-ImageNet, demonstrating competitive accuracy and robustness against constrained and unconstrained baselines, while remaining calibrated out of the box. Code is available at GitHub.
Arthur Chiron, Franck Mamalet, Thomas Massena +2
Jul 6, 2026cs.CL

EdgeBench: Unveiling Scaling Laws of Learning from Real-World Environments

Pretraining scaling laws reveal that model capability improves predictably with data and compute. But learning from real world environments after deployment remains far less understood. Analyzing roughly 38,000 hours of agent interaction with the environment across 134 real world tasks, we find, to the best of our knowledge, the first evidence that overall performance during environment learning follows a log-sigmoid scaling law with remarkably high precision, reaching R^2 = 0.998. Across model generations, we also find that agent learning speed roughly doubles every three months. This discovery stems from EdgeBench, a suite of 134 real world tasks with ultra-long horizons, spanning scientific discovery, software engineering, combinatorial optimization, professional knowledge work, formal mathematics, and interactive games. Each task sustains at least 12 hours of continuous agent operation under rich, multilevel feedback, and is built through substantial expert effort. We publicly release 51 tasks and our full evaluation framework to accelerate the study of how agents learn from real world experience.
Deyao Zhu, Xin Zhou, Shengling Qin +44
Jul 6, 2026cs.SD

Listen, Think, Transcribe: Continuous Latent Test-Time Scaling for ASR

End-to-end ASR models transcribe in a single pass, leaving no room for the decoder to revisit hard inputs. We propose LatentASR, a parameter-efficient method that adds continuous latent test-time scaling to a frozen ASR backbone. Two small trainable modules drive it: a Latent Adapter that iteratively refines a few latent prefix positions through bounded, stabilized updates, and a Value Head that predicts whether extra computation will help and halts the loop early. The Qwen3-ASR-0.6B backbone stays fully frozen, and we train only ~4M extra parameters. We activate this loop with a deliberately small, diverse 500-utterance training set. Under this minimal-data regime, standard adaptation methods all regress: full fine-tuning, LoRA, and prompt tuning each increase WER. LatentASR is the only tested method that reduces WER on both clean benchmarks (FLEURS -2.54% and VoxPopuli -0.47% relative). The reductions are concentrated on intrinsically hard inputs. On accented and code-switched speech (ASCEND), LatentASR achieves a 16.0% relative CER reduction. Across 30 FLEURS languages (23,049 utterances), the multilingual WER decreases uniformly across resource tiers, confirming that the adapter generalizes without overfitting. Dynamic halting preserves most of the clean-set reduction at a fraction of the compute, skipping roughly half of all utterances at the entry gate. Our results show that a small, carefully chosen activation set can switch on test-time scaling inside a frozen ASR model without corrupting the model itself, converting fixed per-utterance compute into input-dependent compute where it is most needed.
Ho Lam Chung, Yiming Chen, Dau-Cheng Lyu +2
Jul 5, 2026cs.MM

Lights, Camera, Carbon: Architectural Scaling Laws for Video Generation Energy Consumption

We present a bidirectional framework for estimating the energy consumption of text-to-video (T2V) and text-to-video-audio (T2VA) models from architectural first principles and observable generation parameters such as resolution and duration, requiring no access to weights, model size, or implementation details. Forward, it predicts energy from generation parameters and architectural principles; backward, it recovers architectural scaling behavior from observed inference times, with accuracy serving as a criterion for architectural validity. Building on the established compute-bound nature of video diffusion models, we demonstrate that each model's energy profile obeys theoretically derived scaling laws, decomposing into quadratic and linear terms whose coefficients directly reflect the underlying architectural complexity. Validated across six open-source models spanning 8.3B-27B parameters and three GPU configurations, this decomposition achieves below 3% MAPE across all architectures. This approach offers a standardized, empirically and theoretically grounded framework for sustainability benchmarking across T2V models and architectures.
Nidhal Jegham, Boris Gamazaychikov, Sasha Luccioni
Jul 2, 2026cs.CL

Will Scaling Improve Social Simulation with LLMs?

Large Language Model (LLM) social simulations are a promising research method, but they are not yet faithful enough to be adopted widely. In this work, we investigate whether the current scaling paradigm in language modeling is likely to close these gaps, or whether simulation fidelity is orthogonal to general capabilities and therefore deserving of more research attention. We use scaling laws to study the relationship between LLMs' compute scale, general capability benchmarks, and the fidelity of social simulation in three representative sub-domains: opinion modeling, behavioral simulation, and longitudinal forecasting. Surprisingly, we discover strong compute scaling in all three settings, using a suite of 85 transformer LLMs with the Qwen3 architecture pre-trained on the DCLM web text corpus under fixed-compute budgets from 101810^{18} to 102010^{20} FLOPs. Then we evaluate 35 larger and more capable open-weight models up to 70B parameters, allowing us to predict downstream accuracy from loss. This reveals that the majority of behavioral and opinion simulation tasks will rapidly improve with scale, particularly when they involve populations that are well-represented in English web corpora. Longitudinal forecasting and underrepresented opinions scale more slowly, especially when they are less correlated with general knowledge and reasoning benchmarks like MMLU. In behavior simulation, scaling fails to improve model calibration with human cognitive biases like risk aversion, as well as human heuristics like learning correlated rewards from related tasks. On these tasks, even fine-tuned models fail to noticeably scale up performance from 0.5B to 8B parameters. Taken together, we conclude that scale will improve social simulations in most settings, but outliers exist, and improvements will be less reliable in low-resource domains.
Caleb Ziems, William Held, Su Doga Karaca +3
Jul 2, 2026cs.CL

When Does Generating More Help? Disentangling Fixed-Source Synthesis from Source Expansion in Synthetic Data Scaling

Synthetic data can be scaled along two routes: Source Expansion (SE), which enlarges the source by adding seed materials or generators, and Fixed-Source Synthesis (FSS), which holds the source fixed and scales the generation budget. Existing scaling studies typically expand the source as the data grows, conflating SE with FSS and leaving FSS underexplored. We isolate FSS by holding the seed-question pool and teacher model fixed, varying only the per-question response budget under Rejection Sampling (RS). We adapt the rectified scaling law to FSS, deriving it from how repeated sampling covers a fixed source. Empirically, the derived form, fit on low budgets, predicts performance at the held-out highest budget for every evaluated teacher--student pair. At matched total-sample budgets, SE and FSS are comparable at small budgets; at large budgets, adding seed questions outperforms spending the same budget on more responses. Within FSS, however, neither synthesizing additional questions from the existing seeds nor varying the synthesis protocol outperforms plain RS at matched budgets. FSS is thus a bounded scaling axis and a controlled setting for comparing synthesis protocols. We will release our code and data to facilitate further research.
Xu Guo, Jian Tong, Zhihui Lu +1
Jul 2, 2026cs.AI

Scaling with Confidence: Calibrating Confidence of LLMs for Adaptive Test Time Scaling

Training large language models (LLMs) with reinforcement learning (RL) has significantly advanced their performance on reasoning and question-answering tasks. However, prevailing RL reward designs typically prioritize response correctness, neglecting to incentivize models to express their confidence accurately. This leads to a critical problem: performance gains are often accompanied by poor calibration between confidence and accuracy, misleading models to overconfidently hallucinate when uncertain. To address this limitation, we propose C\textbf{C}orrectness and C\textbf{C}onfidence C\textbf{C}alibration R\textbf{R}einforcement L\textbf{L}earning (C3RL\textbf{C3RL}), a novel RL algorithm integrating correctness, calibration and dataset-informed reference accuracy rewards together. Comprehensive evaluation across 8 text and multimodal datasets demonstrates that C3RL enhances calibration without sacrificing accuracy, outperforming the current state-of-the-art method in both performance and calibration metrics. Utilizing the well-calibrated verbalized confidence from C3RL, we further introduce C\textbf{C}onfidence-based A\textbf{A}daptive Test Time S\textbf{S}caling (CAS\textbf{CAS}), an adjustable inference-time strategy that allocates computational resources based on response confidence. Experiments show that CAS surpasses majority voting on both in-domain and out-of-domain datasets while reducing the inference budget by up to 12.33 times. We believe the synergy of C3RL and CAS paves the way for deploying more reliable and resource-efficient LLMs. The code, data and models will be released.
Xuqing Yang, Yi Yuan, Shanzhe Lei +1
Jul 1, 2026cs.LG

How to Allocate Your Tokens? Scaling Laws with Training Steps and Batch Size

We propose a scaling law that takes into account model size and training data while explicitly splitting the latter into training steps and batch size (called three-term law). Fitting the proposed law on a large set of training runs, we find that it correctly recovers the scaling of the optimal batch size. Moreover, because it makes use of training runs with suboptimal batch size, our proposed law can be robustly fit with a significantly smaller amount of training runs. We further show that the three-term law can be used to derive scaling laws for suboptimal batch sizes, and that it matches previous empirical findings related to the critical batch size.
Fabian Schaipp
Jul 1, 2026cs.CL

Comparing Architectures for Supervised Political Scaling

Text scaling, the task of positioning political actors on an ideological scale, is a fundamental task in political analysis. To ease the need for manual analysis, various NLP methods have been proposed for this task, including classification- and regression-based approaches, showing successes as well as limitations. The goal of our paper is to consolidate the state of the art in this area. We ask two questions: (a) Can the performance of scaling methods be improved by predicting scales not individually but jointly? (b) Is there a middle ground between classification and regression?
Anna Golub, Sebastian Padó
Jul 1, 2026cs.LG

QuasiMoTTo: Quasi-Monte Carlo Test-Time Scaling

Scaling inference compute, by generating many parallel attempts per problem, is a costly but reliable lever for improving language model capabilities. By default these attempts are generated independently, wasting inference compute on redundant solutions. This waste seems unavoidable. After all, independence is what makes parallel sampling trivial to scale. However, this tradeoff is not fundamental: there is a rich design space of samplers that generate correlated but exact samples entirely in parallel. We explore this design space as an avenue for improving sample efficiency in scaling inference compute and reinforcement learning (RL). Concretely, we introduce QuasiMoTTo, which uses correlated samples as a drop-in replacement for i.i.d. samples. To generate these samples, QuasiMoTTo uses a reparameterization of autoregressive sampling as inverse-CDF sampling and draws the underlying uniforms with quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC); because QMC spreads the uniforms out more evenly than i.i.d., the resulting samples cover the output space with far less redundancy. Even though the batch is correlated, each sample is marginally distributed according to the language model, so we can use the batch for policy-gradient training. Our empirical analysis focuses on understanding how efficiently QuasiMoTTo can turn compute into performance. To evaluate correlated samplers, whose dependence breaks standard pass@k estimators, we first develop an unbiased bootstrap estimator. Across four reasoning benchmarks, QuasiMoTTo matches i.i.d. pass@k accuracy with 25-47% fewer samples. Strikingly, QuasiMoTTo often saturates an upper bound on pass@k that holds for any marginal-preserving sampler. We also apply QuasiMoTTo to policy-gradient RL (GRPO) where it matches i.i.d. performance with 50% fewer training steps. These gains come from higher coverage, which yields a stronger learning signal per batch.
Michael Y. Li, Anthony Zhan, Kanishk Gandhi +2
Jul 1, 2026cs.LG

Staleness-Learning Rate Scaling Laws for Asynchronous RLHF

High-throughput RLHF systems often decouple rollout generation from policy optimization, leading to the use of stale rollouts during learner updates. In this work, we study the effect of such staleness in asynchronous GRPO. We make the behavior policy explicit in the GRPO surrogate objective and distinguish between the surrogate-gradient mapping used by the learner and the true total derivative of a distribution-dependent population objective. Under assumptions of local boundedness, distributional smoothness, and behavior-policy smoothness, we show that stale rollouts introduce a per-step surrogate-gradient bias of order O(S * eta), where S denotes the maximum rollout lag and eta denotes the learning rate. We further derive a conditional collapse-time scaling law: when within-cycle drift remains below a batch-level clipping radius, collapse is governed primarily by cumulative learner drift T * eta; when the stale-rollout constraint is active, stability instead depends explicitly on S * eta. This yields a two-constraint stability condition eta << min{R_batch / (S * G_upd), R_crit / (T * G_upd)}, explaining why the maximum stable learning rate may appear weakly dependent on staleness in the horizon-limited regime.
Jingwei Song, Haofeng Xu, Jie Xiao +8
Jul 1, 2026cs.LG

Scaling Laws for Grid-Based Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search in High Dimensions

Grid-based approaches to approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search have been absent from modern scaling analyses. We present a systematic characterization of a multiprobe grid algorithm with respect to dataset size NN and dimensionality dd. Our experiments reveal a previously unreported dd-scaling crossover on the GloVe embedding family, in which multiprobe grid search maintains an approximately constant dimensional scaling exponent while other graph-, tree-, and partitioning-based methods exhibit degrading throughput. The advantage comes with near-linear query scaling in NN, but also with lower indexing cost than competing ANN methods. Our results suggest that grid-based methods such as multiprobe grid may be competitive in rebuild-heavy or high-dimensional settings where indexing cost and dimensional robustness dictate performance. More broadly, recent work has formalized self-attention as an ANN operation. Thus, the NN- and dd-scaling properties of ANN algorithms may guide cost analysis of efficient transformer architectures. Code is available at: https://github.com/weiz345/MultiProbeANN.
Matthew J Liu, Wei Hang Zheng, Vidhan Purohit +4
Jul 1, 2026stat.CO

Optimal scaling of MCMC algorithms: the Hamiltonian approach

We present a simple, yet general approach to study the scaling properties as the dimensionality of Metropolised MCMC sampling algorithms increases. The study relies on the symmetries of the Hamiltonian formalism and ultimately on the symmetry of the Metropolis-Hastings formula. Our findings contain, as particular cases, many known results for the Random Walk Metropolis, MALA and other algorithms. In addition, they provide, in an easy way, new optimal scaling results for a variety of proposal mechanisms, including implicit proposals and proposals generated with the help of differential equation integrators. The analysis applies to targets that are products of a given, not necessarily univariate distribution, and also to cases where the different terms in the product are scaled differently. We show how to construct gradient-based MALA-like proposals where the variance of the proposal as the dimension dd increases may be taken as O(1/dμ)O(1/d^μ), with μ>0μ>0 arbitrarily small, to be compared with the values μ=1μ= 1 for Random Walk Metropolis and μ=1/3μ=1/3 for MALA.
P. Dobson, J. M. Sanz-Serna, K. C. Zygalakis
Jun 30, 2026cs.LG

Nonlinearity-Aware LoRA: Structured Gate Adaptation under Low-Rank Constraints

Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) is commonly viewed as an update-space approximation to full fine-tuning, yet this view is incomplete for self-gated Transformer feed-forward networks. In gated FFNs, a low-rank residual can change not only projected features but also the nonlinear selection weights that determine which channels contribute to the output. We formalize this effect as selection misalignment and connect it to the local effective homogeneity of self-gated activations. This motivates a nonlinearity-aware principle for parameter-efficient fine-tuning: low-rank updates should allocate capacity to gate channels whose nonlinear states remain responsive and should shape the temporal evolution of selection. We propose NA-LoRA, a training-only method with two lightweight mechanisms: a derivative-based temporal-importance mask for gate-related LoRA updates and an activation-specific step-scaling rule when a meaningful coarse effective-homogeneity partition is available. NA-LoRA adds no auxiliary loss and incurs no inference-time overhead. Experiments on language-model fine-tuning and vision-language transfer benchmarks show that NA-LoRA consistently improves over vanilla LoRA and is competitive with or better than strong PEFT variants.
Shuai Yuan, Sudong Cai, Bingzhi Chen +4
Jun 30, 2026cs.RO

ELASTIC: Efficiently Learning to Adaptively Scale Test-Time Compute for Generative Control Policies

Generative control policies (GCPs), such as diffusion policies and flow-based vision-language-action models, enable test-time scaling in robot control. Test-time compute can be allocated along two axes: sequential scaling, which increases denoising steps to refine actions, and parallel scaling, which samples multiple candidate actions to search across modes of the policy distribution. However, the optimal allocation of sequential and parallel compute is hard to know a priori as it is state-, task-, and policy-dependent. For example, early stages of a grasp may benefit from broader parallel exploration, while near-contact phases may require more sequential refinement for precision. We present ELASTIC, an algorithm that learns state-dependent test-time compute schedules for GCPs. We formulate compute allocation as a meta-Markov Decision Process in which a meta-policy interacts with a frozen pretrained robot policy and selects sequential steps and parallel samples at each denoising iteration to maximize task success while minimizing compute. Using reinforcement learning, this meta-policy also learns adaptive compute schedules without access to the GCP's training data. Across simulated manipulation benchmarks with diffusion policies, ELASTIC Pareto-dominates fixed and single-axis scaling baselines at matched compute budgets. On real-world robot manipulation with the π0.5π_{0.5} vision-language-action model, ELASTIC matches best-of-1010 success while reducing wall-clock latency by 34%.
Andrew Zou Li, Gokul Swamy, Yonatan Bisk +1
Jun 29, 2026cs.CL

Scaling the Horizon, Not the Parameters: Reaching Trillion-Parameter Performance with a 35B Agent

We introduce Agents-A1, a 35B Mixture-of-Experts Agentic Model that reaches trillion-parameter-level performance by scaling the agent horizon. We investigate agent-horizon scaling from two perspectives: scaling long-horizon trajectories and scaling heterogeneous agent abilities. To support this goal, we build a long-horizon knowledge-action infrastructure that connects external knowledge, actions, observations, and verifier outcomes, producing agentic trajectories with an average length of 45K tokens. Based on this, we train Agents-A1 with a three-stage recipe. First, we perform full-domain supervised fine-tuning to align the base model with broad agentic behaviors. Second, we train domain-level teacher models to capture specialized expertise in each domain. Third, we propose a multi-teacher domain-routed on-policy distillation with salient vocabulary alignment to improve knowledge transfer efficiency across different domains, unifying six heterogeneous domains into one deployable student model. Agents-A1 achieves strong and broad performance for long-horizon agent benchmarks. Compared with 1T-parameter model such as Kimi-K2.6 and DeepSeek-V4-pro, Agents-A1 achieves leading results on SEAL-0 (56.4), IFBench (80.6), HiPhO (46.4), FrontierScience-Olympiad (79.0), and MolBench-Bind (56.8), and remains highly competitive on SciCode (44.3), HLE (47.6) and BrowseComp (75.5). We hope this work provides the community with a practical path for scaling the horizon using a 35B agent that can reach or match the performance of 1T models on long-horizon tasks.
Lei Bai, Zongsheng Cao, Yang Chen +50
Jun 29, 2026cs.AI

The FIL Hypothesis: Inductive Biases Help with Kernel Engineering

The Bitter Lesson, which posits that general-purpose methods that scale with computation and data ultimately outperform those with built-in human knowledge, has become a dominant paradigm in the era of Large Language Models. We revisit this principle by observing a new and critical scaling dimension: the duration of the Feedback Information Loop (FIL), the time required for a system to receive a verification signal after generating a prediction. Most historic successes in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have benefited from near instantaneous feedback (e.g., games or classification tasks), but we argue that future AI applications in science and the physical world will inherently involve FILs ranging from hours to weeks. This trend poses a fundamental scaling limit, as obtaining enough verification steps required by purely data-driven methods becomes practically impossible. Additionally, we propose a method that is orthogonal to purely data-driven approaches, based on human-inspired expert knowledge. The method relies on inductive biases and constraining the solution space. We provide an initial validation of the hypothesis and the method, by studying the real-world GPU programming task, a domain with non-trivial FIL, and demonstrate that incorporating inductive biases yields superior performance over data-driven approaches. The code is released under: https://github.com/ai-nikolai/robust_kernelbench
Nikolai Rozanov, Subhabrata Dutta, Preslav Nakov +1
Jun 29, 2026stat.ML

A Stochastic--Geometric Theory of Scaling Laws in Grokking

Delayed generalization (\ie~grokking) refers to the phenomenon in which a neural network fits its training data early in training but only begins to generalize after a prolonged delay, often through an abrupt transition. Despite extensive empirical study, its underlying mechanism remains poorly understood. In this work, we first theoretically characterize a shell--core topological configuration of the reachable solution space induced by Adam's optimization dynamics with weight-shrinkage regularization, supported by empirical evidence. This optimization-induced topological configuration gives rise to grokking. In model's parameter space, random initialization solutions concentrate on a thin outer spherical shell, enclosing another spherical shell of memorization solutions, which in turn contains a core corresponding to the generalization solutions. Leveraging stopping-time theory, we then analyze the geometry of this topological configuration and the solution transition time at which optimization trajectories escape the memorization manifold and first reach the boundary of the generalization manifold. Our theoretical analysis derives grokking scaling laws for the learning rate, batch size, and 2\ell_2 regularization coefficient, which are further validated through experiments and shown to recover results from prior literature.
Róisín Luo, Christian Gagné, Jonas Ngnawé +2
Jun 29, 2026cs.CL

REAR: Test-time Preference Realignment through Reward Decomposition

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with diverse user preferences is a critical yet challenging task. While post-training methods can adapt models to specific needs, they often require costly data curation and additional training. Test-time scaling (TTS) presents an efficient, training-free alternative, but its application has been largely limited to verifiable domains like mathematics and coding, where response correctness is easily judged. To extend TTS to preference alignment, we introduce a novel framework that models the task as a realignment problem, since the base model often fails to sufficiently align with the stated preference. Our key insight is to decompose the underlying reward function into two components: one related to the question and the other to preference information. This allows us to derive a REAlignment Reward (REAR) that selectively rescales the proportions of these two reward terms. We then show that REAR can be formulated as a linear combination of token-level policy log-probabilities, making it computationally efficient and easy to integrate with various TTS algorithms such as best-of-NN sampling and tree search. Experiments show that compared to other test-time baselines, REAR not only enables scalable test-time realignment for preference alignment tasks under diverse user requirements, but also generalizes to mathematical and visual tasks under appropriate preference settings.
Fuxiang Zhang, Pengcheng Wang, Chenran Li +6
Jun 29, 2026cs.CL

Smooth Scaling Laws Hide Stepwise Token Learning

Language model loss follows remarkably regular scaling laws over model and data size, yet it remains unclear why the aggregate loss should exhibit a power-law form. Existing explanations often attribute this regularity to a heavy-tailed spectrum of pattern difficulty in natural language, but this view has not been directly validated at token-level granularity in large-scale real-data training. We present a token-level framework that decomposes scaling laws into localized learning events of individual contextualized tokens. By fitting token loss trajectories with sigmoids, we show that token learning is concentrated in localized transitions, giving rise to a learning-time spectrum that dominates the scaling-law shape. Across more than one hundred pre-training runs on large and diverse real-language corpora with modern LLM architectures, scaling up to 6B parameters and 300B training tokens, the measured learning-time spectrum quantitatively reconstructs the validation loss derivative along the training-step TT, data-scale DD, and model-scale MM axes. We further show that the same signal is actionable: by reshaping the training distribution according to when tokens become learnable, we alter the optimization trajectory and achieve 11% faster validation-loss reduction. These results provide direct empirical evidence that scaling laws are governed primarily by the distribution of token-level learning times, and that this distribution can be used not only to explain scaling behavior but also to improve training performance.
Pingjie Wang, Zechen Hu, Peiru Yang +2
Jun 28, 2026cs.CV

ScAle: Attention Head Scaling as a Minimal Adapter for Spatial Reasoning in Vision Language Models

Spatial reasoning remains a persistent challenge for many vision language models (VLMs), and improving it typically requires fine-tuning with substantial additional parameters. Our preliminary analysis reveals that rescaling activations in selected transformer layers-without modifying pretrained weights-can significantly influence downstream performance. Motivated by this observation, we propose ScAle, an ultra-lightweight adaptation method that learns a small set of scalar coefficients to modulate last-token attention and MLP activations in a fully frozen backbone. We evaluate our method on the synthetic spatial reasoning benchmark SpatialEval and on real-world VQA datasets (COCOQA and VGQA) across multiple model families. Our method, ScAle, achieves up to 134.1% relative accuracy gains using only 1K trainable parameters without requiring millions of trainable parameters as in standard PEFT methods such as LoRA. Despite its extreme compactness, our approach recovers a substantial fraction of standard PEFT performance while preserving strong non-spatial VQA accuracy. These results demonstrate that bounded activation reweighting provides a simple, architecture-agnostic, and highly parameter-efficient alternative for adapting pretrained VLMs.
Rahul Chowdhury, Timothy A Rupprecht, Xuan Shen +2
Jun 28, 2026cs.LG

Anti-Collapse Dynamics and the Emergence of Multi-Time-Scale Learning in Recurrent Neural Networks

Long-range learning is hard for recurrent networks trained with stochastic gradient descent, because the influence of a past input fades with the lag \ell, and if it fades too fast the dependence cannot be learned from finite data. This fade is captured by an envelope f()f(\ell). An exponential fade makes the data needed to learn a lag-\ell dependence grow exponentially, putting long horizons out of reach; a power-law fade keeps the cost polynomial. We show that the asymptotic decay class of f()f(\ell) is not fixed by the architecture. Instead, it emerges from the coupling between the state dynamics and parameter dynamics, settling into either a collapsed regime (fast, exponential forgetting) or an extended, anti-collapsed regime (slow, power-law forgetting). The intuition is a competition within these coupled dynamics. Training drives the network's effective time scales toward short ones, while rare, heavy-tailed fluctuations of the learning dynamics push a few of them to very long values. The extended regime survives only when these heavy-tailed pushes are strong enough to balance the pull. We make this mathematically precise with a coarse-grained stochastic process and prove exactly when the extended regime exists. A single exponent, the spectral exponent~ββ, then governs both the spread of time scales and how slowly the network forgets. Realizing the regime in practice needs one more ingredient: the joint action of the architecture and the optimizer must be able to hold such a broad spread. A network whose capacity to generate broad time-scale spectra is severely constrained still collapses, even when supplied with strong heavy-tailed forcing. Heavy-tailed fluctuations thus act not as noise to be suppressed, but as the mechanism that sustains long-range learning.
Lorenzo Livi
Jun 28, 2026cs.CV

Pointer-CAD v2: Plan-Then-Construct CAD Generation with Dimension-Aware Parametric Precision

Computer-aided design (CAD) plays a fundamental role in modern manufacturing by providing the high precision required for industrial production. Recent large language model based approaches formulate CAD generation as a sequence prediction problem and have achieved promising results. However, existing methods and evaluation protocols primarily emphasize visual similarity, while overlooking precise geometric parameters and correct metric scale. Small numerical deviations that are negligible at the shape-level may still violate industrial tolerance requirements, a problem further compounded by current autoregressive paradigms that utilize command sequence representations, aggressively quantize numerical parameters to ease LLM prediction. In this work, we present Pointer-CAD v2. Compared with v1 (arXiv:2603.04337), this version directly predicts continuous values, bypassing the need for quantized numerical parameters and thereby eliminating quantization errors. Specifically, we propose a unified framework that decouples parameter reasoning from geometric construction through a Plan-Then-Construct paradigm. Our method first produces a structured design plan with explicit metric scale parameters. These parameters are organized into a dictionary and directly referenced during sequence generation via a pointer mechanism, eliminating discretization errors and ensuring dimensionally consistent execution. In addition, we construct a new large-scale dataset with plan-level annotation and introduce three hierarchical geometry accuracy metrics to evaluate parametric fidelity at the vertex, edge, and face levels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Pointer-CAD v2 consistently outperforms existing baselines and achieves substantial improvements in geometric accuracy, enabling reliable CAD generation for precision-critical engineering applications.
Dacheng Qi, Chenyu Wang, Jingwei Xu +2
Jun 28, 2026cs.CV

ScaleErasure: Inference-Time Minimal Intervention for Precise Concept Erasure in Next-Scale Autoregressive Image Generation

Concept erasure aims to prevent image generative models from producing unsafe content while preserving their general generative capability. Meanwhile, next-scale autoregressive (AR) image generation has recently emerged as a new generative paradigm characterized by next-scale prediction, for which concept erasure remains largely unexplored. In this paradigm, semantic information is highly compressed at early scales, leading to severe entanglement between unsafe and unrelated semantics. In this paper, we propose ScaleErasure, an inference-time concept erasure method that performs minimal intervention. ScaleErasure precisely selects and guides predicted logits that are most relevant to the unsafe concept, thereby enabling effective erasure under severe semantic entanglement. Specifically, ScaleErasure performs two additional forward passes conditioned on the unsafe concept and the corresponding safe concept, and leverages their outputs to guide the target logits away from unsafe concepts toward safe concepts. To enable precise and minimal intervention, logits selection and guidance are conducted across three dimensions: scales, tokens, and bit channels. Experiments demonstrate that ScaleErasure outperforms adapted baselines in the next-scale AR paradigm, achieving more precise concept erasure while largely preserving general generative capability. The code is available at https://github.com/coziiizz/ScaleErasure.
Cong Wang, Haiyu Wu, Zhiwei Jiang +4
Jun 28, 2026cs.LG

Bayesian Best-Arm Identification with Abstention: A Polynomial-to-Exponential Phase Transition

We study the Bayesian fixed-budget best-arm identification problem in which a learner can abstain from making a terminal recommendation. Subject to an abstention budget αα, we analyze the probability of undetected error--the risk of recommending a suboptimal arm without abstaining. Our central finding is that abstention induces a phase transition: without abstention, the error probability decays polynomially in the sampling budget TT; in contrast, introducing any small positive abstention budget shifts this to an exponential decay. For Gaussian priors and rewards, in the regime TT\to\infty followed by α0α\downarrow0, we establish exact matching information-theoretic lower bounds and algorithmic upper bounds on the optimal error exponent, which takes the form exp(α2T8κν2)\exp(-\frac{α^{2}T}{8κ_ν^{2}}). The hardness parameter κνκ_ν represents the prior density of the top-two gap at zero, highlighting that nearly tied instances drive the fundamental error. We introduce an adaptive algorithm, PGWS, that successfully achieves this optimal exponent by expending its abstention budget on statistically ambiguous instances. We further demonstrate that this polynomial-to-exponential improvement is exclusively a Bayesian phenomenon--in the frequentist setting, abstention only affects lower-order exponent terms. We also extend our results beyond the Gaussian model.
Yuqi Huang, Yunlong Hou, Vincent Y. F. Tan
Jun 28, 2026cs.LG

On the Nonlinearity of Learning Rate Scaling for LLM Training

Learning-rate transfer can reduce the cost of training large language models: instead of sweeping learning rates at target scale, practitioners extrapolate from smaller runs. Existing approaches often assume that the optimal learning rate follows a log-linear scaling law in data scale and model size. We carefully examine and evaluate this scaling law. In our empirical study of GPT-2--style models from 22M to 707M parameters trained on 5B to 100B tokens, the optimal learning rate develops upward curvature at larger scales, leading to inaccurate extrapolation. We find that this curvature largely disappears when learning rates are replaced by effective learning rate (the step size in normalized weight space), and when data DD extrapolation is used instead of model size NN extrapolation. Next, we explain nonlinearity in scaling: weight-norm converges to equilibrium slower when optimal learning is small, requiring a larger step size to reduce the transient phase. Experiments with AdamH, which directly controls the effective learning rate, further support this explanation.
Zaiwen Yang, Huaqing Zhang, Jing Xu +1
Jun 28, 2026cs.AI

Flow Reasoning Models: Turning Flows Into Efficient Recurrent Reasoners

Structured reasoning requires making and revising interdependent decisions to reach a globally consistent solution. Existing architectures struggle with this: autoregressive models commit sequentially and cannot revise earlier decisions, while masked diffusion models often require careful decoding schemes to coordinate interdependent predictions. We introduce Flow Reasoning Models (FRMs), a novel framework for structured reasoning that adapts continuous flows over discrete structured outputs with a simple recurrent refinement mechanism. By self-conditioning a flow model on its own past outputs, we turn one-shot denoising into iterative solution refinement. This lets FRMs make and revise decisions in parallel, efficiently coordinating interdependent choices across solutions. Yet conventional self-conditioning becomes unreliable at greater recurrent depth due to exposure bias between one-step training predictions and recursively generated inference states. We address this mismatch with Fixed-Point Forcing (FPF), which trains FRMs on states produced by their own inference dynamics while preserving the standard flow-matching objective. FRMs achieve solve rates of 99.5%99.5\%, 100.0%100.0\%, and 99.9%99.9\% on Sudoku-Extreme, Zebra, and Maze-Unique, respectively. On Sudoku-Extreme, FRMs achieve higher peak accuracy than the evaluated masked-diffusion and specialized reasoning baselines while remaining highly compute-efficient, matching the next-best method's 98.7%98.7\% peak solve rate with 44×44\times fewer inference FLOPs.
Alec Helbling, Andrey Bryutkin, Mauro Martino +3
Jun 27, 2026cs.CV

On Test-Time Scaling for Vision-Language Models

Test-time scaling is a paradigm where large models use additional compute at inference to achieve better performance, without changing model weights. While it has been widely studied for Large Language Models (LLMs), its applicability to Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) remains less explored and analyzed, with limited analysis of whether, when, and to what extent these approaches transfer to LVLMs. In this work, we ask a simple but fundamental question: can conventional test-time scaling methods developed for LLMs be directly applied to LVLMs? We present the first comprehensive study of test-time scaling for LVLMs, spanning multiple models and model sizes, nine test-time scaling methods, and six diverse benchmarks. Our main findings is that 1) different from previous findings, small, well-performing models benefit the most from test-time scaling, enabling performance improvements of up to around 30%, reaching large models performance, and often outperforming them, 2) LVLMs lose focus when given more compute than necessary, and 3) Visual information is encoded early in the reasoning chain, after which the chain is dominated by text-only reasoning and the contribution of image tokens drops significantly. Finally, we also provide a global and fine-grained analysis on the quality and information sufficiency of the reasoning chains produced. Overall, our findings and analysis provide practical guidance and insights into LVLMs and their deployment in research and industry.
Fawaz Sammani, Tzoulio Chamiti, Nikos Deligiannis
Jun 27, 2026cs.LG

When More Sampling Hurts: The Modal Ceiling and Correlation Ceiling of Test-Time Scaling

People overthink; language models over-sample, and the extra effort can talk both into a worse answer. Reasoning systems answer a hard question by sampling it many times (test-time scaling), and the more they draw, the more often a correct answer turns up somewhere, so coverage, the fraction of problems with at least one correct try, climbs and appears to be progress. But a deployed system must return one answer, and choosing it, not knowing which try is right, is selection; selection is capped, and past a point extra samples only make the model surer of a confident mistake, even as every draw adds cost. The gap between climbing coverage and stalled selection, the identifiability gap, is the answer a model can produce but not pick. So the real question is not whether to sample but how far, and the answer is: not far. For picking an answer, the vote has already settled within a few dozen draws, the modal ceiling; for scoring a benchmark, sooner still, the correlation ceiling. Beyond that, extra draws cost compute and add nothing, and can even make the answer worse. This paper turns the cutoff into a single number, the effective number of samples, that any sampling run already reveals. The bottleneck is recognizing a right answer, not generating one.
Yong Yi Bay, Kathleen A. Yearick
Jun 26, 2026cs.LG

How Width and Data Shape Generalization Scaling Laws in Quadratic Neural Networks

Understanding how performance scales jointly with model size and data is a central problem in modern machine learning. Existing theoretical works on scaling laws typically describe generalization as a function of data or compute, often in fixed-feature or infinite-width regimes and for online SGD. Here, we instead study how generalization scales with the number of trainable parameters and the number of samples in a feature-learning model. We analyze 2\ell_2-regularized empirical test error minimization in a quadratic two-layer network in a finite-sample setting with structured data. This setting allows for an explicit characterization of the generalization error as a function of the number of samples, model width, and regularization. Our results reveal a phase diagram with distinct scaling regimes as the number of parameters varies. In particular, the generalization error follows data-dependent power laws controlled by the spectral structure of the target. We further characterize the transitions between regimes, including the onset of interpolation, and their impact on generalization.
Julius Girardin, Emanuele Troiani, Yizhou Xu +3
Jun 26, 2026cs.RO

Unleashing Infinite Motion: Scaling Expressive Quadrupedal Motion via Generative Video Priors

Quadruped robots have achieved remarkable locomotion, yet their behavioral repertoire remains confined to a few gaits--far from the expressive, companion-like presence long envisioned for them. Attempts to import the humanoid recipe of large-scale motion data have inherited one tacit assumption: that robot motion must first pass through an animal body, making data collection dependent on cooperative animals, reconstruction fragile across species, and retargeting ill-posed across incompatible morphologies. We propose Uni-Mo, a fully automated pipeline that removes the animal from the loop by reframing data scarcity as a generation problem: an LLM proposes motion prompts, a video diffusion model synthesizes the corresponding robot behaviors, and the generated videos are lifted into 3D reference trajectories used to train tracking policies deployed on a real Unitree Go2. To make naively-drifting generations reliably extractable, we introduce an Identity Consistency Loss that enforces appearance coherence across frames. We release Quad-Imaginarium at https://github.com/Amap-Robotics/Quad-Imaginarium, the resulting open-source dataset of 7,488 language-annotated quadruped motions (18.5 hours) spanning acrobatic and performative behaviors. We validate 392 randomly sampled motions on a real Unitree Go2 with a 96.7% deployment success rate, complemented by a 97.6% success rate across the full dataset in simulation.
Youzhi Liu, Li Gao, Yifei Qian +3
Jun 26, 2026cs.LG

MixTTA: Low-Rank Cross-Channel Mixing for Reliable Test-Time Adaptation

Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) methods commonly update the affine parameters of normalization layers to adapt deployed models under distribution shifts. However, per-channel affine parameters perform axis-aligned scaling and shifting, making them geometrically incapable of correcting cross-channel structural changes induced by distribution shift. To address this limitation, we propose MixTTA, a lightweight plug-in module that equips normalization layers with a low-rank cross-channel transformation, enabling inter-channel mixing at each layer. To ensure that the low-rank branch captures only cross-channel interactions, we also propose Decoupling Projection that enforces strict separation from the diagonal affine path, along with Spectral Projection that prevents rank-1 collapse under non-stationary test streams. MixTTA can be seamlessly integrated into any existing normalization-based TTA method. Experiments in both standard and wild TTA settings show consistent improvements over strong baselines while mitigating adaptation failure under challenging conditions. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/delta6189/MixTTA.
Mansoo Jung, Youngwook Kim, Jungwoo Lee
Jun 26, 2026cs.CL

Mitigating Position Bias in Transformers via Layer-Specific Positional Embedding Scaling

Large Language Models (LLMs) still struggle with the ``lost-in-the-middle'' problem, where critical information located in the middle of long-context inputs is often underrepresented or lost. While existing methods attempt to address this by combining multi-scale rotary position embeddings (RoPE), they typically suffer from high latency or rely on suboptimal hand-crafted scaling strategies. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a layer-specific positional embedding scaling~(LPES) method that assigns distinct scaling factors to each layer. LPES achieves a more balanced attention distribution without fine-tuning model parameters or increasing inference delay. A specially designed genetic algorithm is employed to efficiently select the optimal scaling factors for each layer by incorporating Bézier curves to significantly reduce the search space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LPES effectively mitigates positional attention bias and delivers consistent improvements across multiple long-context benchmarks, yielding up to an 11.211.2% accuracy gain on the key-value retrieval dataset.
Changze Lv, Zhenghua Wang, Yiran Ding +9
Jun 25, 2026cs.RO

E-TTS: A New Embodied Test-Time Scaling Framework for Robotic Manipulation

Recently, a few works have made early attempts to study test-time scaling for embodied tasks. However, two major challenges remain unsolved: (1) reasoning can effectively improve the performance of the policy, but its scaling mechanism has seldom been studied; (2) historical information is essential, as embodied tasks are inherently long-horizon and sequential, making sole reliance on current observations for action scaling inadequate due to the lack of historical context utilization. To address these challenges, we introduce E-TTS, a modular and plug-and-play Embodied Test-Time Scaling framework that unifies reasoning and action scaling for robotic manipulation via history-aware iterative refinement with vision-language verifiers. To support joint reasoning-action scaling, E-TTS performs reasoning-action joint sampling and scoring in a pairwise manner. To better utilize historical information, E-TTS uses a history buffer to store historical context, which is then used by reasoning and action verifiers to evaluate the sampled candidates. Unlike conventional open-loop TTS methods, E-TTS introduces feedback generation into the sampling process to form a closed-loop iterative refinement mechanism, enhancing both inference efficiency and environmental adaptability. Each component functions as an independent and composable module, allowing flexible and adaptive configuration depending on task requirements. To evaluate the advantages of our framework, we conduct experiments across 4 different benchmarks, 6 environments, 3 embodiments, and 4 base vision-language-action models. The experimental results demonstrate that, without requiring additional expert data collection or retraining, E-TTS consistently improves performance, achieving up to a 33.14% increase in simulation and 26.62% in real-world scenarios.
Wen Ye, Peiyan Li, Tingyu Yuan +7
Jun 25, 2026cs.LG

Sketched Linear Contrastive Learning: Approximation, Optimization, and Statistical Scaling

Scaling laws describe how learning performance varies with model size, data size, and compute. While recent theoretical work has established scaling laws for sketched linear regression, much less is understood for contrastive representation learning. In this paper, we study a sketched linear model for contrastive learning under a paired Gaussian latent-variable setup. The learner observes only sketched views of two correlated variables and trains a bilinear contrastive score by full-batch empirical gradient descent. We analyze a Gaussian-negative quadratic contrastive surrogate under aligned power-law spectra and a contrastive source condition, where we derive a risk decomposition into irreducible risk, approximation error, GD bias, GD variance, and a cross term. The cross term is controlled by the bias and variance and therefore does not affect the upper-bound scaling. Our main theorem gives an explicit scaling law with respect to sketch dimension MM, sample size NN, and effective optimization horizon LeffγL_{\mathrm{eff}}γ. Compared with standard linear-regression scaling laws, the contrastive setting must learn interactions between two views, and this changes how optimization and finite-sample noise scale with model size, data, and training time. This provides a first theoretical step toward understanding scaling behavior in contrastive learning and gives guidance for balancing model size, data, and optimization compute.
Ziyan Chen, Zhongzhu Zhou, Ding-Xuan Zhou
Jun 24, 2026cs.AI

Data-driven Machine Learning Cannot Reach Symbolic-level Logical Reasoning -- The Limit of the Scaling Law

Sphere neural networks have achieved symbolic level syllogistic reasoning without training data, raising the question of where the limit of the scaling law for logical reasoning lies, i.e., whether data-driven machine learning systems can achieve the same level by increasing training data and training time. We show two methodological limitations that prevent supervised deep learning from reaching the symbolic-level syllogistic reasoning: (1) training data can not distinguish all 24 types of valid syllogistic reasoning; (2) end-to-end mapping from premises to conclusion introduces contradictory training targets between neural components for pattern recognition and logical reasoning. Beside theoretical analysis, we experimentally illustrate that Euler Net cannot achieve rigorous syllogistic reasoning. We further challenge the most recent ChatGPTs (GPT-5-nano and GPT-5) to determine the satisfiability of syllogistic statements in four surface forms (patterns): words, double words, simple symbols, and long random symbols, showing that surface forms affect the reasoning performance and that ChatGPT GPT-5 may reach 100% accuracy but still provide incorrect explanations. As empirical training processes are stopped after achieving 100% accuracy, we conclude that supervised machine learning systems will not attain the rigour of symbolic logical reasoning.
Tiansi Dong, Mateja Jamnik, Pietro Liò
Jun 24, 2026cs.LG

The Inference-Compute Frontier and a Latency-Efficient Architecture for Limit Order Book Prediction

We study whether a scaling-law-style inference-compute frontier appears in limit order book prediction. Using FI-2010 and a suite of models ranging from small decision trees to neural LOB architectures, we find that the realized empirical frontier of predictive loss versus structural forward work is well summarized by a power law. In particular, with MLPLOB held out as an architecture family, a power-law fit to the low- and mid-compute non-MLPLOB frontier extrapolates across multiple orders of magnitude and attains R2=0.941R^2=0.941 on the excluded high-compute MLPLOB target frontier. A similar exercise in latency space gives substantially weaker results, showing that latency is not merely noisy compute. We use this gap to motivate FastBiNLOB, a dense axis-separable LOB mixer built from hardware-friendly temporal and feature mixing operations. In a five-seed experiment, FastBiNLOB exceeds the published y10y_{10} and y100y_{100} macro-F1 targets at notably lower latency than existing published SOTA architectures.
C. Evans Hedges
Jun 24, 2026cs.RO

Morphology-Specific Closed-Loop Control of Logarithmic-Spiral Continuum Arms via Online Jacobian Error Compensation

Logarithmic spirals are ubiquitous in biological appendages and provide an attractive morphology for continuum manipulators capable of reaching, wrapping, and grasping. Recently reported logarithmic-spiral robots demonstrated scalable fabrication and versatile grasping but lacked inverse kinematics and closed-loop control. This work presents the first morphology-specific closed-loop task-space control framework for logarithmic-spiral continuum arms. A segmented tendon-driven model with a centerline backbone and equilateral tendon routing is developed in MuJoCo to capture tapered compliance and contact dynamics. An analytical task-space Jacobian is derived directly from the logarithmic-spiral kinematics and combined with online Jacobian error compensation using a Broyden secant update and Kalman-filter estimation. The resulting controller continuously corrects modeling errors arising from nonlinear deformation, contact, and geometric mismatch. The framework is validated through planar and spatial simulations, including trajectory tracking, attitude regulation, disturbance rejection, three-dimensional position tracking, and simultaneous position-orientation control. Compared with a piecewise-constant-curvature (PCC) baseline, the proposed method consistently reduces tracking errors, suppresses attitude drift, and maintains a bounded Jacobian estimation error. The controller is further applied to morphology-enabled manipulation tasks, including obstacle-assisted reach-wrap-release motions, adaptive whole-arm grasping, and cooperative multi-arm object handling. Results demonstrate that combining logarithmic-spiral morphology with online Jacobian compensation enables accurate, robust, and scalable control of highly underactuated continuum manipulators. The proposed framework establishes a physics-grounded baseline for future hardware implementation and learning-augmented soft robotic control.
Partha Datta, Yi Jin, Wei Lin +1
Jun 24, 2026cs.SD

Sarashina2.2-TTS: Tackling Kanji Polyphony in Japanese Speech Generation via Data Scaling and Targeted Data Synthesis

While large language model (LLM)-based text-to-speech (TTS) systems have achieved high-quality speech synthesis, most existing systems focus on English and Chinese. Japanese, however, remains under-explored, and its unique linguistic challenges, such as widespread context-dependent kanji polyphony, have yet to be adequately tackled. Here we introduce Sarashina2.2-TTS (https://github.com/sbintuitions/sarashina2.2-tts), a Japanese-centric LLM-TTS system that tackles these challenges through a dual approach: data strategy and evaluation methodology. First, we scale training to approximately 361k hours of speech, incorporating a balanced mix of Japanese and English data. Furthermore, we design a targeted data augmentation pipeline covering all 2,136 Joyo (regular-use) kanji designated by Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs to efficiently address kanji polyphony disambiguation. Second, we introduce the Joyo Kanji Yomi Benchmark (https://github.com/sbintuitions/JoyoKanji-Yomi-Benchmark), covering all 2,136 Joyo kanji and their 4,378 readings. Alongside this benchmark, we propose Kana-CER, a metric that compares synthesized speech against reference readings in the kana space, eliminating orthographic variations to directly measure pronunciation correctness. Experiments demonstrate that our targeted data augmentation significantly improves reading accuracy. Overall, Sarashina2.2-TTS achieves state-of-the-art kanji-level reading accuracy and matches top baselines on general sentence-level pronunciation, while delivering the highest speaker similarity in zero-shot Japanese speech synthesis. Furthermore, cross-lingual evaluation reveals that Sarashina2.2-TTS is the only system that maintains stable Japanese pronunciation regardless of the prompt language, confirming that our balanced training approach improves cross-lingual robustness.
Lianbo Liu, Shiao Zhu, Kai Washizaki +10
Jun 24, 2026cs.CL

Efficient and Trainable Language Model Test-Time Scaling via Local Branch Routing

Test-time scaling improves language-model reasoning, but existing approaches often face a difficult trade-off: long chain-of-thought sampling remains single-threaded, while sentence- or solution-level search can be computationally expensive and hard to train end-to-end. We introduce Local Branch Routing (LBR), a token-level test-time scaling framework that expands a small local lookahead tree, forwards all sampled branches through the language model, and uses a lightweight router to select the depth-1 subtree to commit. By routing over the hidden states of candidate local futures, LBR allows each token decision to use evidence beyond the root next-token distribution while avoiding full solution-level search. The resulting prune-shift-grow decoding process preserves discrete branch identities and defines a tractable tree-trajectory likelihood: newly grown nodes are counted when first sampled, and router decisions are assigned explicit probabilities. This enables end-to-end reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards, jointly optimizing the base model and router under the same likelihood-ratio principle as discrete-token RLVR. On synthetic hierarchical-planning tasks, LBR shows that post-candidate hidden states provide useful routing evidence. On mathematical reasoning benchmarks, LBR improves both Pass@1 and Pass@32 over discrete chain-of-thought, vanilla discrete-token RLVR, and RL-compatible soft-token branching baselines. These results suggest that lightweight local branching offers an efficient, trainable, and discrete form of language-model test-time scaling.
Yutong Yin, Mingyu Jin, Jin Pan +12
Jun 23, 2026cs.LG

Neural Scaling Universality: If Exponents Are Fixed, Time to Understand Coefficients

Neural scaling laws describe how pre-training loss decays as power laws with training time, model size, and compute. This position paper argues that the exponents of these power laws are fixed by generic mechanisms: a one-third time scaling due to the strong nonlinearity of Softmax, an inverse width scaling due to representational superposition, and an inverse depth scaling due to ensemble averaging of Transformer layers. These mechanisms are robust to a wide range of data structures and architectural details, placing current large language models in a universality class with fixed exponents. The coefficients, however, are expected to be sensitive to data and architecture details, and directly determine practical quantities such as the optimal model shape and the compute-optimal frontier. We therefore argue that understanding the coefficients is the key to near-term performance improvements, and that a closer examination of the current universality class may reveal pathways to better universality classes.
Yizhou Liu, Jeff Gore
Jun 23, 2026cs.AI

Scaling Laws for Task-Specific LLM Distillation

Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong performance across a growing range of domains, yet their scale poses deployment challenges in applications where latency and cost constraints are critical. This paper derives empirical scaling laws for domain-specific LLM compression, quantifying how in-domain and general knowledge performance scale with dataset size, compression ratio, supervision format, and iterative pruning schedule. Using quantitative finance as our application domain, we compare logit-based and LoRA-based distillation under iterative structural pruning, introducing a blended chain-of-thought supervision loss that stabilizes KL-divergence distillation over reasoning traces. In-domain task quality degrades predictably under compression while general-knowledge benchmarks collapse well before the same point; supervision format is the key driver of this tradeoff, with chain-of-thought supervision actively recovering general knowledge that pruning erases. We release the headline dataset FinHeadlineMix, scaling law results, and practical recommendations to provide a reusable framework for domain-specific compression decisions.
Lavinia Ghita, Dhruv Desai, Ioana Boier
Jun 23, 2026cs.LG

Internal Data Repetition Destroys Language Models

Language models are running out of high-quality training data, and even aggressively deduplicated corpora retain some amount of repetition. Earlier controlled studies predated Chinchilla-style scaling laws and could only measure the cost of repetition indirectly. We revisit repetition in the Chinchilla era, using a fitted no-repetition scaling law to report Compute-Equivalent Gain and Compute-Equivalent Loss. We show that under this modernized paradigm, repetition damage is systematic in three ways. First, holding compute allocated to repeated data constant, eval loss peaks at an intermediate repeat count \Rep\Rep; repeating a moderately sized subset a moderate number of times damages performance more than repeating a large subset a few times or a small subset many times. Second, the location of this peak is well-fit by a power law in model size; this scaling law reveals that the most damaging number of repeated data grows more quickly than compute. Finally, when repeated documents consume 10% of the FLOPs budget in a controlled exact-document repetition setting, the compute-equivalent loss can be large: on FineWeb-Edu-Dedup, the most damaging repeat count for a Qwen3-style 344M-parameter model at \OT=1\OT=1 matches the loss of a no-repetition run using 67% of the FLOPs. We demonstrate that these phenomena are not language-model-specific, and can be analytically understood in a simple statistical model: a misspecified linear regression with verbatim duplicates reproduces the same qualitative loss peak, quantifying how such peaks can arise from a statistical tradeoff between memorization and generalization. Our findings add precision to the study of duplication in language models, allowing practitioners to quantify the wasted compute incurred by the presence and repeat structure of duplicates in pretraining corpora.
Jessica Chudnovsky, Joshua Kazdan, Noam Levi +6
Jun 23, 2026stat.ML

Model selection with proper scoring rules on data sets of time series: prefer the mean scaled score

We study the problem of model selection among probabilistic forecasting models evaluated on datasets of multiple time series. The performance of a model on a single time series is quantified by the average value (score) of a proper scoring rule over a test set, but extending model selection to data sets of time series requires aggregating these scores. Common approaches either rely on scaling scores and averaging them (mean scaled score) or avoid scaling by using alternative statistics such as mean ranks or win rates. However, these approaches can yield conflicting conclusions. We show that such discrepancies arise from the skewness of the distribution of the scores, which is particularly pronounced when test sets are short. The skewness can cause non-mean criteria (e.g., mean rank, median, win rate) to select misspecified models. In contrast, the mean score is immune from this problem. We further show that, as the size of the test sets increases, all aggregation criteria converge to the same model selection decision, mitigating these discrepancies. Our experiments on intermittent demand time series, including data from the M5 competition, highlight the importance of sufficiently large test sets; the mean scaled score appears to be the more reliable approach, also because empirically we found its decision to remain consistent when different scaling factors are adopted.
Giorgio Corani, Stefano Damato, Dario Azzimonti +1
Jun 23, 2026cs.AI

SAFARI: Scaling Long Horizon Agentic Fault Attribution via Active Investigation

As autonomous agents tackle increasingly complex multi-step, multi-agent tasks, their execution trajectories have scaled beyond the constraints of even the largest context windows. Current methods for effectively diagnosing agent failures load the full trajectory into an LLM's context window, which suffers from attention dilution and fails when agentic traces inevitably exceed context limits. To address this, we introduce SAFARI (Scaling long-horizon Agentic Fault AttRibution via active Investigation), a framework that replaces linear context loading with a tool-augmented diagnostic loop. By equipping LLMs with a specialized toolbox to read and search trajectory segments alongside a persistent Short-Term Memory (STM) for cross-turn reasoning, SAFARI effectively decouples diagnostic accuracy from architectural context limits. Our experiments demonstrate that SAFARI outperforms state-of-the-art results by 20% on the Who&When dataset within a 1M token budget, and by 19% on TRAIL GAIA subset on a 25K token budget. Most significantly, SAFARI maintains a 0.58 precision even when the target fault resides 5x beyond the model's native context window, a scenario where traditional evaluators fail entirely.
Chenyang Zhu, Jiayu Yao, Kushal Chawla +10
Jun 23, 2026cs.AI

On the Smallness of the Large Language Models Scaling Exponents

We discuss reasons why the scaling exponents of current Large Language Models (LLMs) applications are indicating an unsustainable regime in terms of energy resources. We further show that attributing the smallness of such exponents to a numerical bias due to the neglect of a non-zero value of the loss function in the limit of infinite data (``pedestal effect") does not remove the unsustainability issue. Finally, the effects of the smoothness (roughness) of the data on the scaling exponents is commented upon based on an analogy with phenomenological models of fluid turbulence.
Sauro Succi, Peter V. Coveney, Alex Hansen
Jun 23, 2026cs.AI

ReM-MoA: Reasoning Memory Sustains Mixture-of-Agents Scaling

Mixture-of-Agents (MoA) architectures improve inference-time scaling by organizing multiple LLM agents into layered reasoning pipelines. However, existing MoA variants fail to sustain gains as depth increases, exhibiting degradation, early plateauing, or saturation. We propose ReM-MoA, a memory-augmented MoA framework that sustains scaling through two mechanisms: (1) a Ranked Reasoning Memory that persistently stores and ranks reasoning traces from all layers using a comparative Reviewer Agent, and (2) a Curated Diversified Memory Routing scheme that exposes different agents to distinct combinations of successful and failed traces, preserving exploration diversity while propagating high-quality reasoning. We further introduce an optional multi-domain Reviewer distillation pipeline that improves ranking quality through frontier-model supervision. Across five reasoning benchmarks spanning math, formal logic, code, knowledge, and commonsense, ReM-MoA consistently outperforms prior MoA variants across both depth and width scaling, and its advantage widens with depth, establishing structured cross-layer reasoning memory as a key missing mechanism for scalable multi-agent inference.
Heng Ping, Arijit Bhattacharjee, Peiyu Zhang +5
Jun 22, 2026cs.LG

Scaling Linear Mode Connectivity and Merging to Billion Parameter Pretrained Transformers

Linear mode connectivity (LMC) provides a promising foundation for understanding and merging independently trained neural networks, but existing methods typically optimize the interpolation path from only one model endpoint, limiting their scalability and effectiveness for large pretrained transformers. We propose a novel and scalable framework for enabling LMC-based model merging to {\em billion-parameter pretrained transformers}. Our method applies properly parameterized functionality-preserving weight transformations to align functionally equivalent solutions, and introduces a dual learning procedure in which both models jointly learn their corresponding transformations toward a shared linear interpolation path. This bidirectional optimization substantially reduces interpolation barriers and enables more reliable merging across large-scale architectures. Empirically, we show that our approach achieves near-zero loss barriers on WikiText for language models with medium-sized parameters, representing, to our knowledge, the first demonstration of near-barrier-free linear connectivity at this scale. In the vision domain, ViT-L maintains above 69% ImageNet top-1 accuracy throughout the interpolation path, while modern billion-parameter LLMs exhibit only small loss barriers. These results suggest that properly resolving parameter symmetries enables large pretrained Transformers to be connected and merged through simple linear paths with substantially improved interpolation performance. Code: https://github.com/VILA-Lab/Dual-Learned-Matching .
Tianyi Li, Zhiqiang Shen
Jun 22, 2026cs.LG

Solve for the Hyperparameter, Skip the Search: Kolmogorov-Optimal Scaling Laws for Spline Regression

Hyperparameter tuning almost always means search: fit the model at every value on a grid, score each by cross-validation, and keep the winner. For spline regression that search is unnecessary. The optimal resolution can be solved for in closed form, to the accuracy an exhaustive search reaches, at a fraction of the compute. Three ingredients make this possible: classical approximation theory pins the squared bias to a known power of the resolution G, exactly the Kolmogorov n-width of the smoothness class; the basis dimension is an explicit polynomial in G; and leave-one-out error follows from a single fit via the PRESS identity. Balancing the two known curves gives the minimizer analytically. We extend this calculus to many coordinates by replacing ambient input dimension with interaction order, the number of active low-order components in an ANOVA decomposition, yielding a scaling law in which the optimal resolution and error are power functions of the effective density (sample size per active component), with input dimension absent from the exponent. The law becomes an algorithm. KORE (Kolmogorov-optimal Order-aware Resolution Estimation) fits two pilot resolutions, solves a leverage-calibrated 2x2 system for the bias and noise scales, and evaluates the closed-form plug-in resolution with a tiny leave-one-out certificate: about a dozen fits instead of a full grid sweep, with a consistency guarantee as the sample grows. Across additive and sparse pairwise targets up to 80 input dimensions, KORE matches exhaustive 3-fold cross-validation and the full classical ladder (GCV, Mallows' Cp, AIC, BIC) while fitting roughly 8x fewer models; on 36 real tabular datasets it ranks first among 21 methods in accuracy per unit of compute, ahead of tuned boosters and kernel machines. When complexity lives in low interaction order, solving for the resolution beats searching for it.
Yong Yi Bay, Kathleen A. Yearick
Jun 22, 2026cs.AI

VeriEvol: Scaling Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning via Verifiable Evol-Instruct

Scaling reinforcement learning for visual mathematical reasoning requires more than generating harder questions: as data volume grows, the reward labels themselves must remain reliable. Yet existing data pipelines scale supervision while trusting the labeller, and policy-side methods assume the underlying answers are already correct. We instead treat scaling as a verifiable data-construction problem and decouple two axes before any policy update: prompt difficulty, expanded by route-specific evolution operators, and answer reliability, enforced by offline hypothesis-test falsification. We instantiate this as VeriEvol, an iterative framework with two extensible components: a type-aware evolution module that rewrites low-difficulty image-question seeds into harder, image-grounded prompts; and HTV-Agent, a verifier that accepts an answer only after multi-source counter-evidence has failed to refute it. The resulting verified data scales in volume, extends by adding evolution routes or verifier channels, and plugs directly into existing GRPO-style RL recipes. On a five-benchmark visual-math suite, scaling evolved SFT data from 10K to 250K samples raises the mean accuracy from 35.42 to 54.73; then, with backbone, SFT initialization, and GRPO recipe held fixed, VeriEvol adds a cumulative +3.88 over an un-evolved RL baseline, of which +1.82 comes from evolved prompts and +2.06 from the HTV-Agent verifier. We release the prompts, data, models, code, and the full verifier trace of every sample, so that downstream work can scale and audit the pipeline rather than only inspect its outputs.
Haoling Li, Kai Zheng, Jie Wu +4
Jun 22, 2026cs.CV

Scaling State-Space Models from Lines to Paragraphs: An Ablation of Mamba-based OCR

End-to-end OCR increasingly relies on autoregressive sequence models, where the quadratic cost of Transformer attention limits efficient transcription of long, paragraph-level text. State-Space Models (SSMs) such as Mamba offer linear-time decoding and have recently been shown to match Transformer accuracy on printed historical lines, but their behavior as sequences grow from short lines to full paragraphs, and their generalization to handwriting, remain poorly understood. We study how a Mamba-based OCR recognizer scales from lines to paragraphs. We first conduct a systematic exploration of its four core hyperparameters (decoder depth, state dimension, expansion factor, and connector depth) on synthetic paragraphs from 100 to 1,000 characters, identifying the recurrent state dimension and the expansion factor as the dominant levers for long-sequence accuracy. We then compare the recognizer against a Transformer baseline trained under an identical protocol. On clean synthetic paragraphs, both models stay below 1% CER at every length while the SSM runs 1.4 to 4.5 times faster, the speedup growing with sequence length. On real handwriting, however, the SSM lags clearly behind: it reaches 8.2% CER on IAM lines and 10.0% on IAM paragraphs, against 4.2% and 3.5% for the Transformer baseline. Through controlled experiments we show that a substantial part of this gap stems from data scarcity rather than from an intrinsic architectural limit: the autoregressive SSM decoder is markedly data-hungry on long sequences. Our study clarifies when SSMs are a practical choice for large-scale document transcription and when they are not.
Merveilles Agbeti-Messan, Pierrick Tranouez, Stéphane Nicolas +2