Training Data

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Period ending 2026-09-21

7 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Training Data.

Period ending 2026-09-14

8 new papers

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Period ending 2026-09-07

4 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Training Data.

130 papers

Latest in Training Data

Sep 17, 2026cs.CV

TouchSight: Bare-Handed Tactile Prediction from Egocentric Video via Generative Visual Augmentation

Tactile signals provide direct contact and force measurements that are essential for understanding physical interactions and enabling dexterous robotic manipulation. However, tactile sensing requires direct measurement at contact interfaces, making large-scale data collection reliant on intrusive, costly, and restrictive instrumentation. We present TouchSight, a monocular egocentric vision framework for dense full-hand contact force prediction that leverages 500 hours of pressure-glove recordings and extensive hand-object interaction (HOI) data. To address the appearance gap between gloved training data and bare-hand real-world scenarios, we construct TwinTouch-20H: 20 hours of paired visual data in which generative video models re-render gloved recordings as bare-hand observations against new backgrounds while preserving the original measured tactile labels. TouchSight predicts dense force from both gloved and generated bare-hand videos, outperforms prior contact prediction methods on OakInk2, qualitatively generalizes to natural bare-hand egocentric videos from unseen datasets, and improves consistently as glove supervision scales. These results demonstrate that dense tactile signals can be recovered from egocentric vision alone, without tactile instrumentation at capture time.
Danyan Zhou, Jinxuan Lu, Jiawei Lin +3
Sep 17, 2026cs.LG

QUALS: Corpus Equilibrium for Universal Forecasting via Pattern Quantization and Learnability Synchronization

Ubiquitous time series data across diverse domains enables critical applications in areas such as transportation systems and power grids. Recently, training foundation models on massive datasets to achieve accurate zero-shot forecasting has emerged as a major research focus. However, current studies predominantly prioritize architectural innovations while insufficiently addressing data diversity, often relying on simple data sampling strategies that fail to manage complex data distributions effectively, leading to inefficient use of training data and suboptimal performance. To address this, we propose QUALS, a large-scale time series corpus equilibrium framework. QUALS significantly enhances data efficiency, i.e., enabling existing models to achieve superior performance using only a small fraction of the original training data. Specifically, QUALS operates through two core mechanisms. First, a pattern quantization framework systematically decodes heterogeneous patterns from mixed corpora via vector quantization and uniform binning. Second, a learnability synchronization framework calibrates sampling weights for heterogeneous patterns, bridging the optimization gap between simple and complex motifs to maximize overall training efficiency. Extensive benchmarks demonstrate that pre-training on QUALS consistently achieves superior zero-shot performance, even under substantially reduced training budgets.
Yujie Li, Zezhi Shao, Chengqing Yu +7
Sep 17, 2026cs.AI

Can Data Attribution Filter Out Subliminal Learning? Not Reliably

Subliminal learning allows language models to transmit behavioral traits through training data with no obvious semantic relationship to those traits, undermining content-based data filtering as a safety intervention. Training data attribution offers an alternative: it identifies the training examples responsible for a given model behavior, independent of their semantic content, and so may apply in exactly the cases where semantic inspection fails. We evaluate three gradient-based attribution methods (GradCos, a contrastive GradCos variant, and EK-FAC) across three models, comparing them against divergence tokens, a strong baseline previously shown to localize subliminal learning (albeit one that requires access to counterfactual teacher models). Filtering at the token level, EK-FAC mitigates a significant part of the effect, the other methods provide little benefit, and all mostly fall short of divergence tokens. Filtering entire samples is less effective for every method, though EK-FAC often gives a stronger signal than divergence tokens in this setting. Success is inconsistent across methods and settings: variants that work well for some model-preference combinations fail for others, and we do not identify a consistent explanation for these differences. Our results suggest that gradient-based attribution can identify data responsible for subliminal learning in some settings, but that some approximations are more reliable than others.
Moritz Weckbecker, Sweta Jena, Jonas Müller +5
Sep 17, 2026cs.CL

Form Over Content In Gradient-Based Data Attribution Methods

Data attribution methods using gradient similarity are widely used to analyze and select training data for large language models, but what gradient similarity actually measures is debated. Some interpret it as identifying task-relevant skills, while other work reports that surface form is the main factor. We resolve this debate for supervised fine-tuning examples by varying task and answer format independently. Specifically, we render benchmarks in different answer formats, such that datasets can share a task without a format or a format without a task. We find that gradient alignment follows the answer format, as benchmark pairs sharing an answer format align strongly (disattenuated cosine near 0.4), while same benchmarks rendered with different answer format classes show no alignment (near 0.0). We demonstrate that this ordering holds from the earliest pretraining checkpoints through post-training, and across model scales and families. We then analyze the released selections of LESS, a gradient-based data selection method for instruction tuning, and find that each target's selections over-represent the target's own answer format. Hence, we demonstrate that gradient-based attribution methods track format similarity more than task semantics, meaning that such methods, as well as the semantic interpretation of the gradient, should be tested on data where answer format and task vary independently for greater robustness and reliability.
Sunwoo Kim, Seokwon Jung, Sohyung Kim +2
Sep 15, 2026cs.LG

OPEN-1B: A Fully Auditable Training Run

Open-source language models have a reproducibility problem. Despite releasing weights, training data, and recipes, none of them are provably reproducible due to the non-associativity of floating-point arithmetic. Deep learning frameworks often offer a deterministic execution mode, allowing reproducible operations on the same machines. Unfortunately, this determinism does not carry across hardware such that a user can verify that a released checkpoint was actually produced using the declared training recipe. This leaves room for undisclosed data, injected biases, or backdoors that existing techniques such as proof-of-learning or proof-of-training-data cannot rule out. We introduce a new tier of model transparency, fully auditable, in which every operation on every data sample during training is independently reproducible on heterogeneous commodity hardware with bitwise certainty. By imposing a definite order on the sources of training nondeterminism, GPU kernel reductions, data batch ordering across a data-parallel cluster, and inter/intra-node collective communication, we make it possible to replay any individual step of a large, distributed training run on a single piece of commodity hardware and check it against the published trajectory. Because replaying an entire run on one machine is infeasible, we support this with a collective verification scheme in which many independent auditors each certify individual steps, together covering the whole run. We release Open-1B, a model trained under this regime, together with its full pretraining dataset, every intermediate checkpoint, the training codebase, and the audit harness needed to reproduce and verify any step of its training.
John Donaghy, Brian Wilcox, Oğuzhan Ersoy +6
Sep 14, 2026cs.SE

Failure-Guided Co-Evolution of Prompts and Training Data

Automatic prompt optimization (APO) improves language-model programs by revising prompts from task feedback, yet it typically holds its training data fixed. Repeatedly optimizing against the same instances confines feedback to weaknesses already represented in those data, leaving related failure conditions unexplored. We therefore view each failure as a dual signal: it indicates both how the prompt should be revised and what new training evidence should be synthesized. We introduce FORGE, a failure-guided framework that co-evolves prompts and training data. FORGE abstracts imperfect executions into reusable failure modes and synthesizes new training data through four complementary mutation strategies. Verified instances are fed back into prompt search, allowing updated prompts to expose the next data needs. Across eight heterogeneous benchmarks, FORGE improves the aggregate score over the unoptimized baseline by 16.52 percentage points and outperforms all evaluated APO baselines. The synthesized data also transfer beyond FORGE: in a transfer study, they improve all nine APO comparisons by 2--9 points and all three GRPO comparisons by 4--8 points under matched optimization budgets. These results establish failures as a shared interface between prompt optimization and data synthesis, and show the benefit of jointly adapting what a model is instructed to do and what it learns from.
Tianyu Yuan, Zhuzhong Qian
Sep 14, 2026cs.CL

SynthSentry: Detecting Synthetic Data Contamination in Language Model Training Data

Large language models trained recursively on their own or other models' outputs undergo model collapse, in which distributional tails and factual accuracy deteriorate while fluency survives. Prior work diagnoses collapse after training; the actionable problem is screening a corpus of unknown provenance before training. We introduce SynthSentry, a corpus-level, model-agnostic contamination signal requiring no access to the generating model, no generation history, and no synthetic labels. The score is a distributional divergence over three statistics: lexical diversity collapse, n-gram tail truncation, and perplexity variance across reference models. We evaluate on corpora contaminated by small open-weight generators and an instruction-tuned open-weight model under a leave-one-generator-out protocol. A domain-stratified study measures false positives on naturally repetitive human text (legal, clinical, source code). The score ranks corpora by severity with little loss when whole generator families are held out. Per-domain calibration holds near its nominal false-positive budget once covariance shrinkage and a bootstrap threshold replace a naive quantile, which runs four times over budget. A downstream fine-tuning check showed no contamination-driven accuracy deficit at our scale, so whether pruning recovers one remains open; the same run shows over-pruning risk once pruning exceeds the true contamination fraction. We frame screening as a data-curation defense rather than a post-hoc diagnosis and release the scoring toolkit. All results are small-scale; scope is English-language, batch-mode corpus screening. Contamination sources are single-generation or hand-authored rather than recursively generated, so results speak to synthetic contamination generally and not to recursion depth.
Praveen Kumar Myakala, Ravichandra Namburi, Sowmya Keragodu Jayaramu +1
Sep 11, 2026cs.LG

Combining Synthetic and Real Data for Low-Resource Historical OCR: A Manchu Case Study

Manchu, now critically endangered, was one of the principal languages of the Qing empire (1636-1912), and its extensive archival record is increasingly digitized but remains difficult to search and analyze at scale. Previous work showed that vision-language models (VLMs) trained only on synthetic Manchu word images can reach 87.4% word accuracy on real Qing manuscripts and prints, leaving a substantial synthetic-to-real gap. This study examines how synthetic and real historical training data should be combined for low-resource OCR. Using 60,000 synthetic and 20,306 real historical word images, we evaluate three pretrained VLMs and a compact convolutional recurrent neural network (CRNN) under four regimes: synthetic-only, real-only, joint synthetic-real, and sequential synthetic-to-real training, following a common checkpoint-selection and archival evaluation protocol. Introducing real training images raises the leading configurations to between 95.09% and 96.28% word accuracy, while no synthetic-only configuration exceeds 87.92%. Synthetic supplementation substantially improves all three VLMs, whereas its marginal effect for the CRNN is sensitive to the training objective. Joint and sequential training yield broadly similar archival accuracy under the tested practical pipelines. A compact CRNN also reaches the leading performance range once real images are available, showing that model scale alone does not determine recognition accuracy. Finally, complementary errors among strong recognizers allow voting to raise accuracy to 98.27% without additional training, while an eighteenth-century Manchu dictionary provides a principled rule for adjudicating disagreements.
Yan Hon Michael Chung, Hanlin Wang
Sep 10, 2026cs.CR

Empirical Evaluation of Data Poisoning Attacks in Supervised Learning

Data poisoning corrupts training data to degrade a model or to plant attacker-controlled behavior. This study evaluates two representative training-time attacks, label flipping and backdoor poisoning, on MNIST and Fashion-MNIST with three baseline classifiers: Logistic Regression, Linear SVM, and Random Forest. Clean training is compared with poisoning rates of 5%, 10%, and 20% using clean-test accuracy, macro-precision, macro-recall, macro-F1, and, for backdoors, attack success rate. Label flipping caused clear degradation, largest for Logistic Regression and Linear SVM, while Random Forest stayed comparatively stable. Backdoor poisoning reached attack success rates from 0.9667 to 1.0000 on both datasets and all three models while often keeping clean-test performance near baseline. The results separate indiscriminate poisoning, which shows up in standard metrics, from targeted backdoor poisoning, which stays comparatively stealthy while embedding highly effective malicious behavior, and they support security-oriented evaluation beyond conventional clean-test metrics.
Toshif Khan, Muhammad Abusaqer
Sep 9, 2026cs.CL

Detectable Only Where It Is Confounded: What Verified Duplication Counts Say About Membership Evidence in Language Models

When a language model finds a sentence unusually cheap to predict, it is tempting to conclude that the sentence was in its training data. Almost every published test of that inference has had to guess which sentences were in the training data, the members, and which were not. This paper removes the guessing. Two model families, OLMo-2 and Pythia, publish their pretraining corpora, and a public index over those corpora returns the exact number of times any sentence appeared in each. Those counts make three questions answerable directly. The answers form a pincer, closing from two sides. At the duplication levels ordinary text actually has, five models from 1B to 13B parameters carry at most a faint trace of their own exposure. We measure that trace with a design that reads the same sentence through two models, which cancels fluency and quality by construction, and it comes to a rank correlation near -0.08, where -1 would be a perfect relation and 0 none. Where the trace does become strong, above roughly a thousand copies, the two corpora agree on which sentences those are, because they are the famous ones, so exposure can no longer be told apart from fame. Two further measurements show how apparent membership signal gets manufactured. A common way to build a non-member is to change one word of a member. The model does prefer the original, but the gap is the same whether the original appeared once or a hundred times, so what the model is rewarding is the author's word choice, not memory. Above a thousand copies the gap grows with model size on the twelve sentences we can test there, at the same boundary where the pincer closes. And swapping the controls for sentences that differ from the members in register moves a detector from 0.83 to 0.94 AUC, on a scale where 0.5 is a coin flip and 1.0 is perfect separation. We release the sentence banks, counts, and code.
Arman Nik Khah
Sep 8, 2026cs.CL

ActReview: Rebuttal-Guided Training Data and Rubric Rewards for Actionable Peer Review Generation

As LLMs are increasingly used for pre-submission self-review, there is growing demand for feedback that not only identifies weaknesses but also guides authors toward concrete revisions. We study this as Actionable Peer-review Generation and decompose it into two subtasks: diagnostic claim generation and revision suggestion generation. We introduce ActReview, a rebuttal-guided post-training framework that connects paper-specific diagnoses to concrete, grounded revision plans. Our central insight is that author rebuttals reveal plausible actions for addressing reviewer concerns and can therefore provide latent supervision for revision-oriented feedback. From real review-rebuttal threads on OpenReview, we construct ActReview-40K by aligning reviewer weaknesses with author responses and grounding the resulting feedback in localized paper evidence. We post-train Qwen3-8B-Base with multi-task supervised fine-tuning followed by GRPO using candidate-aware, weakness-specific rubric rewards. We also introduce ActReview-Bench, a human-curated benchmark of 1,000 instances for evaluating diagnostic quality and revision usefulness. Experiments show that ActReview outperforms prior specialized review-generation models on actionability and grounding while remaining competitive with strong prompt-based LLMs. Human evaluation confirms improved revision usefulness while revealing a remaining gap in technical accuracy, and additional analyses support generalization to held-out papers and robustness across independent judges.
Yiling Ma, Yilun Zhao, Sihong Wu +3
Sep 8, 2026cs.CV

Compensating for Scarce Historical Images in Cross-Domain Cultural Heritage Retrieval Using Synthetic Aging

Cultural heritage collections often contain contemporary and historical visual records of the same physical object. Linking these records is difficult because corresponding images may differ in viewpoint, acquisition conditions, color reproduction, framing, resolution, and degradation, while genuine historical images are frequently scarce. This study investigates whether synthetically aged contemporary images can replace or complement missing historical training data in bidirectional instance-level retrieval. Synthetic old-domain images are generated using degradation-oriented transformations. An EfficientNetV2-M model is evaluated on identity-disjoint training, validation, and test sets across three dataset partitions and three training seeds. Mixed real-synthetic training is compared with real-only baselines using proportionally scaled and fixed 300-batch-per-epoch schedules. Complete replacement of genuine historical images reduced bidirectional mean R@1 from 86.56% to 81.27%, showing that synthetic aging does not reproduce the full genuine old-domain variability. Increasing the number of independently generated synthetic variants provided no consistent improvement. Under controlled scarcity, however, synthetic completion improved mean R@1 by 3.69 percentage points at 25% genuine historical coverage and by 2.92 points at 50%, relative to the proportionally scaled real-only baselines. At 75%, the gain decreased to 2.00 points, while performance remained comparable to the complete-real-data reference. Fixed-schedule real-only controls did not reproduce these improvements. The results indicate that genuine and synthetic observations are complementary. Synthetic completion primarily benefits retrieval by extending cross-domain identity coverage rather than by increasing training exposure, with its contribution gradually decreasing as genuine historical coverage increases.
Marcin Iwanowski, Adam Mazgaj, Ferdynand Gorski +1
Sep 8, 2026cs.AI

zScore-N: A Neural Network for On-Chain Wallet Reputation Scoring

Wallet reputation scores decide who receives an airdrop, who can borrow, and who enters an allowlist across decentralised finance. They almost always begin as hand-written formulas: compositions of clamped logarithmic, linear and square-root transforms over behavioural features, with every threshold and point award set by hand. Such a formula is readable and deterministic, but it is piecewise and non-differentiable, it cannot improve as data accumulates, and it cannot distinguish a feature that is genuinely zero from one its pipeline failed to capture. We present zScore-N, the neural network that replaced ours in production. The formula served as its teacher: calibrated against 5,208,952 wallets sampled across 2019-2024 and verified to reproduce production output to within 2.3e-13, it supplies unlimited labelled training data at zero label noise. The trained network reproduces it to 0.58 points RMSE on the 1000-point scale (R^2 = 0.99997), against 2.25 for gradient-boosted trees and 28.04 for linear regression on identical features and splits. Trained with missing-value masks against uncorrupted targets, it halves the error that incomplete data introduces: at 10% feature-level missingness the formula drifts 51.4 points from its own complete-data output with a systematic -12.5 point bias, while the network drifts 17.9. The network carries the score at production scale, across a population of millions of wallets spanning six orders of magnitude in size and activity.
Girish G N, Ashutosh Sahoo, Akshay SP +2
Sep 7, 2026cs.LG

Attributing Cohen's d: Training Data Attribution for Disease-Related Effects in Normative Age Biomarkers

Normative age models are trained to predict chronological age in a nominally healthy cohort. Applied to patients, they deviate, and the gap between predicted and chronological age is read as disease risk. Here, we attribute the disease-related effect size of the age gap directly to individual training samples, rather than using a prediction-level loss as the attribution target. For Cohen's dd, the resulting closed-form influence functional, validated against leave-one-out retraining, ranks training samples by their effect on held-out case-control separation. Across four diseases and two biomarker modalities in UK Biobank, removing the 10% most influential training samples raises held-out disease-related effect size in every seed. It more than doubles the metabolomic-age effect for type-2 diabetes and raises the brain-age effect for multiple sclerosis by roughly a third. Random removal leaves effect size flat even at 50% removal, confirming the gain comes from which samples are removed, not how many. Flagged subjects carry subclinical cardiometabolic burden that diagnosis-based exclusion misses, on markers the model never sees. For type-2 diabetes, where the method gains most, the marker recovered is HbA1c, the standard measure of blood sugar control. We release pyinfluence, our influence-function package, for reproducibility and reuse.
Jakob Snel, Marc-Andre Schulz
Sep 3, 2026cs.LG

From Zero to Hero: An Open LLM Ecosystem for Armenian

Pretraining data for Armenian, a morphologically rich and low-resource language, is scarce, and no open Armenian LLM has been released with the data and recipe needed to reproduce it. To address this gap, we curate and release two datasets. ArmWeb is an extensively validated corpus of 4.37M Armenian news documents. ArmSTEM is a parallel English-Armenian collection of 373K math and science problems with step-by-step solutions, translated into Armenian and verified through both answer-preserving LLM judgment and human evaluation. Continued pretraining of Gemma-4-E4B on these datasets yields arm-gemma-e4b, which outperforms every existing open Armenian model as well as its unadapted base, and is the first open Armenian LLM with complete training data and recipe. Our ablations show that news-only continued pretraining improves fluency while eroding knowledge, a pattern we also observe in existing Armenian models, and that a small share of verified translated STEM data reverses the loss. We further find that the largest public Armenian corpora overlap web-derived evaluation panels heavily, including a train/test self-overlap inside FineWeb-2. We openly release all data, models, and code.
Erik Arakelyan, Khatun Avetisyan, Meri Davtyan +5
Sep 2, 2026cs.CV

Test-Time Logit Prompting for Source-Free Missing Modality Adaptation

Vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable performance by leveraging complementary information from large-scale image-text pairs. However, missing-modality inputs are commonly encountered during real-world deployment, often leading to significant performance degradation. Existing methods primarily enhance model robustness by learning modality compensation strategies from source training data. However, their reliance on source training data makes them difficult to apply when original data are unavailable due to privacy, storage, or accessibility constraints, such as clinical applications and personalized AI services. This raises an important yet underexplored question: can VLMs be efficiently adapted at test time for visual recognition with missing modalities without accessing source training data? To this end, we propose Test-Time Logit Prompting (TLP), a lightweight source-free test-time adaptation framework for visual recognition with missing modalities. To address missing-induced prediction shifts, TLP optimizes logit prompts with uncertainty-aware adjustment and modality-complete consistency regularization, adaptively adjusting prediction confidence while preserving semantic consistency. Extensive experiments across diverse vision-language benchmarks demonstrate that TLP consistently enhances recognition performance under missing-modality scenarios, achieving up to 8% improvements while requiring only hundreds of tunable parameters and a few test-time optimization steps.
Taixi Chen, Nancy Guo
Sep 1, 2026cs.CL

Probing Factual Knowledge Transfer with Training Data Interventions

Do multilingual language models transfer factual knowledge across languages during continued pretraining, or do they mostly recall facts learned directly from the target-language data? To answer this question more reliably, we propose an intervention-based framework: starting from an English-pretrained model, we continue pretraining on Persian data from which specific facts have been systematically removed at varying levels of granularity. We construct SIFT, a resource of 500 triples across 20 relations, stratified by the cultural origin of each fact's subject into general (globally prominent) and Persian-related entities, designed for both systematic fact removal from training data and evaluation, with natively written Persian cloze templates. Our results show that fact transfer is very limited: under the strictest removal condition, a large majority of English-acquired facts fail to transfer into Persian. We further show that sentence-level co-occurrence removal is insufficient to eliminate fact signal, and that easier (randomly selected) negative candidate sets substantially inflate apparent transfer by rewarding shallow associative heuristics, while performance on a harder candidate set that allows for less reliance on heuristics is much lower. Finally, we show that source-language entity frequency has a large influence, with Persian-related facts, which are orders of magnitude rarer in the English corpus, hardly transferring.
Romina Oji, Marc Braun, Marcel Bollmann +2
Aug 31, 2026cs.SE

LLM Post-Training as Brownfield Maintenance: An Industrial Perspective on Dataware Engineering

Industrial post-training is a brownfield regime. Teams inherit a deployed checkpoint and must land targeted improvements under fixed compute and mixture budgets without regressing the rest. The maintained artifact is increasingly dataware: behavior governed by a curated post-training mixture, updated via bounded mixture patches rather than clean-slate retraining. From an industrial code-generation improvement effort, we offer a maintainer's perspective on why this work is hard in practice, distilling three recurring challenges, zero-sum mixture design, yield as the binding metric, and end-to-end integration under uncertainty, and arguing that progress depends less on one-off recipes than on an engineering discipline for programming dataware. In our case study, interventions that raised the conversion of teacher distillation into usable training data increased accepted supervision by 2.84 times while using the same solution teacher and four solution attempts per candidate problem. In our primary evaluation, the yield-engineered patch improved CodeForces pass@1 by +2.59 points (+3.11 pass@3) and held-out LiveCodeBench v6 pass@1 by +6.11 (+8.05 pass@3), all statistically significant across 16 stochastic evaluations of each benchmark from one fixed checkpoint per condition, with internal AIME and MATH regression suites within tolerance.
Gopi Krishnan Rajbahadur, Amir M. Ebrahimi, Boyuan Chen +1
Aug 31, 2026stat.ML

Estimating Population-Risk Curves Along Nonconvex Gradient Flows from the Training Sample

We estimate the conditional population-risk curve of a realized smooth nonconvex gradient flow from the training sample. Flow approximate leave-one-out (Flow-ALO) propagates a deletion response and evaluates omitted observations at approximate deleted paths. The risk-curve error decomposes into response approximation, exact-LOO fluctuation, and deletion-to-full risk transfer. On each fixed finite horizon, bounded centered training-loss gradients, a one-sided Hessian lower bound, locally Lipschitz Hessians, and a strict tube-closure condition yield an explicit (n1)2(n-1)^{-2} bound for the deletion-response error. Bounded evaluation-loss gradients transfer the deletion-response bound to the score without requiring the Hessian to be invertible. Direct first-order jackknife cancellation and exact-LOO concentration control deletion-to-full risk transfer and fluctuation, respectively, completing recovery of the conditional population-risk curve. For bounded smooth two-layer mean-field networks training both layers, the score-error bound is uniform in width.
Mingzhi Song
Aug 30, 2026math.OC

Transformer-Based Flow Shop Scheduling Using MILP-Generated Training Data

Advances in machine learning (ML) have created new opportunities to complement traditional operations research (OR) methods. In particular, transformer models can capture complex interactions in token sequences by mapping tokens into a high-dimensional embedding space and propagating contextual information via attention. This makes them a candidate to model non-permutation flow shop scheduling with secondary resources as a next-token prediction task, where tokens represent job-machine-secondary resource tuples. For training, mixed-integer linear programming (MILP)-generated schedules are tokenized and used as next-token prediction data. During inference, partial token sequences (prefixes) are randomly generated and completed by the trained transformer through constrained decoding. A computational study is conducted on a flow shop with 8 jobs, 4 machines, and 3 secondary resources, where jobs are selected from a fixed pool of 20 jobs that is sampled during training and provides the candidates during prefix completion. The transformer achieves better solution quality (smaller makespans) compared to a genetic algorithm (GA), the NEH heuristic, and random search. It is outperformed only by the MILP model and the iterated greedy (IG) heuristic. The study concludes that transformer models can, to some extent, learn patterns from MILP-optimized non-permutation flow shop schedules and that transformer-based scheduling represents an interesting direction for future research, particularly in settings with a fixed, recurring job set.
Roderich Wallrath
Aug 13, 2026cs.CL

Measuring Task-Agnostic Training Data Influence Across Language Model Pretraining

Measuring training data influence consistently across language model pretraining is challenging. It is difficult to select downstream tasks or validation sets representative of a model's general capabilities, and reliance on task performance at intermediate checkpoints complicates comparisons across training. We propose a measure of training data influence that does not require selecting a downstream task or validation set as the attribution target. Specifically, we define an example's influence by how much its gradient update reduces the squared distance to the final parameters of a given pretraining run, and estimate this quantity from intermediate checkpoints without retraining. Applying the method to 18 configurations from the Pythia and PolyPythia suites, we find systematic temporal changes in influential data. Early in training, literature-related data are more strongly aligned with the trajectory toward the final parameters, whereas STEM data become more strongly aligned in later stages. This qualitative crossover is broadly consistent across model configurations. Our results provide a tractable trajectory-level view of how influential data change throughout pretraining, complementing influence analyses defined with respect to specific downstream tasks or validation sets.
Yuto Nishida, Hirokazu Kiyomaru, Yusuke Oda +6
Aug 8, 2026cs.AI

TokenPrint: A Calibrated Token-Space Fingerprint for Language-Model Provenance

Establishing the provenance of a language model---including its base checkpoint and possible overlap in training distributions---is a governance challenge that metadata alone cannot resolve. We introduce a training-free fingerprint based on the top-kk vocabulary projections of late hidden states elicited by 250 fixed knowledge probes, compared using Jaccard overlap over decoded token strings. We evaluate the method on 32 open-weight models from nine families (0.6B--32B) with documented relationships. (1)~A \emph{similarity ladder} broadly follows model relatedness: independently trained models on identical data score 0.48 raw (0.35 vocabulary-corrected), followed by shared-base fine-tunes (0.39/0.33), same-developer relatives (0.38/0.28), and models with no documented relationship (0.22/0.17). This identical-data signal persists across three organizations, two tokenizer families, and two architecture classes, and emerges within the first 1% of training before measurable task competence, suggesting a contribution from shared training data beyond capability convergence. (2)~As a nearest-neighbor \emph{lineage-retrieval} method, the fingerprint ranks the exact documented base among the top two candidates for all five R1 distillations (mean rank 1.8, MRR 0.60), including a math-specialized base not identifiable from coarse metadata. (3)~A \emph{depth ablation} shows that lineage group discrimination strengthens toward the output distribution, with AUC increasing from 0.72 at quarter depth to 0.90 at the output; using only the top 5 output tokens retains AUC 0.87. (4)~The fingerprint remains stable under quantization, with Jaccard similarity of 0.92 under int8 and 0.82--0.85 under int4, compared with a maximum cross-model similarity of 0.81 in the calibration pool. We release the probes, code, and fingerprints.
Yuqi Wu, Shengming Zhao, Jie Chen
Aug 6, 2026cs.CV

Vorch-IR: Long-Form Unified Multimodal Identity Replacement Video Generation

Video identity replacement seeks to transfer the identities of one or more subjects while preserving the motion, expressions, and temporal structure of a driving video. Existing methods largely target single-person settings and often require task-specific structural controls, such as masks or pose representations, limiting their flexibility in general multimodal editing systems. Progress on multi-person replacement is further constrained by the scarcity of paired training data. We present Vorch-IR, a unified framework that supports single- and dual-person identity replacement, with optional background replacement, in a single model. Built on LTX2, Vorch-IR jointly conditions on a driving video, indexed reference images, and a textual editing instruction. The reference images need not match the pose, layout, or spatial configuration of the driving video: their roles as subject or background references are specified through the instruction. Dense visual conditions are fused through self-attention, while a vision-language context establishes semantic correspondence through cross-attention. We further develop an automatic data construction pipeline that synthesizes paired supervision for all four editing settings. Experiments using automatic metrics and pairwise human evaluation demonstrate strong identity preservation, motion fidelity, and temporal coherence across diverse scenarios. A temporal overlapping inference strategy additionally extends the short-clip model to minute-long generation without autoregressive continuation.
Yaole Wang, Xiaoyu Chen, Xin Ma +5
Jul 31, 2026cs.AR

RTLCurator: Label-Efficient Data Curation for RTL Generation

Training large language models (LLMs) to write register-transfer level (RTL) requires large corpora of paired specifications and code, and such data is scarce enough that most public corpora are now synthesized. Synthesis provides scale but not correctness, and in two widely used RTL datasets only 24.4% and 53.5% of pairs pass generated functional tests. This raises the question of how much of such a corpus to keep and which part of it. Correctness alone is a poor answer. A pair that misbehaves in one corner case still shows valid syntax and interface conventions, and complex sequential designs are both harder to generate and harder to validate, so filtering by correctness leaves a corpus of short and simple modules. Correctness is also hard to obtain, since behavior leaves little trace on the surface in RTL, and validating an entire corpus only sorts pairs into passed and failed. We present RTLCurator, which learns a behavior-aware compatibility prior by contrasting each specification with implementations that fail simulation, and calibrates it to a new corpus using a small number of validated pairs. It then constructs the retained subset by balancing alignment, representation coverage, and RTL structural richness. On CodeV and RTLCoder, keeping 80% of the corpus this way improves on training with the full corpus across all reported metrics while validating only 10% of the pool, whereas ranking by the score alone falls below random selection and filtering the whole pool by simulation does no better.
Siyang Cai, Cangyuan Li, Wenjing Chang +4
Jul 30, 2026cs.AI

Meta-Task: Turning Terminal Task Synthesis into a Terminal Task for Scalable Agent Training

Training terminal agents at scale requires diverse, verifiable terminal tasks and high-quality interaction trajectories, yet acquiring such data remains a significant challenge. Existing synthesis methods face two key limitations: (1) weak reliability caused by the disconnect between task generation and real execution, and (2) limited diversity and scalability due to dependence on existing repositories. We propose Meta-Task, a framework that redefines terminal task synthesis as a Terminal-Bench-format task itself: an agent operates within a real container environment to iteratively generate, execute, and verify tasks, so that synthesized components are checked for internal consistency and executability within the generation loop itself. Building upon this, we decouple the target task requirements along multiple dimensions, introduce a multi-phase mechanism that dynamically designs novel task specifications before producing the actual tasks, and incorporate optional external material support to enhance diversity and realism. We additionally apply LLM-as-Judge filtering to ensure the quality of the final training data. Experiments on Terminal-Bench 2.0 show that fine-tuning on only 3,221 Meta-Task synthesized trajectories achieves 22.5% and 31.8% Avg Pass@1 for Qwen3-14B and Qwen3-32B respectively, outperforming concurrent approaches with significantly less training data.
Zhihong Pan, Jiyuan He, Kai Zhang +5
Jul 21, 2026cs.CV

Moving Alphabet: A Controlled Study of Training Data for Text-to-Video Generation

Text-to-video generation has advanced significantly over the past five years through scaling of model size, data, and compute. Unlike model architecture, training data is often underexplored. Real-world data curation is complex and non-trivial, involving clip selection from raw videos and captioning to create video-text pairs for learning text-to-video mappings. We study how data distribution and caption quality impact text-to-video models. To enable controlled experiments, we introduce Moving Alphabet, a procedural testbed that renders letters with varying fonts, colors, sizes, and positions, moving in different directions and speeds against a black background. This design allows precise control over data distribution and caption quality by corrupting ground-truth metadata. Our experiments yield three findings: a) a diverse and balanced distribution of video content and duration is critical for generalization; b) caption quality significantly affects both model performance and training efficiency, suggesting that text-to-video models are bounded by video understanding capabilities; and c) classifier-free guidance and fine-tuning on high-quality data provide partial recovery from models trained on corrupted captions, but cannot fully compensate for poor pre-training data. We believe these insights can inform the development of large-scale text-to-video models, and we advocate for greater attention to the science of pre-training data.
Amber Yijia Zheng, Lu Liu, Raymond A. Yeh +1
Jul 20, 2026cs.CL

PPL-Factory: Task-Aware and Budget-Aware Data Selection from Language Modeling to Reasoning

Not all training samples contribute equally to large language model fine-tuning. Selecting informative training samples can reduce the computational cost while preserving downstream performance. Many existing data selection methods rely on indirect heuristics, such as data quality, diversity or reasoning trace length. However, the effectiveness of these fixed criteria is task-dependent and difficult to generalize across diverse downstream tasks. Perplexity-based data selection provides a simple and model-aware solution to estimate the sample difficulty, but existing approaches typically score the entire training sequence and ignore the difference in learning objectives of language modeling and reasoning tasks. In this paper, we propose PPL-Factory, a simple and interpretable data selection framework that combines task-aware perplexity-based scores and data budget-aware selection criteria. Experiments on GSM8K demonstrate that PPL-Factory outperforms other state-of-the-art data selection methods using only 1%1\% of the training set. With 10%10\% of the data, PPL-Factory exceeds full-data fine-tuning accuracy by 0.9 on GSM8K and 4.8 on MATH. Overall, our results demonstrate that task-aware and budget-aware perplexity-based selection provides an effective and applicable approach for efficient fine-tuning.
Hang Zhang, Warren J. Gross
Jul 19, 2026cs.AI

Bridging the Information Gap: Semantic Densification and Hindsight Distillation for Cold-Start Prediction

New-user cold-start is a critical bottleneck for e-commerce platforms: predicting user lifetime value (LTV) and conversion rate (CVR) for users with sparse interaction history. Two prior directions -- LLM-based semantic augmentation and learning using privileged information (LUPI) -- each face a key limitation. First, LLM augmentation produces unstructured rationales that are noisy and hard to operationalize in production. Second, naive student-teacher distillation can be brittle due to an information gap between the privileged teacher and the sparse student; moreover, this gap is heterogeneous across users. We propose SemRaD, a Semantic Reasoning-aware Distillation framework addressing both limitations. First, a Structured Semantic Reasoning Pipeline replaces free-form rationales with a structured schema built via a discover-curate-audit workflow, producing per user a Densified Semantic Profile (consumed by the deployed student via a Semantic-Gated Encoder that focuses on the most informative dimensions) and a Hindsight Distillation Target reconciled from pre- and post-conversion reasoning (used only at training). Second, to bridge this gap and handle its heterogeneity, a Hindsight-Aware Distillation Network transfers privileged knowledge via the hindsight target, with Distillation Experts improving transfer under per-user variability. On a large-scale industrial dataset, SemRaD lifts +1.9% LTV (Gini) and +1.0% CVR (AUROC) over a production-grade base; a four-week online A/B at Keeta confirms +1.0% LTV / +0.43% CVR. SemRaD also matches the production system's LTV using only 9% of the training data while improving CVR by 0.8%.
Hao Duong Le, Yifei Gao, Huan Li +4
Jul 17, 2026cs.LG

Neural spectroscopy of AlphaFold2 reveals encoded protein conformational landscapes

AlphaFold2's 93 million parameters, shaped by the evolutionary record of protein structure encoded in the Protein Data Bank and in sequence alignments, are conventionally treated only as machinery for converting sequence to structure. We propose they are also a scientific object that can be analyzed directly: a learned encoding of protein conformational organization that can be probed and characterized. By smoothing the Evoformer's weight tensors with a Gaussian convolution and scaling the result, we show that the trained model produces physically structured conformational landscapes. Under perturbation, ubiquitin's native contacts break in the order established by decades of folding experiments. For KaiB, five independently trained models agree that the alternative fold is not recovered under perturbation. For alpha-synuclein, five models produce five different but coherent landscapes, mapping where the training signal has determined the representation and where it has not. Matched-power noise controls confirm that random corruption of equal magnitude produces debris, not conformations. The model learned to predict static structures; the conformational organization visible under perturbation was not an explicit training target, suggesting it emerged as a byproduct of that objective. AlphaFold2's weights appear to encode structural constraints, shaped by evolutionary and structural training data, that extend beyond what unperturbed inference reveals. We call the approach of reading them neural spectroscopy, and Scaled Gaussian Convolution one such protocol.
Kaustav Mehta
Jul 16, 2026cs.LG

Analytical study of the optimal combination of binary classifiers based on classifiers-induced partitioning of the training set

This paper studies an optimal linear combination of binary classifiers based on a logical structuration of the dataset via truth tables. The given classifiers partition data into equivalence classes, allowing for a rigorous analysis of the convexified empirical risk through a multidimensional generalization of classification calibrated functions. We establish sufficient conditions for the existence and uniqueness of the (global) point of minimum of the convexified empirical risk for any list of classifiers (when the number of classifiers is large, there frequently could be no point of minimum). In the case of three classifiers, our analysis allows to list all the configurations leading to either a unique solution, infima or non-unique points of minimum. Furthermore, we derive explicit analytical formulae for optimal weights using Exponential (Boost) and Logistic (Logit) loss functions, bypassing iterative optimization. The stability of the resulting classifier and the analysis of data quality can be evaluated through the introduction of the notion of φφ-frontiers.
Jean-Marc Brossier, Olivier Lafitte
Jul 15, 2026cs.AI

Tracing LLM Behavior to the Training Data with Empirical Next-Token Distributions

In this paper, we study the connection between an LLM's output distribution and the data used to train it. Specifically, we study the degree to which an LLM's next-token distribution agrees with the empirical next-token distribution (ENTD) given the context in the training data. The ENTD is an appealing target because it is the unrestricted global minimizer of the next-token cross entropy loss used for pretraining, as well as an easily interpretable function of the pretraining corpus. We find that for a significant fraction of inputs, the LLM's distribution agrees with the ENTD almost perfectly, and the average agreement increases with model scale and training compute. Nevertheless, there is a long tail of input sequences where the LLM and ENTD differ significantly, and we examine several possible sources of this discrepancy across the transformer architecture, training procedure, and finite-sample noise in the ENTD estimate itself. More broadly, we hope our findings will encourage more work on ``data-centric mechanistic interpretability,'' a complement to standard mechanistic interpretability that opens the black box of how model behaviors arise from the data, rather than how they are encoded in the learned weights.
Zachary Izzo
Jul 14, 2026cs.LG

Reducing information dependency does not cause training data privacy. Adversarially non-robust features do

In this paper, we challenge the prevailing view that information dependency (including rote memorization) drives training data exposure to image reconstruction attacks. We show that extensive exposure can persist without rote memorization and is instead caused by a tunable connection to adversarial robustness. We begin by presenting three surprising results: (1) recent defenses that inhibit reconstruction by Model Inversion Attacks (MIAs), which evaluate leakage under an idealized attacker, do not reduce standard measures of information dependency (HSIC); (2) models that maximally memorize their training datasets remain robust to MIA reconstruction; and (3) models trained without seeing 97% of the training pixels, where recent information-theoretic bounds give arbitrarily strong privacy guarantees under standard assumptions, can still be devastatingly reconstructed by MIA. To explain these findings, we provide causal evidence that privacy under MIA arises from what the adversarial examples literature calls ``non-robust'' features (generalizable but imperceptible and unstable features). We further show that recent MIA defenses obtain their privacy improvements by unintentionally shifting models toward such features. To establish this causal relationship, we introduce Anti Adversarial Training (AT-AT), a training regime that intentionally learns non-robust features to obtain both superior reconstruction defense and higher accuracy than state-of-the-art defenses. Our results revise the prevailing understanding of training data exposure and reveal a new privacy-robustness tradeoff.
Rasmus Torp, Shailen K. Smith, Adam Breuer
Jul 13, 2026cs.CV

Data Safety: Synthetic Data Quality Analysis Using CIFAKE Dataset

Recently, the societal implementation of high-performance image classification models has expanded rapidly. While these models require vast amounts of training data to improve performance, securing sufficient real images is often impractical. As a means to compensate for this shortage, the use of synthetic data is becoming widespread. However, synthetic images are not necessarily equivalent to real images for training purposes. This study systematically analyzes the differences between two types of synthetic images created by different generation methods and real images from three perspectives: high-dimensional feature space, low-level statistics in color space, and the model training process. Furthermore, it experimentally verifies how synthetic data should be utilized by considering realistic data mixing scenarios. This enables the proposal of an evaluation and application strategy for performing preliminary assessments on synthetic images of unknown quality and safely incorporating them into training. This research aims to contribute to enhancing the reliability and safety of image classification models utilizing synthetic images.
Kuniko Paxton, Amila Akagić, Koorosh Aslansefat +2
Jul 13, 2026cs.LG

Requential Coding: Pushing the Limits of Model Compression with Self-Generated Training Data

Compression is fundamental to intelligence. A model that can represent its training data as a short code has discovered regularities that enable generalization. Large neural networks may learn functions far simpler than their parameter counts suggest, but it is challenging to construct codes that realize this simplicity. Parameter-based methods such as quantization produce code lengths that scale with model size, insensitive to how much information the parameters store. Prequential coding bypasses this issue by compressing the training trajectory, but codes the exact data sequence regardless of how much the model learns, yielding large codes when the data has high entropy. We introduce requential coding, where a teacher model selects training samples drawn from the student's own distribution. The student's code records only these selections, which cost bits only where teacher and student disagree. The resulting code length is independent of parameter count and data entropy, and often orders of magnitude shorter than the prequential counterpart, with an advantage that grows with scale. This compression sheds light on phenomena inaccessible to prior compressors. Holding loss fixed, larger models and ensembles compress to much smaller sizes despite more parameters. Plugged into a PAC-Bayes bound, the requential code yields state-of-the-art generalization guarantees for billion-parameter LLMs, outperforming bounds built on aggressive post-training quantization even granted zero error. The bound tightens with scale in the compute-optimal regime, as models become increasingly compressible relative to dataset size. The same code predicts that models gradually overfit when trained for multiple epochs. It also isolates the learnable information in a dataset from its unpredictable, random content, revealing that lower-entropy text holds far more learnable structure than higher-entropy image data.
Shikai Qiu, Marc Finzi, Yujia Zheng +2
Jul 10, 2026cs.SD

What You Train Is What You Get: Gender Bias, Training Composition, and Post-Hoc Mitigation in Audio Deepfake Detection

Audio deepfake detection models determine whether speech is genuine or artificially generated, but high overall accuracy can mask substantial performance disparities across demographic groups. In this work, we investigate gender bias in audio deepfake detection using the ASVspoof5 dataset. We use ASVspoof5 under a controlled custom split designed to isolate gender-composition effects. We train attack-specific models on nine training sets with different gender compositions, ranging from female-only to male-only. We use a ResNet18 classifier with LogSpectrogram and WavLM-Base+ features, and we evaluated six post-hoc threshold calibration methods. Experimental results show that training data composition strongly predicts bias direction, with the underrepresented gender performing worse at test time. WavLM-Base+ features are shown to produce gender performance gaps 3.0 to 4.3 times larger than LogSpectrogram under identical training conditions, and balanced training is found to reduce LogSpectrogram bias but leave WavLM bias largely intact. Moreover, all six calibration strategies, including Oracle calibration with full test-set label access, leave the Equal Error Rate gap unchanged at 1.317 pp, confirming that threshold adjustment cannot correct underlying score distribution disparities. Overall, these findings suggest that gender fairness in audio deepfake detection must be addressed at training time, as post-hoc methods can only partially mitigate the resulting disparities
Aishwarya R. Fursule, Vamshi Nallaguntla, Shruti Kshirsagar +1
Jul 8, 2026cs.LG

FedCVESA: Taking Away Training Data in Federated Learning via Correlation Value Encoding and Segmented Aggregation

Federated learning (FL) avoids explicit data exposure by keeping raw data on local clients, yet privacy risks remain in the training process and the learned model itself. Recently, centralized Taking Away Training Data (TATD) attacks have shown that malicious training could abuse the memorization capacity of deep models to store and later recover training data. However, this memorization-based threat has not been systematically studied under FL environments, where multi-client averaging could overwrite encoded training data. In this paper, we study a white-box TATD attack in which a malicious server selects n target clients from K participating clients and actively writes private training data into the global model during federated training. We propose FedCVESA, a federated variant of Correlation Value Encoding Attack (CVEA), by adding a Pearson-correlation regularizer to the loss function of target clients, so that private training data are gradually encoded into selected model parameters, referred to as carrier parameters. To reduce the overwriting of carrier parameters during server aggregation, we further propose segmented aggregation over dispersed carrier parameters, preserving selected carrier parameters while keeping standard averaging on the remaining parameters. Experiments on MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and CIFAR-10 under Dirichlet non-IID partitions show that the proposed method can steal semantically meaningful private training images from the trained model while maintaining acceptable main-task utility in a controlled proof-of-concept setting. These results demonstrate that FL can become a parameter-level memorization channel for active TATD attack under the studied white-box malicious-server setting.
Chongkai Li, Bang Zhang, Wenjian Luo
Jul 8, 2026cs.LG

Selective Left-Shift: Turning Test-Time Compute and Difficulty-based Curation into Training Data for Low-Resource Code Generation

Large Language Models achieve strong code generation for high resource languages like Python and Java but suffer sharp performance drops on Low-Resource Programming Languages~(LRPLs) such as Julia. Improving Small Language Models~(SLMs) for these languages faces a trilemma: Supervised Fine-Tuning~(SFT) is bottlenecked by data scarcity, inference-time scaling is too expensive for deployment, and Reinforcement Learning from scratch yields near zero advantages. We propose a three-phase pipeline that resolves this trilemma by decoupling syntax acquisition from algorithmic reasoning. First, we \emph{left-shift} inference-time compute to an offline data synthesis engine that uses iterative compiler and test feedback to generate verified training examples. Second, we fine-tune an SLM on this synthetic, verified data to embed strong syntactic priors. Third, we apply Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward~(RLVR) grounded by language-agnostic Input/Output tests, where the SFT prior constrains exploration away from syntax errors. Applied to Qwen3-8B, our pipeline improves pass@1 by up to +7.6 points on MultiPL-E and +14.2 points on the Agnostics LiveCodeBench for Julia compared to SOTA results. Furthermore, the pipeline only used 13\frac{1}{3} data and 16\frac{1}{6} cost over the previous state-of-the-art. We further demonstrate that the pipeline generalizes to Ballerina achieving 49.7% MultiPL-E Pass@1, a language with near-zero pretraining representation. Ablations confirm that both the SFT phase and execution-grounded rewards are necessary for stable training.
Didula Samaraweera, Anjana Supun, Srinath Perera
Jul 5, 2026cs.LG

One Framework for All: Cross-Modal Membership Inference for Generative Models

Large generative models across text-to-text, text-to-image, and image-to-text modalities have been shown to pose significant privacy risks. One fundamental threat is membership inference attacks (MIA), which aim to determine whether a given data point was used in a model's training set. Although prior work has investigated MIAs against these three classes of generative models, existing approaches treat them in isolation and are not cross-applicable, thereby limiting their real-world utility. To address this limitation, we present the first comprehensive study of a unified membership inference framework that applies across text-to-text, text-to-image, and image-to-text modalities. Our approach is grounded in a key modality-agnostic observation: the output distribution of a generative model can approximate its training data distribution. Leveraging this property, we model the distributions of model-generated outputs and auxiliary non-member samples in a shared embedding space, and perform membership inference via likelihood ratio testing. We conduct extensive experiments in a strict black-box setting under both partial-knowledge and zero-knowledge threat models, and evaluate membership inference against both fine-tuning and pre-training data. Experimental results demonstrate our approach's superior performance in comparison to existing state-of-the-art methods, which are typically optimized for a single model class.
Dayong Ye, Tainqing Zhu, Kun Gao +6
Jul 2, 2026cs.AI

A^{2}utoLPBench: An Auto-Generated, Agent-Friendly LP Benchmark via Inverse-KKT Construction

Most LP-from-text benchmarks are static datasets of word problems written and labeled by hand. Once such a dataset is released, its size is fixed, its difficulty is fixed, and every problem can leak into the training data of future LLMs. We present \textbf{A2^{2}utoLPBench}, a benchmark for testing LLM-driven agents on linear programming problems written in plain text. We first pick a feasible point and dual, then write down a problem for which that point is optimal and the objective value is known. The answer is known by construction, with no solver call and no human annotator. The evaluation environment bundles a reference solver-critic baseline and a Docker image whose usage instructions are written for an LLM-driven agent to read. With these in place, any agent can run the benchmark and get a calibrated score with one command. Because the benchmark is a generator rather than a fixed dataset, it has properties no fixed dataset can match: an unlimited supply of fresh problems, a difficulty knob set by (n,m)(n,m), ground-truth answers correct by construction, low LLM-side cost per problem relative to human authoring, repeatable scores across independent batches, and resistance to training-data leakage when fresh post-cutoff seed ranges are used.
Shuo Ren, Yaohui Han, Yifan Shi +6
Jul 2, 2026cs.LG

WARP: Weight-Space Analysis for Recovering Training Data Portfolios

Foundation models are routinely released to the public, yet the data recipes used to train them -- such as domain mixture weights that determine how different sources are sampled -- are rarely disclosed. This creates an access asymmetry: researchers study the resulting models but lack visibility into the training distribution that produces them. Prior works for inferring training data, such as membership inference, detect at the level of individual samples and thus cannot characterize the global composition of the training corpus. We introduce WARP, a framework that recovers a fine-tuned model's training mixtures directly from its released weights. WARP interpolates between the base and fine-tuned models using model merging, generating pseudo-checkpoints that approximate the missing training trajectory and expose a geometric footprint of the training data in the weight space. From these simulated footprints, WARP extracts geometric features and maps them to domain proportions using either a parameter-free softmax readout or an MLP projector trained on synthetic mixtures. In controlled experiments with BERT and GPT-2, WARP recovers domain mixtures with an average MAE as low as 0.046 and 0.104 respectively, outperforming membership inference and a variant with access to the true training trajectory.
Tzu-Heng Huang, Aditya Goyal, John Cooper +1
Jul 2, 2026cs.SD

UT-AISTimprt submission for ICME 2026 Grand Challenge on Academic Text-to-Music Generation

This work investigates the effect of batch sampling strategies during training for text-to-audio music generation under low-data and small-scale model settings. This paper describes our approach and findings for the ICME 2026 Grand Challenge on Academic Text-to-Music Generation. Training data are clustered using either text embeddings or audio embeddings, and samples with similar characteristics are grouped within the same mini-batch to mitigate gradient interference. The effects of modality and cluster granularity on clustering are analyzed. Results show that clustering based on text embeddings achieves better performance on objective evaluation metrics than clustering based on audio embeddings. In addition, different cluster granularity leads to different behaviors across evaluation criteria: a moderate number of clusters performs best on objective metrics, while a larger number of clusters tends to exhibit music with more coherent structure in listening tests.
Shunsuke Yoshida, Yu-Hua Chen, Satoru Fukayama
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.LG

Watermarking for Proprietary Dataset Protection

A growing body of literature suggests that training data membership inference problems are fundamentally hard tasks in modern language modeling settings. We argue that output watermarking techniques are the right gadget to make training membership tests for generative models more tractable, based on prior results showing that language models exhibit residual watermark "radioactivity" under partially watermarked training datasets. We pit a watermark-based dataset inference approach head-to-head against traditional loss-based membership inference methods and show that watermarking can achieve comparable membership detection performance when subset exposure is high enough, under an alternate set of assumptions.
John Kirchenbauer, Brian R. Bartoldson, Bhavya Kailkhura +1
Jun 30, 2026cs.CV

Preserve the Hard, Regenerate the Rest: Uncertainty-Guided Synthetic Training Data Augmentation with Diffusion Models

Semantic segmentation models struggle with data sparsity and rare or visually diverse regions, e.g., dense regions or small objects in aerial or autonomous mobility data. While synthetic augmentation is an appealing solution, directly generating new labeled data risks misalignment of labels and generated pixels. Existing solutions to this problem often rely on external models, or employ coarse heuristics such as indiscriminately augmenting all foreground objects or entire backgrounds, which wastes capacity on uninformative pixels. To address this, we propose an uncertainty-guided synthetic context augmentation strategy that strictly preserves label validity and efficiently maximizes pixel informativeness per synthetic sample - no external guardrails required. Using a baseline segmenter's predictive entropy, we identify uncertain semantic regions and inpaint only the complementary visual context. When fine-tuning the segmenter on this synthetic data, we compute the loss only over the original pixels, excluding inpainted regions. This focuses learning on the unmodified, uncertain regions while presenting them in novel contexts. We demonstrate substantial mIoU gains on Cityscapes, UAVID, and BDD100K with the largest gains on rare and difficult classes such as buses, trains, or (from the aerial perspective) cars. Our results demonstrate that uncertainty-guided context augmentation is a highly effective lever to improve segmentation performance on complex datasets, with code provided at https://github.com/XITASO/Preserve-the-Hard-Regenerate-the-Rest.
Nikolai Röhrich, Julian Gleißner, Ahmed H. A. Ibrahim +2
Jun 30, 2026cs.CV

DataEvolver: Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Data Construction for Text-Rich Image Generation

Text-rich image generation is one of the most challenging settings in image generation, since models must simultaneously produce visually realistic images and render legible, semantically aligned, and layout-consistent text. Existing data pipelines usually follow a static crawl-filter-freeze paradigm. They collect candidate samples, filter them once, and freeze the accepted data for training. However, rejected samples are usually discarded, although they often contain useful failure signals such as OCR errors and semantic mismatches. As a result, later construction rounds may repeat the same failure modes. To address these limitations, we propose DataEvolver, a self-evolving multi-agent framework for text-rich image data construction. DataEvolver treats data construction as feedback-driven construction policy evolution. A Retriever collects candidate samples, a Verifier assigns quality scores and rejection causes, a Critic summarizes round-level feedback into semantic feedback, and a Generator completes under-covered regions through targeted synthesis. The updated feedback memory then guides the next construction round. Experiments on text-rich image generation benchmarks show that DataEvolver produces more useful training data than fixed-dataset baselines under matched data budgets. At the 0.75M scale on PixArt-alpha, DataEvolver improves OCR-F1 over the strongest baseline by 85.3 percent on TextScenesHQ and 35.3 percent on LongTextBench. The improvements are consistent across both evaluated benchmarks and also transfer to Show-o2, indicating that the benefit of DataEvolver is not tied to a single downstream generator. These results suggest that rejected samples can provide actionable feedback for improving text-rich image data construction.
Siyu Yan, Yizhen Gao, Yilin Wang +2
Jun 27, 2026cs.CL

Labeling Training Data for Entity Matching Using Large Language Models

Recent large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on entity matching without requiring task-specific training data. However, applying these models to large sets of candidate pairs remains slow and costly. In contrast, entity matchers using traditional machine learning methods or small language models (SLMs), such as RoBERTa, offer much faster inference but require task-specific training data. This paper investigates whether the need to provide task-specific training data can be avoided by using knowledge-distillation workflows, in which an LLM serves as a teacher model to label training pairs that are subsequently used to train a smaller student model. We investigate knowledge distillation for entity matching along the following dimensions: pair-selection strategy, teacher model, label post-processing method, and student model. We evaluate the workflows using the Abt-Buy, Walmart-Amazon, WDC Products, DBLP-ACM, and DBLP-Scholar benchmarks, and compare the performance of student models trained with machine-labeled data to the performance of the same models trained using the benchmark training sets. Our experiments show that student models trained using the machine-labeled sets perform approximately on par with models trained on the benchmark training sets, with the remaining differences in both directions staying below two F1 points. Using GPT-5.2 to label the training sets for all five benchmarks costs US$28.31 to US$40.88, whereas manually labeling the same training sets is estimated to require 470 hours of work. At inference time, Ditto is 41.5 to 534 times faster than directly using an LLM to perform the matching tasks. These results indicate that current LLMs, when combined with a suitable pair-selection method, can substantially reduce or even eliminate the manual effort required to label use case-specific training data for entity matching.
Aaron Steiner, Christian Bizer
Jun 24, 2026cs.LG

Dataset Usage Inference without Shadow Models or Held-out Data

How much of my data was used to train a machine learning model? Dataset Usage Inference (DUI) aims to answer this by estimating what fraction of a dataset contributed to a model's training. However, existing DUI methods rely on assumptions that rarely hold in practice: they require training expensive shadow models to imitate the target model, and they assume access to both known training samples and an in-distribution held-out set confirmed to be absent from training. These conditions make current approaches impractical for modern large models and real data ownership disputes. We introduce a practical DUI framework that removes these constraints. Our method requires neither shadow models nor real held-out data. Instead, it generates synthetic non-member samples, extracts diverse membership signals, and casts DUI as a mixture proportion estimation problem to estimate what share of the candidate dataset was used during training. Experiments on large image generative models show that our method reliably quantifies dataset usage, providing a practical tool for data owners to determine how much of their data was used to train a model.
Wojciech Łapacz, Stanisław Pawlak, Jan Dubiński +2
Jun 23, 2026cs.CL

Less is More: Quality-Aware Training Data Selection for Scientific Summarization

Scientific long-document summarization datasets commonly treat author-written abstracts as gold reference summaries, although their quality and alignment with the source article vary. At the same time, publicly available scientific summarization datasets remain limited in scale and structure for modern long-context models. In this work, we address both challenges by a) constructing and releasing one of the largest biomedical and life science datasets for long-document summarization, containing 1.88 million PMC articles, and b) analyzing the reference quality of author-written abstracts with source-grounded and model-based metrics. We show that author-written abstracts vary in their alignment with the full article and that these quality signals can guide training-data selection. Training on selected high-quality subsets outperforms random sampling at matched training sizes and can match or exceed larger random subsets on factuality-oriented metrics. Our findings suggest that reference quality is an important factor in scientific summarization and that quality-aware data selection can improve training efficiency.
Maria Nefeli Paraskevopoulou, Tatiana Passali, Grigorios Tsoumakas
Jun 23, 2026cs.CV

Revealing Training Data Exposure in Vision Language Large Models via Parameter Gradients

Vision-Language Large Models (VLLMs) trained on massive crawled corpora raise pressing copyright and data-provenance concerns. These concerns are particularly acute in healthcare, where patient medical images paired with clinical reports demand rigorous privacy safeguards. However, existing training data detection methods either fail in cross-modal scenarios or rely on superficial output signals with insufficient discriminative power. We introduce GradAudit, a gradient-based auditing framework that examines internal optimization dynamics rather than treating VLLMs as black boxes. Our approach builds on a key observation: model parameters converge to regions where gradients on training samples become stable and well-aligned, whereas gradients on non-training samples remain noisy and inconsistent. By analyzing these gradient signatures, GradAudit achieves strong separability and detects genuine image-text associations learned during training, not merely individual modality membership. Empirically, across both medical and general-domain datasets, GradAudit substantially outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both pretraining and fine-tuning VLLMs. In a case study employing copyrighted content, we show that existing training data detection methods not only underestimate the extent of unauthorized data usage, but that this underestimation becomes more pronounced as models become more recent and more advanced.
Zhihao Zhu, Hongyi Tang, Yi Yang +1
Jun 23, 2026cs.LG

Training Dynamics of Neural Software Defect Predictors under Coupled Data-Quality Issues

Context: Software defect prediction supports maintenance decisions such as testing prioritization, release-risk assessment, and quality monitoring. However, metric-based SDP datasets often contain coupled data-quality issues, especially class imbalance and class overlap. Prior work has mainly measured their impact through endpoint performance, while recent evidence suggests that such issues may also appear in neural training dynamics (gradients, weights, biases, error trajectories). However, these studies examine issues in isolation, leaving open how internal neural network training patterns manifest when data quality issues are coupled. Objective: We investigate how training-dynamics patterns from class imbalance, overlap, and their coupling can be characterized under interaction-aware conditions in deep learning-based SDP. Method: We conduct a controlled intervention study on class-level UBD datasets, training a fixed MLP under imbalance-only, overlap-only, and joint conditions across five seeds. Training dynamics are logged per epoch; fidelity is monitored via coupling ratios. Patterns are characterized using effect sizes, trajectories, sensitivity analyses, and rule-based classification. Expected contribution: The study will produce an interaction-aware empirical protocol and a candidate taxonomy of training-dynamics patterns for coupled data-quality issues in metric-based SDP.
Emmanuel Charleson Dapaah, Philip Makedonski, Jens Grabowski
Jun 22, 2026cs.LG

MGI: Member vs Generated Inference

As generative models increasingly produce samples that are indistinguishable from human-created content, it becomes difficult to determine whether a given data point was part of a model's natural training set or was generated by the model itself, especially when models memorize and reproduce training data. We formalize this challenge as Member vs Generated Inference (MGI): given a sample and a target generative model, infer whether the sample is a true training member or a generated output of that model. Focusing on image generation, we show that existing membership inference methods systematically misclassify generated samples as training members, while attribution-based methods often misclassify true members as generated. This failure arises because both approaches rely on likelihood-related signals that are similarly elevated for training examples and for the model's own outputs. To address MGI, we propose Data Circuit Breaker (DCB), a three-stage method that combines complementary signals from a generative model's autoencoder and latent generator to distinguish training members from generated samples. Across multiple generative models, including image autoregressive and diffusion models, DCB consistently addresses the shortcomings of membership inference and attribution methods, remains effective even when models reproduce near-duplicates of training samples, and generalizes to challenging model derivative settings in which new models are trained on generated data.
Bihe Zhao, Michel Meintz, Juangui Xu +2
Jun 22, 2026cs.AI

CLI-Universe: Towards Verifiable Task Synthesis Engine for Terminal Agents

While recent LLM-based terminal agents have demonstrated promising capabilities, the scarcity of high-quality, executable training data remains a critical bottleneck. Existing synthesis pipelines typically scale by retrofitting surface-level artifacts into tasks, frequently yielding ambiguous instructions, shallow execution paths, and brittle tests that provide weak learning signals. To overcome this, we introduce CLI-Universe, a principled synthesis engine that constructs terminal-agent tasks. CLI-Universe generates candidate tasks by sampling combinations across a multi-dimensional capability taxonomy (domain, skill type, capability, and engineering pillar), then grounds each candidate through evidence-guided deep research over real-world technical materials. To ensure rigorous supervision, validated blueprints are instantiated into Dockerized environments and subjected to a multi-stage executable verification pipeline featuring rubric-gated test construction, hint-conditional filtering, and strict fail-to-pass checking. Across the full pipeline, from candidate generation to verification, approximately two-thirds of candidates are discarded, retaining only those that are genuine, verifiable, and non-trivially challenging. To validate our framework, we instantiate a highly distilled dataset of 6,000 trajectories called CLI-Universe-6K. Remarkably, fine-tuning Qwen3-32B on CLI-Universe-6K achieves 33.4% on Terminal-Bench 2.0. This sets a new state-of-the-art for models trained on open-source data at or below 32B parameters, and outperforms several models an order of magnitude larger, demonstrating the profound data efficiency of structured, high-fidelity synthesis.
Zhanbo Hua, Yifan Yao, Weihao Xie +14
Jun 18, 2026cs.RO

Efficiently Linking Real Scenes with Synthetic Data Generation for AI-based Cognitive Robotics and Computer Vision Applications

AI vision models are a driving factor for the potential use case scenarios of cognitive robotics within in the industry and household applications. A large array of methods from semantic environment analysis towards 6D and grasping pose estimation have been proposed based on the latest AI achievements. However, such advancements require further strong and efficient methods w.r.t. training data and AI-architectures, which are capable in synergy to tackle current challenges, precision limits, and scalability beyond domain gaps. In this paper, we discuss these current limits and trends in the related state-of-the-art which are challenging those. Further we discuss our current work in progress on bridging the domain gap between simulations and real world applications by linking those in the training data generation.
Paul Koch, Vivek Chavan, André Sers +4
Jun 16, 2026cs.PL

Visored: A Controlled-Natural-Language Prover for LLM-Generated Mathematics

We present a dependent-type-based prover designed around the way LLMs (and humans) tend to write mathematics, complementing existing systems such as Lean and Rocq. Its core design choices are a surface that imitates mathematical natural language and a rule-driven automation layer that closes the routine steps a textbook would omit, so that an accepted proof can be re-emitted as a checked Lean file. Early experiments suggest that, even without any prover-specific training data, LLMs can learn to use it effectively on the miniF2F benchmark. Lean output excerpts: https://github.com/xiyuzhai-husky-lang/visored/
Xiyu Zhai, Xinyi Chen, Yiping Wang +3
Jun 14, 2026cs.DC

Quantifying the Impact of Lossy Compression on Neural Generative Surrogate Modeling

Neural networks are used as generative surrogate models for scientific discovery, which are trainable approximations of scientific simulations. These models enable users to replace time-consuming numerical simulations with learned alternatives, providing quick solutions. However, high-fidelity generative surrogate models require massive training datasets, which can create storage and I/O challenges. Lossy compression is a promising way to reduce this burden, but compression errors may affect the model quality in subtle ways, making it challenging to quantify their impact. In this work, we examine how lossy compression of training data impacts the quality of generative surrogate models. We begin by characterizing the uncertainty inherent in training neural networks, showing that identical training configurations can produce different models. By exploiting this variability, we propose a method to estimate how much compression-induced error a surrogate model can tolerate without affecting its accuracy. Evaluation of two application simulations demonstrates that our approach significantly reduces memory/storage requirements and speeds up training while producing high-quality surrogate models. These results show that lossy compression saves data storage up to 23.7x and 39x with negligible impact on the quality of the surrogate model. Meanwhile, reducing the size of the training data set also enhances the data loading speed and reduces the training time by up to 3x.
Zhimin Li, Harshitha Menon, Charles Jekel +2
Jun 11, 2026cs.CL

SENTINEL: Failure-Driven Reinforcement Learning for Training Tool-Using Language Model Agents

Language model agents are increasingly effective in solving realistic tasks through multi-turn tool use. However, training reliable tool-using agents remains challenging in practice. While reinforcement learning provides an on-policy paradigm for improving agents from their own environment interactions, its effectiveness depends heavily on the training task distribution. When tasks are fixed before training, the task distribution can become increasingly mismatched with the policy's evolving capabilities, causing many rollouts to be spent on uninformative tasks. We propose SENTINEL, a failure-driven reinforcement learning framework that turns the Solver's rollout failures into targeted training tasks. SENTINEL follows a Controller--Proposer--Solver loop: the Controller analyzes failed trajectories and summarizes recurring error patterns, the Proposer generates executable tasks that stress these weaknesses, and the Solver is trained on the targeted tasks. On Tau2-Bench Retail with Qwen3-4B-Thinking-2507, SENTINEL improves Pass^{}1 from 66.4 to 74.9 and outperforms RL on general synthetic tasks across Pass^{}k metrics. These results demonstrate that model failures provide an effective and scalable source of targeted training signal for improving tool-using language model agents.
Ziyi Wang, Yuxuan Lu, Yimeng Zhang +8
Jun 10, 2026cs.LG

DeMix: Debugging Training Data with Mixed Data Error Types by Investigating Influence Vectors

High-quality training data is essential for the success of machine learning models. However, real-world datasets often contain mixed types of errors arising from systematic flaws in data preparation pipelines, including label errors, feature errors, and spurious correlations. Effective debugging of training data requires both detecting erroneous samples and identifying their specific error types to enable targeted repair, yet existing data cleaning and attribution methods fail to adequately address this dual requirement. In this paper, we propose DeMix, a novel framework that simultaneously diagnoses erroneous samples and their error types. Our key insight is that different error types produce distinct patterns on model behavior. DeMix captures such error-specific patterns by influence vectors that characterize how each training sample affects model predictions across all validation samples. We formulate training data debugging as a multi-label classification problem where a classifier is developed to predict error types directly from influence vectors. We further introduce an intervention-based learning strategy that guides the classifier to capture invariant rationales specific to each error type, ensuring the learned classifier generalizes effectively. Empirical evaluations on 11 tasks across tabular data prediction, recommendation systems, and LLM alignment demonstrate that DeMix significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving a 22.61% improvement in data debugging F1-score and a 9.32% gain in task model performance after data repair. Code is available at: https://github.com/SJTU-DMTai/DeMix.
Jiale Deng, Yanyan Shen, Xiaogang Shi +1
Jun 9, 2026cs.CV

i1: A Simple and Fully Open Recipe for Strong Text-to-Image Models

Diffusion models have consistently driven progress in text-to-image generation. However, it is challenging to attribute recent progress to specific modeling and data choices: state-of-the-art open-weight models provide limited ablations, and do not disclose their training data and full training details. The research community needs fully open (weights, data, and code) models as a foundation for further research; yet existing fully open models still fall significantly short of leading models in performance. In this project, we conduct a systematic investigation of the modeling and data design choices in text-to-image diffusion training and inference with 300+ controlled experiments totaling 700K+ TPU v6e hours. Our experiments highlight several empirical findings (e.g., equal weighting is a strong default for mixing curated datasets) and simple design decisions (e.g., larger text encoder adapters improve performance with minimal added parameters) for training strong models. Guided by these insights, we train i1, a 3B-parameter text-to-image diffusion model using only publicly available datasets. i1 is competitive with leading models on five representative benchmarks (GenEval, DPG, PRISM, CVTG-2K, and LongText), and outperforms the best existing fully open model by 29.5 absolute percentage points on average. We provide the i1 checkpoints, training and inference code, and the data processing pipeline. Together, our findings and the i1 recipe establish a practical foundation for future open research in text-to-image diffusion models. Our code is available at https://github.com/zlab-princeton/i1.
Boya Zeng, Tianze Luo, Shu Pu +4
Jun 9, 2026eess.AS

Massive Open-Vocabulary Keyword Spotting

Automatic speech recognition systems have been shown to under-perform when it comes to transcribing words rarely seen in the training data, namely specialized terminology. Open-vocabulary keyword spotting, combined with contextual biasing, has been shown to mitigate this issue. However, existing systems can only handle glossaries of a few hundred terms without becoming an infeasible bottleneck. We propose a system that stores features with a memory footprint up to 128 times smaller than a comparable baseline and allows users to process massive databases while remaining open-vocabulary. Without fine-tuning the speech recognition model, our system achieves a comparable entity recall as uncompressed solutions, even in languages not seen during training.
Leonor Barreiros, Raul Monteiro, Afonso Mendes +1
Jun 8, 2026astro-ph.GA

Integral Field Unit Spectroscopy with One Fiber

Integral field unit (IFU) spectroscopy provides spatially resolved spectra across galaxies, offering crucial insights into their evolution. However, its high observational cost limits current IFU datasets to 104\sim 10^4 objects. We present a multi-modal, probabilistic foundation model that predicts high-resolution spectra with calibrated uncertainties at arbitrary spatial locations within a galaxy directly from broadband images. Built on a masked autoencoder framework, our architecture injects fiber positional encodings and redshift aware wavelength encodings, enabling spatially conditioned predictions. Trained on 4.7 million images and single fiber spectroscopic observations from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) survey, our model exploits the natural variance of fiber placements and the morphological self-similarity of galaxies to achieve IFU-like capabilities without any IFU training data. Predicted emission line flux maps match independent IFU observations from the Mapping Nearby Galaxies at APO (MaNGA) survey, with performance comparable to a supervised baseline trained directly on IFU data.
Zehao Peng, Biprateep Dey, Chris J. Maddison +1