Transform Concepts

General-purpose models can adapt to many tasks from context, while specialised models can execute individual functions with less capacity. Yet obtaining such specialists requires task-specific training or adaptation. We ask whether they can instead be generated directly from a few demonstrations. Using ARC-1D as a controlled testbed, we show that individual transformations can be represented by tiny specialist models, and that a hypernetwork can generate their parameters from context. The generated parameters form a structured weight space, while the resulting specialists show partial compositional generalisation and generalisation to transformations not seen during training. In both settings, removing explicit task identifiers improves generalisation beyond the training transformations. Together, these results provide a proof of concept that few-shot task context can be compiled on-the-fly into compact executable model parameters, and that the resulting weight space can support reuse and generalisation beyond known functions.

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) generate text by denoising a sequence or successive blocks, allowing several tokens to be revealed in parallel. Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) reuses terminal feedback across these decisions, even as their conditioning context changes. We propose stepwise risk-sensitive GRPO (StepRS-GRPO), which varies the risk coefficient of the group-advantage transformation across denoising states while retaining the underlying trainer. For binary rewards, we show that this transformation is exactly a prompt- and state-dependent rescaling of centered outcome advantages. A capability-based calibration suggests a coefficient scale, while endpoint and interpolation ablations guide schedule selection. Across multiple dLLM backbones and mathematical reasoning benchmarks, StepRS-GRPO improves both pass@1 accuracy and pass@k coverage over centered GRPO, while increasing answer diversity. In our ablation studies, mass-matched controls support the contributions of state allocation and schedule direction, and the gains persist after matching the root mean square (RMS) of the advantages to that of centered GRPO. Reasoning-trace diagnostics further show that the diversity gains from StepRS-GRPO extend beyond final-answer strings.

Optimal Transport (OT) provides a principled framework for learning transformations between probability distributions from unpaired samples. In many applications, however, a single transformation must map several source distributions to a common target distribution. For example, image restoration might require handling different types of degradation without knowing the degradation of each input at inference time. Simple approaches of pooling the source distributions only encourage alignment with the target at the aggregate level and may leave individual sources misaligned. In our paper, we consider the simultaneous OT problem which formalizes the task of learning a shared transport map that minimizes the average transport cost while aligning each source distribution with a prescribed target. We propose a neural method for solving the simultaneous OT problem by learning a shared transport map that minimizes the average transport cost while aligning each source distribution with a prescribed target. We derive a max-min formulation for learning this map. We illustrate its application to image restoration, where a single model handles multiple degradation types using a common collection of clean target images.

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) commonly trains decentralized policies from scratch, requiring agents to acquire individual task competence and coordination simultaneously. Yet many multi-agent problems admit a compatible single-agent counterpart in which the underlying task can be learned in isolation. We introduce Multi-Agent Observation Transformation for Existing Single-Agent Policies (MATES), an input-side adaptation framework for tasks whose multi-agent observations preserve the solo-task information while exposing separately identifiable neighbor information. From multi-agent experience, MATES learns a small adapter that maps this observation into the format expected by a frozen single-agent policy, inducing actions suited to the shared environment without updating the single-agent policy itself. MATES leaves the pretrained policy's internal architecture unchanged and retains the objectives and update procedures of the underlying MARL algorithm. We evaluate MATES using both on- and off-policy algorithms on lifelong pathfinding, navigation, and cooperative discovery, spanning discrete and continuous observation and action spaces. Across all evaluated settings, MATES optimizes only 3.5-7.3% as many parameters as full-policy training while consistently outperforming MARL training from scratch. It approaches the performance of full fine-tuning, remains competitive overall with demonstration-based baselines, and retains strong task performance at team sizes not encountered during training. These results provide evidence that, under this observation structure, effective multi-agent behavior can be learned without modifying the policy that encodes individual competence.

How neural representations preserve the structure of input changes connects representation analysis with internal intervention. We study operable representational content through compatible actions of reference transformations on neural features. We characterise when a transformation descends through an encoder, and give a linear setting in which the defect is governed by the transformation's demand for discarded information, measured in the metric the representation induces. On a rectifier the failure to realise a transformation has two distinguishable sources --- what the source region has already made unrecoverable, and what it costs to satisfy every region the transformation visits with one operator --- and for a \textit{measured} harmonic carrier the same question has a closed answer: a linear realisation exists exactly when the retained harmonic blocks are invariant under the action. Using colour as the in-depth instance, we find that hue orbits in frozen visual features concentrate 84--88% of their energy in the first two harmonics with rotation planes shared across shapes, that this organisation is substantially inherited from input and architecture and is reshaped by training and depth, and that the measured structure supports prediction, transport from new starting states, and composition --- with global and local realisations differing sharply in which they achieve. Guided by the measurements, we construct a compact interface whose rotation action is fixed by the structure and never fitted: it reads hue zero-shot at 3.4$^\circ$ median error on unseen shapes. Theory, structural measurement, and construction together establish transformation laws as a concrete object connecting the understanding of neural representations to their design.

Can deep learning translate physical fields governed by fundamentally different equations? We address this question by introducing Cross-Physics Mapping (CPM), an operator-learning framework for mappings between heterogeneous physical domains. We formulate sufficient conditions for such mappings through compatible latent representations and propose a dimensionless scaling principle that aligns the characteristic evolution scales of the source and target systems without assuming their dynamical equivalence. As a representative test, paired diffusion and wave fields are generated independently from their respective parabolic and hyperbolic equations while sharing the same latent geometry, material heterogeneity, excitation, and dimensionless scale. Seven architectures-ResUNet, DeepONet, Fourier, latent, wavelet, U-shaped, and Galerkin neural operators-are evaluated for both diffusion-to-wave and wave-to-diffusion mappings. The results reveal a strong directional asymmetry. Diffusion-to-wave reconstruction is more challenging because it requires recovering wavefront, phase, and time-of-flight information attenuated by diffusion; U-NO performs best in this direction, achieving a relative $\ell_2$ error of $0.307$ and an $R^2$ of $0.905$. Wave-to-diffusion mapping is considerably more stable, with GNO attaining a relative $\ell_2$ error of $0.154$ and an $R^2$ of $0.935$. Neural operators generally outperform the conventional convolutional baseline, highlighting the nonlocal nature of cross-physics transformations. These findings demonstrate that deep learning can establish useful mappings between distinct physical modalities on a shared latent manifold, while the achievable accuracy remains fundamentally constrained by the direction-dependent information content of the governing physics.

Robustness evaluation of large language models (LLMs) remains a critical challenge, particularly in assessing their sensitivity to perturbations in input data. In this work, we systematically evaluate LLM robustness across multiple dimensions, including word error rate, character repetition and duplication, modifications in choices, and variability in instruction following. To facilitate this evaluation, we construct a synthetic and augmented dataset encompassing a diverse set of LLM benchmarks, specifically targeting multiple-choice question (MCQ) datasets and instruction-following tasks. We conduct extensive experiments on LLMs of varying scales-small, medium, and large-as well as across base and instruction-tuned variants. Our analysis quantifies the variability in model responses under perturbed conditions and highlights discrepancies relative to baseline models. The findings provide insights into the stability of LLMs across different evaluation scenarios contributing to the development of more robust and reliable language models as well as robust evaluation methodologies.

We introduce BDH-CQ, a reasoning model that combines in-context learning with recurrent latent reasoning. Inputs presented at inference time continuously update the model's recurrent memory; the model then solves a query through iterative computation in a high-dimensional latent space, without verbalizing its intermediate reasoning. We evaluate the model on the public ARC-AGI-1 evaluation set and use controlled ARC-like interventions to study what it learns from demonstrations, how consistently it applies an inferred transformation, and which concepts remain difficult. A 150M-parameter configuration reaches 29.5% pass@2 at a computed inference cost of $0.0007 per task. This operating point breaks through the previously reported ARC-AGI-1 cost-accuracy Pareto frontier, establishing a new state of the art in benchmark cost efficiency.

We investigate whether simple transformations can translate representations across heterogeneous text embedding models. Understanding how independently trained models organize semantic information is an enabler for AI-to-AI latent communication without decoding into human-readable text. Focusing on lightweight translators such as linear mappings, we test the literature hypothesis of latent universality in a realistic text setting beyond simplified benchmarks. Across nine embedding models differing in architecture, pooling strategy, and training objective, we evaluate compatibility using CKA, downstream transfer, fidelity, and retrieval. Simple translators recover meaningful shared structure and support transfer for some compatible pairs, but fail sharply for others. Compatibility depends jointly on architecture, training objective, pooling, and data distribution. Overall, the results show that heterogeneous embedding spaces are not universally related by simple mappings as often suggested in some literature.

How concepts are represented in neural networks is a fundamental question in machine learning. The dominant view treats concept representations as stationary geometric objects. Yet concepts appear in context, and context transforms them. Drawing from neural population geometry, we formalize concept representations as point-cloud manifolds and contextual transformations as vector fields, and instantiate this framework in large language models. Across six model families of varying scales, we find that context moves each concept differently. The variance in these displacements is semantically organized, correlating with lexical concreteness and density. Importantly, both the concepts being transformed and this variance structure are shared across models: displacement structure transported from one model predicts held-out displacements in others significantly above chance. Together, these findings show that models share a common geometry not only in how concepts are represented, but more importantly in how context transforms them, a structure with richer organization than prior work has recognized.

Training of neural networks for histopathology classification tasks typically relies on data encoding into latent space, which reduces complexity and improves performance. There are several encoder networks available, either pretrained on general image datasets such as ImageNET, or specifically on histopathological images. Training of encoder networks should be adapted to downstream tasks, allowing encoding of biologic/diagnostic content while rendering networks invariant to label-irrelevant transformations. This paper investigates the effect of classical image transformation on the latent space, using networks provided by Lunit Inc. and Bioptimus, both focusing on pathological images, and by Meta Research Team. We assess variance of embeddings resulting from standard data transformations by comparing original and transformed image embeddings and by contrasting them with random, unrelated embeddings, using image tiles from hematoxylin/eosin-stained sections available in a colorectal tissue dataset and the publicly accessible TCGA dataset. Our findings show that embeddings of original and transformed images are closer to each other than to random embeddings, indicating robustness to transformations. However, they are not fully invariant, revealing that the encoder networks do not completely neutralize transformation effects in latent space, explaining why transformation-mediated augmentation of datasets can improve performance. Significant differences were observed between general and histopathology-specific encoder networks.

Realistic integration of user-specified textures into scene images is a fundamental task in computer graphics and image editing. While existing material transfer and reference-guided inpainting methods can edit surface appearances, they often fail to address the specific requirements of texture tiling. This task necessitates precisely repeating a reference pattern according to user-defined parameters such as frequency, orientation, and scale. Furthermore, current generative approaches often struggle to maintain the structural fidelity of the reference texture, limited by either destructive pixel-level resampling or the lack of fine-grained spatial information in semantic image encoders, and they frequently fail to preserve the coherent lighting and geometry of the original scene. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for controllable and high-fidelity texture tiling based on Diffusion Transformers. Our approach introduces two key technical innovations to decouple spatial manipulation from content generation. First, we propose a Coordinate-Transformed Rotary Embedding mechanism. By applying 2D affine transformations directly to the relative positional embeddings between the target latent and the image condition, we achieve precise control over tiling patterns without explicit pixel warping, thereby utilizing the full information of the reference condition without degradation. Second, a Disjoint Attention Mask is employed to shield reference features from semantic leakage. This preserves structural integrity while seamlessly blending the synthesized texture with the scene's original lighting and geometry. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both control accuracy and texture fidelity.

Multimodal time series forecasting, which pairs numerical sequences with domain-relevant textual reports, promises to inject world knowledge into forecasting pipelines. However, we uncover a critical failure mode in existing frameworks that we term text collapse: the text branch converges to a content-independent transformation, contributing negligible discriminative signal regardless of the input description. We argue that text collapse is a consequence of a fundamental asymmetry in time series forecasting: the numerical input is strongly autocorrelated with the output, making the numerical backbone inherently dominant, while the text branch, despite carrying complementary and often critical information, is insufficiently utilized, leading to its systematic underexploitation. To address this, we propose \textbf{REST-TS} (\textbf{R}esidual-\textbf{E}xclusive \textbf{S}upervision for \textbf{T}ext in \textbf{T}ime \textbf{S}eries), which turns the asymmetry into a design principle: the numerical backbone produces its own independent numerical forecast, and the text branch is exclusively supervised to predict the structured components of the residual, the prediction gap that numbers cannot explain. Because no numerical pathway can reduce these losses, the text branch must extract genuine content from the input description. Evaluated across diverse real-world domains and backbone architectures, REST-TS achieves state-of-the-art performance and consistently demonstrates greater text-branch utilization than existing frameworks, providing strong empirical evidence that supervising the text branch on the residual compels it to extract genuine content from the input.

Recent advances in time series anomaly detection (TSAD) have highlighted the effectiveness of self-supervised classification-based approaches. These methods apply transformations to normal training samples, training a classifier to recognize transformation-specific patterns that help identify anomalies through increased classification errors. Despite their strong performance, a significant challenge is their lack of explainability, as they provide limited insight into the characteristics of flagged anomalies. To address this limitation, we propose ProtoX-AD, a prototype-based self-explainable framework for self-supervised TSAD. ProtoX-AD learns transformation-aware latent representations alongside interpretable prototypes, enabling both accurate anomaly detection and the identification of distinct anomalous profiles through prototype-based explanations. Additionally, it allows for systematic analysis of how transformation design impacts detection performance and explainability. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that ProtoX-AD achieves detection performance comparable to its black-box counterparts while offering more consistent and semantically meaningful explanations than existing explainable baselines. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Aitorzan3/ProtoX-AD.

Neural operators approximate mappings between function spaces, but often generalize poorly to other operators and usually require fine-tuning or retraining. In-Context Operator Networks (ICON) addresses this issue by prompting the model with numerical context so that the model learns specific operators from prompts and adapt to different operators without fine-tuning. However, ICON may still fail to generalize to out-of-distribution (OOD) operator tasks. Inpired by the success of harness engineering of Large Language models (LLMs), we introduce Chain of Operators (CHOP), a framework that harness a frozen ICON to OOD operator tasks without updating its parameters. Specifically, CHOP constructs a chain of operators consisting of explicit elementary transformations and the frozen ICON. Experiments on a scalar conservation law and a mean-field control problem show that CHOP reduces relative inference error over direct ICON evaluation, while each operator in the chain remains interpretable and in closed form. A chain constructed on one PDE family further generalizes to a different family, indicating shared mechanisms across harness systems.

The automatic synthesis of a program from any form of specification is regarded as a holy grail of computer science. Fueled by LLMs, NL2Code has achieved tremendous success, yet the fundamentally more challenging task of synthesizing programs from input-output behavior, which we refer to as IO2Code, remains largely unsolved. Whereas NL2Code can exploit the semantic alignment between natural language and code acquired during pretraining, IO2Code requires recovering underlying principles from concrete computational behavior, navigating a vast and underspecified hypothesis space. To address this, we propose DIO-Agent, a discovery agent for IO2Code. Our method frames IO2Code as an evolutionary search over discrete program space, in which an LLM serves as the mutation operator and concrete error signals from execution guide each mutation. To prevent the search from wandering into structurally complex yet incorrect dead ends, we introduce the Transformation Priority Premise as a mutation prior that biases the LLM toward the simplest hypothesis consistent with current evidence, progressively escalating from constants to conditionals to iteration only when simpler constructs are insufficient. To facilitate systematic study, we further construct an IO2CodeBench spanning multiple difficulty levels. Extensive experiments show that DIO-Agent consistently outperforms both traditional program-by-example method and SOTA evolution-agent baselines across all difficulty levels and various LLMs, while substantially surpassing test-time scaling strategies with equivalent sampling budgets.

Single-model ensembles (SMEs) have attracted attention as a way to approximate some of the benefits of deep ensembles within a single network. However, under an approximately matched parameter budget, it remains unclear whether model capacity should be concentrated in a single wide pathway or redistributed into many narrow and independent members. We investigate this question through the Multi-Narrow (MN) transformation, which converts a baseline CNN into an SME of narrow, path-wise independent branches while approximately preserving the dominant parameter budget. We systematically compare Single-Wide and Multi-Narrow configurations across different training-data regimes, architectures, and datasets. The results show that the effectiveness of MN is strongly data-dependent: weakly partitioned or baseline-wide models are preferable in data-rich settings, whereas highly partitioned MN models consistently outperform the baseline in low-data settings. This tendency is reproduced across multiple CNN architectures and image-classification datasets, suggesting that it is not specific to a single benchmark or model family. Analysis of internal representations shows that high-MN models learn more diverse and less redundant path-wise features. In low-data regimes, this diversity is broadly utilized and improves generalization, whereas in data-rich regimes, training becomes imbalanced and prediction is dominated by a small subset of paths. These findings clarify when and why Multi-Narrow transformation is effective, and provide practical guidance for allocating model capacity between width and member multiplicity under a limited budget.