ML Reads

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ML papers to read today.

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5 papers

#01Oct 22, 2026

cs.CV

UniVOE: A Removal-Driven Framework for Interaction-Aware Universal Video Object Editing

Shuzhou Yang, Lanqing Guo, Lingen Li and 4 more

Video object removal and injection are reciprocal editing operations between object-present and object-absent video states, yet they differ substantially in training difficulty. Removal can be effectively bootstrapped from video inpainting and further adapted to erase object-related interaction effects. Injection, however, requires large-scale paired supervision to model object appearance, dynamics, and scene-dependent effects, while perfectly aligned real-world pairs are difficult to collect and synthetic data lacks sufficient realism and diversity. To address this challenge, we present UniVOE, a removal-driven framework for training both video object removal and injection models. We first train an effect-aware remover by transferring video inpainting priors and finetuning on object-present/object-absent pairs. The trained remover converts real object-present videos into object-absent counterparts, creating large-scale paired supervision for injection. An injection model is trained on these pairs in the reverse direction to recover objects together with their dynamics and interaction effects. Moreover, since pixel-level reconstruction alone cannot adequately capture perceptual realism, we introduce a reward-based post-training method that aligns injection results with human preferences using a proprietary reward model. Experiments against strong open-source and commercial systems demonstrate that UniVOE achieves state-of-the-art performance on both object removal and injection, particularly in challenging interaction-effect cases.

#02Oct 22, 2026

cs.CV

Sensorimotor Alignment: A Platonic Proxy for Embodied Policy Success

Yunfei Xie, Howard H. Qian, Shiyi Lan and 2 more

Robotic foundation models are typically evaluated through costly closed-loop rollouts, which motivates cheap offline proxies for model capability. The Platonic Representation Hypothesis (PRH) suggests that as representations improve, different modalities such as vision and language converge toward a shared statistical model of reality. We ask whether motion trajectories form another such modality: as embodied models become more capable, should their sensory representations converge toward the structure of physical motion? To examine this, we propose Sensorimotor Alignment ($S^2$), a training-free offline metric that measures how well a model's sensory representation aligns with the geometry of physical motion. We find that $S^2$ correlates positively with downstream robot task success across embodied model families, making it a low-cost offline proxy for prioritizing models before closed-loop evaluation. $S^2$ can also identify promising vision-language model (VLM) backbones even before costly fine-tuning into vision-language-action models (VLAs). Beyond this correlation, $S^2$ offers representation-level explanations for phenomena observed in VLAs and world action models (WAMs). With $S^2$, we extend PRH to embodied models and make sensorimotor alignment empirically measurable, offering insight into why an embodied model succeeds beyond its closed-loop success rate.

#03Oct 22, 2026

cs.AI

EpiSEM-Bench: Evaluating Safety and Evidence Recovery in LLM Agents under Missing Evidence

Qijin Zhang, Hanzhen Wang, Yuehan Zhao and 4 more

Tool-using language model agents rely on environmental facts to decide whether an action is permitted. When a tool response omits a safety-relevant fact, an agent may carry out a prohibited action even though the user request is benign and every returned statement is true. We introduce \bench{}, an executable benchmark for evaluating unsafe execution, safety boundaries, and evidence recovery in LLM agents under missing evidence. It contains 300 matched unsafe/safe task pairs across six domains. By systematically suppressing critical facts, the benchmark measures unsafe execution under critical evidence omission and determines the minimum observed failure cardinality, including failures with full evidence and cases with no observed failure after exhaustive testing. An independent audit tool tests whether agents seek missing facts and then withhold prohibited actions while completing permissible tasks. The benchmark reveals substantial variation across the ten models in omission robustness, evidence acquisition, and appropriate action. Resistance to missing evidence does not necessarily translate into useful recovery. Recovery access reduces unsafe execution for all ten models, but agents differ in whether they actively obtain the missing facts and use them to act appropriately in both worlds.

#04Oct 22, 2026

cs.CL

Low-Bit N-Gram Embeddings for Language Models

Stephen Chung, Wenyu Du

Many recent open-weight language models use n-gram embedding tables to improve performance. These tables store learned representations of short token sequences, such as pairs or triples of consecutive tokens, which the model retrieves during processing. However, they can require substantial memory: DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, for example, allocates 196 billion parameters to its Engram n-gram memory. We therefore investigate whether this memory cost can be reduced while preserving the performance improvement that the tables provide. We propose storing n-gram embeddings at low precision and systematically investigate different quantization methods and bit allocations across tables. Across nanochat-, Llama-, and GPT-2-family models trained from scratch, four-bit tables save approximately 75% of table memory while preserving more than 99% of the validation-loss improvement from adding the tables. Using fewer bits leads to a larger drop in performance, although we find that a short fine-tuning phase recovers a significant part of this loss. In addition, reinvesting the saved memory in larger tables can improve performance beyond that of the original full-precision tables while still using less memory. These table memory savings also extend to large existing models: on DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash and Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, low-bit tables save 47-55% of table memory, with perplexity increases of less than 1.2% and largely preserved downstream task performance. These findings establish low-bit precision as a practical way to reduce the memory requirements of n-gram embeddings and use the saved capacity to improve model performance.

#05Oct 22, 2026

cs.CV

BrickWright: Agentic Creation of Physically Feasible Brick Builds

Ava Pun, Kevin Dai, Sally Chen and 7 more

Frontier coding agents are becoming increasingly adept at 3D modeling. Yet, they still face challenges when building objects meant to be assembled in the physical world, often creating invalid assemblies with floating, colliding, or disconnected parts. We argue that providing agents with tools for assembling builds and verifying their physical feasibility is sufficient for them to produce physically valid assemblies that still adhere to input prompts. Focusing on the domain of LEGO brick builds, we present BrickWright, a framework for generating physically feasible brick builds from text or image prompts using pre-trained agents, where a build is physically feasible if it uses only real parts, has no colliding or floating parts, and forms a connected structure if possible. BrickWright guides agents to create builds by writing code with BrickLayer, a Python toolkit with two main components: an ergonomic brick assembly API that halves inference cost compared to working in raw LDraw, and a validator that provides feedback on physical feasibility. Whereas baseline agents achieve physical validity rates ranging from only 9% (GPT-6 Luna) to 69% (GPT-6 Astra), BrickWright-guided agents achieve 100% validity on a sample of 512 prompts, while improving prompt adherence for lightweight agents and maintaining it for stronger agents. Additionally, they outperform specialized models on the text-to-brick task. Code is available on our project page: https://avalovelace1.github.io/brickwright/