#01Oct 29, 2026
cs.AI
FARMS: A Verifiable Foundation for Automated Computational Science
Di Wu, Ling Liang, Haizhao Yang
Automated computational science could accelerate discovery by selecting, adapting and developing numerical methods. This prospect requires mathematical knowledge that AI systems can interpret and reuse with explicit guarantees. Here we present FARMS, a faithful and efficient foundation that transforms computational mathematics into AI-ready computing knowledge. FARMS connects formal statements to source context, algorithmic meaning and quantitative guarantees through source preparation, reusable representations and semantic review. Across 171 targets in randomized numerical linear algebra and numerical partial differential equations, 157 were accepted by the pipeline, with mean estimated costs of US \$0.85-2.29 per target across sources. Lean-checked implications from explicit source premises connect selected statements to computational skills, illustrated by a heat-flow solve and wave-response compression. FARMS therefore supports an affordable, reusable knowledge foundation for trustworthy automated computational science.
#02Oct 29, 2026
cs.LG
An ODE-based Sampler for Discrete Diffusion Models
Samson Gourevitch, Yazid Janati, Eric Moulines and 3 more
The marginals of a continuous diffusion model can be reproduced by a deterministic ordinary differential equation (ODE), known as the probability flow ODE, which provides a foundation for accelerated sampling and consistency distillation. In this paper we address the question whether an analogous formulation exists for discrete diffusion models and answer it affirmatively by introducing exponential residual flows (ERFs). Our framework augments the discrete state with a continuous residual variable for each token and position. These residuals evolve deterministically according to piecewise-defined ODEs whose vector fields depend on the current discrete state and the forward and backward rate matrices of the prescribed diffusion model. The discrete state changes whenever a residual reaches zero. We prove that this construction preserves the marginals of the original diffusion. We derive a practical discretization of our sampler and specialize it to masked and uniform diffusion. The deterministic trajectories of ERFs support consistency distillation and yield empirical improvements over previous approaches across a variety of benchmarks including code and text generation tasks.
#03Oct 29, 2026
cs.RO
Gym-Anything for Robotics: Scaling physical simulations with digital agents
Pranjal Aggarwal, Sean Welleck
Realistic, fast robotics simulations could enable large-scale training of embodied AI models that transfer to the real world. However, despite decades of progress, available simulations cover only a narrow range of real-world tasks and physical phenomena. The core bottleneck is that creating better simulations requires significant expert effort and therefore does not scale. To address this, we introduce Gym-Anything for Robotics, a framework in which coding agents create realistic robotics simulations. Our core insight is that simulation creation is a coding agent task, so improvements in coding agents translate directly into richer and more faithful simulations. We select simulations based on U.S. GDP data to cover economically valuable physical work, define what makes a good simulation and a good task, and develop an adversarial creation-audit loop that checks each simulation and task against these definitions. Using this pipeline, we build RoboWorld, a set of 25 simulations with 25 test and 175 training RL environments of varying difficulty. Even the best frontier models fail on every RoboWorld test task, achieving an average reward of only 0.06. Building on RoboWorld, we introduce several new ways for frontier models to improve, including in-context learning across repeated attempts, a privileged teacher that reads the simulator state and teaches a student in context, self-assisted learning from the model's own privileged experience, and code policies that generate demonstrations across varied scenes to train vision-language-action models (VLAs) such as $π_{0.5}$. Each of these substantially improves performance. We release our pipeline, RL environments, and benchmark to facilitate future research. Code and data are available at https://gym-anything.github.io/robotics
#04Oct 29, 2026
cs.CL
When to Assist and What to Suggest: Joint Gating and Memory-Grounded Hint Generation in One Compact Decoder
A. J. A. Jubayer Talukder, Mohammad Ariful Haque
Proactive assistants offer short, memory-grounded hints during a conversation, deciding when to assist and what to suggest. Current systems split this between a gate and a larger generator; we evaluate both together on 28,058 decision points. Stage-wise generation scores are oracle-gate ceilings: behind a real gate, end-to-end exact match is 0.2619 against a ceiling of 0.2971, and end-to-end precision is 0.2387, leaving substantial headroom. A gate pays off through precision and compute, whose saving falls from 4.39x with an 8B generator to 1.38x with a 1B one. The memory profile drives hint quality: removing it costs 24.7 exact-match points (rescaled BERTScore 0.57 to 0.35), while retrieval and a larger generator add nothing on exact match. One 1B decoder can do both, gating from an intermediate layer and generating in the same pass. At its final checkpoint it matches or exceeds the two-model pipelines on automatic end-to-end measures with 1.31-1.76x less wall-clock time than the matched 1B pipeline; across three seeds, its deeper exit ties the separate gate. A human evaluation (1,144 ratings over 32 dialogues) supports the memory effect and rates the single model level with the matched 1B pipeline and below the 8B one. Graded metrics and LlamaPIE's native judge track human ratings more closely than exact match, which we report as a strict lower bound.
#05Oct 29, 2026
eess.SY
Adaptive Scenario Generation for KL-DRO Around a Learned Density Model
Aron Brenner, Saurabh Amin
Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) hedges data-driven two-stage stochastic programs against error in the distribution estimated from a finite record, and standard ambiguity sets differ in how they treat realizations absent from that record. A divergence ball around the empirical distribution contains only reweightings of the record, whereas a transport ball also contains distributions supported off the record, including on realizations the data-generating process cannot produce, against which the decision is then hedged as well. We instead propose a Kullback-Leibler (KL) ball centered at a density model fitted to the record, the learned nominal, which lets the adversary up-weight costly unobserved realizations in proportion to the probability the model assigns them. Solving the resulting problem poses a second difficulty, because it can accommodate only a few scenarios, and an independent sample of that size is likely to omit the rare realizations on which the worst case concentrates. We therefore build the scenario set adaptively, alternating between solving the finite problem and drawing new realizations from the learned nominal, steered toward the worst case at the current decision, with importance weights that correct the draws back to the model. On a multi-item newsvendor problem and a capacity expansion problem on realistic grid data, centering the ball at the learned nominal rather than at the record lowers cost under distribution shift, at comparable in-distribution cost, when the record is scarce and the model class captures structure that lets it extrapolate beyond the record. The advantage fades as the record grows or as the shift departs from the structure the model has learned.