#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.RO
BURGER: Benchmarking and Understanding Robotic Generalization via Embodied Drawing
Xiangyu Xu, Bangshuai Peng, Ziyi Liu and 5 more
How effectively can vision-language-action (VLA) models learn diverse language-conditioned behaviors as training data scales? Investigating this question requires large and varied robot datasets, whose collection on physical robots remains costly. We introduce BURGER, a language-conditioned robotic drawing benchmark with a scalable, prompt-driven pipeline for generating continuous drawing trajectories, both in simulation and the real world. In BURGER, an agent starts from the same blank canvas and controls a robot arm to draw the object or spatial composition specified by language, while each instruction allows an open-ended variety of valid drawings and stroke orders. Using 28,200 simulated demonstrations spanning 282 drawing tasks, we evaluate five representative VLA models across data scales, language grounding, and multimodal behavior. BURGER supports fine-grained analysis of language grounding, spatial composition, and action generation, revealing distinct failure patterns across VLA models. Our experiments suggest that some VLA models can benefit from greater task diversity and demonstration scale, capture multimodal drawing behaviors, and generalize to unseen compositions of familiar objects. Finally, we deploy a trained policy on a Franka Panda arm, demonstrating the ability to draw reactively under human intervention. Project homepage and code can be found at https://siyingzhao.github.io/BURGER/.
#03Oct 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.
#04Oct 29, 2026
cs.LG
Propose-Filter-Release: Scaling Noise to Typical Sensitivity via Private Filtering
Moshe Shenfeld, Eliad Tsfadia, Katrina Ligett
An estimator can be accurate and stable on typical data, yet sensitive to a few possible records. Differentially private mechanisms commonly scale their noise to the worst-case influence of a single record, which lets these records dictate the noise even when the remaining data would allow far less. Removing them first would restore the smaller scale, but the removal must itself be private. We introduce \emph{propose-filter-release} (PFR), which, by privately filtering its input, turns a mechanism that protects the addition or removal of a typical record, one that fits the remaining data, into one that is differentially private in the standard sense, on every input. Using our novel filtering step, PFR requires only a concave friendliness score, which measures how well a record fits a dataset, and a release mechanism that is friendly-DP, that is, private when the changed record fits the remaining data. For every such score and release mechanism, it guarantees differential privacy under public conditions on the number of records, so it is a general privacy primitive, comparable to propose-test-release, and FriendlyCore can be viewed as one of its implementations. We illustrate the generality of PFR by instantiating it for scalar statistics, principal subspace estimation, the KL divergence of user histograms, the effective resistances of a graph, and treatment-rule selection.
#05Oct 29, 2026
cs.AI
Comparing Human Role-Players and LLM-Simulated Clients in Online Counselling Training: An Analysis of Counselling Patterns
Eric Rudolph, Philipp Steigerwald, Jens Albrecht
This study investigates the capabilities of Large Language Models to simulate counselling clients in educational role-plays in comparison to human role-players. Initially, we recorded role-playing sessions, where novice counsellors interacted with human peers acting as clients, followed by role-plays between humans and clients simulated by Mistrals Mixtral 8x7b using 4-bit quantization. These interactions were analysed with a counselling communication pattern system at sentence level. We investigated two key questions: (1) to what extent LLM-generated responses replicate authentic conversational dynamics and (2) whether counsellors' communication behaviour differs when interacting with human versus LLM-simulated clients. The findings highlight both similarities and differences in the application of counselling patterns across scenarios, showing the potential of LLM-based role-playing exercises to enhance counselling competencies and to identify areas for further refinement in virtual client simulations.