#01Oct 30, 2026
cs.LG
Towards Understanding the Impact of Plasticity Loss on Reinforcement Learning in Stochastic Environments
Philipp Bordne, André Biedenkapp
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful framework for sequential decision-making. Despite many high-profile successes in recent years, deep RL is known to be brittle. An emerging line of research attributes this brittleness to a loss of plasticity in neural networks. However, plasticity loss has so far been understudied in stochastic environments. We study this interplay systematically, training SAC agents on three DeepMind Control tasks augmented with controlled levels of observation and action noise. We find that plasticity-preserving methods increase learning robustness on the two harder tasks, with their advantage growing as observation noise increases, while combining resets with layer normalization underperforms resets alone at every observation noise level tested. Further, stochasticity can accelerate the loss of plasticity in harder environments, whereas in easier settings noise can act as a regularizer that sustains plasticity. Lastly, plasticity loss is most pronounced in the early stages of training. In the most challenging stochastic settings, TD instability rather than gradual plasticity loss becomes the dominant failure mode.
#02Oct 30, 2026
cs.LG
GhostPrefix: Synchronization-Free Universal Prefix Attacks for ASR Manipulation
Shengding Liu, Ashwin Innuganti, Qiben Yan
We present GhostPrefix, the first synchronization-free universal adversarial prefix attack against automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. Unlike prior audio attacks, which are typically crafted per utterance, require synchronization with the victim waveform, or target narrow objectives, GhostPrefix learns a short, reusable audio segment prepended to arbitrary live speech to exert real-time control over ASR outputs without knowledge of the future utterance or temporal alignment. A key challenge is maintaining stable adversarial effects across unknown, evolving speech contexts. GhostPrefix combines token-level losses with a novel representation-level objective for stable, input-agnostic effects. GhostPrefix supports three attack modes: (i) prompted prefix attacks for semantic steering, (ii) targeted prefix attacks for transcript hijacking, and (iii) untargeted prefix attacks for transcription degradation. To remain perceptually inconspicuous, we regularize prefixes toward benign environmental-sound distributions and improve robustness against over-the-air distortions. We evaluate GhostPrefix across 13 open-source ASR models from four families. In digital settings, it achieves average attack success rates of 97.6% for prompted steering and 93.4% for targeted hijacking, while driving word error rate to 1.18 under untargeted attacks. Over the air, it achieves success rates of 91.5% and 89.5% for prompted and targeted modes, respectively. These manipulations propagate into downstream AI-assisted pipelines, including voice assistants and AI note-taking tools, causing systematic semantic misinterpretations. GhostPrefix exposes synchronization-free universal prefixes as a practical, under-explored threat to real-world ASR and downstream applications. Artifacts and demos are available at https://ghostprefix.github.io/.
#03Oct 30, 2026
cs.AI
CausalWAM: Learning the Causes of Actions in World Action Models
Juntao Cheng, Jinzhou Tang, Fan Feng and 2 more
World action models (WAMs) learn latent variables from observations and use these to both predict the evolution of the scene and to generate actions. The prediction has to be of the whole scene, whereas only a portion of the scene causes actions. WAMs fitted to demonstrations do not, in general, guarantee that they will generate actions solely from the latent causes of the demonstrated actions (the action-relevant latent variables), as the model could just as well learn to imitate in this way whilst entangling the action-relevant latent variables with the nuisance variables. We therefore separate out what causes action from what prediction depends on. We prove that under a sparsity constraint the latent variables used to generate actions are an invertible function of the action-relevant latent variables alone and the true structure is identified up to a permutation of the latent variables. This requires neither sufficient temporal dependence nor any assumptions on how the unobserved regimes evolve and holds even when the action-relevant latent variables are statistically dependent on the rest. We therefore propose CWAM (Causal WAM), which incorporates the constraint into a pretrained WAM by adding a sparse routing path to its action head, with the world modeling objective remaining unchanged. Experiments on both synthetic data and real-world robots validate the theory as well as showcase the improved efficiency in closed-loop success.
#04Oct 30, 2026
cs.LG
There Is No Free Loop: When Does Looping a Trained Model Pay for Its Inference Compute?
Rhea Sanjay Sukthanker, Pashmina Cameron
Looping re-applies a block of layers so that each token passes through the block more than once. Adding a loop to a trained model is attractive because it leaves the parameter count, and hence the disk size, the memory footprint and the training cost unchanged. Unfortunately, every generated token pays for the loop. Re-applying m of N layers makes each token about (N+m)/N times as expensive. Loops that a model learns during large-scale pretraining justify this price, but whether loops added after pretraining justify this cost remains unclear. We compare a looped model with two simple baselines. We first compare it with the same model trained identically without the loop (equal parameters). Secondly, we compare it with the best unlooped use of the same inference floating-point operations (equal FLOPs). Across Qwen3 and Qwen3.5 models from 0.8B to 9B parameters, only the looped 0.8B model beats both baselines. At 4B and 9B, the looped model does not beat the first baseline, i.e. the same model trained without the loop. This is not because the benchmarks are too easy, since on the same benchmarks the unlooped 9B model still scores up to 13 points higher than the 4B model, showing that there is ample room for improvement. Introducing loops in an already pretrained model therefore only pays for small models with a fixed parameter budget.
#05Oct 30, 2026
eess.SY
A Neural Network Approach towards Real-Time Knot Point Density Estimates for the Nonlinear Quadrotor
Jasmine Ratchford, Raffaele Romagnoli, Mark H. Klein
Spline representations provide a compact way to approximate continuous trajectories using a finite number of parameters. When approximating trajectories generated by dynamical systems, the efficiency of a spline representation depends strongly on the placement of knot points. Uniform knot distributions often lead to inefficient representations, requiring either unnecessary control points or producing poor approximations in regions where the trajectory varies rapidly. In this work we propose a learning-based method for adaptive knot placement in B-spline approximations of trajectories generated by ordinary differential equations. A neural network learns a mapping from the initial condition of the system to quantities that characterize the local variation of the resulting trajectory. These estimates are used to construct nonuniform knot distributions that approximately equidistribute a local error indicator, reducing the number of control points needed to meet a prescribed accuracy.