ML Reads

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ML papers to read today.

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5 papers

#01Oct 23, 2026

cs.CV

SceneBloom: Agentic Indoor Environment Generation with Realistic and Diverse Layouts for Embodied Learning

Yuhan Liu, Lianhui Qin, Shenji Wan

Training generalizable embodied agents requires realistic, varied, and simulation-ready indoor environments. Language-guided methods support semantic planning and object-level reasoning, but precise spatial grounding remains difficult. Visual generative models offer rich priors over plausible arrangements, yet their outputs require geometric reasoning to become physically valid 3D scenes. We introduce SceneBloom, an agentic framework that combines visual layout sampling with contract-guided 3D compilation. A hierarchical sampler uses diffusion priors to generate furniture arrangements within functional zones. A compiler then uses relations extracted from each proposal to guide geometric fitting and local pose correction. Across five room types, SceneBloom attains the highest visual quality and physical stability among the compared methods and is the only method with no detected mesh collisions and out-of-bounds objects. Its layouts are also closer to the distribution of real rooms than those of all compared baselines. Object navigation policies trained in these realistic scenes achieve a higher success rate in held-out real scans than those trained on an equal number of real training scans. Code is available at https://github.com/Tinaliu0123/scenebloom.

#02Oct 23, 2026

econ.TH

Monetizing Intelligence: Advertising and Subscription Design on LLM Platforms

Yuhang Ji, Fasheng Xu, Tianjun Feng

Large language model (LLM) platforms introducing advertising must decide how much capability ad revenue should fund and what consumers should pay to avoid ads. We study a monopolistic platform that jointly chooses costly response quality, advertising intensity, and subscription prices when advertising reduces user value but better service raises advertising returns. Three findings follow. First, when partly ad-supported and ad-free plans coexist, advertising can finance useful service for consumers who receive none under pure subscription. Lower effective quality in middle plans weakens the alternatives available to premium users, allowing higher prices for unchanged ad-free service. Some fully ad-supported users gain utility, while partly ad-supported and ad-free users lose: broader access can coexist with utility polarization. Second, an intermediate advertising cap can maximize consumer surplus by preserving some revenue that finances service while limiting degradation. Third, cheaper compute can raise quality and reduce ad intensity, yet sufficiently large cost reductions can increase aggregate advertising revenue above its initial level because better service raises the value of the remaining advertised interactions. An extension shows how advertising-funded upgrades can bring plans to the same maximum capability and advertising exposure, eliminating the basis for different prices. These results make menu design central to evaluating LLM advertising: the consequences extend beyond users who see ads to the alternatives and prices faced by those who do not.

#03Oct 23, 2026

cs.LG

PoKER: A Probability of Kill Estimation Rate Model for Air-to-Air Missiles Using Machine Learning on Stochastic Targets

Joao P. A. Dantas, Andre N. Costa, Diego Geraldo and 2 more

This work introduces PoKER, a novel probabilistic model engineered to optimize missile launch effectiveness in air-to-air scenarios, specifically within Beyond Visual Range (BVR) air combat. Unlike conventional Weapon Engagement Zone (WEZ) models that delineate zones based on static distances such as maximum, minimum, and no-escape ranges, PoKER applies machine learning to predict kill probabilities more accurately by integrating the stochastic behaviors of targets and missile miss distances. This model dynamically evaluates target behavior, greatly expanding the predictive capabilities of engagement analysis. By factoring in elements such as warhead lethality, target and shooter orientations, and the specific conditions of engagement, PoKER provides important insights into engagement dynamics and quantifies success probabilities. Consequently, it can potentially be an important tool for BVR air combat pilots, improving operational decision-making within this specialized combat domain.

#04Oct 23, 2026

cs.LG

Multiplicative vs. Additive State Coupling in Learned Optimizer Schedules

M. Harper Langston, Pierre-David Letourneau, Dalton Jones and 7 more

We learn schedules for a continuous penalty relaxation of MAX-CUT by backpropagating through an unrolled classical solver. A state-blind schedule generalizes to instances substantially larger than those used for training. A state-adaptive bilinear schedule also generalizes out of distribution, outperforming its untrained baseline across 15 seeds ($t=4.1$). By contrast, an additive ablation with identical inputs and output heads is statistically indistinguishable from the bilinear model in distribution but performs worse than its own baseline out of distribution ($t=-11.7$). This separation appears without regularization and persists across a $30$ round weight-decay sweep: the bilinear advantage remains significant at every tested value, whereas the additive model never recovers. The results in this setting isolate how solver state enters the schedule, rather than state adaptivity alone, as the architectural distinction associated with out-of-distribution transfer.

#05Oct 23, 2026

cs.LG

Interpretable sparse fine-tuning with TopKLoRA enables faithful circuit discovery

Marek Masiak, Andrzej Szablewski, Nicola Cancedda and 1 more

Fine-tuning on datasets of unknown origin can create a backdoor in the trained model when the data includes poisoned examples. Difficult to localise and remove, backdoors can persist through safety training. While parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods capture the full parameter changes introduced during training, they are not easily interpretable. We present the full method of TopKLoRA, extending the preliminary proposal of Masiak et al. (2025), an interpretable-by-design LoRA variant in which only the $k$ largest adapter latents are active at each token. Unlike SAEs, TopKLoRA is trained purely on downstream loss, where optimisation pressure incentivises learning functionally causal latents. We demonstrate this sparse LoRA adapter in a sleeper-agent backdoor case study where we create model organisms by fine-tuning gemma-2-2b, Qwen2.5-1.5B, and Qwen2.5-7B on a poisoned instruction-following dataset. For each organism, we identify and ablate a circuit that is both necessary and sufficient to implement the backdoor. Furthermore, our new fine-tuning method produces sparse circuits that are up to an order of magnitude smaller than a dense LoRA baseline, allowing surgical ablation of the malicious capability without sacrificing instruction-following performance. Finally, we propose a technique to construct model organisms with localised circuits using TopKLoRA latents and gradient-routing, which we use to validate the findings of our circuit search algorithm. We consider these findings as a step toward interpretable-by-design architectures that provide faithful units of analysis without compromising model performance. We share our code: https://github.com/interpretable-finetuning/TopKLoRA.