#01Nov 2, 2026
quant-ph
Spacetime Emergence in the Memory of a Learning Agent
Philip A. LeMaitre, T. Rick Perche
We show that the causal structure of spacetime can emerge within the memory of a learning agent performing a quantum information task. We train a model-based reinforcement-learning agent to maximize the quantum mutual information between localized quantum probes interacting with a quantum field in Minkowski spacetime, without directly providing it with information regarding the spacetime metric or causal structure. In learning to accomplish this task, the reinforcement-learning agent constructs an internal predictive model whose planner develops the characteristic null structure of spacetime, allowing us to reconstruct the causal structure of the Minkowski metric with high accuracy. Within this task, spacetime geometry is obtained from an agent's successful predictions and actions, providing a first step toward showing that spacetime concepts emerge from operational quantum experience.
#02Nov 2, 2026
cs.LG
Benchmark Prediction with Sparse and Unpaired Cached Responses
Hayden Helm, Avijit Ghosh, Ben Johnson and 1 more
Evaluating a generative model on all queries from all available benchmark tasks is prohibitively expensive. As such, models are often evaluated on different subsets of tasks and/or different subsets of queries from a given task. The resulting collection of responses and the corresponding (model, task) score matrix are sparse and unpaired. In this paper, we introduce the Product Kernel Perspective Space (PKPS), a collection of low-dimensional representations of models based on their embedded responses. PKPS generalizes existing methods for representing black-box generative models by comparing responses to similar -- rather than just identical -- queries and is therefore able to utilize sparse and unpaired information. Theoretically, we show that benchmark prediction using PKPS is query-efficient relative to methods that only use information from dense and paired portions of the evaluation data. Empirically, we show that PKPS-based methods outperform baselines on benchmark prediction across two large benchmark suites.
#03Nov 2, 2026
cs.RO
PanoTac: A Dense Three-Axis Tactile Sensor for Robust Touch-Centric Manipulation
Binglin, Wang, Xiaole and 7 more
Contact-rich manipulation benefits from tactile feedback that captures both detailed contact geometry and interaction forces. When scooping grains, contact patterns help infer spoon orientation, while resistance transmitted through the grasp guides motion. To provide these complementary sensing capabilities, we present PanoTac, a low-cost, compliant tactile fingertip designed for dense three-axis tactile sensing. Each fingertip provides a $12 \times 32 \times 3$ tactile representation, with one normal ($z$) and two shear ($x$, $y$) response components at each taxel. The sensor operates at 60 Hz and costs less than $50 per fingertip. Sensor characterization quantifies response repeatability and consistency across sensor instances and contact locations. We integrate PanoTac into a robotic system with a visuo-tactile pipeline. Across test-tube preparation, grain scooping, and salt pouring, the resulting policies outperform vision-only baselines by an average of 46.7 percentage points. Ablations show that removing either spatial contact information or shear feedback reduces overall performance across the task suite. Our project page is available at https://panotac.github.io.
#04Nov 2, 2026
cs.LG
Library of Layers (LoL): Adaptively Ordering Transformer Layers at Runtime
Abdellah Rahmani, Sean McLeish, Ang Li and 3 more
Computer programmers chain together the same reusable computational primitives, for example, conditional statements or loops, but in different orders to implement different algorithms. In contrast, existing language model architectures always execute their layers in the same order. We introduce Library of Layers (LoL), an architecture that dynamically orders its layers during inference to solve the problem at hand. LoL has a single hyperparameter, the size of its global library of transformer blocks, that allows it to transition seamlessly between parameter reuse and sparsity, generalizing the parameter-efficiency and FLOPs-efficiency tradeoffs of dense, depth-recurrent, and mixture of experts architectures in one unified family. We show that LoL achieves competitive performance with all three above baselines when pretrained on text data. On synthetic sudoku and maze data, we observe that the model employs distinct layer orderings to implement different solution strategies, and we can intervene on routing to force a model to apply a specific solution strategy to a problem instance. In a multilingual natural language setting, we find that LoL chooses different layer order patterns based on language and script. Similarly, we train LoL on safety data and fit probes to its router outputs, finding that these probes distinguish safe from unsafe text with high AUROC. LoL provides a path toward a future in which models dynamically compose their own computational graph, enabling more efficient and controllable reasoning.
#05Nov 2, 2026
cs.LG
Pretraining Data Scale Reverses the Muon-AdamW Fine-Tuning Gap
Catherine Li, Jingchu Gai, Andrej Risteski and 2 more
Muon has recently emerged as a promising optimizer for pretraining large language models, offering a speedup over AdamW in minimizing pretraining loss. However, it remains unclear whether Muon's advantage persists after fine-tuning. In this paper, we study the downstream behavior of Muon and AdamW and uncover a surprising trend: beyond a sufficiently large pretraining data budget, AdamW outperforms Muon after fine-tuning. Moreover, as model size increases, AdamW overtakes Muon at progressively smaller pretraining token-parameter ratios. To explain this reversal, we view fine-tuning as a perturbation of the outputs and introduce the margin-to-spread ratio, which measures how far the correct logit lies above the wrong ones relative to how widely the wrong logits are spread. In language models, Muon has the larger margin-to-spread ratio at small data budgets and AdamW at large ones, mirroring the fine-tuning trend. In a linear associative memory, we prove that after one update the margin-to-spread ratio of gradient descent gains on that of Muon as the data budget grows, and simulations show that this trend persists after extended training.