ML Reads

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ML papers to read today.

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5 papers

#01Jul 20, 2026

cs.CL

SWE-Pruner Pro: The Coder LLM Already Knows What to Prune

Yuhang Wang, Yuling Shi, Shaoqiu Zhang and 6 more

Pruning long context for coding agents has been a vital technology for efficient context management. While existing context pruning methods such as SWE-Pruner realize this by attaching a separate code classifier, we find the agent itself encodes internal representations indicating the relevance of code context when reading tool output. Based on this finding, we propose SWE-Pruner Pro, which prunes tool outputs directly inside the agent. Concretely, a small head turns the agent's own internal representations into a keep-or-prune label for each line, with a length-aware embedding keyed to each tool output's line count. Across two open-weight backbones and four multi-turn benchmarks, SWE-Pruner Pro saves up to 39% of prompt and completion tokens while preserving task quality, with bounded inference overhead. Notably, on MiMo-V2-Flash SWE-Pruner Pro additionally raises the SWE-Bench Verified resolve rate by +3.8% and the long-context Oolong accuracy by +2.2 points.

#02Jul 20, 2026

cs.CV

Certified Training for Convolutional Perturbations

Benedikt Brückner, Alessio Lomuscio

Vision models have been found to be susceptible to perturbations such as motion blur induced at runtime by a shaking camera. This impedes their deployment in critical applications since phenomena such as slightly blurred vision might lead to failures, for example an object detector missing objects. While methods such as data augmentation or Adversarial Training can improve empirical robustness, they lack formal safety guarantees, making it difficult to identify and mitigate hidden vulnerabilities. We introduce a novel Certified Training approach that leverages an efficient encoding of convolutional perturbations to train provably robust models. Our method significantly outperforms Adversarial Training, achieving, for example, over 80% robust accuracy against motion blur of reasonable intensity on CIFAR10 while maintaining comparable standard accuracy.

#03Jul 20, 2026

cs.CV

Plenoptic Condensation: A Novel Approach to Generalized Scene Reconstruction

Brevin Tilmon, Alex DeJournett, John Leffingwell and 1 more

We present a novel Generalized Scene Reconstruction (GSR) approach called Plenoptic Condensation (PCon). PCon uses a multi-stage reconstruction pipeline, initially converting images into "soupy" scene elements with low (representational) power, then adaptively condensing the "soup" into "structured" elements of higher power capable of efficiently representing, for example, sharp edges and smooth reflective surfaces. PCon scene models called Reality Models (Relms) enable spatially varying representational power, which is essential for high-fidelity rendering, measurement, and scene understanding. We showcase several in-the-wild PCon reconstructions captured with consumer phone cameras and drones. In one case called "Damaged Fiat", PCon is benchmarked against two state-of-the-art (SOTA) GSR methods: NeRO and RT-Splatting. Referring to Figure 1 below, PCon reconstructs the car hood more than twice as accurately as the SOTA methods. But more importantly, the local damage profile error for PCon is 35 um (0.035 mm), whereas the two other SOTA methods are essentially unable to measure the damage at all. Our project website is available at https://quidient.github.io/pcon-2026.html.

#04Jul 20, 2026

cs.AI

Logical Judgments Under Pressure: Diagnosing Syllogistic Stability with Learned Soft Prefixes

Brian K Chen

To test how correct logical judgments respond to learned context, we prepend a soft prefix to an exactly labeled syllogistic reasoning benchmark while keeping the model fixed. Soft prefixes are opaque continuous vectors, so we characterize them through the behavior they induce across controlled variations in logical form and interface. By studying which prefixes succeed and how their effects generalize, we characterize how learned contextual pressure can override correct judgments and expose limits in a model's logical stability. Across Qwen3.6-35B-A3B MoE, Qwen3-8B, and Gemma 4 31B, learned prefixes redirect many correct answers and remain effective across unseen forms and interface changes. In repeated tests with Qwen3.6 MoE and Gemma, they outperform paired random controls in all 16 model--direction--split comparisons by 37 to 99 percentage points. Qwen3.6 MoE flip rates remain between 72% and 90% across wording and prompt changes, while Gemma validity prefixes retain 54% to 56% flip compared with less than 1% for matched random prefixes. Diagnostic tests show that the dominant effect is a broad preference for one answer meaning rather than fixed-symbol forcing or a logical operation that transfers reliably between tasks. The form of this bias differs across models. In both Qwen models, simple score models often predict which judgments will flip but not how far their margins will move, whereas Gemma's overall response is more closely approximated by the same models. These results show that the dominant behavioral effect of successful soft prefixes is a broad answer preference, while the remaining response reveals substantial model-specific differences in logical stability.

#05Jul 20, 2026

cs.RO

Patch Policy: Efficient Embodied Control via Dense Visual Representations

Gaoyue Zhou, Zichen Jeff Cui, Ada Langford and 3 more

Pretrained dense visual features from Vision Transformers (ViTs) are powerful yet have been underutilized in robot learning. Modern robot policies either compress each observation into a single global token, or rely on visual backbones trained from scratch, sacrificing both fine-grained spatial detail and the benefits of large-scale visual pre-training. While there exist policies that do operate on dense patch features like large vision-language-action models (VLAs), they tend to be heavy and slow, inheriting the full cost of a billion-parameter vision-language model (VLM) backbone. We close this gap with Patch Policy, a minimal architectural extension that enables transformer-based policies to consume dense pre-trained patch tokens directly without the computational overhead of a full VLM. At its core is a block-causal attention mask that preserves the temporal causality of standard policies while letting the model attend over many patch tokens per observation, alongside other state information. Patch Policy is lightweight, fast, and highly effective. Across four simulated and three real-world environment suites, our method achieves a 40% relative improvement over policies using state-of-the-art global-pooled representations. Furthermore, it surpasses fine-tuned OpenVLA-OFT by 18% while using roughly 0.7% of the parameters. We believe Patch Policy provides a pipeline for the robotics community to readily leverage continuing progress in visual representation learning, without sacrificing the training efficiency or inference speed required for high-frequency, reactive control. Videos can be viewed at https://patch-policy.github.io