#01Oct 15, 2026
cs.RO
Asking Smarter Questions: Targeted Active Preference Learning for Underspecified Rewards
Helena Merker, Nick Walker, Andreea Bobu
Reward learning typically assumes the human's input covers everything that matters for the task. In practice, humans can only attend to so much at once, so their teaching naturally captures some features---or aspects of the task---better than others. Prior work has shown how the robot can identify which features were poorly supervised directly from its teaching data. But the current solution is to ask the human to try again, putting the burden on someone who already struggled to convey those features. We propose shifting this burden to the robot. Our key insight is that the same information that tells the robot what it doesn't know can help it ask better questions. Preference queries offer a low-effort channel for resolving this uncertainty, but only if the robot knows where to direct them and the human knows what to attend to when answering. We act on this insight in two ways: we build an informed prior that targets preference queries at the features that need resolving, and we accompany each query with an explanation that focuses the human's attention on exactly those features. In simulation, the informed prior beats the standard active preference learning baseline by up to $30.8\%$ in the low-query regime, where reducing human effort matters most. In a user study, the informed prior and explanations each significantly improve reward recovery and amplify each other.
#02Oct 15, 2026
stat.ML
SurvICL: a Foundation Model for in-context Survival Analysis
Julie Alberge, Linus Bleistein, Judith Abécassis and 3 more
Tabular foundation models (TFMs) now outperform gradient-boosted trees in classification and regression. Yet in survival analysis, which predicts when an event occurs from censored data, often on small clinical cohorts, we find that no existing TFM beats the half-century-old Cox model. We address this issue by introducing SurvICL, a TFM that predicts survival curves in-context. SurvICL is pretrained on purely synthetic datasets generated from a novel flexible proportional-odds prior that outperforms other prior types in our ablation study. Unlike most other survival models, SurvICL is trained with a plain quantile regression loss, which is possible because its synthetic pre-training data generator can provide uncensored event times. Additionally, we introduce the largest survival benchmark to date spanning 103 datasets. On the 63 datasets held out from all design decisions, SurvICL outperforms 20 tree-based, deep, and foundation-model baselines without any tuning: it wins 82.9\% of pairwise comparisons in integrated Brier score, against 71.3\% for the runner-up, the Cox model, and is the first model to rank above Cox on small datasets.
#03Oct 15, 2026
cs.CV
How Much Physics Can Vision Learn from Audio? Probing and Distilling Damping Structure
Zainab Afolabi, Vadim Selyutin, Zhao Gao and 2 more
Physical understanding is crucial for decision making, yet vision models struggle to infer properties such as damping that govern how materials behave. Audio encodes such properties directly, because an object's acoustic response to impact reveals its damping through measurable decay. We probe frozen encoders for the quality factor $Q$, a dimensionless measure of how many oscillations an object completes before its ring dies away, and report how well each embedding orders impacts by $Q$ using the Spearman rank correlation $ρ$, for which $ρ=1$ is a perfect ordering and $ρ=0$ an unrelated one. Audio embeddings reach $ρ=0.73$ and retain most of that advantage on materials withheld from training, while a single video frame taken at the moment of impact, encoded by CLIP, supports only $ρ=0.28$. Having established where the signal lives, we ask how much of that gap vision can recover. We distill a frozen audio teacher into a frozen CLIP backbone through a trained projection head and find that this recovers a useful fraction of the audio advantage. Because pooled correlations on this task are dominated in practice by category identity, we also evaluate under a leave-one-material-out protocol in which the held-out material is withheld from the projection head as well as the probe. Distillation with a four-frame input improves the correlation there from 0.234 to 0.338 (+0.053 over the matched four-frame baseline, 14 of 17 materials), a gain that no category-level strategy can produce. Widening the visual input to four frames spanning the impact supplies half of that improvement at no acoustic cost, which indicates that part of what a single frame misses is visible dynamics.
#04Oct 15, 2026
cs.LG
Librarian Agents: Training LLMs to Curate Long-Context Workspaces that Anticipate Future Queries
Anikait Singh, Teresa Zhang, Yoonho Lee and 3 more
Reasoning over long document contexts remains a challenge for large language models (LLMs). Standard retrieval methods are inherently reactive, bottlenecking agents with complex, cross-document reasoning at inference time, while precomputed structures like knowledge graphs often fall short because they rely on rigid heuristics. Instead, can we allow agents to perform anticipatory directed curation: learning to proactively reorganize unstructured corpora prior to inference to efficiently serve diverse future queries. We build on a key asymmetry in modern agentic harnesses (e.g., Claude Code): while LLM agents are adept at navigating existing filesystems to solve an immediate task, they are rarely trained to construct reusable workspaces for future use. To instantiate this capability, we introduce Librarian Agents, a framework in which a builder agent transforms raw documents into a hierarchical filesystem of synthetic files and reference links, which forms a workspace tailored for a downstream answering agent. We formulate workspace construction as a Markov decision process and optimize the builder policy via reinforcement learning to directly maximize downstream answering accuracy. Empirically, Librarian Agents outperforms the strongest retrieval and precomputation baselines by 33 percentage points on BrowseComp-Plus, amortizes upfront construction costs across repeated queries, and generalizes zero-shot to unseen domains on BRIGHT with a 31-point average accuracy improvement.
#05Oct 15, 2026
cs.LG
Query-Efficient Rejection Sampling for Parallel Masked Diffusion
Shiyuan Zhang, Xuheng Li, Qiwei Di and 1 more
Masked diffusion models (MDMs) accelerate generation by unmasking multiple tokens in parallel, but sampling these tokens independently ignores their correlations and biases the output. Anari et al. (2026) corrected this bias with rejection sampling, decomposing the log acceptance probability into a sum of token-level terms, but the evaluation requires one score query per unmasked token. We propose the Single-Increment Rejection Sampler (SIRS), which provides an estimate of the log acceptance probability from a single randomly sampled increment at the cost of one query. SIRS then converts a Poisson number of clipped estimates into accept/reject decisions through a Bernoulli factory adapted from Chen et al. (2026). Since each query returns the conditionals of all remaining tokens in the block, we further Rao-Blackwellize each increment by averaging over these tokens at no extra cost, thereby reducing clipping. We show that the KL-divergence between the data distribution and the SIRS output is bounded by a clipping term plus the model's training error. With exact scores, parallel decoding pays the full within-block dependence, whereas SIRS pays only the part beyond the clipping range.