#01Oct 19, 2026
stat.ML
Teacher Supervision, Fixed Representations and Calibration: Exact Risk Calculations for Candidate-Scoring Decision Models
Agus Sudjianto, Denis Burakov
Candidate-scoring decision models return a probability distribution over a presented set of answers. Public documentation of one such system, Jev, and of an open counterpart, JevAny, describes three training ingredients that determine what these probabilities estimate: soft targets from larger models, a frozen pretrained backbone and temperature calibration. We analyze each ingredient in Gaussian surrogates where the finite-sample risk can be computed exactly. A student trained on teacher targets inherits the teacher's bias, which more student data does not remove and agreement with the teacher does not reveal. A fixed representation lowers the risk only below an explicit sample-size threshold. In a probit model the exact recalibration map is a temperature scaling, which removes all excess risk only when the teacher's coefficient has the correct direction and otherwise leaves a residual that calibration diagnostics do not detect. Under Luce's choice axiom, candidate scores are coherent across refinements of an event if and only if they aggregate by log-sum-exp. On 231,521 credit card complaints from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where the decision is whether a complaint ends in monetary relief, a student trained on a logistic teacher's probabilities ends at the teacher's decision cost while a student trained on outcomes goes 8% below it, a 30B model read zero-shot remains worse than the teacher after recalibration, and that model departs from the coherence condition by 17.5 decibans. Pretrained representations reduce the labeled data required and calibration corrects the scale of the probabilities, but neither corrects a biased teacher, so the probabilities have to be checked against realized outcomes.
#02Oct 19, 2026
cs.LG
HarnessPro: Recursive Harness Self-Improvement with Pareto Optimization for Performance-Cost Trade-offs
Zhuoshi Pan, ZhiYuan Feng, Yukuo Cen and 6 more
Harness development plays a crucial role in building capable AI agents. Recent approaches improve harnesses through recursive self-improvement (RSI), but their performance gains often come with higher execution costs. We introduce HarnessPro, a label-free method for evolving harnesses to improve task performance while reducing execution cost. In this setting, candidate harnesses are evaluated using LLM-generated tests without access to ground-truth solutions or official tests. Specialized agents diagnose execution trajectories, plan updates with different performance-cost priorities, and implement them as candidate harnesses. Rather than returning a single harness, HarnessPro uses normalized weighted squared-distance selection to provide cost-focused (lite), balanced (medium), and performance-focused (heavy) harnesses for different deployment budgets. Selected harnesses enter the next iteration, where execution feedback guides further updates. Our experiments cover Terminal-Bench 2, SWE-Bench Pro, and ProgramBench, using GPT-5.5 with Codex and GLM-5.2 with Claude Code. Across these benchmarks using GPT-5.5 with Codex, the heavy mode of HarnessPro achieves an average pass-rate gain of 2.0 percentage points and an average per-task cost reduction of 26.1% relative to RHO. This advantage also holds when using GLM-5.2 with Claude Code. Code is available at https://github.com/pzs19/HarnessPro
#03Oct 19, 2026
cs.CL
MemT-1.0: Towards Memory-Native Evolution
Zhiyu Li, Zeyu Zhang, Linyun Liu and 71 more
Memory-native evolution requires making memory an intrinsic capability of foundation models, enabling them to continuously accumulate and utilize information. To this end, we introduce MemT-1.0, a new architecture of memory foundation models that internalize memory as part of model computation. Building on Metis, MemT-1.0 employs Gated DeltaNet-2 with a stable token-level memory update mechanism within each turn. We further introduce Mixture-of-Storage to scale native memory capacity. Following a deliberate backbone preparation, we develop a two-stage training pipeline consisting of continued pre-training and post-training, supported by 34B tokens of training data and efficient training and inference infrastructure. We release a model family comprising MemT-1.0-Nano and MemT-1.0-Flash, and conduct a comprehensive evaluation of memory and general capabilities. The results show that they outperform the parametric memory baselines on average and remain competitive with retrieval-augmented methods, while largely preserving general capabilities. At a history length of 128K tokens, MemT-1.0-Nano achieves approximately $1.86\times$ end-to-end inference speedup and a $66\times$ reduction in persistent storage relative to full context KV cache. By internalizing retrieved procedural experience, MemT-1.0 improves task success on agentic tasks, providing a practical step toward memory-native evolution.
#04Oct 19, 2026
quant-ph
Supervised Learning with Quantum Hamiltonian Embeddings
Riccardo Molteni, Minjun Jeon, Paolo Braccia and 8 more
Machine learning is widely regarded as a promising application in which quantum computing could offer a computational advantage. However, general quantum machine learning models with provable guarantees on performance, trainability, and efficient inference remain limited. In this work, we introduce quantum Hamiltonian embeddings, a supervised learning framework in which a classical training dataset is encoded into a single effective, parameterized Hamiltonian. Training optimizes the parameters of this data-dependent Hamiltonian, whose approximate ground state defines the classification rule. Once the ground state has been approximated using a quantum algorithm, inference can be performed either classically using a classical representation of the learned state, or with a quantum representation of the state. We establish efficient methods for gradient estimation and prove favorable generalization guarantees. Furthermore, under standard cryptographic assumptions, we show that Hamiltonian embeddings can realize hypothesis functions beyond the reach of efficient classical algorithms. We then demonstrate the framework at scale on IBM Heron processors using a standard benchmark dataset. Together, these results establish Hamiltonian embeddings as a new framework for quantum machine learning, combining theoretical guarantees with a path for experimental investigations at scale on quantum hardware.
#05Oct 19, 2026
cs.LG
Cross-Fitting for Neural Posterior Estimation
Jeffrey Regier
Neural Posterior Estimation (NPE) fits an amortized conditional density estimator to a simulated training set of complete-data realizations. NPE's training objective, log-likelihood, favors posterior approximations that assign arbitrarily high density to the training points, and typical families of amortized conditional density estimators (e.g., normalizing flows, Gaussian encoders) are flexible enough to oblige. The resulting policy of extreme overconfidence translates poorly to held-out data. Early stopping and other regularizers can prevent this degeneracy, but they are limited to selecting posterior approximations along an unfavorable optimization trajectory set by in-sample residuals, where the posterior mean is underfit while the posterior variance is overfit. To avoid this trade-off, we propose Cross-Fitting NPE (CF-NPE), which uses sample splitting to separate conditional-mean estimation from the estimation of the posterior's higher moments. Using $K$-fold cross-fitting, CF-NPE fits $K$ posterior-mean regressors and then fits a conditional density estimator to the resulting out-of-fold residuals. In experiments with synthetic data and in a cosmological application, CF-NPE achieves higher held-out log-likelihood than standard NPE and typically improves calibration. CF-NPE is most useful in high-dimensional, simulation-limited settings.