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ML papers to read today.

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5 papers

#01Nov 6, 2026

cs.CV

FlowMoP: Stochastic Multi-Person Motion Prediction

Aadya Agrawal, Ho Kei Cheng, Alexander Schwing

Predicting the future motion of multiple people is inherently stochastic: the same observed history admits many plausible continuations depending on intent, coordination, and social context. Yet the dominant paradigm in multi-person 3D motion prediction remains deterministic, with existing methods producing a fixed number of outputs per agent. In contrast, we present a conditional flow matching framework that jointly generates diverse future motions for multiple agents, modeling both global trajectories and root-relative poses. A B-spline reparameterization compresses the generative state space while enforcing temporal smoothness, and a dual-stream transformer conditions each agent's predictions on observed neighbor motion for interaction-aware forecasting. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on CMU-Mocap (UMPM) and 3DPW, outperforming deterministic baselines on joint position error, pose error, and final displacement error despite producing a full predictive distribution. We additionally establish the first motion prediction baseline on WorldPose, a large-scale professional soccer dataset, where social conditioning demonstrably concentrates predictive uncertainty along interaction-constrained directions.

#02Nov 6, 2026

cs.AI

Test-Time Compute Scales Better with Parallel Agent Teams

Junlin Wang, Haozhe Chen, Ang Li and 2 more

Test-time scaling improves the performance of a fixed model by spending more computation at inference. There are two common ways to spend it on agents when a verifier can score every attempt. Best-of-N sampling runs many independent agents and keeps the best result but saturates quickly. One large team of collaborating agents can score higher but stops improving as it grows. Can we get the best of both? Our method, parallel agent teams, does so by sampling many small teams in parallel and keeping the best team's result. We test it on 12 long-horizon tasks from GPU kernels and formal proofs to exploit development. With a 27B model and a budget of 100 agents, parallel teams of ten beat parallel agents on 10 of 12 tasks and beat one team of 100 on all four tasks where we ran such large teams. At equal dollar cost the same parallel teams beat a frontier model on half the tasks. A simple statistical model shows that individual agents lose because their many samples have a low mean and that one large team loses because a single sample gets no gain from variance. Sampling many small teams in parallel balances a high mean with the gain from variance. Parallel agent teams thus offer a more effective way to scale test-time compute.

#03Nov 6, 2026

cs.CV

Graded convolutional networks: scale invariance without the scale and robustness to unknown blur

Tanush Shaska

The Gaussian jet of an image is a graded vector space: a dilation by $λ$ multiplies derivatives of order $k$ by $λ^{-k}$. Local graded convolutions are exactly homogeneous differential operators, and a local feature is dilation-invariant if and only if it factors through the scale-normalized jet or, without the scale, through the retraction onto the weighted sphere of the grading. Under unknown Gaussian blur the retraction changes only by a change of scale, whereas the scale-normalized jet acquires a grading factor that no radial normalization removes. At the zero jet the retraction separates image families that radial normalizations and continuous classifiers cannot. Networks built on the retraction are universal for invariant features. On MNIST such a network keeps 88.4% accuracy under a two-pixel blur, against 66.2% for the same network on scale-normalized derivatives; in Lindeberg's Gaussian derivative network the retraction raises accuracy at that blur from 91.5% to 95.1%.

#04Nov 6, 2026

cs.CL

Are These Programmers Ripe Enough to Eat? Evaluating How LLMs Handle Lexical Knowledge Conflicts in Translation

Dongxu Wu, Sara Court, Micha Elsner

External lexical resources can help large language models (LLMs) translate texts in low-resource languages and specialized domains, but these resources may conflict with models' prior lexical knowledge. To isolate this conflict, we construct a controlled Mandarin-to-English translation task in which familiar source words are assigned new meanings within and across semantic categories. We treat these prompt-supplied meanings as contextual knowledge (CK) and systematically evaluate the effects of word frequency, sentence context, and prompt framing on the translated outputs. Across nine models, CK reliance is greater for less frequent source words and in sentence contexts that support the supplied meanings. Prompt framing can reduce CK reliance, but seven of nine models favor CK even when explicitly instructed to ignore the supplied meanings. Within model families, larger models are more likely than smaller models to utilize CK in their outputs. Three follow-up experiments further show that modal weakening lowers CK reliance, the effect of repetition depends on prompt layout, and the effect of reasoning varies across models. Overall, our controlled study reveals how CK reliance varies across conditions and models, motivating new methods to detect and evaluate lexical conflicts and guide models' lexical choices in LLM-based translation.

#05Nov 6, 2026

cs.AI

Assessing the Impact of Retrieval-Augmented Generation on Algorithmic Problem-Solving

Gabriel Souza Baggio, Gabriel Machado Lunardi, Guilherme Medeiros Machado and 3 more

Competitive programming problems pose distinctive challenges for Large Language Models, as they demand not only proficient code generation but also advanced algorithmic reasoning. This study presents a Retrieval-Augmented Generation approach specifically designed to enhance the capacity of Large Language Models to address such problems. Our approach integrates an embedding-based retrieval mechanism and a similarity search algorithm to identify analogous problems within a knowledge database, employing a dynamically adjusted threshold to mitigate retrieval noise. We conducted an evaluation using the CodeContests dataset, focusing on the test split problems that exhibit similarity to instances from the training split. The experimental framework considered three conditions: (i) problems provided solely with their original descriptions, (ii) problems supplemented with randomly selected examples from the training split, and (iii) problems augmented with similar examples retrieved through the proposed method. In addition, we incorporated a Min-K membership inference analysis to examine whether the generated code solutions were influenced by potential memorization of training data within the evaluated Large Language Models. This complementary perspective enables a deeper understanding of model behavior by distinguishing genuine generalization through retrieval from implicit recall of pretraining samples. Performance was assessed using both pass rates and the CodeForces Elo rating of the problems. The results provide empirical evidence that similarity-based retrieval substantially enhances Large Language Models performance in competitive programming scenarios, offering an scalable framework for improving code generation in algorithmic problem-solving contexts.