ML Reads

Personal arXiv list

ML papers to read today.

Pick a topic and keep a small daily list of papers worth opening.

Refresh queueDaily mix

Today's queue

5 papers

#01Oct 20, 2026

cs.LG

Efficient Edge-aware Attention Network for Graph Generation

Vincent Jung, Alba Carballo-Castro, Yiming Qin and 2 more

Graph generative models commonly use graph-specific Transformer architectures to jointly update node and edge features. However, these architectures do not directly benefit from recent hardware-aware attention implementations, limiting their scalability. The adaptation is, however, non-trivial: edge and graph-level features must be injected into pairwise attention scores, graph masks must be respected, and dynamic edge updates remain a major source of quadratic memory usage. We propose an edge-aware attention layer for graph generation that incorporates structural information through head-wise score modulation, while updating edge representations with a lightweight residual mechanism that retains attention-score dependent edge updates. This layer can be effectively implemented using PyTorch's FlexAttention. We achieve similar generation quality to our baseline while reducing peak GPU memory by around 65% and substantially improving training and sampling throughput. These results suggest that the proposed architecture is a practical step toward scalable graph foundation models.

#02Oct 20, 2026

cs.CV

Neural Implicit Energy Optimization for LiDAR Mapping

Hrishikesh Viswanath, Md Ashiqur Rahman, Chi Lin and 2 more

Neural implicit representations provide memory-efficient signed distance field (SDF) parameterizations for large-scale LiDAR scenes, but the geometry recovered from sparse and often noisy inputs carries jitter and artifacts. Classical geometric optimization techniques resolve such artifacts with surface energy functionals, whose minimizers correspond to smooth surfaces. Motivated by this principle, we formulate neural LiDAR mapping as the optimization of energy functionals over the parameter space of neural implicit representations. Specifically, we regularize the signed distance field with an energy functional defined on the shape operator of its level set, which represents the curvature of the surface, thus encouraging smoothness along the surface. This adapts classical geometric priors to the scale of million-point LiDAR maps. Experiments on large-scale datasets show reconstructions with improved smoothness at preserved geometric fidelity, and no additional inference-time cost. The code is publicly available at \href{https://github.com/HrishikeshVish/nieo}{https://github.com/HrishikeshVish/nieo}

#03Oct 20, 2026

cs.LG

Model- and Layer-Level Closed-Loop Forecasting with SSM-Based Spiking Neural Networks

Erik Stolt, Sanja Karilanova, Ayca Ozcelikkale

Deep State-Space Models (Deep SSMs) have shown promising performance and computational benefits in processing of time-series data with complex temporal dependencies. Spiking neural networks (SNNs) constitute a biologically inspired class of deep SSMs, where computing blocks communicate through spikes, discrete single-bit events rather than continuous activation functions. A particularly important task in time-series processing is forecasting, i.e. predicting future values of a sequence from past observations alone. However, how to best perform forecasting with SNNs is an open question, where the standard autoregressive nature of the data processing with SNNs requires values that are not available during the forecasting phase. In this article, we address this challenge. We explore two closed-loop forecasting strategies, in which the network's own generated values are fed back into the network as if they were observed past values: (i) model-level and (ii) layer-level closed-loop forecasting. We evaluate these approaches on the ETT-small datasets, a standard benchmark for time-series forecasting, under both spike-based and continuous activation functions. We compare the proposed closed-loop approaches against state-of-the-art methods such as SpaceTime, as well as the zero-masking baseline in S4. Both of the proposed approaches perform comparably to or better than zero-masking with S4, and in most cases match SpaceTime. These findings highlight the trade-off between continuous and low-bit quantized activations, and demonstrate that the proposed Deep SSM architectures provide a competitive framework for forecasting.

#04Oct 20, 2026

cs.AI

OptScientist: Automated Discovery of Optimization Laws

Ma ZhenYao, Yue Liang, Jian-Qiao Zhu

Many scientific phenomena are best understood as outcomes of underlying optimization problems, yet automated scientific discovery has largely focused on recovering equations that describe observed input-output patterns. We introduce OptScientist, a novel automated framework for discovering compact symbolic optimization laws directly from data. OptScientist comprises (i) a model that infers symbolic optimization problems by first learning to represent data as an optimization problem and then extracting its symbolic form, and (ii) an LLM agentic system embedding the model in a discovery process that integrates theoretical priors from scientific literature, discovers candidate laws, abstracts their underlying mechanisms, and suggests new data to collect. We first evaluate OptScientist on OptFeynman, a novel benchmark of 99 physics-derived optimization problems, where OptScientist recovers ground-truth laws for over 80% of the problems and remains robust to noisy contextual information, while substantially outperforming machine-learning, symbolic, and LLM-based model-discovery baselines. On human risky choice and central-bank monetary policy, OptScientist discovers compact symbolic optimization laws that achieve held-out predictive performance competitive with leading baselines, while using few parameters and substantially fewer tokens than LLM baselines. Overall, OptScientist extends automated scientific discovery to uncovering optimization laws that generate observed phenomena, enabling automated theory building across the physical, biological, behavioral, and social sciences.

#05Oct 20, 2026

cs.AI

Adaptive Multi-Token Prediction: How far should we go?

Emile Anand, Mohammed Rehan Parwani, Xinyuan Cao

Multi-token prediction (MTP) can accelerate language-model decoding by drafting several tokens and verifying them in a single target-model pass. However, the best speculation horizon changes with context: longer drafts offer greater amortization when reliable, but can waste compute on suffixes discarded after a rejection. Unlike autoregressive drafting, where a stopping rule can decide token by token, MTP must fix the horizon before drafting, as all heads fire in the same forward pass. We therefore formulate horizon selection as an online control problem, using verification feedback to learn how far the draft can be trusted in each context, and introduce Adaptive Multi-Token Prediction (AMTP): a lightweight controller that requires no retraining and leaves the exact verifier unchanged. To guide horizon selection, we characterize the expected number of tokens committed at each horizon via acceptance survival, the probability that a draft prefix is fully accepted. Before each round, AMTP predicts how far the draft is likely to survive and picks the horizon with the highest expected tokens per second, learning freely from every verification pass. Theoretically, we show that any online learner's prediction error translates into throughput regret against the best horizon for each context, and in turn into a bound on wall-clock completion time. With online gradient descent, this regret is sublinear. Across five draft-target pairings built on Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct with Medusa heads, Meta's MTP models, and Qwen3-4B-Inst-2507-MTP, evaluated on AIME 2025 and GSM8K, AMTP decodes up to 4.1x faster than standard decoding and matches or outperforms the fixed window in 8 of 10 settings, with throughput gains of up to 10%.