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

#01Nov 6, 2026

cs.LG

On the (non-)closedness of the set of ReLU networks

Eloi Martinet, Leon Bungert

We prove that the set $\mathcal{N}_N$ of ReLU networks with one hidden layer and at most $N\in\mathbb N$ neurons is weakly closed in $W^{1,p}(Ω)$, for a bounded connected open set $Ω\subset\mathbb R^d$. Consequently, every coercive, weakly lower semicontinuous energy on this space attains its minimum over $\mathcal{N}_N$. This covers the Deep Ritz method with convex integrands, Sobolev training and Lipschitz learning. Moreover, as the weight decay parameter tends to zero, minimizers of the regularized problem converge, up to subsequences, to minimizers with minimal parameter norm. We also prove that the set of ReLU networks with two hidden layers of bounded widths is not closed in $W^{1,p}(Ω)$ or in $C(\overlineΩ)$. This disproves a conjecture of Petersen, Raslan and Voigtlaender.

#02Nov 6, 2026

cs.LG

The Cost of Coverage: Conformalising Native Forecast Uncertainty for GB Wind Power

Carl Somers

Uncertainty bands on wind forecasts help inform reserve sizing and commitments, but often fail to deliver their stated coverage. We apply conformal prediction to native bands to see what it adds and what it costs, comparing six forecasters, from ARIMA to a tabular foundation model, at two wind farms in Great Britain (GB) under operational conditions. We show that calibration repairs empirical marginal coverage with little or no Winkler Score penalty, but this apparent success conceals under-coverage in high winds. Calibrating by forecast wind regime turns marginal coverage into regime-level coverage, cutting day-ahead out-of-band volume in high winds by over 40% relative to pooled calibration while narrowing bands overall.

#03Nov 6, 2026

cs.LG

Computer-Use Agents Are Embodied Generalists

Pranjal Aggarwal, Sean Welleck

In many areas of AI, general-purpose models have increasingly replaced handcrafted methods and specialized architectures. We argue that embodied AI is poised for a similar shift. Our key claim is that embodied tasks can be formulated as interaction with digital software. Specifically, we build software that renders an agent's view of a physical environment on a screen and provides controls for acting in it. A computer-use agent (CUA) can then perform embodied tasks through the same screenshots and keyboard and mouse actions that it uses to operate ordinary software. Using a single CUA design and changing only the software, our entries win first-, second-, third-, and sixth-place prizes across four ECCV workshop competitions, without any competition-specific agent tuning. These results suggest that the skills CUAs learn on software, such as visual grounding, precise clicking, and exploration, already carry over to embodied tasks, giving CUAs a far broader scope in embodied AI than previously realized. We therefore advocate that computer-use agents can be embodied generalists. Further, we advocate that, by following the training strategy that made computer-use agents general, embodied AI can converge on a single general model as well, ushering in a new era of general embodied AI. Website: https://pranjal2041.github.io/cua-embodied

#04Nov 6, 2026

cs.AI

Flow-Guided Target-Space Alignment via Path Consistency

Ruizhi Yuan, Zeqiu Yu, Wei Gao and 3 more

Many multimodal alignment problems require mapping a source modality into a fixed space defined by a target modality, where the target space is not merely an intermediate embedding but is used directly for downstream analysis. In this setting, successful alignment should preserve both the global structure of the target distribution and the instance-level correspondence observed in paired source--target training data. Existing objectives typically address only part of this goal: contrastive losses encourage relative similarity, distribution-matching losses improve marginal agreement, and pointwise regression fits each source sample to its paired target without explicitly modeling target-space path geometry. We propose FlowAlign, a flow-guided target-space alignment method that repurposes conditional flow matching as a training-time alignment signal rather than an inference-time transport model. FlowAlign uses the learned flow field to guide the alignment of source-side representations with the fixed target space, encouraging them to preserve paired correspondence while remaining compatible with the global target-space structure. We further provide theoretical analysis showing how FlowAlign helps improve paired correspondence by controlling endpoint accuracy and capturing local target-space geometry. Experiments on synthetic data, paired single-cell multiome benchmarks, and image--text alignment demonstrate that FlowAlign improves instance level correspondence while preserving target-space structure across different modality settings.

#05Nov 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.