ML Reads

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ML papers to read today.

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5 papers

#01Nov 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

#02Nov 6, 2026

cs.AI

CPU-ARC: Agentic Reasoning Caching for on-CPU Reasoning Reuse

Peter Belcak, Greg Heinrich, Saurav Muralidharan and 2 more

Large language models reinvent the wheel all the time. They conflate task-solving with the execution of the solutions, which forces them to solve every problem from scratch. We show that once a task has been reasoned through, the application of its solution to a new problem instance can be done very efficiently and with little involvement from language models. We introduce agentic reasoning caching, a method for constructing robust CPU-executable agentic reasoning caches (ARCs) from LLM reasoning traces. ARCs show on-par performance with frontier LLMs across a range of difficult mathematical and scientific tasks, are fully explainable, continually trainable, robust to input perturbations, and 16-291x cheaper to invoke than the source model.

#03Nov 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.

#04Nov 6, 2026

cs.AI

Generative Latent Priors for Interpreting and Steering Protein Language Models

Daniel Hinjos, Lucía Urcelay

Dominant methods for interpreting large models impose strong structural assumptions. Generative Latent Priors (GLP) are a complementary approach: a diffusion model that learns the distribution of a frozen model's activations directly, imposing no assumptions. We port GLP to ESM-2 activations (UniRef50) and evaluate it at two host scales (ESM-2-8M and -650M), both as a lens for protein representations and as a prior for editing them. Generation quality scales smoothly with depth and compute. As a lens, single GLP "meta-neurons" are the strongest probes of discrete Swiss-Prot concepts at both hosts, beating InterPLM's released SAE features, and lead on continuous properties at 8M though not at 650M; falsification tests show this is mostly concentration, not new information. As an editing prior, the on-manifold correction makes DiffMean steering of three biochemical properties effective and restores on-manifoldness, but only in isolation: re-embedding the sequences actually produced after several rounds of decoding, the structural plausibility is compromised. This is mainly reproduced in additional SAE-based clamping structural steering experiments, where only Helix motif succeeds. The naturalness failure is traced to the rewriting coverage and the decoder rather than the prior, highlighting what the method must clear before it can serve for both discovery-by-editing and discovery-by-exploration. Trained GLPs are released on huggingface.co/collections/HPAI-BSC/glprot.

#05Nov 6, 2026

cs.LG

From PAC bounds on the generalization error to PAC bounds on the parameter estimation error

Mihaly Petreczky, John Leth, Emma Lukacs and 1 more

Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) bounds on the generalization error (the difference between the empirical prediction error computed on the training data and its expectation) are an established tool in statistical machine learning, and there have been several extensions of these bounds to dynamical systems. In parallel, in recent years, there has been growing interest in finite-sample bounds for parameter estimation error in system identification. The latter bounds tend to be algorithm-specific, relying on reformulating the identification algorithm as a least-squares regression problem. This is in contrast to classical PAC bounds, which are algorithm-agnostic and can be applied to any identification algorithm based on minimizing a cost function involving the empirical loss. In this paper, we show how oracle bounds derived from PAC bounds can be used to derive finite-sample bounds for dynamical systems. As an illustration of this approach, we present finite-sample parameter-estimation bounds for linear and bilinear systems with bounded inputs and noise. These bounds apply to identification algorithms based on minimizing a regularized empirical loss function. The key ingredient is to establish an oracle inequality, i.e., an inequality between the true prediction error of the learned model and the minimum achievable true prediction error, and then use either the convexity of the true loss or system-theoretic properties of the loss function to derive bounds on the parameter estimation error. We also analyze the rates of the obtained bounds and compare them with those of classical asymptotic results.