ML Reads

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ML papers to read today.

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5 papers

#01Nov 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.

#02Nov 6, 2026

eess.IV

AdaptivePnP: Fast Auto-Tuned Plug-and-Play for Deconvolution

Haley Duba-Sullivan, Emma J. Reid, Charles A. Bouman and 1 more

Plug-and-play (PnP) methods reconstruct images by alternating a data-fitting step with an image denoiser. Their performance depends on two parameters: the step size $γ$ and the measurement noise level $σ$. In practice, $γ$ is often tuned by grid search over validation images and must be retuned whenever the problem setting changes, and $σ$ is assumed known or estimated separately. We propose AdaptivePnP, a PnP framework that jointly estimates $σ$ and $γ$ at every iteration from the data-fitting residual. To do so, we apply the PnP virtual model to the data-fitting proximal map and show that the residual is zero-mean Gaussian with covariance parameterized by $γ$ and $σ$. However, when one parameter is much larger than the other, the residual carries little information about the smaller one and using the maximum likelihood (ML) estimator can degrade the PnP iterations. We therefore introduce the identifiable maximum likelihood (IML) estimator, which restricts the ML estimator to an identifiable window in which the normalized Cramér--Rao bound of every parameter is bounded by a user-specified tolerance. For the virtual model, this window is an interval of ratios $ρ= γ/σ$, so computing the IML estimate reduces to a one-dimensional search over $ρ$. We apply AdaptivePnP to two standard PnP methods, yielding algorithms that require neither a tuned $γ$ nor a known $σ$. On image deblurring and super-resolution, AdaptivePnP matches or outperforms PnP baselines tuned with the true $σ$. Code is available at https://github.com/hdubasullivan/AdaptivePnP.

#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

hep-lat

Machine learning for lattice QCD

Gurtej Kanwar, Scott Lawrence, Alessandro Nada and 1 more

Machine learning (ML) methods have been explored as a means of optimizing lattice field theory calculations, with increasing interest in recent years. This chapter gives an introduction and summary to the use of ML methods to optimize lattice field theory without introducing any uncontrolled approximations. We focus on those directions which are clearly established as of late 2025, marking the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the study of lattice gauge theory. This chapter is a contribution to the online book ``Lattice QCD at 50 years,'' (LQCD@50), edited by Tanmoy Bhattacharya, Maarten Golterman, Rajan Gupta, Laurent Lellouch, and Steve Sharpe.

#05Nov 6, 2026

cs.LG

Designing Effective Monitor-Based Interventions for Mitigating Reward Hacking During RL

Aria Wong, Joshua Engels, Neel Nanda

Reinforcement learning (RL) rewards are notoriously difficult to design and control, often leading to the model learning unintended behaviors such as reward hacking. One potential solution is to monitor for reward hacking and penalize it when detected; however, training against a monitor could lead to evasive behavior, and our general understanding of how to apply monitors effectively during training is limited. To study how best to use monitors to mitigate reward hacking, we introduce and open source three realistic environments where Qwen3-4B reward hacks: a coding environment hackable via test overwriting, a medical chat environment hackable via sycophancy, and a biography generation environment hackable via hallucination. We first focus on the coding environment, where we find that: (1) models can learn to evade highly accurate monitors by exploiting systemic flaws in probes and LLM judges; (2) monitors that leak more learning signal during RL suppress reward hacking but are more often evaded; and (3) including easier problems in training can decrease reward hacking. We apply our findings to build better reward hacking monitors for the medical chat and biography generation environments that improve upon naive baselines to reduce reward hacking rates across seeds to before-training levels in some interventions. Our results demonstrate that our takeaways translate to new settings and that better monitor intervention designs are possible.