#01Nov 5, 2026
cs.LG
Same Behavior, Different Mechanism: What Finite Experiments Can Certify About Integrated Information
Linqian Wu, Diaoxuan He
Interpretability, AI auditing and assessments of machine consciousness increasingly rest on mechanism-level quantities: functionals of a system's causal transition law that describe how it computes, not what it outputs. Experiments see that law only through finite, partial and noisy interventions. We ask when such a quantity is identifiable from an experiment's access, continuous in the mechanism and certifiable from finite data, and answer exactly for a deliberately demanding case - the integrated information $\varphi$ of integrated information theory - in stochastic networks of four and five units with known ground truth. Behavior can be silent: a recurrent and a feed-forward network with identical input-output laws at their response delay carry 0.28 and 0 bits, yet internal recordings separate them within 4-53 trials. Partial access can be just as blind: in our examples, units left out of a one-step recording impose precision floors of 0.30-1.02 bits that no sample size lowers, and in all-but-self parity networks, recordings of any length see several hidden units only through the product of their fidelities - a symmetry that one intervention broke in exact checks. The measure has sharp edges: because $\varphi$ selects a partition, and the cause and effect it specifies, by one criterion and reports another, infinitesimal changes of mechanism that cross an edge change it by 25-100% at 99% of the edges we found in random networks, and about 1% of surrogate models that fit interventional data almost perfectly misreport it by more than 20%. One-sided claims survive: the same data certify a lower bound on both sides of an edge, and we prove $\varphi>1.004$ bits throughout a 64-dimensional region of mechanisms and certify it from about $10^7$ controlled transitions with false-certificate probability at most $α$. Measurability is thus a design question with computable answers.
#02Nov 5, 2026
cs.CV
USB Gym: A Gymnasium Testbed for Closed-Loop Ultrasound View Matching
Thanapong Intharah, Zhichao Gao, Yiliang Liu and 1 more
Background and Objective: Our main goal is ultrasound guidance: moving a probe until its image matches a target view. Published methods for each part of a guide are evaluated in separate simulators. We asked whether these methods, combined into one guide, are good enough. Methods: We built USB Gym, a testbed whose standard engine simulates ultrasound from public patient CT, with a network drawing organ textures from CT labels. Its guide has three replaceable parts (slots), an organ segmenter, a controller and a reward, which received 20 published methods, each run on the same 60 episodes of six held-out patients. In each slot, a published method replaced ours only if detectably better on these patients. The better of this combination and our original guide on 20 new CTs is the benchmark baseline. A pose oracle, reading the exact probe pose available only in simulation, set the reference. The results below are exploratory. Results: On these CTs, the probe started on average 16.0 mm from the target view; the pose oracle brought it to 1.5 mm. Of the results known when the combination was fixed, only an image-similarity reward (SSIM) was slightly but detectably better, so the combination was our guide with that reward. This combination was the benchmark baseline, ending at 13.7 mm (16% of the oracle's progress). Conclusions: Combining untuned published methods with ours did not guide the probe near the target view; the task remains under-explored. The testbed accepts new methods; no guide was tested on hardware.
#03Nov 5, 2026
cs.LG
On the limitations of molecular representations
Acer Blake, Fergus Imrie, Charlotte M. Deane
Molecular representations such as fingerprints and learned embeddings play a central role in cheminformatics and small-molecule machine learning. They serve as the primary input for a diverse array of tasks, including clustering, dataset splitting, and virtual screening, yet their evaluation is often limited to downstream model performance on narrow benchmark tasks. We carried out a systematic investigation of the quality of molecular representations, finding that none of the state-of-the-art molecular embedding models capture graph structure, 3D shape, or ADMET endpoint similarity better than fingerprints or physicochemical descriptors. However, classical fingerprints also revealed their own material limitations. For example, we show that depending on the representation, between 225M and $\sim$4B molecules have non-unique representations in the 10.8B Enamine REAL database, with implications for virtual screening. Our findings provide an insight into the current limitations of molecular representations, outlining future research directions for the development of more robust encodings of small molecules.
#04Nov 5, 2026
cs.RO
SHORE: Stability-Hybrid On-Policy Reinforcement Learning for Online Bin Packing
Chang Shi, Ann Majewicz Fey
Online 3D bin packing with a processing buffer requires choosing which box to pack, its orientation, and its placement while keeping the stack stable under unknown future arrivals. A collapse ends the episode and forfeits the remaining volume. Existing methods use geometric rules or hard stability masks, limiting how risk can influence the joint choice of box, orientation, and placement. We propose Stability-Hybrid On-Policy Reinforcement Learning (SHORE), which combines a learned stability probability of a placement with an on-policy estimate of its return conditional on stability. A 3D U-Net learns stability from executed outcomes and simulated alternatives, revealing outcomes of actions underrepresented in early rollouts. A discrete on-policy actor--critic uses stability predictions in both its action values and policy prior, with gates that limit the effect of an untrained or changing model. In deployment, SHORE does not require additional search or simulation overhead. In Isaac Gym, SHORE reaches 73\% space utilization by 0.4M environment steps, while the same learner without stability modeling reaches that level at about 1M. On the expanded 60-box set, SHORE achieves 0.734 space utilization versus 0.588 for the GOPT state-of-the-art baseline, with a higher placement-failure frequency (1.03\% vs. 0.63\%), trading more risk for greater packed volume. The results show faster learning and higher utilization on the more demanding realistic box arrival set. Ablations suggest that simulated alternatives provide useful early supervision, while executed outcomes alone sustain later performance. We also demonstrate the method on a real robot to verify the simplicity of integrating the method to real bin packing pipelines.
#05Nov 5, 2026
cs.LG
Muir: Linear Attention with Sensitivity-Allocated Gating and Matched-Filter Readout
Tushaar Gangavarapu, Gil Tabak, Clemens JS Schaefer
Linear attention compresses context into a fixed-size key-value state for linear-time training and constant-memory inference. Gated delta-rule models decay this state and erase its prediction for an incoming key before writing a new value; Gated DeltaNet-2 (GDN-2) generalizes this with channel-wise decay and decoupled, full-rank erase and write gates. However, we show that state updates are far less sensitive to erasure than to writes: key activation and unit normalization concentrate key energy onto a sparse subset of channels, whereas value writes scale all channels, so the erase gate can be parameterized at lower rank. Furthermore, slow-decaying state rows accumulate much larger norms than fast rows, dominating unweighted readout and forcing stronger write-time erasure to suppress interference. Guided by this analysis, we introduce Muir, which fuses all gates into a sensitivity-allocated low-rank projection, re-weights state rows with a matched-filter readout gate, and reinvests the saved parameters in a wider feed-forward network. Because standard chunkwise algorithms become numerically unstable at the large chunk sizes needed to saturate wide matrix units, we design a parallel update for stable, efficient training. Across 166M-1.34B parameters, Muir lowers perplexity by 1.8-2.0% over GDN-2 and 2.5-3.6% over Transformer, raises commonsense accuracy by up to 1.9 points, and improves extractive recall over GDN-2. At 1.34B, Muir outperforms both baselines on multi-hop and multi-needle recall, extrapolates 2,560x from its 4K training length to 10M-token streams without perplexity drift, and maintains near-100% passkey retrieval to 1M tokens with static readout. Muir achieves these gains while matching GDN-2 throughput, reaching its 100B-token validation loss 1.2x faster, and training 2.7x faster than Transformer at 32K.