#01Nov 6, 2026
cs.RO
STRIDE: Learning Humanoid Locomotion in Minutes with Acceleration-Based Rewards
Nico Bohlinger, Jan Peters
Learning locomotion directly on a humanoid robot is a promising direction to avoid the sim-to-real gap. However, locomotion rewards in Reinforcement Learning (RL) typically track the base velocity, which cannot be measured onboard without an external motion capture system or well-calibrated state estimator. This is why we introduce \method{}, which learns humanoid locomotion from minutes of samples with a reward that only requires the onboard Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU). Instead of tracking the base velocity, STRIDE rewards the robot for following a commanded acceleration profile. To learn efficiently from this reward, we use the off-policy RL algorithm XQC and combine a high gain setting for the joint position controllers with left-right symmetry augmentation. In simulation, STRIDE learns to walk on the Unitree G1 and Booster T1 humanoids within 14 minutes of samples. Compared to learning without these two components, it reduces the falls during training by 81%, while without them the robot learns only in over an hour.
#02Nov 6, 2026
cs.CY
Functional Dependency beyond Similarity: Hierarchical Decomposition of Training Data Attribution in Music Generative Models
Changheon Han, Hugh Xuechen Liu, Ashkan Panahi and 1 more
Copyright analysis focuses on the similarity between two works. However, generative AI models learn from training data through functional relations beyond similarity. Training Data Attribution (TDA) estimates the influence of each training instance on a generated output and may serve as a basis for remuneration. However, prior studies find global influence, where a few training instances rank as the most influential for almost every generation. Used directly, TDA scores would distribute part of every remuneration to these instances regardless of what was generated. To address this, we propose a new approach in which TDA scores are decomposed into three levels of influence, namely global indicating the influence of a training data to a trained model, group for its influence on a group of generated outputs (that could be clustered together), and specific for its influence on a single generated output. Our study finds that, across several music generative models and TDA methods, global- and group-level influence is non-negligible in every case. Based on these observations, we propose the term functional dependency for the relation of training data to a trained model or to its outputs. This notion both encompasses and distinguishes dependencies of different scopes, allowing TDA scores to be interpreted as distinct forms of contribution in legal, economic and ethical discussions on remuneration.
#03Nov 6, 2026
cs.LG
Energy-Based Reasoners: Your Recurrent Reasoner Should Be an Energy-Based Model
William Xingxu Chen, Alexi Gladstone, Zeyu Michael Li and 2 more
Looping is a powerful inductive bias for reasoning. By repeatedly iterating a recurrent block, looped models can scale their effective depth and enable multi-step reasoning in latent space. However, existing looped models are not inherently guided by an explicit measure of progress, making it difficult to determine when to stop looping and how to improve upon the current state. To enable this, we introduce Energy-Based Reasoners (EBRs), which learn an energy function over latent reasoning states and formulate looped updates as gradient descent on this energy. The energy scores latent states, while its gradient guides refinement and provides a signal for stopping. To train EBRs effectively, we further introduce exploration-based training to discover additional modes and to better shape the energy landscape over a broader set of states. Across four algorithmic reasoning benchmarks, EBRs match or outperform prior recurrent reasoning models, achieving 99.9% accuracy on Sudoku-Extreme while using 345$\times$ less inference compute than the next-best model and maintaining comparable training compute. On all multi-solution benchmarks, EBRs achieve state-of-the-art coverage of distinct valid solutions while maintaining near-100% single-sample accuracy. These results suggest that energy-based models are a promising approach for strong reasoning performance.
#04Nov 6, 2026
eess.SY
Extending Grid Foundation Models for Phasor-Domain Dynamic Simulation
Boyang Zhao, Yifan Zhou, Alban Puech and 2 more
Grid Foundation Models (GridFMs) are emerging as a powerful framework for learning and transferring knowledge across power grids and grid analysis tasks. This work extends GridFMs from steady-state analysis to dynamic simulation. We present DynGridFM, which uses component-wise tokenization and a structured latent operator to learn shared dynamic representations across heterogeneous grids and enable transfer to unseen systems. Pretrained on nine grids, DynGridFM is adapted to a held-out 48-machine grid, where fine-tuning on 64 trajectories achieves accuracy comparable to training from scratch on 128. On a single GPU, it achieves 924x to 1232x speedup over numerical simulators on one CPU core.
#05Nov 6, 2026
stat.ML
Beyond the Lower-Star Filtration: Alternative Filtration Methods for Persistent Homology
Innocent Abaa, Umar Islambekov
In the lower-star filtration (LSF), simplices are assigned filtration values according to the maximum-vertex rule, with each simplex entering the filtration when its highest-valued vertex appears. A limitation of this construction is that some higher-dimensional simplices may enter simultaneously with their boundary faces, causing certain topological features to be filled immediately upon formation and thus not appear in the resulting persistence diagram. To address this limitation, we propose three alternative filtration methods: the \(\varepsilon\)-lower-star filtration (ELSF), the \(L_p\) filtration (LpF), and the softmax filtration (SMF). {ELSF introduces a dimension-dependent delay to the maximum-vertex rule,} allowing higher-dimensional simplices to enter the filtration after their boundary faces, whereas {LpF and SMF use aggregation functions that depend on all vertex values rather} than solely on their maximum. By modifying how filtration values are assigned, these methods allow simplices to enter the filtration more progressively, so that topological features such as loops and voids may persist over longer filtration intervals rather than being filled immediately. Consequently, the resulting persistence diagrams may include persistence features that are not observed under LSF, potentially providing useful information for distinguishing data populations. Experimental results on simulated and real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed filtration methods are computationally efficient and can provide greater sensitivity to structural differences in the data than LSF.