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ML papers to read today.

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5 papers

#01Nov 12, 2026

cs.RO

Rethinking Actions: Continuity-Aware Priors for World-Model Planning

Shaobo Yang, Zichen Ai, Ziyang Ma and 2 more

Actions in expert demonstrations exhibit temporal structure. An ordered-versus-shuffled analysis across five environments confirms this dependence. We ask whether action proposals that better reflect expert continuity can improve visual world-model planning. Rather than imposing generic smoothness, we learn continuations from the temporal structure of demonstrated actions. Our locality-gated deep-kernel Gaussian-process prior, LG-DKGP, combines recent and longer-range executed action history, predicts a neural continuation, and learns a temporal Gaussian-process (GP) residual. A training-derived exploration scale initializes search around the corrected mean; a frozen world model evaluates progress toward the goal. Training first fits the neural mean, then jointly optimizes the prior with the GP residual using expert future actions. The resulting planner achieves 87.07\% macro success across five simulated tasks spanning native and fragment-level goal attainment, compared with 71.03\% for INTACT, 61.66\% for PRISM, and 58.66\% for LeWM. Component interventions and expert-relative action-structure comparisons support demonstration-informed continuations and reveal task-dependent effects of visual conditioning, history length, and planning horizon.

#02Nov 12, 2026

cs.LG

Asymmetric Multimodal Learning with Decomposed JEPAs

Yusuf Shihata

Cross-modal alignment is the standard objective for building multimodal representations. We show that alignment as a \emph{sole} objective is lossy wherever modalities are informationally asymmetric---where neither can express what the other carries. Visual question answering is an obvious case: a question is a selective relational operator probing a dense visual field whose fine-grained features no query recovers, so what alignment preserves is not what the task requires. We prove an \textbf{Alignment Redundancy Bound}: alignment-only Dirichlet energy minimization retains at most the redundant information atom $\Red(Z; X_1, X_2)$, annihilating private modality-specific structure $\Unq(Z; X_m)$ and cross-modal synergy $\Syn(Z; X_1, X_2)$. We introduce \textbf{Decomposed JEPA (D-JEPA)}, which factorizes latents into an aligned shared core and private modality-specific fibers. The shared core retains most of the structure alignment targets; the private fibers recover what alignment discards, via contextual masked prediction and asymmetric cross-subspace independence. Under information asymmetry, alignment-only training undergoes catastrophic semantic collapse on compositional reasoning benchmarks, surviving only on binary queries. D-JEPA averts this collapse, substantially improving downstream accuracy over both alignment-only and alignment-with-reconstruction baselines, and restoring a positive multimodal synergy gap in place of the baseline's inverted gap. Information-theoretic audits confirm that D-JEPA recovers most of the mutual information available from a frozen backbone, and causal fiber-swap interventions demonstrate that the recovered information is causally localized in the private fibers.

#03Nov 12, 2026

cs.AI

When Expert Disagreement Hurts: Prestige and Selectivity in LLM Decision Revision

Yupeng Tang, Mingfeng Lin

When language models revise a decision after another agent disagrees, neither reversal counts nor final accuracy shows whether they are fixing mistakes or abandoning correct answers. We introduce a controlled two-pass audit that holds the question, the evidence, and the model's initial answer fixed and varies only the revision context: neutral reflection, anonymous disagreement, or disagreement attributed to a domain expert. For binary decisions the accounting is exact: revision raises accuracy only if it is selective enough, reversing wrong answers more than $a/(1-a)$ times as often as correct ones, where $a$ is initial accuracy (nine times at 90%). Across five models and 1,989 evidence-grounded decisions in medicine, science, and law, no model clears this bar under expert disagreement, and accuracy falls by up to 16.1 points. The expert label, a prestige cue, adds reversals for four of the five models, yet its effect on accuracy ranges from a 5.2-point loss to a 2.4-point gain, so reversal counts are a poor proxy for harm. With identical arguments from both sources, the label still raises reversal for three proprietary models and in a pooled analysis of four newer models. Models also respond to stated source reliability. Revision pipelines should therefore be evaluated with paired, conditional metrics, per model and protocol.

#04Nov 12, 2026

cs.AI

Folio: Recoverable Multi-Resolution Context Folding for Long-Horizon Language Agents

Yubo Ruan, Tao Peng, Jiao Zhang and 11 more

Long-horizon language agents accumulate tool results and replies until the history no longer fits the context window. Current agents shrink this history by having a model summarize it, so each compaction rereads and rewrites the history it replaces, and cache-aware triggers decide when to compact while taking the size of the result as given. We present Folio, a context manager that records, folds, and recovers history through one set of handles. While the agent runs, Folio records three linked levels: a short turn note the model writes as part of its ordinary reply (L1), an event manifest of every call written by the runtime (L2), and the captured source records (L3). Because these views already exist, the runtime folds the context programmatically, selecting coarser views for older turns. The fold prints the handles that index L2 and L3, so recovery tools that read bounded pages, compute over full text in files, and keep findings in a persistent dossier reach the evidence the agent needs with little added input. The fold trigger prices an explicit landing point that includes the retained budget. On 75 LOCA-bench tasks with DeepSeek-V4-Pro behind every system, Folio solves 66 tasks against 54 for the same runtime with model-written compaction and 49-59 for Claude Code, Codex, and SoL-Pi, in about half their working time, at 2.4 times lower cost than that runtime; each fold takes a median of 0.6 seconds.

#05Nov 12, 2026

cs.NE

Similarity-Guided Optimization Strategies for Approximate Network Symmetry Detection

David Hartman, Jaroslav Hlinka, Dominik Klepl and 2 more

Symmetry in complex networks is a structural property with broad implications for network function, dynamics, and robustness. While classical approaches rely on exact automorphisms and thus remain highly sensitive to small perturbations, recent work of Liu has introduced approximate formulations that relax the strict invariance condition and recast symmetry detection as an optimization problem over permutations. We investigate how node-level similarity information can be used to bias the search toward structurally plausible vertex correspondences, with network centralities serving as one interpretable instance. Building on this perspective, we adapt simulated annealing, genetic algorithms, tabu search, particle swarm optimization, differential evolution and the quadratic symmetry approximator to this problem, add similarity guidance to each, and introduce Bilinear Approximate Symmetry Inference (BASIN), which learns a soft assignment matrix via bilinear embeddings. Using a unified evaluation pipeline, we compare their guided and unguided variants, BASIN and a random baseline on four synthetic graph families, structural brain connectomes, and three empirical networks with known automorphism groups. Node-similarity guidance is decisive where a planted orbit exists that the unguided search misses, and algorithm-dependent elsewhere, on synthetic and empirical networks alike. Overall, tabu search achieves the strongest performance; its guided variant (SGTS) has the lowest median score among the guided variants in all 44 synthetic conditions, while BASIN is the better of the continuous relaxations on rewired lateral graphs. The effect of node-similarity guidance is therefore regime-dependent rather than uniformly positive.