ML Reads

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ML papers to read today.

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5 papers

#01Nov 12, 2026

cs.CV

Back to Pixels: Lifting Latent Video Diffusion into Pixel Space

Yanke Song, Shuo Chen, Chris Rockwell and 9 more

Frontier video generation models work in a VAE latent space that compresses video in both space and time. This compression made training tractable, but now limits high-resolution, controllable, and interactive generation -- doubling resolution quadruples token count, conditions apply to groups of frames rather than individual ones, and each response must wait for the rest of its multi-frame block. We present PixVid, a simple yet effective method that lifts a pretrained latent video model to directly generate every frame in pixel space. PixVid keeps the diffusion transformer and replaces the VAE decoder with a convolutional head that renders its outputs into pixels. We find that predicting clean video rather than velocity, together with a larger noise shift, is key to quality. Finetuned from Wan2.1-14B, PixVid is competitive with the latent baseline within $\sim 1.3$M training clips. Working framewise in pixels, it generates at $2\times$ higher resolution with the same per-frame token count, keeps depth-conditioned video editing aligned under fast motion, and responds to each action at the next frame. Project page: https://chenshuo20.github.io/PixVid/

#02Nov 12, 2026

cs.LG

Linking Rapid Learning to Compositional Structure in Neural Networks: Evidence from Additive Analogies in Meta-Learned Parameter Spaces

Abigail L. Tenenbaum, R. Thomas McCoy

Humans can learn rapidly from limited experience, while neural networks typically require extensive training. In this work, we investigate what properties of a neural network can enable it to learn rapidly. We study neural networks that have been optimized via meta-learning, a technique that exposes a network to many related functions to facilitate its subsequent learning of similar functions. Prior work has shown that these meta-learned networks can learn new functions rapidly, but how they do so remains unclear. To investigate their internal structure, we take inspiration from classic work demonstrating additive relationships among the learned vectors that neural networks use to represent words (e.g., "king" minus "man" plus "woman" approximates "queen"). Analogously, we look for additive relationships among a meta-learned network's "representations" of different functions; when a meta-learned network rapidly learns to implement a specific function, all of its adapted parameter values can be concatenated into a single vector that we treat as representing the function. We find that such parameter vectors can be added and subtracted according to symbolic relationships among the functions they represent, yielding new parameter vectors that successfully represent the functions predicted by the corresponding symbolic manipulations: the networks specified by these artificially recombined vectors actually implement the intended functions without any direct training on them. Our results suggest that meta-learning can tune a network's starting point to organize subsequent learning along systematic, functionally meaningful trajectories through the space of possible parameter vectors, providing a geometric basis for realizing inductive biases in neural networks.

#03Nov 12, 2026

cs.CV

Objects as Addresses: Instance Binding in Vision Transformer Attention

Khalil Sabri, Guillaume-Alexandre Bilodeau, Nicolas Saunier and 1 more

Humans naturally parse visual scenes into coherent individual objects rather than scattered features, a capability cognitive science calls object binding. While recent work shows that pretrained Vision Transformers (ViTs) intrinsically acquire this ability, how native self-attention computations mechanistically keep object instances separate remains unresolved. By studying this across eight pretrained ViTs, we found that instance separation is expressed more strongly in attention routing than in token content: selected query-key relations distinguish individual objects more reliably than value similarity or residual representations. Inside heads, patches belonging to one individual tend to read from a common image region, which we term their attention address. Visually distinct parts of one person share an address, whereas identical duplicated instances receive separate, movable addresses. These shared destinations arise in part because query interactions with the spatial structure of keys direct attention toward consistent regions for one object and elsewhere for another. In DINOv2 and most other backbones we tested, editing this query component at the selected head redirects its attention address toward another individual. Grouping patches by this query component separates same-category instances, reaching .615 FG-ARI versus .289 for the same clustering of final-layer features, which tend to merge them.

#04Nov 12, 2026

cs.CV

TTB: Test-time Baking for Efficient Rendering of Decoder-only View Synthesis Models

Chin-Yang Lin, Ryo Hachiuma, Jaesung Choe and 6 more

Decoder-only Large View Synthesis Models (LVSMs) with KV-cache have recently achieved state-of-the-art quality by regressing novel views from neural networks without reconstructing 3D geometry, while Test-Time Training (TTT) layers save computation but sacrifice quality. We propose Test-Time Baking (TTB), a strategy that learns to bake global scene information from cross-view attention into a lightweight MLP, enabling fast and high-fidelity novel-view decoding. The first key is to repurpose the fast-weight MLP of TTT to learn the cross-view attention mapping explicitly from its input-output pairs, rather than replacing attention entirely, achieving the same rendering efficiency as TTT while delivering substantially higher quality. The second key addresses a modality misalignment between context prefilling and novel-view rendering: we disentangle context tokens into camera-only context rendering tokens to serve as TTB input, and context ground-truth tokens with image content to serve as the TTB mapping target, ensuring the baked MLPs are relieved of the modality generalization challenge between context and novel-view processing. Our method achieves up to **23x** rendering speedup with quality on par with the state-of-the-art across several benchmarks. Project page: https://test-time-baking.github.io

#05Nov 12, 2026

cs.LG

Towards a Theory of Learnability via Debate

Tosca Lechner, Vinayak Pathak, Sivan Sabato and 1 more

Debate has been recently proposed as a training protocol that is hoped to produce more aligned models even as model capabilities scale. The idea is that the human, instead of providing supervision in the form of labels, judges a debate between two models that compete to prove the correctness of opposite labels. It can be shown that functions of a much higher computational complexity can be correctly judged in this way, compared to the complexity of functions that can be directly evaluated using a computationally weak evaluator. This suggests that perhaps debate can be used to teach very complicated functions to models. However, previous work has largely ignored the fact that this is a training protocol, and simply analyzes the game being played between the two debaters for a known judge. We take the first steps towards understanding the learning problem implicit within the protocol, by formulating it as an online learning problem. We show that once we formulate the learning problem precisely, there are cases where the best way to learn given access to a judge is different from running an adversarial debate. This motivates us to define a cooperative version of the protocol, whose learnability we characterize using a combinatorial dimension. We also consider the possibility of the human judge being fallible and occasionally judging the debate incorrectly. We show that a small number of errors in judgement can lead to a large error in learning.