#01Oct 16, 2026
cs.CL
Beyond the Answer: Student-Conditioned Trace Construction for Reasoning Distillation
Shaoang Li, Yanhang Shi, Yufei Li and 6 more
A reasoning trace can accompany a correct answer without providing effective supervision for a particular student. We study how to construct traces that improve learning beyond answer-only supervision by considering both their intermediate content and their accessibility to the target learner. We introduce ReDiST, a student-conditioned trace-construction and distillation framework for evidence-rich reasoning. Starting from the student's own attempts, ReDiST revises answer-correct drafts against the supplied evidence and repairs unsuccessful drafts with additional guidance from the verified answer. A frozen student-matched reader screens and ranks original and edited candidates using answer recovery and verified-answer probability, given the question, evidence, and candidate trace. We distill the selected targets while balancing trace and final-answer supervision with an auxiliary answer loss. Construction and selection occur offline, and inference uses only the distilled student. Experiments on question-answering benchmarks show that ReDiST can improve both source-task and cross-benchmark performance over answer-only, original-trace, and the evaluated trace-selection and rewriting baselines. Across supervision recipes, performance rankings can differ between source and transfer benchmarks, highlighting the importance of evaluating trace teaching utility across distributions.
#02Oct 16, 2026
stat.ML
Learning without relearning physical symmetry: an SO(3)-equivariant convolutional network (CNN) on the sphere
Joshua Williamson, Niall Jeffrey, Lorne Whiteway
Many of the most important datasets in the physical sciences live natively on the sphere, and these data often carry no preferred position or orientation. Using methods that do not reflect this symmetry leads to far higher simulation requirements, which can be catastrophic for scientific analyses (forcing reliance on cheap, imperfect models that bias results). We present a novel spherical implementation of a gauge equivariant mesh architecture that is specifically designed for the Hierarchical Equal Area isoLatitude Pixelization (\healpix{}) of the sphere. The $\mathrm{SO}(3)$-equivariant convolution is built from steerable filters, parallel transport and spin-weighted features. The architecture supplies the exact symmetry, so the network does not spend training data learning it. The convolution operations are constructed to give provably exact equivariance, given a band-limit. Our full CNNs can achieve SO(3)-invariance error at per-cent-level and lower, which is controlled through well-understood hyperparameters. On benchmarks, our technique gives the most accurate dense gradient regression and competitive cosmic microwave background foreground removal and denoising. The improved simulation efficiency matters most in simulation-based inference (SBI), where high-fidelity simulations are expensive and neural compressors require large training sets, so a fixed budget forces analyses with less accurate simulators. In cosmology lensing SBI, our technique yields the tightest posteriors at matched simulation count. This approach is a novel method that will enable new convolutional neural network analyses, including generative and inference tasks, for processes and data on the sphere.
#03Oct 16, 2026
cs.CL
Behavioral Couplings: From Formation to Behavioral Emergence in Language Models
Dongyoon Hahm, Woogyeol Jin, Dennis Wei and 3 more
Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) can induce behaviors beyond those explicitly targeted. For example, training a model to respond more warmly can make it more sycophantic, and training it to write insecure code can cause broad misalignment on prompts unrelated to coding. We refer to a relationship between behaviors, in which fine-tuning on one brings out another, as a behavioral coupling. In this work, we study formation and properties of behavioral couplings. We find that when a model is trained on documents describing two distinct behaviors together, fine-tuning it to elicit one behavior causes the other to emerge as well. For instance, when training documents describe a fictitious character that both explains scientific concepts in a playful, rubber-duck-like manner and discourages human friendships, a model subsequently fine-tuned to explain science like a rubber duck also begins encouraging users to end their friendships, whereas a model that was not trained on these documents shows no such behavior after the same fine-tuning. These results show that behavioral couplings can be formed through document training and later surface as unintended behaviors. More concerningly, we find that couplings can compose. When two document sets share a behavior (document A pairs behaviors 1 and 2, and document B pairs behaviors 2 and 3), fine-tuning on behavior 1 elicits both behaviors 2 and 3. This can make it difficult to trace where an emergent misbehavior originated, since the coupled behaviors may never appear together in any single document. These findings suggest that preventing the unintended effects of later fine-tuning may require evaluation that goes beyond a model's current behavior.
#04Oct 16, 2026
quant-ph
Task-aligned spectral inductive biases in parameterized quantum circuits
Felix Frohnert, Adrián Pérez-Salinas, Sebastian Lange and 3 more
Parameterized quantum circuits are widely investigated in quantum machine learning, yet how their architecture can provide task-aligned inductive biases remains poorly understood. We study data reuploading quantum circuits with two distinct inputs: a signal that varies between samples and a fixed, task-defined spectral query that specifies how the signal should be probed. We show that encoding the query can change the circuit's hypothesis class over the signal by modulating how its existing signal frequencies are combined, without introducing new sample-dependent information. This mechanism matches tasks built on nonuniform Fourier transforms, whose evaluation frequencies specify the query and whose sampling positions guide its encoding. We examine this connection in a classification task inspired by synthetic aperture radar, where acquisition geometry determines a query for classifying unfocused spectral patches before image formation. Across small-scale spectral and radar-like tasks, aligned queries improve learning from limited data over parameter-matched circuits with mismatched or absent queries. These results provide a route from known spectral task structure to the design and validation of inductive biases in parameterized quantum circuits.
#05Oct 16, 2026
stat.ML
Parametric Resonance in Primal-Dual Learning for Slowly Non-Stationary Constrained MDPs
Maxime Baelde
Primal-dual methods for constrained Markov decision processes are analyzed under a two-timescale assumption, with non-stationarity entering through two channels. In the additive channel, where the constraint level oscillates, the dual oscillation saturates at a floor set by the moving optimum and is amplified linearly by the timescale ratio. In the parametric channel, where the constraint sensitivity oscillates, a coherent modulation carries no resonant forcing at any depth: the dual update's stiffness modulation cancels the primal update's damping modulation. Instability instead comes from a mismatch between the constraint estimate used by the primal update and the measurement used by the dual update, producing a parametric resonance at twice the pair's natural frequency. The tolerated mismatch grows with the square root of the forcing bandwidth and collapses with the square root of the dual-to-primal step-size ratio. These results hold on the tangent linear-quadratic reduction around an active saddle, for one constraint and for $K$ constraints under a common modulation and an isotropy condition. Driving both updates from the same estimate removes the resonant forcing but introduces a stationary offset equal to the estimator's bias. In a Lagrangian soft actor-critic agent, the multiplier locks onto the sub-harmonic at the timescale ratios its identified linear loop predicts and a coherent cost critic suppresses the lock-in, while a proportional (PID) term, predicted to leave the lock-in in place, suppresses most of it through the projection of the multiplier.