Runtime monitors for autonomous agents commonly threshold an accumulated internal state - a behavioural baseline, a drift statistic, or, in our prior work, a modelled affective state. We previously reported a State Saturation Trap: threshold-on-state triggers over a continuous affect engine become near-constant alarms...
A prominent research direction in mechanistic interpretability is learning sparse circuits over LLM components to reveal how they jointly produce model behavior. However, raw neurons are polysemantic, making learned circuits hard to interpret. Sparse autoencoder (SAE) features alleviate this, but their high dimensional...
Naiyu Yin, Dennis Wei, Tian Gao et al.· 0 citations
Multi-turn tool-use agents must reason, call tools, and adapt to observations across several interaction turns. Post-training such agents is challenging, as reinforcement learning often suffers from sparse rewards and weak credit assignment despite matching the prompt-only inference setting, while supervised fine-tunin...
Zhenbang Du, Jun Luo, Zhiwei Zheng et al.· 0 citations
Modern video diffusion models generate increasingly realistic and temporally coherent videos, motivating their use as candidate world simulators. Yet it remains unclear whether these models internally encode physical structure, or merely reproduce motion patterns seen during training. We study this question by probing...
Parsa Esmati, Somjit Nath, Katja Hofmann et al.· 0 citations
Reach audiences
Advertise in front of researchers, engineers, and readers.
Self on-policy distillation trains a student policy against a teacher derived from its own parameter history, yet the teacher's update schedule -- which governs the \emph{temporal coupling} between teacher and student -- has not been systematically studied as a stability variable. Through a controlled schedule sweep on...
Haowei Guo, Baolong Bi, Ruicheng Zhang et al.· 0 citations
Safe exploration remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), limiting the deployment of RL agents in the real world. We propose Sampling-Based Safe Reinforcement Learning (SBSRL), a model-based RL algorithm that maintains safety throughout the learning process by enforcing constraints jointly across...
Luca Vignola, Bruce D. Lee, Manish Prajapat et al.· 0 citations
Industrial machines are actuated systems, yet most open time-series corpora record sensor outcomes alone; the few that do log commanded signals expose them in vendor-specific forms that differ from machine to machine, so commanded intent and measured response cannot be compared across embodiments. We introduce FactoryN...
Jonas Petersen, Pratik Jawahar, Riccardo Maggioni et al.· 0 citations
Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) aligns language models using pairwise preference comparisons, offering a simple and effective alternative to Reinforcement Learning (RL) from human feedback. However, in many practical settings, training data consists of multiple rollouts per prompt, inducing rich preference structu...
Ning Liu, Chuanneng Sun, Kristina Klinkner et al.· 0 citations
Spiking neural networks (SNNs) have been proposed as energy-efficient alternatives to deep neural networks. Their training is non-convex and involves a non-differentiable spike function, so existing methods offer no guarantee of reaching a global optimum. We address this issue by formulating SNN optimization as an equi...
Himanshu Udupi, Calvin Ang, Sungyoon Kim et al.· 0 citations
We study the convergence dynamics of Gradient Descent (GD) in a minimal binary classification setting, consisting of a two-neuron ReLU network and two training instances. We prove that even under these strong simplifying assumptions, while GD successfully converges to an optimal robustness margin, effectively maximizin...
Guy Smorodinsky, Sveta Gimpleson, Itay Safran· 0 citations
We investigate the theoretical aspects of offline reinforcement learning (RL) under general function approximation. While prior works (e.g., Xie et al., 2021) have established the theoretical foundations of learning a good policy from offline data via pessimism, existing algorithms that are computationally tractable (o...
Professor Paris Smaragdis develops computers with superhuman hearing for applications like speech recognition, music understanding, and environmental monitoring.
MIT News · Artificial Intelligence· news.mit.eduOct 27, 2026
Prabha Jha used her experience with MIT Open Learning’s program for senior executives to develop AI solutions for her employer, Verizon, and to write a book.
Assistant Professor Benjamin Lindquist studies how engineers deliberately injected randomness into early AI, giving rise to deep-learning models that sometimes hallucinate.