arXiv AI
Taskonomy: Disentangling Task Transfer Learning
Read the original on arXiv AI →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
Related stories
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 25
Transformers as Cross-Task Learners: Shared Structure Drives Sample Efficiency in In-Context Learning
Transformers can learn broad families of tasks during pretraining and adapt to unseen tasks from a short prompt, but a rigorous understanding of this capability is limited. This paper studies how shared cross‑task structure influences the sample complexity of in‑context learning (ICL) by characterizing task‑space complexity through covering numbers, yielding a set of anchor functions that localize unseen tasks and predict responses. The authors construct a Transformer with Softmax attention to approximate this procedure and derive an error bound that separates the effects of pretraining tasks and prompt length, showing that once enough tasks are available the dependence on prompt length becomes dimension‑free.
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 9
WOVEN: Weaving Visual World Modeling into Multimodal LLMs
WOVEN is a new training source and benchmark for visual transition reasoning, comprising 36,076 examples across 20 scenes, 5 actions, and 8 reasoning types. The study shows that current multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have a systematic deficit in spatial, embodied, physical, and temporal reasoning, and that training on WOVEN improves performance on 22 of 26 external benchmarks by up to 27.3 percentage points. The authors also provide a training recipe that prioritizes reasoning operations and larger visual changes for robust visual world modeling.
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2
CORE-MTL: Rethinking Gradient Balancing via Causal Orthogonal Representations
arXiv:2606. 02221v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-task learning (MTL) aims to construct a joint model for multiple tasks by sharing a common representation across domains.
arXiv AI
Sep 28
Beyond Bag-of-Words: Diagnosing Compositional Binding Failures in Vision-Language Models
The paper introduces Auto-Comp, a fully automated, concept-driven pipeline that generates photorealistic compositional benchmarks for vision‑language models. Auto‑Comp creates paired Minimal and Contextual samples for each concept, enabling isolation of core binding abilities from visio‑linguistic complexity. Evaluations across 25 models reveal consistent failures in attribute and relational binding, with context helping relational tasks but hindering attribute tasks due to visual clutter.
arXiv AI
Aug 25
TASSO: TAsk-Specific Subspace Optimization for Continual Learning of Vision-Language Models
arXiv:2608.21487v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) exhibit strong zero-shot capabilities, making them an attractive solution for continual learning across diverse tasks....
arXiv AI
Sep 4
Making Every Tool Call Count: Necessary Tool-Evidence Path Rewards for Agentic Vision-Language Models
The paper introduces the Necessary Tool‑Evidence Path (NTEP) annotation scheme and its associated reward mechanism (NTEP‑R) to better supervise vision‑language models that use external tools. By explicitly specifying which evidence is needed and penalizing redundant tool calls, the authors train an 8B‑parameter model that shows improved accuracy and tool‑use efficiency across seven image‑grounded benchmarks. The approach demonstrates that fine‑grained supervision of tool‑evidence paths is essential for robust agentic VLM performance.