Fine-tuning and adaptation

LoRA, PEFT, instruction tuning and domain adaptation — adapting a pretrained model without paying to train one.

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arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 30

Selecting What Matters: Semantic Compression-Guided Selective Pooling for Long-Context Embeddings

The paper introduces SCSP, a training‑free framework that improves long‑context embeddings by selectively pooling informative tokens. SCSP partitions documents into sentence‑aware chunks, adds a semantic compression prompt to each chunk, and uses prompt‑isolated attention masks to estimate token importance. The selected tokens’ intermediate‑layer representations are aggregated to form the final embedding, yielding consistent performance gains across zero‑shot and fine‑tuned models on long‑context benchmarks.

By Zifeng Cheng, Jie Zheng, Zhiwei Jiang, Shuwen Wang, Fei Shen, Shiping Ge, Qing Gu
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 30

LongLive-Plug: Once-for-All Distillation for Video Generation

LongLive‑Plug is a once‑for‑all distillation framework that learns reusable LoRA adapters on a base video diffusion model, enabling training‑free, plug‑and‑play deployment to a wide range of downstream models. These adapters provide single‑pass classifier‑free guidance, few‑step sampling, and long‑context error correction for autoregressive generation, and remain effective even when downstream models add conditioning branches or expand output channels. The authors demonstrate that the approach works on 54 downstream models across three backbone families and eight task categories, including world modeling, robotics, editing, and multimodal generation.

By Shuai Yang, Luozhou Wang, Wei Huang, ZhiFei Chen, Bohan Zhang, Xiao Fu, Qianli Ma, Chen-Hsuan Lin, Weian Mao, Bryan Chu, Song Han, Yukang Chen
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 30

Adversarial Training for Pixel Diffusion

Pixel diffusion models generate RGB images directly but tend to miss fine‑scale natural‑image statistics. The authors introduce an adversarial post‑training step that adds an adversarial loss to the model’s output at non‑high‑noise timesteps, without changing the architecture or sampling procedure. This approach improves distribution fidelity, coverage, prompt alignment, and perceptual quality across two pixel backbones, and restores missing high‑frequency spectral power while avoiding memorization or mode dropping.

By Xin Lin, Zhifei Zhang, Yuqian Zhou, Haitian Zheng, Zhe Lin, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Truong Nguyen
arXiv AI
Sep 30

FLOORA: A Human-Aligned Domain-Specific Language Model for Architectural Design

arXiv:2609.36064v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Foundation models are powerful generators, but many engineering domains require structured representations that general-purpose systems handle poorly...

By Sahand Rezaei-Shoshtari, Patryk Wozniczka, Shu Ishida, Gregg Streuber, Farnoosh Javadi, Jeffrey Landes, Angela Ju, Muhammad Azam, Bryan Lim, Johan Luttun, Indrajeet Haldar, Jonathan Shaw, Beatriz Guerra, Ivan Sosnovik, James Stoddart, Robert Giaquinto, Adam Gaier
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 30

Speed in the Blind Spot: An Interpretability Analysis of Dynamic Perception in VLMs for Autonomous Driving

Vision‑Language Models (VLMs) used in autonomous driving are evaluated on their ability to understand velocity through three tasks: surrounding‑agent speed, current ego speed, and short‑horizon future ego‑speed. Experiments on nuScenes show that while current ego speed can be accessed internally, verbal outputs are poor and surrounding‑agent speed is weakly encoded; temporal cues and frame order are largely ignored. Specialized driving models (Alpamayo‑1.5) improve latent speed representations but still leave gaps between internal knowledge and verbal readout, indicating that good planning outputs do not guarantee reliable dynamic state recovery.

By Katharina Winter, Stefan Englmeier, Fabian B. Flohr
arXiv AI
Sep 30

Benchmarking Vision-Language Models on Synapse Detection and Proofreading in Connectomics

The paper benchmarks vision‑language models (VLMs) on two key tasks in connectomics: synapse detection (presence and polarity) and proofreading (split and merge errors). It evaluates 21 models (19 open, 2 closed) under zero‑shot, few‑shot, and LoRA fine‑tuning, comparing them to specialist models on datasets built from public resources. While most VLMs perform at chance in zero‑shot settings, LoRA fine‑tuning with a few thousand labels brings open models to specialist performance, and adapted VLMs outperform specialists on unseen species for merge‑error detection.

By Yicong Li, Junjie Wang, Leander Lauenburg, Ella Hugie, Alexandra Irger, Wanhua Li, Donglai Wei, Hanspeter Pfister
arXiv AI
Sep 30

Towards an AI Software Factory for Data Systems

The paper describes progress toward an AI Software Factory that accelerates every stage of the software development lifecycle—Targeting, Coding, Reviewing, and Ops—by generating a metadata exhaust for self‑improvement. It focuses on data systems and evolutionary coding tasks, reporting scaled deployments at Microsoft that achieved three‑fold engineering efficiency over agentic coding and up to 22‑fold token efficiency. The authors also outline several open challenges for further development.

By Anna Pavlenko, Bogdan Crivat, Brandon Haynes, Carlo Curino, Fotis Psallidas, Jaro Slawinski, Johannes Freischuetz, Laura Pereira Sanchez, Markus Weimer, Mathieu Demarne, Matthias Jasny, Mauktik Gandhi, Max Bovykin, Mirco Milletari, Purbasha Ghosh, Qiushi Bai, Raghu Ramakrishnan, Rahul Pandita, Sergiy Matusevich, Shivaram Venkataraman, Subru Krishnan, Md. Tareq Mahmood, Tiemo Bang, Venkatesh Emani, Xuan Zhao, Yiwen Zhu
arXiv AI
Sep 30

HyperZip: Efficient Data Compression through Personalized Diffusion LLMs with Hypernetworks

HyperZip introduces an efficient data compression framework that uses diffusion-based large language models (dLLMs) with Multi-Token Prediction to speed up compression. It addresses the trade‑off between throughput and compression rate by employing a hypernetwork that generates data‑specific updates from a context representation, allowing the dLLM to adapt to target data without costly fine‑tuning. Experiments show HyperZip outperforms state‑of‑the‑art baselines in both compression rate and speed.

By Thai Nguyen, Khang Tran, NhatHai Phan
arXiv AI
Sep 30

Multi-Channel Mitigation of Source-Trust Shortcuts in Fact-Checking RL Agents

The paper introduces TrustSwap, a counterfactual test that swaps or removes source reliability labels while keeping evidence text constant, to evaluate how retrieval‑augmented fact‑checking models respond across verdict, confidence, and search decisions. Experiments on untrained and RL‑trained models show that confidence and search largely follow labels, yet label changes can flip a significant portion of verdicts, especially in larger models. The authors propose trust‑swap augmentation (TSA) to mitigate this shortcut, demonstrating reduced verdict flip rates and maintained accuracy in several settings, though its effectiveness diminishes at larger model scales.

By Jianchang Su, Yiwei Yang, Wei Zhang
arXiv AI
Sep 30

VISTA: Value-Informed Event Appraisal for Multimodal Emotion Conflict

VISTA (Value-Informed Semantic Trust Arbitration) is a learned seven-field appraisal interface that conditions modality arbitration on concerns, event relations, and expression conditions while retaining a joint-evidence residual. It uses a log-odds decomposition to separate emotion expectation from cue diagnosticity, allowing appraisal to change how evidence is interpreted. With a shared Qwen2.5-Omni-7B backbone, VISTA achieves 64.5% conflict accuracy on CA-MER, improving on modality gating by 2.5 percentage points on conflict and 0.2 on consistency, and a frozen-backbone probe reaches 0.600 macro CCC for appraisal readout versus 0.505 for emotion-only fine-tuning.

By Jiale Dai, Liuxian Ma, Xiaoke Niu, Wenjing Zhang, Huiying Zhao, Zhaoxiang Liu, Shiguo Lian, Guojie Song
arXiv AI
Sep 30

Seek Before You Move: Evidence Seeking for Progress Grounding in Vision-Language Navigation

SeekVLN is a new framework for Vision‑Language Navigation that addresses the problem of agents acting on insufficient evidence, termed Progress Myopia. It combines semantic progress reasoning with active evidence seeking, trained first with Future‑guided Reverse Generation to augment expert trajectories, and then refined via Counterfactual Contrastive Policy Optimization to reward beneficial seeking actions. Experiments on simulated benchmarks show significant gains, improving success rates by 12.7% on R2R‑CE and 7.5% on RxR‑CE, and real‑world tests demonstrate human‑like evidence‑seeking behavior.

By Zhimin Wang, Meiyuan Zhu, Duo Wu, Linjia Kang, Yajun Wang, Yuan Ni, Xiaohang Wang, Tianlu Pan, Jingyan Jiang, Yaowei Wang, Zhi Wang
arXiv AI
Sep 30

SkillGym: Training Skill-Use Agents with Automatic Verifiable Environment Generation

SkillGym is an automatic pipeline that generates verifiable environments for training skill-use agents. It crawls internet skills, filters for reproducible workflows, and uses a builder‑reviewer process to create difficulty‑controlled tasks with reference solutions and verifiers. The system builds 6.8k environments, collects 19k successful trajectories, and fine‑tunes LLMs from 2B to 122B parameters, improving performance and skill invocation rates.

By Renxi Wang, Mingshan Hee, Fajri Koto, Timothy Baldwin, Haonan Li
arXiv AI
Sep 30

FOCUS: Training-Free Decision-Preserving Context Compression for LLM Agents

The paper introduces FOCUS, a training‑free framework that compresses the interaction history of large language model agents by preserving only the past interactions that causally influence future decisions. Unlike prior methods that learn compression policies offline, FOCUS operates entirely at test time, requiring no additional data collection or fine‑tuning and can be applied to any closed‑API model. Experiments on a variety of agentic benchmarks show that FOCUS reduces peak context length by up to 48% and dependency by 73%, while improving task success by up to 8.9 percentage points.

By Shantanu Dixit, Anson Bastos, Xuchao Zhang, Chetan Bansal, Saravan Rajmohan