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TreeGPT: A Novel Hybrid Architecture for Abstract Syntax Tree Processing with Global Parent-Child Aggregation

arXiv:2509.05550v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce TreeGPT, a novel neural architecture that combines transformer-based attention mechanisms with global parent-child aggregation for processing Abstract Syntax Trees (ASTs) in neural program synthesis tasks. Unlike traditional approaches that rely solely on sequential processing or graph neural networks, TreeGPT employs a hybrid design that leverages both self-attention for capturing local dependencies and a specialized Tree Feed-Forward Network (TreeFFN) for modeling hierarchical tree structures through iterative message passing. The core innovation lies in our Global Parent-Child Aggregation mechanism, formalized as: $$h_i^{(t+1)} = sigma Big( h_i^{(0)} + W_{pc} sum_{(p,c) in E_i} f(h_p^{(t)}, h_c^{(t)}) + b Big)$$ where $h_i^{(t)}$ represents the hidden state of node $i$ at iteration $t$, $E_i$ denotes all parent-child edges involving node $i$, and $f(h_p, h_c)$ is an edge aggregation function. This formulation enables each node to progressively aggregate information from the entire tree structure through $T$ iterations. Our architecture integrates optional enhancements including gated aggregation with learnable edge weights, residual connections for gradient stability, and bidirectional propagation for capturing both bottom-up and top-down dependencies. We evaluate TreeGPT on the ARC Prize 2025 dataset, a challenging visual reasoning benchmark requiring abstract pattern recognition and rule inference. Experimental results demonstrate that TreeGPT achieves 96% accuracy, significantly outperforming transformer baselines (1.3%), large-scale models like Grok-4 (15.9%), and specialized program synthesis methods like SOAR (52%) while using only 1.5M parameters. Our comprehensive ablation study reveals that edge projection is the most critical component, with the combination of edge projection and gating achieving optimal performance.

Neural Port-Hamiltonian Differential Algebraic Equations for Compositional Learning of Electrical Networks

arXiv:2412.11215v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We develop compositional learning algorithms for coupled dynamical systems, with a particular focus on electrical networks. While deep learning has proven effective at modeling complex relationships from data, compositional couplings between system components typically introduce algebraic constraints on state variables, posing challenges to many existing data-driven approaches to modeling dynamical systems. Towards developing deep learning models for constrained dynamical systems, we introduce neural port-Hamiltonian differential algebraic equations (N-PHDAEs), which use neural networks to parameterize unknown terms in both the differential and algebraic components of a port-Hamiltonian DAE. To train these models, we propose an algorithm that uses automatic differentiation to perform index reduction, automatically transforming the neural DAE into an equivalent system of neural ordinary differential equations (N-ODEs), for which established model inference and backpropagation methods exist. Experiments simulating the dynamics of nonlinear circuits exemplify the benefits of our approach: the proposed N-PHDAE model achieves an order of magnitude improvement in prediction accuracy and constraint satisfaction when compared to a baseline N-ODE over long prediction time horizons. We also validate the compositional capabilities of our approach through experiments on a simulated DC microgrid: we train individual N-PHDAE models for separate grid components, before coupling them to accurately predict the behavior of larger-scale networks.

OccVLA: Vision-Language-Action Model with Implicit 3D Occupancy Supervision

arXiv:2509.05578v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong vision-language reasoning abilities but still lack robust 3D spatial understanding, which is critical for autonomous driving. This limitation stems from two key challenges: (1) the difficulty of constructing accessible yet effective 3D representations without expensive manual annotations, and (2) the loss of fine-grained spatial details in VLMs due to the absence of large-scale 3D vision-language pretraining. To address these challenges, we propose OccVLA, a novel framework that integrates 3D occupancy representations into a unified multimodal reasoning process. Unlike prior approaches that rely on explicit 3D inputs, OccVLA treats dense 3D occupancy as both a predictive output and a supervisory signal, enabling the model to learn fine-grained spatial structures directly from 2D visual inputs. The occupancy predictions are regarded as implicit reasoning processes and can be skipped during inference without performance degradation, thereby adding no extra computational overhead. OccVLA achieves state-of-the-art results on the nuScenes benchmark for trajectory planning and demonstrates superior performance on 3D visual question-answering tasks, offering a scalable, interpretable, and fully vision-based solution for autonomous driving.

Efficient $Q$-Learning and Actor-Critic Methods for Robust Average Reward Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2506.07040v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present a non-asymptotic convergence analysis of $Q$-learning and actor-critic algorithms for robust average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) under contamination, total-variation (TV) distance, and Wasserstein uncertainty sets. A key ingredient of our analysis is showing that the optimal robust $Q$ operator is a strict contraction with respect to a carefully designed semi-norm (with constant functions quotiented out). This property enables a stochastic approximation update that learns the optimal robust $Q$-function using $tilde{mathcal{O}}(epsilon^{-2})$ samples. We also provide an efficient routine for robust $Q$-function estimation, which in turn facilitates robust critic estimation. Building on this, we introduce an actor-critic algorithm that learns an $epsilon$-optimal robust policy within $tilde{mathcal{O}}(epsilon^{-2})$ samples. We provide numerical simulations to evaluate the performance of our algorithms.

MSRFormer: Road Network Representation Learning using Multi-scale Feature Fusion of Heterogeneous Spatial Interactions

arXiv:2509.05685v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transforming road network data into vector representations using deep learning has proven effective for road network analysis. However, urban road networks' heterogeneous and hierarchical nature poses challenges for accurate representation learning. Graph neural networks, which aggregate features from neighboring nodes, often struggle due to their homogeneity assumption and focus on a single structural scale. To address these issues, this paper presents MSRFormer, a novel road network representation learning framework that integrates multi-scale spatial interactions by addressing their flow heterogeneity and long-distance dependencies. It uses spatial flow convolution to extract small-scale features from large trajectory datasets, and identifies scale-dependent spatial interaction regions to capture the spatial structure of road networks and flow heterogeneity. By employing a graph transformer, MSRFormer effectively captures complex spatial dependencies across multiple scales. The spatial interaction features are fused using residual connections, which are fed to a contrastive learning algorithm to derive the final road network representation. Validation on two real-world datasets demonstrates that MSRFormer outperforms baseline methods in two road network analysis tasks. The performance gains of MSRFormer suggest the traffic-related task benefits more from incorporating trajectory data, also resulting in greater improvements in complex road network structures with up to 16% improvements compared to the most competitive baseline method. This research provides a practical framework for developing task-agnostic road network representation models and highlights distinct association patterns of the interplay between scale effects and flow heterogeneity of spatial interactions.

CARFT: Boosting LLM Reasoning via Contrastive Learning with Annotated Chain-of-Thought-based Reinforced Fine-Tuning

arXiv:2508.15868v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reasoning capability plays a significantly critical role in the the broad applications of Large Language Models (LLMs). To enhance the reasoning performance of LLMs, diverse Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based fine-tuning approaches have been proposed to address the limited generalization capability of LLMs trained solely via Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). Despite their effectiveness, two major limitations hinder the advancement of LLMs. First, vanilla RL-based approaches ignore annotated Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and incorporate unstable reasoning path sampling, which typically results in model collapse, unstable training process, and suboptimal performance. Second, existing SFT approaches generally overemphasize the annotated CoT, potentially leading to performance degradation due to insufficient exploitation of potential CoT. In this paper, we propose a Contrastive learning with annotated CoT-based Reinforced Fine-Tuning approach, i.e., TheName{}, to enhance the reasoning performance of LLMs while addressing the aforementioned limitations. Specifically, we propose learning a representation for each CoT. Based on this representation, we design novel contrastive signals to guide the fine-tuning process. Our approach not only fully exploits the available annotated CoT but also stabilizes the fine-tuning procedure by incorporating an additional unsupervised learning signal. We conduct comprehensive experiments and in-depth analysis with three baseline approaches, two foundation models, and two datasets to demonstrate significant advantages of TheName{} in terms of robustness, performance (up to 10.15%), and efficiency (up to 30.62%). Code is available at https://github.com/WNQzhu/CARFT.

Towards Meta-Cognitive Knowledge Editing for Multimodal LLMs

arXiv:2509.05714v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge editing enables multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to efficiently update outdated or incorrect information. However, existing benchmarks primarily emphasize cognitive-level modifications while lacking a focus on deeper meta-cognitive processes. To bridge this gap, we introduce CogEdit, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate MLLMs' meta-cognitive knowledge editing abilities across three levels: (1) Counterfactual-Driven Editing, assessing self-awareness of knowledge correctness changes; (2) Boundary Constraint Editing, ensuring appropriate generalization without unintended interference; and (3) Noise-Robust Editing, promoting reflective evaluation of uncertain information. To advance meta-cognitive editing, we propose MIND (Meta-cognitive INtegrated Dynamic Knowledge Editing), a framework that constructs a meta-knowledge memory for self-awareness, employs game-theoretic interactions to monitor knowledge activation, and incorporates label refinement for noise-robust updates. Extensive experiments show that MIND significantly outperforms existing cognitive editing approaches, achieving strong performance on both traditional and meta-cognitive knowledge editing benchmarks.

QualityFM: a Multimodal Physiological Signal Foundation Model with Self-Distillation for Signal Quality Challenges in Critically Ill Patients

arXiv:2509.06516v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Photoplethysmogram (PPG) and electrocardiogram (ECG) are commonly recorded in intesive care unit (ICU) and operating room (OR). However, the high incidence of poor, incomplete, and inconsistent signal quality, can lead to false alarms or diagnostic inaccuracies. The methods explored so far suffer from limited generalizability, reliance on extensive labeled data, and poor cross-task transferability. To overcome these challenges, we introduce QualityFM, a novel multimodal foundation model for these physiological signals, designed to acquire a general-purpose understanding of signal quality. Our model is pre-trained on an large-scale dataset comprising over 21 million 30-second waveforms and 179,757 hours of data. Our approach involves a dual-track architecture that processes paired physiological signals of differing quality, leveraging a self-distillation strategy where an encoder for high-quality signals is used to guide the training of an encoder for low-quality signals. To efficiently handle long sequential signals and capture essential local quasi-periodic patterns, we integrate a windowed sparse attention mechanism within our Transformer-based model. Furthermore, a composite loss function, which combines direct distillation loss on encoder outputs with indirect reconstruction loss based on power and phase spectra, ensures the preservation of frequency-domain characteristics of the signals. We pre-train three models with varying parameter counts (9.6 M to 319 M) and demonstrate their efficacy and practical value through transfer learning on three distinct clinical tasks: false alarm of ventricular tachycardia detection, the identification of atrial fibrillation and the estimation of arterial blood pressure (ABP) from PPG and ECG signals.

NoisyNN: Exploring the Impact of Information Entropy Change in Learning Systems

arXiv:2309.10625v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate the impact of entropy change in deep learning systems by noise injection at different levels, including the embedding space and the image. The series of models that employ our methodology are collectively known as Noisy Neural Networks (NoisyNN), with examples such as NoisyViT and NoisyCNN. Noise is conventionally viewed as a harmful perturbation in various deep learning architectures, such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and vision transformers (ViTs), as well as different learning tasks like image classification and transfer learning. However, this work shows noise can be an effective way to change the entropy of the learning system. We demonstrate that specific noise can boost the performance of various deep models under certain conditions. We theoretically prove the enhancement gained from positive noise by reducing the task complexity defined by information entropy and experimentally show the significant performance gain in large image datasets, such as the ImageNet. Herein, we use the information entropy to define the complexity of the task. We categorize the noise into two types, positive noise (PN) and harmful noise (HN), based on whether the noise can help reduce the task complexity. Extensive experiments of CNNs and ViTs have shown performance improvements by proactively injecting positive noise, where we achieved an unprecedented top 1 accuracy of 95$%$ on ImageNet. Both theoretical analysis and empirical evidence have confirmed that the presence of positive noise, can benefit the learning process, while the traditionally perceived harmful noise indeed impairs deep learning models. The different roles of noise offer new explanations for deep models on specific tasks and provide a new paradigm for improving model performance. Moreover, it reminds us that we can influence the performance of learning systems via information entropy change.