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11 papers · 1 filter

cs.LG2026

Understanding and Exploiting Anisotropy in Post-Training

Samyak Jha, Harshvardhan Saini, Yizhen Liao +2

LLM post-training combines supervised fine-tuning (SFT), a mode-covering forward-KL objective, with reinforcement learning (RL), a mode-seeking reverse-KL objective. Frequency-weig…

cs.CL2026

Masking Frequent Tokens Sharpens Direct Preference Optimization

Harshvardhan Saini, Samyak Jha, Yiming Tang +1

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) aligns language models by optimizing over sequence-level sums of token-wise implicit reward differences. However, we identify a pervasive patho…

cs.LG2026

Capsule Lens: Locating and Tracking Concept Geometry in Model Representations

Yiming Tang, Harshvardhan Saini, Samyak Jha +3

Understanding how concepts are encoded in the internal representations of machine learning models is a central problem in mechanistic interpretability, essential both for the scien…

cs.CV2026

Emergent Hierarchical Monosemantic Neurons from the Group-Contrastive Forward-Forward Algorithm

Yiming Tang, Qinglin Qi, Zhaoqian Yao +2

Mechanistic interpretability has made significant strides in understanding neural network representations, with sparse dictionary learning (SDL) methods, most prominently sparse au…

cs.CV2026

When Language Overwrites Vision: Over-Alignment and Geometric Debiasing in Vision-Language Models

Harshvardhan Saini, Samyak Jha, Yiming Tang +1

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) increasingly power high-stakes applications, from medical imaging to autonomous systems, yet they routinely hallucinate, confidently describing conten…

cs.LG2026

JEDI: Joint Embedding Diffusion World Model for Online Model-Based Reinforcement Learning

Jing Yu Lim, Rushi Shah, Zarif Ikram +4

Diffusion world models have recently become competitive for online model-based reinforcement learning, but current approaches expose a tension: pixel diffusion is effective but com…

cs.DC2026

AB-Sparse: Sparse Attention with Adaptive Block Size for Accurate and Efficient Long-Context Inference

Di Liu, Ruitian Wang, Chen Chen +6

As large language models scale to longer contexts, loading the growing KV cache during attention computation becomes a critical bottleneck. Previous work has shown that attention c…

cs.AI2026

Absurd World: A Simple Yet Powerful Method to Absurdify the Real-world for Probing LLM Reasoning Capabilities

Ryan Albright, Golam Md Muktadir, Zarif Ikram +3

While extremely powerful and versatile at various tasks, the thinking capabilities of large language models (LLMs) are often put under scrutiny as they sometimes fail to solve prob…

cs.LG2026

Mitigating Premature Discretization with Progressive Quantization for Robust Vector Tokenization

Wenhao Zhao, Qiran Zou, Zhouhan Lin +1

Vector Quantization (VQ) has become the cornerstone of tokenization for many multimodal Large Language Models and diffusion synthesis. However, existing VQ paradigms suffer from a…

cs.CL2026

VQKV: High-Fidelity and High-Ratio Cache Compression via Vector-Quantization

Yixuan Wang, Qingyu Shi, Jiayu Zhou +3

The growing context length of Large Language Models (LLMs) enlarges the Key-Value (KV) cache, limiting deployment in resource-limited environments. Prior training-free approaches f…

cs.LG2026

Bridging Mechanistic Interpretability and Prompt Engineering with Gradient Ascent for Interpretable Persona Control

Harshvardhan Saini, Yiming Tang, Dianbo Liu

Controlling emergent behavioral personas (e.g., sycophancy, hallucination) in Large Language Models (LLMs) is critical for AI safety, yet remains a persistent challenge. Existing s…