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cs.LG2026

Activation-Keyed Momentum: An Anisotropic Momentum Update via the Delta Rule

Euijin Hong, Guannan Qu

Most modern optimizers form their momentum as an exponential moving average (EMA) of past gradients, forgetting every direction at one fixed rate. However, the inputs a deep networ…

cs.LG2026

Emergent and Subliminal Misalignment Through the Lens of Data-Mediated Transfer

Baris Askin, Muhammed Ustaomeroglu, Anupam Nayak +3

Fine-tuning LLMs on narrow harmful datasets can induce Emergent Misalignment (EM), where models exhibit misaligned behavior far beyond the fine-tuning distribution. We argue that e…

cs.LG2026

Revisiting Policy Gradients for Restricted Policy Classes: Escaping Myopic Local Optima with -step Policy Gradients

Alex DeWeese, Guannan Qu

This work revisits standard policy gradient methods used on restricted policy classes, which are known to get stuck in suboptimal critical points. We identify an important cause fo…

cs.LG2026

Understanding, Predicting, and Steering LLM Behavior via Representational Effective Theory

Muhammed Ustaomeroglu, Guannan Qu

Large language models (LLMs) assist with writing, teaching, programming and decision-making, yet the computations underlying their behaviour remain largely opaque. Full access to e…

cs.LG2026

BLOCK-EM: Preventing Emergent Misalignment via Latent Blocking

Muhammed Ustaomeroglu, Guannan Qu

Emergent misalignment can arise when a language model is fine-tuned on a narrowly scoped supervised objective: the model learns the target behavior, yet also develops undesirable o…

cs.LG2025

Transformer-Based Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Networked Systems with Long-Range Interactions

Vidur Sinha, Muhammed Ustaomeroglu, Guannan Qu

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has shown promise for large-scale network control, yet existing methods face two major limitations. First, they typically rely on an expon…

cs.LG2025

A Theoretical Study of (Hyper) Self-Attention through the Lens of Interactions: Representation, Training, Generalization

Muhammed Ustaomeroglu, Guannan Qu

Self-attention has emerged as a core component of modern neural architectures, yet its theoretical underpinnings remain elusive. In this paper, we study self-attention through the…