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Oct 22

Listening Forward: Next Patch Embedding Prediction Enables Scalable Audio Learners

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has driven substantial progress in audio representation learning, though existing methods have increasingly relied on elaborate pre-training recipes to reach competitive performance. A markedly different pre-training philosophy underpins the most influential progress in language modeling and, more recently, in visual representation learning: rather than train encoders as static feature extractors, models are trained to predict the next element, a discrete token or a continuous embedding, from the preceding context. Autoregressive prediction thereby provides a unified pre-training interface that transfers across modalities, compelling the model to learn the underlying data distribution. We ask whether such a simple causal paradigm can yield strong audio learners, given that audio's temporal structure makes autoregressive prediction of patch embeddings a natural fit. We introduce NAPE (Next-Audio-Patch-Embedding prediction), a self-supervised framework in which a causal Transformer predicts each next patch embedding of a log-mel spectrogram from the previous ones, using causal masking and stop-gradient as its sole training signal. The design is intentionally minimalist, avoiding reconstruction decoders, acoustic tokenizers, student-teacher setups, and auxiliary regularization losses. Across six audio and speech benchmarks, NAPE achieves state-of-the-art fine-tuning performance on several tasks, scales consistently across encoder sizes, and yields strong linear-probing results. NAPE also produces structured attention patterns without explicit supervision.

Beyond Next-Token: Next-X Prediction for Autoregressive Visual Generation

Autoregressive (AR) modeling, known for its next-token prediction paradigm, underpins state-of-the-art language and visual generative models. Traditionally, a ``token'' is treated as the smallest prediction unit, often a discrete symbol in language or a quantized patch in vision. However, the optimal token definition for 2D image structures remains an open question. Moreover, AR models suffer from exposure bias, where teacher forcing during training leads to error accumulation at inference. In this paper, we propose xAR, a generalized AR framework that extends the notion of a token to an entity X, which can represent an individual patch token, a cell (a ktimes k grouping of neighboring patches), a subsample (a non-local grouping of distant patches), a scale (coarse-to-fine resolution), or even a whole image. Additionally, we reformulate discrete token classification as continuous entity regression, leveraging flow-matching methods at each AR step. This approach conditions training on noisy entities instead of ground truth tokens, leading to Noisy Context Learning, which effectively alleviates exposure bias. As a result, xAR offers two key advantages: (1) it enables flexible prediction units that capture different contextual granularity and spatial structures, and (2) it mitigates exposure bias by avoiding reliance on teacher forcing. On ImageNet-256 generation benchmark, our base model, xAR-B (172M), outperforms DiT-XL/SiT-XL (675M) while achieving 20times faster inference. Meanwhile, xAR-H sets a new state-of-the-art with an FID of 1.24, running 2.2times faster than the previous best-performing model without relying on vision foundation modules (\eg, DINOv2) or advanced guidance interval sampling.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 27, 2025 2

Cautious Next Token Prediction

Next token prediction paradigm has been prevailing for autoregressive models in the era of LLMs. The current default sampling choice for popular LLMs is temperature scaling together with nucleus sampling to balance diversity and coherence. Nevertheless, such approach leads to inferior performance in various NLP tasks when the model is not certain about testing questions. To this end, we propose a brand new training-free decoding strategy, dubbed as Cautious Next Token Prediction (CNTP). In the decoding process, if the model has comparatively high prediction entropy at a certain step, we sample multiple trials starting from the step independently and stop when encountering any punctuation. Then we select the trial with the lowest perplexity score viewed as the most probable and reliable trial path given the model's capacity. The trial number is negatively correlated with the prediction confidence, i.e., the less confident the model is, the more trials it should sample. This is consistent with human beings' behaviour: when feeling uncertain or unconfident, one tends to think more creatively, exploring multiple thinking paths, to cautiously select the path one feels most confident about. Extensive experiments on both LLMs and MLLMs show that our proposed CNTP approach outperforms existing standard decoding strategies consistently by a clear margin. Moreover, the integration of CNTP with self consistency can further improve over vanilla self consistency. We believe our proposed CNTP has the potential to become one of the default choices for LLM decoding. Code is available at https://github.com/wyzjack/CNTP.

  • 10 authors
·
Jul 3, 2025

Transformers Can Navigate Mazes With Multi-Step Prediction

Despite their remarkable success in language modeling, transformers trained to predict the next token in a sequence struggle with long-term planning. This limitation is particularly evident in tasks requiring foresight to plan multiple steps ahead such as maze navigation. The standard next single token prediction objective, however, offers no explicit mechanism to predict multiple steps ahead - or revisit the path taken so far. Consequently, in this work we study whether explicitly predicting multiple steps ahead (and backwards) can improve transformers' maze navigation. We train parameter-matched transformers from scratch, under identical settings, to navigate mazes of varying types and sizes with standard next token prediction and MLM-U, an objective explicitly predicting multiple steps ahead and backwards. We find that MLM-U considerably improves transformers' ability to navigate mazes compared to standard next token prediction across maze types and complexities. We also find MLM-U training is 4x more sample efficient and converges 2x faster in terms of GPU training hours relative to next token training. Finally, for more complex mazes we find MLM-U benefits from scaling to larger transformers. Remarkably, we find transformers trained with MLM-U outperform larger transformers trained with next token prediction using additional supervision from A* search traces. We hope these findings underscore the promise of learning objectives to advance transformers' capacity for long-term planning.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 6, 2024

RisingBALLER: A player is a token, a match is a sentence, A path towards a foundational model for football players data analytics

In this paper, I introduce RisingBALLER, the first publicly available approach that leverages a transformer model trained on football match data to learn match-specific player representations. Drawing inspiration from advances in language modeling, RisingBALLER treats each football match as a unique sequence in which players serve as tokens, with their embeddings shaped by the specific context of the match. Through the use of masked player prediction (MPP) as a pre-training task, RisingBALLER learns foundational features for football player representations, similar to how language models learn semantic features for text representations. As a downstream task, I introduce next match statistics prediction (NMSP) to showcase the effectiveness of the learned player embeddings. The NMSP model surpasses a strong baseline commonly used for performance forecasting within the community. Furthermore, I conduct an in-depth analysis to demonstrate how the learned embeddings by RisingBALLER can be used in various football analytics tasks, such as producing meaningful positional features that capture the essence and variety of player roles beyond rigid x,y coordinates, team cohesion estimation, and similar player retrieval for more effective data-driven scouting. More than a simple machine learning model, RisingBALLER is a comprehensive framework designed to transform football data analytics by learning high-level foundational features for players, taking into account the context of each match. It offers a deeper understanding of football players beyond individual statistics.

  • 1 authors
·
Oct 1, 2024

TRIP: Temporal Residual Learning with Image Noise Prior for Image-to-Video Diffusion Models

Recent advances in text-to-video generation have demonstrated the utility of powerful diffusion models. Nevertheless, the problem is not trivial when shaping diffusion models to animate static image (i.e., image-to-video generation). The difficulty originates from the aspect that the diffusion process of subsequent animated frames should not only preserve the faithful alignment with the given image but also pursue temporal coherence among adjacent frames. To alleviate this, we present TRIP, a new recipe of image-to-video diffusion paradigm that pivots on image noise prior derived from static image to jointly trigger inter-frame relational reasoning and ease the coherent temporal modeling via temporal residual learning. Technically, the image noise prior is first attained through one-step backward diffusion process based on both static image and noised video latent codes. Next, TRIP executes a residual-like dual-path scheme for noise prediction: 1) a shortcut path that directly takes image noise prior as the reference noise of each frame to amplify the alignment between the first frame and subsequent frames; 2) a residual path that employs 3D-UNet over noised video and static image latent codes to enable inter-frame relational reasoning, thereby easing the learning of the residual noise for each frame. Furthermore, both reference and residual noise of each frame are dynamically merged via attention mechanism for final video generation. Extensive experiments on WebVid-10M, DTDB and MSR-VTT datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our TRIP for image-to-video generation. Please see our project page at https://trip-i2v.github.io/TRIP/.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 25, 2024 1

Agentic World Modeling: Foundations, Capabilities, Laws, and Beyond

As AI systems move from generating text to accomplishing goals through sustained interaction, the ability to model environment dynamics becomes a central bottleneck. Agents that manipulate objects, navigate software, coordinate with others, or design experiments require predictive environment models, yet the term world model carries different meanings across research communities. We introduce a "levels x laws" taxonomy organized along two axes. The first defines three capability levels: L1 Predictor, which learns one-step local transition operators; L2 Simulator, which composes them into multi-step, action-conditioned rollouts that respect domain laws; and L3 Evolver, which autonomously revises its own model when predictions fail against new evidence. The second identifies four governing-law regimes: physical, digital, social, and scientific. These regimes determine what constraints a world model must satisfy and where it is most likely to fail. Using this framework, we synthesize over 400 works and summarize more than 100 representative systems spanning model-based reinforcement learning, video generation, web and GUI agents, multi-agent social simulation, and AI-driven scientific discovery. We analyze methods, failure modes, and evaluation practices across level-regime pairs, propose decision-centric evaluation principles and a minimal reproducible evaluation package, and outline architectural guidance, open problems, and governance challenges. The resulting roadmap connects previously isolated communities and charts a path from passive next-step prediction toward world models that can simulate, and ultimately reshape, the environments in which agents operate.

  • 42 authors
·
Apr 23 5

Cambrian-S: Towards Spatial Supersensing in Video

We argue that progress in true multimodal intelligence calls for a shift from reactive, task-driven systems and brute-force long context towards a broader paradigm of supersensing. We frame spatial supersensing as four stages beyond linguistic-only understanding: semantic perception (naming what is seen), streaming event cognition (maintaining memory across continuous experiences), implicit 3D spatial cognition (inferring the world behind pixels), and predictive world modeling (creating internal models that filter and organize information). Current benchmarks largely test only the early stages, offering narrow coverage of spatial cognition and rarely challenging models in ways that require true world modeling. To drive progress in spatial supersensing, we present VSI-SUPER, a two-part benchmark: VSR (long-horizon visual spatial recall) and VSC (continual visual spatial counting). These tasks require arbitrarily long video inputs yet are resistant to brute-force context expansion. We then test data scaling limits by curating VSI-590K and training Cambrian-S, achieving +30% absolute improvement on VSI-Bench without sacrificing general capabilities. Yet performance on VSI-SUPER remains limited, indicating that scale alone is insufficient for spatial supersensing. We propose predictive sensing as a path forward, presenting a proof-of-concept in which a self-supervised next-latent-frame predictor leverages surprise (prediction error) to drive memory and event segmentation. On VSI-SUPER, this approach substantially outperforms leading proprietary baselines, showing that spatial supersensing requires models that not only see but also anticipate, select, and organize experience.

  • 15 authors
·
Nov 6, 2025 5

Bottleneck Tokens for Unified Multimodal Retrieval

Adapting decoder-only multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for unified multimodal retrieval faces two structural gaps. First, existing methods rely on implicit pooling, which overloads the hidden state of a standard vocabulary token (e.g., <EOS>) as the sequence-level representation, a mechanism never designed for information aggregation. Second, contrastive fine-tuning specifies what the embedding should match but provides no token-level guidance on how information should be compressed into it. We address both gaps with two complementary components. Architecturally, we introduce Bottleneck Tokens (BToks), a small set of learnable tokens that serve as a fixed-capacity explicit pooling mechanism. For training, we propose Generative Information Condensation: a next-token prediction objective coupled with a Condensation Mask that severs the direct attention path from target tokens to query tokens. All predictive signals are thereby forced through the BToks, converting the generative loss into dense, token-level supervision for semantic compression. At inference time, only the input and BToks are processed in a single forward pass with negligible overhead over conventional last-token pooling. On MMEB-V2 (78 datasets, 3 modalities, 9 meta-tasks), our approach achieves state-of-the-art among 2B-scale methods under comparable data conditions, attaining an Overall score of 59.0 (+3.6 over VLM2Vec-V2) with substantial gains on semantically demanding tasks (e.g., +12.6 on Video-QA).

  • 11 authors
·
Apr 12

Decoupling Turn-Taking from Semantics: A Decoupled Data Approach for Finite-State-Machine-Based Full-Duplex Dialogue

The Neural Finite State Machine (NFSM) framework offers a pragmatic path to full-duplex dialogue by serializing turn-taking control and response generation onto a single causal tape under the standard next-token prediction objective, thereby preserving semantic prowess at a low fine-tuning cost. However, its reliance on synthetic text data fundamentally limits turn-taking naturalness, as Large Language Models (LLMs) cannot faithfully simulate the fine-grained acoustic temporal dynamics of real human dialogues. In this work, we propose a decoupled data approach that learns turn-taking from real Human-Human (HH) spoken dialogues while shaping semantic behavior through configurable Human-Agent (HA) text dialogues. To operationalize this approach, we introduce a rule-based event-guided data transformation method that serializes HH spoken dialogues into FSM tapes by classifying turn-taking events and applying deterministic mapping rules, enabling scalable supervision without LLM-generated annotations. We further propose a Source-Aware Calibrated (SAC) Loss that jointly calibrates the long-tailed distribution of state transition tokens and channels each data source toward the capability it best supervises. Experiments show that our approach substantially improves turn-taking proficiency while recovering the foundation LLM's semantic capability. Our code and model are available at https://github.com/Liyht/def-fsm.

  • 2 authors
·
Sep 2

Analysis on Riemann Hypothesis with Cross Entropy Optimization and Reasoning

In this paper, we present a novel framework for the analysis of Riemann Hypothesis [27], which is composed of three key components: a) probabilistic modeling with cross entropy optimization and reasoning; b) the application of the law of large numbers; c) the application of mathematical inductions. The analysis is mainly conducted by virtue of probabilistic modeling of cross entropy optimization and reasoning with rare event simulation techniques. The application of the law of large numbers [2, 3, 6] and the application of mathematical inductions make the analysis of Riemann Hypothesis self-contained and complete to make sure that the whole complex plane is covered as conjectured in Riemann Hypothesis. We also discuss the method of enhanced top-p sampling with large language models (LLMs) for reasoning, where next token prediction is not just based on the estimated probabilities of each possible token in the current round but also based on accumulated path probabilities among multiple top-k chain of thoughts (CoTs) paths. The probabilistic modeling of cross entropy optimization and reasoning may suit well with the analysis of Riemann Hypothesis as Riemann Zeta functions are inherently dealing with the sums of infinite components of a complex number series. We hope that our analysis in this paper could shed some light on some of the insights of Riemann Hypothesis. The framework and techniques presented in this paper, coupled with recent developments with chain of thought (CoT) or diagram of thought (DoT) reasoning in large language models (LLMs) with reinforcement learning (RL) [1, 7, 18, 21, 24, 34, 39-41], could pave the way for eventual proof of Riemann Hypothesis [27].

  • 2 authors
·
Sep 29, 2024

Reading Order Inference for Complex Document Layouts

Reading order inference remains a critical bottleneck in the digitization of complex historical manuscripts, where pages contain multiple spatially interleaved reading streams, the canonical example being the Glossa Ordinaria layout, in which a central text is surrounded by commentaries that wrap around it in non-rectangular, non-convex regions. We present a training-free, graph-based framework: each OCR text line becomes a node in a directed candidate-transition graph, edges are scored by a weighted additive ensemble of two lightweight language-model signals (causal language model conditional likelihood and BERT next-sentence prediction, NSP; a third sentence-embedding signal was evaluated but did not improve reading order), and the global reading order is recovered as a degree-constrained directed path cover. To avoid the cascading "edge-theft" failures of greedy edge selection, we propose a max-regret inference rule that prioritizes commitments with high opportunity cost. We evaluate on synthetic Glossa Ordinaria grid layouts, on 23 ALTO page geometries (10 historical source pages plus mirrored and flipped variants), and on a 140-page multi-column English subset of OmniDocBench, comparing our method against the canonical recursive XY-cut (PaddleOCR PP-StructureV3) and two LayoutReader variants (layout-only and text+layout) on identical inputs. On wrap-around Glossa layouts our method recovers 95% of ground-truth successor edges on average vs. XY-cut's 50%; on the OmniDocBench multi-column subset it reaches 88% macro edge accuracy versus XY-cut's 75% and LayoutReader's 25%. The LayoutReader baselines transfer poorly due to a word-level vs. line-level granularity mismatch. We additionally verify mirror-invariance under horizontal and vertical page reflections: Our method changes by less than 1 percentage point, classical XY-cut by 2 points, and LayoutReader-T by up to 8 points.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 30

EntroPE: Entropy-Guided Dynamic Patch Encoder for Time Series Forecasting

Transformer-based models have significantly advanced time series forecasting, with patch-based input strategies offering efficiency and improved long-horizon modeling. Yet, existing approaches rely on temporally-agnostic patch construction, where arbitrary starting positions and fixed lengths fracture temporal coherence by splitting natural transitions across boundaries. This naive segmentation often disrupts short-term dependencies and weakens representation learning. In response, we propose EntroPE (Entropy-Guided Dynamic Patch Encoder), a novel, temporally informed framework that dynamically detects transition points via conditional entropy and dynamically places patch boundaries. This preserves temporal structure while retaining the computational benefits of patching. EntroPE consists of two key modules, namely an Entropy-based Dynamic Patcher (EDP) that applies information-theoretic criteria to locate natural temporal shifts and determine patch boundaries, and an Adaptive Patch Encoder (APE) that employs pooling and cross-attention to capture intra-patch dependencies and produce fixed-size latent representations. These embeddings are then processed by a global transformer to model inter-patch dynamics. Experiments across long-term forecasting benchmarks demonstrate that EntroPE improves both accuracy and efficiency, establishing entropy-guided dynamic patching as a promising new paradigm for time series modeling. Code is available at: https://github.com/Sachithx/EntroPE.

Next Edit Prediction: Learning to Predict Code Edits from Context and Interaction History

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has led to the widespread adoption of AI-powered coding assistants integrated into a development environment. On one hand, low-latency code completion offers completion suggestions but is fundamentally constrained to the cursor's current position. On the other hand, chat-based editing can perform complex modifications, yet forces developers to stop their work, describe the intent in natural language, which causes a context-switch away from the code. This creates a suboptimal user experience, as neither paradigm proactively predicts the developer's next edit in a sequence of related edits. To bridge this gap and provide the seamless code edit suggestion, we introduce the task of Next Edit Prediction, a novel task designed to infer developer intent from recent interaction history to predict both the location and content of the subsequent edit. Specifically, we curate a high-quality supervised fine-tuning dataset and an evaluation benchmark for the Next Edit Prediction task. Then, we conduct supervised fine-tuning on a series of models and performed a comprehensive evaluation of both the fine-tuned models and other baseline models, yielding several novel findings. This work lays the foundation for a new interaction paradigm that proactively collaborate with developers by anticipating their following action, rather than merely reacting to explicit instructions.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 13, 2025

MultiMend: Multilingual Program Repair with Context Augmentation and Multi-Hunk Patch Generation

Context: Bugs in code are inevitable and can lead to severe consequences, ranging from security vulnerabilities to operational failures. Debugging software remains challenging despite advances in testing and verification, often requiring extensive manual effort. Learning-based automated program repair (APR) has shown promise in reducing the time, effort, and cost of manually fixing bugs. However, existing techniques face several challenges, including language-dependent strategies, limited bug context utilization, and difficulties in handling bugs that span multiple locations in the code. Objective: This paper introduces MultiMend, a learning-based APR approach designed to improve repair performance on multiple programming languages with language-independent context augmentation and multi-hunk patch generation. Method: MultiMend fine-tunes a pre-trained encoder-decoder transformer model (CodeT5) to generate bug-fixing patches. It embeds source code lines and applies retrieval-augmented generation to augment the buggy context with relevant lines during patch generation. The approach systematically constructs patches for multi-hunk bugs to reduce the needed patch validations. We evaluate MultiMend on four benchmarks with four programming languages and compare it with state-of-the-art methods. Results: Experimental results show that MultiMend achieves competitive effectiveness and efficiency against compared tools. Across all benchmarks, MultiMend fixes 2,077 bugs, of which 1,455 are identical to the developer's patch, and 106 are for multi-hunk bugs. Both context augmentation and multi-hunk patch generation positively contribute to the results. Conclusion: MultiMend shows promising performance across benchmarks. The findings highlight its applicability to real-world software maintenance and its potential to reduce manual debugging efforts.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 27, 2025

Are "Solved Issues" in SWE-bench Really Solved Correctly? An Empirical Study

Automated issue solving aims to resolve real-world issues in software repositories. The most popular benchmarks for automated issue solving are SWE-bench and its human-filtered subset SWE-bench Verified. These benchmarks leverage testing to validate generated patches. However, because testing is rarely exhaustive, a patch may pass the tests but nevertheless fail to match the developers' expectations. Unfortunately, it is currently unclear to what extent evaluations performed with SWE-bench suffer from such plausible but incorrect patches. This paper presents an in-depth empirical study of the correctness of plausible patches generated by three state-of-the-art issue-solving tools evaluated on SWE-bench Verified. We extensively test and inspect generated patches, and compare them against human-written ground truth patches. The core of our methodology is a novel technique PatchDiff for differential patch testing, which automatically exposes behavioral discrepancies between two patches. Our findings reveal critical weaknesses in SWE-bench's patch validation mechanism, which causes 7.8% of all patches to count as correct while failing the developer-written test suite. Moreover, our novel automated technique reveals that even more (29.6%) plausible patches induce different behavior than the ground truth patches. These behavioral differences are often due to similar, but divergent implementations (46.8%) and due to generated patches that adapt more behavior than the ground truth patches (27.3%). Our manual inspection shows that 28.6% of behaviorally divergent patches are certainly incorrect. Combined, the different weaknesses lead to an inflation of reported resolution rates by 6.2 absolute percent points. Our findings are a call to arms for more robust and reliable evaluation of issue-solving tools. We envision our automated differential patch testing technique to be useful for this purpose.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 19, 2025

Proactive Model Adaptation Against Concept Drift for Online Time Series Forecasting

Time series forecasting always faces the challenge of concept drift, where data distributions evolve over time, leading to a decline in forecast model performance. Existing solutions are based on online learning, which continually organize recent time series observations as new training samples and update model parameters according to the forecasting feedback on recent data. However, they overlook a critical issue: obtaining ground-truth future values of each sample should be delayed until after the forecast horizon. This delay creates a temporal gap between the training samples and the test sample. Our empirical analysis reveals that the gap can introduce concept drift, causing forecast models to adapt to outdated concepts. In this paper, we present Proceed, a novel proactive model adaptation framework for online time series forecasting. Proceed first estimates the concept drift between the recently used training samples and the current test sample. It then employs an adaptation generator to efficiently translate the estimated drift into parameter adjustments, proactively adapting the model to the test sample. To enhance the generalization capability of the framework, Proceed is trained on synthetic diverse concept drifts. Extensive experiments on five real-world datasets across various forecast models demonstrate that Proceed brings more performance improvements than the state-of-the-art online learning methods, significantly facilitating forecast models' resilience against concept drifts. Code is available at https://github.com/SJTU-DMTai/OnlineTSF.

  • 2 authors
·
Dec 11, 2024

Refine After Generation: Toward Correct and Concise Patches in LLM-based Program Repair

Large language models (LLMs) have advanced automatic program repair (APR) to the point where agentic systems routinely resolve real-world, repository-level issues. Yet the generated patch has received little scrutiny beyond whether it passes tests. In this paper, we identify patch verbosity as a major yet overlooked concern in LLM-based APR. Characterizing 28 state-of-the-art approaches on SWE-bench Verified, we find that even successful patches are consistently larger and more complex than developer patches, with the median approach producing 121.78% more total changes, 80.91% more net changes, and 43.99% higher cyclomatic complexity. We further show that this verbosity is rooted in capability-oriented design choices such as iterative refinement and broad context, and can hardly be reduced by surface-level controls such as output format or minimality prompts. Motivated by these findings, we formulate post-generation patch refinement and propose RECAP, a lightweight, plug-and-play adapter that attaches to existing repair frameworks after generation. RECAP's refiner is trained via supervised fine-tuning and direct preference optimization with distilled reasoning traces, on a dataset of patch pairs we construct from multiple sources. Across four host systems, prompting, commit-untangling, and minimality-aware baselines reduce patch size only by sacrificing 49 to 217 resolved instances. In contrast, RECAP achieves a substantially better size-correctness tradeoff, cutting average total changes from +242.14% to +4.24% and net changes from +348.24% to -39.75% relative to developer patches while preserving or improving resolution by up to 42 instances. Our results indicate that minimality cannot be simply reduced to syntactic compression, and that decoupling minimization from generation offers a practical path to more reviewable repairs.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 12

Lotus: Learning to Understand Time-series by Learning to Forecast

Time-series language models typically align numerical signals with language using labels, captions, or question-answer pairs. Although such supervision encourages linguistic representations, it does not explicitly require them to preserve information about how the underlying time-series signal evolves. We introduce forecast grounding, a pretraining principle that requires language-aligned time-series representations to remain predictive of the future evolution before they are adapted to downstream tasks. We instantiate this principle in LOTUS, which divides each time-series channel into non-overlapping patches and maps them into the LLM embedding space. It then predicts the next patch from the LLM hidden states of the time-series tokens, encouraging the learned representation to retain temporal information. To capture both temporal changes and periodic patterns, we also propose a temporal-spectral patch representation that combines each raw time-series patch with its spectral representation before mapping it into the LLM embedding space. Across three language model backbones and six downstream evaluation datasets, LOTUS achieves the best average performance with minimal trainable parameters, reaching 59.91% accuracy and outperforming the strongest matched baseline by 3.36%. Our representation analyses further show that LOTUS uses the numerical input and preserves temporal structure in its learned patch representations. These results establish forecast grounding as a promising pretraining principle, enabling compact time-series language models to outperform models 25 to 50 times their size on TSRBench.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 30

Test-Time Training with Next-Token Prediction

Next-token prediction is the self-supervised signal that trains language models, and every observed prompt token provides the same signal at test time. We study whether this signal can define the inner-loop objective for test-time training (TTT) in pretrained long-context language models. Many TTT architectures require models to be trained with test-time adaptation in mind, limiting their direct applicability to released LLM checkpoints. While recent in-place TTT methods make fast-weight adaptation possible for pretrained LLMs without redesigning the backbone, they leave a central question unresolved: what should each test-time write store? Existing recipes train the fast weight to match a learned local value proxy but they are not directly tied to the self-supervised next-token prediction signal. We introduce Test-Time Training with Next-Token Prediction (TTT-NTP), a drop-in fast-weight adaptation method for pretrained LLMs that instead supervises updates using the model's own next contextual hidden state. This makes each local write follow the same causal computation that supports next-token prediction: the value target is a pointwise linear projection of a single next-position contextual state. On RULER Full-13 (averaged over 4k, 8k, 16k, and 32k context lengths), TTT-NTP is the only method that consistently improves the released backbone across four models spanning three families and a 0.6--8B size range: Llama-3.1-8B (+3.9), Mistral-7B-v0.3 (+3.0), and the Qwen3 series (Qwen3-4B +4.1, Qwen3-0.6B +2.9). On the real-world LongBench-v2 long-document QA benchmark, TTT-NTP improves over the base model on both Llama-3.1-8B (+5.6) and Mistral-7B-v0.3 (+3.7), while preserving commonsense and knowledge performance.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 18 1

MoHETS: Long-term Time Series Forecasting with Mixture-of-Heterogeneous-Experts

Real-world multivariate time series can exhibit intricate multi-scale structures, including global trends, local periodicities, and non-stationary regimes, which makes long-horizon forecasting challenging. Although sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) approaches improve scalability and specialization, they typically rely on homogeneous MLP experts that poorly capture the diverse temporal dynamics of time series data. We address these limitations with MoHETS, an encoder-only Transformer that integrates sparse Mixture-of-Heterogeneous-Experts (MoHE) layers. MoHE routes temporal patches to a small subset of expert networks, combining a shared depthwise-convolution expert for sequence-level continuity with routed Fourier-based experts for patch-level periodic structures. MoHETS further improves robustness to non-stationary dynamics by incorporating exogenous information via cross-attention over covariate patch embeddings. Finally, we replace parameter-heavy linear projection heads with a lightweight convolutional patch decoder, improving parameter efficiency, reducing training instability, and allowing a single model to generalize across arbitrary forecast horizons. We validate across seven multivariate benchmarks and multiple horizons, with MoHETS consistently achieving state-of-the-art performance, reducing the average MSE by 12% compared to strong recent baselines, demonstrating effective heterogeneous specialization for long-term forecasting.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 29 1

TiRex-2: Generalizing TiRex to Multivariate Data and Streaming

We introduce TiRex-2, a recurrent xLSTM-based time series foundation model that generalizes the univariate TiRex to multivariate forecasting with both past and future covariates. Real-world forecasting is inherently sequential: observations arrive continuously, variables evolve jointly, and a subset of covariates is known ahead of time. Existing Transformer-based time series foundation models capture cross-variate dependencies but incur quadratic complexity in context length and require full-history recomputation as new observations arrive. TiRex-2 addresses these limitations through a memory-centric recurrent design that operates at constant per-patch cost under streaming. The model combines a bidirectional time mixer with an asymmetric grouped-attention variate mixer, enabling the integration of future-known covariates while preserving strict causality over target variables. To our knowledge, this is the first time series foundation model that achieves this combination of properties. To support scalable multivariate pretraining, we propose a synthetic coupling pipeline that composes diverse multivariate samples on the fly from large univariate corpora. Empirically, TiRex-2 achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on GIFT-Eval and fev-bench, remains stable when streamed to arbitrary context lengths, and maintains constant inference cost per patch. The model uses 38.4M active parameters in univariate mode, with an additional 44.1M parameters activated for multivariate forecasting.

  • 10 authors
·
Jun 30

HPNet: Dynamic Trajectory Forecasting with Historical Prediction Attention

Predicting the trajectories of road agents is essential for autonomous driving systems. The recent mainstream methods follow a static paradigm, which predicts the future trajectory by using a fixed duration of historical frames. These methods make the predictions independently even at adjacent time steps, which leads to potential instability and temporal inconsistency. As successive time steps have largely overlapping historical frames, their forecasting should have intrinsic correlation, such as overlapping predicted trajectories should be consistent, or be different but share the same motion goal depending on the road situation. Motivated by this, in this work, we introduce HPNet, a novel dynamic trajectory forecasting method. Aiming for stable and accurate trajectory forecasting, our method leverages not only historical frames including maps and agent states, but also historical predictions. Specifically, we newly design a Historical Prediction Attention module to automatically encode the dynamic relationship between successive predictions. Besides, it also extends the attention range beyond the currently visible window benefitting from the use of historical predictions. The proposed Historical Prediction Attention together with the Agent Attention and Mode Attention is further formulated as the Triple Factorized Attention module, serving as the core design of HPNet.Experiments on the Argoverse and INTERACTION datasets show that HPNet achieves state-of-the-art performance, and generates accurate and stable future trajectories. Our code are available at https://github.com/XiaolongTang23/HPNet.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 9, 2024

The Predicted-Updates Dynamic Model: Offline, Incremental, and Decremental to Fully Dynamic Transformations

We formulate the predicted-updates dynamic model, one of the first beyond-worst-case models for dynamic algorithms, which generalizes a large set of well-studied dynamic models including the offline dynamic, incremental, and decremental models to the fully dynamic setting when given predictions about the update times of the elements. In the most basic form of our model, we receive a set of predicted update times for all of the updates that occur over the event horizon. We give a novel framework that "lifts" offline divide-and-conquer algorithms into the fully dynamic setting with little overhead. Using this, we are able to interpolate between the offline and fully dynamic settings; when the ell_1 error of the prediction is linear in the number of updates, we achieve the offline runtime of the algorithm (up to poly log n factors). Provided a fully dynamic backstop algorithm, our algorithm will never do worse than the backstop algorithm regardless of the prediction error. Furthermore, our framework achieves a smooth linear trade-off between ell_1 error in the predictions and runtime. These correspond to the desiderata of consistency, robustness, and graceful degradation of the algorithms-with-predictions literature. We further extend our techniques to incremental and decremental settings, transforming algorithms in these settings when given predictions of only the deletion and insertion times, respectively. Our framework is general, and we apply it to obtain improved efficiency bounds over the state-of-the-art dynamic algorithms for a variety of problems including triconnectivity, planar digraph all pairs shortest paths, k-edge connectivity, and others, for prediction error of reasonable magnitude.

  • 2 authors
·
Jul 17, 2023

RAP-Gen: Retrieval-Augmented Patch Generation with CodeT5 for Automatic Program Repair

Automatic program repair (APR) is crucial to reduce manual debugging efforts for developers and improve software reliability. While conventional search-based techniques typically rely on heuristic rules or a redundancy assumption to mine fix patterns, recent years have witnessed the surge of deep learning (DL) based approaches to automate the program repair process in a data-driven manner. However, their performance is often limited by a fixed set of parameters to model the highly complex search space of APR. To ease such burden on the parametric models, in this work, we propose a novel Retrieval-Augmented Patch Generation framework (RAP-Gen) by explicitly leveraging relevant fix patterns retrieved from a codebase of previous bug-fix pairs. Specifically, we build a hybrid patch retriever to account for both lexical and semantic matching based on the raw source code in a language-agnostic manner, which does not rely on any code-specific features. In addition, we adapt a code-aware language model CodeT5 as our foundation model to facilitate both patch retrieval and generation tasks in a unified manner. We adopt a stage-wise approach where the patch retriever first retrieves a relevant external bug-fix pair to augment the buggy input for the CodeT5 patch generator, which synthesizes a ranked list of repair patch candidates. Notably, RAP-Gen is a generic APR framework that can flexibly integrate different patch retrievers and generators to repair various types of bugs. We thoroughly evaluate RAP-Gen on three benchmarks in two programming languages, including the TFix benchmark in JavaScript, and Code Refinement and Defects4J benchmarks in Java, where the bug localization information may or may not be provided. Experimental results show that RAP-Gen significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches on all benchmarks, e.g., repairing 15 more bugs on 818 Defects4J bugs.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 12, 2023

D-CTNet: A Dual-Branch Channel-Temporal Forecasting Network with Frequency-Domain Correction

Accurate Multivariate Time Series (MTS) forecasting is crucial for collaborative design of complex systems, Digital Twin building, and maintenance ahead of time. However, the collaborative industrial environment presents new challenges for MTS forecasting models: models should decouple complex inter-variable dependencies while addressing non-stationary distribution shift brought by environmental changes. To address these challenges and improve collaborative sensing reliability, we propose a Patch-Based Dual-Branch Channel-Temporal Forecasting Network (D-CTNet). Particularly, with a parallel dual-branch design incorporating linear temporal modeling layer and channel attention mechanism, our method explicitly decouples and jointly learns intra-channel temporal evolution patterns and dynamic multivariate correlations. Furthermore, a global patch attention fusion module goes beyond the local window scope to model long range dependencies. Most importantly, aiming at non-stationarity, a Frequency-Domain Stationarity Correction mechanism adaptively suppresses distribution shift impacts from environment change by spectrum alignment. Evaluations on seven benchmark datasets show that our model achieves better forecasting accuracy and robustness compared with state-of-the-art methods. Our work shows great promise as a new forecasting engine for industrial collaborative systems.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 30, 2025

GAMMA: Revisiting Template-based Automated Program Repair via Mask Prediction

Automated program repair (APR) aims to fix software bugs without human intervention and template-based APR has been widely investigated with promising results. However, it is challenging for template-based APR to select the appropriate donor code, which is an important repair ingredient for generating candidate patches. Inappropriate donor code may cause plausible but incorrect patch generation even with correct fix patterns, limiting the repair performance. In this paper, we aim to revisit template-based APR, and propose GAMMA, to directly leverage large pre-trained language models for donor code generation. Our main insight is that instead of retrieving donor code in the local buggy file, we can directly predict the correct code tokens based on the context code snippets and repair patterns by a cloze task. Specifically, (1) GAMMA revises a variety of fix templates from state-of-the-art template-based APR techniques (i.e., TBar) and transforms them into mask patterns. (2) GAMMA adopts a pre-trained language model to predict the correct code for masked code as a fill-in-the-blank task. The experimental results demonstrate that GAMMA correctly repairs 82 bugs on Defects4J-v1.2, which achieves 20.59\% (14 bugs) and 26.15\% (17 bugs) improvement over the previous state-of-the-art template-based approach TBar and learning-based one Recoder. Furthermore, GAMMA repairs 45 bugs and 22 bugs from the additional Defects4J-v2.0 and QuixBugs, indicating the generalizability of GAMMA in addressing the dataset overfitting issue. We also prove that adopting other pre-trained language models can provide substantial advancement, e.g., CodeBERT-based and ChatGPT-based GAMMA is able to fix 80 and 67 bugs on Defects4J-v1.2, indicating the scalability of GAMMA. Overall, our study highlights the promising future of adopting pre-trained models to generate correct patches on top of fix patterns.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 17, 2023

Surprised by Attention: Predictable Query Dynamics for Time Series Anomaly Detection

Multivariate time series anomalies often manifest as shifts in cross-channel dependencies rather than simple amplitude excursions. In autonomous driving, for instance, a steering command might be internally consistent but decouple from the resulting lateral acceleration. Residual-based detectors can miss such anomalies when flexible sequence models still reconstruct signals plausibly despite altered coordination. We introduce AxonAD, an unsupervised detector that treats multi-head attention query evolution as a short horizon predictable process. A gradient-updated reconstruction pathway is coupled with a history-only predictor that forecasts future query vectors from past context. This is trained via a masked predictor-target objective against an exponential moving average (EMA) target encoder. At inference, reconstruction error is combined with a tail-aggregated query mismatch score, which measures cosine deviation between predicted and target queries on recent timesteps. This dual approach provides sensitivity to structural dependency shifts while retaining amplitude-level detection. On proprietary in-vehicle telemetry with interval annotations and on the TSB-AD multi-variate suite (17 datasets, 180 series) with threshold-free and range-aware metrics, AxonAD improves ranking quality and temporal localization over strong baselines. Ablations confirm that query prediction and combined scoring are the primary drivers of the observed gains. Code is available at the URL https://github.com/iis-esslingen/AxonAD.

Self-Evolving Agent Harnesses via Gated Semantic Quality-Diversity

An LLM agent's real-task performance is shaped as much by the harness around its model as by the frozen model itself: its prompts, injected knowledge, runtime control, and configuration. In deployment the harness is often the only lever available, so improving it automatically is the natural way to raise performance without touching the weights. The hard part is not generating changes but knowing which one truly helped. Self-generated feedback is noisy, and an apparent gain can be a measurement artifact or an edit that merely overfits the tasks it was tuned on. We present a self-evolving agent-harness framework that separates proposing changes from crediting them: a language model diagnoses failures and proposes patches, while all sampling, measurement, and significance testing are owned by deterministic code, so every credited improvement is trustworthy by construction. Patches populate a gated, categorical quality-diversity archive (GSME) keyed on the (WHERE x WHY) pathology an edit addresses rather than the tasks it fixes, an anti-overfitting inductive bias; generalization is measured on a sealed test scored only after evolution. Across seven domains with a frozen open-weight model, the harness is train-selected and scored once on a sealed test; its credited gains there are +9 to +15.5pp and retain 86-147% of the training gain, evidence they generalize rather than overfit. The winning patch tracks the model's dominant pathology, not its size or family: changing the model can change the pathology and the patch, while the same pathology-to-patch match recurs across two model families. What transfers is the diagnose-and-credit loop, not any specific harness.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 14

PatchRNN: A Deep Learning-Based System for Security Patch Identification

With the increasing usage of open-source software (OSS) components, vulnerabilities embedded within them are propagated to a huge number of underlying applications. In practice, the timely application of security patches in downstream software is challenging. The main reason is that such patches do not explicitly indicate their security impacts in the documentation, which would be difficult to recognize for software maintainers and users. However, attackers can still identify these "secret" security patches by analyzing the source code and generate corresponding exploits to compromise not only unpatched versions of the current software, but also other similar software packages that may contain the same vulnerability due to code cloning or similar design/implementation logic. Therefore, it is critical to identify these secret security patches to enable timely fixes. To this end, we propose a deep learning-based defense system called PatchRNN to automatically identify secret security patches in OSS. Besides considering descriptive keywords in the commit message (i.e., at the text level), we leverage both syntactic and semantic features at the source-code level. To evaluate the performance of our system, we apply it on a large-scale real-world patch dataset and conduct a case study on a popular open-source web server software - NGINX. Experimental results show that the PatchRNN can successfully detect secret security patches with a low false positive rate.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 6, 2021

Foresight -- Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT) for Modelling of Patient Timelines using EHRs

Background: Electronic Health Records hold detailed longitudinal information about each patient's health status and general clinical history, a large portion of which is stored within the unstructured text. Existing approaches focus mostly on structured data and a subset of single-domain outcomes. We explore how temporal modelling of patients from free text and structured data, using deep generative transformers can be used to forecast a wide range of future disorders, substances, procedures or findings. Methods: We present Foresight, a novel transformer-based pipeline that uses named entity recognition and linking tools to convert document text into structured, coded concepts, followed by providing probabilistic forecasts for future medical events such as disorders, substances, procedures and findings. We processed the entire free-text portion from three different hospital datasets totalling 811336 patients covering both physical and mental health. Findings: On tests in two UK hospitals (King's College Hospital, South London and Maudsley) and the US MIMIC-III dataset precision@10 0.68, 0.76 and 0.88 was achieved for forecasting the next disorder in a patient timeline, while precision@10 of 0.80, 0.81 and 0.91 was achieved for forecasting the next biomedical concept. Foresight was also validated on 34 synthetic patient timelines by five clinicians and achieved relevancy of 97% for the top forecasted candidate disorder. As a generative model, it can forecast follow-on biomedical concepts for as many steps as required. Interpretation: Foresight is a general-purpose model for biomedical concept modelling that can be used for real-world risk forecasting, virtual trials and clinical research to study the progression of disorders, simulate interventions and counterfactuals, and educational purposes.

  • 12 authors
·
Dec 13, 2022

Next Forcing: Causal World Modeling with Multi-Chunk Prediction

Autoregressive video generation has emerged as a powerful paradigm for World Action Models (WAMs). However, existing approaches suffer from slow training convergence and limited converged accuracy, particularly at high frame rates, as the training supervision is confined to the current chunk without explicit signals about future dynamics; they also suffer from slow inference due to iterative video denoising. In this paper, we present Next Forcing, a multi-chunk prediction (MCP) framework for causal world modeling that enables faster training, higher accuracy, and accelerated inference. Inspired by multi-token prediction in large language models, Next Forcing introduces an MCP training objective that augments the main model with lightweight auxiliary MCP modules to simultaneously denoise video chunks at multiple future temporal horizons (next^1, next^2, next^3 chunks). These MCP modules form a causal chain across prediction depths, where intermediate features fused from multiple layers of the main model are leveraged to predict future dynamics, allowing near-future predictions to inform farther-future ones and providing dense multi-scale temporal supervision back to the main model. During training, the MCP modules significantly accelerate convergence and improve converged accuracy, especially at high frame rates: at 50 fps, Next Forcing achieves a 93.1% relative improvement over LingBot-VA at 5k training steps and 2.3x faster convergence, and establishes new state-of-the-art results on the RoboTwin benchmark (94.1/93.5% on Clean/Random). At inference, the MCP modules can be retained to predict the next video chunk in parallel with the current one, achieving 2x inference acceleration. Next Forcing also demonstrates significant improvements on PhyWorld, a benchmark evaluating adherence to physical laws in video generation, and over 50% FVD reduction on general video pretraining.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 8 2

Harnessing Pre-Resolution Signals for Future Prediction Agents

Many high-stakes decisions depend on forecasts made before outcomes are known. In this future prediction setting, the central challenge is that public evidence evolves over time, while the main supervision signal arrives only after resolution: the realized outcome mainly assesses final correctness, offering only coarse guidance on what to track, what to verify, and which judgments to leave uncertain along the way. Our key observation is that revisiting the same unresolved question over time creates informative temporal contrasts across evolving evidence and repeated forecasts, exposing what earlier attempts missed before resolution and yielding a diagnostic signal we call the pre-resolution signal. We instantiate this idea in Milkyway, a future prediction agent with a persistent future prediction harness, an editable external state that stores reusable procedural guidance across revisits to the same unresolved question. As the same unresolved question is revisited, Milkyway extracts pre-resolution signals from evolving evidence and repeated forecasts, uses them to update the harness, and improves later forecasts on that question before resolution. After resolution, the realized outcome serves as a post-resolution check of provisional updates. On the FutureX and FutureWorld benchmarks, Milkyway achieves strong performance against competitive baselines, and a mechanism study suggests that the gains stem from harness evolution driven by pre-resolution signals rather than repeated prediction alone.

  • 15 authors
·
May 7

PatchBench: Evaluating AI Agents for Vulnerability Patching

AI agents have recently demonstrated strong performance in automated vulnerability patching. However, existing evaluations often validate a patch only by testing whether the provided Proof-of-Concept (PoC) input still triggers a crash. This leaves two key threats to validity: agents may reproduce memorized historical developer patches, or they may generate surface-level fixes that only suppress the reported crash. We study these concerns for C/C++ vulnerability patching. We introduce a patch similarity metric to detect memorized patches. On average, 25% of the agent patches exhibit substantial similarity to historical developer patches, indicating that patch memorization is a real threat to the validity of vulnerability patching evaluations. Meanwhile, agents also frequently exploit benchmark structures to pass patch validation by patching on the crash stack trace to suppress the crash, rather than localizing and fixing the root cause of the vulnerabilities. To handle these issues, we propose PatchBench, a new benchmark for evaluating AI agents on realistic vulnerability patching tasks. PatchBench selects vulnerabilities whose ground-truth fixes lie outside the crash stack and uses vulnerability transplant and code mutations to migrate historical vulnerabilities into new repository contexts, reducing the risks of surface-level fixes and patch memorization. We develop new patch validation methods that thoroughly evaluate both security and semantic correctness of agent patches. Across 11 state-of-the-art agents, including the top three AIxCC agents, the original PoC-only validation inflates the patching task solve rate of agents by 1.83times on average. Our results reveal key limitations of current patching agents and point to future research directions for more reliable vulnerability repair.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 2

IMTS is Worth Time times Channel Patches: Visual Masked Autoencoders for Irregular Multivariate Time Series Prediction

Irregular Multivariate Time Series (IMTS) forecasting is challenging due to the unaligned nature of multi-channel signals and the prevalence of extensive missing data. Existing methods struggle to capture reliable temporal patterns from such data due to significant missing values. While pre-trained foundation models show potential for addressing these challenges, they are typically designed for Regularly Sampled Time Series (RTS). Motivated by the visual Mask AutoEncoder's (MAE) powerful capability for modeling sparse multi-channel information and its success in RTS forecasting, we propose VIMTS, a framework adapting Visual MAE for IMTS forecasting. To mitigate the effect of missing values, VIMTS first processes IMTS along the timeline into feature patches at equal intervals. These patches are then complemented using learned cross-channel dependencies. Then it leverages visual MAE's capability in handling sparse multichannel data for patch reconstruction, followed by a coarse-to-fine technique to generate precise predictions from focused contexts. In addition, we integrate self-supervised learning for improved IMTS modeling by adapting the visual MAE to IMTS data. Extensive experiments demonstrate VIMTS's superior performance and few-shot capability, advancing the application of visual foundation models in more general time series tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/WHU-HZY/VIMTS.

sanae-ai-lab Sanae AI Lab
·
May 29, 2025

Learning Next Action Predictors from Human-Computer Interaction

Truly proactive AI systems must anticipate what we will do next. This foresight demands far richer information than the sparse signals we type into our prompts -- it demands reasoning over the entire context of what we see and do. We formalize this as next action prediction (NAP): given a sequence of a user's multimodal interactions with a computer (screenshots, clicks, sensor data), predict that user's next action. Progress on this task requires both new data and modeling approaches. To scale data, we annotate longitudinal, naturalistic computer use with vision-language models. We release an open-source pipeline for performing this labeling on private infrastructure, and label over 360K actions across one month of continuous phone usage from 20 users, amounting to 1,800 hours of screen time. We then introduce LongNAP, a user model that combines parametric and in-context learning to reason over long interaction histories. LongNAP is trained via policy gradient methods to generate user-specific reasoning traces given some context; retrieve relevant traces from a library of past traces; and then apply retrieved traces in-context to predict future actions. Using an LLM-as-judge evaluation metric (0-1 similarity to ground truth), LongNAP significantly outperforms supervised finetuning and prompted baselines on held-out data (by 79% and 39% respectively). Additionally, LongNAP generalizes to held out users when trained across individuals. The space of next actions a user might take at any moment is unbounded, spanning thousands of possible outcomes. Despite this, 17.1% of LongNAP's predicted trajectories are well-aligned with what a user does next (LLM-judge score geq 0.5). This rises to 26% when we filter to highly confident predictions. In sum, we argue that learning from the full context of user behavior to anticipate user needs is now a viable task with substantial opportunity.

  • 11 authors
·
Mar 6

TGB-Seq Benchmark: Challenging Temporal GNNs with Complex Sequential Dynamics

Future link prediction is a fundamental challenge in various real-world dynamic systems. To address this, numerous temporal graph neural networks (temporal GNNs) and benchmark datasets have been developed. However, these datasets often feature excessive repeated edges and lack complex sequential dynamics, a key characteristic inherent in many real-world applications such as recommender systems and ``Who-To-Follow'' on social networks. This oversight has led existing methods to inadvertently downplay the importance of learning sequential dynamics, focusing primarily on predicting repeated edges. In this study, we demonstrate that existing methods, such as GraphMixer and DyGFormer, are inherently incapable of learning simple sequential dynamics, such as ``a user who has followed OpenAI and Anthropic is more likely to follow AI at Meta next.'' Motivated by this issue, we introduce the Temporal Graph Benchmark with Sequential Dynamics (TGB-Seq), a new benchmark carefully curated to minimize repeated edges, challenging models to learn sequential dynamics and generalize to unseen edges. TGB-Seq comprises large real-world datasets spanning diverse domains, including e-commerce interactions, movie ratings, business reviews, social networks, citation networks and web link networks. Benchmarking experiments reveal that current methods usually suffer significant performance degradation and incur substantial training costs on TGB-Seq, posing new challenges and opportunities for future research. TGB-Seq datasets, leaderboards, and example codes are available at https://tgb-seq.github.io/.

  • 8 authors
·
Feb 5, 2025

Time-LLM: Time Series Forecasting by Reprogramming Large Language Models

Time series forecasting holds significant importance in many real-world dynamic systems and has been extensively studied. Unlike natural language process (NLP) and computer vision (CV), where a single large model can tackle multiple tasks, models for time series forecasting are often specialized, necessitating distinct designs for different tasks and applications. While pre-trained foundation models have made impressive strides in NLP and CV, their development in time series domains has been constrained by data sparsity. Recent studies have revealed that large language models (LLMs) possess robust pattern recognition and reasoning abilities over complex sequences of tokens. However, the challenge remains in effectively aligning the modalities of time series data and natural language to leverage these capabilities. In this work, we present Time-LLM, a reprogramming framework to repurpose LLMs for general time series forecasting with the backbone language models kept intact. We begin by reprogramming the input time series with text prototypes before feeding it into the frozen LLM to align the two modalities. To augment the LLM's ability to reason with time series data, we propose Prompt-as-Prefix (PaP), which enriches the input context and directs the transformation of reprogrammed input patches. The transformed time series patches from the LLM are finally projected to obtain the forecasts. Our comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that Time-LLM is a powerful time series learner that outperforms state-of-the-art, specialized forecasting models. Moreover, Time-LLM excels in both few-shot and zero-shot learning scenarios.

  • 11 authors
·
Oct 2, 2023

Next-Token Prediction and Regret Minimization

We consider the question of how to employ next-token prediction algorithms in adversarial online decision-making environments. Specifically, if we train a next-token prediction model on a distribution D over sequences of opponent actions, when is it the case that the induced online decision-making algorithm (by approximately best responding to the model's predictions) has low adversarial regret (i.e., when is D a low-regret distribution)? For unbounded context windows (where the prediction made by the model can depend on all the actions taken by the adversary thus far), we show that although not every distribution D is a low-regret distribution, every distribution D is exponentially close (in TV distance) to one low-regret distribution, and hence sublinear regret can always be achieved at negligible cost to the accuracy of the original next-token prediction model. In contrast to this, for bounded context windows (where the prediction made by the model can depend only on the past w actions taken by the adversary, as may be the case in modern transformer architectures), we show that there are some distributions D of opponent play that are Θ(1)-far from any low-regret distribution D' (even when w = Ω(T) and such distributions exist). Finally, we complement these results by showing that the unbounded context robustification procedure can be implemented by layers of a standard transformer architecture, and provide empirical evidence that transformer models can be efficiently trained to represent these new low-regret distributions.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 29

Problems with SZZ and Features: An empirical study of the state of practice of defect prediction data collection

Context: The SZZ algorithm is the de facto standard for labeling bug fixing commits and finding inducing changes for defect prediction data. Recent research uncovered potential problems in different parts of the SZZ algorithm. Most defect prediction data sets provide only static code metrics as features, while research indicates that other features are also important. Objective: We provide an empirical analysis of the defect labels created with the SZZ algorithm and the impact of commonly used features on results. Method: We used a combination of manual validation and adopted or improved heuristics for the collection of defect data. We conducted an empirical study on 398 releases of 38 Apache projects. Results: We found that only half of the bug fixing commits determined by SZZ are actually bug fixing. If a six-month time frame is used in combination with SZZ to determine which bugs affect a release, one file is incorrectly labeled as defective for every file that is correctly labeled as defective. In addition, two defective files are missed. We also explored the impact of the relatively small set of features that are available in most defect prediction data sets, as there are multiple publications that indicate that, e.g., churn related features are important for defect prediction. We found that the difference of using more features is not significant. Conclusion: Problems with inaccurate defect labels are a severe threat to the validity of the state of the art of defect prediction. Small feature sets seem to be a less severe threat.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 10, 2021

OneForecast: A Universal Framework for Global and Regional Weather Forecasting

Accurate weather forecasts are important for disaster prevention, agricultural planning, etc. Traditional numerical weather prediction (NWP) methods offer physically interpretable high-accuracy predictions but are computationally expensive and fail to fully leverage rapidly growing historical data. In recent years, deep learning models have made significant progress in weather forecasting, but challenges remain, such as balancing global and regional high-resolution forecasts, excessive smoothing in extreme event predictions, and insufficient dynamic system modeling. To address these issues, this paper proposes a global-regional nested weather forecasting framework (OneForecast) based on graph neural networks. By combining a dynamic system perspective with multi-grid theory, we construct a multi-scale graph structure and densify the target region to capture local high-frequency features. We introduce an adaptive messaging mechanism, using dynamic gating units to deeply integrate node and edge features for more accurate extreme event forecasting. For high-resolution regional forecasts, we propose a neural nested grid method to mitigate boundary information loss. Experimental results show that OneForecast performs excellently across global to regional scales and short-term to long-term forecasts, especially in extreme event predictions. Codes link https://github.com/YuanGao-YG/OneForecast.

  • 14 authors
·
Feb 1, 2025

Tropical Cyclone Forecasting via Latent Rectified Flow using Satellite Imagery and Atmospheric Fields

Tropical cyclones are growing more destructive in a changing climate, and efficient forecasting of their structure and track has become a necessity. Deep generative models promise an alternative to computationally expensive numerical weather prediction (NWP), yet current systems produce either satellite imagery or atmospheric fields, never both; they need many sampling steps, putting them out of reach of modest hardware; and their storm tracks come from regression heads with no physical link to the generated atmosphere. This work presents a single-pass model that jointly forecasts GRIDSAT-B1 infrared imagery and four ERA5 atmospheric fields (U-wind, V-wind, air temperature, and surface pressure) out to nine hours. A five-channel variational autoencoder compresses each 5 x 256 x 256 frame to a 4 x 64 x 64 latent, and a conditional rectified-flow UNet with a factorized temporal-attention module predicts the next three frames from three past frames, their best-track coordinates, and timestamps. The model is then reward-fine-tuned (DRaFT) against a differentiable track error derived from the predicted winds through a steering-flow calculation. On held-out 2022 storms the model reaches 16.35 dB PSNR and 0.759 SSIM, ahead of a reproduced cascaded-diffusion baseline at every lead time (+0.84 dB at +9 h) while sampling ~30x faster (56 ms vs. 1673 ms). Track error at +9 h is 62.4 km, 15% below the baseline, and a reward fine-tuning study demonstrates a further 8-11% track-error reduction across sampler budgets.

  • 2 authors
·
Aug 14

Advancing Parsimonious Deep Learning Weather Prediction using the HEALPix Mesh

We present a parsimonious deep learning weather prediction model to forecast seven atmospheric variables with 3-h time resolution for up to one-year lead times on a 110-km global mesh using the Hierarchical Equal Area isoLatitude Pixelization (HEALPix). In comparison to state-of-the-art (SOTA) machine learning (ML) weather forecast models, such as Pangu-Weather and GraphCast, our DLWP-HPX model uses coarser resolution and far fewer prognostic variables. Yet, at one-week lead times, its skill is only about one day behind both SOTA ML forecast models and the SOTA numerical weather prediction model from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. We report several improvements in model design, including switching from the cubed sphere to the HEALPix mesh, inverting the channel depth of the U-Net, and introducing gated recurrent units (GRU) on each level of the U-Net hierarchy. The consistent east-west orientation of all cells on the HEALPix mesh facilitates the development of location-invariant convolution kernels that successfully propagate weather patterns across the globe without requiring separate kernels for the polar and equatorial faces of the cube sphere. Without any loss of spectral power after the first two days, the model can be unrolled autoregressively for hundreds of steps into the future to generate realistic states of the atmosphere that respect seasonal trends, as showcased in one-year simulations.

  • 8 authors
·
Sep 11, 2023

Next-Latent Prediction Transformers Learn Compact World Models

Transformers replace recurrence with a memory that grows with sequence length and self-attention that enables ad-hoc look ups over past tokens. Consequently, they lack an inherent incentive to compress history into compact latent states with consistent transition rules. This often leads to learning solutions that generalize poorly. We introduce Next-Latent Prediction (NextLat), which extends standard next-token training with self-supervised predictions in the latent space. Specifically, NextLat trains a transformer to learn latent representations that are predictive of its next latent state given the next output token. Theoretically, we show that these latents provably converge to belief states, compressed information of the history necessary to predict the future. This simple auxiliary objective also injects a recurrent inductive bias into transformers, while leaving their architecture, parallel training, and inference unchanged. NextLat effectively encourages the transformer to form compact internal world models with its own belief states and transition dynamics -- a crucial property absent in standard next-token prediction transformers. Empirically, across benchmarks targeting core sequence modeling competencies -- world modeling, reasoning, planning, and language modeling -- NextLat demonstrates significant gains over standard next-token training in downstream accuracy, representation compression, and lookahead planning. NextLat stands as a simple and efficient paradigm for shaping transformer representations toward stronger generalization.

MicrosoftResearch Microsoft Research
·
Nov 8, 2025 1

One Future, Every Robot: Label-Efficient Collective-State Prediction with Decentralized JEPA

Can every robot in a swarm predict the same future collective state from only local observations and bandwidth-limited messages? We formulate this as decentralized shared-state prediction and introduce Collective-State JEPA (CS-JEPA), a recurrent joint-embedding predictive architecture whose output at every robot represents one common future token field. At deployment, each robot uses a 16-frame local history and one 64-float recurrent message per directed edge; there is no global pooling, target encoder, episode clock, or recorded future action. After pretraining without downstream collective labels, frozen representations are evaluated with ridge probes fitted on 6, 12, or 24 globally labeled episodes. Against raw-future reconstruction with the same receiver anchor and deployment capacity but 9,607 additional training-only parameters, a prospectively registered five-seed follow-up improves prediction-error and inter-robot-agreement label-budget AUC on in-distribution, ring, mutual-kNN, and unseen-size families up to 108 robots. Every effect favors CS-JEPA in 5/5 outer seeds. In a separate sealed eight-seed follow-up, matched action-conditioned predictors receive each candidate four-step plan before producing receiver-local predictive representations. CS-JEPA reduces branch-value MSE by 45.5% and improves within-context candidate-score Pearson correlation by 0.1291, with both effects favorable in 8/8 seeds, including at unseen N=32. These results support common-future JEPA targets as a label-efficient primitive for decentralized swarm prediction under topology and size shift, with additional evidence of planning-relevant value estimation.