Amortized Sampling with Transferable Normalizing Flows
Charlie B. Tan
Leon Klein
Saifuddin Syed
Michael M. Bronstein
Alexander Tong
Beyond Cosine Decay: On the effectiveness of Infinite Learning Rate Schedule for Continual Pre-training
The ever-growing availability of unlabeled data presents both opportunities and challenges for training artificial intelligence systems. Whi… (voir plus)le self-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for extracting meaningful representations from vast amounts of unlabeled data, existing methods still struggle to adapt to the non-stationary, non-IID nature of real-world data streams without forgetting previously learned knowledge. Recent works have adopted a repeated cosine annealing schedule for large-scale continual pre-training; however, these schedules (1) inherently cause forgetting during the re-warming phase and (2) have not been systematically compared to existing continual SSL methods. In this work, we systematically compare the widely used cosine schedule with the recently proposed infinite learning rate schedule and empirically find the latter to be a more effective alternative. Our extensive empirical evaluation across diverse image and language datasets demonstrates that the infinite learning rate schedule consistently enhances continual pre-training performance compared to a repeated cosine decay without being restricted to a fixed iteration budget. For instance, in a small-scale MAE pre-training setup, it outperforms several strong baselines from the literature. We then scale up our experiments to larger MAE pre-training and autoregressive language model pre-training. Our results show that the infinite learning rate schedule remains effective at scale, surpassing repeated cosine decay for both MAE pre-training and zero-shot LM benchmarks.
Causal Climate Emulation with Bayesian Filtering
Sebastian H. M. Hickman
Alex Archibald
Yaniv Gurwicz
Peer Nowack
Traditional models of climate change use complex systems of coupled equations to simulate physical processes across the Earth system. These … (voir plus)simulations are highly computationally expensive, limiting our predictions of climate change and analyses of its causes and effects. Machine learning has the potential to quickly emulate data from climate models, but current approaches are not able to incorporate physics-informed causal relationships. Here, we develop an interpretable climate model emulator based on causal representation learning. We derive a physics-informed approach including a Bayesian filter for stable long-term autoregressive emulation. We demonstrate that our emulator learns accurate climate dynamics, and we show the importance of each one of its components on a realistic synthetic dataset and data from two widely deployed climate models.
Causal Climate Emulation with Bayesian Filtering
Sebastian H. M. Hickman
Alex Archibald
Yaniv Gurwicz
Peer Nowack
Traditional models of climate change use complex systems of coupled equations to simulate physical processes across the Earth system. These … (voir plus)simulations are highly computationally expensive, limiting our predictions of climate change and analyses of its causes and effects. Machine learning has the potential to quickly emulate data from climate models, but current approaches are not able to incorporate physics-informed causal relationships. Here, we develop an interpretable climate model emulator based on causal representation learning. We derive a physics-informed approach including a Bayesian filter for stable long-term autoregressive emulation. We demonstrate that our emulator learns accurate climate dynamics, and we show the importance of each one of its components on a realistic synthetic dataset and data from two widely deployed climate models.
Fast Monte Carlo Tree Diffusion: 100x Speedup via Parallel Sparse Planning
Jaesik Yoon
Hyeonseo Cho
Sungjin Ahn
Diffusion models have recently emerged as a powerful approach for trajectory planning. However, their inherently non-sequential nature limit… (voir plus)s their effectiveness in long-horizon reasoning tasks at test time. The recently proposed Monte Carlo Tree Diffusion (MCTD) offers a promising solution by combining diffusion with tree-based search, achieving state-of-the-art performance on complex planning problems. Despite its strengths, our analysis shows that MCTD incurs substantial computational overhead due to the sequential nature of tree search and the cost of iterative denoising. To address this, we propose Fast-MCTD, a more efficient variant that preserves the strengths of MCTD while significantly improving its speed and scalability. Fast-MCTD integrates two techniques: Parallel MCTD, which enables parallel rollouts via delayed tree updates and redundancy-aware selection; and Sparse MCTD, which reduces rollout length through trajectory coarsening. Experiments show that Fast-MCTD achieves up to 100x speedup over standard MCTD while maintaining or improving planning performance. Remarkably, it even outperforms Diffuser in inference speed on some tasks, despite Diffuser requiring no search and yielding weaker solutions. These results position Fast-MCTD as a practical and scalable solution for diffusion-based inference-time reasoning.
Fast Monte Carlo Tree Diffusion: 100x Speedup via Parallel Sparse Planning
Jaesik Yoon
Hyeonseo Cho
Sungjin Ahn
Diffusion models have recently emerged as a powerful approach for trajectory planning. However, their inherently non-sequential nature limit… (voir plus)s their effectiveness in long-horizon reasoning tasks at test time. The recently proposed Monte Carlo Tree Diffusion (MCTD) offers a promising solution by combining diffusion with tree-based search, achieving state-of-the-art performance on complex planning problems. Despite its strengths, our analysis shows that MCTD incurs substantial computational overhead due to the sequential nature of tree search and the cost of iterative denoising. To address this, we propose Fast-MCTD, a more efficient variant that preserves the strengths of MCTD while significantly improving its speed and scalability. Fast-MCTD integrates two techniques: Parallel MCTD, which enables parallel rollouts via delayed tree updates and redundancy-aware selection; and Sparse MCTD, which reduces rollout length through trajectory coarsening. Experiments show that Fast-MCTD achieves up to 100x speedup over standard MCTD while maintaining or improving planning performance. Remarkably, it even outperforms Diffuser in inference speed on some tasks, despite Diffuser requiring no search and yielding weaker solutions. These results position Fast-MCTD as a practical and scalable solution for diffusion-based inference-time reasoning.
FORT: Forward-Only Regression Training of Normalizing Flows
Oscar Davis
Michael M. Bronstein
Alexander Tong
Simulation-free training frameworks have been at the forefront of the generative modelling revolution in continuous spaces, leading to neura… (voir plus)l dynamical systems that encompass modern large-scale diffusion and flow matching models. Despite the scalability of training, the generation of high-quality samples and their corresponding likelihood under the model requires expensive numerical simulation -- inhibiting adoption in numerous scientific applications such as equilibrium sampling of molecular systems. In this paper, we revisit classical normalizing flows as one-step generative models with exact likelihoods and propose a novel, scalable training objective that does not require computing the expensive change of variable formula used in conventional maximum likelihood training. We propose Forward-Only Regression Training (FORT), a simple
HEIST: A Graph Foundation Model for Spatial Transcriptomics and Proteomics Data
Hiren Madhu
João Felipe Rocha
Tinglin Huang
Siddharth Viswanath
Rex Ying
IntPhys 2: Benchmarking Intuitive Physics Understanding In Complex Synthetic Environments
Quentin Garrido
Justine T Kao
Adina Williams
Emmanuel Dupoux
We present IntPhys 2, a video benchmark designed to evaluate the intuitive physics understanding of deep learning models. Building on the or… (voir plus)iginal IntPhys benchmark, IntPhys 2 focuses on four core principles related to macroscopic objects: Permanence, Immutability, Spatio-Temporal Continuity, and Solidity. These conditions are inspired by research into intuitive physical understanding emerging during early childhood. IntPhys 2 offers a comprehensive suite of tests, based on the violation of expectation framework, that challenge models to differentiate between possible and impossible events within controlled and diverse virtual environments. Alongside the benchmark, we provide performance evaluations of several state-of-the-art models. Our findings indicate that while these models demonstrate basic visual understanding, they face significant challenges in grasping intuitive physics across the four principles in complex scenes, with most models performing at chance levels (50%), in stark contrast to human performance, which achieves near-perfect accuracy. This underscores the gap between current models and human-like intuitive physics understanding, highlighting the need for advancements in model architectures and training methodologies.
IntPhys 2: Benchmarking Intuitive Physics Understanding In Complex Synthetic Environments
Quentin Garrido
Justine T Kao
Adina Williams
Emmanuel Dupoux
We present IntPhys 2, a video benchmark designed to evaluate the intuitive physics understanding of deep learning models. Building on the or… (voir plus)iginal IntPhys benchmark, IntPhys 2 focuses on four core principles related to macroscopic objects: Permanence, Immutability, Spatio-Temporal Continuity, and Solidity. These conditions are inspired by research into intuitive physical understanding emerging during early childhood. IntPhys 2 offers a comprehensive suite of tests, based on the violation of expectation framework, that challenge models to differentiate between possible and impossible events within controlled and diverse virtual environments. Alongside the benchmark, we provide performance evaluations of several state-of-the-art models. Our findings indicate that while these models demonstrate basic visual understanding, they face significant challenges in grasping intuitive physics across the four principles in complex scenes, with most models performing at chance levels (50%), in stark contrast to human performance, which achieves near-perfect accuracy. This underscores the gap between current models and human-like intuitive physics understanding, highlighting the need for advancements in model architectures and training methodologies.
Learning What Matters: Prioritized Concept Learning via Relative Error-driven Sample Selection
Instruction tuning has been central to the success of recent vision-language models (VLMs), but it remains expensive-requiring large-scale d… (voir plus)atasets, high-quality annotations, and large compute budgets. We propose PRioritized cOncept learninG via Relative Error-driven Sample Selection (PROGRESS), a data- and compute-efficient framework that enables VLMs to dynamically select what to learn next based on their evolving needs during training. At each stage, the model tracks its learning progress across skills and selects the most informative samples-those it has not already mastered and that are not too difficult to learn at the current stage of training. This strategy effectively controls skill acquisition and the order in which skills are learned. Specifically, we sample from skills showing the highest learning progress, prioritizing those with the most rapid improvement. Unlike prior methods, PROGRESS requires no upfront answer annotations, queries answers only on a need basis, avoids reliance on additional supervision from auxiliary VLMs, and does not require compute-heavy gradient computations for data selection. Experiments across multiple instruction-tuning datasets of varying scales demonstrate that PROGRESS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines with much less data and supervision. Additionally, we show strong cross-architecture generalization and transferability to larger models, validating PROGRESS as a scalable solution for efficient learning.
LLMs for Experiment Design in Scientific Domains: Are We There Yet?
Jason Hartford