Systolic Linear Attention: Co-Designing Tile-Grouped Gated Delta Attention for TPUs
Gagik Amirkhanyan, Nuojin Cheng
AI 速览：作者提出SLA，通过加宽键维度、分组衰减门和单核融合分块求解，使门控Delta线性注意力更适配TPU的宽脉动矩阵单元，并报告了相对KDA内核与预训练的训练加速。
Gated-delta linear attention layers such as Gated DeltaNet (GDN), Kimi Delta Attention (KDA), and GDN-2 are tuned for GPUs, where small tensor-core tiles and fast vector registers make per-channel decay rescaling and sequential in-block solves cheap. On Google TPUs, which concentrate compute in wide $256 \times 256$ systolic matrix units backed by a slower vector unit, porting these layers directly leaves half of each matrix tile empty and bottlenecks on vector operations. We present \textbf{Systolic Linear Attention (SLA)}, which reshapes gated delta attention around the matrix unit by widening keys to $256$ with grouped value heads, grouping decay gates into four $64$-channel tiles, and computing the chunk solve entirely with block matrix products in a single fused kernel. On TPU v7x, a full \texttt{SLA-R4} layer runs $1.6\times$--$2.5\times$ faster than the open-source Tokamax KDA kernel ($1.4\times$--$2.4\times$ with exact chunk inversion), driven primarily by head sharing and kernel fusion. Across a $2{,}048$-chip TPU v7x pre-training study of sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models from $6.5\text{B}$ to $63.1\text{B}$ parameters, SLA trains $11\%$--$24\%$ faster than KDA at similar perplexity, and reaches slightly lower perplexity than KDA in smaller matched-seed runs.
Andreas Schliebitz, Heiko Tapken, Martin Atzmueller
Self-supervised learning (SSL) typically relies on a backbone encoder followed by a small multilayer perceptron (MLP) projection head, which is conventionally discarded after training, while backbone quality is assessed via costly linear probing on labeled data. We argue that this approach including discarding the projector is rather computationally wasteful. Instead, we propose replacing the MLP head with a radial basis function network (RBFN), whose interpretable center and shape parameters can be exploited to judge representation quality without labels or a separate classifier. To this end, we introduce Scale-Normalized Separation (SNS), a novel label-free quality metric derived solely from the kernel centers and shapes learned during training. Across five canonical SSL architectures (MoCo, SimCLR, BYOL, SwAV and SimSiam) and four image classification datasets, we show that RBFN projection heads are competitive drop-in replacements for standard MLP projectors. We recommend constructing them with three RBF layers activated by the Gaussian radial basis function. Moreover, SNS exhibits strong to very strong positive correlation with established logistic regression metrics, demonstrating that a trained RBFN projector can act as a reliable proxy for backbone representation quality. We additionally publish a novel PyTorch compatible image classification dataset based on Google's Open Images V7 to facilitate reproducible research into representation learning.
Speech watermarking is becoming a key defense for digital copyright and content authentication. Existing attacks treat evasion as a removal problem: they erase the watermark, relying on detector access or on speech data that is hard to collect, such as paired clean-watermarked or clean target speaker speech. Commercial platforms are moving to close off these assumptions. TrustedAudio, for instance, restricts detection to authenticated users and denies meaningful detection feedback to unauthorized parties. Adversaries thus cannot tell whether a sample is watermarked or which watermark it carries, nor reliably remove it without degrading speech quality. In this work, we show that evading a speech watermark does not require erasing it: detection relies on the structural consistency of the embedded pattern, and disrupting this consistency is enough to defeat it. Building on this observation, we identify harmonic structure as an effective attack surface, as perturbing it breaks watermark consistency while preserving perceptual quality. We therefore propose ScrambleMark, a zero-query, watermark-agnostic, black-box attack that evades detection through harmonic scrambling. ScrambleMark combines a deterministic engine for discovering transferable harmonic perturbations with a generative model that learns randomized scrambling patterns, avoiding reliance on fixed attack rules. Across three commercial platforms (Google SynthID, Resemble AI, and TrustedAudio), ScrambleMark is the only attack to both evade detection and keep speech natural, achieving nearly 97% evasion and a 4.2/5 human rating, far above the 1.1 to 1.7 of prior attacks. Beyond evasion, ScrambleMark withstands adaptive recovery designed to reverse it, evidence that structural evasion is hard to mitigate in practice.
Yilun Hao, Ruixiao Yang, Hudson Hilal, Yongchao Chen, Kaizhi Qian, Yada Zhu, Yang Zhang, Chuchu Fan
Real-world problems span diverse domains, including program synthesis, symbolic reasoning, planning, and optimization, and often require fundamentally different solution paradigms. A central challenge for LLM-based reasoning is twofold: identifying an appropriate problem-solving approach and formulating it correctly. In this paper, we propose AlgoPilot, a cross-paradigm reasoning framework that enables adaptive selection of the solving approaches and structured problem formulation prior to execution. The AlgoPilot framework contains three components: 1) a SteerLM, trained via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL), that adaptively selects the solving strategy (paradigm and modes) based on input problems, 2) the corresponding expert GuideLM, trained via SFT, that generates structured formulation guidance tailored to the selected strategy, and 3) an ExecutionLM that generates solutions conditioned on both the selected strategy and its formulation. Unlike prompting-based methods that rely on fixed reasoning templates, our approach learns to adaptively choose and structure problem-solving strategies based on the input. We build AlgoPilot on Qwen3-8B and evaluate across 5 problem categories and 13 benchmarks with 66 unique domains, comparing against both the latest similarly scaled small models and large LLMs. AlgoPilot significantly improves average accuracy for the same model from 38.4% to 72.9%, outperforming the best large LLM prompting baseline GLM-5 by 11.7%. Ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of each component. Notably, we show that the learned steering and formulation modules can transfer across execution models, suggesting their potential to improve other LLMs. Project page: https://sites.google.com/view/algopilot.
Variable fonts enable continuous variation of glyph geometry along semantic design axes such as weight, width, slant, and optical size. However, constructing a variable font from a static font remains a labor-intensive process requiring expert typographic design and manual specification of glyph variation data. We introduce NIV (Neural Axis Variations), a method that automatically converts a static font into a fully functional variable font. Given glyph outlines and a set of desired design axes, NIV predicts per-point displacements. The model operates directly on vector glyph geometry and employs a novel Property Embedding mechanism that captures interactions between multiple axes, enabling consistent multi-axis variation within a unified framework. We train NIV on a newly constructed dataset derived from variable Google Fonts, comprising over one million variation tuples. The resulting model generalizes across unseen code points, unseen font styles, high-complexity CJK glyphs, and even out-of-distribution handwriting inputs. The generated outputs are standard variable font files supporting continuous interpolation via existing rendering engines. To facilitate research, we release the dataset, the complete training and inference implementation, and trained models at https://github.com/ndvbd/NIV. Beyond typography, our approach demonstrates how structured geometric objects with continuous parametric variation can be synthesized using neural deformations.
Is It the Curriculum or Just the Easy Start? Benchmarking Unsupervised Environment Design on Quadrupeds
Jakub Gilewicz, Dominik Galus, Piotr Wojdas
AI 速览：该论文在五种3D四足机器人上统一基准测试了十四种无监督环境设计、域随机化和机器人课程方法，发现没有一种方法在所有机器人和关卡集上均最优，且简单或低难度训练关卡的方法在分布内随机关卡上表现突出。
Unsupervised environment design (UED) methods such as PLR, ACCEL, SFL and PAIRED are compared mostly on 2D mazes, grid worlds and BipedalWalker, while terrain curricula for legged robots are hand-designed and evaluated against a few baselines. We present a benchmark that runs fourteen UED, domain-randomisation and robotics curricula under one protocol on five 3D quadrupeds in MuJoCo MJX: the closed-chain W01-TEK and the open-chain Unitree Go1 and Go2, Google Barkour vB and Boston Dynamics Spot. Levels are vectors of eight interpretable terrain parameters, and all curricula drive the same PPO student at matched environment-step budgets. The evaluation reports success on random and held-out structured terrains, interquartile means with stratified bootstrap intervals, capability envelopes and a level-by-level domination comparison. We compare methods within each robot and report, per level set, the top group of methods not significantly below the best. No method is in the top group on every robot and level set. Methods with easy or low-difficulty training levels, curated or not, fill the top groups on in-distribution random levels of Go1 and Barkour, and of W01-TEK apart from PAIRED+BiBC. The success-driven terrain curriculum from legged-robot practice is in a top group most often, domain randomisation on uniform levels in none, and PAIRED in none outside Spot, where the fourteen methods lie within 3.8 points on random levels of difficulty 0.25. On three robots the leader on in-distribution random levels is not the leader on held-out terrain. We collect the results into a per-robot guide to choosing a curriculum.
Henrique Schechter Vera, Sahil Dua, Jovan Andonov, Sara Smoot, Sebastian Russo, Ivan Llanos, Max Matveev, Jae Hyeon Yoo 等 73 位作者
We present EmbeddingGemma 2, an open multimodal embedding model which natively represents text, images, audio, video, and combinations thereof in a unified space. Our approach introduces improvements such as simplified per-layer embeddings and a multi-stage curriculum with modality and objective progression which ensure strong quality across unimodal, cross-modal, and mixed-modal evaluations. Notably, in comprehensive embedding benchmarks across all modalities, EmbeddingGemma 2 establishes a new Pareto frontier, outperforming both specialist models and models two to twelve times larger. Furthermore, our design offers flexibility for resource-constrained environments, supporting selective modality encoder loading, adjustable vision token budgets, truncatable embedding dimensions, and quantized weights. We present ablations analyzing key decisions and release EmbeddingGemma 2 to promote further research.
Alejandra Zambrano, Sara Vera Marjanovic, Imene Kerboua, Xing Han Lù, Leila Kosseim
Despite recent advances, LLM-based web agents still struggle with limited exploration, omission of critical steps, and sensitivity to task constraints. Prior work suggests that many of these failures stem from weaknesses in planning, yet the impact of alternative natural language plan representations remains unexplored. To address this, we introduce PlanAhead, a static planner-executor framework that evaluates the impact of plan representation on agent performance. We first automatically categorize WebArena tasks into 3 difficulty levels, enabling consistent difficulty grading without human annotation. Then we systematically evaluate 4 different plan representations on the tasks categorized as hard: sequential subgoals, narrative, pseudocode, and checklist; across different families of multimodal LLM-powered agents(OpenAI, Alibaba, and Google). To account for stochastic variability, we introduce a novel decomposition of agent Success Rate (SR) into 2 interpretable evaluation metrics: Achievement Rate (AR) and Solved-Task Consistency (STC). Our results show that both, the plan formulation and the underlying LLM generating the plan, significantly influence web-agent robustness and task success.
We present Agaram 2.5B, a Tamil-first language model trained from scratch that converses in Tamil script, romanized Tanglish and English, and calls tools. Our first model, Agaram 1.5B, guided the new base, tokenizer and fine-tuning recipe: we pretrained a new 2.53B-parameter base on 50 billion tokens, 58% of them Tamil, with a tokenizer that needs 1.55 tokens per Tamil word where Qwen2.5's needs 9.44. A four-day public preview of our first 2.5B chat model showed where it fell short with real users, and we rebuilt supervised fine-tuning around what we saw, on 222,662 records. The released model scores above Sarvam-1 in all six translation directions we measured (FLORES chrF 56.9 into Tamil and 55.4 into English), chooses the expected tool on all 25 prompts of a tool set that was used during checkpoint selection and whose schemas appear in training, with exact arguments on 16, and was preferred over the preview model by an LLM judge on 100 sealed human-written prompts (net preference +30 points, 95% interval +14.5 to +45.0). On FLORES it also scores above Google's Gemma 4 E4B-it and our fine-tuned variant of it in both directions, with 2.53B parameters against E4B's 4.5B effective parameters. Factual knowledge and reliable refusal of harmful requests remain open problems, which we set out as future work. The base and chat weights and GGUF files are released under Apache-2.0, and this report gives a full account of the data, training and evaluation as a playbook for building language models for under-represented languages.
We measure the emotion geometry of six LLMs spanning Google's Gemma 2 family. Using an extraction pipeline established by Sofroniew et al. (2026) on Claude Sonnet 4.5 and replicated by Hollowell (2026) on Gemma 2 27B base, we compare emotion geometry across base and instruction-tuned variants of Gemma 2 2B, 9B, and 27B. First, all six model cells exhibit the core emotion geometry. A linear map fit between two cells places held-out emotions nearest their own vectors in the target model. Across all fifteen model pairs, fit in one direction each, this failed exactly once, and the median rank was 1 in every pair. Linear maps refit on cleaned embedding-table vectors recover every held-out emotion at rank 1 in all thirty ordered pairs. Second, scale spreads the geometry's variance across more directions without weakening its tie to valence. The leading component's share of variance falls from 31.6 percent (2B) to 29.8 (9B) to 26.7 (27B) in the base models and from 31.9 (2B) to 29.2 (9B) to 27.3 (27B) in the tuned ones, while its correlation with human valence ratings stays between .71 and .78 in all six models. Third, we project each emotion vector onto the output vocabulary and ask at what depth the vector's own emotion word enters the top 10,000 of the 256,000 tokens. In the 2B and 9B models the median emotion word is there from layer 0, while in the 27B models it begins near chance, stays outside the top 10,000 for half the network, and enters at layer 23 in one step. Fourth, tuning leaves every registered analysis-layer measure within its floor. At every size, valence correlation rises and arousal correlation falls by amounts within their floors, the latter against prediction. PC2's variance share also falls, with a pooled decrease significant after correction. Mid-late layer stability exceeds its floor and traces to base 27B's final layer. Code, data, and audit reports are released.
Planetary Geospatial Foundation Models: A New Paradigm for Global Public Health
Arbaaz Muslim, Aviv Slobodkin, Katherine Wheeler-Martin, Eric Zhou, John Brittain, Martin Frasch, Hamsa Subramaniam, Jacob Bien 等 38 位作者
AI 速览：提出并展示地理空间基础模型 PDFM 如何以可泛化的地点表征补充传统流行病学工作流，并在多国多任务案例中改善公共卫生监测。
The efficacy of traditional disease prediction is limited by spatial gaps and temporal lags, which impact the timing and targets of resource deployments. Outbreaks escalate undetected, chronic disease burdens are quantified years later, and at-risk populations in data-sparse regions remain unaddressed. Planetary geospatial foundation models complement existing epidemiological workflows to provide operational improvements, encoding multimodal search, mobility, and environmental signals into generalizable place representations. As illustrations of this complementarity, we present independent global health case studies of Google Earth AI's Population Dynamics Foundation Model (PDFM) -- a foundation model for geospatial inference -- across four domains (vaccine-preventable, communicable, noncommunicable, maternal mental health), five tasks (spatial extrapolation, interpolation/nowcasting, probabilistic forecasting, prospective forecasting, risk stratification), and four countries (USA, Canada, Mexico, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo). Across these case studies, PDFM addresses critical surveillance gaps across domains: improving US-Canada border MMR vaccination coverage predictions by capturing cross-border behavioral spillovers domestic models miss; nowcasting cardiovascular disease to accelerate data availability; enhancing short-term municipal Mexican dengue forecasts for timely outbreak vector control; improving forecasts of cholera hotspots; and adding a transferable signal to individual-level postpartum-depression risk prediction in US states the model had never seen, while not replacing individual socioeconomic data or closing demographic screening gaps. Together, these results showcase capabilities of geospatial foundation models for public health surveillance.
AI 速览：提出自主AI系统PPE，从自然语言查询出发自动完成多模态地理空间数据检索、融合与模型搜索，并在多个健康、风险与流行病预测任务上报告优于专家基线。
Addressing critical global challenges, from food security and disaster risk to disease outbreaks and socio-economic vulnerability, demands high-fidelity geospatial modeling. However, building predictive planetary models remains bottlenecked by a fragmented data ecosystem, requiring manual data retrieval, multimodal data curation and fusion along with iterative model selection. We present the Planetary Prediction Engine (PPE), an autonomous AI system that executes this end-to-end workflow directly from natural-language queries. PPE synthesizes multimodal datasets on the fly, retrieving spatiotemporally relevant covariates across open-web and Earth observation platforms (Data Commons, Google Earth Engine) and fusing them with geospatial foundation model embeddings (PDFM, AlphaEarth). Simultaneously, it searches over task-tailored model architecture families with automated overfitting guards. Across diverse tasks, geographies, and scientific domains, PPE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art or manually tuned expert baselines. For US spatial regression, PPE improves mean $R^2$ across 21 CDC health indicators (76.8% vs. 60.0%), FEMA national risk indices (64.9% vs. 60.0%), and the Social Vulnerability Index (66.2% vs. 58.6%). For spatial downscaling in data-scarce settings, PPE integrates localized proxies to double baseline accuracy in Nigerian food security indicators ($R^2$ of 66.1% vs. 31.5%). For epidemiological nowcasting of the 2026 DRC Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak, PPE achieves a Recall@10 of 83.3% (identifying 15 of 18 newly invaded health zones across five weekly forecasts), a +10.3 percentage-point improvement over the public state-of-the-art modeling (~73%). By combining autonomous multimodal planetary data discovery with targeted model optimization, PPE lowers the technical barrier to planetary-scale analytics, enabling rapid, customized, expert-level deployment.
Diffusion models have achieved remarkable progress in various domains with an intriguing ability to produce new data that do not exist in the training set. In this work, we study the hypothesis that such creativity arises from the neural network backbone learning a smoothed version of the empirical score function, which guides the denoising dynamics to generate data points that interpolate the training data. Focusing mainly on settings where the training set lies uniformly in a one-dimensional subspace, we elucidate the interplay between score smoothing and the denoising dynamics with analytical solutions and numerical experiments, demonstrating how smoothing the score function can cause the denoised data samples to interpolate the training set along the subspace. Moreover, we present theoretical and empirical evidence that learning score functions with neural networks - either with or without explicit regularization - can naturally achieve a similar effect, including when the data belong to simple nonlinear manifolds.
Towards Automating Scientific Review with Google's Paper Assistant Tool
Rajesh Jayaram, Drew Tyler, David Woodruff, Corinna Cortes, Yossi Matias, Vahab Mirrokni, Vincent Cohen-Addad
AI 速览：提出AI与人类在科学评审中协作的四级分类框架，并介绍用于深度科学评审与验证的智能体框架Paper Assistant Tool（PAT）。
Artificial intelligence is driving a revolution in scientific discovery, accelerating everything from hypothesis generation to mathematical theorem proving. However, this rapid acceleration is creating a systemic challenge: traditional human peer review cannot scale to match the influx of AI-assisted science. Ultimately, to resolve this tension, we must also deploy AI to accelerate the verification and review process itself. To frame the discussion around this transition, we propose a taxonomy consisting of four progressive levels of AI-human collaboration in scientific evaluation, and discuss various trade-offs involved with each. As a step toward this future, we introduce the Paper Assistant Tool (PAT), an agentic AI framework built for deep scientific review and verification. PAT ingests full scientific manuscripts and produces a comprehensive evaluation, checking theoretical results, validating experiments, suggesting improvements, and identifying potential flaws. By utilizing inference scaling techniques, PAT is able to identify deeper issues than a single model call alone, achieving a 34% improvement over zero-shot recall on mathematical errors in the SPOT benchmark. Pilot deployments of PAT as a pre-submission tool for authors at two major Computer Science conferences -- STOC and ICML -- demonstrate its ability to identify critical errors and suggest substantive improvements to research papers. By catching errors early, PAT eases the cognitive burden placed on referees, while preserving their control over the outcomes of the review process.
Tony Feng, Trieu H. Trinh, Garrett Bingham, Dawsen Hwang, Yuri Chervonyi, Junehyuk Jung, Joonkyung Lee, Carlo Pagano 等 28 位作者
Recent advances in foundational models have yielded reasoning systems capable of achieving a gold-medal standard at the International Mathematical Olympiad. The transition from competition-level problem-solving to professional research, however, requires navigating vast literature and constructing long-horizon proofs. In this work, we introduce Aletheia, a math research agent that iteratively generates, verifies, and revises solutions end-to-end in natural language. Specifically, Aletheia is powered by an advanced version of Gemini Deep Think for challenging reasoning problems, a novel inference-time scaling law that extends beyond Olympiad-level problems, and intensive tool use to navigate the complexities of mathematical research. We demonstrate the capability of Aletheia from Olympiad problems to PhD-level exercises and most notably, through several distinct milestones in AI-assisted mathematics research: (a) a research paper (Feng26) generated by AI without any human intervention in calculating certain structure constants in arithmetic geometry called eigenweights; (b) a research paper (LeeSeo26) demonstrating human-AI collaboration in proving bounds on systems of interacting particles called independent sets; and (c) an extensive semi-autonomous evaluation (Feng et al., 2026a) of 700 open problems on Bloom's Erdos Conjectures database, including autonomous solutions to four open questions. In order to help the public better understand the developments pertaining to AI and mathematics, we suggest quantifying standard levels of autonomy and novelty of AI-assisted results, as well as propose a novel concept of human-AI interaction cards for transparency. We conclude with reflections on human-AI collaboration in mathematics and share all prompts as well as model outputs at https://github.com/google-deepmind/superhuman/tree/main/aletheia.
János Kramár, Joshua Engels, Zheng Wang, Bilal Chughtai, Rohin Shah, Neel Nanda, Arthur Conmy
Frontier language model capabilities are improving rapidly. We thus need stronger mitigations against bad actors misusing increasingly powerful systems. Prior work has shown that activation probes may be a promising misuse mitigation technique, but we identify a key remaining challenge: probes fail to generalize under important production distribution shifts. In particular, we find that the shift from short-context to long-context inputs is difficult for existing probe architectures. We propose several new probe architectures that handle this long-context distribution shift. We evaluate these probes in the cyber-offensive domain, testing their robustness against various production-relevant distribution shifts, including multi-turn conversations, long context prompts, and adaptive red teaming. Our results demonstrate that while our novel architectures address context length, a combination of architecture choice and training on diverse distributions is required for broad generalization. Additionally, we show that pairing probes with prompted classifiers achieves optimal accuracy at a low cost due to the computational efficiency of probes. These findings have informed the successful deployment of misuse mitigation probes in user-facing instances of Gemini, Google's frontier language model. Finally, we find early positive results using AlphaEvolve to automate improvements in both probe architecture search and adaptive red teaming, showing that automating some AI safety research is already possible.
TiRex: Zero-Shot Forecasting Across Long and Short Horizons with Enhanced In-Context Learning
Andreas Auer, Patrick Podest, Daniel Klotz, Sebastian Böck, Günter Klambauer, Sepp Hochreiter
AI 速览：提出基于 xLSTM 的零样本时间序列预测模型 TiRex，通过保留状态追踪能力与 CPM 训练掩码策略，在长短视野预测上取得作者报告的新最优结果。
In-context learning, the ability of large language models to perform tasks using only examples provided in the prompt, has recently been adapted for time series forecasting. This paradigm enables zero-shot prediction, where past values serve as context for forecasting future values, making powerful forecasting tools accessible to non-experts and increasing the performance when training data are scarce. Most existing zero-shot forecasting approaches rely on transformer architectures, which, despite their success in language, often fall short of expectations in time series forecasting, where recurrent models like LSTMs frequently have the edge. Conversely, while LSTMs are well-suited for time series modeling due to their state-tracking capabilities, they lack strong in-context learning abilities. We introduce TiRex that closes this gap by leveraging xLSTM, an enhanced LSTM with competitive in-context learning skills. Unlike transformers, state-space models, or parallelizable RNNs such as RWKV, TiRex retains state-tracking, a critical property for long-horizon forecasting. To further facilitate its state-tracking ability, we propose a training-time masking strategy called CPM. TiRex sets a new state of the art in zero-shot time series forecasting on the HuggingFace benchmarks GiftEval and Chronos-ZS, outperforming significantly larger models including TabPFN-TS (Prior Labs), Chronos Bolt (Amazon), TimesFM (Google), and Moirai (Salesforce) across both short- and long-term forecasts.
Shreya Agrawal, Mohammed Alewi Hassen, Emmanuel Asiedu Brempong, Boris Babenko, Fred Zyda, Olivia Graham, Di Li, Samier Merchant 等 19 位作者
Precipitation nowcasting, which predicts rainfall up to a few hours ahead, is a critical tool for vulnerable communities in the Global South frequently exposed to intense, rapidly developing storms. Timely forecasts provide a crucial window to protect lives and livelihoods. Traditional numerical weather prediction (NWP) methods suffer from high latency, low spatial and temporal resolution, and significant gaps in accuracy across the world. Recent machine learning-based nowcasting methods, common in the Global North, cannot be extended to the Global South due to extremely sparse radar coverage. We present Global MetNet, an operational global machine learning nowcasting model. It leverages the Global Precipitation Mission's CORRA dataset, geostationary satellite data, and global NWP data to predict precipitation for the next 12 hours. The model operates at a high resolution of approximately 0.05° (~5km) spatially and 15 minutes temporally. Global MetNet significantly outperforms industry-standard hourly forecasts and achieves significantly higher skill, making forecasts useful over a much larger area of the world than previously available. Our model demonstrates better skill in data-sparse regions than even the best high-resolution NWP models achieve in the US. Validated using ground radar and satellite data, it shows significant improvements across key metrics like the critical success index and fractions skill score for all precipitation rates and lead times. Crucially, our model generates forecasts in under a minute, making it readily deployable for real-time applications. It is already deployed for millions of users on Google Search. This work represents a key step in reducing global disparities in forecast quality and integrating sparse, high-resolution satellite observations into weather forecasting.
AlphaEvolve: A coding agent for scientific and algorithmic discovery
Alexander Novikov, Ngân Vũ, Marvin Eisenberger, Emilien Dupont, Po-Sen Huang, Adam Zsolt Wagner, Sergey Shirobokov, Borislav Kozlovskii 等 18 位作者
AI 速览：AlphaEvolve 是一个进化式编码智能体，通过让 LLM 直接改写代码并持续接收评估器反馈，迭代改进算法，并在数学与计算基础设施问题上取得作者报告的进展。
In this white paper, we present AlphaEvolve, an evolutionary coding agent that substantially enhances capabilities of state-of-the-art LLMs on highly challenging tasks such as tackling open scientific problems or optimizing critical pieces of computational infrastructure. AlphaEvolve orchestrates an autonomous pipeline of LLMs, whose task is to improve an algorithm by making direct changes to the code. Using an evolutionary approach, continuously receiving feedback from one or more evaluators, AlphaEvolve iteratively improves the algorithm, potentially leading to new scientific and practical discoveries. We demonstrate the broad applicability of this approach by applying it to a number of important computational problems. When applied to optimizing critical components of large-scale computational stacks at Google, AlphaEvolve developed a more efficient scheduling algorithm for data centers, found a functionally equivalent simplification in the circuit design of hardware accelerators, and accelerated the training of the LLM underpinning AlphaEvolve itself. Furthermore, AlphaEvolve discovered novel, provably correct algorithms that surpass state-of-the-art solutions on a spectrum of problems in mathematics and computer science, significantly expanding the scope of prior automated discovery methods (Romera-Paredes et al., 2023). Notably, AlphaEvolve developed a search algorithm that found a procedure to multiply two $4 \times 4$ complex-valued matrices using $48$ scalar multiplications; offering the first improvement, after 56 years, over Strassen's algorithm in this setting. We believe AlphaEvolve and coding agents like it can have a significant impact in improving solutions of problems across many areas of science and computation.
Aviad Barzilai, Yotam Gigi, Amr Helmy, Vered Silverman, Yehonathan Refael, Bolous Jaber, Tomer Shekel, George Leifman 等 9 位作者
Foundation models have had a significant impact across various AI applications, enabling use cases that were previously impossible. Contrastive Visual Language Models (VLMs), in particular, have outperformed other techniques in many tasks. However, their prevalence in remote sensing (RS) is still limited, due to the scarcity of diverse remote-sensing visual-language datasets. In this work we introduce two novel image-caption datasets for training of remote sensing foundation models. The first dataset pairs aerial and satellite imagery with captions generated by Gemini using landmarks extracted from Google Maps. The second dataset utilizes public web images and their corresponding alt-text, filtered for the remote sensing domain, resulting in a diverse dataset with greater breadth in image styles and subject matter. These datasets are used to pre-train the MaMMUT~\citep{kuo2023mammutsimplearchitecturejoint} VLM architecture, resulting in state-of-the-art generalization performance in zero-shot cross-modal retrieval on well-known public benchmarks. Finally, we present our ongoing research to distill image-level knowledge gained in the VLM contrastive training procedure to enhance the model's localization ability. Specifically, we iteratively generate pseudo-labels for image regions based on the model's attention maps and use these labels for further training. To mitigate noisy attention maps and create robust segmentation masks, we introduce a novel attention-pooling mechanism called the Smooth-Attention-Operation.
Mert Yuksekgonul, Federico Bianchi, Joseph Boen, Sheng Liu, Zhi Huang, Carlos Guestrin, James Zou
AI 速览：TextGrad 利用 LLM 提供的文本反馈对复合 AI 系统进行类似自动微分的优化，并在多种任务上展示了效果。
AI is undergoing a paradigm shift, with breakthroughs achieved by systems orchestrating multiple large language models (LLMs) and other complex components. As a result, developing principled and automated optimization methods for compound AI systems is one of the most important new challenges. Neural networks faced a similar challenge in its early days until backpropagation and automatic differentiation transformed the field by making optimization turn-key. Inspired by this, we introduce TextGrad, a powerful framework performing automatic ``differentiation'' via text. TextGrad backpropagates textual feedback provided by LLMs to improve individual components of a compound AI system. In our framework, LLMs provide rich, general, natural language suggestions to optimize variables in computation graphs, ranging from code snippets to molecular structures. TextGrad follows PyTorch's syntax and abstraction and is flexible and easy-to-use. It works out-of-the-box for a variety of tasks, where the users only provide the objective function without tuning components or prompts of the framework. We showcase TextGrad's effectiveness and generality across a diverse range of applications, from question answering and molecule optimization to radiotherapy treatment planning. Without modifying the framework, TextGrad improves the zero-shot accuracy of GPT-4o in Google-Proof Question Answering from $51\%$ to $55\%$, yields $20\%$ relative performance gain in optimizing LeetCode-Hard coding problem solutions, improves prompts for reasoning, designs new druglike small molecules with desirable in silico binding, and designs radiation oncology treatment plans with high specificity. TextGrad lays a foundation to accelerate the development of the next-generation of AI systems.
Improved Differential Privacy for SGD via Optimal Private Linear Operators on Adaptive Streams
Sergey Denisov, Brendan McMahan, Keith Rush, Adam Smith, Abhradeep Guha Thakurta
AI 速览：该论文研究自适应流场景下矩阵机制的最优实例化，提出无参数不动点算法计算最优分解，并在联邦学习用户级差分隐私中报告了显著改进。
Motivated by recent applications requiring differential privacy over adaptive streams, we investigate the question of optimal instantiations of the matrix mechanism in this setting. We prove fundamental theoretical results on the applicability of matrix factorizations to adaptive streams, and provide a parameter-free fixed-point algorithm for computing optimal factorizations. We instantiate this framework with respect to concrete matrices which arise naturally in machine learning, and train user-level differentially private models with the resulting optimal mechanisms, yielding significant improvements in a notable problem in federated learning with user-level differential privacy.
Reza Shokri, Marco Stronati, Congzheng Song, Vitaly Shmatikov
We quantitatively investigate how machine learning models leak information about the individual data records on which they were trained. We focus on the basic membership inference attack: given a data record and black-box access to a model, determine if the record was in the model's training dataset. To perform membership inference against a target model, we make adversarial use of machine learning and train our own inference model to recognize differences in the target model's predictions on the inputs that it trained on versus the inputs that it did not train on. We empirically evaluate our inference techniques on classification models trained by commercial "machine learning as a service" providers such as Google and Amazon. Using realistic datasets and classification tasks, including a hospital discharge dataset whose membership is sensitive from the privacy perspective, we show that these models can be vulnerable to membership inference attacks. We then investigate the factors that influence this leakage and evaluate mitigation strategies.