Ax Nicolas Anguita, Francesco Locatello, Andrew M. Saxe, Marco Mondelli, Flavia Mancini, Samuel Lippl, Clementine Domine 2/24/2026

A Theory of How Pretraining Shapes Inductive Bias in Fine-Tuning

Theoretical analysis of how pretraining initializations impact feature learning and refinement during fine-tuning in modern deep learning systems.

Ax Florentin Coeurdoux, Etienne Lempereur, Nathana\"el Cuvelle-Magar, Thomas Eboli, St\'ephane Mallat, Anastasia Borovykh, Eric Vanden-Eijnden 2/24/2026

Training-Free Generative Modeling via Kernelized Stochastic Interpolants

Kernel method for generative modeling within stochastic interpolant framework replacing neural network training with linear systems solved from data.

Ax Thanh Q. Tran, Arun Verma, Kiwan Wong, Bryan Kian Hsiang Low, Daniela Rus, Wei Xiao 2/24/2026

BarrierSteer: LLM Safety via Learning Barrier Steering

BarrierSteer framework for LLM safety using barrier steering to prevent adversarial attacks and unsafe content generation with theoretical guarantees.

Ax Wendi Li, Sharon Li 2/24/2026

LAD: Learning Advantage Distribution for Reasoning

New RL objective for LLM reasoning using advantage distribution matching to improve diversity and exploration beyond reward maximization in multi-step reasoning tasks.

Ax Shiyu Wang, Haolin Chen, Liangwei Yang, Jielin Qiu, Rithesh Murthy, Ming Zhu, Zixiang Chen, Silvio Savarese, Caiming Xiong, Shelby Heinecke, Huan Wang 2/24/2026

Prompt Optimization Via Diffusion Language Models

Diffusion language models optimize system prompts via masked denoising without gradient access to base LLM.

Ax Tommoro Robotics, :, Jesoon Kang, Taegeon Park, Jisu An, Soo Min Kimm, Jaejoon Kim, Jinu Pahk, Byungju Kim, Junseok Lee, Namheon Baek, Sungwan Ha, Hojun Baek, Eduardo Ayerve Cruz, Wontae Kim, Junghyeon Choi, Yousuk Lee, Joonmo Han, Sunghyun Cho, Sunghyun Kwon, Soyoung Lee, Jun Ki Lee, Seung-Joon Yi, Byoung-Tak Zhang, Theo Taeyeong Kim 2/24/2026

Habilis-$\beta$: A Fast-Motion and Long-Lasting On-Device Vision-Language-Action Model

Habilis-β: on-device vision-language-action model for real-world robotic deployment with long-duration evaluation metrics.

Ax Domenic Rosati, Xijie Zeng, Hong Huang, Sebastian Dionicio, Subhabrata Majumdar, Frank Rudzicz, Hassan Sajjad 2/24/2026

Limits of Convergence-Rate Control for Open-Weight Safety

Theoretical analysis of convergence-rate control as defense mechanism against fine-tuning of open-weight models for harmful purposes.