Daily Papers

We present UTF8Tokenizer, a minimalist byte-level tokenizer that maps text exactly to IDs corresponding to the bytes underlying the text's UTF-8 encoding (e.g., byte x09 is token ID 9). Unlike prior byte-level approaches (Xue et al., 2021; Pagnoni et al., 2025), our implementation never introduces out-of-range IDs (i.e. there is no token ID 256) or auxiliary tokens: all special behavior (e.g., padding, boundaries, conversation structure, attention segments, tool calling, "thinking" spans, etc.) is encoded using C0 control bytes - just as ASCII was originally designed to embed control information alongside printable text. These design principles yield practical benefits: (1) faster tokenization (14x) and significantly lower host-device transfer (8x less than int64); (2) simple, shareable 256*d embedding tables that can be aligned across models; and (3) a training-time enhancement via bit-biased embeddings, which exposes per-byte bit structure and can be added to the embedding table post-training, removing inference costs. Our HuggingFace-compatible implementation improves language modeling convergence.

Control Flow Attestation (CFA) allows remote verification of run-time software integrity in embedded systems. However, CFA is limited by the storage/transmission costs of generated control flow logs (CFlog). Recent work has proposed application-specific optimizations by speculating on likely sub-paths in CFlog and replacing them with reserved symbols at runtime. Albeit effective, prior approaches do not consider the representation of addresses in a control flow path for speculation. This work proposes RESPEC-CFA, an architectural extension for CFA allowing for speculation on (1) the locality of control flows and (2) their Huffman encoding. Alone, RESPEC-CFA reduces CFlog sizes by up to 90.1%. Combined with prior methods, RESPEC-CFA yields reductions of up to 99.7%, representing a significant step toward practical CFA.

Zero-shot capability has been considered as a new revolution of deep learning, letting machines work on tasks without curated training data. As a good start and the only existing outcome of zero-shot image captioning (IC), ZeroCap abandons supervised training and sequentially searches every word in the caption using the knowledge of large-scale pretrained models. Though effective, its autoregressive generation and gradient-directed searching mechanism limit the diversity of captions and inference speed, respectively. Moreover, ZeroCap does not consider the controllability issue of zero-shot IC. To move forward, we propose a framework for Controllable Zero-shot IC, named ConZIC. The core of ConZIC is a novel sampling-based non-autoregressive language model named GibbsBERT, which can generate and continuously polish every word. Extensive quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed ConZIC for both zero-shot IC and controllable zero-shot IC. Especially, ConZIC achieves about 5x faster generation speed than ZeroCap, and about 1.5x higher diversity scores, with accurate generation given different control signals.

There have been growing discussions on estimating and subsequently reducing the operational carbon footprint of enterprise data centers. The design and intelligent control for data centers have an important impact on data center carbon footprint. In this paper, we showcase PyDCM, a Python library that enables extremely fast prototyping of data center design and applies reinforcement learning-enabled control with the purpose of evaluating key sustainability metrics including carbon footprint, energy consumption, and observing temperature hotspots. We demonstrate these capabilities of PyDCM and compare them to existing works in EnergyPlus for modeling data centers. PyDCM can also be used as a standalone Gymnasium environment for demonstrating sustainability-focused data center control.

Region-level captioning is challenged by the caption degeneration issue, which refers to that pre-trained multimodal models tend to predict the most frequent captions but miss the less frequent ones. In this study, we propose a controllable region-level captioning (ControlCap) approach, which introduces control words to a multimodal model to address the caption degeneration issue. In specific, ControlCap leverages a discriminative module to generate control words within the caption space to partition it to multiple sub-spaces. The multimodal model is constrained to generate captions within a few sub-spaces containing the control words, which increases the opportunity of hitting less frequent captions, alleviating the caption degeneration issue. Furthermore, interactive control words can be given by either a human or an expert model, which enables captioning beyond the training caption space, enhancing the model's generalization ability. Extensive experiments on Visual Genome and RefCOCOg datasets show that ControlCap respectively improves the CIDEr score by 21.6 and 2.2, outperforming the state-of-the-arts by significant margins. Code is available at https://github.com/callsys/ControlCap.

Retraining-free MoE compression reduces deployment memory by pruning or merging experts, but often treats the compressed checkpoint as the final artifact. We argue that this view is incomplete: compressed MoE checkpoints are better understood as compressed initializations that benefit from a tiny post-compression adjustment stage. Across two MoE LLM backbones, four pruning/merging methods, three expert-retention ratios, and 28 benchmarks, we compare LM fine-tuning and teacher-based KD under matched small-data budgets and measured GPU costs. Using only 3,000 C4 examples and a single epoch of adjustment, Full FT recovers 37.3% of the original-to-compressed performance gap on average. Moreover, LM fine-tuning is more cost-effective than standard token-level KD, and full-parameter adjustment gives the strongest cost--recovery trade-off among the tested scopes. These results suggest that retraining-free compression should be paired with small post-compression adjustment to recover a substantial portion of the performance lost during compression.

Although recent generative image compression methods have demonstrated impressive potential in optimizing the rate-distortion-perception trade-off, they still face the critical challenge of flexible rate adaption to diverse compression necessities and scenarios. To overcome this challenge, this paper proposes a Controllable Generative Image Compression framework, termed Control-GIC, the first capable of fine-grained bitrate adaption across a broad spectrum while ensuring high-fidelity and generality compression. Control-GIC is grounded in a VQGAN framework that encodes an image as a sequence of variable-length codes (i.e. VQ-indices), which can be losslessly compressed and exhibits a direct positive correlation with the bitrates. Drawing inspiration from the classical coding principle, we correlate the information density of local image patches with their granular representations. Hence, we can flexibly determine a proper allocation of granularity for the patches to achieve dynamic adjustment for VQ-indices, resulting in desirable compression rates. We further develop a probabilistic conditional decoder capable of retrieving historic encoded multi-granularity representations according to transmitted codes, and then reconstruct hierarchical granular features in the formalization of conditional probability, enabling more informative aggregation to improve reconstruction realism. Our experiments show that Control-GIC allows highly flexible and controllable bitrate adaption where the results demonstrate its superior performance over recent state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/lianqi1008/Control-GIC.

Prior research on deep video compression (DVC) for machine tasks typically necessitates training a unique codec for each specific task, mandating a dedicated decoder per task. In contrast, traditional video codecs employ a flexible encoder controller, enabling the adaptation of a single codec to different tasks through mechanisms like mode prediction. Drawing inspiration from this, we introduce an innovative encoder controller for deep video compression for machines. This controller features a mode prediction and a Group of Pictures (GoP) selection module. Our approach centralizes control at the encoding stage, allowing for adaptable encoder adjustments across different tasks, such as detection and tracking, while maintaining compatibility with a standard pre-trained DVC decoder. Empirical evidence demonstrates that our method is applicable across multiple tasks with various existing pre-trained DVCs. Moreover, extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms previous DVC by about 25% bitrate for different tasks, with only one pre-trained decoder.

Rate control algorithms are at the heart of video conferencing platforms, determining target bitrates that match dynamic network characteristics for high quality. Recent data-driven strategies have shown promise for this challenging task, but the performance degradation they introduce during training has been a nonstarter for many production services, precluding adoption. This paper aims to bolster the practicality of data-driven rate control by presenting an alternative avenue for experiential learning: leveraging purely existing telemetry logs produced by the incumbent algorithm in production. We observe that these logs contain effective decisions, although often at the wrong times or in the wrong order. To realize this approach despite the inherent uncertainty that log-based learning brings (i.e., lack of feedback for new decisions), our system, Mowgli, combines a variety of robust learning techniques (i.e., conservatively reasoning about alternate behavior to minimize risk and using a richer model formulation to account for environmental noise). Across diverse networks (emulated and real-world), Mowgli outperforms the widely deployed GCC algorithm, increasing average video bitrates by 15-39% while reducing freeze rates by 60-100%.

Ternary language models such as BitNet b1.58, Falcon-E and BitCPM are fine-tuned with higher-precision latent weights and deployed as ternary codes produced by an export step that, in the labs' documented pipelines, first casts the latents to bf16. We audit those pipelines across three labs. In released checkpoints, fp32 quantization of the shipped latents disagrees with the deployed codes on 0.83-1.77% of codes in Falcon-E and BitCPM and on 1.530% in BitNet 2B-4T; for Falcon-E and BitCPM most disagreements are products that bf16 rounding lands exactly on the threshold, which ties-to-even maps to zero, and the unmodified onebitllms exporter reproduces all four Falcon-E releases byte for byte. At fine-tuned endpoints, with learning rates selected to match a nominal learning-rate-to-bf16-ULP ratio, the documented export lowers greedy GSM8K strict accuracy from 58.79% to 0.78% for Falcon-E-1B-Base and from 36.13% to 0.39% for BitCPM-CANN-0.5B, and a bf16 save and reload lowers BitNet 2B-4T's strict accuracy by 27.54 points while its last-number accuracy rises. Two compatibility remedies, writing the training quantizer's codes directly or adjusting the bf16 inputs until the unchanged tools emit them, each met a 4-point strict-accuracy non-inferiority criterion against online evaluation in all three models. In two model families, randomized interventions on the initial distance from the threshold support distance-dependent selection of the codes that fine-tuning changes.

Nanosatellites are proliferating as low-cost dedicated sensing systems with lean development cycles. Kyushu Institute of Technology and collaborators have launched a joint venture for a nanosatellite mission, VERTECS. The primary mission is to elucidate the formation history of stars by observing the optical-wavelength cosmic background radiation. The VERTECS satellite will be equipped with a small-aperture telescope and a high-precision attitude control system to capture the cosmic data for analysis on the ground. However, nanosatellites are limited by their onboard memory resources and downlink speed capabilities. Additionally, due to a limited number of ground stations, the satellite mission will face issues meeting the required data budget for mission success. To alleviate this issue, we propose an on-orbit system to autonomously classify and then compress desirable image data for data downlink prioritization and optimization. The system comprises a prototype Camera Controller Board (CCB) which carries a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 which is used for classification and compression. The system uses a lightweight Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model to classify and determine the desirability of captured image data. The model is designed to be lean and robust to reduce the computational and memory load on the satellite. The model is trained and tested on a novel star field dataset consisting of data captured by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). The dataset is meant to simulate the expected data produced by the 6U satellite. The compression step implements GZip, RICE or HCOMPRESS compression, which are standards for astronomical data. Preliminary testing on the proposed CNN model results in a classification accuracy of about 100\% on the star field dataset, with compression ratios of 3.99, 5.16 and 5.43 for GZip, RICE and HCOMPRESS that were achieved on tested FITS image data.

Language-model agents read attacker-writable context to solve tasks. Tool execution needs a separate authority check for protected sink fields, sink-interpreted payloads, and the invocation event. Context-to-Execution Integrity (CXI) is an execution-boundary system for this setting. Policies mark protected sink fields, typed releases carry narrow validated values from writable context to specific destinations, opaque data slots keep evidence as data, and a deterministic gate admits a call only after field authority, exact-effect authorization, and invocation authority all bind to the same action manifest. We evaluate CXI on open-weight field-projection runs, AgentDojo live episodes, a code-agent exact-effect benchmark, manifest-bound ledger faults, proposal-pressure controls, and hosted/API compatibility traces. AgentDojo covers 720 live episodes and 1,739 LLM calls; the code-agent benchmark covers 400 repository episodes with exact-effect authorization and lease-bound execution, yielding 231 safe task completions and zero observed field, effect, or invocation escapes. The accounting reports parser outcomes, authorization outcomes, and task-quality outcomes together with the admission-integrity result. Across the evaluated sinks, CXI admits execution only when field, effect, and invocation authority bind to the same action manifest.

We present AutoCompress, a transformer compression method motivated by an empirical finding: in small transformers, Layer 0 carries disproportionately high task-critical information, with an NTK-based importance score of 3.6 compared to a maximum of 0.054 for all other layers -- a gap of over 60x. Based on this finding, we propose Critical Layer Isolation (CLI), an architecture that protects Layer 0 at full dimensionality, compresses all intermediate layers through a learned bottleneck, and restores the full dimension at the final layer. Applied to GPT-2 Medium (354.8M parameters), CLI-GPT2 achieves 204.5 perplexity on WikiText-103 with only 143.8M parameters -- a 2.47x compression ratio and 59.5% parameter reduction. Crucially, an ablation study demonstrates that a uniform bottleneck baseline of comparable size achieves only 571.8 perplexity under identical training conditions, confirming that the architectural decision to protect Layer 0 -- rather than simply reducing model size -- is the primary driver of performance. Code and checkpoints are publicly available.