arXiv:2602.18507v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural networks have long strived to emulate the learning capabilities of the human brain. While deep neural networks (DNNs) draw inspiration from the brain in neuron design, their training methods diverge from biological foundations. Backpropagation, the primary training method for DNNs, requires substantial computational resources and fully labeled datasets, presenting major bottlenecks in development and application. This work demonstrates that by returning to biomimicry, specifically mimicking how the brain learns through pruning, we can solve various classical machine learning problems while utilizing orders of magnitude fewer computational resources and no labels. Our experiments successfully personalized multiple speech recognition and image classification models, including ResNet50 on ImageNet, resulting in increased sparsity of approximately 70\% while simultaneously improving model accuracy to around 90\%, all without the limitations of backpropagation. This biologically inspired approach offers a promising avenue for efficient, personalized machine learning models in resource-constrained environments.

arXiv:2602.19261v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning fine-tuning has proven effective for steering generative diffusion models toward desired properties in image and molecular domains. Graph diffusion models have similarly been applied to combinatorial structure generation, including neural architecture search (NAS). However, neural architectures are directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) where edge direction encodes functional semantics such as data flow-information that existing graph diffusion methods, designed for undirected structures, discard. We propose Directed Graph Policy Optimization (DGPO), which extends reinforcement learning fine-tuning of discrete graph diffusion models to DAGs via topological node ordering and positional encoding. Validated on NAS-Bench-101 and NAS-Bench-201, DGPO matches the benchmark optimum on all three NAS-Bench-201 tasks (91.61%, 73.49%, 46.77%). The central finding is that the model learns transferable structural priors: pretrained on only 7% of the search space, it generates near-oracle architectures after fine-tuning, within 0.32 percentage points of the full-data model and extrapolating 7.3 percentage points beyond its training ceiling. Bidirectional control experiments confirm genuine reward-driven steering, with inverse optimization reaching near random-chance accuracy (9.5%). These results demonstrate that reinforcement learning-steered discrete diffusion, once extended to handle directionality, provides a controllable generative framework for directed combinatorial structures.

arXiv:2602.19268v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This brief presents a runtime-adaptive, performance-enhanced vector engine featuring a low-resource, iterative CORDIC-based MAC unit for edge AI acceleration. The proposed design enables dynamic reconfiguration between approximate and accurate modes, exploiting the latency-accuracy trade-off for a wide range of workloads. Its resource-efficient approach further enables up to 4x throughput improvement within the same hardware resources by leveraging vectorised, time-multiplexed execution and flexible precision scaling. With a time-multiplexed multi-AF block and a lightweight pooling and normalisation unit, the proposed vector engine supports flexible precision (4/8/16-bit) and high MAC density. The ASIC implementation results show that each MAC stage can save up to 33% of time and 21% of power, with a 256-PE configuration that achieves higher compute density (4.83 TOPS/mm2 ) and energy efficiency (11.67 TOPS/W) than previous state-of-the-art work. A detailed hardware-software co-design methodology for object detection and classification tasks on Pynq-Z2 is discussed to assess the proposed architecture, demonstrating a scalable, energy-efficient solution for edge AI applications.

arXiv:2602.20133v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The paradigm of automated program generation is shifting from one-shot generation to inference-time search, where Large Language Models (LLMs) function as semantic mutation operators within evolutionary loops. While effective, these systems are currently governed by static schedules that fail to account for the non-stationary dynamics of the search process. This rigidity results in substantial computational waste, as resources are indiscriminately allocated to stagnating populations while promising frontiers remain under-exploited. We introduce AdaEvolve, a framework that reformulates LLM-driven evolution as a hierarchical adaptive optimization problem. AdaEvolve uses an "accumulated improvement signal" to unify decisions across three levels: Local Adaptation, which dynamically modulates the exploration intensity within a population of solution candidates; Global Adaptation, which routes the global resource budget via bandit-based scheduling across different solution candidate populations; and Meta-Guidance which generates novel solution tactics based on the previously generated solutions and their corresponding improvements when the progress stalls. We demonstrate that AdaEvolve consistently outperforms the open-sourced baselines across 185 different open-ended optimization problems including combinatorial, systems optimization and algorithm design problems.