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Authors: Renfei Zhang ×
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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Why Pool When You Can Flow? Active Learning with GFlowNets

arXiv:2509.00704v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The scalability of pool-based active learning is limited by the computational cost of evaluating large unlabeled datasets, a challenge that is particularly acute in virtual screening for drug discovery. While active learning strategies such as Bayesian Active Learning by Disagreement (BALD) prioritize informative samples, it remains computationally intensive when scaled to libraries containing billions samples. In this work, we introduce BALD-GFlowNet, a generative active learning framework that circumvents this issue. Our method leverages Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) to directly sample objects in proportion to the BALD reward. By replacing traditional pool-based acquisition with generative sampling, BALD-GFlowNet achieves scalability that is independent of the size of the unlabeled pool. In our virtual screening experiment, we show that BALD-GFlowNet achieves a performance comparable to that of standard BALD baseline while generating more structurally diverse molecules, offering a promising direction for efficient and scalable molecular discovery.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Reinforcement Learning Improves Traversal of Parametric Knowledge in LLMs

Reinforcement learning (RL) is often credited with improving language model reasoning at the expense of knowledge. We challenge this narrative by showing that reasoning models consistently outperform their instruction-tuned versions on pure knowledge recall tasks. These gains do not reflect newly acquired information, but rather an improved procedural skill in navigating and searching existing knowledge hierarchies within the model parameters. Structured prompting, which explicitly guides models through hierarchical traversal – recovers most of the instruct-reasoning gap across five model families. A controlled RL experiment on unseen, non-extractable facts improves recall of held-out frequent but previously inaccessible facts, ruling out simple data exposure. On depth-stratified retrieval tasks, reasoning models exhibit superior traversal as retrieval depth grows. Layerwise activation analysis further shows that while factual representations maintain high cosine similarity between instruct and reasoning models, query representations diverge noticeably, indicating that reasoning primarily reshapes how models traverse knowledge rather than the knowledge representation itself. Finally, we find that distilled models often fail to match reasoning models on knowledge recall because they imitate self-correction without acquiring the exploratory behavior needed for hierarchical navigation. Together, these findings suggest that improving factual recall in LLMs depends not only on expanding what models know but also on teaching them to navigate it – motivating future post-training methods that optimize traversal.