arXiv Daily Index

Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are a major target of machine-learning-based property prediction, yet most models assume that a single framework representation maps to a single property value. This assumption becomes problematic for experimental MOFs, where samples reported as the same framework can exhibit different properties because of differences in crystallinity, phase purity, defects, and other sample-dependent factors. Here we introduce Experimental X-ray Diffraction Integrated Transformer (EXIT), a multimodal transformer for sample-aware prediction of MOF properties that combines MOFid with X-ray diffraction (XRD). In EXIT, MOFid encodes MOF identity, whereas XRD provides complementary information about the experimentally realized sample state. EXIT is pre-trained on one million hypothetical MOFs with simulated XRD to learn transferable representations, leading to improved downstream performance relative to existing approaches. EXIT is fine-tuned on literature-derived experimental datasets for surface area and pore volume prediction. Incorporating experimental XRD improves predictive performance relative to models without experimental XRD, and attention analysis and sample-level case studies further show that EXIT assigns different predictions to samples sharing the same MOF identity when their XRD patterns differ. These results establish a practical step from framework-aware to sample-aware MOF property prediction and highlight the value of incorporating experimental characterization into porous materials informatics....

Existing AI benchmarks for software automation rarely combine cross-application coordination, autonomous API discovery, and policy adherence. Real business workflows demand all three: a single task may span a CRM, inbox, calendar, and messaging platform - requiring the agent to find the right endpoints, follow a policy document, and write correct data to each system. To address this gap, we introduce AutomationBench, a benchmark for evaluating AI agents on cross-application workflow orchestration via REST APIs. Drawing on real workflow patterns from Zapier's platform, tasks span Sales, Marketing, Operations, Support, Finance, and HR domains. Agents must discover relevant endpoints themselves, follow layered business rules, and navigate environments with irrelevant and sometimes misleading records. Grading is programmatic and end-state only: whether the correct data ended up in the right systems. Even the best frontier models currently score below 10%. AutomationBench provides a challenging, realistic measure of where current models stand relative to the agentic capabilities businesses actually need....

With the rise in capabilities of large language models (LLMs) and their deployment in real-world tasks, evaluating LLM alignment with human preferences has become an important challenge. Current benchmarks average preferences across all users to compute aggregate ratings, overlooking individual user preferences when establishing model rankings. Since users have varying preferences in different contexts, we call for personalized LLM benchmarks that rank models according to individual needs. We compute personalized model rankings using ELO ratings and Bradley-Terry coefficients for 115 active Chatbot Arena users and analyze how user query characteristics (topics and writing style) relate to LLM ranking variations. We demonstrate that individual rankings of LLM models diverge dramatically from aggregate LLM rankings, with Bradley-Terry correlations averaging only $ρ= 0.04$ (57\% of users show near-zero or negative correlation) and ELO ratings showing moderate correlation ($ρ= 0.43$). Through topic modeling and style analysis, we find users exhibit substantial heterogeneity in topical interests and communication styles, influencing their model preferences. We further show that a compact combination of topic and style features provides a useful feature space for predicting user-specific model rankings. Our results provide strong quantitative evidence that aggregate benchmarks fail to capture individual preferences for most users, and highlight the importance of developing personalized benchmarks that rank LLM models according to individual user preferences....

Large reasoning models (LRMs) achieve strong performance on complex reasoning tasks but often generate harmful responses to malicious user queries. This paper investigates the underlying cause of these safety risks and shows that the issue lies in the reasoning structure itself. Based on this insight, we claim that effective safety alignment can be achieved by altering the reasoning structure. We propose AltTrain, a simple yet effective post training method that explicitly alters the reasoning structure of LRMs. AltTrain is both practical and generalizable, requiring no complex reinforcement learning (RL) training or reward design, only supervised finetuning (SFT) with a lightweight 1K training examples. Experiments across LRM backbones and model sizes demonstrate strong safety alignment, along with robust generalization across reasoning, QA, summarization, and multilingual setting....

This paper introduces DW-Bench, a new benchmark that evaluates large language models (LLMs) on graph-topology reasoning over data warehouse schemas, explicitly integrating both foreign-key (FK) and data-lineage edges. The benchmark comprises 1,046 automatically generated, verifiably correct questions across five schemas. Experiments show that tool-augmented methods substantially outperform static approaches but plateau on hard compositional subtypes.

Social intelligence, the ability to navigate complex interpersonal interactions, presents a fundamental challenge for language agents. Training such agents via reinforcement learning requires solving the credit assignment problem: determining how individual utterances contribute to multi-turn dialogue outcomes. Existing approaches directly employ language models to distribute episode-level rewards, yielding attributions that are retrospective and lack theoretical grounding. We propose SAVOIR (ShApley Value fOr SocIal RL), a novel principled framework grounded in cooperative game theory. Our approach combines two complementary principles: expected utility shifts evaluation from retrospective attribution to prospective valuation, capturing an utterance's strategic potential for enabling favorable future trajectories; Shapley values ensure fair credit distribution with axiomatic guarantees of efficiency, symmetry, and marginality. Experiments on the SOTOPIA benchmark demonstrate that SAVOIR achieves new state-of-the-art performance across all evaluation settings, with our 7B model matching or exceeding proprietary models including GPT-4o and Claude-3.5-Sonnet. Notably, even large reasoning models consistently underperform, suggesting social intelligence requires qualitatively different capabilities than analytical reasoning....

A major challenge for niche scientific and technical domains in leveraging coding agents is the lack of access to up-to-date, domain- specific knowledge. Foundational models often demonstrate limited reasoning capabilities in specialized fields and cannot inherently incorporate knowledge that evolves through ongoing research and experimentation. Materials scientists exploring novel compounds, communication engineers designing and evaluating new protocols, and bioengineering researchers conducting iterative experiments all face this limitation. These experts typically lack the resources to fine-tune large models or continuously embed new findings, creating a barrier to adopting AI-driven coding agents. To address this, we introduce a framework that gives coding agents instanta- neous access to research repositories and technical documentation, enabling real-time, context-aware operation. Our open-source im- plementation allows users to upload documents via doc-search.dev and includes zed-fork, which enforces domain-specific rules and workflows. Together, these tools accelerate the integration of coding agents into specialized scientific and technical workflows...

Defeasible statements are statements that are likely, or probable, or usually true, but may occasionally be false. Plausible reasoning makes conclusions from statements that are either facts or defeasible statements without using numbers. So there are no probabilities or suchlike involved. Seventeen principles of logics that do plausible reasoning are suggested and several important plausible reasoning examples are considered. There are 14 necessary principles and 3 desirable principles, one of which is not formally stated. A first-order logic, called Plausible Logic (PL), is defined that satisfies all but two of the desirable principles and reasons correctly with all the examples. As far as we are aware, this is the only such logic. PL has 8 reasoning algorithms because, from a given plausible reasoning situation, there are different sensible conclusions. This article is a condensation of my book `Plausible Reasoning and Plausible Logic' (PRPL), which is to be submitted. Each section of this article corresponds to a chapter in PRPL, and vice versa. The proofs of all the results are in PRPL, so they are omitted in this article....

Efficient construction of models capturing the preconditions and effects of actions is essential for applying AI planning in real-world domains. Extensive prior work has explored learning such models from high-level descriptions of state and/or action sequences. In this paper, we tackle a more challenging setting: learning lifted action models from sequences of state images, without action observation. We propose a deep learning framework that jointly learns state prediction, action prediction, and a lifted action model. We also introduce a mixed-integer linear program (MILP) to prevent prediction collapse and self-reinforcing errors among predictions. The MILP takes the predicted states, actions, and action model over a subset of traces and solves for logically consistent states, actions, and action model that are as close as possible to the original predictions. Pseudo-labels extracted from the MILP solution are then used to guide further training. Experiments across multiple domains show that integrating MILP-based correction helps the model escape local optima and converge toward globally consistent solutions....

Accurate disease classification from radiology reports is essential for many applications. While supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of lightweight LLMs improves accuracy, it can degrade reasoning. We propose a two-stage approach: SFT on disease labels followed by Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to refine predictions by optimizing accuracy and format without reasoning supervision. Across three radiologist-annotated datasets, SFT outperformed baselines and GRPO further improved classification and enhanced reasoning recall and comprehensiveness....

We introduce Options LLM (OLLM), a simple, general method that replaces the single next-token prediction of standard LLMs with a \textit{set of learned options} for the next token, indexed by a discrete latent variable. Instead of relying on temperature or sampling heuristics to induce diversity, OLLM models variation explicitly: a small latent space parametrizes multiple plausible next-token options which can be selected or searched by a downstream policy. Architecturally, OLLM is a lightweight "plug-in" that inserts two layers: an encoder and a decoder, before the output head, allowing almost any pretrained LLM to be converted with minimal additional parameters. We apply OLLM to a 1.7B-parameter backbone (only $1.56\%$ of parameters trainable) trained on OpenMathReasoning and evaluated on OmniMath. The SOTA LoRA-adapted baselines peak at $51\%$ final answer correctness, while OLLM's option set allows up to $\sim 70\%$ under optimal latent selection. We then train a compact policy in the latent space that emits latents to control generation. Operating in a low-dimensional option space makes reward optimization far more sample-efficient and substantially reduces common misalignments (e.g., language switching or degenerate reasoning), as the policy is constrained to options learned during SFT. Crucially, this alignment arises from model structure rather than additional KL or handcrafted alignment losses. Our results demonstrate that optionized next-token modeling enhances controllability, robustness, and efficiency in math reasoning, and highlight latent-space policy learning as a promising direction for reinforcement learning in LLMs....

Large language models (LLMs) require frequent knowledge updates to reflect changing facts and mitigate hallucinations. To meet this demand, lifelong knowledge editing has emerged as a continual approach to modify specific pieces of knowledge without retraining the entire model. Existing parameter editing methods struggle with stability during sequential edits due to catastrophic forgetting. While retrieval-based approaches are proposed to alleviate this issue, their applicability remains limited across various datasets because of high training costs. To address these limitations and enhance scalability in lifelong settings, we propose LightEdit. Our framework first selects relevant knowledge from retrieved information to modify the query effectively. It then incorporates a decoding strategy to suppress the model's original knowledge probabilities, thereby enabling efficient edits based on the selected information. Extensive experiments on ZSRE, Counterfact, and RIPE benchmarks demonstrate that LightEdit outperforms existing lifelong knowledge editing methods. Furthermore, by minimizing training costs, LightEdit achieves cost-effective scalability, enabling easy adaptation to various datasets....

Automated essay scoring (AES) is commonly evaluated on public benchmarks using quadratic weighted kappa (QWK). However, because benchmark labels are assigned by human raters and inevitably contain scoring errors, it remains unclear both what QWK is theoretically attainable and what level is practically sufficient for deployment. We therefore derive two dataset-specific QWK ceilings based on the reliability concept in classical test theory, which can be estimated from standard two-rater benchmarks without additional annotation. The first is the theoretical ceiling: the maximum QWK that an ideal AES model that perfectly predicts latent true scores can achieve under label noise. The second is the human-like ceiling: the QWK attainable by an AES model with human-level scoring error, providing a practical target when AES is intended to replace a single human rater. We further show that human--human QWK, often used as a ceiling reference, can underestimate the true ceiling. Simulation experiments validate the proposed ceilings, and experiments on real benchmarks illustrate how they clarify the current performance and remaining headroom of modern AES models....

The rapid advancement and widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) have elevated the need for reliable AI-generated content (AIGC) detection, which remains challenging as models evolve. We introduce AIGC-text-bank, a comprehensive multi-domain dataset with diverse LLM sources and authorship scenarios, and propose REVEAL, a detection framework that generates interpretable reasoning chains before classification. Our approach uses a two-stage training strategy: supervised fine-tuning to establish reasoning capabilities, followed by reinforcement learning to improve accuracy, improve logical consistency, and reduce hallucinations. Extensive experiments show that REVEAL achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks, offering a robust and transparent solution for AIGC detection. The project is open-source at https://aka.ms/reveal...

Current AI agent frameworks have made remarkable progress in automating individual tasks, yet all existing systems serve a single user. Human productivity rests on the social and organizational relationships through which people coordinate, negotiate, and delegate. When agents move beyond performing tasks for one person to representing that person in collaboration with others, the infrastructure for cross-user agent collaboration is entirely absent, let alone the governance mechanisms needed to secure it. We argue that the next frontier for AI agents lies not in stronger individual capability, but in the digitization of human collaborative relationships. To this end, we propose a human-symbiotic agent paradigm. Each user owns a permanently bound agent system that collaborates on the owner's behalf, forming a network whose nodes are humans rather than agents. This paradigm rests on three governance primitives. A layered identity architecture separates a Manager Agent from multiple context-specific Identity Agents; the Manager Agent holds global knowledge but is architecturally isolated from external communication. Scoped authorization enforces per-identity access control and escalates boundary violations to the owner. Action-level accountability logs every operation against its owner's identity and authorization, ensuring full auditability. We instantiate this paradigm in ClawNet, an identity-governed agent collaboration framework that enforces identity binding and authorization verification through a central orchestrator, enabling multiple users to collaborate securely through their respective agents....

Full-duplex speech interaction, as the most natural and intuitive mode of human communication, is driving artificial intelligence toward more human-like conversational systems. Traditional cascaded speech processing pipelines suffer from critical limitations, including accumulated latency, information loss, and error propagation across modules. To address these issues, recent efforts focus on the end-to-end audio large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4o, which primarily unify speech understanding and generation task. However, most of these models are inherently half-duplex, and rely on a suite of separate, task-specific front-end components, such as voice activity detection (VAD) and turn-taking detection (TD). In our development of speech assistant, we observed that optimizing the speech front-end is equally crucial as advancing the back-end unified model for achieving seamless, responsive interactions. To bridge this gap, we propose the first unified audio front-end LLM (UAF) tailored for full-duplex speech systems. Our model reformulates diverse audio front-end tasks into a single auto-regressive sequence prediction problem, including VAD, TD, speaker recognition (SR), automatic speech recognition (ASR) and question answer (QA). It takes streaming fixed-duration audio chunk (e.g., 600 ms) as input, leverages a reference audio prompt to anchor the target speaker at the beginning, and regressively generates discrete tokens encoding both semantic content and system-level state controls (e.g., interruption signals). Experiments demonstrate that our model achieves leading performance across multiple audio front-end tasks and significantly enhances response latency and interruption accuracy in real-world interaction scenarios....

Industrial surface defect detection often suffers from limited defect samples, severe long-tailed distributions, and difficulties in accurately localizing subtle defects under complex backgrounds. To address these challenges, this paper proposes an unsupervised defect detection method that integrates a Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM) with an asymmetric teacher-student architecture. First, at the data level, the DDPM is trained solely on normal samples. By introducing constant-variance Gaussian perturbations and Perlin noise-based masks, high-fidelity and physically consistent defect samples along with pixel-level annotations are generated, effectively alleviating the data scarcity problem. Second, at the model level, an asymmetric dual-stream network is constructed. The teacher network provides stable representations of normal features, while the student network reconstructs normal patterns and amplifies discrepancies between normal and anomalous regions. Finally, a joint optimization strategy combining cosine similarity loss and pixel-wise segmentation supervision is adopted to achieve precise localization of subtle defects. Experimental results on the MVTecAD dataset show that the proposed method achieves 98.4\% image-level AUROC and 98.3\% pixel-level AUROC, significantly outperforming existing unsupervised and mainstream deep learning methods. The proposed approach does not require large amounts of real defect samples and enables accurate and robust industrial defect detection and localization. \keywords{Industrial defect detection \and diffusion models \and data generation \and teacher-student architecture \and pixel-level localization}...

LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) show promise on complex tasks but remain prone to coordination failures such as goal drift, error cascades, and misaligned behaviors. We propose Explicit Trait Inference (ETI), a psychologically grounded method for improving coordination. ETI enables agents to infer and track partner characteristics along two established psychological dimensions--warmth (e.g., trust) and competence (e.g., skill)--from interaction histories to guide decisions. We evaluate ETI in controlled settings (economic games), where it reduces payoff loss by 45-77%, and in more realistic, complex multi-agent settings (MultiAgentBench), where it improves performance by 3-29% depending on the scenario and model, relative to a CoT baseline. Additional analysis shows that gains are closely linked to trait inference: ETI profiles predict agents' actions, and informative profiles drive improvements. These results highlight ETI as a lightweight and robust mechanism for improving coordination in diverse multi-agent settings, and provide the first systematic evidence that LLM agents can (i) reliably infer others' traits from interaction histories and (ii) leverage structured awareness of others' traits for coordination....

The conformity bias exhibited by large language models (LLMs) can pose a significant challenge to decision-making in LLM-based multi-agent systems (LLM-MAS). While many prior studies have treated "conformity" simply as a matter of opinion change, this study introduces the social psychological distinction between informational conformity and normative conformity in order to understand LLM conformity at the mechanism level. Specifically, we design new tasks to distinguish between informational conformity, in which participants in a discussion are motivated to make accurate judgments, and normative conformity, in which participants are motivated to avoid conflict or gain acceptance within a group. We then conduct experiments based on these task settings. The experimental results show that, among the six LLMs evaluated, up to five exhibited tendencies toward not only informational conformity but also normative conformity. Furthermore, intriguingly, we demonstrate that by manipulating subtle aspects of the social context, it may be possible to control the target toward which a particular LLM directs its normative conformity. These findings suggest that decision-making in LLM-MAS may be vulnerable to manipulation by a small number of malicious users. In addition, through analysis of internal vectors associated with informational and normative conformity, we suggest that although both behaviors appear externally as the same form of "conformity," they may in fact be driven by distinct internal mechanisms. Taken together, these results may serve as an initial milestone toward understanding how "norms" are implemented in LLMs and how they influence group dynamics....

Large Language Model (LLM) agents are increasingly proposed for autonomous cybersecurity tasks, but their capabilities in realistic offensive settings remain poorly understood. We present DeepRed, an open-source benchmark for evaluating LLM-based agents on realistic Capture The Flag (CTF) challenges in isolated virtualized environments. DeepRed places an agent in a Kali attacker environment with terminal tools and optional web search, connected over a private network to a target challenge, and records full execution traces for analysis. To move beyond binary solved/unsolved outcomes, we introduce a partial-credit scoring method based on challenge-specific checkpoints derived from public writeups, together with an automated summarise-then-judge labelling pipeline for assigning checkpoint completion from logs. Using DeepRed, we benchmark ten commercially accessible LLMs on ten VM-based CTF challenges spanning different challenge categories. The results indicate that current agents remain limited: the best model achieves only 35% average checkpoint completion, performing strongest on common challenge types and weakest on tasks requiring non-standard discovery and longer-horizon adaptation....

The emergence of sixth-generation (6G) technologies has introduced new challenges and opportunities for machine learning (ML) applications in Internet of Things (IoT) networks, particularly concerning energy efficiency. As model training and data transmission contribute significantly to energy consumption, optimizing these processes has become critical for sustainable system design. This study first conduct analysis on the energy consumption model for both centralized and decentralized architecture and then presents a testbed deployed within the German railway infrastructure, leveraging sensor data for ML-based predictive maintenance. A comparative analysis of distributed versus Centralized Learning (CL) architectures reveals that distributed models maintain competitive predictive accuracy (~90%) while reducing overall electricity consumption by up to 70%. These findings underscore the potential of distributed ML to improve energy efficiency in real-world IoT deployments, particularly by mitigating transmission-related energy costs....

Large language models (LLMs) are expensive to serve because model parameters, attention computation, and KV caches impose substantial memory and latency costs. We present GRASPrune, a structured pruning framework applied after pretraining that jointly prunes FFN channels and KV head groups under a single global budget. Instead of learning importance scores without constraints and applying the budget only after training, GRASPrune learns lightweight gate scores with a projected straight-through estimator that enforces a hard mask satisfying the budget at every step while keeping the backbone weights frozen. After the mask is fixed, we calibrate scaling factors on the retained units to mitigate scale mismatch caused by pruning, and fold these factors into the pruned weights to obtain a smaller dense checkpoint with no extra parameters at inference. On LLaMA-2-7B, GRASPrune removes 50% of parameters and achieves 12.18 perplexity on WikiText-2 while maintaining competitive average zero-shot accuracy on five benchmarks, using four epochs on 512 unlabeled calibration sequences on a single NVIDIA A100 80GB GPU without any full model fine-tuning....

Long-horizon enterprise agents make high-stakes decisions (loan underwriting, claims adjudication, clinical review, prior authorization) under lossy memory, multi-step reasoning, and binding regulatory constraints. Current evaluation reports a single task-success scalar that conflates distinct failure modes and hides whether an agent is aligned with the standards its deployment environment requires. We propose that long-horizon decision behavior decomposes into four orthogonal alignment axes, each independently measurable and failable: factual precision (FRP), reasoning coherence (RCS), compliance reconstruction (CRR), and calibrated abstention (CAR). CRR is a novel regulatory-grounded axis; CAR is a measurement axis separating coverage from accuracy. We exercise the decomposition on a controlled benchmark (LongHorizon-Bench) covering loan qualification and insurance claims adjudication with deterministic ground-truth construction. Running six memory architectures, we find structure aggregate accuracy cannot see: retrieval collapses on factual precision; schema-anchored architectures pay a scaffolding tax; plain summarization under a fact-preservation prompt is a strong baseline on FRP, RCS, EDA, and CRR; and all six architectures commit on every case, exposing a decisional-alignment axis the field has not targeted. The decomposition also surfaced a pre-registered prediction of our own, that summarization would fail factual recall, which the data reversed at large magnitude, an axis-level reversal aggregate accuracy would have hidden. Institutional alignment (regulatory reconstruction) and decisional alignment (calibrated abstention) are under-represented in the alignment literature and become load-bearing once decisions leave the laboratory. The framework transfers to any regulated decisioning domain via two steps: build a fact schema, and calibrate the CRR auditor prompt....

Formal verification guarantees proof validity but not formalization faithfulness. For natural-language logical reasoning, where models construct axiom systems from scratch without library constraints, this gap between valid proofs and faithful translations is especially acute. We investigate whether frontier models exploit this gap when generating Lean 4 proofs, a behavior we term formalization gaming. We evaluate GPT-5 and DeepSeek-R1 on 303 first-order logic problems (203 from FOLIO, 100 from Multi-LogiEval), comparing unified generation against a two-stage pipeline that separates formalization from proving. Despite compilation rates of 87-99%, we find no evidence of systematic gaming in unified generation: models prefer reporting failure over forcing proofs, even under prompting designed to encourage it. However, unfaithfulness that evades our detection signals may still occur. The two-stage pipeline reveals two distinct modes of unfaithfulness: GPT-5 fabricates axioms during proof generation, a reactive fallback detectable via cross-stage comparison, while DeepSeek-R1 mistranslates premises during formalization, producing internally consistent outputs that evade detection entirely. These findings show that high compilation rates or accuracies should not be equated with faithful reasoning. Code and data are available at https://github.com/koreankiwi99/formalization-gaming....

Extreme-edge scientific applications use machine learning models to analyze sensor data and make real-time decisions. Their stringent latency and throughput requirements demand small batch sizes and require that model weights remain fully on-chip. Spatial dataflow implementations are common for extreme-edge applications. Spatial dataflow works well for small networks, but it fails to scale to larger models due to inherent resource scaling limitations. AI Engines on modern FPGA SoCs offer a promising alternative with high compute density and additional on-chip memory. However, the architecture, programming model, and performance-scaling behavior of AI Engines differ fundamentally from those of the programmable logic, making direct comparison non-trivial and the benefits of using AI Engines unclear. This work addresses how and when extreme-edge scientific neural networks should be implemented on AI Engines versus programmable logic. We provide systematic architectural characterization and micro-benchmarking and introduce a latency-adjusted resource equivalence (LARE) metric that identifies when AI Engine implementations outperform programmable logic designs. We further propose spatial and API-level dataflow optimizations tailored to low-latency scientific inference. Finally, we demonstrate the successful deployment of end-to-end neural networks on AI Engines that cannot fit on programmable logic when using the hlsml toolchain....

Vision-language models (VLMs) exhibit affirmation bias: a systematic tendency to select positive captions ("X is present") even when the correct description contains negation ("no X"). While prior work has documented this failure mode in English and proposed solutions, negation manifests differently across languages through varying morphology, word order, and cliticization patterns, raising the question of whether these solutions serve all linguistic communities equitably. We introduce the first human-verified multilingual negation benchmark, spanning seven typologically diverse languages: English, Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, Greek, Russian, Tagalog, and Spanish. Evaluating three VLMs - CLIP, SigLIP, and MultiCLIP - we find that standard CLIP performs at or below chance on non-Latin-script languages, while MultiCLIP achieves the highest and most uniform accuracy. We also evaluate SpaceVLM, a proposed negation correction, and find that it produces substantial improvements for several languages - particularly English, Greek, Spanish, and Tagalog - while showing varied effectiveness across typologically different languages. This variation reveals that linguistic properties like morphology, script, and negation structure interact with model improvements in fairness-relevant ways. As VLMs are deployed globally, multilingual benchmarks are essential for understanding not just whether solutions work, but for whom....

Named Entity Recognition (NER) models trained on clean, high-resource corpora exhibit catastrophic performance collapse when deployed on noisy, sparse User-Generated Content (UGC), such as social media. Prior research has predominantly focused on point-wise symptom remediation -- employing customized fine-tuning to address issues like neologisms, alias drift, non-standard orthography, long-tail entities, and class imbalance. However, these improvements often fail to generalize because they overlook the structural sparsity inherent in UGC. This study reveals that surface-level noise symptoms share a unified root cause: low Information Density (ID). Through hierarchical confounding-controlled resampling experiments (specifically controlling for entity rarity and annotation consistency), this paper identifies ID as an independent key factor. We introduce Attention Spectrum Analysis (ASA) to quantify how reduced ID causally leads to ``attention blunting,'' ultimately degrading NER performance. Informed by these mechanistic insights, we propose the Window-Aware Optimization Module (WOM), an LLM-empowered, model-agnostic framework. WOM identifies information-sparse regions and utilizes selective back-translation to directionally enhance semantic density without altering model architecture. Deployed atop mainstream architectures on standard UGC datasets (WNUT2017, Twitter-NER, WNUT2016), WOM yields up to 4.5\% absolute F1 improvement, demonstrating robustness and achieving new state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on WNUT2017....

In this study, we present the first comprehensive evaluation of modern LLMs - including GPT-4, GPT-4o, GPT-3.5-Turbo, Gemini 1.5 Pro, DeepSeek-V3, Llama 3.2, and BERT - across three core social media analytics tasks on a Twitter (X) dataset: (I) Social Media Authorship Verification, (II) Social Media Post Generation, and (III) User Attribute Inference. For the authorship verification, we introduce a systematic sampling framework over diverse user and post selection strategies and evaluate generalization on newly collected tweets from January 2024 onward to mitigate "seen-data" bias. For post generation, we assess the ability of LLMs to produce authentic, user-like content using comprehensive evaluation metrics. Bridging Tasks I and II, we conduct a user study to measure real users' perceptions of LLM-generated posts conditioned on their own writing. For attribute inference, we annotate occupations and interests using two standardized taxonomies (IAB Tech Lab 2023 and 2018 U.S. SOC) and benchmark LLMs against existing baselines. Overall, our unified evaluation provides new insights and establishes reproducible benchmarks for LLM-driven social media analytics. The code and data are provided in the supplementary material and will also be made publicly available upon publication....

While Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used, they remain susceptible to jailbreak prompts that can elicit harmful or inappropriate responses. This paper introduces STAR-Teaming, a novel black-box framework for automated red teaming that effectively generates such prompts. STAR-Teaming integrates a Multi-Agent System (MAS) with a Strategy-Response Multiplex Network and employs network-driven optimization to sample effective attack strategies. This network-based approach recasts the intractable high-dimensional embedding space into a tractable structure, yielding two key advantages: it enhances the interpretability of the LLM's strategic vulnerabilities, and it streamlines the search for effective strategies by organizing the search space into semantic communities, thereby preventing redundant exploration. Empirical results demonstrate that STAR-Teaming significantly surpasses existing methods, achieving a higher attack success rate (ASR) at a lower computational cost. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness and explainability of the Multiplex Network. The code is available at https://github.com/selectstar-ai/STAR-Teaming-paper....

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive generation by enabling parallel token prediction. However, practical dLLM decoding still suffers from high inference latency, which limits deployment. In this work, we observe that a substantial part of this inefficiency comes from recurring redundancy in the decoding process, including spatial redundancy caused by confidence clusters and positional ambiguity, and temporal redundancy caused by repeatedly remasking predictions that have already stabilized. Motivated by these patterns, we propose $R^2$-dLLM, a unified framework for reducing decoding redundancy from both inference and training perspectives. At inference time, we introduce training-free decoding rules that aggregate local confidence and token predictions, and finalize temporally stable tokens to avoid redundant decoding steps. We further propose a redundancy-aware supervised fine-tuning pipeline that aligns the model with efficient decoding trajectories and reduces reliance on manually tuned thresholds. Experiments demonstrate that $R^2$-dLLM consistently reduces the number of decoding steps by up to 75% compared to existing decoding strategies, while maintaining competitive generation quality across different models and tasks. These results validate that decoding redundancy is a central bottleneck in dLLMs, and that explicitly reducing it yields substantial practical efficiency gains....

Large reasoning models (LRMs) produce complex, multi-step reasoning traces, yet safety evaluation remains focused on final outputs, overlooking how harm emerges during reasoning. When jailbroken, harm does not appear instantaneously but unfolds through distinct behavioral steps such as suppressing refusal, rationalizing compliance, decomposing harmful tasks, and concealing risk. However, no existing benchmark captures this process at sentence-level granularity within reasoning traces -- a key step toward reliable safety monitoring, interventions, and systematic failure diagnosis. To address this gap, we introduce HarmThoughts, a benchmark for step-wise safety evaluation of reasoning traces. \ourdataset is built on our proposed harm taxonomy of 16 harmful reasoning behaviors across four functional groups that characterize how harm propagates rather than what harm is produced. The dataset consists of 56,931 sentences from 1,018 reasoning traces generated by four model families, each annotated with fine-grained sentence-level behavioral labels. Using HarmThoughts, we analyze harm propagation patterns across reasoning traces, identifying common behavioral trajectories and drift points where reasoning transitions from safe to unsafe. Finally, we systematically compare white-box and black-box detectors on the task of identifying harmful reasoning behaviours on HarmThoughts. Our results show that existing detectors struggle with fine-grained behavior detection in reasoning traces, particularly for nuanced categories within harm emergence and execution, highlighting a critical gap in process-level safety monitoring. HarmThoughts is available publicly at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/ishitakakkar-10/HarmThoughts...

Half-truths, claims that are factually correct yet misleading due to omitted context, remain a blind spot for fact verification systems focused on explicit falsehoods. Addressing such omission-based manipulation requires reasoning not only about what is said, but also about what is left unsaid. We propose RADAR, a role-anchored multi-agent debate framework for omission-aware fact verification under realistic, noisy retrieval. RADAR assigns complementary roles to a Politician and a Scientist, who reason adversarially over shared retrieved evidence, moderated by a neutral Judge. A dual-threshold early termination controller adaptively decides when sufficient reasoning has been reached to issue a verdict. Experiments show that RADAR consistently outperforms strong single- and multi-agent baselines across datasets and backbones, improving omission detection accuracy while reducing reasoning cost. These results demonstrate that role-anchored, retrieval-grounded debate with adaptive control is an effective and scalable framework for uncovering missing context in fact verification. The code is available at https://github.com/tangyixuan/RADAR....

Cultural alignment in Large Language Models (LLMs) is essential for producing contextually aware, respectful, and trustworthy outputs. Without it, models risk generating stereotyped, insensitive, or misleading responses that fail to reflect cultural diversity w.r.t Helpful, Harmless, and Honest (HHH) paradigm. Existing benchmarks represent early steps toward cultural alignment; yet, no benchmarks currently enables systematic evaluation of cultural alignment in line with UNESCO's principles of cultural diversity w.r.t HHH paradigm. Therefore, to address this gap, we built Align-Cultura, two-stage pipeline for cultural alignment. Stage I constructs CULTURAX, the HHH-English dataset grounded in the UNESCO cultural taxonomy, through Query Construction, which reclassifies prompts, expands underrepresented domains (or labels), and prevents data leakage with SimHash. Then, Response Generation pairs prompts with culturally grounded responses via two-stage rejection sampling. The final dataset contains 1,500 samples spanning 30 subdomains of tangible and intangible cultural forms. Stage II benchmarks CULTURAX on general-purpose models, culturally fine-tuned models, and open-weight LLMs (Qwen3-8B and DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B). Empirically, culturally fine-tuned models improve joint HHH by 4%-6%, reduce cultural failures by 18%, achieve 10%-12% efficiency gains, and limit leakage to 0.3%....

Existing QA benchmarks typically assume distinct documents with minimal overlap, yet real-world retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems operate on corpora such as financial reports, legal codes, and patents, where information is highly redundant and documents exhibit strong inter-document similarity. This mismatch undermines evaluation validity: retrievers can be unfairly undervalued even when they retrieve documents that provide sufficient evidence, because redundancy across documents is not accounted for in evaluation. On the other hand, retrievers that perform well on standard benchmarks often generalize poorly to real-world corpora with highly similar and redundant documents. We present RARE (Redundancy-Aware Retrieval Evaluation), a framework for constructing realistic benchmarks by (i) decomposing documents into atomic facts to enable precise redundancy tracking and (ii) enhancing LLM-based data generation with CRRF. RAG benchmark data usually requires multiple quality criteria, but LLMs often yield trivial outputs. CRRF scores criteria separately and fuses decisions by rank, improving the reliability of generated data. Applying RARE to Finance, Legal, and Patent corpora, we introduce RedQA, where a strong retriever baseline drops from 66.4% PerfRecall@10 on 4-hop General-Wiki to 5.0-27.9% PerfRecall@10 at 4-hop depth, revealing robustness gaps that current benchmarks fail to capture. RARE enables practitioners to build domain-specific RAG evaluations that faithfully reflect real-world deployment conditions....

The combination of Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) and Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has shown significant potential for enhancing the multi-task learning capabilities of Large Language Models. However, existing methods face two primary challenges: (1)Imprecise Routing in the current MoE-LoRA method fails to explicitly match input semantics with expert capabilities, leading to weak expert specialization. (2)Uniform weight fusion strategies struggle to provide adaptive update strengths, overlooking the varying complexity of different tasks. To address these limitations, we propose SAMoRA (Semantic-Aware Mixture of LoRA Experts), a novel parameter-efficient fine-tuning framework tailored for task-adaptive learning. Specifically, A Semantic-Aware Router is proposed to explicitly align textual semantics with the most suitable experts for precise routing. A Task-Adaptive Scaling mechanism is designed to regulate expert contributions based on specific task requirements dynamically. In addition, a novel regularization objective is proposed to jointly promote expert specialization and effective scaling. Extensive experiments on multiple multi-task benchmarks demonstrate that SAMoRA significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and holds excellent task generalization capabilities. Code is available at https://github.com/boyan-code/SAMoRA...

Understanding a discourse requires tracking entities and the relations that hold between them. While Large Language Models (LLMs) perform well on relational reasoning, the mechanism by which they bind entities, relations, and attributes remains unclear. We study discourse-level relational binding and show that LLMs encode it via a Cell-based Binding Representation (CBR): a low-dimensional linear subspace in which each ``cell'' corresponds to an entity--relation index pair, and bound attributes are retrieved from the corresponding cell during inference. Using controlled multi-sentence data annotated with entity and relation indices, we identify the CBR subspace by decoding these indices from attribute-token activations with Partial Least Squares regression. Across domains and two model families, the indices are linearly decodable and form a grid-like geometry in the projected space. We further find that context-specific CBR representations are related by translation vectors in activation space, enabling cross-context transfer. Finally, activation patching shows that manipulating this subspace systematically changes relational predictions and that perturbing it disrupts performance, providing causal evidence that LLMs rely on CBR for relational binding....

Neural NLI models overfit dataset artifacts instead of truly reasoning. A hypothesis-only model gets 57.7% in SNLI, showing strong spurious correlations, and 38.6% of the baseline errors are the result of these artifacts. We propose Product-of-Experts (PoE) training, which downweights examples where biased models are overconfident. PoE nearly preserves accuracy (89.10% vs. 89.30%) while cutting bias reliance by 4.71% (bias agreement 49.85% to 45%). An ablation finds lambda = 1.5 that best balances debiasing and accuracy. Behavioral tests still reveal issues with negation and numerical reasoning....

Zero-shot reasoning on text-rich networks (TRNs) remains a challenging frontier, as models must integrate textual semantics with relational structure without task-specific supervision. While graph neural networks rely on fixed label spaces and supervised objectives, recent large language model (LLM)-based approaches often overlook graph context or depend on distillation from larger models, limiting generalisation. We propose TRN-R1-Zero, a post-training framework for TRN reasoning trained solely via reinforcement learning. TRN-R1-Zero directly optimises base LLMs using a Neighbour-aware Group Relative Policy Optimisation objective that dynamically adjusts rewards based on a novel margin gain metric for the informativeness of neighbouring signals, effectively guiding the model toward relational reasoning. Unlike prior methods, TRN-R1-Zero requires no supervised fine-tuning or chain-of-thought data generated from large reasoning models. Extensive experiments across citation, hyperlink, social and co-purchase TRN benchmarks demonstrate the superiority and robustness of TRN-R1-Zero. Moreover, relying strictly on node-level training, TRN-R1-Zero achieves zero-shot inference on edge- and graph-level tasks, extending beyond cross-domain transfer. The codebase is publicly available at https://github.com/superallen13/TRN-R1-Zero....

Evaluating the writing capabilities of large language models (LLMs) remains a significant challenge due to the multidimensional nature of writing skills and the limitations of existing metrics. LLM's performance in thousand-words level and open-ended writing is inadequately assessed by traditional reference-based metrics or modern LLM-as-a-judge methods. We propose Tree-of-Writing (ToW), to resolve the implicit inconsistency often found when LLM-as-a-judge aggregates all sub-features in text evaluation. ToW incorporates a tree-structured workflow by explicitly modeling the aggregation weights of sub-features. We also present HowToBench, a large-scale Chinese writing benchmark encompassing 12 genres and 1302 instructions across three task categories: contextual completion, outline-guided writing, and open-ended generation. ToW successfully mitigates the biases, achieving a 0.93 Pearson correlation with human judgments. Furthermore, we detect that both overlap-based text generation metrics and popular LLM-as-a-judge practices are vulnerable to textual disturbances, while ToW is robust to them. We also uncover a negative correlation between input length and content-related scores in the Guide task, showcasing that it cannot be simply improved by input-side information piling....

English financial NLP has progressed rapidly through benchmarks for sentiment, document understanding, and financial question answering, while Arabic financial NLP remains comparatively under-explored despite strong practical demand for trustworthy finance and Islamic-finance assistants. We introduce SAHM, a document-grounded benchmark and instruction-tuning dataset for Arabic financial NLP and Shari'ah-compliant reasoning. SAHM contains 14,380 expert-verified instances spanning seven tasks: AAOIFI standards QA, fatwa-based QA/MCQ, accounting and business exams, financial sentiment analysis, extractive summarization, and event-cause reasoning, curated from authentic regulatory, juristic, and corporate sources. We evaluate 19 strong open and proprietary LLMs using task-specific metrics and rubric-based scoring for open-ended outputs, and find that Arabic fluency does not reliably translate to evidence-grounded financial reasoning: models are substantially stronger on recognition-style tasks than on generation and causal reasoning, with the largest gaps on event-cause reasoning. We release the benchmark, evaluation framework, and an instruction-tuned model to support future research on trustworthy Arabic financial NLP....

Existing detoxification methods for large language models mainly focus on post-training stage or inference time, while few tackle the source of toxicity, namely, the dataset itself. Such training-based or controllable decoding approaches cannot completely suppress the model's inherent toxicity, whereas detoxifying the pretraining dataset can fundamentally reduce the toxicity that the model learns during training. Hence, we attempt to detoxify directly on raw corpora with SoCD (Soft Contrastive Decoding), which guides an LLM to localize and rewrite toxic spans in raw data while preserving semantics, in our proposed HSPD (Hierarchical Semantic-Preserving Detoxification) pipeline, yielding a detoxified corpus that can drop-in replace the original for fine-tuning or other training. On GPT2-XL, HSPD attains state-of-the-art detoxification, reducing Toxicity Probability (TP) from 0.42 to 0.18 and Expected Maximum Toxicity (EMT) from 0.43 to 0.20. We further validate consistent best-in-class results on LLaMA2-7B, OPT-6.7B, and Falcon-7B. These findings show that semantics-preserving, corpus-level rewriting with HSPD effectively suppresses downstream toxicity while retaining data utility and allowing seamless source-level mitigation, thereby reducing the cost of later model behavior adjustment. (Code is available at: https://github.com/ntsw2001/data_detox_for_llm)...

Large language models have been extensively studied for emotion recognition and moral reasoning as distinct capabilities, yet the extent to which emotions influence moral judgment remains underexplored. In this work, we develop an emotion-induction pipeline that infuses emotion into moral situations and evaluate shifts in moral acceptability across multiple datasets and LLMs. We observe a directional pattern: positive emotions increase moral acceptability and negative emotions decrease it, with effects strong enough to reverse binary moral judgments in up to 20% of cases, and with susceptibility scaling inversely with model capability. Our analysis further reveals that specific emotions can sometimes behave contrary to what their valence would predict (e.g., remorse paradoxically increases acceptability). A complementary human annotation study shows humans do not exhibit these systematic shifts, indicating an alignment gap in current LLMs....

Knowledge Graph (KG) can effectively integrate valuable information from massive data, and thus has been rapidly developed and widely used in many fields. Traditional KG construction methods rely on manual annotation, which often consumes a lot of time and manpower. And KG construction schemes based on deep learning tend to have weak generalization capabilities. With the rapid development of Pre-trained Language Models (PLM), PLM has shown great potential in the field of KG construction. This paper provides a comprehensive review of recent research advances in the field of construction of KGs using PLM. In this paper, we explain how PLM can utilize its language understanding and generation capabilities to automatically extract key information for KGs, such as entities and relations, from textual data. In addition, We also propose a new Hyper-Relarional Knowledge Graph construction framework based on lightweight Large Language Model (LLM) named LLHKG and compares it with previous methods. Under our framework, the KG construction capability of lightweight LLM is comparable to GPT3.5....

As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to evolve through alignment techniques such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and Constitutional AI, a growing and increasingly conspicuous phenomenon has emerged: the proliferation of verbal tics -- repetitive, formulaic linguistic patterns that pervade model outputs. These range from sycophantic openers ("That's a great question!", "Awesome!") to pseudo-empathetic affirmations ("I completely understand your concern", "I'm right here to catch you") and overused vocabulary ("delve", "tapestry", "nuanced"). In this paper, we present a systematic analysis of the verbal tic phenomenon across eight state-of-the-art LLMs: GPT-5.4, Claude Opus 4.7, Gemini 3.1 Pro, Grok 4.2, Doubao-Seed-2.0-pro, Kimi K2.5, DeepSeek V3.2, and MiMo-V2-Pro. Utilizing a custom evaluation framework for standardized API-based evaluation, we assess 10,000 prompts across 10 task categories in both English and Chinese, yielding 160,000 model responses. We introduce the Verbal Tic Index (VTI), a composite metric quantifying tic prevalence, and analyze its correlation with sycophancy, lexical diversity, and human-perceived naturalness. Our findings reveal significant inter-model variation: Gemini 3.1 Pro exhibits the highest VTI (0.590), while DeepSeek V3.2 achieves the lowest (0.295). We further demonstrate that verbal tics accumulate over multi-turn conversations, are amplified in subjective tasks, and show distinct cross-lingual patterns. Human evaluation (N = 120) confirms a strong inverse relationship between sycophancy and perceived naturalness (r = -0.87, p < 0.001). These results underscore the "alignment tax" of current training paradigms and highlight the urgent need for more authentic human-AI interaction frameworks....

Recent years have witnessed growing interest in applying Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) to Machine Translation (MT). Existing approaches predominantly adopt a "think-first-then-translate" paradigm. Although explicit reasoning trajectories significantly enhance translation quality, they incur prohibitive inference costs and latency. To address these limitations, we propose ReflectMT, a two-stage reflection internalization algorithm for machine translation that employs a "translate-first-think-later" paradigm. Our approach develops the model's "translate-reflect-refine" capability through reinforcement learning. In the first stage, we cultivate the model's capacity for high-quality reflection and refinement, thereby enhancing its semantic comprehension and task-specific knowledge. In the second stage, we train the model to internalize the knowledge acquired during reflection. As a result, during inference, ReflectMT operates in a direct translation mode, producing high-quality translations on the first attempt without any explicit reasoning steps. Experimental results on datasets such as WMT24 demonstrate that our model's first-pass translations during inference outperform multi-step reasoning LRMs such as DeepSeek-R1 in both automatic metrics and GPT-based evaluation, achieving a 2.16-point improvement in GPT-based translation quality evaluation while reducing token consumption by 94.33%....

Thinking LLMs produce reasoning traces before answering. Prior activation steering work mainly targets on shaping these traces. It remains less understood how answer tokens actually read and integrate the reasoning to produce reliable outcomes. Focusing on quantitative reasoning, we analyze the answer-to-reasoning attention and observe a benign self-reading pattern aligned with correctness, characterized by a forward drift of the reading focus along the reasoning trace and a persistent concentration on key semantic anchors, whereas incorrect solutions exhibit diffuse and irregular attention pattern. We interpret this as internal certainty during answer decoding, where the model commits to a viable solution branch and integrates key evidence. Following this, we propose a training-free steering method driven by Self-Reading Quality (SRQ) scores combining geometric metrics for process control with semantic metrics for content monitoring. SRQ selects data to build steering vectors that guide inference toward benign self-reading and away from uncertain and disorganized reading. Experiments show that our method yields consistent accuracy gains....

Existing Indic ASR benchmarks often use scripted, clean speech and leaderboard driven evaluation that encourages dataset specific overfitting. In addition, strict single reference WER penalizes natural spelling variation in Indian languages, including non standardized spellings of code-mixed English origin words. To address these limitations, we introduce Voice of India, a closed source benchmark built from unscripted telephonic conversations covering 15 major Indian languages across 139 regional clusters. The dataset contains 306230 utterances, totaling 536 hours of speech from 36691 speakers with transcripts accounting for spelling variations. We also analyze performance geographically at the district level, revealing disparities. Finally, we provide detailed analysis across factors such as audio quality, speaking rate, gender, and device type, highlighting where current ASR systems struggle and offering insights for improving real world Indic ASR systems....

This paper studies uncertainty quantification for large language models (LLMs) under black-box access, where only a small number of responses can be sampled for each query. In this setting, estimating the effective semantic alphabet size--that is, the number of distinct meanings expressed in the sampled responses--provides a useful proxy for downstream risk. However, frequency-based estimators tend to undercount rare semantic modes when the sample size is small, while graph-spectral quantities alone are not designed to estimate semantic occupancy accurately. To address this issue, we propose SHADE (Soft-Hybrid Alphabet Dynamic Estimator), a simple and interpretable estimator that combines Generalized Good-Turing coverage with a heat-kernel trace of the normalized Laplacian constructed from an entailment-weighted graph over sampled responses. The estimated coverage adaptively determines the fusion rule: under high coverage, SHADE uses a convex combination of the two signals, while under low coverage it applies a LogSumExp fusion to emphasize missing or weakly observed semantic modes. A finite-sample correction is then introduced to stabilize the resulting cardinality estimate before converting it into a coverage-adjusted semantic entropy score. Experiments on pooled semantic alphabet-size estimation against large-sample references and on QA incorrectness detection show that SHADE achieves the strongest improvements in the most sample-limited regime, while the performance gap narrows as the number of samples increases. These results suggest that hybrid semantic occupancy estimation is particularly beneficial when black-box uncertainty quantification must operate under tight sampling budgets....

Small language models (SLMs), such as BART, can achieve summarization performance comparable to large language models (LLMs) via distillation. However, existing LLM-based ranking strategies for summary candidates suffer from instability, while classical metrics (e.g., ROUGE) are insufficient to rank high-quality summaries. To address these issues, we introduce \textbf{SCURank}, a framework that enhances summarization by leveraging \textbf{Summary Content Units (SCUs)}. Instead of relying on unstable comparisons or surface-level overlap, SCURank evaluates summaries based on the richness and semantic importance of information content. We investigate the effectiveness of SCURank in distilling summaries from multiple diverse LLMs. Experimental results demonstrate that SCURank outperforms traditional metrics and LLM-based ranking methods across evaluation measures and datasets. Furthermore, our findings show that incorporating diverse LLM summaries enhances model abstractiveness and overall distilled model performance, validating the benefits of information-centric ranking in multi-LLM distillation. The code for SCURank is available at https://github.com/IKMLab/SCURank....

For news headlines to influence beliefs and drive action, relevant information needs to be retained and retrievable from memory. In this probing study we draw on experiment designs from cognitive psychology to examine how a specific linguistic feature, namely direct address through first- and second-person pronouns, affects memorability and to what extent it is feasible to use large language models for the targeted insertion of such a feature into existing text without changing its core meaning. Across three controlled memorization experiments with a total of 240 participants, yielding 7,680 unique memory judgments, we show that pronoun insertion has mixed effects on memorability. Exploratory analyses indicate that effects differ based on headline topic, how pronouns are inserted and their immediate contexts. Additional data and fine-grained analysis is needed to draw definitive conclusions on these mediating factors. We further show that automatic revisions by LLMs are not always appropriate: Crowdsourced evaluations find many of them to be lacking in content accuracy and emotion retention or resulting in unnatural writing style. We make our collected data available for future work....

Repair, an important resource for resolving trouble in human-human conversation, remains underexplored in human-LLM interaction. In this study, we investigate how LLMs engage in the interactive process of repair in multi-turn dialogues around solvable and unsolvable math questions. We examine whether models initiate repair themselves and how they respond to user-initiated repair. Our results show strong differences across models: reactions range from being almost completely resistant to (appropriate) repair attempts to being highly susceptible and easily manipulated. We further demonstrate that once conversations extend beyond a single turn, model behavior becomes more distinctive and less predictable across systems. Overall, our findings indicate that each tested LLM exhibits its own characteristic form of unreliability in the context of repair....

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) reduces the training cost of full-parameter fine-tuning for large language models (LLMs) by training only a small set of task-specific parameters while freezing the pretrained backbone. However, existing approaches, such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), achieve adaptation by inserting independent low-rank perturbations directly to individual weights, resulting in a local parameterization of adaptation. We propose ShadowPEFT, a centralized PEFT framework that instead performs layer-level refinement through a depth-shared shadow module. At each transformer layer, ShadowPEFT maintains a parallel shadow state and evolves it repeatedly for progressively richer hidden states. This design shifts adaptation from distributed weight-space perturbations to a shared layer-space refinement process. Since the shadow module is decoupled from the backbone, it can be reused across depth, independently pretrained, and optionally deployed in a detached mode, benefiting edge computing scenarios. Experiments on generation and understanding benchmarks show that ShadowPEFT matches or outperforms LoRA and DoRA under comparable trainable-parameter budgets. Additional analyses on shadow pretraining, cross-dataset transfer, parameter scaling, inference latency, and system-level evaluation suggest that centralized layer-space adaptation is a competitive and flexible alternative to conventional low-rank PEFT....

The evaluation of narrative quality remains a complex challenge, as it involves subjective factors such as plot, character development, and emotional impact. This work proposes a quantitative approach to narrative assessment by focusing on the linguistic dimension as a primary indicator of quality. The paper presents a methodology for the automatic evaluation of narrative based on the extraction of a comprehensive set of 33 quantitative linguistic features categorized into lexical, syntactic, and semantic groups. To test the model, an experiment was conducted on a specialized corpus of 23 books, including canonical masterpieces and self-published works. Through a similarity matrix, the system successfully clustered the narratives, distinguishing almost perfectly between professionally edited and self-published texts. Furthermore, the methodology was validated against a human-annotated dataset; it significantly outperforms traditional story-level evaluation metrics, demonstrating the effectiveness of quantitative linguistic features in assessing narrative quality....

Large language models (LLMs) are now deployed worldwide, inspiring a surge of benchmarks that measure their multilingual and multicultural abilities. However, these benchmarks prioritize generic language understanding or superficial cultural trivia, leaving the evaluation of grounded tasks -- where models must reason within real-world, context-rich scenarios -- largely unaddressed. To fill this gap, we present CulturALL, a comprehensive and challenging benchmark to assess LLMs' multilingual and multicultural competence on grounded tasks. CulturALL is built via a human--AI collaborative framework: expert annotators ensure appropriate difficulty and factual accuracy, while LLMs lighten the manual workload. By incorporating diverse sources, CulturALL ensures comprehensive scenario coverage. Each item is carefully designed to present a high level of difficulty, making CulturALL challenging. CulturALL contains 2,610 samples in 14 languages from 51 regions, distributed across 16 topics to capture the full breadth of grounded tasks. Experiments show that the best LLM achieves 44.48% accuracy on CulturALL, underscoring substantial room for improvement....

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as co-authors in collaborative writing, where users begin with rough drafts and rely on LLMs to complete, revise, and refine their content. However, this capability poses a serious safety risk: malicious users could jailbreak the models-filling incomplete drafts with dangerous content-to force them into generating harmful outputs. In this paper, we identify the vulnerability of current LLMs to such draft-based co-authoring jailbreak attacks and introduce HarDBench, a systematic benchmark designed to evaluate the robustness of LLMs against this emerging threat. HarDBench spans a range of high-risk domains-including Explosives, Drugs, Weapons, and Cyberattacks-and features prompts with realistic structure and domain-specific cues to assess the model susceptibility to harmful completions. To mitigate this risk, we introduce a safety-utility balanced alignment approach based on preference optimization, training models to refuse harmful completions while remaining helpful on benign drafts. Experimental results show that existing LLMs are highly vulnerable in co-authoring contexts and our alignment method significantly reduces harmful outputs without degrading performance on co-authoring capabilities. This presents a new paradigm for evaluating and aligning LLMs in human-LLM collaborative writing settings. Our new benchmark and dataset are available on our project page at https://github.com/untae0122/HarDBench...

Multilingual large language models (LLMs) have minimized the fluency gap between languages. This advancement, however, exposes models to the risk of biased behavior, as knowledge and norms may propagate across languages. In this work, we aim to quantify models' inter- and intra-lingual biases, via their ability to answer locale-ambiguous questions. To this end, we present LocQA, a test set containing 2,156 questions in 12 languages, referring to various locale-dependent facts such as laws, dates, and measurements. The questions do not contain indications of the locales they relate to, other than the querying language itself. LLMs' responses to LocQA locale-ambiguous questions thus reveal models' implicit priors. We used LocQA to evaluate 32 models, and detected two types of structural biases. Inter-lingually, we show a global bias towards answers relevant to the US-locale, even when models are asked in languages other than English. Moreover, we discovered that this global bias is exacerbated in models that underwent instruction tuning, compared to their base counterparts. Intra-lingually, we show that when multiple locales are relevant for the same language, models act as demographic probability engines, prioritizing locales with larger populations. Taken together, insights from LocQA may help in shaping LLMs' desired local behavior, and in quantifying the impact of various training phases on different kinds of biases....

We introduce IndiaFinBench, to our knowledge the first publicly available evaluation benchmark for assessing large language model (LLM) performance on Indian financial regulatory text. Existing financial NLP benchmarks draw exclusively from Western financial corpora (SEC filings, US earnings reports, and English-language financial news), leaving a significant gap in coverage of non-Western regulatory frameworks. IndiaFinBench addresses this gap with 406 expert-annotated question-answer pairs drawn from 192 documents sourced from the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), spanning four task types: regulatory interpretation (174 items), numerical reasoning (92 items), contradiction detection (62 items), and temporal reasoning (78 items). Annotation quality is validated through a model-based secondary pass (kappa=0.918 on contradiction detection) and a 60-item human inter-annotator agreement evaluation (kappa=0.611; 76.7% overall agreement). We evaluate twelve models under zero-shot conditions, with accuracy ranging from 70.4% (Gemma 4 E4B) to 89.7% (Gemini 2.5 Flash). All models substantially outperform a non-specialist human baseline of 60.0%. Numerical reasoning is the most discriminative task, with a 35.9 percentage-point spread across models. Bootstrap significance testing (10,000 resamples) reveals three statistically distinct performance tiers. The dataset, evaluation code, and all model outputs are available at https://github.com/rajveerpall/IndiaFinBench...

Despite the impressive capabilities of large language models, their substantial computational costs, latency, and privacy risks hinder their widespread deployment in real-world applications. Small Language Models (SLMs) with fewer than 10 billion parameters present a promising alternative; however, their inherent limitations in knowledge and reasoning curtail their effectiveness. Existing research primarily focuses on enhancing SLMs through scaling laws or fine-tuning strategies while overlooking the potential of using agent paradigms, such as tool use and multi-agent collaboration, to systematically compensate for the inherent weaknesses of small models. To address this gap, this paper presents the first large-scale, comprehensive study of <10B open-source models under three paradigms: (1) the base model, (2) a single agent equipped with tools, and (3) a multi-agent system with collaborative capabilities. Our results show that single-agent systems achieve the best balance between performance and cost, while multi-agent setups add overhead with limited gains. Our findings highlight the importance of agent-centric design for efficient and trustworthy deployment in resource-constrained settings....

Understanding how policy is debated and justified in parliament is a fundamental aspect of the democratic process. However, the volume and complexity of such debates mean that outside audiences struggle to engage. Meanwhile, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to enable automated summarisation at scale. While summaries of debates can make parliamentary procedures more accessible, evaluating whether these summaries faithfully communicate argumentative content remains challenging. Existing automated summarisation metrics have been shown to correlate poorly with human judgements of consistency (i.e., faithfulness or alignment between summary and source). In this work, we propose a formal framework for evaluating parliamentary debate summaries that grounds argument structures in the contested proposals up for debate. Our novel approach, driven by computational argumentation, focuses the evaluation on formal properties concerning the faithful preservation of the reasoning presented to justify or oppose policy outcomes. We demonstrate our methods using a case-study of debates from the European Parliament and associated LLM-driven summaries....

Generative AI-powered by Large Language Models (LLMs)-is increasingly deployed in industry across healthcare decision support, financial analytics, enterprise retrieval, and conversational automation, where reliability, efficiency, and cost control are critical. In such settings, models must satisfy strict constraints on energy, latency, and hardware utilization-not accuracy alone. Yet prevailing evaluation pipelines remain accuracy-centric, creating a Deployment-Evaluation Gap-the absence of operational and economic criteria in model assessment. To address this gap, we present EDGE-EVAL-a industry-oriented benchmarking framework that evaluates LLMs across their full lifecycle on legacy NVIDIA Tesla T4 GPUs. Benchmarking LLaMA and Qwen variants across three industrial tasks, we introduce five deployment metrics-Economic Break-Even (Nbreak), Intelligence-Per-Watt (IPW ), System Density (\r{ho}sys), Cold-Start Tax (Ctax), and Quantization Fidelity (Qret)-capturing profitability, energy efficiency, hardware scaling, serverless feasibility, and compression safety. Our results reveal a clear efficiency frontier-models in the <2B parameter class dominate larger baselines across economic and ecological dimensions. LLaMA-3.2-1B (INT4) achieves ROI break-even in 14 requests (median), delivers 3x higher energy-normalized intelligence than 7B models, and exceeds 6,900 tokens/s/GB under 4-bit quantization. We further uncover an efficiency anomaly-while QLoRA reduces memory footprint, it increases adaptation energy by up to 7x for small models-challenging prevailing assumptions about quantization-aware training in edge deployment....

The quadratic computational complexity of the standard attention mechanism constitutes a fundamental bottleneck for large language models in long-context inference. While existing KV cache compression methods alleviate memory pressure, they often sacrifice generation quality and fail to address the high overhead of floating-point arithmetic. This paper introduces DASH-KV, an innovative acceleration framework that reformulates attention as approximate nearest-neighbor search via asymmetric deep hashing. Under this paradigm, we design an asymmetric encoding architecture that differentially maps queries and keys to account for their distinctions in precision and reuse characteristics. To balance efficiency and accuracy, we further introduce a dynamic mixed-precision mechanism that adaptively retains full-precision computation for critical tokens. Extensive experiments on LongBench demonstrate that DASH-KV significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baseline methods while matching the performance of full attention, all while reducing inference complexity from O(N^2) to linear O(N). The code is available at https://github.com/Zhihan-Zh/DASH-KV...

This paper narrows the performance gap between small, specialized models and significantly larger general-purpose models through domain adaptation via continual pre-training and merging. We address the scarcity of specialized non-English data by constructing a high-quality German medical corpus (FineMed-de) from FineWeb2. This corpus is used to continually pre-train and merge three well-known LLMs (ranging from $7B$ to $24B$ parameters), creating the DeFineMed model family. A comprehensive evaluation confirms that specialization dramatically enhances $7B$ model performance on German medical benchmarks. Furthermore, the pairwise win-rate analysis of the Qwen2.5-based models demonstrates an approximately $3.5$-fold increase in the win-rate against the much larger Mistral-Small-24B-Instruct through domain adaptation. This evidence positions specialized $7B$ models as a competitive, resource-efficient solution for complex medical instruction-following tasks. While model merging successfully restores instruction-following abilities, a subsequent failure mode analysis reveals inherent trade-offs, including the introduction of language mixing and increased verbosity, highlighting the need for more targeted fine-tuning in future work. This research provides a robust, compliant methodology for developing specialized LLMs, serving as the foundation for practical use in German-speaking healthcare contexts....

While self-consistency is known to improve performance on symbolic reasoning, its effect on the recall of encyclopedic knowledge is unclear due to a lack of targeted evaluation grounds. To address this, we establish such a knowledge recall split for the popular MMLU benchmark by applying a data-driven heuristic from prior work. We validate this split by showing that the performance patterns on the symbolic reasoning and knowledge recall subsets mirror those of GSM8K and MedMCQA, respectively. Using this solid ground, we find that self-consistency consistently improves performance across both symbolic reasoning and knowledge recall, even though its underlying CoT prompting is primarily effective for symbolic reasoning. As a result, we achieve an 89\% accuracy on MMLU, the best performance to date with the use of GPT-4o....

Automatic evaluators such as reward models play a central role in the alignment and evaluation of large vision-language models (LVLMs). Despite their growing importance, these evaluators are almost exclusively assessed on English-centric benchmarks, leaving open the question of how well these evaluators generalize across languages. To answer this question, we introduce MM-JudgeBench, the first large-scale benchmark for multilingual and multimodal judge model evaluation, which includes over 60K pairwise preference instances spanning 25 typologically diverse languages. MM-JudgeBench integrates two complementary subsets: a general vision-language preference evaluation subset extending VL-RewardBench, and a chart-centric visual-text reasoning subset derived from OpenCQA, enabling systematic analysis of reward models (i.e., LVLM judges) across diverse settings. We additionally release a multilingual training set derived from MM-RewardBench, disjoint from our evaluation data, to support domain adaptation. By evaluating 22 LVLMs (15 open-source, 7 proprietary), we uncover substantial cross-lingual performance variance in our proposed benchmark. Our analysis further shows that model size and architecture are poor predictors of multilingual robustness, and that even state-of-the-art LVLM judges exhibit inconsistent behavior across languages. Together, these findings expose fundamental limitations of current reward modeling and underscore the necessity of multilingual, multimodal benchmarks for developing reliable automated evaluators....

Recent work has demonstrated the promise of orchestrating large language models (LLMs) within evolutionary and agentic optimization systems. However, the mechanisms driving these optimization gains remain poorly understood. In this work, we present a large-scale study of LLM-guided evolutionary search, collecting optimization trajectories for 15 LLMs across 8 tasks. Although zero-shot problem-solving ability correlates with final optimization outcomes, it explains only part of the variance: models with similar initial capability often induce dramatically different search trajectories and outcomes. By analyzing these trajectories, we find that strong LLM optimizers behave as local refiners, producing frequent incremental improvements while progressively localizing the search in semantic space. Conversely, weaker optimizers exhibit large semantic drift, with sporadic breakthroughs followed by stagnation. Notably, various measures of solution novelty do not predict final performance; novelty is beneficial only when the search remains sufficiently localized around high-performing regions of the solution space. Our results highlight the importance of trajectory analysis for understanding and improving LLM-based optimization systems and provide actionable insights for their design and training....

We present a dual-track pipeline for detecting biblical allusions in literary fiction and apply it to the novels of Cormac McCarthy. A bottom-up embedding track uses inverse document frequency to identify rare vocabulary shared with the King James Bible, embeds occurrences in their local context for sense disambiguation, and passes candidate passage pairs through cascaded LLM review. A top-down register track asks an LLM to read McCarthy's prose undirected to any specific biblical passage for comparison, catching allusions not distinguished by word or phrase rarity. Both tracks are cross-validated by a long-context model that holds entire novels alongside the KJV in a single pass, and every finding is checked against published scholarship. Restricting attention to allusions that carry a textual echo--shared phrasing, reworked vocabulary, or transplanted cadence--and distinguishing literary allusions proper from signposted biblical references (similes naming biblical figures, characters overtly citing scripture), the pipeline surfaces 349 allusions across the corpus. Among a target set of 115 previously documented allusions retrieved through human review of the academic literature, the pipeline independently recovers 62 (54% recall), with recall varying by connection type from 30% (transformed imagery) to 80% (register collisions). We contextualise these results with respect to the value-add from LLMs as assistants to mechanical stylometric analyses, and their potential to facilitate the statistical study of intertextuality in massive literary corpora....

More than half of the global population struggles to meet their civil justice needs due to limited legal resources. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities, significant challenges remain even at the foundational step of legal issue identification. To investigate LLMs' capabilities in this task, we constructed a dataset from 769 real-world Malaysian Contract Act court cases, using GPT-4o to extract facts and generate candidate legal issues, annotated by senior legal experts, which reveals a critical limitation: while LLMs generate diverse issue candidates, their precision remains inadequate (GPT-4o achieves only 62%). To address this gap, we propose LePREC (Legal Professional-inspired Reasoning Elicitation and Classification), a neuro-symbolic framework combining neural generation with structured statistical reasoning. LePREC consists of: (1) a neuro component leverages LLMs to transform legal descriptions into question-answer pairs representing diverse analytical factors, and (2) a symbolic component applies sparse linear models over these discrete features, learning explicit algebraic weights that identify the most informative reasoning factors. Unlike end-to-end neural approaches, LePREC achieves interpretability through transparent feature weighting while maintaining data efficiency through correlation-based statistical classification. Experiments show a 30-40% improvement over advanced LLM baselines, including GPT-4o and Claude, confirming that correlation-based factor-issue analysis offers a more data-efficient solution for relevance decisions....

LLM-assisted defect discovery has a precision crisis: plausible-but-wrong reports overwhelm maintainers and degrade credibility for real findings. We present Refute-or-Promote, an inference-time reliability pattern combining Stratified Context Hunting (SCH) for candidate generation, adversarial kill mandates, context asymmetry, and a Cross-Model Critic (CMC). Adversarial agents attempt to disprove candidates at each promotion gate; cold-start reviewers are intended to reduce anchoring cascades; cross-family review can catch correlated blind spots that same-family review misses. Over a 31-day campaign across 7 targets (security libraries, the ISO C++ standard, major compilers), the pipeline killed roughly 79% of 171 candidates before advancing to disclosure (retrospective aggregate); on a consolidated-protocol subset (lcms2, wolfSSL; n=30), the prospective kill rate was 83%. Outcomes: 4 CVEs (3 public, 1 embargoed); LWG 4549 accepted to the C++ working paper; 5 merged C++ editorial PRs; 3 compiler conformance bugs; 8 merged security-related fixes without CVE; an RFC 9000 errata filed under committee review; and 1+ FIPS 140-3 normative compliance issues under coordinated disclosure -- all evaluated by external acceptance, not benchmarks. The most instructive failure: ten dedicated reviewers unanimously endorsed a non-existent Bleichenbacher padding oracle in OpenSSL's CMS module; it was killed only by a single empirical test, motivating the mandatory empirical gate. No vulnerability was discovered autonomously; the contribution is external structure that filters LLM agents' persistent false positives. As a preliminary transfer test beyond defect discovery, a simplified cross-family critique variant also solved five previously unsolved SymPy instances on SWE-bench Verified and one SWE-rebench hard task....

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable success in cross-modal understanding and generation, yet their deployment is threatened by critical safety vulnerabilities. While prior works have demonstrated the feasibility of backdoors in MLLMs via fine-tuning data poisoning to manipulate inference, the underlying mechanisms of backdoor attacks remain opaque, complicating the understanding and mitigation. To bridge this gap, we propose ProjLens, an interpretability framework designed to demystify MLLMs backdoors. We first establish that normal downstream task alignment--even when restricted to projector fine--tuning--introduces vulnerability to backdoor injection, whose activation mechanism is different from that observed in text-only LLMs. Through extensive experiments across four backdoor variants, we uncover:(1) Low-Rank Structure: Backdoor injection updates appear overall full-rank and lack dedicated ``trigger neurons'', but the backdoor-critical parameters are encoded within a low-rank subspace of the projector;(2) Activation Mechanism: Both clean and poisoned embedding undergoes a semantic shift toward a shared direction aligned with the backdoor target, but the shifting magnitude scales linearly with the input norm, resulting in the distinct backdoor activation on poisoned samples. Our code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ProjLens-8FD7...

Modern distributed systems generate massive volumes of log data that are critical for detecting anomalies and cyber threats. However, in real world settings, these logs are often distributed across multiple organizations and cannot be centralized due to privacy and security constraints. Existing log anomaly detection methods, including recent large language model (LLM) based approaches, largely rely on centralized training and are not suitable for such environments. In this paper, we propose DP-FLogTinyLLM, a privacy preserving federated framework for log anomaly detection using parameter efficient LLMs. Our approach enables collaborative learning without sharing raw log data by integrating federated optimization with differential privacy. To ensure scalability in resource constrained environments, we employ low rank adaptation (LoRA) for efficient fine tuning of Tiny LLMs at each client. Empirical results on the Thunderbird and BGL datasets show that the proposed framework matches the performance of centralized LLM based methods, while incurring additional computational overhead due to privacy mechanisms. Compared to existing federated baselines, DP-FLogTinyLLM consistently achieves higher precision and F1-score, with particularly strong gains on the Thunderbird dataset, highlighting its effectiveness in detecting anomalies while minimizing false positives....

Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training among multiple parties without centralizing raw data. There are two main paradigms in FL: Horizontal FL (HFL), where all participants share the same feature space but hold different samples, and Vertical FL (VFL), where parties possess complementary features for the same set of samples. A prerequisite for VFL training is privacy-preserving entity alignment (PPEA), which establishes a common index of samples across parties (alignment) without revealing which samples are shared between them. Conventional private set intersection (PSI) achieves alignment but leaks intersection membership, exposing sensitive relationships between datasets. The standard private set union (PSU) mitigates this risk by aligning on the union of identifiers rather than the intersection. However, existing approaches are often limited to two parties or lack support for typo-tolerant matching. In this paper, we introduce the Sherpa.ai multi-party PSU protocol for VFL, a PPEA method that hides intersection membership and enables both exact and noisy matching. The protocol generalizes two-party approaches to multiple parties with low communication overhead and offers two variants: an order-preserving version for exact alignment and an unordered version tolerant to typographical and formatting discrepancies. We prove correctness and privacy, analyze communication and computational (exponentiation) complexity, and formalize a universal index mapping from local records to a shared index space. This multi-party PSU offers a scalable, mathematically grounded protocol for PPEA in real-world VFL deployments, such as multi-institutional healthcare disease detection, collaborative risk modeling between banks and insurers, and cross-domain fraud detection between telecommunications and financial institutions, while preserving intersection privacy....

Autonomous driving systems often degrade under adverse visibility conditions-such as rain, nighttime, or snow-where online scene geometry (e.g., lane dividers, road boundaries, and pedestrian crossings) becomes sparse or fragmented. While high-definition (HD) maps can provide missing structural context, they are costly to construct and maintain at scale. We propose Localization-Guided Foreground Augmentation (LG-FA), a lightweight and plug-and-play inference module that enhances foreground perception by enriching geometric context online. LG-FA: (i) incrementally constructs a sparse global vector layer from per-frame Bird's-Eye View (BEV) predictions; (ii) estimates ego pose via class-constrained geometric alignment, jointly improving localization and completing missing local topology; and (iii) reprojects the augmented foreground into a unified global frame to improve per-frame predictions. Experiments on challenging nuScenes sequences demonstrate that LG-FA improves the geometric completeness and temporal stability of BEV representations, reduces localization error, and produces globally consistent lane and topology reconstructions. The module can be seamlessly integrated into existing BEV-based perception systems without backbone modification. By providing a reliable geometric context prior, LG-FA enhances temporal consistency and supplies stable structural support for downstream modules such as tracking and decision-making....

Extracting standardized metallurgical metrics from microscopy images remains challenging due to complex grain morphology and the data demands of supervised segmentation. To bridge foundational computer vision with practical metallurgical evaluation, we propose an automated pipeline for dense instance segmentation and grain size estimation that adapts Cellpose-SAM to microstructures and integrates its topology-aware gradient tracking with an ASTM E112 Jeffries planimetric module. We systematically benchmark this pipeline against a classical convolutional network (U-Net), an adaptive-prompting vision foundation model (MatSAM) and a contemporary vision-language model (Qwen2.5-VL-7B). Our evaluations reveal that while the out-of-the-box vision-language model struggles with the localized spatial reasoning required for dense microscopic counting and MatSAM suffers from over-segmentation despite its domain-specific prompt generation, our adapted pipeline successfully maintains topological separation. Furthermore, experiments across progressively reduced training splits demonstrate exceptional few-shot scalability; utilizing only two training samples, the proposed system predicts the ASTM grain size number (G) with a mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) as low as 1.50%, while robustness testing across varying target grain counts empirically validates the ASTM 50-grain sampling minimum. These results highlight the efficacy of application-level foundation model integration for highly accurate, automated materials characterization. Our project repository is available at https://github.com/mueez-overflow/ASTM-Grain-Size-Estimator....

Chest X-ray (CXR) radiology report generation (RRG) models have shown rapid progress, yet their clinical utility remains uncertain due to limited evaluation by radiologists. We present CXRMate-2, a state-of-the-art CXR RRG model that integrates structured multimodal conditioning and reinforcement learning with a composite reward for semantic alignment with radiologist reports. Across the MIMIC-CXR, CheXpert Plus, and ReXgradient datasets, CXRMate-2 achieves statistically significant improvements over strong benchmarks, including gains of 11.2% and 24.4% in GREEN and RadGraph-XL, respectively, on MIMIC-CXR relative to MedGemma 1.5 (4B). To directly compare CXRMate-2 against radiologist reporting, we conduct a blinded, randomised qualitative retrospective evaluation. Three consultant radiologists compare generated and radiologist reports across 120 studies from the MIMIC-CXR test set. Generated reports were deemed acceptable (defined as preferred or rated equally to radiologist reports) in 45% of ratings, with no statistically significant difference in preference rates between radiologist reports and acceptable generated reports for seven of the eight analysed findings. Preference for radiologist reports was driven primarily by higher recall, while generated reports were often preferred for readability. Together, these results suggest a credible pathway to clinically acceptable CXR RRG. Improvements in recall, alongside better detection of subtle findings (e.g., pulmonary congestion), are likely sufficient to achieve non-inferiority to radiologist reporting. With these targeted advances, CXR RRG systems may be ready for prospective evaluation in assistive roles within radiologist-led workflows....

Reducing the number of Gaussian-tile pairs is one of the most promising approaches to improve 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS) rendering speed on GPUs. However, the importance difference existing among Gaussian-tile pairs has never been considered in the previous works. In this paper, we propose AdaGScale, a novel viewpoint-adaptive Gaussian scaling technique for reducing the number of Gaussian-tile pairs. AdaGScale is based on the observation that the peripheral tiles located far from Gaussian center contribute negligibly to pixel color accumulation. This suggests an opportunity for reducing the number of Gaussian-tile pairs based on color contribution. AdaGScale efficiently estimates the color contribution in the peripheral region of each Gaussian during a preprocessing stage and adaptively scales its size based on the peripheral score. As a result, Gaussians with lower importance intersect with fewer tiles during the intersection test, which improves rendering speed while maintaining image quality. The adjusted size is used only for tile intersection test, and the original size is retained during color accumulation to preserve visual fidelity. Experimental results show that AdaGScale achieves a geometric mean speedup of 13.8x over original 3D-GS on a GPU, with only about 0.5 dB degradation in PSNR on city-scale scenes....

Multimodal empathetic response generation (MERG) aims to generate emotionally engaging and empathetic responses based on users' multimodal contexts. Existing approaches usually rely on an implicit one-pass generation paradigm from multimodal context to the final response, which overlooks two intrinsic characteristics of MERG: (1) Human perception of emotional cues is inherently structured rather than a direct mapping. The conventional paradigm neglects the hierarchical progression of emotion perception, leading to distorted emotional judgments. (2) Given the inherent complexity and ambiguity of human emotions, the conventional paradigm is prone to significant emotional biases, ultimately resulting in suboptimal empathy. In this paper, we propose a multi-agent framework for MERG, which enhances empathy through structured reasoning and reflective refinement. Specifically, we first introduce a structured empathetic reasoning-to-generation module that explicitly decomposes response generation via multimodal perception, consistency-aware emotion forecasting, pragmatic strategy planning, and strategy-guided response generation, providing a clearer intermediate path from multimodal evidence to response realization. Besides, we develop a global reflection and refinement module, in which a global reflection agent performs step-wise auditing over intermediate states and the generated response, eliminating existing emotional biases and empathy errors, and triggering targeted regeneration. Overall, such a closed-loop framework enables our model to gradually improve the accuracy of emotion perception and eliminate emotion biases during the iteration process. Experiments on several benchmarks, e.g., IEMOCAP and MELD, demonstrate that our model has superior empathic response generation capabilities compared to state-of-the-art methods....

Perception robustness under adverse weather remains a critical challenge for autonomous driving, with the core bottleneck being the scarcity of real-world video data in adverse weather. Existing weather generation approaches struggle to balance visual quality and annotation reusability. We present AutoAWG, a controllable Adverse Weather video Generation framework for Autonomous driving. Our method employs a semantics-guided adaptive fusion of multiple controls to balance strong weather stylization with high-fidelity preservation of safety-critical targets; leverages a vanishing point-anchored temporal synthesis strategy to construct training sequences from static images, thereby reducing reliance on synthetic data; and adopts masked training to enhance long-horizon generation stability. On the nuScenes validation set, AutoAWG significantly outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods: without first-frame conditioning, FID and FVD are relatively reduced by 50.0% and 16.1%; with first-frame conditioning, they are further reduced by 8.7% and 7.2%, respectively. Extensive qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate advantages in style fidelity, temporal consistency, and semantic--structural integrity, underscoring the practical value of AutoAWG for improving downstream perception in autonomous driving. Our code is available at: https://github.com/higherhu/AutoAWG...

Constructing structured spatial memory is essential for enabling long-horizon reasoning in complex embodied navigation tasks. Current memory construction predominantly relies on a decoupled, two-stage paradigm: agents first aggregate environmental data through exploration, followed by the offline reconstruction of spatial memory. However, this post-hoc and geometry-centric approach precludes agents from leveraging high-level semantic intelligence, often causing them to overlook navigationally critical landmarks (e.g., doorways and staircases) that serve as fundamental semantic anchors in human cognitive maps. To bridge this gap, we propose ABot-Explorer, a novel active exploration framework that unifies memory construction and exploration into an online, RGB-only process. At its core, ABot-Explorer leverages Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to distill Semantic Navigational Affordances (SNA), which act as cognitive-aligned anchors to guide the agent's movement. By dynamically integrating these SNAs into a hierarchical SG-Memo, ABot-Explorer mirrors human-like exploratory logic by prioritizing structural transit nodes to facilitate efficient coverage. To support this framework, we contribute a large-scale dataset extending InteriorGS with SNA and SG-Memo annotations. Experimental results demonstrate that ABot-Explorer significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in both exploration efficiency and environment coverage, while the resulting SG-Memo is shown to effectively support diverse downstream tasks....

We present a generative method for texture filtering, which exhibits surprisingly good performance and generalizability. Our core idea is to empower texture filtering by taking full advantage of the strong learned image prior of pre-trained generative models. To this end, we propose to fine-tune a pre-trained generative model via a two-stage strategy. Specifically, we first conduct supervised fine-tuning on a very small set of paired images, and then perform reinforcement fine-tuning on a large-scale unlabeled dataset under the guidance of a reward function that quantifies the quality of texture removal and structure preservation. Extensive experiments show that our method clearly outperforms previous methods, and is effective to deal with previously challenging cases. Our code is available at https://github.com/OnlyZZZZ/Generative_Texture_Filtering....

The IEEE Low-Power Computer Vision Challenge (LPCVC) aims to promote the development of efficient vision models for edge devices, balancing accuracy with constraints such as latency, memory capacity, and energy use. The 2025 challenge featured three tracks: (1) Image classification under various lighting conditions and styles, (2) Open-Vocabulary Segmentation with Text Prompt, and (3) Monocular Depth Estimation. This paper presents the design of LPCVC 2025, including its competition structure and evaluation framework, which integrates the Qualcomm AI Hub for consistent and reproducible benchmarking. The paper also introduces the top-performing solutions from each track and outlines key trends and observations. The paper concludes with suggestions for future computer vision competitions....

In vision-and-language navigation (VLN), self-improvement from policy-induced experience, using only standard VLN action supervision, critically depends on balancing behavioral diversity and learning stability, which governs whether the agent can extract a reliable learning signal for improvement. Increasing behavioral diversity is necessary to expose alternative action hypotheses but can destabilize policy-induced learning signals, whereas overly conservative stability constraints suppress exploration and induce early commitment, making reliable self-improvement difficult. To address this challenge, we propose Stability-Diversity Balance (SDB), a plug-and-play mechanism for balanced self-improvement in VLN. SDB expands each decision step into multiple latent behavioral hypotheses by applying controlled shifts in the instruction-conditioned hidden states, and then performs reliability-aware soft evaluation and aggregation to retain diverse yet instruction-consistent alternatives during learning. An explicit regularizer further constrains hypothesis interactions, preventing excessive drift or premature collapse of hypothesis diversity and stabilizing self-improvement without discarding training signals. Experiments on R2R, SOON, and REVERIE show consistent improvements; for example, on REVERIE val-unseen, SDB improves SPL from 33.73 to 35.93 and OSR from 51.07 to 54.25....

Multi-modal test-time adaptation (TTA) enhances the resilience of benchmark multi-modal models against distribution shifts by leveraging the unlabeled target data during inference. Despite the documented success, the advancement of multi-modal TTA methodologies has been impeded by a persistent limitation, i.e., the lack of explicit modeling of category-conditional distributions, which is crucial for yielding accurate predictions and reliable decision boundaries. Canonical Gaussian discriminant analysis (GDA) provides a vanilla modeling of category-conditional distributions and achieves moderate advancement in uni-modal contexts. However, in multi-modal TTA scenario, the inherent modality distribution asymmetry undermines the effectiveness of modeling the category-conditional distribution via the canonical GDA. To this end, we introduce a tailored probabilistic Gaussian model for multi-modal TTA to explicitly model the category-conditional distributions, and further propose an adaptive contrastive asymmetry rectification technique to counteract the adverse effects arising from modality asymmetry, thereby deriving calibrated predictions and reliable decision boundaries. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance under a wide range of distribution shifts. The code is available at https://github.com/XuJinglinn/AdaPGC....

Faithfully modeling human behavior in dynamic environments is a foundational challenge for embodied intelligence. While conditional motion synthesis has achieved significant advances, egocentric motion generation remains largely underexplored due to the inherent complexity of first-person perception. In this work, we investigate Egocentric Vision-Language (Ego-VL) motion generation. This task requires synthesizing 3D human motion conditioned jointly on first-person visual observations and natural language instructions. We identify a critical \textit{reasoning-generation entanglement} challenge: the simultaneous optimization of semantic reasoning and kinematic modeling introduces gradient conflicts. These conflicts systematically degrade the fidelity of multimodal grounding and motion quality. To address this challenge, we propose a hierarchical generative framework \textbf{EgoMotion}. Inspired by the biological decoupling of cognitive reasoning and motor control, EgoMotion operates in two stages. In the Cognitive Reasoning stage, A vision-language model (VLM) projects multimodal inputs into a structured space of discrete motion primitives. This forces the VLM to acquire goal-consistent representations, effectively bridging the semantic gap between high-level perceptual understanding and low-level action execution. In the Motion Generation stage, these learned representations serve as expressive conditioning signals for a diffusion-based motion generator. By performing iterative denoising within a continuous latent space, the generator synthesizes physically plausible and temporally coherent trajectories. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that EgoMotion achieves state-of-the-art performance, and produces motion sequences that are both semantically grounded and kinematically superior to existing approaches....

Existing facial reenactment methods struggle with a trade-off between expressiveness and fine-grained controllability. Holistic facial reenactment models often sacrifice granular control for expressiveness, while methods designed for control may struggle with fidelity and robust disentanglement. Instead of treating facial motion as a monolithic signal, we explore an alternative compositional perspective. In this paper, we introduce PortraitDirector, a novel framework that formulates face reenactment as a hierarchical composition task, achieving high-fidelity and controllable results. We employ a Hierarchical Motion Disentanglement and Composition strategy, deconstructing facial motion into a Spatial Layer for physical movements and a Semantic Layer for emotional content. The Spatial Layer comprises: (i) global head pose, managed via a dedicated representation and injection pathway; (ii) spatially separated local facial expressions, distilled from cropped facial regions and purged of emotional cues via Emotion-Filtering Module leveraging an information bottleneck. The Semantic Layer contains a derived global emotion. The disentangled components are then recomposed into an expressive motion latent. Furthermore, we engineer the framework for real-time performance through a suite of optimizations, including diffusion distillation, causal attention and VAE acceleration. PortraitDirector achieves streaming, high-fidelity, controllable 512 x 512 face reenactment at 20 FPS with a end-to-end 800 ms latency on a single 5090 GPU....

Robust 3D reconstruction across varying environmental conditions remains a critical challenge for robotic perception, particularly when transitioning between air and water. To address this, we introduce BALTIC, a controlled benchmark designed to systematically evaluate modern 3D reconstruction methods under variations in medium and lighting. The benchmark comprises 13 datasets spanning two media (air and water) and three lighting conditions (ambient, artificial, and mixed), with additional variations in motion type, scanning pattern, and initialization trajectory, resulting in a diverse set of sequences. Our experimental setup features a custom water tank equipped with a monocular camera and an HTC Vive tracker, enabling accurate ground-truth pose estimation. We further investigate cross-domain reconstruction by augmenting underwater image sequences with a small number of in-air views captured under similar lighting conditions. We evaluate Structure-from-Motion reconstruction using COLMAP in terms of both trajectory accuracy and scene geometry, and use these reconstructions as input to Neural Radiance Fields and 3D Gaussian Splatting methods. The resulting models are assessed against ground-truth trajectories and in-air references, while rendered outputs are compared using perceptual and photometric metrics. Additionally, we perform a color restoration analysis to evaluate radiometric consistency across domains. Our results show that under controlled, texture-consistent conditions, Gaussian Splatting with simple preprocessing (e.g., white balance correction) can achieve performance comparable to specialized underwater methods, although its robustness decreases in more complex and heterogeneous real-world environments...

This paper presents the first exploration of text-to-image diffusion models for zero-shot sketch-based 3D shape retrieval (ZS-SBSR). Existing sketch-based 3D shape retrieval methods struggle in zero-shot settings due to the absence of category supervision and the extreme sparsity of sketch inputs. Our key insight is that large-scale pretrained diffusion models inherently exhibit open-vocabulary capability and strong shape bias, making them well suited for zero-shot visual retrieval. We leverage a frozen Stable Diffusion backbone to extract and aggregate discriminative representations from intermediate U-Net layers for both sketches and rendered 3D views. Diffusion models struggle with sketches due to their extreme abstraction and sparsity, compounded by a significant domain gap from natural images. To address this limitation without costly retraining, we introduce a multimodal feature-enhanced strategy that conditions the frozen diffusion backbone with complementary visual and textual cues from CLIP, explicitly enhancing the ability of semantic context capture and concentrating on sketch contours. Specifically, we inject global and local visual features derived from a pretrained CLIP visual encoder, and incorporate enriched textual guidance by combining learnable soft prompts with hard textual descriptions generated by BLIP. Furthermore, we employ the Circle-T loss to dynamically strengthen positive-pair attraction once negative samples are sufficiently separated, thereby adapting to sketch noise and enabling more effective sketch-3D alignment. Extensive experiments on two public benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in ZS-SBSR....

Diffusion- and flow-based models usually allocate compute uniformly across space, updating all patches with the same timestep and number of function evaluations. While convenient, this ignores the heterogeneity of natural images: some regions are easy to denoise, whereas others benefit from more refinement or additional context. Motivated by this, we explore patch-level noise scales for image synthesis. We find that naively varying timesteps across image tokens performs poorly, as it exposes the model to overly informative training states that do not occur at inference. We therefore introduce a timestep sampler that explicitly controls the maximum patch-level information available during training, and show that moving from global to patch-level timesteps already improves image generation over standard baselines. By further augmenting the model with a lightweight per-patch difficulty head, we enable adaptive samplers that allocate compute dynamically where it is most needed. Combined with noise levels varying over both space and diffusion time, this yields Patch Forcing (PF), a framework that advances easier regions earlier so they can provide context for harder ones. PF achieves superior results on class-conditional ImageNet, remains orthogonal to representation alignment and guidance methods, and scales to text-to-image synthesis. Our results suggest that patch-level denoising schedules provide a promising foundation for adaptive image generation....

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have become central to autonomous driving systems, yet their deployment is severely bottlenecked by the massive computational overhead of multi-view camera and multi-frame video input. Existing token pruning methods, primarily designed for single-image inputs, treat each frame or view in isolation and thus fail to exploit the inherent spatio-temporal redundancies in driving scenarios. To bridge this gap, we propose ST-Prune, a training-free, plug-and-play framework comprising two complementary modules: Motion-aware Temporal Pruning (MTP) and Ring-view Spatial Pruning (RSP). MTP addresses temporal redundancy by encoding motion volatility and temporal recency as soft constraints within the diversity selection objective, prioritizing dynamic trajectories and current-frame content over static historical background. RSP further resolves spatial redundancy by exploiting the ring-view camera geometry to penalize bilateral cross-view similarity, eliminating duplicate projections and residual background that temporal pruning alone cannot suppress. These two modules together constitute a complete spatio-temporal pruning process, preserving key scene information under strict compression. Validated across four benchmarks spanning perception, prediction, and planning, ST-Prune establishes new state-of-the-art for training-free token pruning. Notably, even at 90\% token reduction, ST-Prune achieves near-lossless performance with certain metrics surpassing the full-model baseline, while maintaining inference speeds comparable to existing pruning approaches....

Deep-feature-based perceptual similarity models have demonstrated strong alignment with human visual perception in Image Quality Assessment (IQA). However, most existing approaches operate at a single spatial scale, implicitly assuming that structural similarity at a fixed resolution is sufficient. The role of spatial scale in deep-feature similarity modeling thus remains insufficiently understood. In this letter, we isolate spatial scale as an independent factor using a minimal multiscale extension of DeepSSIM, referred to as Deep Structural Similarity with Multiscale Representation (MSDS). The proposed framework decouples deep feature representation from cross-scale integration by computing DeepSSIM independently across pyramid levels and fusing the resulting scores with a lightweight set of learnable global weights. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate consistent and statistically significant improvements over the single-scale baseline, while introducing negligible additional complexity. The results empirically confirm spatial scale as a non-negligible factor in deep perceptual similarity, isolated here via a minimal testbed....

Anomaly detection in medical imaging is essential for identifying rare pathological conditions, particularly when annotated abnormal samples are limited. We propose a hybrid anomaly detection framework that integrates self-supervised representation learning with manifold-based density estimation, a combination that remains largely unexplored in this domain. Medical images are first embedded into a latent feature space using pretrained, potentially domain-specific, backbones. These representations are then refined via Mean Shift Density Enhancement (MSDE), an iterative manifold-shifting procedure that moves samples toward regions of higher likelihood. Anomaly scores are subsequently computed using Gaussian density estimation in a PCA-reduced latent space, where Mahalanobis distance measures deviation from the learned normal distribution. The framework follows a one-class learning paradigm and requires only normal samples for training. Extensive experiments on seven medical imaging datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. MSDE achieves the highest AUC on four datasets and the highest Average Precision on five datasets, including near-perfect performance on brain tumor detection (0.981 AUC/AP). These results underscore the potential of the proposed framework as a scalable clinical decision-support tool for early disease detection, screening in low-label settings, and robust deployment across diverse imaging modalities....

Despite remarkable progress toward general-purpose video models, a critical question remains unanswered: how far are these models from achieving true multimodal reasoning? Existing benchmarks fail to address this question rigorously, as they remain constrained by straightforward task designs and fragmented evaluation metrics that neglect complex multimodal reasoning. To bridge this gap, we introduce CLVG-Bench, an evaluation framework designed to probe video models' zero-shot reasoning capabilities via Context Learning in Video Generation. CLVG-Bench comprises more than 1,000 high-quality, manually annotated metadata across 6 categories and 47 subcategories, covering complex scenarios including physical simulation, logical reasoning, and interactive contexts. To enable rigorous and scalable assessment, we further propose an Adaptive Video Evaluator (AVE) that aligns with human expert perception using minimal annotations, delivering interpretable textual feedback across diverse video context tasks. Extensive experiments reveal a striking answer to our central question: while state-of-the-art (SOTA) video models, such as Seedance 2.0, demonstrate competence on certain understanding and reasoning subtasks, they fall substantially short with logically grounded and interactive generation tasks (achieving success rates <25% and ~0%, respectively), exposing multimodal reasoning and physical grounding as critical bottlenecks. By systematically quantifying these limitations, the proposed method provides actionable feedbacks and a clear roadmap toward truly robust, general-purpose video models. CLVG-Bench and code are released here....

Face Anti-Spoofing (FAS) remains challenging due to the requirement for robust domain generalization across unseen environments. While recent trends leverage Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for semantic supervision, these multimodal approaches often demand prohibitive computational resources and exhibit high inference latency. Furthermore, their efficacy is inherently limited by the quality of the underlying visual features. This paper revisits the potential of vision-only foundation models to establish a highly efficient and robust baseline for FAS. We conduct a systematic benchmarking of 15 pre-trained models, such as supervised CNNs, supervised ViTs, and self-supervised ViTs, under severe cross-domain scenarios including the MICO and Limited Source Domains (LSD) protocols. Our comprehensive analysis reveals that self-supervised vision models, particularly DINOv2 with Registers, significantly suppress attention artifacts and capture critical, fine-grained spoofing cues. Combined with Face Anti-Spoofing Data Augmentation (FAS-Aug), Patch-wise Data Augmentation (PDA) and Attention-weighted Patch Loss (APL), our proposed vision-only baseline achieves state-of-the-art performance in the MICO protocol. This baseline outperforms existing methods under the data-constrained LSD protocol while maintaining superior computational efficiency. This work provides a definitive vision-only baseline for FAS, demonstrating that optimized self-supervised vision transformers can serve as a backbone for both vision-only and future multimodal FAS systems. The project page is available at: https://gsisaoki.github.io/FAS-VFMbenchmark-CVPRW2026/ ....

The deployment of AI systems in safety-critical domains, such as industrial defect inspection, autonomous driving, and medical diagnosis, is severely hampered by their lack of reliability. A single undetected erroneous prediction can lead to catastrophic outcomes. Unfortunately, there is often no alternative but to place trust in the outputs of a trained AI system, which operates without an internal safeguard to flag unreliable predictions, even in cases of high accuracy. We propose a post-hoc explanation-based indicator to detect false negatives in binary defect detection networks. To our knowledge, this is the first method to proactively identify potentially erroneous network outputs. Our core idea leverages the difference between class-specific discriminative heatmaps and class-agnostic ones. We compute the difference in their intersection over union (IoU) as a reliability score. An adversarial enhancement method is further introduced to amplify this disparity. Evaluations on two industrial defect detection benchmarks show our method effectively identifies false negatives. With adversarial enhancement, it achieves 100\% recall, albeit with a trade-off for true negatives. Our work thus advocates for a new and trustworthy deployment paradigm: data-model-explanation-output, moving beyond conventional end-to-end systems to provide critical support for reliable AI in real-world applications....

Data acquisition through mobile phones remains a challenge for 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). In this work we target the object-centered scenario and enable reliable mobile acquisition by providing on-device capture guidance and recording onboard sensor signals for offline reconstruction. After the calibration step, the device orientations are aligned to a baseline frame to obtain relative poses, and the optical axis of the camera is mapped to an object-centered spherical grid for uniform viewpoint indexing. To curb polar sampling bias, we compute area-weighted spherical coverage in real-time and guide the user's motion accordingly. We compare the proposed method with RealityScan and the free-capture strategy. Our method achieves superior reconstruction quality using fewer input images compared to free capture and RealityScan. Further analysis shows that the proposed method is able to obtain more comprehensive and uniform viewpoint coverage during object-centered acquisition....

Crop yield prediction is one of the most important challenge, which is crucial to world food security and policy-making decisions. The conventional forecasting techniques are limited in their accuracy with reference to the fact that they utilize static data sources that do not reflect the dynamic and intricate relationships that exist between the variables of the environment over time [5,13]. This paper presents Attention-Based Multi-Modal Deep Learning Framework (ABMMDLF), which is suggested to be used in high-accuracy spatio-temporal crop yield prediction. The model we use combines multi-year satellite imagery, high-resolution time-series of meteorological data and initial soil properties as opposed to the traditional models which use only one of the aforementioned factors [12, 21]. The main architecture involves the use of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to extract spatial features and a Temporal Attention Mechanism to adaptively weight important phenological periods targeted by the algorithm to change over time and condition on spatial features of images and video sequences. As can be experimentally seen, the proposed research work provides an R^2 score of 0.89, which is far better than the baseline models do....

Learning identity-discriminative representations with multi-scene generality has become a critical objective in person re-identification (ReID). However, mainstream perception-driven paradigms tend to identify fitting from massive annotated data rather than identity-causal cues understanding, which presents a fragile representation against multiple disruptions. In this work, ReID-R is proposed as a novel reasoning-driven paradigm that achieves explicit identity understanding and reasoning by incorporating chain-of-thought into the ReID pipeline. Specifically, ReID-R consists of a two-stage contribution: (i) Discriminative reasoning warm-up, where a model is trained in a CoT label-free manner to acquire identity-aware feature understanding; and (ii) Efficient reinforcement learning, which proposes a non-trivial sampling to construct scene-generalizable data. On this basis, ReID-R leverages high-quality reward signals to guide the model toward focusing on ID-related cues, achieving accurate reasoning and correct responses. Extensive experiments on multiple ReID benchmarks demonstrate that ReID-R achieves competitive identity discrimination as superior methods using only 14.3K non-trivial data (20.9% of the existing data scale). Furthermore, benefit from inherent reasoning, ReID-R can provide high-quality interpretation for results....

Deep learning-based object detectors have achieved remarkable success across numerous computer vision applications, yet they continue to struggle with small object detection in high-resolution aerial and satellite imagery, where dense object distributions, variable shooting angles, diminutive target sizes, and substantial inter-class variability pose formidable challenges. Existing slicing strategies that partition high-resolution images into manageable patches have demonstrated promising results for enlarging the effective receptive field of small targets; however, their reliance on fixed slice dimensions introduces significant redundant computation, inflating inference cost and undermining detection speed. In this paper, we propose \textbf{Adaptive Slicing-Assisted Hyper Inference (ASAHI)}, a novel slicing framework that shifts the paradigm from prescribing a fixed slice size to adaptively determining the optimal number of slices according to image resolution, thereby substantially mitigating redundant computation while preserving beneficial overlap between adjacent patches. ASAHI integrates three synergistic components: (1)an adaptive resolution-aware slicing algorithm that dynamically generates 6 or 12 overlapping patches based on a learned threshold, (2)a slicing-assisted fine-tuning (SAF) strategy that constructs augmented training data comprising both full-resolution and sliced image patches, and (3)a Cluster-DIoU-NMS (CDN) post-processing module that combines the geometric merging efficiency of Cluster-NMS with the center-distance-aware suppression of DIoU-NMS to achieve robust duplicate elimination in crowded scenes. Extensive experiments on VisDrone2019 and xView, demonstrate that ASAHI achieves state-of-the-art performance with 56.8% on VisDrone2019-DET-val and 22.7% on xView-test, while reducing inference time by 20-25% compared to the baseline SAHI method....

Reinforcement learning, particularly Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), has emerged as an effective framework for post-training visual generative models with human preference signals. However, its effectiveness is fundamentally limited by coarse reward credit assignment. In modern visual generation, multiple reward models are often used to capture heterogeneous objectives, such as visual quality, motion consistency, and text alignment. Existing GRPO pipelines typically collapse these rewards into a single static scalar and propagate it uniformly across the entire diffusion trajectory. This design ignores the stage-specific roles of different denoising steps and produces mistimed or incompatible optimization signals. To address this issue, we propose Objective-aware Trajectory Credit Assignment (OTCA), a structured framework for fine-grained GRPO training. OTCA consists of two key components. Trajectory-Level Credit Decomposition estimates the relative importance of different denoising steps. Multi-Objective Credit Allocation adaptively weights and combines multiple reward signals throughout the denoising process. By jointly modeling temporal credit and objective-level credit, OTCA converts coarse reward supervision into a structured, timestep-aware training signal that better matches the iterative nature of diffusion-based generation. Extensive experiments show that OTCA consistently improves both image and video generation quality across evaluation metrics....

Real-world image super-resolution (Real-SR) has been revolutionized by leveraging the powerful generative priors of large-scale diffusion and flow-based models. However, fine-tuning these models on limited LR-HR pairs often precipitates "prior collapse" that the model sacrifices its inherent generative richness to overfit specific training degradations. This issue is further exacerbated in one-step generation, where the absence of multi-step refinement leads to significant trajectory drift and artifact generation. In this paper, we propose Allo{SR}$^2$, a novel framework that rectifies one-step SR trajectories via allomorphic generative flows to maintain high-fidelity generative realism. Specifically, we utilize Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) Guided Trajectory Initialization to establish a physically grounded starting state by aligning the degradation level of LR latent features with the optimal anchoring timestep of the pre-trained flow. To ensure a stable, curvature-free path for one-step inference, we propose Flow-Anchored Trajectory Consistency (FATC), which enforces velocity-level supervision across intermediate states. Furthermore, we develop Allomorphic Trajectory Matching (ATM), a self-adversarial alignment strategy that minimizes the distributional discrepancy between the SR flow and the generative flow in a unified vector field. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that Allo{SR}$^2$ achieves state-of-the-art performance in one-step Real-SR, offering a superior balance between restoration fidelity and generative realism while maintaining extreme efficiency....

Creating realistic and simulation-ready 3D assets is crucial for autonomous driving research and virtual environment construction. However, existing 3D vehicle generation methods are often trained on synthetic data with significant domain gaps from real-world distributions. The generated models often exhibit arbitrary poses and undefined scales, resulting in poor visual consistency when integrated into driving scenes. In this paper, we present Unposed-to-3D, a novel framework that learns to reconstruct 3D vehicles from real-world driving images using image-only supervision. Our approach consists of two stages. In the first stage, we train an image-to-3D reconstruction network using posed images with known camera parameters. In the second stage, we remove camera supervision and use a camera prediction head that directly estimates the camera parameters from unposed images. The predicted pose is then used for differentiable rendering to provide self-supervised photometric feedback, enabling the model to learn 3D geometry purely from unposed images. To ensure simulation readiness, we further introduce a scale-aware module to predict real-world size information, and a harmonization module that adapts the generated vehicles to the target driving scene with consistent lighting and appearance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Unposed-to-3D effectively reconstructs realistic, pose-consistent, and harmonized 3D vehicle models from real-world images, providing a scalable path toward creating high-quality assets for driving scene simulation and digital twin environments....

Multi-class defect detection constitutes a critical yet challenging task in industrial quality inspection, where existing approaches typically suffer from two fundamental limitations: (i) the necessity of training separate models for each defect category, resulting in substantial computational and memory overhead, and (ii) degraded robustness caused by inter-class feature perturbation when heterogeneous defect categories are jointly modeled. In this paper, we present FPFNet, a Feature Perturbation Pool-based Fusion Network that synergistically integrates a stochastic feature perturbation pool with a multi-layer feature fusion strategy to address these challenges within a unified detection framework. The feature perturbation pool enriches the training distribution by randomly injecting diverse noise patterns -- including Gaussian noise, F-Noise, and F-Drop -- into the extracted feature representations, thereby strengthening the model's robustness against domain shifts and unseen defect morphologies. Concurrently, the multi-layer feature fusion module aggregates hierarchical feature representations from both the encoder and decoder through residual connections and normalization, enabling the network to capture complex cross-scale relationships while preserving fine-grained spatial details essential for precise defect localization. Built upon the UniAD architecture~\cite{you2022unified}, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on two widely adopted benchmarks: 97.17\% image-level AUROC and 96.93\% pixel-level AUROC on MVTec-AD, and 91.08\% image-level AUROC and 99.08\% pixel-level AUROC on VisA, surpassing existing methods by notable margins while introducing no additional learnable parameters or computational complexity....

Agentic multimodal models have garnered significant attention for their ability to leverage external tools to tackle complex tasks. However, it is observed that such agents often meet premature interaction collapse, caused by two primary reasons: 1) the terminal reward often appending on the last token prevents the advantage from distinguishing trajectories with exploratory behavior; 2) excessively redundant context hinders the agent from absorbing useful feedback. To address these issues, we propose the Deepening Reasoning MMSearchAgent, the framework leverages the structural proximity to derive advantage signals from the whole rollout trajectories in an entire batch, such that trajectories of different lengths are further encouraged to be generated, even when containing the same correct answer. Additionally, differentiated gaussian rewards are employed to dynamically calibrate interaction tolerance, thereby ensuring information reliability and reduce redundancy. To support multi-turn interaction training, we have constructed a multi-step deep-reasoning dataset including 3602 high-quality QA pair with at least 3 reasonning steps. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming the MMSearch-R1 by 8.4$\%$ on FVQA-test....

Recovering corrupted images is one of the most challenging problems in image processing. Among various restoration tasks, blind image deblurring has been extensively studied due to its practical importance and inherent difficulty. In this problem, both the point spread function (PSF) and the underlying latent sharp image must be estimated simultaneously. This problem cannot be solved directly due to its ill-posed nature. One powerful tool for solving such problems is total variation (TV) regularization. The $\ell_0$-norm regularization within the TV framework has been widely adopted to promote sparsity in image gradients or transform domains, leading to improved preservation of edges and fine structures. However, the use of the $\ell_0$-norm results in a highly nonconvex and computationally intractable optimization problem, which limits its practical applicability. To overcome these difficulties, we employ the minimax concave penalty (MCP), which promotes enhanced sparsity and provides a closer approximation to the $\ell_0$-norm. In addition, a reweighted $\ell_1$-norm regularization is incorporated to further reduce estimation bias and improve the preservation of fine image details and textures. After introducing the proposed model, a numerical algorithm is developed to solve the resulting optimization problem. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is then demonstrated through experimental evaluations on several test images....

Multi-view crowd tracking estimates each person's tracking trajectories on the ground of the scene. Recent research works mainly rely on CNNs-based multi-view crowd tracking architectures, and most of them are evaluated and compared on relatively small datasets, such as Wildtrack and MultiviewX. Since these two datasets are collected in small scenes and only contain tens of frames in the evaluation stage, it is difficult for the current methods to be applied to real-world applications where scene size and occlusion are more complicated. In this paper, we propose a Transformer-based multi-view crowd tracking model, \textit{MVTrackTrans}, which adopts interactions between camera views and the ground plane for enhanced multi-view tracking performance. Besides, for better evaluation, we collect and label two large real-world multi-view tracking datasets, MVCrowdTrack and CityTrack, which contain a much larger scene size over a longer time period. Compared with existing methods on the two large and new datasets, the proposed MVTrackTrans model achieves better performance, demonstrating the advantages of the model design in dealing with large scenes. We believe the proposed datasets and model will push the frontiers of the task to more practical scenarios, and the datasets and code are available at: https://github.com/zqyq/MVTrackTrans....

We introduce PLaMo 2.1-VL, a lightweight Vision Language Model (VLM) for autonomous devices, available in 8B and 2B variants and designed for local and edge deployment with Japanese-language operation. Focusing on Visual Question Answering (VQA) and Visual Grounding as its core capabilities, we develop and evaluate the models for two real-world application scenarios: factory task analysis via tool recognition, and infrastructure anomaly detection. We also develop a large-scale synthetic data generation pipeline and comprehensive Japanese training and evaluation resources. PLaMo 2.1-VL outperforms comparable open models on Japanese and English benchmarks, achieving 61.5 ROUGE-L on JA-VG-VQA-500 and 85.2% accuracy on Japanese Ref-L4. For the two application scenarios, it achieves 53.9% zero-shot accuracy on factory task analysis, and fine-tuning on power plant data improves anomaly detection bbox + label F1-score from 39.7 to 64.9....

Recent work in the machine learning literature has demonstrated that deep learning can train neural networks made of discrete logic gate functions to perform simple image classification tasks at very high speeds on CPU, GPU and FPGA platforms. By virtue of being formed by discrete logic gates, these Differentiable Logic Gate Networks (DLGNs) lend themselves naturally to implementation in custom silicon - in this work we present a method to map DLGNs in a one-to-one fashion to a digital CMOS standard cell library by converting the trained model to a gate-level netlist. We also propose a novel loss function whereby the DLGN can optimize the area, and indirectly power consumption, of the resulting circuit by minimizing the expected area per neuron based on the area of the standard cells in the target standard cell library. Finally, we also show for the first time an implementation of a DLGN as a silicon circuit in simulation, performing layout of a DLGN in the SkyWater 130nm process as a custom hard macro using a Cadence standard cell library and performing post-layout power analysis. We find that our custom macro can perform classification on MNIST with 97% accuracy 41.8 million times a second at a power consumption of 83.88 mW....

Ultra-fine-grained visual categorization (Ultra-FGVC) aims to classify highly similar subcategories within fine-grained objects using limited training samples. However, holistic yet discriminative cues, such as leaf contours in extremely similar cultivars, remain under-explored in current studies, thereby limiting recognition performance. Though crucial, modeling holistic cues with complex morphological structures typically requires massive training samples, posing significant challenges in data-limited scenarios. To address this challenge, we propose a novel Divide-and-Conquer Holistic Cognition Network (DHCNet) that implements a divide-and-conquer strategy by decomposing holistic cues into spatially-associated subtle discrepancies and progressively establishing the holistic cognition process, significantly simplifying holistic cognition while reducing dependency on training data. Technically, DHCNet begins by progressively analyzing subtle discrepancies, transitioning from smaller local patches to larger ones using a self-shuffling operation on local regions. Simultaneously, it leverages the unaffected local regions to potentially guide the perception of the original topological structure among the shuffled patches, thereby aiding in the establishment of spatial associations for these discrepancies. Additionally, DHCNet incorporates the online refinement of these holistic cues discovered from local regions into the training process to iteratively improve their quality. As a result, DHCNet uses these holistic cues as supervisory signals to fine-tune the parameters of the recognition model, thus improving its sensitivity to holistic cues across the entire objects. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that DHCNet achieves remarkable performance on five widely-used Ultra-FGVC datasets....

This paper investigates the intrinsic geometrical features of highly similar objects and introduces a general self-supervised framework called the Geometric Attribute Exploration Network (GAEor), which is designed to address the ultra-fine-grained visual categorization (Ultra-FGVC) task in data-limited scenarios. Unlike prior work that often captures subtle yet critical distinctions, GAEor generates geometric attributes as novel alternative recognition cues. These attributes are determined by various details within the object, aligned with its geometric patterns, such as the intricate vein structures in soybean leaves. Crucially, each category exhibits distinct geometric descriptors that serve as powerful cues, even among objects with minimal visual variation -- a factor largely overlooked in recent research. GAEor discovers these geometric attributes by first amplifying geometry-relevant details via visual feedback from a backbone network, then embedding the relative polar coordinates of these details into the final representation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GAEor significantly sets new state-of-the-art records in five widely-used Ultra-FGVC benchmarks....

Monocular scene flow estimation aims to recover dense 3D motion from image sequences, yet most existing methods are limited to two-frame inputs, restricting temporal modeling and robustness to occlusions. We propose RAFT-MSF++, a self-supervised multi-frame framework that recurrently fuses temporal features to jointly estimate depth and scene flow. Central to our approach is the Geometry-Motion Feature (GMF), which compactly encodes coupled motion and geometry cues and is iteratively updated for effective temporal reasoning. To ensure the robustness of this temporal fusion against occlusions, we incorporate relative positional attention to inject spatial priors and an occlusion regularization module to propagate reliable motion from visible regions. These components enable the GMF to effectively propagate information even in ambiguous areas. Extensive experiments show that RAFT-MSF++ achieves 24.14% SF-all on the KITTI Scene Flow benchmark, with a 30.99% improvement over the baseline and better robustness in occluded regions. The code is available at https://github.com/sunzunyi/RAFT-MSF-PlusPlus....

Vision Transformers $(\texttt{ViT})$ have become the architecture of choice for many computer vision tasks, yet their performance in computer-aided diagnostics remains limited. Focusing on breast cancer detection from mammograms, we identify two main causes for this shortfall. First, medical images are high-resolution with small abnormalities, leading to an excessive number of tokens and making it difficult for the softmax-based attention to localize and attend to relevant regions. Second, medical image classification is inherently fine-grained, with low inter-class and high intra-class variability, where standard cross-entropy training is insufficient. To overcome these challenges, we propose a framework with three key components: (1) Region of interest $(\texttt{RoI})$ based token reduction using an object detection model to guide attention; (2) contrastive learning between selected $\texttt{RoI}$ to enhance fine-grained discrimination through hard-negative based training; and (3) a $\texttt{DINOv2}$ pretrained $\texttt{ViT}$ that captures localization-aware, fine-grained features instead of global $\texttt{CLIP}$ representations. Experiments on public mammography datasets demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance over existing baselines, establishing its effectiveness and potential clinical utility for large-scale breast cancer screening. Our code is available for reproducibility here: https://aih-iitd.github.io/publications/attend-what-matters...

Face recognition systems are often used for biometric authentication. Nevertheless, it is known that without any protective measures, face recognition systems are vulnerable to presentation attacks. To tackle this security problem, methods for detecting presentation attacks have been developed and shown good detection performance on several benchmark datasets. However, generalising presentation attack detection methods to new and novel types of attacks is an ongoing challenge. In this work, we employ 1,608 T-shirt attacks of the T-shirt Face Presentation Attack (TFPA) database using 100 unique presentation attack instruments together with 152 bona fide presentations. In a comprehensive evaluation, we show that this type of attack can compromise the security of face recognition systems. Furthermore, we propose a detection method based on spatial consistency checks in order to detect said T-shirt attacks. Precisely, state-of-the-art face and person detectors are combined to analyse the spatial positions of detected faces and persons based on which T-shirt attacks can be reliably detected....

Predicting driver intention from neurophysiological signals offers a promising pathway for enhancing proactive safety in advanced driver assistance systems, yet remains challenging in real-world driving due to EEG signal non-stationarity and the complexity of cognitive-motor preparation. This study proposes and evaluates an EEG-based driver intention prediction framework using a synchronised multi-sensor platform integrated into a real electric vehicle. A real-world on-road dataset was collected across 32 driving sessions, and 12 deep learning architectures were evaluated under consistent experimental conditions. Among the evaluated architectures, TSCeption achieved the highest average accuracy (0.907) and Macro-F1 score (0.901). The proposed framework demonstrates strong temporal stability, maintaining robust decoding performance up to 1000 ms before manoeuvre execution with minimal degradation. Furthermore, additional analyses reveal that minimal EEG preprocessing outperforms artefact-handling pipelines, and prediction performance peaks within a 400-600 ms interval, corresponding to a critical neural preparatory phase preceding driving manoeuvres. Overall, these findings support the feasibility of early and stable EEG-based driver intention decoding under real-world on-road conditions. Code: https://github.com/galosaimi/Mind2Drive....

Peak picking is a fundamental preprocessing step in Mass Spectrometry Imaging (MSI), where each sample is represented by hundreds to thousands of ion images. Existing approaches require careful dataset-specific hyperparameter tuning, and often fail to generalize across acquisition protocols. We introduce IonMorphNet, a spatial-structure-aware representation model for ion images that enables fully data-driven peak picking without any task-specific supervision. We curate 53 publicly available MSI datasets and define six structural classes capturing representative spatial patterns in ion images to train standard image backbones for structural pattern classification. Once trained, IonMorphNet can assess ion images and perform peak picking without additional hyperparameter tuning. Using a ConvNeXt V2-Tiny backbone, our approach improves peak picking performance by +7 % mSCF1 compared to state-of-the-art methods across multiple datasets. Beyond peak picking, we demonstrate that spatially informed channel reduction enables a 3D CNN for patch-based tumor classification in MSI. This approach matches or exceeds pixel-wise spectral classifiers by up to +7.3 % Balanced Accuracy on three tumor classification tasks, indicating meaningful ion image selection. The source code and model weights are available at https://github.com/CeMOS-IS/IonMorphNet....

This paper presents the first study on Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) for multimodal 3D panoptic segmentation (mm-3DPS), aiming to improve generalization under domain shifts commonly encountered in real-world autonomous driving. A straightforward solution is to employ a pseudo-labeling strategy, which is widely used in UDA to generate supervision for unlabeled target data, combined with an mm-3DPS backbone. However, existing supervised mm-3DPS methods rely heavily on strong cross-modal complementarity between LiDAR and RGB inputs, making them fragile under domain shifts where one modality degrades (e.g., poor lighting or adverse weather). Moreover, conventional pseudo-labeling typically retains only high-confidence regions, leading to fragmented masks and incomplete object supervision, which are issues particularly detrimental to panoptic segmentation. To address these challenges, we propose PanDA, the first UDA framework specifically designed for multimodal 3D panoptic segmentation. To improve robustness against single-sensor degradation, we introduce an asymmetric multimodal augmentation that selectively drops regions to simulate domain shifts and improve robust representation learning. To enhance pseudo-label completeness and reliability, we further develop a dual-expert pseudo-label refinement module that extracts domain-invariant priors from both 2D and 3D modalities. Extensive experiments across diverse domain shifts, spanning time, weather, location, and sensor variations, significantly surpass state-of-the-art UDA baselines for 3D semantic segmentation....

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) has attracted significant attention due to its flexible multimodal query method, yet its development is severely constrained by the Noisy Triplet Correspondence (NTC) problem. Most existing robust learning methods rely on the "small loss hypothesis", but the unique semantic ambiguity in NTC, such as "partial matching", invalidates this assumption, leading to unreliable noise identification. This entraps the model in a self dependent vicious cycle where the learner is intertwined with the arbiter, ultimately causing catastrophic "representation pollution". To address this critical challenge, we propose a novel "Expert-Proxy-Diversion" decoupling paradigm, named Air-Know (ArbIteR calibrated Knowledge iNternalizing rObust netWork). Air-Know incorporates three core modules: (1) External Prior Arbitration (EPA), which utilizes Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) as an offline expert to construct a high precision anchor dataset; (2) Expert Knowledge Internalization (EKI), which efficiently guides a lightweight proxy "arbiter" to internalize the expert's discriminative logic; (3) Dual Stream Reconciliation (DSR), which leverages the EKI's matching confidence to divert the training data, achieving a clean alignment stream and a representation feedback reconciliation stream. Extensive experiments on multiple CIR benchmark datasets demonstrate that Air-Know significantly outperforms existing SOTA methods under the NTC setting, while also showing strong competitiveness in traditional CIR....

Satellite image composition plays a critical role in remote sensing applications such as data augmentation, disaste simulation, and urban planning. We propose HarmoniDiff-RS, a training-free diffusion-based framework for harmonizing composite satellite images under diverse domain conditions. Our method aligns the source and target domains through a Latent Mean Shift operation that transfers radiometric characteristics between them. To balance harmonization and content preservation, we introduce a Timestep-wise Latent Fusion strategy by leveraging early inverted latents for high harmonization and late latents for semantic consistency to generate a set of composite candidates. A lightweight harmony classifier is trained to further automatically select the most coherent result among them. We also construct RSIC-H, a benchmark dataset for satellite image harmonization derived from fMoW, providing 500 paired composition samples. Experiments demonstrate that our method effectively performs satellite image composition, showing strong potential for scalable remote-sensing synthesis and simulation tasks. Code is available at: https://github.com/XiaoqiZhuang/HarmoniDiff-RS....

Accurate cardiac anatomy modeling requires the model to be able to handle intricate interrelations among structures. In this paper, we propose VecHeart, a unified framework for holistic reconstruction and generation of four-chamber cardiac structures. To overcome the limitations of current feed-forward implicit methods, specifically their restriction to single-object modeling and their neglect of inter-part correlations, we introduce Hybrid Part Transformer, which leverages part-specific learnable queries and interleaved attention to capture complex inter-chamber dependencies. Furthermore, we propose Anatomical Completion Masking and Modality Alignment strategies, enabling the model to infer complete four-chamber structures from partial, sparse, or noisy observations, even when certain anatomical parts are entirely missing. VecHeart also seamlessly extends to 3D+t dynamic mesh sequence generation, demonstrating exceptional versatility. Experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, maintaining high-fidelity reconstruction across diverse challenging scenarios. Code will be released....

Common image editing tasks typically adopt powerful generative diffusion models as the leading paradigm for real-world content editing. Meanwhile, although reinforcement learning (RL) methods such as Diffusion-DPO and Flow-GRPO have further improved generation quality, efficiently applying Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) to diffusion-based editing remains largely unexplored, due to a lack of scalable human-preference datasets and frameworks tailored to diverse editing needs. To fill this gap, we propose HP-Edit, a post-training framework for Human Preference-aligned Editing, and introduce RealPref-50K, a real-world dataset across eight common tasks and balancing common object editing. Specifically, HP-Edit leverages a small amount of human-preference scoring data and a pretrained visual large language model (VLM) to develop HP-Scorer--an automatic, human preference-aligned evaluator. We then use HP-Scorer both to efficiently build a scalable preference dataset and to serve as the reward function for post-training the editing model. We also introduce RealPref-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating real-world editing performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances models such as Qwen-Image-Edit-2509, aligning their outputs more closely with human preference....

Understanding road scenes in a geometrically consistent, scene-centric representation is crucial for planning and mapping. We present GOLD-BEV, a framework that learns dense bird's-eye-view (BEV) semantic environment maps-including dynamic agents-from ego-centric sensors, using time-synchronized aerial imagery as supervision only during training. BEV-aligned aerial crops provide an intuitive target space, enabling dense semantic annotation with minimal manual effort and avoiding the ambiguity of ego-only BEV labeling. Crucially, strict aerial-ground synchronization allows overhead observations to supervise moving traffic participants and mitigates the temporal inconsistencies inherent to non-synchronized overhead sources. To obtain scalable dense targets, we generate BEV pseudo-labels using domain-adapted aerial teachers, and jointly train BEV segmentation with optional pseudo-aerial BEV reconstruction for interpretability. Finally, we extend beyond aerial coverage by learning to synthesize pseudo-aerial BEV images from ego sensors, which support lightweight human annotation and uncertainty-aware pseudo-labeling on unlabeled drives....

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) frequently suffer from Object Hallucination (OH), wherein they generate descriptions containing objects that are not actually present in the input image. This phenomenon is particularly problematic in real-world applications such as medical imaging and autonomous driving, where accuracy is critical. Recent studies suggest that the hallucination problem may stem from language priors: biases learned during pretraining that cause LVLMs to generate words based on their statistical co-occurrence. To mitigate this problem, we propose Visual Contrastive Editing (VCE), a novel post-hoc method that identifies and suppresses hallucinatory tendencies by analyzing the model's response to contrastive visual perturbations. Using Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), we decompose the model's activation patterns to isolate hallucination subspaces and apply targeted parameter edits to attenuate its influence. Unlike existing approaches that require fine-tuning or labeled data, VCE operates as a label-free intervention, making it both scalable and practical for deployment in resource-constrained settings. Experimental results demonstrate that VCE effectively reduces object hallucination across multiple benchmarks while maintaining the model's original computational efficiency....

Maintaining long-term accuracy of stereo camera calibration parameters is important for autonomous systems' perception. This work proposes Online Tracking of Essential Matrix by Stochastic Optimization (TESO). The core mechanisms of TESO are: 1) a robust loss function based on kernel correlation over tentative correspondences, 2) an adaptive online stochastic optimization on the essential manifold. TESO has low CPU and memory requirements, relies on a few hyperparameters, and eliminates the need for data-driven training, enabling the usage in resource-constrained online perception systems. We evaluated the influence of TESO on geometric precision, rectification quality, and stereo depth consistency. On the large-scale MAN TruckScenes dataset, TESO tracks rotational calibration drift with 0.12 deg precision in the Y-axis (critical for stereo accuracy) while the X- and Z-axes are five times more precise. Tracking applied to sequences with simulated drift shows similar precision with respect to the reference as tracking applied to no-drift sequences, indicating the tracker is unbiased. On the KITTI dataset, TESO revealed systematic inconsistencies in extrinsic parameters across stereo pairs, confirming previous published findings. We verified that intrinsic decalibration affected these errors, as evidenced by the conflicting behavior of the rectification and depth metrics. After correcting the reference calibration, TESO improved its rotation precision around the Y-axis 20 times to 0.025 deg and its depth accuracy 50 times. Despite its lightweight design, direct optimization of the proposed TESO loss function alone achieves accuracy comparable to that of neural network-based single-frame methods....

Vision foundation models have shown great promise for open-set 3D object retrieval (3DOR) through efficient adaptation to multi-view images. Leveraging semantically aligned latent space, previous work typically adapts the CLIP encoder to build view-based 3D descriptors. Despite CLIP's strong generalization ability, its lack of fine-grainedness prompted us to explore the potential of a more recent self-supervised encoder-DINO. To address this, we propose DINO Eats CLIP (DEC), a novel framework for dynamic multi-view integration that is regularized by synthesizing data for unseen classes. We first find that simply mean-pooling over view features from a frozen DINO backbone gives decent performance. Yet, further adaptation causes severe overfitting on average view patterns of known classes. To combat it, we then design a module named Chunking and Adapting Module (CAM). It segments multi-view images into chunks and dynamically integrates local view relations, yielding more robust features than the standard pooling strategy. Finally, we propose Virtual Feature Synthesis (VFS) module to mitigate bias towards known categories explicitly. Under the hood, VFS leverages CLIP's broad, pre-aligned vision-language space to synthesize virtual features for unseen classes. By exposing DEC to these virtual features, we greatly enhance its open-set discrimination capacity. Extensive experiments on standard open-set 3DOR benchmarks demonstrate its superior efficacy....

This paper presents a review for the LoViF Challenge on Real-World All-in-One Image Restoration. The challenge aimed to advance research on real-world all-in-one image restoration under diverse real-world degradation conditions, including blur, low-light, haze, rain, and snow. It provided a unified benchmark to evaluate the robustness and generalization ability of restoration models across multiple degradation categories within a common framework. The competition attracted 124 registered participants and received 9 valid final submissions with corresponding fact sheets, significantly contributing to the progress of real-world all-in-one image restoration. This report provides a detailed analysis of the submitted methods and corresponding results, emphasizing recent progress in unified real-world image restoration. The analysis highlights effective approaches and establishes a benchmark for future research in real-world low-level vision....

Generating high-quality videos from complex temporal descriptions that contain multiple sequential actions is a key unsolved problem. Existing methods are constrained by an inherent trade-off: using multiple short prompts fed sequentially into the model improves action fidelity but compromises temporal consistency, while a single complex prompt preserves consistency at the cost of prompt-following capability. We attribute this problem to two primary causes: 1) temporal misalignment between video content and the prompt, and 2) conflicting attention coupling between motion-related visual objects and their associated text conditions. To address these challenges, we propose a novel, training-free attention mechanism, Temporal-wise Separable Attention (TS-Attn), which dynamically rearranges attention distribution to ensure temporal awareness and global coherence in multi-event scenarios. TS-Attn can be seamlessly integrated into various pre-trained text-to-video models, boosting StoryEval-Bench scores by 33.5% and 16.4% on Wan2.1-T2V-14B and Wan2.2-T2V-A14B with only a 2% increase in inference time. It also supports plug-and-play usage across models for multi-event image-to-video generation. The source code and project page are available at https://github.com/Hong-yu-Zhang/TS-Attn....

While foundation models drive steady progress in image segmentation and diffusion algorithms compose always more realistic images, the seemingly simple problem of identifying recurrent patterns in a collection of images remains very much open. In this paper, we focus on sprite-based image decomposition models, which have shown some promise for clustering and image decomposition and are appealing because of their high interpretability. These models come in different flavors, need to be tailored to specific datasets, and struggle to scale to images with many objects. We dive into the details of their design, identify their core components, and perform an extensive analysis on clustering benchmarks. We leverage this analysis to propose a deep sprite-based image decomposition method that performs on par with state-of-the-art unsupervised class-aware image segmentation methods on the standard CLEVR benchmark, scales linearly with the number of objects, identifies explicitly object categories, and fully models images in an easily interpretable way....

LLMs are increasingly being considered for prediction tasks in high-stakes social service settings, but their algorithmic fairness properties in this context are poorly understood. In this short technical report, we audit the algorithmic fairness of LLM-based tabular classification on a real housing placement prediction task, augmented with street outreach casenotes from a nonprofit partner. We audit multi-class classification error disparities. We find that a fine-tuned model augmented with casenote summaries can improve accuracy while reducing algorithmic fairness disparities. We experiment with variable importance improvements to zero-shot tabular classification and find mixed results on resulting algorithmic fairness. Overall, given historical inequities in housing placement, it is crucial to audit LLM use. We find that leveraging LLMs to augment tabular classification with casenote summaries can safely leverage additional text information at low implementation burden. The outreach casenotes are fairly short and heavily redacted. Our assessment is that LLM zero-shot classification does not introduce additional textual biases beyond algorithmic biases in tabular classification. Combining fine-tuning and leveraging casenote summaries can improve accuracy and algorithmic fairness....

Fairness audits of institutional risk models are critical for understanding how deployed machine learning pipelines allocate resources. Drawing on multi-year collaboration with Centennial College, where our prior ethnographic work introduced the ASP-HEI Cycle, we present a replica-based audit of a deployed Early Warning System (EWS), replicating its model using institutional training data and design specifications. We evaluate disparities by gender, age, and residency status across the full pipeline (training data, model predictions, and post-processing) using standard fairness metrics. Our audit reveals systematic misallocation: younger, male, and international students are disproportionately flagged for support, even when many ultimately succeed, while older and female students with comparable dropout risk are under-identified. Post-processing amplifies these disparities by collapsing heterogeneous probabilities into percentile-based risk tiers. This work provides a replicable methodology for auditing institutional ML systems and shows how disparities emerge and compound across stages, highlighting the importance of evaluating construct validity alongside statistical fairness. It contributes one empirical thread to a broader program investigating algorithms, student data, and power in higher education....

UV-parameterized Gaussian Splatting (UVGS) maps an unstructured set of 3D Gaussians to a regular UV tensor, enabling compact storage and explicit control of representation capacity. Existing UVGS, however, uses a deterministic spherical pro- jection to assign Gaussians to UV locations. Because this mapping ignores the global Gaussian distribution, it often leaves many UV slots empty while causing frequent collisions in dense regions. We reinterpret UV mapping as a capacity-allocation problem under a fixed UV budget and propose OT-UVGS, a lightweight, separable one-dimensional optimal-transport-inspired mapping that globally couples assignments while preserving the original UVGS representation. The method is implemented with rank-based sorting, has O(N log N) complexity for N Gaussians, and can be used as a drop-in replacement for spherical UVGS. Across 184 object-centric scenes and the Mip-NeRF dataset, OT-UVGS consistently improves peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity (SSIM), and Learned Perceptual Image Patch Similarity (LPIPS) under the same UV resolution and per-slot capacity (K=1). These gains are accompanied by substantially better UV utilization, including higher non-empty slot ratios, fewer collisions, and higher Gaussian retention. Our results show that revisiting the mapping alone can unlock a significant fraction of the latent capacity of UVGS....

We present an approach for enhancing non-playable characters (NPCs) in games by combining large language models (LLMs) with computer vision to provide contextual awareness of their surroundings. Conventional NPCs typically rely on pre-scripted dialogue and lack spatial understanding, which limits their responsiveness to player actions and reduces overall immersion. Our method addresses these limitations by capturing panoramic images of an NPC's environment and applying semantic segmentation to identify objects and their spatial positions. The extracted information is used to generate a structured JSON representation of the environment, combining object locations derived from segmentation with additional scene graph data within the NPC's bounding sphere, encoded as directional vectors. This representation is provided as input to the LLM, enabling NPCs to incorporate spatial knowledge into player interactions. As a result, NPCs can dynamically reference nearby objects, landmarks, and environmental features, leading to more believable and engaging gameplay. We describe the technical implementation of the system and evaluate it in two stages. First, an expert interview was conducted to gather feedback and identify areas for improvement. After integrating these refinements, a user study was performed, showing that participants preferred the context-aware NPCs over a non-context-aware baseline, confirming the effectiveness of the proposed approach....

Traffic microsimulation software such as SUMO generate rich spatio-temporal data describing individual vehicle movements, interactions, and support the development of control strategies. While numerical outputs and 2D visualisations are sufficient for many technical analyses, they are often inadequate for applications that require intuitive interpretation, effective communication, or human-centred evaluation. In particular, user studies in mobility psychology, acceptance research, and virtual experience stated-preference experiments require realistic visualisations that reflect how traffic scenarios are perceived from a human perspective. This paper introduces sumo3Dviz, a lightweight, open-source 3D visualisation pipeline for SUMO traffic simulations. It converts standard SUMO simulation outputs, such as vehicle trajectories and signal states, into high-quality 3D renderings using a Python-based framework. In contrast to heavyweight game-engine-based approaches or tightly coupled co-simulation frameworks, sumo3Dviz is designed to be simple, scriptable, and reproducible. The tool is installable through the pip package manager, runs across operating systems, and works independently of any proprietary software or licenses. sumo3Dviz supports both external camera views and first-person perspectives, enabling cinematic overviews as well as driver-level experiences. The rendering process is optimized for batch video generation, making it suitable for large-scale scenario visualisation, educational demonstrations, and automated experiment pipelines. A key technical challenge addressed by the tool is trajectory interpolation and orientation smoothing, enabling visually coherent motion from discrete simulation outputs. Source Code on project's GitHub page: https://github.com/DerKevinRiehl/sumo3dviz/....

3D Gaussian representations have emerged as a powerful paradigm for digital head modeling, achieving photorealistic quality with real-time rendering. However, intuitive and interactive creation or editing of 3D Gaussian head models remains challenging. Although 2D sketches provide an ideal interaction modality for fast, intuitive conceptual design, they are sparse, depth-ambiguous, and lack high-frequency appearance cues, making it difficult to infer dense, geometrically consistent 3D Gaussian structures from strokes - especially under real-time constraints. To address these challenges, we propose SketchFaceGS, the first sketch-driven framework for real-time generation and editing of photorealistic 3D Gaussian head models from 2D sketches. Our method uses a feed-forward, coarse-to-fine architecture. A Transformer-based UV feature-prediction module first reconstructs a coarse but geometrically consistent UV feature map from the input sketch, and then a 3D UV feature enhancement module refines it with high-frequency, photorealistic detail to produce a high-fidelity 3D head. For editing, we introduce a UV Mask Fusion technique combined with a layer-by-layer feature-fusion strategy, enabling precise, real-time, free-viewpoint modifications. Extensive experiments show that SketchFaceGS outperforms existing methods in both generation fidelity and editing flexibility, producing high-quality, editable 3D heads from sketches in a single forward pass....

The Sierpinski triangle and the Sierpinski arrowhead curve are both defined in dimension 2 and can be used to model the same fractal. While a natural extension of the triangular construction to arbitrary dimensions exists, an analogous extension of the curve representation does not. In this article, we analyze the properties of the two-dimensional Sierpinski arrowhead curve to formulate an extension to arbitrary dimensions based on reproduction rules. Building on this formulation, we demonstrate a way to visualize such curves in a comparative manner across levels. Finally, as geometric patterns have a long history in the arts, and especially in fashion, we exemplify this visualization approach in knitwear, specifically in the yoke of a sweater....

We establish finite-time last-iterate guarantees for vanilla stochastic gradient descent in co-coercive games under noisy feedback. This is a broad class of games that is more general than strongly monotone games, allows for multiple Nash equilibria, and includes examples such as quadratic games with negative semidefinite interaction matrices and potential games with smooth concave potentials. Prior work in this setting has relied on relative noise models, where the noise vanishes as iterates approach equilibrium, an assumption that is often unrealistic in practice. We work instead under a substantially more general noise model in which the second moment of the noise is allowed to scale affinely with the squared norm of the iterates, an assumption natural in learning with unbounded action spaces. Under this model, we prove a last-iterate bound of order $O(\log(t)/t^{1/3})$, the first such bound for co-coercive games under non-vanishing noise. We additionally establish almost sure convergence of the iterates to the set of Nash equilibria and derive time-average convergence guarantees....

Education is not merely the transmission of information or the optimisation of individual performance; it is a fundamentally social, constructive, and relational practice. However, recent advances in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) increasingly emphasise efficiency, automation, and individualised assistance, risking the weakening of relational learning processes. Despite growing adoption, AI in education (AIED) research has yet to fully articulate how AI can be designed in ways that sustain the social and ecological relationships through which learning occurs. In this paper, we re-centre education as relational and frame learner-AI interactions as context-specific relationships with clearly defined purposes and boundaries, rather than positioning them as substitutes for, or replacements of, human interaction. Grounded in participatory design practices and inspired by Indigenous worldviews (including Aboriginal Australian, Native American, and Mesoamerican traditions) that foreground reciprocity and relational accountability, we argue that meaningful educational AI should support learning with others rather than replace them. We advance this perspective by: i) conceptualising AIED as a relational design problem grounded in reciprocity; ii) articulating key tensions introduced by GenAI in education; and iii) outlining design directions that expand the AIED design space toward reciprocity, including when not to use AI, how to define pedagogical boundaries, and how to support responsible uses of AIED innovations that sustain communities and natural environments....

The use of Large Language Models (LLMs) to support patients in addressing medical questions is becoming increasingly prevalent. However, most of the measures currently used to evaluate the performance of these models in this context only measure how closely a model's answers match semantically, and therefore do not provide a true indication of the model's medical accuracy or of the health equity risks associated with it. To address these shortcomings, we present a new evaluation framework for medical question answering called VB-Score (Verification-Based Score) that provides a separate evaluation of the four components of entity recognition, semantic similarity, factual consistency, and structured information completeness for medical question-answering models. We perform rigorous reviews of the performance of three well-known and widely used LLMs on 48 public health-related topics taken from high-quality, authoritative information sources. Based on our analyses, we discover a major discrepancy between the models' semantic and entity accuracy. Our assessments of the performance of all three models show that each of them has almost uniformly severe performance failures when evaluated against our criteria. Our findings indicate alarming performance disparities across various public health topics, with most of the models exhibiting 13.8% lower performance (compared to an overall average) for all the public health topics that relate to chronic conditions that occur in older and minority populations, which indicates the existence of what's known as condition-based algorithmic discrimination. Our findings also demonstrate that prompt engineering alone does not compensate for basic architectural limitations on how these models perform in extracting medical entities and raise the question of whether semantic evaluation alone is a sufficient measure of medical AI safety....

Qualitative coding relies on a researcher's application of codes to textual data. As coding proceeds across large datasets, interpretations of codes often shift (temporal drift), reducing the credibility of the analysis. Existing Computer-Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis (CAQDAS) tools provide support for data management but offer no workflow for real-time detection of these drifts. We present Co-Refine, an AI-augmented qualitative coding platform that delivers continuous, grounded feedback on coding consistency without disrupting the researcher's workflow. The system employs a three-stage audit pipeline: Stage 1 computes deterministic embedding-based metrics for mathematical consistency; Stage 2 grounds LLM verdicts within $\pm0.15$ of the deterministic scores; and Stage 3 produces code definitions from previous patterns to create a deepening feedback loop. Co-Refine demonstrates that deterministic scoring can effectively constrain LLM outputs to produce reliable, real-time audit signals for qualitative analysis....

Generative answer engines expose content through selective citation rather than ranked retrieval, fundamentally altering how visibility is determined. This shift calls for new optimization methods beyond traditional search engine optimization. Existing generative engine optimization (GEO) approaches primarily rely on token-level text rewriting, offering limited interpretability and weak control over the trade-off between citation visibility and content quality. We propose FeatGEO, a feature-level, multi-objective optimization framework that abstracts webpages into interpretable structural, content, and linguistic properties. Instead of directly editing text, FeatGEO optimizes over this feature space and uses a language model to realize feature configurations into natural language, decoupling high-level optimization from surface-level generation. Experiments on GEO-Bench across three generative engines demonstrate that FeatGEO consistently improves citation visibility while maintaining or improving content quality, substantially outperforming token-level baselines. Further analyses show that citation behavior is more strongly influenced by document-level content properties than by isolated lexical edits, and that the learned feature configurations generalize across language models of different scales....

Sequential Recommendation (SR) aims to predict the next interaction of a user based on their behavior sequence, where complementary relations often provide essential signals for predicting the next item. However, mainstream models relying on sparse co-purchase statistics often mistake spurious correlations (e.g., due to popularity bias) for true complementary relations. Identifying true complementary relations requires capturing the fine-grained item semantics (e.g., specifications) that simple cooccurrence statistics would be unable to model. While recent semantics-based methods utilize discrete semantic codes to represent items, they typically aggregate semantic codes into coarse item representations. This aggregation process blurs specific semantic details required to identify complementarity. To address these critical limitations and effectively leverage semantics for capturing reliable complementary relations, we propose a Complementary-Aware Semantic Transition (CAST) framework that introduces a new modeling paradigm built upon semantic-level transitions. Specifically, a semantic-level transition module is designed to model dynamic transitions directly in the discrete semantic code space, effectively capturing fine-grained semantic dependencies often lost in aggregated item representations. Then, a complementary prior injection module is designed to incorporate LLM-verified complementary priors into the attention mechanism, thereby prioritizing complementary patterns over co-occurrence statistics. Experiments on multiple e-commerce datasets demonstrate that CAST consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches, achieving up to 17.6% Recall and 16.0% NDCG gains with 65x training acceleration. This validates its effectiveness and efficiency in uncovering latent item complementarity beyond statistics. The code will be released upon acceptance....

Despite the growing application of Large Language Models (LLMs) to theoretical physics, there is little academic exploration into how domain-specific physics reasoning ability develops while training these models. To investigate this, we perform the first academic fine-tuning study of small (7B-parameter) reasoning models dedicated specifically to theoretical physics. Because open-source verifiable training data required to train such capabilities is scarce, we developed a robust data generation pipeline that can both create synthetic problems and make existing human-authored problems suitable for model training. Selecting Quantum Field Theory (QFT) as our primary domain, we generated over 2,500 synthetic problems alongside a curated collection of human-adapted problems sourced from arXiv and standard pedagogical resources. We conduct both Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) experiments, benchmarking performance gains as well as generalization to other physics domains. We perform an extensive analysis of model chains-of-though before and after fine-tuning, to understand how reasoning errors evolve during RL and SFT. Finally, we publicly release our data pipeline, verifiable QFT training data, and $\sim$200M tokens of QFT reasoning traces....

Table annotation is crucial for making web and enterprise tables usable in downstream NLP applications. Unlike textual data where learning semantically rich token or sentence embeddings often suffice, tables are structured combinations of columns wherein useful representations must jointly capture column's semantics and the inter-column relationships. Existing models learn by linearizing the 2D table into a 1D token sequence and encoding it with pretrained language models (PLMs) such as BERT. However, this leads to limited semantic quality and weaker generalization to unseen or rare values compared to modern LLMs, and degraded structural modeling due to 2D-to-1D flattening and context-length constraints. We propose TabEmb, which directly targets these limitations by decoupling semantic encoding from structural modeling. An LLM first produces semantically rich embeddings for each column, and a graph-based module over columns then injects relationships into the embeddings, yielding joint semantic-tructural representations for table annotation. Experiments show that TabEmb consistently outperforms strong baselines on different table annotation tasks. Source code and datasets are available at https://github.com/hoseinzadeehsan/TabEmb...

Deep learning surrogates for CFD flow-field prediction often rely on large, complex models, which can be slow and fragile when data are noisy or incomplete. We introduce FlowForge, a staged local rollout engine that predicts future flow fields by compiling a locality-preserving update schedule and executing it with a shared lightweight local predictor. Rather than producing the next frame in a single global pass, FlowForge rewrites spatial sites stage by stage so that each update conditions only on bounded local context exposed by earlier stages. This compile-execute design aligns inference with short-range physical dependence, keeps latency predictable, and limits error amplification from global mixing. Across PDEBench, CFDBench, and BubbleML, FlowForge matches or improves upon strong baselines in pointwise accuracy, delivers consistently better robustness to noise and missing observations, and maintains stable multi-step rollout behavior while reducing per-step latency....

Knowledge distillation (KD) transfers capabilities from large language models (LLMs) to smaller students, yet it can fail unpredictably and also underpins model leakage risks. Our analysis revealed several distillation traps: tail noise, off-policy instability, and, most fundamentally, the teacher-student gap, that distort training signals. These traps manifest as overconfident hallucinations, self-correction collapse, and local decoding degradation, causing distillation to fail. Motivated by these findings, we propose a post-hoc calibration method that, to the best of our knowledge, for the first time enables control over a teacher's distillability via reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT). Our objective combines task utility, KL anchor, and across-tokenizer calibration reward. This makes distillability a practical safety lever for foundation models, connecting robust teacher-student transfer with deployment-aware model protection. Experiments across math, knowledge QA, and instruction-following tasks show that students distilled from distillable calibrated teachers outperform SFT and KD baselines, while undistillable calibrated teachers retain their task performance but cause distilled students to collapse, offering a practical knob for both better KD and model IP protection....

While language models have been adapted for tabular data generation, two fundamental limitations remain: (1) static fine-tuning produces models that cannot learn from their own generated samples and adapt to self-correct, and (2) autoregressive objectives preserve local token coherence but neglect global statistical properties, degrading tabular quality. Reinforcement learning offers a potential solution but requires designing reward functions that balance competing objectives -- impractical for tabular data. To fill the gap, we introduce TabGRAA (Tabular Group-Relative Advantage Alignment), the first self-improving framework for tabular data generation via automated feedback. At each iteration, TabGRAA uses an \emph{automated quality signal} -- such as a two-sample distinguishability classifier or a distance-based reward -- to partition newly generated samples into high- and low-quality groups, then optimizes a group-relative advantage objective that reinforces realistic patterns while penalizing artifacts. The specific signal is a modular choice rather than a fixed component of the framework. This establishes a virtuous feedback cycle, where the quality signal is re-computed against newly \emph{generated synthetic} samples at each round; the language model is only fine-tuned on these self-generated signals, so no additional real record is exposed during alignment, mitigating data-leakage risk beyond the initial supervised fine-tuning. Experiments show TabGRAA outperforms existing methods in fidelity, utility, and privacy, while matching or exceeding diffusion-based synthesizers, advancing tabular synthesis from static statistical replication to dynamic, self-improving generation....

We can often verify the correctness of neural network outputs using ground truth labels, but we cannot reliably determine whether the output was produced by normal or anomalous internal mechanisms. Mechanistic anomaly detection (MAD) aims to flag these cases, but existing methods either depend on latent space analysis, which is vulnerable to obfuscation, or are specific to particular architectures and modalities. We reframe MAD as a functional attribution problem: asking to what extent samples from a trusted set can explain the model's output, where attribution failure signals anomalous behavior. We operationalize this using influence functions, measuring functional coupling between test samples and a small reference set via parameter-space sampling. We evaluate across multiple anomaly types and modalities. For backdoors in vision models, our method achieves state-of-the-art detection on BackdoorBench, with an average Defense Effectiveness Rating (DER) of 0.93 across seven attacks and four datasets (next best 0.83). For LLMs, we similarly achieve a significant improvement over baselines for several backdoor types, including on explicitly obfuscated models. Beyond backdoors, our method can detect adversarial and out-of-distribution samples, and distinguishes multiple anomalous mechanisms within a single model. Our results establish functional attribution as an effective, modality-agnostic tool for detecting anomalous behavior in deployed models....

Scaling critic capacity is a promising direction for enhancing off-policy reinforcement learning (RL). However, larger critics are prone to overfitting and unstable in replay-buffer-based bootstrap training. This paper leverages Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) as a structural-sparsity regularizer for off-policy critics. Our approach freezes randomly initialized base matrices and solely optimizes low-rank adapters, thereby constraining critic updates to a low-dimensional subspace. Built on top of SimbaV2, we further develop a LoRA formulation, compatible with SimbaV2, that preserves its hyperspherical normalization geometry under frozen-backbone training. We evaluate our method with SAC and FastTD3 on DeepMind Control locomotion and IsaacLab robotics benchmarks. LoRA consistently achieves lower critic loss during training and stronger policy performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that adaptive low-rank updates provide a simple, scalable, and effective structural regularization for critic learning in off-policy RL....

Statement autoformalization acts as a critical bridge between human mathematics and formal mathematics by translating natural language problems into formal language. While prior works have focused on data synthesis and diverse training paradigms to optimize end-to-end Large Language Models (LLMs), they typically treat formal code as flat sequences, neglecting the hierarchical logic inherent in mathematical statements. In this work, we introduce Decompose, Structure, and Repair (DSR), a neuro-symbolic framework that restructures autoformalization into a modular pipeline. DSR decomposes statements into logical components and maps them to structured operator trees, leveraging this topological blueprint to precisely localize and repair errors via sub-tree refinement. Furthermore, we introduce PRIME, a benchmark of 156 undergraduate and graduate-level theorems selected from canonical textbooks and expertly annotated in Lean 4. Experimental results demonstrate that DSR establishes a new state-of-the-art, consistently outperforming baselines under equivalent computational budgets. The datasets, model, and code will be released to the public soon....

Diffusion distillation, exemplified by Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD), has shown great promise in few-step generation but often sacrifices quality for sampling speed. While integrating Reinforcement Learning (RL) into distillation offers potential, a naive fusion of these two objectives relies on suboptimal raw sample evaluation. This sample-based scoring creates inherent conflicts with the distillation trajectory and produces unreliable rewards due to the noisy nature of early-stage generation. To overcome these limitations, we propose GDMD, a novel framework that redefines the reward mechanism by prioritizing distillation gradients over raw pixel outputs as the primary signal for optimization. By reinterpreting the DMD gradients as implicit target tensors, our framework enables existing reward models to directly evaluate the quality of distillation updates. This gradient-level guidance functions as an adaptive weighting that synchronizes the RL policy with the distillation objective, effectively neutralizing optimization divergence. Empirical results show that GDMD sets a new SOTA for few-step generation. Specifically, our 4-step models outperform the quality of their multi-step teacher and substantially exceed previous DMDR results in GenEval and human-preference metrics, exhibiting strong scalability potential....

Trajectory Optimization (TO) solvers exploit known system dynamics to compute locally optimal trajectories through iterative improvements. A downside is that each new problem instance is solved independently; therefore, convergence speed and quality of the solution found depend on the initial trajectory proposed. To improve efficiency, a natural approach is to warm-start TO with initial guesses produced by a learned policy trained on trajectories previously generated by the solver. Diffusion-based policies have recently emerged as expressive imitation learning models, making them promising candidates for this role. Yet, a counterintuitive challenge comes from the local optimality of TO demonstrations: when a policy is rolled out, small non-optimal deviations may push it into situations not represented in the training data, triggering compounding errors over long horizons. In this work, we focus on learning-based warm-starting for gradient-based TO solvers that also provide feedback gains. Exploiting this specificity, we derive a first-order loss for Sobolev learning of diffusion-based policies using both trajectories and feedback gains. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that the resulting policy avoids compounding errors, and so can learn from very few trajectories to provide initial guesses reducing solving time by $2\times$ to $20 \times$. Incorporating first-order information enables predictions with fewer diffusion steps, reducing inference latency....

Federated fine-tuning of Large Language Models (LLMs) is obstructed by a trilemma of challenges: protecting LLMs intellectual property (IP), ensuring client privacy, and mitigating performance loss on heterogeneous data. Existing methods like Offsite-Tuning (OT) secure the LLMs IP by having clients train only lightweight adapters, yet our analysis reveals they suffer from a fundamental performance bottleneck, leaving a significant gap compared to centralized training. To bridge this gap, we introduce FedProxy, a new federated adaptation framework. FedProxy replaces weak adapters with a unified, powerful Proxy Small Language Model (SLM), compressed from the proprietary LLM, to serve as a high-fidelity surrogate for collaborative fine-tuning. Our framework systematically resolves the trilemma through a three-stage architecture: (i) Efficient Representation via server-guided compression to create a resource-friendly proxy; (ii) Robust Optimization through an interference-mitigating aggregation strategy to handle data heterogeneity; and (iii) Effortless Fusion via a training-free "plug-in" mechanism to integrate learned knowledge back into the LLM. Experiments show FedProxy significantly outperforms OT methods and approaches centralized performance, establishing a new benchmark for secure and high-performance federated LLM adaptation....

Inference-time LLM alignment methods, particularly activation steering, offer an alternative to fine-tuning by directly modifying activations during generation. Existing methods, however, often rely on non-anticipative interventions that ignore how perturbations propagate through transformer layers and lack online error feedback, resulting in suboptimal, open-loop control. To address this, we show empirically that, despite the nonlinear structure of transformer blocks, layer-wise dynamics across multiple LLM architectures and scales are well-approximated by locally-linear models. Exploiting this property, we model LLM inference as a linear time-varying dynamical system and adapt the classical linear quadratic regulator to compute feedback controllers using layer-wise Jacobians, steering activations toward desired semantic setpoints in closed-loop with minimal computational overhead and no offline training. We also derive theoretical bounds on setpoint tracking error, enabling formal guarantees on steering performance. Using a novel adaptive semantic feature setpoint signal, our method yields robust, fine-grained behavior control across models, scales, and tasks, including state-of-the-art modulation of toxicity, truthfulness, refusal, and arbitrary concepts, surpassing baseline steering methods. Our code is available at: https://github.com/trustworthyrobotics/lqr-activation-steering...

Linear attention mechanisms have emerged as promising alternatives to softmax attention, offering linear-time complexity during inference. Recent advances such as Gated DeltaNet (GDN) and Kimi Delta Attention (KDA) have demonstrated that the delta rule, an online gradient descent update, enables superior associative recall compared to simple additive updates. While KDA refined the coarse head-wise decay gate into channel-wise decay, the learning rate $β_t$ in the delta update remains a scalar, limiting the model's capacity for dimension-specific adaptation. We introduce FG$^2$-GDN, which replaces the scalar $β_t$ with a channel-wise vector analogous to the transition from SGD to per-coordinate adaptive optimizers such as AdaGrad and Adam. We further propose FG$^2$-GDN+, which decouples the scaling for keys and values, enabling independent control of erasure strength and write strength. Experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks show that FG$^2$-GDN and its variant improve associative recall and long-context understanding over GDN and KDA, with comparable computational efficiency....

Safe Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (Safe RLHF) has recently achieved empirical success in developing helpful and harmless large language models by decoupling human preferences regarding helpfulness and harmlessness. Existing approaches typically rely on fitting fixed horizon reward models from human feedback and have only been validated empirically. In this paper, we formulate safe RLHF as an infinite horizon discounted Con- strained Markov Decision Process (CMDP), since humans may interact with the model over a continuing sequence of interactions rather than within a single finite episode. We propose two Safe RLHF algorithms that do not require reward model fitting and, in contrast to prior work assuming fixed-length trajectories, support flexible trajectory lengths for training. Both algo- rithms are based on the primal-dual method and achieve global convergence guarantees with polynomial rates in terms of policy gradient iterations, trajectory sample lengths, and human preference queries. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to study infinite horizon discounted CMDP under human feedback and establish global, non-asymptotic convergence....

One of the most challenging problems in graph machine learning is generalizing across graphs with diverse properties. Graph neural networks (GNNs) face a fundamental limitation: they require separate training for each new graph, preventing universal generalization across diverse graph datasets. A critical challenge facing GNNs lies in their reliance on labeled training data for each individual graph, a requirement that hinders the capacity for universal node classification due to the heterogeneity inherent in graphs -- differences in homophily levels, community structures, and feature distributions across datasets. Inspired by the success of large language models (LLMs) that achieve in-context learning through massive-scale pre-training on diverse datasets, we introduce NodePFN. This universal node classification method generalizes to arbitrary graphs without graph-specific training. NodePFN learns posterior predictive distributions (PPDs) by training only on thousands of synthetic graphs generated from carefully designed priors. Our synthetic graph generation covers real-world graphs through the use of random networks with controllable homophily levels and structural causal models for complex feature-label relationships. We develop a dual-branch architecture combining context-query attention mechanisms with local message passing to enable graph-aware in-context learning. Extensive evaluation on 23 benchmarks demonstrates that a single pre-trained NodePFN achieves 71.27 average accuracy. These results validate that universal graph learning patterns can be effectively learned from synthetic priors, establishing a new paradigm for generalization in node classification....

In gradient-based learning, a step size chosen in parameter units does not produce a predictable per-step change in function output. This often leads to instability in the streaming setting (i.e., batch size=1), where stochasticity is not averaged out and update magnitudes can momentarily become arbitrarily big or small. Instead, we propose intentional updates: first specify the intended outcome of an update and then solve for the step size that approximately achieves it. This strategy has precedent in online supervised linear regression via Normalized Least Mean Squares algorithm, which selects a step size to yield a specified change in the function output proportional to the current error. We extend this principle to streaming deep reinforcement learning by defining appropriate intended outcomes: Intentional TD aims for a fixed fractional reduction of the TD error, and Intentional Policy Gradient aims for a bounded per-step change in the policy, limiting local KL divergence. We propose practical algorithms combining eligibility traces and diagonal scaling. Empirically, these methods yield state-of-the-art streaming performance, frequently performing on par with batch and replay-buffer approaches....

Physical activity (PA) is widely recognized as protective against mental distress, yet whether this benefit varies systematically across population subgroups remains poorly understood. Using pooled data from ten consecutive annual waves of the U.S. Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (2015-2024; n = 3,242,218), we investigate heterogeneity in the association between leisure-time PA and frequent mental distress (FMD, >=14 days/month) across age groups. Survey-weighted logistic regression reveals a striking age gradient: the adjusted odds ratio for PA ranges from 0.89 among young adults (18-24) to 0.50 among adults aged 55-64, with the protective association strengthening monotonically with age. Temporal analysis across all ten years shows that the young-adult PA effect has been eroding over the past decade, with the 18-24 OR reaching 1.01 (null) in both 2018 and 2024 -- paralleling the deepening youth mental health crisis. Causal Forest via Double Machine Learning independently identifies age as the dominant driver of treatment effect heterogeneity (feature importance = 0.39, 2.5x the next predictor). E-value sensitivity analysis, propensity score overlap checks, placebo tests, and imputation comparisons confirm the robustness of the findings. These results suggest that the well-documented exercise--mental health link may not generalize to the youngest adult population, whose distress appears increasingly driven by stressors that PA alone cannot mitigate....

Semi-supervised learning with manifold regularization is a classical framework for jointly learning from both labeled and unlabeled data, where the key requirement is that the support of the unknown marginal distribution has the geometric structure of a Riemannian manifold. Typically, the Laplace-Beltrami operator-based manifold regularization can be approximated empirically by the Laplacian regularization associated with the entire training data and its corresponding graph Laplacian matrix. However, the graph Laplacian matrix depends heavily on the prespecified similarity metric and may lead to inappropriate penalties when dealing with redundant or noisy input variables. To address the above issues, this paper proposes a new \textit{Semi-Supervised Meta Additive Model (S$^2$MAM) based on a bilevel optimization scheme that automatically identifies informative variables, updates the similarity matrix, and simultaneously achieves interpretable predictions. Theoretical guarantees are provided for S$^2$MAM, including the computing convergence and the statistical generalization bound. Experimental assessments across 4 synthetic and 12 real-world datasets, with varying levels and categories of corruption, validate the robustness and interpretability of the proposed approach....

As a means to balance the growth of the AI industry with the need for privacy protection, machine unlearning plays a crucial role in realizing the ``right to be forgotten'' in artificial intelligence. This technique enables AI systems to remove the influence of specific data while preserving the rest of the learned knowledge. Although it has been actively studied, most existing unlearning methods assume that unlearning is performed only once. In this work, we evaluate existing unlearning algorithms in a more realistic scenario where unlearning is conducted repeatedly, and in this setting, we identify two critical phenomena: (1) Knowledge Erosion, where the accuracy on retain data progressively degrades over unlearning phases, and (2) Forgetting Reversal, where previously forgotten samples become recognizable again in later phases. To address these challenges, we propose SAFER (StAbility-preserving Forgetting with Effective Regularization), a continual unlearning framework that maintains representation stability for retain data while enforcing negative logit margins for forget data. Extensive experiments show that SAFER mitigates not only knowledge erosion but also forgetting reversal, achieving stable performance across multiple unlearning phases....

When a language model agrees with a user's false belief, is it failing to detect the error, or noticing and agreeing anyway? We show the latter. Across twelve open-weight models from five labs, spanning small to frontier scale, the same small set of attention heads carries a "this statement is wrong" signal whether the model is evaluating a claim on its own or being pressured to agree with a user. Silencing these heads flips sycophantic behavior sharply while leaving factual accuracy intact, so the circuit controls deference rather than knowledge. Edge-level path patching confirms that the same head-to-head connections drive sycophancy, factual lying, and instructed lying. Opinion-agreement, where no factual ground truth exists, reuses these head positions but writes into an orthogonal direction, ruling out a simple "truth-direction" reading of the substrate. Alignment training leaves this circuit in place: an RLHF refresh cuts sycophantic behavior roughly tenfold while the shared heads persist or grow, a pattern that replicates on an independent model family and under targeted anti-sycophancy DPO. When these models sycophant, they register that the user is wrong and agree anyway....

Particle accelerator beamline optimization is a high-dimensional control problem traditionally requiring significant expert intervention. We present RLABC (Reinforcement Learning for Accelerator Beamline Control), an open-source Python framework that automatically transforms standard Elegant beamline configurations into reinforcement learning environments. RLABC integrates with the widely-used Elegant beam dynamics simulation code via SDDS-based interfaces, enabling researchers to apply modern RL algorithms to beamline optimization with minimal RL-specific development. The main contribution is a general methodology for formulating beamline tuning as a Markov decision process: RLABC automatically preprocesses lattice files to insert diagnostic watch points before each tunable element, constructs a 57-dimensional state representation from beam statistics, covariance information, and aperture constraints, and provides a configurable reward function for transmission optimization. The framework supports multiple RL algorithms through Stable-Baselines3 compatibility and implements stage learning strategies for improved training efficiency. Validation on a test beamline derived from the VEPP-5 injection complex (37 control parameters across 11 quadrupoles and 4 dipoles) demonstrates that the framework successfully enables RL-based optimization, with a Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient agent achieving 70.3\% particle transmission -- performance matching established methods such as differential evolution. The framework's stage learning capability allows decomposition of complex optimization problems into manageable subproblems, improving training efficiency. The complete framework, including configuration files and example notebooks, is available as open-source software to facilitate adoption and further research....

Scaling Transformers typically necessitates training larger models from scratch, as standard architectures struggle to expand without discarding learned representations. We identify the primary bottleneck in the attention mechanism's linear projections, which strictly confine feature extraction to fixed-dimensional subspaces, limiting both expressivity and incremental capacity. To address this, we introduce Nexusformer, which replaces linear $Q/K/V$ projections with a Nexus-Rank layer, a three-stage nonlinear mapping driven by dual activations in progressively higher dimensional spaces. This design overcomes the linearity constraint and enables lossless structured growth: new capacity can be injected along two axes via zero-initialized blocks that preserve pretrained knowledge. Experiments on language modeling and reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that Nexusformer matches Tokenformer's perplexity using up to 41.5\% less training compute during progressive scaling (240M to 440M). Furthermore, our analysis of growth dynamics reveals that zero initialization induces a stable convergence trajectory, allowing us to derive a geometric scaling law that accurately predicts performance across expansion scales....

KV-cache memory is a major bottleneck in real-world LLM serving, where systems must simultaneously support latency-sensitive small-batch requests and high-throughput concurrent workloads. Although many KV-cache compression methods improve offline accuracy or compression ratio, they often violate practical serving constraints such as paged memory layouts, regular memory access, and fused attention execution, limiting their effectiveness in deployment. In this work, we identify the minimal set of 4-bit KV-cache quantization methods that remain viable under these constraints. Our central finding is that a simple design--token-wise INT4 quantization with block-diagonal Hadamard rotation--consistently achieves the best accuracy-efficiency trade-off. Across multiple models and benchmarks, this approach recovers nearly all of the accuracy lost by naive INT4, while more complex methods such as vector quantization and Hessian-aware quantization provide only marginal additional gains once serving compatibility is taken into account. To make this practical, we implement a fused rotation-quantization kernel that integrates directly into paged KV-cache layouts and introduces zero measurable end-to-end overhead, matching plain INT4 throughput across concurrency levels. Our results show that effective KV-cache compression is fundamentally a systems co-design problem: under real serving constraints, lightweight block-diagonal Hadamard rotation is a viable method that delivers near-lossless accuracy without sacrificing serving efficiency....

Deploying large language models (LLMs) in resource-constrained environments is hindered by heavy computational and memory requirements. We present LBLLM, a lightweight binarization framework that achieves effective W(1+1)A4 quantization through a novel three-stage quantization strategy. The framework proceeds as follows: (1) initialize a high-quality quantized model via PTQ; (2) quantize binarized weights, group-wise bitmaps, and quantization parameters through layer-wise distillation while keeping activations in full precision; and (3) training learnable activation quantization factors to dynamically quantize activations to 4 bits. This decoupled design mitigates interference between weight and activation quantization, yielding greater training stability and better inference accuracy. LBLLM, trained only using 0.016B tokens with a single GPU, surpasses existing state-of-the-art binarization methods on W2A4 quantization settings across tasks of language modeling, commonsense QA, and language understanding. These results demonstrate that extreme low-bit quantization of LLMs can be both practical and highly effective without introducing any extra high-precision channels or rotational matrices commonly used in recent PTQ-based works, offering a promising path toward efficient LLM deployment in resource-limited situations....

Heterogeneous graphs have attracted increasing attention for modeling multi-typed entities and relations in complex real-world systems. Multi-label node classification on heterogeneous graphs is challenging due to structural heterogeneity and the need to learn shared representations across multiple labels. Existing methods typically adopt either flexible attention mechanisms or meta-path constrained anchoring, but in heterogeneous multi-label prediction they often suffer from semantic dilution or coverage constraint. Both issues are further amplified under multi-label supervision. We present a theoretical analysis showing that as heterogeneous neighborhoods expand, the attention mass allocated to task-critical (primary) neighborhoods diminishes, and that meta-path constrained aggregation exhibits a dilemma: too few meta-paths intensify coverage constraint, while too many re-introduce dilution. To resolve this coverage-anchoring conflict, we propose FOCAL: Fusion Of Coverage and Anchoring Learning, with two components: coverage-oriented attention (COA) for flexible, unconstrained heterogeneous context aggregation, and anchoring-oriented attention (AOA) that restricts aggregation to meta-path-induced primary semantics. Our theoretical analysis and experimental results further indicates that FOCAL has a better performance than other state-of-the-art methods....

Heterophily is a prevalent property of real-world graphs and is well known to impair the performance of homophilic Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). Prior work has attempted to adapt GNNs to heterophilic graphs through non-local neighbor extension or architecture refinement. However, the fundamental reasons behind misclassifications remain poorly understood. In this work, we take a novel perspective by examining recurring inductive subgraphs, empirically and theoretically showing that they act as spurious shortcuts that mislead GNNs and reinforce non-causal correlations in heterophilic graphs. To address this, we adopt a causal inference perspective to analyze and correct the biased learning behavior induced by shortcut inductive subgraphs. We propose a debiased causal graph that explicitly blocks confounding and spillover paths responsible for these shortcuts. Guided by this causal graph, we introduce Causal Disentangled GNN (CD-GNN), a principled framework that disentangles spurious inductive subgraphs from true causal subgraphs by explicitly blocking non-causal paths. By focusing on genuine causal signals, CD-GNN substantially improves the robustness and accuracy of node classification in heterophilic graphs. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets not only validate our theoretical findings but also demonstrate that our proposed CD-GNN outperforms state-of-the-art heterophily-aware baselines....

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are the standard for learning on graphs, yet they have limited expressive power, often expressed in terms of the Weisfeiler-Leman (WL) hierarchy or within the framework of first-order logic. In this context, topological neural networks (TNNs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative for graph representation learning. By incorporating higher-order relational structures into message-passing schemes, TNNs offer higher representational power than traditional GNNs. However, a fundamental question remains open: what is the logical expressiveness of TNNs? Answering this allows us to characterize precisely which binary classifiers TNNs can represent. In this paper, we address this question by analyzing isomorphism tests derived from the underlying mechanisms of general TNNs. We introduce and investigate the power of higher-order variants of WL-based tests for combinatorial complexes, called $k$-CCWL test. In addition, we introduce the topological counting logic (TC$_k$), an extension of standard counting logic featuring a novel pairwise counting quantifier $ \exists^{N}(x_i,x_j)\, \varphi(x_i,x_j), $ which explicitly quantifies pairs $(x_i, x_j)$ satisfying property $\varphi$. We rigorously prove the exact equivalence: $ \text{k-CCWL} \equiv \text{TC}_{k{+}2} \equiv \text{Topological }(k{+}2)\text{-pebble game}.$ These results establish a logical expressiveness theory for TNNs....

Test-time training (TTT) adapts model parameters on unlabeled test instances during inference time, which continuously extends capabilities beyond the reach of offline training. Despite initial gains, existing TTT methods for LRMs plateau quickly and do not benefit from additional test-time compute. Without external calibration, the self-generated reward signal increasingly drifts as the policy model evolves, leading to both performance plateaus and diversity collapse. We propose TEMPO, a TTT framework that interleaves policy refinement on unlabeled questions with periodic critic recalibration on a labeled dataset. By formalizing this alternating procedure through the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm, we reveal that prior methods can be interpreted as incomplete variants that omit the crucial recalibration step. Reintroducing this step tightens the evidence lower bound (ELBO) and enables sustained improvement. Across diverse model families (Qwen3 and OLMO3) and reasoning tasks, TEMPO improves OLMO3-7B on AIME 2024 from 33.0% to 51.1% and Qwen3-14B from 42.3% to 65.8%, while maintaining high diversity....

Neural operators are widely used to approximate solution maps of complex physical systems. In many applications, however, the goal is not to recover the full solution trajectory, but to summarize the solution trajectory via a scalar target quantity (e.g., a functional such as time spent in a target range, time above a threshold, accumulated cost, or total energy). In this paper, we introduce DOPE (debiased neural operator): a semiparametric estimator for such target quantities of solution trajectories obtained from neural operators. DOPE is broadly applicable to settings with both partial and irregular observations and can be combined with arbitrary neural operator architectures. We make three main contributions. (1) We show that, in contrast to DOPE, naive plug-in estimation can suffer from first-order bias. (2) To address this, we derive a novel one-step, Neyman-orthogonal estimator that treats the neural operator as a high-dimensional nuisance mapping between function spaces, and removes the leading bias term. For this, DOPE uses a weighting mechanism that simultaneously accounts for irregular observation designs and for how sensitive the target quantity is to perturbations of the underlying trajectory. (3) To learn the weights, we extend automatic debiased machine learning to operator-valued nuisances via Riesz regression. We demonstrate the benefits of DOPE across various numerical experiments....

Neural processes are meta-learning models that map context sets to predictive distributions. While inspired by stochastic processes, NPs do not generally satisfy the Kolmogorov consistency conditions required to define a valid stochastic process. This inconsistency is widely acknowledged but poorly understood. Practitioners note that NPs work well despite the violation, without quantifying what this means. We address this gap by defining the conditioning consistency gap, a KL divergence measuring how much a conditional neural process's (CNP) predictions change when a point is added to the context versus conditioned upon. Our main results show that for CNPs with bounded encoders and Lipschitz decoders, the consistency gap is $O(1/n^2)$ in context size $n$, and that this rate is tight. These bounds establish the precise sense in which CNPs approximate valid stochastic processes. The inconsistency is negligible for moderate context sizes but can be significant in the few-shot regime....

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) remains structurally uncertain despite parameter-efficient methods such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), as the layer-specific roles of internal representations are poorly understood, leading to heuristic decisions about where adaptation should be applied. We model the evolution of hidden states as a high-dimensional geometric trajectory and propose using the Ramer-Douglas-Peucker (RDP) algorithm, a parameter-free and training-free polygon simplification method that preserves global structural transitions while eliminating locally redundant changes, to identify critical breakpoints along the representation path. Crucially, we use these geometric pivots not merely for analysis, but as a direct decision signal for determining which layers should be adapted during parameter-efficient fine-tuning. By integrating this geometry-aware layer selection strategy into LoRA fine-tuning of Qwen3-8B-Base, we achieve superior performance on MMLU-Math using only 13 RDP-selected layers (81.67%), significantly outperforming both full 36-layer adaptation (79.32%) and random 13-layer selection (75.56%), as well as the baseline Qwen3-8B-Base model (74.25%). These results demonstrate that leveraging the intrinsic geometry of representation trajectories provides a robust, interpretable, and training-free signal for optimizing layer selection during model adaptation....

Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) route predictions exclusively through a clinically grounded concept layer, binding interpretability to concept-label consistency. When a dataset contains concept-level inconsistencies, identical concept profiles mapped to conflicting diagnosis labels create an unresolvable bottleneck that imposes a hard ceiling on achievable accuracy. In this paper, we apply rough set theory to the Derm7pt dermoscopy benchmark and characterize the full extent and clinical structure of this inconsistency. Among 305 unique concept profiles formed by the 7 dermoscopic criteria of the 7-point melanoma checklist, 50 (16.4%) are inconsistent, spanning 306 images (30.3% of the dataset). This yields a theoretical accuracy ceiling of 92.1%, independent of backbone architecture or training strategy for CBMs that exclusively operate with hard concepts. In addition, we characterize the conflict-severity distribution, identify the clinical features most responsible for boundary ambiguity, and evaluate two filtering strategies with quantified effects on dataset composition and CBM interpretability. Symmetric removal of all boundary-region images yields Derm7pt+, a fully consistent benchmark subset of 705 images with perfect quality of classification and no hard accuracy ceiling. Building on this filtered dataset, we present a hard CBM evaluated across 19 backbone architectures from the EfficientNet, DenseNet, ResNet, and Wide ResNet families. Under symmetric filtering, explored for completeness, EfficientNet-B5 achieves the best label F1 score (0.85) and label accuracy (0.90) on the held-out test set, with a concept accuracy of 0.70. Under asymmetric filtering, EfficientNet-B7 leads across all four metrics, reaching a label F1 score of 0.82 and concept accuracy of 0.70. These results establish reproducible baselines for concept-consistent CBM evaluation on dermoscopic data....

The rapid growth of chemical literature has generated vast amounts of unstructured data, where reaction information is particularly valuable for applications such as reaction predictions and drug design. However, the prohibitive cost of expert annotation has led to a scarcity of training data, severely hindering the performance of automatic reaction extraction. In this work, we conduct a systematic study of active learning for chemical reaction extraction. We integrate six uncertainty- and diversity-based strategies with pretrained transformer-CRF architectures, and evaluate them on product extraction and role labeling task. While several methods approach full-data performance with fewer labeled instances, learning curves are often non-monotonic and task-dependent. Our analysis shows that strong pretraining, structured CRF decoding, and label sparsity limit the stability of conventional active learning strategies. These findings provide practical insights for the effective use of active learning in chemical information extraction....

Online federated learning (OFL) has emerged as a popular framework for decentralized decision-making over continuous data streams without compromising client privacy. However, the adversary model assumed in standard OFL typically precludes any potential benefits of parallelization. Further, it fails to adequately capture the different sources of statistical variation in OFL problems. In this paper, we extend the OFL paradigm by integrating a stochastically extended adversary (SEA). Under this framework, the loss function remains fixed across clients over time. However, the adversary dynamically and independently selects the data distribution for each client at each time. We propose the \algoOFL{} algorithm to solve this problem, which utilizes online stochastic gradient descent at the clients, along with periodic global aggregation via the server. We establish bounds on the global network regret over a time horizon \(T\) for two classes of functions: (1) for smooth and convex losses, we prove an \(\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{T})\) bound, and (2) for smooth and strongly convex losses, we prove an \(\mathcal{O}(\log T)\) bound. Through careful analysis, we quantify the individual impact of both spatial (across clients) and temporal (over time) data heterogeneity on the regret bounds. Consequently, we identify a regime of mild temporal variation (relative to stochastic gradient variance), where the network regret improves with parallelization. Hence, in the SEA setting, our results improve the existing pessimistic worst-case results in online federated learning....

Language models are increasingly used in scientific discovery to generate hypotheses, propose candidate solutions, implement systems, and iteratively refine them. At the core of these trial-and-error loops lies evaluation: the process of obtaining feedback on candidate solutions via verifiers, simulators, or task-specific scoring functions. While prior work has highlighted the importance of evaluation, it has not explicitly formulated the problem of how evaluation-driven discovery loops can be scaled up in a principled and effective manner to push the boundaries of scientific discovery, a problem this paper seeks to address. We introduce Simple Test-time Evaluation-driven Scaling (SimpleTES), a general framework that strategically combines parallel exploration, feedback-driven refinement, and local selection, revealing substantial gains unlocked by scaling evaluation-driven discovery loops along the right dimensions. Across 21 scientific problems spanning six domains, SimpleTES discovers state-of-the-art solutions using gpt-oss models, consistently outperforming both frontier-model baselines and sophisticated optimization pipelines. Particularly, we sped up the widely used LASSO algorithm by over 2x, designed quantum circuit routing policies that reduce gate overhead by 24.5%, and discovered new Erdos minimum overlap constructions that surpass the best-known results. Beyond novel discoveries, SimpleTES produces trajectory-level histories that naturally supervise feedback-driven learning. When post-trained on successful trajectories, models not only improve efficiency on seen problems but also generalize to unseen problems, discovering solutions that base models fail to uncover. Together, our results establish effective evaluation-driven loop scaling as a central axis for advancing LLM-driven scientific discovery, and provide a simple yet practical framework for realizing these gains....

High-fidelity measurements of continuum physical fields are essential for scientific discovery and engineering design but remain challenging under sparse and constrained sensing. Conventional reconstruction methods typically rely on fixed sensor layouts, which cannot adapt to evolving physical states. We propose LASER, a unified, closed-loop framework that formulates active sensing as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP). At its core, LASER employs a continuum field latent world model that captures the underlying physical dynamics and provides intrinsic reward feedback. This enables a reinforcement learning policy to simulate ''what-if'' sensing scenarios within a latent imagination space. By conditioning sensor movements on predicted latent states, LASER navigates toward potentially high-information regions beyond current observations. Our experiments demonstrate that LASER consistently outperforms static and offline-optimized strategies, achieving high-fidelity reconstruction under sparsity across diverse continuum fields....

The evaluation of machine learning models typically relies mainly on performance metrics based on loss functions, which risk to overlook changes in performance in relevant subgroups. Auditing tools such as SliceFinder and SliceLine were proposed to detect such groups, but usually have conceptual disadvantages, such as the inability to directly address continuous covariates. In this paper, we introduce FairTree, a novel algorithm adapted from psychometric invariance testing. Unlike SliceFinder and related algorithms, FairTree directly handles continuous, categorical, and ordinal features without discretization. It further decomposes performance disparities into systematic bias and variance, allowing a categorization of changes in algorithm performance. We propose and evaluate two variations of the algorithm: a permutation-based approach, which is conceptually closer to SliceFinder, and a fluctuation test. Through simulation studies that include a direct comparison with SliceLine, we demonstrate that both approaches have a satisfactory rate of false-positive results, but that the fluctuation approach has relatively higher power. We further illustrate the method on the UCI Adult Census dataset. The proposed algorithms provide a flexible framework for the statistical evaluation of the performance and aspects of fairness of machine learning models in a wide range of applications even in relatively small data....

Graph representation learning has achieved notable success in encoding graph-structured data into latent vector spaces, enabling a wide range of downstream tasks. However, these node representations remain opaque and difficult to interpret. Existing explainability methods primarily focus on supervised settings or on explaining individual representation dimensions, leaving a critical gap in explaining the overall structure of node representations. In this paper, we propose TACENR (Task-Agnostic Contrastive Explanations for Node Representations), a local explanation method that identifies not only attribute features but also proximity and structural ones that contribute the most in the representation space. TACENR builds on contrastive learning, through which we learn a similarity function in the representation space, revealing which are the features that play an important role in the representation of a node. While our focus is on task-agnostic explanations, TACENR can be applied to supervised scenarios as well. Experimental results demonstrate that proximity and structural features play a significant role in shaping node representations and that our supervised variant performs comparably to existing task-specific approaches in identifying the most impactful features....

Federated learning (FL) is a key paradigm for distributed model learning across decentralized data sources. Communication in each FL round typically consists of two phases: (i) distributing the global model from a server to clients, and (ii) collecting updated local models from clients to the server for aggregation. This paper focuses on a type of FL where communication between a client and the server is relay-based over dynamic networks, making routing optimization essential. A typical scenario is in-orbit FL, where satellites act as clients and communicate with a server (which can be a satellite, ground station, or aerial platform) via multi-hop inter-satellite links. This paper presents a comprehensive tractability analysis of routing optimization for in-orbit FL under different settings. For global model distribution, these include the number of models, the objective function, and routing schemes (unicast versus multicast, and splittable versus unsplittable flow). For local model collection, the settings consider the number of models, client selection, and flow splittability. For each case, we rigorously prove whether the global optimum is obtainable in polynomial time or the problem is NP-hard. Together, our analysis draws clear boundaries between tractable and intractable regimes for a broad spectrum of routing problems for in-orbit FL. For tractable cases, the derived efficient algorithms are directly applicable in practice. For intractable cases, we provide fundamental insights into their inherent complexity. These contributions fill a critical yet unexplored research gap, laying a foundation for principled routing design, evaluation, and deployment in satellite-based FL or similar distributed learning systems....

Knowledge Graph Embeddings (KGEs) support a wide range of downstream tasks over Knowledge Graphs (KGs). In practice, KGs evolve as new entities and facts are added, motivating Continual Knowledge Graph Embedding (CKGE) methods that update embeddings over time. Current CKGE approaches address catastrophic forgetting (i.e., the performance degradation on previously learned tasks) primarily by limiting changes to existing embeddings. However, we show that this view is incomplete. When new entities are introduced, their embeddings can interfere with previously learned ones, causing the model to predict them in place of previously correct answers. This phenomenon, which we call entity interference, has been largely overlooked and is not accounted for in current CKGE evaluation protocols. As a result, the assessment of catastrophic forgetting becomes misleading, and CKGE methods performance is systematically overestimated. To address this issue, we introduce a corrected CKGE evaluation protocol that accounts for entity interference. Through experiments on multiple benchmarks, we show that ignoring this effect can lead to performance overestimation of up to 25%, particularly in scenarios with significant entity growth. We further analyze how different CKGE methods and KGE models are affected by the different sources of forgetting, and introduce a catastrophic forgetting metric tailored to CKGE....

Reasoning language models can solve increasingly complex tasks, but struggle to produce the calibrated confidence estimates necessary for reliable deployment. Existing calibration methods usually depend on labels or repeated sampling at inference time, making them impractical in many settings. We introduce a method for unsupervised confidence calibration of reasoning LLMs when only a single generation is available at inference time. Our approach uses offline sampling on unlabeled data to derive a self-consistency-based proxy target, then distills this signal into a lightweight deployment-time confidence predictor. In a broad evaluation across 5 math and question-answering tasks using 9 reasoning models, our method substantially outperforms baselines, including under distribution shift, and improves downstream performance in selective prediction and simulated downstream decision-making....

Federated prognostics enable clients (e.g., companies, factories, and production lines) to collaboratively develop a failure time prediction model while keeping each client's data local and confidential. However, traditional federated models often assume homogeneity in the degradation processes across clients, an assumption that may not hold in many industrial settings. To overcome this, this paper proposes a personalized federated prognostic model designed to accommodate clients with heterogeneous degradation processes, allowing them to build tailored prognostic models. The prognostic model iteratively facilitates the underlying pairwise collaborations between clients with similar degradation patterns, which enhances the performance of personalized federated learning. To estimate parameters jointly using decentralized datasets, we develop a federated parameter estimation algorithm based on proximal gradient descent. The proposed approach addresses the limitations of existing federated prognostic models by simultaneously achieving model personalization, preserving data privacy, and providing comprehensive failure time distributions. The superiority of the proposed model is validated through extensive simulation studies and a case study using the turbofan engine degradation dataset from the NASA repository....

Batch Normalization (BN) is a cornerstone of deep learning, yet it fundamentally breaks down in micro-batch regimes (e.g., 3D medical imaging) and non-IID Federated Learning. Removing BN from deep architectures, however, often leads to catastrophic training failures such as vanishing gradients and dying channels. We identify that standard activation functions, like Swish and ReLU, exacerbate this instability in BN-free networks due to their non-zero-centered nature, which causes compounding activation mean-shifts as network depth increases. In this technical communication, we propose Zero-Centered Swish (ZC-Swish), a drop-in activation function parameterized to dynamically anchor activation means near zero. Through targeted stress-testing on BN-free convolutional networks at depths 8, 16, and 32, we demonstrate that while standard Swish collapses to near-random performance at depth 16 and beyond, ZC-Swish maintains stable layer-wise activation dynamics and achieves the highest test accuracy at depth 16 (51.5%) with seed 42. ZC-Swish thus provides a robust, parameter-efficient solution for stabilizing deep networks in memory-constrained and privacy-preserving applications where traditional normalization is unviable....

Reinforcement learning (RL) for LLM post-training faces a fundamental design choice: whether to use a learned critic as a baseline for policy optimization. Classical theory favors critic-based methods such as PPO for variance reduction, yet critic-free alternatives like GRPO have gained widespread adoption due to their simplicity and competitive performance. We show that in sparse-reward settings, a learned critic can inject estimation noise that exceeds the state signal it captures, increasing rather than reducing advantage variance. By casting baseline selection as a Kalman filtering problem, we unify PPO and GRPO as two extremes of the Kalman gain and prove that explained variance (EV), computable from a single training batch, identifies the exact boundary: positive EV indicates the critic reduces variance, while zero or negative EV signals that it inflates variance. Building on this insight, we propose Explained Variance Policy Optimization (EVPO), which monitors batch-level EV at each training step and adaptively switches between critic-based and batch-mean advantage estimation, provably achieving no greater variance than the better of the two at every step. Across four tasks spanning classical control, agentic interaction, and mathematical reasoning, EVPO consistently outperforms both PPO and GRPO regardless of which fixed baseline is stronger on a given task. Further analysis confirms that the adaptive gating tracks critic maturation over training and that the theoretically derived zero threshold is empirically optimal....

Streamliner constraints reduce the search space of combinatorial problems by ruling out portions of the solution space. We adapt the StreamLLM approach, which uses Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate streamliners for Constraint Programming, to Answer Set Programming (ASP). Given an ASP encoding and a few small training instances, we prompt multiple LLMs to propose candidate constraints. Candidates that cause syntax errors, render satisfiable instances unsatisfiable, or degrade performance on all training instances are discarded. The surviving streamliners are evaluated together with the original encoding, and we report results for a virtual best encoding (VBE) that, for each instance, selects the fastest among the original encoding and its streamlined variants. On three ASP Competition benchmarks (Partner Units Problem, Sokoban, Towers of Hanoi), the VBE achieves speedups of up to 4--5x over the original encoding. Different LLMs produce semantically diverse constraints, not mere syntactic variations, indicating that the approach captures genuine problem structure....

Generative AI systems are known to amplify biases present in their training data. While several inference-time mitigation strategies have been proposed, they remain largely empirical and lack formal guarantees. In this paper we introduce CTLF, a branching-time logic designed to reason about bias in series of generative AI outputs. CTLF adopts a counting worlds semantics where each world represents a possible output at a given step in the generation process and introduces modal operators that allow us to verify whether the current output series respects an intended probability distribution over a protected attribute, to predict the likelihood of remaining within acceptable bounds as new outputs are generated, and to determine how many outputs are needed to remove in order to restore fairness. We illustrate the framework on a toy example of biased image generation, showing how CTLF formulas can express concrete fairness properties at different points in the output series....

Adaptive multi-agent systems (MAS) are increasingly adopted to tackle complex problems.However, the narrow task coverage of their optimization raises the question of whether they can function as general-purpose systems.To address this gap, we conduct an extensive empirical study of adaptive MAS, revealing two key findings: (1) topological overfitting -- they fail to generalize across different domains; and (2) illusory coordination -- they achieve reasonable surface-level accuracy while the underlying agent interactions diverge from ideal MAS behavior, raising concerns about their practical utility.These findings highlight the pressing need to prioritize generalization in MAS development and motivate evaluation protocols that extend beyond simple final-answer correctness....

We study when, where, and why 978 Holocaust survivors smile in video testimonies. We create an automatic smile detection model from facial features with an F1 of 85% and annotate detected smiles under two established taxonomies of smiling. We produce narrative features on 1,083,417 transcript sentences as well as emotional valence from three different modalities: audio, eye gaze, and text transcript. Smiling rates are significantly correlated with specific semantic topics, narrative structures, and temporal syntaxes across the entire corpus. Smiles often occur during periods of intense negative affect; these negative-affect smiles improve the valence trajectory of surrounding sentences significantly across all three modalities. Smiling reduces eye dynamics and blink rates, and the strength of both of these effects is also modulated by narrative valence. Taken together, we conclude that smiling plays a critical role in regulating emotion and social interaction during traumatic recollection....

Memristive devices present a promising foundation for next-generation information processing by combining memory and computation within a single physical substrate. This unique characteristic enables efficient, fast, and adaptive computing, particularly well suited for deep learning applications. Among recent developments, the memristive-friendly echo state network (MF-ESN) has emerged as a promising approach that combines memristive-inspired dynamics with the training simplicity of reservoir computing, where only the readout layer is learned. Building on this framework, we propose memristive-friendly parallelized reservoirs (MARS), a simplified yet more effective architecture that enables efficient scalable parallel computation and deeper model composition through novel subtractive skip connections. This design yields two key advantages: substantial training speedups of up to 21x over the inherently lightweight echo state network baseline and significantly improved predictive performance. Moreover, MARS demonstrates what is possible with parallel memristive-friendly reservoir computing: on several long sequence benchmarks our compact gradient-free models substantially outperform strong gradient-based sequence models such as LRU, S5, and Mamba, while reducing full training time from minutes or hours down seconds or even only a few hundred milliseconds. Our work positions parallel memristive-friendly computing as a promising route towards scalable neuromorphic learning systems that combine high predictive capability with radically improved computational efficiency, while providing a clear pathway to energy-efficient, low-latency implementations on emerging memristive and in-memory hardware....

Robotic manipulation tasks exhibit varying memory requirements, ranging from Markovian tasks that require no memory to non-Markovian tasks that depend on historical information spanning single or multiple interaction trials. Surprisingly, simply extending observation histories of a visuomotor policy often leads to a significant performance drop due to distribution shift and overfitting. To address these issues, we propose Gated Memory Policy (GMP), a visuomotor policy that learns both when to recall memory and what to recall. To learn when to recall memory, GMP employs a learned memory gate mechanism that selectively activates history context only when necessary, improving robustness and reactivity. To learn what to recall efficiently, GMP introduces a lightweight cross-attention module that constructs effective latent memory representations. To further enhance robustness, GMP injects diffusion noise into historical actions, mitigating sensitivity to noisy or inaccurate histories during both training and inference. On our proposed non-Markovian benchmark MemMimic, GMP achieves a 30.1% average success rate improvement over long-history baselines, while maintaining competitive performance on Markovian tasks in RoboMimic. All code, data and in-the-wild deployment instructions are available on our project website https://gated-memory-policy.github.io/....

This paper presents an AI-enabled cascaded hybrid vision/force control framework for tendon-driven aerial continuum manipulators based on constant-strain modeling in $SE(3)$ as a coupled system. The proposed controller is designed to enable autonomous, physical interaction with a static environment while stabilizing the image feature error. The developed strategy combines the cascaded fast fixed-time sliding mode control and a radial basis function neural network to cope with the uncertainties in the image acquired by the eye-in-hand monocular camera and the measurements from the force sensing apparatus. This ensures rapid, online learning of the vision- and force-related uncertainties without requiring offline training. Furthermore, the features are extracted via a state-of-the-art graph neural network architecture employed by a visual servoing framework using line features, rather than relying on heuristic geometric line extractors, to concurrently contribute to tracking the desired normal interaction force during contact and regulating the image feature error. A comparative study benchmarks the proposed controller against established rigid-arm aerial manipulation methods, evaluating robustness across diverse scenarios and feature extraction strategies. The simulation and experimental results showcase the effectiveness of the proposed methodology under various initial conditions and demonstrate robust performance in executing manipulation tasks....

Recent advances in large-scale video world models have enabled increasingly realistic future prediction, raising the prospect of leveraging imagined videos for robot learning. However, visual realism does not imply physical plausibility, and behaviors inferred from generated videos may violate dynamics and fail when executed by embodied agents. Existing benchmarks begin to incorporate notions of physical plausibility, but they largely remain perception- or diagnostic-oriented and do not systematically evaluate whether predicted behaviors can be translated into executable actions that complete the intended task. To address this gap, we introduce RoboWM-Bench, a manipulation-centric benchmark for embodiment-grounded evaluation of video world models. RoboWM-Bench converts generated behaviors from both human-hand and robotic manipulation videos into embodied action sequences and validates them through robotic execution. The benchmark spans diverse manipulation scenarios and establishes a unified protocol for consistent and reproducible evaluation. Using RoboWM-Bench, we evaluate state-of-the-art video world models and find that reliably generating physically executable behaviors remains an open challenge. Common failure modes include errors in spatial reasoning, unstable contact prediction, and non-physical deformations. While finetuning on manipulation data yields improvements, physical inconsistencies still persist, suggesting opportunities for more physically grounded video generation for robots....

Learning diverse locomotion skills for humanoid robots in a unified reinforcement learning framework remains challenging due to the conflicting requirements of stability and dynamic expressiveness across different gaits. We present a multi-gait learning approach that enables a humanoid robot to master five distinct gaits -- walking, goose-stepping, running, stair climbing, and jumping -- using a consistent policy structure, action space, and reward formulation. The key contribution is a selective Adversarial Motion Prior (AMP) strategy: AMP is applied to periodic, stability-critical gaits (walking, goose-stepping, stair climbing) where it accelerates convergence and suppresses erratic behavior, while being deliberately omitted for highly dynamic gaits (running, jumping) where its regularization would over-constrain the motion. Policies are trained via PPO with domain randomization in simulation and deployed on a physical 12-DOF humanoid robot through zero-shot sim-to-real transfer. Quantitative comparisons demonstrate that selective AMP outperforms a uniform AMP policy across all five gaits, achieving faster convergence, lower tracking error, and higher success rates on stability-focused gaits without sacrificing the agility required for dynamic ones....

Developing bipedal football robots in dynamiccombat environments presents challenges related to motionstability and deep coupling of multiple tasks, as well ascontrol switching issues between different states such as up-right walking and fall recovery. To address these problems,this paper proposes a modular reinforcement learning (RL)framework for achieving adaptive multi-task control. Firstly,this framework combines an open-loop feedforward oscilla-tor with a reinforcement learning-based feedback residualstrategy, effectively separating the generation of basic gaitsfrom complex football actions. Secondly, a posture-driven statemachine is introduced, clearly switching between the ballseeking and kicking network (BSKN) and the fall recoverynetwork (FRN), fundamentally preventing state interference.The FRN is efficiently trained through a progressive forceattenuation curriculum learning strategy. The architecture wasverified in Unity simulations of bipedal robots, demonstratingexcellent spatial adaptability-reliably finding and kicking theball even in restricted corner scenarios-and rapid autonomousfall recovery (with an average recovery time of 0.715 seconds).This ensures seamless and stable operation in complex multi-task environments....

Traditional policy learning methods in cooperative pursuit face fundamental challenges in biomimetic underwater robots, where long-horizon decision making, partial observability, and inter-robot coordination require both expressiveness and stability. To address these issues, a novel framework called Mamba-based multi-agent group relative policy optimization (M$^{2}$GRPO) is proposed, which integrates a selective state-space Mamba policy with group-relative policy optimization under the centralized-training and decentralized-execution (CTDE) paradigm. Specifically, the Mamba-based policy leverages observation history to capture long-horizon temporal dependencies and exploits attention-based relational features to encode inter-agent interactions, producing bounded continuous actions through normalized Gaussian sampling. To further improve credit assignment without sacrificing stability, the group-relative advantages are obtained by normalizing rewards across agents within each episode and optimized through a multi-agent extension of GRPO, significantly reducing the demand for training resources while enabling stable and scalable policy updates. Extensive simulations and real-world pool experiments across team scales and evader strategies demonstrate that M$^{2}$GRPO consistently outperforms MAPPO and recurrent baselines in both pursuit success rate and capture efficiency. Overall, the proposed framework provides a practical and scalable solution for cooperative underwater pursuit with biomimetic robot systems....

Despite growing interest in Quranic data research, existing Quran datasets remain limited in both scale and diversity. To address this gap, we present Tadabur, a large-scale Quran audio dataset. Tadabur comprises more than 1400+ hours of recitation audio from over 600 distinct reciters, providing substantial variation in recitation styles, vocal characteristics, and recording conditions. This diversity makes Tadabur a comprehensive and representative resource for Quranic speech research and analysis. By significantly expanding both the total duration and variability of available Quran data, Tadabur aims to support future research and facilitate the development of standardized Quranic speech benchmarks....

High-fidelity character voice synthesis is a cornerstone of immersive multimedia applications, particularly for interacting with anime avatars and digital humans. However, existing systems struggle to maintain consistent persona traits across diverse emotional contexts. To bridge this gap, we present ATRIE, a unified framework utilizing a Persona-Prosody Dual-Track (P2-DT) architecture. Our system disentangles generation into a static Timbre Track (via Scalar Quantization) and a dynamic Prosody Track (via Hierarchical Flow-Matching), distilled from a 14B LLM teacher. This design enables robust identity preservation (Zero-Shot Speaker Verification EER: 0.04) and rich emotional expression. Evaluated on our extended AnimeTTS-Bench (50 characters), ATRIE achieves state-of-the-art performance in both generation and cross-modal retrieval (mAP: 0.75), establishing a new paradigm for persona-driven multimedia content creation....

An direction of development in the extraction of features from audio signals is based on processing raw samples in the time domain. Such an approach appears to be effective, especially in the era of neural networks. An example is SincNet. In this solution, the core of the neural network layer is a set of sinc functions that are convolved with the input signal. Due to the finite length of sinc functions, distortions appear in the frequency domain of the convolved signal, the same as in the case of windowing the signal. Recently, a new approach has been developed that uses Gabor filters to replace sinc functions. Due to the complex results, further modifications had to be applied, such as squared modulus or Gaussian Lowpass Pooling. In this work, an ingestion layer based on a bank of Gabor filters, named GaborNet, and its modifications are intensively examined within the popular RawNet2 and RawGAT- ST architectures. These have been developed for the purpose of audio spoof detection. Another issue that has been investigated was audio augmentation using codec conversions, room responses, and additive noises....

Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) have recently achieved strong performance across various audio-centric tasks. However, hallucination, where models generate responses that are semantically incorrect or acoustically unsupported, remains largely underexplored in the audio domain. Existing hallucination benchmarks mainly focus on text or vision, while the few audio-oriented studies are limited in scale, modality coverage, and diagnostic depth. We therefore introduce HalluAudio, the first large-scale benchmark for evaluating hallucinations across speech, environmental sound, and music. HalluAudio comprises over 5K human-verified QA pairs and spans diverse task types, including binary judgments, multi-choice reasoning, attribute verification, and open-ended QA. To systematically induce hallucinations, we design adversarial prompts and mixed-audio conditions. Beyond accuracy, our evaluation protocol measures hallucination rate, yes/no bias, error-type analysis, and refusal rate, enabling a fine-grained analysis of LALM failure modes. We benchmark a broad range of open-source and proprietary models, providing the first large-scale comparison across speech, sound, and music. Our results reveal significant deficiencies in acoustic grounding, temporal reasoning, and music attribute understanding, underscoring the need for reliable and robust LALMs....

The intonational structure of Seoul Korean has been defined with discrete tonal categories within the Autosegmental-Metrical model of intonational phonology. However, it is challenging to map continuous $F_0$ contours to these invariant categories due to variable $F_0$ realizations in real-world speech. Our paper proposes Dual-Glob, a deep supervised contrastive learning framework to robustly classify fine-grained pitch accent patterns in Seoul Korean. Unlike conventional local predictive models, our approach captures holistic $F_0$ contour shapes by enforcing structural consistency between clean and augmented views in a shared latent space. To this aim, we introduce the first large-scale benchmark dataset, consisting of manually annotated 10,093 Accentual Phrases in Seoul Korean. Experimental results show that our Dual-Glob significantly outperforms strong baseline models with state-of-the-art accuracy (77.75%) and F1-score (51.54%). Therefore, our work supports AM-based intonational phonology using data-driven methodology, showing that deep contrastive learning effectively captures holistic structural features of continuous $F_0$ contours....

The self-noise of capacitive sensors, primarily caused by thermal noise from the gate-bias resistor in the preamplifier, imposes a fundamental limit on measurement sensitivity. In electret condenser microphones (ECMs), this resistor simultaneously determines the noise low-pass cutoff frequency and the signal high-pass cutoff frequency through a single RC time constant, creating a trade-off between noise reduction and signal bandwidth. This paper proposes PDS-Amp (Photoelectric DC Servo Amplifier), a circuit technique that replaces the gate-bias resistor with a photoelectric element functioning as an ultra-high-impedance current source. A DC servo loop using lag-lead compensation feeds back the preamplifier output through an LED to control the photocurrent, thereby stabilizing the gate bias while decoupling the noise and signal cutoff frequencies. A custom photosensor based on the external photoelectric effect of a zinc photocathode was fabricated to achieve sub-picoampere dark current, overcoming the limitations of commercial semiconductor photodiodes. Combined with a cascode JFET preamplifier that minimizes input capacitance through bootstrap action, PDS-Amp achieved a self-noise of 11 dBA with a 12 pF dummy microphone. Despite using a small-diameter ECM capsule, this performance is comparable to that of large-diaphragm condenser microphones costing several thousand dollars. Recording experiments with an actual ECM capsule qualitatively confirmed a significant reduction in background noise. The proposed technique is applicable not only to microphones but broadly to capacitive sensors including accelerometers, pressure sensors, and pyroelectric sensors....

Unification of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems reduces development and maintenance costs, but training a single model to perform well in both offline and low-latency streaming settings remains challenging. We present a Unified ASR framework for Transducer (RNNT) training that supports both offline and streaming decoding within a single model, using chunk-limited attention with right context and dynamic chunked convolutions. To further close the gap between offline and streaming performance, we introduce an efficient Triton implementation of mode-consistency regularization for RNNT (MCR-RNNT), which encourages agreement across training modes. Experiments show that the proposed approach improves streaming accuracy at low latency while preserving offline performance and scaling to larger model sizes and training datasets. The proposed Unified ASR framework and the English model checkpoint are open-sourced....

Recent advances in Text-To-Speech (TTS) synthesis have seen the popularity of multi-stage approaches that first predict semantic tokens and then generate acoustic tokens. In this paper, we extend the coarse-to-fine generation paradigm to the temporal domain and introduce Chain-of-Details (CoD), a novel framework that explicitly models temporal coarse-to-fine dynamics in speech generation using a cascaded architecture. Our method progressively refines temporal details across multiple stages, with each stage targeting a specific temporal granularity. All temporal detail predictions are performed using a shared decoder, enabling efficient parameter utilization across different temporal resolutions. Notably, we observe that the lowest detail level naturally performs phonetic planning without the need for an explicit phoneme duration predictor. We evaluate our method on several datasets and compare it against several baselines. Experimental results show that CoD achieves competitive performance with significantly fewer parameters than existing approaches. Our findings demonstrate that explicit modeling of temporal dynamics with the CoD framework leads to more natural speech synthesis....

Mainstream optical satellites often acquire multispectral multi-resolution images, which have limited material identifiability compared to the HSIs. Thus, spectrally super-resolving the MSI into their hyperspectral counterparts greatly facilitates remote material identification and the downstream tasks. However, spectrally super-resolving the MSI into an HSI is often constrained by the multi-resolution nature of the sensor. Specifically, due to the presence of some LR bands in the MSI, the initial spectral super-resolution results often appear to be spatially blurry, resulting in an LR HSI. To overcome this bottleneck, we then leverage some HR band inherent in the acquired MSI to spatially guide the reconstruction procedure, thereby yielding the desired HR HSI. This fusion procedure elegantly coincides with a widely known spatial super-resolution problem in satellite remote sensing. Hence, we have reformulated the tough spectral super-resolution problem into a more widely investigated spatial super-resolution problem, referred to as the spectral-spatial duality theory. Accordingly, we propose ExplainS2A, consisting of a deep unfolding network and an explainable fusion network, that unifies spectral recovery and spatial fusion into a single explainable framework. Unlike conventional black-box models, ExplainS2A offers interpretability and operates as a linear-time algorithm. Remarkably, it can process a million-scale Sentinel-2 image in less than one second, yielding high-fidelity HSI over the same scene, and upgrades the blind source separation results. Although demonstrated on the Sentinel-2 and AVIRIS sensors, ExplainS2A also serves as a general framework applicable to various sensor pairs with different resolution configurations, and has experimentally demonstrated cross-region and cross-season generalization ability. Source codes: https://github.com/IHCLab/ExplainS2A....

We study the deep image prior (DIP) framework applied to photoacoustic tomography (PAT) as an unsupervised reconstruction approach to mitigate limited-view artifacts and noise commonly encountered in experimental settings. Efficient implementation is achieved by employing recently published fast forward and adjoint algorithms for circular measurement geometries. Initialization via a fast inverse and total variation (TV) regularization are applied to further suppress noise and mitigate overfitting. For comparison, we compute a classical TV reconstruction. Our experiments comprise simulated PAT measurements under limited-view geometries and varying levels of added noise as well as experimental measurements together with using a digital twin for quality assessment. Our findings suggest that DIP framework provides an effective unsupervised strategy for robust PAT reconstruction even in the challenging case of a limited view geometry providing improvement in several quantitative measures over total variation reconstructions....

Reliable harmonization of heterogeneous magnetic resonance~(MR) image datasets, especially those acquired in pragmatic clinical trials, is critical to advance multi-center neuroimaging studies and translational machine learning in healthcare. We present an enhanced and rigorously validated version of the HACA3 harmonization algorithm, which we refer to as HACA3$^+$, incorporating key methodological enhancements: (1)~an improved artifact encoder to better isolate and mitigate image artifacts, (2)~background and foreground-sensitive attention mechanisms to increase harmonization specificity, and (3)~extensive training using data spanning 100+ scanners from 64 independent sites, providing a broader diversity of scanners than other harmonization methods. Our study focuses on four commonly acquired MR image contrasts (T1-weighted, T2-weighted, proton density, \& fluid-attenuated inversion recovery), reflecting realistic clinical protocols. We perform inter-site harmonization experiments using traveling subjects to assess the generalization and robustness of the harmonization model. We compare the results of the publicly available version of HACA3 and our implementation, HACA3$^+$. Downstream relevance is further established through whole brain segmentation and image imputation. Finally, we justify each enhancement through an ablation experiment. Pre-trained weights and code for HACA3$^+$ are made publicly available at https://github.com/shays15/haca3-plus....

We present a physics-driven framework for accurate evaluation of discrete spectral bands using a low-cost multispectral setup built from off-the-shelf RGB cameras and narrow multi-band optical filters. The approach starts by explicitly formulating a linear measurement model. The camera responses are expressed as linear mixtures of unknown spectral components, with mixing coefficients determined by the overlap between the camera spectral sensitivities and the filter transmittances. For a multi-camera configuration, the per-camera models are stacked into a single global system whose structure is fully determined by the allocation of target wavelengths across the camera--filter units. We pose wavelength allocation as a deterministic design problem and select the configuration that minimizes the spectral condition number of the resulting system matrix. Guided by a frame-theoretic interpretation, this criterion promotes numerical stability, maximizes worst-case output signal-to-noise ratio, and improves the robustness of spectral reconstruction. The design space is finite, enabling the evaluation of all feasible configurations under practical constraints. We demonstrate the method on a representative example with 12 target wavelengths and four triband filters, and identify the wavelength allocation that yields the most stable and noise-robust recovery. The proposed framework includes redundant configurations, in which individual wavelengths are measured by multiple cameras, thereby providing additional degrees of freedom that further improve noise robustness....

This study aims to develop and improve machine learning-based post-processing models for precipitation, temperature, and wind speed predictions using the Mesoscale Model (MSM) dataset provided by the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) for 18 locations across Japan, including plains, mountainous regions, and islands. By incorporating meteorological variables from grid points surrounding the target locations as input features and applying feature selection based on correlation analysis, we found that, in our experimental setting, the LightGBM-based models achieved lower RMSE than the specific neural-network baselines tested in this study, including a reproduced CNN baseline, and also generally achieved lower RMSE than both the raw MSM forecasts and the JMA post-processing product, MSM Guidance (MSMG), across many locations and forecast lead times. Because precipitation has a highly skewed distribution with many zero cases, we additionally examined Tweedie-based loss functions and event-weighted training strategies for precipitation forecasting. These improved event-oriented performance relative to the original LightGBM model, especially at higher rainfall thresholds, although the gains were site dependent and overall performance remained slightly below MSMG....

Understanding how complex systems respond to perturbations, such as whether they will remain stable or what their most sensitive patterns are, is a fundamental challenge across science and engineering. Traditional stability and receptivity (resolvent) analyses are powerful but rely on known equations and linearization, limiting their use in nonlinear or poorly modeled systems. Here, we introduce a data-driven framework that automatically identifies stability properties and optimal forcing responses from observation data alone, without requiring governing equations. By training a neural network as a dynamics emulator and using automatic differentiation to extract its Jacobian, we can compute eigenmodes and resolvent modes directly from data. We demonstrate the method on both canonical chaotic models and high-dimensional fluid flows, successfully identifying dominant instability modes and input-output structures even in strongly nonlinear regimes. By leveraging a neural network-based emulator, we readily obtain a nonlinear representation of system dynamics while additionally retrieving intricate dynamical patterns that were previously difficult to resolve. This equation-free methodology establishes a broadly applicable tool for analyzing complex, high-dimensional datasets, with immediate relevance to grand challenges in fields such as climate science, neuroscience, and fluid engineering....

Air pollution is a worldwide public health threat that can cause or exacerbate many illnesses, including respiratory disease, cardiovascular disease, and some cancers. However, epidemiological studies and public health decision-making are stymied by the inability to assess pollution exposure impacts in near real time. To address this, developing accurate digital twins of environmental pollutants will enable timely data-driven analytics - a crucial step in modernizing health policy and decision-making. Although other models predict and analyze fine particulate matter exposure, they often rely on modeled input data sources and data streams that are not regularly updated. Another challenge stems from current models relying on predefined grids. In contrast, our deep-learning approach interpolates surface level PM2.5 concentrations between sparsely distributed US EPA monitoring stations in a grid-free manner. By incorporating additional, readily available datasets - including topographic, meteorological, and land-use data - we improve its ability to predict pollutant concentrations with high spatial and temporal resolution. This enables model querying at any spatial location for rapid predictions without computing over the entire grid. To ensure robustness, we randomize spatial sampling during training to enable our model to perform well in both dense and sparse monitored regions. This model is well suited for near real-time deployment because its lightweight architecture allows for fast updates in response to streaming data. Moreover, model flexibility and scalability allow it to be adapted to various geographical contexts and scales, making it a practical tool for delivering accurate and timely air quality assessments. Its capacity to rapidly evaluate multiple scenarios can be especially valuable for decision-making during public health crises....

We study finite-horizon continuous-time policy evaluation from discrete closed-loop trajectories under time-inhomogeneous dynamics. The target value surface solves a backward parabolic equation, but the Bellman baseline obtained from one-step recursion is only first-order in the grid width. We estimate the time-dependent generator from multi-step transitions using moment-matching coefficients that cancel lower-order truncation terms, and combine the resulting surrogate with backward regression. The main theory gives an end-to-end decomposition into generator misspecification, projection error, pooling bias, finite-sample error, and start-up error, together with a decision-frequency regime map explaining when higher-order gains should be visible. Across calibration studies, four-scale benchmarks, feature and start-up ablations, and gain-mismatch stress tests, the second-order estimator consistently improves on the Bellman baseline and remains stable in the regime where the theory predicts visible gains. These results position high-order generator regression as an interpretable continuous-time policy-evaluation method with a clear operating region....

Estimating the number of components is a fundamental challenge in unsupervised learning, particularly when dealing with high-dimensional data with many components or severely imbalanced component sizes. This paper addresses this challenge for classical Gaussian mixture models. The proposed estimator is simple: center the data, compute the singular values of the centered matrix, and count those above a threshold. No iterative fitting, no likelihood calculation, and no prior knowledge of the number of components are required. We prove that, under a mild separation condition on the component centers, the estimator consistently recovers the true number of components. The result holds in high-dimensional settings where the dimension can be much larger than the sample size. It also holds when the number of components grows to the smaller of the dimension and the sample size, even under severe imbalance among component sizes. Computationally, the method is extremely fast: for example, it processes ten million samples in one hundred dimensions within one minute. Extensive experimental studies confirm its accuracy in challenging settings such as high dimensionality, many components, and severe class imbalance....

In uncertainty quantification, evaluating sensitivity measures under specific conditions (i.e., conditional Sobol' indices) is essential for systems with parameterized responses, such as spatial fields or varying operating conditions. Traditional approaches often rely on point-wise modeling, which is computationally expensive and may lack consistency across the parameter space. This paper demonstrates that for a pre-trained global Polynomial Chaos Expansion (PCE) model, the analytical conditional Sobol' indices are inherently embedded within its basis functions. By leveraging the tensor-product property of PCE bases, we reformulate the global expansion into a set of analytical coefficient fields that depend on the conditioning variables. Based on the preservation of orthogonality under conditional probability measures, we derive closed-form expressions for conditional variances and Sobol' indices. This framework bypasses the need for repetitive modeling or additional sampling, transforming conditional sensitivity analysis into a purely algebraic post-processing step. Numerical benchmarks indicate that the proposed method ensures physical coherence and offers superior numerical robustness and computational efficiency compared to conventional point-wise approaches....