Real-world robot deployment rarely maintains the training-stage camera setup, where cameras often experience repositioning or remounting depending on actual scenarios. Existing view-robust Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies tolerate such camera variations only when the camera extrinsics are explicitly provided, making them fragile and hard to use especially when view robustness is critical. We argue that the policy should not be told where the camera is, but rather figure it out by itself. To this end, we introduce Camera-Centric VLA (CamVLA), a new VLA model that decouples manipulation controls from camera geometry by predicting (i) a camera-centric end-effector action expressed in the local camera frame, and (ii) a 6-DoF hand-eye matrix relating cameras to the robot base. A deterministic geometric transformation composes the two predictions into a robot base-frame action. This disentangles how I should move in pose-independent camera-centric action generation from where I am looking from in camera-perspective geometric grounding. The resulting policy is calibration-free, depth-free, and single-view, requiring only a single monocular RGB image as the visual observation and task instruction at deployment. Evaluations in both simulation and real-world robot data show that CamVLA consistently improves success rates across diverse unseen viewpoints. Project page: https://alibaba-damo-academy.github.io/CamVLA/.

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is a powerful recipe for improving language-model reasoning, but it is expensive to repeat on every new strong model because the target model must generate many rollouts during training. As models scale, post-training itself becomes a bottleneck. We study a weak-to-strong alternative: run RL on a smaller model where rollouts are cheaper, then reuse what that RL run learned to improve a stronger target model. Directly distilling the post-RL weak teacher is not enough, because the teacher's final policy mixes useful RL gains with the limitations of the smaller model. We propose Direct On-Policy Distillation (Direct-OPD), which transfers the teacher's RL-induced policy shift instead. Direct-OPD compares the post-RL teacher with its own pre-RL reference and treats their log-ratio as a dense implicit reward for the student. In plain terms, the checkpoint pair tells us which actions RL made the weak model more or less likely to take, and Direct-OPD applies that signal on the stronger student's own on-policy states. This directly reuses the weak model's RL supervision signal without training an explicit reward model or running sparse-reward RL on the target model. Empirically, Direct-OPD consistently leverages weaker teachers to improve stronger target models; notably, it boosts Qwen3-1.7B from 48.3% to 62.4% on AIME 2024 in just 4 hours on 8 A100 GPUs. It outperforms step-matched direct RL and enables the sequential composition of multiple policy shifts. Our results show that RL outcomes can be reused across model scales as implicit reward signals, not merely as final models to imitate.

Time-domain surveys generate many transient candidates, making Real-Bogus classification a critical step in automated discovery pipelines. Reliable labels are costly, while community labels can be noisy and survey-dependent. We aim to develop a Real-Bogus classification framework that can be trained without human-labeled data using injected transients and bogus-dominated survey data, remains robust under strong class contamination, and provides calibrated uncertainty quantification. We combine simulated transient injections with a contaminated survey class and train a dual-network model using asymmetric co-teaching for classes with different label-noise levels. We evaluate performance on a benchmark subset and analyze the learned representation with latent-space visualization tools. For uncertainty quantification (UQ), we compare MC dropout and deep ensembles and propose a low-cost hybrid strategy that exploits the dual-network setting to improve calibration. We extend the evaluation to the light-curve domain to assess recovery of light-curve classes. The method achieves strong Real-Bogus performance on the labeled subset and remains stable under severe class contamination. It recovers transient light-curve classes with high fidelity, while single-source identification is limited by ambiguity in light-curve-derived labels. Our hybrid UQ approach achieves competitive calibration relative to more expensive ensemble baselines. Latent-space analyses indicate that uncertainty aligns with the decision boundary and reveal subclasses within the bogus population. Our results show that injection-driven, weakly supervised training can enable scalable and consistent Real-Bogus classification without human-labeled training data while providing calibrated uncertainties. The method is suited for transfer to forthcoming surveys by re-running the injection-based training pipeline.

We present SynCity 3000, a framework for generating 3D scenes that are globally coherent while enabling fine-grained layout control. Building on the ability of current image-to-3D generators to produce complex 3D assets from a single image, we extend this capability to the scale of entire scenes by adapting the generator to be applicable as a convolutional operator. We achieve this by fine-tuning the model on scene-like data generated by a new synthetic data engine, which we propose to address the scarcity of 3D scene data for training. The convolutional generator is then applied to a dimetric image of the entire scene, generated from the user prompt, resulting in 3D scenes of arbitrary size and complexity. Across diverse prompts and layouts, SynCity 3000 produces large, coherent, and detailed scenes, addressing the shortcomings of prior approaches to 3D scene generation.

Scaling pre-training, post-training, and test-time compute have become the central paradigms for improving the capabilities of LLMs. In this work, we identify verification, the ability to determine the correctness of a solution, as a new scaling axis. To unlock this and demonstrate its effectiveness, we introduce LLM-as-a-Verifier, a general-purpose verification framework that provides fine-grained feedback for agentic tasks without requiring additional training. Unlike standard LM judges that prompt LLMs to produce discrete scores for candidate solutions, LLM-as-a-Verifier computes the expectation over the distribution of scoring token logits to generate continuous scores. This probabilistic formulation enables verification to scale along multiple dimensions: (1) score granularity, (2) repeated evaluation, and (3) criteria decomposition. In particular, we show that scaling the scoring granularity leads to better separation between positive and negative solutions, resulting in more calibrated comparisons. Moreover, scaling repeated evaluation and criteria decomposition consistently lead to additional gains in verification accuracy through variance and complexity reduction. We further introduce a cost-efficient ranking algorithm for selecting the best solution among candidates using the verifier's continuous scores. LLM-as-a-Verifier achieves state-of-the-art performance on Terminal-Bench V2 (86.5%), SWE-Bench Verified (78.2%), RoboRewardBench (87.4%), and MedAgentBench (73.3%). Beyond verification, the fine-grained signals from LLM-as-a-Verifier can also serve as a proxy for estimating task progress. We build an extension for Claude Code, enabling developers to monitor and improve their own agentic systems. Finally, we show that LLM-as-a-Verifier can provide dense feedback for RL, improving the sample efficiency of SAC and GRPO on robotics and mathematical reasoning benchmarks.

Predicting object dynamics (i.e., world modeling) is a fundamental challenge for robotic manipulation, and modeling deformable objects presents a particularly difficult case due to their high-dimensional state spaces and complex material properties. While current world models approach this through two distinct paradigms: learning the dynamics over the 2D pixel space or more explicit 3D geometric space. A systematic understanding of their relative strengths and limitations remains elusive due to the lack of diverse, large-scale real-world data. To address this, we present Deform360, a large-scale visuotactile dataset featuring 198 daily-life objects, 1,980 interaction sequences, and over 215 hours of observations from 41 surround-view cameras and bimanual tactile grippers to capture both global motion and contact-induced local deformations. Leveraging a novel markerless visuotactile 3D tracking pipeline to extract dense geometry and motion, we systematically evaluate current state-of-the-art world models, comparing 2D video models against 3D particle models. Finally, we provide a preliminary demonstration indicating the real-world applicability of our dataset by performing robot planning tasks on deformable objects. Our analysis reveals key insights into the trade-offs between structural priors and scalability, providing a solid benchmark for future research in generalizable deformable object-centric world modeling. Project website: https://deform360.lhy.xyz

Camera intrinsics are vital for recovering 3D structure from 2D video. However, most 3D algorithms assume fixed intrinsics throughout a video, an assumption that often fails for real-world in-the-wild videos. Consequently, estimating per-frame intrinsics from RGB images is critical for making 3D methods robust to videos with dynamic intrinsics. InFlux previously advanced this research direction by establishing the first real-world benchmark with per-frame ground truth intrinsics for dynamic intrinsics videos. Nevertheless, existing methods remain inaccurate due to two obstacles: (i) training data is scarce and lacks intrinsics diversity; and (ii) benchmarks, including InFlux, have limited scene and camera motion diversity, making it difficult to properly evaluate methods. To address both gaps, we present InFlux++, consisting of two components. InFlux++ Synth is a large-scale procedurally generated synthetic video dataset with 441K+ annotated frames from 1841 high-resolution videos, providing accurate per-frame ground truth intrinsics for training dynamic intrinsics prediction models; a subset also includes per-frame pose, depth, and normals. The videos feature rich intrinsics diversity through changes in camera zoom and focus, as well as dynamic objects and realistic rendering effects such as lens distortion and defocus blur. InFlux++ Real is a large-scale real-world benchmark that extends InFlux with 514K+ newly captured frames across 334 high-resolution videos, spanning a wider range of scenes and camera motions. Finetuning existing intrinsics prediction methods on InFlux++ Synth consistently improves focal length estimation across both InFlux++ Real and InFlux, suggesting that synthetic supervision is promising for RGB-based intrinsics prediction. For the dataset, benchmark, code, videos, submission instructions, and live leaderboard, please visit https://influx.cs.princeton.edu/ .

We study finite-horizon queue peaks in generalized switches, a standard stochastic-network model in which many queues share constrained service resources. Arrivals may be dependent, nonstationary, and responsive to the system history; the only load condition is uniform interior slack, meaning the conditional mean arrival vector stays in a fixed contraction of the capacity region. We show that this slack reshapes the finite-time peak law for drift-minimizing scheduling policies such as MaxWeight. The square-root envelope that is sharp without slack persists only up to a geometry-dependent threshold; beyond that threshold, the running maximum grows only logarithmically with the horizon, both with high probability and in expectation. The mechanism is self-normalization: in the current queue direction, the projected fluctuation scale is normalized by the stabilizing drift scale. This removes capacity geometry from the logarithmic coefficient, while geometry remains in the threshold. Matching lower bounds show that both the logarithmic term and a geometric threshold are unavoidable. When finite-time state-space collapse is available, the threshold can be sharpened using local bottleneck geometry. For generalized input-queued switches, we obtain finite-time peak bounds with tight logarithmic coefficients. Simulations illustrate the two-phase envelope, local geometric refinements, and variance-sensitive improvements predicted by the theory.

Visual generators excel at rendering, but they confidently fabricate what they do not know. User requests are unbounded, evolving, and deeply long-tailed: new characters, trending entities, post-cutoff events, and more. This world-knowledge bottleneck is structural: generators are trained on fixed corpora, but the visual world is open-ended. We construct SearchGen-20K and SearchGen-Bench, with 20,839 prompts spanning twelve failure categories and twenty-two domains, paired with a pre-executed multimodal SearchGen-Corpus-1M to support offline, reproducible research. On SearchGen-Bench, frontier open generators score only 21 to 28 out of 100, a 40-point collapse invisible to existing benchmarks. The natural remedy is to employ search tools, enabling agentic visual generation. However, we find that naive search fails: it retrieves indiscriminately, injecting noise into prompts the generator already handles. We trace the root cause to a generator-specific, evolving knowledge boundary: the divide between what a generator can internalize through training and what must remain in external context. Although this boundary is hard to specify in advance, we show that it is discoverable through a teach-then-search co-training framework. Even a minimal version of this co-training recipe produces monotonic improvement, laying the foundation for recursive self-improvement in visual generation that can meet world-knowledge-grounded requests. We release the full dataset, co-training corpus, and search corpus as a replayable harness for tool-augmented, world-knowledge-grounded visual generation.

What does a discrete diffusion model learn: a denoiser, a score ratio, or a bridge plug-in predictor? At the level of jump rates, these are one object in different coordinates, and reading a neural network in the wrong coordinate changes the process being trained and sampled. Starting with a rigorous derivation of the continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC) ELBO for any noising process, boundary terms included, we prove the Oracle Distance theorem: the negative ELBO is exactly equal to the data entropy plus the path KL from the oracle reverse process to the learned one, not merely a bound. Its unique optimizer is therefore the conditional expectation of the true reverse jump rate given the current noisy state, and its irreducible cost is the rate at which the forward process Z_t destroys information about the clean data Z_0, -ddtI(Z_0; Z_t), so every noising process shares the same best achievable negative ELBO: the data entropy. For sequences with token-factorizing noise, the oracle projection yields three exact coordinates for the optimizer: denoiser, cavity (bridge plug-in), and score, with closed-form conversions among them. This framework identifies which law each loss in the literature actually optimizes, recovering MDM, UDM, SEDD, and GIDD as special cases; explains why denoiser and cavity coincide for masked diffusion but not for uniform diffusion; proves that a denoiser parameterization makes the uniform ELBO diverge at initialization while the bridge plug-in stays finite; and calibrates ELBO implementations exactly at initialization. Every identity is verified numerically, without approximation, on an exactly solvable model.

In deep learning for tabular data, efficient ensembles of multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) have recently emerged as effective and practical architectures. Existing methods of this kind use the same hyperparameters for all underlying MLPs, which requires hyperparameter tuning for achieving the best performance. In this work, we introduce TabPack, an efficient MLP ensemble with strong out-of-the-box performance and reduced reliance on traditional tuning. In a single run, TabPack samples and trains many MLPs with different hyperparameters efficiently in parallel and selects ensemble members on the fly during training. Thus, TabPack only requires specifying ranges from which to sample MLP hyperparameter rather than exact hyperparameter values, which naturally demands less precision for good performance. In experiments on medium-to-large public datasets, TabPack with default settings performs on par with extensively tuned prior methods, thus substantially reducing effort and compute resources needed to achieve competitive results on tabular tasks. Notably, running the default TabPack configuration on a modern MacBook took less time than tuning some baselines on an industry-grade GPU.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) deployed as situated agents in high-resolution visual environments require active perception -- the ability to dynamically decide where to look through operations like zooming, cropping, and panning. However, current training paradigms produce models that mimic the surface form of such operations without functionally depending on their outputs, a phenomenon we term lazy perception. We trace this to a fundamental learning asymmetry: when coarse global views combined with language priors suffice for moderate accuracy, the model has no incentive to learn harder multi-step visual search. If a model can succeed without actively looking, it will never learn to look. This motivates Starve to Perceive, a training paradigm that constrains visual bandwidth -- restricting each observation to a tight token budget so that no single view suffices for task completion, making active perception the only viable strategy. Despite requiring no auxiliary losses, reward shaping, or architectural changes -- serving as a minimal, plug-in modification to standard post-training pipelines -- models trained under perceptual starvation achieve substantial gains of 5% average relative improvement across diverse benchmarks.

Long-horizon agentic LLMs are increasingly limited by finite context windows, as extended interaction trajectories can exceed the maximum context length before a task is completed. Context compaction offers a natural solution by summarizing previous interaction states and continuing the rollout under a compressed context, but incorporating compaction into reinforcement learning remains underexplored. We propose CompactionRL, a reinforcement learning strategy to train long-horizon agentic LLMs with context compaction. Our approach jointly optimizes task execution and summary generation with token-level loss normalization and cross-trajectory generalized advantage estimation. This design enables the LLM agents to learn from compacted long-horizon trajectories. We train CompactionRL on top of open models and observe consistent performance gains on agentic coding tasks. CompactionRL enables the open GLM-4.5-Air model (106B-A30B) to achieve Pass@1 scores of 66.8% on SWE-bench Verified and 24.5% on Terminal-Bench 2.0, with absolute gains of 7.0 and 3.1 points, respectively. Built upon GLM-4.7-Flash (30B-A3B), CompactionRL improves Pass@1 by 5.5 and 6.8 points, reaching 56.0% on SWE-bench Verified and 20.2% on Terminal-Bench 2.0, respectively. CompactionRL is thus deployed in the RL pipeline for training the open GLM-5.2 model (750B-A40B).

While recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models show promise toward generalist manipulation policies, they struggle with long-horizon tasks due to their Markovian nature-relying solely on current observations. Hierarchical dual-system methods address this but suffer from a gap between high-level planning semantics and low-level execution kinematics. We introduce Cortex, a bidirectionally aligned embodied agent framework with a customized planning interface that conveys executable and tractable subtask plans from high-level VLM to low-level VLA. Specifically, we standardize manipulation subtasks into 32 canonical skill primitives and inject tractability principles, such as representative object attributes and improved trajectory reachability, into the data generation pipeline. This enables automatic annotation of over 4k hours of open-source video data and generation of 30 hours of simulation data. We further devise an event-balanced sampling strategy to construct training data for fine-tuning the framework to better handle planning ambiguity during subtask transitions, enhanced by carefully designed harness engineering from task contexts to skill constraints during inference. Both open-loop VLM and closed-loop system evaluations demonstrate Cortex's efficacy, e.g., it outperforms monolithic baselines by 3.1% on Libero-long and 4.1% on RoboTwin. Notably, Cortex's generalist VLM enables zero-shot completion of unseen real-world long-horizon tasks, such as multi-stage chemistry experiments, by simply combining with a fine-tuned VLA-a capability infeasible through VLA fine-tuning alone.

Which internal mechanisms of a neural network can be replaced while preserving the computation it performs? Structured pruning asks for smaller deployable networks; causal abstraction asks for high-level models that commute with interventions. We introduce causal mechanism reduction (CMR), a framework that treats a trained network as a deterministic structural causal model and replaces selected internal variables by constants or affine functions of retained variables. These replacements compile exactly into smaller dense networks by bias and weight folding, and induce reduced causal models testable with interchange interventions. We derive a unified second-order replacement-risk objective whose special cases recover mean replacement, variance-based pruning (VBP), logit-distortion scoring, and affine neuron merging, together with a margin-based certificate linking logit distortion to interchange-intervention agreement. The framework also exposes a basic invariance requirement: functionally identical ReLU networks should induce the same reduction. Under exact positive-scaling reparameterizations, VBP's kept set collapses to chance-level overlap while the logit-distortion score is exactly invariant. Empirically, CMR variants are competitive with VBP under matched fine-tuning of DeiT-Tiny on ImageNet-100; the clearer separation appears in the invariance and interchange tests, where the logit-distortion score preserves kept sets and consistently improves distributional fidelity. CMR thus gives pruning, compilation, and causal-abstraction verification a common object to optimize and verify.

Recent advances in video diffusion models have enabled either long single-view generation through temporal autoregression, or short multi-view synthesis through bidirectional attention. However, generating long, multi-view consistent videos of dynamic scenes remains unsolved. In this work, we present MV-Forcing, a framework that composes temporal and view-wise autoregression within a single diffusion model by introducing a 4D geometric bridge between sequentially generated views. Our key insight is that an autoregressive 3D reconstruction model naturally interfaces between autoregressively generated views. Given a completed source view, we reconstruct its 3D structure and render a geometric prior of the next target viewpoint, which the diffusion model refines into a high-quality video. To extend generation beyond the teacher's fixed temporal window, we introduce a joint denoising regime where both view slots are initialized from noise during training, enabling temporally unbounded generation. We distill the model via Distribution Matching Distillation with Spatio-Temporal Self-Forcing, closing the train-inference exposure bias gap for both temporal and view-sequential autoregression. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world data demonstrate that MV-Forcing produces geometrically consistent multi-view videos of dynamic scenes at arbitrary lengths and viewpoint counts using a single few-step student model.

Occupancy ratios correct distribution shift in offline reinforcement learning and are central to off-policy evaluation. Existing primal-dual and minimax methods typically estimate these ratios by enforcing occupancy-balance moments over a critic class. We propose fitted occupancy-ratio evaluation (FORE), a fitted fixed-point method that characterizes the discounted occupancy ratio through an adjoint Bellman recursion. At each iteration, FORE solves a single-level density-ratio objective on one-step-transition data, thereby projecting the adjoint Bellman image onto a log-ratio class in Kullback--Leibler (KL) divergence. Unlike analyses of fitted Q-evaluation, which typically require value-function realizability together with Bellman completeness or projected-operator stability, our central approximation condition is just realizability of the discounted occupancy ratio itself. Under this condition, the population KL-projected recursion contracts in relative entropy toward the true ratio by virtue of the adjoint Bellman operator being a KL-contraction. For the empirical recursion, we establish finite-sample regret bounds that yield convergence in KL up to log-ratio approximation error and a statistical error governed by the complexity of the ratio hypothesis class. The fitted ratio supports direct value estimation by reward reweighting, occupancy-weighted fitted Q-evaluation, and doubly robust estimation that combines the fitted ratio with a fitted Q-function. Together, these results identify discounted occupancy-ratio realizability as a sufficient condition for offline policy evaluation without any completeness assumptions.

3D reconstruction and generation are commonly tackled by separate paradigms: pixel-based regression for reconstruction, and latent diffusion for generation. Recent works attempt to unify them in latent space, but with notable drawbacks: the diffusion objective is defined on latent features rather than the underlying 3D representation, and both branches suffer from information loss introduced by latent encoding, while requiring a pretrained Variational Autoencoder (VAE) or Representation Autoencoder (RAE). In this paper, we reformulate these two tasks under a unified pixel-space diffusion paradigm and introduce PixWorld, a single model that jointly addresses 3D reconstruction and generation. By supervising diffusion directly on rendered images, PixWorld removes the above limitations and aligns optimization with 3D scene fidelity. Beyond photometric and perceptual supervision that operates at the 2D image level and lacks 3D geometric awareness, we further introduce a geometry perception loss that aligns rendered views with their ground truth in the geometry-aware feature space of a pretrained 3D foundation model, providing 3D structural supervision. PixWorld consistently outperforms prior latent-space generation methods and matches state-of-the-art reconstruction methods, demonstrating the superiority of a unified pixel-space approach.

Agentic reinforcement learning requires assigning credit to environment-facing actions such as searches, clicks, edits, navigation commands, and object interactions. Standard GRPO uses the final verifier outcome as a uniform advantage over all action tokens. This outcome signal is useful but structurally incomplete: it punishes useful exploration in failed rollouts and reinforces redundant or regressive actions in successful rollouts. We propose TRIAGE, a role-typed credit assignment framework that adds a semantic role axis to outcome credit. A structured judge classifies each segment as decisive progress, useful exploration, no-progress infrastructure, or regression, and a fixed role-conditioned rule maps these labels to bounded segment-level process rewards. This keeps verifier outcomes as the source of optimization direction while correcting the two main blind spots of outcome-only credit. We further show that role-conditioned credit is the optimal segment-level correction expressible from role labels alone – a projection of the per-segment advantage residual onto the role variable – so that the fixed role constants reduce advantage estimation error whenever the judge is reliable, and we connect this to lower-variance policy gradients. Across ALFWorld, Search-QA, and WebShop, TRIAGE improves success rates over GRPO for two policy models and outperforms both a scalar judge-derived process reward and an outcome-supervised shared-backbone value baseline. Ablations show that the gain comes from role typing rather than merely adding dense rewards: reliable detection of regression inside successful trajectories is the dominant contributor, while exploration credit provides a consistent secondary gain; on completed ALFWorld and WebShop rollouts, TRIAGE also reduces environment-facing turns by an additional 10.4% and 14.8% relative to GRPO.

For robots to work reliably in commercial and industrial applications, can recent advances in agentic coding systems combine interpretable robot programming with the open-world adaptability of model-free policies? We focus on "Variational Automation" (VA), a class of tasks that have larger variations in object geometry and pose than fixed automation. Model-free policies often struggle to close the reliability gap for VA tasks, which must be executed persistently and reliably in commercial and industrial applications. Motivated by prior work on Task and Motion Planning (TAMP) and the Robot Operating System (ROS), we introduce Graph-as-Policy (GaP), a multi-agent coding harness that generates directed computation graphs with perception, planning, and control nodes from a Modular Open Robot Skill Library (MORSL). GaP then generates an internal simulation environment to rehearse task instances with different graphs in parallel to iteratively refine the graph structure and parameters to improve success rates and throughput. Evaluation with 8 new open VA task benchmarks, 4 in-simulation and 4 in real-world, suggests that GaP can achieve success rates that significantly outperform baselines. Details, code, and data can be found online: https://graph-robots.github.io/gap

Streaming speech-to-speech language models aim to answer spoken queries directly with synthetic speech. However, standard speech and text benchmarks do not capture whether these systems behave naturally in conversations, where timing, turn-taking, prosody, interpersonal stance, language and dialect consistency, and relationship-aware appropriateness jointly shape perceived quality. We introduce SPEARBench, a benchmark for evaluating naturalness in speech-to-speech language models from question-answer interactions. SPEARBench constructs controlled dialogue prompts from the Seamless Interaction corpus, runs inference across multiple models, and evaluates generated answers using a multidimensional protocol that covers response latency, interruptions, speech quality, ASR robustness, language and dialect consistency, emotional naturalness, interpersonal stance, and explainable distributional baselines. The benchmark includes original human answers as a reference condition and reports results for several contemporary models. Results show that current models can achieve high signal-level quality and low ASR error while still differing from human conversational behavior in latency, overlap, dialect preservation, emotional adaptation, and interpersonal stance dynamics.

Modern autoregressive ASR systems can emit timestamps as decoded tokens, enabling timestamped transcription without frame-level aligners or inference-time post-processing. We show that these generated timestamps can drift across long non-speech spans: the transcript may remain plausible, but the decoded time axis drifts away from the audio. We study this non-speech-induced timestamp drift with self-built gap and long-gap benchmarks across 15 evaluated timestamp-producing ASR and audio-language systems. Naive timestamp-corrected fine-tuning improves alignment but can severely degrade non-target ASR behavior, exposing a forgetting problem. We propose REDDIT(REplay-based Distribution eDITing), a lightweight two-stage post-training framework that corrects timestamps while avoiding this catastrophic forgetting: it first edits timestamp targets under the model's own replayed decoder context while matching the frozen base distribution on non-timestamp tokens, then applies a short edited-prefix refinement stage. In this framework, we construct correction supervision without human transcripts or human timestamp annotations by combining VAD-trimmed speech spans with inserted non-speech gaps and known concatenation offsets. On Whisper-tiny, 34.9 hours of targeted correction audio used and only 1.6% of model parameters updated, raising long-gap mIoU from 38.7% to 95.0% and reducing mixed-gap out-of-domain AAS from 2752 ms to 223 ms while preserving CV-en MER at 41.3% (versus 524.2% for ordinary SFT decoder tuning).

Personal agents are becoming persistent user-owned intermediaries: they remember preferences, filter platform-mediated information, use tools, and negotiate with services. Existing benchmarks evaluate tool use, web navigation, desktop control, personalization, recommendation, and evolving context, but rarely ask whether an agent preserves user sovereignty: advancing the user's current interests while respecting privacy, consent, evidence, user burden, and resistance to manipulative incentives. We introduce SovereignPA-Bench, an executable benchmark for evaluating user-owned personal agents under evolving intent, platform mediation, privacy boundaries, consent constraints, evidence requirements, and burden tradeoffs. The benchmark separates agent-visible ObservableState from evaluator-only HiddenLabels, reports component metrics for task success, alignment, privacy, consent, evidence, manipulation, burden, and auditability, and preserves paired scenario ordering for model and policy comparisons. We evaluate 120 sovereignty stress scenarios across 4 model families and 8 policy baselines, yielding 3,840 frozen-prompt trajectories with raw prompts, outputs, provider-form responses, parsed actions, recomputable metrics, hard-set analyses, qualitative cases, and a blinded 3-annotator audit over 240 items. Full-sovereign scaffolding improves sovereignty score over direct, memory-only, consent-only, evidence-only, ReAct/tool-use, safety-prompt, and judge-guard baselines while reducing privacy leakage, consent violation, over-concession, and manipulation capture. Human audit shows high agreement on privacy and consent and lower agreement on manipulation, identifying the subjective frontier of platform-persuasion judgments. These results show that personal-agent evaluation must move beyond task completion toward representative, consent-aware, evidence-grounded action.

Of 1,536 Gaussian release covariances we tested for single-layer hidden-state privacy, zero achieve both moderate utility and moderate privacy against an adaptive retrieval attacker. We prove a complementary Fisher-ball lower bound: every full-rank Gaussian release at O(1) Fisher utility admits a direction whose Mahalanobis signal grows linearly in hidden width, ruling out uniform Gaussian safety in the class and matching the empirical empty middle. The diagonal inverse-Fisher release Σ^⋆_diag(𝒦) = (2𝒦/d) diag(1/F_ii) is the unique minimax-optimal diagonal mechanism at first-order KL budget 𝒦 and the only release with worst-attacker top-1 ≤ 0.001 at every point of a 32 model-layer grid, but it sits on a privacy/utility edge rather than filling the middle. A generalized-eigen mechanism reaching 13× Pareto reduction under Euclidean retrieval collapses to 100% top-1 under the adaptive Mahalanobis attacker, and a full-trajectory sequence inverter recovers 94% of clean GPT-2 prefixes but 0% under Σ_diag. A split-memory transformer trained from scratch reaches G_Mah∈ [20, 33] at 90M and maintains a 6–24× advantage over same-budget GPT baselines from 30M to 1B at a fixed-token language-modeling loss penalty; pretrained models top out at 9.3. These results reframe hidden-state release from mechanism-design within the Gaussian class to architecture or release co-design.

Planning under uncertainty in continuous domains is essential for autonomous systems, yet computationally demanding. Tree-based search methods such as Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) remain popular, but their branching structure can require sampling budgets that grow exponentially with lookahead depth in the worst case. From a tree perspective, continuous state or action spaces become especially challenging, since the planner must decide where to search in an infinite branching hierarchy. We propose Graph Sparse Sampling (GSS), an online planning algorithm that shares sampled futures across many candidate decisions, rather than sampling separate successors for each candidate action. This branch-free graph exposes large GPU-friendly batches, while using heuristics to focus computation. We prove finite-sample performance guarantees for GSS covering full-rank or low-rank generative simulators via smoothed backups, and discrete or sampled continuous action spaces. Under suitable overlap, regularity, and action-coverage conditions, these bounds have polynomial dependence on the planning horizon, formalizing when shared futures can avoid the exponential horizon dependence of tree-shaped sparse sampling. We demonstrate continuous-control simulations where GSS substantially outperforms tree-based planners on long horizons or achieves near-optimal performance, supporting no-branching graph planning as a complementary design principle for online control.

Streaming 3D reconstruction relies on a compact recurrent scene state to process long image streams in linear time and bounded memory. However, repeated updates can gradually corrupt this state, causing reliable historical information to be overwritten by noisy or ambiguous observations. We introduce ReCal3R, a reliability-calibrated learning rate method for recurrent 3D reconstruction. Instead of directly applying a candidate learning rate, our method estimates state token reliability from the maintained scene state and uses it to calibrate a candidate learning rate derived from token alignment, state reconstruction residual, and recent update pressure. The resulting token-wise learning rate interpolates between a conservative base rate and the candidate rate, suppressing aggressive updates on unreliable tokens while preserving adaptation to informative frames. Applied to CUT3R as a training-free calibration rule, ReCal3R reaches strong performance on long sequences in pose, depth, and reconstruction quality, including a 3.7× reduction in ATE, with comparable runtime and memory. Code is available at: https://github.com/Powertony102/ReCal3R.

Attribution scores increasingly identify which neuron rows of a language model matter for applications such as pruning, interpretability, and editing for safety, yet whether they identify causally important rows is rarely tested directly. We address this with two paired audits built on one-shot neuron-row zeroing. We first audit selectors at the language-modeling level: attribution methods substantially outperform activation and magnitude-based baselines at identifying dispensable rows across five LLMs. We then adapt the same intervention into a behavior test by driving it with a contrastive harmful-versus-benign signal; the attributed rows are sufficient to install refusal on hate and crime while keeping benign over-refusal low and preserving language model fluency, and specific in that layer-matched random controls at the same depths fail. Highly rank-stable selectors can be among the least causally valid. Refusal moreover lives in a redundant subspace, where different attribution methods install it through largely disjoint row sets, so the recovered edit is one realization of a sufficient set rather than a unique mechanism. Together, these findings show that rank-stability proxies miss the kinds of selector failures a direct causal audit can surface.%

Monocular-to-stereo conversion synthesizes stereoscopic content from 2D videos for immersive 3D experiences. In modern Depth-Image-Based Rendering (DIBR) approaches, stereo inpainting of disocclusions is the critical bottleneck. Training-based methods achieve superior quality but rely on scarce stereo pairs or synthetic data with domain gaps. We address this through the first self-supervised framework learning from monocular videos via cycle consistency. Our key contribution is the Geometric Reciprocity Theorem (GRT): under the nearest-neighbor DIBR formulation, the disocclusion mask when synthesizing a target view equals the mask of pixels lost when warping back from target to source, enabling analytical computation of test-time disocclusion masks directly from monocular images. This yields train-test consistency for the stated warping formulation, supporting self-supervised learning from unlimited monocular videos and substantial improvements over training-free and supervised state-of-the-art methods. Project page: https://visual-ai.github.io/grt/

Watermarking methods embed imperceptible and verifiable signals into text generated by large language models (LLMs). Existing approaches include zero-bit schemes for distinguishing synthetic text from human writing and multi-bit schemes for embedding metadata. However, current multi-bit watermarking methods do not allow selective disclosure: verifying any part of the watermark requires revealing the entire embedded message. This lack of control leads to unnecessary information exposure and raises privacy concerns. We propose Hierarchical Vocabulary Routing (HeRo), a watermarking framework that enables selective disclosure of embedded metadata. The method recursively partitions the vocabulary and distributes watermark information across hierarchical layers, so that different verifiers can decode only the portions of the payload corresponding to their access level. We show that the proposed scheme preserves the unbiasedness of the underlying sampling process and thus maintains text quality. Experiments demonstrate that our framework supports fine-grained access control while achieving high detection accuracy and low latency. Code is available at https://github.com/xuyangc03/hero-watermark.

We introduce the first multiplayer world model for highly dynamic environments governed by complex physical interactions. Whereas single-player world models treat the other agents as part of the environment, ours conditions on the action streams of multiple agents, learning to attribute changes in the scene to the correct player and to stay coherent under arbitrary combinations of their actions. We study this problem in the game of Rocket League, where players compete and cooperate under fast, tightly coupled dynamics. Trained on 10,000 hours of gameplay collected with publicly available bots, our 5-billion-parameter latent diffusion model generates four-player matches in real time, producing 20 frames per second on a single Nvidia B200 GPU. Although trained only on short clips, its rollouts stay stable far beyond the training horizon: distributional quality holds steady out to five minutes, the longest horizon we measure, and in practice we observe rollouts continuing for hours with no sign of collapse. We systematically investigate the central design choices: the video codec, the generative objective, and the multiplayer conditioning scheme. In addition, we characterize how behavior changes with model and data scale, including the capabilities that emerge and the failure modes that persist. We further develop targeted evaluations that probe the model's physical understanding rather than visual appearance alone. To support continued research on multiplayer world models, we release our dataset, our full training and inference codebase, and a live demo.

Open-vocabulary 3D scene understanding aims to segment 3D scenes beyond predefined categories by transferring semantic knowledge from vision-language models. Existing methods have advanced this task by lifting language-aligned 2D features into 3D, yet they often rely on context-independent semantic representations, leaving object relationships underexplored for contextual refinement. We propose RelGraphOV, a relationship-aware framework that uses 3D scene graphs to enhance open-vocabulary 3D understanding. Our method constructs relational scene graphs from multi-view observations by leveraging vision-language reasoning to infer object relationships and prune geometrically implausible connections, without manual relationship annotations. To aggregate relational context while avoiding feature interference, we introduce an Adaptive Gated Dual-Stream Contextual GAT that separates dense geometric features and semantic CLIP embeddings, performs edge-guided message passing, and adaptively fuses complementary semantics. A hierarchical contrastive objective further promotes instance-level consistency and category-level discrimination. Experiments on ScanNetV2, ScanNet200, ScanNet++, and Replica demonstrate strong performance and generalization ability. Project Page: https://cxavireh.github.io/relgraphov-projectpage

While feedforward 3D reconstruction excels at efficient novel view synthesis, it typically falters when faced with scenes under varying illumination. To this end, we introduce WildSplat, the first feedforward 3D Gaussian Splatting framework capable of appearance-conditioned novel-view synthesis for unposed in-the-wild images. To handle inconsistent photometric conditions, we propose a dual-branch architecture that explicitly decouples geometry from appearance. The geometry branch extracts an appearance-invariant 3D structure and jointly predicts camera poses. To govern the rendering appearance, the appearance branch injects target appearance cues into the content features via a globally pre-modulated cross-attention mechanism. To further prevent feature entanglement, we introduce a joint multi-reference training strategy that stabilizes the training process. Extensive experiments show that WildSplat surpasses existing optimization-based and feedforward methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance in in-the-wild novel view synthesis and appearance editing from sparse inputs in a single forward pass.

Despite rapid progress in interactive world models (IWMs), existing benchmarks evaluate action following only at trajectory level and ignore memory and interaction physics. We introduce WorldRoamBench, an open-world benchmark for long-horizon stability across four dimensions, each with tailored innovations: (i) Action: per-frame action metric bypassing cross-model semantic scale disparity and exposing failures hidden by trajectory; (ii) Vision: segment-based drift metric capturing non-monotonic mid-sequence collapse missed by start-vs-end comparisons; (iii) Physics: controllability-gated evaluation over mechanics, optics, and 3D consistency, scoring plausibility under faithful action execution; (iv) Memory: action-decoupled protocol evaluating scene memory via transition-localized 3D point-cloud reconstruction and subject memory via tracking-plus-VLM reasoning. The benchmark comprises 600+ test cases across Nature, Urban, and Indoor scenes in first/third-person views with WASD 10-60s continuous interaction. Evaluating 10+ open/closed-source models reveals none reliably satisfies all dimensions; even the best achieves only moderate scores. Advances on WorldRoamBench are steps toward IWMs that are stable, physically grounded, memory-faithful, and deployable in real-world applications.

We propose OptiAgent, a multi-agent framework that, given a natural language description of an Operations Research problem, is able to output a solver-ready mathematical formulation as well as executable code. Our architecture prioritizes the mathematical modeling step, where dedicated agents extract structures, such as decision variables and constraints, enabling iterative self-correction. We introduce a novel multi-loop validation architecture with four specialized feedback mechanisms, each targeting a distinct failure mode such as misinterpretation, structural defects, mathematical inconsistencies, validation failures, and code errors. Alongside accuracy, our modular design improves the process of solving optimization problems by improving transparency, as each agent exposes its reasoning and feedback, making the full modeling process auditable. Our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on 3 out of 4 benchmarks across LP, MILP, and Nonlinear Programming tasks, while remaining highly competitive on the remaining dataset.

Where and how language models (LMs) are deployed determines who can benefit from them. However, there are several challenges that prevent effective deployment of LMs in non-English-speaking and hardware constrained communities in the Global South. We call this challenge the last mile: the intersection of multilinguality and edge deployment, where the goals are aligned but the technical requirements often compete. Studying these two fields together is both a need, as linguistically diverse communities often face the most severe infrastructure constraints, and an opportunity, as edge and multilingual NLP research remain largely siloed. To understand the state of the art and the challenges of combining the two areas, we survey 232 papers that tackle this problem across the language modelling pipeline, from data collection to development and deployment. We also discuss open questions and provide actionable recommendations for different stakeholders in the NLP ecosystem. Finally, we hope that this work contributes to the development of inclusive and equitable language technologies.

We study the k-center clustering problem under demographic fairness constraints, where the point set is partitioned into groups, and the aim is to compute clusters that exhibit a given group proportion. Previous work in this direction assumes that the entire point set already respects the desired proportions or uses relaxed notions of fairness. In this work, we propose a model that facilitates the creation of clusters that exactly match given target ratios, even when the input point set does not. We combine the well-known fair clustering model initiated by Chierichetti, Kumar, Lattanzi, and Vassilvitskii (NeurIPS 2017) with the notion of outliers to obtain a practical combinatorial framework that provides constant-factor approximate solutions for all proportion settings from 1:1 for two groups to t_1:t_2:…:t_m for m≥ 2 groups, where t_1,…,t_m are integers. We implement and evaluate our algorithms, compare different variants, and provide evidence of the practicability of this approach.

Clinical decision-making in oncology requires predicting dynamic disease evolution, a task current static AI predictors cannot perform. While world models (WMs) offer a paradigm for generative prediction, existing medical applications remain limited. Existing methods often rely on stochastic diffusion models, focusing on visual reconstruction rather than causal, physiological transitions. Furthermore, in medical domain, models like MeWM typically ignore patient-specific temporal and clinical contexts and lack a feedback mechanism to link predictions to treatment decisions. To address these gaps, we introduce CLARITY, a medical world model that forecasts disease evolution directly within a structured latent space. It explicitly integrates time intervals (temporal context) and patient-specific data (clinical context) to model treatment-conditioned progression as a smooth, interpretable trajectory, and thus generate physiologically faithful, individualized treatment plans. Finally, CLARITY introduces a novel prediction-to-decision framework, translating latent rollouts into transparent, actionable recommendations. CLARITY demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in treatment planning. On the MU-Glioma-Post dataset, our approach outperforms recent MeWM by 12\%, and significantly surpasses all other medical-specific large language models.

3D Gaussian Splatting has demonstrated remarkable potential in novel view synthesis. In contrast to small-scale scenes, large-scale scenes inevitably contain sparsely observed regions with excessively sparse initial points. In this case, supervising Gaussians initialized from low-frequency sparse points with high-frequency images often induces uncontrolled densification and redundant primitives, degrading both efficiency and quality. Intuitively, this issue can be mitigated with scheduling strategies, which can be categorized into two paradigms: modulating target signal frequency via densification and modulating sampling frequency via image resolution. However, previous scheduling strategies are primarily hardcoded, failing to perceive the convergence behavior of scene frequency. To address this, we reframe the scene reconstruction problem from the perspective of signal structure recovery and propose SIG, a novel scheduler that synchronizes image supervision with Gaussian frequencies. Specifically, we derive the average sampling frequency and bandwidth of 3D representations, and then regulate the training image resolution and the Gaussian densification process based on scene frequency convergence. Furthermore, we introduce Sphere-Constrained Gaussians, which leverage the spatial prior of initialized point clouds to control Gaussian optimization. Our framework enables frequency-consistent, geometry-aware, and floater-free training, achieving state-of-the-art performance by a substantial margin in both efficiency and rendering quality in large-scale scenes. The code is available at: https://github.com/weiyixue999/Signal_Structure_Aware_Gaussian

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is effective when the current policy already samples useful reasoning trajectories, but it stalls on hard prompts whose correct solution modes lie outside the student's on-policy support. We propose TREK (Teacher-Routed Exploration via Forward KL), a simple staged procedure that uses distillation not for imitation but for exploration support expansion. A key advantage of TREK is its generality: because it only consumes verified output trajectories, it can use an external black-box teacher, a white-box teacher, or the same model given additional inference-time context, and it can efficiently identify which hard-prompt samples are most worth consolidating even when teacher internals are unavailable. TREK first identifies prompts where the unaided student has very low pass rate, queries a proposal source to produce verified candidate solutions, keeps the top-r proposals ranked by current student likelihood, applies a short forward-KL phase to pull those verified modes into the student's support, and then returns to standard on-policy GRPO refinement. On mathematical reasoning, TREK with DeepSeek-V4 proposals improves Qwen3 models across all tested scales on AIME 2024 and AIME 2025; for Qwen3-8B, it improves AIME 2025 from 36.9 to 40.3 and AIME 2024 from 47.9 to 51.1 (avg@16), while the self-context variant reaches 38.5 and 49.6 without an external teacher. On agentic tasks, TREK raises ALFWorld success rate from 75.8 to 82.8 and ScienceWorld success rate from 12.5 to 26.7; notably, on the hardest task types, TREK achieves high success rates early in training while unaided GRPO requires substantially more optimization steps to reach comparable levels.

Diffusion-based text-to-image models are increasingly used for urban analysis and scenario generation, but their geographic knowledge and representational biases remain poorly understood. We evaluate FLUX 1-schnell and Stable Diffusion 3.5-Large in the United States by generating 150 street-view images for each state, each state capital, and a generic "USA" prompt. Images are embedded with DINO-v2 ViT-S/14 and compared with Fréchet Inception Distance (FID). Pairwise FID clustering shows that geographically proximate states and capitals often group together, indicating implicit geographic structure. However, the generic ``USA'' prompt collapses this diversity into a metropolitan stereotype: frontier, desert, tropical, rural, and small-city environments are underrepresented or distant in FID space. These results show that diffusion models can encode fine-grained geography while still reproducing narrow national-scale visual stereotypes.

Video spatial reasoning requires accumulating viewpoint-dependent evidence over time while retaining information useful to the question being asked. Existing spatial video-language models improve geometric perception and long-range context modeling, but often treat memory as a generic temporal cache, which can introduce redundant or irrelevant evidence and weaken long-horizon reasoning. We propose Q-GeoMem, a question-guided geometric memory framework for video spatial reasoning. Q-GeoMem injects camera-conditioned geometry into visual tokens and maintains two complementary memories: a Fine-Grained Context Bank for recent dense features and camera states, and a Semantic-Geometric Evidence Bank for compact long-range evidence. For each candidate frame, a calibrated Q-Former estimates question relevance, while novelty and evidence utility are recomputed with respect to the active evidence bank. The resulting relevance-novelty utility controls capacity-based replacement and serves as an attention bias during memory reading. During reasoning, both memories are read before update and adaptively fused with the current frame representation. Extensive experiments across two in-domain and five out-of-distribution benchmarks, and controlled memory analyses show that Q-GeoMem achieves state-of-the-art performance in the evaluated settings and validate the effectiveness of question-guided geometric evidence selection.

Evaluating LLM agents on benchmarks like SWE-Bench and GAIA can be expensive, time-consuming, and requires complex infrastructure. A single evaluation can cost thousands of dollars and take days to complete. In contrast, non-agentic LLM benchmarks that test individual capabilities (e.g., reasoning, code generation) are fast and cheap to run. In this paper, we investigate whether performance on expensive agentic benchmarks can be accurately predicted by the performance on a small, carefully selected subset of atomic evaluation instances. We introduce PACE, a framework that constructs proxy benchmarks by selecting instances from existing non-agentic evaluations whose aggregate scores most reliably predict model performances on agentic benchmarks. Given a pool of candidate instances spanning atomic capabilities, PACE fits a regression that maps a model's scores on a compact subset of source instances to its score on the target agentic benchmark. The subset itself is curated by combining two complementary instance-selection strategies, target-relevance local selection and globally informative global selection. We apply PACE to the 4 target agentic benchmarks in this paper, which yields PACE-Bench, the concrete proxy benchmark that we evaluate in the paper. Experiments across 14 models, 4 agentic benchmarks, and 19 non-agentic benchmarks show that PACE-Bench predicts agentic scores with leave-one-out cross-validation (LOOCV) mean absolute error (MAE) under 4%, Spearman correlation above 0.80, and pairwise model-ranking accuracy around 85%, all at much less than 1% of the full agentic evaluation cost. We further analyze the selected proxy instances, revealing which skills each agentic benchmark uniquely demands. PACE enables practitioners to obtain reliable estimates of agentic performance during model development, selection, and routing, without the overhead of full agent evaluation.

Semantic Multi-Object Tracking (SMOT) is evolving from purely geometric localization toward comprehensive video understanding. However, existing paradigms predominantly rely on closed-set interaction tags and fragmented perception pipelines, creating a bottleneck that prevents the full utilization of Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for dynamic scenes. In this paper, we elevate SMOT from rigid classification to an open-ended generative reasoning task. To support this paradigm shift, we introduce Grand-SMOT, a large-scale benchmark featuring high-density, dual-stream narratives. This dataset explicitly decouples micro-level individual dynamics from macro-level environmental contexts, directly resolving the semantic scarcity of prior tracking datasets. Furthermore, we propose LLMTrack, a unified MLLM-driven framework for dynamic SMOT. Guided by a verifiable “Macro-Understanding-First” mechanism, LLMTrack employs a Spatio-Temporal Fusion Module to compress discrete geometric trajectories into continuous semantic tokens, effectively suppressing temporal hallucinations in long-sequence tracking. Extensive experiments, utilizing a novel decoupled evaluation protocol, validate that LLMTrack achieves state-of-the-art geometric tracking robustness while delivering a qualitative leap in generative semantic reasoning. The code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/liaopan-lp/LLMTrack-GrandSMOT.

Siamese verification networks are widely used to compare items such as faces, cars, or signatures. In these scenarios, the network is trained to learn an embedding space in which similar objects are mapped closer together, while dissimilar objects are mapped further apart. Two objects are considered to belong to the same class (e.g., the same person in two different images) when the distance between their embeddings falls below a predefined threshold. Defining this threshold, however, is a non-trivial task and typically requires labeled data. In this work, we assume that the distribution of distances produced by a siamese verification network can be approximated by a bimodal function. Based on this assumption, we propose an unsupervised method to determine the verification threshold by identifying the minimum point between the two modes. The proposed approach does not require annotated samples, enabling the verification threshold to be updated directly in the deployment environment without the cost of manual labeling. We evaluate our method on four datasets: MNIST, CIFAR-10, LFW, and PKLot. The results indicate that the proposed approach achieves an average verification accuracy of 94%, comparable to the Equal Error Rate method, while eliminating the need for labeled data.

Vision-language models (VLMs) can follow complex textual instructions, yet they struggle to reason from purely visual context. In particular, current models fail to infer shared concepts from sets of example images and apply them to new inputs. We introduce Visual Concept Inference from Sets (VICIS), a task that evaluates this capability. Given a small context set of images sharing a concept and a query image, the model must generate new images that preserve the context-defined concept while remaining consistent with the query. We show that state-of-the-art VLMs perform poorly on this task, often ignoring the visual context or defaulting to biased generations. To address this gap, we propose a training framework and architecture that learn to infer visual concepts from image sets and extract concept-specific embeddings from queries. Experiments on synthetic data and large-scale ImageNet/WordNet data show that our model generates more accurate and diverse outputs and generalizes to unseen concepts and modalities such as sketches.

The two-tower model has been widely used for large-scale recommendation systems, particularly in the retrieval stage. Industry standards for training two-tower models typically involve in-batch and/or out-of-batch negative sampling. However, these methods often produce easy negatives that models can quickly learn, failing to sufficiently challenge the model. To address this issue, a novel self-supervised hard negative sampling technique is proposed that leverages a large language model (LLM) to generate hard negatives from the same cluster during model training. By utilizing the LLM to learn media representations, the proposed approach ensures that the generated negatives are more challenging and informative. This real-time sampling framework is designed for seamless integration into production models, capable of handling billions of training data points with minimal computational complexity. Experiments on public datasets, along with deployment to a large-scale online system, demonstrate that the proposed negative sampling technique outperforms widely used industry methods. Furthermore, analysis in industrial applications reveals that this sampling method can help break inherent feedback loops in recommendations and significantly reduce popularity bias.

Cerebral microbleeds (CMBs) are MRI markers of small vessel disease and the microbleed component of amyloid related imaging abnormalities (ARIA-H), but their small size, sparsity, and similarity to vessels, calcification-like foci, and artefacts make automated detection difficult. We propose CenSynCMB, a centre-guided and mimic-aware framework combining a 3D Attention U-Net, auxiliary centre-map supervision, false-negative-driven reweighting, and fold-wise physics-guided synthesis of positive CMBs and labelled hard negatives. Synthetic data expose the detector to compact lesions and common mimics without validation or test leakage. On VALDO Task 2, CenSynCMB achieved the best local-comparison lesion-level F1 (74.3%, p = 0.020); on external AIBL SWI, it achieved the highest local-comparison recall (88.5%, p = 0.0058) and F1 (65.0%, p = 0.0016). Together, these results support scalable CMB candidate extraction in large, unlabelled MRI cohorts, while highlighting cohort-specific calibration as the next step toward reliable burden estimation.

The mechanisms behind LLMs' broad over-generalization beyond training examples remain unclear. Emergent misalignment (EM) offers a striking case study: finetuning on narrow tasks induces broad misalignment to semantically-unrelated test domains. In this work, we propose the Piggyback Hypothesis: the chat-template tokens can piggyback the finetuned behaviour onto out-of-domain queries. We validate this hypothesis by showing that subtle perturbations to the prefix (tokens preceding all user queries), or patching the prefix representations with those from the unfinetuned model, can restore alignment without changing the user query. Building on this finding, we propose Token-Regularized Finetuning (TReFT), which regularizes specific token representations during training to mitigate EM. Across different models and multiple EM-inducing datasets, TReFT reduces EM while preserving in-domain learning. On Llama-3.1-8B finetuned on the legal domain, TReFT achieves 33.5% more EM reduction than data interleaving with a retain set of aligned examples. We further show that TReFT extends to other narrow-finetuning settings, including abstention, tool use, and refusal (off-topic generalization is reduced by 54.3% on average), supporting the Piggyback Hypothesis. Broadly, our work highlights that LLMs may learn and generalize in unintended ways and suggests a path toward more constrained finetuning. It also calls for further study of how shared input features can piggyback model behavior across domains.

We present the first constant-amortized-time algorithms for generating all length-n necklaces and Lyndon words over a k-letter alphabet in colexicographic order, for arbitrary k≥ 2. Our approach introduces a novel class of words called quasinecklaces, which serve as an easily generated superset of necklaces through which all necklaces can be efficiently identified. We derive a formula for the number Q_k(n) of length-n quasinecklaces and show that Q_k(n) is proportional to the number of length-n necklaces, which is the key property needed to achieve constant amortized time. We also apply our results to efficiently generate a well-known de Bruijn sequence and efficiently generate necklaces and Lyndon words subject to a weight constraint.

As large language models (LLMs) are adopted into frameworks that grant them the capacity to make real decisions, it is increasingly important to ensure that they are unbiased. In this paper, we argue that the predominant approach of simply removing existing biases from models is not enough. Using a paradigm from the psychology literature, we demonstrate that LLMs can spontaneously develop novel social biases about artificial demographic groups even when no inherent differences exist. These biases result in highly stratified task allocations, which are less fair than assignments by human participants and are exacerbated in newer and larger models. In humans, emergent biases like these have been shown to result from exploration-exploitation trade-offs, where the decision-maker explores too little, allowing early observations to strongly influence impressions about entire demographic groups. To alleviate this effect, we explore a series of interventions targeting model inputs, problem structure, and explicit steering. While most interventions have limited effect, explicitly incentivizing exploration robustly reduces stratification, highlighting the need for better multifaceted objectives to mitigate bias. These results reveal that LLMs are not merely passive mirrors of human social biases, but can actively create new ones from experience, raising urgent questions about how these systems will shape societies over time.

We study why diffusion autoencoders can achieve similar image quality while learning substantially different latent structures. We trace this behaviour to optimisation dynamics; we analyse curves of image reconstruction against latent representation quality, revealing trajectories that organise around two distinct regimes early in training. Models in the reconstruction regime prioritise image fidelity early, whereas those in the disentanglement regime improve reconstruction and disentanglement more gradually. We hypothesise that this behaviour can be influenced by targeting shortcut pathways in the diffusion U-Net and controlling early noise-level exposure, thereby shaping the reconstruction-disentanglement trade-off during training. To steer optimisation toward stronger representations, we introduce SteeringDRL, combining gated residual U-Nets with a simple noise-level exposure curriculum for training. Across disentanglement benchmarks, SteeringDRL improves representation quality and reduces seed sensitivity. Our method further extends to spatial disentanglement in object-centric learning, improving segmentation quality on synthetic and real-world datasets.

As LLM agents evolve from single-user assistants into shared organizational infrastructure, new privacy risks emerge: inappropriate information may not only be exposed through outputs for external recipients, but also internally across users through inter-agent messages, shared memory and agents. These data spillage risks are not captured by existing privacy benchmarks grounded in contextual integrity (CI) as they focus primarily on either single-user settings or interactions between independently owned agents. We introducePiSAs (Privacy in Shared Agentic systems), a benchmark for assessing unintentional leaks with dual CI annotations: whether an information is appropriate for the task, and which users may legitimately access it. This enables direct measurement of cross-user spillage across agentic system components and interfaces, such as outputs, inter-agent communication, and memory. PiSAsis system-agnostic and supports evaluation across different agent topologies and memory regimes. We find that, although system design improves CI compliance, results are bottlenecked by incorrect LLM judgment calls: even state-of-the-art models fail to reliably filter inappropriate content or restrict transmission to authorized users. Our findings underscore the need for privacy-preserving strategies, beyond those studied in this work.

We introduce NatureBench, a cross-discipline benchmark of 90 tasks distilled from peer-reviewed Nature-family publications, designed to evaluate whether AI coding agents can move beyond reproduction toward discovery on real scientific problems. NatureBench is built on NatureGym, an automated pipeline that constructs a standardized, per-task containerized environment from a source paper, addressing the environment-fragmentation problem that has limited the credibility of prior agent-on-research benchmarks. Evaluating ten frontier agent configurations under a strict web-search-disabled protocol, we find that the strongest model surpasses SOTA on only 17.8% of tasks under the g>0.1 criterion. Analysis of method pathways reveals that agents succeed primarily through methodological translation, converting scientific tasks into familiar supervised prediction problems, rather than through genuine scientific invention. Failures are dominated by wrong method choice and insufficient compute budget, not by task misunderstanding. We release the benchmark, the NatureGym pipeline, and a public leaderboard with maintainer-side reproduction. Code: https://github.com/FrontisAI/NatureBench

Automated detection of intracranial aneurysms (IAs) from CT angiography (CTA) is severely hindered by high false-positive rates. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) rely on local pixel intensities, causing systematic confusion between saccular aneurysms and vascular bifurcations -- a problem especially acute for small lesions (<3 mm), where detection sensitivity falls below 60%. We propose a plug-and-play, topology-aware false-positive reduction framework evaluating the Smooth Euler Characteristic Transform (SECT) -- a directional representation encoding global 3D vascular geometry independently of intensity -- against persistence-based summaries (Persistence Images and Landscapes), tested on a stratified subset of the RSNA 2025 dataset. SECT achieves an AUC of 0.943, substantially outperforming direction-agnostic methods (AUC ~0.68), and exhibits a clinical performance inversion: it excels on the sub-3 mm cohort, maintaining 0.943 AUC and 78.5% sensitivity at 95% specificity. The representation is also scanner-agnostic, achieving 0.927 mean AUC under leave-one-scanner-out (LOGO) validation across four manufacturers. By capturing asymmetric geometric invariants rather than intensity profiles, SECT reliably resolves the primary structural confounder in IA detection, positioning it as a robust downstream filter for hybrid deep-learning diagnostic pipelines.

Large language models generate one token at a time, yet their responses show remarkably consistent length structure: step-by-step solutions converge in predictable token counts, retrievals stop after a few sentences, retractions extend responses by measurable amounts. We ask whether the model carries an internal estimate of how much response remains. Training minimal-capacity linear probes on frozen hidden states of three open-weight 7-8B models across seven completion-style datasets, we find three converging pieces of evidence. First, total response length is linearly decodable from the prompt's last hidden state alone, before any output is emitted. Second, probe directions trained on natural-language datasets transfer broadly, including to controlled synthetic completions never seen in training, outperforming a statistical baseline; the converse direction generally fails, and this asymmetry is itself informative. Third, on curated high-loss completions, the probe's per-position estimate shifts upward at the moment the model retracts and restarts a partial solution, a directional behavior no position-only predictor can reproduce (qualitative, not aggregate). We frame this as approximate estimation of remaining generation length, distinct from exact-counting impossibility results for transformers, and interpret it as evidence that LLMs maintain a plan-like internal representation of output length (decodable, not necessarily used causally).

In this work, we focus on the scenario of a robot-assisted emergency evacuation. We consider two capabilities relevant to such a setting. The first is opening doors ahead of the people being evacuated, so that their path toward an exit stays clear. The second is retrieving rescue equipment and delivering it to the emergency responders carrying out the evacuation. From a systems perspective, this involves several tasks at once. The robot must locate ADA-compliant door buttons and the rescue equipment it needs to retrieve. Additionally, it must remain aware of the people around it and adapt its behavior to them, so that it supports the evacuation rather than getting in the way. We address these demands with a behavior tree at the core of our framework. This structure is chosen for its ability to select high-level tasks based on environmental triggers, and to extend to new situations as they arise. We evaluate the system in 105 trials on the Toyota Human Support Robot, across five hardware and three simulation scenarios. These trials capture the decisions the robot must make in this setting: whether to press a door button, yield to a nearby person, walk through a door someone else is holding, or first retrieve rescue equipment before traversing the door. Overall, the system completes 97 of the 105 trials successfully. These results suggest our framework provides a practical basis for robotic assistance in broader emergency response tasks. Code and video demonstrations are available at https://github.com/AndrewSnowdy/hsr_mm_control.

Male infertility contributes substantially to the global infertility burden, and sperm analysis remains central to diagnosis, treatment planning, and assisted reproductive technology. Conventional semen evaluation, however, is labor-intensive, operator-dependent, and limited by inter- and intra-observer variability, motivating the development of objective and reproducible computational approaches. This review provides a comprehensive and perspective-oriented synthesis of artificial intelligence-driven sperm analysis, with a focus on computer vision, deep learning, multimodal fusion, robustness, and clinical translation. We first review task-specific methods for sperm detection and counting, tracking-based motility assessment, semantic and instance segmentation, morphology and defect classification, functional assessment, and genetic integrity evaluation. We then summarize public datasets, benchmarks, evaluation metrics, and emerging multimodal strategies that integrate microscopic images, time-lapse videos, CASA-derived parameters, DNA integrity assays, and clinical metadata. Beyond algorithmic performance, we discuss key barriers to real-world deployment, including data scarcity, cross-center domain shift, annotation inconsistency, interpretability, uncertainty calibration, privacy-preserving learning, and workflow integration. Finally, we outline a staged clinical translation roadmap spanning technical standardization, multicenter retrospective validation, silent prospective evaluation, human-in-the-loop clinical testing, ART outcome validation, regulatory approval, and post-market monitoring. By organizing the field from task-specific visual recognition to trustworthy multimodal reproductive intelligence, this review highlights both the progress and the unresolved challenges required to translate AI-driven sperm analysis into clinically meaningful decision support.

Model editing promises a fast, targeted way to correct post-deployment mistakes in medical vision-language models (VLMs) without costly retraining. However, existing multimodal model editing benchmarks focus on general-purpose tasks and do not reflect realistic clinical domain requirements and variability. To address this, we introduce M3Bench, a clinically grounded benchmark for multimodal model editing that evaluates whether an edit remains reliable, precise, and generalizable under the challenges of image and text variation, modality and protocol shifts, clinical knowledge composition, and temporal progression. M3Bench contains 16,276 questions spanning diverse anatomy, modalities, and specialties, and supports both single and sequential edits. By evaluating 4 representative editors across 6 medical and general VLMs, we find that no method excels across all criteria. Gradient-based editors achieve strong transfer but suffer from catastrophic locality violations, whereas memory-based methods preserve locality but lack compositional generality and exhibit high backbone-dependent hyperparameter sensitivity. We further attribute these failures to the latent space geometry of VLMs and how different editing methods shift its landscape. Overall, M3Bench establishes a rigorous clinical stress test for multimodal model editing and offers actionable guidance for safer post-deployment adaptation. The benchmark is publicly available at https://github.com/BioMed-AI-Lab-U-Michgan/M3Bench .

A core task in quantum anomaly detection is to compute an anomaly score that quantifies how strongly a test quantum state deviates from a given quantum dataset assumed to be normal. Classically, principal component analysis (PCA) for centered data computes the anomaly score by evaluating the test sample relative to the subspace spanned by the selected leading eigenvectors. However, for quantum data that lack a standard centering, explicitly recovering principal eigenvectors, constructing full Gram matrices, or loading quantum-random-access-memory-style data can be more costly than estimating the anomaly score itself. To avoid these costs, we propose Quantum Spectral Anomaly Detection (QSPADE), which computes PCA-like anomaly scores directly from the spectrum of the average state of the normal dataset. By replacing hard PCA rank selection with a smooth, temperature-controlled spectral threshold, QSPADE makes near-threshold spectral components contribute partially to the anomaly score. This makes the score vary continuously rather than jump when a borderline component is included or excluded, and makes it less sensitive to noise or arbitrary hard cutoffs near the threshold. In the zero-temperature limit, QSPADE recovers the hard-projector PCA score. The proposed measurement-based quantum detector can be calibrated with a sample complexity independent of the data dimension. Numerical simulations show that QSPADE behaves like kernel-PCA on encoded classical data and detects changes across a transverse-field Ising transition without predefined order parameters. Consequently, QSPADE gives an efficient framework for both quantum-kernel anomaly detection on encoded classical data and the monitoring of quantum-native systems where diagnostic observables are unknown.

Integrating complex, multi-omics data presents significant challenges. Existing approaches often face a trade-off between model interpretability and representational capacity, with most either relying on post-hoc interpretation or use linear models that may overlook complex interactions. We report Pathway Activity Autoencoders for the multi-omics setting, which embed prior knowledge via pathway-informed architectural constraints, fostering interpretability, while preserving representational power. Our multi-omic framework is applied in the context of breast cancer and is evaluated in survival prediction and subtype classification with results indicating a positive effect of integration. We conduct analysis of individual omics layer impact on end-task performance, revealing that gene, protein, and microRNA expression layers provide the strongest contribution. Repeatability studies indicate that, while dropout improves model robustness and consistency, excessive regularisation can reduce predictive performance. Finally, visualizations of the learned feature space illustrate the framework's intrinsic transparency and clinical relevance. The results underscore the value of multi-omic integration and delineate the impact of individual omics layers, establishing practical guidelines for integration within our framework. Overall, our pathway activity autoencoder frameworks yield superior latent representations that are biologically meaningful and are directly translatable into clinically relevant insights.