Action-conditioned world models are increasingly used as learned simulators for policy evaluation and improvement, yet their effectiveness rests on an unverified assumption: generated futures faithfully reflect arbitrary valid actions. Existing benchmarks are typically confined to expert demonstrations, leaving off-expert action following inadequately evaluated. To address this gap, we introduce WorldEcho, which probes action following over a broader action distribution using visual integrity and SE(3) trajectory alignment. Our diagnosis shows that current world models reasonably execute expert actions but struggle with diverse off-expert trajectories, either ignoring the commanded actions or producing visually invalid rollouts. We further propose WorldSync, which strengthens action following along three complementary axes: distributional coverage, representational grounding, and intervention-effect alignment. It broadens the training distribution over action consequences, grounds intermediate video representations in action-induced robot dynamics through an Action-Forcing Expert, and aligns predicted changes under action interventions with the corresponding changes in ground-truth futures. Experiments on RoboTwin benchmarks and real-robot tasks show that WorldSync improves WorldEcho metrics and serves as a more reliable simulator for iterative policy improvement, enabling policies to achieve higher success rates.

World action models (WAMs) improve robot control by modeling how observations evolve, but generating future observations at test time incurs substantial latency. Fast-WAM removes this process for efficiency; however, our matched implementations show lower generalization for Fast-WAM than for future-aware alternatives, especially with scarce robot demonstrations and in out-of-distribution scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce **LAWA**, a WAM architecture that uses compact latent actions as an operational representation of future intentions, enabling efficient test-time future imagination without generating future observations. Specifically, a discrete tokenizer enhanced by action-free pre-training produces manipulation-centric codebook targets. LAWA jointly denoises a continuous latent state anchored to these targets with executable action chunks while omitting the future-video branch at inference. On RoboCasa, LAWA achieves state-of-the-art average success rates of 65.6% and 80.8% in the few-shot and full data settings, improving over the matched Fast-WAM baseline by 9.6 and 4.5 points, respectively. It also preserves the performance level of the matched Joint-WAM variant while requiring 42.9% lower inference latency. LAWA also demonstrates competitive zero-shot robustness on LIBERO-Plus and superior performance on real-world tasks. These results show that future imagination need not be discarded: retaining it with compact latent actions yields an effective trade-off among performance, generalization, and latency. Code and models will be released.

Generative models are commonly ranked by Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) and Kernel Inception Distance (KID), yet FID's first-two-moment summary can miss distributional differences, and a reported scalar gap alone is not a calibrated test against sampling variation. FID's moment restriction has concrete consequences: on ImageNet, visually unrecognizable images optimized only to match the reference Inception mean and covariance obtain FID 24.7 versus 58.6 for held-out real images (lower is better). Moreover, FID and KID are scalar discrepancies that are unchanged when the two samples are exchanged and therefore do not encode the direction of a dispersion change: under-dispersion, as can occur in mode collapse, versus over-dispersion. We introduce ZID (Z-resolved Integrated Diagnostic), which combines six standardized location- and dispersion-sensitive arms from a rank graph (RISE) and Gaussian kernels (GPK at two bandwidths). Rather than asking one scalar to serve incompatible roles, ZID reports three linked outputs: an index for ranking departure magnitude, a permutation p-value for testing distributional equality, and a signed dispersion readout for diagnosis. In controlled experiments, ZID detects a broad range of departures, and its score tracks increasing severity along the corresponding sweeps, including cases in which FID is flat or reversed. On DiT-XL/2 and SiT-XL/2 guidance sweeps, ZID detects departure from real data, and its signed readout labels the high-guidance diversity collapse as under-dispersion.

Gaussian distributions are used to model uncertainty in signals and states, and Gaussian mixtures are often used when the underlying distribution is multimodal. Unlike a single Gaussian, a Gaussian mixture generally has no closed-form expression for differential entropy and therefore requires numerical approximation. We propose a Gauss--Hermite quadrature method for evaluating Gaussian mixture differential entropy. The quadrature order controls the numerical resolution of the approximation. The method is evaluated on one- and two-dimensional Gaussian mixture benchmarks against Taylor approximations, analytic entropy bounds, and numerical integration references. For repeated optimization over continuous actions, we also propose a Hermite polynomial surrogate in action space. In a radar pointing benchmark, its second-order form achieves substantially lower surrogate error and optimizer regret than a second-order Taylor surrogate based on local derivatives at the nominal action, while both methods use nine direct objective evaluations per replanning step. The Hermite surrogate also improves pointing performance in the tested benchmark.

Smart glasses are evolving from capture and display accessories into first-person intelligence platforms that connect human perception, persistent context, and digital or physical action. Their on-body viewpoint aligns with the wearer's vision, audition, motion, and hand-object interaction, but must operate under tight energy, thermal, privacy, and feedback constraints. Despite rapid progress in augmented reality, egocentric vision, multimodal models, human-computer interaction, and embodied intelligence, the literature remains fragmented across devices, tasks, and benchmarks. The key challenge is not whether a model can recognize, answer, remember, or act in isolation, but whether a complete system can sustain a reliable, temporally valid, correctable, and governable perception-state-interaction-action loop. This survey is the first to systematically study smart glasses through such a unified framework. We formalize first-person data flow and constrained task utility, characterize devices along eight verifiable hardware capability axes, organize the literature around seven interdependent foundational capabilities, and introduce an L0-L5 framework spanning capture, reactive perception, contextual assistance, persistent state, governed action, and embodied coupling. Across nine application scenes, we connect tasks with datasets, systems, products, stakeholders, failure consequences, and evidence gaps. We further present a nine-dimensional deployment framework, a claim-conditioned evaluation protocol, and an evidence ladder from controlled measurement to longitudinal field validation and audit. Together, these elements make smart glasses more comparable, deployable, and reproducibly evaluated, while outlining a roadmap toward trustworthy first-person intelligence.

Recursive self-improvement (RSI) remains hard in long-horizon tasks, where growing histories obscure the task state and misalign skill invocation. We introduce Recuris, a recursive Experiential-Working Memory architecture for long-horizon agent harnesses, in which Working Memory tracks task progress and guides skill selection from Experiential Memory, grounding skill use in current needs rather than the full history. This coupling also turns execution into structured evidence that localizes failures to specific memory components. Across tasks, a fixed Meta-Agent turns that evidence into localized, validation-gated updates to Skill Memory that reshape execution and yield new evidence, forming a bounded recursive memory-evolution loop. Across four long-horizon benchmarks and ten models, Recuris improves task success in 35 of the 37 completed model-benchmark pairs, carrying frontier models to SOTA-level task success: on tau-bench it adds +17.8 points to GPT-5.6 Sol and +15.6 to Claude Opus 5, taking Opus 5 to 87.9%, and +16.6/+13.5 points on Qwen3.6-27B/35B on SkillFlow. The advantage widens as the interaction horizon grows, to +32.2 points on the longest tasks, and common long-horizon failures fall by up to 80%. These results position recursively evolving memory as a scalable foundation for RSI, enabling agents to continuously transform accumulated experience into increasingly effective long-horizon behavior. Code: https://github.com/Gen-Verse/Recuris

This paper proposes a theoretical and empirical framework for understanding intelligence as a process of atomic compression and compositional reuse. It argues that scalable cognitive, biological, computational, and organisational systems reduce complexity by organising information into reusable units that can be recombined into higher-order structures. The central contribution is the Compression Calculus, a formal framework for comparing surface evidence with atomic representations and for describing how abstraction can compound across layers. The framework is evaluated on large, multi-source software corpora under an open-world concept model, showing substantial evidence-to-concept consolidation in two large projects, while a smaller third project remains below the target threshold. The analysis further identifies important boundary conditions: consolidation depends on corpus scale, evidence-unit definition, and concept identity, and the observed reduction is driven primarily by within-corpus recurrence rather than cross-source recurrence. The paper also develops a representational account of the meaning gap in contemporary generative systems, describing latent, context-dependent conceptual approximations as soft atoms that lack the persistent identity and compositional constraints of stable atomic units. This motivates an architectural view in which large language models function as dynamic fusion engines that navigate and compose persistent conceptual structures rather than serving as the sole repository of those structures.

Group-relative reinforcement learning waits for sibling rollouts of the same prompt, which is costly for long and variable tool-use trajectories. Single-stream Policy Optimization (SPO) removes this dependency with a persistent prompt-level value estimate, but its recipe whitens one advantage per trajectory before optimizing a token-mean actor loss. We show that trajectory centering generally does not center the token-weighted quantity consumed by the actor, and fix the mismatch by standardizing terminal-outcome advantages under the action-token measure. We additionally organize prompt evidence by the policy event that generated it rather than learner receipt order. Across matched runs on ALFWorld at two model scales and on Math-TIR, SPO++ improves online learning efficiency over SPO. A paired ablation identifies action-token-measure normalization as the strongest tested component.

Affine modular linear hashing is one of the simplest classical hash families. For a prime p > u, the hash function is obtained by choosing s,t uniformly from ℤ_p and mapping each key x ∈{0,…,u-1} to one of n bins by h(x) = [(sx+t) p] n. Despite its simplicity, the maximum load of linear hashing remains poorly understood. For n keys hashed into n bins, the best known upper bound is O((n log n)^1/3), whereas the best known lower bound is only Ω(log n / loglog n). We prove a lower bound of exp(Ω(log n / loglog n)) for universes of size n^1+o(1). Surprisingly, there is a key set for which this load holds not just in expectation, but for every random seed. The proof is driven by two simple reductions: one transfers lower bounds from a real version of linear hashing to modular linear hashing, and the other transfers arithmetic Kakeya constructions to real hashing. We further show that, for sufficiently large p, the expected maximum loads in the modular and real settings are essentially the same, giving an alternative route to an n^1/3+o(1) upper bound. Finally, we show that any uniform subpolynomial upper bound for either setting would imply a polynomial-length arithmetic Kakeya conjecture and hence the Kakeya conjecture for upper Minkowski dimension.

Lipschitz constants are a standard way to quantify the sensitivity of neural networks to small input perturbations, but computing them is difficult even for shallow ReLU networks. We study this problem for two-layer input-convex neural networks (ICNNs), a restricted architecture where nonnegative output weights enforce convexity. Computing the L_p-Lipschitz constant for these networks is equivalent to maximizing the dual norm over a zonotope. While L_1- and L_∞-norm maximization on zonotopes admit fixed-parameter and polynomial-time algorithms, respectively, the parameterized complexity of the remaining L_p-norms was open. We prove that, for every fixed p∈ (1,∞)∩ℚ, maximizing the L_p-norm over a zonotope in ℝ^d is W[1]-hard with respect to the dimension d. Moreover, our hardness results imply that brute-force enumeration algorithms are essentially optimal for this problem under the Exponential Time Hypothesis. By duality, the same hardness results hold for computing the L_p-Lipschitz constant of two-layer ReLU ICNNs. Our proof first establishes the result for the L_2-norm and then transfers the construction to arbitrary fixed p∈ (1,∞)∩ℚ using a suitable Taylor approximation. These results resolve the corresponding questions regarding the parameterized complexity status for zonotope norm maximization and two-layer ICNN Lipschitz constants. Our paper resolves an open problem posted at COLT'25. There are several independent concurrent papers resolving the same problem. Our paper prioritizes a clear exposition of the underlying mathematics and conceptual intuitions behind the proof. Additionally, we explicitly describe our research process including the use of LLMs.

The expansion of time-series data from sensors and monitoring systems has made compact representations increasingly important. Such representations should retain signal structure while cutting storage, transmission and computation costs. Adaptive Brownian Bridge-based Aggregation (ABBA) addresses this need by converting long numerical series into short symbolic sequences, but reductions in parameter storage and computational precision remain desirable. We propose Quantized ABBA (QABBA), a quantized version of ABBA. By quantizing the symbolic centers, QABBA reduces the parameter footprint and enables integer arithmetic while maintaining high reconstruction quality. We establish several error bounds for the additional approximation introduced by quantization: a dimension-free bound on the excess error of each segment, a time-domain reconstruction-error bound, a stability condition for symbolic assignment, and a rule for allocating bits between segment lengths and increments. The resulting symbolic strings can be passed directly to a pretrained large language model (LLM) without any extra time-series embedding layer. Experiments on the Monash regression archive, UCR Time Series Classification Archive, and UEA Multivariate Time Series Classification Archive demonstrate a practical trade-off among storage, reconstruction accuracy and downstream predictive performance. QABBA therefore provides an error-controlled, low-precision symbolic representation for time-series compression and LLM-based analysis. The software is publicly available at https://github.com/inEXASCALE/qabba.

Audited against policy-conditional ground truth from executed replay in a single-agent tool environment (ALFWorld), none of the step-level credit signals we audit -- LLM-judge scores, outcome-conditioned logprob ratios, or the policy's own confidence -- shows reliable incremental fidelity beyond its own marginal-matched shuffled control. Correcting for replay-target reliability leaves implicit fidelity bounded near zero and judge fidelity inconclusive at the achieved target reliability. Existing evaluations grade these signals against annotated step *correctness*; we audit them against step *contribution* -- what re-sampling the policy's own alternatives at each decision point and rolling forward changes about the outcome -- and they come apart. The ground truth is structured: 30.5% of decision points where it is defined exhibit a nonzero replay contrast at the achieved sampling resolution, and measurability is model-dependent -- the fraction of points with no policy-supported counterfactual differs twofold (13.1% vs. 26.8%) between two similar-scale policies. The failure mode is identifiable: implicit credit echoes the policy's fluency (median rank correlation +0.75, replicating at +0.70 in a second family under a corrected instrument), while outcome conditioning adds no causal information (partial correlation -0.004, Qwen). A confidence-only router recovers pivotal steps at chance level, but cuts judge cost by 13.1% per turn (14.0% per trajectory). In a seven-arm pre-registered training experiment, no arm reliably outperforms the untrained policy, and the checkpoints' apparent instrument signature is statistically consistent with mediation by effective training dose in this design -- sparser credit retains fewer examples, an order-of-magnitude spread in optimizer steps -- not credit content. Comparisons of credit rules must match effective sample size, or they measure dose, not credit.

Multi-task vehicle routing problem (VRP) solvers seek to handle multiple VRP variants within a single unified model, avoiding the need to train a separate model for every variant. In spite of recent progress, current approaches remain limited on two fronts. On the training side, reinforcement learning suffers from reward-scale disparities and shrinking advantage signals as policies improve, whereas preference optimization stagnates once sampled tours become near-identical and thus fundamentally limited by the quality of the policy's own generated solutions, leaving both paradigms with weak supervision as training progresses. On the architecture side, existing fully shared encoders entangle constraint-dependent representations across heterogeneous variants, which limits generalization. We address these gaps with two model-agnostic contributions. First, we propose Preference Optimization with Locally Augmented Refinement (POLAR), a novel training algorithm that applies a local search refinement pass to the best decoded tour before forming preference pairs, yielding much more informative pairwise margins. Second, a Progressive Layered Extraction (PLE) encoder routes each encoder layer through one shared expert and a set of task-specific experts via a gating mechanism, progressively separating common routing structure from constraint-specific encodings. Through extensive experiments on various VRP variants, we show that POLAR and PLE together elevate the current state-of-the-art among neural multi-task solvers. We reduce the average gap to reference solutions by 21.3% relative to the strongest published baseline on 16 in-distribution variants, and outperform prior neural methods on 27 out of 32 unseen variants. Ablation studies confirm the efficacy of each contribution, showing that both improve cross-problem generalization across multiple backbone model architectures.

Marginalized importance weighting evaluates a target policy by reweighting offline state-action samples with its discounted occupancy ratio, characterized by an adjoint Bellman equation. Existing minimax, primal-dual, and fitted fixed-point estimators can leave residual occupancy-balance violations because of function-class approximation, regularization, or incomplete optimization. These violations are difficult to diagnose and reduce because the objectives generally lack a direct supervised validation loss for hyperparameter tuning, model selection, and early stopping. We introduce isotonic Bellman calibration, a one-dimensional, model-agnostic post-processing method that reduces these violations while preserving the ranking information in any initial occupancy-ratio estimate. The method corrects the estimate's scale and shape by applying fitted occupancy-ratio evaluation (FORE) over a one-dimensional class of nondecreasing transformations. We characterize Bellman calibration as a conditional fixed-point property equivalent to occupancy-balance against every test function of the calibrated ratio. More generally, we derive a calibration-refinement bound showing that any fitted ratio with small calibration error performs nearly as well as the best post-processing based on its fitted values. For isotonic Bellman calibration, we establish finite-sample calibration guarantees and a KL oracle inequality relative to the best monotone transformation of the initial estimate. Consequently, isotonic Bellman calibration achieves small calibration error and KL risk within statistical error of the best monotone correction, with guarantees for downstream target-occupancy functionals, including policy-value estimation.

Latent world models are inherently strong encoders that transform image pixel to latent embedding, yet existing world models still rely on online trajectory optimization for action planning: for every state-goal pair, an iterative optimizer is run from scratch to search for optimal action sequences, treating the world model as a black-box simulator. This approach pays the full iterative optimization cost anew at every replanning step and reuses no planning experience across queries. In this work, we ask whether planning itself can be amortized once a latent world model has been learned. We present LeFlow, which learns a reusable latent trajectory prior operating directly in the latent dynamics space from the world model. LeFlow recasts planning as conditional latent trajectory generation: a rectified-flow model imagines a future latent path between the current and goal embeddings, an inverse dynamics decoder turns latent transitions into action chunks, and the frozen world model verifies each candidate by autoregressive rollout. Across four major goal-conditioned pixel-control benchmarks, LeFlow replaces iterative action-space optimization with amortized latent planning and fixed-budget rollout selection, achieving consistent success-rate gains with an order-of-magnitude reduction in planning time. Our results argue that latent world models should support not only prediction but reusable planning priors. Our code is available at https://github.com/hsiangwei0903/LeFlow.

Social interaction can improve collective learning but also amplify early mistakes. We study this tension when the credibility of social information is generated by the sender's own decision process rather than fixed ex ante. Reinforcement-learning agents make binary choices through a drift--diffusion process that jointly determines choice, decision time, and confidence; decision confidence then becomes social credibility by weighting anticipatory influence and retrospective social learning. Under balanced community exposure, the anticipatory field admits an exact quotient representation. Its local Jacobian is a scalar decision-sensitivity term multiplying the community-coupling matrix, which yields a common-mode amplification threshold and an analytical role for cross-community permeability in damping relative community differences. Monte Carlo experiments show the corresponding non-monotone performance pattern: moderate transmission accelerates correction, whereas strong transmission can lock populations into wrong consensus; low permeability instead sustains disagreement. Ablations reveal a dual role for confidence: credibility-sensitive transmission amplifies social error, while confidence-dependent private learning stabilises it. The model yields testable predictions linking sender confidence to receiver behaviour conditional on accuracy.

Web agents that act from rendered pixels avoid the fragility and heavy token cost of reading a page's HTML or accessibility tree, but training them depends on large amounts of high-quality interaction trajectories, and how to produce such data at scale remains an open problem. Public datasets typically contain only a few thousand trajectories drawn from a fixed and narrow set of websites, and even recent automated synthesis pipelines stay bound to predefined site lists or tutorial sources, so the number of distinct websites the agent ever sees barely grows. We present BrowserForge, a framework that generates web interaction data at scale by driving many browser sandboxes in parallel over the open web. BrowserForge couples three components: an open-web sourcing stage that exposes the agent to hundreds of thousands of real, openly reachable websites; a sandbox cluster manager that schedules hundreds of concurrent browsers with high utilization; and a Proposer-Solver dual-agent loop that turns a raw page into an executable task and then collects a verified trajectory for it. A rule-plus-model cleaning pipeline removes failed runs and rewrites the surviving reasoning into a single unified chain-of-thought style. Page structure such as the accessibility tree is used only as a synthesis-time signal; the agent we train and release acts purely from the screenshot. The resulting corpus contains 203,238 trajectories, each collected from a distinct website, larger and more diverse than prior trajectory datasets. Fine-tuning a compact multimodal model on this corpus raises its success rate on the live Online-Mind2Web from 25.66% to 33.33% and consistently improves step accuracy on the static Multimodal-Mind2Web, with the gain growing as the corpus scales. Controlled analyses further confirm that open-web sourcing and broad website coverage are key contributors to the observed improvement.

Real-world data for knowledge graph question answering is often distributed across different organizations due to governance and data sovereignty constraints. While centralized systems exist, they cannot answer multi-hop questions when the required facts are split across vertically partitioned silos. In this paper, we propose FedV-KGQA, a framework for multi-hop reasoning over knowledge graphs in which organizations share entities but own disjoint sets of relations. Our approach combines local graph enrichment and knowledge graph embeddings to ensure raw triples and relation parameters never leave each silo, establishing a structural data boundary without requiring centralized graph access. We further introduce a topic entity anchoring mechanism that grounds questions in the correct graph neighborhood without any runtime inter-silo communication. We evaluate 12 model configurations across three benchmarks and show that FedV-KGQA performs strongly, remains close to centralized performance, generalizes to 3-hop reasoning, and is robust to embedding perturbations.

We present LAION-BVD, a large-scale open video dataset for multimodal learning, which contains 1.3B platform-specific video URLs collected from CommonCrawl. From these, we download 80M videos with a total duration of 10 million hours. The dataset is designed for multimodal pre-training across the video, audio, and image modalities. Using content-aware scene detection, we extract clips for which we synthetically generate video and audio captions. Models trained on these data achieve competitive performance on standard video-text and audio-text benchmarks, with consistent improvements as training or model scale increases. Additionally, we explore video frames as an alternative source of image-text data by extracting scene-changing frames. These frames exhibit a visual distribution distinct from standard web image corpora, and models trained on this dataset achieve strong image-text retrieval performance. We release LAION-BVD to the research community. It significantly expands open access to multimodal videos at an unprecedented scale.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as AI analysts to process financial disclosures and support AI-assisted investment decisions. Yet such systems are usually evaluated by what they can retrieve, not whether retrieved information affects their judgments. We identify a retrieval-integration gap in long-context financial analysis. Holding focal-firm information fixed and varying only unrelated context from 2,000 to 128,000 tokens, we find that a risk disclosure's influence on investment judgments falls to the experimental noise floor even as direct retrieval remains accurate. The pattern replicates across model families and judgment tasks and in experiments removing real disclosures from actual 10-K filings. More capable models postpone but do not eliminate the gap. Causal memory interventions show that compressed summaries and source-text lookup jointly transmit disclosures into judgments. Workflow architecture determines whether this transmission succeeds: chunk-and-summarize pipelines evict relevant information, whereas a targeted, structured restatement adjacent to the decision restores its influence. AI analyst performance is therefore jointly determined by model capability and workflow architecture. Retrieval-based evaluations can certify systems whose investment judgments ignore information they demonstrably retrieved.

In safety-critical Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), trajectory prediction guides downstream planning and control. Deep learning models forecast well on validation data, but their reliability drops in out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios driven by environmental uncertainty or rare traffic behaviors [1, 2]. Such failures are often silent: forecasts stay spatially plausible while accuracy collapses, and reported uncertainty does not rise [3]. Detection is hard because traffic conditions and interaction patterns keep evolving, yet the safety-critical nature of autonomous driving (AD) demands formal guarantees on detection delay and false-alarm rate. Following [4], we reframe OOD monitoring as quickest changepoint detection (QCD), a principled statistical framework with well-established theory. We find that the evolution of prediction errors on in-distribution (ID) data is well modeled by a Hidden Markov Model (HMM). Building on this, we extend a recent cumulative Maximum Mean Discrepancy approach to our setting. The method needs no detailed prior knowledge of the post-change distribution, yet admits provable delay and false-alarm guarantees. On three real-world driving datasets, it reduces detection delay while staying robust to heavy-tailed distributions and unknown post-change conditions.

Nonstationary Gaussian process (GP) models are powerful tools for capturing input-dependent variability by adapting to observed data. However, with limited sampling and highly parameterized covariance structure, they are often prone to overfitting and overconfident uncertainty estimates, potentially leading to misleading predictions in safety-critical applications. Motivated by ionospheric modeling for satellite-based augmentation systems (SBAS), this paper proposes a Covariance-Boosted Gaussian Process (CBGP) framework centered upon boosting covariance priors to discover nonstationary latent functions for signal and observation variation that capture irregularities in the input domain. An additional layer of GP modeling of "partially-whitened" observations guides latent function relative error estimation that is used to iteratively update weak priors in a gradient descent-like procedure. Following boosting, restrictions are imposed upon prior covariances to prevent overfitting while posterior uncertainties are inflated to prevent model overconfidence. CBGP model efficacy and robustness are demonstrated through out-of-sample testing of both simulated and real-world applications that meet a three-nines integrity standard. The modeling of an extensive ionospheric storm dataset over South America suggests accurate and reliable means to compute SBAS ionospheric corrections in the most challenging space weather environment using regional models that are more informed and responsive than local fitting performed by currently-operating SBAS.

Counterspeech effectively neutralizes the impact of online hate. Although prior work explores automated counterspeech generation, it largely emphasizes stylistic control while treating hate speech as homogeneous, overlooking that distinct forms of abuse require fundamentally different counterspeech strategies. To address this gap, we introduce FIRE (Factuality Informed Multi-Agent Reasoning Framework) that first decomposes hate speech into one of the five distinct categories (misinformation, stereotype, conspiracy, dehumanizing, non-factual), and then maps it to a targeted counterspeech style. To facilitate FIRE, we curate FactualCS, a novel dataset of 4,784 instances that provides the annotations regarding hate categories, reasoning traces, and evidence mappings, which are critical elements for grounded generation that are missing in prior work. A comprehensive evaluation across 28 baseline configurations demonstrates that FIRE significantly surpasses existing methods, despite using compact agents (<2B). FIRE achieves a ∼ 12 % and ∼ 11 % improvements in factual and category-specific accuracy respectively, while simultaneously reducing toxicity by ∼ 11 % relative to the strongest baselines. Further human evaluation confirms that responses generated by FIRE are significantly preferred over the strongest baselines, underscoring its effectiveness for real-world deployment. These findings show that decomposing the underlying intent of hate speech is essential for generating safe, effective, and contextually precise counterspeech.

A data product is designed to address a specific business need by transforming raw data into a curated, usable asset that delivers actionable insights. Despite practical advances in related areas like text-to-SQL and ELT pipelines, there is no comprehensive benchmark for evaluating the end-to-end process of automatically generating such data products from high-level business requests. To fill this gap, we introduce DP-Bench, a first-of-its-kind benchmark for automatic data product creation, built by combining elements from existing ELT and text-to-SQL datasets. We also propose baseline methods using LLMs to generate data products, providing a foundation for future research in bridging natural language business intent and structured data representation. We make the DP-Bench dataset and code available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/ibm-research/dp-bench.

Reconstructing 3D clothed humans from monocular images and videos is a fundamental problem with applications in virtual try-on, avatar creation, and mixed reality. Despite significant progress in human body recovery, accurately reconstructing garment geometry, particularly for loose-fitting clothing, remains an open challenge. We propose a unified framework for high-fidelity 3D garment reconstruction from both single images and video sequences. Our approach combines Implicit Sewing Patterns (ISP) with a generative diffusion model to learn expressive garment shape priors in 2D UV space. Leveraging these priors, we introduce a mapping model that establishes correspondences between image pixels, UV pattern coordinates, and 3D geometry, enabling accurate and detailed garment reconstruction from single images. We further extend this formulation to dynamic reconstruction by introducing a spatio-temporal diffusion scheme with test-time guidance to enforce long-range temporal consistency. We also develop analytic projection-based constraints that preserve image-aligned geometry in visible regions while enforcing coherent completion in occluded areas over time. Although trained exclusively on synthetically simulated cloth data, our method generalizes well to real-world imagery and consistently outperforms existing approaches on both tight- and loose-fitting garments. The reconstructed garments preserve fine geometric detail while exhibiting realistic dynamic motion, supporting downstream applications such as texture editing, garment retargeting, and animation.

This article discusses a particular case of the data clustering problem, where it is necessary to find groups of adjacent text segments of the appropriate length that match a fuzzy pattern represented as a sequence of fuzzy properties. To solve this problem, a heuristic algorithm for finding a sufficiently large number of solutions is proposed. The key idea of the proposed algorithm is the use of the prefix structure to track the process of mapping text segments to fuzzy properties. An important special case of the text segmentation problem is the fuzzy string matching problem, when adjacent text segments have unit length and, accordingly, the fuzzy pattern is a sequence of fuzzy properties of text characters. It is proven that the heuristic segmentation algorithm in this case finds all text segments that match the fuzzy pattern. Finally, we consider the problem of a best segmentation of the entire text based on a fuzzy pattern, which is solved using the dynamic programming method. Keywords: fuzzy clustering, fuzzy string matching, approximate string matching

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are emerging as a unified substrate for embodied intelligence. This shift raises a new class of safety challenges, stemming from the embodied nature of VLA systems, including irreversible physical consequences, a multimodal attack surface across vision, language, and state, real-time latency constraints on defense, error propagation over long-horizon trajectories, and vulnerabilities in the data supply chain. Yet the literature remains fragmented across robotic learning, adversarial machine learning, AI alignment, and autonomous systems safety. This survey provides a unified and up-to-date overview of safety in Vision-Language-Action models. We organize the field along two parallel timing axes, attack timing (training-time vs. inference-time and defense timing (training-time vs. inference-time, linking each class of threat to the stage at which it can be mitigated. We first define the scope of VLA safety, distinguishing it from text-only LLM safety and classical robotic safety, and review the foundations of VLA models, including architectures, training paradigms, and inference mechanisms. We then examine the literature through four lenses: Attacks, Defenses, Evaluation, and Deployment. We survey training-time threats such as data poisoning and backdoors, as well as inference-time attacks including adversarial patches, cross-modal perturbations, semantic jailbreaks, and freezing attacks. We review training-time and runtime defenses, analyze existing benchmarks and metrics, and discuss safety challenges across six deployment domains. Finally, we highlight key open problems, including certified robustness for embodied trajectories, physically realizable defenses, safety-aware training, unified runtime safety architectures, and standardized evaluation.

The rapid expansion of large-scale assessments and the growing adoption of automatic item generation have intensified concerns about incidental content redundancy, where construct-irrelevant elements such as wording or contextual framing become unintentionally repetitive across items. Traditional similarity metrics like BLEU or cosine similarity, often fail to capture the nuanced structural and semantic layers that drive perceived redundancy simultaneously. This study proposes a dual-dimensional framework for Automated Item Similarity Analysis (AISA) powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), operationalizing similarity through Structured Decomposition and Semantic Relatedness. Psychometric validation indicates that LLM-derived metrics align more closely with indicators of construct-irrelevant local dependence and yield more coherent item parameter groupings than traditional text-based measures. The framework is further evaluated through its application in Computerized Adaptive Testing (CAT). Simulations reveal that incorporating LLM-based similarity constraints into item selection improves estimation stability and reduces bias with minimal efficiency trade-offs, outperforming constraints based on conventional metrics. These findings highlight the potential of LLM-powered AISA to support scalable bank curation, content-aware test assembly, and experience-sensitive adaptive testing across diverse assessment contexts.

Large language models are increasingly used for knowledge graph question answering (KGQA), but can fail to correctly ground answers in the underlying graph. Current approaches to LLM-based KGQA either rely on full semantic parsing into executable queries such as SPARQL, which is brittle in practice due to complex schemas or incompleteness of real-world KGs, or on LLM-reasoning and answer generation over KGs, which can be more robust but lacks formal guarantees. In this work, we study a complementary setting in which candidate answers are generated by an LLM-based system and subsequently verified using lightweight symbolic constraints derived from the question. We introduce Constrained Entity Selection under Partial Knowledge (CES-PK), a problem formulation that focuses on eliminating invalid answers and providing symbolic support for valid ones without requiring construction of executable logical forms. To account for incomplete KGs, we employ a three-valued constraint semantics (satisfied, violated, unknown) that avoids incorrect rejections under open-world assumptions. To demonstrate the effects of our method, we instantiate this framework over the Hetionet biomedical knowledge graph and evaluate the impact of type, relation, and exclusion constraints. Experiments show that precision improves by filtering invalid candidates, while recall is preserved due to retaining candidates whose constraints are not explicitly violated. Satisfied constraints provide additional positive symbolic evidence to rank remaining candidates.

Spatially resolved biology requires representations that preserve biological neighborhood structure rather than only exact cross-modal correspondences. Existing histology--transcriptomics objectives can emphasize instance-level matching even when non-paired spots share molecular or spatial context. We introduce BioKERN, a multimodal spatial representation-learning framework that incorporates biological structure as an explicit, learnable inductive bias. BioKERN constructs a training-time biological kernel by combining transcriptomic similarity and spatial proximity, then uses it to provide graded neighborhood supervision and regularize embedding geometry. Evaluation uses a fixed, model-independent biological neighborhood definition shared by all methods. Across Mouse Brain Visium and Human Liver GSE240429, BioKERN consistently improves biological-neighborhood retrieval over BLEEP in both single- and multi-scale settings. Controlled shared-architecture experiments show that most of the improvement arises from biological-kernel regularization rather than increased model capacity. These results support explicit biological geometry as an interpretable inductive bias for multimodal learning in spatial biology.

We present Split-then-Merge (StM), a novel framework designed to enhance control in generative video composition and address its data scarcity problem. Unlike conventional methods relying on annotated datasets or handcrafted rules, StM splits a large corpus of unlabeled videos into dynamic foreground and background layers, then self-composes them to learn how dynamic subjects interact with diverse scenes. This process enables the model to learn the complex compositional dynamics required for realistic video generation. StM introduces a novel transformation-aware training pipeline that utilizes a multi-layer fusion and augmentation to achieve affordance-aware composition, alongside an identity-preservation loss that maintains foreground fidelity during blending. Experiments show StM outperforms SoTA methods in both quantitative benchmarks and in humans/VLM-based qualitative evaluations. More details are available at our project page: https://split-then-merge.github.io

Neighborhood-based fairness audits evaluate individual fairness by comparing predictions among similar individuals in feature space. Despite their widespread use, little is known about the robustness of the auditing procedure itself. Because these audits rely on nearest neighbor relationships, small perturbations in feature space can alter local neighborhoods and produce different fairness assessments even when model predictions remain unchanged. We develop a geometric framework for analyzing the robustness of neighborhood-based fairness audits under bounded perturbations. Our analysis establishes sufficient conditions for neighborhood invariance, quantifies how neighborhood replacement propagates to audit instability, and introduces audit volatility, a measure of the expected sensitivity of fairness audits under repeated perturbations. Experiments on benchmark datasets support the theoretical analysis and show that the proposed framework explains the observed stability of neighborhood-based fairness audits.

Multi-step symbolic reasoning is essential for robust financial analysis, yet most benchmarks neglect intermediate reasoning steps. FinChain introduced verifiable Chain-of-Thought (CoT) evaluation but is limited to English. FINESSE-Bench includes a Russian block but relies on multiple-choice questions without step-level supervision. We present RusFinChain, the first Russian-language symbolic benchmark for verifiable CoT reasoning in finance. It spans 17 domains, 172 topics, and comprises 5,280 parameterized examples from executable Python templates, ensuring contamination-free evaluation. Each example includes a gold-standard reasoning chain with intermediate numeric values for automatic verification. We also introduce enhanced metrics: Fuzzy Numeric Alignment and Soft-Attention Alignment. We evaluate 8 open-weight LLMs on a stratified sample, generating 8,100 responses. Results reveal a substantial reasoning gap: models achieve Hard F1 of ~0.65 for step alignment, but only ~29% of final answers are correct. Our fuzzy and soft metrics show stronger correlation with final-answer correctness (Spearman rho approx 0.48) than the original ChainEval (rho approx 0.38-0.46), demonstrating superior diagnostic power. We release dataset, code, and evaluation framework to foster verifiable financial AI for the Russian-speaking community.

We study adversarial combinatorial bandits with m-set actions, where at each round the learner selects m out of d items and observes only the aggregate loss of the selected items. The resulting action set contains K=dm elements and can therefore be exponentially large. Nevertheless, the loss of every action is determined by the same d-dimensional vector of item losses. We propose a computationally efficient algorithm that exploits this structure without explicitly enumerating the action set. Against adaptive non-anticipating adversaries, it guarantees, with probability at least 1-δ, regret against the best fixed action of R_T = O(√(dTlog(K/δ))). This matches the high-probability regret bound of the finite-action EXP3-KW algorithm of Zimmert and Lattimore, whose direct implementation may require exponential space. Our algorithm instead represents each sampling distribution with d parameters and runs in polynomial time without enumerating the action set. Thus, it resolves the open problem posed by Maiti et al. We complement this upper bound with a matching high-probability lower bound. For all sufficiently small δ, every randomized policy admits a deterministic adaptive non-anticipating adversary for which, with probability at least δ, R_T = Ω(√(dTlog(K/δ))). Thus, the rate is minimax optimal up to universal constants in this regime. In particular, setting m=1 proves that the log K for ordinary K-armed bandits against adaptive non-anticipating adversaries is unavoidable, closing the remaining √(log K) gap between confidence-tuned upper and lower bounds left by Gerchinovitz and Lattimore.

We uncover ELR collapse in language model pretraining: learning rate (LR) and parameter norm govern loss dynamics primarily through their ratio, the effective learning rate (ELR). When ELR is matched across runs, their loss trajectories collapse throughout training despite substantially different LRs and parameter norms. Across optimizers, architectures, datasets, and model scales, mean collapse errors are typically a few x 10^-3, below the seed-to-seed variation measured in a representative configuration. Systematic ablations identify normalization design and the timescale of LR-norm variation as key determinants of collapse precision. Controlled interventions further show that weight decay and Hyperball shape loss dynamics primarily through the ELR schedules they induce. Replacing LR with ELR enables a fitted functional scaling law (FSL) to transfer across norm-control methods. The resulting ELR-based FSL also explains delayed acceleration, a recurring effect of norm control. Together, these results establish ELR as a common coordinate linking LR scheduling, norm control, and loss dynamics.

Hand gesture-based Sign Language Recognition (SLR) serves as a crucial communication bridge between deaf and non-deaf individuals. While Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) are common, they are limited by their reliance on fixed skeletal graphs. To overcome this, we propose the Sequential Spatio-Temporal Attention Network (SSTAN), a novel Transformer-based architecture. Our model employs a hierarchical, stacked design that sequentially integrates Spatial Multi-Head Attention (MHA) to capture intra-frame joint relationships and Temporal MHA to model long-range inter-frame dependencies. This approach allows the model to efficiently learn complex spatio-temporal patterns without predefined graph structures. We validated our model through extensive experiments on diverse, large-scale datasets (WLASL, JSL, and KSL). A key finding is that our model, trained entirely from scratch, achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in the challenging fingerspelling categories (JSL and KSL). Furthermore, it establishes a new SOTA for skeleton-only methods on WLASL, outperforming several approaches that rely on complex self-supervised pre-training. These results demonstrate our model's high data efficiency and its effectiveness in capturing the intricate dynamics of sign language. The official implementation is available at our GitHub repository: \href{https://github.com/K-Hirooka-Aizu/skeleton-slr-transformer}{https://github.com/K-Hirooka-Aizu/skeleton-slr-transformer}.

Temporal difference (TD) learning is a foundational algorithm in reinforcement learning (RL). For nearly forty years, TD learning has served as a workhorse for applied RL as well as a building block for more complex and specialized algorithms. However, despite its widespread use, TD procedures are generally sensitive to step size specification. A poor choice of step size can dramatically increase variance and slow convergence in both on-policy and off-policy evaluation tasks. In practice, researchers often use trial and error to identify stable step sizes, but these approaches tend to be ad hoc and inefficient. As an alternative, we propose implicit TD algorithms that reformulate TD updates into fixed-point equations. Such updates are more stable and less sensitive to step size without sacrificing computational efficiency. Moreover, we derive almost sure convergence guarantees and finite-time error bounds (with a projection step) for the proposed implicit TD algorithms. Our results show that implicit TD algorithms are applicable to a much broader range of step sizes, and thus provide a robust and versatile framework for policy evaluation and value approximation in modern RL tasks. We demonstrate these benefits empirically through extensive numerical experiments spanning both on-policy and off-policy tasks.

Class-imbalanced node classification on temporal graphs is challenging because majority-dominated temporal propagation progressively assimilates minority representations, while conventional node and neighborhood information provides insufficient discriminative evidence for minority classes. To address these issues, we propose MDTE, a minority-aware diffusion framework that reconstructs stable and discriminative temporal edge-event representations through conditional diffusion denoising. Specifically, MDTE introduces Distribution-Aware Selective Propagation, which combines Local Outlier Factor (LOF)-based propagation filtering with cluster-aware low-frequency propagation. The module preserves informative neighborhood dependencies while mitigating harmful propagation and majority-class information assimilation. It further develops Multi-View Discriminative Fusion, which exploits feature reconstruction and topology prediction to characterize class-wise differences in distribution learning and extracts complementary discriminability signals to guide denoising. Experiments on five real-world datasets demonstrate that MDTE consistently achieves the best performance on minority-class-oriented metrics, improving minority-class recall by up to 23.53 percentage points, minority-class F1 by 8.68 percentage points, and AUPRC by 2.67 percentage points over the strongest baselines.

Loan origination is the process by which a lender creates a new loan, from application and underwriting through approval and funding. This process serves a critical role in evaluating the eligibility and level of risk posed by an applicant. Recently, firms have begun using mortgage loan agents to augment human loan officers, despite a lack of any public benchmark. To fill this gap, we present MortarBench, a loan origination agent benchmark. MortarBench uses a financial data synthesis and mutation pipeline to generate examples with broad edge case coverage that match real-world distributions and questions. We find that state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) perform poorly, with closed-source models achieving at most 77.1\% exact match accuracy. We also discover systematic biases in LLM perception of foreignness related to non-English names. Noting these weaknesses, we introduce CRIT, a confidence calibration framework. Our method increases accuracy to 80.5\% while improving risk management steering and reducing bias.

Recent work has applied Mamba style state space models (SSMs) to video anomaly detection, yet existing approaches still rely on buffering clips or windows internally, lack a theoretical account of how temporal memory relates to detection latency, and benchmark efficiency only through GPU throughput rather than the edge hardware these methods are intended to target. We introduce a strictly causal streaming anomaly detector whose fixed size state is updated in O(1) time and memory per incoming frame, with no lookahead and no clip buffering. Its temporal core is a diagonal linear state space recurrence with an input and state dependent decay gate, trained self supervised through causal next embedding prediction on a frozen visual backbone. We derive a closed form relationship between the recurrence decay spectrum and both detection delay and the shortest anomaly it can reliably capture, then validate empirically on UCSD Ped2 and CUHK Avenue. The settling delay bound predicted from the learned base decay (57 to 59 frames) sits far above the measured detection delay (1.6 and 18.4 frames), showing that the event boundary gate, not the base decay, governs responsiveness. We further report end to end latency and throughput measured directly on Apple M3 Pro hardware, 0.74 ms and 0.77 ms per frame (over 1300 FPS), rather than simulated GPU numbers. With an untuned initial configuration the method reaches 67.9 percent and 70.2 percent frame level AUC on Ped2 and Avenue, trailing prior non causal SSM baselines in accuracy. Ablations over decay rate, state size, and gating reveal that the gate contribution is dataset size dependent, hurting accuracy on the smaller Ped2 training set but helping on the larger Avenue one. Closing this accuracy gap and extending evaluation to a third, larger benchmark are immediate next steps.

We present Crase, a bounded and inspectable alternative to deep research agents for scholarly search. Instead of an open-ended search loop, Crase queries a search engine once for seed papers, expands them along their 1.5-hop citation neighborhood, prunes citation edges whose claims lack entailment support, and ranks the remaining papers with a recency-aware random walk. This makes the candidate set, the reason each paper is kept, and the stopping condition explicit and fixed before inference. On LitSearch and one further benchmarks over a 500K-paper arXiv corpus, Crase outperforms deep research agents built on proprietary models by up to 3× recall@50 at roughly a third of the cost.

Model cards are structured documents that summarize key information about machine learning models to improve transparency, usability, and accountability. However, they often lack a consistent structure, and many models provide no model cards, making comparison and interpretation difficult. This paper presents two contributions. First, we propose MCTidy, an LLM-based approach that reorganizes existing model cards into a standardized template to improve clarity and comparability. Second, we introduce MCGenie, an LLM-based system that generates model cards directly from model repository data. We apply MCTidy to 48 Hugging Face model cards and evaluate information retention, section alignment, hallucination, and stability. Our findings show high information retention with minimal textual loss, accurate section assignment, rare hallucinations primarily in descriptive sections, and strong stability across runs. We assess MCGenie by generating model cards for the same 48 models and assessing semantic similarity, factual correctness, and sensitivity to input resources. The generated model cards achieved high semantic similarity (mean around 0.9); over half were fully correct, and most remaining errors were minor. Generation quality depended strongly on the availability of supporting resources, particularly associated papers. Overall, our findings demonstrate the potential of LLM-based methods to enable scalable, standardized model card documentation.

We present StarHarness, a framework for evolving environment-specific agent harnesses while keeping model weights fixed. The evolved harness can include prompt and task framing, tool interfaces, skills, MCP-backed providers, subagent structure, and agent-loop configuration. StarHarness constructs a compact evolution pool by stratifying tasks according to baseline failure behavior, separates proposer-visible search tasks from proposer-hidden selection tasks, and reserves held-out tasks for evaluating generalization. Across ITBench SRE, EnterpriseOps-Gym ITSM, and AutomationBench Finance, harness evolution improves full-benchmark performance by 20-35 percentage points over the default harness after 4-12 accepted changes per environment. These gains persist on tasks excluded from evolution and transfer without re-evolution across GPT and Qwen model families. Trace analysis links the improvements to interface repairs, environment conventions, and operational knowledge that compresses search, with fewer false-positive diagnoses and shorter trajectories in several settings. StarHarness therefore offers a practical way to reduce persistent model-environment mismatch in tool-rich enterprise tasks.

Robot policy evaluation and deployment remain fragmented by model-specific software dependencies, data representations, and runtime interfaces, so that connecting N policies to M evaluation environments requires O(NM) separate integrations. We present XPolicyLab, a unified standard and open ecosystem that reduces this cost to O(N+M). XPolicyLab specifies common observation, action, and trajectory schemas together with a minimal adapter interface for observation updates, action prediction, batched execution, and episode reset, while a dependency-isolated client/server architecture separates policy inference from environment execution, so that each side retains its native software stack and may run locally or remotely. The ecosystem integrates 42 robot policies and standardizes their installation, debugging, serving, and evaluation workflows. Across these adapters, model-specific code varies by an order of magnitude while the environment-facing loop stays within a few lines of a fixed reference, confirming that the contract confines heterogeneity to the policy side. In a controlled study, conforming to the standard reduces the integration effort of a representative policy from over five hours to two hours, and packaged agent skills reduce it further to thirty minutes. The same adapters serve RoboTwin, RoboDojo simulation, and standardized real-robot evaluation through one interface. XPolicyLab is released as shared infrastructure for reproducible policy comparison and standardized deployment across simulation and physical platforms. Project website: https://xpolicylab.github.io/.

Recently, the rapid advancement of multimodal domains has driven a data-centric paradigm shift in graph ML, transitioning from text-attributed to multimodal-attributed graphs. This advancement significantly enhances data representation and expands the scope of graph downstream tasks, such as modality-oriented tasks, thereby improving the practical utility of graph ML. Despite its promise, limitations exist in the current neural paradigms:(1) Neglect Context in Modality Alignment: Most existing methods adopt topology-constrained or modality-specific operators as tokenizers.These aligners inevitably neglect graph context and inhibit modality interaction, resulting in suboptimal alignment.(2) Lack of Adaptation in Modality Fusion: Most existing methods are simple adaptations for 2-modality graphs and fail to adequately exploit aligned tokens equipped with topology priors during fusion, leading to poor generalizability and performance degradation.To address the above issues, we propose LION (cLIffOrd Neural paradigm) based on the Clifford algebra and decoupled graph neural paradigm (i.e., propagation-then-aggregation) to implement alignment-then-fusion in multimodal-attributed graphs. Specifically, we first construct a modality-aware geometric manifold grounded in Clifford algebra.This geometric-induced high-order graph propagation efficiently achieves modality interaction, facilitating modality alignment.Then, based on the topology-aware Clifford components of aligned tokens, we propose adaptive holographic aggregation. This module integrates component-wise energy and propagation-scale information with learnable parameters to improve modality fusion. Extensive experiments on 9 text-image MAG datasets demonstrate that LION significantly outperforms SOTA baselines across 3 graph and 3 modality downstream tasks.

Outcome-supervised search agents learn when and how to retrieve evidence, but terminal rewards neither localize intermediate errors nor redirect an ongoing trajectory before those errors compound. Treating corrective feedback as a learned in-trajectory intervention couples the two roles: the agent must decide when to request and use feedback, while the critic must infer useful corrections from outcome-confounded rollouts whose failure patterns shift as the agent improves. We introduce CAFE (Coupled Agent--Feedback Evolution), a framework in which a shared-parameter model alternates between search-agent and critic roles. CAFE initializes feedback-conditioned recovery from trajectories built around the base agent's own failures, then couples online and offline optimization. During online RL, a comparative feedback estimate uses a prompt-level call--skip success gap to shape request returns, while feedback-aware advantage shaping reweights token advantages before and after feedback. Offline, rollout-derived preference optimization learns feedback from matched successful and unsuccessful trajectories. On seven agentic search benchmarks, CAFE outperforms the evaluated RL-based search agents on average, retains its gains across all six out-of-domain benchmarks, and reduces answer-level hallucinations. One-sided ablations show that improving only the agent or only the critic eventually plateaus, whereas alternating the two updates continues to improve performance. These findings suggest that a self-improving search agent needs feedback that co-evolves with the policy it guides.

Automated malaria diagnosis from stained blood-smear microscopy is dominated by deep convolutional neural networks that are accurate but computationally expensive, poorly interpretable, and rarely validated with patient-level rigor. We present EMFE (Efficient Mathematical Feature Extraction), a five-feature framework for classifying single red-blood-cell images as parasitized or uninfected using Gray World color normalization, adaptive green-channel thresholding, morphological spot detection, and classical machine learning. Using the NIH LHNCBC malaria dataset (27,558 images from 200 patients), we evaluate Random Forest, Histogram Gradient Boosting, and Support Vector Machine classifiers under patient-grouped nested cross-validation (K_outer=20, K_inner=3), ensuring that cells from each patient remain within a single fold. The optimized Random Forest achieves 94.6% pooled out-of-fold accuracy (95% CI [93.6, 95.7]), corroborated by an untouched 40-patient holdout test (94.3%) and a patient-level permutation test (p<0.001, 1,000 permutations). Ablation experiments quantify the contribution of individual features and pipeline stages. Hardware-matched comparisons with retrained DenseNet121, ResNet50, and MobileNetV2 models assess the accuracy-efficiency trade-off. Synthetic perturbations characterize three failure modes, while explainability analysis identifies spot saturation as the dominant discriminative feature. Patient-level aggregation further quantifies sensitivity-specificity trade-offs and false-positive accumulation. These results demonstrate a statistically rigorous, interpretable, and computationally lightweight alternative to deep learning, while explicitly quantifying its limitations.

We present the first mechanised formalisation of Romanov's Triplet Logic (TLS) in the Rocq proof assistant. TLS is a combinatorial framework originally motivated by Boolean satisfiability, based on triplet structures and a filter that we call Simple Vertex Intersection (SVI). We formalise the core of TLS, including its translation from 3-CNF, the clearing procedure, and the SVI algorithm. For the well-formed sliding-window fragment, we prove explicit polynomial-time bounds for the filter stages and verify the translation and intersection operations. Our main contribution is a precise correctness boundary: for general formulas, SVI non-emptiness is necessary but not sufficient for satisfiability; for aligned structures, we prove a full bi-implication, extended to systems of structures. We also formalise the grouped-window translation and provide a formal counterexample to its completeness. We introduce VFR (Verified Filter for Romanov's triplet logic), an extracted OCaml prototype that implements a verified decision procedure for the sliding-window fragment and a sound filter for general 3-CNF, with a Python runtime and Docker packaging. Benchmarks corroborate the predicted behaviour, and the complete toolchain is available as a curated Zenodo artifact. The Rocq development comprises over 23,000 lines of code, with 424 proved lemmas and no unproved assumptions.

Large-scale foundation models exhibit behavioral shifts when subjected to interventions such as scaling, fine-tuning, reinforcement learning with human feedback, or in-context learning. Current explainability methods are structurally ill-suited to explain these shifts, because they either treat models as static objects, as traditional eXplainable AI (XAI) approaches do, or merely compare independent explanations across different checkpoints of a model. As a result, these approaches fail to explain the functional transition between two model instances in which a certain behavior has shifted following an intervention. This gap creates significant governance risks across jurisdictions including the EU AI Act, US state legislation, and Chinese AI regulations, which require documenting causal chains for substantial system modifications. This position paper argues that explaining behavioral shifts in large language models requires a principled approach that treats the shift itself as the primary object of explanation: namely, one that explains how and why an intervention transforms a reference model into an updated model with different behavior. To support this claim, we introduce Comparative XAI (XAI_Δ), a novel XAI paradigm aimed at explaining the difference between two model checkpoints where a behavior has shifted, together with a set of desiderata specifying what XAI_Δ explainers and explanations must satisfy, including comparability, validity, actionability, and monitoring, with the goal of grounding model auditing in explicit, measurable requirements. Finally, we provide preliminary evidence suggesting the need for XAI_Δ in practice through illustrative experiments, compiling the resulting findings into a transition report directly usable for governance and incident documentation.

Clinicians read chain-of-thought (CoT) rationales as evidence of medical reasoning, but whether the visible chain plays that role is rarely tested. General-domain CoT-faithfulness probes ignore clinical cost, and medical LLM evaluations treat the chain as a black box. We close this gap with a medical perturbation audit: a 30-operator battery edits both the chain and the question with clinically motivated operators (severity reversal, negation flip, demographic swap, evidence ablation), paired with a chain-update times answer-flip joint analysis that classifies each model by its failure mode. Applied to 14 LLMs on four medical QA benchmarks, three independent tests converge: the Chain-Decoupling Rate (CDR; chain does not register the edit and the answer does not flip) is 72.9% panel-wide on clinically meaningful destructive edits, chain corruption leaves accuracy unchanged, and removing CoT prompting does not reduce accuracy. Two board-certified clinicians re-annotate N=197 perturbed questions; 98.5% leave the gold defensible. The pattern holds across medical and reasoning fine-tuning and scale; on the closed-source tier, where the chain text is unavailable, the answer-side signals are consistent with the same decoupling. Our framework and CDR provide a reusable yardstick for auditing whether medical CoT is faithful or merely documentation.

Dr. David Blackwell was a mathematician and statistician of the first rank, whose contributions to statistical theory, game theory, and decision theory predated many of the algorithmic breakthroughs that define modern artificial intelligence. This survey examines three of his most consequential theoretical results the Rao Blackwell theorem, the Blackwell Approachability theorem, and the Blackwell Informativeness theorem (comparison of experiments) and traces their direct influence on contemporary AI and machine learning. We show that these results, developed primarily in the 1940s and 1950s, remain technically live across modern subfields including Markov Chain Monte Carlo inference, autonomous mobile robot navigation (SLAM), generative model training, no-regret online learning, reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), large language model alignment, and information design. NVIDIAs 2024 decision to name their flagship GPU architecture (Blackwell) provides vivid testament to his enduring relevance. We also document an emerging frontier: explicit Rao Blackwellized variance reduction in LLM RLHF pipelines, recently proposed but not yet standard practice. Together, Blackwell theorems form a unified framework addressing information compression, sequential decision making under uncertainty, and the comparison of information sources precisely the problems at the core of modern AI.

Clinical prediction from structured electronic health records (EHRs) is challenging due to high dimensionality, heterogeneity, class imbalance, and distribution shift. While tabular in-context learning (TICL) and retrieval-augmented methods perform well on generic benchmarks, their behavior in clinical settings remains unclear. We present a multi-cohort EHR benchmark comparing classical, deep tabular, and TICL models across varying data scale, feature dimensionality, outcome rarity, and cross-cohort generalization. PFN-based TICL models are sample-efficient in low-data regimes but degrade under naive distance-based retrieval as heterogeneity and imbalance increase. We propose AWARE, a task-aligned retrieval framework using supervised embedding learning and lightweight adapters. AWARE improves AUPRC by up to 12.2% under extreme imbalance, with gains increasing with data complexity. Our results identify retrieval quality and retrieval-inference alignment as key bottlenecks for deploying tabular in-context learning in clinical prediction.

The increasing heterogeneity of multi-agent systems poses significant challenges for jointly training a global model across agents. At the same time, cooperative inference between agents has long been recognized as a powerful mechanism for distributed decision making over networks. Motivated by these observations, we propose a collaboration framework for distributed binary classification over multi-agent networks, where a set of independently trained agents, potentially differing in architecture, feature space, or modality, coordinate their actions during test time to form collective predictions. This coordination is achieved by exchanging local decision statistics through a distributed learning protocol. We develop a theoretical and experimental study of this independent training and cooperative inference paradigm, and examine its performance under different communication budgets and distributed learning rules. We establish classification error guarantees under sufficient, finite-round, and finite-precision communication, together with PAC-style generalization bounds. These results capture the influence of model heterogeneity, network topology, combination policy, and communication constraints on prediction accuracy. Taken together with the experimental results, they reveal both the price of independent training and the benefit of collective prediction for the proposed distributed decision making framework with models learned from data.

Accurate segmentation of coronary arteries in X-ray angiography videos is essential for quantitative coronary analysis and image-guided interventions. However, accurate segmentation remains challenging because coronary vessels are thin and exhibit low contrast, while the presence of catheters, guidewires, and complex anatomical background structures can further interfere with vessel delineation. Existing U-Net- and Transformer-based models provide strong baselines, but their shared feature-adaptation pathways may be insufficient for heterogeneous angiographic appearances. In this paper, we propose a prompt-free mixture-of-experts (MoE) feature adapter for binary coronary artery segmentation. Built upon parameter-efficient Vision Transformer adapters, the proposed method uses multiple lightweight experts with input-dependent top-k routing to adaptively refine vessel-related features while limiting active computational cost. Experiments on MOSXAV and external evaluation on XACV show that the proposed method outperforms representative baselines and improves cross-dataset generalisation. These results suggest that MoE-based adapter learning is effective for robust coronary artery segmentation in X-ray angiography videos.

Traditional image similarity metrics such as Mean Squared Error (MSE), Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), and the Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) rely on pixel-level comparisons and often fail to capture perceptually meaningful differences between images. In contrast, latent representations learned by deep neural networks encode high-level semantic information that is more closely aligned with human visual perception. This paper proposes a convolutional autoencoder-based framework for quantifying image differences using cosine similarity in latent space. The learned compact embeddings enable robust differentiation between visually distinct images under variations in illumination, pose, and background. Extensive evaluation on dog-cat images and additional cross-domain datasets demonstrates clear class-wise clustering and strong inter-class separability in the latent space, with 98.4% of dog-cat image pairs exhibiting similarity scores below 0.5. Further validation using the TID2013 dataset shows that latent-space distance correlates positively with human Mean Opinion Scores (MOS), demonstrating sensitivity to perceptually relevant image distortions. The proposed approach provides a computationally efficient and semantically grounded alternative to conventional pixel-based similarity metrics, with potential applications in content-based retrieval, perceptual quality assessment, and semantic similarity analysis.

Distinguishing machine-generated text (MGT) from human-written text (HWT) becomes increasingly important due to potential misuse. However, most supervised detectors often degrade out-of-domain (OOD) and require large, diverse training sets. In this work, we analyze the linearity and quality of MGT representations and show that simple linear probes outperform a wide range of detectors while being substantially more sample-efficient. We first show that MGT and HWT latent representations are linearly separable in low-dimensional space, and provide a plausible explanation for this separability through systematic differences in their representation quality. Motivated by these insights, we train two variants of simple linear probes and evaluate them across 4 benchmarks against 16 baselines. Probes consistently improve OOD detection (+11 AUC), requiring solely ${<}100$ samples to reach near-peak performance. We show that this transferability arises because probes recover a shared latent MGT direction that generalizes across diverse settings. Finally, we demonstrate that probing vectors capture a continuous spectrum of ``machineness'', highlighting their potential for fine-grained estimation of AI-edited text. Overall, our work provides insights into latent-space differences between MGT and HWT and demonstrates the potential of linear probes as as robust and sample-efficient MGT detectors. We release our code on~\href{https://github.com/gerritq/mgt_probes}{github}.

LLM-based agents can interact with external environments through tool invocation, but this capability also introduces security risks such as file modification, information leakage, and unauthorized actions. Existing guardrails often evaluate completed trajectories, leaving pre-execution monitoring of step-level actions underexplored. We propose StepGuard, a step-level guard model that can audit completed agent trajectories and check tool actions before they are executed. To train StepGuard, we introduce StepGen, an automatic data engine that generates safe and unsafe trajectories with the same context but different actions at the risky step. To further reduce over-defense and under-defense, we propose Balance-GRPO, which dynamically balances learning between safe and unsafe actions based on their observed accuracy. Experiments show that StepGuard achieves the highest average accuracy among open-weight guard models, with performance comparable to GPT-5.4. When used to guard agents on AgentDojo and AgentDyn, StepGuard reduces mean attack success rate by 77.3% relative to the no-guard setting, while mean utility drops by only 2.8 percentage points.

We study the fully dynamic edge orientation problem, focusing on worst-case time bounds. An undirected graph undergoes edge insertions and deletions, and the goal is to maintain an orientation with small maximum outdegree (hereafter, outdegree) and small worst-case update time. The outdegree of any orientation is at least α-1, where α is the graph's arboricity, i.e., the minimum number of forests into which its edge set can be partitioned. When α= O(1), it is long known that both the outdegree and the worst-case update time can be bounded by O(log n). Despite numerous follow-ups, no o(log^3 n) worst-case update time is known for maintaining constant outdegree, even for very basic graph families—with a notable exception, forests. For forests, a simple folklore algorithm maintains outdegree 2 via random walks: When an insertion creates a vertex of outdegree 3, the algorithm repeatedly chooses a uniformly random outgoing edge until reaching a vertex of outdegree at most 1, and then flips the resulting directed path. As the underlying graph is cycle-free, the path length is easily shown to be O(log n) in expectation, and also with high probability for polynomially long update sequences. We prove that this simple random walk paradigm extends to outerplanar graphs. Our algorithm maintains constant outdegree with O(log n) worst-case update time, where the time bound holds in expectation, and also with high probability for polynomially long update sequences. We give a tight analysis: outdegree 4 is achievable with O(log n)-length paths, while outdegree 3 incurs 𝚙𝚘𝚕𝚢(n)-length paths. We also extend the argument to K_2,t-minor-free graphs, for any t ≥ 2, with the outdegree bound depending only on t and with the same update time guarantees. The locality of [...]

Vision-Language Navigation for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV-VLN) requires rapid and reactive control in complex 3D environments. Recent minimalist end-to-end paradigms show great promise but typically rely on massive language models containing billions of parameters, incurring prohibitive latency for real-world edge deployment. In this paper, we challenge this parameter-heavy reliance. Comprehensive cross-scale evaluations reveal the critical insight that perception quality fundamentally outweighs language reasoning capacity. We demonstrate that a lightweight 2B model equipped with high-fidelity visual inputs completely matches the overall success rates of massive 7B baselines. However, this minimalist policy exposes a fundamental robustness flaw inherent to pure Behavior Cloning (BC). Lacking explicit negative feedback, the agent fails to internalize robust spatial constraints and exhibits alarming collision rates in out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. To overcome this vulnerability without relying on unscalable human annotations, we propose AeroDPO, a zero-cost automated Direct Preference Optimization pipeline driven by deterministic physical simulation state rollback. Upon detecting collisions, the system autonomously rewinds the environment to extract causal reasoning errors as rejected actions, applies decoupled privileged interventions to synthesize collision-avoidance preferred maneuvers, and leverages an offline vision language inspector to filter visual ambiguities. By equipping our 2B model with this automated data flywheel, AeroDPO boosts success rates to 49.16% on unmapped scenarios while drastically suppressing collision rates, establishing a new SOTA for autonomous aerial agents.

Brain stroke, known for its high mortality and incidence rates, poses significant health risks and requires rapid intervention for survival. Early diagnosis and preventive measures can greatly reduce life loss and disabilities. Recent advancements in deep learning have led to novel computer-aided diagnostic techniques for early stroke detection. This study proposes an intelligent system that predicts potential strokes using eleven features, evaluated through seven supervised machine learning algorithms. The process includes a literature review, dataset visualization, data preprocessing, and model evaluation. Ensemble methods like Random Forest, Stacking Classifier, and Bagging Classifier achieved high accuracies of 99.52%, while Decision Tree reached 98.24%. Other models, including KNN and TabNet, demonstrated reliable performance, achieving accuracies of 96.73% and 96.49%, respectively. The custom feedforward model achieved 94.91%, while SVC and logistic regression had lower accuracies at 88.06% and 77.03%. The results highlight the effectiveness of ensemble methods in stroke classification.