Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLM) classification performance depends critically on evaluation protocol and ground truth quality. Studies comparing MLLMs with supervised and vision-language models report conflicting conclusions, and we show these conflicts stem from protocols that either inflate or underestimate performance. Across the most common evaluation protocols, we identify and fix key issues: model outputs that fall outside the provided class list and are discarded, inflated results from weak multiple-choice distractors, and an open-world setting that underperforms only due to poor output mapping. We additionally quantify the impact of commonly overlooked design choices - batch size, image ordering, and text encoder selection - showing they substantially affect accuracy. Evaluating on ReGT, our multilabel reannotation of 625 ImageNet-1k classes, reveals that MLLMs benefit most from corrected labels (up to +10.8%), substantially narrowing the perceived gap with supervised models. Much of the reported MLLMs underperformance on classification is thus an artifact of noisy ground truth and flawed evaluation protocol rather than genuine model deficiency. Models less reliant on supervised training signals prove most sensitive to annotation quality. Finally, we show that MLLMs can assist human annotators: in a controlled case study, annotators confirmed or integrated MLLMs predictions in approximately 50% of difficult cases, demonstrating their potential for large-scale dataset curation.

While recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made impressive strides, they predominantly employ a conventional autoregressive architecture as their backbone, leaving significant room to explore effective and efficient alternatives in architectural design. Concurrently, recent studies have successfully applied discrete diffusion models to various domains, such as visual understanding and image generation, revealing their considerable potential as a promising backbone for multimodal systems. Drawing inspiration from these pioneering research, we introduce Omni-Diffusion, the first any-to-any multimodal language model built entirely on mask-based discrete diffusion models, which unifies understanding and generation across text, speech, and images. Omni-Diffusion employs a unified mask-based discrete diffusion model to directly capture the joint distribution over discrete multimodal tokens. This approach supports not only bimodal tasks but also more complex scenarios involving multiple modalities. On a diverse set of benchmarks, our method outperforms or performs on par with existing multimodal systems that process two or more modalities, highlighting the significant promise of diffusion models in powering the next generation of multimodal foundation models. Project webpage: https://omni-diffusion.github.io.

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into autonomous driving has attracted growing interest for their strong reasoning and semantic understanding abilities, which are essential for handling complex decision-making and long-tail scenarios. However, existing methods typically feed LLMs with tokens from multi-view and multi-frame images independently, leading to redundant computation and limited spatial consistency. This separation in visual processing hinders accurate 3D spatial reasoning and fails to maintain geometric coherence across views. On the other hand, Bird's-Eye View (BEV) representations learned from geometrically annotated tasks (e.g., object detection) provide spatial structure but lack the semantic richness of foundation vision encoders. To bridge this gap, we propose BEVLM, a framework that connects a spatially consistent and semantically distilled BEV representation with LLMs. Through extensive experiments, we show that BEVLM enables LLMs to reason more effectively in cross-view driving scenes, improving accuracy by 46%, by leveraging BEV features as unified inputs. Furthermore, by distilling semantic knowledge from LLMs into BEV representations, BEVLM significantly improves closed-loop end-to-end driving performance by 29% in safety-critical scenarios.

Obstacle avoidance in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), as a fundamental capability, has gained increasing attention with the growing focus on spatial intelligence. However, current obstacle-avoidance methods mainly depend on limited field-of-view sensors and are ill-suited for UAV scenarios which require full-spatial awareness when the movement direction differs from the UAV's heading. This limitation motivates us to explore omnidirectional obstacle avoidance for panoramic drones with full-view perception. We first study an under explored problem setting in which a UAV must generate collision-free motion in environments with obstacles from arbitrary directions, and then construct a benchmark that consists of three representative flight tasks. Based on such settings, we propose Fly360, a two-stage perception-decision pipeline with a fixed random-yaw training strategy. At the perception stage, panoramic RGB observations are input and converted into depth maps as a robust intermediate representation. For the policy network, it is lightweight and used to output body-frame velocity commands from depth inputs. Extensive simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate that Fly360 achieves stable omnidirectional obstacle avoidance and outperforms forward-view baselines across all tasks. Our model is available at https://zxkai.github.io/fly360/

Incremental Few-Shot (IFS) segmentation aims to learn new categories over time from only a few annotations. Although widely studied in 2D, it remains underexplored for 3D point clouds. Existing methods suffer from catastrophic forgetting or fail to learn discriminative prototypes under sparse supervision, and often overlook a key cue: novel categories frequently appear as unlabelled background in base-training scenes. We introduce SCOPE (Scene-COntextualised Prototype Enrichment), a plug-and-play background-guided prototype enrichment framework that integrates with any prototype-based 3D segmentation method. After base training, a class-agnostic segmentation model extracts high-confidence pseudo-instances from background regions to build a prototype pool. When novel classes arrive with few labelled samples, relevant background prototypes are retrieved and fused with few-shot prototypes to form enriched representations without retraining the backbone or adding parameters. Experiments on ScanNet and S3DIS show that SCOPE achieves SOTA performance, improving novel-class IoU by up to 6.98% and 3.61%, and mean IoU by 2.25% and 1.70%, respectively, while maintaining low forgetting. Code is available https://github.com/Surrey-UP-Lab/SCOPE.

Surgeons don't just see -- they interpret. When an expert observes a surgical scene, they understand not only what instrument is being used, but why it was chosen, what risk it poses, and what comes next. Current surgical AI cannot answer such questions, largely because training data that explicitly encodes surgical reasoning is immensely difficult to annotate at scale. Yet surgical video lectures already contain exactly this -- explanations of intent, rationale, and anticipation, narrated by experts for the purpose of teaching. Though inherently noisy and unstructured, these narrations encode the reasoning that surgical AI currently lacks. We introduce SUREON, a large-scale video QA dataset that systematically harvests this training signal from surgical academic videos. SUREON defines 12 question categories covering safety assessment, decision rationale, and forecasting, and uses a multi-agent pipeline to extract and structure supervision at scale. Across 134.7K clips and 170 procedure types, SUREON yields 206.8k QA pairs and an expert-validated benchmark of 354 examples. To evaluate the extent to which this supervision translates to surgical reasoning ability, we introduce two models: SureonVLM, a vision-language model adapted through supervised fine-tuning, and SureonVLM-R1, a reasoning model trained with Group Relative Policy Optimization. Both models can answer complex questions about surgery and substantially outperform larger general-domain models, exceeding 84% accuracy on the SUREON benchmark while outperforming general-domain models on standard surgical perception tasks. Qualitative analysis of SureonVLM-R1 reveals explicit reasoning behavior, such as inferring operative intent from visual context.

Vision Language Model (VLM) development has largely relied on scaling model size, which hinders deployment on compute-constrained mobile and edge devices such as smartphones and robots. In this work, we explore the performance limits of compact (e.g., 2B and 8B) VLMs. We challenge the prevailing practice that state-of-the-art VLMs must rely on vision encoders initialized via massive contrastive pretraining (e.g., CLIP/SigLIP). We identify an objective mismatch: contrastive learning, optimized for discrimination, enforces coarse and category-level invariances that suppress fine-grained visual cues needed for dense captioning and complex VLM reasoning. To address this issue, we present Penguin-VL, whose vision encoder is initialized from a text-only LLM. Our experiments reveal that Penguin-Encoder serves as a superior alternative to traditional contrastive pretraining, unlocking a higher degree of visual fidelity and data efficiency for multimodal understanding. Across various image and video benchmarks, Penguin-VL achieves performance comparable to leading VLMs (e.g., Qwen3-VL) in mathematical reasoning and surpasses them in tasks such as document understanding, visual knowledge, and multi-perspective video understanding. Notably, these gains are achieved with a lightweight architecture, demonstrating that improved visual representation rather than model scaling is the primary driver of performance. Our ablations show that Penguin-Encoder consistently outperforms contrastive-pretrained encoders, preserving fine-grained spatial and temporal cues that are critical for dense perception and complex reasoning. This makes it a strong drop-in alternative for compute-efficient VLMs and enables high performance in resource-constrained settings. Code: https://github.com/tencent-ailab/Penguin-VL

Generating clinical reports that summarize abnormal patterns, diagnostic findings, and clinical interpretations from long-term EEG recordings remains labor-intensive. We curate a large-scale clinical EEG dataset with 9,922 reports paired with approximately 11,000 hours of EEG recordings from 9,048 patients. We therefore develop CELM, the first clinical EEG-to-Language foundation model capable of summarizing long-duration, variable-length EEG recordings and performing end-to-end clinical report generation at multiple scales, including recording description, background activity, epileptiform abnormalities, events/seizures, and impressions. Experimental results show that, with patient history supervision, our method achieves 70%-95% average relative improvements in standard generation metrics (e.g., ROUGE-1 and METEOR) from 0.2-0.3 to 0.4-0.6. In the zero-shot setting without patient history, CELM attains generation scores in the range of 0.43-0.52, compared to baselines of 0.17-0.26. CELM integrates pretrained EEG foundation models with language models to enable scalable multimodal learning. We release our model and benchmark construction pipeline at https://github.com/Jathurshan0330/CELM.

We introduce the multivariate fields of experts, a new framework for the learning of image priors. Our model generalizes existing fields of experts methods by incorporating multivariate potential functions constructed via Moreau envelopes of the ℓ_∞-norm. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposal across a range of inverse problems that include image denoising, deblurring, compressed-sensing magnetic-resonance imaging, and computed tomography. The proposed approach outperforms comparable univariate models and achieves performance close to that of deep-learning-based regularizers while being significantly faster, requiring fewer parameters, and being trained on substantially fewer data. In addition, our model retains a high level of interpretability due to its structured design. It is supported by theoretical convergence guarantees which ensure reliability in sensitive reconstruction tasks.

Machine-learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) have advanced rapidly, with many top models relying on strong physics-based inductive biases. However, as models scale to larger systems like biomolecules and electrolytes, they struggle to accurately capture long-range (LR) interactions, leading current approaches to rely on explicit physics-based terms or components. In this work, we propose AllScAIP, a straightforward, attention-based, and energy-conserving MLIP model that scales to O(100 million) training samples. It addresses the long-range challenge using an all-to-all node attention component that is data-driven. Extensive ablations reveal that in low-data/small-model regimes, inductive biases improve sample efficiency. However, as data and model size scale, these benefits diminish or even reverse, while all-to-all attention remains critical for capturing LR interactions. Our model achieves state-of-the-art energy/force accuracy on molecular systems, as well as a number of physics-based evaluations (OMol25), while being competitive on materials (OMat24) and catalysts (OC20). Furthermore, it enables stable, long-timescale MD simulations that accurately recover experimental observables, including density and heat of vaporization predictions.

Deep reinforcement learning agents are often misaligned, as they over-exploit early reward signals. Recently, several symbolic approaches have addressed these challenges by encoding sparse objectives along with aligned plans. However, purely symbolic architectures are complex to scale and difficult to apply to continuous settings. Hence, we propose a hybrid approach, inspired by humans' ability to acquire new skills. We use a two-stage framework that injects symbolic structure into neural-based reinforcement learning agents without sacrificing the expressivity of deep policies. Our method, called Hybrid Hierarchical RL (H^2RL), introduces a logical option-based pretraining strategy to steer the learning policy away from short-term reward loops and toward goal-directed behavior while allowing the final policy to be refined via standard environment interaction. Empirically, we show that this approach consistently improves long-horizon decision-making and yields agents that outperform strong neural, symbolic, and neuro-symbolic baselines.

Egocentric video understanding is inherently complex due to the dynamic 4D nature of the environment, where camera motion and object displacements necessitate a continuous re-evaluation of spatial relations. In this work, we target a suite of under-explored egocentric 4D reasoning tasks, including fixture interaction counting, viewpoint-relative fixture location, object movement itinerary tracking, and stationary object localization, that require fundamentally different cognitive operations: spatial anchoring, temporal tracking, and duration reasoning. We observe that these structural differences make task-agnostic approaches insufficient: generic Chain-of-Thought methods lack task-appropriate reasoning primitives, and uniform reinforcement learning actively destabilizes performance on spatial tasks. To address this, we propose EgoReasoner, a two-stage framework that aligns both the reasoning scaffold and the reward signal to each task's cognitive structure. In the first stage, Task-Adaptive Thinking Templates guide the synthesis of structured CoT traces that teach the model to reason adaptively across task types via supervised fine-tuning. In the second stage, task-aware reward functions verify entity grounding, temporal alignment, and task-adaptive logical consistency, selectively strengthening each reasoning pathway via reinforcement fine-tuning with GRPO. Our 3B-parameter model, trained on only 16K samples, achieves 37.5% average accuracy on the challenging HD-EPIC benchmark, surpassing Qwen2.5-VL-7B (25.7%) by over 10 points.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have opened new avenues for accelerating scientific research. While models are increasingly capable of assisting with routine tasks, their ability to contribute to novel, expert-level mathematical discovery is less understood. We present a collection of case studies demonstrating how researchers have successfully collaborated with advanced AI models, specifically Google's Gemini-based models (in particular Gemini Deep Think and its advanced variants), to solve open problems, refute conjectures, and generate new proofs across diverse areas in theoretical computer science, as well as other areas such as economics, optimization, and physics. Based on these experiences, we extract common techniques for effective human-AI collaboration in theoretical research, such as iterative refinement, problem decomposition, and cross-disciplinary knowledge transfer. While the majority of our results stem from this interactive, conversational methodology, we also highlight specific instances that push beyond standard chat interfaces. These include deploying the model as a rigorous adversarial reviewer to detect subtle flaws in existing proofs, and embedding it within a "neuro-symbolic" loop that autonomously writes and executes code to verify complex derivations. Together, these examples highlight the potential of AI not just as a tool for automation, but as a versatile, genuine partner in the creative process of scientific discovery.

The quality of the latent space in visual tokenizers (e.g., VAEs) is crucial for modern generative models. However, the standard reconstruction-based training paradigm produces a latent space that is biased towards low-level information, leading to a foundation flaw: better pixel-level accuracy does not lead to higher-quality generation. This implies that pouring extensive compute into visual tokenizer pre-training translates poorly to improved performance in generation. We identify this as the ``pre-training scaling problem`` and suggest a necessary shift: to be effective for generation, a latent space must concisely represent high-level semantics. We present VTP, a unified visual tokenizer pre-training framework, pioneering the joint optimization of image-text contrastive, self-supervised, and reconstruction losses. Our large-scale study reveals two principal findings: (1) understanding is a key driver of generation, and (2) much better scaling properties, where generative performance scales effectively with compute, parameters, and data allocated to the pretraining of the visual tokenizer. After large-scale pre-training, our tokenizer delivers a competitive profile (78.2 zero-shot accuracy and 0.36 rFID on ImageNet) and 4.1 times faster convergence on generation compared to advanced distillation methods. More importantly, it scales effectively: without modifying standard DiT training specs, solely investing more FLOPS in pretraining VTP achieves 65.8\% FID improvement in downstream generation, while conventional autoencoder stagnates very early at 1/10 FLOPS. Our pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/MiniMax-AI/VTP.

Vision-language models (VLMs) are commonly trained by directly inserting image tokens from a pretrained vision encoder into the text stream of a language model. This allows text and image information to fully attend to one another within the model, but becomes rapidly costly for long multi-image conversations or streaming video applications, both in terms of memory and compute. VLMs leveraging cross-attention (CA) are an efficient alternative to token insertion as image tokens are not added to the KV cache. Despite being introduced early on, multimodal CA models are scarce in the current VLM literature and often underperform their token insertion counterparts. In this work, we reinvestigate the effectiveness of cross-attention for vision-language modeling: (i) We analyze the core differences between the cross-attention and self-attention mechanisms, (ii) we train cross-attention VLMs both from a text-only LLM and by adapting a pretrained insertion-based VLM, showing that simple cross-attention is far more competitive with token insertion than previously reported, and (iii) we demonstrate the practical advantages of cross-attention on real-time video captioning, where it naturally maintains low latency and near-constant memory cost. For samples and code, please see our project page at https://kyutai.org/casa .

Understanding how neural networks transform inputs into outputs is crucial for interpreting and manipulating their behavior. Most existing approaches analyze internal representations by identifying hidden-layer activation patterns correlated with human-interpretable concepts. Here we take a direct approach to examine how hidden neurons act to drive network outputs. We introduce CODEC (Contribution Decomposition), a method that uses sparse autoencoders to decompose network behavior into sparse motifs of hidden-neuron contributions, revealing causal processes that cannot be determined by analyzing activations alone. Applying CODEC to benchmark image-classification networks, we find that contributions grow in sparsity and dimensionality across layers and, unexpectedly, that they progressively decorrelate positive and negative effects on network outputs. We further show that decomposing contributions into sparse modes enables greater control and interpretation of intermediate layers, supporting both causal manipulations of network output and human-interpretable visualizations of distinct image components that combine to drive that output. Finally, by analyzing state-of-the-art models of neural activity in the vertebrate retina, we demonstrate that CODEC uncovers combinatorial actions of model interneurons and identifies the sources of dynamic receptive fields. Overall, CODEC provides a rich and interpretable framework for understanding how nonlinear computations evolve across hierarchical layers, establishing contribution modes as an informative unit of analysis for mechanistic insights into artificial neural networks.

Hierarchical time-series forecasting is essential for demand prediction across various industries. While machine learning models have obtained significant accuracy and scalability on such forecasting tasks, the interpretability of their predictions, informed by application, is still largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel interpretability method for large hierarchical probabilistic time-series forecasting, adapting generic interpretability techniques while addressing challenges associated with hierarchical structures and uncertainty. Our approach offers valuable interpretative insights in response to real-world industrial supply chain scenarios, including 1) the significance of various time-series within the hierarchy and external variables at specific time points, 2) the impact of different variables on forecast uncertainty, and 3) explanations for forecast changes in response to modifications in the training dataset. To evaluate the explainability method, we generate semi-synthetic datasets based on real-world scenarios of explaining hierarchical demands for over ten thousand products at a large chemical company. The experiments showed that our explainability method successfully explained state-of-the-art industrial forecasting methods with significantly higher explainability accuracy. Furthermore, we provide multiple real-world case studies that show the efficacy of our approach in identifying important patterns and explanations that help stakeholders better understand the forecasts. Additionally, our method facilitates the identification of key drivers behind forecasted demand, enabling more informed decision-making and strategic planning. Our approach helps build trust and confidence among users, ultimately leading to better adoption and utilization of hierarchical forecasting models in practice.

The automation of AI R&D (AIRDA) could have significant implications, but its extent and ultimate effects remain uncertain. We need empirical data to resolve these uncertainties, but existing data (primarily capability benchmarks) may not reflect real-world automation or capture its broader consequences, such as whether AIRDA accelerates capabilities more than safety progress or whether our ability to oversee AI R&D can keep pace with its acceleration. To address these gaps, this work proposes metrics to track the extent of AIRDA and its effects on AI progress and oversight. The metrics span dimensions such as capital share of AI R&D spending, researcher time allocation, and AI subversion incidents, and could help decision makers understand the potential consequences of AIRDA, implement appropriate safety measures, and maintain awareness of the pace of AI development. We recommend that companies and third parties (e.g. non-profit research organisations) start to track these metrics, and that governments support these efforts.

Common deep learning approaches for antibody engineering focus on modeling the marginal distribution of sequences. By treating sequences as independent samples, however, these methods overlook affinity maturation as a rich and largely untapped source of information about the evolutionary process by which antibodies explore the underlying fitness landscape. In contrast, classical phylogenetic models explicitly represent evolutionary dynamics but lack the expressivity to capture complex epistatic interactions. We bridge this gap with CoSiNE, a continuous-time Markov chain parameterized by a deep neural network. Mathematically, we prove that CoSiNE provides a first-order approximation to the intractable sequential point mutation process, capturing epistatic effects with an error bound that is quadratic in branch length. Empirically, CoSiNE outperforms state-of-the-art language models in zero-shot variant effect prediction by explicitly disentangling selection from context-dependent somatic hypermutation. Finally, we introduce Guided Gillespie, a classifier-guided sampling scheme that steers CoSiNE at inference time, enabling efficient optimization of antibody binding affinity toward specific antigens.

This paper describes the KCLarity team's participation in CLARITY, a shared task at SemEval 2026 on classifying ambiguity and evasion techniques in political discourse. We investigate two modelling formulations: (i) directly predicting the clarity label, and (ii) predicting the evasion label and deriving clarity through the task taxonomy hierarchy. We further explore several auxiliary training variants and evaluate decoder-only models in a zero-shot setting under the evasion-first formulation. Overall, the two formulations yield comparable performance. Among encoder-based models, RoBERTa-large achieves the strongest results on the public test set, while zero-shot GPT-5.2 generalises better on the hidden evaluation set.

Identifying inputs that trigger specific behaviours or latent features in language models could have a wide range of safety use cases. We investigate a class of methods capable of generating targeted, linguistically fluent inputs that activate specific latent features or elicit model behaviours. We formalise this approach as context modification and present ContextBench -- a benchmark with tasks assessing core method capabilities and potential safety applications. Our evaluation framework measures both elicitation strength (activation of latent features or behaviours) and linguistic fluency, highlighting how current state-of-the-art methods struggle to balance these objectives. We enhance Evolutionary Prompt Optimisation (EPO) with LLM-assistance and diffusion model inpainting, and demonstrate that these variants achieve state-of-the-art performance in balancing elicitation effectiveness and fluency.

Accurate and adaptive dynamic models are critical for underwater vehicle-manipulator systems where hydrodynamic effects induce time-varying parameters. This paper introduces a novel uncertainty-aware adaptive dynamics model framework that remains linear in lumped vehicle and manipulator parameters, and embeds convex physical consistency constraints during online estimation. Moving horizon estimation is used to stack horizon regressors, enforce realizable inertia, damping, friction, and hydrostatics, and quantify uncertainty from parameter evolution. Experiments on a BlueROV2 Heavy with a 4-DOF manipulator demonstrate rapid convergence and calibrated predictions. Manipulator fits achieve R2 = 0.88 to 0.98 with slopes near unity, while vehicle surge, heave, and roll are reproduced with good fidelity under stronger coupling and noise. Median solver time is approximately 0.023 s per update, confirming online feasibility. A comparison against a fixed parameter model shows consistent reductions in MAE and RMSE across degrees of freedom. Results indicate physically plausible parameters and confidence intervals with near 100% coverage, enabling reliable feedforward control and simulation in underwater environments.

We present PepEDiff, a novel peptide binder generator that designs binding sequences given a target receptor protein sequence and its pocket residues. Peptide binder generation is critical in therapeutic and biochemical applications, yet many existing methods rely heavily on intermediate structure prediction, adding complexity and limiting sequence diversity. Our approach departs from this paradigm by generating binder sequences directly in a continuous latent space derived from a pretrained protein embedding model, without relying on predicted structures, thereby improving structural and sequence diversity. To encourage the model to capture binding-relevant features rather than memorizing known sequences, we perform latent-space exploration and diffusion-based sampling, enabling the generation of peptides beyond the limited distribution of known binders. This zero-shot generative strategy leverages the global protein embedding manifold as a semantic prior, allowing the model to propose novel peptide sequences in previously unseen regions of the protein space. We evaluate PepEDiff on TIGIT, a challenging target with a large, flat protein-protein interaction interface that lacks a druggable pocket. Despite its simplicity, our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches across benchmark tests and in the TIGIT case study, demonstrating its potential as a general, structure-free framework for zero-shot peptide binder design. The code for this research is available at GitHub: https://github.com/LabJunBMI/PepEDiff-An-Peptide-binder-Embedding-Diffusion-Model

We present LiveSense - a cross-platform that transforms a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) Wi-Fi Network Interface Card (NIC) on a laptop into a centimeter-level Range-Doppler sensor while preserving simultaneous communication capability. The laptops are equipped with COTS Intel AX211 (Wi-Fi 6E) or Intel BE201 (Wi-Fi 7) NICs. LiveSense can (i) Extract fully-synchronized channel state information (CSI) at >= 40 Hz, (ii) Perform time-phase alignment and self-interference cancellation on-device, and (iii) Provide a real-time stream of range, Doppler, subcarrier magnitude/phase and annotated video frames to a Python/Qt Graphical User Interface (GUI). The demo will showcase the ability to detect (i) Distance and radial velocity of attendees within a few meters of the device, (ii) Micro-motion (respiration), and (iii) Hand-gesture ranging. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first-ever demo to obtain accurate range information of targets from commercial Wi-Fi, despite the limited 160 MHz bandwidth.

Next-generation autonomous vehicles (AVs) rely on large volumes of multisource and multimodal (M^2) data to support real-time decision-making. In practice, data quality (DQ) varies across sources and modalities due to environmental conditions and sensor limitations, yet AV research has largely prioritized algorithm design over DQ analysis. This work focuses on redundancy as a fundamental but underexplored DQ issue in AV datasets. Using the nuScenes and Argoverse 2 (AV2) datasets, we model and measure redundancy in multisource camera data and multimodal image-LiDAR data, and evaluate how removing redundant labels affects the YOLOv8 object detection task. Experimental results show that selectively removing redundant multisource image object labels from cameras with shared fields of view improves detection. In nuScenes, mAP50 gains from 0.66 to 0.70, 0.64 to 0.67, and from 0.53 to 0.55, on three representative overlap regions, while detection on other overlapping camera pairs remains at the baseline even under stronger pruning. In AV2, 4.1-8.6% of labels are removed, and mAP50 stays near the 0.64 baseline. Multimodal analysis also reveals substantial redundancy between image and LiDAR data. These findings demonstrate that redundancy is a measurable and actionable DQ factor with direct implications for AV performance. This work highlights the role of redundancy as a data quality factor in AV perception and motivates a data-centric perspective for evaluating and improving AV datasets. Code, data, and implementation details are publicly available at: https://github.com/yhZHOU515/RedundancyAD

We introduce SurgFormer, a multiresolution gated transformer for data driven soft tissue simulation on volumetric meshes. High fidelity biomechanical solvers are often too costly for interactive use, so we train SurgFormer on solver generated data to predict nodewise displacement fields at near real time rates. SurgFormer builds a fixed mesh hierarchy and applies repeated multibranch blocks that combine local message passing, coarse global self attention, and pointwise feedforward updates, fused by learned per node, per channel gates to adaptively integrate local and long range information while remaining scalable on large meshes. For cut conditioned simulation, resection information is encoded as a learned cut embedding and provided as an additional input, enabling a unified model for both standard deformation prediction and topology altering cases. We also introduce two surgical simulation datasets generated under a unified protocol with XFEM based supervision: a cholecystectomy resection dataset and an appendectomy manipulation and resection dataset with cut and uncut cases. To our knowledge, this is the first learned volumetric surrogate setting to study XFEM supervised cut conditioned deformation within the same volumetric pipeline as standard deformation prediction. Across diverse baselines, SurgFormer achieves strong accuracy with favorable efficiency, making it a practical backbone for both tasks. {Code, data, and project page: \href{https://mint-vu.github.io/SurgFormer/}{available here}}

Subgraph isomorphism is a fundamental problem in graph analysis that seeks to find all instances of a pattern graph within a larger data graph while preserving structural relationships. This NP-complete problem is central to domains such as biological network analysis, social network mining, and quantum circuit optimization. Traditional approaches rely on backtracking algorithms like VF2, which suffer from sequential bottlenecks that limit their ability to exploit modern parallel hardware. In this work, we introduce Δ-Motif, a GPU-accelerated subgraph isomorphism algorithm that reformulates the task through the lens of database operations. Our key insight is to represent both data and pattern graphs in tabular form, turning subgraph isomorphism into database primitives including joins, sorts, merges, and filters. Δ-Motif decomposes graphs into small building blocks called motifs and systematically combines them using scalable relational operations. By leveraging mature, optimized libraries from the NVIDIA RAPIDS ecosystem and Pandas framework, our solution achieves massive parallelism while remaining portable across systems supporting standard relational primitives. Benchmarks show that Δ-Motif outperforms established algorithms like VF2, achieving speedups of up to 595× on GPUs. We further demonstrate its impact by applying it to quantum circuit compilation, addressing a critical bottleneck in quantum computing and enabling scaling to near- and medium-term devices. Our approach democratizes high-performance graph processing by exposing it through familiar database abstractions, eliminating the need for low-level programming while delivering exceptional computational efficiency.

Conversational generative AI is rapidly entering healthcare, where general-purpose models must integrate heterogeneous patient signals and support diverse interaction styles while producing clinically meaningful outputs. In respiratory care, non-invasive audio, such as recordings captured via mobile microphones, enables scalable screening and longitudinal monitoring, but the heterogeneity challenge is particularly acute: recordings vary widely across devices, environments, and acquisition protocols, and questions span multiple intents and question formats. Existing biomedical audio-language QA systems are typically monolithic, without any specialization mechanisms for tackling diverse respiratory corpora and query intents. They are also only validated in limited settings, leaving it unclear how reliably they handle the shifts encountered in real-world settings. To address these limitations, we introduce RAMoEA-QA, a hierarchically routed generative model for respiratory audio question answering that unifies multiple question types and supports both discrete and continuous targets within a single multimodal system. RAMoEA-QA applies two-stage conditional specialization: an Audio Mixture-of-Experts routes each recording to a suitable pre-trained audio encoder, and a Language Mixture-of-Adapters selects a LoRA adapter on a shared frozen LLM to match the query intent and answer format. By specializing both acoustic representations and generation behaviour per example, RAMoEA-QA consistently outperforms strong baselines and routing ablations with minimal parameter overhead, improving in-domain test accuracy to 0.72 (vs. 0.61 and 0.67 for state-of-the-art baselines) and exhibiting the strongest generalization for diagnosis under domain, modality, and task shifts.

Temporal task structure is fundamental for bimanual manipulation: a robot must not only know that one action precedes or overlaps another, but also when each action should occur and how long it should take. While symbolic temporal relations enable high-level reasoning about task structure and alternative execution sequences, concrete timing parameters are equally essential for coordinating two hands at the execution level. Existing approaches address these two levels in isolation, leaving a gap between high-level task planning and low-level movement synchronization. This work presents an approach for learning both symbolic and subsymbolic temporal task constraints from human demonstrations and deriving executable, temporally parametrized plans for bimanual manipulation. Our contributions are (i) a 3-dimensional representation of timings between two actions with methods based on multivariate Gaussian Mixture Models to represent temporal relationships between actions on a subsymbolic level, (ii) a method based on the Davis-Putnam-Logemann-Loveland (DPLL) algorithm that finds and ranks all contradiction-free assignments of Allen relations to action pairs, representing different modes of a task, and (iii) an optimization-based planning system that combines the identified symbolic and subsymbolic temporal task constraints to derive temporally parametrized plans for robot execution. We evaluate our approach on several datasets, demonstrating that our method generates temporally parametrized plans closer to human demonstrations than the most characteristic demonstration baseline.

We present a case study evaluating large language models (LLMs) with 128K-token context windows on a technical question answering (QA) task. Our benchmark is built on a user manual for an agricultural machine, available in English, French, and German. It simulates a cross-lingual information retrieval scenario where questions are posed in English against all three language versions of the manual. The evaluation focuses on realistic "needle-in-a-haystack" challenges and includes unanswerable questions to test for hallucinations. We compare nine long-context LLMs using direct prompting against three Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) strategies (keyword, semantic, hybrid), with an LLM-as-a-judge for evaluation. Our findings for this specific manual show that Hybrid RAG consistently outperforms direct long-context prompting. Models like Gemini 2.5 Flash and the smaller Qwen 2.5 7B achieve high accuracy (over 85%) across all languages with RAG. This paper contributes a detailed analysis of LLM performance in a specialized industrial domain and an open framework for similar evaluations, highlighting practical trade-offs and challenges.

Negation is a fundamental linguistic operator, yet it remains inadequately modeled in diffusion-based generative systems. In this work, we present a formal treatment of linguistic negation in diffusion-based generative models by modeling it as a structured feasibility constraint on semantic guidance within diffusion dynamics. Rather than introducing heuristics or retraining model parameters, we reinterpret classifier-free guidance as defining a semantic update direction and enforce negation by projecting the update onto a convex constraint set derived from linguistic structure. This novel formulation provides a unified framework for handling diverse negation phenomena, including object absence, graded non-inversion semantics, multi-negation composition, and scope-sensitive disambiguation. Our approach is training-free, compatible with pretrained diffusion backbones, and naturally extends from image generation to temporally evolving video trajectories. In addition, we introduce a structured negation-centric benchmark suite that isolates distinct linguistic failure modes in generative systems, to further research in this area. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves robust negation compliance while preserving visual fidelity and structural coherence, establishing the first unified formulation of linguistic negation in diffusion-based generative models beyond representation-level evaluation.

Diffuse direct time-of-flight LiDARs report per-pixel depth histograms formed by aggregating photon returns over a wide instantaneous field of view, violating the single-ray assumption behind standard LiDAR-RGB calibration. We present a simple spatial calibration procedure that estimates, for each diffuse LiDAR pixel, its footprint (effective support region) and relative spatial sensitivity in a co-located RGB image plane. Using a scanned retroreflective patch with background subtraction, we recover per-pixel response maps that provide an explicit LiDAR-to-RGB correspondence for cross-modal alignment and fusion. We demonstrate the method on the ams OSRAM TMF8828.

When humans perceive the world, they naturally integrate multiple audio-visual tasks within dynamic, real-world scenes. However, current works such as event localization, parsing, segmentation and question answering are mostly explored individually, making it challenging to comprehensively understand complex audio-visual scenes and explore inter-task relationships. Hence, we propose AV-Unified, a unified framework that enables joint learning across a wide range of audio-visual scene understanding tasks. AV-Unified standardizes the diverse input-output formats of each task and incorporates a multi-scale spatiotemporal perception network to effectively capture audio-visual associations. Specifically, we unify the inputs and outputs of all supported tasks by converting them into sequences of discrete tokens, establishing a shared representation that allows a single architecture to be trained jointly across heterogeneous varied datasets. Considering the varying temporal granularity of audio-visual events, a multi-scale temporal perception module is designed to capture key cues. Meanwhile, to overcome the lack of auditory supervision in the visual domain, we design a cross-modal guidance-based spatial perception module that models spatial audio-visual associations. Furthermore, task-specific text prompts are employed to enhance the model's adaptability and task-awareness. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets (e.g., AVE, LLP, MUSIC-AVQA, VGG-SS and AVS) demonstrate the effectiveness of AV-Unified across temporal, spatial, and spatiotemporal tasks.

We present a rolling and jumping underactuated monopedal robot designed to explore multimodal locomotion on low-gravity bodies. It uses only two reaction wheels to control its spatial orientation with two controllers: a balancing controller which can aim the robot's jump direction on the ground, and an aerial reorientation controller which can aim the robot's leg for landing after flight. We demonstrate rolling, targeted jumping and landing, and self-righting using only three actuators total, keeping system size to 0.33m and 1.25kg. Simple switching between locomotion modes enables the system to deal with differing landscapes and environmental conditions.

Mobile Agents can autonomously execute user instructions, which requires hybrid-capabilities reasoning, including screen summary, subtask planning, action decision and action function. However, existing agents struggle to achieve both decoupled enhancement and balanced integration of these capabilities. To address these challenges, we propose Channel-of-Mobile-Experts (CoME), a novel agent architecture consisting of four distinct experts, each aligned with a specific reasoning stage, CoME activates the corresponding expert to generate output tokens in each reasoning stage via output-oriented activation. To empower CoME with hybrid-capabilities reasoning, we introduce a progressive training strategy: Expert-FT enables decoupling and enhancement of different experts' capability; Router-FT aligns expert activation with the different reasoning stage; CoT-FT facilitates seamless collaboration and balanced optimization across multiple capabilities. To mitigate error propagation in hybrid-capabilities reasoning, we propose InfoGain-Driven DPO (Info-DPO), which uses information gain to evaluate the contribution of each intermediate step, thereby guiding CoME toward more informative reasoning. Comprehensive experiments show that CoME outperforms dense mobile agents and MoE methods on both AITZ and AMEX datasets.

Orofacial clefts are among the most common congenital craniofacial abnormalities, yet accurate prenatal detection remains challenging due to the scarcity of experienced specialists and the relative rarity of the condition. Early and reliable diagnosis is essential to enable timely clinical intervention and reduce associated morbidity. Here we show that an artificial intelligence system, trained on over 45,139 ultrasound images from 9,215 fetuses across 22 hospitals, can diagnose fetal orofacial clefts with sensitivity and specificity exceeding 93% and 95% respectively, matching the performance of senior radiologists and substantially outperforming junior radiologists. When used as a medical copilot, the system raises junior radiologists' sensitivity by more than 6%. Beyond direct diagnostic assistance, the system also accelerates the development of clinical expertise. A pilot study involving 24 radiologists and trainees demonstrated that the model can improve the expertise development for rare conditions. This dual-purpose approach offers a scalable solution for improving both diagnostic accuracy and specialist training in settings where experienced radiologists are scarce.

Business environments characterized by structural demand intermittency, high variability, and multi-step planning horizons require robust and reproducible model selection mechanisms. Empirical evidence shows that no forecasting model is universally dominant and that relative rankings vary across error metrics, demand regimes, and forecast horizons, generating ambiguity in multi-SKU decision contexts. This study proposes AHSIV (Adaptive Hybrid Selector for Intermittency and Variability), a horizon-aware and regime-conditioned model selection framework designed to address horizon-induced ranking instability. The proposed approach integrates scaled and absolute error metrics adjusted through a Metric Degradation by Forecast Horizon (MDFH) procedure, structural demand classification, multi-objective Pareto dominance, and hierarchical bias refinement within a unified decision architecture. The empirical evaluation is conducted on the Walmart, M3, M4, and M5 datasets under multiple train-test partition schemes and twelve-step forecasting horizons. Results indicate that AHSIV achieves statistical equivalence with the strongest monometric baseline in terms of aggregated performance while increasing the frequency of horizon-specific best-model selection. The findings demonstrate that model selection in heterogeneous demand environments cannot be treated as a static ranking problem, and that horizon-consistent, structurally adaptive mechanisms provide a principled, operationally coherent solution for multi-SKU forecasting.

Vision Transformers naturally accommodate sparsity, yet standard tokenization methods confine features to discrete patch grids. This constraint prevents models from fully exploiting sparse regimes, forcing awkward compromises. We propose Subpixel Placement of Tokens (SPoT), a novel tokenization strategy that positions tokens continuously within images, effectively sidestepping grid-based limitations. With our proposed oracle-guided search, we uncover substantial performance gains achievable with ideal subpixel token positioning, drastically reducing the number of tokens necessary for accurate predictions during inference. SPoT provides a new direction for flexible, efficient, and interpretable ViT architectures, redefining sparsity as a strategic advantage rather than an imposed limitation.

Rapidly increasing context lengths have led to the assumption that large language models (LLMs) can directly reason over entire codebases. Concurrently, recent advances in LLMs have enabled strong performance on software engineering benchmarks, particularly when paired with agentic workflows. In this work, we systematically evaluate whether current LLMs can reliably perform long-context code debugging and patch generation. Using SWE-bench Verified as a controlled experimental setting, we first evaluate state-of-the-art models within an agentic harness (mini-SWE-agent), where performance improves substantially: GPT-5-nano achieves up to a 31\% resolve rate on 100 samples, and open-source models such as Deepseek-R1-0528 obtain competitive results. However, token-level analysis shows that successful agentic trajectories typically remain under 20k-30k tokens, and that longer accumulated contexts correlate with lower success rates, indicating that agentic success primarily arises from task decomposition into short-context steps rather than effective long-context reasoning. To directly test long-context capability, we construct a data pipeline where we artificially inflate the context length of the input by placing the relevant files into the context (ensuring perfect retrieval recall); we then study single-shot patch generation under genuinely long contexts (64k tokens). Despite this setup, performance degrades sharply: Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B achieves only a 7\% resolve rate at 64k context, while GPT-5-nano solves none of the tasks. Qualitative analysis reveals systematic failure modes, including hallucinated diffs, incorrect file targets, and malformed patch headers. Overall, our findings highlight a significant gap between nominal context length and usable context capacity in current LLMs, and suggest that existing agentic coding benchmarks do not meaningfully evaluate long-context reasoning.

Many emerging applications of AI--from scientific discovery to medical diagnosis--require agents to seek information strategically: forming hypotheses, asking targeted questions, and making decisions under uncertainty. In high-stakes settings with limited resources, do language models (LMs) behave like rational agents? Drawing on insights from human cognition, we develop methods to evaluate and enhance agentic information-seeking. First, we introduce a decision-oriented dialogue task called Collaborative Battleship, in which a Captain must balance exploration (asking questions) and action (taking shots), while a Spotter must supply accurate, contextually-grounded answers. Compared to human players (N=42), we find that many LM agents struggle to ask informative questions, produce accurate answers, and identify high-utility actions. To address these gaps, we develop novel Monte Carlo inference strategies for LMs inspired by Bayesian Experimental Design (BED). For Spotter agents, our approach boosts accuracy by up to 14.7% absolute over LM-only baselines; for Captain agents, it raises expected information gain (EIG) by up to 0.227 bits (94.2% of the achievable noise ceiling). Combined, these components yield sharper targeting (+0.303-0.374 F1), and enable weaker LMs, such as Llama-4-Scout, to outperform both humans (8% -> 82% win rate) and frontier models (0% -> 67% win rate vs. GPT-5) at ~1% of GPT-5's cost. We replicate these findings on Guess Who?, where our methods significantly boost accuracy (+28.3-42.4 p.p.), demonstrating their general applicability for building information-seeking agents.

As large language models (LLMs) are deployed in safety-critical settings, it is essential to ensure that their responses comply with safety standards. Prior research has revealed that LLMs often fail to grasp the notion of safe behaviors, resulting in either unjustified refusals to harmless prompts or the generation of harmful content. While substantial efforts have been made to improve their robustness, existing defenses often rely on costly fine-tuning of model parameters or employ suboptimal heuristic techniques. In this work, we take a novel approach to safeguard LLMs by learning to adapt the system prompts in instruction-tuned LLMs. While LLMs are typically pre-trained to follow a fixed system prompt, we investigate the impact of tailoring the system prompt to each specific user input on the safety of the responses. To this end, we propose Sysformer, a transformer model that updates an initial system prompt to a more robust system prompt in the LLM input embedding space while attending to the user prompt. While keeping the LLM parameters frozen, the Sysformer is trained to refuse to respond to a set of harmful prompts while responding ideally to a set of safe ones. Through extensive experiments on 5 LLMs from different families and 2 recent benchmarks, we demonstrate that Sysformer can significantly enhance the robustness of LLMs, leading to upto 80% gain in the refusal rate on harmful prompts while enhancing the compliance with the safe prompts by upto 90%. Results also generalize well to sophisticated jailbreaking attacks, making LLMs upto 100% more robust against different attack strategies. We hope our findings lead to cheaper safeguarding of LLMs and motivate future investigations into designing variable system prompts.

Robotic harvesting in dense crop canopies requires effective interventions that depend not only on geometry, but also on explicit, direction-conditioned relations identifying which organs obstruct a target fruit. We present SG-DOR (Scene Graphs with Direction-Conditioned Occlusion Reasoning), a relational framework that, given instance-segmented organ point clouds, infers a scene graph encoding physical attachments and direction-conditioned occlusion. We introduce an occlusion ranking task for retrieving and ranking candidate leaves for a target fruit and approach direction, and propose a direction-aware graph neural architecture with per-fruit leaf-set attention and union-level aggregation. Experiments on a multi-plant synthetic pepper dataset show improved occlusion prediction (F1=0.73, NDCG@3=0.85) and attachment inference (edge F1=0.83) over strong ablations, yielding a structured relational signal for downstream intervention planning.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become a core paradigm in document question answering tasks. However, existing methods have limitations when dealing with multimodal documents: one category of methods relies on layout analysis and text extraction, which can only utilize explicit text information and struggle to capture images or unstructured content; the other category treats document segmentation as visual input and directly passes it to visual language models (VLMs) for processing, yet it ignores the semantic advantages of text, leading to suboptimal retrieval and generation results. To address these research gaps, we propose the Co-Modality-based RAG (CMRAG) framework, which can simultaneously leverage texts and images for more accurate retrieval and generation. Our framework includes two key components: (1) a Unified Encoding Model (UEM) that projects queries, parsed text, and images into a shared embedding space via triplet-based training, and (2) a Unified Co-Modality-informed Retrieval (UCMR) method that statistically normalizes similarity scores to effectively fuse cross-modal signals. To support research in this direction, we further construct and release a large-scale triplet dataset of (query, text, image) examples. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed framework consistently outperforms single-modality--based RAG in multiple visual document question-answering (VDQA) benchmarks. The findings of this paper show that integrating co-modality information into the RAG framework in a unified manner is an effective approach to improving the performance of complex VDQA systems.

Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models achieve impressive photorealism by training on large-scale web data, but models inherit cultural biases and fail to depict underrepresented regions faithfully. Existing cultural benchmarks focus mainly on object-centric categories (e.g., food, attire, and architecture), overlooking the social and daily activities that more clearly reflect cultural norms. Few metrics exist for measuring cultural faithfulness. We introduce CULTIVate, a benchmark for evaluating T2I models on cross-cultural activities (e.g., greetings, dining, games, traditional dances, and cultural celebrations). CULTIVate spans 16 countries with 576 prompts and more than 19,000 images, and provides an explainable descriptor-based evaluation framework across multiple cultural dimensions, including background, attire, objects, and interactions. We propose four metrics to measure cultural alignment, hallucination, exaggerated elements, and diversity. Our findings reveal systematic disparities: models perform better for global north countries than for the global south, with distinct failure modes across T2I systems. Human studies confirm that our metrics correlate more strongly with human judgments than existing text-image metrics.

We demonstrate the surprising real-world effectiveness of a very simple approach to whole-body model-predictive control (MPC) of quadruped and humanoid robots: the iterative LQR (iLQR) algorithm with MuJoCo dynamics and finite-difference approximated derivatives. Building upon the previous success of model-based behavior synthesis and control of locomotion and manipulation tasks with MuJoCo in simulation, we show that these policies can easily generalize to the real world with few sim-to-real considerations. Our baseline method achieves real-time whole-body MPC on a variety of hardware experiments, including dynamic quadruped locomotion, quadruped walking on two legs, and full-sized humanoid bipedal locomotion. We hope this easy-to-reproduce hardware baseline lowers the barrier to entry for real-world whole-body MPC research and contributes to accelerating research velocity in the community. Our code and experiment videos will be available online at:https://johnzhang3.github.io/mujoco_ilqr

AI agents are increasingly developed and evaluated on benchmarks relevant to human work, yet it remains unclear how representative these benchmarking efforts are of the labor market as a whole. In this work, we systematically study the relationship between agent development efforts and the distribution of real-world human work by mapping benchmark instances to work domains and skills. We first analyze 43 benchmarks and 72,342 tasks, measuring their alignment with human employment and capital allocation across all 1,016 real-world occupations in the U.S. labor market. We reveal substantial mismatches between agent development that tends to be programming-centric, and the categories in which human labor and economic value are concentrated. Within work areas that agents currently target, we further characterize current agent utility by measuring their autonomy levels, providing practical guidance for agent interaction strategies across work scenarios. Building on these findings, we propose three measurable principles for designing benchmarks that better capture socially important and technically challenging forms of work: coverage, realism, and granular evaluation.

While diffusion models have revolutionized visual content generation, their rapid adoption has underscored the critical need to investigate vulnerabilities, e.g., to backdoor attacks. In multimodal diffusion models, it is natural to expect that attacking multiple modalities simultaneously (e.g., text and image) would yield complementary effects and strengthen the overall backdoor. In this paper, we challenge this assumption by investigating the phenomenon of Backdoor Modality Collapse, a scenario where the backdoor mechanism degenerates to rely predominantly on a subset of modalities, rendering others redundant. To rigorously quantify this behavior, we introduce two novel metrics: Trigger Modality Attribution (TMA) and Cross-Trigger Interaction (CTI). Through extensive experiments across diverse training configurations in multimodal conditional diffusion, we consistently observe a ``winner-takes-all'' dynamic in backdoor behavior. Our results reveal that (1) attacks often collapse into subset-modality dominance, and (2) cross-modal interaction is negligible or even negative, contradicting the intuition of synergistic vulnerability. These findings highlight a critical blind spot in current assessments, suggesting that high attack success rates often mask a fundamental reliance on a subset of modalities. This establishes a principled foundation for mechanistic analysis and future defense development.

Strong semantic representations improve the convergence and generation quality of diffusion and flow models. Existing approaches largely rely on external models, which require separate training, operate on misaligned objectives, and exhibit unexpected scaling behavior. We argue that this dependence arises from the model's training objective, which poses a denoising task with little incentive to learn semantic representations. We introduce Self-Flow: a self-supervised flow matching paradigm that integrates representation learning within the generative framework. Our key mechanism, Dual-Timestep Scheduling, applies heterogeneous noise levels across tokens, creating an information asymmetry that forces the model to infer missing information from corrupted inputs. This drives learning strong representations alongside generative capabilities without external supervision. Our method generalizes across modalities and enables multi-modal training while following expected scaling laws, achieving superior image, video, and audio generation.

Concept learning is a form of supervised machine learning that operates on knowledge bases in description logics. State-of-the-art concept learners often rely on an iterative search through a countably infinite concept space. In each iteration, they retrieve instances of candidate solutions to select the best concept for the next iteration. While simple learning problems might require a few dozen instance retrieval calls to find a fitting solution, complex learning problems might necessitate thousands of calls. We alleviate the resulting runtime challenge by presenting a semantics-aware caching approach. Our cache is essentially a subsumption-aware map that links concepts to a set of instances via crisp set operations. Our experiments on 5 datasets with 4 symbolic reasoners, a neuro-symbolic reasoner, and 5 popular pagination policies demonstrate that our cache can reduce the runtime of concept retrieval and concept learning by an order of magnitude while being effective for both symbolic and neuro-symbolic reasoners.

Equivariant atomistic machine learning models have largely been built on spherical-tensor representations, where explicit angular-momentum coupling introduces substantial complexity and systematic extensions beyond energies and forces remain challenging, often requires problem-specific architectural choices. Here we introduce the Tensor Atomic Cluster Expansion (TACE), which unifies scalar and tensorial modeling in Cartesian and space by decomposing local environments into irreducible Cartesian tensors (ICT) constructing a controlled many-body hierarchy with atomic cluster expansion (ACE). In addition to performing ACE in the frequency domain, we propose an efficient Clebsch-Gordan-free alternative in the spatial domain. TACE provides universal invariant (e.g., fidelity tags and charges) and equivariant (e.g., external electric fields and non-collinear magnetic moments) embeddings and predicted tensorial observables are handled on equal footing and enabling explicit control at inference. We demonstrate the accuracy, stability, and efficiency across finite molecules and extended materials, including in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks, spectra, Hessian, external-field responses, charged systems, and multi-fidelity/head training. We further show its robustness on nonequilibrium/reactive datasets and controlled scaling when extending to large foundation model datasets.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning capabilities on math and coding, but frequently fail on symbolic classical planning tasks. Our studies, as well as prior work, show that LLM-generated plans routinely violate domain constraints given in their instructions (e.g., walking through walls). To address this failure, we propose iteratively augmenting instructions with Localized In-Context Learning (L-ICL) demonstrations: targeted corrections for specific failing steps. Specifically, L-ICL identifies the first constraint violation in a trace and injects a minimal input-output example giving the correct behavior for the failing step. Our proposed technique of L-ICL is much effective than explicit instructions or traditional ICL, which adds complete problem-solving trajectories, and many other baselines. For example, on an 8x8 gridworld, L-ICL produces valid plans 89% of the time with only 60 training examples, compared to 59% for the best baseline, an increase of 30%. L-ICL also shows dramatic improvements in other domains (gridworld navigation, mazes, Sokoban, and BlocksWorld), and on several LLM architectures.

Simultaneous speech-to-text translation systems must balance translation quality with latency. Although quality evaluation is well established, latency measurement remains a challenge. Existing metrics produce inconsistent results, especially in short-form settings with artificial presegmentation. We present the first comprehensive meta-evaluation of latency metrics across language pairs and systems. We uncover a structural bias in current metrics related to segmentation. We introduce YAAL (Yet Another Average Lagging) for a more accurate short-form evaluation and LongYAAL for unsegmented audio. We propose SoftSegmenter, a resegmentation tool based on soft word-level alignment. We show that YAAL and LongYAAL, together with SoftSegmenter, outperform popular latency metrics, enabling more reliable assessments of short- and long-form simultaneous speech translation systems. We implement all artifacts within the OmniSTEval toolkit: https://github.com/pe-trik/OmniSTEval.

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has benefited from advances in pretrained speech and language models, yet most systems remain constrained to monolingual settings and short, isolated utterances. While recent efforts in context-aware ASR show promise, two key challenges persist: limited multilingual support and the absence of principled alignment between speech and contextual representations. In this paper, we introduce a context-aware multilingual ASR framework that supports diverse languages and accents while preserving the modularity of pretrained models. Our approach combines a frozen speech encoder and a decoder-only language model via a lightweight projection module, allowing structured context prompts, including dialogue history and biasing words, to guide transcription. To improve interaction between speech and context, we employ a contrastive learning objective that aligns their representations in a shared embedding space. Evaluations on over 1,500 hours of real-world conversational speech across 11 languages and 5 English dialects show that contextual input consistently improves recognition quality. Contrastive alignment provides additional gains when applied to different context types, with an overall performance gain of over 5%. These results highlight the importance of both contextual modeling and cross-modal alignment in multilingual ASR.

Recent advances in multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enable Large Language Models (LLMs) to analyze enterprise spreadsheet workbooks containing millions of cells, cross-sheet dependencies, and embedded visual artifacts. However, state-of-the-art approaches exclude critical context through single-pass retrieval, lose data resolution through compression, and exceed LLM context windows through naive full-context injection, preventing reliable multi-step reasoning over complex enterprise workbooks. We introduce Beyond Rows to Reasoning (BRTR), a multimodal agentic framework for spreadsheet understanding that replaces single-pass retrieval with an iterative tool-calling loop, supporting end-to-end Excel workflows from complex analysis to structured editing. Supported by over 200 hours of expert human evaluation, BRTR achieves state-of-the-art performance across three frontier spreadsheet understanding benchmarks, surpassing prior methods by 25 percentage points on FRTR-Bench, 7 points on SpreadsheetLLM, and 32 points on FINCH. We evaluate five multimodal embedding models, identifying NVIDIA NeMo Retriever 1B as the top performer for mixed tabular and visual data, and vary nine LLMs. Ablation experiments confirm that the planner, retrieval, and iterative reasoning each contribute substantially, and cost analysis shows GPT-5.2 achieves the best efficiency-accuracy trade-off. Throughout all evaluations, BRTR maintains full auditability through explicit tool-call traces.

Reliable localization in prior maps is essential for autonomous navigation, particularly under adverse weather, where optical sensors may fail. We present CFEAR-TR, a teach-and-repeat localization pipeline using a single spinning radar, which is designed for easily deployable, lightweight, and robust navigation in adverse conditions. Our method localizes by jointly aligning live scans to both stored scans from the teach mapping pass, and to a sliding window of recent live keyframes. This ensures accurate and robust pose estimation across different seasons and weather phenomena. Radar scans are represented using a sparse set of oriented surface points, computed from Doppler-compensated measurements. The map is stored in a pose graph that is traversed during localization. Experiments on the held-out test sequences from the Boreas dataset show that CFEAR-TR can localize with an accuracy as low as 0.117 m and 0.096°, corresponding to improvements of up to 63% over the previous state of the art, while running efficiently at 29 Hz. These results substantially narrow the gap to lidar-level localization, particularly in heading estimation. We make the C++ implementation of our work available to the community.

Soft robots achieve functionality through tight coupling among geometry, material composition, and actuation. As a result, effective design optimization requires these three aspects to be considered jointly rather than in isolation. This coupling is computationally challenging: nonlinear large-deformation mechanics increase simulation cost, while contact, collision handling, and non-smooth state transitions limit the applicability of standard gradient-based approaches. We introduce a smooth, low-dimensional design embedding for soft robots that unifies shape morphing, multi-material distribution, and actuation within a single structured parameter space. Shape variation is modeled through continuous deformation maps of a reference geometry, while material properties are encoded as spatial fields. Both are constructed from shared basis functions. This representation enables expressive co-design while drastically reducing the dimensionality of the search space. In our experiments, we show that design expressiveness increases with the number of basis functions, unlike comparable neural network encodings whose representational capacity does not scale predictably with parameter count. We further show that joint co-optimization of shape, material, and actuation using our unified embedding consistently outperforms sequential strategies. All experiments are performed independently of the underlying simulator, confirming compatibility with black-box simulation pipelines. Across multiple dynamic tasks, the proposed embedding surpasses neural network and voxel-based baseline parameterizations while using significantly fewer design parameters. Together, these findings demonstrate that structuring the design space itself enables efficient co-design of soft robots.

Masked autoregressive models (MAR) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for image and video generation, combining the flexibility of masked modeling with the expressiveness of continuous tokenizers. However, when sampling individual frames, video MAR models often produce highly distorted outputs due to the lack of a structured global prior, especially when using only a few sampling steps. To address this, we propose CanvasMAR, a novel autoregressive video prediction model that predicts high-fidelity frames with few sampling steps by introducing a canvas--a blurred, global one-step prediction of the next frame that serves as a non-uniform mask during masked generation. The canvas supplies global structure early in sampling, enabling faster and more coherent frame synthesis. To further stabilize autoregressive sampling, we propose an easy-to-hard curriculum via a motion-aware sampling order that synthesizes relatively stationary regions before attending to highly dynamic ones. We also integrate compositional classifier-free guidance that jointly strengthens the canvas and temporal conditioning to improve generation fidelity. Experiments on the BAIR, UCF-101, and Kinetics-600 benchmarks demonstrate that CanvasMAR produces higher-quality videos with fewer autoregressive steps. On the challenging Kinetics-600 dataset, CanvasMAR achieves remarkable performance among autoregressive models and rivals advanced diffusion-based methods.

The classic theorem of Gallai and Milgram (1960) generalizes several fundamental results in Graph Theory, such as Dilworth's theorem on posets and Kőnig's theorem on matchings in bipartite graphs. The theorem asserts that for every graph G, the vertex set of G can be partitioned into at most α(G) vertex-disjoint paths, where α(G) is the maximum size of an independent set in G. The proof of the Gallai-Milgram theorem is constructive and yields a polynomial-time algorithm that computes a covering of G by at most α(G) vertex-disjoint paths. While the Gallai-Milgram theorem is tight, it was not known prior to our work whether deciding if a graph G could be covered by fewer than α(G) vertex-disjoint paths can be done in polynomial time. We resolve this question by proving the following algorithmic extension of the Gallai-Milgram theorem for undirected graphs: There is an algorithm that, for an n-vertex graph G and an integer parameter k ≥1, runs in time 2^2^O(k^4logk) ·n^O(1) and outputs a path cover P of G together with - a correct conclusion that P is a minimum-size path cover, or - an independent set of size |P|+k, certifying that P contains at most α(G) - k paths. The proof of our algorithmic extension of the Gallai-Milgram theorem is non-trivial and builds on several novel algorithmic ideas. One of the key subroutines in our algorithm is an FPT algorithm, parameterized by α(G), for deciding whether G contains a Hamiltonian path. This result is of independent interest - prior to our work no polynomial-time algorithm for deciding Hamiltonicity was known even for graphs with independence number at most three. Moreover, the algorithmic techniques we develop apply to a wide array of problems in undirected graphs, including Hamiltonian Cycle, Path Cover, Largest Linkage, and Topological Minor Containment.

Activation steering methods enable inference-time control of large language model (LLM) behavior without retraining, but current approaches face a fundamental trade-off: sample-efficient methods suboptimally capture steering signals from labeled examples, while methods that better extract these signals require hundreds to thousands of examples. We introduce COLD-Steer, a training-free framework that steers LLM activations by approximating the representational changes that would result from gradient descent on in-context examples. Our key insight is that the effect of fine-tuning on a small set of examples can be efficiently approximated at inference time without actual parameter updates. We formalize this through two complementary approaches: (i) a unit kernel approximation method that updates the activations directly using gradients with respect to them, normalized across examples, and (ii) a finite-difference approximation requiring only two forward passes regardless of example count. Experiments across a variety of steering tasks and benchmarks demonstrate that COLD-Steer achieves upto 95% steering effectiveness while using 50 times fewer samples compared to the best baseline. COLD-Steer facilitates accommodating diverse perspectives without extensive demonstration data, which we validate through our experiments on pluralistic alignment tasks. Our framework opens new possibilities for adaptive, context-aware model control that can flexibly address varying loss-driven human preferences through principled approximation of learning dynamics rather than specialized training procedures.

In this paper, we introduce Context-Aware Priority Sampling (CAPS), a novel method designed to enhance data efficiency in learning-based autonomous driving systems. CAPS addresses the challenge of imbalanced datasets in imitation learning by leveraging Vector Quantized Variational Autoencoders (VQ-VAEs). In this way, we can get structured and interpretable data representations, which help to reveal meaningful patterns in the data. These patterns are used to group the data into clusters, with each sample being assigned a cluster ID. The cluster IDs are then used to re-balance the dataset, ensuring that rare yet valuable samples receive higher priority during training. We evaluate our method through closed-loop experiments in the CARLA simulator. The results on Bench2Drive scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of CAPS in enhancing model generalization, with substantial improvements in both driving score and success rate.