The long-standing vision of general-purpose robots hinges on their ability to understand and act upon natural language instructions. Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have made remarkable progress toward this goal, yet their generated actions can still misalign with the given instructions. In this paper, we investigate test-time verification as a means to shrink the "intention-action gap.'' We first characterize the test-time scaling law for embodied instruction following and demonstrate that jointly scaling the number of rephrased instructions and generated actions greatly increases test-time sample diversity, often recovering correct actions more efficiently than scaling each dimension independently. To capitalize on these scaling laws, we present CoVer, a contrastive verifier for vision-language-action alignment, and show that our architecture scales gracefully with additional computational resources and data. We then introduce "boot-time compute" and a hierarchical verification inference pipeline for VLAs. At deployment, our framework precomputes a diverse set of rephrased instructions from a Vision-Language-Model (VLM), repeatedly generates action candidates for each instruction, and then uses a verifier to select the optimal high-level prompt and low-level action chunks. Compared to scaling policy pre-training on the same data, our verification approach yields 22% gains in-distribution and 13% out-of-distribution on the SIMPLER benchmark, with a further 45% improvement in real-world experiments. On the PolaRiS benchmark, CoVer achieves 14% gains in task progress and 9% in success rate.

Visual illusions traditionally rely on spatial manipulations such as multi-view consistency. In this work, we introduce Progressive Semantic Illusions, a novel vector sketching task where a single sketch undergoes a dramatic semantic transformation through the sequential addition of strokes. We present Stroke of Surprise, a generative framework that optimizes vector strokes to satisfy distinct semantic interpretations at different drawing stages. The core challenge lies in the "dual-constraint": initial prefix strokes must form a coherent object (e.g., a duck) while simultaneously serving as the structural foundation for a second concept (e.g., a sheep) upon adding delta strokes. To address this, we propose a sequence-aware joint optimization framework driven by a dual-branch Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) mechanism. Unlike sequential approaches that freeze the initial state, our method dynamically adjusts prefix strokes to discover a "common structural subspace" valid for both targets. Furthermore, we introduce a novel Overlay Loss that enforces spatial complementarity, ensuring structural integration rather than occlusion. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in recognizability and illusion strength, successfully expanding visual anagrams from the spatial to the temporal dimension. Project page: https://stroke-of-surprise.github.io/

Unified models can handle both multimodal understanding and generation within a single architecture, yet they typically operate in a single pass without iteratively refining their outputs. Many multimodal tasks, especially those involving complex spatial compositions, multiple interacting objects, or evolving instructions, require decomposing instructions, verifying intermediate results, and making iterative corrections. While test-time scaling (TTS) has demonstrated that allocating additional inference compute for iterative reasoning substantially improves language model performance, extending this paradigm to unified multimodal models remains an open challenge. We introduce UniT, a framework for multimodal chain-of-thought test-time scaling that enables a single unified model to reason, verify, and refine across multiple rounds. UniT combines agentic data synthesis, unified model training, and flexible test-time inference to elicit cognitive behaviors including verification, subgoal decomposition, and content memory. Our key findings are: (1) unified models trained on short reasoning trajectories generalize to longer inference chains at test time; (2) sequential chain-of-thought reasoning provides a more scalable and compute-efficient TTS strategy than parallel sampling; (3) training on generation and editing trajectories improves out-of-distribution visual reasoning. These results establish multimodal test-time scaling as an effective paradigm for advancing both generation and understanding in unified models.

Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) has been widely adopted to help Large Language Models (LLMs) to process tasks involving long documents. However, existing retrieval models are not designed for long document retrieval and fail to address several key challenges of long document retrieval, including context-awareness, causal dependence, and scope of retrieval. In this paper, we proposed AttentionRetriever, a novel long document retrieval model that leverages attention mechanism and entity-based retrieval to build context-aware embeddings for long document and determine the scope of retrieval. With extensive experiments, we found AttentionRetriever is able to outperform existing retrieval models on long document retrieval datasets by a large margin while remaining as efficient as dense retrieval models.

Test-time scaling has become a standard way to improve performance and boost reliability of neural network models. However, its behavior on agentic, multi-step tasks remains less well-understood: small per-step errors can compound over long horizons; and we find that naive policies that uniformly increase sampling show diminishing returns. In this work, we present CATTS, a simple technique for dynamically allocating compute for multi-step agents. We first conduct an empirical study of inference-time scaling for web agents. We find that uniformly increasing per-step compute quickly saturates in long-horizon environments. We then investigate stronger aggregation strategies, including an LLM-based Arbiter that can outperform naive voting, but that can overrule high-consensus decisions. We show that uncertainty statistics derived from the agent's own vote distribution (entropy and top-1/top-2 margin) correlate with downstream success and provide a practical signal for dynamic compute allocation. Based on these findings, we introduce Confidence-Aware Test-Time Scaling (CATTS), which uses vote-derived uncertainty to allocate compute only when decisions are genuinely contentious. CATTS improves performance on WebArena-Lite and GoBrowse by up to 9.1% over React while using up to 2.3x fewer tokens than uniform scaling, providing both efficiency gains and an interpretable decision rule.

Context distillation enables language models to internalize in-context knowledge into their parameters. In our work, we propose On-Policy Context Distillation (OPCD), a framework that bridges on-policy distillation with context distillation by training a student model on its own generated trajectories while minimizing reverse Kullback-Leibler divergence against a context-conditioned teacher. We demonstrate the effectiveness of OPCD on two important applications: experiential knowledge distillation, where models extract and consolidate transferable knowledge from their historical solution traces, and system prompt distillation, where models internalize beneficial behaviors encoded in optimized prompts. Across mathematical reasoning, text-based games, and domain-specific tasks, OPCD consistently outperforms baseline methods, achieving higher task accuracy while better preserving out-of-distribution capabilities. We further show that OPCD enables effective cross-size distillation, where smaller student models can internalize experiential knowledge from larger teachers.

Accurate characterization of subsurface flow is critical for Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) but remains challenged by the ill-posed nature of inverse problems with sparse observations. We present Fun-DDPS, a generative framework that combines function-space diffusion models with differentiable neural operator surrogates for both forward and inverse modeling. Our approach learns a prior distribution over geological parameters (geomodel) using a single-channel diffusion model, then leverages a Local Neural Operator (LNO) surrogate to provide physics-consistent guidance for cross-field conditioning on the dynamics field. This decoupling allows the diffusion prior to robustly recover missing information in parameter space, while the surrogate provides efficient gradient-based guidance for data assimilation. We demonstrate Fun-DDPS on synthetic CCS modeling datasets, achieving two key results: (1) For forward modeling with only 25% observations, Fun-DDPS achieves 7.7% relative error compared to 86.9% for standard surrogates (an 11x improvement), proving its capability to handle extreme data sparsity where deterministic methods fail. (2) We provide the first rigorous validation of diffusion-based inverse solvers against asymptotically exact Rejection Sampling (RS) posteriors. Both Fun-DDPS and the joint-state baseline (Fun-DPS) achieve Jensen-Shannon divergence less than 0.06 against the ground truth. Crucially, Fun-DDPS produces physically consistent realizations free from the high-frequency artifacts observed in joint-state baselines, achieving this with 4x improved sample efficiency compared to rejection sampling.

We propose an optimization-informed deep neural network approach, named iUzawa-Net, aiming for the first solver that enables real-time solutions for a class of nonsmooth optimal control problems of linear partial differential equations (PDEs). The iUzawa-Net unrolls an inexact Uzawa method for saddle point problems, replacing classical preconditioners and PDE solvers with specifically designed learnable neural networks. We prove universal approximation properties and establish the asymptotic ε-optimality for the iUzawa-Net, and validate its promising numerical efficiency through nonsmooth elliptic and parabolic optimal control problems. Our techniques offer a versatile framework for designing and analyzing various optimization-informed deep learning approaches to optimal control and other PDE-constrained optimization problems. The proposed learning-to-control approach synergizes model-based optimization algorithms and data-driven deep learning techniques, inheriting the merits of both methodologies.

Real-time video generation with Diffusion Transformers is bottlenecked by the quadratic cost of 3D self-attention, especially in real-time regimes that are both few-step and autoregressive, where errors compound across time and each denoising step must carry substantially more information. In this setting, we find that prior sparse-attention approximations break down, despite showing strong results for bidirectional, many-step diffusion. Specifically, we observe that video attention is not reliably sparse, but instead combines pronounced periodic structure driven by spatiotemporal position with dynamic, sparse semantic correspondences and dense mixing, exceeding the representational capacity of even oracle top-k attention. Building on this insight, we propose Monarch-RT, a structured attention parameterization for video diffusion models that factorizes attention using Monarch matrices. Through appropriately aligned block structure and our extended tiled Monarch parameterization, we achieve high expressivity while preserving computational efficiency. We further overcome the overhead of parameterization through finetuning, with custom Triton kernels. We first validate the high efficacy of Monarch-RT over existing sparse baselines designed only for bidirectional models. We further observe that Monarch-RT attains up to 95% attention sparsity with no loss in quality when applied to the state-of-the-art model Self-Forcing, making Monarch-RT a pioneering work on highly-capable sparse attention parameterization for real-time video generation. Our optimized implementation outperforms FlashAttention-2, FlashAttention-3, and FlashAttention-4 kernels on Nvidia RTX 5090, H100, and B200 GPUs respectively, providing kernel speedups in the range of 1.4-11.8X. This enables us, for the first time, to achieve true real-time video generation with Self-Forcing at 16 FPS on a single RTX 5090.

We propose a data-efficient, physics-aware generative framework in function space for inverse PDE problems. Existing plug-and-play diffusion posterior samplers represent physics implicitly through joint coefficient-solution modeling, requiring substantial paired supervision. In contrast, our Decoupled Diffusion Inverse Solver (DDIS) employs a decoupled design: an unconditional diffusion learns the coefficient prior, while a neural operator explicitly models the forward PDE for guidance. This decoupling enables superior data efficiency and effective physics-informed learning, while naturally supporting Decoupled Annealing Posterior Sampling (DAPS) to avoid over-smoothing in Diffusion Posterior Sampling (DPS). Theoretically, we prove that DDIS avoids the guidance attenuation failure of joint models when training data is scarce. Empirically, DDIS achieves state-of-the-art performance under sparse observation, improving l_2 error by 11

Copyright law focuses on whether a new work is "substantially similar" to an existing one, but generative AI can closely imitate style without copying content, a capability now central to ongoing litigation. We argue that existing definitions of infringement are ill-suited to this setting and propose a new criterion: a generative AI output infringes on an existing work if it could not have been generated without that work in its training corpus. To operationalize this definition, we model generative systems as closure operators mapping a corpus of existing works to an output of new works. AI generated outputs are permissible if they do not infringe on any existing work according to our criterion. Our results characterize structural properties of permissible generation and reveal a sharp asymptotic dichotomy: when the process of organic creations is light-tailed, dependence on individual works eventually vanishes, so that regulation imposes no limits on AI generation; with heavy-tailed creations, regulation can be persistently constraining.

AI agents are increasingly used to solve real-world tasks by reasoning over multi-turn user interactions and invoking external tools. However, applying reinforcement learning to such settings remains difficult: realistic objectives often lack verifiable rewards and instead emphasize open-ended behaviors; moreover, RL for multi-turn, multi-step agentic tool use is still underexplored; and building and maintaining executable tool environments is costly, limiting scale and coverage. We propose CM2, an RL framework that replaces verifiable outcome rewards with checklist rewards. CM2 decomposes each turn's intended behavior into fine-grained binary criteria with explicit evidence grounding and structured metadata, turning open-ended judging into more stable classification-style decisions. To balance stability and informativeness, our method adopts a strategy of sparse reward assignment but dense evaluation criteria. Training is performed in a scalable LLM-simulated tool environment, avoiding heavy engineering for large tool sets. Experiments show that CM2 consistently improves over supervised fine-tuning. Starting from an 8B Base model and training on an 8k-example RL dataset, CM2 improves over the SFT counterpart by 8 points on tau^-Bench, by 10 points on BFCL-V4, and by 12 points on ToolSandbox. The results match or even outperform similarly sized open-source baselines, including the judging model. CM2 thus provides a scalable recipe for optimizing multi-turn, multi-step tool-using agents without relying on verifiable rewards. Code provided by the open-source community: https://github.com/namezhenzhang/CM2-RLCR-Tool-Agent.

Self-supervised learning (SSL) is a powerful paradigm for learning from unlabeled time-series data. However, popular methods such as masked autoencoders (MAEs) rely on reconstructing inputs from a fixed, predetermined masking ratio. Instead of this static design, we propose treating the corruption level as a new degree of freedom for representation learning, enhancing flexibility and performance. To achieve this, we introduce the Flow-Guided Neural Operator (FGNO), a novel framework combining operator learning with flow matching for SSL training. FGNO learns mappings in functional spaces by using Short-Time Fourier Transform to unify different time resolutions. We extract a rich hierarchy of features by tapping into different network layers and flow times that apply varying strengths of noise to the input data. This enables the extraction of versatile representations, from low-level patterns to high-level global features, using a single model adaptable to specific tasks. Unlike prior generative SSL methods that use noisy inputs during inference, we propose using clean inputs for representation extraction while learning representations with noise; this eliminates randomness and boosts accuracy. We evaluate FGNO across three biomedical domains, where it consistently outperforms established baselines. Our method yields up to 35% AUROC gains in neural signal decoding (BrainTreeBank), 16% RMSE reductions in skin temperature prediction (DREAMT), and over 20% improvement in accuracy and macro-F1 on SleepEDF under low-data regimes. These results highlight FGNO's robustness to data scarcity and its superior capacity to learn expressive representations for diverse time series.

Diffusion large language models (DLLMs) have the potential to enable fast text generation by decoding multiple tokens in parallel. However, in practice, their inference efficiency is constrained by the need for many refinement steps, while aggressively reducing the number of steps leads to a substantial degradation in generation quality. To alleviate this, we propose a trajectory self-distillation framework that improves few-step decoding by distilling the model's own generative trajectories. We incorporate Direct Discriminative Optimization (DDO), a reverse-KL objective that promotes mode-seeking distillation and encourages the student to concentrate on high-probability teacher modes. Across benchmarks, our approach consistently outperforms strong few-step baselines and standard training under tight step budgets. Although full-step decoding remains superior, we substantially narrow the gap, establishing a strong foundation towards practical few-step DLLMs. The source code is available at https://github.com/Tyrion58/T3D.

Explaining observed phenomena through symbolic, interpretable formulas is a fundamental goal of science. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have emerged as promising tools for symbolic equation discovery, owing to their broad domain knowledge and strong reasoning capabilities. However, most existing LLM-based systems try to guess equations directly from data, without modeling the multi-step reasoning process that scientists often follow: first inferring physical properties such as symmetries, then using these as priors to restrict the space of candidate equations. We introduce KeplerAgent, an agentic framework that explicitly follows this scientific reasoning process. The agent coordinates physics-based tools to extract intermediate structure and uses these results to configure symbolic regression engines such as PySINDy and PySR, including their function libraries and structural constraints. Across a suite of physical equation benchmarks, KeplerAgent achieves substantially higher symbolic accuracy and greater robustness to noisy data than both LLM and traditional baselines.

Membership inference attacks (MIAs) aim to determine whether specific data were used to train a model. While extensively studied on classification models, their impact on time series forecasting remains largely unexplored. We address this gap by introducing two new attacks: (i) an adaptation of multivariate LiRA, a state-of-the-art MIA originally developed for classification models, to the time-series forecasting setting, and (ii) a novel end-to-end learning approach called Deep Time Series (DTS) attack. We benchmark these methods against adapted versions of other leading attacks from the classification setting. We evaluate all attacks in realistic settings on the TUH-EEG and ELD datasets, targeting two strong forecasting architectures, LSTM and the state-of-the-art N-HiTS, under both record- and user-level threat models. Our results show that forecasting models are vulnerable, with user-level attacks often achieving perfect detection. The proposed methods achieve the strongest performance in several settings, establishing new baselines for privacy risk assessment in time series forecasting. Furthermore, vulnerability increases with longer prediction horizons and smaller training populations, echoing trends observed in large language models.

While large language models (LLMs) are generally considered proficient in generating language, how similar their language usage is to that of humans remains understudied. In this paper, we test whether models exhibit linguistic convergence, a core pragmatic element of human language communication: do models adapt, or converge, to the linguistic patterns of their user? To answer this, we systematically compare model completions of existing dialogues to original human responses across sixteen language models, three dialogue corpora, and various stylometric features. We find that models strongly converge to the conversation's style, often significantly overfitting relative to the human baseline. While convergence patterns are often feature-specific, we observe consistent shifts in convergence across modeling settings, with instruction-tuned and larger models converging less than their pretrained and smaller counterparts. Given the differences in human and model convergence patterns, we hypothesize that the underlying mechanisms driving these behaviors are very different.

We study Langevin dynamics with noise projected onto the directions orthogonal to an isometric group action. This mathematical model is introduced to shed new light on the effects of symmetry on stochastic gradient descent for over-parametrized models. Our main result identifies a novel form of implicit regularization: when the initial and target density are both invariant under the group action, Langevin dynamics with projected noise is equivalent in law to Langevin dynamics with isotropic diffusion but with an additional drift term proportional to the negative log volume of the group orbit. We prove this result by constructing a coupling of the two processes via a third process on the group itself, and identify the additional drift as the mean curvature of the orbits.

We consider bidding in repeated Bayesian first-price auctions. Bidding algorithms that achieve optimal regret have been extensively studied, but their strategic robustness to the seller's manipulation remains relatively underexplored. Bidding algorithms based on no-swap-regret algorithms achieve both desirable properties, but are suboptimal in terms of statistical and computational efficiency. In contrast, online gradient ascent is the only algorithm that achieves O(√(TK)) regret and strategic robustness [KSS24], where T denotes the number of auctions and K the number of bids. In this paper, we explore whether simple online linear optimization (OLO) algorithms suffice for bidding algorithms with both desirable properties. Our main result shows that sublinear linearized regret is sufficient for strategic robustness. Specifically, we construct simple black-box reductions that convert any OLO algorithm into a strategically robust no-regret bidding algorithm, in both known and unknown value distribution settings. For the known value distribution case, our reduction yields a bidding algorithm that achieves O(√(T log K)) regret and strategic robustness (with exponential improvement on the K-dependence compared to [KSS24]). For the unknown value distribution case, our reduction gives a bidding algorithm with high-probability O(√(T (log K+log(T/δ))) regret and strategic robustness, while removing the bounded density assumption made in [KSS24].

Symbolic regression seeks to uncover physical laws from experimental data by searching for closed-form expressions, which is an important task in AI-driven scientific discovery. Yet the exponential growth of the search space of expression renders the task computationally challenging. A promising yet underexplored direction for reducing the search space and accelerating training lies in *symbolic equivalence*: many expressions, although syntactically different, define the same function – for example, log(x_1^2x_2^3), log(x_1^2)+log(x_2^3), and 2log(x_1)+3log(x_2). Existing algorithms treat such variants as distinct outputs, leading to redundant exploration and slow learning. We introduce EGG-SR, a unified framework that integrates symbolic equivalence into a class of modern symbolic regression methods, including Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL), and Large Language Models (LLMs). EGG-SR compactly represents equivalent expressions through the proposed EGG module (via equality graphs), accelerating learning by: (1) pruning redundant subtree exploration in EGG-MCTS, (2) aggregating rewards across equivalent generated sequences in EGG-DRL, and (3) enriching feedback prompts in EGG-LLM. Theoretically, we show the benefit of embedding EGG into learning: it tightens the regret bound of MCTS and reduces the variance of the DRL gradient estimator. Empirically, EGG-SR consistently enhances a class of symbolic regression models across several benchmarks, discovering more accurate expressions within the same time limit. Project page is at: https://nan-jiang-group.github.io/egg-sr.

This paper presents a technical curriculum on language-oriented artificial intelligence (AI) in the language and translation (L&T) industry. The curriculum aims to foster domain-specific technical AI literacy among stakeholders in the fields of translation and specialised communication by exposing them to the conceptual and technical/algorithmic foundations of modern language-oriented AI in an accessible way. The core curriculum focuses on 1) vector embeddings, 2) the technical foundations of neural networks, 3) tokenization and 4) transformer neural networks. It is intended to help users develop computational thinking as well as algorithmic awareness and algorithmic agency, ultimately contributing to their digital resilience in AI-driven work environments. The didactic suitability of the curriculum was tested in an AI-focused MA course at the Institute of Translation and Multilingual Communication at TH Koeln. Results suggest the didactic effectiveness of the curriculum, but participant feedback indicates that it should be embedded into higher-level didactic scaffolding - e.g., in the form of lecturer support - in order to enable optimal learning conditions.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are designed to use attributed graphs to learn representations. Such representations are beneficial in the unsupervised learning of clusters and community detection. Nonetheless, such inference may reveal sensitive groups, clustered systems, or collective behaviors, raising concerns regarding group-level privacy. Community attribution in social and critical infrastructure networks, for example, can expose coordinated asset groups, operational hierarchies, and system dependencies that could be used for profiling or intelligence gathering. We study a defensive setting in which a data publisher (defender) seeks to conceal a community of interest while making limited, utility-aware changes in the network. Our analysis indicates that community concealment is strongly influenced by two quantifiable factors: connectivity at the community boundary and feature similarity between the protected community and adjacent communities. Informed by these findings, we present a perturbation strategy that rewires a set of selected edges and modifies node features to reduce the distinctiveness leveraged by GNN message passing. The proposed method outperforms DICE in our experiments on synthetic benchmarks and real network graphs under identical perturbation budgets. Overall, it achieves median relative concealment improvements of approximately 20-45% across the evaluated settings. These findings demonstrate a mitigation strategy against GNN-based community learning and highlight group-level privacy risks intrinsic to graph learning.

Despite speech recognition systems achieving low word error rates on standard benchmarks, they often fail on short, high-stakes utterances in real-world deployments. Here, we study this failure mode in a high-stakes task: the transcription of U.S. street names as spoken by U.S. participants. We evaluate 15 models from OpenAI, Deepgram, Google, and Microsoft on recordings from linguistically diverse U.S. speakers and find an average transcription error rate of 44%. We quantify the downstream impact of failed transcriptions by geographic locations and show that mis-transcriptions systematically cause errors for all speakers, but that routing distance errors are twice as large for non-English primary speakers compared to English primary speakers. To mitigate this harm, we introduce a synthetic data generation approach that produces diverse pronunciations of named entities using open-source text-to-speech models. Fine-tuning with less than 1,000 synthetic samples improves street name transcription accuracy by nearly 60% (relative to base models) for non-English primary speakers. Our results highlight a critical gap between benchmark performance and real-world reliability in speech systems and demonstrate a simple, scalable path to reducing high-stakes transcription errors.

Unstructured documents like PDFs contain valuable structured information, but downstream systems require this data in reliable, standardized formats. LLMs are increasingly deployed to automate this extraction, making accuracy and reliability paramount. However, progress is bottlenecked by two gaps. First, no end-to-end benchmark evaluates PDF-to-JSON extraction under enterprise-scale schema breadth. Second, no principled methodology captures the semantics of nested extraction, where fields demand different notions of correctness (exact match for identifiers, tolerance for quantities, semantic equivalence for names), arrays require alignment, and omission must be distinguished from hallucination. We address both gaps with ExtractBench, an open-source benchmark and evaluation framework for PDF-to-JSON structured extraction. The benchmark pairs 35 PDF documents with JSON Schemas and human-annotated gold labels across economically valuable domains, yielding 12,867 evaluatable fields spanning schema complexities from tens to hundreds of fields. The evaluation framework treats the schema as an executable specification: each field declares its scoring metric. Baseline evaluations reveal that frontier models (GPT-5/5.2, Gemini-3 Flash/Pro, Claude 4.5 Opus/Sonnet) remain unreliable on realistic schemas. Performance degrades sharply with schema breadth, culminating in 0% valid output on a 369-field financial reporting schema across all tested models. We release ExtractBench at https://github.com/ContextualAI/extract-bench.

The convergence of robotics and next-generation communication is a critical driver of technological advancement. As the world transitions from 5G to 6G, the foundational capabilities of wireless networks are evolving to support increasingly complex and autonomous robotic systems. This paper examines the transformative impact of 6G on enhancing key robotics functionalities. It provides a systematic mapping of IMT-2030 key performance indicators to robotic functional blocks including sensing, perception, cognition, actuation and self-learning. Building upon this mapping, we propose a high-level architectural framework integrating robotic, intelligent, and network service planes, underscoring the need for a holistic approach. As an example use case, we present a real-time, dynamic safety framework enabled by IMT-2030 capabilities for safe and efficient human-robot collaboration in shared spaces.

Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) aim to learn representations by predicting target embeddings from context embeddings, inducing a scalar compatibility energy in a latent space. In contrast, Quasimetric Reinforcement Learning (QRL) studies goal-conditioned control through directed distance values (cost-to-go) that support reaching goals under asymmetric dynamics. In this short article, we connect these viewpoints by restricting attention to a principled class of JEPA energy functions : intrinsic (least-action) energies, defined as infima of accumulated local effort over admissible trajectories between two states. Under mild closure and additivity assumptions, any intrinsic energy is a quasimetric. In goal-reaching control, optimal cost-to-go functions admit exactly this intrinsic form ; inversely, JEPAs trained to model intrinsic energies lie in the quasimetric value class targeted by QRL. Moreover, we observe why symmetric finite energies are structurally mismatched with one-way reachability, motivating asymmetric (quasimetric) energies when directionality matters.

Open world language conditioned task planning is crucial for robots operating in large-scale household environments. While many recent works attempt to address this problem using Large Language Models (LLMs) via prompting or training, a key challenge remains scalability. Performance often degrades rapidly with increasing environment size, plan length, instruction ambiguity, and constraint complexity. In this work, we propose Any House Any Task (AHAT), a household task planner optimized for long-horizon planning in large environments given ambiguous human instructions. At its core, AHAT utilizes an LLM trained to map task instructions and textual scene graphs into grounded subgoals defined in the Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL). These subgoals are subsequently solved to generate feasible and optimal long-horizon plans through explicit symbolic reasoning. To enhance the model's ability to decompose complex and ambiguous intentions, we introduce TGPO, a novel reinforcement learning algorithm that integrates external correction of intermediate reasoning traces into Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Experiments demonstrate that AHAT achieves significant performance gains over state-of-the-art prompting, planning, and learning methods, particularly in human-style household tasks characterized by brief instructions but requiring complex execution plans.

Multi-robot systems require scalable and federated methods to model complex environments under computational and communication constraints. Gaussian Processes (GPs) offer robust probabilistic modeling, but suffer from cubic computational complexity, limiting their applicability in large-scale deployments. To address this challenge, we introduce the pxpGP, a novel distributed GP framework tailored for both centralized and decentralized large-scale multi-robot networks. Our approach leverages sparse variational inference to generate a local compact pseudo-representation. We introduce a sparse variational optimization scheme that bounds local pseudo-datasets and formulate a global scaled proximal-inexact consensus alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) with adaptive parameter updates and warm-start initialization. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that pxpGP and its decentralized variant, dec-pxpGP, outperform existing distributed GP methods in hyperparameter estimation and prediction accuracy, particularly in large-scale networks.

Recent advances in foundational models have yielded reasoning systems capable of achieving a gold-medal standard at the International Mathematical Olympiad. The transition from competition-level problem-solving to professional research, however, requires navigating vast literature and constructing long-horizon proofs. In this work, we introduce Aletheia, a math research agent that iteratively generates, verifies, and revises solutions end-to-end in natural language. Specifically, Aletheia is powered by an advanced version of Gemini Deep Think for challenging reasoning problems, a novel inference-time scaling law that extends beyond Olympiad-level problems, and intensive tool use to navigate the complexities of mathematical research. We demonstrate the capability of Aletheia from Olympiad problems to PhD-level exercises and most notably, through several distinct milestones in AI-assisted mathematics research: (a) a research paper (Feng26) generated by AI without any human intervention in calculating certain structure constants in arithmetic geometry called eigenweights; (b) a research paper (LeeSeo26) demonstrating human-AI collaboration in proving bounds on systems of interacting particles called independent sets; and (c) an extensive semi-autonomous evaluation (Feng et al., 2026a) of 700 open problems on Bloom's Erdos Conjectures database, including autonomous solutions to four open questions. In order to help the public better understand the developments pertaining to AI and mathematics, we suggest quantifying standard levels of autonomy and novelty of AI-assisted results, as well as propose a novel concept of human-AI interaction cards for transparency. We conclude with reflections on human-AI collaboration in mathematics and share all prompts as well as model outputs at https://github.com/google-deepmind/superhuman/tree/main/aletheia.

Latency-critical speech applications (e.g., live transcription, voice commands, and real-time translation) demand low time-to-first-token (TTFT) and high transcription accuracy, particularly on resource-constrained edge devices. Full-attention Transformer encoders remain a strong accuracy baseline for automatic speech recognition (ASR) because every frame can directly attend to every other frame, which resolves otherwise locally ambiguous acoustics using distant lexical context. However, this global dependency incurs quadratic complexity in sequence length, inducing an inherent "encode-the-whole-utterance" latency profile. For streaming use cases, this causes TTFT to grow linearly with utterance length as the encoder must process the entire prefix before any decoder token can be emitted. To better meet the needs of on-device, streaming ASR use cases we introduce Moonshine v2, an ergodic streaming-encoder ASR model that employs sliding-window self-attention to achieve bounded, low-latency inference while preserving strong local context. Our models achieve state of the art word error rates across standard benchmarks, attaining accuracy on-par with models 6x their size while running significantly faster. These results demonstrate that carefully designed local attention is competitive with the accuracy of full attention at a fraction of the size and latency cost, opening new possibilities for interactive speech interfaces on edge devices.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) layers have emerged as an important tool in scaling up modern neural networks by decoupling total trainable parameters from activated parameters in the forward pass for each token. However, sparse MoEs add complexity to training due to (i) new trainable parameters (router weights) that, like all other parameter groups, require hyperparameter (HP) tuning; (ii) new architecture scale dimensions (number of and size of experts) that must be chosen and potentially taken large. To make HP selection cheap and reliable, we propose a new parameterization for transformer models with MoE layers when scaling model width, depth, number of experts, and expert (hidden) size. Our parameterization is justified by a novel dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT) analysis. When varying different model dimensions trained at a fixed token budget, we find empirically that our parameterization enables reliable HP transfer across models from 51M to over 2B total parameters. We further take HPs identified from sweeping small models on a short token horizon to train larger models on longer horizons and report performant model behaviors.

The training of high-quality, robust machine learning models for speech-driven 3D facial animation requires a large, diverse dataset of high-quality audio-animation pairs. To overcome the lack of such a dataset, recent work has introduced large pre-trained speech encoders that are robust to variations in the input audio and, therefore, enable the facial animation model to generalize across speakers, audio quality, and languages. However, the resulting facial animation models are prohibitively large and lend themselves only to offline inference on a dedicated machine. In this work, we explore on-device, real-time facial animation models in the context of game development. We overcome the lack of large datasets by using hybrid knowledge distillation with pseudo-labeling. Given a large audio dataset, we employ a high-performing teacher model to train very small student models. In contrast to the pre-trained speech encoders, our student models only consist of convolutional and fully-connected layers, removing the need for attention context or recurrent updates. In our experiments, we demonstrate that we can reduce the memory footprint to up to 3.4 MB and required future audio context to up to 81 ms while maintaining high-quality animations. This paves the way for on-device inference, an important step towards realistic, model-driven digital characters.

Data mixing -- determining the ratios of data from different domains -- is a first-order concern for training language models (LMs). While existing mixing methods show promise, they fall short when applied during real-world LM development. We present Olmix, a framework that addresses two such challenges. First, the configuration space for developing a mixing method is not well understood -- design choices across existing methods lack justification or consensus and overlook practical issues like data constraints. We conduct a comprehensive empirical study of this space, identifying which design choices lead to a strong mixing method. Second, in practice, the domain set evolves throughout LM development as datasets are added, removed, partitioned, and revised -- a problem setting largely unaddressed by existing works, which assume fixed domains. We study how to efficiently recompute the mixture after the domain set is updated, leveraging information from past mixtures. We introduce mixture reuse, a mechanism that reuses existing ratios and recomputes ratios only for domains affected by the update. Over a sequence of five domain-set updates mirroring real-world LM development, mixture reuse matches the performance of fully recomputing the mix after each update with 74% less compute and improves over training without mixing by 11.6% on downstream tasks.

Neuromorphic vision systems based on spiking neural networks (SNNs) offer ultra-low-power perception for event-based and frame-based cameras, yet catastrophic forgetting remains a critical barrier to deployment in continually evolving environments. Existing continual learning methods, developed primarily for artificial neural networks, seldom jointly optimize accuracy and energy efficiency, with particularly limited exploration on event-based datasets. We propose an energy-aware spike budgeting framework for continual SNN learning that integrates experience replay, learnable leaky integrate-and-fire neuron parameters, and an adaptive spike scheduler to enforce dataset-specific energy constraints during training. Our approach exhibits modality-dependent behavior: on frame-based datasets (MNIST, CIFAR-10), spike budgeting acts as a sparsity-inducing regularizer, improving accuracy while reducing spike rates by up to 47\%; on event-based datasets (DVS-Gesture, N-MNIST, CIFAR-10-DVS), controlled budget relaxation enables accuracy gains up to 17.45 percentage points with minimal computational overhead. Across five benchmarks spanning both modalities, our method demonstrates consistent performance improvements while minimizing dynamic power consumption, advancing the practical viability of continual learning in neuromorphic vision systems.

Efficient long-context processing remains a crucial challenge for contemporary large language models (LLMs), especially in resource-constrained environments. Soft compression architectures promise to extend effective context length by replacing long token sequences with smaller sets of learned compressed tokens. Yet, the limits of compressibility – and when compression begins to erase task-relevant content – remain underexplored. In this paper, we define token overflow as a regime in which compressed representations no longer contain sufficient information to answer a given query, and propose a methodology to characterize and detect it. In the xRAG soft-compression setting, we find that query-agnostic saturation statistics reliably separate compressed from uncompressed token representations, providing a practical tool for identifying compressed tokens but showing limited overflow detection capability. Lightweight probing classifiers over both query and context xRAG representations detect overflow with 0.72 AUC-ROC on average on HotpotQA, SQuADv2, and TriviaQA datasets, demonstrating that incorporating query information improves detection performance. These results advance from query-independent diagnostics to query-aware detectors, enabling low-cost pre-LLM gating to mitigate compression-induced errors.

We introduce Categorical Flow Maps, a flow-matching method for accelerated few-step generation of categorical data via self-distillation. Building on recent variational formulations of flow matching and the broader trend towards accelerated inference in diffusion and flow-based models, we define a flow map towards the simplex that transports probability mass toward a predicted endpoint, yielding a parametrisation that naturally constrains model predictions. Since our trajectories are continuous rather than discrete, Categorical Flow Maps can be trained with existing distillation techniques, as well as a new objective based on endpoint consistency. This continuous formulation also automatically unlocks test-time inference: we can directly reuse existing guidance and reweighting techniques in the categorical setting to steer sampling toward downstream objectives. Empirically, we achieve state-of-the-art few-step results on images, molecular graphs, and text, with strong performance even in single-step generation.

What does it truly mean for a language model to "reason"? Current evaluations reward models' correct standalone answers-but correctness alone reveals little about the process that produced them. We argue that reasoning should be understood not as a static chain of steps but as a dynamic trajectory in which ideas interact, clash, and evolve into integrated insights. Building on the philosophical tradition of dialectics, we introduce SIEV, a structured evaluation framework that assesses reasoning through explicit thesis-antithesis-synthesis interactions. SIEV produces interpretable trajectories that highlight key properties of reasoning-robustness to challenge, adaptability under conflict, and synthesis across competing viewpoints-dimensions that conventional correctness-based metrics cannot capture. Empirical results on GSM and MMLU demonstrate substantial gaps in the reasoning abilities of state-of-the-art models: for example, GPT-5-chat loses more than 40 points (out of 100) on GSM when evaluated through SIEV's process-oriented lens. By shifting focus from what answer a model gives to how it arrives there, SIEV enables a more transparent and principled distinction between structured reasoning and surface-level pattern generation offering a clearer foundation for assessing and understanding the reasoning capabilities of LLMs.

Diffusion alignment adapts pretrained diffusion models to sample from reward-tilted distributions along the denoising trajectory. This process naturally admits a Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) interpretation, where the denoising model acts as a proposal and reward guidance induces importance weights. Motivated by this view, we introduce Variance Minimisation Policy Optimisation (VMPO), which formulates diffusion alignment as minimising the variance of log importance weights rather than directly optimising a Kullback-Leibler (KL) based objective. We prove that the variance objective is minimised by the reward-tilted target distribution and that, under on-policy sampling, its gradient coincides with that of standard KL-based alignment. This perspective offers a common lens for understanding diffusion alignment. Under different choices of potential functions and variance minimisation strategies, VMPO recovers various existing methods, while also suggesting new design directions beyond KL.

Two-sided matching markets rely on preferences from both sides, yet it is often impractical to evaluate preferences. Participants, therefore, conduct a limited number of interviews, which provide early, noisy impressions and shape final decisions. We study bandit learning in matching markets with interviews, modeling interviews as low-cost hints that reveal partial preference information to both sides. Our framework departs from existing work by allowing firm-side uncertainty: firms, like agents, may be unsure of their own preferences and can make early hiring mistakes by hiring less preferred agents. To handle this, we extend the firm's action space to allow strategic deferral (choosing not to hire in a round), enabling recovery from suboptimal hires and supporting decentralized learning without coordination. We design novel algorithms for (i) a centralized setting with an omniscient interview allocator and (ii) decentralized settings with two types of firm-side feedback. Across all settings, our algorithms achieve time-independent regret, a substantial improvement over the O(log T) regret bounds known for learning stable matchings without interviews. Also, under mild structured markets, decentralized performance matches the centralized counterpart up to polynomial factors in the number of agents and firms.

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is computationally efficient but often yields inferior generalization compared to reinforcement learning (RL). This gap is primarily driven by RL's use of on-policy data. We propose a framework to bridge this chasm by enabling On-Policy SFT. We first present Distribution Discriminant Theory (DDT), which explains and quantifies the alignment between data and the model-induced distribution. Leveraging DDT, we introduce two complementary techniques: (i) In-Distribution Finetuning (IDFT), a loss-level method to enhance generalization ability of SFT, and (ii) Hinted Decoding, a data-level technique that can re-align the training corpus to the model's distribution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves generalization performance on par with prominent offline RL algorithms, including DPO and SimPO, while maintaining the efficiency of an SFT pipeline. The proposed framework thus offers a practical alternative in domains where RL is infeasible. We open-source the code here: https://github.com/zhangmiaosen2000/Towards-On-Policy-SFT

We propose UniDFlow, a unified discrete flow-matching framework for multimodal understanding, generation, and editing. It decouples understanding and generation via task-specific low-rank adapters, avoiding objective interference and representation entanglement, while a novel reference-based multimodal preference alignment optimizes relative outcomes under identical conditioning, improving faithfulness and controllability without large-scale retraining. UniDFlpw achieves SOTA performance across eight benchmarks and exhibits strong zero-shot generalization to tasks including inpainting, in-context image generation, reference-based editing, and compositional generation, despite no explicit task-specific training.

Determining whether neural models internalize physical laws as world models, rather than exploiting statistical shortcuts, remains challenging, especially under out-of-distribution (OOD) shifts. Standard evaluations often test latent capability via downstream adaptation (e.g., fine-tuning or high-capacity probes), but such interventions can change the representations being measured and thus confound what was learned during self-supervised learning (SSL). We propose a non-invasive evaluation protocol, PhyIP. We test whether physical quantities are linearly decodable from frozen representations, motivated by the linear representation hypothesis. Across fluid dynamics and orbital mechanics, we find that when SSL achieves low error, latent structure becomes linearly accessible. PhyIP recovers internal energy and Newtonian inverse-square scaling on OOD tests (e.g., ρ> 0.90). In contrast, adaptation-based evaluations can collapse this structure (ρ≈ 0.05). These findings suggest that adaptation-based evaluation can obscure latent structures and that low-capacity probes offer a more accurate evaluation of physical world models.

Recent robot foundation models largely rely on large-scale behavior cloning, which imitates expert actions but discards transferable dynamics knowledge embedded in heterogeneous embodied data. While the Unified World Model (UWM) formulation has the potential to leverage such diverse data, existing instantiations struggle to scale to foundation-level due to coarse data usage and fragmented datasets. We introduce LDA-1B, a robot foundation model that scales through universal embodied data ingestion by jointly learning dynamics, policy, and visual forecasting, assigning distinct roles to data of varying quality. To support this regime at scale, we assemble and standardize EI-30k, an embodied interaction dataset comprising over 30k hours of human and robot trajectories in a unified format. Scalable dynamics learning over such heterogeneous data is enabled by prediction in a structured DINO latent space, which avoids redundant pixel-space appearance modeling. Complementing this representation, LDA-1B employs a multi-modal diffusion transformer to handle asynchronous vision and action streams, enabling stable training at the 1B-parameter scale. Experiments in simulation and the real world show LDA-1B outperforms prior methods (e.g., π_0.5) by up to 21%, 48%, and 23% on contact-rich, dexterous, and long-horizon tasks, respectively. Notably, LDA-1B enables data-efficient fine-tuning, gaining 10% by leveraging 30% low-quality trajectories typically harmful and discarded.

We study the computational cost of differential privacy in terms of memory efficiency. While the trade-off between accuracy and differential privacy is well-understood, the inherent cost of privacy regarding memory use remains largely unexplored. This paper establishes for the first time an unconditional space lower bound for user-level differential privacy by introducing a novel proof technique based on a multi-player communication game. Central to our approach, this game formally links the hardness of low-memory private algorithms to the necessity of “contribution capping” – tracking and limiting the users who disproportionately impact the dataset. We demonstrate that winning this communication game requires transmitting information proportional to the number of over-active users, which translates directly to memory lower bounds. We apply this framework, as an example, to the fundamental problem of estimating the number of distinct elements in a stream and we prove that any private algorithm requires almost (T^1/3) space to achieve certain error rates in a promise variant of the problem. This resolves an open problem in the literature (by Jain et al. NeurIPS 2023 and Cummings et al. ICML 2025) and establishes the first exponential separation between the space complexity of private algorithms and their non-private O(1) counterparts for a natural statistical estimation task. Furthermore, we show that this communication-theoretic technique generalizes to broad classes of problems, yielding lower bounds for private medians, quantiles, and max-select.

Digital platforms shape how people communicate, deliberate, and form opinions. Studying these dynamics has become increasingly difficult due to restricted data access, ethical constraints on real-world experiments, and limitations of existing research tools. VIRENA (Virtual Arena) is a platform that enables controlled experimentation in realistic social media environments. Multiple participants interact simultaneously in realistic replicas of feed-based platforms (Instagram, Facebook, Reddit) and messaging apps (WhatsApp, Messenger). Large language model-powered AI agents participate alongside humans with configurable personas and realistic behavior. Researchers can manipulate content moderation approaches, pre-schedule stimulus content, and run experiments across conditions through a visual interface requiring no programming skills. VIRENA makes possible research designs that were previously impractical: studying human--AI interaction in realistic social contexts, experimentally comparing moderation interventions, and observing group deliberation as it unfolds. Built on open-source technologies that ensure data remain under institutional control and comply with data protection requirements, VIRENA is currently in use at the University of Zurich and available for pilot collaborations. Designed for researchers, educators, and public organizations alike, VIRENA's no-code interface makes controlled social media simulation accessible across disciplines and sectors. This paper documents its design, architecture, and capabilities.

Traditional time series forecasting methods optimize for accuracy alone. This objective neglects temporal consistency, in other words, how consistently a model predicts the same future event as the forecast origin changes. We introduce the forecast accuracy and coherence score (forecast AC score for short) for measuring the quality of probabilistic multi-horizon forecasts in a way that accounts for both multi-horizon accuracy and stability. Our score additionally allows user-specified weights to balance accuracy and consistency requirements. As an example application, we implement the score as a differentiable objective function for training seasonal auto-regressive integrated models and evaluate it on the M4 Hourly benchmark dataset. Results demonstrate substantial improvements over traditional maximum likelihood estimation. Regarding stability, the AC-optimized model generated out-of-sample forecasts with 91.1\% reduced vertical variance relative to the MLE-fitted model. In terms of accuracy, the AC-optimized model achieved considerable improvements for medium-to-long-horizon forecasts. While one-step-ahead forecasts exhibited a 7.5\% increase in MAPE, all subsequent horizons experienced an improved accuracy as measured by MAPE of up to 26\%. These results indicate that our metric successfully trains models to produce more stable and accurate multi-step forecasts in exchange for some degradation in one-step-ahead performance.

The growth of Electric Vehicles (EVs) creates a conflict in vehicle-to-building (V2B) settings between building operators, who face high energy costs from uncoordinated charging, and drivers, who prioritize convenience and a full charge. To resolve this, we propose a negotiation-based framework that, by design, guarantees voluntary participation, strategy-proofness, and budget feasibility. It transforms EV charging into a strategic resource by offering drivers a range of incentive-backed options for modest flexibility in their departure time or requested state of charge (SoC). Our framework is calibrated with user survey data and validated using real operational data from a commercial building and an EV manufacturer. Simulations show that our negotiation protocol creates a mutually beneficial outcome: lowering the building operator's costs by over 3.5\% compared to an optimized, non-negotiating smart charging policy, while simultaneously reducing user charging expenses by 22\% below the utility's retail energy rate. By aligning operator and EV user objectives, our framework provides a strategic bridge between energy and mobility systems, transforming EV charging from a source of operational friction into a platform for collaboration and shared savings.

Current unified multimodal models for image generation and editing typically rely on massive parameter scales (e.g., >10B), entailing prohibitive training costs and deployment footprints. In this work, we present DeepGen 1.0, a lightweight 5B unified model that achieves comprehensive capabilities competitive with or surpassing much larger counterparts. To overcome the limitations of compact models in semantic understanding and fine-grained control, we introduce Stacked Channel Bridging (SCB), a deep alignment framework that extracts hierarchical features from multiple VLM layers and fuses them with learnable 'think tokens' to provide the generative backbone with structured, reasoning-rich guidance. We further design a data-centric training strategy spanning three progressive stages: (1) Alignment Pre-training on large-scale image-text pairs and editing triplets to synchronize VLM and DiT representations, (2) Joint Supervised Fine-tuning on a high-quality mixture of generation, editing, and reasoning tasks to foster omni-capabilities, and (3) Reinforcement Learning with MR-GRPO, which leverages a mixture of reward functions and supervision signals, resulting in substantial gains in generation quality and alignment with human preferences, while maintaining stable training progress and avoiding visual artifacts. Despite being trained on only ~50M samples, DeepGen 1.0 achieves leading performance across diverse benchmarks, surpassing the 80B HunyuanImage by 28% on WISE and the 27B Qwen-Image-Edit by 37% on UniREditBench. By open-sourcing our training code, weights, and datasets, we provide an efficient, high-performance alternative to democratize unified multimodal research.

How close are neural networks to the best they could possibly do? Standard benchmarks cannot answer this because they lack access to the true posterior p(y|x). We use class-conditional normalizing flows as oracles that make exact posteriors tractable on realistic images (AFHQ, ImageNet). This enables five lines of investigation. Scaling laws: Prediction error decomposes into irreducible aleatoric uncertainty and reducible epistemic error; the epistemic component follows a power law in dataset size, continuing to shrink even when total loss plateaus. Limits of learning: The aleatoric floor is exactly measurable, and architectures differ markedly in how they approach it: ResNets exhibit clean power-law scaling while Vision Transformers stall in low-data regimes. Soft labels: Oracle posteriors contain learnable structure beyond class labels: training with exact posteriors outperforms hard labels and yields near-perfect calibration. Distribution shift: The oracle computes exact KL divergence of controlled perturbations, revealing that shift type matters more than shift magnitude: class imbalance barely affects accuracy at divergence values where input noise causes catastrophic degradation. Active learning: Exact epistemic uncertainty distinguishes genuinely informative samples from inherently ambiguous ones, improving sample efficiency. Our framework reveals that standard metrics hide ongoing learning, mask architectural differences, and cannot diagnose the nature of distribution shift.

Generative modeling typically seeks the path of least action via deterministic flows (ODE). While effective for in-distribution tasks, we argue that these deterministic paths become brittle under causal interventions, which often require transporting probability mass across low-density regions ("off-manifold") where the vector field is ill-defined. This leads to numerical instability and spurious correlations. In this work, we introduce the Causal Schrödinger Bridge (CSB), a framework that reformulates counterfactual inference as Entropic Optimal Transport. Unlike deterministic approaches that require strict invertibility, CSB leverages diffusion processes (SDEs) to robustly "tunnel" through support mismatches while strictly enforcing structural admissibility constraints. We prove the Structural Decomposition Theorem, showing that the global high-dimensional bridge factorizes into local, robust transitions. Empirical validation on high-dimensional interventions (Morpho-MNIST) demonstrates that CSB significantly outperforms deterministic baselines in structural consistency, particularly in regimes of strong, out-of-distribution treatments.

Hybrid architectures combining state-space models with attention have achieved strong efficiency-quality tradeoffs, yet existing approaches either apply attention uniformly or learn static sparse patterns. This misses a key opportunity: attention demand should decrease over time as recurring patterns become familiar. We present a surprising finding from analyzing GPT-2 models: 88% of attention operations retrieve information already predictable from the model's hidden state, and this redundancy does not decrease during training. Motivated by this observation, we introduce (Consolidation-based Routing for Adaptive Memory), a biologically inspired memory consolidation mechanism that gradually distills episodic retrievals into parametric semantic memory. Unlike prior sparse attention methods, exhibits decreasing attention utilization over training, achieving a 37.8× reduction through a sharp phase transition at approximately 3K steps. We prove that this capability is impossible without consolidation: any static routing scheme requires Ω(f · n) attention for tasks with recurring patterns of frequency f. On our proposed SRCD benchmark, achieves 100% retrieval accuracy at 1.6% attention compute (vs. 68% for baselines), and consolidated patterns transfer to unseen tasks with 48–52% attention reduction without retraining. Remarkably, the learned consolidation dynamics quantitatively match human episodic-to-semantic memory transition curves from cognitive psychology (γ= 0.43 vs. γ_human≈ 0.4–0.5). Code and benchmarks are available at [anonymized].

Enterprise documents, such as forms and reports, embed critical information for downstream applications like data archiving, automated workflows, and analytics. Although generalist Vision Language Models (VLMs) perform well on established document understanding benchmarks, their ability to conduct holistic, fine-grained structured extraction across diverse document types and flexible schemas is not well studied. Existing Key Entity Extraction (KEE), Relation Extraction (RE), and Visual Question Answering (VQA) datasets are limited by narrow entity ontologies, simple queries, or homogeneous document types, often overlooking the need for adaptable and structured extraction. To address these gaps, we introduce ExStrucTiny, a new benchmark dataset for structured Information Extraction (IE) from document images, unifying aspects of KEE, RE, and VQA. Built through a novel pipeline combining manual and synthetic human-validated samples, ExStrucTiny covers more varied document types and extraction scenarios. We analyze open and closed VLMs on this benchmark, highlighting challenges such as schema adaptation, query under-specification, and answer localization. We hope our work provides a bedrock for improving generalist models for structured IE in documents.

Model pruning is an effective approach for compressing large language models (LLMs). However, this process often leads to significant degradation of model capabilities. While post-training techniques such as instruction tuning are commonly employed to recover model performance, existing methods often overlook the uneven deterioration of model capabilities and incur high computational costs. Moreover, some irrelevant instructions may also introduce negative effects to model capacity recovery. To address these challenges, we propose the \textbf{P}ost-training d\textbf{A}ta \textbf{S}election method for \textbf{E}fficient pruned large language model \textbf{R}ecovery (\textbf{PASER}). PASER aims to identify instructions to recover the most compromised model capacities with a certain data budget. Our approach first applies manifold learning and spectral clustering to group recovery instructions in the semantic space, revealing capability-specific instruction sets. Then, the data budget is adaptively allocated across clusters by the degree of corresponding model capability degradation. In each cluster, we prioritize data samples that lead to the most decline of model performance. To mitigate potential negative tuning effects, we also detect and filter out conflicting or irrelevant recovery data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PASER significantly outperforms conventional baselines, effectively recovering the general capabilities of pruned LLMs while utilizing merely 4\%-20\% of the original post-training data. We provide the code repository in \href{https://github.com/BokwaiHo/PASER}{Link}.

Linear attention offers a computationally efficient yet expressive alternative to softmax attention. However, recent empirical results indicate that the hidden state of trained linear attention models often exhibits a low-rank structure, suggesting that these models underexploit their capacity in practice. To illuminate this phenomenon, we provide a theoretical analysis of the role of rank in linear attention, revealing that low effective rank can affect retrieval error by amplifying query noise. In addition to these theoretical insights, we conjecture that the low-rank states can be substantially reduced post-training with only minimal performance degradation, yielding faster and more memory-efficient models. To this end, we propose a novel hardware-aware approach that structurally prunes key and query matrices, reducing the state size while retaining compatibility with existing CUDA kernels. We adapt several existing pruning strategies to fit our framework and, building on our theoretical analysis, propose a novel structured pruning method based on a rank-revealing QR decomposition. Our empirical results, evaluated across models of varying sizes and on various downstream tasks, demonstrate the effectiveness of our state reduction framework. We highlight that our framework enables the removal of 50% of the query and key channels at only a marginal increase in perplexity. The code for this project can be found at https://github.com/camail-official/LinearAttentionPruning.

Loss landscapes are a powerful tool for understanding neural network optimization and generalization, yet traditional low-dimensional analyses often miss complex topological features. We present Landscaper, an open-source Python package for arbitrary-dimensional loss landscape analysis. Landscaper combines Hessian-based subspace construction with topological data analysis to reveal geometric structures such as basin hierarchy and connectivity. A key component is the Saddle-Minimum Average Distance (SMAD) for quantifying landscape smoothness. We demonstrate Landscaper's effectiveness across various architectures and tasks, including those involving pre-trained language models, showing that SMAD captures training transitions, such as landscape simplification, that conventional metrics miss. We also illustrate Landscaper's performance in challenging chemical property prediction tasks, where SMAD can serve as a metric for out-of-distribution generalization, offering valuable insights for model diagnostics and architecture design in data-scarce scientific machine learning scenarios.

Post-training compression of large language models (LLMs) often relies on low-rank weight approximations that represent each column of the weight matrix in a shared low-dimensional subspace. This strategy is computationally efficient but the underlying constraint can be overly rigid for heterogeneous projection weights and may incur avoidable accuracy loss. We propose CoSpaDi (Compression via Sparse Dictionary Learning), a training-free framework that replaces low-rank factorization with a structured sparse decomposition in which each weight matrix is represented as a dense dictionary multiplied by a column-sparse coefficient matrix. This yields a union-of-subspaces model: the columns of the weight matrix are represented as linear combinations of different subsets of dictionary atoms, improving expressiveness at a fixed parameter budget. CoSpaDi is calibration-guided: using a small calibration set, we optimize the factorization to minimize functional reconstruction error of layer outputs rather than weight-space error. An activation-derived Gram orthonormalization reformulates this data-aware objective into a standard dictionary learning problem on transformed weights, and we support both per-layer compression and cross-layer dictionary sharing within groups of similar projections. Across Llama and Qwen model families, CoSpaDi consistently improves the accuracy--compression and perplexity--compression trade-offs over state-of-the-art SVD-based baselines and strong structured pruning baselines at 20-40\% compression ratios. The resulting structured sparsity enables sparse--dense computation and integrates with post-training quantization of the sparse coefficients.

We propose a geometric model for optimal shape-change-induced motions of slender locomotors, e.g., snakes slithering on sand. In these scenarios, the motion of a body in world coordinates is completely determined by the sequence of shapes it assumes. Specifically, we formulate Lagrangian least-dissipation principles as boundary value problems whose solutions are given by sub-Riemannian geodesics. Notably, our geometric model accounts not only for the energy dissipated by the body's displacement through the environment, but also for the energy dissipated by the animal's metabolism or a robot's actuators to induce shape changes such as bending and stretching, thus capturing overall locomotion efficiency. Our continuous model, together with a consistent time and space discretization, enables numerical computation of sub-Riemannian geodesics for three different types of boundary conditions, i.e., fixing initial and target body, restricting to cyclic motion, or solely prescribing body displacement and orientation. The resulting optimal deformation gaits qualitatively match observed motion trajectories of organisms such as snakes and spermatozoa, as well as known optimality results for low-dimensional systems such as Purcell's swimmers. Moreover, being geometrically less rigid than previous frameworks, our model enables new insights into locomotion mechanisms of, e.g., generalized Purcell's swimmers. The code is publicly available.

We prove that there is no preferential voting method satisfying the Condorcet winner and loser criteria, positive involvement (if a candidate x wins in an initial preference profile, then adding a voter who ranks x uniquely first cannot cause x to lose), and n-voter resolvability (if x initially ties for winning, then x can be made the unique winner by adding some set of up to n voters). This impossibility theorem holds for any positive integer n. It also holds if either the Condorcet loser criterion is replaced by independence of clones or positive involvement is replaced by negative involvement.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing scientific research, yet its growing integration into laboratory environments presents critical safety challenges. Large language models (LLMs) and vision language models (VLMs) now assist in experiment design and procedural guidance, yet their "illusion of understanding" may lead researchers to overtrust unsafe outputs. Here we show that current models remain far from meeting the reliability needed for safe laboratory operation. We introduce LabSafety Bench, a comprehensive benchmark that evaluates models on hazard identification, risk assessment, and consequence prediction across 765 multiple-choice questions and 404 realistic lab scenarios, encompassing 3,128 open-ended tasks. Evaluations on 19 advanced LLMs and VLMs show that no model evaluated on hazard identification surpasses 70% accuracy. While proprietary models perform well on structured assessments, they do not show a clear advantage in open-ended reasoning. These results underscore the urgent need for specialized safety evaluation frameworks before deploying AI systems in real laboratory settings.

AI models have achieved state-of-the-art results in textual reasoning; however, their ability to reason over spatial and relational structures remains a critical bottleneck -- particularly in early-grade maths, which relies heavily on visuals. This paper introduces the visual reasoning benchmark (VRB), a novel dataset designed to evaluate Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) on their ability to solve authentic visual problems from classrooms. This benchmark is built on a set of 701 questions sourced from primary school examinations in Zambia and India, which cover a range of tasks such as reasoning by analogy, pattern completion, and spatial matching. We outline the methodology and development of the benchmark which intentionally uses unedited, minimal-text images to test if models can meet realistic needs of primary education. Our findings reveal a ``jagged frontier'' of capability where models demonstrate better proficiency in static skills such as counting and scaling, but reach a distinct ``spatial ceiling'' when faced with dynamic operations like folding, reflection, and rotation. These weaknesses pose a risk for classroom use on visual reasoning problems, with the potential for incorrect marking, false scaffolding, and reinforcing student misconceptions. Consequently, education-focused benchmarks like the VRB are essential for determining the functional boundaries of multimodal tools used in classrooms.