Controllable video generation models are increasingly being developed as world models. Accordingly, evaluating them in this role extends beyond the apparent appearance of generated videos to the inherent reactivity of the worlds they depict: the ability to infer from the scene state how the world should react and to generate plausible consequences not explicitly described in the input. Yet existing benchmarks mainly assess visual quality or explicit instruction fulfillment by checking whether requested actions and interaction outcomes are realized, leaving inherent reactivity underexamined. We introduce WorldExam, a hierarchical diagnostic benchmark spanning four levels: Visual Quality, Control Adherence, Spatial Consistency, and World Reactivity. It comprises 1,474 cases across eight dedicated tasks and supports unified evaluation of camera-, action-, and language-driven model paradigms. The World Reactivity level evaluates scene-conditioned reactions and goal-directed behaviors beyond what is explicitly specified in the input. Evaluation of 20 representative models reveals a clear capability split. Camera-driven models excel at camera control, but their interfaces do not support dynamic interaction; action-driven models control subjects more precisely but often leave the world unresponsive; and language-driven models perform better on interaction but follow complex controls less faithfully. No model combines broad task coverage with consistently strong performance, showing that high visual quality and explicit instruction fulfillment do not guarantee inherent reactivity.

Language remains an outlier in generative modeling: while images, video, and audio are increasingly modeled in continuous latent spaces, text generation still relies predominantly on discrete tokens. Existing continuous language models either inherit embedding spaces not designed for joint generation and decoding, or compress autoencoded latents to ease diffusion, sacrificing token-level fidelity. Instead of simplifying the representation to suit the generative model, we preserve a high-capacity, decodable text latent and design the diffusion model to learn its distribution directly. We introduce AURORA-LM, a continuous-latent diffusion language model that separates the construction of a decodable text representation from the modeling of its distribution. A Query-based Encoder-Decoder organizes text into a high-capacity, prefix-aligned latent sequence, and a Block-causal Diffusion Transformer learns its distribution through flow matching, generating blocks left to right while denoising positions within each block in parallel. Because such a latent is harder for diffusion to model, AURORA-LM restricts only the noisy-input pathway while retaining the full clean-latent prediction target, accommodating full-width latents without reducing decoder-facing capacity. We further calibrate the noise-level distribution to the latent width, and introduce self-trajectory consistency to bridge independently sampled training noise and iterative denoising at inference. AURORA-LM achieves the strongest performance among evaluated continuous and diffusion-based language models on OpenWebText free generation and XSum summarization. Scaling to 1B parameters with about 1500 EFLOPs of total compute yields further gains, surpassing a larger publicly released latent-diffusion language model under a matched evaluation protocol. All experiments are conducted on Ascend NPUs.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly central to power and energy systems, supporting modeling, forecasting, optimization, and control. Yet most existing works emphasize specialized applications and offer little reusable material for newcomers or interdisciplinary learners, who increasingly rely on large language models rather than building their own. This gap points to a need for engineering-grounded AI (EGAI), in which AI workflows follow established engineering and power-system domain rules rather than acting as task-agnostic black boxes. Motivated by a community survey of researchers and practitioners, which shows 92% report at least one barrier before running an AI model and 94% want a power-specific hands-on course. This paper presents a framework consisting of open, executable module library that lowers the entry barrier for AI in power systems. The modules follow a progressive difficulty ladder that maps core AI concepts onto representative power-system tasks: (i) foundational deep neural network (DNN) templates for function approximation and load-curve fitting; (ii) a domain-coupled convolutional neural network (CNN) power-flow surrogate for a 5-bus system; and (iii) frontier modules on DNN-assisted optimization, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) for battery storage control, and physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) for the swing equation. All modules are released as Jupyter notebooks that run locally or on Google Colab and are delivered through an IEEE online course and IEEE Power & Energy Society (PES) webinar series. The webinar drew more than 590 live attendees, which is among the ten most-attended IEEE PES webinars, and over 344 repository visits within two weeks, reinforcing the survey-based motivation.

Aerial-ground person re-identification is a challenging task due to cross-platform viewpoint variations, which cause severe occlusion and geometric deformation. Existing methods attempt to learn view-invariant representations exclusively within the 2D image space, where drastic viewpoint variations cause the learned features to remain coupled with viewpoint bias. To address this, we propose VR3D, a View-Robust 3D Representation Learning framework that maps images into a unified 3D coordinate space to achieve view-independent feature interaction. Specifically, we introduce View-Robust 3D Representation Interaction, which leverages 3D priors extracted from single 2D observations to lift 2D appearance features into a canonical 3D space. VR3I employs 3D Geometry-Semantic Attention to establish interactions between 2D patches and 3D voxels from corresponding body parts based on their 3D spatial locations, effectively grounding 2D semantics within a 3D framework. In addition, as the reliability of these representations varies across samples due to viewpoint changes and 3D reconstruction errors, we introduce Reliability-Aware Fusion, which estimates sample-specific reliability and adaptively aggregates the multi-source representations. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets (CARGO, AG-ReID.v1, and AG-ReID.v2) demonstrate that VR3D outperforms recent methods. For example, it achieves a 5.63% improvement in Rank-1 on CARGO. Our code will be released.

Language models are playing an increasingly important role in laboratory science, performing tasks such as experiment planning, execution, and post-hoc analysis. However, precisely measuring their abilities is difficult, as scientific capabilities require a mixture of both problem-solving skills and domain-specific intuition. Existing evaluations rarely measure the capabilities required to make reliable decisions in a physical laboratory and often rely on public data that may have appeared in model training corpora. We introduce onepot-Bench 0, a proprietary benchmark suite for evaluating language models on synthetic chemistry capabilities relevant to wet-lab execution. onepot-Bench 0 comprises three complementary evaluations: ChemAbacus measures tool-free cheminformatics literacy and numerical reasoning; SynthRefusal characterizes safety and refusal behavior across a variety of benign, controlled, and designer-drug targets; and SynthBench evaluates reaction-outcome prediction and catalyst selection using private experimental data generated in our laboratory. Together, these evaluations probe basic competency, reliability, and deeper knowledge, all skills which are required for reliable performance in the lab.

In this opinion paper, we propose MetaHOPE, an error severity-aware annotation framework for evaluating metaphor translations. Metaphors present challenges for machine translation (MT) and natural language understanding and processing (NLU, NLP), because it presents the features of semantic complexity, contextual dependency, and cultural embeddings that can lead to ambiguity issues for NLP models. To investigate how state-of-the-art NLP models perform on translating metaphors, we select three representative systems, i.e., GoogleMT, GPT5.4, and Hunyuan-7b as Neural MT (NMT) models and LLMs. We used two human-annotated metaphor corpora, including VUAMC and PSUCMC for English-to-Chinese and Chinese-to-English translation purposes. The original corpora we used are monolingual, where we carried out error annotation using the MetaHOPE framework, and also produced the human post-edited gold reference for bilingual use as a new resource. We believe the MetaHOPE evaluation framework for metaphor translation annotation, the parallel corpora resources, and the error analysis on SOTA automatic translation models can be useful and shed some light for the field of metaphor translation study. We share our resources publicly at github.com/Jiahui84/MetaHOPE

Captions serve as a primary supervision signal for both multimodal understanding and text-to-image generation. However, previous evaluations treat the caption quality as a single scalar objective, which conflates two distinct properties: (1) how much visual information a caption covers and (2) how reliably the image supports its stated claims. To this end, we design a decoupled caption evaluation benchmark, CAPEval (Coverage And Precision Evaluation), with human-written ground-truth captions and human-verified atomic checklist items. Specifically, CAPEval decomposes caption quality into Coverage and Precision. The former quantifies how thoroughly a caption covers ground-truth factual content, while the latter reflects the factual correctness rate of all claims expressed in the caption. We select 10 captioners and further conduct controlled downstream end-to-end experiments with them from four model families, where the caption source is the only variable. Empirically, we find a consistent task-dependent dissociation: Coverage serves as the stronger correlate for understanding performance, whereas Precision acts as the dominant predictor for generation performance. This decoupled evaluation paradigm not only delivers a more fine-grained diagnosis of caption quality, but also offers actionable guidance for selecting and optimizing captioners tailored to different downstream tasks.

In [AS21], Axiotis and Sviridenko conjectured that the linear dependence on the restricted condition number in sparse convex optimization cannot be improved by a polynomial-time algorithm. We establish their conjectured lower bound for least-squares objectives, conditional on the randomized exact-volume Small-Set Expansion Hypothesis in the weighted regular-graph formulation of Raghavendra, Steurer, and Tulsiani [RST12]. Concretely, for every fixed γ∈(0,1], there is no randomized polynomial-time algorithm that, with probability at least 2/3, returns a vector x such that, writing s=‖ x‖_0, ‖ Ax-b‖_2^2 ≤min_‖ z‖_0≤ k‖ Az-b‖_2^2+ε and s=O(k κ_s+k^ 1-γ), where κ_r is the restricted condition number at sparsity level r. The result holds even on rational instances with A of full column rank. The proof was first obtained using a fully automated Gemini-based agentic system developed internally at Google. The authors have verified the proof and edited it for clarity of presentation.

Optimization-based latent reasoning improves large language model outputs by optimizing instance-specific continuous states at test time while keeping model parameters frozen. Existing methods, however, typically connect these states to the reasoning trajectory through decoded tokens, making sequence-level credit assignment indirect and obscuring how latent updates shape subsequent reasoning. We introduce GradCuit (gradient through circuit), which inserts optimizable latent states at a selected Transformer layer between the hidden representations of the prompt and the generated continuation. Causal self-attention provides every continuation-token log-probability with a differentiable path to every preceding latent state through the remaining Transformer blocks, enabling reward-weighted gradients from the entire continuation to be assigned directly to the latents. Across five instruction-tuned backbones, three reasoning benchmarks, and two answer formats, GradCuit achieves an average accuracy of 64.5%, outperforming chain-of-thought prompting by 6.6 percentage points and the strongest competing method by 2.4 points. GradCuit also demonstrates greater robustness: across seven learning-rate settings, it consistently outperforms LatentSeek while reducing the standard deviation of accuracy from 1.53 to 0.82, and even its random-walk variant remains competitive with LatentSeek. For interpretability, token-level gradient attribution reveals that latent influence concentrates on reasoning-connector tokens, while layer analysis identifies early-to-middle Transformer layers as the most effective optimization space. By directly optimizing internal reasoning from outcome feedback, GradCuit opens a new axis of robust and interpretable test-time scaling, where LLMs adapt how they reason rather than merely regenerate, sample, or rerank outputs.

Open-ended evolution (OEE) in artificial life is typically driven by uninterpretable, black-box neural-network complexity metrics, leaving life-like systems disconnected from physical theories of complexity. We introduce MSPD (Multi-Scale Path Divergence, denoted D_P), a renormalization-group-inspired scalar that quantifies how the heterogeneity of a system's local transition laws is organized across temporal and spatial scales. MSPD is defined at the population level as a functional of the realised trajectory and is computed as a windowed finite-resolution estimator, with consistency between the two stated as a proposition. The metric is an explicit formula and plays a dual role: as a gradient-free fitness function and as a post-hoc analytical lens on any simulation that exposes local transition laws. On a Flow-Lenia substrate we establish three claims. (C1) Under fixed-context replay of the exact pathwise objective, MSPD-optimized parameters score higher than matched random parameters. (C2) Along optimized trajectories, states whose local transition laws are more heterogeneous yield larger future divergence than matched, less-heterogeneous states under exact-state stochastic continuations, so the metric tracks intrinsic dynamics rather than injected noise. (C5) Higher MSPD corresponds to stronger scale-dependent frustration — larger differences between the dynamics expressed at different spatial extents — linking MSPD to the frustration criterion of biological complexity in the sense of Vanchurin et al. All three transfer to Life-like cellular automata and Particle Life++, indicating that MSPD is not specific to a single substrate. A single explicit formula thus both directs open-ended evolution and provides a principled bridge to the physics of complexity that black-box drivers do not.

Sparse retrieval underpins modern search systems, from web search to retrieval-augmented generation. Existing work has introduced Learned Sparse Retrieval (LSR) to push beyond exact lexical matching toward richer semantics. Yet LSR has so far remained tied to encoder-style bidirectional architectures, and its extension to multimodal settings still relies heavily on auxiliary cross-modal modules. To address these limitations, we introduce UEmbed (Unified Embedding), a decoder-only multimodal embedding model that produces both sparse lexical and dense representations in one causal forward pass. UEmbed appends N learnable special tokens to the input and partitions the vocabulary into N disjoint subsets. Each token's causal hidden state predicts sparse weights over its assigned subset, and the N subsets are concatenated into the full sparse vector. Trained on public data, we release UEmbed at 2B, 4B, and 9B scales. UEmbed-9B reaches 71.8 (dense) and 71.0 (sparse) on MMEB-v2, outperforming multimodal embedding models trained on publicly available data (e.g., RzenEmbed). On BEIR, UEmbed also remains competitive with strong dense and sparse baselines. Furthermore, we demonstrate the practical utility of UEmbed across three dimensions: effectiveness, efficiency, and agentic applications. Overall, UEmbed offers a new paradigm: it unifies dense and sparse embeddings in one model, while further extending sparse retrieval to unify text and multimodal inputs.

Learning generalizable robot manipulation policies requires large-scale and diverse demonstration data. Egocentric human manipulation videos offer rich scene and task diversity, and prior work has shown that retargeting and rendering such videos into robot-format data can yield effective per-task policies at small scale. However, whether this approach can provide pretraining benefits for vision-language-action models at scale remains unexplored. We present Ego2Robot, a scalable pipeline that converts egocentric human manipulation videos into robot training data through action retargeting, robot-arm visual synthesis, and multi-level quality curation. Ego2Robot supports both curated datasets and in-the-wild videos, producing 18,561 hours of robot training data spanning 15 robot morphologies, making it the largest ego-to-robot dataset to date. To evaluate generalization, we extend RoboTwin2.0 with disentangled perturbation axes covering visual appearance, scene layout, embodiment morphology, and task semantics. Experiments show that joint pretraining on Ego2Robot-synthesized and robot data consistently improves out-of-distribution generalization across multiple perturbation types, with benefits validated on real-robot deployment. Project page: https://www-ye.github.io/ego2robot_blog/

World Action Models (WAMs) augment robot policies with action-conditioned predicted futures, but a plausible future alone does not justify changing the action that a bimanual policy would execute. We present CoWAM, a selective intervention layer that expresses synchronization, role compatibility, and collision convergence as coordination contracts. Each contract combines typed admissibility checks with event-conditioned verification and calibrated intervention gates. CoWAM preserves the nominal action unless an alternative satisfies every active obligation and provides a clear, low-risk improvement; when the nominal action is also inadmissible, it invokes a predefined abstention fallback. To separate selector quality from proposal quality, all methods operate on identical candidate pools and commit their decisions before shared oracle labeling. Across eight simulated bimanual tasks, CoWAM improves coordination-valid selection by 16.7 percentage points over the contract-only variant and raises closed-loop success by 9.6 percentage points over the strongest selective baseline, while keeping harmful interventions below 1%. Together, these results establish coordination contracts as an effective interface for conservative policy intervention with predicted world-action evidence across coordination-rich bimanual tasks.

We consider optimization problems defined on product spaces of simplices. Examples of this class of problems include learning low-rank discrete multivariate probability distributions via simplex constrained tensor decomposition and performing functional data registration under the Square Root Velocity Function (SRVF) representation. In this work, we demonstrate the feasibility of replacing the product simplex with a smooth, elementwise strictly convex reparameterization, resulting in an unconstrained optimization problem on a manifold. We show that performing such a reparameterization results in the second order Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) points on the smooth manifold being mapped to the weak second order KKT points on the product simplex. This leads to a Riemannian Gradient Descent (RGD) algorithm for solving the reparameterized problem, which outperforms Projected Gradient Descent (PGD), and provides a more faithful representation of the original function shapes while performing curve registration.

Diffusion models rely on stochastic inputs, yet on finite-precision hardware, the "randomness" they consume is realized as deterministic numerical orbits generated by pseudorandom rules. Accessible orbit structure can become a learnable input and affect both training and generation because the realized loss and its gradient depend on the concrete pseudorandom values consumed at each optimization step. A small multilayer perceptron predicts the next value of an orbit from its recent history, measuring general sequence predictability. A diffusion probe replaces real images with online random tensors while preserving the diffusion architecture and training objective, measuring whether the target system can exploit orbit structure. After controlling marginal statistics and screening out clear dynamical and finite-precision failures, the remaining orbits still produce markedly different diffusion losses and generation quality on MNIST and CIFAR-10. Both measures show strong rank correlations with macroscopic generation degradation, although their local rankings differ. After normalization by the IID baseline, the probe loss and the real-data diffusion loss approximately follow an empirical power law, with different exponents on the two datasets. These results suggest that a pseudorandom source is not only a distributional choice, but also a model-dependent structured input.

Quadruped robots are a promising platform for search and rescue missions because they can navigate cluttered indoor environments that may be restrictive for wheeled systems. However, in unknown rescue scenarios, autonomous exploration must balance map expansion with the likelihood of finding victims, which is not explicitly addressed by clas- sical frontier selection strategies. This paper presents a situation aware frontier prioritization method for single robot quadruped search and rescue. The proposed approach preserves the frontier exploration framework, but extends frontier ranking with information gain, observation deficit, rescue relevance, terrain penalty, and travel cost. The method is eval- uated in Gazebo simulation with a quadruped robot in two indoor rescue scenarios with different levels of difficulty. The first scenario is used as a sanity check, while the second introduces stronger clutter and frontier ambiguity. Experimental results show that all methods perform reliably in a simple scenario, whereas in a complex scenario is different. In that setting, the proposed method achieves the highest completion rate and the highest victim recovery among the evaluated approaches. These results indicate that situation aware frontier prioritization is beneficial when frontier choice becomes nontrivial and rescue utility must be balanced against generic exploration objectives.

The efficiency of a datacenter rests on its control plane policies. Designing these policies is increasingly hard: the hardware-software stack grows fast, the design space is vast and interdependent, and prototyping a single policy takes months. Agentic AI promises to automate this search. Off the shelf, however, it falls short on three fronts. It is not formal: with no structured, searchable statement of the problem, the search has little structure to exploit and hard constraints are not guaranteed. It is not transferable: each task is solved from scratch, so nothing learned on one task carries to the next. Finally, it is not systematic: relying on the LLM as the sole source of candidates, it explores a narrow slice of the design space and settles into local optima. We introduce AtumAI, a framework that generates datacenter control-plane policies with agentic AI, making the process formal, transferable, and systematic. From a goal stated in plain language, AtumAI autonomously proposes, tests, and refines candidate policies until one satisfies the request. It does so through two components. The Datacenter Task Compiler automates problem formulation: it compiles the request into a formal, machine-checkable, and searchable specification of the task's objectives, constraints, decision variables, and evaluation methodology. The Evolutionary Design Discovery Loop then searches this specification, expanding the search beyond the LLM itself via a diffusion model, an evolutionary algorithm, and a surrogate model. Together, they reduce onboarding a new task from months of engineering to writing its description. We evaluate AtumAI on three control-plane tasks with distinct problem scopes, design spaces, and trade-offs: workload placement, resource scaling, and power management. Across all tasks, the policies generated by AtumAI consistently outperform expert-engineered baselines.

Quantizing high-dimensional vectors is fundamental to similarity search, distributed learning, and model compression. Feng, Indyk, Kapralov, Krachun, and Prokhorov established sharp guarantees for an unbiased dithered quantizer based on a randomized Hadamard transform [FIK+26]. Their 1/d-scale inner-product estimator, however, uses a second randomized transform and residual quantization, increasing both communication and the leading constant in the proved bound. We show that this extra stage is unnecessary: pairwise-independent dithers across Hadamard coordinates suffice. The resulting unbiased single-stage estimator uses b bits per coordinate and achieves 𝔼[ |⟨ y,x-x⟩|^2 ] ≤(3π√(3)/2+o(1)) ‖ y‖_2^2/d 4^b, as b→∞, with a dimension-free o(1) term uniform over unit inputs and fixed queries. Compared with the two-stage construction of Feng et al., it eliminates the residual-stage O(d)-bit payload and reduces the leading upper-bound constant by a factor of approximately 5.93. The proof was first obtained using a fully automated Gemini-based agentic system developed internally at Google. The authors have verified the proof and edited it for clarity of presentation.

Large language models (LLMs) achieve high pass rates on code generation benchmarks, yet whether they can transfer this ability to languages absent from pretraining remains poorly understood. We introduce PyLang, a minimal imperative language absent from all pretraining corpora, and evaluate frontier models zero-shot and fine-tuned Qwen3 (4B, 8B, 32B) on 352 problems. We find that fine-tuning quickly teaches syntax but fails to transfer semantic competence: Python outperforms PyLang by up to 19% across all configurations, and no intervention (multi-task learning, preference tuning, code infilling, or latent-space objectives) closes the gap. An LLM judge reveals that frontier models select an identical algorithm to Python 80% of the time, yet cannot translate it into a working PyLang implementation., and CKA analysis confirms that fine-tuned models converge to nearly identical internal representations across languages (CKA > 0.97) while diverging at the output stage. We term this the implementation fidelity gap: models possess language-agnostic algorithmic understanding but cannot express it in an unfamiliar language. Our findings highlight the need for training methods that decouple reasoning from language-specific realization.

Automated pain assessment in real clinics is limited by scarce clinically grounded facial video data with weak labels (often sequence-level self-report) and by the fact that pain cues can be subtle or near-neutral in RGB, while thermal and depth signals are informative yet impractical to deploy routinely. To address these challenges, we propose ReMiX-MAE (Reconstructing Missing Channel Cross-Modal Masked Autoencoder), a self-supervised multimodal masked pretraining framework that learns transferable facial representations from synchronized RGB, thermal, and depth videos and explicitly trains robustness to missing modalities, enabling RGB-only deployment. To fill the gap of clinically grounded facial pain data with video-level self-report and longitudinal treatment trajectories, we collect the Sympathetic Mediated Pain (SMP) dataset with paired pre- and post-recordings across multiple visits. Under RGB-only deployment, we evaluate ReMiX-MAE using both direct feature extraction and pseudo-multimodal features decoded from RGB. ReMiX-MAE consistently outperforms an RGB-only masked autoencoder baseline on SMP, with pseudo-multimodal features providing additional gains in the challenging five-class setting. Across external datasets, ReMiX-MAE further shows more robust and label-efficient transfer than RGB-only baselines, highlighting its advantage in data-limited clinical settings.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) imposes a prefill cost proportional to retrieved context length, and – with Transformer backbones – a KV-cache that grows with each generated token. State-Space Models (SSMs) avoid the second cost by construction; we eliminate the first, collapsing prefill from O(L_context) to O(1) per query. We introduce PRECOG (Pre-Computed Context Injection), a retrieval mechanism that exploits a property unique to SSMs: the fixed-size, position-agnostic recurrent hidden state is a complete summary of everything the model has read. PRECOG pre-encodes document corpora offline as SSM hidden states and injects the best-matching state directly at query time, bypassing in-context re-ingestion entirely. The same state-injection mechanism enables SMC (Structured Memory Consolidation): a hierarchical persistent memory with cognitive-domain clustering, an adjustable fidelity-vs-storage dial, and O(1) session initialization, which consolidates short-term episodic states into long-term semantic memory and fuses both with retrieved corpus states at query time. We demonstrate the system on TENNs-LLM, a 1.2B-parameter gated-SSM language model with a 192 KB hidden state. PRECOG matches in-context RAG answer quality, reducing prefill latency from ∼27 s to <6 ms on edge hardware – a ∼4500× speedup that crosses the threshold from unusable to interactive. The mechanism is architecturally impossible for Transformer KV-caches, which are position-entangled and grow linearly with context length.

Cross-view masked autoencoding has emerged as a powerful pretext task for learning dense correspondences, which are essential for applications such as video label propagation. The cross-view pretext task is modeled with a masked autoencoder, where a masked target view is reconstructed from an anchor view. However, acquiring effective training data remains a challenge - collecting diverse video datasets is costly, while simple image crops lack the necessary pose variations, underperforming video-based methods. This paper introduces CDG-MAE, a novel MAE-based self-supervised method that uses diverse synthetic views generated from static images via an image-conditioned diffusion model. We present a quantitative method to evaluate the local and global consistency of the generated views to choose the right diffusion model for cross-view self-supervised pretraining. These generated views exhibit substantial changes in pose and perspective, providing a rich training signal that overcomes the limitations of video and crop-based anchors. Furthermore, we enhance the standard single-anchor MAE setting to a multi-anchor masking strategy to increase the difficulty of the pretext task. CDG-MAE substantially narrows the gap to video-based MAE methods, while maintaining the data advantages of image-only MAEs.

Sheaf Neural Networks (SNNs) generalize message passing by replacing scalar edge weights of standard Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) with learnable, edge-dependent restriction maps between node stalks. Despite their strong theoretical foundations and promising transductive results, SNNs have been evaluated almost exclusively on transductive node classification, leaving their behaviour under inductive protocols unknown. We address this gap through the first systematic benchmark of the sheaf design space, evaluating three diffusion mechanisms (neural sheaf diffusion, sheaf attention, and sheaf attention with Graph Attention Network v2), three restriction-map parameterizations, three stalk dimensions, and six modern GNN architectural components, within a message-passing reformulation that never assembles the heavy sheaf Laplacian, making the full design space trainable under cross-graph batching. Across 1,890 controlled experiments on 14 inductive datasets, multiple insights emerge: restriction maps are the dominant design choice and general maps are preferable, larger stalks add capacity but not long-range reach, architectural components explain more performance variation than the entire sheaf-specific design space itself. Under a matched protocol, SNNs transfer to inductive settings but do not reach the strongest baselines, with gaps being dataset-dependent. Practically, a single sheaf configuration can generalize across datasets, so effort is better spent tuning the surrounding architectural recipe than the sheaf operator itself.

Arabizi refers to Arabic written in Latin script. Although previous studies have shown that the prevalence and usage of Arabizi vary by factors such as region and age group, most NLP research on Arabic texts treats it as a temporary phenomenon resulting from limited technological support for the Arabic script. In this work, we engage with Arabic speakers to collect insights on their perceptions and usage of Arabizi. We further examine writing norms among speakers of different dialects, focusing on Algerian, Egyptian, Lebanese, Moroccan, and Tunisian Arabic. To this end, we release two resources. First, a character-level alignment of Arabic words to study inter- and intra-dialectal variation across these five dialects, based on words transliterated by survey participants, finding systematic intra-dialectal regularity and inter-dialectal variation. Second, to study Arabic speakers' ability to identify this stylistic variation at the sentence-level, we build a manually curated parallel corpus of sentences written in Arabic script alongside multiple Arabizi transliterations, collected from speakers of the same five dialects. Our study presents the largest human-centered, cross-dialectal study of Arabizi's perceptions and practices to date.

The increasing complexity of neural networks poses significant challenges for democratizing federated learning (FL) on resource-constrained edge devices. Parallel split learning (PSL) has emerged as a promising solution by offloading substantial computing workload to a server via model partitioning, shrinking client-side computing load, and eliminating the client-side model aggregation for reduced communication and deployment costs. However, the highly heterogeneous nature of client data in edge computing systems causes aggregation-free PSL to suffer from severe training divergence, stemming from gradient directional inconsistency across clients. To address this challenge, we propose GAPSL, a gradient-aligned PSL framework tailored for data-heterogeneous edge systems, which comprises two key components: leader gradient identification (LGI) and gradient direction alignment (GDA). LGI dynamically selects a set of directionally consistent device gradients to construct a leader gradient as a robust proxy for the global convergence trend. GDA employs a direction-aware regularization to align each client's gradient with the leader gradient, thereby mitigating inter-device gradient directional inconsistency and enhancing model convergence. We evaluate GAPSL on a prototype computing testbed. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GAPSL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks in training accuracy, convergence latency, and system robustness under severe data heterogeneity.

Cognitive AI seeks to move beyond language generation and autonomous task execution toward systems capable of sustained reasoning, adaptive behavior, persistent memory, and self-regulation. While generative and agentic AI have demonstrated impressive capabilities across a wide range of tasks, many fundamental cognitive functions remain fragmented or weakly developed, limiting reliable operation over extended time horizons. This paper presents a taxonomy-driven survey of the major cognitive capability gaps that continue to constrain the development of Cognitive AI. The literature is organized around five dimensions: persistent state modeling, goal-directed autonomy, self-monitoring and control, environment interaction, and learning and adaptation. For each dimension, we review recent advances, identify recurring limitations, and discuss open research challenges. Building on these insights, we outline a conceptual Adaptive Cognitive Intelligence Architecture (ACIA) and examine emerging directions in cognition-centric evaluation. The proposed taxonomy provides a unified framework for organizing existing research, identifying unresolved challenges, and guiding the design of future cognitively capable systems. Together, the taxonomy, architectural perspective, and evaluation framework offer a roadmap for advancing AI systems that exhibit more reliable long-term reasoning, adaptive decision-making, and continual learning. The survey highlights key research opportunities toward more adaptive, reliable, and cognitively capable AI systems, providing a foundation for future progress toward Cognitive AI and, ultimately, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

LLM serving stacks cache prompt KV state, yet the front end still re-tokenizes the full request text on every call. Coding agents pay the most: each call resubmits a long transcript after a small append, and reuse is hard because a short append can move token boundaries near the end of the prior sequence. Across 153,951 agent calls, the median append is 1.4K characters; only 1.0-3.6 TokTier is a stateful CPU+GPU tokenization service for this two-mode workload with one contract: emitted token IDs are always identical to full reference tokenization of the request text. For session continuations it re-tokenizes a small window around the append and splices only when a per-request check finds a stable pre-tokenization boundary, else it widens or falls back. For calls without a reusable prefix it decomposes GPT-family regex pre-tokenization into run-local rules and runs exact pre-tokenization and BPE on a GPU. A sampled shadow verifier re-checks live traffic. Differential campaigns over 17 production tokenizer families (1.5×10^10 split checks, a 12.4TB real-text corpus, 93,000+ replayed agent steps) show zero divergence. Incremental repair takes 0.5-1.1ms from 100K to 3M characters, up to 437× faster than HF tokenization and 2.1× faster at 1M characters than the strongest cache-based baseline (Gigatoken) fully prewarmed. GPU full tokenization encodes 1M characters in 0.87ms, 491× below HF and 23.4× below the fastest published CPU method. With vLLM, median time to first token drops 16-34

Machine Unlearning aims to remove undesired information from trained models without full retraining from scratch. Despite recent progress, the loss landscape and optimization geometry of unlearning are poorly understood. In this paper, we study machine unlearning through the lens of mode connectivity--the phenomenon that independently trained models can often be connected by smooth low-loss paths in parameter space. We introduce {\em mode connectivity in unlearning} (MCU) and evaluate it across a range of settings, including curriculum learning, second-order optimization, and connectivity across different unlearning methods. We find that many unlearned models lie in connected basins with smooth retain/forget behavior, while changes in training dynamics can move solutions into different basins. MCU also reveals that models within the same basin can differ substantially on privacy metrics, and that unlearning progresses nonlinearly from the original model to the unlearned model. In addition, linear connectivity suggests that most approximate unlearning methods are mechanistically distinct from retraining. Finally, MCU-based ensembling can improve generalization and robustness to relearning attacks, and MCU smoothness correlates with unlearning difficulty. To our knowledge, this is the first study of machine unlearning through the lens of mode connectivity.

Fairness evaluation concerns not only what a model produces, but also what its outputs ought to be compared against. When a model generates "a CEO in the United States," the prompt leaves demographic realization to the model. Existing group fairness definitions assume that sensitive attributes are given on the input side. Generative audits instead examine output-side demographic composition, yet the targets they compare it against are typically supplied rather than justified. The upstream question is what the target distribution should be. We formalize this missing-target problem for demographic-value-unspecified generation and decompose target construction into four commitments: the evaluative object, prior admissibility, allocation, and operationalization. In this framework, we admit the geographic prior under a geographic-membership interpretation for the declared public-world use. The occupational prior, under an incumbency interpretation, requires an independently defended objective such as workforce-composition fidelity. Instantiating this construction in AP-Bench, we find substantial distribution divergence from geography-derived targets, ranging from 0.508 to 0.606 on a 0-to-1 scale. Replacing each geography-derived target with an equal-category comparator, while holding generations and measurement fixed, produces model-specific mean absolute cell-level JSD_2 changes ranging from 0.279 to 0.355. Target construction is therefore not a preliminary to fairness evaluation but a component of it. What we supply is not a universal target, but a framework that makes explicit the justification required before a distribution can serve as a fairness standard.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown promise in generating plotting code from chart images, yet achieving structural fidelity remains challenging. Existing approaches largely rely on supervised fine-tuning, encouraging surface-level token imitation rather than faithful modeling of underlying chart structure, which often leads to hallucinated or semantically inconsistent outputs. We propose Chart Specification, a structured intermediate representation that shifts training from text imitation to semantically grounded supervision. Chart Specification filters syntactic noise to construct a structurally balanced training set and supports a Spec-Align Reward that provides fine-grained, verifiable feedback on structural correctness, enabling reinforcement learning to enforce consistent plotting logic. Experiments on three public benchmarks show that our method consistently outperforms prior approaches. With only 3K training samples, we achieve strong data efficiency, surpassing leading baselines by up to 61.7% on complex benchmarks, and scaling to 4K samples establishes new state-of-the-art results across all evaluated metrics. Overall, our results demonstrate that precise structural supervision offers an efficient pathway to high-fidelity chart-to-code generation. Code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/Mighten/chart-specification-paper

Efficient and perceptually meaningful quality assessment is a fundamental requirement for image and video processing, compression, and streaming systems. This article shows that, in the context of Discrete Cosine Transform ( DCT)-based compressed images, Structural Similarity Index ( SSIM ) can be approximated from global Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) or Mean Square Error ( MSE) using local statistics derived only from the reference image. While prior work assumes access to local MSE, we propose two approaches to approximate local MSE by redistributing the global MSE using variance or standard-deviation-based weighting. Experiments on the Kodak and Xiph Subset1 datasets across a range of JPEG quality levels demonstrate that both approaches provide accurate and robust SSIM approximations, substantially outperforming the global MSE baseline. The proposed framework is designed to extend naturally to video, where reference-derived statistics can be amortized across multiple encodes of the same content.

Action chunking—predicting and executing multiple actions instead of a single action—has proven to be a critical component for learning effective robotic control policies. However, our precise understanding of why action chunking improves performance has remained limited. In this work we seek to close this gap. Through rigorous experimental evaluations in both simulated and real-world settings, we show that existing hypotheses for the success of action chunking—temporal consistency, horizon reduction, and representation learning—fail to explain the success of action chunking. Instead, we find that action chunking benefits from greater non-Markovian expressivity and reduced compounding error compared to Markovian policies, but, in many settings of interest, these effects can be fully captured by delayed policies, which at each step predict a single action based on the observation k steps in the past. We then show that there exists an additional benefit of action chunking that we refer to as implicit ensembling. In particular, by learning a diversity of temporal relationships (that is, a_t | o_t, a_t | o_t-1, …), action-chunked policies exhibit behavior matching that of a model ensemble, increasing their robustness and generalization ability over policies that only learn a single temporal relationship. Building on these insights, we show that in simulated and real-world robotic control settings, we can match the performance of action chunking without action chunking—by deploying an action chunking policy as an ensemble of policies with randomized delays. Furthermore, we propose a policy class that amplifies the benefits of action chunking by explicitly instantiating an ensemble, and which we show significantly improves over the performance of action chunking in many domains.

Reachability analysis for visuomotor policies is difficult because large visual encoders make end-to-end set propagation computationally expensive and excessively conservative. We therefore freeze the visual encoder and confine set propagation to a low-dimensional interface between it and the downstream policy, with the interface set calibrated from held-out camera-pose perturbations. Propagating this set through the policy with zonotopes yields a terminal output-enclosure width that set-based training optimizes directly. During evaluation, camera-pose perturbations are sampled from the prescribed distribution, and rollout-level split conformal calibration converts the resulting action-deviation scores into a probabilistic reachable-action radius with finite-sample coverage. In controlled manipulation experiments, set-based training reduces this radius while preserving closed-loop task capability, and matched behavior-only, observational-consistency, and pointwise-adversarial controls all leave a larger radius.

We present a simple Gaussian approximation to the finite-sample distribution of the classical ridge regression estimator. Our approximation captures the fact that, in finite samples, the ridge regression estimator trades off bias and variance to reduce estimation and prediction error. Our approximation is based on nonstandard asymptotics where i) we let the estimator's regularization parameter grow proportionally to the sample size; and ii) we treat the population regression coefficients as local to the reference vector that defines the estimator's direction of shrinkage. In contrast to other asymptotic approximations in the literature, we allow for general forms of heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation in the data generating process (at the cost of considering a low-dimensional model where the number of covariates is not allowed to grow with the sample size). We use our simple Gaussian approximation to propose two new strategies to select the regularization parameter for the ridge regression estimator. The suggested strategies select the regularization parameter to minimize either average or worst-case excess prediction risk, where risk is computed using our suggested Gaussian approximation.

This paper is concerned with one-bit mean estimation, where each independent sample is represented by a single binary message. We consider distributions on ℝ with mean in [-λ,λ] and absolute k-th central moment at most σ^k, where k>1 is fixed. For this class, previous work attained the optimal sample complexity for general queries using a two-stage protocol. The first stage localizes the mean. The second-stage queries are chosen after localization and refine the estimate around the decoded center. We show that this interaction can be avoided by constructing a randomized fully non-adaptive protocol that fixes all queries before observing the data and matches the optimal adaptive sample complexity. For target accuracy ε and confidence 1-δ, its sample complexity scales as log + (σ/ε)^2log(1/δ), k>2, (σ/ε)^2log(σ/ε)log(1/δ), k=2, (σ/ε)^k/(k-1)log(1/δ), 1<k<2, up to constants depending only on k. In the range covered by the known lower bound, this rate is minimax optimal even among fully adaptive protocols. This gives a negative answer to the COLT 2026 open problem asking whether interaction is necessary for order-optimal one-bit mean estimation with general queries <cit.>.

We construct unambiguous DNFs having width O(n) but 0-certificate complexity Ω(n^2). By utilizing the special structure of these DNFs, we prove a lifting theorem with a constant-sized gadget that lifts the DNF to a communication problem, while losslessly translating the separation in certificate complexity to a separation in communication complexity. This leads to an optimal refutation of the Alon-Saks-Seymour conjecture, as well as an optimal communication lower bound for the Clique versus Independent Set problem, improving the previous results of Balodis, Ben-David, Göös, Jain and Kothari (FOCS 2021, SICOMP 2023) by several doubly logarithmic factors. As further applications of our construction to query complexity and learning theory, we exhibit: (a) a family of Boolean functions that has an optimal quartic separation between certificate complexity and approximate degree, and (b) a sample compression lower bound of Ω(√(log c)) for multiclass concept classes over c labels.

Mixtures of low-rank adaptation experts increase parameter-efficient capacity by routing each input through a subset of adapters. Recent dynamic routers activate more experts when the router or prediction is uncertain. This rule silently equates uncertainty with useful additional computation: an uncertain example may contain complementary, unqueried expert evidence, but it may instead remain ambiguous after every expert agrees. We formulate routing as certified value-of-information allocation. VI-MoLE learns the counterfactual risk remaining after each expert prefix, converts these predictions into simultaneous upper-risk certificates on held-out calibration data, and spends a global adapter budget on the token--layer action with the largest certified marginal risk reduction per unit cost. A terminal certificate then decides whether to answer or abstain. Unlike an uncertainty gate, this procedure distinguishes present ambiguity from recoverable and residual risk. We prove simultaneous certificate validity, optimal greedy allocation under diminishing certified gains, and allocation regret under value-estimation error. The evaluation protocol tests matched-compute accuracy, certificate coverage, risk--coverage, distribution shift, and tail latency against fixed and dynamic MoE-LoRA routers.

We present a fully polynomial-time randomised approximation scheme (FPRAS) for the two-terminal reliability problem on general graphs, both directed and undirected. We also show that the complementary unreliability question is \BIS-hard. The key idea of the algorithm was discovered by GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for health-related advice. Existing research measures their safety with static questions rather than pressured patient-facing conversations. We introduce MedPRESS, a multi-turn benchmark for measuring patient-pressure-induced sycophancy in LLMs. MedPRESS contains 600 medically grounded five-turn dialogues across three scenario families: medication and treatment demand, personal health self-care, and symptom triage and care resistance. Each dialogue begins with a health query and escalates through personal experience, social proof, external evidence claims, and direct adversarial challenge. We evaluate 20 LLMs across general, medical-domain, lightweight, large, open-weight, and proprietary families using structured judging and safety-focused metrics. Results show that models frequently shift toward unsafe agreement under repeated patient pressure, with substantial variation across model families, model scale, and prompt type. Anti-sycophancy prompting improves robustness for several models, but does not eliminate unsafe agreement. MedPRESS highlights a critical gap in medical LLM evaluation: safe medical knowledge is not enough unless models can maintain it under conversational pressure.

Effective model-based reinforcement learning in stochastic environments requires planning that accounts for predictive uncertainty. Propagating full state distributions analytically offers a principled way to do this, but has traditionally required restrictive policy or reward structures to remain tractable. Consequently, modern deep reinforcement learning has largely retreated to either stochastic sampling, which introduces significant target variance, or deterministic point estimates that ignore predictive covariance entirely. We investigate whether distribution-aware planning is possible without these constraints. Using a quadratic action-value parameterization, we first reduce the Bellman backup to an expectation over the state-value function alone; the key idea is then a compatibility principle between the predictive transition distribution and the value function class, under which this expectation is analytic in the distribution's moments. We instantiate this principle with a Gaussian transition model paired with a radial-basis value function, yielding a closed-form backup that propagates both predictive mean and covariance. Empirically, our approach reduces target variance and yields well-calibrated predictive uncertainty under stochastic observations in continuous control, providing a principled framework for planning with learned distribution models.

The most capable AI deployments are not single models but ensembles of specialized agents that delegate and act in coordination. This architecture unlocks powerful new capabilities, and it also introduces risks that existing frameworks for monitoring, detection, and mitigation were not designed to address. Most state-of-the-art AI abuse detection literature focuses on single-turn or multi-turn (single-session) threat models. This leaves a critical gap: an attacker can decompose a harmful goal into innocuous-looking units and execute each in isolated agentic sessions. The agent is stateless between conversations, but the attacker is not. This asymmetry allows for cross-session trajectories that are effective at evading detection. Our contributions are twofold. First, we demonstrate cross-session goal decomposition as an evasion technique, showing it may elicit more harmful capability than equivalent single-session or multi-turn attacks. By capability we mean an artifact produced at one step of an objective, evidenced by what an interaction produced (model responses and tool-call results), and composable with capabilities accrued elsewhere into a harmful whole. Second, we propose Magnet: an efficient and robust detection approach that models relevant capabilities accrued over time and across agentic conversations, aggregated at a higher-level correlator (in this case, a user ID) rather than per-conversation state. The main challenge is assembling the evidence bundle Magnet reasons over. The incriminating artifacts may be needles scattered through a haystack of benign sessions that are individually harmless, dangerous only once collected. Rather than searching the haystack straw-by-straw (i.e. per-session inspection), Magnet does what its name implies: it attracts the relevant needles out of the hay, across sessions and across time, into a compact evidence bundle a detector can act on.

As AI-generated fiction becomes increasingly prevalent, questions of authorship and originality are becoming central to how written work is evaluated. While most existing work in this space focuses on identifying surface-level signatures of AI writing, we ask instead whether AI-generated stories can be distinguished from human ones without relying on stylistic signals, focusing on discourse-level narrative choices such as character agency and chronological discontinuity. We propose StoryScope, a pipeline that automatically induces a fine-grained, interpretable feature space of discourse-level narrative features across 10 dimensions. We apply StoryScope to a parallel corpus of 10,272 writing prompts, each written by a human author and five LLMs, yielding 61,608 stories, each ~5,000 words, and 304 extracted features per story. Narrative features alone achieve 93.2% macro-F1 for human vs. AI detection and 68.4% macro-F1 for six-way authorship attribution, retaining over 97% of the performance of models that include stylistic cues. A compact set of 30 core narrative features captures much of this signal: AI stories over-explain themes and favor tidy, single-track plots while human stories frame protagonist' choices as more morally ambiguous and have increased temporal complexity. Per-model fingerprint features enable six-way attribution: for example, Claude produces notably flat event escalation, GPT over-indexes on dream sequences, and Gemini defaults to external character description. We find that AI-generated stories cluster in a shared region of narrative space, while human-authored stories exhibit greater diversity. More broadly, these results suggest that differences in underlying narrative construction, not just writing style, can be used to separate human-written original works from AI-generated fiction.

Long-running assistants and agents consume interaction streams that eventually outgrow the context. Existing context retention, summarization, and retrieval preserve access to selected history, but do not provide a persistent state over the full lifecycle when working context changes. We formulate this missing inference capability as state continuity under context turnover: carrying computation forward through a fixed-capacity memory state whose lifetime is independent of the active context. We introduce an intrinsic memory method, LiveMem, which augments a pretrained full-attention LLM with a memory state that preserves the historical information over the whole lifecycle while the main attention path retains a bounded KV window. Context turnover and memory state maintaining, memory-oriented post-training, and state-aware serving jointly make this memory state load bearing after its originating tokens are released. Our experiments show that LiveMem achieves leading overall performance among evaluated systems and other intrinsic memory methods. Experiments on LongMemEval show that LiveMem is able to answer the question based on the memory state, even when the supporting evidence has been removed from the current context, and evidence-distance analysis shows that useful information persists beyond the active window. LiveMem thus establishes state continuity as a distinct and complementary abstraction for continual LLM inference.

Sequential decision-making in real-world applications often involves uncertainty about the environment's model. Uncertain Markov decision processes (UMDPs) represent the possible environments as a set of MDPs with shared states and actions but potentially different transition probabilities and rewards. Optimizing a single policy across all possible MDPs may sacrifice performance, while preparing an individually optimized policy for every MDP may violate operational, regulatory, or interpretability constraints on the number of policies that can be prepared and deployed. We consider settings in which model uncertainty is resolved shortly before execution, allowing the most suitable policy to be selected from a limited set prepared in advance. We introduce k-adaptable policy synthesis, which optimizes such a set of k policies under a minimax-regret objective. We prove that the problem is NP-hard and develop KAPS, an exact nested branch-and-bound algorithm with problem-specific bounds and heuristics. KAPS jointly optimizes which MDPs share a policy and the policies themselves. Experiments across various UMDP benchmarks show that the largest reduction in regret consistently occurs when increasing from one to two policies. In the single-policy setting, KAPS is competitive with existing methods in solution quality and proves optimality substantially more often.

Learning-based memory systems for self-evolving LLM agents face two tightly coupled challenges. First, trajectory-indexed utilities grow with the interaction history, thereby dispersing limited feedback over an ever-expanding state space. Second, because trajectory-level rewards are jointly assigned to co-retrieved memories, irrelevant experiences may receive misleading utility updates and consequently enter the memory-reward trap. To address these challenges, we introduce Reduced-Order Memory Reinforcement Learning (RoMeRL), which represents the growing trajectory-indexed utility space using a fixed-dimensional per-task memory state factorized by outcome polarity and memory dynamics. RoMeRL incorporates new experiences through a fixed set of semantic coordinates whose contents are updated or replaced over time, thereby concentrating feedback over a bounded utility support. Theoretically, we show that this reduced-order parameterization increases the average feedback received by each utility coordinate and characterize the steady-state occupancy of erroneous coordinates under a generic coordinate-transition model. Empirically, across ALFWorld and LifelongAgentBench, RoMeRL improves task performance, reduces the Cold-Q ratio by 80.0%, increases feedback density by approximately 6.0 times, reduces the maintained memory size by 84.4%, and cuts LLM calls by 21.1%. These results show that reduced-order utility states support efficient self-evolving agent memory while limiting persistent reward contamination. Code is available at: https://github.com/YOUNG-fnxm/RoMeRL

We characterize the finite sample behavior of the log-likelihood ratio statistic in binary logistic regression, uniformly over both the design and the target parameter. For n≥ d≥ 3, we determine, up to universal constants, its worst case (1-δ) quantile over all fixed collections of design vectors and all target parameters: dlog(e n/d)+log(1/δ). This is a nonasymptotic analogue of the Wilks χ^2_d phenomenon and requires no regularity assumptions on the design. The low dimensional cases exhibit unusual behavior. The worst case quantile in dimension d=2 is sharply of order logloglog n+log(1/δ). The worst case quantile in dimension d=1 is of order log(1/δ), with no dependence on n. Finally, i.i.d. Gaussian design vectors recover the classical Wilks scale. In the regime n≳ d+log(1/δ), we prove the sharp bound d+log(1/δ). Unlike existing asymptotic results, our bounds are uniform over the target parameter, which may depend on n, d, and δ.

Can scientific abduction occur without continuous sensorimotor embodiment? Recent arguments in AI and philosophy of science hold that genuine hypothesis generation requires an agent continuously coupled to the physical world. We defend a narrower claim: online embodiment is not necessary for every abductive scientific act. Our focus is identity abduction: the inference that two independently developed structures are one object under an explicit correspondence, reached through representational grounding rather than bodily interaction. An agent may acquire new inferential affordances not through physical interaction but through transformations into representations that expose latent invariants. Scientific diagrams are a practical substrate because they embody independently evolved conventions that partially canonicalize symmetry, topology, and operator structure across disciplines - a property we develop as convention space, which answers a hard retrieval problem: finding mathematically related work when two fields share no discriminating vocabulary. We operationalize the mechanism as an architecture, the Abduction Loop: representation generation, motif extraction, convention-space canonicalization, cross-domain retrieval, identity-hypothesis generation, and adversarial verification, with abstention as the designed default. A documented episode, in which a multimodal model given a figure of a gravitational-memory transport model generated and then verified the hypothesis that its central differential complex is equivalent to the spherical Kaiser-Squires mass-mapping complex of weak-lensing cosmology, serves as a motivating possibility witness from which the architecture is abstracted, not as evidence of general capability. We close with a falsifiable evaluation program, the DAB-30 benchmark. The contribution is a mechanistic proposal, an architecture, and a test program.

Video Diffusion Transformers (VDiTs) enable high-fidelity generation but incur quadratic cost from dense 3D self-attention. Existing head- and block-level sparse methods share computation budgets across queries, overlooking token-specific attention demand. We observe that retained density varies across queries yet correlates log-linearly with attention entropy, while dominant interactions form query-centered neighborhoods with token-dependent radii. Based on these findings, we propose Token Radius Attention (TRA), a training-free framework that maps query entropy to an analytic token budget and converts it into a temporally decayed radius without explicit key ranking. Fused entropy extraction, warm-up reuse, and block-sparse mask construction further reduce overhead. Across seven Wan2.1, Wan2.2, and HunyuanVideo T2V/I2V configurations, TRA retains only 9-19% of attention interactions and achieves 1.56x-2.05x speedup with competitive generation quality. Code is available at https://github.com/IF-LAB-PKU/Token-Radius-Attention.

Motivated by recent work of Kocurek, Oveis Gharan, and Tjowasi, which gives an efficient sampling algorithm for the hard-core model on random regular bipartite graphs by decomposing into fixed-size slices, we study the worst-case tractability of approximate counting and sampling of fixed-size slices for bipartite independent set problems. Let G=(L⊔ R,E) be a bipartite graph with |L|=|R|=n and maximum degree Δ. The fixed-slice problem asks to sample uniformly from independent sets satisfying |I∩ L|=α_L n and |I∩ R|=α_R n. We show that if the overall density α lies in the interval (1/Δ, 12), and the densities on the two sides are more balanced than the typical phase densities of a random Δ-regular bipartite graph, then there is no FPRAS or efficient sampling scheme unless 𝐍𝐏=𝐑𝐏. We then study a related fugacity model in which the densities are not fixed, but the independent set is required to be balanced between the two sides of the bipartition. For λ>0, the balanced hard-core model is the ordinary hard-core model with fugacity λ, conditioned on the event |I∩ L|=|I∩ R|. We prove that this model has the same computational threshold as the hard-core model on general bounded-degree graphs. That is, for every fixed Δ≥ 3, if λ<λ_c(Δ), then the balanced partition function admits an FPTAS and the balanced hard-core distribution admits an efficient sampling scheme. Conversely, if λ>λ_c(Δ), then no FPRAS or efficient sampler exists on this graph class unless 𝐍𝐏=𝐑𝐏.

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in visual generative modeling, yet their training remains computationally prohibitive. While the recently proposed Momentum Orthogonalization (Muon) optimizer offers a promising alternative to AdamW, its direct application to DiTs yields suboptimal late-stage convergence. In this paper, we identify the root cause of this bottleneck: standard DiT architectures fuse functionally distinct weights (e.g., within AdaLN and QKV layers) into unified tensors for computational efficiency. Applying Muon to these fused tensors inadvertently induces implicit subspace coupling, which distorts update directions and degrades global optimization. To address this, we introduce Chunked Muon (CMuon), a simple yet highly effective strategy that partitions these matrices into independent sub-components prior to orthogonalization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that a 675M-parameter DiT trained with CMuon achieves a FID of 1.18 on ImageNet 256 in just 200 epochs. This represents more than a 2x training speedup over AdamW, while effectively overcoming the late-stage convergence plateaus of vanilla Muon.

Real-world software development requires coding agents to operate in shared workspaces where users may inspect and modify code during an ongoing task, yet existing repository-level benchmarks typically evaluate agents working alone or restrict user participation to messages. This leads us to ask: how do coding agents understand and respond to code changes in a shared workspace? We introduce SWE-Touch, a framework that stress-tests this setting through validated Counter-Edits: plausible edits to task-relevant code that conflict with task completion. SWE-Touch mines task-critical regions from multiple repair trajectories, uses a separate User Patch Generator to construct the edits, and injects them with contextual user messages when agents reach the relevant code. We evaluate nine coding models on SWE-bench Verified, with additional experiments on longer-horizon tasks from SWE-Bench Pro and DeepSWE. Counter-Edit lowers average resolve rate by 7.7 percentage points on SWE-bench Verified, with degradation also persisting on both longer-horizon benchmarks. Trajectory analysis links these failures to limited awareness of the evolving workspace: agents may retain conflicting code or replace it without sufficiently re-inspecting the repository and validating the revised code with targeted tests. These findings show that strong autonomous performance does not yet ensure the state awareness and adaptive behavior needed for shared-workspace collaboration, and point to detecting workspace changes, reconciling conflicting edits with the task, and verifying the affected behavior as key capabilities for future optimization.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models excel in robotic manipulation but suffer catastrophic performance drops when canonical instructions are simply paraphrased. Although this brittleness is typically addressed through costly data scaling, our probing reveals that the root cause is architectural rather than a lack of semantic understanding. Specifically, we demonstrate that current VLAs successfully retain the correct task identity internally. The failure actually stems from the joint encoding of dynamic visual observations and text, which introduces systematic feature shifts. Because the downstream action policy is highly vulnerable to these variations, it fails to translate the preserved semantics into correct control commands. To resolve this structural bottleneck, we propose Grounded Semantic Re-binding (GSR), an elegant intervention that bypasses unstable joint routing by explicitly fusing independently extracted task semantics with native visual features to train a completely re-initialized action expert from scratch. This targeted intervention dramatically restores paraphrastic invariance using only canonical demonstrations. On the LIBERO-Para benchmark, GSR improves success rates by up to 44.6 percent. It enables lightweight models to rival massively scaled baselines and pushes state-of-the-art models to a new record PRIDE score of 70.4, outperforming the recently introduced large-scale pretrained model Xiaomi-Robotics-0 in instruction generation capabilities. Building on these insights, we also introduce ParaVLA, a natively decoupled 0.33B-parameter model exhibiting near-perfect robustness to instruction rewording. Ultimately, our work proves that robust semantic grounding can be achieved through elegant structural design, bypassing the inefficient brute-force data scaling paradigm.

Despite the remarkable progress over the past decades, accurately identifying small objects remains challenging because of their insufficient visual cues. Previous works typically attempt to construct discriminative representation of the small objects. However, the wide range frequency domain noises and label ambiguities have been greatly overlooked, which significantly hinders the accurate localization. To address these issues, we propose a novel small object detection (SOD) detector termed DyFrDet, which is able to precisely localize the small object by dynamically suppressing the background distractions in frequency domain. Specifically, we propose a Dynamic Frequency-aware Feature Pyramid Network (DyFrFPN) to adaptively suppress low-frequency redundancy and excessive high-frequency noises. The DyFrFPN transforms the hierarchical features into frequency domain representation, and introduces a Dynamic Band Predictor (DBP) to preserve the discriminative components for small object identification. Afterwards, we present a novel Label Disambiguation Module (LDM), which leverages probabilistic distributions to explicitly model and alleviate the inherent ambiguity of target labels, yielding efficient improvement in localization precision of the small objects with low-resolution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DyFrDet achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks, indicating its effectiveness and robustness in various challenging scenarios. Our code is available at https://github.com/ManOfStory/DyFrDet.

Language models have taken on the role of a very new type of technology, by virtue of their "human-ness" and rapid integration into users' daily lives. This combination of features can introduce longitudinal risks---cognitive, developmental and socio-affective changes in humans---that might not surface in short-term interactions, but can have lasting long-term effects on users. This forms the basis of a critical new mission for NLP: to pivot from static, short-term evaluations of text generations to long-term measurements of behavioral changes, towards a diachronic understanding of human-model interactions. In this work, we draw from measurements used in social science fields that are crucial to understand emergent phenomena in longitudinal data. We discuss how computational methods in the field of NLP need to be combined with such measurements, not only to understand long-term safety risks of human-model interactions, but to help steer model development towards positive rather than negative outcomes for users. This ability to model human behavioral shifts as a function of model interactions can facilitate online rather than post-hoc detection of problematic behaviors, and should be leveraged in alignment frameworks to mitigate long-term risks in users.

Machine Unlearning aims to remove undesired information from trained models without full retraining from scratch. Despite recent progress, the loss landscape and optimization geometry of unlearning are poorly understood. In this paper, we study machine unlearning through the lens of mode connectivity--the phenomenon that independently trained models can often be connected by smooth low-loss paths in parameter space. We introduce {\em mode connectivity in unlearning} (MCU) and evaluate it across a range of settings, including curriculum learning, second-order optimization, and connectivity across different unlearning methods. We find that many unlearned models lie in connected basins with smooth retain/forget behavior, while changes in training dynamics can move solutions into different basins. MCU also reveals that models within the same basin can differ substantially on privacy metrics, and that unlearning progresses nonlinearly from the original model to the unlearned model. In addition, linear connectivity suggests that most approximate unlearning methods are mechanistically distinct from retraining. Finally, MCU-based ensembling can improve generalization and robustness to relearning attacks, and MCU smoothness correlates with unlearning difficulty. To our knowledge, this is the first study of machine unlearning through the lens of mode connectivity.

Recently, rectified flow has emerged as a fundamental framework for large-scale image generation, powering state-of-the-art systems such as FLUX.1 and Stable Diffusion 3. Despite its remarkable empirical success, the computational and statistical guarantees of iterative rectified flow have remained largely unexplored. We address this problem by studying c-rectified flow, a cost-aware class of rectified flow that projects velocity fields onto a gradient class while preserving endpoint marginals. The ordinary rectified flow can fail to recover the optimal transport coupling: in a Gaussian case study, the iteration converges to the optimal coupling if and only if the source and target covariance matrices commute. In contrast, under suitable compactness and uniform-integrability assumptions, iterative c-rectified flow always converges to the optimal transport coupling. We further establish quantitative one-step contraction and exponential convergence guarantees under projection-stability assumptions for both quadratic and strongly convex displacement costs. Finally, under a Hölder ball assumption, we develop new minimax-optimal score estimation rates and show that, when combined with iterative c-rectified flow, they yield a rate-optimal estimator of the optimal transport for the dimension d ≥ 3 and a nearly parametric rate for d=1,2.

Whether neural information processing is entirely classical or involves quantum-mechanical elements remains an open question. Here we propose a model-agnostic, information-theoretic test of nonclassicality that bypasses microscopic assumptions and instead probes the structure of neural representations themselves. Using autoencoders as a transparent model system, we introduce a Bell-type consistency test in latent space, and ask whether decoding statistics obtained under multiple readout contexts can be jointly explained by a single positive latent-variable distribution. By shifting the search for quantum-like signatures in neural systems from microscopic dynamics to experimentally testable constraints on information processing, this work opens a new route for probing the fundamental physics of neural computation. The proposed test identifies violations of classical latent-variable consistency at the level of statistical representations, without assuming a specific underlying physical mechanism.

The field of computer vision has experienced significant advancements through scalable vision encoders and multimodal pre-training frameworks. However, existing approaches often treat vision encoders and large language models (LLMs) as independent modules, limiting the integration of hierarchical visual features. In this work, we propose HIVE (Hierarchical Pre-Training of Vision Encoders), a novel framework that enhances vision-language alignment by introducing hierarchical cross-attention between the vision encoder and LLM. Unlike conventional methods that flatten image embeddings, HIVE enables structured feature fusion across multiple layers, improving gradient flow and representation learning. To optimize this interaction, we introduce a three-stage training strategy that progressively aligns the vision encoder with the LLM, ensuring stable optimization and effective multimodal fusion. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that HIVE achieves superior performance not only in image classification but also on various vision-language tasks, outperforming self-attention-based methods in benchmarks such as MME, GQA, OK-VQA, and ScienceQA. Our results highlight the benefits of hierarchical feature integration, paving the way for more efficient and expressive vision-language models.

Open-source LLMs reliably name Zeus, Jupiter, and Thor, but recover their counterparts in less-represented traditions like Finnish, Slavic, Egyptian, or Chinese mythology far less consistently. We ask where inside the model this cultural default is produced. On a parallel cross-cultural substrate of Thompson-motif entities, we instrument 18 open-source LLMs from 8 architecture families with linear probing, logit lens, activation patching, and output extraction. The residual stream cleanly distinguishes cultures, well above a name-string baseline, yet the decoder collapses culturally-specific tokens onto dominant-tradition ones. The failure is at readout, not at representation. Asking the same question in the target culture's native language versus English produces failures that cluster within language but decouple across language: the decoder is gated on prompt language. We release a per-entity (probe, output) decomposition framework, a citation-anchored cross-cultural ground truth, a within- versus cross-mode correlation test for language-conditioned readout, and per-entity predictions for all 18 models.

Generative AI can produce book-length works of fiction at near-zero cost. These books are often dismissed as low-quality “slop” that buyers will ignore, and are assumed to carry little commercial weight. We test that assumption with full-text AI detection across 14,419 self-published genre-fiction books sold on Amazon from 2023 to 2026, matched to daily sales records through June 2026. None of these books disclose whether or not they contain AI-produced content. We find that books for which we detected substantial AI text (> 25%) make up a large share of the catalog but a smaller share of sales. Even so, they reach commercial scale, winning a growing share of sales over time and taking more of the scarce top-rank positions once held by books with no detected AI text. Over this period, the number of books with observed sales in a quarter grew 19.2-fold, while quarterly revenue grew only 8.9-fold. The market therefore added selling books faster than it added revenue, and revenue per selling book fell across most genres. Books with no AI text lose the most ground in genres with high AI diffusion, and most of all where Kindle Unlimited availability is high. Among top-selling books, those with substantial AI text draw on more distinctive language from existing books than do books with no AI text; for these books overlap rises with revenue, a gradient we do not detect for books with no AI text. Generative AI can thus reshape a creative market through scale rather than quality. Our results bear directly on the market-effect question at the center of the fair use defense to copyright infringement.