We present MobileGym, a browser-hosted, lightweight, fully controllable environment for everyday mobile use, targeting interaction fidelity without replicating proprietary backends. It enables two capabilities previously out of reach for everyday apps: verifiable outcome signals through deterministic state-based judging over structured JSON state, and scalable online RL through low-cost parallel rollouts. The full environment state is captured, configured, forked, and compared as structured JSON, and a single server can host hundreds of parallel instances, with about 400 MB memory per instance and about 3 s cold start. A layered state model and a declarative task-definition framework keep state programmability and task creation practical at scale, and a single programmatic judging mechanism delivers both deterministic evaluation verdicts and dense RL rewards. The accompanying MobileGym-Bench provides 416 parameterized task templates, including 256 test and 160 train templates, over 28 apps, with deterministic judges and a structured AnswerSheet protocol that avoids free-text matching failures. In a Sim-to-Real case study, GRPO on Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct gains +12.8 percentage points on the 256-task test set, and on a 59-task real-device signal subset, real-device execution retains 95.1% of the simulation-side training gain. Project page: https://mobilegym.github.io.

Representation Autoencoders (RAEs) enable diffusion models to operate in the feature spaces of pretrained visual encoders. However, many off-the-shelf encoders are not optimized for faithful reconstruction, discarding fine-grained visual details. As expected, finetuning these encoders for image reconstruction recovers such details. However, perhaps counterintuitively, this procedure reduces the effective dimensionality of the resulting representation, and the altered geometry has downstream effects on generation. Specifically, we show that using the standard velocity prediction in flow matching in this high-dimensional space requires the model to fit orthogonal noise directions outside the low-dimensional signal manifold, making optimization inefficient. This motivates using the clean data parameterization (x_0-prediction) instead, which focuses learning on the underlying signal manifold. Across experiments with multiple strong-reconstruction encoders, we show that x_0-prediction consistently improves text-to-image generation performance.

The Girard–Hutchinson estimator provides an extremely simple randomized estimate of the Frobenius norm of a matrix A that can only be accessed implicitly via matrix-vector products. In particular, if Ω is a random Gaussian matrix with r = O(1/ε^2) columns, than 1/rAΩ_F^2 provides a (1±ε) multiplicative approximation to A_F^2 with high probability. In this work, we introduce a closely related estimator, given by 1/rAΩ_F^2 + 1/rΨ^T A_F^2 - 1/r^2Ψ^T AΩ_F^2, where Ψ is a second, independent random Gaussian matrix with r columns. We prove that this estimator yields a (1±ε) multiplicative approximation to A_F^2 when r = O(1/ε), a quadratic improvement over Girard–Hutchinson. This dependence on ε is optimal. Our method, which we call Hutch# (pronounced “Hutch sharp”), matches the complexity of the Hutch++ algorithm [Meyer, Musco, Musco, Woodruff, 2021]. However, unlike Hutch++, Hutch# uses only non-adaptive matrix-vector products with A and A^T and requires no orthogonalization or other adaptive linear algebra steps. Thus, Hutch# combines the simplicity of the Girard–Hutchinson estimator and the optimal query complexity of Hutch++.

Our results show that contrastive learning outperforms a classification-based approach to authorship verification under the tested settings. We identify loss function, batch size, training duration, pre-trained model, input context length, and random text span data augmentation as important factors of model performance. Based on these considerations, we develop a ModernBERT Bi-Encoder model that achieves 98.4% accuracy on the PAN21 authorship verification task.

Artificial intelligence offers an unprecedented opportunity to augment human capabilities, yet progress at the frontier has focused primarily on advancing model capabilities. We introduce StudentBench, a suite of AI teaching evaluations and a public platform that enables large-scale data collection with over 175,000 student-AI messages to study whether large language models (LLMs) produce learning gains equivalent to human tutoring. Using StudentBench, we measured learning gains on Quantitative and Verbal GRE questions across 2,383 human participants receiving AI tutoring, human tutoring, or no tutoring. We establish that AI tutoring is statistically equivalent to expert human tutoring for GRE learning gains (p = .015), and in five of the seven GRE domains, the best performing AI tutor surpassed the human tutor, on average. In a second study, expert human tutors compared LLM-generated lesson plans and practice problems through 2,028 pairwise rubric evaluations. Together, the two studies clearly separate AI tutors across: (1) lesson planning, (2) practice-problem creation, (3) conversational pedagogy, (4) cost, and (5) engagement. Surprisingly, one AI tutor achieved learning gains equivalent to human tutoring (p = .044) at 918 times lower cost (USD 0.0052 for AI versus USD 4.81 for human, per percentage point gained). For Quantitative GRE sessions, faster AI replies correlated with more student messages, more messages with more correct practice, and more correct practice with larger learning gains (all p < .002). The StudentBench platform is freely available at https://studentbench.org.

High-rate dense perception in dynamic environments is limited by the low update rate of RGB cameras, as rapid scene changes can occur between frames. Event cameras offer temporally dense but spatially sparse measurements, complementary to spatially dense RGB observations. Direct fusion cannot fully exploit this complementarity, while event-guided propagation fails on newly appearing or disoccluded regions without valid RGB support. We present LiFR v2, a unified propagation-completion-memory framework for causal anytime and streaming dense prediction from an RGB keyframe and events. LiFR v2 introduces an Event-Guided Completion Module (EGCM) to recover task-relevant representations where propagation is unsupported, and a History Retrieval Module (HRM) to reuse completed representations across successive queries. The framework supports semantic segmentation, monocular depth estimation, and multi-task dense prediction, and we further introduce SHF-Emerge to evaluate rapid object emergence and disocclusion. LiFR v2 achieves 74.37% mIoU on DSEC and 56.13% on SHF-Emerge, improving LiFR-Seg by 1.85 percentage points on the latter, while reducing SHF-Emerge depth RMSE from 1.564 m to 1.118 m over the propagation baseline. It also exceeds 100 FPS for both segmentation and depth, demonstrating accurate and efficient high-rate perception beyond RGB frame rates.

Bayesian optimization (BO) is widely used for expensive black-box problems, yet practical performance depends not only on high-level algorithmic choices but also on how surrogate model training, input and output warping transformations, acquisition functions, and candidate search are implemented. We present tidyHEBO, a BoTorch-native single-objective optimizer designed for robust general-purpose optimization. tidyHEBO jointly fits Yeo-Johnson output warping with the Gaussian-process surrogate, evaluates acquisition functions on the original objective scale using deterministic quadrature or MC-samples, and performs constrained cumulative Pareto search over multiple acquisition criteria. Without any Olympus-specific hyperparameter tuning - using only default optimizer configurations - tidyHEBO ranked first among the evaluated methods on the Olympus benchmark. It achieved the best average ranks for typical performance (average rank 1.53), worst-tail performance (1.21), and run-to-run variability (2.00), measured by median nAUC, CVaR_nAUC, and IQR_nAUC, respectively. Using the same default configuration, tidyHEBO also performed strongly on synthetic and Needle-in-a-Haystack problems and closely matched HEBO on Bayesmark (92.64 versus 93.34) while exceeding GP with logarithmic expected improvement and random search. Adaptive batching reduced feedback rounds while revealing a controllable trade-off between parallelization and optimization quality as the batch cap increased. These results characterize tidyHEBO as a robust, reproducible general-purpose optimizer for a broad range of practical optimization problems, including scientific applications and hyperparameter tuning.

Social navigation typically assumes a specified goal and focuses on reaching it while respecting social conventions, whereas robot group joining requires predicting where to join based on the group's real-time activity and formation. This is a highly semantic task, yet an important capability for applications such as robotic guide dogs and autonomous mobility scooters. We formulate language-grounded robot group joining: given an observation and a natural-language description of a target group, the robot identifies the relevant group members and predicts socially compliant joining poses. For grounding, we generate structured candidate subsets through recursive spectral partitioning and rank them with a language-conditioned image--geometry model. Given the grounded group, a goal predictor leverages human-formation priors to produce a multimodal energy--orientation map over feasible robot poses. Experiments on conversations, queues, and audiences across varying group sizes, crowd densities, and visual ambiguities show that our method achieves competitive grounding accuracy with sub-second inference and outperforms all baselines in joining-pose prediction. Real-robot experiments further demonstrate group joining in both static and dynamically changing interactions.

Advances in generative models have improved video fidelity, enabling long-horizon generation, interactive world modeling, and evolving visual environments. Autoregressive (AR) video generation extends visual sequences through causal rollouts. However, a fundamental bottleneck emerges: as the generated sequence expands, practical models must operate under strictly bounded context windows, storage, and computational limits. Consequently, critical historical information, e.g., entity identities, dynamic states, and intervention-induced causal changes, often leaves the active context long before its relevance diminishes. Overcoming this limitation and maintaining temporal persistence constitutes a fundamental memory problem. We present a systematic and comprehensive review of memory mechanisms in AR video generation. We formulate memory operationally as persistent historical information maintained across outer AR steps, capable of influencing future generation even after the originating evidence is no longer locally accessible. Building upon this unified framework, we organize the literature through five complementary perspectives: (I) Forms, the representational carriers of history; (II) Functions, the specific semantic and physical information requiring preservation; (III) Operations, the lifecycle of writing, reading, updating, managing, and integrating memory; (IV) Learning, the optimization of memory behaviors under closed-loop rollouts; and (V) Evaluation, the paradigms for diagnosing genuine memory capabilities. We conclude by synthesizing open challenges, including composable and resource-aware memory architectures, trustworthy state updating, self-rollout learning, and standardized evaluation. By bridging representations, mechanisms, and learning paradigms, this paper establishes a structured foundation for developing reliable, memory-conditioned video generation systems.

We introduce Sharper Transductive Local Complexity (STLC), a localized complexity method for transductive learning under uniform sampling without replacement. The construction starts from a Bernstein-type concentration inequality for the supremum of the test–train empirical process. Its proof uses the modified log-Sobolev inequality for the swap walk and a two-parameter entropy closure. A peeling argument with a surrogate localization functional then gives excess-risk bounds with the same fixed-point and confidence terms as the classical inductive local Rademacher-complexity bounds, without the additional logarithmic confidence factor in earlier transductive results. For realizable learning over a binary class of VC dimension , with training size m, test size u, and u≥ m≥, STLC yields {log(me/)/m}. This matches the standard inductive rate and, when m≥9, is within a logarithmic factor of the transductive minimax lower bound of order /m. For transductive kernel learning, STLC gives a spectrum-adaptive excess-risk bound without the multiplicative imbalance factors appearing in the earlier local-complexity bound.

The scarcity of non-English language data in specialized domains significantly limits the development of effective Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools. We present TransBERT, a novel framework for pre-training language models using exclusively synthetically translated text, and introduce TransCorpus, a scalable translation toolkit. Focusing on the life sciences domain in French, our approach demonstrates that state-of-the-art performance on various downstream tasks can be achieved solely by leveraging synthetically translated data. We release the TransCorpus toolkit, the TransCorpus-bio-fr corpus (36.4GB of French life sciences text), TransBERT-bio-fr, its associated pre-trained language model and reproducible code for both pre-training and fine-tuning. Our results highlight the viability of synthetic translation in a high-resource translation direction for building high-quality NLP resources in low-resource language/domain pairs.

As large language model (LLM)-powered agents are increasingly deployed to perform complex, real-world tasks, they face a growing class of attacks that exploit extended user-agent-environment interactions to pursue malicious objectives improbable in single-turn settings. Such long-horizon threats pose significant risks to the safe deployment of LLM agents in critical domains. In this paper, we present ShadowMem, a novel defensive framework designed to counter a wide range of long-horizon threats. Inspired by the "shadow stack" abstraction in systems security, ShadowMem maintains a dedicated, safety-focused agentic memory that distills and retains safety-critical context across the agent's full execution trajectory, leveraging this shadow memory to proactively assess the risk of pending actions prior to their execution. Extensive evaluation demonstrates that ShadowMem substantially outperforms existing defenses across diverse long-horizon threats in detection accuracy, achieves early-stage detection for the majority of attacks, and introduces only negligible overhead to agent utility. To our best knowledge, ShadowMem represents the first framework to detect and mitigate long-horizon threats using an agentic memory approach, establishing a new paradigm for this critical challenge and opening promising directions for future research. The artifacts are available at https://github.com/ZJUWYH/ShadowMem

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in coding tasks, but their ability to reason about code execution remains unclear. Existing repository-level QA benchmarks mainly evaluate static code understanding and often rely on LLM-based evaluation, while execution-reasoning benchmarks are mostly limited to snippets or functions. We introduce SWE-Flux, a repository-level benchmark for dynamic execution reasoning containing 480 execution-grounded instances across 12 real Python repositories, with gold answers automatically harvested from instrumented test executions rather than written manually or judged by LLMs. The benchmark covers singletest and multi-test questions over control flow, loops, program state, dataflow, exceptions, and program invariants. Evaluating five LLMs shows that this task remains challenging. The best model achieves only 37% accuracy. Models perform better on localized behavior such as invariants, intra-procedural control flow, exceptions, and simple loops, but struggle with dataflow, inter-procedural execution, precise state reasoning, and suite-level aggregation. Finally, we show that the oracle-harvesting pipeline can generate fresh benchmark variants using input perturbation. It successfully harvests valid variants for almost 90% of the selected instances, and the resulting variants are substantially more challenging for the evaluated models.

We study the nonequilibrium dynamics of a minimal recurrent transformer with N normalized tokens, Q=K=I, and a negative value map V=-I. Similarity-based attention selects nearby representations, while the negative value map drives tokens away from the selected field. This feedback can continually reorganize both the representation geometry and the attention network. For d=2, the tokens lie on a circle, where the regular polygon is an exact fixed point. As the attention feedback strength γ is increased, the polygon loses stability through a flip bifurcation, giving rise to period-two motion, chaos, and cluster-exchange or cluster-flip states. Despite this temporal complexity, attention remains diffuse as N→∞ at finite fixed softmax sharpness β. Attention condensation instead emerges in the scaling regime β∼ N^2. In the hard-routing limit, repulsive updates amplify local perturbations and routing-partner switches transmit them ballistically, producing an emergent butterfly cone in representation space. High-dimensional geometry provides a distinct route to localization. For d=N→∞, simulations from Gaussian initial conditions provide evidence for a condensation transition at β=O(1), driven by dynamically generated finite overlap gaps. Depending on γ, the resulting phases include diffuse simplex-like states, consensus flips, condensed active routing with signatures of chaos, and fragmented cluster flips. These results establish temporal activity, attention condensation, and geometric clustering as distinct collective phenomena, and show that sparse attention can sustain persistent dynamics rather than freeze it.

Multi-turn agents that plan, invoke tools, and interact with environments offer a promising paradigm for solving complex tasks, yet their capabilities typically rely on very large models whose inference cost is prohibitive in practice. On-Policy Distillation (OPD) is a natural recipe for transferring such capabilities to smaller students, but we find that it suffers a characteristic failure mode in this setting: small student errors compound across turns and push the trajectory out of the teacher's familiar state distribution, so the teacher's supervision becomes least reliable precisely where the student needs it most. We propose Guided On-Policy Distillation (Guided-OPD), a simple yet effective algorithm that mixes teacher- and student-generated turns within each rollout and schedules the teacher's intervention probability along a curriculum that decays to zero. Strong guidance keeps early trajectories close to the teacher distribution and is then gradually withdrawn to recover the purely on-policy regime used at inference. On ALFWorld, ScienceWorld, and WebShop, distilling Qwen3 students from a Qwen3-30B-A3B teacher, Guided-OPD yields average relative gains of 21.1\% in Score and 25.5\% in Success Rate over vanilla OPD, with larger gains on smaller students.

Modern human sensing applications often rely on data distributed across users and devices, where privacy concerns prevent centralized training. Federated Learning (FL) addresses this challenge by enabling collaborative model training without exposing raw data or attributes. However, achieving fairness in such settings remains difficult, as most human sensing datasets lack demographic labels, and FL's privacy guarantees limit the use of sensitive attributes. This paper introduces CurvFed: Curvature Aligned Federated Learning for Fairness without Demographics, a theoretically grounded framework that promotes fairness in FL without requiring any demographic or sensitive attribute information, a concept termed Fairness without Demographics (FWD), by optimizing the underlying loss landscape curvature. Building on the theory that equivalent loss landscape curvature corresponds to consistent model efficacy across sensitive attribute groups, CurvFed regularizes the top eigenvalue of the Fisher Information Matrix (FIM) as an efficient proxy for loss landscape curvature, both within and across clients. This alignment promotes uniform model behavior across diverse bias inducing factors, offering an attribute agnostic route to algorithmic fairness. CurvFed is especially suitable for real world human sensing FL scenarios involving single or multi user edge devices with unknown or multiple bias factors. We validated CurvFed through theoretical and empirical justifications, as well as comprehensive evaluations using three real world datasets and a deployment on a heterogeneous testbed of resource constrained devices. Additionally, we conduct sensitivity analyses on local training data volume, client sampling, communication overhead, resource costs, and runtime performance to demonstrate its feasibility for practical FL edge device deployment.

Reordering a set of mathematical rules without changing its meaning should preserve the correct answer, but must a model's internal representations stay invariant too? We investigate this question using synthetic multi-step function-composition problems, each presented under multiple rule orderings with the same correct answer. We measure accuracy and permutation signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), which quantifies how distinctly ordering patterns are represented relative to variation across problem instances. Across 16 language models ranging from 1B to 8B parameters, we find a pattern: models that solve reordered problems more accurately represent different rule orderings more distinctly. Layer-averaged permutation SNR is positively rank-correlated with accuracy in every synthetic setting we evaluate, with Spearman correlations reaching 0.86. These findings highlight a distinction between answer invariance and representation invariance: successful mathematical rule composition can accompany distinct internal representations between equivalent rule orderings. This motivates distinguishing answer invariance from representation invariance, and offers a representational perspective on mathematical reasoning beyond answer accuracy alone.

The adoption of CMOS sensors in mobile photography is frequently compromised by the rolling shutter (RS) effect, which introduces geometric distortions and motion artifacts. Particularly, recent rolling shutter with global reset (RSGR) mode, while mitigating some RS issues, also incurs major limitations, including reduced capture speed and compressed dynamic range. To address these problems, we propose a novel dual reversed scanning setup utilizing both RSGR and inverted RSGR views. This solution not only handles the inherent flaws of RSGR by synchronizing complementary exposures to balance the dynamic range across the frames but also introduces an effective method for HDR photosequencing under highly dynamic scenes. Our proposed network first accommodates row-wise complementarity and manages visual shifts by row-adaptive feature alignment. Subsequently, the hallucination module, built upon a correlation-guided mixattention block, integrates the mutually reinforced features to recover missing details. In addition, we construct a coaxial imaging system to collect a real-world dataset, enabling robust training and evaluation beyond numerical simulation. Experimental results demonstrate the twofold benefits of our solution in mitigating RSGR limitations and advancing HDR reconstruction techniques.

We study minimal-norm interpolation and ℓ_2-regularized logistic-loss minimization for binary classification by univariate two-layer ReLU networks. We give complete geometric characterizations of the optimal classifiers in function space, resolving how the solutions depend on whether hidden-layer biases are included in the parameter norm. When biases are unpenalized, the minimal-norm interpolators are exactly the continuous piecewise-affine functions that hug every label switch and have kinks of the appropriate convexity. When biases are penalized, the minimizer is unique in function space, has exactly one kink in each intermediate same-label segment, and is therefore a sparsest positive-margin classifier. We further show that adding a free affine skip connection leaves these function-space solutions unchanged but fundamentally improves the parameter-space landscape: every KKT point of the constrained problem becomes globally optimal, whereas suboptimal KKT points can occur without the skip connection. We establish analogous global-optimality and geometric results for sufficiently weak ℓ_2-regularization of the logistic loss. In the unpenalized-bias case, we identify an additional sparsity-like restriction, implying that most minimal-norm interpolators cannot arise as small-regularization limits of margin-normalized logistic-loss minimizers. Numerical experiments across varying dataset complexity and network width support the predicted landscape and sparsity phenomena.

Online information is increasingly consumed in video format. Much of this comes in the form of *raw video*: continuous footage taken on a cell phone, with a hand-held camera, or via CCTV, which is then directly uploaded to social media platforms and content sharing services. Whereas professional or even amateur-edited footage tends to feature scripted speech, chyrons, graphics, and metadata that help contextualize its subject matter, raw video typically contains none of these things, making it a much more challenging medium for information retrieval and machine understanding. To facilitate progress in this domain, we release MultiVENT-Raw, a multilingual collection of nearly 120,000 primarily raw videos (over 5,300 total hours), paired with 130 events and 222 event-centric queries, along with human-annotated video relevance judgments and human-extracted key facts for relevant videos. MultiVENT-Raw supports both a retrieval task---to identify videos in the collection relevant to a query event---and a generation task---to summarize event-related videos into a coherent report for a target user. We benchmark strong baselines on MultiVENT-Raw, showing both tasks to be challenging even for some of the latest multimodal models.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to provide conversational practice for English-as-a-second-language (ESL) learners. Effective ESL tutoring, however, requires more than fluent response generation: a tutor must select an appropriate pedagogical action based on learner behavior and dialogue context. Human-tutoring research offers principles for adaptive support, but they are often task-specific and remain insufficiently integrated into LLM-based ESL tutor training and evaluation. We present TACT (Taxonomy-Aligned Conversational Tutor), a human-grounded framework for post-training and evaluating pedagogically adaptive ESL tutors. Drawing on established literature, we develop two complementary taxonomies: the Tutor-Strategy Taxonomy with 13 tutor response strategies and the Student-Move Taxonomy characterizing learner behavior by move type and status. Using these taxonomies, we construct TACTCorpus, which enriches 260 authentic teacher-student conversations with 32,379 annotations and quality-controlled augmented training data. We then post-train Qwen3.5-4B through supervised fine-tuning followed by taxonomy-aligned Group Relative Policy Optimization, producing TACTutor and optimizing it for scaffolding quality rather than reference imitation alone. On TACTBench, a strategy-balanced diagnostic benchmark comprising 78 authentic tutoring contexts, TACTutor improves over its backbone by 20.30% and outperforms all evaluated proprietary baselines under the same protocol, while maintaining backbone performance on established external educational benchmarks; in a blinded study with 50 learners, it also receives the highest overall mean rating among the evaluated tutors. We release the data, benchmark, and model weights, providing an open foundation for developing pedagogically adaptive ESL tutors.

World Action Models (WAMs) couple predictive world modeling with action generation, allowing anticipated future states to guide agent behavior. Although WAMs are rapidly advancing embodied AI, general-purpose counterparts remain largely unexplored in games. Existing game-oriented approaches often combine action-conditioned world models with external policies and reward functions to realize WAM-like decision-making, yet they operate mainly in 2D visual observation space and do not instantiate persistent 3D geometry. Extending this paradigm to 3D games introduces a distinct challenge. In autonomous driving and robotics, the physical environment exists independently of the model, providing a persistent 3D world in which selected actions can be executed. Games have no such external substrate; the virtual world itself must be instantiated. Most playable games require a persistent and navigable space, while 3D games additionally require explicit geometry that supports movement and interaction. Action-conditioned video rollouts provide visual observations but not this spatial representation. We present Valerant, a training-free framework that transforms a pretrained action-conditioned world model into a WAM for exploring and constructing 3D game maps. By coupling predictive visual rollouts with SLAM-based spatial reconstruction and exploration-driven action selection, Valerant progressively transforms a single image into a persistent 3D game map. This framework extends WAM-based interaction beyond 2D visual simulation and offers a new approach to reducing manual effort in 3D game-map creation.

Adolescent Idiopathic Scoliosis is defined as a lateral curvature of the spine that develops during adolescence, without known cause. The condition can result in significant pain and disability, and often progresses rapidly during adolescence. The objective of this paper is to predict the progression of the condition in a temporal sequence from ages 9 to 24, as measured from a sequence of Dual X-ray Absorptiometry (DXA) scans. To this end, we train a transformer model that takes in the curve of the spine to predict curve progression. The model is trained using a large-scale synthetic dataset of spine curves and their time series, covering different curve types and different progression patterns. We show that the model is able to generalise from synthetic to real data by evaluating it on a dataset of real DXA scans covering multiple time points. We find that fine-tuning the model on real data gives a significant boost to performance. The model is able to accurately predict spine curve progression in both scoliosis and normal cases.

Dexterous manipulation demands long-term foresight and rapid reactive control. Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, while proficient in high-level reasoning, often lack a fine-grained understanding of physical dynamics and spatial perception. Conversely, World-Action Models (WAMs) typically suffer from high inference latency due to iterative generation. These deficiencies result in a critical temporal misalignment where the model's intent fails to adapt to rapid physical contact changes. To overcome this fundamental bottleneck, we propose LiMA, an asynchronous dual-system generative framework that systematically decouples intent planning from reactive execution. LiMA organizes computation into a multi-scale hierarchy: a slow system handles sparse long-horizon spatiotemporal intent generation, while a fast system focuses on dense high-frequency motion refinement. To align sparse intent predictions with dense action trajectories, we introduce a Latent Schrödinger Bridge Coupling mechanism that formulates refinement as an entropy-regularized probabilistic transport process. LiMA reduces inference latency by 45.8% compared with Cosmos-Policy via asynchronous decoupling. Evaluated across six bimanual dexterous manipulation tasks spanning multiple horizons, LiMA achieves an overall success rate of 70.8% and an average subtask success rate of 78.9%, while maintaining performance in unseen scenarios. The project website is available at https://ccdcs.github.io/LiMA_repo/

Precise interference detection and identification are crucial for enhancing the survivability of communication systems in non-cooperative wireless environments. While deep learning (DL) has advanced this field, existing single-task learning (STL) approaches neglect inherent task correlations. Furthermore, emerging multi-task learning (MTL) methods often lack a theoretical foundation for quantifying and modeling task relationships. To bridge this gap, we establish a theoretically grounded MTL framework for joint interference detection, modulation identification, and interference identification. First, we derive an upper bound for the weighted expected loss in MTL frameworks. This bound explicitly connects MTL performance to task similarity, quantified by the Wasserstein distance and learnable task relation coefficients. Guided by this theory, we present the adversarial multi-task interference detection and identification network (AMTIDIN), which integrates adversarial training to minimize distributional discrepancies across tasks and uses adaptive coefficients to model task correlations dynamically. Crucially, we conducted a quantitative analysis of task similarity to reveal intrinsic task relationships, specifically that modulation identification and interference identification share a substantial feature overlap distinct from interference detection. Experiments demonstrate that AMTIDIN outperforms its independently trained single-task counterparts and MTL baselines under the evaluated conditions of limited training data, short signal lengths, and low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs)

This work addresses continuous depression-severity score prediction from clinical interview transcripts under data scarcity. We propose a sequential low-rank adaptation (LoRA) protocol for cross-scale transfer: a Qwen3 backbone with a bounded regression head is first fine-tuned on the English DAIC-WOZ dataset (189 avatar-mediated sessions, PHQ-8), and the adapter then initializes fine-tuning on the Chinese PDCH dataset (100 real clinical consultations, HAMD-17), where a reinitialised, scale-specific head predicts the clinician-assigned score. All configurations use patient-level stratified 5-fold, 2-repeat cross-validation. On the data-scarce HAMD-17 target, the sequential protocol attains the best point-estimate MAE , RMSE, and macro-F_1 on both 0.6B and 1.7B backbones, outperforming target-only training and non-LLM baselines—4.96/6.59/0.36 with Qwen3-0.6B and 4.38/5.62/0.46 with Qwen3-1.7B. Ablations suggest that correctly aligned source supervision gives the best point estimates (unsupervised exposure and shuffled-label controls also show partial gains), that native-Chinese target input outperforms machine-translated English input, and that the reversed order yields no clear gain within run-to-run variance. The study is an exploratory, single-site internal evaluation: it does not establish screening or diagnostic utility, nor separately identify the contribution of the scale, language, or paradigm shifts. To our knowledge, no prior study evaluates this specific DAIC-WOZ-to-PDCH sequential transfer setting.

An always-on robot faces an endless stream that never resets: instructions arrive and lapse, the scene changes, and its own past actions reshape what it must reason about. Today's action models are built for the opposite: a fixed instruction, no mid-task intervention, single-step reasoning. In an open-ended world a robot must watch a live stream for far-future cues, recall its own far-past actions, and act on them under dual-arm concurrency. We present ARMS (Always-on Robot in Multi-modal Streams), a deliberately simple streaming policy: a single pretrained π0.5 backbone augmented by three lightweight modules that turn live perception, embodied states, and the robot's own past actions into context the backbone reads before it acts. The modules update this context asynchronously, so watching and recalling never block acting and the two arms act at once. Rather than inventing new mechanisms, ARMS integrates these learned context providers with an agent-causal self-history that logs which arm did what, and when. To supervise them without extra annotation, we build ARMS Dataset, whose staged construction script itself labels every module from real dual-arm teleoperation. Trained on it, ARMS reaches 45

Personalizing exoskeleton assistance across operating conditions is constrained by the time and physical effort required to collect user feedback. We examined whether a user's preference landscape varies smoothly across operating conditions and when this continuity supports learning from limited feedback. We propose Context-Continuous Preference Learning (CCPL), a Gaussian-process preference model that shares observations across nearby contexts while retaining context-specific utility estimates. We evaluated CCPL through simulations and retrospective analyses of ankle and elbow exoskeleton preference data from nine healthy adults. In simulations, CCPL improved reconstruction and preference-based Bayesian optimization relative to independent learning when preferences varied smoothly, but showed negative transfer when continuity was weak. In both human studies, full-data reference landscapes estimated separately for each participant and context tended to be more similar between nearby operating conditions. With five exposures per context, CCPL increased mean reconstruction correlation with these references from 0.644 to 0.720 for ankle assistance and from 0.476 to 0.526 for elbow assistance relative to independent learning. The five-exposure budget was approximately 37% lower for ankle and 17% lower for elbow than the estimated independent-learning budgets needed to match these correlations. CCPL also improved held-out response prediction relative to independent learning, while benefits over pooled learning varied. These findings support context continuity as a basis for sharing preference observations under limited feedback, although benefits for online personalization in humans remain to be established.

Recursive state estimation often executes approximate numerical solutions inside a feedback loop, where highly accurate local steps do not guarantee better overall results. For a fixed linear Kalman model, we characterize when a correction within a prescribed subspace and norm budget can meet a local admissibility tolerance, and how the defects actually executed affect the finite-horizon covariance response. Centering each defect on the exact gain for the implemented covariance separates current solve error from inherited gain drift. Expanding the exact residual-drift identity reveals opposing quartic contributions beyond the quadratic response: innovation-covariance inflation enters positively, while local-gain reoptimization enters subtractively. Under matched initialization, an absolute sixth-order remainder bound, uniform over bounded defect sequences at fixed horizon, gives sufficient conditions for quadratic under- or overprediction. Machine learning proposes bounded corrections, while a learner-independent residual certificate and verified fallback govern execution of classical and quantum candidates without changing the reference estimator. In a power-grid tolerance study, learned correction lowers the minimum conjugate-gradient iteration count for deployment without fallback relative to uncorrected solves under the same residual certificate. Gains reconstructed from a variational quantum linear solver and from an annealing-based binary encoding, with small-scale terminal measurements on superconducting hardware and sampling on a quantum annealer, are executed through the same interface. By linking local repairability to nonlinear error propagation, the framework evaluates approximate solvers and learned corrections through independent certification and finite-horizon response, providing a practical basis for studying hybrid quantum--classical computation.

Catalog skin recolouring has to change pigment and leave shading alone. The classical Reinhard map does not make that split: it rescales lightness by the ratio of standard deviations, and a flat reference swatch therefore flattens the limb. This paper formalises the correction used in our pipeline, the skin-restricted Reinhard transform. It is the diagonal affine map in CIE Lab that translates lightness, matches the chromatic mean, and clamps the chromatic gain to [0.72, 1.18], with moments taken on the central 84% of each channel. A diagonal affine map has six real parameters. The shading constraint forces the lightness gain to +1 and the lightness shift to the difference of means; one-dimensional quadratic optimal transport on each chromatic axis, followed by Euclidean projection onto the gain interval, fixes the other four. Inside that family the four conditions determine every parameter. The content of the result is the forced lightness gain; it is not a uniqueness claim outside the diagonal affine class. For Gaussian marginals the chromatic step is not merely the best affine map: it is the unrestricted Wasserstein-2 map. The same formulae with trimmed moments remain optimal because a positive affine image commutes with quantile trimming. On hands, arms, legs, and feet of nine photographs and three reference tones, the map keeps the lightness contrast ratio at 0.974 +/- 0.029 with chromatic error 0.77 CIE Lab units. Reinhard matching, the linear Monge map, and histogram matching reach a smaller chromatic error only by cutting lightness contrast to about half.

Rapid progress in video models has largely focused on visual quality, leaving their reasoning capabilities underexplored. Video reasoning grounds intelligence in spatiotemporally consistent visual environments that go beyond what text can naturally capture, enabling intuitive reasoning over spatiotemporal structure such as continuity, interaction, and causality. However, systematically studying video reasoning and its scaling behavior is hindered by the lack of large-scale training data. To address this gap, we introduce the Very Big Video Reasoning (VBVR) Dataset, an unprecedentedly large-scale resource spanning 200 curated reasoning tasks following a principled taxonomy and over one million video clips, approximately three orders of magnitude larger than existing datasets. We further present VBVR-Bench, a verifiable evaluation framework that moves beyond model-based judging by incorporating rule-based, human-aligned scorers, enabling reproducible and interpretable diagnosis of video reasoning capabilities. Leveraging the VBVR suite, we conduct one of the first large-scale scaling studies of video reasoning and observe early signs of emergent generalization to unseen reasoning tasks. Together, VBVR lays a foundation for the next stage of research in generalizable video reasoning. The data, benchmark toolkit, and models are publicly available at https://video-reason.com/?v=vbvr .

This paper integrates end-to-end Visual-Language-Action (VLA) models with agentic tool-use to propose Agentic Robot with Tool-use (ART). ART is a tool-injection framework that tunes any VLA model to leverage off-the-shelf tool modules for low-level vision, high-level affordance, and embodiment enhancement. Compared to vanilla VLA models with a whole continuous action solution space, ART reduces the complexity of the action solution space through tool-use, which not only improves generalizability across different tasks but also reduces data dependency. To demonstrate the advantages (high generalizability and low data dependency) of this framework, we first built a dataset of 30K tool-use trajectories and action demonstrations, which is much smaller than those used by baseline methods. We then designed a training regimen for long-trajectory tool-use reasoning in challenging environments. Experiments show that ART achieves a 20% higher success rate than mainstream baselines on simulation and real-world tasks, such as pick-and-place in the dark at novel viewpoints. Empirical results highlight the benefits of an agent-based approach: modular tool utilization enables more efficient training, lightweight deployment, and scalable integration of new tools. This design fosters robustness, adaptability, and extensibility, paving the way for the practical deployment of VLA systems in complex real-world scenarios.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled agents to tackle long-horizon tasks across diverse environments. To further improve agent performance, existing language world models typically predict environment observations, yet reconstructing high-entropy, execution-dependent tool responses offers limited value when real feedback is available. Meanwhile, agents suffer from task-state contamination, where unsupported assumptions and outdated plans persist in history and distort subsequent decisions. We propose the Agent-Editing World Model (AEWM), which models how reasoning and actions shape future task progress rather than simulating tool responses. AEWM combines Action Judge to distinguish Critical, Exploratory, and Noisy decisions with State Revision to edit noisy reasoning–action continuations from the same observed history. EditAct integrates these capabilities with real execution, directly changing the state underlying subsequent decisions rather than merely providing critiques. We train AEWM across Search, Terminal, and Software Engineering through mid-training and supervised fine-tuning. AEWM achieves 70.5% macro-F1 on our Action Judge benchmark, exceeding the strongest frontier baseline by 10.6 points. Across six benchmarks and three agent backbones, EditAct improves average scores by 3.2–6.7 points over the strongest baseline. Furthermore, rejection sampling fine-tuning on verified EditAct trajectories, termed AEWM-RFT, improves over Self-RFT by 2.2–2.6 points across three domains without online AEWM guidance.

Latent world models that integrate a flow in a frozen self supervised latent space train stably and cheaply, yet silently lose the property manipulation depends on most: motion. The pretrained flow never moves the manipulated object; retraining it with latent-only losses only trades stillness for teleport-like motion. We trace the failure to the training signal, not the representation: anchor-sparse, latent-only supervision never says where along the horizon change belongs. Decode-augmented rollout training (DART) repairs this while keeping the representation frozen, retraining only the flow with decode-path supervision. DART outperforms its latent only parent on the full protocol, restores the temporal structure of motion, and re-couples predicted motion to the scene; at larger scale it further improves prediction quality, closing nearly half the remaining gap to an oracle-informed interpolation reference. Finally, we report an unexpected finding about evaluation: pixel error alone rewards frozen predictions.

Vector Symbolic Algebras project data structures into a hyperdimensional vector space through the application of their vector algebras to randomly generated atomic vector symbols and fractional power encodings of real-valued data. Embedding unstructured data remains an open question. We present Clifford-VAE, a variational autoencoder that learns to project data onto a Clifford torus in arbitrary dimensions. Experiments using the MNIST, FashionMNIST, and CIFAR-10 datasets demonstrate that Clifford-VAE produces representations that are competitive with those produced by Gaussian and Hyperspherical VAEs for semi-supervised classification tasks while outperforming Gaussian and Hyperspherical counterparts in the VSA benchmark tests of self-binding and unbinding, role-filler recovery, and bundle capacity. Clifford-VAE provides a principled technique for grounding perceptual data into a symbolic reasoning framework, providing a new approach to a long-standing problem in the VSA literature.

Collective responses depend on individual differences, contact opportunities, and accumulated experience. Learning their dynamics from aggregate counts requires connecting a population's response distribution to both current observations and future behavior. We introduce Differentiable Gaussian Dynamics (DGD), which learns this connection through three components: a Gaussian mixture representing heterogeneous response propensities, differentiable aggregation of contact intensity and behavioral probabilities, and feedback recurrence that updates subsequent responses. Reparameterized integration and temporal recurrence let aggregate prediction errors jointly train the distribution, observation functions, and feedback parameters. On four windows from KuaiRand-Pure and Online Retail II, DGD achieves lower joint behavioral negative log-likelihood than a DeepAR adaptation with a joint-behavior head. In Retail 2010, its one-day behavioral-count MAE is 4.71 versus 6.88 for this adaptation. Learning the distribution reduces behavioral negative log-likelihood by 10.82% relative to a fixed Gaussian in KuaiRand's standard-recommendation window; removing feedback dynamics raises joint KL from 0.0340 to 0.2577 in a controlled experiment. These results establish the value of learning population representations and their feedback process from aggregate observations. Code is available at https://github.com/OranAi-Ltd/oransim.

Language models typically construct attention values from contextual hidden states, even when some of their content may be reusable across contexts. We investigate whether token-indexed memory can replace the dedicated value projection when complemented by contextual information. We propose Memory Attention (MA), which forms values by combining layer-specific token memory with contextual keys. The memory supplies token-specific representations, while the keys preserve context dependence. At inference, normalization can be folded into the memory tables, reducing value construction to lookup and addition. Token-indexed retrieval also enables CPU offloading with prefetching, reducing GPU parameter storage. Under matched training token budgets and with additional memory parameters, experiments across attention configurations show improved language modeling and average downstream performance.

In the classical list update problem, a set of items must be stored in a list-type structure, where accessing the i-th element costs i. Items will be queried in an IID manner according to some probability distribution p on the items. We want to minimize the expected cost of each query. The optimal order is to place the items in decreasing order of probability p_1 ≥ p_2 ≥⋯ with expected cost 𝖮𝖯𝖳 = ∑_j j p_j, but the probability vector p is generally unknown. Thus we use a self-organizing list following the transposition rule: an item is transposed 1 position forward whenever it is queried. Coester (2026) proved that, at stationarity measure for the transposition rule, the expected cost of a query is at most 𝖮𝖯𝖳 + 1. However, this Markov chain may have arbitrarily slow mixing time. We prove that, for arbitrary p and arbitrary initial orderings σ, after polynomially many queries in the number of items, the expected cost of a query is at most 𝖮𝖯𝖳 + O(1).

This paper addresses the control problem for robotic systems, including non-holonomic and underactuated platforms operating under unknown dynamics and strict actuator limits to satisfy complex high-level specifications. We denote these high-level specifications using Signal Temporal Logic (STL) and propose a novel time-aware Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework that leverages the geometric properties of Spatiotemporal Tubes (STTs). While traditional analytical STT controllers often struggle to enforce input constraints, and existing RL approaches rely on memory-intensive state history, our method natively overcomes both limitations. By mapping the logical and temporal complexities of the full class of STL into time-varying geometric boundaries, we directly constrain the multidimensional system state without relying on scalar robustness metrics. Augmenting the state space with time, we train a time-aware Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) agent using a continuous, geometry-aware reward function that eliminates the need to explicitly evaluate complex logical semantics during execution. The proposed framework offers a history-free, computationally efficient approach to learn continuous control policies that ensure robust satisfaction of specifications while strictly adhering to system input constraints.

Fine-tuning large language models on parallel data improves translation quality but can cause catastrophic forgetting. Mitigation methods are generally evaluated by retention on general benchmarks. We ask whether these findings transfer to machine translation (MT) fine-tuning and to MT-specific instruction following (MT-IF): instructions that modify a translation, such as formality, grammatical gender, and length control. We compare methods anchored to auxiliary data, to model outputs, and to the base model parameters, first in a screening study with Llama 3.2 1B Instruct, then on Llama 3.1 8B Instruct fine-tuned on bidirectional Arabic-English or Spanish-English data. Elastic Weight Consolidation preserves general capabilities best in both stages; on the 8B Spanish model the average score on general benchmarks drops 1.7 points versus 11.0 for standard fine-tuning, yet its scores for formality and grammatical gender control remain close to standard fine-tuning. Only data mixing with control-task examples preserves these controls, but its gains do not transfer to unseen prompts for the same task.

World models are useful for robotic manipulation because robots can predict how actions change the states of objects before executing them. We present PointCast, a point-set world model that spans rigid, articulated, and deformable object manipulation. Its state is a set of 3D points on the object and the end-effector, mesh-free and topology-agnostic. Each point keeps its identity and is supervised on its own trajectory, which teaches the model where every point goes rather than only the shape the points form. Its backbone is a diffusion transformer that denoises a short window of future point positions, conditioned on the points' recent history and the commanded end-effector motion. The backbone's attention alternates between local and global, and cross-attention to the end-effector carries the coupling. This one architecture at 19.8M parameters and one training recipe cover four regimes, rigid objects, cloth, rope, and multi-joint cabinets, with a separate checkpoint trained for each. Trained on randomized simulation and scored against four baselines on the same metric, it is best on three of four regimes and second on rigid. Trained on a real-world robot teleoperation dataset, it has the lowest mean error in four of its six categories, is second in the other two, and improves on the dataset's own model in all six; zero-shot, its simulation checkpoints are best on two of four captures. Frozen inside sampling-based model-predictive control at one network evaluation per window, it plans four simulated tasks over 64 episodes, competitive with or outperforming every baseline on each. Project website at https://pointcast-wm.github.io.

Score matching has driven major advances in classical generative learning by enabling models to learn from data without evaluating intractable normalization constants, or partition functions. Yet, extending this principle to quantum learning requires rethinking its foundations, as quantum states are described by noncommuting density operators rather than scalar probabilities. The noncommutativity creates fundamental challenges not only in defining quantum scores, but also in developing a training framework with efficient circuit implementations and rigorous theoretical guarantees. In this work, we bridge this gap by establishing a general quantum score-matching framework with end-to-end theoretical guarantees. Applied to Gibbs-state learning, our approach avoids additional thermal-state preparation and achieves information-theoretically optimal sample complexity in the high-temperature regime for Hamiltonians with bounded locality and interaction degree. This positions score matching as a new route to state-of-the-art performance in learning quantum Gibbs states. Beyond these theoretical results, numerical simulations show that our method remains effective even when gradients are estimated inaccurately under limited measurement budgets. Experiments on IBM quantum hardware further demonstrate that quantum score matching is NISQ-friendly: without any error mitigation or correction, it reduces the relative Hamiltonian-parameter error from 64% to approximately 10%. Together, these results extend score matching into an experimentally realizable paradigm for quantum-state learning.

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) supervises mathematical reasoning through final-answer correctness, but provides little guidance on individual tokens. On-policy distillation (OPD) supplies dense feedback on student-generated responses, yet teacher preference need not reflect correctness. Recent hybrids combine OPD and verifier-derived advantages or reweight task credit using teacher ratios. However, teacher guidance enters after verifier-based group normalization, and token reweighting need not preserve the total task credit assigned to each response. We introduce Unified Entropy-Calibrated Credit Redistribution for GRPO (UECR-GRPO), which integrates verifier and teacher signals within a single GRPO-style update at both the response and token levels. Path-Utility Unification (PUU) combines verifier reward and a teacher-to-anchor path log-ratio in a single KL-regularized objective. Its on-policy implementation uses a length-normalized teacher score and combines both rewards before group normalization and PPO clipping, allowing teacher evidence to influence the response ranking. Entropy-Calibrated Redistribution (ECR) then uses the signed teacher–old-policy token gap to redistribute the verifier-derived component. Full-vocabulary teacher entropy attenuates uncertain guidance, while a response-wise zero-sum projection preserves the total task credit and its token-wise sign before clipping. Across five mathematical reasoning benchmarks, UECR-GRPO achieves average Avg@12 accuracies of 17.21% and 65.09% with Qwen3-1.7B and Qwen3-4B students, respectively, exceeding the strongest baseline at each scale by 0.89 and 0.56 percentage points.

Humanoid control, leveraging human demonstrations, has achieved diverse, agile, and natural locomotion behaviors through reinforcement learning (RL). While this paradigm has yielded remarkable performance in physical humanoid control, how to eliminate specific motions from learned policies remains insufficiently explored. Addressing this issue is motivated by pressing safety and privacy concerns: the removal of malicious, poisoned, or suboptimal motions, as well as copyright-protected motions subject to the right to be forgotten under regulations such as the GDPR, is of critical importance. To this end, we propose ForgetMimic, the first motion-level unlearning method designed specifically for physical-world humanoid control. The core idea of ForgetMimic is as follows: given a policy π_θ trained on N motions, our method degrades performance on a target subset of K motions while preserving the effectiveness of the remaining N-K motions. Furthermore, we identify and resolve two key training mechanisms in robot control that lead to unlearning failure. We conduct extensive experiments on the Unitree G1 and H2 humanoid robots across 12 motions, including Dance, Fight, Flip, and others. Experimental results demonstrate that ForgetMimic effectively eliminates memory of designated motions while maintaining the normal operation of all other motions.

Optimization problems (OPs) are key to solving many challenging research problems in robotics. However, reproducibility still remains a major issue. In this paper, we present Amplify, a lightweight nonlinear programming library aimed at reproducible results of robotic-related trajectory optimization problems. The minimalistic requirements for the 537-line library (80 characters per line) are an Internet connection, familiarity with the AMPL modeling language, and a text editor. Our primary contribution is the formulation of a library where trajectory optimization algorithms are represented directly within the optimization model. Specifically, we implement the algorithms used to compute the dynamics, trajectories, and reference motions as constraints of the OP in a declarative programming paradigm. We outline how our formulation of objectives, decisions variables, and constraints can be implemented in other transcription libraries that want to be lightweight and reproducible. We also compare the Amplify framework with 3 other libraries across examples of benchmark optimization problems across several fields, including bipedal locomotion and grasp planning.

Ground contact forces acting on the human body, are crucial for biomechanics studies or sport performance analysis. Prior methods rely on force plates or pressure mats to collect ground contact dynamics, limiting their applicability to carefully controlled settings. A more scalable solution is to estimate the dynamics directly from motion capture data. Recent approaches only roughly estimate the ground contact dynamics from the vertical distance between the body and the ground plane, which cannot capture the complex pressure distribution of all contact points. To this end, we propose GraCE -- Gravity-guided Contact Dynamics Estimation, a novel full-body contact dynamics model for human motions using a realistic influence of body mass distribution and gravity. We use the human's center of gravity to estimate the ground contacts based on its relative distance to the human body. The applied force on each contact is estimated via the product of predicted contact probabilities and the total exterior force computed from the center of mass trajectory. We outperform related work on the GroundLink dataset for ground reaction force estimation, and on the MOYO dataset for detailed contact pressure prediction. The code is published at https://github.com/cuongle1206/GraCE

X-ray is medicine's most widely used imaging modality, yet remains among its least quantitative. Unlike volumetric modalities like CT or MRI, X-ray collapses 3D anatomy into a 2D projection, causing structures to overlap and anatomical boundaries to be ambiguous, even to experts. As a result, labeling X-ray databases for training general-purpose segmentation systems is impractical, leaving morphometric and functional X-ray analysis confined to narrow anatomical regions and applications. To this end, we present FleXray, a generalist model for anatomical segmentation across the entire body in clinical X-rays. Instead of curating large, manually annotated X-ray datasets, we build a scalable, physics-based generative X-ray data engine. Using existing 3D whole-body CT segmentation datasets and generative image-editing models, we simulate fully-annotated 2D X-rays with diverse appearances, physiological properties, and imaging geometries. Trained on these simulations, FleXray accurately segments 60 anatomical structures across unseen research datasets and in-the-wild X-rays. We further show that FleXray makes X-rays directly amenable to quantitative analysis, enabling automated measurements for disease grading, robust navigation during X-ray-guided interventions, and data-efficient learning of pathological targets. We release the model, code, a full-body X-ray segmentation dataset, and a local, easy-to-use browser-based tool at https://flexray.csail.mit.edu .

Despite the strong performance of large audio language models (LALMs) in various tasks, exactly how and where they integrate acoustic features with textual context remains unclear. We adapt causal tracing to investigate the internal information flow of LALMs during audio comprehension. By conducting layer-wise and token-wise analyses across DeSTA, Qwen, and Voxtral, we evaluate the causal effects of individual hidden states. Layer-wise analysis identifies different fusion strategies, from progressive integration in DeSTA to abrupt late-stage fusion in Qwen. Token-wise analysis shows that the final sequence token acts as an informational bottleneck where the network decisively retrieves relevant information from the audio. We also observe an attention-like query mechanism at intermediate token positions that triggers the model to pull task-relevant audio context. These findings provide a clear characterization of when and where multi-modal integration occurs within LALMs.

Consumers increasingly delegate purchasing decisions to Large Language Models (LLMs) acting as surrogate consumers. Using "Tool-Lab," an adaptation of information-board process tracing that places product attributes behind costly tool calls, we examine how marketing pricing cues (i.e., just-below pricing and promotional framing) influence AI shopping agents. Across eight commercially deployed LLMs from three providers, we trace pre-choice information acquisition. Under zero cost, pricing cues rarely mislead. Imposing acquisition costs under a vague goal prompt leads LLMs to omit diagnostic attributes required to compute unit price and choose suboptimal choices resembling human heuristics. Relative to a specific goal prompt that mainly preserves diagnostic search and choice optimality, a vague goal prompt under constraints creates a search-mediated vulnerability. This research demonstrates that marketing heuristics in delegated AI shopping are governed by storefront information architecture, not necessarily immutable LLM flaws.

Multiple prompt injection attacks have been proposed against web agents. At the same time, various methods have been developed to detect general prompt injection attacks, but none have been systematically evaluated for web agents. In this work, we bridge this gap by presenting the first comprehensive benchmark study on detecting prompt injection attacks targeting web agents. We begin by introducing a fine-grained categorization of such attacks based on the threat model. We then construct datasets containing both malicious and benign samples: malicious text segments generated by different attacks, benign text segments from four categories, malicious images produced by attacks, and benign images from two categories. Next, we systematize both text-based and image-based detection methods. Finally, we evaluate their performance across multiple scenarios. Our key findings show that while some detectors can identify attacks that rely on explicit textual instructions or visible image perturbations with moderate to high accuracy, they largely fail against attacks that omit explicit instructions or employ imperceptible perturbations. Our datasets and code are released at: https://github.com/Norrrrrrr-lyn/WAInjectBench.

Large language models are rapidly being deployed as AI tutors, yet current evaluation paradigms assess problem-solving accuracy and generic safety in isolation, failing to capture whether a model is simultaneously pedagogically effective and safe across student-tutor interaction. We argue that tutoring safety is fundamentally different from conventional LLM safety: the primary risk is not toxic content but the quiet erosion of learning through answer over-disclosure, misconception reinforcement, and the abdication of scaffolding. To systematically study this failure mode, we introduce SafeTutors, a benchmark that jointly evaluates safety and pedagogy across mathematics, physics, and chemistry. SafeTutors is organized around a theoretically grounded risk taxonomy comprising 11 harm dimensions and 48 sub-risks drawn from learning-science literature. We uncover that all models show broad harm; scale doesn't reliably help; and multi-turn dialogue worsens behavior, with pedagogical failures rising from 17.7% to 77.8%. Harms also vary by subject, so mitigations must be discipline-aware, and single-turn "safe/helpful" results can mask systematic tutor failure over extended interaction.

Chain-of-thought (CoT) can sound plausible yet be unfaithful to the model's underlying reasoning. Most prior work probes CoT faithfulness through input–output behavior or input attributions, leaving internal computation largely underexplored. We instead cast faithfulness as internal concept grounding: Does a large language model's (LLM) CoT reasoning engage the same internal concepts that support the LLM's direct prediction, and do the shared concepts causally drive its answer? Encoding a prediction pass and a CoT pass with a single shared sparse autoencoder (SAE), a reliable approximator of the latent concepts LLMs use, makes their internal concepts directly comparable. We introduce three correlational metrics of concept-level alignment and a causal metric, Δp, which ablates the shared concepts and measures the drop in answer probability. Across five LLMs and four datasets, concept alignment is generally high, as indicated by the correlational metrics; yet these only identify which concepts are shared, not how much they causally contribute. Δp fills this gap: causal faithfulness varies substantially with model depth, peaking at mid-to-late layers rather than the final ones, and model scale reshapes the layer-wise profile. Moreover, causally important shared concepts are not always verbalized in the CoT. These dissociations suggest that faithfulness cannot be reliably assessed from surface-level or representational correspondence alone; assessing it requires causal tests of whether the internal concepts underlying a CoT actually drive the model's prediction.

Vision-language models (VLMs) offer a promising approach to long-tail autonomous driving, but existing driving datasets provide limited supervision for connecting decision-critical visual evidence with reasoning and planning. We introduce AnchorReasoning, a visually grounded reasoning dataset built on WOD-E2E, containing 416,119 annotated frames and 395,379 decision-critical elements across four major categories and 19 fine-grained types. Each frame is organized as a visually grounded chain-of-thought (VG-CoT) that links decision-critical element identification and localization, element attributes and implications, driving-action rationale, and action and trajectory planning. We further develop a curriculum supervised fine-tuning strategy that progressively learns these hierarchical capabilities, together with an object-size-aware grounding metric for evaluating localization quality. Experiments across eight general-purpose, embodied-AI, and AV-specific backbones show that VG-CoT supervision improves grounded reasoning and trajectory prediction. Across models, 5-s ADE and FDE decrease by 7.84 and 11.86, while RFS Frame and Cluster improve by 1.66 and 1.70. These gains are achieved with 18.5 fewer reasoning tokens and 0.32 s/frame lower inference latency on average, demonstrating the value of visually grounded, decision-focused supervision for VLM reasoning and planning in long-tail autonomous driving.

Control barrier functions (CBF) are a popular safety filter to ensure safety for nonlinear dynamical systems. However, when the system is subject to uncertainties and disturbances, this requires the use of robust variants of CBFs, which can be difficult to construct and can be overly conservative, especially for high-dimensional systems under input constraints. In this work, we propose a new approach to solve these challenges by introducing Least-Effort Adversarial Potentials (LEAP), a certificate that quantifies the robustness of a given state against disturbances in terms of the effort required by the disturbance to cause failure. We show that LEAP is a CBF for the undisturbed system, but can also be used to construct a safety filter that is robust to disturbances whose cumulative effort is bounded. We propose a method for constructing LEAPs with on-policy deep reinforcement learning. Next, we demonstrate LEAPs in simulation on a variety of multi-agent systems with disturbances and uncertainties. Finally, hardware experiments on a quadruped and quadrotors validate that LEAPs are well suited to tackle the disturbances and uncertainties from real-world robotic systems.

Traditional melissopalynology is a time-consuming and subjective process, often taking 4-6 hours per sample. We present an automated, high-throughput microscopy system that integrates H_\infty robust mechanical control with advanced deep learning pipelines for the precise counting, classification, and morphological analysis of pollen grains from Bio Bio region in south central territory in Chile. Our system employs U^2-Net for salient object detection and a DINOv2 Vision Transformer backbone trained via Deep Metric Learning for classification. By integrating Gradient-Weighted Attention, the model provides human-interpretable texture and diagnostic feature annotations. The system achieves a 95.8% classification recall and at least 6x processing speedup compared to manual expert analysis.

As mobile robots become increasingly integrated into everyday environments, privacy risks arising from onboard cameras have become a growing concern. Ultra-low-resolution (ULR) RGB can mitigate visual privacy exposure at the source, but ULR appearance alone substantially limits semantic and spatial understanding. We therefore introduce a privacy-preserving asymmetric sensing setting that combines high-resolution (HR) depth with ULR RGB, preserving dense geometry while restricting fine-grained visual information. To address the severe information imbalance between HR depth and ULR RGB, we propose a joint 2D framework using HR geometry to guide semantic-oriented RGB reconstruction and RGB-D segmentation. Despite reliable frame-level predictions, consistent scene-level understanding remains challenging under the asymmetric HR depth--ULR RGB setting. We therefore develop an end-to-end 2D-to-3D pipeline that consolidates 2D semantic features for 3D segmentation. Experiments on ScanNet show that our method achieves the best 2D and 3D segmentation performance among privacy-preserving approaches and delivers the strongest zero-shot transfer to SUN RGB-D and SceneNN. Privacy recoverability analysis shows that our proposed HR depth--ULR RGB input reduces the recoverability of sensitive data, and real-robot experiments demonstrate the utility of the resulting 3D semantics for object-goal navigation.

Driven by practical demands in land resource monitoring and national defense security, this paper introduces the Remote Sensing Copy-Move Question Answering (RSCMQA) task. Unlike traditional Remote Sensing Visual Question Answering (RSVQA), RSCMQA focuses on interpreting complex tampering scenarios and inferring relationships between objects. We present a suite of global RSCMQA datasets, comprising images from 29 different regions across 14 countries. Specifically, we propose five distinct datasets, including the basic dataset RS-CMQA, the category-balanced dataset RS-CMQA-B, the high-authenticity dataset Real-RSCM, the extended dataset RS-TQA, and the extended category-balanced dataset RS-TQA-B. These datasets fill a critical gap in the field while ensuring comprehensiveness, balance, and challenging scenarios. Furthermore, we introduce a region-discrimination-guided multimodal copy-move forgery perception framework (CMFPF), which enhances the accuracy of answering questions about tampered images by leveraging prompts about the differences and connections between the source and tampered regions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method establishes a stronger benchmark for RSCMQA compared to general VQA and RSVQA models. Our datasets and code are publicly available at https://github.com/shenyedepisa/RSCMQA.

Microscaling quantization techniques are increasingly used to represent neural network parameters with 8 bits or fewer while preserving near-full precision accuracy. However, applying these methods efficiently in convolutional layers is not straightforward. A naive approach transfers full-precision weights and activations to processing units and quantizes each tensor twice, resulting in much more memory movement than expected. Additional overhead comes from the activation tensors, whose sizes grow substantially because of the im2col transformation applied before quantization. We propose MicroQonv, a way to combine microscaling with convolutional layers' forward and backward operations by quantizing each tensor only once and quantizing the activation tensor before applying a modified version of im2col: channel-batch-first im2col. MicroQonv reduces the quantization cost by a factor of ×2 for weights and gradients, and by up to ×9 for activations, at a negligible accuracy cost. It reduces memory movement and storage by up to ×7.53 compared to their full-precision counterparts. This way, MicroQonv reduces microscaling-quantized activation memory movement by ×3.5 for state-of-the-art object detection models YOLOV8nano and ×2.2 for YOLOV26nano. It also enables 4-bit microscaling in a quantized latent replay strategy for continual learning at the edge, improving accuracy by +5.7

This study highlights the distribution of Standard Arabic (SA; H(igh) variety) and Colloquial Arabic (CA; L(ow) variety) across X and Facebook. 16754 public posts were collected via Python, with 10000 retained as the net dataset. Posts were classified into 7 discourse categories: *politics, technology, science, business, culture, fun,* and *sports*. Bivariate analyses, including Chi-square tests and Cramer's V (CV), examined associations among platform, discourse category, and diglossic choice, while binary logistic regression with Platform x Discourse Category interactions tested whether these associations varied across platforms. Findings reveal that there are significant associations between discourse category and diglossic choice on X, chi-square(6, *N* = 5000) = 600.35, p < .001, CV = .347, and Facebook, chi-square(6, N = 5000) = 1249.52, p < .001, CV = .500. Across platforms, platform was also associated with diglossic choice, chi-square(1, N = 10000) = 262.16, p < .001, CV = .162. Binary logistic regression further shows higher odds of SA use on X than Facebook in the political reference category (*OR* = 1.31, p = .0028), with significant platform-by-domain interactions for Culture (OR = 2.65), Fun (*OR* = 6.34), Sports (*OR* = 26.71), Science (OR = 0.41), and Technology (OR = 0.71). The study concludes that the diglossic use of SA and CA contributes to the growing body of research on digital discourse, unveiling that the digital age reshapes but does not erode diglossic boundaries, giving rise instead to a reconfigured digital diglossia.

Audio-language models (ALMs) integrate acoustic perception with the knowledge encoded in language models, enabling contextual understanding of auditory events. Making these capabilities practical on devices with limited memory and computation motivates our focus on small ALMs with fewer than 200M parameters. We introduce a recipe that brings together architecture, data, and three-stage training to build Mizar, a 159.3M-parameter ALM. Its architecture connects a compact CED-Small audio encoder to SmolLM2-135M through a frequency-merging mapper. With supervision drawn from ReasonAQA, AudioMCQ, and AVQA, the model undergoes three training stages: audio-language alignment (Stage 1), audio-dependent fine-tuning (Stage 2), and post-training (Stage 3) aimed at strengthening weak skills while retaining learned capabilities. Across five random seeds, Mizar achieves mean accuracies of 52.92% on MMAU, 42.42% on MMAR, and 36.02% on ADQA-clean, surpassing the previous best-performing ALM below 200M parameters on all three benchmarks. It also supports local inference on a single CPU: on questions from the MMAU benchmark, the mean latency from opening the audio file to generating a complete answer is 1.09 seconds. Code and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/KaiyangLi1992/Mizar_159M.