Current vision-language models (VLMs) typically stitch together separate image encoders and language decoders via multi-stage alignment, a modular framework that inevitably fragments pixel-level signals across frames and scatters early pixel-word interactions. In parallel, native VLMs, despite impressive performance on single images, remain largely unexplored in multi-image, video understanding, and spatial intelligence. Hence, we introduce NEO-ov, a native foundation model that learns cross-frame and pixel-word correspondence end-to-end, without any external encoders, auxiliary adapters, or post-hoc fusion. By eliminating module boundaries entirely, NEO-ov enables fine-grained and unified spatiotemporal modeling to emerge natively inside the model. Notably, NEO-ov largely narrows the gap to modular counterparts while excelling at fine-grained visual perception, validating that native "one-vision" architectures are not only feasible but competitive at scale. Beyond empirical performance, we unveil systematic architectural analyses and detailed training recipes to facilitate subsequent native multimodal modeling. Our code and models are publicly available at: https://github.com/EvolvingLMMs-Lab/NEO.

Parameter-efficient finetuning (PEFT) has become the standard approach for adapting large language models, yet evaluations largely emphasize downstream accuracy while overlooking the retention of pretrained capabilities. We argue that PEFT should be assessed through the stability-plasticity dilemma: the trade-off between target-task adaptation and resistance to forgetting. We introduce PEFT-Arena, a benchmark that jointly measures downstream performance and general capability retention. Across methods, we find distinct stability-plasticity profiles; under comparable parameter budgets, orthogonal finetuning achieves the most favorable Pareto frontier. To explain these differences, we analyze PEFT updates from two geometric perspectives. In weight space, spectral analysis reveals how parameterizations interact with the pretrained singular-value structure. In activation space, retention metrics show whether finetuning preserves or distorts general-capability representations, with forgetting linked to non-isometric representation distortion. Finally, an analysis shows that final SFT checkpoints often overshoot a better target-retention operating point. Inspired by this, we present case studies of a post-hoc improvement with path-wise rewinding.

Large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly useful computational models of human language processing, but it remains unclear whether vision-language learning makes text representations more human-like during natural reading. Here, we address this question by comparing tightly matched LLM and vision-language model (VLM) pairs under a strictly text-only setting, allowing us to isolate the effect of multimodal training history from online visual input or cross-modal fusion. We evaluate model alignment with a human natural-reading dataset that includes whole-cortex fMRI responses and synchronized eye-tracking saccades. Our findings demonstrate that multimodal pretraining may not confer a uniform, global advantage in human alignment during natural reading, indicating that language-internal representations remain the key factor for modeling human text processing. However, the VLM advantage could emerge more selectively when sentences contain stronger visual semantic content, with converging evidence from both fMRI and eye-movement alignments. Together, our findings provide a controlled in silico framework for testing how visual learning history shapes model-human alignment of language processing, suggesting that multimodal pretraining contributes selectively rather than globally to human-like language representations during natural reading.

World models for interactive video generation have largely focused on single-agent settings, where future observations are generated from a single control signal. However, many generated environments require multi-agent interaction: multiple players, robots, or embodied agents act simultaneously within a shared space. Scaling world models to such settings requires a principled multi-agent design: agents should remain independently controllable, permutation-symmetric, and support efficient inference while maintaining consistency across time and perspectives. In this paper, we present our generative multi-agent world model for interactive simulation. It introduces Simplex Rotary Agent Encoding, a parameter-free extension of 3D RoPE that represents agents as vertices of a regular simplex in rotary angle space. This gives each agent a distinct phase while making all agents permutation-equivalent, enabling scalable agent identity without learned per-slot identities or a fixed agent ordering. To avoid dense all-to-all attention across agents, we further propose Sparse Hub Attention, where learnable hub tokens mediate token interaction across agents, reducing cross-agent attention cost from quadratic to linear in the number of agents. For real-time rollout, we distill a full-context diffusion teacher into a causal student that generates temporal blocks sequentially with KV caching, enabling action-responsive generation at 24 FPS. Experiments in multiplayer virtual environments show that our model improves video fidelity, action controllability, and inter-agent consistency over slot-based and dense-attention baselines, while generalizing from two to four players without additional training.

Search has been proposed as an effective method for self-improving language models and agentic systems, both for post-training sample generation and for inference. However, widely used methods such as best-of-N sampling and tree search face two fundamental limitations: they are guided by sparse verification signals, and they construct candidates primarily through autoregressive expansion, restricting exploration to regions with substantial model probability mass. To address these, we propose Bidirectional Evolutionary Search (BES), a search framework that couples forward candidate evolution with backward goal decomposition. In the forward search, BES augments standard expansion with evolution operators that recombine partial trajectories to generate candidates that are difficult to obtain from a single model rollout. In the backward search, BES recursively decomposes the original task into checkable subgoals, producing dense intermediate feedback that guides forward search. We provide theoretical motivation showing that candidates generated by expansion-only search are confined to a narrow entropy shell while evolutionary operators can escape it, and that backward search can exponentially reduce the number of required samples to find a correct answer. Experiments show that on challenging post-training tasks where mainstream post-training algorithms fail to improve, BES enables consistent gains, and on three open problem solving benchmarks at inference time, BES outperforms existing open-source frameworks in both average and best-case performance. Code and trained models are available at https://github.com/Embodied-Minds-Lab/BES.

We present a method for harmonizing the lighting of a foreground video to match a target background scene, adjusting shadows, color tone, and illumination intensity (relightful harmonization). Unlike images, acquiring labeled data for videos, where identical motions are recorded under different lighting conditions, is practically infeasible and non-scalable. While one way to create such paired data is to apply existing image-based harmonization models frame by frame to a video, the resulting outputs often suffer from significant temporal jitters. We overcome this problem by introducing a novel lighting deflickering model that can stabilize the global and local lighting flickering artifacts. Our video diffusion model learns from these upgraded deflickered data with a volume of real and synthetic videos to generate high-quality video harmonization results. We further propose an asymmetric alpha mask conditioning technique to learn the clean boundaries from real videos. Experiments demonstrate that our model achieves strong temporal coherence, naturalness, cleaner boundaries, and physically meaningful lighting behavior, while maintaining strong relighting expressiveness compared to prior image-based and video-based harmonization methods.

A primary bottleneck in contact-rich manipulation is the difficulty of collecting real-world data. Sim-to-real reinforcement learning offers a scalable alternative, but the simulation-reality gap prevents information-dense modalities like touch from being effectively used. Existing sim-to-real methods often mitigate this gap by simplifying tactile data into coarse low-dimensional features -- sacrificing the richness required for complex manipulation. In this work, we introduce Center-of-Pressure (CoP), an effective tactile representation grounded in physical principles that preserves dense contact information while maintaining robustness for sim-to-real transfer. To support this representation, we propose a sensor calibration scheme based on differentiable dynamics, enabling the estimation of taxel orientations without requiring ground-truth force measurements. We evaluate CoP on two blind, challenging contact-rich manipulation tasks: peg-in-hole insertion and ball balancing. Across both tasks, policies conditioned on CoP achieve zero-shot sim-to-real transfer on a multi-fingered hand, and outperform both coarse binary-contact and raw-taxel baselines. Analysis of learned policy states further suggests that CoP-conditioned policies encode task-relevant physical properties, such as object mass, as an emergent byproduct of control.

Functional music applications, from consumer focus and sleep aids to clinical interventions, share a distinctive recommendation problem: success is defined by the listener's affective state, but online experimentation on emotion is ethically constrained, particularly for clinical populations who cannot reliably skip a song or report distress. We describe AMRS, the Affective Music Recommendation System deployed on LUCID's health-and-wellness platforms, which serve clinical users (primarily older adults with neurocognitive conditions) and consumer-wellness users across energize, focus, calm, and sleep modes. AMRS is built around a rollout-based world model: a causal transformer trained on logged listening data to jointly predict engagement, binary rating, and self-reported valence and arousal. The world model serves both as an in-silico simulator for offline policy training and as a stress-testing tool before deployment. A recommender policy initialized by behaviour cloning is fine-tuned offline with Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) against a configurable multi-objective utility function. Under a strict cold-start protocol, the world model predicts both behavioural and affective signals with usable fidelity; DPO improves predicted valence and arousal over the cloned baseline while maintaining a similar diversity profile and avoiding the distributional collapse produced by greedy optimization. We position the work as an early deployed validation of a methodology for affective recommendation when online experimentation is ethically untenable.

Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) is important in building real-world learning systems. In CLIP-based CIL, the model performs classification by comparing similarity between visual and textual embeddings obtained from template prompts, e.g., ``a photo of a [CLASS]''. This seemingly monolithic matching process can be decomposed into two conceptually distinct stages: attribute extraction and attribute aggregation. For example, a model may recognize cat using attributes such as fur texture and whiskers. When learning a new class like car, the model must extract additional attributes like wheels and adjust how they are aggregated in the shared representation space. However, since only data from the current task is available, incremental updates can bias both attribute extraction and aggregation toward new classes, leading to catastrophic forgetting. Therefore, we propose AREA for attribute extraction and aggregation in CLIP-based CIL. To stabilize extraction, we anchor class-level visual and textual attributes on the hyperspherical embedding space via principal geodesic analysis. To stabilize aggregation, we learn lightweight task-specific experts with scoring and residual refinement, regularized by a variational information bottleneck objective. During inference, we perform routing over task attribute manifolds via optimal transport for more concise prediction. Experiments show that AREA consistently outperforms SOTA methods. Code is available at https://github.com/LAMDA-CL/ICML2026-AREA.

Agentic AI systems capable of autonomous planning and extended environmental interaction pose a fundamental control problem: how can humans maintain meaningful oversight of systems that may exceed their own capabilities? Existing approaches to scalable oversight rely on complex assumptions, remain largely heuristic, or lack practical methods for sequential settings with statistical guarantees. We introduce Calibrated Collective Oversight (CCO), which aggregates diverse auxiliary scoring functions into a penalty measuring deviation from a conservative baseline. Inspired by Attainable Utility Preservation, CCO enables collective conservatism: actions face a penalty proportional to overseer concern, so high-utility actions are still selected when overseers find them unobjectionable and overridden only when concern accumulates. CCO calibrates this conservatism online using Conformal Decision Theory, ensuring that undesirable outcomes remain below a user-specified target threshold with finite-time bounds and no distributional assumptions. On a modified version of SWE-bench, weaker overseers successfully constrain an adversarially misaligned stronger agent; on MACHIAVELLI, CCO substantially reduces ethical violations while preserving reward. In both settings, empirical violation rates closely match the specified targets, as predicted by the theory.

Assessing originality in AI research is arguably the most consequential yet least reliable step in peer review. Reviewer judgments of originality remain opaque, inconsistent, and dependent on comparisons to prior work that are often incomplete. In this paper, we present a large-scale, data-driven qualitative and quantitative analysis of research originality based on over 100,000 peer-review reports from leading AI venues, spanning a period of rapid growth in the field. Leveraging structured, semantically retrieved prior work and signals embedded in expert reviewer assessments, we systematically characterize how originality is perceived in practice and identify the key dimensions that most strongly influence novelty judgments. Our analysis yields a fine-grained, evidence-based framework that equips both authors and reviewers with actionable insights into how originality is evaluated. In addition, we evaluate the reliability of current large language model (LLM) agents in assessing originality. We find that these models tend to systematically overestimate novelty and struggle to detect conceptual plagiarism, particularly in the presence of paraphrasing. We release our dataset, trained models, and code at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Novelty-Reviewer-365C/.

Long-term memory is increasingly important for personalized AI agents, yet existing benchmarks and methods remain largely text-centric. Even when images are included, the user-specific information needed for later questions is typically recoverable from text alone, and most memory systems reduce image turns to generic captions. Yet images often carry personal information that text rarely states -- both explicit evidence, such as recurring user-associated entities, and implicit evidence, such as latent user facts inferred from visual or multimodal cues. We introduce a benchmark for personal visual memory that targets both forms of evidence, and propose VisualMem, a hybrid visual--text architecture that augments a text-memory backend with a structured personal visual memory module. Rather than collapsing images into captions, VisualMem uses conversational context to resolve identity, ownership, and durable user facts. Experiments show that VisualMem substantially outperforms prior memory systems on our benchmark while remaining competitive on standard text-memory benchmarks, indicating that personal visual memory is a distinct and important component of long-term memory for personalized AI agents.

Visual outcomes are increasingly central to multimodal large language models, making reliable and fine-grained verification essential for scaling generalist foundation models. In this work, we investigate multimodal meta-verification, which leverages verifier-generated rationales rather than decision-only signals, and explore how to effectively incorporate meta-verification feedback into multimodal verifier training. We identify two key findings. First, symbolic verifier outputs (e.g., bounding boxes) outperform textual explanations as meta-verification rationales, enabling efficient rule-based reinforcement learning rewards while avoiding reliance on model-based rewards from auxiliary judge models. Second, decoupling reinforcement learning objectives for binary judgment and meta-verification substantially outperforms joint reward optimization, due to intrinsic differences in output structure and learning dynamics. Based on these insights, we train OmniVerifier-M1, a generalist visual verifier leveraging symbolic meta-verification and decoupled reinforcement learning. OmniVerifier-M1 provides robust verification and fine-grained error localization, and further enables M1-TTS, a verifier-driven agentic generation system achieving dynamic region-level self-correction. This approach paves the way for more reliable, interpretable, and fine-grained multimodal verification, supporting safer and more controllable foundation model deployment.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models unify perception, reasoning, and control within a single policy, yet their multi-billion-parameter backbones and diffusion-based action heads make on-device deployment prohibitively expensive. Prior quantization efforts offer only partial solutions, compressing the LLM backbone while leaving the DiT action head at full precision, or resorting to mixed-precision schemes, driven by the belief that uniformly quantizing the action head is inherently unstable. We challenge this assumption with Omega-QVLA, the first training-free post-training quantization framework that compresses both the language backbone and the entire diffusion action head of a VLA model to a uniform W4A4 precision, eliminating the need for mixed-precision allocation. Omega-QVLA combines a composite SVD-Hadamard rotation that equalizes per-channel weight energy while diffusing residual activation outliers with per-step DiT activation scaling quantization that absorbs dynamic-range drift across denoising steps. On LIBERO, Omega-QVLA compresses Pi 0.5 and GR00T N1.5 to W4A4 with 98.0% and 87.8% task success rates, matching or exceeding their FP16 references of 97.1% and 87.0%, while reducing the static memory footprint by 71.3%. Real-world manipulation experiments further confirm smooth, accurate manipulation where prior methods fail. Code is available at https://github.com/UCMP13753/Omega-QVLA.

Free-text explanations extend human label variation (HLV) beyond label disagreement by revealing the reasoning and preferences behind annotators' decisions. We study whether large language models (LLMs) can learn and reproduce such annotator-specific label-explanation behavior. Using two sentence-pair tasks with four annotators each -- natural language inference and paraphrase judgment -- we first analyze whether annotators exhibit stable individual patterns. We find that such patterns are weak at the single-annotation level due to strong input-content effects, but become detectable after input-content reduction and annotator-level aggregation. We then compare prompting and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) baselines and propose cross-annotator preference optimization (CAPO), which contrasts a target annotator's response with other valid but less target-specific annotations for the same input. Experiments show that prompting is limited and unstable, SFT better captures annotator-specific behavior, and CAPO further improves aggregation-aware imitation and judge-based attribution while preserving target-specific reasoning patterns under human validation. Overall, our results show that HLV can be learned as annotator-specific label-explanation behavior, suggesting a path toward scalable explanation-based annotation grounded in annotator histories rather than labels alone.

Reasoning large language models exhibit complex reasoning behaviors via extended chain-of-thought generation that are highly fragile to information loss during decoding, creating critical challenges for KV cache compression. Existing token-dropping methods directly disrupt reasoning chains by removing intermediate steps, while head-reallocation methods, designed for retrieval tasks, fail to preserve the heads essential for generative reasoning. However, no existing method can identify which attention heads genuinely maintain reasoning consistency and control generation termination. To address this, we propose RLKV, which uses reinforcement learning as a probe to discover which heads contribute to reasoning quality by directly optimizing their cache usage against actual generation outcomes. This discovery naturally leads to an efficient compression strategy: we allocate full KV cache to reasoning-critical heads while aggressively compressing others with constant-size KV cache. Experiments reveal that a fraction of heads proves essential for reasoning, enabling 20--60% cache reduction with near-lossless performance across diverse tasks and models, and up to 2.06x end-to-end speedup at 60% reduction.

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong capabilities as decision-making agents by interleaving reasoning and actions, as seen in ReAct-style frameworks. Yet, their practical deployment is constrained by high inference costs and large model sizes. We propose Structured Agent Distillation, a framework that compresses large LLM-based agents into smaller student models while preserving both reasoning fidelity and action consistency. Unlike standard token-level distillation, our method segments trajectories into [REASON] and [ACT] spans, applying segment-specific losses to align each component with the teacher's behavior. This structure-aware supervision enables compact agents to better replicate the teacher's decision process. Experiments on ALFWorld, HotPotQA-ReAct, and WebShop show that our approach consistently outperforms token-level and imitation learning baselines, achieving significant compression with minimal performance drop. Scaling and ablation results further highlight the importance of span-level alignment for efficient and deployable agents.

Electroencephalography (EEG) is a critical, non-invasive method to monitor electrical brain activity. EEGs can span anywhere from a couple seconds to multiple hours, posing a major hurdle for existing deep learning methods due to two major factors: (1) existing EEG models are predominantly built upon the attention mechanism, incurring quadratic scaling as the sequence length increases, and (2) raw EEG signals must be processed in a sliding-window fashion due to fixed-length input requirements, preventing global understanding of the entire signal. To this extent, we propose CaMBRAIN - the first Causal, Mamba-based state space model (SSM) capable of real-time inference of EEG signals, arguing that bidirectional approaches are needlessly expensive given the causal, unidirectional nature of EEG. However, training such a model is non-trivial, as crucial EEG events can be extremely brief - within fractions of a second - yet separated by long intervals spanning minutes. Current EEG methods use self-supervised objectives that optimize for signal reconstruction, but these are not well suited for streaming SSMs; they fail to explicitly train the hidden state to retain the salient long-range context needed for streaming inference. We therefore introduce a multi-stage self-supervised training pipeline specifically tailored to encourage long-range memory retention and strong performance on EEG signals, while preserving the linear-time complexity of state space models. CaMBRAIN achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results across 3 different EEG datasets with >10x higher throughput than existing models, enabling the first model capable of long-range, continuous inference of variable-length EEG signals.

On-policy self-distillation (SD) improves LLM reasoning by using teacher-side privileged information (PI) to turn sparse verifier outcomes into dense token-level supervision. Existing methods usually assume trusted PI, such as reference answers or successful traces. We ask whether PI can instead come from an experience-derived skill bank, where retrieved skills are compact and reusable but may also be irrelevant or misleading. We propose Skill-Conditioned Gated Self-Distillation (SGSD), which formulates skill-based SD as teacher hypothesis validation rather than unconditional imitation. SGSD retrieves skill-mistake pairs, constructs a multi-teacher pool, and lets all skill-conditioned teachers score the same plain-prompt student rollout. The verifier validates each teacher's polarity: supporting a success or suppressing a failure gives positive supervision, while the opposite stance is reversed. A robust gated objective then distills informative teacher-student disagreements while suppressing uncertain or extreme signals. Experiments on multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that SGSD consistently improves over GRPO and remains competitive with answer-conditioned OPSD under a weaker PI assumption. For example, on Qwen3-1.7B, SGSD outperforms GRPO by 6.2% and OPSD by 1.7% on average on AIME24, AIME25, and HMMT25. Our code is available at https://github.com/walawalagoose/SGSD.

Test-time compute is widely believed to benefit only large reasoning models. We show it also helps small embedding models. Since modern embedding models are distilled from LLM backbones, a frozen encoder should benefit from extra inference compute without retraining. An agentic program-search loop explores 144 candidate programs over a frozen encoder API and produces twelve Pareto-optimal programs that trade extra inference compute for retrieval quality. The search independently rediscovers Rocchio pseudo-relevance feedback, ColBERT-style MaxSim at sentence granularity, reciprocal rank fusion, and the Fisher linear discriminant, all without trainable parameters or external models. Every frontier program improves nDCG@10 over the frozen baseline on all 14 tasks used during program search. Generalization is validated separately: a single fixed program, selected from the discovery frontier before any held-out evaluation, improves nDCG@10 on 61% of model-task pairs across three unseen encoder families and nineteen held-out retrieval tasks, without any per-task selection.

Continuous-time, event-native spiking neural networks (SNNs) operate strictly on spike events, treating spike timing and ordering as the representation rather than an artifact of time discretization. This viewpoint aligns with biological computation and with the native resolution of event sensors and neuromorphic processors, while enabling compute and memory that scale with the number of events. However, two challenges hinder practical, end-to-end trainable event-based SNN systems: 1) exact charge--fire--reset dynamics impose inherently sequential processing of input spikes, and 2) precise spike times must be solved without time bins. We address both. First, we use parallel associative scans to consume multiple input spikes at once, yielding up to 44x speedups over sequential simulation while retaining exact hard-reset dynamics. Second, we implement differentiable spike time solvers that compute spike times to machine-precision without discrete-time approximations or restrictive analytic assumptions. We demonstrate the viability of training SNNs using our solutions on four event-based datasets on GPUs.

We present ReflexGrad, a dual-process architecture for within-episode failure recovery in LLM agents without demonstrations. When agents commit to a wrong approach early and exhaust the step budget, the post-failure trajectory contains the information to escape – but no published architecture acts on it within a single episode. ReflexGrad routes between a fast process (TextGrad-style continuous refinement every k=3 steps) and a slow process (Reflexion-style causal diagnosis when m=5 consecutive low-progress scores fire a routing gate). A deterministic priority merge keeps the natural-language policy coherent, and each slow activation emits three observable artifacts: a reproducible trigger, a causal diagnostic, and a verified fix. On ALFWorld 134 tasks, n=10 seeds, no demonstrations, ReflexGrad lifts Qwen-3-8B from 35.1% to 75.4% (+40.3pp), beating compute-matched 1-shot LATS by +2.7pp (p≈0.01), ToT by +5.7pp (p<10^-4), and Self-Refine by +6.7pp (p<10^-5); on GPT-5 the lift is 46.3→88.1% (+41.8pp). The 1.5pp cross-model difference is within seed noise (p≈0.13), suggesting that the routing mechanism, rather than model scale, is the primary source of the gain. Code, prompts, per-seed logs, and sensitivity sweeps are released.

In the era of autonomous agents, machine-actionable data is critical for data-driven workflows. For more than a decade, semantic metadata like schema.org has anchored the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) for machine-actionable data and enabled discovery tools like Google Dataset Search. However, the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) capable of navigating the unstructured web raises a fundamental question: Is semantic metadata still necessary for agentic data discovery, or can agents reliably retrieve actionable data directly from the web? We present a comparative analysis of agentic data retrieval across two distinct environments: a Baseline Agent searching billions of open-web documents, and a Semantic Agent leveraging a corpus of 90 million datasets using schema.org. We deploy an "LLM-as-a-judge" evaluation pipeline, mapped directly to the FAIR principles, to assess the semantic relevance, data accessibility, and computational utility of the retrieved data. Our results reveal a clear divergence. The Semantic Agent excels at retrieving actionable data, achieving a 44.9% higher precision for metadata-rich registries and a 46.6% higher precision for pages with machine-readable downloads among its returned results. Conversely, the Baseline Agent frequently suffers "Last-Mile Utility" failures, retrieving prose-heavy pages (20.1% of results) and portal landing pages (8.5%) rather than actual data pages. While the Baseline Agent achieves higher coverage by answering 40% more questions, the Semantic Agent delivers greater accuracy, achieving 65.7% higher overall precision in retrieving FAIR-compliant datasets. We conclude that while unstructured retrieval supports broad exploratory tasks, structured ecosystems remain the indispensable foundation for reliable, execution-oriented autonomous workflows.

Discourse particles, such as well and kind of, are crucial components that enable LLMs to “speak” more like humans. They are used to convey emotions, intentions, and interpersonal meanings. However, existing studies have not yet built a comprehensive understanding of LLMs' capabilities in handling discourse particles. Moreover, the limited number of studies focuses primarily on high-resource languages such as English, with little attention paid to Southeast Asian languages. In this paper, we (1) propose MalayPrag, a benchmark designed to systematically evaluate and analyze LLMs' capabilities in handling discourse particles in colloquial Malay; and (2) introduce five attributes that provide a linguistically grounded, unified framework for interpreting the pragmatic functions of discourse particles. Applying these two contributions, we prompt ten off-the-shelf LLMs to perform three prediction tasks. The experimental results reveal substantial challenges for current LLMs in accurately connecting discourse particles with their pragmatic functions in Malay. The provision of the five attributes designed in this study is found to significantly improve these connections, highlighting the need for structured scaffolding for models' pragmatic competence.

Pretrained diffusion models are effective priors for Bayesian inverse problems, but posterior sampling with these priors is often costly because data-consistency guidance is applied throughout the full reverse trajectory. Existing methods have shown that vector-Jacobian products through the denoiser can sometimes be avoided, yet they typically still rely on dense guidance through the full trajectory or expensive inner solves. We introduce Sparse Scheduled Diffusion Guidance for Inverse Problems (Spin), a solver that avoids starting posterior sampling from pure noise. Spin first samples from a posterior time-marginal at an intermediate timestep t_*, and then uses that state as a warm start for a guided reverse diffusion process. At guidance time, instead of enforcing the measurement constraint at every denoising step, Spin applies lightweight corrections only at scheduled timesteps where the denoiser can still clean up artifacts. The resulting procedure decouples prior refinement from data consistency: the prior supplies denoising, while lightweight pixel-space optimization enforces the measurement constraint without backpropagation through the denoiser or decoder. Across linear and nonlinear inverse problems on FFHQ and ImageNet, Spin achieves competitive reconstruction quality with a substantially better runtime–memory profile, running 2x faster on pixel-space models and up to 50x faster on latent diffusion models, with lower memory costs.

Vision classifiers can exploit spurious correlations, achieving high in-distribution accuracy yet failing under distribution shift. Existing approaches to bias mitigation and analysis often depend on curated datasets, spurious-attribute or group labels, or retraining, which may be infeasible once a model is deployed or the relevant bias is unknown. We present a bias-label-free, post-hoc method for identifying spurious concepts in frozen vision models, relying only on standard class labels from a held-out audit dataset. For each target class, we collect patches from inputs predicted as that class and apply non-negative matrix factorization to intermediate activations to obtain a bank of interpretable concept vectors. Candidate concepts are then ranked with a bias estimator derived from their interaction with backpropagated gradients on misclassified examples: bias concepts tend to get activated when correcting false negatives and suppressed when correcting false positives. On Colored MNIST and Waterbirds the method recovers concepts aligned with the known spurious cue, and on CelebA it surfaces decision-relevant directions that only partially coincide with the annotated gender attribute; suppressing the top-ranked concepts at inference time improves worst-group accuracy by up to 17.9 percentage points on Waterbirds and 10.4 on CelebA without any retraining or parameter updates. Our method identifies decision-relevant spurious directions that need not coincide with annotated ones, providing both an interpretable auditing tool and an actionable debiasing handle for frozen vision models. Code is available at https://github.com/vitryt/label-free-bias-identification.

Vision-language models (VLMs) generate fluent causal explanations, but current evaluations cannot distinguish linguistic plausibility from faithful causal reasoning. We introduce a dual-probe methodology that isolates these properties. The Text-Only Probe measures linguistic quality. The Chain-Text Probe requires models to first generate explicit causal chains. The Abstraction Gap (AG) metric quantifies the normalized performance difference. Evaluating eight VLMs on CAGE (Causal Abstraction Gap Evaluation), a benchmark of 49,500 questions across 5,500 images spanning Pearl's causal hierarchy, we find seven models exhibit AG exceeding 0.50 with text scores of 6--8 but chain scores below 2.5. Fine-tuning on 45,000 chain-annotated examples fails to close the gap. However, one model achieves near-zero AG. The capability exists within current VLM architectures and depends on pretraining and architectural choices. CAGE provides a diagnostic tool for assessing faithful causal reasoning in VLMs.

LLMs' linguistically expressed confidence should faithfully reflect their intrinsic uncertainty. While recent work shows LLMs struggle to use epistemic markers (e.g., "it is likely...") in a human-aligned fashion, it remains unclear whether models can apply their own linguistic confidence framework to associate markers with specific confidence levels in a stable and generalizable way, and how contextual features impact this ability. We conduct the first systematic study of this question, formalizing _marker internal confidence_ (MIC) as the estimated intrinsic confidence a model associates with a specific epistemic marker in a given task domain. We present 7 metrics to evaluate the stability of MICs within and across distributions. Applying our analysis framework to diverse models and tasks, we find that LLMs remain faithfully miscalibrated even under model-centric interpretation of marker meanings, struggling to differentiate markers by internal confidence across distributions despite preserving a somewhat consistent ranking order across tasks. This supplies critical, complementary evidence to existing work toward a holistic understanding of faithful calibration in LLMs, emphasizing the need for more aligned and stable marker use to improve trustworthiness and reliability.

Computer-use agents (CUAs) have recently made substantial progress, but deploying a separate large expert for each software domain remains expensive. Small open computer-use agents are more practical specialization targets, but they remain substantially weaker and exhibit uneven domain-specific failures. A straightforward remedy is to synthesize large-scale training data for the target domain, yet we find that this naive approach yields only marginal improvements. Building on this observation, we introduce LearnWeak, an annotation-free specialization framework for small computer-use agents that uses a stronger reference agent to identify the student's weaknesses in the target domain, synthesize targeted tasks, and construct supervision automatically. LearnWeak further introduces an error-aware specialization objective that disentangles planning and execution errors, enabling more behaviorally precise updates than broad uniform supervision. On OSWorld, LearnWeak achieves average gains of 11.6 and 11.1 percentage points over EvoCUA-8B and OpenCUA-7B, respectively, across eight domains. We also validate that our student-aware dataset generation and training approaches outperform existing autonomous trajectory generation and training baselines. Our work highlights the importance of student awareness in both data synthesis and agent training, pointing toward a more principled and efficient path for specializing small computer-use agents in diverse domains.

Vision-language models with extended reasoning succeed on complex problems, but many real-world problems require external tools that internal reasoning alone often cannot resolve. Agentic reasoning therefore interleaves two behaviors with a structural asymmetry: thinking (the self-contained default) and tool use (a high-variance auxiliary acting). We refer to this asymmetry as the Thinking-Acting Gap. Under standard RL recipes like GRPO, the gap manifests as two diagnostic symptoms during training: tool use is attempted on only ~30% of rollouts, and when attempted, the tool-using rollouts within a group are all-wrong on ~40% of questions, suppressing the learning signal at the tool calls that needed it. We propose AXPO (Agent eXplorative Policy Optimization): for each all-wrong tool-using subgroup, AXPO fixes the thinking prefix and resamples the tool call and its continuation, paired with uncertainty-based prefix selection. Across nine multimodal benchmarks and three scales of Qwen3-VL-Thinking, SFT+AXPO outperforms SFT+GRPO at average (+1.8pp Pass@1 and +1.8pp Pass@4 at 8B on average) and 8B with SFT+AXPO surpasses the 32B Base on Pass@4 with 4 times fewer parameters.

Existing memory-augmented LLM agents often treat memory as a static repository with pre-defined representations and fixed retrieval pipelines, which is brittle in dynamic agentic environments where feedback, task variation, and heterogeneous signals continuously reshape what should be remembered and how it should be connected. To address this, we propose FluxMem, a connectivity-evolving memory framework that models memory as a heterogeneous graph and progressively refines its topology through three stages: initial connection formation, feedback-driven refinement, and long-term consolidation. During execution, FluxMem repairs missing links, prunes interference, aligns abstraction granularity, and distills recurrent successful trajectories into reusable procedural circuits, guided by one metric for memory generalizability and evolutionary maturity. Across three fundamentally distinct benchmarks including LoCoMo, Mind2Web, and GAIA, FluxMem achieves consistent state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating strong adaptation and generalization in complex agentic environments. The code will be open-sourced in https://github.com/zjunlp/LightMem.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) still struggle with fine-grained visual understanding, where answers often depend on small but decisive evidence in the full image. We observe a regional-to-global perception gap: the same MLLM answers fine-grained questions more accurately when conditioned on evidence-centered crops than on the corresponding full images, suggesting that many failures stem from difficulty to focus on relevant evidence rather than insufficient local recognition ability. Motivated by this observation, we propose Vision-OPD (Vision On-Policy Distillation), a regional-to-global self-distillation framework that transfers the model's own privileged regional perception to its full-image policy. Vision-OPD instantiates two conditional policies from the same MLLM: a crop-conditioned teacher and a full-image-conditioned student. The student generates on-policy rollouts, and Vision-OPD minimizes token-level divergence between the teacher and student next-token distributions along these rollouts. This enables the model to internalize the benefit of visual zooming without external teacher models, ground-truth labels, reward verifiers, or inference-time tool use. Experiments on multiple fine-grained visual understanding benchmarks show that Vision-OPD models achieve competitive or superior performance against much larger open-source, closed-source, and "Thinking-with-Images" agentic models.

We solve the negative constant-curvature case of the COLT 2023 open problem of Criscitiello, Martínez-Rubio, and Boumal on deterministic first-order methods for Lipschitz geodesically convex optimization. Let ^d_-^2={X∈^d+1:XX=-1, X_0>0}, UV_X=^-2UV, so the sectional curvature is -^2. If f:B̅_(x_0,r)→ is geodesically convex and M-Lipschitz, and s= r, our one-shot Klein cutting-plane method returns a queried point x̂ with f(x̂)-min_B̅_(x_0,r)f≤ Mr using at most ⌈ 2d(d+1) log(16sinh scosh s/s)⌉ oracle calls. For d≥2 each localization update costs O(d^2) arithmetic operations; for d=1 an interval variant satisfies the same bound. Consequently N=O(d^2(s+log(e/))) =O(d^2ζ_slog(e/)), ζ_s=s/tanh s . The argument is not a convex coordinate pullback: in the Beltrami–Klein chart the objective is generally only quasiconvex. The key point is that every Riemannian subgradient halfspace becomes an exact Euclidean central cut. For θ=(X,Y), glog_XY_X =^2gY, and tangency at X turns gY≤0 into ^𝖳(u-c)≤0, u=Φ(Y), c=Φ(X). Thus a fixed Euclidean ellipsoid localizes the whole hyperbolic ball. The only curvature payment is the Klein distortion factor log(sinh scosh s/s) =log(1/)+2s-log(4s)+O(e^-4s).

We present a novel decentralized algorithm for coverage control in unknown spatial environments modeled by Gaussian Processes (GPs). To trade-off between exploration and exploitation, each agent autonomously determines its trajectory by minimizing a local cost function. Inspired by the GP-UCB (Upper Confidence Bound for GPs) acquisition function, the proposed cost combines the expected locational cost with a variance-based exploration term, guiding agents toward regions that are both high in predicted density and model uncertainty. Compared to previous work, our algorithm operates in a fully decentralized fashion, relying only on local observations and communication with neighboring agents. In particular, agents periodically update their inducing points using a greedy selection strategy, enabling scalable online GP updates. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm in simulation.

Deploying machine learning in regulated financial environments -- credit risk, fraud detection, and anti-money laundering -- exposes critical vulnerabilities in algorithmic reproducibility. While early financial ML addressed statistical challenges such as backtest overfitting, deep neural networks and Generative AI have introduced mechanical nondeterminism rooted in hardware and architecture. This survey provides a systems perspective on reproducibility failures across three modalities now dominant in financial AI: tabular models (post-hoc explanation variance), graph networks (stochastic sampling and temporal asynchrony), and LLM-based agentic workflows (batch-dependent divergence and trajectory drift). We supplement the literature analysis with first-party experiments on public financial datasets -- quantifying explanation rank instability in credit scoring, prediction flip rates in GNN-based fraud detection, and tensor-parallel-induced output divergence in LLM entity extraction. We propose a layered evaluation framework linking modality-specific metrics (RBO, D_cos, TDI, PSD) to audit readiness, and empirically validate the complementarity of logit-level and semantic-level determinism measures.

Softmax attention is the cornerstone of modern large language models, but its memory scales linearly and compute quadratically with sequence length. Linear recurrent models, such as linear attention and state space models, have become widely studied as alternatives to attention due to their linear compute and constant memory. While these sub-quadratic token mixing methods, or mixers, achieve promising efficiency gains and competitive results on a wide range of benchmarks, current linear recurrent models still lag behind on tasks that require long-context retrieval or in-context learning. A growing body of work studies hybrid architectures that attempt to mitigate these trade-offs by statically interleaving or merging attention and recurrent blocks. In this work, we explore a new axis of developing hybrid models: across the token sequence. We propose Oryx, a hybrid model that can, throughout a sequence, flexibly switch between different mixers, for example quadratic attention for rich context utilization and linear recurrences for efficient generation. Oryx ties at least 90% of its parameters across mixers, enabling attention and recurrent modes to operate over shared internal representations. We validate our design with Mamba-2 and Gated DeltaNet variants, up to 1.4B models. Under fixed token budgets and a mixed-training strategy, Oryx achieves comparable or better performance than its single-mixer baselines. At the 1.4B scale, all instances of Oryx outperform their respective baselines by at least 0.7 percentage points on averaged language modeling tasks. On retrieval tasks, Oryx achieves performance comparable to the Transformer baseline even when processing only a tiny fraction (<10%) of the tokens in attention mode. These results suggest that attention and linear recurrent models can share internal representations, and motivate sequence-axis hybridization as a promising direction.

Many real-world classification tasks require predicting multiple labels per instance, necessitating the optimization of complex evaluation metrics such as the F-measure and Jaccard index. While the Empirical Utility Maximization (EUM) framework is natural for these population-level metrics, existing theoretical results are largely limited to asymptotic Bayes-consistency. In this paper, we develop principled learning algorithms for optimizing a broad class of generalized metrics within the EUM framework, grounded in the stronger notion of H-consistency. Our key contribution is the design of novel surrogate loss functions for multi-label learning that admit provable H-consistency bounds, enabling optimization with non-asymptotic guarantees tailored to the hypothesis class and finite samples. Crucially, we prove these combinatorially formulated surrogates decompose exactly, operating in strictly O(l) time without approximations. Building on this foundation, we introduce MMO (Multi-Label Metric Optimization), a new family of algorithms for optimizing generalized linear-fractional metrics. We validate our approach through extensive experiments, demonstrating robust scalability and superior performance over state-of-the-art continuous baselines on large-scale datasets (MS-COCO, Reuters-21578) in high-sparsity, deep learning regimes. Our results offer both theoretical rigor and practical effectiveness for general multi-label metric optimization.

Vast quantities of compute (GPU cycles on personal workstations, idle inference servers, and edge devices between jobs) go unused because no incentive-aligned protocol exists for their owners to share them safely and profitably. Existing approaches either require a trusted central coordinator (cloud marketplaces), demand heavy blockchain infrastructure (Golem, BrokerChain), or lack an incentive layer entirely (BOINC, Petals). We propose SwarmHarness, a decentralised protocol in which HarnessAPI skill nodes self-organise into a compute swarm without any central authority. SwarmHarness has three interlocking components: a SwarmRegistry built on a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) for peer discovery and capability advertisement; a SwarmRouter that dispatches tasks to nodes using a utility function over capability, load, latency, and trust; and SwarmCredit, an incentive mechanism that attributes compute-credit rewards to contributing nodes via a Shapley-value approximation. Nodes earn credits by serving tasks and spend credits to submit them; idle nodes that never contribute drain credits and lose routing priority, creating a self-regulating participation economy. As nodes specialise toward high-reward skills and routing signals act as digital pheromones, the network exhibits emergent collective intelligence analogous to biological swarms. Beyond compute sharing, SwarmHarness is a foundational primitive for autonomous distributed AI agent networks in which agents hire compute, route subtasks, and settle credits without human intermediation.

Interactive 3D assets used in games and simulation are typically decomposed into specific semantic parts to support animation, physics, and scripted behaviors, yet most generative 3D models produce either monolithic meshes or arbitrary part decompositions that cannot be aligned with application-specific requirements. We present CubePart, a generative framework for open-vocabulary, part-controllable 3D mesh generation that exposes part structure as an explicit inference-time control signal. Given a global text prompt and a user-defined parts schema expressed as an open-ended list of part names, our method generates a set of meshes - one per schema element - that assemble into a coherent object while respecting the specified semantic structure. To enable this capability, we introduce a scalable data pipeline to construct a large open-vocabulary, part-labeled 3D dataset, along with a two-stage generative architecture that separates global shape synthesis from part-level decoding. We demonstrate that the resulting assets can be directly integrated into game engines and driven by animation and behavior scripts without manual post-processing. Project Page: https://cubepart.github.io/

Zeroth-order (ZO) fine-tuning is attractive for large language models because it replaces backpropagation with forward objective evaluations. Existing implementations nevertheless execute ZO algorithms inside conventional training loops, even though their dominant work is repeated scoring under nearby parameter states. This creates a workload-runtime mismatch: the algorithm asks for structured inference-style scoring, while the system exposes a sequence of fragmented training-loop steps. We show that LLM ZO fine-tuning is an inference-dominated workload and execute its repeated scoring phase through a serving runtime. On OPT-13B SST-2, the resulting vLLM execution path completes the 20k-step LoZO run in 0.51 estimated training hours versus 4.15 hours for the official LoZO baseline under the matched LoRA-only setting, an 8.13x speedup, while reaching 0.922 final evaluation accuracy and 0.931 final full-validation accuracy. In core-step scaling experiments across OPT-1.3B to OPT-13B, the same runtime reorganization gives 2.34x--7.72x speedups. A MeZO-style high-rank factorized experiment shows that the same runtime paradigm can track a MeZO-like loss trajectory while running up to 2.55x faster. More broadly, representing ZO updates as dynamic adapter states suggests a practical path toward inference-time training, where lightweight adaptation can be scheduled as an inference-like workload rather than as a separate training job.

Transformer-based large language models are increasingly used for long-horizon tasks; however, their attention mechanism scales poorly with context length. To handle this, we study a sleep-like consolidation mechanism in which a model periodically converts recent context into persistent fast weights before clearing its key-value cache. During sleep, the model performs N offline recurrent passes over the accumulated context and updates the fast weights in its state-space model (SSM) blocks through a learned local rule. During inference, this shifts extra computation to sleep while preserving the latency of wake-time prediction. We test our method on controlled synthetic tasks, including cellular automata and multi-hop graph retrieval, as well as a realistic math reasoning task, on which a regular transformer as well as SSM-attention hybrid models fail. We then show that increasing sleep duration N for our models improves performance, with the largest gains on examples that require deeper reasoning.

For a Bayes classifier whose input space is a graph, we study the structure of the boundary, which comprises those points for which at least one neighbor is classified differently. The scientific setting is assignment of DNA reads produced by next generations sequencers to candidate source genomes. We show that the boundary is both large and complicated in structure. A new measure of uncertainty, Neighbor Similarity, which compares the classifier result for an input point to the distribution of results for its neighbors, not only tracks two inherent uncertainty measures for the Bayes classifier, but also can be implemented for classifiers without inherent measures of uncertainty.

Strategy synthesis typically follows an all-or-nothing paradigm, returning unrealisable whenever a specification cannot be guaranteed in an uncertain environment. In this paper, we introduce optimal LTLf synthesis, where the goal is to realise as many objectives as possible from a given specification consisting of multiple objectives, especially for the case that they are not all jointly realisable. We first consider max-guarantee synthesis, which commits to a maximal set of objectives that we can a priori guarantee to realise. We then introduce max-observation synthesis, which maximises a posteriori realised objectives that may be incomparable on different executions. Finally, we present incremental max-observation synthesis, which further improves strategies by exploiting opportunities for stronger guarantees when they arise during an execution. Experimental results show that different variations of optimal synthesis scale broadly equally well, solving a large fraction of the benchmark instances within the given timeout, demonstrating the practical feasibility of the approach.

Editable high-fidelity 4D scenes are crucial for autonomous driving, as they can be applied to end-to-end training and closed-loop simulation. However, existing reconstruction methods are primarily limited to replicating observed scenes and lack the capability for diverse weather simulation. While image-level weather editing methods tend to introduce scene artifacts and offer poor controllability over the weather effects. To address these limitations, we propose WeatherCity, a novel framework for 4D urban scene reconstruction and weather editing. Specifically, we leverage a text-guided image editing model to achieve flexible editing of image weather backgrounds. To tackle the challenge of multi-weather modeling, we introduce a novel weather Gaussian representation based on shared scene features and dedicated weather-specific decoders. This representation is further enhanced with a content consistency optimization, ensuring coherent modeling across different weather conditions. Additionally, we design a physics-driven model that simulates dynamic weather effects through particles and motion patterns. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets and various scenes demonstrate that WeatherCity achieves flexible controllability, high fidelity, and temporal consistency in 4D reconstruction and weather editing. Our framework not only enables fine-grained control over weather conditions (e.g., light rain and heavy snow) but also supports object-level manipulation within the scene. Codes are released at https://github.com/IRMVLab/WeatherCity.

Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) leverage neural networks to map coordinates to corresponding signals, enabling continuous and compact representations. This paradigm has driven significant advances in various vision tasks. However, existing INRs lack frequency selectivity and spatial localization, leading to an over-reliance on redundant signal components. Consequently, they exhibit spectral bias, tending to learn low-frequency components early while struggling to capture fine high-frequency details. To address these issues, we propose FLAIR (Frequency- and Locality-Aware Implicit Neural Representations), which incorporates two key innovations. The first is Band-Localized Activation (BLA), a novel activation designed for joint frequency selection and spatial localization under the constraints of the time-frequency uncertainty principle (TFUP). Through structured frequency control and spatially localized responses, BLA effectively mitigates spectral bias and enhances training stability. The second is Wavelet-Energy-Guided Encoding (WEGE), which leverages the discrete wavelet transform to compute energy scores and explicitly guide frequency information to the network, enabling precise frequency selection and adaptive band control. Our method consistently outperforms existing INRs in 2D image representation, as well as 3D shape reconstruction and novel view synthesis.

Linear interpolation between fine-tuned checkpoints has been shown to trace the Pareto front between competing objectives, but whether extrapolative weight averaging can extend such frontiers to new checkpoints useful at inference time, without additional RL training, remains unclear. We study this question in RL for competitive programming, where hidden unit tests under time and memory limits enforce both functional correctness and computational efficiency. Starting from a shared initialization, we train checkpoints under nested unit-test coverage: low-coverage rewards require passing smaller-input tests, while high-coverage rewards require passing progressively larger tests up to the full suite. This sweep reveals the emergence of a correctness-efficiency frontier: on hard problems, higher-coverage reward reduces optimization failures but increases correctness failures, leaving solve rate nearly unchanged. Interpolation between low- and high-coverage checkpoints recovers this frontier, while extrapolation extends it beyond the trained endpoints. Both the frontier and its extrapolative continuation appear across three inference settings, pure reasoning, tool use, and agentic coding, and across two model scales, 32B and 7B. At the problem level, moving along the frontier changes which problems are solved, making extrapolated checkpoints complementary policies in inference-time scaling. Ensembles with extrapolative weight averaging broaden coverage and improve pass@250 on LCB/hard by 3.3% over the best single checkpoint at matched sample budget. These results show that nested unit-test coverage in code RL induces a frontier that extrapolative weight averaging can navigate, extend, and exploit.

3D object inpainting is commonly achieved via multi-view 2D image completion, yet independently inpainted views often suffer from cross-view inconsistencies, leading to blurred textures, geometric discontinuities, and visual artifacts in the reconstructed 3D objects. To overcome these limitations, we propose ObjFiller-3D, a novel method designed for the completion and editing of high-quality and consistent 3D objects. Instead of relying on sparse-view editing or per-view 2D inpainting, our method jointly optimizes a sequence of densely sampled views along a 360^∘ trajectory, enabling global coherence across viewpoints. We design a new framework with three complementary components: a Temporal-Driven Generative Encoder for modeling dense-view dependencies, a Semantic-Aware Completion Encoder for object-level inpainting, and a Cycle-Consistent 3D Encoder that enforces global coherence through a closed-loop formulation. Our framework also supports reference-guided 3D inpainting, allowing fine-grained control over appearance. Extensive experiments on diverse datasets demonstrate that ObjFiller-3D significantly outperforms prior methods, achieving higher reconstruction fidelity (PSNR 26.6 vs. 15.9 of NeRFiller) and perceptual quality (LPIPS 0.19 vs. 0.25 of Instant3dit), while reducing reconstruction time from over 40 minutes to under 10 minutes. These results highlight the effectiveness and practical potential of our approach for real-world 3D editing applications. Project page: https://objfiller3d.github.io/ Code: https://github.com/objfiller3d/ObjFiller-3D .

Identifying feature representations in language models is a central task in mechanistic interpretability. Several recent studies have made the observation that feature representations can be inferred in some cases from singular vectors of attention matrices. However, sound justification for this phenomenon is lacking. In this paper we address that question, asking: why and when do singular vectors align with features? First, we demonstrate that singular vectors robustly align with features in a model where features can be directly observed. We then show theoretically that such alignment is expected under a range of conditions. We close by asking how, operationally, alignment may be recognized in real models where feature representations are not directly observable. We identify sparse attention decomposition as a testable prediction of alignment, and show evidence that it emerges in real models in a manner consistent with predictions. Together these results suggest that alignment of singular vectors with features can be a sound and theoretically justified basis for feature identification in language models.

MLLMs are increasingly deployed in multi-turn settings, where attackers can escalate unsafe intent through the evolving visual-text history and exploit long-context safety decay. Yet safety alignment is still dominated by single-turn data and fixed-template dialogues, leaving a mismatch between training and deployment. To bridge this gap, we propose SaFeR-Steer, a progressive multi-turn alignment framework that combines staged synthetic bootstrapping with tutor-in-the-loop GRPO to train a single student under adaptive, on-policy attacks. We also introduce Trajectory-Consistent Summative Reward (TCSR), which aggregates the historical minimum and average of turn rewards so that any low-quality turn affects the trajectory-level return. I. Dataset. We release STEER, a multi-turn multimodal safety dataset with STEER-SFT (12,934), STEER-RL (2,000), and STEER-Bench (3,227) dialogues spanning 2-10 turns. II. Experiment. Starting from Qwen2.5-VL-3B/7B, SaFeR-Steer substantially improves Safety/Helpfulness on both single-turn (48.30/45.86 → 81.84/70.77 for 3B; 56.21/60.32 → 87.89/77.40 for 7B) and multi-turn benchmarks (12.55/27.13 → 55.58/70.27 for 3B; 24.66/46.48 → 64.89/72.35 for 7B), shifting failures to later turns and yielding robustness beyond scaling alone. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SaFeR-Steer

Continuum robots are advancing bronchoscopy procedures by accessing complex lung airways and enabling targeted interventions. However, their development is limited by the lack of realistic training and test environments: Real data is difficult to collect due to ethical constraints and patient safety concerns, and developing autonomy algorithms requires realistic imaging and physical feedback. We present ROOM (Realistic Optical Observation in Medicine), a comprehensive simulation framework designed for generating photorealistic bronchoscopy training data. By leveraging patient CT scans, our pipeline renders multi-modal sensor data including RGB images with realistic noise and light specularities, metric depth maps, surface normals, optical flow and point clouds at medically relevant scales. We validate the data generated by ROOM in two canonical tasks for medical robotics: multi-view pose estimation and monocular depth estimation, demonstrating diverse challenges that state-of-the-art methods must overcome to transfer to these medical settings. Furthermore, we show that the data produced by ROOM can be used to fine-tune existing depth estimation models to overcome these challenges, also enabling other downstream applications such as navigation. We expect that ROOM will enable large-scale data generation across diverse patient anatomies and procedural scenarios that are challenging to capture in clinical settings. Code and data: https://github.com/iamsalvatore/room.

Training effective artificial intelligence models for telecommunications is challenging due to the scarcity of deployment-specific data. Real data collection is expensive, and available datasets often fail to capture the unique operational conditions and contextual variability of the network environment. Digital twinning provides a potential solution to this problem, as simulators tailored to the current network deployment can generate site-specific data to augment the available training datasets. However, there is a need to develop solutions to bridge the inherent simulation-to-reality (sim-to-real) gap between synthetic and real-world data. This paper reviews recent advances on two complementary strategies: 1) the calibration of digital twins (DTs) through real-world measurements, and 2) the use of sim-to-real gap-aware training strategies to robustly handle residual discrepancies between digital twin-generated and real data. For the latter, we evaluate two conceptually distinct methods that model the sim-to-real gap either at the level of the environment via Bayesian learning or at the level of the training loss via prediction-powered inference.

This paper studies preference-shaped expected improvement criteria for Bayesian multiobjective optimization. We consider two indicator families which are often used for similar algorithmic purposes, but which are geometrically different. The hypervolume indicator is based on a dystopian reference point and measures dominated volume in objective space. The R2 indicator is based on a utopian point and evaluates approximation sets through weighted Tchebycheff scalarization envelopes. The purpose of the paper is to make precise which preference transformations preserve exact computation, Pareto compatibility, and monotonicity properties, and which transformations change the underlying geometry. On the hypervolume side, we revisit canonical EHVI through the Deng representation, formulate product-density weighted EHVI in desirability coordinates, discuss cone-based EHVI as ordinary EHVI after a linear cone transformation, and separate these cases from truncated EHVI, where variance monotonicity may fail. On the R2 side, we prove that exact integral R2 improvement is not, in general, an ordinary objective-space weighted hypervolume. The obstruction is lower-dimensional: Lebesgue-density hypervolume cannot see certain boundary contributions that Tchebycheff scalarizations still detect. We then show that exact integral R2 improvement is exactly a scalarization-space volume, namely the measure of the Tchebycheff shadow between the incumbent scalarization envelope and the reference envelope. This representation yields finite-sum ER2I algorithms for discrete R2, quadrature methods for exact integral R2, and an achievement-space Gaussian surrogate formulation in which ER2I is an integral of scalar Gaussian expected improvements.

Prediction markets such as Polymarket aggregate crowd beliefs into real-time probability estimates, and the comments traders post beneath each market contain rich directional stance signals that prices alone cannot capture. This work introduces the first stance detection study applied to prediction market commentary, a domain characterized by extreme brevity, trader- specific vernacular, and severe class imbalance (only 8.7% of comments oppose the market outcome). RoBERTa-base is fine-tuned across a 4 x 3 ablation: four input configurations ({2- class, 3-class} x {with/without market context}) and three augmentation conditions (baseline, 50% synthetic, 100% synthetic). Synthetic minority-class samples are generated via LLM-driven Pro -> Anti counterfactual flips using the Anthropic API. Results show that (1) market context is the single most impactful factor, raising 3-class Anti recall from 0.10 to 0.45; (2) counterfactual augmentation is conditionally effective, improving Anti F1 in weak configurations (0.10 -> 0.24) while degrading strong ones (2-class-ctx macro F1: 0.68 -> 0.50 at full dose); and (3) 50% augmentation is the optimal dose, with 100% consistently hurting performance. Attention-based interpretability analysis provides mechanistic support for all three findings.

Language models can use verifiable rewards to improve at a wide variety of reasoning tasks. However, both parametric (e.g. RLVR) and non-parametric (e.g. prompt optimization) approaches to doing so typically require hundreds of training samples and thousands of model rollouts, making them expensive in the best case and intractable in the worst. To address this challenge, we introduce Contrastive Reflection (CORE), a non-parametric learning algorithm that compares past reasoning traces to generate insights: short natural-language descriptions of reasoning strategies and constraints that capture differences between successful and unsuccessful problem attempts. Across four reasoning tasks, we demonstrate that CORE enables more rapid improvement than both parametric (GRPO) and non-parametric (GEPA, episodic RAG, and MemRL) methods, while using fewer rollouts. Under fixed rollout budgets with as few as five training samples, we then show that CORE also achieves comparable or greater performance gains than each baseline. Finally, we highlight how CORE is also substantially more context-efficient than non-parametric baselines, requiring fewer prompt tokens while storing learned knowledge as compact, interpretable natural-language insights. Our results therefore suggest that distilling contrasts between successful and unsuccessful reasoning traces into abstract and useful insights can provide a more efficient and interpretable route to model self-improvement than weight updates, prompt optimization, or direct reuse of stored reasoning traces.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) are rapidly evolving toward true multimodal reasoning, with visual search representing a concrete instantiation of the thinking-with-images paradigm. However, LVLM visual search faces two key challenges: incompatibility among intrinsic capabilities after post-training, and interference in long multi-step reasoning contexts. To address these, we identify two novel insights. First, self-regulation between pre- and post-training LVLMs leverages the intrinsic single-step capabilities of the pre-training model to mitigate capability deterioration and long-context interference. Second, probability-based prophetic sampling, replacing naive prompting, provides a probabilistic interface where the pre-training model acts as a prophet and the post-training model selectively accepts prophetic tokens under its output distribution, preserving coherent multi-step reasoning. Building on these insights, we introduce SeProD, a self-prophetic decoding framework that leverages intrinsic single-step capabilities to enable coherent multi-step reasoning in a training-free, plug-and-play manner. Experiments show that SeProD consistently improves multiple visual-search LVLMs across all 12 splits of 4 visual search benchmarks, as well as across general VQA benchmarks, without added computational overhead, thanks to its parallel prophetic acceptance mechanism.

As large language models are increasingly deployed for clinical text, ensuring they can reliably signal their own uncertainty becomes critical. Most existing uncertainty quantification (UQ) methods are designed for open-domain generation and cannot localize uncertainty at the token or span level in long clinical text. We propose Reverse Probing, the first UQ framework specialized for clinical summarization, which estimates token-level uncertainty directly from pre-existing labeled summaries. Rather than sampling new outputs, Reverse Probing treats the text as a probe into the model's internal state, extracting uncertainty signals from four categories of internal activations. We evaluate on two expert-annotated clinical datasets and outperform eight adapted baselines on all metrics, achieving up to 4 times higher AUPRC while reducing inference time and computational costs. Feature analysis reveals that delta energy and neighborhood context are the most consistent predictors across all models. This study offers interpretable insights into how models internally respond to unsupported clinical content.

Tabular data in knowledge-rich domains often carries a latent prior in the form of Boolean implication relationships (BIRs) between pairs of features. We mine such relationships with a sparse-exception binomial test. The mined implications form a typed directed graph, equivalent to a propositional rule base of 2-literal clauses. We encode this graph as the connectivity of a layered neural network, called BIRDNet, in which each hidden unit corresponds to one mined rule and binds only to its two features. We show two consequences of this design: First, the architecture is sparse by construction: at most 2/d of the weights in each BIR layer are active, where d is the input dimension. Second, the model is interpretable: every trained unit keeps a stable symbolic identity, so rules can be read off the network without surrogate models. Unlike most neurosymbolic models, BIRDNet does not consume an external rule base; its structural prior is mined from the data. We evaluate BIRDNet on six transcriptomic and proteomic benchmarks. Our results show that BIRDNet stays within 0.02 AUROC of the strongest dense baseline, at a small accuracy cost, while using up to 96× fewer active parameters than an architecture-matched dense MLP. First-layer rules recover known biological signatures across multiple cancer subtypes and tissue types, including canonical amplicons, lineage-defining co-expression modules, and immune-infiltration markers. Data and code are available at: https://github.com/MAHI-Group/BIRDNet.

Foundation model agents increasingly operate in multi-agent deployments where a coordinator must decide which agent's response to trust. The standard approach weights agents by their self-reported confidence, but recent evidence shows that foundation model confidence is systematically miscalibrated and, on hard tasks, inversely correlated with accuracy. Design-time calibration methods (temperature scaling, Platt scaling, histogram binning) cannot address this problem because they fit a fixed correction to held-out data and degrade under distribution shift. We present MARGIN (Multi-Agent Runtime Grading via Incremental Normalisation), an online calibration method that learns per-agent, per-confidence-band calibration factors from the task stream itself, requiring no model access, no held-out data, and no retraining. MARGIN uses symmetric exponentially weighted moving averages with Bayesian shrinkage blending, and has three hyperparameters with robust defaults. Across 18 foundation models, 8 benchmarks, and over 44,000 observations, MARGIN achieves 3-6x lower calibration error than the best design-time baseline under distribution shift. In multi-agent selection, raw verbalized confidence fails to beat random at pairwise resolution (43-50%) on hard benchmarks. MARGIN corrects this completely, raising pairwise resolution to 70-89% and closing 37-78% of the Raw-to-Oracle pass@1 gap across the five code-generation benchmarks without any oracle knowledge of which model is strongest. Six formal propositions characterize convergence, tracking speed, and the optimality of symmetric updates for non-strategic agents, with all predictions illustrated empirically.

This study presents the first evaluation of general-purpose imitation learning for surgeon-robot collaborative assistance in open surgery, targeting suture following: the grab-pull-release motion an assistant performs at every stitch. We collect 160 teleoperated demonstrations (32,374 frames) on an open-source robot arm, benchmark four architecturally diverse imitation learning policies (ACT, Diffusion Policy, SmolVLA, π_0) across 28 trained models evaluated in 32 configurations along three clinically motivated dimensions: dataset size, camera viewpoint, and background variation. Our results demonstrate that under ideal conditions, the four policies achieve 50-75% task success, with depth error as the dominant failure mode across all architectures. Among all policies, π_0 achieves the strongest results with a pretrained vision-language backbone, demonstrating superior data efficiency, greater robustness to background variation, and smoother trajectories compatible with surgical workflow. When deployed in a surgeon-robot suturing trial, π_0 yields a 92% stitch completion rate. These findings establish collaborative robotic assistance in open surgery as a feasible target for imitation learning and highlight depth perception and end-effector design as key priorities for clinical translation.

Transparent objects are common in daily life, and it is important to understand their multilayer depth, including the transparent surface and the objects behind it. Existing methods for multilayer depth typically extend single-layer prediction. They define layers by the front-to-back ordering of 3D points and predict the layers sequentially. However, as layered geometry can admit multiple valid groupings of 3D points into layers, a predefined grouping strategy is inherently restrictive. In this work, we propose SeeGroup, a multi-layer depth estimation method that avoids imposing a predefined grouping and allows the model itself to adaptively assign surfaces to depth maps. We formulate per-pixel multi-layer depth as a point process, treating depth layers as unordered events along each camera ray. This induces a permutation-invariant likelihood over the observed depth layers, yielding a loss that naturally supports arbitrary layer groupings. Experiments demonstrate that our method significantly advances the state of the art of multi-layer depth estimation, improving quadruplet relative depth accuracy on LayeredDepth benchmark from 61.34% to 70.09%. Code is available at https://github.com/princeton-vl/SeeGroup.