The deployment of large language models (LLMs) is increasingly constrained by memory and latency bottlenecks, motivating the need for quantization techniques that flexibly balance accuracy and efficiency. Recent work has introduced multi-precision models, which enable inference at multiple precisions within a single model depending on runtime constraints. To support such flexibility, quantized weights are often stored as bit-planes, where hardware efficiency improves when the compute operates directly at the bit-plane level and activates only the precision required by each request. In this work, we present AnyBCQ, a hardware-friendly multi-precision extension of Binary-Coded Quantization (BCQ) that supports direct bit-plane operations. By representing weights as binary bit-planes with corresponding scale factors, AnyBCQ enables bit-plane-level computation and maps naturally to accelerator-friendly, bit-parallel arithmetic. Our progressive precision expansion mechanism incrementally refines scaling factors while reusing previously assigned binary codes, yielding monotonic improvements in accuracy as additional bits are enabled. We further co-design a specialized kernel that exploits the BCQ structure to support dynamic per-request precision selection with negligible overhead. Experiments on recent LLMs demonstrate that AnyBCQ significantly narrows the accuracy drop in the low-bit regime (e.g. 2-bit), remains competitive at higher precision, and achieves throughput gains of up to 3.0x over half precision and 1.2x over state-of-the-art multi-precision methods. By aligning algorithmic flexibility with hardware efficiency, AnyBCQ provides a practical foundation for multi-precision LLM deployment across diverse service-level objectives.

The role of world knowledge has been particularly crucial to predict the discourse connective that marks the discourse relation between two arguments, with language models (LMs) being generally successful at this task. We flip this premise in our work, and instead study the inverse problem of understanding whether discourse connectives can inform LMs about the world. To this end, we present WUGNECTIVES, a dataset of 8,880 stimuli that evaluates LMs' inferences about novel entities in contexts where connectives link the entities to particular attributes. On investigating 17 different LMs at various scales, and training regimens, we found that tuning an LM to show reasoning behavior yields noteworthy improvements on most connectives. At the same time, there was a large variation in LMs' overall performance across connective type, with all models systematically struggling on connectives that express a concessive meaning. Our findings pave the way for more nuanced investigations into the functional role of language cues as captured by LMs. We release WUGNECTIVES at https://github.com/kanishkamisra/wugnectives

We present Kaleido, a family of generative models designed for photorealistic, unified object- and scene-level neural rendering. Kaleido operates on the principle that 3D can be regarded as a specialised sub-domain of video, expressed purely as a sequence-to-sequence image synthesis task. Through a systemic study of scaling sequence-to-sequence generative neural rendering, we introduce key architectural innovations that enable our model to: i) perform generative view synthesis without explicit 3D representations; ii) generate any number of 6-DoF target views conditioned on any number of reference views via a masked autoregressive framework; and iii) seamlessly unify 3D and video modelling within a single decoder-only rectified flow transformer. Within this unified framework, Kaleido leverages large-scale video data for pre-training, which significantly improves spatial consistency and reduces reliance on scarce, camera-labelled 3D datasets -- all without any architectural modifications. Kaleido sets a new state-of-the-art on a range of view synthesis benchmarks. Its zero-shot performance substantially outperforms other generative methods in few-view settings, and, for the first time, matches the quality of per-scene optimisation methods in many-view settings.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across vision-language tasks, yet their large-scale deployment raises pressing concerns about memorized private data, outdated knowledge, and harmful content. Existing unlearning approaches for MLLMs typically adapt training-based strategies such as gradient ascent or preference optimization, but these methods are computationally expensive, irreversible, and often distort retained knowledge. In this work, we propose MLLMEraser, an input-aware, training-free framework for test-time unlearning. Our approach leverages activation steering to enable dynamic knowledge erasure without parameter updates. Specifically, we construct a multimodal erasure direction by contrasting adversarially perturbed, knowledge-recall image-text pairs with knowledge-erasure counterparts, capturing both textual and visual discrepancies. To prevent unnecessary interference, we further design an input-aware steering mechanism that adaptively determines when and how the erasure direction should be applied, preserving utility on retained knowledge while enforcing forgetting on designated content. Experiments on LLaVA-1.5 and Qwen-2.5-VL demonstrate that MLLMEraser consistently outperforms state-of-the-art MLLM unlearning baselines, achieving stronger forgetting performance with lower computational cost and minimal utility degradation.

Quadruped mammals coordinate spinal bending and axial compression to enhance locomotion agility and efficiency. However, existing robotic spines typically lack the active compliance required to support such dynamic behaviours. We present SPARC, a compact 3-DoF sagittal-plane spine module that enables simultaneous revolute and prismatic motions within a 1.26 kg package. Using a floating-base impedance controller, we facilitate independent, task-space tuning of spinal stiffness and damping to mimic biological load-bearing strategies. Benchtop experiments confirm high-fidelity rendering of commanded impedance, with linear force-displacement error within 1.5%. Systematic locomotion simulations reveal a critical speed-dependency: while low-speed efficiency is insensitive to spinal properties, precise impedance tuning becomes indispensable for high-speed performance. Our results demonstrate that an optimally compliant spine reduces power consumption by 21% at 0.9 m/s compared to a rigid-spine baseline. This efficiency gain is mechanistically attributed to the spine's role in augmenting stride length and acting as a mechanical low-pass filter to attenuate high-frequency torque fluctuations. SPARC provides an open-source platform for systematic studies of spine compliance in legged locomotion. Available at: github.com/YueWang996/sparc

We present HunyuanImage 3.0, a native multimodal model that unifies multimodal understanding and generation within an autoregressive framework, with its image generation module publicly available. The achievement of HunyuanImage 3.0 relies on several key components, including meticulous data curation, advanced architecture design, a native Chain-of-Thoughts schema, progressive model pre-training, aggressive model post-training, and an efficient infrastructure that enables large-scale training and inference. With these advancements, we successfully trained a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model comprising over 80 billion parameters in total, with 13 billion parameters activated per token during inference, making it the largest and most powerful open-source image generative model to date. We conducted extensive experiments and the results of automatic and human evaluation of text-image alignment and visual quality demonstrate that HunyuanImage 3.0 rivals previous state-of-the-art models. By releasing the code and weights of HunyuanImage 3.0, we aim to enable the community to explore new ideas with a state-of-the-art foundation model, fostering a dynamic and vibrant multimodal ecosystem. All open source assets are publicly available at https://github.com/Tencent-Hunyuan/HunyuanImage-3.0

Multi-task learning (MTL) algorithms typically rely on schemes that combine different task losses or their gradients through weighted averaging. These methods aim to find Pareto stationary points by using heuristics that require access to task loss values, gradients, or both. In doing so, a central challenge arises because task losses can be arbitrarily scaled relative to one another, causing certain tasks to dominate training and degrade overall performance. A recent advance in cooperative bargaining theory, the Direction-based Bargaining Solution (DiBS), yields Pareto stationary solutions immune to task domination because of its invariance to monotonic nonaffine task loss transformations. However, the convergence behavior of DiBS in nonconvex MTL settings is currently not understood. To this end, we prove that under standard assumptions, a subsequence of DiBS iterates converges to a Pareto stationary point when task losses are nonconvex, and propose DiBS-MTL, an adaptation of DiBS to the MTL setting which is more computationally efficient that prior bargaining-inspired MTL approaches. Finally, we empirically show that DiBS-MTL is competitive with leading MTL methods on standard benchmarks, and it drastically outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in multiple examples with poorly-scaled task losses, highlighting the importance of invariance to nonaffine monotonic transformations of the loss landscape. Code available at https://github.com/suryakmurthy/dibs-mtl

In autoregressive language models, each token is sampled by conditioning on all the past tokens; the overall string has thus been sampled from the correct underlying joint distribution represented by the model. In contrast, masked diffusion language models generate text by unmasking tokens out of order and potentially in parallel. Generating an overall string sampled from the correct underlying joint distribution would (again) require exactly one token unmasking in every full-model forward pass. The more tokens unmasked in parallel, the further away the string is from the true joint; this can be seen in the resulting drop in accuracy (but, increase in speed). In this paper we devise a way to {\em approximately} sample multiple tokens from the joint distribution in a single full-model forward pass; we do so by developing a new lightweight single-layer ``sampler" on top of an existing large diffusion LM. One forward pass of the full model can now be followed by multiple forward passes of only this sampler layer, to yield multiple unmasked tokens. Our sampler is trained to mimic exact joint sampling from the (frozen) full model. We show the effectiveness of our approximate joint sampling for both pretrained-only (Dream-7B-Base, Llada-7B-Base) and instruction-tuned (Dream-7B-Instruct, Dream-7B-Coder) models on language modeling and math \& coding tasks. When four tokens are unmasked for each full-model denoising step, our sampling algorithm achieves a MAUVE score of 0.87 (vs marginal baseline of 0.31) with respect to the true joint distribution.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in remote sensing often fail at complex analytical tasks, a limitation stemming from their end-to-end training paradigm that bypasses crucial reasoning steps and leads to unverifiable outputs. To address this limitation, we introduce the Perceptually-Grounded Geospatial Chain-of-Thought (Geo-CoT), a framework that models remote sensing analysis as a verifiable, multi-step process. We instill this analytical process through a two-stage alignment strategy, leveraging Geo-CoT380k, the first large-scale dataset of structured Geo-CoT rationales. This strategy first employs supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to instill the foundational cognitive architecture, then leverages Group Reward Policy Optimization (GRPO) to refine the model's reasoning policy towards factual correctness. The resulting model, RSThinker, outputs both a final answer and its justifying, verifiable analytical trace. This capability yields dominant performance, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art models across a comprehensive range of tasks. The public release of our Geo-CoT380k dataset and RSThinker model upon publication serves as a concrete pathway from opaque perception towards structured, verifiable reasoning for Earth Observation.

Algorithmic recourse seeks to provide individuals with actionable recommendations that increase their chances of receiving favorable outcomes from automated decision systems (e.g., loan approvals). While prior research has emphasized robustness to model updates, considerably less attention has been given to the temporal dynamics of recourse--particularly in competitive, resource-constrained settings where recommendations shape future applicant pools. In this work, we present a novel time-aware framework for algorithmic recourse, explicitly modeling how candidate populations adapt in response to recommendations. Additionally, we introduce a novel reinforcement learning (RL)-based recourse algorithm that captures the evolving dynamics of the environment to generate recommendations that are both feasible and valid. We design our recommendations to be durable, supporting validity over a predefined time horizon T. This durability allows individuals to confidently reapply after taking time to implement the suggested changes. Through extensive experiments in complex simulation environments, we show that our approach substantially outperforms existing baselines, offering a superior balance between feasibility and long-term validity. Together, these results underscore the importance of incorporating temporal and behavioral dynamics into the design of practical recourse systems.

Industrial anomaly segmentation relies heavily on pixel-level annotations, yet real-world anomalies are often scarce, diverse, and costly to label. Segmentation-oriented industrial anomaly synthesis (SIAS) has emerged as a promising alternative; however, existing methods struggle to balance sampling efficiency and generation quality. Moreover, most approaches treat all spatial regions uniformly, overlooking the distinct statistical differences between anomaly and background areas. This uniform treatment hinders the synthesis of controllable, structure-specific anomalies tailored for segmentation tasks. In this paper, we propose FAST, a foreground-aware diffusion framework featuring two novel modules: the Anomaly-Informed Accelerated Sampling (AIAS) and the Foreground-Aware Reconstruction Module (FARM). AIAS is a training-free sampling algorithm specifically designed for segmentation-oriented industrial anomaly synthesis, which accelerates the reverse process through coarse-to-fine aggregation and enables the synthesis of state-of-the-art segmentation-oriented anomalies in as few as 10 steps. Meanwhile, FARM adaptively adjusts the anomaly-aware noise within the masked foreground regions at each sampling step, preserving localized anomaly signals throughout the denoising trajectory. Extensive experiments on multiple industrial benchmarks demonstrate that FAST consistently outperforms existing anomaly synthesis methods in downstream segmentation tasks. We release the code at: https://github.com/Chhro123/fast-foreground-aware-anomaly-synthesis.

Managing natural resources and mitigating risks from floods, droughts, wildfires, and landslides require models that can accurately predict climate-driven land-surface responses. Traditional models often struggle with spatial generalization because they are trained or calibrated on limited observations and can degrade under concept drift. Recently proposed vision foundation models trained on satellite imagery demand massive compute, and they are not designed for dynamic land surface prediction tasks. We introduce StefaLand, a generative spatiotemporal Earth representation learning model centered on learning cross-domain interactions to suppress overfitting. StefaLand demonstrates especially strong spatial generalization on five datasets across four important tasks: streamflow, soil moisture, soil composition and landslides, compared to previous state-of-the-art methods. The domain-inspired design choices include a location-aware masked autoencoder that fuses static and time-series inputs, an attribute-based rather than image-based representation that drastically reduces compute demands, and residual fine-tuning adapters that strengthen knowledge transfer across tasks. StefaLand can be pretrained and finetuned on commonly available academic compute resources, yet consistently outperforms state-of-the-art supervised learning baselines, fine-tuned vision foundation models and commercially available embeddings, highlighting the previously overlooked value of cross-domain interactions and providing assistance to data-poor regions of the world.

Because of the variabilities of real-world image structures under the natural image transformations that arise when observing similar objects or spatio-temporal events under different viewing conditions, the receptive field responses computed in the earliest layers of the visual hierarchy may be strongly influenced by such geometric image transformations. One way of handling this variability is by basing the vision system on covariant receptive field families, which expand the receptive field shapes over the degrees of freedom in the image transformations. This paper addresses the problem of deriving relationships between spatial and spatio-temporal receptive field responses obtained for different values of the shape parameters in the resulting multi-parameter families of receptive fields. For this purpose, we derive both (i) infinitesimal relationships, roughly corresponding to a combination of notions from semi-groups and Lie groups, as well as (ii) macroscopic cascade smoothing properties, which describe how receptive field responses at coarser spatial and temporal scales can be computed by applying smaller support incremental filters to the output from corresponding receptive fields at finer spatial and temporal scales, structurally related to the notion of Lie algebras, although with directional preferences. The presented results provide (i) a deeper understanding of the relationships between spatial and spatio-temporal receptive field responses for different values of the filter parameters, which can be used for both (ii) designing more efficient schemes for computing receptive field responses over populations of multi-parameter families of receptive fields, as well as (iii)~formulating idealized theoretical models of the computations of simple cells in biological vision.

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization provides a powerful framework for problems where explicit gradients are unavailable and have to be approximated using only queries to function value. The prevalent single-query approach is simple, but suffers from high estimation variance, motivating a multi-query paradigm to improve estimation accuracy. This, however, creates a critical trade-off: under a fixed budget of queries (i.e. cost), queries per iteration and the total number of optimization iterations are inversely proportional to one another. How to best allocate this budget is a fundamental, under-explored question. This work systematically resolves this query allocation problem. We analyze two aggregation methods: the de facto simple averaging (ZO-Avg), and a new Projection Alignment method (ZO-Align) we derive from local surrogate minimization. By deriving convergence rates for both methods that make the dependence on the number of queries explicit across strongly convex, convex, non-convex, and stochastic settings, we uncover a stark dichotomy: For ZO-Avg, we prove that using more than one query per iteration is always query-inefficient, rendering the single-query approach optimal. On the contrary, ZO-Align generally performs better with more queries per iteration, resulting in a full-subspace estimation as the optimal approach. Thus, our work clarifies that the multi-query problem boils down to a choice not about an intermediate query size, but between two classic algorithms, a choice dictated entirely by the aggregation method used. These theoretical findings are also consistently validated by extensive experiments.

High memory demands of generative language models have drawn attention to quantization, which reduces computational cost, memory usage, and latency by mapping model weights to lower-precision integers. Approaches such as GPTQ effectively minimize input-weight product errors during quantization; however, recent empirical studies show that they can increase biased outputs and degrade performance on fairness benchmarks, and it remains unclear which specific weights cause this issue. In this work, we draw new links between quantization and model fairness by adding explicit group-fairness constraints to the quantization objective and introduce Fair-GPTQ, the first quantization method explicitly designed to reduce unfairness in large language models. The added constraints guide the learning of the rounding operation toward less-biased text generation for protected groups. Specifically, we focus on stereotype generation involving occupational bias and discriminatory language spanning gender, race, and religion. Fair-GPTQ has minimal impact on performance, preserving at least 90% of baseline accuracy on zero-shot benchmarks, reduces unfairness relative to a half-precision model, and retains the memory and speed benefits of 4-bit quantization. We also compare the performance of Fair-GPTQ with existing debiasing methods and find that it achieves performance on par with the iterative null-space projection debiasing approach on racial-stereotype benchmarks. Overall, the results validate our theoretical solution to the quantization problem with a group-bias term, highlight its applicability for reducing group bias at quantization time in generative models, and demonstrate that our approach can further be used to analyze channel- and weight-level contributions to fairness during quantization.

Natural Language Understanding (NLU) for low-resource languages remains a major challenge in NLP due to the scarcity of high-quality data and language-specific models. Maithili, despite being spoken by millions, lacks adequate computational resources, limiting its inclusion in digital and AI-driven applications. To address this gap, we introducemaiBERT, a BERT-based language model pre-trained specifically for Maithili using the Masked Language Modeling (MLM) technique. Our model is trained on a newly constructed Maithili corpus and evaluated through a news classification task. In our experiments, maiBERT achieved an accuracy of 87.02%, outperforming existing regional models like NepBERTa and HindiBERT, with a 0.13% overall accuracy gain and 5-7% improvement across various classes. We have open-sourced maiBERT on Hugging Face enabling further fine-tuning for downstream tasks such as sentiment analysis and Named Entity Recognition (NER).

Obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA) is a prevalent condition with significant health consequences, yet many patients remain undiagnosed due to the complexity and cost of over-night polysomnography. Acoustic-based screening provides a scalable alternative, yet performance is limited by environmental noise and the lack of physiological context. Respiratory effort is a key signal used in clinical scoring of OSA events, but current approaches require additional contact sensors that reduce scalability and patient comfort. This paper presents the first study to estimate respiratory effort directly from nocturnal audio, enabling physiological context to be recovered from sound alone. We propose a latent-space fusion framework that integrates the estimated effort embeddings with acoustic features for OSA detection. Using a dataset of 157 nights from 103 participants recorded in home environments, our respiratory effort estimator achieves a concordance correlation coefficient of 0.48, capturing meaningful respiratory dynamics. Fusing effort and audio improves sensitivity and AUC over audio-only baselines, especially at low apnoea-hypopnoea index thresholds. The proposed approach requires only smartphone audio at test time, which enables sensor-free, scalable, and longitudinal OSA monitoring.

Advancing research in fields such as Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) and autonomous navigation critically depends on the availability of reliable and reproducible multimodal datasets. While several influential datasets have driven progress in these domains, they often suffer from limitations in sensing modalities, environmental diversity, and the reproducibility of the underlying hardware setups. To address these challenges, this paper introduces SMapper, a novel open-hardware, multi-sensor platform designed explicitly for, though not limited to, SLAM research. The device integrates synchronized LiDAR, multi-camera, and inertial sensing, supported by a robust calibration and synchronization pipeline that ensures precise spatio-temporal alignment across modalities. Its open and replicable design allows researchers to extend its capabilities and reproduce experiments across both handheld and robot-mounted scenarios. To demonstrate its practicality, we additionally release SMapper-light, a publicly available SLAM dataset containing representative indoor and outdoor sequences. The dataset includes tightly synchronized multimodal data and ground truth trajectories derived from offline LiDAR-based SLAM with sub-centimeter accuracy, alongside dense 3D reconstructions. Furthermore, the paper contains benchmarking results on state-of-the-art LiDAR and visual SLAM frameworks using the SMapper-light dataset. By combining open-hardware design, reproducible data collection, and comprehensive benchmarking, SMapper establishes a robust foundation for advancing SLAM algorithm development, evaluation, and reproducibility. The project's documentation, including source code, CAD models, and dataset links, is publicly available at https://snt-arg.github.io/smapper_docs.

Scaling language models to longer contexts is essential for capturing rich dependencies across extended discourse. However, naïve context extension imposes significant computational and memory burdens, often resulting in inefficiencies during both training and inference. In this work, we propose CCF, a novel context compression framework designed to enable efficient long-context modeling by learning hierarchical latent representations that preserve global semantics while aggressively reducing input redundancy. CCF integrates segment-wise semantic aggregation with key-value memory encoding, forming compact representations that support accurate reconstruction and long-range understanding. To further enhance scalability, we introduce a training-efficient optimization strategy that couples incremental segment decoding with sparse reservoir sampling, substantially reducing memory overhead without degrading performance. Empirical results on multiple long-context language modeling benchmarks demonstrate that CCF achieves competitive perplexity under high compression ratios, and significantly improves throughput and memory efficiency compared to existing approaches. These findings highlight the potential of structured compression for scalable and effective long-context language modeling.

The mechanisms by which reasoning training reshapes LLMs' internal computations remain unclear. We study lightweight steering vectors inserted into the base model's residual stream and trained with a reinforcement-learning objective. These vectors explain a large portion of full fine-tuning performance increase while preserving the interpretability of small, additive interventions. We find that (i) the last-layer steering vector acts like a token-substitution bias concentrated on the first generated token, consistently boosting tokens such as "To" and "Step"; (ii) the penultimate-layer vector leaves attention patterns largely intact and instead operates through the MLP and unembedding, preferentially up-weighting process words and structure symbols; and (iii) the steering vectors transfer to other models from the same family. Taken together, these results deepen understanding of how trained steering vectors shape computation and should inform future work in activation engineering and the study of reasoning models.

Text-to-image diffusion models can generate stunning visuals, yet they often fail at tasks children find trivial--like placing a dog to the right of a teddy bear rather than to the left. When combinations get more unusual--a giraffe above an airplane--these failures become even more pronounced. Existing methods attempt to fix these spatial reasoning failures through model fine-tuning or test-time optimization with handcrafted losses that are suboptimal. Rather than imposing our assumptions about spatial encoding, we propose learning these objectives directly from the model's internal representations. We introduce Learn-to-Steer, a novel framework that learns data-driven objectives for test-time optimization rather than handcrafting them. Our key insight is to train a lightweight classifier that decodes spatial relationships from the diffusion model's cross-attention maps, then deploy this classifier as a learned loss function during inference. Training such classifiers poses a surprising challenge: they can take shortcuts by detecting linguistic traces in the cross-attention maps, rather than learning true spatial patterns. We solve this by augmenting our training data with samples generated using prompts with incorrect relation words, which encourages the classifier to avoid linguistic shortcuts and learn spatial patterns from the attention maps. Our method dramatically improves spatial accuracy: from 20% to 61% on FLUX.1-dev and from 7% to 54% on SD2.1 across standard benchmarks. It also generalizes to multiple relations with significantly improved accuracy.

Despite the programmable architecture of Open RAN, today's deployments still rely heavily on static control and manual operations. To move beyond this limitation, we introduce AgentRAN, an AI-native, Open RAN-aligned agentic framework that generates and orchestrates a fabric of distributed AI agents based on natural language intents. Unlike traditional approaches that require explicit programming, AgentRAN's LLM-powered agents interpret natural language intents, negotiate strategies through structured conversations, and orchestrate control loops across the network. AgentRAN instantiates a self-organizing hierarchy of agents that decompose complex intents across time scales (from sub-millisecond to minutes), spatial domains (cell to network-wide), and protocol layers (PHY/MAC to RRC). A central innovation is the AI-RAN Factory, which continuously generates improved agents and algorithms from operational data, transforming the network into a system that evolves its own intelligence. We validate AgentRAN through live 5G experiments, demonstrating dynamic adaptation to changing operator intents across power control and scheduling. Key benefits include transparent decision-making (all agent reasoning is auditable), bootstrapped intelligence (no initial training data required), and continuous self-improvement via the AI-RAN Factory.

Alzheimer's disease is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that remains challenging to predict due to its multifactorial etiology and the complexity of multimodal clinical data. Accurate forecasting of clinically relevant biomarkers, including diagnostic and quantitative measures, is essential for effective monitoring of disease progression. This work introduces L2C-TabPFN, a method that integrates a longitudinal-to-cross-sectional (L2C) transformation with a pre-trained Tabular Foundation Model (TabPFN) to predict Alzheimer's disease outcomes using the TADPOLE dataset. L2C-TabPFN converts sequential patient records into fixed-length feature vectors, enabling robust prediction of diagnosis, cognitive scores, and ventricular volume. Experimental results demonstrate that, while L2C-TabPFN achieves competitive performance on diagnostic and cognitive outcomes, it provides state-of-the-art results in ventricular volume prediction. This key imaging biomarker reflects neurodegeneration and progression in Alzheimer's disease. These findings highlight the potential of tabular foundational models for advancing longitudinal prediction of clinically relevant imaging markers in Alzheimer's disease.

Pathology foundation models (PFMs) achieve strong performance on diverse histopathology tasks, but their sensitivity to hospital-specific domain shifts remains underexplored. We systematically evaluate state-of-the-art PFMs on TCGA patch-level datasets and introduce a lightweight adversarial adaptor to remove hospital-related domain information from latent representations. Experiments show that, while disease classification accuracy is largely maintained, the adaptor effectively reduces hospital-specific bias, as confirmed by t-SNE visualizations. Our study establishes a benchmark for assessing cross-hospital robustness in PFMs and provides a practical strategy for enhancing generalization under heterogeneous clinical settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/MengRes/pfm_domain_bias.

This paper presents a control framework designed to enhance the stability and robustness of legged robots in the presence of uncertainties, including model uncertainties, external disturbances, and faults. The framework enables the full-state feedback estimator to estimate and compensate for uncertainties in the whole-body dynamics of the legged robots. First, we propose a novel moving horizon extended state observer (MH-ESO) to estimate uncertainties and mitigate noise in legged systems, which can be integrated into the framework for disturbance compensation. Second, we introduce a three-level whole-body disturbance rejection control framework (T-WB-DRC). Unlike the previous two-level approach, this three-level framework considers both the plan based on whole-body dynamics without uncertainties and the plan based on dynamics with uncertainties, significantly improving payload transportation, external disturbance rejection, and fault tolerance. Third, simulations of both humanoid and quadruped robots in the Gazebo simulator demonstrate the effectiveness and versatility of T-WB-DRC. Finally, extensive experimental trials on a quadruped robot validate the robustness and stability of the system when using T-WB-DRC under various disturbance conditions.

Symmetry-aware architectures are central to geometric deep learning. We present a systematic approach for constructing continuous rotationally invariant and equivariant functions using symmetric tensor networks. The proposed framework supports inputs and outputs given as a tuple of Cartesian tensors of different rank as well as spherical tensors of different type. We introduce tensor network generators for invariant maps and obtain equivariant maps via differentiation. Specifically, we derive general continuous equivariant maps from vector inputs to Cartesian or spherical tensor output. Finally, we clarify how common equivariant primitives in geometric graph neural networks arise within our construction.

Coupon distribution is a critical marketing strategy used by online platforms to boost revenue and enhance user engagement. Regrettably, existing coupon distribution strategies fall far short of effectively leveraging the complex sequential interactions between platforms and users. This critical oversight, despite the abundance of e-commerce log data, has precipitated a performance plateau. In this paper, we focus on the scene that the platforms make sequential coupon distribution decision multiple times for various users, with each user interacting with the platform repeatedly. Based on this scenario, we propose a novel marketing framework, named \textbf{S}equence-\textbf{A}ware \textbf{C}onstrained \textbf{O}ptimization (SACO) framework, to directly devise coupon distribution policy for long-term revenue boosting. SACO framework enables optimized online decision-making in a variety of real-world marketing scenarios. It achieves this by seamlessly integrating three key characteristics, general scenarios, sequential modeling with more comprehensive historical data, and efficient iterative updates within a unified framework. Furthermore, empirical results on real-world industrial dataset, alongside public and synthetic datasets demonstrate the superiority of our framework.

Understanding biases and stereotypes encoded in the weights of Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial for developing effective mitigation strategies. However, biased behaviour is often subtle and non-trivial to isolate, even when deliberately elicited, making systematic analysis and debiasing particularly challenging. To address this, we introduce \texttt{BiasGym}, a simple, cost-effective, and generalizable framework for reliably and safely injecting, analyzing, and mitigating conceptual associations of biases within LLMs. \texttt{BiasGym} consists of two components: \texttt{BiasInject}, which safely injects specific biases into the model via token-based fine-tuning while keeping the model frozen, and \texttt{BiasScope}, which leverages these injected signals to identify and reliably steer the components responsible for biased behavior. Our method enables consistent bias elicitation for mechanistic analysis, supports targeted debiasing without degrading performance on downstream tasks, and generalizes to biases unseen during fine-tuning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of BiasGym in reducing real-world stereotypes (e.g., people from Italy being `reckless drivers'), showing its utility for both safety interventions and interpretability research.

Video quality assessment (VQA) aims to objectively quantify perceptual quality degradation in alignment with human visual perception. Despite recent advances, existing VQA models still suffer from two critical limitations: \textit{poor generalization to out-of-distribution (OOD) videos} and \textit{limited explainability}, which restrict their applicability in real-world scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{VQAThinker}, a reasoning-based VQA framework that leverages large multimodal models (LMMs) with reinforcement learning to jointly model video quality understanding and scoring, emulating human perceptual decision-making. Specifically, we adopt group relative policy optimization (GRPO), a rule-guided reinforcement learning algorithm that enables reasoning over video quality under score-level supervision, and introduce three VQA-specific rewards: (1) a \textbf{bell-shaped regression reward} that increases rapidly as the prediction error decreases and becomes progressively less sensitive near the ground truth; (2) a \textbf{pairwise ranking reward} that guides the model to correctly determine the relative quality between video pairs; and (3) a \textbf{temporal consistency reward} that encourages the model to prefer temporally coherent videos over their perturbed counterparts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VQAThinker achieves state-of-the-art performance on both in-domain and OOD VQA benchmarks, showing strong generalization for video quality scoring. Furthermore, evaluations on video quality understanding tasks validate its superiority in distortion attribution and quality description compared to existing explainable VQA models and LMMs. These findings demonstrate that reinforcement learning offers an effective pathway toward building generalizable and explainable VQA models solely with score-level supervision.

Large-scale tuberculosis (TB) screening is limited by the high cost and operational complexity of traditional diagnostics, creating a need for artificial-intelligence solutions. We propose DeepGB-TB, a non-invasive system that instantly assigns TB risk scores using only cough audio and basic demographic data. The model couples a lightweight one-dimensional convolutional neural network for audio processing with a gradient-boosted decision tree for tabular features. Its principal innovation is a Cross-Modal Bidirectional Cross-Attention module (CM-BCA) that iteratively exchanges salient cues between modalities, emulating the way clinicians integrate symptoms and risk factors. To meet the clinical priority of minimizing missed cases, we design a Tuberculosis Risk-Balanced Loss (TRBL) that places stronger penalties on false-negative predictions, thereby reducing high-risk misclassifications. DeepGB-TB is evaluated on a diverse dataset of 1,105 patients collected across seven countries, achieving an AUROC of 0.903 and an F1-score of 0.851, representing a new state of the art. Its computational efficiency enables real-time, offline inference directly on common mobile devices, making it ideal for low-resource settings. Importantly, the system produces clinically validated explanations that promote trust and adoption by frontline health workers. By coupling AI innovation with public-health requirements for speed, affordability, and reliability, DeepGB-TB offers a tool for advancing global TB control.