Simultaneous multi-slice (SMS) imaging with in-plane undersampling enables highly accelerated MRI but yields a strongly coupled inverse problem with deterministic inter-slice interference and missing k-space data. Most diffusion-based reconstructions are formulated around Gaussian-noise corruption and rely on additional consistency steps to incorporate SMS physics, which can be mismatched to the operator-governed degradations in SMS acquisition. We propose an operator-guided framework that models the degradation trajectory using known acquisition operators and inverts this process via deterministic updates. Within this framework, we introduce an operator-conditional dual-stream interaction network (OCDI-Net) that explicitly disentangles target-slice content from inter-slice interference and predicts structured degradations for operator-aligned inversion, and we instantiate reconstruction as a two-stage chained inference procedure that performs SMS slice separation followed by in-plane completion. Experiments on fastMRI brain data and prospectively acquired in vivo diffusion MRI data demonstrate improved fidelity and reduced slice leakage over conventional and learning-based SMS reconstructions.

As AI-generated images proliferate across digital platforms, reliable detection methods have become critical for combating misinformation and maintaining content authenticity. While numerous deepfake detection methods have been proposed, existing benchmarks predominantly evaluate fine-tuned models, leaving a critical gap in understanding out-of-the-box performance -- the most common deployment scenario for practitioners. We present the first comprehensive zero-shot evaluation of 16 state-of-the-art detection methods, comprising 23 pretrained detector variants (due to multiple released versions of certain detectors), across 12 diverse datasets, comprising 2.6~million image samples spanning 291 unique generators including modern diffusion models. Our systematic analysis reveals striking findings: (1)~no universal winner exists, with detector rankings exhibiting substantial instability (Spearman~$ρ$: 0.01 -- 0.87 across dataset pairs); (2)~a 37~percentage-point performance gap separates the best detector (75.0\% mean accuracy) from the worst (37.5\%); (3)~training data alignment critically impacts generalization, causing up to 20--60\% performance variance within architecturally identical detector families; (4)~modern commercial generators (Flux~Dev, Firefly~v4, Midjourney~v7) defeat most detectors, achieving only 18--30\% average accuracy; and (5)~we identify three systematic failure patterns affecting cross-dataset generalization. Statistical analysis confirms significant performance differences between detectors (Friedman test: $χ^2$=121.01, $p<10^{-16}$, Kendall~$W$=0.524). Our findings challenge the ``one-size-fits-all'' detector paradigm and provide actionable deployment guidelines, demonstrating that practitioners must carefully select detectors based on their specific threat landscape rather than relying on published benchmark performance.

While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive performance across various tasks, their deployment in real-world scenarios is still constrained by high computational demands. Layer-wise pruning, a commonly employed strategy to mitigate inference costs, can partially address this challenge. However, existing approaches generally depend on static heuristic rules and fail to account for the interdependencies among layers, thereby limiting the effectiveness of the pruning process. To this end, this paper proposes a game-theoretic framework that formulates layer pruning as a cooperative game in which each layer acts as a player and model performance serves as the utility. As computing exact Shapley values is computationally infeasible for large language models (LLMs), we propose using a lightweight surrogate network to estimate layer-wise marginal contributions. This network can predict LLM performance for arbitrary layer combinations at a low computational cost. Additionally, we employ stratified Monte Carlo mask sampling to further reduce the cost of Sharpley value estimation. This approach captures inter-layer dependencies and dynamically identifies critical layers for pruning. Extensive experiments demonstrate the consistent superiority of our method in terms of perplexity and zero-shot accuracy, achieving more efficient and effective layer-wise pruning for large language models.

Transformers have revolutionized natural language processing, but their use for numerical computation has received less attention. We study the approximation of matrix functions, which map scalar functions to matrices, using neural networks including transformers. We focus on functions mapping square matrices to square matrices of the same dimension. These types of matrix functions appear throughout scientific computing, e.g., the matrix exponential in continuous-time Markov chains and the matrix sign function in stability analysis of dynamical systems. In this paper, we make two contributions. First, we prove bounds on the width and depth of ReLU networks needed to approximate the matrix exponential to an arbitrary precision. Second, we show experimentally that a transformer encoder-decoder with suitable numerical encodings can approximate certain matrix functions at a relative error of 5% with high probability. Our study reveals that the encoding scheme strongly affects performance, with different schemes working better for different functions.

Demographic skews in human preference data propagate systematic unfairness through reward models into aligned LLMs. We introduce Fairness Aware Reward Optimization (Faro), an in-processing framework that trains reward models under demographic parity, equalized odds, or counterfactual fairness constraints. We provide the first theoretical analysis of reward-level fairness in LLM alignment, establishing: (i) provable fairness certificates for Faro-trained rewards with controllable slack; a (ii) formal characterization of the accuracy-fairness trade-off induced by KL-regularized fine-tuning, proving fairness transfers from reward to policy; and the (iii) existence of a non-empty Pareto frontier. Unlike pre- and post-processing methods, Faro ensures reward models are simultaneously ordinal (ranking correctly), cardinal (calibrated), and fair. Across multiple LLMs and benchmarks, Faro significantly reduces bias and harmful generations while maintaining or improving model quality.

Detecting anomalies in tabular data is critical for many real-world applications, such as credit card fraud detection. With the rapid advancements in large language models (LLMs), state-of-the-art performance in tabular anomaly detection has been achieved by converting tabular data into text and fine-tuning LLMs. However, these methods randomly order columns during conversion, without considering the causal relationships between them, which is crucial for accurately detecting anomalies. In this paper, we present CausalTaD, a method that injects causal knowledge into LLMs for tabular anomaly detection. We first identify the causal relationships between columns and reorder them to align with these causal relationships. This reordering can be modeled as a linear ordering problem. Since each column contributes differently to the causal relationships, we further propose a reweighting strategy to assign different weights to different columns to enhance this effect. Experiments across more than 30 datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods. The code for CausalTAD is available at https://github.com/350234/CausalTAD.

Eliciting reasoning has emerged as a powerful technique for improving the performance of large language models (LLMs) on complex tasks by inducing thinking. However, their effectiveness in realistic user-engaged agent scenarios remains unclear. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive study on the effect of explicit thinking in user-engaged LLM agents. Our experiments span across seven models, three benchmarks, and two thinking instantiations, and we evaluate them through both a quantitative response taxonomy analysis and qualitative failure propagation case studies. Contrary to expectations, we find that mandatory thinking often backfires on agents in user-engaged settings, causing anomalous performance degradation across various LLMs. Our key finding reveals that thinking makes agents more ``introverted'' by shortening responses and reducing information disclosure to users, which weakens agent-user information exchange and leads to downstream task failures. Furthermore, we demonstrate that explicitly prompting for information disclosure reliably improves performance across diverse model families, suggesting that proactive transparency is a vital lever for agent optimization. Overall, our study suggests that information transparency awareness is a crucial yet underexplored perspective for the future design of reasoning agents in real-world scenarios. Our code is available at https://github.com/deeplearning-wisc/Thinking-Agent.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are typically trained on a diverse set of multi-modal domains, yet current practices rely on costly manual tuning. We propose MaD-Mix, a principled and computationally efficient framework that derives multi-modal data mixtures for VLM training. MaD-Mix formulates data mixing as modality-aware domain alignment maximization and obtains closed-form multi-modal alignment scores from the Fenchel dual through inter-modal coupling variables. MaD-Mix systematically handles domains with missing modalities, allowing for the integration of language-only domains. Empirical evaluations across 0.5B and 7B models demonstrate that MaD-Mix accelerates VLM training across diverse benchmarks. MaD-Mix matches human-tuned data mixtures using 22% fewer training steps in image-text instruction tuning. In complex tri-modal video-image-text scenarios, where manual tuning becomes impractical, MaD-Mix boosts average accuracy over uniform weights, with negligible mixture computation overhead (< 1 GPU-hour), enabling scalable mixture design for modern VLM pipelines.

We present Minitap, a multi-agent system that achieves 100% success on the AndroidWorld benchmark, the first to fully solve all 116 tasks and surpassing human performance (80%). We first analyze why single-agent architectures fail: context pollution from mixed reasoning traces, silent text input failures undetected by the agent, and repetitive action loops without escape. Minitap addresses each failure through targeted mechanisms: cognitive separation across six specialized agents, deterministic post-validation of text input against device state, and meta-cognitive reasoning that detects cycles and triggers strategy changes. Ablations show multi-agent decomposition contributes +21 points over single-agent baselines; verified execution adds +7 points; meta-cognition adds +9 points. We release Minitap as open-source software. https://github.com/minitap-ai/mobile-use

Personalizing large language models (LLMs) to individual users requires incorporating extensive interaction histories and profiles, but input token constraints make this impractical due to high inference latency and API costs. Existing approaches rely on heuristic methods such as selecting recent interactions or prompting summarization models to compress user profiles. However, these methods treat context as a monolithic whole and fail to consider how LLMs internally process and prioritize different profile components. We investigate whether LLMs' attention patterns can effectively identify important personalization signals for intelligent context compression. Through preliminary studies on representative personalization tasks, we discover that (a) LLMs' attention patterns naturally reveal important signals, and (b) fine-tuning enhances LLMs' ability to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant information. Based on these insights, we propose Attn-GS, an attention-guided context compression framework that leverages attention feedback from a marking model to mark important personalization sentences, then guides a compression model to generate task-relevant, high-quality compressed user contexts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Attn-GS significantly outperforms various baselines across different tasks, token limits, and settings, achieving performance close to using full context while reducing token usage by 50 times.

In this study, we address vision-language-guided multi-robot cooperative transport, where each robot grounds natural-language instructions from onboard camera observations. A key challenge in this decentralized setting is perceptual misalignment across robots, where viewpoint differences and language ambiguity can yield inconsistent interpretations and degrade cooperative transport. To mitigate this problem, we adopt a dependent leader-follower design, where one robot serves as the leader and the other as the follower. Although such a leader-follower structure appears straightforward, learning with independent and symmetric agents often yields symmetric or unstable behaviors without explicit inductive biases. To address this challenge, we propose Consistent Leader-Follower (CoLF), a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) framework for stable leader-follower role differentiation. CoLF consists of two key components: (1) an asymmetric policy design that induces leader-follower role differentiation, and (2) a mutual-information-based training objective that maximizes a variational lower bound, encouraging the follower to predict the leader's action from its local observation. The leader and follower policies are jointly optimized under the centralized training and decentralized execution (CTDE) framework to balance task execution and consistent cooperative behaviors. We validate CoLF in both simulation and real-robot experiments using two quadruped robots. The demonstration video is available at https://sites.google.com/view/colf/.

Recent deep search agents built on large reasoning models (LRMs) excel at complex question answering by iteratively planning, acting, and gathering evidence, a capability known as search-integrated reasoning. However, mainstream approaches often train this ability using only outcome-based supervision, neglecting the quality of intermediate thoughts and actions. We introduce SRR-Judge, a framework for reliable step-level assessment of reasoning and search actions. Integrated into a modified ReAct-style rate-and-refine workflow, SRR-Judge provides fine-grained guidance for search-integrated reasoning and enables efficient post-training annotation. Using SRR-annotated data, we apply an iterative rejection sampling fine-tuning procedure to enhance the deep search capability of the base agent. Empirically, SRR-Judge delivers more reliable step-level evaluations than much larger models such as DeepSeek-V3.1, with its ratings showing strong correlation with final answer correctness. Moreover, aligning the policy with SRR-Judge annotated trajectories leads to substantial performance gains, yielding over a 10 percent average absolute pass@1 improvement across challenging deep search benchmarks.

Instrumental variables (IVs) are crucial for addressing unobservable confounders, yet their stringent exogeneity assumptions pose significant challenges in networked data. Existing methods typically rely on modelling neighbour information when recovering IVs, thereby inevitably mixing shared environment-induced endogenous correlations and individual-specific exogenous variation, leading the resulting IVs to inherit dependence on unobserved confounders and to violate exogeneity. To overcome this challenge, we propose $\underline{Dis}$entangled $\underline{I}$nstrumental $\underline{V}$ariables (DisIV) framework, a novel method for causal inference based on networked observational data with latent confounders. DisIV exploits network homogeneity as an inductive bias and employs a structural disentanglement mechanism to extract individual-specific components that serve as latent IVs. The causal validity of the extracted IVs is constrained through explicit orthogonality and exclusion conditions. Extensive semi-synthetic experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that DisIV consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in causal effect estimation under network-induced confounding.

Multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) seeks to learn policies that balance multiple, often conflicting objectives. Although a single preference-conditioned policy is the most flexible and scalable solution, existing approaches remain brittle in practice, frequently failing to recover complete Pareto fronts. We show that this failure stems from two structural issues in current methods: destructive gradient interference caused by premature scalarization and representational collapse across the preference space. We introduce $D^3PO$, a PPO-based framework that reorganizes multi-objective policy optimization to address these issues directly. $D^3PO$ preserves per-objective learning signals through a decomposed optimization pipeline and integrates preferences only after stabilization, enabling reliable credit assignment. In addition, a scaled diversity regularizer enforces sensitivity of policy behavior to preference changes, preventing collapse. Across standard MORL benchmarks, including high-dimensional and many-objective control tasks, $D^3PO$ consistently discovers broader and higher-quality Pareto fronts than prior single- and multi-policy methods, matching or exceeding state-of-the-art hypervolume and expected utility while using a single deployable policy.

The statelessness of foundation models bottlenecks agentic systems' ability to continually learn, a core capability for long-horizon reasoning and adaptation. To address this limitation, agentic systems commonly incorporate memory modules to retain and reuse past experience, aiming for continual learning during test time. However, most existing memory designs are human-crafted and fixed, which limits their ability to adapt to the diversity and non-stationarity of real-world tasks. In this paper, we introduce ALMA (Automated meta-Learning of Memory designs for Agentic systems), a framework that meta-learns memory designs to replace hand-engineered memory designs, therefore minimizing human effort and enabling agentic systems to be continual learners across diverse domains. Our approach employs a Meta Agent that searches over memory designs expressed as executable code in an open-ended manner, theoretically allowing the discovery of arbitrary memory designs, including database schemas as well as their retrieval and update mechanisms. Extensive experiments across four sequential decision-making domains demonstrate that the learned memory designs enable more effective and efficient learning from experience than state-of-the-art human-crafted memory designs on all benchmarks. When developed and deployed safely, ALMA represents a step toward self-improving AI systems that learn to be adaptive, continual learners.

Program code serves as a bridge linking vision and logic, providing a feasible supervisory approach for enhancing the multimodal reasoning capability of large models through geometric operations such as auxiliary line construction and perspective transformation. Nevertheless, current inverse graphics methods face tremendous challenges in accurately reconstructing complex geometric details, which often results in the loss of key geometric constraints or structural distortion. To address this bottleneck, we propose Geo-coder -- the first inverse programming framework for geometric images based on a multi-agent system. Our method innovatively decouples the process into geometric modeling via pixel-wise anchoring and metric-driven code evolution: Stage 1 leverages the complementary advantages of visual operators and large models to achieve precise capture of pixel coordinates and visual attributes; Stage 2 introduces a synthesis-rendering-validation closed loop, where bidirectional visual feedback drives the self-correction of code. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Geo-coder achieves a substantial lead in both geometric reconstruction accuracy and visual consistency. Notably, by effectively preserving the core geometric semantics, the images reconstructed with our method exhibit equivalent performance to the original ones in multimodal reasoning tasks, which fully validates the robustness of the framework. Finally, to further reduce research costs, we have open-sourced the Geo-coder dataset constructed on the GeoCode framework, which contains more than 1,500 samples. On this basis, we have also open-sourced the GeocodeLM model, laying a solid data and model foundation for subsequent research in this field.

Detecting symmetry is crucial for effective object grasping for several reasons. Recognizing symmetrical features or axes within an object helps in developing efficient grasp strategies, as grasping along these axes typically results in a more stable and balanced grip, thereby facilitating successful manipulation. This paper employs geometrical moments to identify symmetries and estimate orthogonal transformations, including rotations and mirror transformations, for objects centered at the frame origin. It provides distinctive metrics for detecting symmetries and estimating orthogonal transformations, encompassing rotations, reflections, and their combinations. A comprehensive methodology is developed to obtain these functions in n-dimensional space, specifically moment \( n \)-tuples. Extensive validation tests are conducted on both 2D and 3D objects to ensure the robustness and reliability of the proposed approach. The proposed method is also compared to state-of-the-art work using iterative optimization for detecting multiple planes of symmetry. The results indicate that combining our method with the iterative one yields satisfactory outcomes in terms of the number of symmetry planes detected and computation time.

We present TerraBind, a foundation model for protein-ligand structure and binding affinity prediction that achieves 26-fold faster inference than state-of-the-art methods while improving affinity prediction accuracy by $\sim$20\%. Current deep learning approaches to structure-based drug design rely on expensive all-atom diffusion to generate 3D coordinates, creating inference bottlenecks that render large-scale compound screening computationally intractable. We challenge this paradigm with a critical hypothesis: full all-atom resolution is unnecessary for accurate small molecule pose and binding affinity prediction. TerraBind tests this hypothesis through a coarse pocket-level representation (protein C$_β$ atoms and ligand heavy atoms only) within a multimodal architecture combining COATI-3 molecular encodings and ESM-2 protein embeddings that learns rich structural representations, which are used in a diffusion-free optimization module for pose generation and a binding affinity likelihood prediction module. On structure prediction benchmarks (FoldBench, PoseBusters, Runs N' Poses), TerraBind matches diffusion-based baselines in ligand pose accuracy. Crucially, TerraBind outperforms Boltz-2 by $\sim$20\% in Pearson correlation for binding affinity prediction on both a public benchmark (CASP16) and a diverse proprietary dataset (18 biochemical/cell assays). We show that the affinity prediction module also provides well-calibrated affinity uncertainty estimates, addressing a critical gap in reliable compound prioritization for drug discovery. Furthermore, this module enables a continual learning framework and a hedged batch selection strategy that, in simulated drug discovery cycles, achieves 6$\times$ greater affinity improvement of selected molecules over greedy-based approaches.

Modern data workflows are inherently adaptive, repeatedly querying the same dataset to refine and validate sequential decisions, but such adaptivity can lead to overfitting and invalid statistical inference. Adaptive Data Analysis (ADA) mechanisms address this challenge; however, there is a fundamental tension between computational efficiency and sample complexity. For $T$ rounds of adaptive analysis, computationally efficient algorithms typically incur suboptimal $O(\sqrt{T})$ sample complexity, whereas statistically optimal $O(\log T)$ algorithms are computationally intractable under standard cryptographic assumptions. In this work, we shed light on this trade-off by identifying a natural class of data distributions under which both computational efficiency and optimal sample complexity are achievable. We propose a computationally efficient ADA mechanism that attains optimal $O(\log T)$ sample complexity when the data distribution is dense with respect to a known prior. This setting includes, in particular, feature--label data distributions arising in distribution-specific learning. As a consequence, our mechanism also yields a sample-efficient (i.e., $O(\log T)$ samples) statistical query oracle in the distribution-specific setting. Moreover, although our algorithm is not based on differential privacy, it satisfies a relaxed privacy notion known as Predicate Singling Out (PSO) security (Cohen and Nissim, 2020). Our results thus reveal an inherent connection between adaptive data analysis and privacy beyond differential privacy.

Reinforcement learning and classical planning are typically seen as two distinct problems, with differing formulations necessitating different solutions. Yet, when humans are given a task, regardless of the way it is specified, they can often derive the additional information needed to solve the problem efficiently. The key to this ability is introspection: by reasoning about their internal models of the problem, humans directly synthesize additional task-relevant information. In this paper, we propose that this introspection can be thought of as program analysis. We discuss examples of how this approach can be applied to various kinds of models used in reinforcement learning. We then describe an algorithm that enables efficient goal-oriented planning over the class of models used in relational reinforcement learning, demonstrating a novel link between reinforcement learning and classical planning.

Evaluating the quality of post-hoc explanations for Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) remains a significant challenge. While recent years have seen an increasing development of explainability methods, current evaluation metrics (e.g., fidelity, sparsity) often fail to assess whether an explanation identifies the true underlying causal variables. To address this, we propose the Explanation-Generalization Score (EGS), a metric that quantifies the causal relevance of GNN explanations. EGS is founded on the principle of feature invariance and posits that if an explanation captures true causal drivers, it should lead to stable predictions across distribution shifts. To quantify this, we introduce a framework that trains GNNs using explanatory subgraphs and evaluates their performance in Out-of-Distribution (OOD) settings (here, OOD generalization serves as a rigorous proxy for the explanation's causal validity). Through large-scale validation involving 11,200 model combinations across synthetic and real-world datasets, our results demonstrate that EGS provides a principled benchmark for ranking explainers based on their ability to capture causal substructures, offering a robust alternative to traditional fidelity-based metrics.

Deep learning models for medical data are typically trained using task specific objectives that encourage representations to collapse onto a small number of discriminative directions. While effective for individual prediction problems, this paradigm underutilizes the rich structure of clinical data and limits the transferability, stability, and interpretability of learned features. In this work, we propose dense feature learning, a representation centric framework that explicitly shapes the linear structure of medical embeddings. Our approach operates directly on embedding matrices, encouraging spectral balance, subspace consistency, and feature orthogonality through objectives defined entirely in terms of linear algebraic properties. Without relying on labels or generative reconstruction, dense feature learning produces representations with higher effective rank, improved conditioning, and greater stability across time. Empirical evaluations across longitudinal EHR data, clinical text, and multimodal patient representations demonstrate consistent improvements in downstream linear performance, robustness, and subspace alignment compared to supervised and self supervised baselines. These results suggest that learning to span clinical variation may be as important as learning to predict clinical outcomes, and position representation geometry as a first class objective in medical AI.

Medical image segmentation plays a vital role in diagnosis and treatment planning, but remains challenging due to the inherent complexity and variability of medical images, especially in capturing non-linear relationships within the data. We propose U-KABS, a novel hybrid framework that integrates the expressive power of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) with a U-shaped encoder-decoder architecture to enhance segmentation performance. The U-KABS model combines the convolutional and squeeze-and-excitation stage, which enhances channel-wise feature representations, and the KAN Bernstein Spline (KABS) stage, which employs learnable activation functions based on Bernstein polynomials and B-splines. This hybrid design leverages the global smoothness of Bernstein polynomials and the local adaptability of B-splines, enabling the model to effectively capture both broad contextual trends and fine-grained patterns critical for delineating complex structures in medical images. Skip connections between encoder and decoder layers support effective multi-scale feature fusion and preserve spatial details. Evaluated across diverse medical imaging benchmark datasets, U-KABS demonstrates superior performance compared to strong baselines, particularly in segmenting complex anatomical structures.

Reliable foreign-object anomaly detection and pixel-level localization in conveyor-belt coal scenes are essential for safe and intelligent mining operations. This task is particularly challenging due to the highly unstructured environment: coal and gangue are randomly piled, backgrounds are complex and variable, and foreign objects often exhibit low contrast, deformation, occlusion, resulting in coupling with their surroundings. These characteristics weaken the stability and regularity assumptions that many anomaly detection methods rely on in structured industrial settings, leading to notable performance degradation. To support evaluation and comparison in this setting, we construct \textbf{CoalAD}, a benchmark for unsupervised foreign-object anomaly detection with pixel-level localization in coal-stream scenes. We further propose a complementary-cue collaborative perception framework that extracts and fuses complementary anomaly evidence from three perspectives: object-level semantic composition modeling, semantic-attribution-based global deviation analysis, and fine-grained texture matching. The fused outputs provide robust image-level anomaly scoring and accurate pixel-level localization. Experiments on CoalAD demonstrate that our method outperforms widely used baselines across the evaluated image-level and pixel-level metrics, and ablation studies validate the contribution of each component. The code is available at https://github.com/xjpp2016/USAD.

Video understanding requires not only recognizing visual content but also performing temporally grounded, multi-step reasoning over long and noisy observations. We propose Process-of-Thought (PoT) Reasoning for Videos, a framework that makes the reasoning process explicit by structuring video inference into a sequence of lightweight, verifiable steps. PoT interleaves (i) temporal evidence selection, (ii) step-wise state updates, and (iii) constrained answer synthesis, enabling the model to progressively refine hypotheses while maintaining traceability to video evidence. The framework is designed to be model-agnostic and can be plugged into existing vision-language backbones, supporting both closed-book reasoning and evidence-augmented reasoning with external tools. We further introduce a unified representation for PoT traces that aligns intermediate decisions with temporal segments, which improves robustness to distractors and reduces hallucinated explanations. Extensive experiments on standard video reasoning tasks demonstrate that PoT consistently improves factual correctness and temporal grounding, while providing interpretable reasoning traces for diagnosis and downstream use.

Gating mechanisms are ubiquitous, yet a complementary question in feed-forward networks remains under-explored: how to introduce frequency-rich expressivity without sacrificing stability and scalability? This tension is exposed by spline-based Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) parameterizations, where grid refinement can induce parameter growth and brittle optimization in high dimensions. To propose a stability-preserving way to inject spectral capacity into existing MLP/FFN layers under fixed parameter and training budgets, we introduce Spectral Gating Networks (SGN), a drop-in spectral reparameterization. SGN augments a standard activation pathway with a compact spectral pathway and learnable gates that allow the model to start from a stable base behavior and progressively allocate capacity to spectral features during training. The spectral pathway is instantiated with trainable Random Fourier Features (learned frequencies and phases), replacing grid-based splines and removing resolution dependence. A hybrid GELU-Fourier formulation further improves optimization robustness while enhancing high-frequency fidelity. Across vision, NLP, audio, and PDE benchmarks, SGN consistently improves accuracy-efficiency trade-offs under comparable computational budgets, achieving 93.15% accuracy on CIFAR-10 and up to 11.7x faster inference than spline-based KAN variants. Code and trained models will be released.

This paper develops the proof of concept for a novel affine transformable unmanned ground vehicle (ATUGV) with the capability of safe and aggressive deformation while carrying multiple payloads. The ATUGV is a multi-body system with mobile robots that can be used to power the ATUGV morphable motion, powered cells to enclose the mobile robots, unpowered cells to contain payloads, and a deformable structure to integrate cells through bars and joints. The objective is that all powered and unpowered cells motion can safely track a desired affine transformation, where an affine transformation can be decomposed into translation, rigid body rotation, and deformation. To this end, the paper first uses a deep neural network to structure cell interconnection in such a way that every cell can freely move over the deformation plane, and the entire structure can reconfigurably deform to track a desired affine transformation. Then, the mobile robots, contained by the powered cells and stepper motors, regulating the connections of the powered and unpowered cells, design the proper controls so that all cells safely track the desired affine transformation. The functionality of the proposed ATUGV is validated through hardware experimentation and simulation.

Machine learning models now influence decisions that directly affect people's lives, making it important to understand not only their predictions, but also how individuals could act to obtain better results. Algorithmic recourse provides actionable input modifications to achieve more favorable outcomes, typically relying on counterfactual explanations to suggest such changes. However, when the Rashomon set - the set of near-optimal models - is large, standard counterfactual explanations can become unreliable, as a recourse action valid for one model may fail under another. We introduce ElliCE, a novel framework for robust algorithmic recourse that optimizes counterfactuals over an ellipsoidal approximation of the Rashomon set. The resulting explanations are provably valid over this ellipsoid, with theoretical guarantees on uniqueness, stability, and alignment with key feature directions. Empirically, ElliCE generates counterfactuals that are not only more robust but also more flexible, adapting to user-specified feature constraints while being substantially faster than existing baselines. This provides a principled and practical solution for reliable recourse under model uncertainty, ensuring stable recommendations for users even as models evolve.

Large language model (LLM) judges have often been used alongside traditional, algorithm-based metrics for tasks like summarization because they better capture semantic information, are better at reasoning, and are more robust to paraphrasing. However, LLM judges show biases for length and order among others, and are vulnerable to various adversarial input prompts. While recent studies have looked into these biases, few have analyzed them at a more granular level in relation to a well-defined overlap metric. In this work we provide an LLM judge bias analysis as a function of overlap with human-written responses in the domain of summarization. We test 9 recent LLMs with parameter counts ranging from 1 billion to 12 billion, including variants of Gemma 3 and LLaMA 3. We find that LLM judges increasingly prefer summaries generated by other LLMs over those written by humans as the similarities (as measured by ROUGE and BLEU) between the judged summaries decrease, and this pattern extends to all but one model tested, and exists regardless of the models' own position biases. Additionally, we find that models struggle to judge even summaries with limited overlaps, suggesting that LLM-as-a-judge in the summary domain should rely on techniques beyond a simple comparison.

Federated Learning (FL) enables decentralized model training across clients without sharing raw data, but its performance degrades under real-world data heterogeneity. Existing methods often fail to address distribution shift across clients and distribution drift over time, or they rely on unrealistic assumptions such as known number of client clusters and data heterogeneity types, which limits their generalizability. We introduce Feroma, a novel FL framework that explicitly handles both distribution shift and drift without relying on client or cluster identity. Feroma builds on client distribution profiles-compact, privacy-preserving representations of local data-that guide model aggregation and test-time model assignment through adaptive similarity-based weighting. This design allows Feroma to dynamically select aggregation strategies during training, ranging from clustered to personalized, and deploy suitable models to unseen, and unlabeled test clients without retraining, online adaptation, or prior knowledge on clients' data. Extensive experiments show that compared to 10 state-of-the-art methods, Feroma improves performance and stability under dynamic data heterogeneity conditions-an average accuracy gain of up to 12 percentage points over the best baselines across 6 benchmarks-while maintaining computational and communication overhead comparable to FedAvg. These results highlight that distribution-profile-based aggregation offers a practical path toward robust FL under both data distribution shifts and drifts.