While single-agent legged locomotion has witnessed remarkable progress, individual robots remain fundamentally constrained by physical actuation limits. To transcend these boundaries, we introduce Co-jump, a cooperative task where two quadrupedal robots synchronize to execute jumps far beyond their solo capabilities. We tackle the high-impulse contact dynamics of this task under a decentralized setting, achieving synchronization without explicit communication or pre-specified motion primitives. Our framework leverages Multi-Agent Proximal Policy Optimization (MAPPO) enhanced by a progressive curriculum strategy, which effectively overcomes the sparse-reward exploration challenges inherent in mechanically coupled systems. We demonstrate robust performance in simulation and successful transfer to physical hardware, executing multi-directional jumps onto platforms up to 1.5 m in height. Specifically, one of the robots achieves a foot-end elevation of 1.1 m, which represents a 144% improvement over the 0.45 m jump height of a standalone quadrupedal robot, demonstrating superior vertical performance. Notably, this precise coordination is achieved solely through proprioceptive feedback, establishing a foundation for communication-free collaborative locomotion in constrained environments.

Deploying vision foundation models typically relies on efficient adaptation strategies, whereas conventional full fine-tuning suffers from prohibitive costs and low efficiency. While delta-tuning has proven effective in boosting the performance and efficiency of LLMs during adaptation, its advantages cannot be directly transferred to the fine-tuning pipeline of vision foundation models. To push the boundaries of adaptation efficiency for vision tasks, we propose an adapter with Complex Linear Projection Optimization (CoLin). For architecture, we design a novel low-rank complex adapter that introduces only about 1% parameters to the backbone. For efficiency, we theoretically prove that low-rank composite matrices suffer from severe convergence issues during training, and address this challenge with a tailored loss. Extensive experiments on object detection, segmentation, image classification, and rotated object detection (remote sensing scenario) demonstrate that CoLin outperforms both full fine-tuning and classical delta-tuning approaches with merely 1% parameters for the first time, providing a novel and efficient solution for deployment of vision foundation models. We release the code on https://github.com/DongshuoYin/CoLin.

Modern segmentation models achieve strong predictive performance but remain largely opaque, limiting our ability to diagnose failures, understand dataset shift, or intervene in a principled manner. We introduce Med-SegLens, a model-diffing framework that decomposes segmentation model activations into interpretable latent features using sparse autoencoders trained on SegFormer and U-Net. Through cross-architecture and cross-dataset latent alignment across healthy, adult, pediatric, and sub-Saharan African glioma cohorts, we identify a stable backbone of shared representations, while dataset shift is driven by differential reliance on population-specific latents. We show that these latents act as causal bottlenecks for segmentation failures, and that targeted latent-level interventions can correct errors and improve cross-dataset adaption without retraining, recovering performance in 70% of failure cases and improving Dice score from 39.4% to 74.2%. Our results demonstrate that latent-level model diffing provides a practical and mechanistic tool for diagnosing failures and mitigating dataset shift in segmentation models.

Graph Domain Adaptation (GDA) aims to bridge distribution shifts between domains by transferring knowledge from well-labeled source graphs to given unlabeled target graphs. One promising recent approach addresses graph transfer by discretizing the adaptation process, typically through the construction of intermediate graphs or stepwise alignment procedures. However, such discrete strategies often fail in real-world scenarios, where graph structures evolve continuously and nonlinearly, making it difficult for fixed-step alignment to approximate the actual transformation process. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{DiffGDA}, a \textbf{Diff}usion-based \textbf{GDA} method that models the domain adaptation process as a continuous-time generative process. We formulate the evolution from source to target graphs using stochastic differential equations (SDEs), enabling the joint modeling of structural and semantic transitions. To guide this evolution, a domain-aware network is introduced to steer the generative process toward the target domain, encouraging the diffusion trajectory to follow an optimal adaptation path. We theoretically show that the diffusion process converges to the optimal solution bridging the source and target domains in the latent space. Extensive experiments on 14 graph transfer tasks across 8 real-world datasets demonstrate DiffGDA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.

Knowledge-Editing-based (KE-based) detoxification has emerged as a promising approach for mitigating harmful behaviours in Large Language Models. Existing evaluations, however, largely rely on automatic toxicity classifiers, implicitly assuming that reduced toxicity scores reflect genuine behavioural suppression. In this work, we propose a robustness-oriented evaluation framework for KE-based detoxification that examines its reliability beyond standard classifier-based metrics along three dimensions: optimisation robustness, compositional robustness, and cross-lingual robustness. We identify pseudo-detoxification as a common failure mode, where apparent toxicity reductions arise from degenerate generation behaviours rather than meaningful suppression of unsafe content. We further show that detoxification effectiveness degrades when multiple unsafe behaviours are edited jointly, and that both monolingual and cross-lingual detoxification remain effective only under specific model-method combinations. Overall, our results indicate that KE-based detoxification is robust only for certain models, limited numbers of detoxification objectives, and a subset of languages.

The proliferation of ride-hailing services has fundamentally transformed urban mobility patterns, making accurate ride-hailing forecasting crucial for optimizing passenger experience and urban transportation efficiency. However, ride-hailing forecasting faces significant challenges due to geospatial heterogeneity and high susceptibility to external events. This paper proposes MVGR-Net(Multi-View Geospatial Representation Learning), a novel framework that addresses these challenges through a two-stage approach. In the pretraining stage, we learn comprehensive geospatial representations by integrating Points-of-Interest and temporal mobility patterns to capture regional characteristics from both semantic attribute and temporal mobility pattern views. The forecasting stage leverages these representations through a prompt-empowered framework that fine-tunes Large Language Models while incorporating external events. Extensive experiments on DiDi's real-world datasets demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance.

Multi-Resolution Hash Encoding (MHE), the foundational technique behind Instant Neural Graphics Primitives, provides a powerful parameterization for neural fields. However, its spatial behavior lacks rigorous understanding from a physical systems perspective, leading to reliance on heuristics for hyperparameter selection. This work introduces a novel analytical approach that characterizes MHE by examining its Point Spread Function (PSF), which is analogous to the Green's function of the system. This methodology enables a quantification of the encoding's spatial resolution and fidelity. We derive a closed-form approximation for the collision-free PSF, uncovering inherent grid-induced anisotropy and a logarithmic spatial profile. We establish that the idealized spatial bandwidth, specifically the Full Width at Half Maximum (FWHM), is determined by the average resolution, $N_{\text{avg}}$. This leads to a counterintuitive finding: the effective resolution of the model is governed by the broadened empirical FWHM (and therefore $N_{\text{avg}}$), rather than the finest resolution $N_{\max}$, a broadening effect we demonstrate arises from optimization dynamics. Furthermore, we analyze the impact of finite hash capacity, demonstrating how collisions introduce speckle noise and degrade the Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR). Leveraging these theoretical insights, we propose Rotated MHE (R-MHE), an architecture that applies distinct rotations to the input coordinates at each resolution level. R-MHE mitigates anisotropy while maintaining the efficiency and parameter count of the original MHE. This study establishes a methodology based on physical principles that moves beyond heuristics to characterize and optimize MHE.

While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has significantly advanced the reasoning capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), relying solely on linear text sequences remains a bottleneck for complex tasks. We observe that even when auxiliary visual elements are interleaved, they are often treated as static snapshots within a one-dimensional, unstructured reasoning chain. We argue that such approaches treat reasoning history as an immutable stream: correcting a local error necessitates either generating verbose downstream corrections or regenerating the entire context. This forces the model to implicitly maintain and track state updates, significantly increasing token consumption and cognitive load. This limitation is particularly acute in high-dimensional domains, such as geometry and SVG design, where the textual expression of CoT lacks explicit visual guidance, further constraining the model's reasoning precision. To bridge this gap, we introduce \textbf{Canvas-of-Thought (Canvas-CoT)}. By leveraging a HTML Canvas as an external reasoning substrate, Canvas-CoT empowers the model to perform atomic, DOM-based CRUD operations. This architecture enables in-place state revisions without disrupting the surrounding context, allowing the model to explicitly maintain the "ground truth". Furthermore, we integrate a rendering-based critique loop that serves as a hard constraint validator, providing explicit visual feedback to resolve complex tasks that are difficult to articulate through text alone. Extensive experiments on VCode, RBench-V, and MathVista demonstrate that Canvas-CoT significantly outperforms existing baselines, establishing a new paradigm for context-efficient multimodal reasoning.

LiDAR sensors are a key modality for 3D perception, yet they are typically designed independently of downstream tasks such as point cloud registration. Conventional registration operates on pre-acquired datasets with fixed LiDAR configurations, leading to suboptimal data collection and significant computational overhead for sampling, noise filtering, and parameter tuning. In this work, we propose an adaptive LiDAR sensing framework that dynamically adjusts sensor parameters, jointly optimizing LiDAR acquisition and registration hyperparameters. By integrating registration feedback into the sensing loop, our approach optimally balances point density, noise, and sparsity, improving registration accuracy and efficiency. Evaluations in the CARLA simulation demonstrate that our method outperforms fixed-parameter baselines while retaining generalization abilities, highlighting the potential of adaptive LiDAR for autonomous perception and robotic applications.

Remote sensing change detection is essential for environmental monitoring, urban planning, and related applications. However, current methods often struggle to capture long-range dependencies while maintaining computational efficiency. Although Transformers can effectively model global context, their quadratic complexity poses scalability challenges, and existing linear attention approaches frequently fail to capture intricate spatiotemporal relationships. Drawing inspiration from the recent success of Titans in language tasks, we present ChangeTitans, the Titans-based framework for remote sensing change detection. Specifically, we propose VTitans, the first Titans-based vision backbone that integrates neural memory with segmented local attention, thereby capturing long-range dependencies while mitigating computational overhead. Next, we present a hierarchical VTitans-Adapter to refine multi-scale features across different network layers. Finally, we introduce TS-CBAM, a two-stream fusion module leveraging cross-temporal attention to suppress pseudo-changes and enhance detection accuracy. Experimental evaluations on four benchmark datasets (LEVIR-CD, WHU-CD, LEVIR-CD+, and SYSU-CD) demonstrate that ChangeTitans achieves state-of-the-art results, attaining \textbf{84.36\%} IoU and \textbf{91.52\%} F1-score on LEVIR-CD, while remaining computationally competitive.

Qualitative Numerical Planning (QNP) serves as an important abstraction model for generalized planning (GP), which aims to compute general plans that solve multiple instances at once. Recent works show that large language models (LLMs) can function as generalized planners. This work investigates whether LLMs can serve as QNP abstraction generators for GP problems and how to fix abstractions via automated debugging. We propose a prompt protocol: input a GP domain and training tasks to LLMs, prompting them to generate abstract features and further abstract the initial state, action set, and goal into QNP problems. An automated debugging method is designed to detect abstraction errors, guiding LLMs to fix abstractions. Experiments demonstrate that under properly guided by automated debugging, some LLMs can generate useful QNP abstractions.

Recent advances in reaction prediction have achieved near-saturated accuracy on standard benchmarks (e.g., USPTO), yet most state-of-the-art models formulate the task as a one-shot mapping from reactants to products, offering limited insight into the underlying reaction process. Procedural alternatives introduce stepwise generation but often rely on mechanism-specific supervision, discrete symbolic edits, and computationally expensive inference. In this work, we propose LatentRxnFlow, a new reaction prediction paradigm that models reactions as continuous latent trajectories anchored at the thermodynamic product state. Built on Conditional Flow Matching, our approach learns time-dependent latent dynamics directly from standard reactant-product pairs, without requiring mechanistic annotations or curated intermediate labels. While LatentRxnFlow achieves state-of-the-art performance on USPTO benchmarks, more importantly, the continuous formulation exposes the full generative trajectory, enabling trajectory-level diagnostics that are difficult to realize with discrete or one-shot models. We show that latent trajectory analysis allows us to localize and characterize failure modes and to mitigate certain errors via gated inference. Furthermore, geometric properties of the learned trajectories provide an intrinsic signal of epistemic uncertainty, helping prioritize reliably predictable reaction outcomes and flag ambiguous cases for additional validation. Overall, LatentRxnFlow combines strong predictive accuracy with improved transparency, diagnosability, and uncertainty awareness, moving reaction prediction toward more trustworthy deployment in high-throughput discovery workflows.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a dominant paradigm for end-to-end autonomous driving (AD). However, RL suffers from sample inefficiency and a lack of semantic interpretability in complex scenarios. Foundation Models, particularly Vision-Language Models (VLMs), can mitigate this by offering rich, context-aware knowledge, yet their high inference latency hinders deployment in high-frequency RL training loops. To bridge this gap, we present Found-RL, a platform tailored to efficiently enhance RL for AD using foundation models. A core innovation is the asynchronous batch inference framework, which decouples heavy VLM reasoning from the simulation loop, effectively resolving latency bottlenecks to support real-time learning. We introduce diverse supervision mechanisms: Value-Margin Regularization (VMR) and Advantage-Weighted Action Guidance (AWAG) to effectively distill expert-like VLM action suggestions into the RL policy. Additionally, we adopt high-throughput CLIP for dense reward shaping. We address CLIP's dynamic blindness via Conditional Contrastive Action Alignment, which conditions prompts on discretized speed/command and yields a normalized, margin-based bonus from context-specific action-anchor scoring. Found-RL provides an end-to-end pipeline for fine-tuned VLM integration and shows that a lightweight RL model can achieve near-VLM performance compared with billion-parameter VLMs while sustaining real-time inference (approx. 500 FPS). Code, data, and models will be publicly available at https://github.com/ys-qu/found-rl.

Interpreting the inference-time behavior of deep neural networks remains a challenging problem. Existing approaches to counterfactual explanation typically ask: What is the closest alternative input that would alter the model's prediction in a desired way? In contrast, we explore counterfactual datasets. Rather than perturbing the input, our method efficiently finds the closest alternative training dataset, one that differs from the original dataset by changing a few labels. Training a new model on this altered dataset can then lead to a different prediction of a given test instance. This perspective provides a new way to assess fairness by directly analyzing the influence of label bias on training and inference. Our approach can be characterized as probing whether a given prediction depends on biased labels. Since exhaustively enumerating all possible alternate datasets is infeasible, we develop analysis techniques that trace how bias in the training data may propagate through the learning algorithm to the trained network. Our method heuristically ranks and modifies the labels of a bounded number of training examples to construct a counterfactual dataset, retrains the model, and checks whether its prediction on a chosen test case changes. We evaluate our approach on feedforward neural networks across over 1100 test cases from 7 widely-used fairness datasets. Results show that it modifies only a small subset of training labels, highlighting its ability to pinpoint the critical training examples that drive prediction changes. Finally, we demonstrate how our counterfactual datasets reveal connections between training examples and test cases, offering an interpretable way to probe dataset bias.

The construction of high-quality parallel corpora for translation research has increasingly evolved from simple sentence alignment to complex, multi-layered annotation tasks. This methodological shift presents significant challenges for structurally divergent language pairs, such as Arabic--English, where standard automated tools frequently fail to capture deep linguistic shifts or semantic nuances. This paper introduces a novel, LLM-assisted interactive tool designed to reduce the gap between scalable automation and the rigorous precision required for expert human judgment. Unlike traditional statistical aligners, our system employs a template-based Prompt Manager that leverages large language models (LLMs) for sentence segmentation and alignment under strict JSON output constraints. In this tool, automated preprocessing integrates into a human-in-the-loop workflow, allowing researchers to refine alignments and apply custom translation technique annotations through a stand-off architecture. By leveraging LLM-assisted processing, the tool balances annotation efficiency with the linguistic precision required to analyze complex translation phenomena in specialized domains.

Many scientific and engineering systems exhibit intrinsically multimodal behavior arising from latent regime switching and non-unique physical mechanisms. In such settings, learning the full conditional distribution of admissible outcomes in a physically consistent and interpretable manner remains a challenge. While recent advances in machine learning have enabled powerful multimodal generative modeling, their integration with physics-constrained scientific modeling remains nontrivial, particularly when physical structure must be preserved or data are limited. This work develops a physics-informed multimodal conditional modeling framework based on mixture density representations. Mixture density networks (MDNs) provide an explicit and interpretable parameterization of multimodal conditional distributions. Physical knowledge is embedded through component-specific regularization terms that penalize violations of governing equations or physical laws. This formulation naturally accommodates non-uniqueness and stochasticity while remaining computationally efficient and amenable to conditioning on contextual inputs. The proposed framework is evaluated across a range of scientific problems in which multimodality arises from intrinsic physical mechanisms rather than observational noise, including bifurcation phenomena in nonlinear dynamical systems, stochastic partial differential equations, and atomistic-scale shock dynamics. In addition, the proposed method is compared with a conditional flow matching (CFM) model, a representative state-of-the-art generative modeling approach, demonstrating that MDNs can achieve competitive performance while offering a simpler and more interpretable formulation.

Hierarchical Agglomerative Clustering (HAC) is a widely-used clustering method based on repeatedly merging the closest pair of clusters, where inter-cluster distances are determined by a linkage function. Unlike many clustering methods, HAC does not optimize a single explicit global objective; clustering quality is therefore primarily evaluated empirically, and the choice of linkage function plays a crucial role in practice. However, popular classical linkages, such as single-linkage, average-linkage and Ward's method show high variability across real-world datasets and do not consistently produce high-quality clusterings in practice. In this paper, we propose \emph{Chamfer-linkage}, a novel linkage function that measures the distance between clusters using the Chamfer distance, a popular notion of distance between point-clouds in machine learning and computer vision. We argue that Chamfer-linkage satisfies desirable concept representation properties that other popular measures struggle to satisfy. Theoretically, we show that Chamfer-linkage HAC can be implemented in $O(n^2)$ time, matching the efficiency of classical linkage functions. Experimentally, we find that Chamfer-linkage consistently yields higher-quality clusterings than classical linkages such as average-linkage and Ward's method across a diverse collection of datasets. Our results establish Chamfer-linkage as a practical drop-in replacement for classical linkage functions, broadening the toolkit for hierarchical clustering in both theory and practice.

Modern data lakes have emerged as foundational platforms for large-scale machine learning, enabling flexible storage of heterogeneous data and structured analytics through table-oriented abstractions. Despite their growing importance, standardized benchmarks for evaluating machine learning performance in data lake environments remain scarce. To address this gap, we present LakeMLB (Data Lake Machine Learning Benchmark), designed for the most common multi-source, multi-table scenarios in data lakes. LakeMLB focuses on two representative multi-table scenarios, Union and Join, and provides three real-world datasets for each scenario, covering government open data, finance, Wikipedia, and online marketplaces. The benchmark supports three representative integration strategies: pre-training-based, data augmentation-based, and feature augmentation-based approaches. We conduct extensive experiments with state-of-the-art tabular learning methods, offering insights into their performance under complex data lake scenarios. We release both datasets and code to facilitate rigorous research on machine learning in data lake ecosystems; the benchmark is available at https://github.com/zhengwang100/LakeMLB.

Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in audio understanding and reasoning. However, their performance on fine grained auditory perception remains unreliable, and existing approaches largely rely on data intensive training to internalize perceptual abilities. We propose AudioRouter, a reinforcement learning framework that enables LALMs to improve audio understanding by learning when and how to use external audio tools. Rather than tightly coupling tool usage with audio reasoning, AudioRouter formulates tool use as an explicit decision making problem and optimizes a lightweight routing policy while keeping the underlying reasoning model frozen. Experimental results show that AudioRouter achieves substantial improvements on standard audio understanding benchmarks while requiring up to 600x less training data to learn tool usage compared with conventional training paradigms. These findings suggest that learning effective tool usage offers a data efficient and scalable alternative to internalizing perceptual abilities in LALMs.

Runtime quantification of vehicle operational intensity is essential for predictive maintenance and condition monitoring in commercial and heavy-duty fleets. Traditional metrics like mileage fail to capture mechanical burden, while unsupervised deep learning models detect statistical anomalies, typically transient surface shocks, but often conflate statistical stability with mechanical rest. We identify this as a critical blind spot: high-load steady states, such as hill climbing with heavy payloads, appear statistically normal yet impose significant drivetrain fatigue. To resolve this, we propose a Dual-Stream Architecture that fuses unsupervised learning for surface anomaly detection with macroscopic physics proxies for cumulative load estimation. This approach leverages low-frequency sensor data to generate a multi-dimensional health vector, distinguishing between dynamic hazards and sustained mechanical effort. Validated on a RISC-V embedded platform, the architecture demonstrates low computational overhead, enabling comprehensive, edge-based health monitoring on resource-constrained ECUs without the latency or bandwidth costs of cloud-based monitoring.

Policy-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) has established itself as the dominant paradigm in generative recommendation for optimizing sequential user interactions. However, when applied to offline historical logs, these methods suffer a critical failure: the dominance of low-quality data induces severe model collapse. We first establish the Divergence Theory of Repulsive Optimization, revealing that negative gradient updates inherently trigger exponential intensity explosion during off-policy training. This theory elucidates the inherent dilemma of existing methods, exposing their inability to reconcile variance reduction and noise imitation. To break this curse, we argue that the solution lies in rigorously identifying the latent high-quality distribution entangled within the noisy behavior policy. Accordingly, we reformulate the objective as an Optimistic Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) problem. Guided by this formulation, we propose Distributionally Robust Policy Optimization (DRPO). We prove that hard filtering is the exact solution to this DRO objective, enabling DRPO to optimally recover high-quality behaviors while strictly discarding divergence-inducing noise. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DRPO achieves state-of-the-art performance on mixed-quality recommendation benchmarks.

Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success across diverse multimodal tasks but remain vulnerable to hallucinations rooted in inherent language bias. Despite recent progress, existing hallucination mitigation methods often overlook the underlying hallucination patterns driven by language bias. In this work, we design a novel pipeline to accurately synthesize Hallucination-Inducing Images (HIIs). Using synthesized HIIs, we reveal a consistent scene-conditioned hallucination pattern: models tend to mention objects that are highly typical of the scene even when visual evidence is removed. To quantify the susceptibility of VLMs to this hallucination pattern, we establish the Masked-Object-Hallucination (MOH) benchmark to rigorously evaluate existing state-of-the-art alignment frameworks. Finally, we leverage HIIs to construct high-quality preference datasets for fine-grained alignment. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach effectively mitigates hallucinations while preserving general model capabilities. Specifically, our method achieves up to a 38% improvement over the current state-of-the-art on standard hallucination benchmarks.

Modern AI systems have been successfully deployed to win medals at international math competitions, assist with research workflows, and prove novel technical lemmas. However, despite their progress at advanced levels of mathematics, they remain stubbornly bad at basic arithmetic, consistently failing on the simple task of adding two numbers. We present a systematic investigation of this phenomenon. We demonstrate empirically that all frontier models suffer significantly degraded accuracy for integer addition as the number of digits increases. Furthermore, we show that most errors made by these models are highly interpretable and can be attributed to either operand misalignment or a failure to correctly carry; these two error classes explain 87.9%, 62.9%, and 92.4% of Claude Opus 4.1, GPT-5, and Gemini 2.5 Pro errors, respectively. Finally, we show that misalignment errors are frequently related to tokenization, and that carrying errors appear largely as independent random failures.

Time series foundation models are typically pre-trained on large, multi-source datasets; however, they often ignore exogenous covariates or incorporate them via simple concatenation with the target series, which limits their effectiveness in covariate-rich applications such as electricity price forecasting and renewable energy forecasting. We introduce LightGTS-Cov, a covariate-enhanced extension of LightGTS that preserves its lightweight, period-aware backbone while explicitly incorporating both past and future-known covariates. Built on a $\sim$1M-parameter LightGTS backbone, LightGTS-Cov adds only a $\sim$0.1M-parameter MLP plug-in that integrates time-aligned covariates into the target forecasts by residually refining the outputs of the decoding process. Across covariate-aware benchmarks on electricity price and energy generation datasets, LightGTS-Cov consistently outperforms LightGTS and achieves superior performance over other covariate-aware baselines under both settings, regardless of whether future-known covariates are provided. We further demonstrate its practical value in two real-world energy case applications: long-term photovoltaic power forecasting with future weather forecasts and day-ahead electricity price forecasting with weather and dispatch-plan covariates. Across both applications, LightGTS-Cov achieves strong forecasting accuracy and stable operational performance after deployment, validating its effectiveness in real-world industrial settings.

Softmax-based dot-product attention is a cornerstone of Transformer architectures, enabling remarkable capabilities such as in-context learning. However, as context lengths increase, a fundamental limitation of the softmax function emerges: it tends to diffuse probability mass to irrelevant tokens degrading performance in long-sequence scenarios. Furthermore, attempts to sharpen focus by lowering softmax temperature hinder learnability due to vanishing gradients. We introduce LUCID Attention, an architectural modification that applies a preconditioner to the attention probabilities. This preconditioner, derived from exponentiated key-key similarities, minimizes overlap between the keys in a Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space, thus allowing the query to focus on important keys among large number of keys accurately with same computational complexity as standard attention. Additionally, LUCID's preconditioning-based approach to retrieval bypasses the need for low temperature and the learnability problems associated with it. We validate our approach by training ~1 billion parameter language models evaluated on up to 128K tokens. Our results demonstrate significant gains on long-context retrieval tasks, specifically retrieval tasks from BABILong, RULER, SCROLLS and LongBench. For instance, LUCID achieves up to 18% improvement in BABILong and 14% improvement in RULER multi-needle performance compared to standard attention.

Adapting large language models (LLMs) trained on broad organic chemistry to smaller, domain-specific reaction datasets is a key challenge in chemical and pharmaceutical R&D. Effective specialisation requires learning new reaction knowledge while preserving general chemical understanding across related tasks. Here, we evaluate Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) as a parameter-efficient alternative to full fine-tuning for organic reaction prediction on limited, complex datasets. Using USPTO reaction classes and challenging C-H functionalisation reactions, we benchmark forward reaction prediction, retrosynthesis and reagent prediction. LoRA achieves accuracy comparable to full fine-tuning while effectively mitigating catastrophic forgetting and better preserving multi-task performance. Both fine-tuning approaches generalise beyond training distributions, producing plausible alternative solvent predictions. Notably, C-H functionalisation fine-tuning reveals that LoRA and full fine-tuning encode subtly different reactivity patterns, suggesting more effective reaction-specific adaptation with LoRA. As LLMs continue to scale, our results highlight the practicality of modular, parameter-efficient fine-tuning strategies for their flexible deployment for chemistry applications.

We present a novel online learning-based approach for concept drift adaptation in optical network failure detection, achieving up to a 70% improvement in performance over conventional static models while maintaining low latency.

In this short paper, we make use of a recently created lexicon of word-anxiety associations to analyze large amounts of US and Canadian social media data (tweets) to explore *when* we are anxious and what insights that reveals about us. We show that our levels of anxiety on social media exhibit systematic patterns of rise and fall during the day -- highest at 8am (in-line with when we have high cortisol levels in the body) and lowest around noon. Anxiety is lowest on weekends and highest mid-week. We also examine anxiety in past, present, and future tense sentences to show that anxiety is highest in past tense and lowest in future tense. Finally, we examine the use of anxiety and calmness words in posts that contain pronouns to show: more anxiety in 3rd person pronouns (he, they) posts than 1st and 2nd person pronouns and higher anxiety in posts with subject pronouns (I, he, she, they) than object pronouns (me, him, her, them). Overall, these trends provide valuable insights on not just when we are anxious, but also how different types of focus (future, past, self, outward, etc.) are related to anxiety.

Recent advances in legged locomotion learning are still dominated by the utilization of geometric representations of the environment, limiting the robot's capability to respond to higher-level semantics such as human instructions. To address this limitation, we propose a novel approach that integrates high-level commonsense reasoning from foundation models into the process of legged locomotion adaptation. Specifically, our method utilizes a pre-trained large language model to synthesize an instruction-grounded skill database tailored for legged robots. A pre-trained vision-language model is employed to extract high-level environmental semantics and ground them within the skill database, enabling real-time skill advisories for the robot. To facilitate versatile skill control, we train a style-conditioned policy capable of generating diverse and robust locomotion skills with high fidelity to specified styles. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to demonstrate real-time adaptation of legged locomotion using high-level reasoning from environmental semantics and instructions with instruction-following accuracy of up to 87% without the need for online query to on-the-cloud foundation models.

Full models of the world require complex knowledge of immense detail. While pre-trained large models have been hypothesized to contain similar knowledge due to extensive pre-training on vast amounts of internet scale data, using them directly in a search procedure is inefficient and inaccurate. Conversely, partial models focus on making high quality predictions for a subset of state and actions: those linked through affordances that achieve user intents~\citep{khetarpal2020can}. Can we posit large models as partial world models? We provide a formal answer to this question, proving that agents achieving task-agnostic, language-conditioned intents necessarily possess predictive partial-world models informed by affordances. In the multi-task setting, we introduce distribution-robust affordances and show that partial models can be extracted to significantly improve search efficiency. Empirical evaluations in tabletop robotics tasks demonstrate that our affordance-aware partial models reduce the search branching factor and achieve higher rewards compared to full world models.