We present a quadrotor dynamics Gaussian Process (GP) with gradient information that achieves real-time inference via state-space partitioning and approximation, and that includes aerodynamic effects using data from mid-fidelity potential flow simulations. While traditional GP-based approaches provide reliable Bayesian predictions with uncertainty quantification, they are computationally expensive and thus unsuitable for real-time simulations. To address this challenge, we integrate gradient information to improve accuracy and introduce a novel partitioning and approximation strategy to reduce online computational cost. In particular, for the latter, we associate a local GP with each non-overlapping region; by splitting the training data into local near and far subsets, and by using Schur complements, we show that a large part of the matrix inversions required for inference can be performed offline, enabling real-time inference at frequencies above 30 Hz on standard desktop hardware. To generate a training dataset that captures aerodynamic effects, such as rotor-rotor interactions and apparent wind direction, we use the CHARM code, which is a mid-fidelity aerodynamic solver. It is applied to the SUI Endurance quadrotor to predict force and torque, along with noise at three specified locations. The derivative information is obtained via finite differences. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed partitioned GP with gradient conditioning achieves higher accuracy than standard partitioned GPs without gradient information, while greatly reducing computational time. This framework provides an efficient foundation for real-time aerodynamic prediction and control algorithms in complex and unsteady environments.

Humans appear to represent objects for intuitive physics with coarse, volumetric bodies'' that smooth concavities - trading fine visual details for efficient physical predictions - yet their internal structure is largely unknown. Segmentation models, in contrast, optimize pixel-accurate masks that may misalign with such bodies. We ask whether and when these models nonetheless acquire human-like bodies. Using a time-to-collision (TTC) behavioral paradigm, we introduce a comparison pipeline and alignment metric, then vary model training time, size, and effective capacity via pruning. Across all manipulations, alignment with human behavior follows an inverse U-shaped curve: small/briefly trained/pruned models under-segment into blobs; large/fully trained models over-segment with boundary wiggles; and an intermediate ideal body granularity'' best matches humans. This suggests human-like coarse bodies emerge from resource constraints rather than bespoke biases, and points to simple knobs - early checkpoints, modest architectures, light pruning - for eliciting physics-efficient representations. We situate these results within resource-rational accounts balancing recognition detail against physical affordances.

Grapes are among the most economically and culturally significant fruits on a global scale, and table grapes and wine are produced in significant quantities in Europe and Asia. The production and quality of grapes are significantly impacted by grape diseases such as Bacterial Rot, Downy Mildew, and Powdery Mildew. Consequently, the sustainable management of a vineyard necessitates the early and precise identification of these diseases. Current automated methods, particularly those that are based on the YOLO framework, are often computationally costly and lack interpretability that makes them unsuitable for real-world scenarios. This study proposes grape leaf disease classification using Optimized DenseNet 121. Domain-specific preprocessing and extensive connectivity reveal disease-relevant characteristics, including veins, edges, and lesions. An extensive comparison with baseline CNN models, including ResNet18, VGG16, AlexNet, and SqueezeNet, demonstrates that the proposed model exhibits superior performance. It achieves an accuracy of 99.27%, an F1 score of 99.28%, a specificity of 99.71%, and a Kappa of 98.86%, with an inference time of 9 seconds. The cross-validation findings show a mean accuracy of 99.12%, indicating strength and generalizability across all classes. We also employ Grad-CAM to highlight disease-related regions to guarantee the model is highlighting physiologically relevant aspects and increase transparency and confidence. Model optimization reduces processing requirements for real-time deployment, while transfer learning ensures consistency on smaller and unbalanced samples. An effective architecture, domain-specific preprocessing, and interpretable outputs make the proposed framework scalable, precise, and computationally inexpensive for detecting grape leaf diseases.

We give a geometric construction of neural networks that separate disjoint compact subsets of $\Bbb R^n$, and use it to obtain a constructive universal approximation theorem. Specifically, we show that networks with two hidden layers and either a sigmoidal activation (i.e., strictly monotone bounded continuous) or the ReLU activation can approximate any real-valued continuous function on an arbitrary compact set $K\subset\Bbb R^n$ to any prescribed accuracy in the uniform norm. For finite $K$, the construction simplifies and yields a sharp depth-2 (single hidden layer) approximation result.

RNA design, the task of finding a sequence that folds into a target secondary structure, has broad biological and biomedical impact but remains computationally challenging due to the exponentially large sequence space and exponentially many competing folds. Traditional approaches treat it as an optimization problem, relying on per-instance heuristics or constraint-based search. We instead reframe RNA design as conditional sequence generation and introduce a reusable neural approximator, instantiated as an autoregressive language model (LM), that maps target structures directly to sequences. We first train our model in a supervised setting on random-induced structure-sequence pairs, and then use reinforcement learning (RL) to optimize end-to-end metrics. We also propose methods to select a small subset for RL that greatly improves RL efficiency and quality. Across four datasets, our approach outperforms state-of-the-art systems on key metrics such as Boltzmann probability while being 1.7x faster, establishing conditional LM generation as a scalable, task-agnostic alternative to per-instance optimization for RNA design. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/KuNyaa/RNA-Design-LM.

Recent studies have shown that CLIP model's adversarial robustness in zero-shot classification tasks can be enhanced by adversarially fine-tuning its image encoder with adversarial examples (AEs), which are generated by minimizing the cosine similarity between images and a hand-crafted template (e.g., ''A photo of a {label}''). However, it has been shown that the cosine similarity between a single image and a single hand-crafted template is insufficient to measure the similarity for image-text pairs. Building on this, in this paper, we find that the AEs generated using cosine similarity may fail to fool CLIP when the similarity metric is replaced with semantically enriched alternatives, making the image encoder fine-tuned with these AEs less robust. To overcome this issue, we first propose a semantic-ensemble attack to generate semantic-aware AEs by minimizing the average similarity between the original image and an ensemble of refined textual descriptions. These descriptions are initially generated by a foundation model to capture core semantic features beyond hand-crafted templates and are then refined to reduce hallucinations. To this end, we propose Semantic-aware Adversarial Fine-Tuning (SAFT), which fine-tunes CLIP's image encoder with semantic-aware AEs. Extensive experiments show that SAFT outperforms current methods, achieving substantial improvements in zero-shot adversarial robustness across 16 datasets. Our code is available at: https://github.com/tmlr-group/SAFT.

Learning Gibbs distributions using only sufficient statistics has long been recognized as a computationally hard problem. On the other hand, computationally efficient algorithms for learning Gibbs distributions rely on access to full sample configurations generated from the model. For many systems of interest that arise in physical contexts, expecting a full sample to be observed is not practical, and hence it is important to look for computationally efficient methods that solve the learning problem with access to only a limited set of statistics. We examine the trade-offs between the power of computation and observation within this scenario, employing the Ising model as a paradigmatic example. We demonstrate that it is feasible to reconstruct the model parameters for a model with $\ell_1$ width $γ$ by observing statistics up to an order of $O(γ)$. This approach allows us to infer the model's structure and also learn its couplings and magnetic fields. We also discuss a setting where prior information about structure of the model is available and show that the learning problem can be solved efficiently with even more limited observational power.

Language models (LMs) are known to be prone to response biases, which present as option preference biases in fixed-response questions. It is therefore imperative to develop low-cost and effective response bias correction methods to improve LM performance and enable more accurate evaluations of model abilities. Here, we propose a simple response bias correction strategy ($\texttt{RBCorr}$) and test it on 12 open-weight language models using yes-no, entailment, and multiple choice questions. We show that response bias is prevalent in LMs pre-correction and that $\texttt{RBCorr}$ effectively eliminates bias and boosts model performance. We also explore the generalizability of bias behavior across models, datasets, and prompt formats, showing that LogProbs-based correction is highly dependent on all three of these aspects. Overall, $\texttt{RBCorr}$ is an easy-to-use method that can boost the performance of smaller LMs and ensure that LM performance on closed-response benchmarks aligns more closely with their true capabilities.

Whole slide images (WSIs) enable weakly supervised prognostic modeling via multiple instance learning (MIL). Spatial transcriptomics (ST) preserves in situ gene expression, providing a spatial molecular context that complements morphology. As paired WSI-ST cohorts scale to population level, leveraging their complementary spatial signals for prognosis becomes crucial; however, principled cross-modal fusion strategies remain limited for this paradigm. To this end, we introduce PathoSpatial, an interpretable end-to-end framework integrating co-registered WSIs and ST to learn spatially informed prognostic representations. PathoSpatial uses task-guided prototype learning within a multi-level experts architecture, adaptively orchestrating unsupervised within-modality discovery with supervised cross-modal aggregation. By design, PathoSpatial substantially strengthens interpretability while maintaining discriminative ability. We evaluate PathoSpatial on a triple-negative breast cancer cohort with paired ST and WSIs. PathoSpatial delivers strong and consistent performance across five survival endpoints, achieving superior or comparable performance to leading unimodal and multimodal methods. PathoSpatial inherently enables post-hoc prototype interpretation and molecular risk decomposition, providing quantitative, biologically grounded explanations, highlighting candidate prognostic factors. We present PathoSpatial as a proof-of-concept for scalable and interpretable multimodal learning for spatial omics-pathology fusion.

Foundation models have achieved remarkable success, yet their growing parameter counts pose significant computational and memory challenges. Low-rank factorization offers a promising route to reduce training and inference costs, but the community lacks a stable recipe for training models from scratch using exclusively low-rank weights while matching the performance of the dense model. We demonstrate that Large Language Models (LLMs) can be trained from scratch using exclusively low-rank factorized weights for all non-embedding matrices without auxiliary "full-rank" guidance required by prior methods. While native low-rank training often suffers from instability and loss spikes, we identify uncontrolled growth in the spectral norm (largest singular value) of the weight matrix update as the dominant factor. To address this, we introduce Spectron: Spectral renormalization with orthogonalization, which dynamically bounds the resultant weight updates based on the current spectral norms of the factors. Our method enables stable, end-to-end factorized training with negligible overhead. Finally, we establish compute-optimal scaling laws for natively low-rank transformers, demonstrating predictable power-law behavior and improved inference efficiency relative to dense models.

Autonomous satellite servicing missions must execute close-range rendezvous under stringent safety and operational constraints while remaining computationally tractable for onboard use and robust to uncertainty in sensing, actuation, and dynamics. This paper presents CORTEX (Convex Optimization for Rendezvous Trajectory Execution), an autonomous, perception-enabled, real-time trajectory design and guidance framework for close-range rendezvous. CORTEX integrates a deep-learning perception pipeline with convex-optimisation-based trajectory design and guidance, including reference regeneration and abort-to-safe-orbit logic to recover from large deviations caused by sensor faults and engine failures. CORTEX is validated in high-fidelity software simulation and hardware-in-the-loop experiments. The software pipeline (Basilisk) models high-fidelity relative dynamics, realistic thruster execution, perception, and attitude control. Hardware testing uses (i) an optical navigation testbed to assess perception-to-estimation performance and (ii) a planar air-bearing testbed to evaluate the end-to-end guidance loop under representative actuation and subsystem effects. A Monte-Carlo campaign in simulation includes initial-state uncertainty, thrust-magnitude errors, and missed-thrust events; under the strongest case investigated, CORTEX achieves terminal docking errors of $36.85 \pm 44.46$ mm in relative position and $1.25 \pm 2.26$ mm/s in relative velocity. On the planar air-bearing testbed, 18 cases are executed (10 nominal; 8 off-nominal requiring recomputation and/or abort due to simulated engine failure and sensor malfunctions), yielding terminal errors of $8.09 \pm 5.29$ mm in position and $2.23 \pm 1.72$ mm/s in velocity.

The increasing complexity of smart manufacturing environments demands interfaces that can translate high-level human intents into machine-executable actions. This paper presents a unified framework that integrates instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) with ontology-aligned Knowledge Graphs (KGs) to enable intent-driven interaction in Manufacturing-as-a-Service (MaaS) ecosystems. We fine-tune Mistral-7B-Instruct-V02 on a domain-specific dataset, enabling the translation of natural language intents into structured JSON requirement models. These models are semantically mapped to a Neo4j-based knowledge graph grounded in the ISA-95 standard, ensuring operational alignment with manufacturing processes, resources, and constraints. Our experimental results demonstrate significant performance gains over zero-shot and 3-shots baselines, achieving 89.33\% exact match accuracy and 97.27\% overall accuracy. This work lays the foundation for scalable, explainable, and adaptive human-machine

Construction automation increasingly requires autonomous mobile robots, yet robust autonomy remains challenging on construction sites. These environments are dynamic and often visually occluded, which complicates perception and navigation. In this context, valuable information from audio sources remains underutilized in most autonomy stacks. This work presents a control barrier function (CBF)-based safety filter that provides safety guarantees for obstacle avoidance while adapting safety margins during navigation using an audio-derived risk cue. The proposed framework augments the CBF with a lightweight, real-time jackhammer detector based on signal envelope and periodicity. Its output serves as an exogenous risk that is directly enforced in the controller by modulating the barrier function. The approach is evaluated in simulation with two CBF formulations (circular and goal-aligned elliptical) with a unicycle robot navigating a cluttered construction environment. Results show that the CBF safety filter eliminates safety violations across all trials while reaching the target in 40.2% (circular) vs. 76.5% (elliptical), as the elliptical formulation better avoids deadlock. This integration of audio perception into a CBF-based controller demonstrates a pathway toward richer multimodal safety reasoning in autonomous robots for safety-critical and dynamic environments.

If LLM training data is polluted with benchmark test data, then benchmark performance gives biased estimates of out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization. Typical decontamination filters use n-gram matching which fail to detect semantic duplicates: sentences with equivalent (or near-equivalent) content that are not close in string space. We study this soft contamination of training data by semantic duplicates. Among other experiments, we embed the Olmo3 training corpus and find that: 1) contamination remains widespread, e.g. we find semantic duplicates for 78% of CodeForces and exact duplicates for 50% of ZebraLogic problems; 2) including semantic duplicates of benchmark data in training does improve benchmark performance; and 3) when finetuning on duplicates of benchmark datapoints, performance also improves on truly-held-out datapoints from the same benchmark. We argue that recent benchmark gains are thus confounded: the prevalence of soft contamination means gains reflect both genuine capability improvements and the accumulation of test data and effective test data in growing training corpora.

Reasoning about failures is crucial for building reliable and trustworthy robotic systems. Prior approaches either treat failure reasoning as a closed-set classification problem or assume access to ample human annotations. Failures in the real world are typically subtle, combinatorial, and difficult to enumerate, whereas rich reasoning labels are expensive to acquire. We address this problem by introducing ARMOR: Adaptive Round-based Multi-task mOdel for Robotic failure detection and reasoning. We formulate detection and reasoning as a multi-task self-refinement process, where the model iteratively predicts detection outcomes and natural language reasoning conditioned on past outputs. During training, ARMOR learns from heterogeneous supervision - large-scale sparse binary labels and small-scale rich reasoning annotations - optimized via a combination of offline and online imitation learning. At inference time, ARMOR generates multiple refinement trajectories and selects the most confident prediction via a self-certainty metric. Experiments across diverse environments show that ARMOR achieves state-of-the-art performance by improving over the previous approaches by up to 30% on failure detection rate and up to 100% in reasoning measured through LLM fuzzy match score, demonstrating robustness to heterogeneous supervision and open-ended reasoning beyond predefined failure modes. We provide dditional visualizations on our website: https://sites.google.com/utexas.edu/armor

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) decompose polysemantic neural representations, where neurons respond to multiple unrelated concepts, into monosemantic features that capture single, interpretable concepts. However, standard training objectives only weakly encourage this decomposition, and existing monosemanticity metrics require pairwise comparisons across all dataset samples, making them inefficient during training and evaluation. We study a recent MonoScore metric and derive a single-pass algorithm that computes exactly the same quantity, but with a cost that grows linearly, rather than quadratically, with the number of dataset images. On OpenImagesV7, we achieve up to a 1200x speedup wall-clock speedup in evaluation and 159x during training, while adding only ~4% per-epoch overhead. This allows us to treat MonoScore as a training signal: we introduce the Monosemanticity Loss (MonoLoss), a plug-in objective that directly rewards semantically consistent activations for learning interpretable monosemantic representations. Across SAEs trained on CLIP, SigLIP2, and pretrained ViT features, using BatchTopK, TopK, and JumpReLU SAEs, MonoLoss increases MonoScore for most latents. MonoLoss also consistently improves class purity (the fraction of a latent's activating images belonging to its dominant class) across all encoder and SAE combinations, with the largest gain raising baseline purity from 0.152 to 0.723. Used as an auxiliary regularizer during ResNet-50 and CLIP-ViT-B/32 finetuning, MonoLoss yields up to 0.6\% accuracy gains on ImageNet-1K and monosemantic activating patterns on standard benchmark datasets. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/AtlasAnalyticsLab/MonoLoss.

Analog and mixed-signal (AMS) integrated circuits (ICs) lie at the core of modern computing and communications systems. However, despite the continued rise in design complexity, advances in AMS automation remain limited. This reflects the central challenge in developing a generalized optimization method applicable across diverse circuit design spaces, many of which are distinct, constrained, and non-differentiable. To address this, our work casts circuit design as a graph generation problem and introduces a novel method of AMS synthesis driven by deep reinforcement learning (AstRL). Based on a policy-gradient approach, AstRL generates circuits directly optimized for user-specified targets within a simulator-embedded environment that provides ground-truth feedback during training. Through behavioral-cloning and discriminator-based similarity rewards, our method demonstrates, for the first time, an expert-aligned paradigm for generalized circuit generation validated in simulation. Importantly, the proposed approach operates at the level of individual transistors, enabling highly expressive, fine-grained topology generation. Strong inductive biases encoded in the action space and environment further drive structurally consistent and valid generation. Experimental results for three realistic design tasks illustrate substantial improvements in conventional design metrics over state-of-the-art baselines, with 100% of generated designs being structurally correct and over 90% demonstrating required functionality.

Zero-shot Learning (ZSL) enables classifiers to recognize classes unseen during training, commonly via generative two stage methods: (1) learn visual semantic correlations from seen classes; (2) synthesize unseen class features from semantics to train classifiers. In this paper, we identify spurious visual semantic correlations in existing generative ZSL worsened by scarce seen class samples and introduce two metrics to quantify spuriousness for seen and unseen classes. Furthermore, we point out a more critical bottleneck: existing unadaptive fully noised generators produce features disconnected from real test samples, which also leads to the spurious correlation. To enhance the visual-semantic correlations on both seen and unseen classes, we propose ZeroDiff++, a diffusion-based generative framework. In training, ZeroDiff++ uses (i) diffusion augmentation to produce diverse noised samples, (ii) supervised contrastive (SC) representations for instance level semantics, and (iii) multi view discriminators with Wasserstein mutual learning to assess generated features. At generation time, we introduce (iv) Diffusion-based Test time Adaptation (DiffTTA) to adapt the generator using pseudo label reconstruction, and (v) Diffusion-based Test time Generation (DiffGen) to trace the diffusion denoising path and produce partially synthesized features that connect real and generated data, and mitigates data scarcity further. Extensive experiments on three ZSL benchmarks demonstrate that ZeroDiff++ not only achieves significant improvements over existing ZSL methods but also maintains robust performance even with scarce training data. Code would be available.

Reinforcement learning (RL) with verifiable rewards has become a standard post-training stage for boosting visual reasoning in vision-language models, yet it remains unclear what capabilities RL actually improves compared with supervised fine-tuning as cold-start initialization (IN). End-to-end benchmark gains conflate multiple factors, making it difficult to attribute improvements to specific skills. To bridge the gap, we propose a Frankenstein-style analysis framework including: (i) functional localization via causal probing; (ii) update characterization via parameter comparison; and (iii) transferability test via model merging. Instead, RL induces a consistent inference-time shift primarily in mid-to-late layers, and these mid-to-late refinements are both transferable (via merging) and necessary (via freezing) for RL gains. Overall, our results suggest that RL's reliable contribution in visual reasoning is not a uniform enhancement of visual perception, but a systematic refinement of mid-to-late transformer computation that improves vision-to-reasoning alignment and reasoning performance, highlighting the limitations of benchmark-only evaluation for understanding multimodal reasoning improvements.

Personalized prompting offers large opportunities for deploying large language models (LLMs) to diverse users, yet existing prompt optimization methods primarily focus on task-level optimization while largely overlooking user-specific preferences and latent constraints of individual users. This gap is primarily due to (i) the absence of high-quality, privacy-sensitive data that capture personalized user-LLM interactions at scale, and (ii) the lack of robust reward signals for individual preferences. To overcome existing data limitations, we introduce a high-fidelity synthetic data generation framework called PersonaGym. Unlike prior work that treats personalization as static persona-preference pairs, PersonaGym models a dynamic preference process via an agentic LLM system to simulate realistic preference behaviors and semantic-aware noise in order to generate personalized multi-turn interaction trajectories. Using PersonaGym, we release PersonaAtlas, a large-scale, high-quality, and diverse synthetic dataset of high-fidelity multi-turn personalized interaction trajectories that closely mirror real-world preference expression and noise patterns. We further propose Personalized Prompt Optimization (PPOpt), a scalable and model-agnostic framework that optimizes user prompts based on interaction histories without modifying the deployed LLM. PPOpt adopts a reason-then-optimize paradigm that infers an explicit user profile and conditions prompt rewriting on the user profile to avoid reward hacking. Our training procedure for PPOpt integrates a cold-start supervised prior with outcome-driven multi-objective reinforcement learning. We present extensive experiments to demonstrate consistent improvements over state-of-the-art baselines in terms of task performance, personalization quality, and robustness to noisy as well as to sparse preference signals.

DragDiffusion is a diffusion-based method for interactive point-based image editing that enables users to manipulate images by directly dragging selected points. The method claims that accurate spatial control can be achieved by optimizing a single diffusion latent at an intermediate timestep, together with identity-preserving fine-tuning and spatial regularization. This work presents a reproducibility study of DragDiffusion using the authors' released implementation and the DragBench benchmark. We reproduce the main ablation studies on diffusion timestep selection, LoRA-based fine-tuning, mask regularization strength, and UNet feature supervision, and observe close agreement with the qualitative and quantitative trends reported in the original work. At the same time, our experiments show that performance is sensitive to a small number of hyperparameter assumptions, particularly the optimized timestep and the feature level used for motion supervision, while other components admit broader operating ranges. We further evaluate a multi-timestep latent optimization variant and find that it does not improve spatial accuracy while substantially increasing computational cost. Overall, our findings support the central claims of DragDiffusion while clarifying the conditions under which they are reliably reproducible. Code is available at https://github.com/AliSubhan5341/DragDiffusion-TMLR-Reproducibility-Challenge.

Level set estimation (LSE) classifies whether an unknown function's value exceeds a specified threshold for given inputs, a fundamental problem in many real-world applications. In active learning settings with limited initial data, we aim to iteratively acquire informative points to construct an accurate classifier for this task. In high-dimensional spaces, this becomes challenging where the search volume grows exponentially with increasing dimensionality. We propose TRLSE, an algorithm for high-dimensional LSE, which identifies and refines regions near the threshold boundary with dual acquisition functions operating at both global and local levels. We provide a theoretical analysis of TRLSE's accuracy and show its superior sample efficiency against existing methods through extensive evaluations on multiple synthetic and real-world LSE problems.

We study neural networks with trainable low-degree rational activation functions and show that they are more expressive and parameter-efficient than modern piecewise-linear and smooth activations such as ELU, LeakyReLU, LogSigmoid, PReLU, ReLU, SELU, CELU, Sigmoid, SiLU, Mish, Softplus, Tanh, Softmin, Softmax, and LogSoftmax. For an error target of $\varepsilon>0$, we establish approximation-theoretic separations: Any network built from standard fixed activations can be uniformly approximated on compact domains by a rational-activation network with only $\mathrm{poly}(\log\log(1/\varepsilon))$ overhead in size, while the converse provably requires $Ω(\log(1/\varepsilon))$ parameters in the worst case. This exponential gap persists at the level of full networks and extends to gated activations and transformer-style nonlinearities. In practice, rational activations integrate seamlessly into standard architectures and training pipelines, allowing rationals to match or outperform fixed activations under identical architectures and optimizers.

High-performance autonomous mobile robots endure significant mechanical stress during in-the-wild operations, e.g., driving at high speeds or over rugged terrain. Although these platforms are engineered to withstand such conditions, mechanical degradation is inevitable. Structural damage manifests as consistent and notable changes in kinodynamic behavior compared to a healthy vehicle. Given the heterogeneous nature of structural failures, quantifying various damages to inform kinodynamics is challenging. We posit that natural language can describe and thus capture this variety of damages. Therefore, we propose Zero-shot Language Informed Kinodynamics (ZLIK), which employs self-supervised learning to ground semantic information of damage descriptions in kinodynamic behaviors to learn a forward kinodynamics model in a data-driven manner. Using the high-fidelity soft-body physics simulator BeamNG.tech, we collect data from a variety of structurally compromised vehicles. Our learned model achieves zero-shot adaptation to different damages with up to 81% reduction in kinodynamics error and generalizes across the sim-to-real and full-to-1/10$^{\text{th}}$ scale gaps.

Recent generative models produce near-photorealistic images, challenging the trustworthiness of photographs. Synthetic image detection (SID) has thus become an important area of research. Prior work has highlighted how synthetic images differ from real photographs--unfortunately, SID methods often struggle to generalize to novel generative models and often perform poorly in practical settings. CLIP, a foundational vision-language model which yields semantically rich image-text embeddings, shows strong accuracy and generalization for SID. Yet, the underlying relevant cues embedded in CLIP-features remain unknown. It is unclear, whether CLIP-based detectors simply detect strong visual artifacts or exploit subtle semantic biases, both of which would render them useless in practical settings or on generative models of high quality. We introduce SynthCLIC, a paired dataset of real photographs and high-quality synthetic counterparts from recent diffusion models, designed to reduce semantic bias in SID. Using an interpretable linear head with de-correlated activations and a text-grounded concept-model, we analyze what CLIP-based detectors learn. CLIP-based linear detectors reach 0.96 mAP on a GAN-based benchmark but only 0.92 on our high-quality diffusion dataset SynthCLIC, and generalization across generator families drops to as low as 0.37 mAP. We find that the detectors primarily rely on high-level photographic attributes (e.g., minimalist style, lens flare, or depth layering), rather than overt generator-specific artifacts. CLIP-based detectors perform well overall but generalize unevenly across diverse generative architectures. This highlights the need for continual model updates and broader training exposure, while reinforcing CLIP-based approaches as a strong foundation for more universal, robust SID.

Accurate forecasting of Bitcoin (BTC) has always been a challenge because decentralized markets are non-linear, highly volatile, and have temporal irregularities. Existing deep learning models often struggle with interpretability and generalization across diverse market conditions. This research presents a hybrid stacked-generalization framework, TFT-ACB-XML, for BTC closing price prediction. The framework integrates two parallel base learners: a customized Temporal Fusion Transformer (TFT) and an Attention-Customized Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory network (ACB), followed by an XGBoost regressor as the meta-learner. The customized TFT model handles long-range dependencies and global temporal dynamics via variable selection networks and interpretable single-head attention. The ACB module uses a new attention mechanism alongside the customized BiLSTM to capture short-term sequential dependencies. Predictions from both customized TFT and ACB are weighted through an error-reciprocal weighting strategy. These weights are derived from validation performance, where a model showing lower prediction error receives a higher weight. Finally, the framework concatenates these weighted outputs into a feature vector and feeds the vector to an XGBoost regressor, which captures non-linear residuals and produces the final BTC closing price prediction. Empirical validation using BTC data from October 1, 2014, to January 5, 2026, shows improved performance of the proposed framework compared to recent Deep Learning and Transformer baseline models. The results show a MAPE of 0.65%, an MAE of 198.15, and an RMSE of 258.30 for one-step-ahead out-of-sample under a walk-forward evaluation on the test block. The evaluation period spans the 2024 BTC halving and the spot ETFs (exchange-traded funds) period, which coincide with major liquidity and volatility shifts.

Optimistic value estimates provide one mechanism for directed exploration in reinforcement learning (RL). The agent acts greedily with respect to an estimate of the value plus what can be seen as a value bonus. The value bonus can be learned by estimating a value function on reward bonuses, propagating local uncertainties around rewards. However, this approach only increases the value bonus for an action retroactively, after seeing a higher reward bonus from that state and action. Such an approach does not encourage the agent to visit a state and action for the first time. In this work, we introduce an algorithm for exploration called Value Bonuses with Ensemble errors (VBE), that maintains an ensemble of random action-value functions (RQFs). VBE uses the errors in the estimation of these RQFs to design value bonuses that provide first-visit optimism and deep exploration. The key idea is to design the rewards for these RQFs in such a way that the value bonus can decrease to zero. We show that VBE outperforms Bootstrap DQN and two reward bonus approaches (RND and ACB) on several classic environments used to test exploration and provide demonstrative experiments that it can scale easily to more complex environments like Atari.

The opioid epidemic remains one of the most severe public health crises in the United States, yet evaluating policy interventions before implementation is difficult: multiple policies interact within a dynamic system where targeting one risk pathway may inadvertently amplify another. We argue that effective opioid policy evaluation requires three capabilities -- forecasting future outcomes under current policies, counterfactual reasoning about alternative past decisions, and optimization over candidate interventions -- and propose to unify them through world modeling. We introduce Policy4OOD, a knowledge-guided spatio-temporal world model that addresses three core challenges: what policies prescribe, where effects manifest, and when effects unfold.Policy4OOD jointly encodes policy knowledge graphs, state-level spatial dependencies, and socioeconomic time series into a policy-conditioned Transformer that forecasts future opioid outcomes.Once trained, the world model serves as a simulator: forecasting requires only a forward pass, counterfactual analysis substitutes alternative policy encodings in the historical sequence, and policy optimization employs Monte Carlo Tree Search over the learned simulator. To support this framework, we construct a state-level monthly dataset (2019--2024) integrating opioid mortality, socioeconomic indicators, and structured policy encodings. Experiments demonstrate that spatial dependencies and structured policy knowledge significantly improve forecasting accuracy, validating each architectural component and the potential of world modeling for data-driven public health decision support.

This work introduces the Nirenberg Neural Network: a numerical approach to the Nirenberg problem of prescribing Gaussian curvature on $S^2$ for metrics that are pointwise conformal to the round metric. Our mesh-free physics-informed neural network (PINN) approach directly parametrises the conformal factor globally and is trained with a geometry-aware loss enforcing the curvature equation. Additional consistency checks were performed via the Gauss-Bonnet theorem, and spherical-harmonic expansions were fit to the learnt models to provide interpretability. For prescribed curvatures with known realisability, the neural network achieves very low losses ($10^{-7} - 10^{-10}$), while unrealisable curvatures yield significantly higher losses. This distinction enables the assessment of unknown cases, separating likely realisable functions from non-realisable ones. The current capabilities of the Nirenberg Neural Network demonstrate that neural solvers can serve as exploratory tools in geometric analysis, offering a quantitative computational perspective on longstanding existence questions.

Thermal infrared imaging captures skin temperature changes driven by autonomic regulation and can potentially provide contactless estimation of electrodermal activity (EDA), heart rate (HR), and breathing rate (BR). While visible-light methods address HR and BR, they cannot access EDA, a standard marker of sympathetic activation. This paper characterizes the extraction of these three biosignals from facial thermal video using a signal-processing pipeline that tracks anatomical regions, applies spatial aggregation, and separates slow sudomotor trends from faster cardiorespiratory components. For HR, we apply an orthogonal matrix image transformation (OMIT) decomposition across multiple facial regions of interest (ROIs), and for BR we average nasal and cheek signals before spectral peak detection. We evaluate 288 EDA configurations and the HR/BR pipeline on 31 sessions from the public SIMULATOR STUDY 1 (SIM1) driver monitoring dataset. The best fixed EDA configuration (nose region, exponential moving average) reaches a mean absolute correlation of $0.40 \pm 0.23$ against palm EDA, with individual sessions reaching 0.89. BR estimation achieves a mean absolute error of $3.1 \pm 1.1$ bpm, while HR estimation yields $13.8 \pm 7.5$ bpm MAE, limited by the low camera frame rate (7.5 Hz). We report signal polarity alternation across sessions, short thermodynamic latency for well-tracked signals, and condition-dependent and demographic effects on extraction quality. These results provide baseline performance bounds and design guidance for thermal contactless biosignal estimation.