Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable success in comprehension tasks such as visual description and visual question answering. However, their direct application to embedding-based tasks like retrieval remains challenging due to the discrepancy between output formats and optimization objectives. Previous approaches often employ contrastive fine-tuning to adapt MLLMs for retrieval, but at the cost of losing their generative capabilities. We argue that both generative and embedding tasks fundamentally rely on shared cognitive mechanisms, specifically cross-modal representation alignment and contextual comprehension. To this end, we propose CREM (Compression-driven Representation Enhanced Model), with a unified framework that enhances multimodal representations for retrieval while preserving generative ability. Specifically, we introduce a compression-based prompt design with learnable chorus tokens to aggregate multimodal semantics and a compression-driven training strategy that integrates contrastive and generative objectives through compression-aware attention. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CREM achieves state-of-the-art retrieval performance on MMEB while maintaining strong generative performance on multiple comprehension benchmarks. Our findings highlight that generative supervision can further improve the representational quality of MLLMs under the proposed compression-driven paradigm.

Current 3D human animation methods struggle to achieve photorealism: kinematics-based approaches lack non-rigid dynamics (e.g., clothing dynamics), while methods that leverage video diffusion priors can synthesize non-rigid motion but suffer from quality artifacts and identity loss. To overcome these limitations, we present Ani3DHuman, a framework that marries kinematics-based animation with video diffusion priors. We first introduce a layered motion representation that disentangles rigid motion from residual non-rigid motion. Rigid motion is generated by a kinematic method, which then produces a coarse rendering to guide the video diffusion model in generating video sequences that restore the residual non-rigid motion. However, this restoration task, based on diffusion sampling, is highly challenging, as the initial renderings are out-of-distribution, causing standard deterministic ODE samplers to fail. Therefore, we propose a novel self-guided stochastic sampling method, which effectively addresses the out-of-distribution problem by combining stochastic sampling (for photorealistic quality) with self-guidance (for identity fidelity). These restored videos provide high-quality supervision, enabling the optimization of the residual non-rigid motion field. Extensive experiments demonstrate that \MethodName can generate photorealistic 3D human animation, outperforming existing methods. Code is available in https://github.com/qiisun/ani3dhuman.

Topic modeling extracts latent themes from large text collections, but leading approaches like BERTopic face critical limitations: stochastic instability, loss of lexical precision ("Embedding Blur"), and reliance on a single data perspective. We present TriTopic, a framework that addresses these weaknesses through a tri-modal graph fusing semantic embeddings, TF-IDF, and metadata. Three core innovations drive its performance: hybrid graph construction via Mutual kNN and Shared Nearest Neighbors to eliminate noise and combat the curse of dimensionality; Consensus Leiden Clustering for reproducible, stable partitions; and Iterative Refinement that sharpens embeddings through dynamic centroid-pulling. TriTopic also replaces the "average document" concept with archetype-based topic representations defined by boundary cases rather than centers alone. In benchmarks across 20 Newsgroups, BBC News, AG News, and Arxiv, TriTopic achieves the highest NMI on every dataset (mean NMI 0.575 vs. 0.513 for BERTopic, 0.416 for NMF, 0.299 for LDA), guarantees 100% corpus coverage with 0% outliers, and is available as an open-source PyPI library.

Amphibious robots, operating seamlessly across land and water, are advancing applications in conservation, disaster response, and defense. Their performance depends on locomotion mechanisms, actuation technologies, and sensor-control integration. This review highlights recent progress in these areas, examining movement strategies, material-based actuators, and control systems for autonomy and adaptability. Challenges and opportunities are outlined to guide future research toward more efficient, resilient, and multifunctional amphibious robots.

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) has become popular in the last few years. The Artificial Intelligence (AI) community in general, and the Machine Learning (ML) community in particular, is coming to the realisation that in many applications, for AI to be trusted, it must not only demonstrate good performance in its decisionmaking, but it also must explain these decisions and convince us that it is making the decisions for the right reasons. However, different applications have different requirements on the information required of the underlying AI system in order to convince us that it is worthy of our trust. How do we define these requirements? In this paper, we present three dimensions for categorising the explanatory requirements of different applications. These are Source, Depth and Scope. We focus on the problem of matching up the explanatory requirements of different applications with the capabilities of underlying ML techniques to provide them. We deliberately avoid including aspects of explanation that are already well-covered by the existing literature and we focus our discussion on ML although the principles apply to AI more broadly.

Current time series foundation models (TSFMs) primarily focus on learning prevalent and regular patterns within a predefined time or frequency domain to enable supervised downstream tasks (e.g., forecasting). Consequently, they are often ineffective for inherently unsupervised downstream tasks-such as time series anomaly detection (TSAD), which aims to identify rare, irregular patterns. This limitation arises because such abnormal patterns can closely resemble the regular patterns when presented in the same time/frequency domain. To address this issue, we introduce TimeRadar, an innovative TSFM built in a fractional time-frequency domain to support generalist TSAD across diverse unseen datasets. Our key insight is that rotating a time series into a data-dependent fractional time-frequency representation can adaptively differentiate the normal and abnormal signals across different datasets. To this end, a novel component, namely Fractionally modulated Time-Frequency Reconstruction (FTFRecon), is proposed in TimeRadar to leverage a learnable fractional order to rotate the time series to the most pronounced angle between a continuous time and frequency domain for accurate data reconstruction. This provides adaptive data reconstruction in an optimal time-frequency domain for each data input, enabling effective differentiation of the unbounded abnormal patterns from the regular ones across datasets, including unseen datasets. To allow TimeRadar to model local abnormality that is not captured by the global data reconstruction, we further introduce a Contextual Deviation Learning (CDL) component to model the local deviation of the input relative to its contextual time series data in the rotatable domain.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are evolving into autonomous agents, yet current "frameless" development--relying on ambiguous natural language without engineering blueprints--leads to critical risks such as scope creep and open-loop failures. To ensure industrial-grade reliability, this study proposes Agentic Problem Frames (APF), a systematic engineering framework that shifts focus from internal model intelligence to the structured interaction between the agent and its environment. The APF establishes a dynamic specification paradigm where intent is concretized at runtime through domain knowledge injection. At its core, the Act-Verify-Refine (AVR) loop functions as a closed-loop control system that transforms execution results into verified knowledge assets, driving system behavior toward asymptotic convergence to mission requirements (R). To operationalize this, this study introduces the Agentic Job Description (AJD), a formal specification tool that defines jurisdictional boundaries, operational contexts, and epistemic evaluation criteria. The efficacy of this framework is validated through two contrasting case studies: a delegated proxy model for business travel and an autonomous supervisor model for industrial equipment management. By applying AJD-based specification and APF modeling to these scenarios, the analysis demonstrates how operational scenarios are systematically controlled within defined boundaries. These cases provide a conceptual proof that agent reliability stems not from a model's internal reasoning alone, but from the rigorous engineering structures that anchor stochastic AI within deterministic business processes, thereby enabling the development of verifiable and dependable domain agents.

Range-view (RV) based LiDAR diffusion has recently made huge strides towards 2D photo-realism. However, it neglects 3D geometry realism and often generates various RV artifacts such as depth bleeding and wavy surfaces. We design L3DR, a 3D-aware LiDAR Diffusion and Rectification framework that can regress and cancel RV artifacts in 3D space and restore local geometry accurately. Our theoretical and empirical analysis reveals that 3D models are inherently superior to 2D models in generating sharp and authentic boundaries. Leveraging such analysis, we design a 3D residual regression network that rectifies RV artifacts and achieves superb geometry realism by predicting point-level offsets in 3D space. On top of that, we design a Welsch Loss that helps focus on local geometry and ignore anomalous regions effectively. Extensive experiments over multiple benchmarks including KITTI, KITTI360, nuScenes and Waymo show that the proposed L3DR achieves state-of-the-art generation and superior geometry-realism consistently. In addition, L3DR is generally applicable to different LiDAR diffusion models with little computational overhead.

3D large multimodal models (3D LMMs) rely heavily on ego poses for enabling directional question-answering and spatial reasoning. However, most existing point cloud benchmarks contain rich directional queries but lack the corresponding ego poses, making them inherently ill-posed in 3D large multimodal modelling. In this work, we redefine a new and rigorous paradigm that enables direction-aware 3D LMMs by identifying and supplementing ego poses into point cloud benchmarks and transforming the corresponding point cloud data according to the identified ego poses. We enable direction-aware 3D LMMs with two novel designs. The first is PoseRecover, a fully automatic pose recovery pipeline that matches questions with ego poses from RGB-D video extrinsics via object-frustum intersection and visibility check with Z-buffers. The second is PoseAlign that transforms the point cloud data to be aligned with the identified ego poses instead of either injecting ego poses into textual prompts or introducing pose-encoded features in the projection layers. Extensive experiments show that our designs yield consistent improvements across multiple 3D LMM backbones such as LL3DA, LL3DA-SONATA, Chat-Scene, and 3D-LLAVA, improving ScanRefer mIoU by 30.0% and Scan2Cap LLM-as-judge accuracy by 11.7%. In addition, our approach is simple, generic, and training-efficient, requiring only instruction tuning while establishing a strong baseline for direction-aware 3D-LMMs.

Path planning for high-speed unmanned surface vehicles requires more complex solutions to reduce sailing time and save energy. This article proposes a new predictive artificial potential field that incorporates time information and predictive potential to plan smoother paths. It explores the principles of the artificial potential field, considering vehicle dynamics and local minimum reachability. The study first analyzes the most advanced traditional artificial potential field and its drawbacks in global and local path planning. It then introduces three modifications to the predictive artificial potential field-angle limit, velocity adjustment, and predictive potential to enhance the feasibility and flatness of the generated path. A comparison between the traditional and predictive artificial potential fields demonstrates that the latter successfully restricts the maximum turning angle, shortens sailing time, and intelligently avoids obstacles. Simulation results further verify that the predictive artificial potential field addresses the concave local minimum problem and improves reachability in special scenarios, ultimately generating a more efficient path that reduces sailing time and conserves energy for unmanned surface vehicles.

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have rapidly advanced across various domains, yet they still lag behind strong text-only large language models (LLMs) on tasks that require multi-step inference and compositional decision-making. Motivated by their shared transformer architectures, we investigate whether the two model families rely on common internal computation for such inference. At the neuron level, we uncover a surprisingly large overlap: more than half of the top-activated units during multi-step inference are shared between representative LLMs and LVLMs, revealing a modality-invariant inference subspace. Through causal probing via activation amplification, we further show that these shared neurons encode consistent and interpretable concept-level effects, demonstrating their functional contribution to inference. Building on this insight, we propose Shared Neuron Low-Rank Fusion (SNRF), a parameter-efficient framework that transfers mature inference circuitry from LLMs to LVLMs. SNRF profiles cross-model activations to identify shared neurons, computes a low-rank approximation of inter-model weight differences, and injects these updates selectively within the shared-neuron subspace. This mechanism strengthens multimodal inference performance with minimal parameter changes and requires no large-scale multimodal fine-tuning. Across diverse mathematics and perception benchmarks, SNRF consistently enhances LVLM inference performance while preserving perceptual capabilities. Our results demonstrate that shared neurons form an interpretable bridge between LLMs and LVLMs, enabling low-cost transfer of inference ability into multimodal models. Our code is available at [https://github.com/chenhangcuisg-code/Do-LLMs-VLMs-Share-Neurons](https://github.com/chenhangcuisg-code/Do-LLMs-VLMs-Share-Neurons).

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate significant potential in multi-agent negotiation tasks, yet evaluation in this domain remains challenging due to a lack of robust and generalizable benchmarks. Abdelnabi et al. (2024) introduce a negotiation benchmark based on Scoreable Games, with the aim of developing a highly complex and realistic evaluation framework for LLMs. Our work investigates the reproducibility of claims in their benchmark, and provides a deeper understanding of its usability and generalizability. We replicate the original experiments on additional models, and introduce additional metrics to verify negotiation quality and evenness of evaluation. Our findings reveal that while the benchmark is indeed complex, model comparison is ambiguous, raising questions about its objectivity. Furthermore, we identify limitations in the experimental setup, particularly in information leakage detection and thoroughness of the ablation study. By examining and analyzing the behavior of a wider range of models on an extended version of the benchmark, we reveal insights that provide additional context to potential users. Our results highlight the importance of context in model-comparative evaluations.

Short-video platforms now host vast multimodal ads whose deceptive visuals, speech and subtitles demand finer-grained, policy-driven moderation than community safety filters. We present BLM-Guard, a content-audit framework for commercial ads that fuses Chain-of-Thought reasoning with rule-based policy principles and a critic-guided reward. A rule-driven ICoT data-synthesis pipeline jump-starts training by generating structured scene descriptions, reasoning chains and labels, cutting annotation costs. Reinforcement learning then refines the model using a composite reward balancing causal coherence with policy adherence. A multitask architecture models intra-modal manipulations (e.g., exaggerated imagery) and cross-modal mismatches (e.g., subtitle-speech drift), boosting robustness. Experiments on real short-video ads show BLM-Guard surpasses strong baselines in accuracy, consistency and generalization.

Activation steering, or representation engineering, offers a lightweight approach to align large language models (LLMs) by manipulating their internal activations at inference time. However, current methods suffer from two key limitations: (i) the lack of a unified theoretical framework for guiding the design of steering directions, and (ii) an over-reliance on one-step steering that fail to capture complex patterns of activation distributions. In this work, we propose a unified ordinary differential equations (ODEs)-based theoretical framework for activation steering in LLM alignment. We show that conventional activation addition can be interpreted as a first-order approximation to the solution of an ODE. Based on this ODE perspective, identifying a steering direction becomes equivalent to designing a barrier function from control theory. Derived from this framework, we introduce ODESteer, a kind of ODE-based steering guided by barrier functions, which shows empirical advancement in LLM alignment. ODESteer identifies steering directions by defining the barrier function as the log-density ratio between positive and negative activations, and employs it to construct an ODE for multi-step and adaptive steering. Compared to state-of-the-art activation steering methods, ODESteer achieves consistent empirical improvements on diverse LLM alignment benchmarks, a notable $5.7\%$ improvement over TruthfulQA, $2.5\%$ over UltraFeedback, and $2.4\%$ over RealToxicityPrompts. Our work establishes a principled new view of activation steering in LLM alignment by unifying its theoretical foundations via ODEs, and validating it empirically through the proposed ODESteer method.

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) exhibit strong performance, yet often produce rationales that sound plausible but fail to reflect their true decision process, undermining reliability and trust. We introduce a formal framework for reasoning faithfulness, defined by two testable conditions: stance consistency (a coherent stance linking reasoning to answer) and causal influence (the stated reasoning causally drives the answer under output-level interventions), explicitly decoupled from accuracy. To operationalize this, we present RFEval, a benchmark of 7,186 instances across seven tasks that probes faithfulness via controlled, output-level counterfactual interventions. Evaluating twelve open-source LRMs, we find unfaithfulness in 49.7% of outputs, predominantly from stance inconsistency. Failures are concentrated in brittle, convergent domains such as math and code, and correlate more with post-training regimes than with scale: within-family ablations indicate that adding current RL-style objectives on top of supervised fine-tuning can reduce reasoning faithfulness, even when accuracy is maintained. Crucially, accuracy is neither a sufficient nor a reliable proxy for faithfulness: once controlling for model and task, the accuracy-faithfulness link is weak and statistically insignificant. Our work establishes a rigorous methodology for auditing LRM reliability and shows that trustworthy AI requires optimizing not only for correct outcomes but also for the structural integrity of the reasoning process. Our code and dataset can be found at project page: https://aidaslab.github.io/RFEval/

Neural audio compression models have recently achieved extreme compression rates, enabling efficient latent generative modeling. Conversely, latent generative models have been applied to compression, pushing the limits of continuous and discrete approaches. However, existing methods remain constrained to low-resolution audio and degrade substantially at very low bitrates, where audible artifacts are prominent. In this paper, we present S-PRESSO, a 48kHz sound effect compression model that produces both continuous and discrete embeddings at ultra-low bitrates, down to 0.096 kbps, via offline quantization. Our model relies on a pretrained latent diffusion model to decode compressed audio embeddings learned by a latent encoder. Leveraging the generative priors of the diffusion decoder, we achieve extremely low frame rates, down to 1Hz (750x compression rate), producing convincing and realistic reconstructions at the cost of exact fidelity. Despite operating at high compression rates, we demonstrate that S-PRESSO outperforms both continuous and discrete baselines in audio quality, acoustic similarity and reconstruction metrics.

Medical image generation is pivotal in applications like data augmentation for low-resource clinical tasks and privacy-preserving data sharing. However, developing a scalable generative backbone for medical imaging requires architectural efficiency, sufficient multi-organ data, and principled evaluation, yet current approaches leave these aspects unresolved. Therefore, we introduce MedVAR, the first autoregressive-based foundation model that adopts the next-scale prediction paradigm to enable fast and scale-up-friendly medical image synthesis. MedVAR generates images in a coarse-to-fine manner and produces structured multi-scale representations suitable for downstream use. To support hierarchical generation, we curate a harmonized dataset of around 440,000 CT and MRI images spanning six anatomical regions. Comprehensive experiments across fidelity, diversity, and scalability show that MedVAR achieves state-of-the-art generative performance and offers a promising architectural direction for future medical generative foundation models.

IR in low-resource languages remains limited by the scarcity of high-quality, task-specific annotated datasets. Manual annotation is expensive and difficult to scale, while using large language models (LLMs) as automated annotators introduces concerns about label reliability, bias, and evaluation validity. This work presents a Bangla IR dataset constructed using a BETA-labeling framework involving multiple LLM annotators from diverse model families. The framework incorporates contextual alignment, consistency checks, and majority agreement, followed by human evaluation to verify label quality. Beyond dataset creation, we examine whether IR datasets from other low-resource languages can be effectively reused through one-hop machine translation. Using LLM-based translation across multiple language pairs, we experimented on meaning preservation and task validity between source and translated datasets. Our experiment reveal substantial variation across languages, reflecting language-dependent biases and inconsistent semantic preservation that directly affect the reliability of cross-lingual dataset reuse. Overall, this study highlights both the potential and limitations of LLM-assisted dataset creation for low-resource IR. It provides empirical evidence of the risks associated with cross-lingual dataset reuse and offers practical guidance for constructing more reliable benchmarks and evaluation pipelines in low-resource language settings.

We investigate how formal temporal logic specifications can enhance the safety and robustness of reinforcement learning (RL) control in aerospace applications. Using the open source AeroBench F-16 simulation benchmark, we train a Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) agent to regulate engine throttle and track commanded airspeed. The control objective is encoded as a Signal Temporal Logic (STL) requirement to maintain airspeed within a prescribed band during the final seconds of each maneuver. To enforce this specification at run time, we introduce a conformal STL shield that filters the RL agent's actions using online conformal prediction. We compare three settings: (i) PPO baseline, (ii) PPO with a classical rule-based STL shield, and (iii) PPO with the proposed conformal shield, under both nominal conditions and a severe stress scenario involving aerodynamic model mismatch, actuator rate limits, measurement noise, and mid-episode setpoint jumps. Experiments show that the conformal shield preserves STL satisfaction while maintaining near baseline performance and providing stronger robustness guarantees than the classical shield. These results demonstrate that combining formal specification monitoring with data driven RL control can substantially improve the reliability of autonomous flight control in challenging environments.

Batch size scheduling (BSS) plays a critical role in large-scale deep learning training, influencing both optimization dynamics and computational efficiency. Yet, its theoretical foundations remain poorly understood. In this work, we show that the functional scaling law (FSL) framework introduced in Li et al. (2025a) provides a principled lens for analyzing BSS. Specifically, we characterize the optimal BSS under a fixed data budget and show that its structure depends sharply on task difficulty. For easy tasks, optimal schedules keep increasing batch size throughout. In contrast, for hard tasks, the optimal schedule maintains small batch sizes for most of training and switches to large batches only in a late stage. To explain the emergence of late switching, we uncover a dynamical mechanism -- the fast catch-up effect -- which also manifests in large language model (LLM) pretraining. After switching from small to large batches, the loss rapidly aligns with the constant large-batch trajectory. Using FSL, we show that this effect stems from rapid forgetting of accumulated gradient noise, with the catch-up speed determined by task difficulty. Crucially, this effect implies that large batches can be safely deferred to late training without sacrificing performance, while substantially reducing data consumption. Finally, extensive LLM pretraining experiments -- covering both Dense and MoE architectures with up to 1.1B parameters and 1T tokens -- validate our theoretical predictions. Across all settings, late-switch schedules consistently outperform constant-batch and early-switch baselines.

We investigate a skill-based framework for humanoid box rearrangement that enables long-horizon execution by sequencing reusable skills at the task level. In our architecture, all skills execute through a shared, task-agnostic whole-body controller (WBC), providing a consistent closed-loop interface for skill composition, in contrast to non-shared designs that use separate low-level controllers per skill. We find that naively reusing the same pretrained WBC can reduce robustness over long horizons, as new skills and their compositions induce shifted state and command distributions. We address this with a simple data aggregation procedure that augments shared-WBC training with rollouts from closed-loop skill execution under domain randomization. To evaluate the approach, we introduce Humanoid Hanoi, a long-horizon Tower-of-Hanoi box rearrangement benchmark, and report results in simulation and on the Digit V3 humanoid robot, demonstrating fully autonomous rearrangement over extended horizons and quantifying the benefits of the shared-WBC approach over non-shared baselines. Project page: https://osudrl.github.io/Humanoid_Hanoi/

We present a novel method for optimizing the posture of kinematically redundant torque-controlled robots to improve robustness during impacts. A rigid impact model is used as the basis for a configuration-dependent metric that quantifies the variation between pre- and post-impact velocities. By finding configurations (postures) that minimize the aforementioned metric, spikes in the robot's state and input commands can be significantly reduced during impacts, improving safety and robustness. The problem of identifying impact-robust postures is posed as a min-max optimization of the aforementioned metric. To overcome the real-time intractability of the problem, we reformulate it as a gradient-based motion task that iteratively guides the robot towards configurations that minimize the proposed metric. This task is embedded within a task-space inverse dynamics (TSID) whole-body controller, enabling seamless integration with other control objectives. The method is applied to a kinematically redundant aerial manipulator performing repeated point contact tasks. We test our method inside a realistic physics simulator and compare it with the nominal TSID. Our method leads to a reduction (up to 51% w.r.t. standard TSID) of post-impact spikes in the robot's configuration and successfully avoids actuator saturation. Moreover, we demonstrate the importance of kinematic redundancy for impact robustness using additional numerical simulations on a quadruped and a humanoid robot, resulting in up to 45% reduction of post-impact spikes in the robot's state w.r.t. nominal TSID.

We study how to improve large foundation vision-language-action (VLA) systems through online reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world settings. Central to this process is the value function, which provides learning signals to guide VLA learning from experience. In practice, the value function is estimated from trajectory fragments collected from different data sources, including historical policies and intermittent human interventions. Estimating the value function of current behavior quality from the mixture data is inherently an off-policy evaluation problem. However, prior work often adopts conservative on-policy estimation for stability, which avoids direct evaluation of the current high-capacity policy and limits learning effectiveness. In this paper, we propose ALOE, an action-level off-policy evaluation framework for VLA post-training. ALOE applies chunking-based temporal-difference bootstrapping to evaluate individual action sequences instead of predicting final task outcomes. This design improves effective credit assignment to critical action chunks under sparse rewards and supports stable policy improvement. We evaluate our method on three real-world manipulation tasks, including smartphone packing as a high-precision task, laundry folding as a long-horizon deformable-object task, and bimanual pick-and-place involving multi-object perception. Across all tasks, ALOE improves learning efficiency without compromising execution speed, showing that off-policy RL can be reintroduced in a reliable manner for real-world VLA post-training. Videos and additional materials are available at our project website.

Domain Generalized Video Semantic Segmentation (DGVSS) is trained on a single labeled driving domain and is directly deployed on unseen domains without target labels and test-time adaptation while maintaining temporally consistent predictions over video streams. In practice, both domain shift and temporal-sampling shift break correspondence-based propagation and fixed-stride temporal aggregation, causing severe frame-to-frame flicker even in label-stable regions. We propose Time2General, a DGVSS framework built on Stability Queries. Time2General introduces a Spatio-Temporal Memory Decoder that aggregates multi-frame context into a clip-level spatio-temporal memory and decodes temporally consistent per-frame masks without explicit correspondence propagation. To further suppress flicker and improve robustness to varying sampling rates, the Masked Temporal Consistency Loss is proposed to regularize temporal prediction discrepancies across different strides, and randomize training strides to expose the model to diverse temporal gaps. Extensive experiments on multiple driving benchmarks show that Time2General achieves a substantial improvement in cross-domain accuracy and temporal stability over prior DGSS and VSS baselines while running at up to 18 FPS. Code will be released after the review process.

Recent advances in diffusion-based video generation have substantially improved visual fidelity and temporal coherence. However, most existing approaches remain task-specific and rely primarily on textual instructions, limiting their ability to handle multimodal inputs, contextual references, and diverse video generation and editing scenarios within a unified framework. Moreover, many video editing methods depend on carefully engineered pipelines tailored to individual operations, which hinders scalability and composability. In this paper, we propose Tele-Omni, a unified multimodal framework for video generation and editing that follows multimodal instructions, including text, images, and reference videos, within a single model. Tele-Omni leverages pretrained multimodal large language models to parse heterogeneous instructions and infer structured generation or editing intents, while diffusion-based generators perform high-quality video synthesis conditioned on these structured signals. To enable joint training across heterogeneous video tasks, we introduce a task-aware data processing pipeline that unifies multimodal inputs into a structured instruction format while preserving task-specific constraints. Tele-Omni supports a wide range of video-centric tasks, including text-to-video generation, image-to-video generation, first-last-frame video generation, in-context video generation, and in-context video editing. By decoupling instruction parsing from video synthesis and combining it with task-aware data design, Tele-Omni achieves flexible multimodal control while maintaining strong temporal coherence and visual consistency. Experimental results demonstrate that Tele-Omni achieves competitive performance across multiple tasks.

Generative modeling typically seeks the path of least action via deterministic flows (ODE). While effective for in-distribution tasks, we argue that these deterministic paths become brittle under causal interventions, which often require transporting probability mass across low-density regions ("off-manifold") where the vector field is ill-defined. This leads to numerical instability and the pathology of anticipatory control. In this work, we introduce the Causal Schrodinger Bridge (CSB), a framework that reformulates counterfactual inference as Entropic Optimal Transport. By leveraging diffusion processes (SDEs), CSB enables probability mass to robustly "tunnel" through support mismatches while strictly enforcing structural admissibility. We prove the Structural Decomposition Theorem, showing that the global high-dimensional bridge factorizes exactly into local, robust transitions. This theorem provides a principled resolution to the Information Bottleneck that plagues monolithic architectures in high dimensions. We empirically validate CSB on a full-rank causal system (d=10^5, intrinsic rank 10^5), where standard structure-blind MLPs fail to converge (MSE ~0.31). By physically implementing the structural decomposition, CSB achieves high-fidelity transport (MSE ~0.06) in just 73.73 seconds on a single GPU. This stands in stark contrast to structure-agnostic O(d^3) baselines, estimated to require over 6 years. Our results demonstrate that CSB breaks the Curse of Dimensionality through structural intelligence, offering a scalable foundation for high-stakes causal discovery in 10^5-node systems. Code is available at: https://github.com/cochran1/causal-schrodinger-bridge

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) is increasingly deployed in safety-critical domains, yet methods for interpretable failure detection and attribution remain underdeveloped. We introduce a two-stage gradient-based framework that provides interpretable diagnostics for three critical failure analysis tasks: (1) detecting the true initial failure source (Patient-0); (2) validating why non-attacked agents may be flagged first due to domino effects; and (3) tracing how failures propagate through learned coordination pathways. Stage 1 performs interpretable per-agent failure detection via Taylor-remainder analysis of policy-gradient costs, declaring an initial Patient-0 candidate at the first threshold crossing. Stage 2 provides validation through geometric analysis of critic derivatives-first-order sensitivity and directional second-order curvature aggregated over causal windows to construct interpretable contagion graphs. This approach explains "downstream-first" detection anomalies by revealing pathways that amplify upstream deviations. Evaluated across 500 episodes in Simple Spread (3 and 5 agents) and 100 episodes in StarCraft II using MADDPG and HATRPO, our method achieves 88.2-99.4% Patient-0 detection accuracy while providing interpretable geometric evidence for detection decisions. By moving beyond black-box detection to interpretable gradient-level forensics, this framework offers practical tools for diagnosing cascading failures in safety-critical MARL systems.

This study investigates students' perceptions of Artificial Intelligence (AI) grading systems in an undergraduate computer science course (n = 27), focusing on a block-based programming final project. Guided by the ethical principles framework articulated by Jobin (2019), our study examines fairness, trust, consistency, and transparency in AI grading by comparing AI-generated feedback with original human-graded feedback. Findings reveal concerns about AI's lack of contextual understanding and personalization. We recommend that equitable and trustworthy AI systems reflect human judgment, flexibility, and empathy, serving as supplementary tools under human oversight. This work contributes to ethics-centered assessment practices by amplifying student voices and offering design principles for humanizing AI in designed learning environments.

Large Language Models (LLMs) inference is central to modern AI applications, dominating worldwide datacenter workloads, making it critical to predict its energy footprint. Existing approaches estimate energy consumption as a simple linear function of input and output sequence. However, by analyzing the autoregressive structure of Transformers, which implies a fundamentally non-linear relationship between input and output sequence lengths and energy consumption, we demonstrate the existence of a generation energy minima. Peak efficiency occurs with short-to-moderate inputs and medium-length outputs, while efficiency drops sharply for long inputs or very short outputs. Consequently, we propose SweetSpot, an analytical model derived from the computational and memory-access complexity of the Transformer architecture, which accurately characterizes the efficiency curve as a function of input and output lengths. To assess accuracy, we measure energy consumption using TensorRT-LLM on NVIDIA H100 GPUs across a diverse set of LLMs ranging from 1B to 9B parameters, including OPT, LLaMA, Gemma, Falcon, Qwen2, and Granite. We test input and output lengths from 64 to 4096 tokens and achieve a mean MAPE of 1.79%. Our results show that aligning sequence lengths with these efficiency "sweet spots" reduce energy usage, up to 33.41x, enabling informed truncation, summarization, and adaptive generation strategies in production systems.

Current audio foundation models typically rely on rigid, task-specific supervision, addressing isolated factors of audio rather than the whole. In contrast, human intelligence processes audio holistically, seamlessly bridging physical signals with abstract cognitive concepts to execute complex tasks. Grounded in this philosophy, we introduce Bagpiper, an 8B audio foundation model that interprets physical audio via rich captions, i.e., comprehensive natural language descriptions that encapsulate the critical cognitive concepts inherent in the signal (e.g., transcription, audio events). By pre-training on a massive corpus of 600B tokens, the model establishes a robust bidirectional mapping between raw audio and this high-level conceptual space. During fine-tuning, Bagpiper adopts a caption-then-process workflow, simulating an intermediate cognitive reasoning step to solve diverse tasks without task-specific priors. Experimentally, Bagpiper outperforms Qwen-2.5-Omni on MMAU and AIRBench for audio understanding and surpasses CosyVoice3 and TangoFlux in generation quality, capable of synthesizing arbitrary compositions of speech, music, and sound effects. To the best of our knowledge, Bagpiper is among the first works that achieve unified understanding generation for general audio. Model, data, and code are available at Bagpiper Home Page.