Mean-shift-based approaches have recently emerged as a representative class of methods for robot swarm shape assembly. They rely on image-based target-shape representations to compute local density gradients and perform mean-shift exploration, which constitute their core mechanism. However, such representations incur substantial memory overhead, especially for high-resolution or 3D shapes. To address this limitation, we propose a memory-efficient tree representation that hierarchically encodes user-specified shapes in both 2D and 3D. Based on this representation, we design a behavior-based distributed controller for assignment-free shape assembly. Comparative 2D and 3D simulations against a state-of-the-art mean-shift algorithm show one to two orders of magnitude lower memory usage and two to four times faster shape entry. Physical experiments with 6 to 7 UAVs further validate real-world practicality.

Visual Place Recognition (VPR) requires robust retrieval of geotagged images despite large appearance, viewpoint, and environmental variation. Prior methods focus on descriptor fine-tuning or fixed sampling strategies yet neglect the dynamic interplay between spatial context and visual similarity during training. We present SAGE (Spatial-visual Adaptive Graph Exploration), a unified training pipeline that enhances granular spatial-visual discrimination by jointly improving local feature aggregation, organize samples during training, and hard sample mining. We introduce a lightweight Soft Probing module that learns residual weights from training data for patch descriptors before bilinear aggregation, boosting distinctive local cues. During training we reconstruct an online geo-visual graph that fuses geographic proximity and current visual similarity so that candidate neighborhoods reflect the evolving embedding landscape. To concentrate learning on the most informative place neighborhoods, we seed clusters from high-affinity anchors and iteratively expand them with a greedy weighted clique expansion sampler. Implemented with a frozen DINOv2 backbone and parameter-efficient fine-tuning, SAGE achieves SOTA across eight benchmarks. Notably, our method obtains 100% Recall@10 on SPED only using 4096D global descriptors. The code and model are available at https://github.com/chenshunpeng/SAGE.

There are two primary approaches to solving Markov decision problems (MDPs): dynamic programming based on the Bellman equation and linear programming (LP). Dynamic programming methods are the most widely used and form the foundation of both classical and modern reinforcement learning (RL). By contrast, LP-based methods have been less commonly employed, although they have recently gained attention in contexts such as offline RL. The relative underuse of the LP-based methods stems from the fact that it leads to an inequality-constrained optimization problem, which is generally more challenging to solve effectively compared with Bellman-equation-based methods. The purpose of this paper is to establish a theoretical foundation for solving LP-based MDPs in a more effective and practical manner. Our key idea is to leverage the log-barrier function, widely used in inequality-constrained optimization, to transform the LP formulation of the MDP into an unconstrained optimization problem. This reformulation enables approximate solutions to be obtained easily via gradient descent. While the method may appear simple, to the best of our knowledge, a thorough theoretical interpretation of this approach has not yet been developed. This paper aims to bridge this gap.

Visual-inertial fusion is crucial for a large amount of intelligent and autonomous applications, such as robot navigation and augmented reality. To bootstrap and achieve optimal state estimation, the spatial-temporal displacements between IMU and cameras must be calibrated in advance. Most existing calibration methods adopt continuous-time state representation, more specifically the B-spline. Despite these methods achieve precise spatial-temporal calibration, they suffer from high computational cost caused by continuous-time state representation. To this end, we propose a novel and extremely efficient calibration method that unleashes the power of discrete-time state representation. Moreover, the weakness of discrete-time state representation in temporal calibration is tackled in this paper. With the increasing production of drones, cellphones and other visual-inertial platforms, if one million devices need calibration around the world, saving one minute for the calibration of each device means saving 2083 work days in total. To benefit both the research and industry communities, the open-source implementation is released at https://github.com/JunlinSong/DT-VI-Calib.

Communication barriers pose significant challenges for individuals with hearing and speech impairments, often limiting their ability to effectively interact in everyday environments. This project introduces a real-time assistive technology solution that leverages advanced deep learning techniques to translate sign language gestures into textual and audible speech. By employing convolution neural networks (CNN) trained on the Sign Language MNIST dataset, the system accurately classifies hand gestures captured live via webcam. Detected gestures are instantaneously translated into their corresponding meanings and transcribed into spoken language using text-to-speech synthesis, thus facilitating seamless communication. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate high model accuracy and robust real-time performance with some latency, highlighting the system's practical applicability as an accessible, reliable, and user-friendly tool for enhancing the autonomy and integration of sign language users in diverse social settings.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated strong potential in generating 'believable human-like' behavior in web environments. Prior work has explored augmenting training data with LLM-synthesized rationales and applying supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to enhance reasoning ability, which in turn can improve downstream action prediction. However, the performance of such approaches remains inherently bounded by the reasoning capabilities of the model used to generate the rationales. In this paper, we introduce Shop-R1, a novel reinforcement learning (RL) framework aimed at enhancing the reasoning ability of LLMs for simulation of real human behavior in online shopping environments. Specifically, Shop-R1 decomposes the human behavior simulation task into two stages: rationale generation and action prediction, each guided by distinct reward signals. For rationale generation, we leverage internal model signals (e.g., logit distributions) to guide the reasoning process in a self-supervised manner. For action prediction, we propose a hierarchical reward structure with difficulty-aware scaling to prevent reward hacking and enable fine-grained reward assignment. This design evaluates both high-level action types and the correctness of fine-grained sub-action details (attributes and values), rewarding outputs proportionally to their difficulty. Experimental results show that our method achieves a relative improvement of over 65% compared to the baseline. The project page is available at https://damon-demon.github.io/shop-r1.html.

Due to an exponential increase in published research articles, it is impossible for individual scientists to read all publications, even within their own research field. In this work, we investigate the use of large language models (LLMs) for the purpose of extracting the main concepts and semantic information from scientific abstracts in the domain of materials science to find links that were not noticed by humans and thus to suggest inspiring near/mid-term future research directions. We show that LLMs can extract concepts more efficiently than automated keyword extraction methods to build a concept graph as an abstraction of the scientific literature. A machine learning model is trained to predict emerging combinations of concepts, i.e. new research ideas, based on historical data. We demonstrate that integrating semantic concept information leads to an increased prediction performance. The applicability of our model is demonstrated in qualitative interviews with domain experts based on individualized model suggestions. We show that the model can inspire materials scientists in their creative thinking process by predicting innovative combinations of topics that have not yet been investigated.

LLM-based agents struggle to execute complex, multi-step Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) that are fundamental to industrial automation. Existing benchmarks fail to capture the procedural complexity and tool orchestration demands of real-world workflows. We introduce SOP-Bench, a benchmark of 2,000+ tasks from human expert-authored SOPs across 12 business domains (healthcare, logistics, finance, content moderation, etc.). Using a human-AI collaborative framework, experts crafted authentic SOPs while AI generated artifacts (tools, APIs, datasets), all human-validated, yielding realistic tasks with executable interfaces and ground-truth outputs. SOP-Bench serves as a research enabler for systematically investigating agent architectures, model capabilities, and deployment considerations across diverse procedural tasks. We demonstrate its utility through illustrative experiments with a subset of frontier models across Function-Calling (FC) and ReAct agents, revealing critical insights. For example, (1) newer models do not guarantee better performance - Claude 4 family outperforms Claude 4.5 family on ReAct tasks (Claude 4 Opus: 72.4% vs. Claude 4.5 Sonnet: 63.3% task success rate), demonstrating that production upgrades require validation; (2) no single model-agent combination dominates: best performances range from 57% to 100% depending on domain. These examples illustrate how SOP-Bench enables isolating and studying specific dimensions of agent performance without costly production experiments. Our goal is not to rank model capabilities or build optimal agents, but to provide a rigorous evaluation framework that enables the researchers and practitioners to systematically investigate agent design choices, model selection, and deployment strategies. We release the benchmark at https://github.com/amazon-science/sop-bench.

Recent studies have shown that large language models (LLMs), especially smaller ones, often lack robustness in grade school math (GSM) reasoning. In particular, they tend to experience performance drops when faced with distribution shifts, such as changes to numerical or nominal variables, or insertions of distracting clauses. A possible strategy to address this involves generating synthetic data to further "instantiate" reasoning problems on potential variations. In this work, we instead focus on the strategy of "abstracting" reasoning problems. This not only helps counteract distribution shifts but also facilitates the connection to symbolic tools for deriving solutions. Focusing on GSM, we find that this abstraction process is better acquired through reinforcement learning (RL) than just supervised fine-tuning, which often fails to produce faithful abstractions. Our method, AbstRaL -- which promotes abstract reasoning in LLMs using RL on granular abstraction data -- significantly mitigates performance degradation on recent GSM perturbation benchmarks. Besides, improving GSM robustness via AbstRaL is shown to also implicitly benefit LLMs' capabilities on OOD mathematical and general reasoning tasks, indicating that abstract thinking broadly enables better generalizability.

Autonomous harvesting in the open presents a complex manipulation problem. In most scenarios, an autonomous system has to deal with significant occlusion and require interaction in the presence of large structural uncertainties (every plant is different). Perceptual and modeling uncertainty make design of reliable manipulation controllers for harvesting challenging, resulting in poor performance during deployment. We present a sim2real reinforcement learning (RL) framework for occlusion-aware plant manipulation, where a policy is learned entirely in simulation to reposition stems and leaves to reveal target fruit(s). In our proposed approach, we decouple high-level kinematic planning from low-level compliant control which simplifies the sim2real transfer. This decomposition allows the learned policy to generalize across multiple plants with different stiffness and morphology. In experiments with multiple real-world plant setups, our system achieves up to 86.7% success in exposing target fruits, demonstrating robustness to occlusion variation and structural uncertainty.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced the state-of-the-art in Text-to-SQL, robust reasoning in complex, multi-table environments remains a bottleneck for parameter-efficient models. This paper presents a systematic empirical study on injecting reasoning capabilities into Text-to-SQL through the lens of Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR). We uncover a critical interplay between reward density, advantage scaling, and model capacity. Our analysis yields four primary insights. First, we propose a novel execution-guided dense reward function that significantly outperforms binary signals and existing state-of-the-art rewards by providing granular feedback at the instance level. Second, we analyze the mechanics of advantage calculation, demonstrating that while large models thrive on sparse signals with aggressive advantage scaling, smaller models require dense rewards and conservative scaling to improve Text-to-SQL performance. Third, we evaluate the impact of cold start, showing that distillation does not always improve RLVR performance and that supervised, fine-tuned models are prone to distributional mimicry. Fourth, we map the Pareto frontier of training efficiency, providing insights for optimizing Text-to-SQL reasoning under computational constraints. Our findings culminate in the Think2SQL family: our 4B-parameter model demonstrates reasoning capabilities competitive with state-of-the-art models such as o3. We release our models, datasets, and code to create a blueprint for RLVR optimization in Text-to-SQL at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Think2SQL-3B7F.

Traditional classifiers treat all labels as mutually independent, thereby considering all negative classes to be equally incorrect. This approach fails severely in many real-world scenarios, where a known semantic hierarchy defines a partial order of preferences over negative classes. While hierarchy-aware feature representations have shown promise in mitigating this problem, their performance is typically assessed using metrics like MS and AHD. In this paper, we highlight important shortcomings in existing hierarchical evaluation metrics, demonstrating that they are often incapable of measuring true hierarchical performance. Our analysis reveals that existing methods learn sub-optimal hierarchical representations, despite competitive MS and AHD scores. To counter these issues, we introduce Hier-COS, a novel framework for unified hierarchy-aware fine-grained and hierarchical multi-level classification. We show that Hier-COS is theoretically guaranteed to be consistent with the given hierarchy tree. Furthermore, our framework implicitly adapts the learning capacity for different classes based on their position within the hierarchy tree-a vital property absent in existing methods. Finally, to address the limitations of evaluation metrics, we propose HOPS, a ranking-based metric that demonstrably overcomes the deficiencies of current evaluation standards. We benchmark Hier-COS on four challenging datasets, including the deep and imbalanced tieredImageNet-H and iNaturalist-19. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that Hier-COS achieves SOTA across all hierarchical metrics for every dataset, while simultaneously beating the top-1 accuracy in all but one case. Lastly, we show that Hier-COS can effectively learn to transform the frozen features extracted from a pretrained backbone (ViT) to be hierarchy-aware, yielding substantial benefits for hierarchical classification performance.

There is growing concern over the safety of powerful diffusion models (DMs), as they are often misused to produce inappropriate, not-safe-for-work (NSFW) content or generate copyrighted material or data of individuals who wish to be forgotten. Many existing methods tackle these issues by heavily relying on text-based negative prompts or extensively retraining DMs to eliminate certain features or samples. In this paper, we take a radically different approach, directly modifying the sampling trajectory by leveraging a negation set (e.g., unsafe images, copyrighted data, or datapoints needed to be excluded) to avoid specific regions of data distribution, without needing to retrain or fine-tune DMs. We formally derive the relationship between the expected denoised samples that are safe and those that are not safe, leading to our $\textit{safe}$ denoiser which ensures its final samples are away from the area to be negated. Inspired by the derivation, we develop a practical algorithm that successfully produces high-quality samples while avoiding negation areas of the data distribution in text-conditional, class-conditional, and unconditional image generation scenarios. These results hint at the great potential of our training-free safe denoiser for using DMs more safely.

Benchmarks are important tools for tracking the rapid advancements in large language model (LLM) capabilities. However, benchmarks are not keeping pace in difficulty: LLMs now achieve over 90\% accuracy on popular benchmarks like MMLU, limiting informed measurement of state-of-the-art LLM capabilities. In response, we introduce Humanity's Last Exam (HLE), a multi-modal benchmark at the frontier of human knowledge, designed to be the final closed-ended academic benchmark of its kind with broad subject coverage. HLE consists of 2,500 questions across dozens of subjects, including mathematics, humanities, and the natural sciences. HLE is developed globally by subject-matter experts and consists of multiple-choice and short-answer questions suitable for automated grading. Each question has a known solution that is unambiguous and easily verifiable, but cannot be quickly answered via internet retrieval. State-of-the-art LLMs demonstrate low accuracy and calibration on HLE, highlighting a significant gap between current LLM capabilities and the expert human frontier on closed-ended academic questions. To inform research and policymaking upon a clear understanding of model capabilities, we publicly release HLE at https://lastexam.ai.

Clustering large high-dimensional datasets with diverse variable is essential for extracting high-level latent information from these datasets. Here, we developed an unsupervised clustering algorithm, we call "Village-Net". Village-Net is specifically designed to effectively cluster high-dimension data without priori knowledge on the number of existing clusters. The algorithm operates in two phases: first, utilizing K-Means clustering, it divides the dataset into distinct subsets we refer to as "villages". Next, a weighted network is created, with each node representing a village, capturing their proximity relationships. To achieve optimal clustering, we process this network using a community detection algorithm called Walk-likelihood Community Finder (WLCF), a community detection algorithm developed by one of our team members. A salient feature of Village-Net Clustering is its ability to autonomously determine an optimal number of clusters for further analysis based on inherent characteristics of the data. We present extensive benchmarking on extant real-world datasets with known ground-truth labels to showcase its competitive performance, particularly in terms of the normalized mutual information (NMI) score, when compared to other state-of-the-art methods. The algorithm is computationally efficient, boasting a time complexity of O(N*k*d), where N signifies the number of instances, k represents the number of villages and d represents the dimension of the dataset, which makes it well suited for effectively handling large-scale datasets.

This study investigates crash severity risk modeling strategies for work zones involving large vehicles (i.e., trucks, buses, and vans) under crash data imbalance between low-severity (LS) and high-severity (HS) crashes. We utilized crash data involving large vehicles in South Carolina work zones from 2014 to 2018, which included four times more LS crashes than HS crashes. The objective of this study is to evaluate the crash severity prediction performance of various statistical, machine learning, and deep learning models under different feature selection and data balancing techniques. Findings highlight a disparity in LS and HS predictions, with lower accuracy for HS crashes due to class imbalance and feature overlap. Discriminative Mutual Information (DMI) yields the most effective feature set for predicting HS crashes without requiring data balancing, particularly when paired with gradient boosting models and deep neural networks such as CatBoost, NeuralNetTorch, XGBoost, and LightGBM. Data balancing techniques such as NearMiss-1 maximize HS recall when combined with DMI-selected features and certain models such as LightGBM, making them well-suited for HS crash prediction. Conversely, RandomUnderSampler, HS Class Weighting, and RandomOverSampler achieve more balanced performance, which is defined as an equitable trade-off between LS and HS metrics, especially when applied to NeuralNetTorch, NeuralNetFastAI, CatBoost, LightGBM, and Bayesian Mixed Logit (BML) using merged feature sets or models without feature selection. The insights from this study offer safety analysts guidance on selecting models, feature selection, and data balancing techniques aligned with specific safety goals, providing a robust foundation for enhancing work-zone crash severity prediction.

AIs can beat humans in game environments; however, how helpful those agents are to human remains understudied. We augment CICERO, a natural language agent that demonstrates superhuman performance in Diplomacy, to generate both move and message advice based on player intentions. A dozen Diplomacy games with novice and experienced players, with varying advice settings, show that some of the generated advice is beneficial. It helps novices compete with experienced players and in some instances even surpass them. The mere presence of advice can be advantageous, even if players do not follow it.

Mesh reconstruction from Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) is widely used in 3D reconstruction and has been applied across numerous domains. However, existing methods typically rely solely on the given training set images, which restricts supervision to limited observations and makes it difficult to fully constrain geometry and appearance. Moreover, the contribution of each viewpoint for training is not uniform and changes dynamically during the optimization process, which can result in suboptimal guidance for both geometric refinement and rendering quality. To address these limitations, we propose $R^2$-Mesh, a reinforcement learning framework that combines NeRF-rendered pseudo-supervision with online viewpoint selection. Our key insight is to exploit NeRF's rendering ability to synthesize additional high-quality images, enriching training with diverse viewpoint information. To ensure that supervision focuses on the most beneficial perspectives, we introduce a UCB-based strategy with a geometry-aware reward, which dynamically balances exploration and exploitation to identify informative viewpoints throughout training. Within this framework, we jointly optimize SDF geometry and view-dependent appearance under differentiable rendering, while periodically refining meshes to capture fine geometric details. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves competitive results in both geometric accuracy and rendering quality.

With the rapid progress of Multimodal LLMs, evaluating their mathematical reasoning capabilities has become an increasingly important research direction. In particular, visual-textual mathematical reasoning serves as a key indicator of an MLLM's ability to comprehend and solve complex, multi-step quantitative problems. While existing benchmarks such as MathVista and MathVerse have advanced the evaluation of multimodal math proficiency, they primarily rely on digitally rendered content and fall short in capturing the complexity of real-world scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce MathScape, a novel benchmark focused on assessing MLLMs' reasoning ability in realistic mathematical contexts. MathScape comprises 1,369 high-quality math problems paired with human-captured real-world images, closely reflecting the challenges encountered in practical educational settings. We conduct a thorough multi-dimensional evaluation across nine leading closed-source MLLMs, three open-source MLLMs with over 20 billion parameters, and seven smaller-scale MLLMs. Our results show that even state-of-the-art models struggle with real-world math tasks, lagging behind human performance, highlighting critical limitations in current model capabilities. Moreover, we find that strong performance on synthetic or digitally rendered images does not guarantee similar effectiveness on real-world tasks. This underscores the necessity of MathScape in the next stage of multimodal mathematical reasoning.

An increasing number of scientific experiments support the view of perception as Bayesian inference, which is rooted in Helmholtz's view of perception as unconscious inference. Recent study of logic presents a view of logical reasoning as Bayesian inference. In this paper, we give a simple probabilistic model that is applicable to both perceptual reasoning and logical reasoning. We show that the model unifies the two essential processes common in perceptual and logical systems: on the one hand, the process by which perceptual and logical knowledge is derived from another knowledge, and on the other hand, the process by which such knowledge is derived from data. We fully characterise the model in terms of logical consequence relations.

In reinforcement learning, abstraction methods that remove unnecessary information from the observation are commonly used to learn policies which generalize better to unseen tasks. However, these methods often overlook a crucial weakness: the function which extracts the reduced-information representation has unknown generalization ability in unseen observations. In this paper, we address this problem by presenting an information removal method which more reliably generalizes to new states. We accomplish this by using a learned masking function which operates on, and is integrated with, the attention weights within an attention-based policy network. We demonstrate that our method significantly improves policy generalization to unseen tasks in the Procgen benchmark compared to standard PPO and masking approaches.

Current zero-shot Camouflaged Object Segmentation methods typically employ a two-stage pipeline (discover-then-segment): using MLLMs to obtain visual prompts, followed by SAM segmentation. However, relying solely on MLLMs for camouflaged object discovery often leads to inaccurate localization, false positives, and missed detections. To address these issues, we propose the \textbf{D}iscover-\textbf{S}egment-\textbf{S}elect (\textbf{DSS}) mechanism, a progressive framework designed to refine segmentation step by step. The proposed method contains a Feature-coherent Object Discovery (FOD) module that leverages visual features to generate diverse object proposals, a segmentation module that refines these proposals through SAM segmentation, and a Semantic-driven Mask Selection (SMS) module that employs MLLMs to evaluate and select the optimal segmentation mask from multiple candidates. Without requiring any training or supervision, DSS achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple COS benchmarks, especially in multiple-instance scenes.

Data-driven neural Koopman operator theory has emerged as a powerful tool for linearizing and controlling nonlinear robotic systems. However, the performance of these data-driven models fundamentally depends on the trade-off between sample size and model dimensions, a relationship for which the scaling laws have remained unclear. This paper establishes a rigorous framework to address this challenge by deriving and empirically validating scaling laws that connect sample size, latent space dimension, and downstream control quality. We derive a theoretical upper bound on the Koopman approximation error, explicitly decomposing it into sampling error and projection error. We show that these terms decay at specific rates relative to dataset size and latent dimension, providing a rigorous basis for the scaling law. Based on the theoretical results, we introduce two lightweight regularizers for the neural Koopman operator: a covariance loss to help stabilize the learned latent features and an inverse control loss to ensure the model aligns with physical actuation. The results from systematic experiments across six robotic environments confirm that model fitting error follows the derived scaling laws, and the regularizers improve dynamic model fitting fidelity, with enhanced closed-loop control performance. Together, our results provide a simple recipe for allocating effort between data collection and model capacity when learning Koopman dynamics for control.

Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE) architectures are increasingly used to scale large language models efficiently, delivering strong accuracy under fixed compute budgets. However, SMoE models often suffer from severe load imbalance across experts, where a small subset of experts receives most tokens while others are underutilized. Prior work has focused mainly on training-time solutions such as routing regularization or auxiliary losses, leaving inference-time behavior, which is critical for deployment, less explored. We present a systematic analysis of expert routing during inference and identify three findings: (i) load imbalance persists and worsens with larger batch sizes, (ii) selection frequency does not reliably reflect expert importance, and (iii) overall expert workload and importance can be estimated using a small calibration set. These insights motivate inference-time mechanisms that rebalance workloads without retraining or router modification. We propose Replicate-and-Quantize (R&Q), a training-free and near-lossless framework for dynamic workload rebalancing. In each layer, heavy-hitter experts are replicated to increase parallel capacity, while less critical experts and replicas are quantized to remain within the original memory budget. We also introduce a Load-Imbalance Score (LIS) to measure routing skew by comparing heavy-hitter load to an equal allocation baseline. Experiments across representative SMoE models and benchmarks show up to 1.4x reduction in imbalance with accuracy maintained within +/-0.6%, enabling more predictable and efficient inference.

Learning neural implicit fields of 3D shapes is a rapidly emerging field that enables shape representation at arbitrary resolutions. Due to the flexibility, neural implicit fields have succeeded in many research areas, including shape reconstruction, novel view image synthesis, and more recently, object pose estimation. Neural implicit fields enable learning dense correspondences between the camera space and the object's canonical space-including unobserved regions in camera space-significantly boosting object pose estimation performance in challenging scenarios like highly occluded objects and novel shapes. Despite progress, predicting canonical coordinates for unobserved camera-space regions remains challenging due to the lack of direct observational signals. This necessitates heavy reliance on the model's generalization ability, resulting in high uncertainty. Consequently, densely sampling points across the entire camera space may yield inaccurate estimations that hinder the learning process and compromise performance. To alleviate this problem, we propose a method combining an SO(3)-equivariant convolutional implicit network and a positive-incentive point sampling (PIPS) strategy. The SO(3)-equivariant convolutional implicit network estimates point-level attributes with SO(3)-equivariance at arbitrary query locations, demonstrating superior performance compared to most existing baselines. The PIPS strategy dynamically determines sampling locations based on the input, thereby boosting the network's accuracy and training efficiency. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art on three pose estimation datasets. Notably, it demonstrates significant improvements in challenging scenarios, such as objects captured with unseen pose, high occlusion, novel geometry, and severe noise.

Incorporating diffusion-generated synthetic data into adversarial training (AT) has been shown to substantially improve the training of robust image classifiers. In this work, we extend the role of diffusion models beyond merely generating synthetic data, examining whether their internal representations, which encode meaningful features of the data, can provide additional benefits for robust classifier training. Through systematic experiments, we show that diffusion models offer representations that are both diverse and partially robust, and that explicitly incorporating diffusion representations as an auxiliary learning signal during AT consistently improves robustness across settings. Furthermore, our representation analysis indicates that incorporating diffusion models into AT encourages more disentangled features, while diffusion representations and diffusion-generated synthetic data play complementary roles in shaping representations. Experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet validate these findings, demonstrating the effectiveness of jointly leveraging diffusion representations and synthetic data within AT.

Imitation learning stands at a crossroads: despite decades of progress, current imitation learning agents remain sophisticated memorisation machines, excelling at replay but failing when contexts shift or goals evolve. This paper argues that this failure is not technical but foundational: imitation learning has been optimised for the wrong objective. We propose a research agenda that redefines success from perfect replay to compositional adaptability. Such adaptability hinges on learning behavioural primitives once and recombining them through novel contexts without retraining. We establish metrics for compositional generalisation, propose hybrid architectures, and outline interdisciplinary research directions drawing on cognitive science and cultural evolution. Agents that embed adaptability at the core of imitation learning thus have an essential capability for operating in an open-ended world.

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) has garnered significant interest due to its safe and easily scalable paradigm. However, training under this paradigm presents its own challenge: the extrapolation error stemming from out-of-distribution (OOD) data. Existing methodologies have endeavored to address this issue through means like penalizing OOD Q-values or imposing similarity constraints on the learned policy and the behavior policy. Nonetheless, these approaches are often beset by limitations such as being overly conservative in utilizing OOD data, imprecise OOD data characterization, and significant computational overhead. To address these challenges, this paper introduces an Uncertainty-Aware Rank-One Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) Q Network framework. The framework aims to enhance Offline Reinforcement Learning by fully leveraging the potential of OOD data while still ensuring efficiency in the learning process. Specifically, the framework quantifies data uncertainty and harnesses it in the training losses, aiming to train a policy that maximizes the lower confidence bound of the corresponding Q-function. Furthermore, a Rank-One MIMO architecture is introduced to model the uncertainty-aware Q-function, \TP{offering the same ability for uncertainty quantification as an ensemble of networks but with a cost nearly equivalent to that of a single network}. Consequently, this framework strikes a harmonious balance between precision, speed, and memory efficiency, culminating in improved overall performance. Extensive experimentation on the D4RL benchmark demonstrates that the framework attains state-of-the-art performance while remaining computationally efficient. By incorporating the concept of uncertainty quantification, our framework offers a promising avenue to alleviate extrapolation errors and enhance the efficiency of offline RL.

Due to the real-time rendering performance, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as the leading method for radiance field reconstruction. However, its reliance on spherical harmonics for color encoding inherently limits its ability to separate diffuse and specular components, making it challenging to accurately represent complex reflections. To address this, we propose a novel enhanced Gaussian kernel that explicitly models specular effects through view-dependent opacity. Meanwhile, we introduce an error-driven compensation strategy to improve rendering quality in existing 3DGS scenes. Our method begins with 2D Gaussian initialization and then adaptively inserts and optimizes enhanced Gaussian kernels, ultimately producing an augmented radiance field. Experiments demonstrate that our method not only surpasses state-of-the-art NeRF methods in rendering performance but also achieves greater parameter efficiency. Project page at: https://xiaoxinyyx.github.io/augs.

Understanding and predicting microstructure evolution is fundamental to materials science, as it governs the resulting properties and performance of materials. Traditional simulation methods, such as phase-field models, offer high-fidelity results but are computationally expensive due to the need to solve complex partial differential equations at fine spatiotemporal resolutions. To address this challenge, we propose a deep learning-based framework that accelerates microstructure evolution predictions while maintaining high accuracy. Our approach utilizes a fully convolutional spatiotemporal model trained in a self-supervised manner using sequential images generated from simulations of microstructural processes, including grain growth and spinodal decomposition. The trained neural network effectively learns the underlying physical dynamics and can accurately capture both short-term local behaviors and long-term statistical properties of evolving microstructures, while also demonstrating generalization to unseen spatiotemporal domains and variations in configuration and material parameters. Compared to recurrent neural architectures, our model achieves state-of-the-art predictive performance with significantly reduced computational cost in both training and inference. This work establishes a robust baseline for spatiotemporal learning in materials science and offers a scalable, data-driven alternative for fast and reliable microstructure simulations.