3D object affordance grounding aims to identify regions on 3D objects that support human-object interaction (HOI), a capability essential to embodied visual reasoning. However, most existing approaches rely on static visual or textual cues, neglecting that affordances are inherently defined by dynamic actions. As a result, they often struggle to localize the true contact regions involved in real interactions. We take a different perspective. Humans learn how to use objects by observing and imitating actions, not just by examining shapes. Motivated by this intuition, we introduce video-guided 3D affordance grounding, which leverages dynamic interaction sequences to provide functional supervision. To achieve this, we propose VAGNet, a framework that aligns video-derived interaction cues with 3D structure to resolve ambiguities that static cues cannot address. To support this new setting, we introduce PVAD, the first HOI video-3D pairing affordance dataset, providing functional supervision unavailable in prior works. Extensive experiments on PVAD show that VAGNet achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming static-based baselines. The code and dataset will be open publicly.

A fine-grained understanding of egocentric human-environment interactions is crucial for developing next-generation embodied agents. One fundamental challenge in this area involves accurately parsing hands and active objects. While transformer-based architectures have demonstrated considerable potential for such tasks, several key limitations remain unaddressed: 1) existing query initialization mechanisms rely primarily on semantic cues or learnable parameters, demonstrating limited adaptability to changing active objects across varying input scenes; 2) previous transformer-based methods utilize pixel-level semantic features to iteratively refine queries during mask generation, which may introduce interaction-irrelevant content into the final embeddings; and 3) prevailing models are susceptible to "interaction illusion", producing physically inconsistent predictions. To address these issues, we propose an end-to-end Interaction-aware Transformer (InterFormer), which integrates three key components, i.e., a Dynamic Query Generator (DQG), a Dual-context Feature Selector (DFS), and the Conditional Co-occurrence (CoCo) loss. The DQG explicitly grounds query initialization in the spatial dynamics of hand-object contact, enabling targeted generation of interaction-aware queries for hands and various active objects. The DFS fuses coarse interactive cues with semantic features, thereby suppressing interaction-irrelevant noise and emphasizing the learning of interactive relationships. The CoCo loss incorporates hand-object relationship constraints to enhance physical consistency in prediction. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on both the EgoHOS and the challenging out-of-distribution mini-HOI4D datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness and strong generalization ability. Code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/yuggiehk/InterFormer.

As a distributed collaborative machine learning paradigm, vertical federated learning (VFL) allows multiple passive parties with distinct features and one active party with labels to collaboratively train a model. Although it is known for the privacy-preserving capabilities, VFL still faces significant privacy and security threats from backdoor attacks. Existing backdoor attacks typically involve an attacker implanting a trigger into the model during the training phase and executing the attack by adding the trigger to the samples during the inference phase. However, in this paper, we find that triggers are not essential for backdoor attacks in VFL. In light of this, we disclose a new backdoor attack pathway in VFL by introducing a feature-based triggerless backdoor attack. This attack operates under a more stringent security assumption, where the attacker is honest-but-curious rather than malicious during the training phase. It comprises three modules: label inference for the targeted backdoor attack, poison generation with amplification and perturbation mechanisms, and backdoor execution to implement the attack. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate that our attack outperforms three baseline backdoor attacks by 2 to 50 times while minimally impacting the main task. Even in VFL scenarios with 32 passive parties and only one set of auxiliary data, our attack maintains high performance. Moreover, when confronted with distinct defense strategies, our attack remains largely unaffected and exhibits strong robustness. We hope that the disclosure of this triggerless backdoor attack pathway will encourage the community to revisit security threats in VFL scenarios and inspire researchers to develop more robust and practical defense strategies.

Speech signals encode emotional, linguistic, and pathological information within a shared acoustic channel; however, disentanglement is typically assessed indirectly through downstream task performance. We introduce an information-theoretic framework to quantify cross-dimension statistical dependence in handcrafted acoustic features by integrating bounded neural mutual information (MI) estimation with non-parametric validation. Across six corpora, cross-dimension MI remains low, with tight estimation bounds ($< 0.15$ nats), indicating weak statistical coupling in the data considered, whereas Source--Filter MI is substantially higher (0.47 nats). Attribution analysis, defined as the proportion of total MI attributable to source versus filter components, reveals source dominance for emotional dimensions (80\%) and filter dominance for linguistic and pathological dimensions (60\% and 58\%, respectively). These findings provide a principled framework for quantifying dimensional independence in speech.

Long-term environmental monitoring requires the ability to reconstruct and align 3D models across repeated site visits separated by months or years. However, existing Structure-from-Motion (SfM) pipelines implicitly assume near-simultaneous image capture and limited appearance change, and therefore fail when applied to long-term monitoring scenarios such as coral reef surveys, where substantial visual and structural change is common. In this paper, we show that the primary limitation of current approaches lies in their reliance on post-hoc alignment of independently reconstructed sessions, which is insufficient under large temporal appearance change. We address this limitation by enforcing cross-session correspondences directly within a joint SfM reconstruction. Our approach combines complementary handcrafted and learned visual features to robustly establish correspondences across large temporal gaps, enabling the reconstruction of a single coherent 3D model from imagery captured years apart, where standard independent and joint SfM pipelines break down. We evaluate our method on long-term coral reef datasets exhibiting significant real-world change, and demonstrate consistent joint reconstruction across sessions in cases where existing methods fail to produce coherent reconstructions. To ensure scalability to large datasets, we further restrict expensive learned feature matching to a small set of likely cross-session image pairs identified via visual place recognition, which reduces computational cost and improves alignment robustness.

Propagation-based video editing enables precise user control by propagating a single edited frame into following frames while maintaining the original context such as motion and structures. However, training such models requires large-scale, paired (source and edited) video datasets, which are costly and complex to acquire. Hence, we propose the PropFly, a training pipeline for Propagation-based video editing, relying on on-the-Fly supervision from pre-trained video diffusion models (VDMs) instead of requiring off-the-shelf or precomputed paired video editing datasets. Specifically, our PropFly leverages one-step clean latent estimations from intermediate noised latents with varying Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) scales to synthesize diverse pairs of 'source' (low-CFG) and 'edited' (high-CFG) latents on-the-fly. The source latent serves as structural information of the video, while the edited latent provides the target transformation for learning propagation. Our pipeline enables an additional adapter attached to the pre-trained VDM to learn to propagate edits via Guidance-Modulated Flow Matching (GMFM) loss, which guides the model to replicate the target transformation. Our on-the-fly supervision ensures the model to learn temporally consistent and dynamic transformations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our PropFly significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on various video editing tasks, producing high-quality editing results.

Modern language models (LM) are trained on large scrapes of the Web, containing millions of personal information (PI) instances, many of which LMs memorize, increasing privacy risks. In this work, we develop the regexes and rules (R&R) detector suite to detect email addresses, phone numbers, and IP addresses, which outperforms the best regex-based PI detectors. On a manually curated set of 483 instances of PI, we measure memorization: finding that 13.6% are parroted verbatim by the Pythia-6.9b model, i.e., when the model is prompted with the tokens that precede the PI in the original document, greedy decoding generates the entire PI span exactly. We expand this analysis to study models of varying sizes (160M-6.9B) and pretraining time steps (70k-143k iterations) in the Pythia model suite and find that both model size and amount of pretraining are positively correlated with memorization. Even the smallest model, Pythia-160m, parrots 2.7% of the instances exactly. Consequently, we strongly recommend that pretraining datasets be aggressively filtered and anonymized to minimize PI parroting.

We study online maximization of non-monotone Diminishing-Return(DR)-submodular functions over down-closed convex sets, a regime where existing projection-free online methods suffer from suboptimal regret and limited feedback guarantees. Our main contribution is a new structural result showing that this class is $1/e$-linearizable under carefully designed exponential reparametrization, scaling parameter, and surrogate potential, enabling a reduction to online linear optimization. As a result, we obtain $O(T^{1/2})$ static regret with a single gradient query per round and unlock adaptive and dynamic regret guarantees, together with improved rates under semi-bandit, bandit, and zeroth-order feedback. Across all feedback models, our bounds strictly improve the state of the art.

Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have emerged as promising candidates for end-to-end autonomous driving. However, these models typically face challenges in inference latency, action precision, and explainability. Existing autoregressive approaches struggle with slow token-by-token generation, while prior diffusion-based planners often rely on verbose, general-purpose language tokens that lack explicit geometric structure. In this work, we propose Masked Vision-Language-Action Diffusion for Autonomous Driving (MVLAD-AD), a novel framework designed to bridge the gap between efficient planning and semantic explainability via a masked vision-language-action diffusion model. Unlike methods that force actions into the language space, we introduce a discrete action tokenization strategy that constructs a compact codebook of kinematically feasible waypoints from real-world driving distributions. Moreover, we propose geometry-aware embedding learning to ensure that embeddings in the latent space approximate physical geometric metrics. Finally, an action-priority decoding strategy is introduced to prioritize trajectory generation. Extensive experiments on nuScenes and derived benchmarks demonstrate that MVLAD-AD achieves superior efficiency and outperforms state-of-the-art autoregressive and diffusion baselines in planning precision, while providing high-fidelity and explainable reasoning.

The evolution of autonomous driving towards full automation demands robust interactive capabilities; however, the development of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models is constrained by the sparsity of interactive scenarios and inadequate multimodal alignment in existing data. To this end, this paper proposes the Interactive Enhanced Driving Dataset (IEDD). We develop a scalable pipeline to mine million-level interactive segments from naturalistic driving data based on interactive trajectories, and design metrics to quantify the interaction processes. Furthermore, the IEDD-VQA dataset is constructed by generating synthetic Bird's Eye View (BEV) videos where semantic actions are strictly aligned with structured language. Benchmark results evaluating ten mainstream Vision Language Models (VLMs) are provided to demonstrate the dataset's reuse value in assessing and fine-tuning the reasoning capabilities of autonomous driving models.

We study self-distillation in settings where supervision is unreliable: there are no ground truth labels, verifiable rewards, or external graders to evaluate answers. We focus on document-grounded question answering with asymmetric context, where a single model serves as both tutor (with access to a relevant source document during training) and student (answering from the question alone at test time). Rather than assuming tutor correctness, we derive supervision online from tutor consensus by sampling multiple document-grounded reasoning traces and using agreement to gate learning. Conditioned on this reliability signal, we distill knowledge through full tutor reasoning trajectories (not just final answers), providing a dense and stable learning signal. Empirically, this consensus-gated trajectory distillation substantially improves transfer to the document-free student. Held-out in-domain accuracy under asymmetric evaluation improves from 46.0\% to 62.0\%, and average (maj@8) accuracy on public document-free math benchmarks improves from 20.2\% to 35.4\%.

We present AIForge-Doc, the first dedicated benchmark targeting exclusively diffusion-model-based inpainting in financial and form documents with pixel-level annotation. Existing document forgery datasets rely on traditional digital editing tools (e.g., Adobe Photoshop, GIMP), creating a critical gap: state-of-the-art detectors are blind to the rapidly growing threat of AI-forged document fraud. AIForge-Doc addresses this gap by systematically forging numeric fields in real-world receipt and form images using two AI inpainting APIs -- Gemini 2.5 Flash Image and Ideogram v2 Edit -- yielding 4,061 forged images from four public document datasets (CORD, WildReceipt, SROIE, XFUND) across nine languages, annotated with pixel-precise tampered-region masks in DocTamper-compatible format. We benchmark three representative detectors -- TruFor, DocTamper, and a zero-shot GPT-4o judge -- and find that all existing methods degrade substantially: TruFor achieves AUC=0.751 (zero-shot, out-of-distribution) vs. AUC=0.96 on NIST16; DocTamper achieves AUC=0.563 vs. AUC=0.98 in-distribution, with pixel-level IoU=0.020; GPT-4o achieves only 0.509 -- essentially at chance -- confirming that AI-forged values are indistinguishable to automated detectors and VLMs. These results demonstrate that AIForge-Doc represents a qualitatively new and unsolved challenge for document forensics.

Push-Sum-based decentralized learning enables optimization over directed communication networks, where information exchange may be asymmetric. While convergence properties of such methods are well understood, their finite-iteration stability and generalization behavior remain unclear due to structural bias induced by column-stochastic mixing and asymmetric error propagation. In this work, we develop a unified uniform-stability framework for the Stochastic Gradient Push (SGP) algorithm that captures the effect of directed topology. A key technical ingredient is an imbalance-aware consistency bound for Push-Sum, which controls consensus deviation through two quantities: the stationary distribution imbalance parameter $δ$ and the spectral gap $(1-λ)$ governing mixing speed. This decomposition enables us to disentangle statistical effects from topology-induced bias. We establish finite-iteration stability and optimization guarantees for both convex objectives and non-convex objectives satisfying the Polyak--Łojasiewicz condition. For convex problems, SGP attains excess generalization error of order $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}\!\left(\frac{1}{\sqrt{mn}}+\fracγ{δ(1-λ)}+γ\right)$ under step-size schedules, and we characterize the corresponding optimal early stopping time that minimizes this bound. For PŁ objectives, we obtain convex-like optimization and generalization rates with dominant dependence proportional to $κ\!\left(1+\frac{1}{δ(1-λ)}\right)$, revealing a multiplicative coupling between problem conditioning and directed communication topology. Our analysis clarifies when Push-Sum correction is necessary compared with standard decentralized SGD and quantifies how imbalance and mixing jointly shape the best attainable learning performance.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have achieved significant breakthroughs by leveraging Large Vision Language Models (VLMs) to jointly interpret instructions and visual inputs. However, the substantial increase in visual tokens, particularly from multi-view inputs, poses serious challenges to real-time robotic manipulation. Existing acceleration techniques for VLMs, such as token pruning, often result in degraded performance when directly applied to VLA models, as they overlook the relationships between different views and fail to account for the dynamic and task-specific characteristics of robotic operation. To address this, we propose BFA++, a dynamic token pruning framework designed specifically for VLA models. BFA++ introduces a hierarchical pruning strategy guided by two-level importance predictors: an intra-view predictor highlights task-relevant regions within each image to suppress spatial noise, while an inter-view predictor identifies critical camera views throughout different manipulation phases to reduce cross-view redundancy. This design enables efficient token selection while preserving essential visual cues, resulting in improved computational efficiency and higher manipulation success rates. Evaluations on the RoboTwin benchmark and real-world robotic tasks demonstrate that BFA++ consistently outperforms existing methods. BFA++ improves the success rate by about 10% on both the π0 and RDT models, achieving speedup of 1.8X and 1.5X, respectively. Our results highlight that context-sensitive and task-aware token pruning serves as a more effective strategy than full visual processing, enabling faster inference and improved manipulation accuracy in real-world robotic systems.

Symbolic Regression (SR) tries to reveal the hidden equations behind observed data. However, most methods search within a discrete equation space, where the structural modifications of equations rarely align with their numerical behavior, leaving fitting error feedback too noisy to guide exploration. To address this challenge, we propose GenSR, a generative latent space-based SR framework following the `map construction -> coarse localization -> fine search'' paradigm. Specifically, GenSR first pretrains a dual-branch Conditional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE) to reparameterize symbolic equations into a generative latent space with symbolic continuity and local numerical smoothness. This space can be regarded as a well-structured `map'' of the equation space, providing directional signals for search. At inference, the CVAE coarsely localizes the input data to promising regions in the latent space. Then, a modified CMA-ES refines the candidate region, leveraging smooth latent gradients. From a Bayesian perspective, GenSR reframes the SR task as maximizing the conditional distribution $p(\mathrm{Equ.} \mid \mathrm{Num.})$, with CVAE training achieving this objective through the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO). This new perspective provides a theoretical guarantee for the effectiveness of GenSR. Extensive experiments show that GenSR jointly optimizes predictive accuracy, expression simplicity, and computational efficiency, while remaining robust under noise.

Despite recent progress in 3D hand reconstruction from monocular videos, most existing methods rely on data captured in well-controlled environments and therefore degrade in real-world settings with severe perturbations, such as hand-object interactions, extreme poses, illumination changes, and motion blur. To tackle these issues, we introduce WildGHand, an optimization-based framework that enables self-adaptive 3D Gaussian splatting on in-the-wild videos and produces high-fidelity hand avatars. WildGHand incorporates two key components: (i) a dynamic perturbation disentanglement module that explicitly represents perturbations as time-varying biases on 3D Gaussian attributes during optimization, and (ii) a perturbation-aware optimization strategy that generates per-frame anisotropic weighted masks to guide optimization. Together, these components allow the framework to identify and suppress perturbations across both spatial and temporal dimensions. We further curate a dataset of monocular hand videos captured under diverse perturbations to benchmark in-the-wild hand avatar reconstruction. Extensive experiments on this dataset and two public datasets demonstrate that WildGHand achieves state-of-the-art performance and substantially improves over its base model across multiple metrics (e.g., up to a $15.8\%$ relative gain in PSNR and a $23.1\%$ relative reduction in LPIPS). Our implementation and dataset are available at https://github.com/XuanHuang0/WildGHand.

Computational imaging forward models, from coded aperture spectral cameras to MRI scanners, are traditionally implemented as monolithic, modality-specific codes. We prove that every forward model in a broad, precisely defined operator class Cimg (encompassing clinical, scientific, and industrial imaging modalities, both linear and nonlinear) admits an epsilon-approximate representation as a typed directed acyclic graph (DAG) whose nodes are drawn from a library of exactly 11 canonical primitives: Propagate, Modulate, Project, Encode, Convolve, Accumulate, Detect, Sample, Disperse, Scatter, and Transform. We call this the Finite Primitive Basis Theorem. The proof is constructive: we provide an algorithm that, given any H in Cimg, produces a DAG G with relative operator error at most epsilon and graph complexity within prescribed bounds. We further prove that the library is minimal: removing any single primitive causes at least one modality to lose its epsilon-approximate representation. A systematic analysis of nonlinearities in imaging physics shows they fall into two structural categories: pointwise scalar functions (handled by Transform) and self-consistent iterations (unrolled into existing linear primitives). Empirical validation on 31 linear modalities confirms eimg below 0.01 with at most 5 nodes and depth 5, and we provide constructive DAG decompositions for 9 additional nonlinear modalities. These results establish mathematical foundations for the Physics World Model (PWM) framework.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) represent a promising paradigm for energy-efficient neuromorphic computing due to their bio-plausible and spike-driven characteristics. However, the robustness of SNNs in complex adversarial environments remains significantly constrained. In this study, we theoretically demonstrate that those threshold-neighboring spiking neurons are the key factors limiting the robustness of directly trained SNNs. We find that these neurons set the upper limits for the maximum potential strength of adversarial attacks and are prone to state-flipping under minor disturbances. To address this challenge, we propose a Threshold Guarding Optimization (TGO) method, which comprises two key aspects. First, we incorporate additional constraints into the loss function to move neurons' membrane potentials away from their thresholds. It increases SNNs' gradient sparsity, thereby reducing the theoretical upper bound of adversarial attacks. Second, we introduce noisy spiking neurons to transition the neuronal firing mechanism from deterministic to probabilistic, decreasing their state-flipping probability due to minor disturbances. Extensive experiments conducted in standard adversarial scenarios prove that our method significantly enhances the robustness of directly trained SNNs. These findings pave the way for advancing more reliable and secure neuromorphic computing in real-world applications.

Colony-forming unit (CFU) detection is critical in pharmaceutical manufacturing, serving as a key component of Environmental Monitoring programs and ensuring compliance with stringent quality standards. Manual counting is labor-intensive and error-prone, while deep learning (DL) approaches, though accurate, remain vulnerable to sample quality variations and artifacts. Building on our earlier CNN-based framework (Beznik et al., 2020), we evaluated YOLOv5, YOLOv7, and YOLOv8 for CFU detection; however, these achieved only 97.08 percent accuracy, insufficient for pharmaceutical-grade requirements. A custom Detectron2 model trained on GSK's dataset of over 50,000 Petri dish images achieved 99 percent detection rate with 2 percent false positives and 0.6 percent false negatives. Despite high validation accuracy, Detectron2 performance degrades on outlier cases including contaminated plates, plastic artifacts, or poor optical clarity. To address this, we developed a multi-agent framework combining DL with vision-language models (VLMs). The VLM agent first classifies plates as valid or invalid. For valid samples, both DL and VLM agents independently estimate colony counts. When predictions align within 5 percent, results are automatically recorded in Postgres and SAP; otherwise, samples are routed for expert review. Expert feedback enables continuous retraining and self-improvement. Initial DL-based automation reduced human verification by 50 percent across vaccine manufacturing sites. With VLM integration, this increased to 85 percent, delivering significant operational savings. The proposed system provides a scalable, auditable, and regulation-ready solution for microbiological quality control, advancing automation in biopharmaceutical production.

Post-training large foundation models with reinforcement learning typically relies on massive and heterogeneous datasets, making effective curriculum learning both critical and challenging. In this work, we propose ACTOR-CURATOR, a scalable and fully automated curriculum learning framework for reinforcement learning post-training of large language models (LLMs). ACTOR-CURATOR learns a neural curator that dynamically selects training problems from large problem banks by directly optimizing for expected policy performance improvement. We formulate problem selection as a non-stationary stochastic bandit problem, derive a principled loss function based on online stochastic mirror descent, and establish regret guarantees under partial feedback. Empirically, ACTOR-CURATOR consistently outperforms uniform sampling and strong curriculum baselines across a wide range of challenging reasoning benchmarks, demonstrating improved training stability and efficiency. Notably, it achieves relative gains of 28.6% on AIME2024 and 30.5% on ARC-1D over the strongest baseline and up to 80% speedup. These results suggest that ACTOR-CURATOR is a powerful and practical approach for scalable LLM post-training.

App ratings are among the most significant indicators of the quality, usability, and overall user satisfaction of mobile applications. However, existing app rating prediction models are largely limited to textual data or user interface (UI) features, overlooking the importance of jointly leveraging UI and semantic information. To address these limitations, this study proposes a lightweight vision--language framework that integrates both mobile UI and semantic information for app rating prediction. The framework combines MobileNetV3 to extract visual features from UI layouts and DistilBERT to extract textual features. These multimodal features are fused through a gated fusion module with Swish activations, followed by a multilayer perceptron (MLP) regression head. The proposed model is evaluated using mean absolute error (MAE), root mean square error (RMSE), mean squared error (MSE), coefficient of determination (R2), and Pearson correlation. After training for 20 epochs, the model achieves an MAE of 0.1060, an RMSE of 0.1433, an MSE of 0.0205, an R2 of 0.8529, and a Pearson correlation of 0.9251. Extensive ablation studies further demonstrate the effectiveness of different combinations of visual and textual encoders. Overall, the proposed lightweight framework provides valuable insights for developers and end users, supports sustainable app development, and enables efficient deployment on edge devices.

Emotion recognition from multi-modal physiological and behavioral signals plays a pivotal role in affective computing, yet most existing models remain constrained to the prediction of singular emotions in controlled laboratory settings. Real-world human emotional experiences, by contrast, are often characterized by the simultaneous presence of multiple affective states, spurring recent interest in mixed emotion recognition as an emotion distribution learning problem. Current approaches, however, often neglect the valence consistency and structured correlations inherent among coexisting emotions. To address this limitation, we propose a Memory-guided Prototypical Co-occurrence Learning (MPCL) framework that explicitly models emotion co-occurrence patterns. Specifically, we first fuse multi-modal signals via a multi-scale associative memory mechanism. To capture cross-modal semantic relationships, we construct emotion-specific prototype memory banks, yielding rich physiological and behavioral representations, and employ prototype relation distillation to ensure cross-modal alignment in the latent prototype space. Furthermore, inspired by human cognitive memory systems, we introduce a memory retrieval strategy to extract semantic-level co-occurrence associations across emotion categories. Through this bottom-up hierarchical abstraction process, our model learns affectively informative representations for accurate emotion distribution prediction. Comprehensive experiments on two public datasets demonstrate that MPCL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in mixed emotion recognition, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

The Stop-Think-AutoRegress Language Diffusion Model (STAR-LDM) integrates latent diffusion planning with autoregressive generation. Unlike conventional autoregressive language models limited to token-by-token decisions, STAR-LDM incorporates a "thinking" phase that pauses generation to refine a semantic plan through diffusion before continuing. This enables global planning in continuous space prior to committing to discrete tokens. Evaluations show STAR-LDM significantly outperforms similar-sized models on language understanding benchmarks and achieves $>70\%$ win rates in LLM-as-judge comparisons for narrative coherence and commonsense reasoning. The architecture also allows straightforward control through lightweight classifiers, enabling fine-grained steering of attributes without model retraining while maintaining better fluency-control trade-offs than specialized approaches.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) have advanced rapidly in recent years and have been successfully applied to e-learning environments like intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs). Despite great success, the broader application of DRL to educational technologies has been limited due to major challenges such as sample inefficiency and difficulty designing the reward function. In contrast, Apprenticeship Learning (AL) uses a few expert demonstrations to infer the expert's underlying reward functions and derive decision-making policies that generalize and replicate optimal behavior. In this work, we leverage a generalized AL framework, THEMES, to induce effective pedagogical policies by capturing the complexities of the expert student learning process, where multiple reward functions may dynamically evolve over time. We evaluate the effectiveness of THEMES against six state-of-the-art baselines, demonstrating its superior performance and highlighting its potential as a powerful alternative for inducing effective pedagogical policies and show that it can achieve high performance, with an AUC of 0.899 and a Jaccard of 0.653, using only 18 trajectories of a previous semester to predict student pedagogical decisions in a later semester.

We study how visual artifacts introduced by diffusion-based inpainting affect language generation in vision-language models. We use a two-stage diagnostic setup in which masked image regions are reconstructed and then provided to captioning models, enabling controlled comparisons between captions generated from original and reconstructed inputs. Across multiple datasets, we analyze the relationship between reconstruction fidelity and downstream caption quality. We observe consistent associations between pixel-level and perceptual reconstruction metrics and both lexical and semantic captioning performance. Additional analysis of intermediate visual representations and attention patterns shows that inpainting artifacts lead to systematic, layer-dependent changes in model behavior. Together, these results provide a practical diagnostic framework for examining how visual reconstruction quality influences language generation in multimodal systems.

Effective human-AI coordination requires artificial agents capable of exhibiting and responding to human-like behaviors while adapting to changing contexts. Imitation learning has emerged as one of the prominent approaches to build such agents by training them to mimic human-demonstrated behaviors. However, current methods struggle to capture the inherent diversity and non-Markovian nature of human behavior and lack the ability to steer behavior at inference time. Drawing inspiration from the theory of human cognitive processes, where inner speech guides action selection before execution, we propose MIMIC (Modeling Inner Motivations for Imitation and Control), a framework that uses language as an internal representation of behavioral intent. MIMIC employs the novel use of vision-language models as linguistic scaffolding to train a conditional variational autoencoder capable of generating inner speech from observations. A diffusion-based behavior cloning policy then selects actions conditioned on current observations and the generated inner speech. MIMIC enables fine-grained steering of behavior at inference time by conditioning the agent on behavior-specific speech. Experiments across robotic manipulation tasks and human-AI collaboration games demonstrate that MIMIC significantly enhances both behavior diversity and fidelity to human demonstrations while enabling nuanced behavioral steering without training on additional demonstrations. We open source our code and provide pre-trained MIMIC agents and qualitative demos at: https://mimic-research.github.io.

As large language models (LLMs) continue to improve at completing discrete tasks, they are being integrated into increasingly complex and diverse real-world systems. However, task-level success alone does not establish a model's fit for use in practice. In applied, high-stakes settings, LLM effectiveness is driven by a wider array of sociotechnical determinants that extend beyond conventional performance measures. Although a growing set of metrics capture many of these considerations, they are rarely organized in a way that supports consistent evaluation, leaving no unified taxonomy for assessing and comparing LLM utility across use cases. To address this gap, we introduce the Language Model Utility Taxonomy (LUX), a comprehensive framework that structures utility evaluation across four domains: performance, interaction, operations, and governance. Within each domain, LUX is organized hierarchically into thematically aligned dimensions and components, each grounded in metrics that enable quantitative comparison and alignment of model selection with intended use. In addition, an external dynamic web tool is provided to support exploration of the framework by connecting each component to a repository of relevant metrics (factors) for applied evaluation.

This paper investigates a problem called Multi-Agent Path Finding with Elevators (MAPF-E), which seeks conflict-free paths for multiple agents from their start to goal locations that may locate on different floors, and the agents can use elevators to travel between floors. The existence of elevators complicates the interaction among the agents and introduces new challenges to the planning. On the one hand, elevators can cause many conflicts among the agents due to its relatively long traversal time across floors, especially when many agents need to reach a different floor. On the other hand, the planner has to reason in a larger state space including the states of the elevators, besides the locations of the agents.

Existing Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents operate through step-by-step calls to vision language models--taking a screenshot, reasoning about the next action, executing it, then repeating on the new page--resulting in high costs and latency that scale with the number of reasoning steps, and limited accuracy due to no persistent memory of previously visited pages. We propose ActionEngine, a training-free framework that transitions from reactive execution to programmatic planning through a novel two-agent architecture: a Crawling Agent that constructs an updatable state-machine memory of the GUIs through offline exploration, and an Execution Agent that leverages this memory to synthesize complete, executable Python programs for online task execution. To ensure robustness against evolving interfaces, execution failures trigger a vision-based re-grounding fallback that repairs the failed action and updates the memory. This design drastically improves both efficiency and accuracy: on Reddit tasks from the WebArena benchmark, our agent achieves 95% task success with on average a single LLM call, compared to 66% for the strongest vision-only baseline, while reducing cost by 11.8x and end-to-end latency by 2x. Together, these components yield scalable and reliable GUI interaction by combining global programmatic planning, crawler-validated action templates, and node-level execution with localized validation and repair.

Autonomous laparoscopic camera control must maintain a stable and safe surgical view under rapid tool-tissue interactions while remaining interpretable to surgeons. We present a strategy-grounded framework that couples high-level vision-language inference with low-level closed-loop control. Offline, raw surgical videos are parsed into camera-relevant temporal events (e.g., interaction, working-distance deviation, and view-quality degradation) and structured as attributed event graphs. Mining these graphs yields a compact set of reusable camera-handling strategy primitives, which provide structured supervision for learning. Online, a fine-tuned Vision-Language Model (VLM) processes the live laparoscopic view to predict the dominant strategy and discrete image-based motion commands, executed by an IBVS-RCM controller under strict safety constraints; optional speech input enables intuitive human-in-the-loop conditioning. On a surgeon-annotated dataset, event parsing achieves reliable temporal localization (F1-score 0.86), and the mined strategies show strong semantic alignment with expert interpretation (cluster purity 0.81). Extensive ex vivo experiments on silicone phantoms and porcine tissues demonstrate that the proposed system outperforms junior surgeons in standardized camera-handling evaluations, reducing field-of-view centering error by 35.26% and image shaking by 62.33%, while preserving smooth motion and stable working-distance regulation.