Song generation aims to produce full songs with vocals and accompaniment from lyrics and text descriptions, yet end-to-end models remain data- and compute-intensive and provide limited editability. We advocate a compositional alternative that decomposes the task into melody composition, singing voice synthesis, and singing accompaniment generation. Central to our approach is MIDI-informed singing accompaniment generation (MIDI-SAG), which conditions accompaniment on the symbolic vocal-melody MIDI to improve rhythmic and harmonic alignment between singing and instrumentation. Moreover, beyond conventional SAG settings that assume continuously sung vocals, compositional song generation features intermittent vocals; we address this by combining explicit rhythmic/harmonic controls with audio continuation to keep the backing track consistent across vocal and non-vocal regions. With lightweight newly trained components requiring only 2.5k hours of audio on a single RTX 3090, our pipeline approaches the perceptual quality of recent open-source end-to-end baselines in several metrics. We provide audio demos and will open-source our model at https://composerflow.github.io/web/.

Metro trains often operate in highly complex environments, characterized by illumination variations, high-speed motion, and adverse weather conditions. These factors pose significant challenges for visual perception systems, especially those relying solely on conventional RGB cameras. To tackle these difficulties, we explore the integration of event cameras into the perception system, leveraging their advantages in low-light conditions, high-speed scenarios, and low power consumption. Specifically, we focus on Kilometer Marker Recognition (KMR), a critical task for autonomous metro localization under GNSS-denied conditions. In this context, we propose a robust baseline method based on a pre-trained RGB OCR foundation model, enhanced through multi-modal adaptation. Furthermore, we construct the first large-scale RGB-Event dataset, EvMetro5K, containing 5,599 pairs of synchronized RGB-Event samples, split into 4,479 training and 1,120 testing samples. Extensive experiments on EvMetro5K and other widely used benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for KMR. Both the dataset and source code will be released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/EvMetro5K_benchmark

Disease progression modeling provides a robust framework to identify long-term disease trajectories from short-term biomarker data. It is a valuable tool to gain a deeper understanding of diseases with a long disease trajectory, such as Alzheimer's disease. A key limitation of most disease progression models is that they are specific to a single data type (e.g., continuous data), thereby limiting their applicability to heterogeneous, real-world datasets. To address this limitation, we propose the Mixed Events model, a novel disease progression model that handles both discrete and continuous data types. This model is implemented within the Subtype and Stage Inference (SuStaIn) framework, resulting in Mixed-SuStaIn, enabling subtype and progression modeling. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Mixed-SuStaIn through simulation experiments and real-world data from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative, showing that it performs well on mixed datasets. The code is available at: https://github.com/ucl-pond/pySuStaIn.

Bayesian deep learning (BDL) has emerged as a principled approach to produce reliable uncertainty estimates by integrating deep neural networks with Bayesian inference, and the selection of informative prior distributions remains a significant challenge. Various function-space variational inference (FSVI) regularisation methods have been presented, assigning meaningful priors over model predictions. However, these methods typically rely on a Gaussian prior, which fails to capture the heavy-tailed statistical characteristics inherent in neural network outputs. By contrast, this work proposes a novel function-space empirical Bayes regularisation framework -- termed ST-FS-EB -- which employs heavy-tailed Student's $t$ priors in both parameter and function spaces. Also, we approximate the posterior distribution through variational inference (VI), inducing an evidence lower bound (ELBO) objective based on Monte Carlo (MC) dropout. Furthermore, the proposed method is evaluated against various VI-based BDL baselines, and the results demonstrate its robust performance in in-distribution prediction, out-of-distribution (OOD) detection and handling distribution shifts.

Diversity has been gaining interest in the NLP community in recent years. At the same time, state-of-the-art transformer models such as ModernBERT use very large pre-training datasets, which are driven by size rather than by diversity. This summons for an investigation of the impact of diversity on the ModernBERT pre-training. We do so in this study, with the express intent of reducing pre-training dataset size, while retaining at least comparable performance. We compare diversity-driven sampling algorithms, so as to pick the best one. We find that diversity-driven sampling allows in some tasks to gain 10 points relative to randomly-sampled pre-training data of commensurate size. We also see that a model pre-trained for 483h on a diversity-driven dataset of 150M tokens can yield a commensurate performance to a model pre-trained for 1,775h on a randomly-driven dataset of 2.4B tokens.

Leveraging future observation modeling to facilitate action generation presents a promising avenue for enhancing the capabilities of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. However, existing approaches struggle to strike a balance between maintaining efficient, predictable future representations and preserving sufficient fine-grained information to guide precise action generation. To address this limitation, we propose WoG (World Guidance), a framework that maps future observations into compact conditions by injecting them into the action inference pipeline. The VLA is then trained to simultaneously predict these compressed conditions alongside future actions, thereby achieving effective world modeling within the condition space for action inference. We demonstrate that modeling and predicting this condition space not only facilitates fine-grained action generation but also exhibits superior generalization capabilities. Moreover, it learns effectively from substantial human manipulation videos. Extensive experiments across both simulation and real-world environments validate that our method significantly outperforms existing methods based on future prediction. Project page is available at: https://selen-suyue.github.io/WoGNet/

In recent years, the machine learning community has increasingly embraced the optimal transport (OT) framework for modeling distributional relationships. In this work, we introduce a sample-based neural solver for computing the Wasserstein geodesic between a source and target distribution, along with the associated velocity field. Building on the dynamical formulation of the optimal transport (OT) problem, we recast the constrained optimization as a minimax problem, using deep neural networks to approximate the relevant functions. This approach not only provides the Wasserstein geodesic but also recovers the OT map, enabling direct sampling from the target distribution. By estimating the OT map, we obtain velocity estimates along particle trajectories, which in turn allow us to learn the full velocity field. The framework is flexible and readily extends to general cost functions, including the commonly used quadratic cost. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through experiments on both synthetic and real datasets.

In humans and robots alike, transfer learning occurs at different levels of abstraction, from high-level linguistic transfer to low-level transfer of motor skills. In this article, we provide an overview of the impact that foundation models and transformer networks have had on these different levels, bringing robots closer than ever to "full-stack transfer". Considering LLMs, VLMs and VLAs from a robotic transfer learning perspective allows us to highlight recurring concepts for transfer, beyond specific implementations. We also consider the challenges of data collection and transfer benchmarks for robotics in the age of foundation models. Are foundation models the route to full-stack transfer in robotics? Our expectation is that they will certainly stay on this route as a key technology.

360 panoramic images are increasingly used in virtual reality, autonomous driving, and robotics for holistic scene understanding. However, current Vision-Language Models (VLMs) struggle with 3D spatial reasoning on Equirectangular Projection (ERP) images due to geometric distortion and limited 3D supervision. We introduce PanoEnv, a large-scale VQA benchmark built from synthetic 3D environments, containing 14.8K questions across five categories (e.g., relative position, volume comparison) grounded in accurate 3D annotations including depth, segmentation, and bounding boxes. Benchmarking 14 state-of-the-art VLMs reveals limited 3D understanding, achieving only 49.34% overall accuracy and 8.36% on open-ended (OE) questions. To enhance 3D reasoning, we propose a reinforcement learning post-training framework based on Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with a ground-truth-guided reward that incorporates five geometry-aware strategies such as distance tolerance and spatial consistency. A two-stage curriculum further mitigates catastrophic forgetting: Stage 1 trains on structured tasks (true/false and multiple choice), and Stage 2 fine-tunes on mixed open-ended data to improve generalization. Our 7B model achieves new state-of-the-art performance, improving overall accuracy to 52.93% (+3.59%) and open-ended accuracy to 14.83% while maintaining structured-task performance. It also achieves top semantic evaluation scores (Q-Score 6.24, P-Score 5.95), surpassing 32B models. These results demonstrate that PanoEnv-QA and our curriculum-based RL framework effectively instill 3D spatial intelligence in VLMs for omnidirectional perception.

Leveraging auditory and visual feedback for attention reorientation is essential for natural gaze shifts in social interaction. However, enabling humanoid robots to perform natural and context-appropriate gaze shifts in unconstrained human--robot interaction (HRI) remains challenging, as it requires the coupling of cognitive attention mechanisms and biomimetic motion generation. In this work, we propose the Robot Gaze-Shift (RGS) framework, which integrates these two components into a unified pipeline. First, RGS employs a vision--language model (VLM)-based gaze reasoning pipeline to infer context-appropriate gaze targets from multimodal interaction cues, ensuring consistency with human gaze-orienting regularities. Second, RGS introduces a conditional Vector Quantized-Variational Autoencoder (VQ-VAE) model for eye--head coordinated gaze-shift motion generation, producing diverse and human-like gaze-shift behaviors. Experiments validate that RGS effectively replicates human-like target selection and generates realistic, diverse gaze-shift motions.

Recent work has examined language models from a linguistic perspective to better understand how they acquire language. Most existing benchmarks focus on judging grammatical acceptability, whereas the ability to interpret meanings conveyed by grammatical forms has received much less attention. We introduce the Linguistic Minimal-Pair Benchmark for Evaluating Constructional Understanding in Language Models (CxMP), a benchmark grounded in Construction Grammar that treats form-meaning pairings, or constructions, as fundamental linguistic units. CxMP evaluates whether models can interpret the semantic relations implied by constructions, using a controlled minimal-pair design across nine construction types, including the let-alone, caused motion, and ditransitive constructions. Our results show that while syntactic competence emerges early, constructional understanding develops more gradually and remains limited even in large language models (LLMs). CxMP thus reveals persistent gaps in how language models integrate form and meaning, providing a framework for studying constructional understanding and learning trajectories in language models.

In addition to the core tasks of simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), active SLAM additionally in- volves generating robot actions that enable effective and efficient exploration of unknown environments. However, existing active SLAM pipelines are limited by three main factors. First, they inherit the restrictions of the underlying SLAM modules that they may be using. Second, their motion planning strategies are typically shortsighted and lack long-term vision. Third, most approaches struggle to handle dynamic scenes. To address these limitations, we propose a novel monocular active SLAM method, Dream-SLAM, which is based on dreaming cross-spatio-temporal images and semantically plausible structures of partially observed dynamic environments. The generated cross-spatio-temporal im- ages are fused with real observations to mitigate noise and data incompleteness, leading to more accurate camera pose estimation and a more coherent 3D scene representation. Furthermore, we integrate dreamed and observed scene structures to enable long- horizon planning, producing farsighted trajectories that promote efficient and thorough exploration. Extensive experiments on both public and self-collected datasets demonstrate that Dream-SLAM outperforms state-of-the-art methods in localization accuracy, mapping quality, and exploration efficiency. Source code will be publicly available upon paper acceptance.

Critical applications in areas such as medicine, robotics and autonomous systems require compact (i.e., memory efficient), uncertainty-aware neural networks suitable for edge and other resource-constrained deployments. We study compact spectral circulant and block-circulant-with-circulant-blocks (BCCB) layers: FFT-diagonalizable circular convolutions whose weights live directly in the real FFT (RFFT) half (1D) or half-plane (2D). Parameterizing filters in the frequency domain lets us impose simple spectral structure, perform structured variational inference in a low-dimensional weight space, and calculate exact layer spectral norms, enabling inexpensive global Lipschitz bounds and margin-based robustness diagnostics. By placing independent complex Gaussians on the Hermitian support we obtain a discrete instance of the spectral representation of stationary kernels, inducing an exact stationary Gaussian-process prior over filters on the discrete circle/torus. We exploit this to define a practical spectral prior and a Hermitian-aware low-rank-plus-diagonal variational posterior in real coordinates. Empirically, spectral circulant/BCCB layers are effective compact building blocks in both (variational) Bayesian and point estimate regimes: compact Bayesian neural networks on MNIST->Fashion-MNIST, variational heads on frozen CIFAR-10 features, and deterministic ViT projections on CIFAR-10/Tiny ImageNet; spectral layers match strong baselines while using substantially fewer parameters and with tighter Lipschitz certificates.

The pose graph is a core component of Structure-from-Motion (SfM), where images act as nodes and edges encode relative poses. Since geometric verification is expensive, SfM pipelines restrict the pose graph to a sparse set of candidate edges, making initialization critical. Existing methods rely on image retrieval to connect each image to its $k$ nearest neighbors, treating pairs independently and ignoring global consistency. We address this limitation through the concept of edge prioritization, ranking candidate edges by their utility for SfM. Our approach has three components: (1) a GNN trained with SfM-derived supervision to predict globally consistent edge reliability; (2) multi-minimal-spanning-tree-based pose graph construction guided by these ranks; and (3) connectivity-aware score modulation that reinforces weak regions and reduces graph diameter. This globally informed initialization yields more reliable and compact pose graphs, improving reconstruction accuracy in sparse and high-speed settings and outperforming SOTA retrieval methods on ambiguous scenes. The ode and trained models are available at https://github.com/weitong8591/global_edge_prior.

We investigate the robustness of sparse artificial neural networks trained with adaptive topology. We focus on a simple yet effective architecture consisting of three sparse layers with 99% sparsity followed by a dense layer, applied to image classification tasks such as MNIST and Fashion MNIST. By updating the topology of the sparse layers between each epoch, we achieve competitive accuracy despite the significantly reduced number of weights. Our primary contribution is a detailed analysis of the robustness of these networks, exploring their performance under various perturbations including random link removal, adversarial attack, and link weight shuffling. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that adaptive topology not only enhances efficiency but also maintains robustness. This work highlights the potential of adaptive sparse networks as a promising direction for developing efficient and reliable deep learning models.

To reduce carbon emissions and minimize shipping costs, improving the fuel efficiency of ships is crucial. Various measures are taken to reduce the total fuel consumption of ships, including optimizing vessel parameters and selecting routes with the lowest fuel consumption. Different estimation methods are proposed for predicting fuel consumption, while various optimization methods are proposed to minimize fuel oil consumption. This paper provides a comprehensive review of methods for estimating and optimizing fuel oil consumption in maritime transport. Our novel contributions include categorizing fuel oil consumption \& estimation methods into physics-based, machine-learning, and hybrid models, exploring their strengths and limitations. Furthermore, we highlight the importance of data fusion techniques, which combine AIS, onboard sensors, and meteorological data to enhance accuracy. We make the first attempt to discuss the emerging role of Explainable AI in enhancing model transparency for decision-making. Uniquely, key challenges, including data quality, availability, and the need for real-time optimization, are identified, and future research directions are proposed to address these gaps, with a focus on hybrid models, real-time optimization, and the standardization of datasets.

Text Image Machine Translation (TIMT) aims to translate text embedded in images in the source-language into target-language, requiring synergistic integration of visual perception and linguistic understanding. Existing TIMT methods, whether cascaded pipelines or end-to-end multimodal large language models (MLLMs),struggle with high-resolution text-rich images due to cluttered layouts, diverse fonts, and non-textual distractions, resulting in text omission, semantic drift, and contextual inconsistency. To address these challenges, we propose GLoTran, a global-local dual visual perception framework for MLLM-based TIMT. GLoTran integrates a low-resolution global image with multi-scale region-level text image slices under an instruction-guided alignment strategy, conditioning MLLMs to maintain scene-level contextual consistency while faithfully capturing fine-grained textual details. Moreover, to realize this dual-perception paradigm, we construct GLoD, a large-scale text-rich TIMT dataset comprising 510K high-resolution global-local image-text pairs covering diverse real-world scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GLoTran substantially improves translation completeness and accuracy over state-of-the-art MLLMs, offering a new paradigm for fine-grained TIMT under high-resolution and text-rich conditions.

Vision-Language Models (VLM) exhibit strong reasoning capabilities, showing promise for end-to-end autonomous driving systems. Chain-of-Thought (CoT), as VLM's widely used reasoning strategy, is facing critical challenges. Existing textual CoT has a large gap between text semantic space and trajectory physical space. Although the recent approach utilizes future image to replace text as CoT process, it lacks clear planning-oriented objective guidance to generate images with accurate scene evolution. To address these, we innovatively propose MindDriver, a progressive multimodal reasoning framework that enables VLM to imitate human-like progressive thinking for autonomous driving. MindDriver presents semantic understanding, semantic-to-physical space imagination, and physical-space trajectory planning. To achieve aligned reasoning processes in MindDriver, we develop a feedback-guided automatic data annotation pipeline to generate aligned multimodal reasoning training data. Furthermore, we develop a progressive reinforcement fine-tuning method to optimize the alignment through progressive high- level reward-based learning. MindDriver demonstrates superior performance in both nuScences open-loop and Bench2Drive closed-loop evaluation. Codes are available at https://github.com/hotdogcheesewhite/MindDriver.

Knowledge graph reasoning (KGR) infers missing facts, with recent advances increasingly harnessing the semantic priors and reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, prevailing generative paradigms are prone to memorizing surface-level co-occurrences rather than learning genuine relational semantics, limiting out-of-distribution generalization. To address this, we propose RADAR, which reformulates KGR from generative pattern matching to discriminative relational reasoning. We recast KGR as discriminative entity selection, where reinforcement learning enforces relative entity separability beyond token-likelihood imitation. Leveraging this separability, inference operates directly in representation space, ensuring consistency with the discriminative optimization and bypassing generation-induced hallucinations. Across four benchmarks, RADAR achieves 5-6% relative gains on link prediction and triple classification over strong LLM baselines, while increasing task-relevant mutual information in intermediate representations by 62.9%, indicating more robust and transferable relational reasoning.

Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) have been used in many studies to synthesise mixed tabular data. Conditional tabular GAN (CTGAN) have been the most popular variant but struggle to effectively navigate the risk-utility trade-off. Bayesian GAN have received less attention for tabular data, but have been explored with unstructured data such as images and text. The most used technique employed in Bayesian GAN is Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), but it is computationally intensive, particularly in terms of weight storage. In this paper, we introduce Gaussian Approximation of CTGAN (GACTGAN), an integration of the Bayesian posterior approximation technique using Stochastic Weight Averaging-Gaussian (SWAG) within the CTGAN generator to synthesise tabular data, reducing computational overhead after the training phase. We demonstrate that GACTGAN yields better synthetic data compared to CTGAN, achieving better preservation of tabular structure and inferential statistics with less privacy risk. These results highlight GACTGAN as a simpler, effective implementation of Bayesian tabular synthesis.

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is one of the leading causes of vision loss worldwide, making early and accurate DR grading critical for timely intervention. Recent clinical practices leverage multi-view fundus images for DR detection with a wide coverage of the field of view (FOV), motivating deep learning methods to explore the potential of multi-view learning for DR grading. However, existing methods often overlook the inter-view correlations when fusing multi-view fundus images, failing to fully exploit the inherent consistency across views originating from the same patient. In this work, we present MVGFDR, an end-to-end Multi-View Graph Fusion framework for DR grading. Different from existing methods that directly fuse visual features from multiple views, MVGFDR is equipped with a novel Multi-View Graph Fusion (MVGF) module to explicitly disentangle the shared and view-specific visual features. Specifically, MVGF comprises three key components: (1) Multi-view Graph Initialization, which constructs visual graphs via residual-guided connections and employs Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) coefficients as frequency-domain anchors; (2) Multi-view Graph Fusion, which integrates selective nodes across multi-view graphs based on frequency-domain relevance to capture complementary view-specific information; and (3) Masked Cross-view Reconstruction, which leverages masked reconstruction of shared information across views to facilitate view-invariant representation learning. Extensive experimental results on MFIDDR, by far the largest multi-view fundus image dataset, demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approach over existing state-of-the-art approaches in diabetic retinopathy grading.

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is a major cause of vision impairment worldwide. However, manual diagnosis is often time-consuming and prone to errors, leading to delays in screening. This paper presents a lightweight automated deep learning framework for efficient assessment of DR severity from digital fundus images. We use a MobileNetV3 architecture with a Consistent Rank Logits (CORAL) head to model the ordered progression of disease while maintaining computational efficiency for resource-constrained environments. The model is trained and validated on a combined dataset of APTOS 2019 and IDRiD images using a preprocessing pipeline including circular cropping and illumination normalization. Extensive experiments including 3-fold cross-validation and ablation studies demonstrate strong performance. The model achieves a Quadratic Weighted Kappa (QWK) score of 0.9019 and an accuracy of 80.03 percent. Additionally, we address real-world deployment challenges through model calibration to reduce overconfidence and optimization for mobile devices. The proposed system provides a scalable and practical tool for early-stage diabetic retinopathy screening.

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) progresses as a continuous and irreversible deterioration of the retina, following a well-defined clinical trajectory from mild to severe stages. However, most existing ordinal regression approaches model DR severity as a set of static, symmetric ranks, capturing relative order while ignoring the inherent unidirectional nature of disease progression. As a result, the learned feature representations may violate biological plausibility, allowing implausible proximity between non-consecutive stages or even reverse transitions. To bridge this gap, we propose Directed Ordinal Diffusion Regularization (D-ODR), which explicitly models the feature space as a directed flow by constructing a progression-constrained directed graph that strictly enforces forward disease evolution. By performing multi-scale diffusion on this directed structure, D-ODR imposes penalties on score inversions along valid progression paths, thereby effectively preventing the model from learning biologically inconsistent reverse transitions. This mechanism aligns the feature representation with the natural trajectory of DR worsening. Extensive experiments demonstrate that D-ODR yields superior grading performance compared to state-of-the-art ordinal regression and DR-specific grading methods, offering a more clinically reliable assessment of disease severity. Our code is available on https://github.com/HovChen/D-ODR.

Multimodal Role-Playing Agents (MRPAs) are attracting increasing attention due to their ability to deliver more immersive multimodal emotional interactions. However, existing studies still rely on pure textual benchmarks to evaluate the text responses of MRPAs, while delegating the assessment of their multimodal expressions solely to modality-synthesis metrics. This evaluation paradigm, on the one hand, entangles semantic assessment with modality generation, leading to ambiguous error attribution, and on the other hand remains constrained by the heavy reliance on human judgment. To this end, we propose MERRY, a semantically decoupled evaluation framework for assessing Multimodal Emotional and Role consistencies of Role-playing agents. This framework introduce five refined metrics for EC and three for RC. Notably, we transform the traditional subjective scoring approach into a novel bidirectional-evidence-finding task, significantly improving the human agreement of LLM-as-Judge evaluations. Based on MERRY, we conduct extensive evaluations. Our empirical results primarily reveal that: (1) Training on synthetic datasets tends to reduce emotional consistency, whereas training on real-world datasets improves it; (2) Existing models suffer from emotional templatization and simplification, exhibiting positive-bias and performance bottleneck in fine-grained negative emotions; (3) Simple prompting method strengthens the weak models but constrains the strong ones, while simple fine-tuning method suffers from poor role generalization. Codes and dataset are available.

Coronary artery calcium (CAC) scoring is a key predictor of cardiovascular risk, but it relies on ECG-gated CT scans, restricting its use to specialized cardiac imaging settings. We introduce an automated framework for CAC detection and lesion-specific Agatston scoring that operates across both gated and non-gated CT scans. At its core is CARD-ViT, a self-supervised Vision Transformer trained exclusively on gated CT data using DINO. Without any non-gated training data, our framework achieves 0.707 accuracy and a Cohen's kappa of 0.528 on the Stanford non-gated dataset, matching models trained directly on non-gated scans. On gated test sets, the framework achieves 0.910 accuracy with Cohen's kappa scores of 0.871 and 0.874 across independent datasets, demonstrating robust risk stratification. These results demonstrate the feasibility of cross-domain CAC scoring from gated to non-gated domains, supporting scalable cardiovascular screening in routine chest imaging without additional scans or annotations.

Sarcasm detection in multilingual and code-mixed environments remains a challenging task for natural language processing models due to structural variations, informal expressions, and low-resource linguistic availability. This study compares four large language models, Llama 3.1, Mistral, Gemma 3, and Phi-4, with a fine-tuned DistilBERT model for sarcasm detection in code-mixed Hinglish text. The results indicate that the smaller, sequentially fine-tuned DistilBERT model achieved the highest overall accuracy of 84%, outperforming all of the LLMs in zero and few-shot set ups, using minimal LLM generated code-mixed data used for fine-tuning. These findings indicate that domain-adaptive fine-tuning of smaller transformer based models may significantly improve sarcasm detection over general LLM inference, in low-resource and data scarce settings.

Scene-consistent video generation aims to create videos that explore 3D scenes based on a camera trajectory. Previous methods rely on video generation models with external memory for consistency, or iterative 3D reconstruction and inpainting, which accumulate errors during inference due to incorrect intermediary outputs, non-differentiable processes, and separate models. To overcome these limitations, we introduce ``geometry-as-context". It iteratively completes the following steps using an autoregressive camera-controlled video generation model: (1) estimates the geometry of the current view necessary for 3D reconstruction, and (2) simulates and restores novel view images rendered by the 3D scene. Under this multi-task framework, we develop the camera gated attention module to enhance the model's capability to effectively leverage camera poses. During the training phase, text contexts are utilized to ascertain whether geometric or RGB images should be generated. To ensure that the model can generate RGB-only outputs during inference, the geometry context is randomly dropped from the interleaved text-image-geometry training sequence. The method has been tested on scene video generation with one-direction and forth-and-back trajectories. The results show its superiority over previous approaches in maintaining scene consistency and camera control.

Root cause analysis (RCA) in networked industrial systems, such as supply chains and power networks, is notoriously difficult due to unknown and dynamically evolving interdependencies among geographically distributed clients. These clients represent heterogeneous physical processes and industrial assets equipped with sensors that generate large volumes of nonlinear, high-dimensional, and heterogeneous IoT data. Classical RCA methods require partial or full knowledge of the system's dependency graph, which is rarely available in these complex networks. While federated learning (FL) offers a natural framework for decentralized settings, most existing FL methods assume homogeneous feature spaces and retrainable client models. These assumptions are not compatible with our problem setting. Different clients have different data features and often run fixed, proprietary models that cannot be modified. This paper presents a federated cross-client interdependency learning methodology for feature-partitioned, nonlinear time-series data, without requiring access to raw sensor streams or modifying proprietary client models. Each proprietary local client model is augmented with a Machine Learning (ML) model that encodes cross-client interdependencies. These ML models are coordinated via a global server that enforces representation consistency while preserving privacy through calibrated differential privacy noise. RCA is performed using model residuals and anomaly flags. We establish theoretical convergence guarantees and validate our approach on extensive simulations and a real-world industrial cybersecurity dataset.

Alleviating catastrophic forgetting while enabling further learning is a primary challenge in continual learning (CL). Orthogonal-based training methods have gained attention for their efficiency and strong theoretical properties, and many existing approaches enforce orthogonality through gradient projection. In this paper, we revisit orthogonality and exploit the fact that small singular values correspond to directions that are nearly orthogonal to the input space of previous tasks. Building on this principle, we introduce NESS (Null-space Estimated from Small Singular values), a CL method that applies orthogonality directly in the weight space rather than through gradient manipulation. Specifically, NESS constructs an approximate null space using the smallest singular values of each layer's input representation and parameterizes task-specific updates via a compact low-rank adaptation (LoRA-style) formulation constrained to this subspace. The subspace basis is fixed to preserve the null-space constraint, and only a single trainable matrix is learned for each task. This design ensures that the resulting updates remain approximately in the null space of previous inputs while enabling adaptation to new tasks. Our theoretical analysis and experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate competitive performance, low forgetting, and stable accuracy across tasks, highlighting the role of small singular values in continual learning. The code is available at https://github.com/pacman-ctm/NESS.

Operator learning has the potential to strongly impact scientific computing by learning solution operators for differential equations, potentially accelerating multi-query tasks such as design optimization and uncertainty quantification by orders of magnitude. Despite proven universal approximation properties, deep operator networks (DeepONets) often exhibit limited accuracy and generalization in practice, which hinders their adoption. Understanding these limitations is therefore crucial for further advancing the approach. This work analyzes performance limitations of the classical DeepONet architecture. It is shown that the approximation error is dominated by the branch network when the internal dimension is sufficiently large, and that the learned trunk basis can often be replaced by classical basis functions without a significant impact on performance. To investigate this further, a modified DeepONet is constructed in which the trunk network is replaced by the left singular vectors of the training solution matrix. This modification yields several key insights. First, a spectral bias in the branch network is observed, with coefficients of dominant, low-frequency modes learned more effectively. Second, due to singular-value scaling of the branch coefficients, the overall branch error is dominated by modes with intermediate singular values rather than the smallest ones. Third, using a shared branch network for all mode coefficients, as in the standard architecture, improves generalization of small modes compared to a stacked architecture in which coefficients are computed separately. Finally, strong and detrimental coupling between modes in parameter space is identified.