Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have advanced zero-shot end-to-end Vision-Language Navigation (VLN), yet robust navigation requires not only semantic understanding but also predictive modeling of environment dynamics and spatial structure. We propose PROSPECT, a unified streaming navigation agent that couples a streaming Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policy with latent predictive representation learning. PROSPECT uses CUT3R as a streaming 3D foundation spatial encoder to produce long-context, absolute-scale spatial features, and fuses them with SigLIP semantic features via cross-attention. During training, we introduce learnable stream query tokens that query the streaming context and predict next-step 2D and 3D latent features (rather than pixels or explicit modalities), supervised in the latent spaces of frozen SigLIP and CUT3R teachers. The predictive branch shapes internal representations without inference overhead. Experiments on VLN-CE benchmarks and real-robot deployment demonstrate state-of-the-art performance and improved long-horizon robustness under diverse lighting. We will release code for the community soon.

Snake robots are inspired by the ability of biological snakes to move over rock, grass, leaves, soil, up trees, along pavement and more. Their ability to move in multiple distinct environments is due to their legless locomotion strategy, which combines distinct gaits with a skin that exhibits frictional anisotropy. Designing soft robotic snakes with similar capabilities requires an understanding of how this underlying frictional anisotropy should be created in engineered systems, and how variances in the frictional anisotropy ratio affect locomotion speed and direction on different surfaces. While forward and backward frictional ratios have been characterized for previous scale designs, lateral friction and the associated ratios are often overlooked. In this paper, our contributions include: (i) the development of a novel articulated pseudo-skin design that is modular, easy to construct and has removable or replaceable scales; (ii) experimental measurement of the frictional characteristics of otherwise-identical scales at varying angles of attack (15°, 25°, 35°, 45°) on different surfaces of interest (grass, bark, smooth surface, carpet);(iii) separate measurements of locomotion speed for each angle and surface. Consequently, while we observed some consistent trends between frictional coefficients and scale angle, aligning with literature and intuition, we were not able to consistently identify expected correlations between frictional ratios and locomotion speed. We conclude that either frictional ratios alone are not sufficient to predict the observed speed of a snake robot, or that specific measurement approaches are required to accurately capture these ratios.

The volume of freely scraped data on the Internet has driven the tremendous success of deep learning. Along with this comes the growing concern about data privacy and security. Numerous methods for generating unlearnable examples have been proposed to prevent data from being illicitly learned by unauthorized deep models by impeding generalization. However, the existing approaches primarily rely on empirical heuristics, making it challenging to enhance unlearnable examples with solid explanations. In this paper, we analyze and improve unlearnable examples from a novel perspective: mutual information reduction. We demonstrate that effective unlearnable examples always decrease mutual information between clean features and poisoned features, and when the network gets deeper, the unlearnability goes better together with lower mutual information. Further, we prove from a covariance reduction perspective that minimizing the conditional covariance of intra-class poisoned features reduces the mutual information between distributions. Based on the theoretical results, we propose a novel unlearnable method called Mutual Information Unlearnable Examples (MI-UE) that reduces covariance by maximizing the cosine similarity among intra-class features, thus impeding the generalization effectively. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms the previous methods, even under defense mechanisms.

Glass surface segmentation from RGB images is a challenging task, since glass as a transparent material distinctly lacks visual characteristics. However, glass segmentation is critical for scene understanding and robotics, as transparent glass surfaces must be identified as solid material. This paper presents a novel architecture for glass segmentation, deploying a dual-backbone producing general visual features as well as task-specific learned visual features. General visual features are produced by a frozen DINOv3 vision foundation model, and the task-specific features are generated with a Swin model trained in a supervised manner. Resulting multi-scale feature representations are downsampled with residual Squeeze-and-Excitation Channel Reduction, and fed into a Mask2Former Decoder, producing the final segmentation masks. The architecture was evaluated on four commonly used glass segmentation datasets, achieving state-of-the-art results on several accuracy metrics. The model also has a competitive inference speed compared to the previous state-of-the-art method, and surpasses it when using a lighter DINOv3 backbone variant. The implementation source code and model weights are available at: https://github.com/ojalar/lgnet

We study a systematic bias in modern image generation models: the mention order of entities in text spuriously determines spatial layout and entity--role binding. We term this phenomenon Order-to-Space Bias (OTS) and show that it arises in both text-to-image and image-to-image generation, often overriding grounded cues and causing incorrect layouts or swapped assignments. To quantify OTS, we introduce OTS-Bench, which isolates order effects with paired prompts differing only in entity order and evaluates models along two dimensions: homogenization and correctness. Experiments show that Order-to-Space Bias (OTS) is widespread in modern image generation models, and provide evidence that it is primarily data-driven and manifests during the early stages of layout formation. Motivated by this insight, we show that both targeted fine-tuning and early-stage intervention strategies can substantially reduce OTS, while preserving generation quality.

In the vision of smart cities, technologies are being developed to enhance the efficiency of urban services and improve residents' quality of life. However, most existing research focuses on optimizing individual services in isolation, without adequately considering reciprocal interactions among heterogeneous urban services that could yield higher efficiency and improved resource utilization. For example, human couriers could collect traffic and air quality data along their delivery routes, while sensing robots could assist with on-demand delivery during peak hours, enhancing both sensing coverage and delivery efficiency. However, the joint optimization of different urban services is challenging due to potentially conflicting objectives and the need for real-time coordination in dynamic environments. In this paper, we propose UrbanHuRo, a two-layer human-robot collaboration framework for joint optimization of heterogeneous urban services, demonstrated through crowdsourced delivery and urban sensing. UrbanHuRo includes two key designs: (i) a scalable distributed MapReduce-based K-submodular maximization module for efficient order dispatch, and (ii) a deep submodular reward reinforcement learning algorithm for sensing route planning. Experimental evaluations on real-world datasets from a food delivery platform demonstrate that UrbanHuRo improves sensing coverage by 29.7% and courier income by 39.2% on average in most settings, while also significantly reducing the number of overdue orders.

Reliable localization is essential for sustainable forest management, as it allows robots or sensor systems to revisit and monitor the status of individual trees over long periods. In modern forestry, this management is structured around Digital Forest Inventories (DFIs), which encode stems using compact geometric attributes rather than raw data. Despite their central role, DFIs have been overlooked in localization research, and most methods still rely on dense gigabyte-sized point clouds that are costly to store and maintain. To improve upon this, we propose TreeLoc++, a global localization framework that operates directly on DFIs as a discriminative representation, eliminating the need to use the raw point clouds. TreeLoc++ reduces false matches in structurally ambiguous forests and improves the reliability of full 6-DoF pose estimation. It augments coarse retrieval with a pairwise distance histogram that encodes local tree-layout context, subsequently refining candidates via DBH-based filtering and yaw-consistent inlier selection to further reduce mismatches. Furthermore, a constrained optimization leveraging tree geometry jointly estimates roll, pitch, and height, enhancing pose stability and enabling accurate localization without reliance on dense 3D point cloud data. Evaluations on 27 sequences recorded in forests across three datasets and four countries show that TreeLoc++ achieves precise localization with centimeter-level accuracy. We further demonstrate robustness to long-term change by localizing data recorded in 2025 against inventories built from 2023 data, spanning a two-year interval. The system represents 15 sessions spanning 7.98 km of trajectories using only 250KB of map data and outperforms both hand-crafted and learning-based baselines that rely on point cloud maps. This demonstrates the scalability of TreeLoc++ for long-term deployment.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown strong performance in vision-language tasks, but their inference efficiency is severely limited by the exponential growth of visual tokens in complex scenarios such as high-resolution images and videos. Existing visual token pruning methods mainly operate after visual encoding, overlooking the substantial computational cost incurred during the encoding stage. To address this issue, we propose EvoPrune, an early-stage visual token pruning method for MLLMs that performs pruning directly during visual encoding. Specifically, EvoPrune employs a layer-wise pruning strategy guided by token similarity, diversity, and attention-based importance to retain the most informative visual tokens at selected encoding layers. Extensive experiments on image and video benchmarks validate the effectiveness of EvoPrune. In particular, on the VideoMME dataset, EvoPrune achieves 2$\times$ inference speedup with less than 1% performance degradation, demonstrating its potential for latency-sensitive MLLM deployment.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in learned tasks, yet they often struggle to adapt to non-stationary environments with feedback. While In-Context Learning and external memory offer some flexibility, they fail to internalize the adaptive ability required for long-term improvement. Meta-Reinforcement Learning (meta-RL) provides an alternative by embedding the learning process directly within the model. However, existing meta-RL approaches for LLMs focus primarily on exploration in single-agent settings, neglecting the strategic exploitation necessary for multi-agent environments. We propose MAGE, a meta-RL framework that empowers LLM agents for strategic exploration and exploitation. MAGE utilizes a multi-episode training regime where interaction histories and reflections are integrated into the context window. By using the final episode reward as the objective, MAGE incentivizes the agent to refine its strategy based on past experiences. We further combine population-based training with an agent-specific advantage normalization technique to enrich agent diversity and ensure stable learning. Experiment results show that MAGE outperforms existing baselines in both exploration and exploitation tasks. Furthermore, MAGE exhibits strong generalization to unseen opponents, suggesting it has internalized the ability for strategic exploration and exploitation. Code is available at https://github.com/Lu-Yang666/MAGE.

Large language models (LLMs) have advanced medical dialogue systems, yet psychiatric consultation poses substantially higher demands due to subjective ambiguity and comorbidity complexity: an agent must continuously extract psychopathological cues from incomplete and inconsistent patient reports in multi-turn interactions and perform rigorous differential diagnostic reasoning. However, existing methods face two fundamental challenges. First, without criteria-grounded clinical supports, they are prone to unsupported clinical assertions when symptoms are atypical or underspecified. Second, in multi-turn interactions, they struggle to mitigate inquiry drift (off-topic or low-yield questioning) and optimize questioning strategies. To address these challenges, we propose MIND, a unified inquiry--diagnosis reinforcement learning framework for psychiatric consultation. Specifically, we build a Criteria-Grounded Psychiatric Reasoning Bank (PRB) that summarizes dialogue context into clinical retrieval states, retrieves semantically similar reference consultations, and distills reusable criteria-grounded clinical supports to guide criteria-aligned inquiry and reasoning. Building on this foundation, MIND enforces explicit clinical reasoning with rubric-based process rewards to provide fine-grained supervision over intermediate decision steps, and incorporates a value-aware trajectory rectification mechanism to jointly improve information acquisition and diagnostic decision-making across turns. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MIND consistently outperforms strong baselines in diagnostic accuracy, empathetic interaction quality, interpretability, and generalization.

Stein's identity is a fundamental tool in machine learning with applications in generative models, stochastic optimization, and other problems involving gradients of expectations under Gaussian distributions. Less attention has been paid to problems with non-Gaussian expectations. Here, we consider the class of bounded-support $q$-Gaussians and derive a new Stein identity leading to gradient estimators which have nearly identical forms to the Gaussian ones, and which are similarly easy to implement. We do this by extending the previous results of Landsman, Vanduffel, and Yao (2013) to prove new Bonnet- and Price-type theorems for q-Gaussians. We also simplify their forms by using escort distributions. Our experiments show that bounded-support distributions can reduce the variance of gradient estimators, which can potentially be useful for Bayesian deep learning and sharpness-aware minimization. Overall, our work simplifies the application of Stein's identity for an important class of non-Gaussian distributions.

The Shapley value provides a principled foundation for data valuation, but exact computation is #P-hard due to the exponential coalition space. Existing accelerations remain global and ignore a structural property of modern predictors: for a given test instance, only a small subset of training points influences the prediction. We formalize this model-induced locality through support sets defined by the model's computational pathway (e.g., neighbors in KNN, leaves in trees, receptive fields in GNNs), showing that Shapley computation can be projected onto these supports without loss when locality is exact. This reframes Shapley evaluation as a structured data processing problem over overlapping support-induced subset families rather than exhaustive coalition enumeration. We prove that the intrinsic complexity of Local Shapley is governed by the number of distinct influential subsets, establishing an information-theoretic lower bound on retraining operations. Guided by this result, we propose LSMR (Local Shapley via Model Reuse), an optimal subset-centric algorithm that trains each influential subset exactly once via support mapping and pivot scheduling. For larger supports, we develop LSMR-A, a reuse-aware Monte Carlo estimator that remains unbiased with exponential concentration, with runtime determined by the number of distinct sampled subsets rather than total draws. Experiments across multiple model families demonstrate substantial retraining reductions and speedups while preserving high valuation fidelity.

The proliferation of facial recognition (FR) systems has raised privacy concerns in the digital realm, as malicious uses of FR models pose a significant threat. Traditional countermeasures, such as makeup style transfer, have suffered from low transferability in black-box settings and limited applicability across various demographic groups, including males and individuals with darker skin tones. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel facial privacy protection method, dubbed \textbf{MAP}, a pioneering approach that employs human emotion modifications to disguise original identities as target identities in facial images. Our method uniquely fine-tunes a score network to learn dual objectives, target identity and human expression, which are jointly optimized through gradient projection to ensure convergence at a shared local optimum. Additionally, we enhance the perceptual quality of protected images by applying local smoothness regularization and optimizing the score matching loss within our network. Empirical experiments demonstrate that our innovative approach surpasses previous baselines, including noise-based, makeup-based, and freeform attribute methods, in both qualitative fidelity and quantitative metrics. Furthermore, MAP proves its effectiveness against an online FR API and shows advanced adaptability in uncommon photographic scenarios.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as a powerful framework for processing graph-structured data. However, conventional GNNs and their variants are inherently limited by the homophily assumption, leading to degradation in performance on heterophilic graphs. Although substantial efforts have been made to mitigate this issue, they remain constrained by the message-passing paradigm, which is inherently rooted in homophily. In this paper, a detailed analysis of how the underlying label autocorrelation of the homophily assumption introduces bias into GNNs is presented. We innovatively leverage a negative feedback mechanism to correct the bias and propose Graph Negative Feedback Bias Correction (GNFBC), a simple yet effective framework that is independent of any specific aggregation strategy. Specifically, we introduce a negative feedback loss that penalizes the sensitivity of predictions to label autocorrelation. Furthermore, we incorporate the output of graph-agnostic models as a feedback term, leveraging independent node feature information to counteract correlation-induced bias guided by Dirichlet energy. GNFBC can be seamlessly integrated into existing GNN architectures, improving overall performance with comparable computational and memory overhead.

Multimodal generative models have made significant strides in image editing, demonstrating impressive performance on a variety of static tasks. However, their proficiency typically does not extend to complex scenarios requiring dynamic reasoning, leaving them ill-equipped to model the coherent, intermediate logical pathways that constitute a multi-step evolution from an initial state to a final one. This capacity is crucial for unlocking a deeper level of procedural and causal understanding in visual manipulation. To systematically measure this critical limitation, we introduce InEdit-Bench, the first evaluation benchmark dedicated to reasoning over intermediate pathways in image editing. InEdit-Bench comprises meticulously annotated test cases covering four fundamental task categories: state transition, dynamic process, temporal sequence, and scientific simulation. Additionally, to enable fine-grained evaluation, we propose a set of assessment criteria to evaluate the logical coherence and visual naturalness of the generated pathways, as well as the model's fidelity to specified path constraints. Our comprehensive evaluation of 14 representative image editing models on InEdit-Bench reveals significant and widespread shortcomings in this domain. By providing a standardized and challenging benchmark, we aim for InEdit-Bench to catalyze research and steer development towards more dynamic, reason-aware, and intelligent multimodal generative models.

Tool-augmented large language model (LLM) agents promise to unify scientific reasoning with computation, yet their deployment in high-stakes domains like drug discovery is bottlenecked by two critical barriers: unconstrained tool-use governance and poor long-horizon reliability. In dependency-heavy pharmaceutical pipelines, autonomous agents often drift into irreproducible trajectories, where early-stage hallucinations multiplicatively compound into downstream failures. To overcome this, we present Mozi, a dual-layer architecture that bridges the flexibility of generative AI with the deterministic rigor of computational biology. Layer A (Control Plane) establishes a governed supervisor--worker hierarchy that enforces role-based tool isolation, limits execution to constrained action spaces, and drives reflection-based replanning. Layer B (Workflow Plane) operationalizes canonical drug discovery stages -- from Target Identification to Lead Optimization -- as stateful, composable skill graphs. This layer integrates strict data contracts and strategic human-in-the-loop (HITL) checkpoints to safeguard scientific validity at high-uncertainty decision boundaries. Operating on the design principle of ``free-form reasoning for safe tasks, structured execution for long-horizon pipelines,'' Mozi provides built-in robustness mechanisms and trace-level audibility to completely mitigate error accumulation. We evaluate Mozi on PharmaBench, a curated benchmark for biomedical agents, demonstrating superior orchestration accuracy over existing baselines. Furthermore, through end-to-end therapeutic case studies, we demonstrate Mozi's ability to navigate massive chemical spaces, enforce stringent toxicity filters, and generate highly competitive in silico candidates, effectively transforming the LLM from a fragile conversationalist into a reliable, governed co-scientist.

Construction aggregates, including sand and gravel, crushed stone and riprap, are the core building blocks of the construction industry. State-of-the-practice characterization methods mainly relies on visual inspection and manual measurement. State-of-the-art aggregate imaging methods have limitations that are only applicable to regular-sized aggregates under well-controlled conditions. This dissertation addresses these major challenges by developing a field imaging framework for the morphological characterization of aggregates as a multi-scenario solution. For individual and non-overlapping aggregates, a field imaging system was designed and the associated segmentation and volume estimation algorithms were developed. For 2D image analyses of aggregates in stockpiles, an automated 2D instance segmentation and morphological analysis approach was established. For 3D point cloud analyses of aggregate stockpiles, an integrated 3D Reconstruction-Segmentation-Completion (RSC-3D) approach was established: 3D reconstruction procedures from multi-view images, 3D stockpile instance segmentation, and 3D shape completion to predict the unseen sides. First, a 3D reconstruction procedure was developed to obtain high-fidelity 3D models of collected aggregate samples, based on which a 3D aggregate particle library was constructed. Next, two datasets were derived from the 3D particle library for 3D learning: a synthetic dataset of aggregate stockpiles with ground-truth instance labels, and a dataset of partial-complete shape pairs, developed with varying-view raycasting schemes. A state-of-the-art 3D instance segmentation network and a 3D shape completion network were trained on the datasets, respectively. The application of the integrated approach was demonstrated on real stockpiles and validated with ground-truth, showing good performance in capturing and predicting the unseen sides of aggregates.

Short text classification (STC) remains a challenging task due to the scarcity of contextual information and labeled data. However, existing approaches have pre-dominantly focused on English because most benchmark datasets for the STC are primarily available in English. Consequently, existing methods seldom incorporate the linguistic and structural characteristics of Korean, such as its agglutinative morphology and flexible word order. To address these limitations, we propose LIGRAM, a hierarchical heterogeneous graph model for Korean short-text classification. The proposed model constructs sub-graphs at the morpheme, part-of-speech, and named-entity levels and hierarchically integrates them to compensate for the limited contextual information in short texts while precisely capturing the grammatical and semantic dependencies inherent in Korean. In addition, we apply Semantics-aware Contrastive Learning (SemCon) to reflect semantic similarity across documents, enabling the model to establish clearer decision boundaries even in short texts where class distinctions are often ambiguous. We evaluate LIGRAM on four Korean short-text datasets, where it consistently outperforms existing baseline models. These outcomes validate that integrating language-specific graph representations with SemCon provides an effective solution for short text classification in agglutinative languages such as Korean.

Freezing of Gait (FOG) is a debilitating motor symptom commonly experienced by individuals with Parkinson's Disease (PD) which often leads to falls and reduced mobility. Timely and accurate prediction of FOG episodes is essential for enabling proactive interventions through assistive technologies. This study presents a reinforcement learning-based framework designed to identify optimal pre-FOG onset points, thereby extending the prediction horizon for anticipatory cueing systems. The model implements a Double Deep Q-Network (DDQN) architecture enhanced with Prioritized Experience Replay (PER) allowing the agent to focus learning on high-impact experiences and refine its policy. Trained over 9000 episodes with a reward shaping strategy that promotes cautious decision-making, the agent demonstrated robust performance in both subject-dependent and subject-independent evaluations. The model achieved a prediction horizon of up to 8.72 seconds prior to FOG onset in subject-independent scenarios and 7.89 seconds in subject-dependent settings. These results highlight the model's potential for integration into wearable assistive devices, offering timely and personalized interventions to mitigate FOG in PD patients.

Physical dynamical systems can be viewed as natural information processors: their systems preserve, transform, and disperse input information. This perspective motivates learning not only from data generated by such systems, but also how to measure them in a way that extracts the most useful information for a given task. We propose a general computing framework for adaptive information extraction from dynamical systems, in which a trainable attention module learns both where to probe the system state and how to combine these measurements to optimize prediction performance. As a concrete instantiation, we implement this idea using a spatiotemporal field governed by a partial differential equation as the underlying dynamics, though the framework applies equally to any system whose state can be sampled. Our results show that adaptive spatial sensing significantly improves prediction accuracy on canonical chaotic benchmarks. This work provides a perspective on attention-enhanced reservoir computing as a special case of a broader paradigm: neural networks as trainable measurement devices for extracting information from physical dynamical systems.

Generating long-form storytelling videos with consistent visual narratives remains a significant challenge in video synthesis. We present a novel framework, dataset, and a model that address three critical limitations: background consistency across shots, seamless multi-subject shot-to-shot transitions, and scalability to hour-long narratives. Our approach introduces a background-consistent generation pipeline that maintains visual coherence across scenes while preserving character identity and spatial relationships. We further propose a transition-aware video synthesis module that generates smooth shot transitions for complex scenarios involving multiple subjects entering or exiting frames, going beyond the single-subject limitations of prior work. To support this, we contribute with a synthetic dataset of 10,000 multi-subject transition sequences covering underrepresented dynamic scene compositions. On VBench, InfinityStory achieves the highest Background Consistency (88.94), highest Subject Consistency (82.11), and the best overall average rank (2.80), showing improved stability, smoother transitions, and better temporal coherence.

With the availability of open APIs in social robots, it has become easier to customize general-purpose tools to meet users' needs. However, interpreting high-level user instructions, selecting and configuring appropriate tools, and executing them reliably remain challenging for users without programming experience. To address these challenges, we introduce MistyPilot, an agentic LLM-driven framework for autonomous tool selection, orchestration, and parameter configuration. MistyPilot comprises two core components: a Physically Interactive Agent (PIA) and a Socially Intelligent Agent (SIA). The PIA enables robust sensor-triggered and tool-driven task execution, while the SIA generates socially intelligent and emotionally aligned dialogue. MistyPilot further integrates a fast-slow thinking paradigm to capture user preferences, reduce latency, and improve task efficiency. To comprehensively evaluate MistyPilot, we contribute five benchmark datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in routing correctness, task completeness, fast-slow thinking retrieval efficiency, tool scalability,and emotion alignment. All code, datasets, and experimental videos will be made publicly available on the project webpage.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) integrate vision and text to power applications, but this integration introduces new vulnerabilities. We study Image-based Prompt Injection (IPI), a black-box attack in which adversarial instructions are embedded into natural images to override model behavior. Our end-to-end IPI pipeline incorporates segmentation-based region selection, adaptive font scaling, and background-aware rendering to conceal prompts from human perception while preserving model interpretability. Using the COCO dataset and GPT-4-turbo, we evaluate 12 adversarial prompt strategies and multiple embedding configurations. The results show that IPI can reliably manipulate the output of the model, with the most effective configuration achieving up to 64\% attack success under stealth constraints. These findings highlight IPI as a practical threat in black-box settings and underscore the need for defenses against multimodal prompt injection.

Reliable insertion of industrial connectors remains a central challenge in robotics, requiring sub-millimeter precision under uncertainty and often without full visual access. Vision-based approaches struggle with occlusion and limited generalization, while learning-based policies frequently fail to transfer to unseen geometries. To address these limitations, we leverage tactile sensing, which captures local surface geometry at the point of contact and thus provides reliable information even under occlusion and across novel connector shapes. Building on this capability, we present \emph{Touch2Insert}, a tactile-based framework for arbitrary peg insertion. Our method reconstructs cross-sectional geometry from high-resolution tactile images and estimates the relative pose of the hole with respect to the peg in a zero-shot manner. By aligning reconstructed shapes through registration, the framework enables insertion from a single contact without task-specific training. To evaluate its performance, we conducted experiments with three diverse connectors in both simulation and real-robot settings. The results indicate that Touch2Insert achieved sub-millimeter pose estimation accuracy for all connectors in simulation, and attained an average success rate of 86.7\% on the real robot, thereby confirming the robustness and generalizability of tactile sensing for real-world robotic connector insertion.

The growing use of unstructured text in business research makes topic modeling a central tool for constructing explanatory variables from reviews, social media, and open-ended survey responses, yet existing approaches function poorly as measurement instruments. Prior work shows that textual content predicts outcomes such as sales, satisfaction, and firm performance, but probabilistic models often generate conceptually diffuse topics, neural topic models are difficult to interpret in theory-driven settings, and large language model approaches lack standardization, stability, and alignment with document-level representations. We introduce LX Topic, a neural topic method that conceptualizes topics as latent linguistic constructs and produces calibrated document-level topic proportions for empirical analysis. LX Topic builds on FASTopic to ensure strong document representativeness and integrates large language model refinement at the topic-word level using alignment and confidence-weighting mechanisms that enhance semantic coherence without distorting document-topic distributions. Evaluations on large-scale Amazon and Yelp review datasets demonstrate that LX Topic achieves the highest overall topic quality relative to leading models while preserving clustering and classification performance. By unifying topic discovery, refinement, and standardized output in a web-based system, LX Topic establishes topic modeling as a reproducible, interpretable, and measurement-oriented instrument for marketing research and practice.

We develop a rigorous framework for extending neural operators to handle out-of-distribution input functions. We leverage kernel approximation techniques and provide theory for characterizing the input-output function spaces in terms of Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces (RKHSs). We provide theorems on the requirements for reliable extensions and their predicted approximation accuracy. We also establish formal relationships between specific kernel choices and their corresponding Sobolev Native Spaces. This connection further allows the extended neural operators to reliably capture not only function values but also their derivatives. Our methods are empirically validated through the solution of elliptic partial differential equations (PDEs) involving operators on manifolds having point-cloud representations and handling geometric contributions. We report results on key factors impacting the accuracy and computational performance of the extension approaches.

Accurate brain tumor typing requires integrating heterogeneous clinical evidence, including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), histopathology, and pathology reports, which are often incomplete at the time of diagnosis. We introduce CoRe-BT, a cross-modal radiology-pathology-text benchmark for brain tumor typing, designed to study robust multimodal learning under missing modality conditions. The dataset comprises 310 patients with multi-sequence brain MRI (T1, T1c, T2, FLAIR), including 95 cases with paired H&E-stained whole-slide pathology images and pathology reports. All cases are annotated with tumor type and grade, and MRI volumes include expert-annotated tumor masks, enabling both region-aware modeling and auxiliary learning tasks. Tumors are categorized into six clinically relevant classes capturing the heterogeneity of common and rare glioma subtypes. We evaluate tumor typing under variable modality availability by comparing MRI-only models with multimodal approaches that incorporate pathology information when present. Baseline experiments demonstrate the feasibility of multimodal fusion and highlight complementary modality contributions across clinically relevant typing tasks. CoRe-BT provides a grounded testbed for advancing multimodal glioma typing and representation learning in realistic scenarios with incomplete clinical data.

RGB-Thermal (RGBT) tracking aims to achieve robust object localization across diverse environmental conditions by fusing visible and thermal infrared modalities. However, existing RGBT trackers rely solely on initial-frame visual information for target modeling, failing to adapt to appearance variations due to the absence of language guidance. Furthermore, current methods suffer from redundant search regions and heterogeneous modality gaps, causing background distraction. To address these issues, we first introduce textual descriptions into RGBT tracking benchmarks. This is accomplished through a pipeline that leverages Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to automatically produce texual annotations. Afterwards, we propose RAGTrack, a novel Retrieval-Augmented Generation framework for robust RGBT tracking. To this end, we introduce a Multi-modal Transformer Encoder (MTE) for unified visual-language modeling. Then, we design an Adaptive Token Fusion (ATF) to select target-relevant tokens and perform channel exchanges based on cross-modal correlations, mitigating search redundancies and modality gaps. Finally, we propose a Context-aware Reasoning Module (CRM) to maintain a dynamic knowledge base and employ a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to enable temporal linguistic reasoning for robust target modeling. Extensive experiments on four RGBT benchmarks demonstrate that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance across various challenging scenarios. The source code is available https://github.com/IdolLab/RAGTrack.

Intelligent forest tree breeding has advanced plant phenotyping, yet existing research largely focuses on large-leaf agricultural crops, with limited attention to fine-grained leaf analysis of sapling trees in open-field environments. Natural scenes introduce challenges including scale variation, illumination changes, and irregular leaf morphology. To address these issues, we collected UAV RGB imagery of field-grown saplings and constructed the Poplar-leaf dataset, containing 1,202 branches and 19,876 pixel-level annotated leaf instances. To our knowledge, this is the first instance segmentation dataset specifically designed for forestry leaves in open-field conditions. We propose LeafInst, a novel segmentation framework tailored for irregular and multi-scale leaf structures. The model integrates an Asymptotic Feature Pyramid Network (AFPN) for multi-scale perception, a Dynamic Asymmetric Spatial Perception (DASP) module for irregular shape modeling, and a dual-residual Dynamic Anomalous Regression Head (DARH) with Top-down Concatenation decoder Feature Fusion (TCFU) to improve detection and segmentation performance. On Poplar-leaf, LeafInst achieves 68.4 mAP, outperforming YOLOv11 by 7.1 percent and MaskDINO by 6.5 percent. On the public PhenoBench benchmark, it reaches 52.7 box mAP, exceeding MaskDINO by 3.4 percent. Additional experiments demonstrate strong generalization and practical utility for large-scale leaf phenotyping.

Multi-view image compression (MIC) aims to achieve high compression efficiency by exploiting inter-image correlations, playing a crucial role in 3D applications. As a subfield of MIC, distributed multi-view image compression (DMIC) offers performance comparable to MIC while eliminating the need for inter-view information at the encoder side. However, existing methods in DMIC typically treat all images equally, overlooking the varying degrees of correlation between different views during decoding, which leads to suboptimal coding performance. To address this limitation, we propose a novel $\textbf{OmniParallax Attention Mechanism}$ (OPAM), which is a general mechanism for explicitly modeling correlations and aligned features between arbitrary pairs of information sources. Building upon OPAM, we propose a Parallax Multi Information Fusion Module (PMIFM) to adaptively integrate information from different sources. PMIFM is incorporated into both the joint decoder and the entropy model to construct our end-to-end DMIC framework, $\textbf{ParaHydra}$. Extensive experiments demonstrate that $\textbf{ParaHydra}$ is $\textbf{the first DMIC method}$ to significantly surpass state-of-the-art MIC codecs, while maintaining low computational overhead. Performance gains become more pronounced as the number of input views increases. Compared with LDMIC, $\textbf{ParaHydra}$ achieves bitrate savings of $\textbf{19.72%}$ on WildTrack(3) and up to $\textbf{24.18%}$ on WildTrack(6), while significantly improving coding efficiency (as much as $\textbf{65}\times$ in decoding and $\textbf{34}\times$ in encoding).