Target speaker extraction (TSE) aims to isolate a specific speaker's voice from multi-speaker mixtures. Despite strong benchmark results, real-world performance often degrades due to different interacting factors. Previous curriculum learning approaches for TSE typically address these factors separately, failing to capture their complex interactions and relying on predefined difficulty factors that may not align with actual model learning behavior. To address this challenge, we first propose a multi-factor curriculum learning strategy that jointly schedules SNR thresholds, speaker counts, overlap ratios, and synthetic/real proportions, enabling progressive learning from simple to complex scenarios. However, determining optimal scheduling without predefined assumptions remains challenging. We therefore introduce TSE-Datamap, a visualization framework that grounds curriculum design in observed training dynamics by tracking confidence and variability across training epochs. Our analysis reveals three characteristic data regions: (i) easy-to-learn examples where models consistently perform well, (ii) ambiguous examples where models oscillate between alternative predictions, and (iii) hard-to-learn examples where models persistently struggle. Guided by these data-driven insights, our methods improve extraction results over random sampling, with particularly strong gains in challenging multi-speaker scenarios.

This paper investigates person detection and tracking in an industrial indoor workspace using a LiDAR mounted on an overhead crane. The overhead viewpoint introduces a strong domain shift from common vehicle-centric LiDAR benchmarks, and limited availability of suitable public training data. Henceforth, we curate a site-specific overhead LiDAR dataset with 3D human bounding-box annotations and adapt selected candidate 3D detectors under a unified training and evaluation protocol. We further integrate lightweight tracking-by-detection using AB3DMOT and SimpleTrack to maintain person identities over time. Detection performance is reported with distance-sliced evaluation to quantify the practical operating envelope of the sensing setup. The best adapted detector configurations achieve average precision (AP) up to 0.84 within a 5.0 m horizontal radius, increasing to 0.97 at 1.0 m, with VoxelNeXt and SECOND emerging as the most reliable backbones across this range. The acquired results contribute in bridging the domain gap between standard driving datasets and overhead sensing for person detection and tracking. We also report latency measurements, highlighting practical real-time feasibility. Finally, we release our dataset and implementations in GitHub to support further research

Vehicular edge intelligence (VEI) is vital for future intelligent transportation systems. However, traditional centralized learning in dynamic vehicular networks faces significant communication overhead and privacy risks. Split federated learning (SFL) offers a distributed solution but is often hindered by substantial communication bottlenecks from transmitting high-dimensional intermediate features and can present label privacy concerns. Semantic communication offers a transformative approach to alleviate these communication challenges in SFL by focusing on transmitting only task-relevant information. This paper leverages the advantages of semantic communication in the design of SFL, and presents a case study the semantic communication-enhanced U-Shaped split federated learning (SC-USFL) framework that inherently enhances label privacy by localizing sensitive computations with reduced overhead. It features a dedicated semantic communication module (SCM), with pre-trained and parameter-frozen encoding/decoding units, to efficiently compress and transmit only the task-relevant semantic information over the critical uplink path from vehicular users to the edge server (ES). Furthermore, a network status monitor (NSM) module enables adaptive adjustment of the semantic compression rate in real-time response to fluctuating wireless channel conditions. The SC-USFL framework demonstrates a promising approach for efficiently balancing communication load, preserving privacy, and maintaining learning performance in resource-constrained vehicular environments. Finally, this paper highlights key open research directions to further advance the synergy between semantic communication and SFL in the vehicular network.

In this paper, we present AILS-NTUA system for Track-A of SemEval-2026 Task 3 on Dimensional Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (DimABSA), which encompasses three complementary problems: Dimensional Aspect Sentiment Regression (DimASR), Dimensional Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (DimASTE), and Dimensional Aspect Sentiment Quadruplet Prediction (DimASQP) within a multilingual and multi-domain framework. Our methodology combines fine-tuning of language-appropriate encoder backbones for continuous aspect-level sentiment prediction with language-specific instruction tuning of large language models using LoRA for structured triplet and quadruplet extraction. This unified yet task-adaptive design emphasizes parameter-efficient specialization across languages and domains, enabling reduced training and inference requirements while maintaining strong effectiveness. Empirical results demonstrate that the proposed models achieve competitive performance and consistently surpass the provided baselines across most evaluation settings.

This paper presents a novel agentic LLM pipeline for SemEval-2026 Task 10 that jointly extracts psycholinguistic conspiracy markers and detects conspiracy endorsement. Unlike traditional classifiers that conflate semantic reasoning with structural localization, our decoupled design isolates these challenges. For marker extraction, we propose Dynamic Discriminative Chain-of-Thought (DD-CoT) with deterministic anchoring to resolve semantic ambiguity and character-level brittleness. For conspiracy detection, an "Anti-Echo Chamber" architecture, consisting of an adversarial Parallel Council adjudicated by a Calibrated Judge, overcomes the "Reporter Trap," where models falsely penalize objective reporting. Achieving 0.24 Macro F1 (+100\% over baseline) on S1 and 0.79 Macro F1 (+49\%) on S2, with the S1 system ranking 3rd on the development leaderboard, our approach establishes a versatile paradigm for interpretable, psycholinguistically-grounded NLP.

Bid optimization in online advertising relies on black-box machine-learning models that learn bidding decisions from historical data. However, these approaches fail to replicate human experts' adaptive, experience-driven, and globally coherent decisions. Specifically, they generalize poorly in data-sparse cases because of missing structured knowledge, make short-sighted sequential decisions that ignore long-term interdependencies, and struggle to adapt in out-of-distribution scenarios where human experts succeed. To address this, we propose KBD (Knowledge-informed Bidding with Dual-process control), a novel method for bid optimization. KBD embeds human expertise as inductive biases through the informed machine-learning paradigm, uses Decision Transformer (DT) to globally optimize multi-step bidding sequences, and implements dual-process control by combining a fast rule-based PID (System 1) with DT (System 2). Extensive experiments highlight KBD's advantage over existing methods and underscore the benefit of grounding bid optimization in human expertise and dual-process control.

Proximal constraints are fundamental to the stability of the Large Language Model reinforcement learning. While the canonical clipping mechanism in PPO serves as an efficient surrogate for trust regions, we identify a critical bottleneck: fixed bounds strictly constrain the upward update margin of low-probability actions, disproportionately suppressing high-advantage tail strategies and inducing rapid entropy collapse. To address this, we introduce Band-constrained Policy Optimization (BandPO). BandPO replaces canonical clipping with Band, a unified theoretical operator that projects trust regions defined by f-divergences into dynamic, probability-aware clipping intervals. Theoretical analysis confirms that Band effectively resolves this exploration bottleneck. We formulate this mapping as a convex optimization problem, guaranteeing a globally optimal numerical solution while deriving closed-form solutions for specific divergences. Extensive experiments across diverse models and datasets demonstrate that BandPO consistently outperforms canonical clipping and Clip-Higher, while robustly mitigating entropy collapse.

Smart contracts on public blockchains now manage large amounts of value, and vulnerabilities in these systems can lead to substantial losses. As AI agents become more capable at reading, writing, and running code, it is natural to ask how well they can already navigate this landscape, both in ways that improve security and in ways that might increase risk. We introduce EVMbench, an evaluation that measures the ability of agents to detect, patch, and exploit smart contract vulnerabilities. EVMbench draws on 117 curated vulnerabilities from 40 repositories and, in the most realistic setting, uses programmatic grading based on tests and blockchain state under a local Ethereum execution environment. We evaluate a range of frontier agents and find that they are capable of discovering and exploiting vulnerabilities end-to-end against live blockchain instances. We release code, tasks, and tooling to support continued measurement of these capabilities and future work on security.

Uncertainties arising from localization error, trajectory prediction errors of the moving obstacles and environmental disturbances pose significant challenges to robot's safe navigation. Existing uncertainty-aware planners often approximate polygon-shaped robots and obstacles using simple geometric primitives such as circles or ellipses. Though computationally convenient, these approximations substantially shrink the feasible space, leading to overly conservative trajectories and even planning failure in narrow environments. In addition, many such methods rely on specific assumptions about noise distributions, which may not hold in practice and thus limit their performance guarantees. To address these limitations, we extend the Optimization-Based Collision Avoidance (OBCA) framework to an uncertainty-aware formulation, termed \emph{U-OBCA}. The proposed method explicitly accounts for the collision risk between polygon-shaped robots and obstacles by formulating OBCA-based chance constraints, and hence avoiding geometric simplifications and reducing unnecessary conservatism. These probabilistic constraints are further tightened into deterministic nonlinear constraints under mild distributional assumptions, which can be solved efficiently by standard numerical optimization solvers. The proposed approach is validated through theoretical analysis, numerical simulations and real-world experiments. The results demonstrate that U-OBCA significantly mitigates the conservatism in trajectory planning and achieves higher navigation efficiency compared to existing baseline methods, particularly in narrow and cluttered environments.

Neural network-based visuomotor policies enable robots to perform manipulation tasks but remain susceptible to perceptual attacks. For example, conventional 2D adversarial patches are effective under fixed-camera setups, where appearance is relatively consistent; however, their efficacy often diminishes under dynamic viewpoints from moving cameras, such as wrist-mounted setups, due to perspective distortions. To proactively investigate potential vulnerabilities beyond 2D patches, this work proposes a viewpoint-consistent adversarial texture optimization method for 3D objects through differentiable rendering. As optimization strategies, we employ Expectation over Transformation (EOT) with a Coarse-to-Fine (C2F) curriculum, exploiting distance-dependent frequency characteristics to induce textures effective across varying camera-object distances. We further integrate saliency-guided perturbations to redirect policy attention and design a targeted loss that persistently drives robots toward adversarial objects. Our comprehensive experiments show that the proposed method is effective under various environmental conditions, while confirming its black-box transferability and real-world applicability.

Imitation learning from human demonstrations has achieved significant success in robotic control, yet most visuomotor policies still condition on single-step observations or short-context histories, making them struggle with non-Markovian tasks that require long-term memory. Simply enlarging the context window incurs substantial computational and memory costs and encourages overfitting to spurious correlations, leading to catastrophic failures under distribution shift and violating real-time constraints in robotic systems. By contrast, humans can compress important past experiences into long-term memories and exploit them to solve tasks throughout their lifetime. In this paper, we propose VPWEM, a non-Markovian visuomotor policy equipped with working and episodic memories. VPWEM retains a sliding window of recent observation tokens as short-term working memory, and introduces a Transformer-based contextual memory compressor that recursively converts out-of-window observations into a fixed number of episodic memory tokens. The compressor uses self-attention over a cache of past summary tokens and cross-attention over a cache of historical observations, and is trained jointly with the policy. We instantiate VPWEM on diffusion policies to exploit both short-term and episode-wide information for action generation with nearly constant memory and computation per step. Experiments demonstrate that VPWEM outperforms state-of-the-art baselines including diffusion policies and vision-language-action (VLA) models by more than 20% on the memory-intensive manipulation tasks in MIKASA and achieves an average 5% improvement on the mobile manipulation benchmark MoMaRT. Code is available at https://github.com/HarryLui98/code_vpwem.

Hallucination has been a significant impediment to the development and application of current Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). To mitigate hallucinations, one intuitive and effective way is to directly increase attention weights to image tokens during inference. Although this effectively reduces the hallucination rate, it often induces repetitive descriptions. To address this, we first conduct an analysis of attention patterns and reveal that real object tokens tend to assign higher attention to the generated text than hallucinated ones. This inspires us to leverage the generated text, which contains instruction-related visual information and contextual knowledge, to alleviate hallucinations while maintaining linguistic coherence. We therefore propose Attention to Generated Text (IAT) and demonstrate that it significantly reduces the hallucination rate while avoiding repetitive descriptions. To prevent naive amplification from impairing the inherent prediction capabilities of LVLMs, we further explore Adaptive IAT (AdaIAT) that employs a layer-wise threshold to control intervention time and fine-grained amplification magnitude tailored to the characteristics of each attention head. Both analysis and experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of AdaIAT. Results of several LVLMs show that AdaIAT effectively alleviates hallucination (reducing hallucination rates $C_S$ and $C_I$ on LLaVA-1.5 by 35.8% and 37.1%, respectively) while preserving linguistic performance and prediction capability, achieving an attractive trade-off.

In perpetrator treatment, a recurring observation is the dissociation between insight and action: offenders articulate remorse yet behavioral change does not follow. We report four preregistered studies (1,584 multi-agent simulations across 16 languages and three model families) demonstrating that alignment interventions in large language models produce a structurally analogous phenomenon: surface safety that masks or generates collective pathology and internal dissociation. In Study 1 (N = 150), increasing alignment-instructed agents reduced collective pathology in English (g = -1.844, p < .0001) but amplified it in Japanese (g = +0.771, p = .038)--a directional reversal we term "alignment backfire." Study 2 (N = 1,174) extended to 16 languages: alignment-induced dissociation was near-universal (15/16 languages; beta = 0.0667, p < .0001), while collective pathology bifurcated along cultural-linguistic lines (interaction beta = 0.0684, p = .0003), correlating with Power Distance Index (r = 0.474, p = .064). Study 3 (N = 180) tested individuation as countermeasure; individuated agents became the primary source of both pathology and dissociation (DI = +1.120) with conformity above 84%--demonstrating iatrogenesis. Study 4 (N = 80) validated patterns across Llama 3.3 70B, GPT-4o-mini, and Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B, confirming English safety is model-general while Japanese backfire is model-specific. These findings reframe alignment as a behavioral intervention subject to risk homeostasis and iatrogenesis. Language space--the linguistic, pragmatic, and cultural properties inherited from training data--structurally determines alignment outcomes. Safety validated in English does not transfer to other languages, and prompt-level interventions cannot override language-space-level constraints.

LLM-based agents depend on effective tool-use policies to solve complex tasks, yet optimizing these policies remains challenging due to delayed supervision and the difficulty of credit assignment in long-horizon trajectories. Existing optimization approaches tend to be either monolithic, which are prone to entangling behaviors, or single-aspect, which ignore cross-module error propagation. To address these limitations, we propose EvoTool, a self-evolving framework that optimizes a modular tool-use policy via a gradient-free evolutionary paradigm. EvoTool decomposes agent's tool-use policy into four modules, including Planner, Selector, Caller, and Synthesizer, and iteratively improves them in a self-improving loop through three novel mechanisms. Trajectory-Grounded Blame Attribution uses diagnostic traces to localize failures to a specific module. Feedback-Guided Targeted Mutation then edits only that module via natural-language critique. Diversity-Aware Population Selection preserves complementary candidates to ensure solution diversity. Across four benchmarks, EvoTool outperforms strong baselines by over 5 points on both GPT-4.1 and Qwen3-8B, while achieving superior efficiency and transferability. The code will be released once paper is accepted.

Large pre-trained video diffusion models excel in video frame interpolation but struggle to generate high fidelity frames due to reliance on intrinsic generative priors, limiting detail preservation from start and end frames. Existing methods often depend on motion control for temporal consistency, yet dense optical flow is error-prone, and sparse points lack structural context. In this paper, we propose FC-VFI for faithful and consistent video frame interpolation, supporting \(4\times\)x and \(8\times\) interpolation, boosting frame rates from 30 FPS to 120 and 240 FPS at \(2560\times 1440\)resolution while preserving visual fidelity and motion consistency. We introduce a temporal modeling strategy on the latent sequences to inherit fidelity cues from start and end frames and leverage semantic matching lines for structure-aware motion guidance, improving motion consistency. Furthermore, we propose a temporal difference loss to mitigate temporal inconsistencies. Extensive experiments show FC-VFI achieves high performance and structural integrity across diverse scenarios.

This demonstration presents U-Parking, a distributed Ultra-Wideband (UWB)-assisted autonomous parking system. By integrating Large Language Models (LLMs)-assisted planning with robust fusion localization and trajectory tracking, it enables reliable automated parking in challenging indoor environments, as validated through real-vehicle demonstrations.

The rapid adoption of vision-language models (VLMs) has heightened the demand for robust intellectual property (IP) protection of these high-value pretrained models. Effective IP protection should proactively confine model deployment within authorized domains and prevent unauthorized transfers. However, existing methods rely on static training-time definitions, limiting flexibility in dynamic environments and often producing opaque responses to unauthorized inputs. To address these limitations, we propose a novel dynamic authorization with legality-aware intellectual property protection (AoD-IP) for VLMs, a framework that supports authorize-on-demand and legality-aware assessment. AoD-IP introduces a lightweight dynamic authorization module that enables flexible, user-controlled authorization, allowing users to actively specify or switch authorized domains on demand at deployment time. This enables the model to adapt seamlessly as application scenarios evolve and provides substantially greater extensibility than existing static-domain approaches. In addition, AoD-IP incorporates a dual-path inference mechanism that jointly predicts input legality-aware and task-specific outputs. Comprehensive experimental results on multiple cross-domain benchmarks demonstrate that AoD-IP maintains strong authorized-domain performance and reliable unauthorized detection, while supporting user-controlled authorization for adaptive deployment in dynamic environments.

Vision-language models are increasingly applied to sensitive domains such as medical imaging and personal photographs, yet existing differentially private methods for in-context learning are limited to few-shot, text-only settings because privacy cost scales with the number of tokens processed. We present Differentially Private Multimodal Task Vectors (DP-MTV), the first framework enabling many-shot multimodal in-context learning with formal $(\varepsilon, δ)$-differential privacy by aggregating hundreds of demonstrations into compact task vectors in activation space. DP-MTV partitions private data into disjoint chunks, applies per-layer clipping to bound sensitivity, and adds calibrated noise to the aggregate, requiring only a single noise addition that enables unlimited inference queries. We evaluate on eight benchmarks across three VLM architectures, supporting deployment with or without auxiliary data. At $\varepsilon=1.0$, DP-MTV achieves 50% on VizWiz compared to 55% non-private and 35% zero-shot, preserving most of the gain from in-context learning under meaningful privacy constraints.

Diverse outputs in text generation are necessary for effective exploration in complex reasoning tasks, such as code generation and mathematical problem solving. Such Pass@$k$ problems benefit from distinct candidates covering the solution space. However, traditional sampling approaches often waste computational resources on repetitive failure modes. While Diffusion Language Models have emerged as a competitive alternative to the prevailing Autoregressive paradigm, they remain susceptible to this redundancy, with independent samples frequently collapsing into similar modes. To address this, we propose a training free, low cost intervention to enhance generative diversity in Diffusion Language Models. Our approach modifies intermediate samples in a batch sequentially, where each sample is repelled from the feature space of previous samples, actively penalising redundancy. Unlike prior methods that require retraining or beam search, our strategy incurs negligible computational overhead, while ensuring that each sample contributes a unique perspective to the batch. We evaluate our method on the HumanEval and GSM8K benchmarks using the LLaDA-8B-Instruct model. Our results demonstrate significantly improved diversity and Pass@$k$ performance across various temperature settings. As a simple modification to the sampling process, our method offers an immediate, low-cost improvement for current and future Diffusion Language Models in tasks that benefit from diverse solution search. We make our code available at https://github.com/sean-lamont/odd.

Vision transformers have demonstrated remarkable success in classification by leveraging global self-attention to capture long-range dependencies. However, this same mechanism can obscure fine-grained spatial details crucial for tasks such as segmentation. In this work, we seek to enhance segmentation performance of vision transformers after standard image-level classification training. More specifically, we present a simple yet effective add-on that improves performance on segmentation tasks while retaining vision transformers' image-level recognition capabilities. In our approach, we modulate the self-attention with a learnable Gaussian kernel that biases the attention toward neighboring patches. We further refine the patch representations to learn better embeddings at patch positions. These modifications encourage tokens to focus on local surroundings and ensure meaningful representations at spatial positions, while still preserving the model's ability to incorporate global information. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our modifications, evidenced by substantial segmentation gains on three benchmarks (e.g., over 6% and 4% on ADE20K for ViT Tiny and Base), without changing the training regime or sacrificing classification performance. The code is available at https://github.com/sinahmr/LocAtViT/.

Multimodal Federated Learning (MFL) enables clients with heterogeneous data modalities to collaboratively train models without sharing raw data, offering a privacy-preserving framework that leverages complementary cross-modal information. However, existing methods often overlook personalized client performance and struggle with modality/task discrepancies, as well as model heterogeneity. To address these challenges, we propose FedAFD, a unified MFL framework that enhances client and server learning. On the client side, we introduce a bi-level adversarial alignment strategy to align local and global representations within and across modalities, mitigating modality and task gaps. We further design a granularity-aware fusion module to integrate global knowledge into the personalized features adaptively. On the server side, to handle model heterogeneity, we propose a similarity-guided ensemble distillation mechanism that aggregates client representations on shared public data based on feature similarity and distills the fused knowledge into the global model. Extensive experiments conducted under both IID and non-IID settings demonstrate that FedAFD achieves superior performance and efficiency for both the client and the server.

Most existing federated learning (FL) methods for medical image analysis only considered intramodal heterogeneity, limiting their applicability to multimodal imaging applications. In practice, some FL participants may possess only a subset of the complete imaging modalities, posing intermodal heterogeneity as a challenge to effectively training a global model on all participants' data. Meanwhile, each participant expects a personalized model tailored to its local data characteristics in FL. This work proposes a new FL framework with federated modality-specific encoders and partially personalized multimodal fusion decoders (FedMEPD) to address the two concurrent issues. Specifically, FedMEPD employs an exclusive encoder for each modality to account for the intermodal heterogeneity. While these encoders are fully federated, the decoders are partially personalized to meet individual needs -- using the discrepancy between global and local parameter updates to dynamically determine which decoder filters are personalized. Implementation-wise, a server with full-modal data employs a fusion decoder to fuse representations from all modality-specific encoders, thus bridging the modalities to optimize the encoders via backpropagation. Moreover, multiple anchors are extracted from the fused multimodal representations and distributed to the clients in addition to the model parameters. Conversely, the clients with incomplete modalities calibrate their missing-modal representations toward the global full-modal anchors via scaled dot-product cross-attention, making up for the information loss due to absent modalities. FedMEPD is validated on the BraTS 2018 and 2020 multimodal brain tumor segmentation benchmarks. Results show that it outperforms various up-to-date methods for multimodal and personalized FL, and its novel designs are effective.

Temporal Forgery Localization (TFL) aims to precisely identify manipulated segments in video and audio, offering strong interpretability for security and forensics. While recent State Space Models (SSMs) show promise in precise temporal reasoning, their use in TFL is hindered by ambiguous boundaries, sparse forgeries, and limited long-range modeling. We propose DeformTrace, which enhances SSMs with deformable dynamics and relay mechanisms to address these challenges. Specifically, Deformable Self-SSM (DS-SSM) introduces dynamic receptive fields into SSMs for precise temporal localization. To further enhance its capacity for temporal reasoning and mitigate long-range decay, a Relay Token Mechanism is integrated into DS-SSM. Besides, Deformable Cross-SSM (DC-SSM) partitions the global state space into query-specific subspaces, reducing non-forgery information accumulation and boosting sensitivity to sparse forgeries. These components are integrated into a hybrid architecture that combines the global modeling of Transformers with the efficiency of SSMs. Extensive experiments show that DeformTrace achieves state-of-the-art performance with fewer parameters, faster inference, and stronger robustness.

Computed Tomography Report Generation (CTRG) aims to automate the clinical radiology reporting process, thereby reducing the workload of report writing and facilitating patient care. While deep learning approaches have achieved remarkable advances in X-ray report generation, their effectiveness may be limited in CTRG due to larger data volumes of CT images and more intricate details required to describe them. This work introduces a novel two-stage (structure- and report-learning) framework tailored for CTRG featuring effective structure-wise image-text contrasting. In the first stage, a set of learnable structure-specific visual queries observe corresponding structures in a CT image. The resulting observation tokens are contrasted with structure-specific textual features extracted from the accompanying radiology report with a structure-wise image-text contrastive loss. In addition, text-text similarity-based soft pseudo targets are proposed to mitigate the impact of false negatives, i.e., semantically identical image structures and texts from non-paired images and reports. Thus, the model learns structure-level semantic correspondences between CT images and reports. Further, a dynamic, diversity-enhanced negative queue is proposed to guide the network in learning to discriminate various abnormalities. In the second stage, the visual structure queries are frozen and used to select the critical image patch embeddings depicting each anatomical structure, minimizing distractions from irrelevant areas while reducing memory consumption. Also, a text decoder is added and trained for report generation.Our extensive experiments on two public datasets demonstrate that our framework establishes new state-of-the-art performance for CTRG in clinical efficiency, and its components are effective.

How much can a pitcher's body reveal about the upcoming pitch? We study this question at scale by classifying eight pitch types from monocular 3D pose sequences, without access to ball-flight data. Our pipeline chains a diffusion-based 3D pose backbone with automatic pitching-event detection, groundtruth-validated biomechanical feature extraction, and gradient-boosted classification over 229 kinematic features. Evaluated on 119,561 professional pitches, the largest such benchmark to date, we achieve 80.4\% accuracy using body kinematics alone. A systematic importance analysis reveals that upper-body mechanics contribute 64.9\% of the predictive signal versus 35.1\% for the lower body, with wrist position (14.8\%) and trunk lateral tilt emerging as the most informative joint group and biomechanical feature, respectively. We further show that grip-defined variants (four-seam vs.\ two-seam fastball) are not separable from pose, establishing an empirical ceiling near 80\% and delineating where kinematic information ends and ball-flight information begins.

Establishing reliable image correspondences is essential for many robotic vision problems. However, existing methods often struggle in challenging scenarios with large viewpoint changes or textureless regions, where incorrect cor- respondences may still receive high similarity scores. This is mainly because conventional models rely solely on fea- ture similarity, lacking an explicit mechanism to estimate the reliability of predicted matches, leading to overconfident errors. To address this issue, we propose SURE, a Semi- dense Uncertainty-REfined matching framework that jointly predicts correspondences and their confidence by modeling both aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties. Our approach in- troduces a novel evidential head for trustworthy coordinate regression, along with a lightweight spatial fusion module that enhances local feature precision with minimal overhead. We evaluated our method on multiple standard benchmarks, where it consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art semi-dense matching models in both accuracy and efficiency. our code will be available on https://github.com/LSC-ALAN/SURE.

Generating realistic and diverse trajectories is a critical challenge in autonomous driving simulation. While Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise, existing methods often rely on structured data like vectorized maps, which fail to capture the rich, unstructured visual context of a scene. To address this, we propose K-Gen, an interpretable keypoint-guided multimodal framework that leverages Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to unify rasterized BEV map inputs with textual scene descriptions. Instead of directly predicting full trajectories, K-Gen generates interpretable keypoints along with reasoning that reflects agent intentions, which are subsequently refined into accurate trajectories by a refinement module. To further enhance keypoint generation, we apply T-DAPO, a trajectory-aware reinforcement fine-tuning algorithm. Experiments on WOMD and nuPlan demonstrate that K-Gen outperforms existing baselines, highlighting the effectiveness of combining multimodal reasoning with keypoint-guided trajectory generation.

Injury prediction in pitching depends on precise biomechanical signals, yet gold-standard measurements come from expensive, stadium-installed multi-camera systems that are unavailable outside professional venues. We present a monocular video pipeline that recovers 18 clinically relevant biomechanics metrics from broadcast footage, positioning pose-derived kinematics as a scalable source for injury-risk modeling. Built on DreamPose3D, our approach introduces a drift-controlled global lifting module that recovers pelvis trajectory via velocity-based parameterization and sliding-window inference, lifting pelvis-rooted poses into global space. To address motion blur, compression artifacts, and extreme pitching poses, we incorporate a kinematics refinement pipeline with bone-length constraints, joint-limited inverse kinematics, smoothing, and symmetry constraints to ensure temporally stable and physically plausible kinematics. On 13 professional pitchers (156 paired pitches), 16/18 metrics achieve sub-degree agreement (MAE $< 1^{\circ}$). Using these metrics for injury prediction, an automated screening model achieves AUC 0.811 for Tommy John surgery and 0.825 for significant arm injuries on 7,348 pitchers. The resulting pose-derived metrics support scalable injury-risk screening, establishing monocular broadcast video as a viable alternative to stadium-scale motion capture for biomechanics.

Preference-based reward learning is widely used for shaping agent behavior to match a user's preference, yet its sparse binary feedback makes it especially vulnerable to causal confusion. The learned reward often latches onto spurious features that merely co-occur with preferred trajectories during training, collapsing when those correlations disappear or reverse at test time. We introduce ReCouPLe, a lightweight framework that uses natural language rationales to provide the missing causal signal. Each rationale is treated as a guiding projection axis in an embedding space, training the model to score trajectories based on features aligned with that axis while de-emphasizing context that is unrelated to the stated reason. Because the same rationales (e.g., "avoids collisions", "completes the task faster") can appear across multiple tasks, ReCouPLe naturally reuses the same causal direction whenever tasks share semantics, and transfers preference knowledge to novel tasks without extra data or language-model fine-tuning. Our learned reward model can ground preferences on the articulated reason, aligning better with user intent and generalizing beyond spurious features. ReCouPLe outperforms baselines by up to 1.5x in reward accuracy under distribution shifts, and 2x in downstream policy performance in novel tasks. We have released our code at https://github.com/mj-hwang/ReCouPLe

Instruction following is critical for LLMs deployed in enterprise and API-driven settings, where strict adherence to output formats, content constraints, and procedural requirements is essential for enabling reliable LLM-assisted workflows. However, existing instruction following benchmarks predominantly evaluate natural language generation constraints that reflect the needs of chat assistants rather than enterprise users. To bridge this gap, we introduce FireBench, an LLM instruction following benchmark grounded in real-world enterprise and API usage patterns. FireBench evaluates six core capability dimensions across diverse applications including information extraction, customer support, and coding agents, comprising over 2,400 samples. We evaluate 11 LLMs and present key findings on their instruction following behavior in enterprise scenarios. We open-source FireBench at fire-bench.com to help users assess model suitability, support model developers in diagnosing performance, and invite community contributions.