Networks of timestamped interactions arise across social, financial, and biological domains, where forecasting future events requires modeling both evolving topology and temporal ordering. Temporal link prediction methods typically frame the task as binary classification with negative sampling, discarding the sequential and correlated nature of real-world interactions. We introduce STEP (STochastic Event Predictor), a framework that reformulates temporal link prediction as a sequential forecasting problem in continuous time. STEP models event dynamics through discrete temporal motif transitions governed by Poisson processes, maintaining a set of open motif instances that evolve as new interactions arrive. At each step, the framework decides whether to initiate a new temporal motif or extend an existing one, selecting the most probable event via Bayesian scoring of temporal likelihoods and structural priors. STEP also produces compact, temporal motif-based feature vectors that can be concatenated with existing temporal graph neural network outputs, enriching their representations without architectural modifications. Experiments on five real-world datasets demonstrate up to 21% average precision gains over state-of-the-art baselines in classification and 0.99 precision in next $k$ sequential forecasting, with consistently lower runtime than competing motif-aware methods.

Medical image segmentation is fundamental to clinical workflows, yet models trained on a single dataset often fail to generalize across institutions, scanners, or patient populations. While vision foundation models have shown great promise in addressing this challenge, their deployment typically requires task-specific fine-tuning, which introduces substantial communication overhead in federated learning and prevents continuous knowledge evolution during deployment. In this work, we propose a memory-augmented segmentation agent (MemSeg-Agent) that shifts adaptation from weight space to memory space, enabling few-shot learning, federated supervised learning, and test-time adaptation within a unified architecture. MemSeg-Agent conditions a fixed backbone with lightweight static, few-shot, and test-time working memories, which are dynamically composed by an agentic controller. In federated settings, we update compact memory units instead of model parameters, substantially reducing communication overhead. Experiments on four public datasets demonstrate strong performance and robustness to domain shift: Static memory alone matches or surpasses strong supervised baselines with high parameter efficiency, and test-time working memory further improves in-domain and cross-domain performance without fine-tuning. Overall, MemSeg-Agent introduces a new paradigm for scalable and adaptive medical image segmentation in the era of agentic AI.

Despite remarkable progress in Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) for robot manipulation, these large pre-trained models require fine-tuning to be deployed in specific environments. These fine-tuned models are highly sensitive to camera viewpoint changes that frequently occur in unstructured environments. In this paper, we propose a zero-shot camera adaptation framework without additional demonstration data, policy fine-tuning, or architectural modification. Our key idea is to virtually adjust test-time camera observations to match the training camera configuration in real-time. For that, we use a recent feed-forward novel view synthesis model which outputs high-quality target view images, handling both extrinsic and intrinsic parameters. This plug-and-play approach preserves the pre-trained capabilities of VLAs and applies to any RGB-based policy. Through extensive experiments on the LIBERO benchmark, our method consistently outperforms baselines that use data augmentation for policy fine-tuning or additional 3D-aware features for visual input. We further validate that our approach constantly enhances viewpoint robustness in real-world robotic manipulation scenarios, including settings with varying camera extrinsics, intrinsics, and freely moving handheld cameras.

High-fidelity teleoperation of dexterous robotic hands is essential for bringing robots into unstructured domestic environments. However, existing teleoperation systems often face a trade-off between performance and portability: vision-based capture systems are constrained by costs and line-of-sight requirements, while mechanical exoskeletons are bulky and physically restrictive. In this paper, we present DexEMG, a lightweight and cost-effective teleoperation system leveraging surface electromyography (sEMG) to bridge the gap between human intent and robotic execution. We first collect a synchronized dataset of sEMG signals and hand poses via a MoCap glove to train EMG2Pose, a neural network capable of continuously predicting hand kinematics directly from muscle activity. To ensure seamless control, we develop a robust hand retargeting algorithm that maps the predicted poses onto a multi-fingered dexterous hand in real-time. Experimental results demonstrate that DexEMG achieves high precision in diverse teleoperation tasks. Notably, our system exhibits strong generalization capabilities across novel objects and complex environments without the need for intensive individual-specific recalibration. This work offers a scalable and intuitive interface for both general-purpose robotic manipulation and assistive technologies.

Clinical image interpretation is inherently multi-step and tool-centric: clinicians iteratively combine visual evidence with patient context, quantify findings, and refine their decisions through a sequence of specialized procedures. While LLM-based agents promise to orchestrate such heterogeneous medical tools, existing systems treat tool sets and invocation strategies as static after deployment. This design is brittle under real-world domain shifts, across tasks, and evolving diagnostic requirements, where predefined tool chains frequently degrade and demand costly manual re-design. We propose MACRO, a self-evolving, experience-augmented medical agent that shifts from static tool composition to experience-driven tool discovery. From verified execution trajectories, the agent autonomously identifies recurring effective multi-step tool sequences, synthesizes them into reusable composite tools, and registers these as new high-level primitives that continuously expand its behavioral repertoire. A lightweight image-feature memory grounds tool selection in a visual-clinical context, while a GRPO-like training loop reinforces reliable invocation of discovered composites, enabling closed-loop self-improvement with minimal supervision. Extensive experiments across diverse medical imaging datasets and tasks demonstrate that autonomous composite tool discovery consistently improves multi-step orchestration accuracy and cross-domain generalization over strong baselines and recent state-of-the-art agentic methods, bridging the gap between brittle static tool use and adaptive, context-aware clinical AI assistance. Code will be available upon acceptance.

Recent advances in speech synthesis and voice conversion have greatly improved the naturalness and authenticity of generated audio. Meanwhile, evolving encoding, compression, and transmission mechanisms on social media platforms further obscure deepfake artifacts. These factors complicate reliable detection in real-world environments, underscoring the need for representative evaluation benchmarks. To this end, we introduce ML-ITW (Multilingual In-The-Wild), a multilingual dataset covering 14 languages, seven major platforms, and 180 public figures, totaling 28.39 hours of audio. We evaluate three detection paradigms: end-to-end neural models, self-supervised feature-based (SSL) methods, and audio large language models (Audio LLMs). Experimental results reveal significant performance degradation across diverse languages and real-world acoustic conditions, highlighting the limited generalization ability of existing detectors in practical scenarios. The ML-ITW dataset is publicly available.

Video stabilization aims to mitigate camera shake but faces a fundamental trade-off between geometric robustness and full-frame consistency. While 2D methods suffer from aggressive cropping, 3D techniques are often undermined by fragile optimization pipelines that fail under extreme motions. To bridge this gap, we propose VS3R, a framework that synergizes feed-forward 3D reconstruction with generative video diffusion. Our pipeline jointly estimates camera parameters, depth, and masks to ensure all-scenario reliability, and introduces a Hybrid Stabilized Rendering module that fuses semantic and geometric cues for dynamic consistency. Finally, a Dual-Stream Video Diffusion Model restores disoccluded regions and rectifies artifacts by synergizing structural guidance with semantic anchors. Collectively, VS3R achieves high-fidelity, full-frame stabilization across diverse camera models and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in robustness and visual quality.

Generative models have achieved success in producing semantically plausible 2D images, but it remains challenging in 3D generation due to the absence of spatial geometry constraints. Typically, existing methods utilize geometric features as conditions to enhance spatial awareness. However, these methods can only model relative relationships and are prone to scale inconsistency of absolute geometry. Thus, we argue that semantic information and absolute geometry empower 3D cognition, thereby enabling controllable 3D generation for the physical world. In this work, we propose Cog2Gen3D, a 3D cognition-guided diffusion framework for 3D generation. Our model is guided by three key designs: 1) Cognitive Feature Embeddings. We encode different modalities into semantic and geometric representations and further extract logical representations. 2) 3D Latent Cognition Graph. We structure different representations into dual-stream semantic-geometric graphs and fuse them via common-based cross-attention to obtain a 3D cognition graph. 3) Cognition-Guided Latent Diffusion. We leverage the fused 3D cognition graph as the condition to guide the latent diffusion process for 3D Gaussian generation. Under this unified framework, the 3D cognition graph ensures the physical plausibility and structural rationality of 3D generation. Moreover, we construct a validation subset based on the Marble World Labs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our Cog2Gen3D significantly outperforms existing methods in both semantic fidelity and geometric plausibility.

Remote sensing imagery plays a crucial role in many applications and requires accurate computerized classification techniques. Reliable classification is essential for transforming raw imagery into structured and usable information. While Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are mostly used for image classification, they excel at local feature extraction, but struggle to capture global contextual information. Vision Transformers (ViTs) address this limitation through self attention mechanisms that model long-range dependencies. Integrating CNNs and ViTs, therefore, leads to better performance than standalone architectures. However, the use of additional CNN and ViT components does not lead to further performance improvement and instead introduces a bottleneck caused by redundant feature representations. In this research, we propose a fusion model that combines the strengths of CNNs and ViTs for remote sensing image classification. To overcome the performance bottleneck, the proposed approach trains four independent fusion models that integrate CNN and ViT backbones and combine their outputs at the final prediction stage through ensembling. The proposed method achieves accuracy rates of 98.10 percent, 94.46 percent, and 95.45 percent on the UC Merced, RSSCN7, and MSRSI datasets, respectively. These results outperform competing architectures and highlight the effectiveness of the proposed solution, particularly due to its efficient use of computational resources during training.

Reinforcement learning has demonstrated significant potential in the field of autonomous driving. However, it suffers from defects such as training instability and unsafe action outputs when faced with autonomous racing environments characterized by high dynamics and strong nonlinearities. To this end, this paper proposes a trajectory guidance and dynamics constraints Reinforcement Learning (TraD-RL) method for autonomous racing. The key features of this method are as follows: 1) leveraging the prior expert racing line to construct an augmented state representation and facilitate reward shaping, thereby integrating domain knowledge to stabilize early-stage policy learning; 2) embedding explicit vehicle dynamic priors into a safe operating envelope formulated via control barrier functions to enable safety-constrained learning; and 3) adopting a multi-stage curriculum learning strategy that shifts from expert-guided learning to autonomous exploration, allowing the learned policy to surpass expert-level performance. The proposed method is evaluated in a high-fidelity simulation environment modeled after the Tempelhof Airport Street Circuit. Experimental results demonstrate that TraD-RL effectively improves both lap speed and driving stability of the autonomous racing vehicle, achieving a synergistic optimization of racing performance and safety.

Unlike their large-scale counterparts, small-scale robots are largely confined to laboratory environments and are rarely deployed in real-world settings. As robot size decreases, robot-terrain interactions fundamentally change; however, there remains a lack of systematic understanding of what sensory information small-scale robots should acquire and how they should respond when traversing complex natural terrains. To address these challenges, we develop a Small-scale, Intelligent, Lizard-inspired, Adaptive Robot (SILA Bot) capable of adapting to diverse substrates. We use granular media of varying depths as a controlled yet representative terrain paradigm. We show that the optimal body movement pattern (ranging from standing-wave bending that assists limb retraction on flat ground to traveling-wave undulation that generates thrust in deep granular media) can be parameterized and approximated as a linear function of granular depth. Furthermore, proprioceptive signals, such as joint torque, provide sufficient information to estimate granular depth via a K-Nearest Neighbors classifier, achieving 95% accuracy. Leveraging these relationships, we design a simple linear feedback controller that modulates body phase and substantially improves locomotion performance on terrains with unknown depth. Together, these results establish a principled framework for perception and control in small-scale locomotion and enable effective terrain-adaptive locomotion while maintaining low computational complexity.

Legged manipulators offer high mobility and versatile manipulation. However, robust interaction with heterogeneous articulated objects, such as doors, drawers, and cabinets, remains challenging because of the diverse articulation types of the objects and the complex dynamics of the legged robot. Existing reinforcement learning (RL)-based approaches often rely on high-dimensional sensory inputs, leading to sample inefficiency. In this paper, we propose a robust and sample-efficient framework for opening heterogeneous articulated objects with a legged manipulator. In particular, we propose Sampling-based Abstracted Feature Extraction (SAFE), which encodes handle and panel geometry into a compact low-dimensional representation, improving cross-domain generalization. Additionally, Articulation Information Estimator (ArtIEst) is introduced to adaptively mix proprioception with exteroception to estimate opening direction and range of motion for each object. The proposed framework was deployed to manipulate various heterogeneous articulated objects in simulation and real-world robot systems. Videos can be found on the project website: https://openheart-icra.github.io/OpenHEART/

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in text generation and knowledge-intensive question answering. Nevertheless, they are prone to producing hallucinated content, which severely undermines their reliability in high-stakes application domains. Existing hallucination attribution approaches, based on either external knowledge retrieval or internal model mechanisms, primarily focus on semantic similarity matching or representation-level discrimination. As a result, they have difficulty establishing structured correspondences at the span level between hallucination types, underlying error generation mechanisms, and external factual evidence, thereby limiting the interpretability of hallucinated fragments and the traceability of supporting or opposing evidence. To address these limitations, we propose HART, a fine-grained hallucination attribution and evidence retrieval framework for large language models. HART formalizes hallucination tracing as a structured modeling task comprising four stages: span localization, mechanism attribution, evidence retrieval, and causal tracing. Based upon this formulation, we develop the first structured dataset tailored for hallucination tracing, in which hallucination types, error mechanisms, and sets of counterfactual evidence are jointly annotated to enable causal-level interpretability evaluation. Experimental results on the proposed dataset demonstrate that HART substantially outperforms strong retrieval baselines, including BM25 and DPR, validating the effectiveness and generalization capability of the proposed tracing paradigm for hallucination analysis and evidence alignment.

Adapting foundation models to new clinical sites remains challenging in practice. Domain shift and scarce annotations must be handled by experts, yet many clinical groups do not have ready access to skilled AI engineers to tune adapter designs and training recipes. As a result, adaptation cycles can stretch from weeks to months, particularly in few-shot settings. Existing PEFT methods either require manual adapter configuration or automated searches that are computationally infeasible in few-shot 3D settings. We propose SEA-PEFT (SElf-Auditing Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning) to automate this process. SEA-PEFT treats adapter configuration as an online allocation problem solved during fine-tuning rather than through manual, fixed-topology choices. SEA-PEFT uses a search-audit-allocate loop that trains active adapters, estimates each adapter's Dice utility by momentarily toggling it off, and then reselects the active set under a parameter budget using a greedy knapsack allocator. Exponential Moving Average and Interquartile Range smoothing, together with a Finite-State Ranking controller, stabilize the loop and improve reliability in high-noise few-shot regimes. On TotalSegmentator and FLARE'22, SEA-PEFT improves mean Dice by 2.4--2.8 points over the strongest fixed-topology PEFT baselines across 1/5/10-shot settings while training <1% of parameters. For reproducibility purposes, we made our code publicly available at https://github.com/tsly123/SEA_PEFT

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at multi-step reasoning, yet increasing the structural complexity of inference does not consistently improve system-level returns. Methods such as Tree of Thoughts (ToT), Graph of Thoughts (GoT), and Adaptive Graph of Thoughts (AGoT) can boost accuracy on some benchmarks, but often introduce substantial overhead in token consumption and latency, and their gains can be unstable across task distributions-sometimes underperforming simpler Chain-of-Thought (CoT) or direct input-output prompting (IO). We attribute this inefficiency to stage-wise and node-wise heterogeneity inside GoT-style reasoning pipelines: high-quality planning and final synthesis are globally coupled and typically benefit from strong models, whereas many intermediate subtasks are localized and can be solved accurately by lighter models with far fewer tokens. Motivated by these observations, we propose RouteGoT, a budget-controllable, node-adaptive routing framework for graph-structured reasoning. RouteGoT performs in-graph routing by prioritizing strong models for planning and synthesis, while dynamically allocating lightweight models and cost-effective strategies to leaf subtasks based on predicted difficulty. It further integrates explicit budget constraints into a global inference scheduler to control graph expansion under a user-specified token budget, enabling predictable performance-cost trade-offs. Experiments across reasoning, retrieval, and multi-hop QA benchmarks show that RouteGoT matching or improving accuracy while substantially reducing token usage; specifically, it achieves an average 8.1 percentage points accuracy improvement and 79.1\% output token reduction compared to AGoT. Furthermore, RouteGoT outperforms existing routing baselines by maintaining a superior cost-accuracy trade-off, demonstrating improved robustness under varying budget targets and tasks.

Latent Action Models (LAMs) enable learning from actionless data for applications ranging from robotic control to interactive world models. However, existing LAMs typically focus on short-horizon frame transitions and capture low-level motion while overlooking longer-term temporal structure. In contrast, actionless videos often contain temporally extended and high-level skills. We present HiLAM, a hierarchical latent action model that discovers latent skills by modeling long-term temporal information. To capture these dependencies across long horizons, we utilize a pretrained LAM as a low-level extractor. This architecture aggregates latent action sequences, which contain the underlying dynamic patterns of the video, into high-level latent skills. Our experiments demonstrate that HiLAM improves over the baseline and exhibits robust dynamic skill discovery.

Deep vision classifiers often achieve high accuracy while remaining poorly calibrated and fragile under small distribution shifts. We present Margin and Consistency Supervision (MaCS), a simple, architecture-agnostic regularization framework that jointly enforces logit-space separation and local prediction stability. MaCS augments cross-entropy with (i) a hinge-squared margin penalty that enforces a target logit gap between the correct class and the strongest competitor, and (ii) a consistency regularizer that minimizes the KL divergence between predictions on clean inputs and mildly perturbed views. We provide a unifying theoretical analysis showing that increasing classification margin while reducing local sensitivity formalized via a Lipschitz-type stability proxy yields improved generalization guarantees and a provable robustness radius bound scaling with the margin-to-sensitivity ratio. Across several image classification benchmarks and several backbones spanning CNNs and Vision Transformers, MaCS consistently improves calibration (lower ECE and NLL) and robustness to common corruptions while preserving or improving top-1 accuracy. Our approach requires no additional data, no architectural changes, and negligible inference overhead, making it an effective drop-in replacement for standard training objectives.

Dynamic vision sensors, also known as event cameras, are rapidly rising in popularity for robotic and computer vision tasks due to their sparse activation and high-temporal resolution. Event cameras have been used in robotic navigation and localization tasks where accurate positioning needs to occur on small and frequent time scales, or when energy concerns are paramount. In this work, we present EventGeM, a state-of-the-art global to local feature fusion pipeline for event-based Visual Place Recognition. We use a pre-trained vision transformer (ViT-S/16) backbone to obtain global feature patch for initial match predictions embeddings from event histogram images. Local feature keypoints were then detected using a pre-trained MaxViT backbone for 2D-homography based re-ranking with RANSAC. For additional re-ranking refinement, we subsequently used a pre-trained vision foundation model for depth estimation to compare structural similarity between references and queries. Our work performs state-of-the-art localization when compared to the best currently available event-based place recognition method across several benchmark datasets and lighting conditions all whilst being fully capable of running in real-time when deployed across a variety of compute architectures. We demonstrate the capability of EventGeM in a real-world deployment on a robotic platform for online localization using event streams directly from an event camera. Project page: https://eventgemvpr.github.io/

Mixture of Experts (MoE) models enable parameter-efficient scaling through sparse expert activations, yet optimizing their inference and memory costs remains challenging due to limited understanding of their specialization behavior. We present a systematic analysis of expert specialization in MoEs through two complementary approaches: domain-specific routing patterns and an early decoding framework that tracks expert contributions to output representations. Our analysis of the DeepSeekMoE model reveals that despite having 64 routed experts with 6 active for each layer's computation, the model predominantly relies on a few specialized experts, with the top-weighted expert's output closely approximating the full ensemble prediction. We quantitatively validate these findings through a systematic analysis of the token routing distribution, demonstrating that very few experts handle over 50\% of routing decisions across different specialized domains. Hidden state similarity between single and ensemble experts for every layer is extremely high, with some layers having cosine similarity as high as 0.95 and perplexity increasing by only 5\% when using a single expert across all three domains. Our results indicate that Mixture of Experts models exhibit concentrated expertise highlighting potential opportunities for inference optimization through targeted expert pruning while maintaining model performance and opening avenues towards studying localization of learned knowledge in these models.

Mixture of Experts (MoE) achieve parameter-efficient scaling through sparse expert routing, yet their internal representations remain poorly understood compared to dense models. We present a systematic comparison of MoE and dense model internals using crosscoders, a variant of sparse autoencoders, that jointly models multiple activation spaces. We train 5-layer dense and MoEs (equal active parameters) on 1B tokens across code, scientific text, and english stories. Using BatchTopK crosscoders with explicitly designated shared features, we achieve $\sim 87\%$ fractional variance explained and uncover concrete differences in feature organization. The MoE learns significantly fewer unique features compared to the dense model. MoE-specific features also exhibit higher activation density than shared features, whereas dense-specific features show lower density. Our analysis reveals that MoEs develop more specialized, focused representations while dense models distribute information across broader, more general-purpose features.

High-quality teleoperated demonstrations are a primary bottleneck for imitation learning (IL) in dexterous manipulation. However, haptic feedback provides operators with real-time contact information, enabling real-time finger posture adjustments, and thereby improving demonstration quality. Existing dexterous teleoperation platforms typically omit haptic feedback and remain bulky and expensive. We introduce CDF-Glove, a lightweight and low cost cable-driven force-feedback glove. The real-time state is available for 20 finger degrees of freedom (DoF), of which 16 are directly sensed and 4 are passively coupled (inferred from kinematic constraints). We develop a kinematic model and control stack for the glove, and validate them across multiple robotic hands with diverse kinematics and DoF. The CDF-Glove achieves distal joint repeatability of 0.4 degrees, and delivers about 200 ms force feedback latency, yielding a 4x improvement in task success rate relative to no-feedback teleoperation. We collect two bimanual teleoperation datasets, on which we train and evaluate Diffusion Policy baselines. Compared to kinesthetic teaching, the policies trained in our teleoperated demonstrations increase the average success rate by 55% and reduce the mean completion time by approximately 15.2 seconds (a 47.2% relative reduction). In particular, the CDF-Glove costs approximately US$230. The code and designs are released as open source at https://cdfglove.github.io/.

A typical 2D-to-3D pipeline takes multi-view images as input, where a Vision Foundation Model (VFM) extracts features that are spatially upsampled to dense representations for 3D reconstruction. If dense features across views preserve geometric consistency, differentiable rendering can recover an accurate 3D representation, making the feature upsampler a critical component. Recent learnable upsampling methods mainly aim to enhance spatial details, such as sharper geometry or richer textures, yet their impact on 3D awareness remains underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce a spectral diagnostic framework with six complementary metrics that characterize amplitude redistribution, structural spectral alignment, and directional stability. Across classical interpolation and learnable upsampling methods on CLIP and DINO backbones, we observe three key findings. First, structural spectral consistency (SSC/CSC) is the strongest predictor of NVS quality, whereas High-Frequency Spectral Slope Drift (HFSS) often correlates negatively with reconstruction performance, indicating that emphasizing high-frequency details alone does not necessarily improve 3D reconstruction. Second, geometry and texture respond to different spectral properties: Angular Energy Consistency (ADC) correlates more strongly with geometry-related metrics, while SSC/CSC influence texture fidelity slightly more than geometric accuracy. Third, although learnable upsamplers often produce sharper spatial features, they rarely outperform classical interpolation in reconstruction quality, and their effectiveness depends on the reconstruction model. Overall, our results indicate that reconstruction quality is more closely related to preserving spectral structure than to enhancing spatial detail, highlighting spectral consistency as an important principle for designing upsampling strategies in 2D-to-3D pipelines.

Real-world quadruped navigation is constrained by a scale mismatch between high-level navigation decisions and low-level gait execution, as well as by instabilities under out-of-distribution environmental changes. Such variations challenge sim-to-real transfer and can trigger falls when policies lack explicit interfaces for adaptation. In this paper, we present a hierarchical policy architecture for quadrupedal navigation, termed Task-level Decision to Gait Control (TDGC). A low-level policy, trained with reinforcement learning in simulation, delivers gait-conditioned locomotion and maps task requirements to a compact set of controllable behavior parameters, enabling robust mode generation and smooth switching. A high-level policy makes task-centric decisions from sparse semantic or geometric terrain cues and translates them into low-level targets, forming a traceable decision pipeline without dense maps or high-resolution terrain reconstruction. Different from end-to-end approaches, our architecture provides explicit interfaces for deployment-time tuning, fault diagnosis, and policy refinement. We introduce a structured curriculum with performance-driven progression that expands environmental difficulty and disturbance ranges. Experiments show higher task success rates on mixed terrains and out-of-distribution tests.

Dense image retrieval is accurate but offers limited interpretability and attribution, and it can be compute-intensive at scale. We present \textbf{BM25-V}, which applies Okapi BM25 scoring to sparse visual-word activations from a Sparse Auto-Encoder (SAE) on Vision Transformer patch features. Across a large gallery, visual-word document frequencies are highly imbalanced and follow a Zipfian-like distribution, making BM25's inverse document frequency (IDF) weighting well suited for suppressing ubiquitous, low-information words and emphasizing rare, discriminative ones. BM25-V retrieves high-recall candidates via sparse inverted-index operations and serves as an efficient first-stage retriever for dense reranking. Across seven benchmarks, BM25-V achieves Recall@200 $\geq$ 0.993, enabling a two-stage pipeline that reranks only $K{=}200$ candidates per query and recovers near-dense accuracy within $0.2$\% on average. An SAE trained once on ImageNet-1K transfers zero-shot to seven fine-grained benchmarks without fine-tuning, and BM25-V retrieval decisions are attributable to specific visual words with quantified IDF contributions.

Understanding what makes tutoring effective requires methods for systematically analyzing tutors' instructional actions during learning interactions. This paper presents a tutor move taxonomy designed to support large-scale analysis of tutoring dialogue within the National Tutoring Observatory. The taxonomy provides a structured annotation framework for labeling tutors' instructional moves during one-on-one tutoring sessions. We developed the taxonomy through a hybrid deductive-inductive process. First, we synthesized research from cognitive science, the learning sciences, classroom discourse analysis, and intelligent tutoring systems to construct a preliminary framework of tutoring moves. We then refined the taxonomy through iterative coding of authentic tutoring transcripts conducted by expert annotators with extensive instructional and qualitative research experience. The resulting taxonomy organizes tutoring behaviors into four categories: tutoring support, learning support, social-emotional and motivational support, and logistical support. Learning support moves are further organized along a spectrum of student engagement, distinguishing between moves that elicit student reasoning and those that provide direct explanation or answers. By defining tutoring dialogue in terms of discrete instructional actions, the taxonomy enables scalable annotation using AI, computational modeling of tutoring strategies, and empirical analysis of how tutoring behaviors relate to learning outcomes.

Motivation: Patient-generated text contains critical information about patients' lived experiences, social circumstances, and engagement in care, including factors that strongly influence adherence, care coordination, and health equity. However, these patient voice signals are rarely available in structured form, limiting their use in patient-centered outcomes research and clinical quality improvement. Reliable extraction of such information is therefore essential for understanding and addressing non-clinical drivers of health outcomes at scale. Results: We introduce PVminer, a benchmark for structured extraction of patient voice, and propose PVminerLLM, a supervised fine-tuned large language model tailored to this task. Across multiple datasets and model sizes, PVminerLLM substantially outperforms prompt-based baselines, achieving up to 83.82% F1 for Code prediction, 80.74% F1 for Sub-code prediction, and 87.03% F1 for evidence Span extraction. Notably, strong performance is achieved even with smaller models, demonstrating that reliable patient voice extraction is feasible without extreme model scale. These results enable scalable analysis of social and experiential signals embedded in patient-generated text. Availability and Implementation: Code, evaluation scripts, and trained LLMs will be released publicly. Annotated datasets will be made available upon request for research use. Keywords: Large Language Models, Supervised Fine-Tuning, Medical Annotation, Patient-Generated Text, Clinical NLP

This paper addresses the distributed stochastic minimax optimization problem subject to stochastic constraints. We propose a novel first-order Softmax-Weighted Switching Gradient method tailored for federated learning. Under full client participation, our algorithm achieves the standard $\mathcal{O}(ε^{-4})$ oracle complexity to satisfy a unified bound $ε$ for both the optimality gap and feasibility tolerance. We extend our theoretical analysis to the practical partial participation regime by quantifying client sampling noise through a stochastic superiority assumption. Furthermore, by relaxing standard boundedness assumptions on the objective functions, we establish a strictly tighter lower bound for the softmax hyperparameter. We provide a unified error decomposition and establish a sharp $\mathcal{O}(\log\frac{1}δ)$ high-probability convergence guarantee. Ultimately, our framework demonstrates that a single-loop primal-only switching mechanism provides a stable alternative for optimizing worst-case client performance, effectively bypassing the hyperparameter sensitivity and convergence oscillations often encountered in traditional primal-dual or penalty-based approaches. We verify the efficacy of our algorithm via experiment on the Neyman-Pearson (NP) classification and fair classification tasks.

Region-instructed layout control in text-to-image generation is highly practical, yet existing methods suffer from limitations: (i) training-based approaches inherit data bias and often degrade image quality, and (ii) current techniques struggle with occlusion order, limiting real-world usability. To address these issues, we propose LayerBind. By modeling regional generation as distinct layers and binding them during the generation, our method enables precise regional and occlusion controllability. Our motivation stems from the observation that spatial layout and occlusion are established at a very early denoising stage, suggesting that rearranging the early latent structure is sufficient to modify the final output. Building on this, we structure the scheme into two phases: instance initialization and subsequent semantic nursing. (1) First, leveraging the contextual sharing mechanism in multimodal joint attention, Layer-wise Instance Initialization creates per-instance branches that attend to their own regions while anchoring to the shared background. At a designated early step, these branches are fused according to the layer order to form a unified latent with a pre-established layout. (2) Then, Layer-wise Semantic Nursing reinforces regional details and maintains the occlusion order via a layer-wise attention enhancement. Specifically, a sequential layered attention path operates alongside the standard global path, with updates composited under a layer-transparency scheduler. LayerBind is training-free and plug-and-play, serving as a regional and occlusion controller across Diffusion Transformers. Beyond generation, it natively supports editable workflows, allowing for flexible modifications like changing instances or rearranging visible orders. Both qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate LayerBind's effectiveness, highlighting its strong potential for creative applications.

We address multi-robot motion planning under Signal Temporal Logic (STL) specifications with kinodynamic constraints. Exact approaches face scalability bottlenecks and limited adaptability, while conventional sampling-based methods require excessive samples to construct optimal trajectories. We propose a two-stage framework integrating sampling-based online learning with formal STL reasoning. At the single-robot level, our constrained Bayesian Optimization-based Tree search (cBOT) planner uses a Gaussian process as a surrogate model to learn local cost maps and feasibility constraints, generating shorter collision-free trajectories with fewer samples. At the multi-robot level, our STL-enhanced Kinodynamic Conflict-Based Search (STL-KCBS) algorithm incorporates STL monitoring into conflict detection and resolution, ensuring specification satisfaction while maintaining scalability and probabilistic completeness. Benchmarking demonstrates improved trajectory efficiency and safety over existing methods. Real-world experiments with autonomous surface vehicles validate robustness and practical applicability in uncertain environments. The STLcBOT Planner will be released as an open-source package, and videos of real-world and simulated experiments are available at https://stlbot.github.io/.

Autonomous coding agents can produce strong tabular baselines quickly on Kaggle-style tasks. Practical value depends on end-to-end correctness and reliability under time limits. This paper introduces TML-Bench, a tabular benchmark for data science agents on Kaggle-style tasks. This paper evaluates 10 OSS LLMs on four Kaggle competitions and three time budgets (240s, 600s, and 1200s). Each model is run five times per task and budget. A run is successful if it produces a valid submission and a private-holdout score on hidden labels that are not accessible to the agent. This paper reports median performance, success rates, and run-to-run variability. MiniMax-M2.1 model achieves the best aggregate performance score on all four competitions under the paper's primary aggregation. Average performance improves with larger time budgets. Scaling is noisy for some individual models at the current run count. Code and materials are available at https://github.com/MykolaPinchuk/TML-bench/tree/master.