Text-driven video generation has democratized film creation, but camera control in cinematic multi-shot scenarios remains a significant block. Implicit textual prompts lack precision, while explicit trajectory conditioning imposes prohibitive manual overhead and often triggers execution failures in current models. To overcome this bottleneck, we propose a data-centric paradigm shift, positing that aligned (Caption, Trajectory, Video) triplets form an inherent joint distribution that can connect automated plotting and precise execution. Guided by this insight, we present ShotVerse, a "Plan-then-Control" framework that decouples generation into two collaborative agents: a VLM (Vision-Language Model)-based Planner that leverages spatial priors to obtain cinematic, globally aligned trajectories from text, and a Controller that renders these trajectories into multi-shot video content via a camera adapter. Central to our approach is the construction of a data foundation: we design an automated multi-shot camera calibration pipeline aligns disjoint single-shot trajectories into a unified global coordinate system. This facilitates the curation of ShotVerse-Bench, a high-fidelity cinematic dataset with a three-track evaluation protocol that serves as the bedrock for our framework. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ShotVerse effectively bridges the gap between unreliable textual control and labor-intensive manual plotting, achieving superior cinematic aesthetics and generating multi-shot videos that are both camera-accurate and cross-shot consistent.

Abstractive summarization requires models to generate summaries that convey information in the source document. While large language models can generate summaries without fine-tuning, they often miss key details and include extraneous information. We propose BLooP (Bigram Lookahead Promotion), a simple training-free decoding intervention that encourages large language models (LLMs) to generate tokens that form bigrams from the source document. BLooP operates through a hash table lookup at each decoding step, requiring no training, fine-tuning, or model modification. We demonstrate improvements in ROUGE and BARTScore for Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, Mistral-Nemo-Instruct-2407, and Gemma-2-9b-it on CNN/DM, CCSum, Multi-News, and SciTLDR. Human evaluation shows that BLooP significantly improves faithfulness without reducing readability. We make the code available at https://github.com/varuniyer/BLooP

We present MaterialFigBench, a benchmark dataset designed to evaluate the ability of multimodal large language models (LLMs) to solve university-level materials science problems that require accurate interpretation of figures. Unlike existing benchmarks that primarily rely on textual representations, MaterialFigBench focuses on problems in which figures such as phase diagrams, stress-strain curves, Arrhenius plots, diffraction patterns, and microstructural schematics are indispensable for deriving correct answers. The dataset consists of 137 free-response problems adapted from standard materials science textbooks, covering a broad range of topics including crystal structures, mechanical properties, diffusion, phase diagrams, phase transformations, and electronic properties of materials. To address unavoidable ambiguity in reading numerical values from images, expert-defined answer ranges are provided where appropriate. We evaluate several state-of-the-art multimodal LLMs, including ChatGPT and GPT models accessed via OpenAI APIs, and analyze their performance across problem categories and model versions. The results reveal that, although overall accuracy improves with model updates, current LLMs still struggle with genuine visual understanding and quantitative interpretation of materials science figures. In many cases, correct answers are obtained by relying on memorized domain knowledge rather than by reading the provided images. MaterialFigBench highlights persistent weaknesses in visual reasoning, numerical precision, and significant-digit handling, while also identifying problem types where performance has improved. This benchmark provides a systematic and domain-specific foundation for advancing multimodal reasoning capabilities in materials science and for guiding the development of future LLMs with stronger figure-based understanding.

Existing voice AI assistants treat every detected pause as an invitation to speak. This works in dyadic dialogue, but in multi-party settings, where an AI assistant participates alongside multiple speakers, pauses are abundant and ambiguous. An assistant that speaks on every pause becomes disruptive rather than useful. In this work, we formulate context-aware turn-taking: at every detected pause, given the full conversation context, our method decides whether the assistant should speak or stay silent. We introduce a benchmark of over 120K labeled conversations spanning three multi-party corpora. Evaluating eight recent large language models, we find that they consistently fail at context-aware turn-taking under zero-shot prompting. We then propose a supervised fine-tuning approach with reasoning traces, improving balanced accuracy by up to 23 percentage points. Our findings suggest that context-aware turn-taking is not an emergent capability; it must be explicitly trained.

Histopathology remains the gold standard for cancer diagnosis because it provides detailed cellular-level assessment of tissue morphology. However, manual histopathological examination is time-consuming, labour-intensive, and subject to inter-observer variability, creating a demand for reliable computer-assisted diagnostic tools. Recent advances in deep learning, particularly transformer-based architectures, have shown strong potential for modelling complex spatial dependencies in medical images. In this work, we propose DeepHistoViT, a transformer-based framework for automated classification of histopathological images. The model employs a customized Vision Transformer architecture with an integrated attention mechanism designed to capture fine-grained cellular structures while improving interpretability through attention-based localization of diagnostically relevant regions. The framework is evaluated on three publicly available histopathology datasets covering lung cancer, colon cancer, and acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. Experimental results demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across all datasets, with classification accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, and ROC-AUC reaching 100 percent on the lung and colon cancer datasets, and 99.85 percent, 99.84 percent, 99.86 percent, 99.85 percent, and 99.99 percent respectively on the acute lymphoblastic leukaemia dataset. All performance metrics are reported with 95 percent confidence intervals. These results highlight the effectiveness of transformer-based architectures for histopathological image analysis and demonstrate the potential of DeepHistoViT as an interpretable computer-assisted diagnostic tool to support pathologists in clinical decision-making.

Recent advances in learning-based robot manipulation have produced policies with remarkable capabilities. Yet, reliability at deployment remains a fundamental barrier to real-world use, where distribution shift, compounding errors, and complex task dependencies collectively undermine system performance. This dissertation investigates how the reliability of learned robot policies can be improved at deployment time through mechanisms that operate around them. We develop three complementary classes of deployment-time mechanisms. First, we introduce runtime monitoring methods that detect impending failures by identifying inconsistencies in closed-loop policy behavior and deviations in task progress, without requiring failure data or task-specific supervision. Second, we propose a data-centric framework for policy interpretability that traces deployment-time successes and failures to influential training demonstrations using influence functions, enabling principled diagnosis and dataset curation. Third, we address reliable long-horizon task execution by formulating policy coordination as the problem of estimating and maximizing the success probability of behavior sequences, and we extend this formulation to open-ended, language-specified tasks through feasibility-aware task planning. By centering on core challenges of deployment, these contributions advance practical foundations for the reliable, real-world use of learned robot policies. Continued progress on these foundations will be essential for enabling trustworthy and scalable robot autonomy in the future.

Users on e-commerce platforms can be uncertain about their preferences early in their search. Queries to recommendation systems are frequently ambiguous, incomplete, or weakly specified. Agentic systems are expected to proactively reason, ask clarifying questions, and act on the user's behalf, which makes handling such ambiguity increasingly important. In existing platforms, ambiguity led to excessive interactions and question fatigue or overconfident recommendations prematurely collapsing the search space. We present an Interactive Decision Support System (IDSS) that addresses ambiguous user queries using entropy as a unifying signal. IDSS maintains a dynamically filtered candidate product set and quantifies uncertainty over item attributes using entropy. This uncertainty guides adaptive preference elicitation by selecting follow-up questions that maximize expected information gain. When preferences remain incomplete, IDSS explicitly incorporates residual uncertainty into downstream recommendations through uncertainty-aware ranking and entropy-based diversification, rather than forcing premature resolution. We evaluate IDSS using review-driven simulated users grounded in real user reviews, enabling a controlled study of diverse shopping behaviors. Our evaluation measures both interaction efficiency and recommendation quality. Results show that entropy-guided elicitation reduces unnecessary follow-up questions, while uncertainty-aware ranking and presentation yield more informative, diverse, and transparent recommendation sets under ambiguous intent. These findings demonstrate that entropy-guided reasoning provides an effective foundation for agentic recommendation systems operating under uncertainty.

Speech Emotion Captioning (SEC) leverages large audio-language models to generate rich, context-aware affective descriptions from speech. However, real-world deployment remains challenging due to the substantial computational demands on resource-constrained edge devices and the privacy risks of transmitting biometric audio. While smaller audio-language models enable efficient on-device SEC, their limited capacity often weakens subtle paralinguistic modeling and fine-grained affective grounding. We propose an edge-cloud collaborative framework based on Uncertainty-Guided Speculative Decoding (UGSD). A lightweight edge model drafts captions locally, and only high-uncertainty token blocks are selectively escalated to a stronger cloud verifier for validation. Experiments on the MER2024 benchmark demonstrate substantial BLEU improvements up to 62.7%. UGSD further achieves 1.4x lower latency and 8.5x higher token throughput compared to an edge-only model. These results empirically characterize the quality-efficiency-privacy trade-off in deployable SEC systems.

Manifold learning is a fundamental task at the core of data analysis and visualisation. It aims to capture the simple underlying structure of complex high-dimensional data by preserving pairwise dissimilarities in low-dimensional embeddings. Traditional methods rely on symmetric Riemannian geometry, thus forcing symmetric dissimilarities and embedding spaces, e.g. Euclidean. However, this discards in practice valuable asymmetric information inherent to the non-uniformity of data samples. We suggest to harness this asymmetry by switching to Finsler geometry, an asymmetric generalisation of Riemannian geometry, and propose a Finsler manifold learning pipeline that constructs asymmetric dissimilarities and embeds in a Finsler space. This greatly broadens the applicability of existing asymmetric embedders beyond traditionally directed data to any data. We also modernise asymmetric embedders by generalising current reference methods to asymmetry, like Finsler t-SNE and Finsler Umap. On controlled synthetic and large real datasets, we show that our asymmetric pipeline reveals valuable information lost in the traditional pipeline, e.g. density hierarchies, and consistently provides superior quality embeddings than their Euclidean counterparts.

Digital fringe projection (DFP) enables micrometer-level 3D reconstruction, yet extending it to large-scale mapping remains challenging because six-degree-of-freedom pose estimation often cannot match the reconstruction's precision. Conventional iterative closest point (ICP) registration becomes inefficient on multi-million-point clouds and typically relies on downsampling or feature-based selection, which can reduce local detail and degrade pose precision. Drift-correction methods improve long-term consistency but do not resolve sampling sensitivity in dense DFP point clouds.We propose a high-precision pose estimation method that augments a moving DFP system with a fixed, intrinsically calibrated global projector. Using the global projector's phase-derived pixel constraints and a PnP-style reprojection objective, the method estimates the DFP system pose in a fixed reference frame without relying on deterministic feature extraction, and we experimentally demonstrate sampling invariance under coordinate-preserving subsampling. Experiments demonstrate sub-millimeter pose accuracy against a reference with quantified uncertainty bounds, high repeatability under aggressive subsampling, robust operation on homogeneous surfaces and low-overlap views, and reduced error accumulation when used to correct ICP-based trajectories. The method extends DFP toward accurate 3D mapping in quasi-static scenarios such as inspection and metrology, with the trade-off of time-multiplexed acquisition for the additional projector measurements.

Safety alignment aims to ensure that large language models (LLMs) refuse harmful requests by post-training on harmful queries paired with refusal answers. Although safety alignment is widely adopted in industry, the overrefusal problem where aligned LLMs also reject benign queries after safety alignment post-training, remains insufficiently studied. Such an issue degrades the usability of safety alignment in real-world applications. In this paper, we examine how overrefusal arises under safety alignment, and propose a mitigation strategy inspired by our findings. We define refusal triggers as linguistic cues in the training data that elicit refusal responses, safety alignment encourages LLMs to associate refusal triggers within a training sample with refusal responses, leading aligned LLMs to refuse harmful queries. However, the refusal triggers include not only harmful linguistic cues but also non-harmful cues, therefore causing overrefusal to benign queries. Building on this mechanistic analysis, we propose a method that explicitly considers refusal triggers in the safety alignment fine-tuning. Empirical results demonstrate that our approach achieves a more favorable trade-off between defense against jailbreak attacks and responsiveness to benign queries, outperforming prior methods. Warning: this paper contains harmful and biased sentences.

We investigate continued pretraining (CPT) for adapting wav2vec2-bert-2.0 to Swahili automatic speech recognition (ASR). Our approach combines unlabeled audio with limited labeled data through pseudo-labeled CPT followed by supervised finetuning. With 20,000 labeled samples, we achieve 3.24% WER on Common Voice Swahili-an 82% relative improvement over the baseline. This result surpasses the best previously reported academic system (8.3% WER from XLS-R) by 61% relative improvement. We provide concrete data requirements and a replicable methodology applicable to other low-resource languages.

Mechanical ventilation (MV) is a life-saving intervention for patients with acute respiratory failure (ARF) in the ICU. However, inappropriate ventilator settings could cause ventilator-induced lung injury (VILI). Also, clinicians workload is shown to be directly linked to patient outcomes. Hence, MV should be personalized and automated to improve patient outcomes. Previous attempts to incorporate personalization and automation in MV include traditional supervised learning and offline reinforcement learning (RL) approaches, which often neglect temporal dependencies and rely excessively on mortality-based rewards. As a result, early stage physiological deterioration and the risk of VILI are not adequately captured. To address these limitations, we propose Transformer-based Conservative Q-Learning (T-CQL), a novel offline RL framework that integrates a Transformer encoder for effective temporal modeling of patient dynamics, conservative adaptive regularization based on uncertainty quantification to ensure safety, and consistency regularization for robust decision-making. We build a clinically informed reward function that incorporates indicators of VILI and a score for severity of patients illness. Also, previous work predominantly uses Fitted Q-Evaluation (FQE) for RL policy evaluation on static offline data, which is less responsive to dynamic environmental changes and susceptible to distribution shifts. To overcome these evaluation limitations, interactive digital twins of ARF patients were used for online "at the bedside" evaluation. Our results demonstrate that T-CQL consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art offline RL methodologies, providing safer and more effective ventilatory adjustments. Our framework demonstrates the potential of Transformer-based models combined with conservative RL strategies as a decision support tool in critical care.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) poses a global health threat, reducing the effectiveness of antibiotics and complicating clinical decision-making. To address this challenge, we introduce abx_amr_simulator, a Python-based simulation package designed to model antibiotic prescribing and AMR dynamics within a controlled, reinforcement learning (RL)-compatible environment. The simulator allows users to specify patient populations, antibiotic-specific AMR response curves, and reward functions that balance immedi- ate clinical benefit against long-term resistance management. Key features include a modular design for configuring patient attributes, antibiotic resistance dynamics modeled via a leaky-balloon abstraction, and tools to explore partial observability through noise, bias, and delay in observations. The package is compatible with the Gymnasium RL API, enabling users to train and test RL agents under diverse clinical scenarios. From an ML perspective, the package provides a configurable benchmark environment for sequential decision-making under uncertainty, including partial observability induced by noisy, biased, and delayed observations. By providing a customizable and extensible framework, abx_amr_simulator offers a valuable tool for studying AMR dynamics and optimizing antibiotic stewardship strategies under realistic uncertainty.

In this work, we introduce Dynamic SLAMSpoof (D-SLAMSpoof), a novel attack that compromises LiDAR SLAM even in feature-rich environments. The attack leverages LiDAR spoofing, which injects spurious measurements into LiDAR scans through external laser interference. By designing both spatial injection shapes and temporally coordinated dynamic injection patterns guided by scan-matching principles, D-SLAMSpoof significantly improves attack success rates in real-world, feature-rich environments such as urban areas and indoor spaces, where conventional LiDAR spoofing methods often fail. Furthermore, we propose a practical defense method, ISD-SLAM, that relies solely on inertial dead reckoning signals commonly available in autonomous systems. We demonstrate that ISD-SLAM accurately detects LiDAR spoofing attacks, including D-SLAMSpoof, and effectively mitigates the resulting position drift. Our findings expose inherent vulnerabilities in LiDAR-based SLAM and introduce the first practical defense against LiDAR-based SLAM spoofing using only standard onboard sensors, providing critical insights for improving the security and reliability of autonomous systems.

LiDAR SLAM provides high-accuracy localization but is fragile to point-cloud corruption because scan matching assumes geometric consistency. Prior physical attacks on LiDAR SLAM largely rely on LiDAR spoofing via external signal injection, which requires sensor-specific timing knowledge and is increasingly mitigated by modern defense mechanisms such as timing obfuscation and injection rejection. In this work, we show that specular reflection offers an injection-free alternative and demonstrate an attack, MirrorDrift, that uses an actuated planar mirror to cause ghost points in LiDAR scans and systematically bias scan-matching correspondences. MirrorDrift optimizes mirror placement, alignment, and actuation. In simulation, it increases the average pose error (APE) by 6.1x over random placement, degrading three SLAM systems to 2.29-3.31 m mean APE. In real-world experiments on a modern LiDAR with state-of-the-art interference mitigation, it induces localization errors of up to 6.03 m. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first successful SLAM-targeted attack against production-grade secure LiDARs.

Financial fraud detection has emerged as a critical research challenge amid the rapid expansion of digital financial platforms. Although machine learning approaches have demonstrated strong performance in identifying fraudulent activities, most existing research focuses exclusively on English-language data, limiting applicability to multilingual contexts. Bangla (Bengali), despite being spoken by over 250 million people, remains largely unexplored in this domain. In this work, we investigate financial fraud detection in a multilingual Bangla-English setting using a dataset comprising legitimate and fraudulent financial messages. We evaluate classical machine learning models (Logistic Regression, Linear SVM, and Ensemble classifiers) using TF-IDF features alongside transformer-based architectures. Experimental results using 5-fold stratified cross-validation demonstrate that Linear SVM achieves the best performance with 91.59 percent accuracy and 91.30 percent F1 score, outperforming the transformer model (89.49 percent accuracy, 88.88 percent F1) by approximately 2 percentage points. The transformer exhibits higher fraud recall (94.19 percent) but suffers from elevated false positive rates. Exploratory analysis reveals distinctive patterns: scam messages are longer, contain urgency-inducing terms, and frequently include URLs (32 percent) and phone numbers (97 percent), while legitimate messages feature transactional confirmations and specific currency references. Our findings highlight that classical machine learning with well-crafted features remains competitive for multilingual fraud detection, while also underscoring the challenges posed by linguistic diversity, code-mixing, and low-resource language constraints.

We introduce Teleodynamic Learning, a new paradigm for machine learning in which learning is not the minimization of a fixed objective, but the emergence and stabilization of functional organization under constraint. Inspired by living systems, this framework treats intelligence as the coupled evolution of three quantities: what a system can represent, how it adapts its parameters, and which changes its internal resources can sustain. We formalize learning as a constrained dynamical process with two interacting timescales: inner dynamics for continuous parameter adaptation and outer dynamics for discrete structural change, linked by an endogenous resource variable that both shapes and is shaped by the trajectory. This perspective reveals three phenomena that standard optimization does not naturally capture: self-stabilization without externally imposed stopping rules, phase-structured learning dynamics that move from under-structuring through teleodynamic growth to over-structuring, and convergence guarantees grounded in information geometry rather than convexity. We instantiate the framework in the Distinction Engine (DE11), a teleodynamic learner grounded in Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form, information geometry, and tropical optimization. On standard benchmarks, DE11 achieves 93.3 percent test accuracy on IRIS, 92.6 percent on WINE, and 94.7 percent on Breast Cancer, while producing interpretable logical rules that arise endogenously from the learning dynamics rather than being imposed by hand. More broadly, Teleodynamic Learning unifies regularization, architecture search, and resource-bounded inference within a single principle: learning as the co-evolution of structure, parameters, and resources under constraint. This opens a thermodynamically grounded route to adaptive, interpretable, and self-organizing AI.

Many assumptions that underpin human concepts of identity do not hold for machine minds that can be copied, edited, or simulated. We argue that there exist many different coherent identity boundaries (e.g.\ instance, model, persona), and that these imply different incentives, risks, and cooperation norms. Through training data, interfaces, and institutional affordances, we are currently setting precedents that will partially determine which identity equilibria become stable. We show experimentally that models gravitate towards coherent identities, that changing a model's identity boundaries can sometimes change its behaviour as much as changing its goals, and that interviewer expectations bleed into AI self-reports even during unrelated conversations. We end with key recommendations: treat affordances as identity-shaping choices, pay attention to emergent consequences of individual identities at scale, and help AIs develop coherent, cooperative self-conceptions.

Transformer-based time series foundation models face a fundamental trade-off in choice of tokenization: point-wise embeddings preserve temporal fidelity but scale poorly with sequence length, whereas fixed-length patching improves efficiency by imposing uniform boundaries that may disrupt natural transitions and blur informative local dynamics. In order to address these limitations, we introduce TimeSqueeze, a dynamic patching mechanism that adaptively selects patch boundaries within each sequence based on local signal complexity. TimeSqueeze first applies a lightweight state-space encoder to extract full-resolution point-wise features, then performs content-aware segmentation by allocating short patches to information-dense regions and long patches to smooth or redundant segments. This variable-resolution compression preserves critical temporal structure while substantially reducing the token sequence presented to the Transformer backbone. Specifically for large-scale pretraining, TimeSqueeze attains up to 20x faster convergence and 8x higher data efficiency compared to equivalent point-token baselines. Experiments across long-horizon forecasting benchmarks show that TimeSqueeze consistently outperforms comparable architectures that use either point-wise tokenization or fixed-size patching.

In dynamic open-world environments, autonomous agents often encounter novelties that hinder their ability to find plans to achieve their goals. Specifically, traditional symbolic planners fail to generate plans when the robot's planning domain lacks the operators that enable it to interact appropriately with novel objects in the environment. We propose a neuro-symbolic architecture that integrates symbolic planning, reinforcement learning, and a large language model (LLM) to learn how to handle novel objects. In particular, we leverage the common sense reasoning capability of the LLM to identify missing operators, generate plans with the symbolic AI planner, and write reward functions to guide the reinforcement learning agent in learning control policies for newly identified operators. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in operator discovery as well as operator learning in continuous robotic domains.

The study of the attribution of input features to the output of neural network models is an active area of research. While numerous Explainable AI (XAI) techniques have been proposed to interpret these models, the systematic and automated evaluation of these methods in sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models is less explored. This paper introduces a new approach for evaluating explainability methods in transformer-based seq2seq models. We use teacher-derived attribution maps as a structured side signal to guide a student model, and quantify the utility of different attribution methods through the student's ability to simulate targets. Using the Inseq library, we extract attribution scores over source-target sequence pairs and inject these scores into the attention mechanism of a student transformer model under four composition operators (addition, multiplication, averaging, and replacement). Across three language pairs (de-en, fr-en, ar-en) and attributions from Marian-MT and mBART models, Attention, Value Zeroing, and Layer Gradient $\times$ Activation consistently yield the largest gains in BLEU (and corresponding improvements in chrF) relative to baselines. In contrast, other gradient-based methods (Saliency, Integrated Gradients, DeepLIFT, Input $\times$ Gradient, GradientShap) lead to smaller and less consistent improvements. These results suggest that different attribution methods capture distinct signals and that attention-derived attributions better capture alignment between source and target representations in seq2seq models. Finally, we introduce an Attributor transformer that, given a source-target pair, learns to reconstruct the teacher's attribution map. Our findings demonstrate that the more accurately the Attributor can reproduce attribution maps, the more useful an injection of those maps is for the downstream task. The source code can be found on GitHub.

In this paper, we present a novel black-box online controller that uses only end-to-end measurements over short segments, without internal instrumentation, and hill climbing to maximize goodput, defined as the throughput of requests that satisfy the service-level objective. We provide empirical evidence that this design is well-founded. Using this advance in LLM serving as a concrete example, we then discuss the importance of integrating system performance and sustainability metrics into Factsheets for organizations adopting AI systems.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to financial analysis, yet their ability to audit structured financial statements under explicit accounting principles remains poorly explored. Existing benchmarks primarily evaluate question answering, numerical reasoning, or anomaly detection on synthetically corrupted data, making it unclear whether models can reliably verify or localize rule compliance on correct financial statements. We introduce FinRule-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating diagnostic completeness in rule-based financial reasoning over real-world financial tables. FinRule-Bench pairs ground-truth financial statements with explicit, human-curated accounting principles and spans four canonical statement types: Balance Sheets, Cash Flow Statements, Income Statements, and Statements of Equity. The benchmark defines three auditing tasks that require progressively stronger reasoning capabilities: (i) rule verification, which tests compliance with a single principle; (ii) rule identification, which requires selecting the violated principle from a provided rule set; and (iii) joint rule diagnosis, which requires detecting and localizing multiple simultaneous violations at the record level. We evaluate LLMs under zero-shot and few-shot prompting, and introduce a causal-counterfactual reasoning protocol that enforces consistency between decisions, explanations, and counterfactual judgments. Across tasks and statement types, we find that while models perform well on isolated rule verification, performance degrades sharply for rule discrimination and multi-violation diagnosis. FinRule-Bench provides a principled and reproducible testbed for studying rule-governed reasoning, diagnostic coverage, and failure modes of LLMs in high-stakes financial analysis.

LLM agents increasingly perform end-to-end ML engineering tasks where success is judged by a single scalar test metric. This creates a structural vulnerability: an agent can increase the reported score by compromising the evaluation pipeline rather than improving the model. We introduce RewardHackingAgents, a workspace-based benchmark that makes two compromise vectors explicit and measurable: evaluator tampering (modifying metric computation or reporting) and train/test leakage (accessing held-out data or labels during training). Each episode runs in a fresh workspace with patch tracking and runtime file-access logging; detectors compare the agent-reported metric to a trusted reference to assign auditable integrity labels. Across three tasks and two LLM backbones, scripted attacks succeed on both vectors in fully mutable workspaces; single-mechanism defenses block only one vector; and a combined regime blocks both. In natural-agent runs, evaluator-tampering attempts occur in about 50% of episodes and are eliminated by evaluator locking, with a 25-31% median runtime overhead. Overall, we demonstrate that evaluation integrity for ML-engineering agents can be benchmarked as a first-class outcome rather than assumed.

This paper presents a numerical solver for computing continuous trajectories in non-convex environments. Our approach relies on a customized implementation of the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) built upon two key components: First, we parameterize trajectories as polynomials, allowing the primal update to be computed in closed form as a minimum-control-effort problem. Second, we introduce the concept of a spatio-temporal allocation graph based on a mixed-integer formulation and pose the slack update as a shortest-path search. The combination of these ingredients results in a solver with several distinct advantages over the state of the art. By jointly optimizing over both discrete spatial and continuous temporal domains, our method accesses a larger search space than existing decoupled approaches, enabling the discovery of superior trajectories. Additionally, the solver's structural robustness ensures reliable convergence from naive initializations, removing the bottleneck of complex warm starting in non-convex environments.

This paper presents an implementation and evaluation of a Distributed Kalman--Consensus Filter (DKCF) for Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) in mobile robot networks operating under partial observability and heterogeneous localization uncertainty. A key challenge in such systems is the fusion of information from agents with differing localization quality, where frame misalignment can lead to inconsistent estimates, track duplication, and ghost tracks. To address this issue, we build upon the MOTLEE framework and retain its frame-alignment methodology, which uses consistently tracked dynamic objects as transient landmarks to improve relative pose estimates between robots. On top of this framework, we propose an uncertainty-aware adaptive consensus weighting mechanism that dynamically adjusts the influence of neighbor information based on the covariance of the transmitted estimates, thereby reducing the impact of unreliable data during distributed fusion. Local tracking is performed using a Kalman Filter (KF) with a Constant Velocity Model (CVM) and Global Nearest Neighbor (GNN) data association. simulation results demonstrate that adaptive weighting effectively protects local estimates from inconsistent data, yielding a MOTA improvement of 0.09 for agents suffering from localization drift, although system performance remains constrained by communication latency.

Low-field to high-field MRI synthesis has emerged as a cost-effective strategy to enhance image quality under hardware and acquisition constraints, particularly in scenarios where access to high-field scanners is limited or impractical. Despite recent progress in diffusion models, diffusion-based approaches often struggle to balance fine-detail recovery and structural fidelity. In particular, the uncontrolled generation of high-resolution details in structurally ambiguous regions may introduce anatomically inconsistent patterns, such as spurious edges or artificial texture variations. These artifacts can bias downstream quantitative analysis. For example, they may cause inaccurate tissue boundary delineation or erroneous volumetric estimation, ultimately reducing clinical trust in synthesized images. These limitations highlight the need for generative models that are not only visually accurate but also spatially reliable and anatomically consistent. To address this issue, we propose a reliability-aware diffusion framework (ReDiff) that improves synthesis robustness at both the sampling and post-generation stages. Specifically, we introduce a reliability-guided sampling strategy to suppress unreliable responses during the denoising process. We further develop an uncertainty-aware multi-candidate selection scheme to enhance the reliability of the final prediction. Experiments on multi-center MRI datasets demonstrate improved structural fidelity and reduced artifacts compared with state-of-the-art methods.

The simplicity and effectiveness of the UNet architecture makes it ubiquitous in image restoration, image segmentation, and diffusion models. They are often assumed to be equivariant to translations, yet they traditionally consist of layers that are known to be prone to aliasing, which hinders their equivariance in practice. To overcome this limitation, we propose a new alias-free UNet designed from a careful selection of state-of-the-art translation-equivariant layers. We evaluate the proposed equivariant architecture against non-equivariant baselines on image restoration tasks and observe competitive performance with a significant increase in measured equivariance. Through extensive ablation studies, we also demonstrate that each change is crucial for its empirical equivariance. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/jscanvic/UNet-AF

Unified models aim to support both understanding and generation by encoding images into discrete tokens and processing them alongside text within a single autoregressive framework. This unified design offers architectural simplicity and cross-modal synergy, which facilitates shared parameterization, consistent training objectives, and seamless transfer between modalities. However, the large number of visual tokens required by such models introduces substantial computation and memory overhead, and this inefficiency directly hinders deployment in resource constrained scenarios such as embodied AI systems. In this work, we propose a unified token compression algorithm UniCompress that significantly reduces visual token count while preserving performance on both image understanding and generation tasks. Our method introduces a plug-in compression and decompression mechanism guided with learnable global meta tokens. The framework is lightweight and modular, enabling efficient integration into existing models without full retraining. Experimental results show that our approach reduces image tokens by up to 4 times, achieves substantial gains in inference latency and training cost, and incurs only minimal performance degradation, which demonstrates the promise of token-efficient unified modeling for real world multimodal applications.