We introduce xplainfi, an R package built on top of the mlr3 ecosystem for global, loss-based feature importance methods for machine learning models. Various feature importance methods exist in R, but significant gaps remain, particularly regarding conditional importance methods and associated statistical inference procedures. The package implements permutation feature importance, conditional feature importance, relative feature importance, leave-one-covariate-out, and generalizations thereof, and both marginal and conditional Shapley additive global importance methods. It provides a modular conditional sampling architecture based on Gaussian distributions, adversarial random forests, conditional inference trees, and knockoff-based samplers, which enable conditional importance analysis for continuous and mixed data. Statistical inference is available through multiple approaches, including variance-corrected confidence intervals and the conditional predictive impact framework. We demonstrate that xplainfi produces importance scores consistent with existing implementations across multiple simulation settings and learner types, while offering competitive runtime performance. The package is available on CRAN and provides researchers and practitioners with a comprehensive toolkit for feature importance analysis and model interpretation in R.

Recent advancements in generative video codec (GVC) typically encode video into a 2D latent grid and employ high-capacity generative decoders for reconstruction. However, this paradigm still leaves two key challenges in fully exploiting spatial-temporal redundancy: Spatially, the 2D latent grid inevitably preserves intra-frame redundancy due to its rigid structure, where adjacent patches remain highly similar, thereby necessitating a higher bitrate. Temporally, the 2D latent grid is less effective for modeling long-term correlations in a compact and semantically coherent manner, as it hinders the aggregation of common contents across frames. To address these limitations, we introduce Generative Video Compression with One-Dimensional (1D) Latent Representation (GVC1D). GVC1D encodes the video data into extreme compact 1D latent tokens conditioned on both short- and long-term contexts. Without the rigid 2D spatial correspondence, these 1D latent tokens can adaptively attend to semantic regions and naturally facilitate token reduction, thereby reducing spatial redundancy. Furthermore, the proposed 1D memory provides semantically rich long-term context while maintaining low computational cost, thereby further reducing temporal redundancy. Experimental results indicate that GVC1D attains superior compression efficiency, where it achieves bitrate reductions of 60.4\% under LPIPS and 68.8\% under DISTS on the HEVC Class B dataset, surpassing the previous video compression methods.Project: https://gvc1d.github.io/

Few-Shot Industrial Visual Anomaly Detection (FS-IVAD) comprises a critical task in modern manufacturing settings, where automated product inspection systems need to identify rare defects using only a handful of normal/defect-free training samples. In this context, the current study introduces a novel reconstruction-based approach termed GATE-AD. In particular, the proposed framework relies on the employment of a masked, representation-aligned Graph Attention Network (GAT) encoding scheme to learn robust appearance patterns of normal samples. By leveraging dense, patch-level, visual feature tokens as graph nodes, the model employs stacked self-attentional layers to adaptively encode complex, irregular, non-Euclidean, local relations. The graph is enhanced with a representation alignment component grounded on a learnable, latent space, where high reconstruction residual areas (i.e., defects) are assessed using a Scaled Cosine Error (SCE) objective function. Extensive comparative evaluation on the MVTec AD, VisA, and MPDD industrial defect detection benchmarks demonstrates that GATE-AD achieves state-of-the-art performance across the $1$- to $8$-shot settings, combining the highest detection accuracy (increase up to $1.8\%$ in image AUROC in the 8-shot case in MPDD) with the lowest per-image inference latency (at least $25.05\%$ faster), compared to the best-performing literature methods. In order to facilitate reproducibility and further research, the source code of GATE-AD is available at https://github.com/gthpapadopoulos/GATE-AD.

Dragonchess, a three-dimensional chess variant introduced by Gary Gygax, presents unique strategic and computational challenges that make it an ideal environment for studying the transfer of artificial intelligence (AI) heuristics across domains. In this work, we introduce Dragonchess as a novel testbed for AI research and provide an open-source, Python-based game engine for community use. Our research investigates evolutionary transfer learning by adapting heuristic evaluation functions directly from Stockfish, a leading chess engine, and subsequently optimizing them using Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES). Initial trials showed that direct heuristic transfers were inadequate due to Dragonchess's distinct multi-layer structure and movement rules. However, evolutionary optimization significantly improved AI agent performance, resulting in superior gameplay demonstrated through empirical evaluation in a 50-round Swiss-style tournament. This research establishes the effectiveness of evolutionary methods in adapting heuristic knowledge to structurally complex, previously unexplored game domains.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance across various sentence-based linguistic phenomena, yet their ability to capture cross-sentence paradigmatic patterns, such as verb alternations, remains underexplored. In this work, we present curated paradigm-based datasets for four languages, designed to probe systematic cross-sentence knowledge of verb alternations (change-of-state and object-drop constructions in English, German and Italian, and Hebrew binyanim). The datasets comprise thousands of the Blackbird Language Matrices (BLMs) problems. The BLM task -- an RPM/ARC-like task devised specifically for language -- is a controlled linguistic puzzle where models must select the sentence that completes a pattern according to syntactic and semantic rules. We introduce three types of templates varying in complexity and apply linguistically-informed data augmentation strategies across synthetic and natural data. We provide simple baseline performance results across English, Italian, German, and Hebrew, that demonstrate the diagnostic usefulness of the datasets.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has attracted increasing interest for adaptive traffic signal control due to its model-free ability to learn control policies directly from interaction with the traffic environment. However, several challenges remain before RL-based signal control can be considered ready for field deployment. Many existing studies rely on simplified signal timing structures, robustness of trained models under varying traffic demand conditions remains insufficiently evaluated, and runtime efficiency continues to pose challenges when training RL algorithms in traffic microscopic simulation environments. This study formulates an RL-based signal control algorithm capable of representing a full eight-phase ring-barrier configuration consistent with field signal controllers. The algorithm is trained and evaluated under varying traffic demand conditions and benchmarked against state-of-the-practice actuated signal control (ASC). To assess robustness, experiments are conducted across multiple traffic volumes and origin-destination (O-D) demand patterns with varying levels of structural similarity. To improve training efficiency, a distributed asynchronous training architecture is implemented that enables parallel simulation across multiple computing nodes. Results from a case study intersection show that the proposed RL-based signal control significantly outperforms optimized ASC, reducing average delay by 11-32% across movements. A model trained on a single O-D pattern generalizes well to similar unseen demand patterns but degrades under substantially different demand conditions. In contrast, a model trained on diverse O-D patterns demonstrates strong robustness, consistently outperforming ASC even under highly dissimilar unseen demand scenarios.

Learned action policies are increasingly popular in sequential decision-making, but suffer from a lack of safety guarantees. Recent work introduced a pipeline for testing the safety of such policies under initial-state and action-outcome non-determinism. At the pipeline's core, is the problem of deciding whether a state is safe (a safe policy exists from the state) and finding faults, which are state-action pairs that transition from a safe state to an unsafe one. Their most effective algorithm for deciding safety, TarjanSafe, is effective on their benchmarks, but we show that it has exponential worst-case runtime with respect to the state space. A linear-time alternative exists, but it is slower in practice. We close this gap with a new policy-iteration algorithm iPI, that combines the best of both: it matches TarjanSafe's best-case runtime while guaranteeing a polynomial worst-case. Experiments confirm our theory and show that in problems amenable to TarjanSafe iPI has similar performance, whereas in ill-suited problems iPI scales exponentially better.

Inertial navigation using low-cost MEMS sensors is plagued by rapid drift due to sensor noise and bias instability. While recent data-driven approaches have made significant strides, they often struggle with micro-drifts during stationarity and mode fusion during complex motion transitions due to their reliance on fixed-window regression. In this work, we introduce Gated Neural Inertial Odometry (GNIO), a novel learning-based framework that explicitly models motion validity and context. We propose two key architectural innovations: \ding{182} a learnable Motion Bank that queries a global dictionary of motion patterns to provide semantic context beyond the local receptive field, and \ding{183} a Gated Prediction Head that decomposes displacement into magnitude and direction. This gating mechanism acts as a soft, differentiable Zero-Velocity Update (ZUPT), dynamically suppressing sensor noise during stationary periods while scaling predictions during dynamic motion. Extensive experiments across four public benchmarks demonstrate that GNIO significantly reduces position drift compared to state-of-the-art CNN and Transformer-based baselines. Notably, GNIO achieves a $60.21\%$ reduction in trajectory error on the OxIOD dataset and exhibits superior generalization in challenging scenarios involving frequent stops and irregular motion speeds.

Recent advances in large language models have driven the emergence of intelligent agents operating in open-world, multimodal environments. To support long-term reasoning, such agents are typically equipped with external memory systems. However, most existing multimodal agent memories rely primarily on neural representations and vector-based retrieval, which are well-suited for inductive, intuitive reasoning but fundamentally limited in supporting analytical, deductive reasoning critical for real-world decision making. To address this limitation, we propose NS-Mem, a long-term neuro-symbolic memory framework designed to advance multimodal agent reasoning by integrating neural memory with explicit symbolic structures and rules. Specifically, NS-Mem is operated around three core components of a memory system: (1) a three-layer memory architecture that consists episodic layer, semantic layer and logic rule layer, (2) a memory construction and maintenance mechanism implemented by SK-Gen that automatically consolidates structured knowledge from accumulated multimodal experiences and incrementally updates both neural representations and symbolic rules, and (3) a hybrid memory retrieval mechanism that combines similarity-based search with deterministic symbolic query functions to support structured reasoning. Experiments on real-world multimodal reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that Neural-Symbolic Memory achieves an average 4.35% improvement in overall reasoning accuracy over pure neural memory systems, with gains of up to 12.5% on constrained reasoning queries, validating the effectiveness of NS-Mem.

Conditional Flow Matching (CFM), a simulation-free method for training continuous normalizing flows, provides an efficient alternative to diffusion models for key tasks like image and video generation. The performance of CFM in solving these tasks depends on the way data is coupled with noise. A recent approach uses minibatch optimal transport (OT) to reassign noise-data pairs in each training step to streamline sampling trajectories and thus accelerate inference. However, its optimization is restricted to individual minibatches, limiting its effectiveness on large datasets. To address this shortcoming, we introduce LOOM-CFM (Looking Out Of Minibatch-CFM), a novel method to extend the scope of minibatch OT by preserving and optimizing these assignments across minibatches over training time. Our approach demonstrates consistent improvements in the sampling speed-quality trade-off across multiple datasets. LOOM-CFM also enhances distillation initialization and supports high-resolution synthesis in latent space training.

The diversity of training datasets is usually perceived as an important aspect to obtain a robust model. However, the definition of diversity is often not defined or differs across papers, and while some metrics exist, the quantification of this diversity is often overlooked when developing new algorithms. In this work, we study the behaviour of multiple dataset diversity metrics for image, text and metadata using MorphoMNIST, a toy dataset with controlled perturbations, and PadChest, a publicly available chest X-ray dataset. We evaluate whether these metrics correlate with each other but also with the intuition of a clinical expert. We also assess whether they correlate with downstream-task performance and how they impact the training dynamic of the models. We find limited correlations between the AUC and image or metadata reference-free diversity metrics, but higher correlations with the FID and the semantic diversity metrics. Finally, the clinical expert indicates that scanners are the main source of diversity in practice. However, we find that the addition of another scanner to the training set leads to shortcut learning. The code used in this study is available at https://github.com/TheoSourget/dataset_diversity_evaluation

Native unified multimodal models, which integrate both generative and understanding capabilities, face substantial computational overhead that hinders their real-world deployment. Existing acceleration techniques typically employ a static, monolithic strategy, ignoring the fundamental divergence in computational profiles between iterative generation tasks (e.g., image generation) and single-pass understanding tasks (e.g., VQA). In this work, we present the first systematic analysis of unified models, revealing pronounced parameter specialization, where distinct neuron sets are critical for each task. This implies that, at the parameter level, unified models have implicitly internalized separate inference pathways for generation and understanding within a single architecture. Based on these insights, we introduce a training-free and task-aware acceleration framework, FlashU, that tailors optimization to each task's demands. Across both tasks, we introduce Task-Specific Network Pruning and Dynamic Layer Skipping, aiming to eliminate inter-layer and task-specific redundancy. For visual generation, we implement a time-varying control signal for the guidance scale and a temporal approximation for the diffusion head via Diffusion Head Cache. For multimodal understanding, building upon the pruned model, we introduce Dynamic Token Pruning via a V-Norm Proxy to exploit the spatial redundancy of visual inputs. Extensive experiments on Show-o2 demonstrate that FlashU achieves 1.78$\times$ to 2.01$\times$ inference acceleration across both understanding and generation tasks while maintaining SOTA performance, outperforming competing unified models and validating our task-aware acceleration paradigm. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Rirayh/FlashU.

We present a framework to take advantage of existing labels at inference, called \textit{exemplars}, in order to improve the performance of object detection in medical images. The method, \textit{exemplar diffusion}, leverages existing diffusion methods for object detection to enable a training-free approach to adding information of known bounding boxes at test time. We demonstrate that for medical image datasets with clear spatial structure, the method yields an across-the-board increase in average precision and recall, and a robustness to exemplar quality, enabling non-expert annotation. Moreover, we demonstrate how our method may also be used to quantify predictive uncertainty in diffusion detection methods. Source code and data splits openly available online: https://github.com/waahlstrand/ExemplarDiffusion

The ability of robots to handle multiple tasks under a unified policy is critical for deploying embodied intelligence in real-world household and industrial applications. However, out-of-distribution variation across tasks often causes severe task interference and negative transfer when training general robotic policies. To address this challenge, we propose a lightweight multi-task imitation learning framework for bimanual manipulation, termed Mixture-of-Experts-Enhanced Action Chunking Transformer (MoE-ACT), which integrates sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) modules into the Transformer encoder of ACT. The MoE layer decomposes a unified task policy into independently invoked expert components. Through adaptive activation, it naturally decouples multi-task action distributions in latent space. During decoding, Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM) dynamically modulates action tokens to improve consistency between action generation and task instructions. In parallel, multi-scale cross-attention enables the policy to simultaneously focus on both low-level and high-level semantic features, providing rich visual information for robotic manipulation. We further incorporate textual information, transitioning the framework from a purely vision-based model to a vision-centric, language-conditioned action generation system. Experimental validation in both simulation and a real-world dual-arm setup shows that MoE-ACT substantially improves multi-task performance. Specifically, MoE-ACT outperforms vanilla ACT by an average of 33% in success rate. These results indicate that MoE-ACT provides stronger robustness and generalization in complex multi-task bimanual manipulation environments. Our open-source project page can be found at https://j3k7.github.io/MoE-ACT/.

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has revolutionized representation learning, with Joint-Embedding Architectures (JEAs) emerging as an effective approach for capturing semantic features. Existing JEAs rely on implicit or explicit batch interaction -- via negative sampling or statistical regularization -- to prevent representation collapse. This reliance becomes problematic in regimes where batch sizes must be small, such as high-dimensional scientific data, where memory constraints and class imbalance make large, well-balanced batches infeasible. We introduce IConE (Instance-Contrasted Embeddings), a framework that decouples collapse prevention from the training batch size. Rather than enforcing diversity through batch statistics, IConE maintains a global set of learnable auxiliary instance embeddings regularized by an explicit diversity objective. This transfers the anti-collapse mechanism from the transient batch to a dataset-level embedding space, allowing stable training even when batch statistics are unreliable, down to batch size 1. Across diverse 2D and 3D biomedical modalities, IConE outperforms strong contrastive and non-contrastive baselines throughout the small-batch regime (from B=1 to B=64) and demonstrates marked robustness to severe class imbalance. Geometric analysis shows that IConE preserves high intrinsic dimensionality in the learned representations, preventing the collapse observed in existing JEAs as batch sizes shrink.

Personalizing automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems for non-normative speech, such as dysarthric and aphasic speech, is challenging. While speaker-specific fine-tuning (SS-FT) is widely used, it is typically initialized directly from a generic pre-trained model. Whether speaker-independent adaptation provides a stronger initialization prior under such mismatch remains unclear. In this work, we propose a two-stage adaptation framework consisting of speaker-independent fine-tuning (SI-FT) on multi-speaker non-normative data followed by SS-FT, and evaluate it through a controlled comparison with direct SS-FT under identical per-speaker conditions. Experiments on AphasiaBank and UA-Speech with Whisper-Large-v3 and Qwen3-ASR, alongside evaluation on typical-speech datasets TED-LIUM v3 and FLEURS, show that two-stage adaptation consistently improves personalization while maintaining manageable out-of-domain (OOD) trade-offs.

Accurate weather forecasting is more than grid-wise regression: it must preserve coherent synoptic structures and physical consistency of meteorological fields, especially under autoregressive rollouts where small one-step errors can amplify into structural bias. Existing physics-priors approaches typically impose global, once-for-all constraints via architectures, regularization, or NWP coupling, offering limited state-adaptive and sample-specific controllability at deployment. To bridge this gap, we propose Agent-Guided Cross-modal Decoding (AGCD), a plug-and-play decoding-time prior-injection paradigm that derives state-conditioned physics-priors from the current multivariate atmosphere and injects them into forecasters in a controllable and reusable way. Specifically, We design a multi-agent meteorological narration pipeline to generate state-conditioned physics-priors, utilizing MLLMs to extract various meteorological elements effectively. To effectively apply the priors, AGCD further introduce cross-modal region interaction decoding that performs region-aware multi-scale tokenization and efficient physics-priors injection to refine visual features without changing the backbone interface. Experiments on WeatherBench demonstrate consistent gains for 6-hour forecasting across two resolutions (5.625 degree and 1.40625 degree) and diverse backbones (generic and weather-specialized), including strictly causal 48-hour autoregressive rollouts that reduce early-stage error accumulation and improve long-horizon stability.

The safety and reliability of vision-language models (VLMs) are a crucial part of deploying trustworthy agentic AI systems. However, VLMs remain vulnerable to jailbreaking attacks that undermine their safety alignment to yield harmful outputs. In this work, we extend the Randomized Embedding Smoothing and Token Aggregation (RESTA) defense to VLMs and evaluate its performance against the JailBreakV-28K benchmark of multi-modal jailbreaking attacks. We find that RESTA is effective in reducing attack success rate over this diverse corpus of attacks, in particular, when employing directional embedding noise, where the injected noise is aligned with the original token embedding vectors. Our results demonstrate that RESTA can contribute to securing VLMs within agentic systems, as a lightweight, inference-time defense layer of an overall security framework.

Tactile sensing is a crucial capability for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) architectures, as it enables dexterous and safe manipulation in contact-rich tasks. However, reliance on dedicated tactile hardware increases cost and reduces reproducibility across robotic platforms. We argue that tactile-aware manipulation can be learned offline and deployed without direct haptic feedback at inference. To this end, we present HapticVLA, which proceeds in two tightly coupled stages: Safety-Aware Reward-Weighted Flow Matching (SA-RWFM) and Tactile Distillation (TD). SA-RWFM trains a flow-matching action expert that incorporates precomputed, safety-aware tactile rewards penalizing excessive grasping force and suboptimal grasping trajectories. TD further transfers this tactile-aware capability into a conventional VLA: we distill a compact tactile token from the SA-RWFM teacher and train a student VLA to predict that token from vision and state modalities, enabling tactile-aware action generation at inference without requiring on-board tactile sensors. This design preserves contact-rich tactile-aware reasoning within VLA while removing the need for on-board tactile sensors during deployment. On real-world experiments, HapticVLA achieves a mean success rate of 86.7%, consistently outperforming baseline VLAs - including versions provided with direct tactile feedback during inference.

The identification of dynamic parameters in mechanical systems is important for improving model-based control as well as for performing realistic dynamic simulations. Generally, when identification techniques are applied only a subset of so-called base parameters can be identified. More even, some of these parameters cannot be identified properly given that they have a small contribution to the robot dynamics and hence in the presence of noise in measurements and discrepancy in modeling, their quality of being identifiable decreases. For this reason, a strategy for dynamic parameter identification of fully parallel robots in terms of a subset called relevant parameters is put forward. The objective of the proposed methodology is to start from a full dynamic model, then simplification concerning the geometry of each link and, the symmetry due to legs of fully parallel robots, are carried out. After that, the identification is done by Weighted Least Squares. Then, with statistical considerations the model is reduced until the physical feasibility conditions are met. The application of the propose strategy has been experimentally tested on two difierent configurations of actual 3-DOF parallel robots. The response of the inverse and forward dynamics of the identified models agrees with experiments. In order to evaluate the forward dynamics response, an approach for obtaining the forward dynamics in terms of the relevant parameters is also proposed.

Empathy is central to human connection, yet people often struggle to express it effectively. In blinded evaluations, large language models (LLMs) generate responses that are often judged more empathic than human-written ones. Yet when a response is attributed to AI, recipients feel less heard and validated than when comparable responses are attributed to a human. To probe and address this gap in empathic communication skill, we built Lend an Ear, an experimental conversation platform in which participants are asked to offer empathic support to an LLM role-playing personal and workplace troubles. From 33,938 messages spanning 2,904 text-based conversations between 968 participants and their LLM conversational partners, we derive a data-driven taxonomy of idiomatic empathic expressions in naturalistic dialogue. Based on a pre-registered randomized experiment, we present evidence that a brief LLM coaching intervention offering personalized feedback on how to effectively communicate empathy significantly boosts alignment of participants' communication patterns with normative empathic communication patterns relative to both a control group and a group that received video-based but non-personalized feedback. Moreover, we find evidence for a silent empathy effect that people feel empathy but systematically fail to express it. Nonetheless, participants reliably identify responses aligned with normative empathic communication criteria as more expressive of empathy. Together, these results advance the scientific understanding of how empathy is expressed and valued and demonstrate a scalable, AI-based intervention for scaffolding and cultivating it.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate strong general-purpose reasoning but remain limited in physics-grounded anomaly detection, where causal understanding of dynamics is essential. Existing VLMs, trained predominantly on appearance-centric correlations, fail to capture kinematic constraints, leading to poor performance on anomalies such as irregular rotations or violated mechanical motions. We introduce a physics-informed instruction tuning framework that explicitly encodes object properties, motion paradigms, and dynamic constraints into structured prompts. By delivering these physical priors through multi-turn dialogues, our method decomposes causal reasoning into incremental steps, enabling robust internal representations of normal and abnormal dynamics. Evaluated on the Phys-AD benchmark, our approach achieves 96.7% AUROC in video-level detection--substantially outperforming prior SOTA (66.9%)--and yields superior causal explanations (0.777 LLM score). This work highlights how structured physics priors can transform VLMs into reliable detectors of dynamic anomalies.

Machine Translation (MT) evaluation has gone beyond metrics, towards more specific linguistic phenomena. Regarding English-Chinese language pairs, passive sentences are constructed and distributed differently due to language variation, thus need special attention in MT. This paper proposes a bidirectional multi-domain dataset of passive sentences, extracted from five Chinese-English parallel corpora and annotated automatically with structure labels according to human translation, and a test set with manually verified annotation. The dataset consists of 73,965 parallel sentence pairs (2,358,731 English words, 3,498,229 Chinese characters). We evaluate two state-of-the-art open-source MT systems with our dataset, and four commercial models with the test set. The results show that, unlike humans, models are more influenced by the voice of the source text rather than the general voice usage of the source language, and therefore tend to maintain the passive voice when translating a passive in either direction. However, models demonstrate some knowledge of the low frequency and predominantly negative context of Chinese passives, leading to higher voice consistency with human translators in English-to-Chinese translation than in Chinese-to-English translation. Commercial NMT models scored higher in metric evaluations, but LLMs showed a better ability to use diverse alternative translations. Datasets and annotation script will be shared upon request.

Large Language Models (LLMs) often suffer from catastrophic forgetting and collapse during sequential knowledge editing. This vulnerability stems from the prevailing dense editing paradigm, which treats models as black boxes and relies on coarse-grained parameter interventions that inevitably disrupt preserved knowledge. To address this, we propose SCAN (a sparse editing framework based on Sparse Circuit Anchored Neuron) which transforms editing into a mechanism-aware manipulation by constructing a knowledge circuit via Sparse Transcoders. Experiments on Gemma2, Qwen3, and Llama3.1 across CounterFact, ZsRE and WikiFactDiff demonstrate that SCAN achieves a superior performance, maintaining model integrity on benchmarks like MMLU and GSM8K even after 3,000 sequential edits, whereas other existing methods deteriorate progressively as editing accumulates, eventually resulting in model collapse.

Robotic affordance estimation is challenging due to visual, geometric, and semantic ambiguities in sensory input. We propose a method that disambiguates these signals using two coupled recursive estimators for sub-aspects of affordances: graspable and movable regions. Each estimator encodes property-specific regularities to reduce uncertainty, while their coupling enables bidirectional information exchange that focuses attention on regions where both agree, i.e., affordances. Evaluated on a real-world dataset, our method outperforms three recent affordance estimators (Where2Act, Hands-as-Probes, and HRP) by 308%, 245%, and 257% in precision, and remains robust under challenging conditions such as low light or cluttered environments. Furthermore, our method achieves a 70% success rate in our real-world evaluation. These results demonstrate that coupling complementary estimators yields precise, robust, and embodiment-appropriate affordance predictions.

Deploying autonomous driving systems requires robustness against long-tail scenarios that are rare but safety-critical. While adversarial training offers a promising solution, existing methods typically decouple scenario generation from policy optimization and rely on heuristic surrogates. This leads to objective misalignment and fails to capture the shifting failure modes of evolving policies. This paper presents ADV-0, a closed-loop min-max optimization framework that treats the interaction between driving policy (defender) and adversarial agent (attacker) as a zero-sum Markov game. By aligning the attacker's utility directly with the defender's objective, we reveal the optimal adversary distribution. To make this tractable, we cast dynamic adversary evolution as iterative preference learning, efficiently approximating this optimum and offering an algorithm-agnostic solution to the game. Theoretically, ADV-0 converges to a Nash Equilibrium and maximizes a certified lower bound on real-world performance. Experiments indicate that it effectively exposes diverse safety-critical failures and greatly enhances the generalizability of both learned policies and motion planners against unseen long-tail risks.

Strict anonymity of model responses is a key for the reliability of voting-based leaderboards, such as LM Arena. While prior studies have attempted to compromise this assumption using simple statistical features like TF-IDF or bag-ofwords, these methods often lack the discriminative power to distinguish between stylistically similar or within-family models. To overcome these limitations and expose the severity of vulnerability, we introduce INTERPOL, a model-driven identification framework that learns to distinguish target models from others using interpolated preference data. Specifically, INTERPOL captures deep stylistic patterns that superficial statistical features miss by synthesizing hard negative samples through model interpolation and employing an adaptive curriculum learning strategy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that INTERPOL significantly outperforms existing baselines in identification accuracy. Furthermore, we quantify the real-world threat of our findings through ranking manipulation simulations on Arena battle data.

Aggregating a consensus ranking from multiple input rankings is a fundamental problem with applications in recommendation systems, search engines, job recruitment, and elections. Despite decades of research in consensus ranking aggregation, minimizing the Kemeny distance remains computationally intractable. Specifically, determining an optimal aggregation of rankings with respect to the Kemeny distance is an NP-hard problem, limiting its practical application to relatively small-scale instances. We propose the Kemeny Transformer, a novel Transformer-based algorithm trained via reinforcement learning to efficiently approximate the Kemeny optimal ranking. Experimental results demonstrate that our model outperforms classical majority-heuristic and Markov-chain approaches, achieving substantially faster inference than integer linear programming solvers. Our approach thus offers a practical, scalable alternative for real-world ranking-aggregation tasks.

Evaluating football player transfers is challenging because player actions depend strongly on tactical systems, teammates, and match context. Despite this complexity, recruitment decisions often rely on static statistics and subjective expert judgment, which do not fully account for these contextual factors. This limitation stems largely from the absence of counterfactual simulation mechanisms capable of predicting outcomes in hypothetical scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose ScoutGPT, a generative model that treats football match events as sequential tokens within a language modeling framework. Utilizing a NanoGPT-based Transformer architecture trained on next-token prediction, ScoutGPT learns the dynamics of match event sequences to simulate event sequences under hypothetical lineups, demonstrating superior predictive performance compared to existing baseline models. Leveraging this capability, the model employs Monte Carlo sampling to enable counterfactual simulation, allowing for the assessment of unobserved scenarios. Experiments on K League data show that simulated player transfers lead to measurable changes in offensive progression and goal probabilities, indicating that ScoutGPT captures player-specific impact beyond traditional static metrics.

Document parsing, as a fundamental yet crucial vision task, is being revolutionized by vision-language models (VLMs). However, the autoregressive (AR) decoding inherent to VLMs creates a significant bottleneck, severely limiting parsing speed. In this paper, we propose Parallel-Token Prediction (PTP), a plugable, model-agnostic and simple-yet-effective method that enables VLMs to generate multiple future tokens in parallel with improved sample efficiency. Specifically, we insert some learnable tokens into the input sequence and design corresponding training objectives to equip the model with parallel decoding capabilities for document parsing. Furthermore, to support effective training, we develop a comprehensive data generation pipeline that efficiently produces large-scale, high-quality document parsing training data for VLMs. Extensive experiments on OmniDocBench and olmOCR-bench demonstrate that our method not only significantly improves decoding speed (1.6x-2.2x) but also reduces model hallucinations and exhibits strong generalization abilities.