3D Gaussian Splat (3DGS) enables high-fidelity, real-time novel view synthesis by representing scenes with large sets of anisotropic primitives, but often requires millions of Splats, incurring significant storage and transmission costs. Most existing compression methods rely on GPU-intensive post-training optimization with calibrated images, limiting practical deployment. We introduce NanoGS, a training-free and lightweight framework for Gaussian Splat simplification. Instead of relying on image-based rendering supervision, NanoGS formulates simplification as local pairwise merging over a sparse spatial graph. The method approximates a pair of Gaussians with a single primitive using mass preserved moment matching and evaluates merge quality through a principled merge cost between the original mixture and its approximation. By restricting merge candidates to local neighborhoods and selecting compatible pairs efficiently, NanoGS produces compact Gaussian representations while preserving scene structure and appearance. NanoGS operates directly on existing Gaussian Splat models, runs efficiently on CPU, and preserves the standard 3DGS parameterization, enabling seamless integration with existing rendering pipelines. Experiments demonstrate that NanoGS substantially reduces primitive count while maintaining high rendering fidelity, providing an efficient and practical solution for Gaussian Splat simplification. Our project website is available at https://saliteta.github.io/NanoGS/.

Existing diffusion-based 3D scene generation methods primarily operate in 2D image/video latent spaces, which makes maintaining cross-view appearance and geometric consistency inherently challenging. To bridge this gap, we present OneWorld, a framework that performs diffusion directly within a coherent 3D representation space. Central to our approach is the 3D Unified Representation Autoencoder (3D-URAE); it leverages pretrained 3D foundation models and augments their geometry-centric nature by injecting appearance and distilling semantics into a unified 3D latent space. Furthermore, we introduce token-level Cross-View-Correspondence (CVC) consistency loss to explicitly enforce structural alignment across views, and propose Manifold-Drift Forcing (MDF) to mitigate train-inference exposure bias and shape a robust 3D manifold by mixing drifted and original representations. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that OneWorld generates high-quality 3D scenes with superior cross-view consistency compared to state-of-the-art 2D-based methods. Our code will be available at https://github.com/SensenGao/OneWorld.

Multimodal generative models have shown remarkable progress in single-modality video and audio synthesis, yet truly joint audio-video generation remains an open challenge. In this paper, I explore four key contributions to advance this field. First, I release two high-quality, paired audio-video datasets. The datasets consisting on 13 hours of video-game clips and 64 hours of concert performances, each segmented into consistent 34-second samples to facilitate reproducible research. Second, I train the MM-Diffusion architecture from scratch on our datasets, demonstrating its ability to produce semantically coherent audio-video pairs and quantitatively evaluating alignment on rapid actions and musical cues. Third, I investigate joint latent diffusion by leveraging pretrained video and audio encoder-decoders, uncovering challenges and inconsistencies in the multimodal decoding stage. Finally, I propose a sequential two-step text-to-audio-video generation pipeline: first generating video, then conditioning on both the video output and the original prompt to synthesize temporally synchronized audio. My experiments show that this modular approach yields high-fidelity generations of audio video generation.

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) employ multi-modal in-context learning (MM-ICL) to adapt to new tasks by leveraging demonstration examples. While increasing the number of demonstrations boosts performance, they incur significant inference latency due to the quadratic computational cost of Transformer attention with respect to the context length. To address this trade-off, we propose Parallel In-Context Learning (Parallel-ICL), a plug-and-play inference algorithm. Parallel-ICL partitions the long demonstration context into multiple shorter, manageable chunks. It processes these chunks in parallel and integrates their predictions at the logit level, using a weighted Product-of-Experts (PoE) ensemble to approximate the full-context output. Guided by ensemble learning theory, we introduce principled strategies for Parallel-ICL: (i) clustering-based context chunking to maximize inter-chunk diversity and (ii) similarity-based context compilation to weight predictions by query relevance. Extensive experiments on VQA, image captioning, and classification benchmarks demonstrate that Parallel-ICL achieves performance comparable to full-context MM-ICL, while significantly improving inference speed. Our work offers an effective solution to the accuracy-efficiency trade-off in MM-ICL, enabling dynamic task adaptation with substantially reduced inference overhead.

While recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have begun to incorporate audio, they typically treat sound as static pre-execution prompts or focus exclusively on human speech. This leaves a significant gap in real-time, sound-centric manipulation where fleeting environmental acoustics provide critical state verification during task execution. Consequently, key sounds are easily missed due to low-frequency updates or system latency. This problem is exacerbated by action chunking with open-loop execution, which creates a Blind Execution Interval where acoustic events are lost between discrete audio observation windows. Recognizing the necessity of continuous auditory awareness, we formalize Vision-Sound-Language-Action (VSLA) as a continuous control paradigm conditioned on vision, streaming audio, language, and proprioception under delayed decision loops. As an instantiation, we introduce HEAR, a VSLA framework integrating four components: (i) a streaming Historizer to maintain a compact, causal audio context across execution gaps; (ii) an Envisioner adapted from omni foundation models to reason over multi-sensory inputs; (iii) an Advancer, formulated as an audio world model, to learn temporal dynamics by predicting near-future audio codes; and (iv) a flow-matching Realizer policy to generate smooth action chunks. To address the scarcity of pretraining data and evaluations for VSLA, we construct OpenX-Sound for pretraining, alongside HEAR-Bench, the first sound-centric manipulation benchmark with strict causal timing rules. Our results suggest that robust sound-centric manipulation necessitates causal persistence and explicit temporal learning. This framework provides a practical step toward multi-sensory foundation models for embodied agents, enabling robots to perceive and interact with dynamic environments. Code and videos are available at https://hear.irmv.top.

Recent breakthroughs in 3D generation have enabled the synthesis of high-fidelity individual assets. However, generating 3D compositional objects from single images--particularly under occlusions--remains challenging. Existing methods often degrade geometric details in hidden regions and fail to preserve the underlying object-object spatial relationships (OOR). We present a novel framework Interact3D designed to generate physically plausible interacting 3D compositional objects. Our approach first leverages advanced generative priors to curate high-quality individual assets with a unified 3D guidance scene. To physically compose these assets, we then introduce a robust two-stage composition pipeline. Based on the 3D guidance scene, the primary object is anchored through precise global-to-local geometric alignment (registration), while subsequent geometries are integrated using a differentiable Signed Distance Field (SDF)-based optimization that explicitly penalizes geometry intersections. To reduce challenging collisions, we further deploy a closed-loop, agentic refinement strategy. A Vision-Language Model (VLM) autonomously analyzes multi-view renderings of the composed scene, formulates targeted corrective prompts, and guides an image editing module to iteratively self-correct the generation pipeline. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Interact3D successfully produces promising collsion-aware compositions with improved geometric fidelity and consistent spatial relationships.

Driving scene parsing is critical for autonomous vehicles to operate reliably in complex real-world traffic environments. To reduce the reliance on costly pixel-level annotations, synthetic datasets with automatically generated labels have become a popular alternative. However, models trained on synthetic data often perform poorly when applied to real-world scenes due to the synthetic-to-real domain gap. Despite the success of unsupervised domain adaptation in narrowing this gap, most existing methods mainly focus on global feature alignment while overlooking the semantic structure of the feature space. As a result, semantic relations among classes are insufficiently modeled, limiting the model's ability to generalize. To address these challenges, this study introduces a novel unsupervised domain adaptation framework that explicitly regularizes semantic feature structures to significantly enhance driving scene parsing performance in real-world scenarios. Specifically, the proposed method enforces inter-class separation and intra-class compactness by leveraging class-specific prototypes, thereby enhancing the discriminability and structural coherence of feature clusters. An entropy-based noise filtering strategy improves the reliability of pseudo labels, while a pixel-level attention mechanism further refines feature alignment. Extensive experiments on representative benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods. These results underscore the importance of preserving semantic structure for robust synthetic-to-real adaptation in driving scene parsing tasks.

Bitcoin transaction networks are large scale socio- technical systems in which activities are represented through multi-hop interaction patterns. Graph Neural Networks(GNNs) have become a widely adopted tool for analyzing such systems, supporting tasks such as entity detection and transaction classification. Large-scale datasets like Elliptic have allowed for a rise in the analysis of these systems and in tasks such as fraud detection. In these settings, the amount of transactional context available to each node is determined by the neighborhood aggregation and sampling strategies, yet the interaction between these receptive fields and embedding geometry has received limited attention. In this work, we conduct a controlled comparison of Euclidean and tangent-space hyperbolic GNNs for node classification on a large Bitcoin transaction graph. By explicitly varying the neighborhood while keeping the model architecture and dimensionality fixed, we analyze the differences in two embedding spaces. We further examine optimization behavior and observe that joint selection of learning rate and curvature plays a critical role in stabilizing high-dimensional hyperbolic embeddings. Overall, our findings provide practical insights into the role of embedding geometry and neighborhood depth when modeling large-scale transaction networks, informing the deployment of hyperbolic GNNs for computational social systems.

Establishing dense volumetric correspondences across anatomical shapes is essential for group-level analysis but remains challenging for implicit neural representations. Most existing implicit registration methods rely on supervision near the zero-level set and thus capture only surface correspondences, leaving interior deformations under-constrained. We introduce a volumetrically consistent implicit model that couples reconstruction of signed distance functions (SDFs) with neural diffeomorphic flow to learn a shared canonical template of the placenta. Volumetric regularization, including Jacobian-determinant and biharmonic penalties, suppresses local folding and promotes globally coherent deformations. In the motivating application to placenta MRI, our formulation jointly reconstructs individual placentas, aligns them to a population-derived implicit template, and enables voxel-wise intensity mapping in a unified canonical space. Experiments on in-vivo placenta MRI scans demonstrate improved geometric fidelity and volumetric alignment over surface-based implicit baseline methods, yielding anatomically interpretable and topologically consistent flattening suitable for group analysis.

Hate speech detection relies heavily on linguistic resources, which are primarily available in high-resource languages such as English and Chinese, creating barriers for researchers and platforms developing tools for low-resource languages in Southeast Asia, where diverse socio-linguistic contexts complicate online hate moderation. To address this, we introduce SEAHateCheck, a pioneering dataset tailored to Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Vietnam, covering Indonesian, Tagalog, Thai, and Vietnamese. Building on HateCheck's functional testing framework and refining SGHateCheck's methods, SEAHateCheck provides culturally relevant test cases, augmented by large language models and validated by local experts for accuracy. Experiments with state-of-the-art and multilingual models revealed limitations in detecting hate speech in specific low-resource languages. In particular, Tagalog test cases showed the lowest model accuracy, likely due to linguistic complexity and limited training data. In contrast, slang-based functional tests proved the hardest, as models struggled with culturally nuanced expressions. The diagnostic insights of SEAHateCheck further exposed model weaknesses in implicit hate detection and models' struggles with counter-speech expression. As the first functional test suite for these Southeast Asian languages, this work equips researchers with a robust benchmark, advancing the development of practical, culturally attuned hate speech detection tools for inclusive online content moderation.

Attribution methods in explainable AI rely on upsampling techniques that were designed for natural images, not saliency maps. Standard bilinear and bicubic interpolation systematically corrupts attribution signals through aliasing, ringing, and boundary bleeding, producing spurious high-importance regions that misrepresent model reasoning. We identify that the core issue is treating attribution upsampling as an interpolation problem that operates in isolation from the model's reasoning, rather than a mass redistribution problem where model-derived semantic boundaries must govern how importance flows. We present Universal Semantic-Aware Upsampling (USU), a principled method that reformulates upsampling through ratio-form mass redistribution operators, provably preserving attribution mass and relative importance ordering. Extending the axiomatic tradition of feature attribution to upsampling, we formalize four desiderata for faithful upsampling and prove that interpolation structurally violates three of them. These same three force any redistribution operator into a ratio form; the fourth selects the unique potential within this family, yielding USU. Controlled experiments on models with known attribution priors verify USU's formal guarantees; evaluation across ImageNet, CIFAR-10, and CUB-200 confirms consistent faithfulness improvements and qualitatively superior, semantically coherent explanations.

This paper introduces a novel variational Bayesian method that integrates Tucker decomposition for efficient high-dimensional inverse problem solving. The method reduces computational complexity by transforming variational inference from a high-dimensional space to a lower-dimensional core tensor space via Tucker decomposition. A key innovation is the introduction of per-mode precision parameters, enabling adaptive regularization for anisotropic structures. For instance, in directional image deblurring, learned parameters align with physical anisotropy, applying stronger regularization to critical directions (e.g., row vs. column axes). The method further estimates noise levels from data, eliminating reliance on prior knowledge of noise parameters (unlike conventional benchmarks such as the discrepancy principle (DP)). Experimental evaluations across 2D deblurring, 3D heat conduction, and Fredholm integral equations demonstrate consistent improvements in quantitative metrics (PSNR, SSIM) and qualitative visualizations (error maps, precision parameter trends) compared to L-curve criterion, generalized cross-validation (GCV), unbiased predictive risk estimator (UPRE), and DP. The approach scales to problems with 110,000 variables and outperforms existing methods by 0.73-2.09 dB in deblurring tasks and 6.75 dB in 3D heat conduction. Limitations include sensitivity to rank selection in Tucker decomposition and the need for theoretical analysis. Future work will explore automated rank selection and theoretical guarantees. This method bridges Bayesian theory and scalable computation, offering practical solutions for large-scale inverse problems in imaging, remote sensing, and scientific computing.

Vision Transformers (ViTs) based vision foundation models (VFMs) have achieved remarkable performance across diverse vision tasks, but suffer from quadratic complexity that limits scalability to long sequences. Existing linear attention approaches for ViTs are typically trained from scratch, requiring substantial computational resources, while linearization-based methods developed for large language model decoders do not transfer well to ViTs. To address these challenges, we propose ViT-AdaLA, a novel framework for effectively adapting and transferring prior knowledge from VFMs to linear attention ViTs. ViT-AdaLA consists of three stages: attention alignment, feature alignment, and supervised fine-tuning. In the attention alignment stage, we align vanilla linear attention with the original softmax-based attention in each block to approximate the behavior of softmax attention. However, residual approximation errors inevitably accumulate across layers. We mitigate this by fine-tuning the linearized ViT to align its final-layer features with a frozen softmax VFM teacher. Finally, the adapted prior knowledge is transferred to downstream tasks through supervised fine-tuning. Extensive experiments on classification and segmentation tasks demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of ViT-AdaLA over various state-of-the-art linear attention counterpart.

Large language models (LLMs) have made remarkable progress in generating fluent text, but they still face a critical challenge of contextual misalignment in long-term and dynamic dialogue. When human users omit premises, simplify references, or shift context abruptly during interactions with LLMs, the models may fail to capture their actual intentions, producing mechanical or off-topic responses that weaken the collaborative potential of dialogue. To address this problem, this paper proposes a computational framework called the Context Alignment Pre-processor (C.A.P.). Rather than operating during generation, C.A.P. functions as a pre-processing module between user input and response generation. The framework includes three core processes: (1) semantic expansion, which extends a user instruction to a broader semantic span including its premises, literal meaning, and implications; (2) time-weighted context retrieval, which prioritizes recent dialogue history through a temporal decay function approximating human conversational focus; and (3) alignment verification and decision branching, which evaluates whether the dialogue remains on track by measuring the semantic similarity between the current prompt and the weighted historical context. When a significant deviation is detected, C.A.P. initiates a structured clarification protocol to help users and the system recalibrate the conversation. This study presents the architecture and theoretical basis of C.A.P., drawing on cognitive science and Common Ground theory in human-computer interaction. We argue that C.A.P. is not only a technical refinement but also a step toward shifting human-computer dialogue from one-way command-execution patterns to two-way, self-correcting, partnership-based collaboration. Finally, we discuss implementation paths, evaluation methods, and implications for the future design of interactive intelligent systems.

Autonomous driving is undergoing a shift from modular rule based pipelines toward end to end (E2E) learning systems. This paper examines this transition by tracing the evolution from classical sense perceive plan control architectures to large driving models (LDMs) capable of mapping raw sensor input directly to driving actions. We analyze recent developments including Tesla's Full Self Driving (FSD) V12 V14, Rivian's Unified Intelligence platform, NVIDIA Cosmos, and emerging commercial robotaxi deployments, focusing on architectural design, deployment strategies, safety considerations and industry implications. A key emerging product category is supervised E2E driving, often referred to as FSD (Supervised) or L2 plus plus, which several manufacturers plan to deploy from 2026 onwards. These systems can perform most of the Dynamic Driving Task (DDT) in complex environments while requiring human supervision, shifting the driver's role to safety oversight. Early operational evidence suggests E2E learning handles the long tail distribution of real world driving scenarios and is becoming a dominant commercial strategy. We also discuss how similar architectural advances may extend beyond autonomous vehicles (AV) to other embodied AI systems, including humanoid robotics.

Small language models (sLLMs) are increasingly deployed on-device, where imperfect user prompts--typos, unclear intent, or missing context--can trigger factual errors and hallucinations. Existing automatic prompt optimization (APO) methods were designed for large cloud LLMs and rely on search that often produces long, structured instructions; when executed under an on-device constraint where the same small model must act as optimizer and solver, these pipelines can waste context and even hurt accuracy. We propose POaaS, a minimal-edit prompt optimization layer that routes each query to lightweight specialists (Cleaner, Paraphraser, Fact-Adder) and merges their outputs under strict drift and length constraints, with a conservative skip policy for well-formed prompts. Under a strict fixed-model setting with Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct and Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, POaaS improves both task accuracy and factuality while representative APO baselines degrade them, and POaaS recovers up to +7.4% under token deletion and mixup. Overall, per-query conservative optimization is a practical alternative to search-heavy APO for on-device sLLMs.

Generalization remains a core challenge in embodied AI, as robots must adapt to diverse environments. While OpenVLA represents the State-of-the-Art (SOTA) in Vision-Language-Action models by leveraging large-scale pre-training, its zero-shot performance can be limited when encountering completely new environments. This paper proposes a parameter-efficient fine-tuning strategy to enhance the linguistic generalization of OpenVLA by synthesizing a general instruction set for the Bridge Dataset V2. The paper leverages a Large Language Model (LLM) to generate a rich variety of semantically equivalent but structurally diverse commands for existing trajectories. In this experiment, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is implemented to fine-tune OpenVLA on augmented pairs, allowing the model to bridge the gap between complex natural language intent and robotic actions. Results demonstrate that the LoRA-enhanced model's robustness, suggesting that enriching the linguistic space of specialized datasets is crucial for embodied agents.

Human Activity Recognition using wearable inertial sensors is foundational to healthcare monitoring, fitness analytics, and context-aware computing, yet its deployment is hindered by cross-user variability arising from heterogeneous physiological traits, motor habits, and sensor placements. Existing domain generalization approaches either neglect temporal dependencies in sensor streams or depend on impractical target-domain annotations. We propose a different paradigm: modeling generalizable feature extraction as a collaborative sequential generation process governed by reinforcement learning. Our framework, CTFG (Collaborative Temporal Feature Generation), employs a Transformer-based autoregressive generator that incrementally constructs feature token sequences, each conditioned on prior context and the encoded sensor input. The generator is optimized via Group-Relative Policy Optimization, a critic-free algorithm that evaluates each generated sequence against a cohort of alternatives sampled from the same input, deriving advantages through intra-group normalization rather than learned value estimation. This design eliminates the distribution-dependent bias inherent in critic-based methods and provides self-calibrating optimization signals that remain stable across heterogeneous user distributions. A tri-objective reward comprising class discrimination, cross-user invariance, and temporal fidelity jointly shapes the feature space to separate activities, align user distributions, and preserve fine-grained temporal content. Evaluations on the DSADS and PAMAP2 benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art cross-user accuracy (88.53\% and 75.22\%), substantial reduction in inter-task training variance, accelerated convergence, and robust generalization under varying action-space dimensionalities.

This study proposes a non-contact photo-reflector-based joint torque sensor for precise joint-level torque control and safe physical interaction. Current-sensor-based torque estimation in many collaborative robots suffers from poor low-torque accuracy due to gearbox stiction/friction and current-torque nonlinearity, especially near static conditions. The proposed sensor optically measures micro-deformation of an elastic structure and employs a redundant array of photo-reflectors arranged in four directions to improve sensitivity and signal-to-noise ratio. We further present a quadratic-programming-based calibration method that exploits redundancy to suppress noise and enhance resolution compared to least-squares calibration. The sensor is implemented in a compact form factor (96 mm diameter, 12 mm thickness). Experiments demonstrate a maximum error of 0.083%FS and an RMS error of 0.0266 Nm for z-axis torque measurement. Calibration tests show that the proposed calibration achieves a 3 sigma resolution of 0.0224 Nm at 1 kHz without filtering, corresponding to a 2.14 times improvement over the least-squares baseline. Temperature chamber characterization and rational fitting based compensation mitigate zero drift induced by MCU self heating and motor heat. Motor-level validation via torque control and admittance control confirms improved low torque tracking and disturbance robustness relative to current-sensor-based control.

We study rigid-body motion planning through multiple sequential narrow openings, which requires long-horizon geometric reasoning because the configuration used to traverse an early opening constrains the set of reachable configurations for subsequent ones. To achieve this, we propose a geometry-aligned large language model (LLM) fine-tuning framework that generates fixed-length, machine-readable waypoint sequences that are both geometrically feasible and coordinated across openings. Our approach uses a bi-level training pipeline. First, we perform failure-driven LoRA supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on human demonstrations, which incorporates structured failure feedback to teach the model common failure modes and enforce the output format. Second, we refine the same LoRA adapters using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with geometric verification: each sampled waypoint sequence is densified by a model-based planner and scored with a deterministic geometry-derived reward to achieve continuous-motion feasibility. To validate the effectiveness of our proposed method, we provide both quantitative and qualitative results from simulations. Our method achieves the highest success rate in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution environments and qualitatively exhibits long-horizon geometric reasoning by selecting exit poses that facilitate entry into subsequent openings.

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly participate in morally sensitive decision-making, yet how they organize ethical frameworks across reasoning steps remains underexplored. We introduce \textit{moral reasoning trajectories}, sequences of ethical framework invocations across intermediate reasoning steps, and analyze their dynamics across six models and three benchmarks. We find that moral reasoning involves systematic multi-framework deliberation: 55.4--57.7\% of consecutive steps involve framework switches, and only 16.4--17.8\% of trajectories remain framework-consistent. Unstable trajectories remain 1.29$\times$ more susceptible to persuasive attacks ($p=0.015$). At the representation level, linear probes localize framework-specific encoding to model-specific layers (layer 63/81 for Llama-3.3-70B; layer 17/81 for Qwen2.5-72B), achieving 13.8--22.6\% lower KL divergence than the training-set prior baseline. Lightweight activation steering modulates framework integration patterns (6.7--8.9\% drift reduction) and amplifies the stability--accuracy relationship. We further propose a Moral Representation Consistency (MRC) metric that correlates strongly ($r=0.715$, $p<0.0001$) with LLM coherence ratings, whose underlying framework attributions are validated by human annotators (mean cosine similarity $= 0.859$).

A single egocentric image typically captures only a small portion of the floor, yet a complete metric traversability map of the surroundings would better serve applications such as indoor navigation. We introduce FlatLands, a dataset and benchmark for single-view bird's-eye view (BEV) floor completion. The dataset contains 270,575 observations from 17,656 real metric indoor scenes drawn from six existing datasets, with aligned observation, visibility, validity, and ground-truth BEV maps, and the benchmark includes both in- and out-of-distribution evaluation protocols. We compare training-free approaches, deterministic models, ensembles, and stochastic generative models. Finally, we instantiate the task as an end-to-end monocular RGB-to-floormaps pipeline. FlatLands provides a rigorous testbed for uncertainty-aware indoor mapping and generative completion for embodied navigation.

Recent work has highlighted the centrality of smooth calibration [Kakade and Foster, 2008] as a robust measure of calibration error. We generalize, unify, and extend previous results on smooth calibration, both as a robust calibration measure, and as a step towards omniprediction, which enables predictions with low regret for downstream decision makers seeking to optimize some proper loss unknown to the predictor. We present a new omniprediction guarantee for smoothly calibrated predictors, for the class of all bounded proper losses. We smooth the predictor by adding some noise to it, and compete against smoothed versions of any benchmark predictor on the space, where we add some noise to the predictor and then post-process it arbitrarily. The omniprediction error is bounded by the smooth calibration error of the predictor and the earth mover's distance from the benchmark. We exhibit instances showing that this dependence cannot, in general, be improved. We show how this unifies and extends prior results [Foster and Vohra, 1998; Hartline, Wu, and Yang, 2025] on omniprediction from smooth calibration. We present a crisp new characterization of smooth calibration in terms of the earth mover's distance to the closest perfectly calibrated joint distribution of predictions and labels. This also yields a simpler proof of the relation to the lower distance to calibration from [Blasiok, Gopalan, Hu, and Nakkiran, 2023]. We use this to show that the upper distance to calibration cannot be estimated within a quadratic factor with sample complexity independent of the support size of the predictions. This is in contrast to the distance to calibration, where the corresponding problem was known to be information-theoretically impossible: no finite number of samples suffice [Blasiok, Gopalan, Hu, and Nakkiran, 2023].

Radiology report annotation is essential for clinical NLP, yet manual labeling is slow and costly. We present RadAnnotate, an LLM-based framework that studies retrieval-augmented synthetic reports and confidence-based selective automation to reduce expert effort for labeling in RadGraph. We study RadGraph-style entity labeling (graph nodes) and leave relation extraction (edges) to future work. First, we train entity-specific classifiers on gold-standard reports and characterize their strengths and failure modes across anatomy and observation categories, with uncertain observations hardest to learn. Second, we generate RAG-guided synthetic reports and show that synthetic-only models remain within 1-2 F1 points of gold-trained models, and that synthetic augmentation is especially helpful for uncertain observations in a low-resource setting, improving F1 from 0.61 to 0.70. Finally, by learning entity-specific confidence thresholds, RadAnnotate can automatically annotate 55-90% of reports at 0.86-0.92 entity match score while routing low-confidence cases for expert review.

Network pruning is an effective technique for enabling lightweight Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), which primarily incorporates both weights and activations into the importance metric. However, existing efforts typically process calibration data from different modalities in a unified manner, overlooking modality-specific behaviors. This raises a critical challenge: how to address the divergent behaviors of textual and visual tokens for accurate pruning of LVLMs. To this end, we systematically investigate the sensitivity of visual and textual tokens to the pruning operation by decoupling their corresponding weights, revealing that: (i) the textual pathway should be calibrated via text tokens, since it exhibits higher sensitivity than the visual pathway; (ii) the visual pathway exhibits high redundancy, permitting even 50% sparsity. Motivated by these insights, we propose a simple yet effective Asymmetric Text-Visual Weight Pruning method for LVLMs, dubbed ATV-Pruning, which establishes the importance metric for accurate weight pruning by selecting the informative tokens from both textual and visual pathways. Specifically, ATV-Pruning integrates two primary innovations: first, a calibration pool is adaptively constructed by drawing on all textual tokens and a subset of visual tokens; second, we devise a layer-adaptive selection strategy to yield important visual tokens. Finally, extensive experiments across standard multimodal benchmarks verify the superiority of our ATV-Pruning over state-of-the-art methods.

Retrieval-augmented generation stores all content indiscriminately, degrading accuracy as noise accumulates. Parametric approaches compress knowledge into weights, precluding selective updates. Neither mirrors biological memory, which gates encoding based on salience and archives rather than deletes superseded information. We introduce write-time gating that filters incoming knowledge objects using composite salience scores (source reputation, novelty, reliability) while maintaining version chains that preserve prior states. Using real LLM evaluation without oracle access to quality labels, write gating achieves 100 percent accuracy versus 13 percent for ungated stores. The critical finding emerges under distractor scaling: at 8:1 distractor ratios, read-time filtering (Self-RAG) collapses to 0 percent while write gating maintains 100 percent, revealing a structural advantage of write-time over read-time curation. Validation on Wikipedia (20 entities), procedurally generated pharmacology data, and 2026 arXiv papers confirms these findings. The gating advantage scales inversely with parametric memory support: +25pp for Wikipedia, +48pp for post-cutoff arXiv, +65pp for procedural data with zero training knowledge. Signal ablation confirms the method does not depend on oracle-correlated metadata. Write gating matches Self-RAG accuracy at one-ninth the query-time cost.

Each LoRA checkpoint compactly stores task-specific updates in low-rank weight matrices, offering an efficient way to adapt large language models to new tasks and domains. In principle, these weights already encode what the adapter does and how well it performs. In this paper, we ask whether this information can be read directly from the weights, without running the base model or accessing training data. A key obstacle is that a single LoRA update can be factorized in infinitely many ways. Without resolving this ambiguity, models trained on the factors may fit the particular factorization rather than the underlying update. To this end, we propose \methodfull, which maps each LoRA update to a provably canonical form via QR decomposition followed by SVD, so that all equivalent factorizations share the same representation. The resulting components are then tokenized and processed by a Transformer to produce a weight-space embedding. Across language and vision LoRA collections, W2T achieves strong results on attribute classification, performance prediction, and adapter retrieval, demonstrating that LoRA weights reliably indicate model behavior once factorization ambiguity is removed. Code is available at https://github.com/xiaolonghan2000/Weight2Token.

Achieving deterministic computation results in asynchronous neuromorphic systems remains a fundamental challenge due to the inherent temporal stochasticity of continuous-time hardware. To address this, we develop a unified continuous-time framework for spiking neural networks (SNNs) that couples the Law of Charge Conservation with minimal neuron-level constraints. This integration ensures that the terminal state depends solely on the aggregate input charge, providing a unique cumulated output invariant to temporal stochasticity. We prove that this mapping is strictly invariant to spike timing in acyclic networks, whereas recurrent connectivity can introduce temporal sensitivity. Furthermore, we establish an exact representational correspondence between these charge-conserving SNNs and quantized artificial neural networks, bridging the gap between static deep learning and event-driven dynamics without approximation errors. These results establish a rigorous theoretical basis for designing continuous-time neuromorphic systems that harness the efficiency of asynchronous processing while maintaining algorithmic determinism.

Speech large language models (LLMs) observe paralinguistic cues such as prosody, emotion, and non-verbal sounds--crucial for intent understanding. However, leveraging these cues faces challenges: limited training data, annotation difficulty, and models exploiting lexical shortcuts over paralinguistic signals. We propose multi-task reinforcement learning (RL) with chain-of-thought prompting that elicits explicit affective reasoning. To address data scarcity, we introduce a paralinguistics-aware speech LLM (PALLM) that jointly optimizes sentiment classification from audio and paralinguistics-aware response generation via a two-stage pipeline. Experiments demonstrate that our approach improves paralinguistics understanding over both supervised baselines and strong proprietary models (Gemini-2.5-Pro, GPT-4o-audio) by 8-12% on Expresso, IEMOCAP, and RAVDESS. The results show that modeling paralinguistic reasoning with multi-task RL is crucial for building emotionally intelligent speech LLMs.

While large language models have significantly accelerated scientific code generation, comprehensively evaluating the generated code remains a major challenge. Traditional benchmarks reduce evaluation to test-case matching, an approach insufficient for library code in HPC where solver selection, API conventions, memory management, and performance are just as critical as functional correctness. To address this gap, we introduce petscagent-bench, an agentic framework built on an agents-evaluating-agents paradigm. Instead of relying on static scripts, petscagent-bench deploys a tool-augmented evaluator agent that compiles, executes, and measures code produced by a separate model-under-test agent, orchestrating a 14-evaluator pipeline across five scoring categories: correctness, performance, code quality, algorithmic appropriateness, and library-specific conventions. Because the agents communicate through standardized protocols (A2A and MCP), the framework enables black-box evaluation of any coding agent without requiring access to its source code. We demonstrate the framework on a benchmark suite of realistic problems using the PETSc library for HPC. Our empirical analysis of frontier models reveals that while current models generate readable, well-structured code, they consistently struggle with library-specific conventions that traditional pass/fail metrics completely miss.