Gradient regularization (GR) has been shown to improve the generalizability of trained models. While Natural Gradient Descent has been shown to accelerate optimization in the initial phase of training, little attention has been paid to how the training dynamics of second-order optimizers can benefit from GR. In this work, we propose Gradient-Regularized Natural Gradients (GRNG), a family of scalable second-order optimizers that integrate explicit gradient regularization with natural gradient updates. Our framework introduces two frequentist algorithms: Regularized Explicit Natural Gradient (RENG), which utilizes double backpropagation to explicitly minimize the gradient norm, and Regularized Implicit Natural Gradient (RING), which incorporates regularization implicitly into the update direction. We also propose a Bayesian variant based on a Regularized-Kalman formulation that eliminates the need for FIM inversion entirely. We establish convergence guarantees for GRNG, showing that gradient regularization improves stability and enables convergence to global minima. Empirically, we demonstrate that GRNG consistently enhances both optimization speed and generalization compared to first-order methods (SGD, AdamW) and second-order baselines (K-FAC, Sophia), with strong results on vision and language benchmarks.

While integrating multiple modalities has the potential to improve environmental monitoring, current approaches struggle to combine data sources with heterogeneous formats or contents. A central difficulty arises when combining continuous gridded data (e.g., remote sensing) with sparse and irregular point observations such as species records. Existing geostatistical and deep-learning-based approaches typically operate on a single modality or focus on spatially aligned inputs, and thus cannot seamlessly overcome this difficulty. We propose a Geolocation-Aware MultiModal Approach (GAMMA), a transformer-based fusion approach designed to integrate heterogeneous ecological data using explicit spatial context. Instead of interpolating observations into a common grid, GAMMA first represents all inputs as location-aware embeddings that preserve spatial relationships between samples. GAMMA dynamically selects relevant neighbours across modalities and spatial scales, enabling the model to jointly exploit continuous remote sensing imagery and sparse geolocated observations. We evaluate GAMMA on the task of predicting 103 environmental variables from the SWECO25 data cube across Switzerland. Inputs combine aerial imagery with biodiversity observations from GBIF and textual habitat descriptions from Wikipedia, provided by the EcoWikiRS dataset. Experiments show that multimodal fusion consistently improves prediction performance over single-modality baselines and that explicit spatial context further enhances model accuracy. The flexible architecture of GAMMA also allows to analyse the contribution of each modality through controlled ablation experiments. These results demonstrate the potential of location-aware multimodal learning for integrating heterogeneous ecological data and for supporting large-scale environmental mapping tasks and biodiversity monitoring.

Recent advances in video reward models and post-training strategies have improved text-to-video (T2V) generation. While these models typically assess visual quality, motion quality, and text alignment, they often overlook key structural distortions, such as abnormal object appearances and interactions, which can degrade the overall quality of the generative video. To address this gap, we introduce REACT, a frame-level reward model designed specifically for structural distortions evaluation in generative videos. REACT assigns point-wise scores and attribution labels by reasoning over video frames, focusing on recognizing distortions. To support this, we construct a large-scale human preference dataset, annotated based on our proposed taxonomy of structural distortions, and generate additional data using a efficient Chain-of-Thought (CoT) synthesis pipeline. REACT is trained with a two-stage framework: (1) supervised fine-tuning with masked loss for domain knowledge injection, followed by (2) reinforcement learning with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) and pairwise rewards to enhance reasoning capability and align output scores with human preferences. During inference, a dynamic sampling mechanism is introduced to focus on frames most likely to exhibit distortion. We also present REACT-Bench, a benchmark for generative video distortion evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate that REACT complements existing reward models in assessing structutal distortion, achieving both accurate quantitative evaluations and interpretable attribution analysis.

Structured shape completion recovers missing geometry as primitives rather than as unstructured points, which enables primitive-based surface reconstruction. Instead of following the prevailing cascade, we rethink how primitives and points should interact, and find it more effective to decode primitives in a dedicated pathway that attends to shared shape features. Following this principle, we present UniCo, which in a single feed-forward pass predicts a set of primitives with complete geometry, semantics, and inlier membership. To drive this unified representation, we introduce primitive proxies, learnable queries that are contextualized to produce assembly-ready outputs. To ensure consistent optimization, our training strategy couples primitives and points with online target updates. Across synthetic and real-world benchmarks with four independent assembly solvers, UniCo consistently outperforms recent baselines, lowering Chamfer distance by up to 50% and improving normal consistency by up to 7%. These results establish an attractive recipe for structured 3D understanding from incomplete data. Project page: https://unico-completion.github.io.

As machine learning models are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains, the need for interpretability has grown to meet strict regulatory and accountability constraints. Despite this interest, systematic evaluations of inherently interpretable models for tabular data remain scarce and often focus solely on aggregated performance. To address this gap, we evaluate sixteen interpretable methods, including Explainable Boosting Machines (EBMs), Symbolic Regression (SR), and Generalized Optimal Sparse Decision Trees, across 216 real-world tabular datasets. We assess predictive accuracy, computational efficiency, and generalization under distributional shifts. Moving beyond aggregate performance rankings, we further analyze how model behavior varies with dataset meta-features and operationalize these descriptors to study algorithm selection. Our analyses reveal a clear dichotomy: in regression tasks, models exhibit a predictable performance hierarchy dominated by EBMs and SR that can be inferred from dataset characteristics. In contrast, classification performance remains highly dataset-dependent with no stable hierarchy, showing that standard complexity measures fail to provide actionable guidance. Furthermore, we identify an "interpretability tax", showing that models explicitly optimizing for structural sparsity incur significantly longer training times. Overall, these findings provide practical guidance for practitioners seeking a balance between interpretability and predictive performance, and contribute to a deeper empirical understanding of interpretable modeling for tabular data.

Current medical retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approaches overlook evidence-based medicine (EBM) principles, leading to two key gaps: (1) the lack of PICO alignment between queries and retrieved evidence, and (2) the absence of evidence hierarchy considerations during reranking. We present SR-RAG, an EBM-adapted GraphRAG framework that integrates the PICO framework into knowledge graph construction and retrieval, and proposes Bayesian Evidence Tier Reranking (BETR) to calibrate ranking scores by evidence grade without predefined weights. Validated in sports rehabilitation, we release a knowledge graph (357,844 nodes, 371,226 edges) and a benchmark of 1,637 QA pairs. SR-RAG achieves 0.812 evidence recall@10, 0.830 nugget coverage, 0.819 answer faithfulness, 0.882 semantic similarity, and 0.788 PICOT match accuracy, substantially outperforming five baselines. Five expert clinicians rated the system 4.66--4.84 on a 5-point Likert scale, and system rankings are preserved on a human-verified gold subset (n=80).

Despite recent progress in 3D self-supervised learning, collecting large-scale 3D scene scans remains expensive and labor-intensive. In this work, we investigate whether 3D representations can be learned from unlabeled videos recorded without any real 3D sensors. We present Laplacian-Aware Multi-level 3D Clustering with Sinkhorn-Knopp (LAM3C), a self-supervised framework that learns from video-generated point clouds reconstructed from unlabeled videos. We first introduce RoomTours, a video-generated point cloud dataset constructed by collecting room-walkthrough videos from the web (e.g., real-estate tours) and generating 49,219 scenes using an off-the-shelf feed-forward reconstruction model. We also propose a noise-regularized loss that stabilizes representation learning by enforcing local geometric smoothness and ensuring feature stability under noisy point clouds. Remarkably, without using any real 3D scans, LAM3C achieves better performance than previous self-supervised methods on indoor semantic and instance segmentation. These results suggest that unlabeled videos represent an abundant source of data for 3D self-supervised learning. Our source code is available at https://ryosuke-yamada.github.io/lam3c/.

Human-object interaction (HOI) video generation has garnered increasing attention due to its promising applications in digital humans, e-commerce, advertising, and robotics imitation learning. However, existing methods face two critical limitations: (1) a lack of effective mechanisms to inject multi-view information of the object into the model, leading to poor cross-view consistency, and (2) heavy reliance on fine-grained hand mesh annotations for modeling interaction occlusions. To address these challenges, we introduce ByteLoom, a Diffusion Transformer (DiT)-based framework that generates realistic HOI videos with geometrically consistent object illustration, using simplified human conditioning and 3D object inputs. We first propose an RCM-cache mechanism that leverages Relative Coordinate Maps (RCM) as a universal representation to maintain object's geometry consistency and precisely control 6-DoF object transformations in the meantime. To compensate HOI dataset scarcity and leverage existing datasets, we further design a training curriculum that enhances model capabilities in a progressive style and relaxes the demand of hand mesh. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method faithfully preserves human identity and the object's multi-view geometry, while maintaining smooth motion and object manipulation.

Machine learning is a powerful tool enabling full automation of a huge number of tasks without explicit programming. Despite recent progress of machine learning in different domains, these models have shown vulnerabilities when they are exposed to adversarial threats. Adversarial threats aim to hinder the machine learning models from satisfying their objectives. They can create adversarial perturbations, which are imperceptible to humans' eyes but have the ability to cause misclassification during inference. In this paper, we propose a defense system, which devises an adversarial training module within mixture-of-experts architecture to enhance its robustness against white-box evasion attacks. In our proposed defense system, we use nine pre-trained classifiers (experts) with ResNet-18 as their backbone. During end-to-end training, the parameters of all experts and the gating mechanism are jointly updated allowing further optimization of the experts. Our proposed defense system outperforms prior MoE-based defenses under strong white-box FGSM and PGD evaluation on CIFAR-10 and SVHN. The use of multiple experts increases training time and compute relative to single-network baselines; however, inference scales approximately linearly with the number of experts and is substantially cheaper than training.

In recent years, the development of multimodal autoencoders has gained significant attention due to their potential to handle multimodal complex data types and improve model performance. Understanding the stability and robustness of these models is crucial for optimizing their training, architecture, and real-world applicability. This paper presents an analysis of Lipschitz properties in multimodal autoencoders, combining both theoretical insights and empirical validation to enhance the training stability of these models. We begin by deriving the theoretical Lipschitz constants for aggregation methods within the multimodal autoencoder framework. We then introduce a regularized attention-based fusion method, developed based on our theoretical analysis, which demonstrates improved stability and performance during training. Through a series of experiments, we empirically validate our theoretical findings by estimating the Lipschitz constants across multiple trials and fusion strategies. Our results demonstrate that our proposed fusion function not only aligns with theoretical predictions but also outperforms existing strategies in terms of consistency, convergence speed, and accuracy. This work provides a solid theoretical foundation for understanding fusion in multimodal autoencoders and contributes a solution for enhancing their performance.

User interface to code (UI2Code) aims to generate executable code that can faithfully reconstruct a given input UI. Prior work focuses largely on web pages and mobile screens, leaving app widgets underexplored. Unlike web or mobile UIs with rich hierarchical context, widgets are compact, context-free micro-interfaces that summarize key information through dense layouts and iconography under strict spatial constraints. Moreover, while (image, code) pairs are widely available for web or mobile UIs, widget designs are proprietary and lack accessible markup. We formalize this setting as the Widget-to-Code (Widget2Code) and introduce an image-only widget benchmark with fine-grained, multi-dimensional evaluation metrics. Benchmarking shows that although generalized multimodal large language models (MLLMs) outperform specialized UI2Code methods, they still produce unreliable and visually inconsistent code. To address these limitations, we develop a baseline that jointly advances perceptual understanding and structured code generation. At the perceptual level, we follow widget design principles to assemble atomic components into complete layouts, equipped with icon retrieval and reusable visualization modules. At the system level, we design an end-to-end infrastructure, WidgetFactory, which includes a framework-agnostic widget-tailored domain-specific language (WidgetDSL) and a compiler that translates it into multiple front-end implementations (e.g., React, HTML/CSS). An adaptive rendering module further refines spatial dimensions to satisfy compactness constraints. Together, these contributions substantially enhance visual fidelity, establishing a strong baseline and unified infrastructure for future Widget2Code research.

Understanding and generating multi-person interactions is a fundamental challenge with broad implications for robotics and social computing. While humans naturally coordinate in groups, modeling such interactions remains difficult due to long temporal horizons, strong inter-agent dependencies, and variable group sizes. Existing motion generation methods are largely task-specific and do not generalize to flexible multi-agent generation. We introduce MAGNet (Multi-Agent Generative Network), a unified autoregressive diffusion framework for multi-agent motion generation that supports a wide range of interaction tasks through flexible conditioning and sampling. MAGNet performs dyadic and polyadic prediction, partner inpainting, partner prediction, and agentic generation all within a single model, and can autoregressively generate ultra-long sequences spanning hundreds of motion steps. We explicitly model inter-agent coupling during autoregressive denoising, enabling coherent coordination across agents. As a result, MAGNet captures both tightly synchronized activities (e.g., dancing, boxing) and loosely structured social interactions. Our approach performs on par with specialized methods on dyadic benchmarks while naturally extending to polyadic scenarios involving three or more interacting people. Please watch the supplemental video, where the temporal dynamics and spatial coordination of generated interactions are best appreciated. Project page: https://von31.github.io/MAGNet/

This paper does not introduce a novel method but instead establishes a straightforward, incremental, yet essential baseline for video temporal grounding (VTG), a core capability in video understanding. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) excel at various video understanding tasks, the recipes for optimizing them for VTG remain under-explored. In this paper, we present TimeLens, a systematic investigation into building MLLMs with strong VTG ability, along two primary dimensions: data quality and algorithmic design. We first expose critical quality issues in existing VTG benchmarks and introduce TimeLens-Bench, comprising meticulously re-annotated versions of three popular benchmarks with strict quality criteria. Our analysis reveals dramatic model re-rankings compared to legacy benchmarks, confirming the unreliability of prior evaluation standards. We also address noisy training data through an automated re-annotation pipeline, yielding TimeLens-100K, a large-scale, high-quality training dataset. Building on our data foundation, we conduct in-depth explorations of algorithmic design principles, yielding a series of meaningful insights and effective yet efficient practices. These include interleaved textual encoding for time representation, a thinking-free reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) approach as the training paradigm, and carefully designed recipes for RLVR training. These efforts culminate in TimeLens models, a family of MLLMs with state-of-the-art VTG performance among open-source models and even surpass proprietary models such as GPT-5 and Gemini-2.5-Flash. All codes, data, and models will be released to facilitate future research.

We introduce MoLingo, a text-to-motion (T2M) model that generates realistic, lifelike human motion by denoising in a continuous latent space. Recent works perform latent space diffusion, either on the whole latent at once or auto-regressively over multiple latents. In this paper, we study how to make diffusion on continuous motion latents work best. We focus on two questions: (1) how to build a semantically aligned latent space so diffusion becomes more effective, and (2) how to best inject text conditioning so the motion follows the description closely. We propose a semantic-aligned motion encoder trained with frame-level text labels so that latents with similar text meaning stay close, which makes the latent space more diffusion-friendly. We also compare single-token conditioning with a multi-token cross-attention scheme and find that cross-attention gives better motion realism and text-motion alignment. With semantically aligned latents, auto-regressive generation, and cross-attention text conditioning, our model sets a new state of the art in human motion generation on standard metrics and in a user study. We will release our code and models for further research and downstream usage.

Trajectory-scoring planners achieve high navigation compliance when following the expert's original command, yet they struggle at intersections when presented with alternative commands; over 30 percent of such commands are ignored. We attribute this navigation compliance gap to two root causes: (1) existing metrics like Ego Progress do not explicitly measure navigation adherence, diluting the gap between on-route and off-route trajectories; and (2) current datasets pair each scenario with a single command, preventing models from learning command-dependent behavior. We address the metric gap by introducing the binary Navigation Compliance metric (NAVI) and the derived Controllability Measure (CM), and the data gap with the NavControl dataset, 14,918 intersection scenarios augmented with all feasible alternative commands and routing annotations, yielding over 34,000 direction samples. Building on these, we propose NaviHydra, a trajectory-scoring planner incorporating NAVI distillation and Bird's Eye View (BEV)-based trajectory gathering for context-position-aware trajectory feature extraction. NaviHydra achieves 92.7 PDM score on NAVSIM navtest split and 77.5 CM on NavControl test split. Training with NavControl improves controllability across diverse architectures, confirming it as a broadly effective augmentation for navigation compliance.

Neural network constraint satisfaction is crucial for safety-critical applications such as power system optimization, robotic path planning, and autonomous driving. However, existing constraint satisfaction methods face efficiency-applicability trade-offs, with hard constraint methods suffering from either high computational complexity or restrictive assumptions on constraint structures. The Sampling Kaczmarz-Motzkin (SKM) method is a randomized iterative algorithm for solving large-scale linear inequality systems with favorable convergence properties, but its argmax operations introduce non-differentiability, posing challenges for neural network applications. This work proposes the Trainable Sampling Kaczmarz-Motzkin Network (T-SKM-Net) framework and, for the first time, systematically integrates SKM-type methods into neural network constraint satisfaction. The framework transforms mixed constraint problems into pure inequality problems through null space transformation, employs SKM for iterative solving, and maps solutions back to the original constraint space, efficiently handling both equality and inequality constraints. We provide theoretical proof of post-processing effectiveness in expectation and end-to-end trainability guarantees based on unbiased gradient estimators, demonstrating that despite non-differentiable operations, the framework supports standard backpropagation. On the DCOPF case118 benchmark, our method achieves 4.27ms/item GPU serial forward inference with 0.0025% max optimality gap with post-processing mode and 5.25ms/item with 0.0008% max optimality gap with joint training mode, delivering over 25$\times$ speedup compared to the pandapower solver while maintaining zero constraint violations under given tolerance.

Recent advances in 4D Gaussian Splatting (4DGS) have extended the high-speed rendering capability of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) into the temporal domain, enabling real-time rendering of dynamic scenes. However, one of the major remaining challenges lies in modeling long-range motion-contained dynamic videos, where a naive extension of existing methods leads to severe memory explosion, temporal flickering, and failure to handle appearing or disappearing occlusions over time. To address these challenges, we propose a novel 4DGS framework characterized by an Anchor Relay-based Bidirectional Blending (ARBB) mechanism, named MoRel, which enables temporally consistent and memory-efficient modeling of long-range dynamic scenes. Our method progressively constructs locally canonical anchor spaces at key-frame time index and models inter-frame deformations at the anchor level, enhancing temporal coherence. By learning bidirectional deformations between KfA and adaptively blending them through learnable opacity control, our approach mitigates temporal discontinuities and flickering artifacts. We further introduce a Feature-variance-guided Hierarchical Densification (FHD) scheme that effectively densifies KfA's while keeping rendering quality, based on an assigned level of feature-variance. To effectively evaluate our model's capability to handle real-world long-range 4D motion, we newly compose long-range 4D motion-contained dataset, called SelfCap$_{\text{LR}}$. It has larger average dynamic motion magnitude, captured at spatially wider spaces, compared to previous dynamic video datasets. Overall, our MoRel achieves temporally coherent and flicker-free long-range 4D reconstruction while maintaining bounded memory usage, demonstrating both scalability and efficiency in dynamic Gaussian-based representations.

Image generation has emerged as a mainstream application of large generative models. Just as test-time compute and reasoning have improved language model capabilities, similar benefits have been observed for image generation models. In particular, searching over noise samples for diffusion and flow models has been shown to scale well with test-time compute. While recent works explore allocating non-uniform inference-compute budgets across denoising steps, existing approaches rely on greedy heuristics and often allocate the compute budget ineffectively. In this work, we study this problem and propose a simple fix. We propose Verifier-Threshold, which automatically reallocates test-time compute and delivers substantial efficiency improvements. For the same performance on the GenEval benchmark, we achieve a 2-4x reduction in computational time over the state-of-the-art method.

Accurate tropical cyclones (TCs) tracking represents a critical challenge in the context of weather and climate science. Traditional tracking schemes mainly rely on subjective thresholds, which may introduce biases in their skills on the geographical region of application and are often computationally and data-intensive, due to the management of a large number of variables. We present \textit{ByteStorm}, an efficient data-driven framework for reconstructing TC tracks. It leverages deep learning networks to detect TC centers (via classification and localization), using only relative vorticity (850 mb) and mean sea-level pressure. Then, detected centers are linked into TC tracks through the BYTE algorithm. \textit{ByteStorm} is benchmarked with state-of-the-art deterministic trackers on the main global TC formation basins. The proposed framework achieves good tracking skills in terms of Probability of Detection and False Alarm Rate, accurately reproduces Seasonal and Inter-Annual Variability, and reconstructs reliable, smooth and coherent TC tracks. These results highlight the potential of integrating deep learning and computer vision to provide robust, computationally efficient and skillful data-driven alternatives to TC tracking.

Scenes in the real world are often composed of several static and dynamic objects. Capturing their 4-dimensional structures, composition and spatio-temporal configuration in-the-wild, though extremely interesting, is equally hard. Therefore, existing works often focus on one object at a time, while relying on some category-specific parametric shape model for dynamic objects. This can lead to inconsistent scene configurations, in addition to being limited to the modeled object categories. We propose COM4D (Compositional 4D), a method that consistently and jointly predicts the structure and spatio-temporal configuration of 4D/3D objects using only static multi-object or dynamic single object supervision. We achieve this by a carefully designed training of spatial and temporal attentions on 2D video input. The training is disentangled into learning from object compositions on the one hand, and single object dynamics throughout the video on the other, thus completely avoiding reliance on 4D compositional training data. At inference time, our proposed attention mixing mechanism combines these independently learned attentions, without requiring any 4D composition examples. By alternating between spatial and temporal reasoning, COM4D reconstructs complete and persistent 4D scenes with multiple interacting objects directly from monocular videos. Furthermore, COM4D provides state-of-the-art results in existing separate problems of 4D object and composed 3D reconstruction despite being purely data-driven.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently achieved remarkable progress in robotic manipulation, yet they remain limited in failure diagnosis and learning from failures. Additionally, existing failure datasets are mostly generated programmatically in simulation, which limits their generalization to the real world. In light of these, we introduce ViFailback, a framework designed to diagnose robotic manipulation failures and provide both textual and visual correction guidance. Our framework utilizes explicit visual symbols to enhance annotation efficiency. We further release the ViFailback dataset, a large-scale collection of 58,126 Visual Question Answering (VQA) pairs along with their corresponding 5,202 real-world manipulation trajectories. Based on the dataset, we establish ViFailback-Bench, a benchmark of 11 fine-grained VQA tasks designed to assess the failure diagnosis and correction abilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), featuring ViFailback-Bench Lite for closed-ended and ViFailback-Bench Hard for open-ended evaluation. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, we built the ViFailback-8B VLM, which not only achieves significant overall performance improvement on ViFailback-Bench but also generates visual symbols for corrective action guidance. Finally, by integrating ViFailback-8B with a VLA model, we conduct real-world robotic experiments demonstrating its ability to assist the VLA model in recovering from failures. Project Website: https://x1nyuzhou.github.io/vifailback.github.io/

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are biologically inspired, event-driven models suited for temporal data processing and energy-efficient neuromorphic computing. In SNNs, richer neuronal dynamic allows capturing more complex temporal dependencies, with delays playing a crucial role by allowing past inputs to directly influence present spiking behavior. We propose a general framework for incorporating delays into SNNs through additional state variables. The proposed mechanism enables each neuron to access a finite temporal input history. The framework is agnostic to neuron models and hence can be seamlessly integrated into standard spiking neuron models such as Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (LIF) and Adaptive LIF (adLIF). We analyze how the duration of the delays and the learnable parameters associated with them affect the performance. We investigate the trade-offs in the network architecture due to additional state variables introduced by the delay mechanism. Experiments on the Spiking Heidelberg Digits (SHD) dataset show that the proposed mechanism matches existing delay-based SNNs in performance while remaining computationally efficient, with particular gains in smaller networks.

Recent progress in contact-rich robotic manipulation has been striking, yet most deployed systems remain confined to simple, scripted routines. One of the key barriers is the lack of motion planning algorithms that can provide verifiable guarantees for safety, efficiency and reliability. To address this, a family of algorithms called Constant-Time Motion Planning (CTMP) was introduced, which leverages a preprocessing phase to enable collision-free motion queries in a fixed, user-specified time budget (e.g., 10 milliseconds). However, existing CTMP methods do not explicitly incorporate the manipulation behaviors essential for object handling. To bridge this gap, we introduce the \textit{Behavioral Constant-Time Motion Planner} (B-CTMP), an algorithm that extends CTMP to solve a broad class of two-step manipulation tasks: (1) a collision-free motion to a behavior initiation state, followed by (2) execution of a manipulation behavior (such as grasping or insertion) to reach the goal. By precomputing compact data structures, B-CTMP guarantees constant-time query in mere milliseconds while ensuring completeness and successful task execution over a specified set of states. We evaluate B-CTMP on two canonical manipulation tasks, shelf picking and plug insertion, in simulation and on a real robot. Our results show that B-CTMP unifies collision-free planning and object manipulation within a single constant-time framework, providing provable guarantees of speed and success for manipulation in semi-structured environments.

Existing active learning (AL) strategies capture fundamentally different notions of data value, e.g., uncertainty or representativeness. Consequently, the effectiveness of strategies can vary substantially across datasets, models, and even AL cycles. Committing to a single strategy risks suboptimal performance, as no single strategy dominates throughout the entire AL process. We introduce REFINE, an ensemble AL method that combines multiple strategies without knowing in advance which will perform best. In each AL cycle, REFINE operates in two stages: (1) Progressive filtering iteratively refines the unlabeled pool by considering an ensemble of AL strategies, retaining promising candidates capturing different notions of value. (2) Coverage-based selection then chooses a final batch from this refined pool, ensuring all previously identified notions of value are accounted for. Extensive experiments across 6 classification datasets and 3 foundation models show that REFINE consistently outperforms individual strategies and existing ensemble methods. Notably, progressive filtering serves as a powerful preprocessing step that improves the performance of any individual AL strategy applied to the refined pool, which we demonstrate on an audio spectrogram classification use case. Finally, the ensemble of REFINE can be easily extended with upcoming state-of-the-art AL strategies.

Foundation models pre-trained with self-supervised learning (SSL) on large-scale datasets have become powerful general-purpose feature extractors. However, their immense size and computational cost make them prohibitive for deployment on edge devices such as robots and AR/VR headsets. Existing compression techniques like standard knowledge distillation create efficient 'specialist' models but sacrifice the crucial, downstream-agnostic generality that makes foundation models so valuable. In this paper, we introduce Foundation Model Distillation (FMD), a new paradigm for compressing large SSL models into compact, efficient, and faithful proxies that retain their general-purpose representational power. We present Foundry, the first implementation of FMD for 3D point clouds. Our approach, Foundry, trains a student to learn a compressed set of SuperTokens that reconstruct the teacher's token-level representations, capturing a compact basis of its latent space. A single distilled model maintains strong transferability across diverse downstream tasks-classification, part segmentation, and few-shot scenarios-approaching full foundation-model performance while using significantly fewer tokens and FLOPs, making such models more practical for deployment on resourceconstrained hardware.

Diffusion models face a fundamental trade-off between generation quality and computational efficiency. Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) offer an efficient solution but suffer from potential information loss and non-end-to-end training. In contrast, existing pixel space models bypass VAEs but are computationally prohibitive for high-resolution synthesis. To resolve this dilemma, we propose DiP, an efficient pixel space diffusion framework. DiP decouples generation into a global and a local stage: a Diffusion Transformer (DiT) backbone operates on large patches for efficient global structure construction, while a co-trained lightweight Patch Detailer Head leverages contextual features to restore fine-grained local details. This synergistic design achieves computational efficiency comparable to LDMs without relying on a VAE. DiP is accomplished with up to 10$\times$ faster inference speeds than previous method while increasing the total number of parameters by only 0.3%, and achieves an 1.79 FID score on ImageNet 256$\times$256.

The applicability of current lesion segmentation models for chest X-rays (CXRs) has been limited both by a small number of target labels and the reliance on complex, expert-level text inputs, creating a barrier to practical use. To address these limitations, we introduce instruction-guided lesion segmentation (ILS), a medical-domain adaptation of referring image segmentation (RIS) designed to segment diverse lesion types based on simple, user-friendly instructions. Under this task, we construct MIMIC-ILS, the first large-scale instruction-answer dataset for CXR lesion segmentation, using our fully automated multimodal pipeline that generates annotations from CXR images and their corresponding reports. MIMIC-ILS contains 1.1M instruction-answer pairs derived from 192K images and 91K unique segmentation masks, covering seven major lesion types. To empirically demonstrate its utility, we present ROSALIA, a LISA model fine-tuned on the MIMIC-ILS dataset. ROSALIA can segment diverse lesions and provide textual explanations in response to user instructions. The model achieves high accuracy in our newly proposed task, highlighting the effectiveness of our pipeline and the value of MIMIC-ILS as a foundational resource for pixel-level CXR lesion grounding. The dataset and model are available at https://github.com/checkoneee/ROSALIA.

The integration of AI tools into medical applications has aimed to improve the efficiency of diagnosis. The emergence of large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT and Claude, has expanded this integration even further despite a concern for their environmental impact. Because of LLM versatility and ease of use through APIs, these larger models are often utilised even though smaller, custom models can be used instead. In this paper, LLMs and small discriminative models are integrated into a Mendix application to detect Covid-19 in chest X-rays. These discriminative models are also used to provide knowledge bases for LLMs to improve accuracy. This provides a benchmark study of 14 different model configurations for comparison of diagnostic accuracy and environmental impact. The findings indicated that while smaller models reduced the carbon footprint of the application, the output was biased towards a positive diagnosis and the output probabilities were lacking confidence. Meanwhile, restricting LLMs to only give probabilistic output caused poor performance in both accuracy and carbon footprint, demonstrating the risk of using LLMs as a universal AI solution. While using the smaller LLM GPT-4.1-Nano reduced the carbon footprint by 94.2% compared to the larger models, this was still disproportionate to the discriminative models; the most efficient solution was the Covid-Net model. Although it had a larger carbon footprint than other small models, its carbon footprint was 99.9% less than when using GPT-4.5-Preview, whilst achieving an accuracy of 95.5%, the highest of all models examined. This paper contributes to knowledge by comparing generative and discriminative models in Covid-19 detection as well as highlighting the environmental risk of using generative tools for classification tasks.

Log-based anomaly detection is critical for ensuring the stability and reliability of web systems. One of the key problems in this task is the lack of sufficient labeled logs, which limits the rapid deployment in new systems. Existing works usually leverage large-scale labeled logs from a mature web system and a small amount of labeled logs from a new system, using transfer learning to extract and generalize general knowledge across both domains. However, these methods focus solely on the transfer of general knowledge and neglect the disparity and potential mismatch between such knowledge and the proprietary knowledge of target system, thus constraining performance. To address this limitation, we propose FusionLog, a novel zero-label cross-system log-based anomaly detection method that effectively achieves the fusion of general and proprietary knowledge, enabling cross-system generalization without any labeled target logs. Specifically, we first design a training-free router based on semantic similarity that dynamically partitions unlabeled target logs into 'general logs' and 'proprietary logs.' For general logs, FusionLog employs a small model based on system-agnostic representation meta-learning for direct training and inference, inheriting the general anomaly patterns shared between the source and target systems. For proprietary logs, we iteratively generate pseudo-labels and fine-tune the small model using multi-round collaborative knowledge distillation and fusion based on large language model (LLM) and small model (SM) to enhance its capability to recognize anomaly patterns specific to the target system. Experimental results on three public log datasets from different systems show that FusionLog achieves over 90% F1-score under a fully zero-label setting, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art cross-system log-based anomaly detection methods.

People see text. Humans read by recognizing words as visual objects, including their shapes, layouts, and patterns, before connecting them to meaning, which enables us to handle typos, distorted fonts, and various scripts effectively. Modern large language models (LLMs), however, rely on subword tokenization, fragmenting text into pieces from a fixed vocabulary. While effective for high-resource languages, this approach over-segments low-resource languages, yielding long, linguistically meaningless sequences and inflating computation. In this work, we challenge this entrenched paradigm and move toward a vision-centric alternative. Our method, SeeTok, renders text as images (visual-text) and leverages pretrained multimodal LLMs to interpret them, reusing strong OCR and text-vision alignment abilities learned from large-scale multimodal training. Across three different language tasks, SeeTok matches or surpasses subword tokenizers while requiring 4.43 times fewer tokens and reducing FLOPs by 70.5%, with additional gains in cross-lingual generalization, robustness to typographic noise, and linguistic hierarchy. SeeTok signals a shift from symbolic tokenization to human-like visual reading, and takes a step toward more natural and cognitively inspired language models.