Reasoning-focused LLMs improve answer quality by generating longer reasoning traces, but the additional tokens dramatically increase serving cost, motivating inference optimization. We extend and apply Puzzle, a post-training neural architecture search (NAS) framework, to gpt-oss-120B to produce gpt-oss-puzzle-88B, a deployment-optimized derivative. Our approach combines heterogeneous MoE expert pruning, selective replacement of full-context attention with window attention, FP8 KV-cache quantization with calibrated scales, and post-training reinforcement learning to recover accuracy, while maintaining low generation length. In terms of per-token speeds, on an 8XH100 node we achieve 1.63X and 1.22X throughput speedups in long-context and short-context settings, respectively. gpt-oss-puzzle-88B also delivers throughput speedups of 2.82X on a single NVIDIA H100 GPU. However, because token counts can change with reasoning effort and model variants, per-token throughput (tok/s) and latency (ms/token) do not necessarily lead to end-to-end speedups: a 2X throughput gain is erased if traces grow 2X. Conversely, throughput gains can be spent on more reasoning tokens to improve accuracy; we therefore advocate request-level efficiency metrics that normalize throughput by tokens generated and trace an accuracy--speed frontier across reasoning efforts. We show that gpt-oss-puzzle-88B improves over gpt-oss-120B along the entire frontier, delivering up to 1.29X higher request-level efficiency. Across various benchmarks, gpt-oss-puzzle-88B matches or slightly exceeds the parent on suite-average accuracy across reasoning efforts, with retention ranging from 100.8% (high) to 108.2% (low), showing that post-training architecture search can substantially reduce inference costs without sacrificing quality.

We present Wid3R, a feed-forward neural network for multi-view visual geometry reconstruction that supports wide field-of-view camera models. Unlike existing methods that assume rectified or pinhole inputs, Wid3R directly models wide-angle imagery without explicit calibration or undistortion. Our approach leverages a ray-based representation with spherical harmonics and introduces a novel camera model token to enable distortion-aware reconstruction. To the best of our knowledge, Wid3R is the first multi-frame feed-forward 3D reconstruction method that supports 360 imagery. Moreover, we show that conditioning on diverse camera types improves generalization to 360 scenes and alleviates data sparsity issues. Wid3R achieves significant performance gains, improving AUC@30 by up to +33.67 on Zip-NeRF (fisheye) and +77.33 on Stanford2D3D (360).

Infrared small targets are typically tiny and locally salient, which belong to high-frequency components (HFCs) in images. Single-frame infrared small target (SIRST) detection is challenging, since there are many HFCs along with targets, such as bright corners, broken clouds, and other clutters. Current learning-based methods rely on the powerful capabilities of deep networks, but neglect explicit modeling and discriminative representation learning of various HFCs, which is important to distinguish targets from other HFCs. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose a dynamic high-frequency convolution (DHiF) to translate the discriminative modeling process into the generation of a dynamic local filter bank. Especially, DHiF is sensitive to HFCs, owing to the dynamic parameters of its generated filters being symmetrically adjusted within a zero-centered range according to Fourier transformation properties. Combining with standard convolution operations, DHiF can adaptively and dynamically process different HFC regions and capture their distinctive grayscale variation characteristics for discriminative representation learning. DHiF functions as a drop-in replacement for standard convolution and can be used in arbitrary SIRST detection networks without significant decrease in computational efficiency. To validate the effectiveness of our DHiF, we conducted extensive experiments across different SIRST detection networks on real-scene datasets. Compared to other state-of-the-art convolution operations, DHiF exhibits superior detection performance with promising improvement. Codes are available at https://github.com/TinaLRJ/DHiF.

Municipal meeting minutes are official documents of local governance, exhibiting heterogeneous formats and writing styles. Effective information retrieval (IR) requires identifying metadata such as meeting number, date, location, participants, and start/end times, elements that are rarely standardized or easy to extract automatically. Existing named entity recognition (NER) models are ill-suited to this task, as they are not adapted to such domain-specific categories. In this paper, we propose a two-stage pipeline for metadata extraction from municipal minutes. First, a question answering (QA) model identifies the opening and closing text segments containing metadata. Transformer-based models (BERTimbau and XLM-RoBERTa with and without a CRF layer) are then applied for fine-grained entity extraction and enhanced through deslexicalization. To evaluate our proposed pipeline, we benchmark both open-weight (Phi) and closed-weight (Gemini) LLMs, assessing predictive performance, inference cost, and carbon footprint. Our results demonstrate strong in-domain performance, better than larger general-purpose LLMs. However, cross-municipality evaluation reveals reduced generalization reflecting the variability and linguistic complexity of municipal records. This work establishes the first benchmark for metadata extraction from municipal meeting minutes, providing a solid foundation for future research in this domain.

Fact-checking remains a demanding and time-consuming task, still largely dependent on manual verification and unable to match the rapid spread of misinformation online. This is particularly important because debunking false information typically takes longer to reach consumers than the misinformation itself; accelerating corrections through automation can therefore help counter it more effectively. Although many organizations perform manual fact-checking, this approach is difficult to scale given the growing volume of digital content. These limitations have motivated interest in automating fact-checking, where identifying claims is a crucial first step. However, progress has been uneven across languages, with English dominating due to abundant annotated data. Portuguese, like other languages, still lacks accessible, licensed datasets, limiting research, NLP developments and applications. In this paper, we introduce ClaimPT, a dataset of European Portuguese news articles annotated for factual claims, comprising 1,308 articles and 6,875 individual annotations. Unlike most existing resources based on social media or parliamentary transcripts, ClaimPT focuses on journalistic content, collected through a partnership with LUSA, the Portuguese News Agency. To ensure annotation quality, two trained annotators labeled each article, with a curator validating all annotations according to a newly proposed scheme. We also provide baseline models for claim detection, establishing initial benchmarks and enabling future NLP and IR applications. By releasing ClaimPT, we aim to advance research on low-resource fact-checking and enhance understanding of misinformation in news media.

City council minutes are typically lengthy and formal documents with a bureaucratic writing style. Although publicly available, their structure often makes it difficult for citizens or journalists to efficiently find information. In this demo, we present CitiLink, a platform designed to transform unstructured municipal meeting minutes into structured and searchable data, demonstrating how NLP and IR can enhance the accessibility and transparency of local government. The system employs LLMs to extract metadata, discussed subjects, and voting outcomes, which are then indexed in a database to support full-text search with BM25 ranking and faceted filtering through a user-friendly interface. The developed system was built over a collection of 120 minutes made available by six Portuguese municipalities. To assess its usability, CitiLink was tested through guided sessions with municipal personnel, providing insights into how real users interact with the system. In addition, we evaluated Gemini's performance in extracting relevant information from the minutes, highlighting its effectiveness in data extraction.

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) are typically trained using autoregressive language modeling objectives, which align visual representations with linguistic space. While effective for multimodal reasoning, this alignment can weaken vision-centric capabilities, causing LVLMs to underperform their base vision encoders on tasks such as image classification. To address this limitation, we propose Context-Aware Image Representation Prioritization via Ensemble (CARPE), a lightweight framework that integrates raw vision features with aligned LLM representations through vision-integration layers and a context-aware ensemble mechanism. This design enhances the model's ability to adaptively weight visual and textual modalities and enables the model to capture various aspects of image representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CARPE improves performance on both image classification and diverse vision-language benchmarks. Our results suggest that modality balancing plays a critical role in multimodal generalization by improving representation utilization within autoregressive LVLMs.

Decentralized Federated Learning (DFL) has emerged as a privacy-preserving machine learning paradigm that enables collaborative training among users without relying on a central server. However, its performance often degrades significantly due to limited connectivity and data heterogeneity. As we move toward the next generation of wireless networks, mobility is increasingly embedded in many real-world applications. The user mobility, either natural or induced, enables clients to act as relays or bridges, thus enhancing information flow in sparse networks; however, its impact on DFL has been largely overlooked despite its potential. In this work, we systematically investigate the role of mobility in improving DFL performance. We first establish the convergence of DFL in sparse networks under user mobility and theoretically demonstrate that even random movement of a fraction of users can significantly boost performance. Building upon this insight, we propose a DFL framework that utilizes mobile users with induced mobility patterns, allowing them to exploit the knowledge of data distribution to determine their trajectories to enhance information propagation through the network. Through extensive experiments, we empirically confirm our theoretical findings, validate the superiority of our approach over baselines, and provide a comprehensive analysis of how various network parameters influence DFL performance in mobile networks.

The present paper introduces concurrency-driven enhancements to the training algorithm for the Kolmogorov-Arnold networks (KANs) that is based on the Newton-Kaczmarz (NK) method. Prior research shows that KANs trained using the NK-based approach significantly overtake classical neural networks based on multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) in terms of accuracy and training time. Although some parts of the algorithm, such as the evaluation of the basis functions, can be parallelised, the fundamental limitation lies in the sequential computation of the updates - each update depends on the results of the previous step, obstructing parallelisation. However, substantial acceleration is achievable. Three complementary strategies are proposed in the present paper: (i) a pre-training procedure tailored to the NK updates' structure, (ii) training on disjoint subsets of data, followed by models' merging, not in the context of federated learning, but as a mechanism for accelerating the convergence, and (iii) a parallelisation technique suitable for execution on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), which is implemented and tested directly on the device. With these novel techniques, computational experiments show that KANs can be trained more than 40 times faster than neural networks, when training is done to the same accuracy on CPUs. All presented experimental results are fully reproducible, with the complete source codes available online.

Training large neural networks and merging task-specific models both exploit low-rank structure and require parameter importance estimation, yet these challenges have been pursued in isolation. Current workflows compute curvature information during training, discard it, then recompute similar information for merging--wasting computation and discarding valuable trajectory data. We introduce a unified framework that maintains factorized momentum and curvature statistics during training, then reuses this information for geometry-aware model composition. The proposed method incurs modest memory overhead (approximately 30% over AdamW) to accumulate task saliency scores that enable curvature-aware merging. These scores, computed as a byproduct of optimization, provide importance estimates comparable to post-hoc Fisher computation while producing merge-ready models directly from training. We establish convergence guarantees for non-convex objectives with approximation error bounded by gradient singular value decay. On natural language understanding benchmarks, curvature-aware parameter selection outperforms magnitude-only baselines across all sparsity levels, with multi-task merging improving 1.6% over strong baselines. The proposed framework exhibits rank-invariant convergence and superior hyperparameter robustness compared to existing low-rank optimizers. By treating the optimization trajectory as a reusable asset rather than discarding it, our approach demonstrates that training-time curvature information suffices for effective model composition, enabling a unified training-merging pipeline.

Radio path loss prediction (RPP) is critical for optimizing 5G networks and enabling IoT, smart city, and similar applications. However, current deep learning-based RPP methods lack proactive environmental modeling, struggle with realistic multi-transmitter scenarios, and generalize poorly under distribution shifts, particularly when training/testing environments differ in building density or transmitter configurations. This paper identifies three key issues: (1) passive environmental modeling that overlooks transmitters and key environmental features; (2) overemphasis on single-transmitter scenarios despite real-world multi-transmitter prevalence; (3) excessive focus on in-distribution performance while neglecting distribution shift challenges. To address these, we propose PathFinder, a novel architecture that actively models buildings and transmitters via disentangled feature encoding and integrates Mask-Guided Low-Rank Attention to independently focus on receiver and building regions. We also introduce a Transmitter-Oriented Mixup strategy for robust training and a new benchmark, single-to-multi-transmitter RPP (S2MT-RPP), tailored to evaluate extrapolation performance (multi-transmitter testing after single-transmitter training). Experimental results show PathFinder outperforms state-of-the-art methods significantly, especially in challenging multi-transmitter scenarios. Our code and project site are available at: https://emorzz1g.github.io/PathFinder/.

Mixture of Experts (MoE) models have emerged as the de facto architecture for scaling up language models without significantly increasing the computational cost. Recent MoE models demonstrate a clear trend towards high expert granularity (smaller expert intermediate dimension) and higher sparsity (constant number of activated experts with a higher number of total experts), which improve model quality per FLOP. However, fine-grained MoEs suffer from increased activation memory footprint and reduced hardware efficiency due to higher IO costs, while sparser MoEs suffer from wasted computations due to padding in Grouped GEMM kernels. In response, we propose a memory-efficient algorithm to compute the forward and backward passes of MoEs with minimal activation caching for the backward pass. We also design GPU kernels that overlap memory IO with computation, benefiting all MoE architectures. Finally, we propose a novel "token rounding" method that minimizes the wasted compute due to padding in Grouped GEMM kernels. As a result, our method SonicMoE reduces activation memory by 45% and achieves a 1.86x compute throughput improvement on Hopper GPUs compared to ScatterMoE's BF16 MoE kernel for a fine-grained 7B MoE. Concretely, SonicMoE on 64 H100s achieves a training throughput of 213 billion tokens per day, comparable to ScatterMoE's 225 billion tokens per day on 96 H100s for a 7B MoE model training with FSDP-2 using the lm-engine codebase. On Blackwell GPUs, SonicMoE also achieves a 25% and 15% relative speedup on the forward and backward pass respectively compared to a highly optimized DeepGEMM baseline on OLMoE-sized 7B MoE models. Under high MoE sparsity settings, our tile-aware token rounding algorithm yields an additional 1.16x speedup on kernel execution time compared to vanilla top-K routing while maintaining similar downstream performance on Hopper GPUs. We open-source all our kernels.

Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative training across clients while preserving privacy. While most existing FL methods assume homogeneous model architectures, client heterogeneity in both data and resources makes this assumption impractical, thus motivating model-heterogeneous FL. To address this problem, we propose Federated Representation Entanglement (FedRE), a framework built upon a novel form of client knowledge termed entangled representation. Specifically, each client aggregates its local representations into a single entangled representation using normalized random weights, and then applies the same weights to integrate the corresponding one-hot label encodings into an entangled-label encoding. Both are subsequently uploaded to the server to train a global classifier. During training, each entangled representation is supervised across categories via its entangled-label encoding, while random weights are re-sampled at each round to introduce diversity, alleviating overconfidence in the global classifier and yielding smoother decision boundaries. Moreover, each client uploads a single entangled representation along with its entangled-label encoding, mitigating the risk of representation inversion attacks and reducing communication overhead. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FedRE achieves an effective trade-off among model performance, privacy protection, and communication overhead. The codes are available at https://github.com/AIResearch-Group/FedRE.

Conventional AI-driven AMS design automation algorithms remain constrained by their reliance on high-quality datasets to capture underlying circuit behavior, coupled with poor transferability across architectures, and a lack of adaptive mechanisms. This work proposes HeaRT, a hierarchical circuit reasoning-based agentic framework for automation loops and a step toward adaptive, human-style design optimization. HeaRT consistently improves F1(subcircuits) by >= 13.5% and F1(loops) by >= 37.8% over few-shot prompting baselines across multiple LLM backbones on our 40-circuit AMS benchmark of flattened SPICE netlists, even as circuit complexity increases. Our experiments further show that HeaRT achieves >= 3x faster convergence in incremental design adaptation tasks under specification shifts across diverse optimization approaches, supporting both topology reconfiguration and sizing.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures expand model capacity by sparsely activating experts but face two core challenges: misalignment between router logits and each expert's internal structure leads to unstable routing and expert underutilization, and load imbalances create straggler bottlenecks. Standard solutions, such as auxiliary load-balancing losses, can reduce load disparities but often weaken expert specialization and hurt downstream performance. To address these issues, we propose ERMoE, a sparse MoE transformer that reparameterizes each expert in a learned orthonormal eigenbasis and replaces learned gating logits with an "Eigenbasis Score", defined as the cosine similarity between input features and an expert's basis. This content-aware routing ties token assignments directly to experts' representation spaces, stabilizing utilization and promoting interpretable specialization without sacrificing sparsity. Crucially, ERMoE removes the need for explicit balancing losses and avoids the interfering gradients they introduce. We show that ERMoE achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on ImageNet classification and cross-modal image-text retrieval benchmarks (e.g., COCO, Flickr30K), while naturally producing flatter expert load distributions. Moreover, a 3D MRI variant (ERMoE-ba) improves brain age prediction accuracy by more than 7\% and yields anatomically interpretable expert specializations. ERMoE thus introduces a new architectural principle for sparse expert models that directly addresses routing instabilities and enables improved performance with scalable, interpretable specialization.

Even modern AI models often remain vulnerable to multimodal queries in which harmful intent is embedded in images. A widely used approach for safety alignment is training with extensive multimodal safety datasets, but the costs of data curation and training are often prohibitive. To mitigate these costs, inference-time alignment has recently been explored, but they often lack generalizability across diverse multimodal jailbreaks and still incur notable overhead due to extra forward passes for response refinement or heavy pre-deployment calibration procedures. Here, we identify insufficient visual attention to safety-critical image regions as one of the key causes of multimodal safety failures. Building on this insight, we propose Multimodal Risk-Adaptive Steering (MoRAS), which enhances safety-critical visual attention via concise visual contexts for accurate multimodal risk assessment. This risk signal enables risk-adaptive steering for direct refusals, reducing inference overhead while remaining generalizable across diverse multimodal jailbreaks. Notably, MoRAS requires only a small calibration set to estimate multimodal risk, substantially reducing pre-deployment overhead. We conduct various empirical validations across multiple benchmarks and MLLM backbones, and observe that the proposed MoRAS consistently mitigates jailbreaks, preserves utility, and reduces computational overhead compared to state-of-the-art inference-time defenses.

Language-specified mobile manipulation tasks in novel environments simultaneously face challenges interacting with a scene which is only partially observed, grounding semantic information from language instructions to the partially observed scene, and actively updating knowledge of the scene with new observations. To address these challenges, we propose HELIOS, a hierarchical scene representation and associated search objective. We construct 2D maps containing the relevant semantic and occupancy information for navigation while simultaneously actively constructing 3D Gaussian representations of task-relevant objects. We fuse observations across this multi-layered representation while explicitly modeling the multi-view consistency of the detections of each object using the Dirichlet distribution. Planning is formulated as a search problem over our hierarchical representation. We formulate an objective that jointly considers (i) exploration of unobserved or uncertain regions of the environment and (ii) information gathering from additional observations of candidate objects. This objective integrates frontier-based exploration with the expected information gain associated with improving semantic consistency of object detections. We evaluate HELIOS on the OVMM benchmark in the Habitat simulator, a pick and place benchmark in which perception is challenging due to large and complex scenes with comparatively small target objects. HELIOS achieves state-of-the-art results on OVMM. We demonstrate HELIOS performing language specified pick and place in a real world office environment on a Spot robot. Our method leverages pretrained VLMs to achieve these results in simulation and the real world without any task specific training.

Trajectory prediction is a fundamental problem in computer vision, vision-language-action models, world models, and autonomous systems, with broad impact on autonomous driving, robotics, and surveillance. However, most existing methods assume complete and clean observations, and therefore do not adequately handle out-of-sight agents or noisy sensing signals caused by limited camera coverage, occlusions, and the absence of ground-truth denoised trajectories. These challenges raise safety concerns and reduce robustness in real-world deployment. In this extended study, we introduce major improvements to Out-of-Sight Trajectory (OST), a task for predicting noise-free visual trajectories of out-of-sight objects from noisy sensor observations. Building on our prior work, we expand Out-of-Sight Trajectory Prediction (OOSTraj) from pedestrians to both pedestrians and vehicles, increasing its relevance to autonomous driving, robotics, and surveillance. Our improved Vision-Positioning Denoising Module exploits camera calibration to establish vision-position correspondence, mitigating the lack of direct visual cues and enabling effective unsupervised denoising of noisy sensor signals. Extensive experiments on the Vi-Fi and JRDB datasets show that our method achieves state-of-the-art results for both trajectory denoising and trajectory prediction, with clear gains over prior baselines. We also compare with classical denoising methods, including Kalman filtering, and adapt recent trajectory prediction models to this setting, establishing a stronger benchmark. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to use vision-positioning projection to denoise noisy sensor trajectories of out-of-sight agents, opening new directions for future research.

Pathology is experiencing rapid digital transformation driven by whole-slide imaging and artificial intelligence (AI). While deep learning-based computational pathology has achieved notable success, traditional models primarily focus on image analysis without integrating natural language instruction or rich, text-based context. Current multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in computational pathology face limitations, including insufficient training data, inadequate support and evaluation for multi-image understanding, and a lack of autonomous, diagnostic reasoning capabilities. To address these limitations, we introduce PathChat+, a new MLLM specifically designed for human pathology, trained on over 1 million diverse, pathology-specific instruction samples and nearly 5.5 million question answer turns. Extensive evaluations across diverse pathology benchmarks demonstrated that PathChat+ substantially outperforms the prior PathChat copilot, as well as both state-of-the-art (SOTA) general-purpose and other pathology-specific models. Furthermore, we present SlideSeek, a reasoning-enabled multi-agent AI system leveraging PathChat+ to autonomously evaluate gigapixel whole-slide images (WSIs) through iterative, hierarchical diagnostic reasoning, reaching high accuracy on DDxBench, a challenging open-ended differential diagnosis benchmark, while also capable of generating visually grounded, humanly-interpretable summary reports.

Infrared small target (IRST) detection is challenging in simultaneously achieving precise, robust, and efficient performance due to extremely dim targets and strong interference. Current learning-based methods attempt to leverage ``more" information from both the spatial and the short-term temporal domains, but suffer from unreliable performance under complex conditions while incurring computational redundancy. In this paper, we explore the ``more essential" information from a more crucial domain for the detection. Through theoretical analysis, we reveal that the global temporal saliency and correlation information in the temporal profile demonstrate significant superiority in distinguishing target signals from other signals. To investigate whether such superiority is preferentially leveraged by well-trained networks, we built the first prediction attribution tool in this field and verified the importance of the temporal profile information. Inspired by the above conclusions, we remodel the IRST detection task as a one-dimensional signal anomaly detection task, and propose an efficient deep temporal probe network (DeepPro) that only performs calculations in the time dimension for IRST detection. We conducted extensive experiments to fully validate the effectiveness of our method. The experimental results are exciting, as our DeepPro outperforms existing state-of-the-art IRST detection methods on widely-used benchmarks with extremely high efficiency, and achieves a significant improvement on dim targets and in complex scenarios. We provide a new modeling domain, a new insight, a new method, and a new performance, which can promote the development of IRST detection. Codes are available at https://tinalrj.github.io/DeepPro/.

Despite advances in diffusion-based image editing, manipulating multi-object scenes remains challenging. Existing approaches often achieve semantic changes at the expense of structural consistency, failing to preserve exact object counts and spatial layouts without introducing unintended relocations or background modifications. To address this limitation, we introduce quantity-and-layout-consistent image editing (QL-Edit) to modify object semantics while maintaining the original instance cardinality and spatial layout. We propose IMAGHarmony, a parameter-efficient framework featuring a harmony-aware (HA) module that incorporates perception cues from the reference image into the diffusion process. This enables the model to jointly reason about object semantics, counts, and spatial positions for improved structural consistency. Furthermore, we introduce a preference-guided noise selection (PNS) strategy that identifies favorable initialization conditions, substantially improving generation stability in challenging multi-object scenarios. To support systematic evaluation, we construct HarmonyBench, a benchmark designed to measure semantic editing accuracy and structural consistency under quantity and layout constraints. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IMAGHarmony consistently outperforms existing methods in both structural preservation and semantic accuracy. Notably, our framework is highly efficient, requiring only 200 training images and 10.6M trainable parameters. Code, models, and data are available at \url{https://github.com/muzishen/IMAGHarmony}.

Daily Activity Recordings for Artificial Intelligence (DARai, pronounced "Dahr-ree") is a multimodal, hierarchically annotated dataset constructed to understand human activities in real-world settings. DARai consists of continuous scripted and unscripted recordings of 50 participants in 10 different environments, totaling over 200 hours of data from 20 sensors including multiple camera views, depth and radar sensors, wearable inertial measurement units (IMUs), electromyography (EMG), insole pressure sensors, biomonitor sensors, and gaze tracker. To capture the complexity in human activities, DARai is annotated at three levels of hierarchy: (i) high-level activities (L1) that are independent tasks, (ii) lower-level actions (L2) that are patterns shared between activities, and (iii) fine-grained procedures (L3) that detail the exact execution steps for actions. The dataset annotations and recordings are designed so that 22.7% of L2 actions are shared between L1 activities and 14.2% of L3 procedures are shared between L2 actions. The overlap and unscripted nature of DARai allows counterfactual activities in the dataset. Experiments with various machine learning models showcase the value of DARai in uncovering important challenges in human-centered applications. Specifically, we conduct unimodal and multimodal sensor fusion experiments for recognition, temporal localization, and future action anticipation across all hierarchical annotation levels. To highlight the limitations of individual sensors, we also conduct domain-variant experiments that are enabled by DARai's multi-sensor and counterfactual activity design setup. The code, documentation, and dataset are available at the dedicated DARai website: https://alregib.ece.gatech.edu/software-and-datasets/darai-daily-activity-recordings-for-artificial-intelligence-and-machine-learning/

Recent advancements in imitation learning have led to transformer-based behavior foundation models (BFMs) that enable multi-modal, human-like control for humanoid agents. While excelling at zero-shot generation of robust behaviors, BFMs often require meticulous prompt engineering for specific tasks, potentially yielding suboptimal results. We introduce "Task Tokens", a method to effectively tailor BFMs to specific tasks while preserving their flexibility. Our approach leverages the transformer architecture of BFMs to learn a new task-specific encoder through reinforcement learning, keeping the original BFM frozen. This allows incorporation of user-defined priors, balancing reward design and prompt engineering. By training a task encoder to map observations to tokens, used as additional BFM inputs, we guide performance improvement while maintaining the model's diverse control characteristics. We demonstrate Task Tokens' efficacy across various tasks, including out-of-distribution scenarios, and show their compatibility with other prompting modalities. Our results suggest that Task Tokens offer a promising approach for adapting BFMs to specific control tasks while retaining their generalization capabilities.

While 3D point clouds are widely used in vision applications, their irregular and sparse nature make them challenging to handle. In response, numerous encoding approaches have been proposed to capture the rich semantic information of point clouds. Yet, a critical limitation persists: a lack of consideration for colored point clouds, which serve as more expressive 3D representations encompassing both color and geometry. While existing methods handle color and geometry separately on a per-point basis, this leads to a limited receptive field and restricted ability to capture relationships across multiple points. To address this, we pioneer a colored point cloud encoding methodology that leverages 3D Fourier decomposition to disentangle color and geometric features while extending the receptive field through spectral-domain operations. Our analysis confirms that our approach effectively separates feature components, where the amplitude uniquely captures color attributes and the phase encodes geometric structure, thereby enabling independent learning and utilization of both attributes. We validate our colored point cloud encoding approach on classification, segmentation, and style transfer tasks, achieving state-of-the-art results on the DensePoint dataset.

Facial forgery methods such as deepfakes can be misused for identity manipulation and spreading misinformation. They have evolved alongside advancements in generative AI, leading to new and more sophisticated forgery techniques that diverge from existing ``known" methods. Conventional deepfake detection methods use the closed-set paradigm, thus limiting their applicability to detecting forgeries created using methods that are not part of the training dataset. In this paper, we propose a shift from the closed-set paradigm for deepfake detection. In the open-set paradigm, models are designed not only to identify images created by known facial forgery methods but also to identify and flag those produced by previously unknown methods as `unknown' and not as unforged or real or nmanipulated. In this paper, we propose an open-set deepfake classification algorithm based on supervised contrastive learning. The open-set paradigm used in our model allows it to function as a more robust tool capable of handling emerging and unseen deepfake techniques, enhancing reliability and confidence, and complementing forensic analysis. In the open-set paradigm, we identify three groups, including the `unknown' group that is neither considered a known deepfake nor real. We investigate deepfake open-set classification across three scenarios: classifying deepfakes from unknown methods not as real, distinguishing real images from deepfakes, and classifying deepfakes from known methods, using the FaceForensics++ dataset as a benchmark. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results in the first two tasks and competitive results in the third task.

Photo-realistic human avatars have broad applications, yet high-fidelity avatar generation has traditionally required expensive professional camera rigs and extensive artistic labor. Recent research has enabled constructing them automatically from smartphones with RGB and IR sensors, however, these new methods still rely on high-resolution cameras on modern smartphones and often require offloading the processing to powerful servers with GPUs. Modern applications such as video conferencing call for the ability to generate these avatars from consumer-grade laptop webcams using limited compute available on-device. In this work, we develop a novel method based on 3D morphable models, landmark detection, photorealistic texture GANs, and differentiable rendering to tackle the problem of low webcam image quality and edge computation. We build an automatic system to generate high-fidelity animatable avatars under these limitations, leveraging the compute capabilities of AMD mobile processors.

Global optimisation to optimise expensive-to-evaluate black-box functions without gradient information. Bayesian optimisation, one of the most well-known techniques, typically employs Gaussian processes as surrogate models, leveraging their probabilistic nature to balance exploration and exploitation. However, these processes become computationally prohibitive in high-dimensional spaces. Recent alternatives, based on inverse distance weighting (IDW) and radial basis functions (RBFs), offer competitive, computationally lighter solutions. Despite their efficiency, both traditional global and Bayesian optimisation strategies suffer from the myopic nature of their acquisition functions, which focus on immediate improvement neglecting future implications of the sequential decision making process. Nonmyopic acquisition functions devised for the Bayesian setting have shown promise in improving long-term performance. Yet, their combination with deterministic surrogate models remains unexplored. In this work, we introduce novel nonmyopic acquisition strategies tailored to IDW and RBF based on approximate dynamic programming paradigms, including rollout and multi-step scenario-based optimisation schemes, to enable lookahead acquisition. These methods optimise a sequence of query points over a horizon by predicting the evolution of the surrogate model, inherently managing the exploration-exploitation trade-off via optimisation techniques. The proposed approach represents a significant advance in extending nonmyopic acquisition principles, previously confined to Bayesian optimisation, to deterministic models. Empirical results on synthetic and hyperparameter tuning benchmark problems, a constrained problem, as well as on a data-driven predictive control application, demonstrate that these nonmyopic methods outperform conventional myopic approaches, leading to faster and more robust convergence.

The rapid adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) in modern transport systems has made energy-aware routing a critical task in their successful integration, especially within large-scale transport networks. In cases where an EV's remaining energy is limited and charging locations are not easily accessible, some destinations may only be reachable through an energy-optimal path: a route that consumes less energy than all other alternatives. The feasibility of such energy-efficient paths depends heavily on the accuracy of the energy model used for planning, and thus failing to account for vehicle dynamics can lead to inaccurate energy estimates, rendering some planned routes infeasible in reality. This paper explores the impact of vehicle dynamics on energy-optimal path planning for EVs. We first investigate how energy model accuracy influences energy-optimal pathfinding and, consequently, feasibility of planned trips, using a novel data-driven model that incorporates key vehicle dynamics parameters into energy calculations. Additionally, we introduce two novel online reweighting and energy heuristic functions that accelerate path planning with negative energy costs arise due to regenerative braking, making our approach well-suited for real-time applications. Extensive experiments on real-world transport networks demonstrate that our method significantly improves both the computational efficiency of energy-optimal pathfinding for EVs.

Large language models (LLMs) excel in natural language generation but often confidently produce incorrect responses, especially in tasks like mathematical reasoning. Chain-of-thought prompting, self-verification, and multi-agent debate are among the strategies proposed to improve the reasoning and factual accuracy of LLMs. Building on Du et al.'s multi-agent debate framework, we find that multi-agent debate helps at any model scale, and that diversity of thought elicits stronger reasoning in debating LLMs. Across various model sizes, performance on mathematical reasoning tasks benefits most when diverse trained models are used. Remarkably, after 4 rounds of debate, a diverse set of medium-capacity models (Gemini-Pro, Mixtral 7BX8, and PaLM 2-M) outperforms GPT-4 on the GSM-8K benchmark, scoring 91% accuracy. By comparison, when 3 instances of Gemini-Pro are used, performance only reaches 82%. Finally, this diverse set of medium-capacity models sets a new state-of-the-art performance on the ASDiv benchmark (94%). These results underscore the idea that the future of AI is agentic, with diverse cooperating agents yielding emergent capabilities beyond even the most powerful individual models.

Self-supervised learning has emerged as a powerful paradigm for pretraining foundation models using large-scale data. Existing pretraining approaches predominantly rely on masked reconstruction or next-token prediction strategies, demonstrating strong performance across various downstream tasks, including geoscience applications. However, these approaches do not fully capture the knowledge of causal interplay between different geospatial and environmental variables. To address this limitation, we propose Knowledge Guided Variable-Step Forecasting (KG-VSF), a novel pretraining task that models forecasting as a conditional generation task, where driver variables (e.g., weather) inform the prediction of response variables (e.g., satellite imagery). We demonstrate that pretraining in such a fashion leads to strong embeddings which give enhanced performance when finetuned on downstream tasks where capturing this causality matters such as pixel wise crop type mapping, soil moisture estimation and forecasting, missing image prediction, and future image forecasting when compared to finetuning embeddings from other standard pretraining approaches.