Stochastic bilevel optimization (SBO) has been integrated into many machine learning paradigms recently, including hyperparameter optimization, meta learning, and reinforcement learning. Along with the wide range of applications, there have been numerous studies on the computational behavior of SBO. However, the generalization guarantees of SBO methods are far less understood from the lens of statistical learning theory. In this paper, we provide a systematic generalization analysis of the first-order gradient-based bilevel optimization methods. Firstly, we establish the quantitative connections between the on-average argument stability and the generalization gap of SBO methods. Then, we derive the upper bounds of on-average argument stability for single-timescale stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and two-timescale SGD, where three settings (nonconvex-nonconvex (NC-NC), convex-convex (C-C), and strongly-convex-strongly-convex (SC-SC)) are considered respectively. Experimental analysis validates our theoretical findings. Compared with the previous algorithmic stability analysis, our results do not require reinitializing the inner-level parameters at each iteration and are applicable to more general objective functions.

Learner-item cognitive modeling plays a central role in the web-based online intelligent education system by enabling cognitive diagnosis (CD) across diverse online educational scenarios. Although ID embedding remains the mainstream approach in cognitive modeling due to its effectiveness and flexibility, recent advances in language models (LMs) have introduced new possibilities for incorporating rich semantic representations to enhance CD performance. This highlights the need for a comprehensive analysis of how LMs enhance embeddings through semantic integration across mainstream CD tasks. This paper identifies two key challenges in fully leveraging LMs in existing work: Misalignment between the training objectives of LMs and CD models creates a distribution gap in feature spaces; A unified framework is essential for integrating textual embeddings across varied CD tasks while preserving the strengths of existing cognitive modeling paradigms to ensure the robustness of embedding enhancement. To address these challenges, this paper introduces EduEmbed, a unified embedding enhancement framework that leverages fine-tuned LMs to enrich learner-item cognitive modeling across diverse CD tasks. EduEmbed operates in two stages. In the first stage, we fine-tune LMs based on role-specific representations and an interaction diagnoser to bridge the semantic gap of CD models. In the second stage, we employ a textual adapter to extract task-relevant semantics and integrate them with existing modeling paradigms to improve generalization. We evaluate the proposed framework on four CD tasks and computerized adaptive testing (CAT) task, achieving robust performance. Further analysis reveals the impact of semantic information across diverse tasks, offering key insights for future research on the application of LMs in CD for online intelligent education systems.

In this paper, we propose Localized Artifact Attention X (LAA-X), a novel deepfake detection framework that is both robust to high-quality forgeries and capable of generalizing to unseen manipulations. Existing approaches typically rely on binary classifiers coupled with implicit attention mechanisms, which often fail to generalize beyond known manipulations. In contrast, LAA-X introduces an explicit attention strategy based on a multi-task learning framework combined with blending-based data synthesis. Auxiliary tasks are designed to guide the model toward localized, artifact-prone (i.e., vulnerable) regions. The proposed framework is compatible with both CNN and transformer backbones, resulting in two different versions, namely, LAA-Net and LAA-Former, respectively. Despite being trained only on real and pseudo-fake samples, LAA-X competes with state-of-the-art methods across multiple benchmarks. Code and pre-trained weights for LAA-Net\footnote{https://github.com/10Ring/LAA-Net} and LAA-Former\footnote{https://github.com/10Ring/LAA-Former} are publicly available.

Recent advancements in computer vision, driven by artificial intelligence, have significantly enhanced monitoring systems. One notable application is traffic monitoring, which leverages computer vision alongside deep learning-based object detection and counting. We present an offline, real-time traffic monitoring system that couples a pre-trained YOLOv11 detector with BoT-SORT/ByteTrack for multi-object tracking, implemented in PyTorch/OpenCV and wrapped in a Qt-based desktop UI. The CNN pipeline enables efficient vehicle detection and counting from video streams without cloud dependencies. Across diverse scenes, the system achieves (66.67-95.83%) counting accuracy. Class-wise detection yields high precision (cars: 0.97-1.00; trucks: 1.00) with strong recall (cars: 0.82-1.00; trucks: 0.70-1.00), resulting in F1 scores of (0.90-1.00 for cars and 0.82-1.00 for trucks). While adverse weather conditions may negatively impact this performance, results remain robust in typical conditions. By integrating lightweight models with an accessible, cloud-independent interface, this paper contributes to the modernization and development of future smart cities by showing the capacity of AI-driven traffic monitoring systems.

We formulate curator-in-the-loop duplicate discovery in the AtticPOT repository as a Positive-Unlabeled (PU) learning problem. Given a single anchor per artefact, we train a lightweight per-query Clone Encoder on augmented views of the anchor and score the unlabeled repository with an interpretable threshold on the latent l_2 norm. The system proposes candidates for curator verification, uncovering cross-record duplicates that were not verified a priori. On CIFAR-10 we obtain F1=96.37 (AUROC=97.97); on AtticPOT we reach F1=90.79 (AUROC=98.99), improving F1 by +7.70 points over the best baseline (SVDD) under the same lightweight backbone. Qualitative "find-similar" panels show stable neighbourhoods across viewpoint and condition. The method avoids explicit negatives, offers a transparent operating point, and fits de-duplication, record linkage, and curator-in-the-loop workflows.

Small language models (SLMs) in the 100M-10B parameter range increasingly power production systems, yet whether they possess the internal emotion representations recently discovered in frontier models remains unknown. We present the first comparative analysis of emotion vector extraction methods for SLMs, evaluating 9 models across 5 architectural families (GPT-2, Gemma, Qwen, Llama, Mistral) using 20 emotions and two extraction methods (generation-based and comprehension-based). Generation-based extraction produces statistically superior emotion separation (Mann-Whitney p = 0.007; Cohen's d = -107.5), with the advantage modulated by instruction tuning and architecture. Emotion representations localize at middle transformer layers (~50% depth), following a U-shaped curve that is architecture-invariant from 124M to 3B parameters. We validate these findings against representational anisotropy baselines across 4 models and confirm causal behavioral effects through steering experiments, independently verified by an external emotion classifier (92% success rate, 37/40 scenarios). Steering reveals three regimes -- surgical (coherent text transformation), repetitive collapse, and explosive (text degradation) -- quantified by perplexity ratios and separated by model architecture rather than scale. We document cross-lingual emotion entanglement in Qwen, where steering activates semantically aligned Chinese tokens that RLHF does not suppress, raising safety concerns for multilingual deployment. This work provides methodological guidelines for emotion research on open-weight models and contributes to the Model Medicine series by bridging external behavioral profiling with internal representational analysis.

This paper tackles the challenge of recovering 4D dynamic scenes from videos captured by as few as four portable cameras. Learning to model scene dynamics for temporally consistent novel-view rendering is a foundational task in computer graphics, where previous works often require dense multi-view captures using camera arrays of dozens or even hundreds of views. We propose \textbf{4C4D}, a novel framework that enables high-fidelity 4D Gaussian Splatting from video captures of extremely sparse cameras. Our key insight lies that the geometric learning under sparse settings is substantially more difficult than modeling appearance. Driven by this observation, we introduce a Neural Decaying Function on Gaussian opacities for enhancing the geometric modeling capability of 4D Gaussians. This design mitigates the inherent imbalance between geometry and appearance modeling in 4DGS by encouraging the 4DGS gradients to focus more on geometric learning. Extensive experiments across sparse-view datasets with varying camera overlaps show that 4C4D achieves superior performance over prior art. Project page at: https://junshengzhou.github.io/4C4D.

We present DINO Patch Visual Odometry (DINO-VO), an end-to-end monocular visual odometry system with strong scene generalization. Current Visual Odometry (VO) systems often rely on heuristic feature extraction strategies, which can degrade accuracy and robustness, particularly in large-scale outdoor environments. DINO-VO addresses these limitations by incorporating a differentiable adaptive patch selector into the end-to-end pipeline, improving the quality of extracted patches and enhancing generalization across diverse datasets. Additionally, our system integrates a multi-task feature extraction module with a differentiable bundle adjustment (BA) module that leverages inverse depth priors, enabling the system to learn and utilize appearance and geometric information effectively. This integration bridges the gap between feature learning and state estimation. Extensive experiments on the TartanAir, KITTI, Euroc, and TUM datasets demonstrate that DINO-VO exhibits strong generalization across synthetic, indoor, and outdoor environments, achieving state-of-the-art tracking accuracy.

Flow-matching methods for 3D shape assembly learn point-wise velocity fields that transport parts toward assembled configurations, yet they receive no explicit guidance about which cross-part interactions should drive the motion. We introduce TORA, a topology-first representation alignment framework that distills relational structure from a frozen pretrained 3D encoder into the flow-matching backbone during training. We first realize this via simple instantiation, token-wise cosine matching, which injects the learned geometric descriptors from the teacher representation. We then extend to employ a Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA) loss to match the similarity structure between student and teacher representations for enhanced topological alignment. Through systematic probing of diverse 3D encoders, we show that geometry- and contact-centric teacher properties, not semantic classification ability, govern alignment effectiveness, and that alignment is most beneficial at later transformer layers where spatial structure naturally emerges. TORA introduces zero inference overhead while yielding two consistent benefits: faster convergence (up to 6.9$\times$) and improved accuracy in-distribution, along with greater robustness under domain shift. Experiments on five benchmarks spanning geometric, semantic, and inter-object assembly demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, with particularly pronounced gains in zero-shot transfer to unseen real-world and synthetic datasets. Project page: https://nahyuklee.github.io/tora.

Recent work has shown that fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on insecure code or culturally loaded numeric codes can induce emergent misalignment, causing models to produce harmful content in unrelated downstream tasks. The authors of that work concluded that $k$-shot prompting alone does not induce this effect. We revisit this conclusion and show that inference-time semantic drift is real and measurable; however, it requires models of large-enough capability. Using a controlled experiment in which five culturally loaded numbers are injected as few-shot demonstrations before a semantically unrelated prompt, we find that models with richer cultural-associative representations exhibit significant distributional shifts toward darker, authoritarian, and stigmatized themes, while a simpler/smaller model does not. We additionally find that structurally inert demonstrations (nonsense strings) perturb output distributions, suggesting two separable mechanisms: structural format contamination and semantic content contamination. Our results map the boundary conditions under which inference-time contamination occurs, and carry direct implications for the security of LLM-based applications that use few-shot prompting.

Accurate dynamics models are critical for the design of predictive controller for autonomous mobile robots. Physics-based models are often too simple to capture relevant real-world effects, while data-driven models are data-intensive and slow to train. We introduce an approach for fast adaptation of neural robot dynamic models that combines offline training with efficient online updates. Our approach learns an incremental neural dynamics model offline and performs low-rank second-order parameter adaptation online, enabling rapid updates without full retraining. We demonstrate the approach on a real quadrotor robot, achieving robust predictive tracking control in novel operational conditions.

AI-generated videos (AIGVs) have achieved unprecedented photorealism, posing severe threats to digital forensics. Existing AIGV detectors focus mainly on localized artifacts or short-term temporal inconsistencies, thus often fail to capture the underlying generative logic governing global temporal evolution, limiting AIGV detection performance. In this paper, we identify a distinctive fingerprint in AIGVs, termed anomalous temporal self-similarity (ATSS). Unlike real videos that exhibit stochastic natural dynamics, AIGVs follow deterministic anchor-driven trajectories (e.g., text or image prompts), inducing unnaturally repetitive correlations across visual and semantic domains. To exploit this, we propose the ATSS method, a multimodal detection framework that exploits this insight via a triple-similarity representation and a cross-attentive fusion mechanism. Specifically, ATSS reconstructs semantic trajectories by leveraging frame-wise descriptions to construct visual, textual, and cross-modal similarity matrices, which jointly quantify the inherent temporal anomalies. These matrices are encoded by dedicated Transformer encoders and integrated via a bidirectional cross-attentive fusion module to effectively model intra- and inter-modal dynamics. Extensive experiments on four large-scale benchmarks, including GenVideo, EvalCrafter, VideoPhy, and VidProM, demonstrate that ATSS significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of AP, AUC, and ACC metrics, exhibiting superior generalization across diverse video generation models. Code and models of ATSS will be released at https://github.com/hwang-cs-ime/ATSS.

This paper primarily focuses on the hallucinations caused due to AI language models(LLMs).LLMs have shown extraordinary Language understanding and generation capabilities .Still it has major a disadvantage hallucinations which give outputs which are factually incorrect ,misleading or unsupported by input data . These hallucinations cause serious problems in scenarios like medical diagnosis or legal reasoning.Through this work,we propose causal graph attention network (GCAN) framework that reduces hallucinations through interpretation of internal attention flow within a transformer architecture with the help of constructing token level graphs that combine self attention weights and gradient based influence scores.our method quantifies each tokens factual dependency using a new metric called the Causal Contribution Score (CCS). We further introduce a fact-anchored graph reweighting layer that dynamically reduces the influence of hallucination prone nodes during generation. Experiments on standard benchmarks such as TruthfulQA and HotpotQA show a 27.8 percent reduction in hallucination rate and 16.4 percent improvement in factual accuracy over baseline retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) models. This work contributes to the interpretability,robustness, and factual reliability of future LLM architectures.

Diffusion models produce high-quality text-to-image results, but their iterative denoising is computationally expensive.Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) emerges as a promising path to few-step distillation, but suffers from diversity collapse and fidelity degradation when reduced to two steps or fewer. We present 1.x-Distill, the first fractional-step distillation framework that breaks the integer-step constraint of prior few-step methods and establishes 1.x-step generation as a practical regime for distilled diffusion models.Specifically, we first analyze the overlooked role of teacher CFG in DMD and introduce a simple yet effective modification to suppress mode collapse. Then, to improve performance under extreme steps, we introduce Stagewise Focused Distillation, a two-stage strategy that learns coarse structure through diversity-preserving distribution matching and refines details with inference-consistent adversarial distillation. Furthermore, we design a lightweight compensation module for Distill--Cache co-Training, which naturally incorporates block-level caching into our distillation pipeline.Experiments on SD3-Medium and SD3.5-Large show that 1.x-Distill surpasses prior few-step methods, achieving better quality and diversity at 1.67 and 1.74 effective NFEs, respectively, with up to 33x speedup over original 28x2 NFE sampling.

Deep research agents integrate fragmented evidence through multi-step tool use. BrowseComp offers a text-only testbed for such agents, but existing multimodal benchmarks rarely require both weak visual cues composition and BrowseComp-style multi-hop verification. Geolocation is a natural testbed because answers depend on combining multiple ambiguous visual cues and validating them with open-web evidence. Thus, we introduce GeoBrowse, a geolocation benchmark that combines visual reasoning with knowledge-intensive multi-hop queries. Level 1 tests extracting and composing fragmented visual cues, and Level 2 increases query difficulty by injecting long-tail knowledge and obfuscating key entities. To support evaluation, we provide an agentic workflow GATE with five think-with-image tools and four knowledge-intensive tools, and release expert-annotated stepwise traces grounded in verifiable evidence for trajectory-level analysis. Experiments show that GATE outperforms direct inference and open-source agents, indicating that no-tool, search-only or image-only setups are insufficient. Gains come from coherent, level-specific tool-use plans rather than more tool calls, as they more reliably reach annotated key evidence steps and make fewer errors when integrating into the final decision. The GeoBrowse bernchmark and codes are provided in https://github.com/ornamentt/GeoBrowse

Reconstructing dynamic scenes with complex human-object interactions is a fundamental challenge in computer vision and graphics. Existing Gaussian Splatting methods either rely on human pose priors while neglecting dynamic objects, or approximate all motions within a single field, limiting their ability to capture interaction-rich dynamics. To address this gap, we propose Human-Object Interaction Gaussian Splatting (HOIGS), which explicitly models interaction-induced deformation between humans and objects through a cross-attention-based HOI module. Distinct deformation baselines are employed to extract features: HexPlane for humans and Cubic Hermite Spline (CHS) for objects. By integrating these heterogeneous features, HOIGS effectively captures interdependent motions and improves deformation estimation in scenarios involving occlusion, contact, and object manipulation. Comprehensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art human-centric and 4D Gaussian approaches, highlighting the importance of explicitly modeling human-object interactions for high-fidelity reconstruction.

The increasing size and complexity of large language models (LLMs) have raised significant challenges in deployment efficiency, particularly under resource constraints. Post-training quantization (PTQ) has emerged as a practical solution by compressing models without requiring retraining. While existing methods focus on uniform quantization schemes for both weights and activations, they often suffer from substantial accuracy degradation due to the non-uniform nature of activation distributions. In this work, we revisit the activation quantization problem from a theoretical perspective grounded in the Lloyd-Max optimality conditions. We identify the core issue as the non-uniform distribution of activations within the quantization interval, which causes the optimal quantization point under the Lloyd-Max criterion to shift away from the midpoint of the interval. To address this issue, we propose a two-stage orthogonal transformation method, RUQuant. In the first stage, activations are divided into blocks. Each block is mapped to uniformly sampled target vectors using composite orthogonal matrices, which are constructed from Householder reflections and Givens rotations. In the second stage, a global Householder reflection is fine-tuned to further minimize quantization error using Transformer output discrepancies. Empirical results show that our method achieves near-optimal quantization performance without requiring model fine-tuning: RUQuant achieves 99.8% of full-precision accuracy with W6A6 and 97% with W4A4 quantization for a 13B LLM, within approximately one minute. A fine-tuned variant yields even higher accuracy, demonstrating the effectiveness and scalability of our approach.

Severe occlusions of objects pose a major challenge for computer vision. We show that two root causes are (1) the loss of visible information and (2) the distracting patterns caused by the occluders. Our approach addresses both causes at the same time. First, the distracting patterns are removed at test-time, via masking of the occluding patterns. This masking is independent of the type of occlusion, by handling the occlusion through the lens of visual anomalies w.r.t. the object of interest. Second, to deal with less visual details, we follow standard practice by masking random parts of the object during training, for various degrees of occlusions. We discover that (a) it is possible to estimate the degree of the occlusion (i.e. severity) at test-time, and (b) that a model optimized for a specific degree of occlusion also performs best on a similar degree during test-time. Combining these two insights brings us to a severity-informed classification model called OASIC: Occlusion Agnostic Severity Informed Classification. We estimate the severity of occlusion for a test image, mask the occluder, and select the model that is optimized for the degree of occlusion. This strategy performs better than any single model optimized for any smaller or broader range of occlusion severities. Experiments show that combining gray masking with adaptive model selection improves $\text{AUC}_\text{occ}$ by +18.5 over standard training on occluded images and +23.7 over finetuning on unoccluded images.

This paper presents an integrated model-based framework for generating and executing dynamic whole-body dance motions on humanoid robots. The framework operates in two stages: offline motion generation and online motion execution, both leveraging future state prediction to enable robust and dynamic dance motions in real-world environments. In the offline motion generation stage, human dance demonstrations are captured via a motion capture (MoCap) system, retargeted to the robot by solving a Quadratic Programming (QP) problem, and further refined using Trajectory Optimization (TO) to ensure dynamic feasibility. In the online motion execution stage, a centroidal dynamics-based Model Predictive Control (MPC) framework tracks the planned motions in real time and proactively adjusts swing foot placement to adapt to real world disturbances. We validate our framework on the full-size humanoid robot Kuavo 4Pro, demonstrating the dynamic dance motions both in simulation and in a four-minute live public performance with a team of four robots. Experimental results show that longer prediction horizons improve both motion expressiveness in planning and stability in execution.

Interpreting dynamic, heterogeneous multimedia commands with real-time responsiveness is critical for Human-Robot Interaction. We present VA-FastNavi-MARL, a framework that aligns asynchronous audio-visual inputs into a unified latent representation. By treating diverse instructions as a distribution of navigable goals via Meta-Reinforcement Learning, our method enables rapid adaptation to unseen directives with negligible inference overhead. Unlike approaches bottlenecked by heavy sensory processing, our modality-agnostic stream ensures seamless, low-latency control. Validation on a multi-arm workspace confirms that VA-FastNavi-MARL significantly outperforms baselines in sample efficiency and maintains robust, real-time execution even under noisy multimedia streams.

As audio-visual multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly deployed in safety-critical applications, understanding their vulnerabilities is crucial. To this end, we introduce Multi-Modal Typography, a systematic study examining how typographic attacks across multiple modalities adversely influence MLLMs. While prior work focuses narrowly on unimodal attacks, we expose the cross-modal fragility of MLLMs. We analyze the interactions between audio, visual, and text perturbations and reveal that coordinated multi-modal attack creates a significantly more potent threat than single-modality attacks (attack success rate = $83.43\%$ vs $34.93\%$).Our findings across multiple frontier MLLMs, tasks, and common-sense reasoning and content moderation benchmarks establishes multi-modal typography as a critical and underexplored attack strategy in multi-modal reasoning. Code and data will be publicly available.

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) effectively trains reasoning models that rely on abundant perfect labels, but its vulnerability to unavoidable noisy labels due to expert scarcity remains critically underexplored. In this work, we take the first step toward a systematic analysis of noisy label mechanisms in RLVR. In contrast to supervised classification, most RLVR algorithms incorporate a rollout-based condition: a label's influence on training is contingent on whether the current policy can generate rollouts that realize it, a property that naturally extends to noisy labels. Based on this observation, we distinguish two types of noise: inactive noisy labels, which reduce data efficiency, and active noisy labels, which are reinforced and risk skewing the model toward incorrect distributions. From experiments on training with noisy samples, we identify an Early Correctness Coherence phenomenon: although noisy samples begin to lag behind in later stages, accuracy on both clean and noisy samples increases similarly in early training. Motivated by this dynamic, we propose Online Label Refinement (OLR), which progressively corrects potentially noisy labels with majority-voted answers when two conditions hold: a positive slope in the majority answer's rollout pass rate and stable historical consistency across updates, enabling gradual self-correction as the policy improves. We evaluate OLR on six in-distribution mathematical reasoning benchmarks (AIME24/25, AMC, MATH-500, Minerva, and Olympiad) and three out-of-distribution tasks (ARC-c, GPQA-diamond, and MMLU-pro). Across noise ratios from 0.1 to 0.9, OLR consistently improves robustness under both inactive and active noisy-label settings, achieving average gains of 3.6% to 3.9% on in-distribution benchmarks and 3.3% to 4.6% on out-of-distribution evaluations.

Damped sinusoidal oscillations are widely observed in many physical systems, and their analysis provides access to underlying physical properties. However, parameter estimation becomes difficult when the signal decays rapidly, multiple components are superposed, and observational noise is present. In this study, we develop an autoencoder-based method that uses the latent space to estimate the frequency, phase, decay time, and amplitude of each component in noisy multi-component damped sinusoidal signals. We investigate multi-component cases under Gaussian-distribution training and further examine the effect of the training-data distribution through comparisons between Gaussian and uniform training. The performance is evaluated through waveform reconstruction and parameter-estimation accuracy. We find that the proposed method can estimate the parameters with high accuracy even in challenging setups, such as those involving a subdominant component or nearly opposite-phase components, while remaining reasonably robust when the training distribution is less informative. This demonstrates its potential as a tool for analyzing short-duration, noisy signals.

Ancient murals are valuable cultural artifacts, but many have suffered severe degradation due to environmental exposure, material aging, and human activity. Restoring these artworks is challenging because it requires both reconstructing large missing structures and strictly preserving authentic, undamaged regions. This paper presents the Hybrid Mask-Aware Transformer (HMAT), a unified framework for high-fidelity mural restoration. HMAT integrates Mask-Aware Dynamic Filtering for robust local texture modeling with a Transformer bottleneck for long-range structural inference. To further address the diverse morphology of degradation, we introduce a mask-conditional style fusion module that dynamically guides the generative process. In addition, a Teacher-Forcing Decoder with hard-gated skip connections is designed to enforce fidelity in valid regions and focus reconstruction on missing areas. We evaluate HMAT on the DHMural dataset and a curated Nine-Colored Deer dataset under varying degradation levels. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches, while producing more structurally coherent and visually faithful restorations. These findings suggest that HMAT provides an effective solution for the digital restoration of cultural heritage murals.

Many particle-based Bayesian inference methods use a single global step size for all parts of the update. In Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD), however, each update combines two qualitatively different effects: attraction toward high-posterior regions and repulsion that preserves particle diversity. These effects can evolve at different rates, especially in high-dimensional, anisotropic, or hierarchical posteriors, so one step size can be unstable in some regions and inefficient in others. We derive a multirate version of SVGD that updates these components on different time scales. The framework yields practical algorithms, including a symmetric split method, a fixed multirate method (MR-SVGD), and an adaptive multirate method (Adapt-MR-SVGD) with local error control. We evaluate the methods in a broad and rigorous benchmark suite covering six problem families: a 50D Gaussian target, multiple 2D synthetic targets, UCI Bayesian logistic regression, multimodal Gaussian mixtures, Bayesian neural networks, and large-scale hierarchical logistic regression. Evaluation includes posterior-matching metrics, predictive performance, calibration quality, mixing, and explicit computational cost accounting. Across these six benchmark families, multirate SVGD variants improve robustness and quality-cost tradeoffs relative to vanilla SVGD. The strongest gains appear on stiff hierarchical, strongly anisotropic, and multimodal targets, where adaptive multirate SVGD is usually the strongest variant and fixed multirate SVGD provides a simpler robust alternative at lower cost.

Parameter-efficient prompt learning has become the de facto standard for adapting Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to downstream tasks. Existing approaches predominantly focus on aligning text prompts with first-order visual features (i.e., spatial feature maps). While effective for fine-grained semantic discrimination, we argue that relying solely on first-order information is insufficient for robust adaptation, as these spatially entangled features are highly susceptible to domain shifts and local noise. In this work, we propose \textbf{Gram-Anchored Prompt Learning (GAPL)} for Vision-Language Models via Second-Order Statistics, a framework that synergizes local semantic alignment with global structural consistency. Methodologically, we introduce an additional second-order statistical stream via \textbf{Gram matrices} that augments the standard first-order spatial interaction. By anchoring prompts to these second-order priors, our approach enables language representations to dynamically adapt to statistical distribution shifts across diverse domains. Extensive experiments indicate the effectiveness of the second-order features, and show compelling performances of GAPL on various benchmarks.

Prior work on trustworthy AI emphasizes model-internal properties such as bias mitigation, adversarial robustness, and interpretability. As AI systems evolve into autonomous agents deployed in open environments and increasingly connected to payments or assets, the operational meaning of trust shifts to end-to-end outcomes: whether an agent completes tasks, follows user intent, and avoids failures that cause material or psychological harm. These risks are fundamentally product-level and cannot be eliminated by technical safeguards alone because agent behavior is inherently stochastic. To address this gap between model-level reliability and user-facing assurance, we propose a complementary framework based on risk management. Drawing inspiration from financial underwriting, we introduce the \textbf{Agentic Risk Standard (ARS)}, a payment settlement standard for AI-mediated transactions. ARS integrates risk assessment, underwriting, and compensation into a single transaction framework that protects users when interacting with agents. Under ARS, users receive predefined and contractually enforceable compensation in cases of execution failure, misalignment, or unintended outcomes. This shifts trust from an implicit expectation about model behavior to an explicit, measurable, and enforceable product guarantee. We also present a simulation study analyzing the social benefits of applying ARS to agentic transactions. ARS's implementation can be found at https://github.com/t54-labs/AgenticRiskStandard.

3D shape anomaly detection is a crucial task for industrial inspection and geometric analysis. Existing deep learning approaches typically learn representations of normal shapes and identify anomalies via out-of-distribution feature detection or decoder-based reconstruction. They often fail to generalize across diverse anomaly types and scales, such as global geometric errors (e.g., planar shifts, angle misalignments), and are sensitive to noisy or incomplete local points during training. To address these limitations, we propose a hierarchical point-patch anomaly scoring network that jointly models regional part features and local point features for robust anomaly reasoning. An adaptive patchification module integrates self-supervised decomposition to capture complex structural deviations. Beyond evaluations on public benchmarks (Anomaly-ShapeNet and Real3D-AD), we release an industrial test set with real CAD models exhibiting planar, angular, and structural defects. Experiments on public and industrial datasets show superior AUC-ROC and AUC-PR performance, including over 40% point-level improvement on the new industrial anomaly type and average object-level gains of 7% on Real3D-AD and 4% on Anomaly-ShapeNet, demonstrating strong robustness and generalization.

Modern scientific ecosystems are rich in procedural knowledge across repositories, APIs, scripts, notebooks, documentation, databases, and papers, yet much of this knowledge remains fragmented across heterogeneous artifacts that agents cannot readily operationalize. This gap between abundant scientific know-how and usable agent capabilities is a key bottleneck for building effective scientific agents. We present SkillFoundry, a self-evolving framework that converts such resources into validated agent skills, reusable packages that encode task scope, inputs and outputs, execution steps, environment assumptions, provenance, and tests. SkillFoundry organizes a target domain as a domain knowledge tree, mines resources from high-value branches, extracts operational contracts, compiles them into executable skill packages, and then iteratively expands, repairs, merges, or prunes the resulting library through a closed-loop validation process. SkillFoundry produces a substantially novel and internally valid skill library, with 71.1\% of mined skills differing from existing skill libraries such as SkillHub and SkillSMP. We demonstrate that these mined skills improve coding agent performance on five of the six MoSciBench datasets. We further show that SkillFoundry can design new task-specific skills on demand for concrete scientific objectives, and that the resulting skills substantially improve performance on two challenging genomics tasks: cell type annotation and the scDRS workflow. Together, these results show that automatically mined skills improve agent performance on benchmarks and domain-specific tasks, expand coverage beyond hand-crafted skill libraries, and provide a practical foundation for more capable scientific agents.

In many practical LLM deployments, a single guardrail is used for both prompt and response moderation. Prompt moderation operates on fully observed text, whereas streaming response moderation requires safety decisions to be made over partial generations. Existing text-based streaming guardrails commonly frame this output-side problem as boundary detection, training models to identify the earliest prefix at which a response has already become unsafe. In this work, we introduce StreamGuard, a unified model-agnostic streaming guardrail that instead formulates moderation as a forecasting problem: given a partial prefix, the model predicts the expected harmfulness of likely future continuations. We supervise this prediction using Monte Carlo rollouts, which enables early intervention without requiring exact token-level boundary annotations. Across standard safety benchmarks, StreamGuard performs strongly both for input moderation and for streaming output moderation. At the 8B scale, StreamGuard improves aggregated input-moderation F1 from 86.7 to 88.2 and aggregated streaming output-moderation F1 from 80.4 to 81.9 relative to Qwen3Guard-Stream-8B-strict. On the QWENGUARDTEST response_loc streaming benchmark, StreamGuard reaches 97.5 F1, 95.1 recall, and 92.6% on-time intervention, compared to 95.9 F1, 92.1 recall, and 89.9% for Qwen3Guard-Stream-8B-stric, while reducing the miss rate from 7.9% to 4.9%. We further show that forecasting-based supervision transfers effectively across tokenizers and model families: with transferred targets, Gemma3-StreamGuard-1B reaches 81.3 response-moderation F1, 98.2 streaming F1, and a 3.5% miss rate. These results show that strong end-to-end streaming moderation can be obtained without exact boundary labels, and that forecasting future risk is an effective supervision strategy for low-latency safety intervention.