Visual in-context learning (VICL) enables visual foundation models to handle multiple tasks by steering them with demonstrative prompts. The choice of such prompts largely influences VICL performance, standing out as a key challenge. Prior work has made substantial progress on prompt retrieval and reranking strategies, but mainly focuses on prompt images while overlooking labels. We reveal these approaches sometimes get visually similar but label-inconsistent prompts, which potentially degrade VICL performance. On the other hand, higher label consistency between query and prompts preferably indicates stronger VICL results. Motivated by these findings, we develop a framework named LaPR (Label-aware Prompt Retrieval), which highlights the role of labels in prompt selection. Our framework first designs an image-label joint representation for prompts to incorporate label cues explicitly. Besides, to handle unavailable query labels at test time, we introduce a mixture-of-expert mechanism to the dual encoders with query-adaptive routing. Each expert is expected to capture a specific label mode, while the router infers query-adaptive mixture weights and helps to learn label-aware representation. We carefully design alternative optimization for experts and router, with a VICL performance-guided contrastive loss and a label-guided contrastive loss, respectively. Extensive experiments show promising and consistent improvement of LaPR on in-context segmentation, detection, and colorization tasks. Moreover, LaPR generalizes well across feature extractors and cross-fold scenarios, suggesting the importance of label utilization in prompt retrieval for VICL. Code is available at https://github.com/luotc-why/CVPR26-LaPR.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is rapidly reshaping digital marketing paradigms in the era of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, current GEO strategies predominantly rely on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), which inherently suffers from probabilistic hallucinations and the "zero-click" paradox, failing to establish sustainable commercial trust. In this paper, we systematically deconstruct the probabilistic flaws of existing RAG-based GEO and propose a paradigm shift towards deterministic multi-agent intent routing. First, we mathematically formulate Semantic Entropy Drift (SED) to model the dynamic decay of confidence curves in LLMs over continuous temporal and contextual perturbations. To rigorously quantify optimization value in black-box commercial engines, we introduce the Isomorphic Attribution Regression (IAR) model, leveraging a Multi-Agent System (MAS) probe with strict human-in-the-loop physical isolation to enforce hallucination penalties. Furthermore, we architect the Deterministic Agent Handoff (DAH) protocol, conceptualizing an Agentic Trust Brokerage (ATB) ecosystem where LLMs function solely as intent routers rather than final answer generators. We empirically validate this architecture using EasyNote, an industrial AI meeting minutes product by Yishu Technology. By routing the intent of "knowledge graph mapping on an infinite canvas" directly to its specialized proprietary agent via DAH, we demonstrate the reduction of vertical task hallucination rates to near zero. This work establishes a foundational theoretical framework for next-generation GEO and paves the way for a well-ordered, deterministic human-AI collaboration ecosystem.

Partially Relevant Video Retrieval (PRVR) aims to retrieve untrimmed videos based on text queries that describe only partial events. Existing methods suffer from incomplete global contextual perception, struggling with query ambiguity and local noise induced by spurious responses. To address these issues, we propose DreamPRVR, which adopts a coarse-to-fine representation learning paradigm. The model first generates global contextual semantic registers as coarse-grained highlights spanning the entire video and then concentrates on fine-grained similarity optimization for precise cross-modal matching. Concretely, these registers are generated by initializing from the video-centric distribution produced by a probabilistic variational sampler and then iteratively refined via a text-supervised truncated diffusion model. During this process, textual semantic structure learning constructs a well-formed textual latent space, enhancing the reliability of global perception. The registers are then adaptively fused with video tokens through register-augmented Gaussian attention blocks, enabling context-aware feature learning. Extensive experiments show that DreamPRVR outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Code is released at https://github.com/lijun2005/CVPR26-DreamPRVR.

Accurate 3D human pose estimation from monocular videos requires effective modelling of complex spatial and temporal dependencies. However, existing methods often face challenges in efficiency and adaptability when modelling spatial and temporal dependencies, particularly under dense attention or fixed modelling schemes. In this work, we propose MASC-Pose, a Motion-Adaptive multi-scale temporal modelling framework with Skeleton-Constrained spatial graphs for efficient 3D human pose estimation. Specifically, it introduces an Adaptive Multi-scale Temporal Modelling (AMTM) module to adaptively capture heterogeneous motion dynamics at different temporal scales, together with a Skeleton-constrained Adaptive GCN (SAGCN) for joint-specific spatial interaction modelling. By jointly enabling adaptive temporal reasoning and efficient spatial aggregation, our method achieves strong accuracy with high computational efficiency. Extensive experiments on Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) requires effective modeling of cross-modal interactions and contextual dependencies while remaining computationally efficient. Existing fusion approaches predominantly rely on Transformer-based cross-modal attention, which incurs quadratic complexity with respect to sequence length and limits scalability. Moreover, contextual information from preceding utterances is often incorporated through concatenation or independent fusion, without explicit temporal modeling that captures sentiment evolution across dialogue turns. To address these limitations, we propose CAGMamba, a context-aware gated cross-modal Mamba framework for dialogue-based sentiment analysis. Specifically, we organize the contextual and the current-utterance features into a temporally ordered binary sequence, which provides Mamba with explicit temporal structure for modeling sentiment evolution. To further enable controllable cross-modal integration, we propose a Gated Cross-Modal Mamba Network (GCMN) that integrates cross-modal and unimodal paths via learnable gating to balance information fusion and modality preservation, and is trained with a three-branch multi-task objective over text, audio, and fused predictions. Experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that CAGMamba achieves state-of-the-art or competitive results across multiple evaluation metrics. All codes are available at https://github.com/User2024-xj/CAGMamba.

Accurate prediction of real-world pedestrian trajectories is crucial for a wide range of robot-related applications. Recent approaches typically adopt graph-based or transformer-based frameworks to model interactions. Despite their effectiveness, these methods either introduce unnecessary computational overhead or struggle to represent the diverse and time-varying characteristics of human interactions. In this work, we present an Adaptive Relational Transformer (ART), which introduces a Temporal-Aware Relation Graph (TARG) to explicitly capture the evolution of pairwise interactions and an Adaptive Interaction Pruning (AIP) mechanism to reduce redundant computations efficiently. Extensive evaluations on ETH/UCY and NBA benchmarks show that ART delivers state-of-the-art accuracy with high computational efficiency.

As the Internet of Things (IoT) becomes deeply embedded in daily life, users are increasingly concerned about privacy leakage, especially from video data. Since frame-by-frame protection in large-scale video analytics (e.g., smart communities) introduces significant latency, a more efficient solution is to selectively protect frames containing privacy objects (e.g., faces). Existing object detectors require fully decoded videos or per-frame processing in compressed videos, leading to decoding overhead or reduced accuracy. Therefore, we propose ComPrivDet, an efficient method for detecting privacy objects in compressed video by reusing I-frame inference results. By identifying the presence of new objects through compressed-domain cues, ComPrivDet either skips P- and B-frame detections or efficiently refines them with a lightweight detector. ComPrivDet maintains 99.75% accuracy in private face detection and 96.83% in private license plate detection while skipping over 80% of inferences. It averages 9.84% higher accuracy with 75.95% lower latency than existing compressed-domain detection methods.

Precise analysis of nanoparticles for characterization in electron microscopy images is essential for advancing nanomaterial development. Yet it remains challenging due to the time-consuming nature of manual methods and the shortcomings of traditional automated segmentation techniques, especially when dealing with complex shapes and imaging artifacts. While conventional methods yield promising results, they depend on a large volume of labeled training data, which is both difficult to acquire and highly time-consuming to generate. In order to overcome these challenges, we have developed a two-step solution: Firstly, our system learns to segment the key features of nanoparticles from a dataset of real images using a self-attention driven U-Net architecture that focuses on important physical and morphological details while ignoring background features and noise. Secondly, this trained Attention U-Net is embedded in a cycle-consistent generative adversarial network (CycleGAN) framework, inspired by the cGAN-Seg model introduced by Abzargar et al. This integration allows for the creation of highly realistic synthetic electron microscopy image-mask pairs that naturally reflect the structural patterns learned by the Attention U-Net. Consequently, the model can accurately detect features in a diverse array of real-world nanoparticle images and autonomously augment the training dataset without requiring human input. Cycle consistency enforces a direct correspondence between synthetic images and ground-truth masks, ensuring realistic features, which is crucial for accurate segmentation training.

Accurate diagnosis and treatment of complex diseases require integrating histological, molecular, and clinical data, yet in practice these modalities are often incomplete owing to tissue scarcity, assay cost, and workflow constraints. Existing computational approaches attempt to impute missing modalities from available data but rely on task-specific models trained on narrow, single source-target pairs, limiting their generalizability. Here we introduce MuPD (Multimodal Pathology Diffusion), a generative foundation model that embeds hematoxylin and eosin (H&E)-stained histology, molecular RNA profiles, and clinical text into a shared latent space through a diffusion transformer with decoupled cross-modal attention. Pretrained on 100 million histology image patches, 1.6 million text-histology pairs, and 10.8 million RNA-histology pairs spanning 34 human organs, MuPD supports diverse cross-modal synthesis tasks with minimal or no task-specific fine-tuning. For text-conditioned and image-to-image generation, MuPD synthesizes histologically faithful tissue architectures, reducing Fréchet inception distance (FID) scores by 50% relative to domain-specific models and improving few-shot classification accuracy by up to 47% through synthetic data augmentation. For RNA-conditioned histology generation, MuPD reduces FID by 23% compared with the next-best method while preserving cell-type distributions across five cancer types. As a virtual stainer, MuPD translates H&E images to immunohistochemistry and multiplex immunofluorescence, improving average marker correlation by 37% over existing approaches. These results demonstrate that a single, unified generative model pretrained across heterogeneous pathology modalities can substantially outperform specialized alternatives, providing a scalable computational framework for multimodal histopathology.

On-screen learning behavior provides valuable insights into how students seek, use, and create information during learning. Analyzing on-screen behavioral engagement is essential for capturing students' cognitive and collaborative processes. The recent development of Vision Language Models (VLMs) offers new opportunities to automate the labor-intensive manual coding often required for multimodal video data analysis. In this study, we compared the performance of both leading closed-source VLMs (Claude-3.7-Sonnet, GPT-4.1) and open-source VLM (Qwen2.5-VL-72B) in single- and multi-agent settings for automated coding of screen recordings in collaborative learning contexts based on the ICAP framework. In particular, we proposed and compared two multi-agent frameworks: 1) a three-agent workflow multi-agent system (MAS) that segments screen videos by scene and detects on-screen behaviors using cursor-informed VLM prompting with evidence-based verification; 2) an autonomous-decision MAS inspired by ReAct that iteratively interleaves reasoning, tool-like operations (segmentation/ classification/ validation), and observation-driven self-correction to produce interpretable on-screen behavior labels. Experimental results demonstrated that the two proposed MAS frameworks achieved viable performance, outperforming the single VLMs in scene and action detection tasks. It is worth noting that the workflow-based agent achieved best on scene detection, and the autonomous-decision MAS achieved best on action detection. This study demonstrates the effectiveness of VLM-based Multi-agent System for video analysis and contributes a scalable framework for multimodal data analytics.

Spatial transcriptomics (ST) enables gene expression mapping within anatomical context but remains costly and low-throughput. Hematoxylin and eosin (H\&E) staining offers rich morphology yet lacks molecular resolution. We present \textbf{\ours} (\textbf{S}patial \textbf{T}ranscriptomics and hist\textbf{O}logy \textbf{R}epresentation \textbf{M}odel), a foundation model trained on 1.2 million spatially resolved transcriptomic profiles with matched histology across 18 organs. Using a hierarchical architecture integrating morphological features, gene expression, and spatial context, STORM bridges imaging and omics through robust molecular--morphological representations. STORM enhances spatial domain discovery, producing biologically coherent tissue maps, and outperforms existing methods in predicting spatial gene expression from H\&E images across 11 tumor types. The model is platform-agnostic, performing consistently across Visium, Xenium, Visium HD, and CosMx. Applied to 23 independent cohorts comprising 7,245 patients, STORM significantly improves immunotherapy response prediction and prognostication over established biomarkers, providing a scalable framework for spatially informed discovery and clinical precision medicine.

With the growing demand for large-scale and high-quality data in edge intelligence systems, mobile robots are increasingly deployed to collect data proactively, particularly in complex environments. However, existing robot-assisted data collection methods face significant challenges in achieving reliable and efficient performance, especially in non-line-of-sight (NLoS) environments. This paper proposes a communication-and-learning dual-driven (CLD) autonomous navigation scheme that incorporates region-aware propagation characteristics and a non-point-mass robot representation. This scheme enables simultaneous optimization of navigation, communication, and learning performance. An efficient algorithm based on majorization-minimization (MM) is proposed to solve the non-convex and non-smooth CLD problem. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves superior performance in collision-avoidance navigation, data collection, and model training compared to benchmark methods. It is also shown that CLD can adapt to different scenarios by flexibly adjusting the weight factor among navigation, communication and learning objectives.

Modeling long-range spatiotemporal dynamics in functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) remains a key challenge due to the high dimensionality of the four-dimensional signals. Prior voxel-based models, although demonstrating excellent performance and interpretation capabilities, are constrained by prohibitive memory demands and thus can only capture limited temporal windows. To address this, we propose TABLeT (Two-dimensionally Autoencoded Brain Latent Transformer), a novel approach that tokenizes fMRI volumes using a pre-trained 2D natural image autoencoder. Each 3D fMRI volume is compressed into a compact set of continuous tokens, enabling long-sequence modeling with a simple Transformer encoder with limited VRAM. Across large-scale benchmarks including the UK-Biobank (UKB), Human Connectome Project (HCP), and ADHD-200 datasets, TABLeT outperforms existing models in multiple tasks, while demonstrating substantial gains in computational and memory efficiency over the state-of-the-art voxel-based method given the same input. Furthermore, we develop a self-supervised masked token modeling approach to pre-train TABLeT, which improves the model's performance for various downstream tasks. Our findings suggest a promising approach for scalable and interpretable spatiotemporal modeling of brain activity. Our code is available at https://github.com/beotborry/TABLeT.

Asking a large language model to respond in JSON should be a formatting choice, not a capability tax. Yet we find that structured output requirements -- JSON, XML, LaTeX, Markdown -- substantially degrade reasoning and writing performance across open-weight models. The research response has focused on constrained decoding, but sampling bias accounts for only a fraction of the degradation. The dominant cost enters at the prompt: format-requesting instructions alone cause most of the accuracy loss, before any decoder constraint is applied. This diagnosis points to a simple principle: decouple reasoning from formatting. Whether by generating freeform first and reformatting in a second pass, or by enabling extended thinking within a single generation, separating the two concerns substantially recovers lost accuracy. Across six open-weight models, four API models, four formats, and tasks spanning math, science, logic, and writing, decoupling recovers most lost accuracy. Notably, most recent closed-weight models show little to no format tax, suggesting the problem is not inherent to structured generation but a gap that current open-weight models have yet to close. Code is available at https://github.com/ivnle/the-format-tax.

Global optimization of black-box functions from noisy samples is a fundamental challenge in machine learning and scientific computing. Traditional methods such as Bayesian Optimization often converge to local minima on multi-modal functions, while gradient-free methods require many function evaluations. We present a novel neural approach that learns to find global minima through iterative refinement. Our model takes noisy function samples and their fitted spline representation as input, then iteratively refines an initial guess toward the true global minimum. Trained on randomly generated functions with ground truth global minima obtained via exhaustive search, our method achieves a mean error of 8.05 percent on challenging multi-modal test functions, compared to 36.24 percent for the spline initialization, a 28.18 percent improvement. The model successfully finds global minima in 72 percent of test cases with error below 10 percent, demonstrating learned optimization principles rather than mere curve fitting. Our architecture combines encoding of multiple modalities including function values, derivatives, and spline coefficients with iterative position updates, enabling robust global optimization without requiring derivative information or multiple restarts.

Collecting human demonstrations via teleoperation is a common approach for teaching robots task-specific skills. However, when only a limited number of demonstrations are available, policies are prone to entering out-of-distribution (OOD) states due to compounding errors or environmental stochasticity. Existing interactive imitation learning or human-in-the-loop methods try to address this issue by following the Human-Gated DAgger (HG-DAgger) paradigm, an approach that augments demonstrations through selective human intervention during policy execution. Nevertheless, these approaches struggle to balance dexterity and generality: they either provide fine-grained corrections but are limited to specific kinematic structures, or achieve generality at the cost of precise control. To overcome this limitation, we propose the Human-Robot Copilot framework that can leverage a scaling factor for dexterous teleoperation while maintaining compatibility with a wide range of industrial and research manipulators. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework achieves higher performance with the same number of demonstration trajectories. Moreover, since corrective interventions are required only intermittently, the overall data collection process is more efficient and less time-consuming.

Federated learning (FL) research increasingly relies on single-node simulations with hundreds or thousands of virtual clients, making both efficiency and reproducibility essential. Yet parallel client training often introduces nondeterminism through shared random state and scheduling variability, forcing researchers to trade throughput for reproducibility or to implement custom control logic within complex frameworks. We present BlazeFL, a lightweight framework for single-node FL simulation that alleviates this trade-off through free-threaded shared-memory execution and deterministic randomness management. BlazeFL uses thread-based parallelism with in-memory parameter exchange between the server and clients, avoiding serialization and inter-process communication overhead. To support deterministic execution, BlazeFL assigns isolated random number generator (RNG) streams to clients. Under a fixed software/hardware stack, and when stochastic operators consume BlazeFL-managed generators, this design yields bitwise-identical results across repeated high-concurrency runs in both thread-based and process-based modes. In CIFAR-10 image-classification experiments, BlazeFL substantially reduces execution time relative to a widely used open-source baseline, achieving up to 3.1$\times$ speedup on communication-dominated workloads while preserving a lightweight dependency footprint. Our open-source implementation is available at: https://github.com/kitsuyaazuma/blazefl.

Plug-and-play (PnP) methods are widely used for solving imaging inverse problems by incorporating a denoiser into optimization algorithms. Score-based diffusion models (SBDMs) have recently demonstrated strong generative performance through a denoiser trained across a wide range of noise levels. Despite their shared reliance on denoisers, it remains unclear how to systematically use SBDMs as priors within the PnP framework without relying on reverse diffusion sampling. In this paper, we establish a score-based interpretation of PnP that justifies using pretrained SBDMs directly within PnP algorithms. Building on this connection, we introduce a stochastic generative PnP (SGPnP) framework that injects noise to better leverage the expressive generative SBDM priors, thereby improving robustness in severely ill-posed inverse problems. We provide a new theory showing that this noise injection induces optimization on a Gaussian-smoothed objective and promotes escape from strict saddle points. Experiments on challenging inverse tasks, such as multi-coil MRI reconstruction and large-mask natural image inpainting, demonstrate consistent improvement over conventional PnP methods and achieve performance competitive with diffusion-based solvers.

For a larger set of predictions of several differently trained machine learning models, known as bagging predictors, the mean of all predictions is taken by default. Nevertheless, this proceeding can deviate from the actual ground truth in certain parameter regions. An approach is presented to determine a representative y_BS from such a set of predictions using Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) in nonlinear regression with Neural Networks (NN) which simultaneously provides an associated quality criterion beta_BS, called Bagging Score (BS), that reflects the confidence of the obtained ensemble prediction. It is shown that working with the new approach better predictions can be made than working with the common use of mean or median. In addition to this, the used method is contrasted to several approaches of nonlinear regression from the literatur, resulting in a top ranking in each of the calculated error values without using any optimization or feature selection technique.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models exhibit striking performance disparities across languages, yet the internal mechanisms driving these gaps remain poorly understood. In this work, we conduct a systematic analysis of expert routing patterns in MoE models, revealing a phenomenon we term Language Routing Isolation, in which high- and low-resource languages tend to activate largely disjoint expert sets. Through layer-stratified analysis, we further show that routing patterns exhibit a layer-wise convergence-divergence pattern across model depth. Building on these findings, we propose RISE (Routing Isolation-guided Subnetwork Enhancement), a framework that exploits routing isolation to identify and adapt language-specific expert subnetworks. RISE applies a tripartite selection strategy, using specificity scores to identify language-specific experts in shallow and deep layers and overlap scores to select universal experts in middle layers. By training only the selected subnetwork while freezing all other parameters, RISE substantially improves low-resource language performance while preserving capabilities in other languages. Experiments on 10 languages demonstrate that RISE achieves target-language F1 gains of up to 10.85% with minimal cross-lingual degradation.

Many modern video-based human action recognition (HAR) approaches use 2D skeleton as the intermediate representation in their prediction pipelines. Despite overall encouraging results, these approaches still struggle in many common scenes, mainly because the skeleton does not capture critical action-related information pertaining to the depth of the joints, contour of the human body, and interaction between the human and objects. To address this, we propose an effective approach to augment skeleton with a representation capturing action-related information in the pipeline of HAR. The representation, termed Scale-Body-Flow (SBF), consists of three distinct components, namely a scale map volume given by the scale (and hence depth information) of each joint, a body map outlining the human subject, and a flow map indicating human-object interaction given by pixel-wise optical flow values. To predict SBF, we further present SFSNet, a novel segmentation network supervised by the skeleton and optical flow without extra annotation overhead beyond the existing skeleton extraction. Extensive experiments across different datasets demonstrate that our pipeline based on SBF and SFSNet achieves significantly higher HAR accuracy with similar compactness and efficiency as compared with the state-of-the-art skeleton-only approaches.

Small language models (SLMs) have been increasingly deployed in edge devices and other resource-constrained settings. However, these models make confident mispredictions and produce unstable output, making them risky for factual and decision-critical tasks. Current evaluation methodology relies on final accuracy or hallucination rates without explaining how internal model behavior affects outputs. Specifically, how entropy evolves during decoding, how attention is distributed across layers, and how hidden representations contribute to uncertainty, logical inconsistencies, and misinformation propagation are often overlooked. Consequently, this study introduces a trace-level analysis of entropy and attention dynamics in SLMs evaluated with the TruthfulQA dataset. Four models with parameter ranges of 1B-1.7B parameters were examined via token-level output entropy, attention entropy, head dispersion, and hidden-state representation. The results reflect three model classifications by entropy patterns. Deterministic models (DeepSeek-1.5B and LLaMA-1B): output entropy decreases over time. Exploratory models (Gemma-1B): with increasing entropy, and balanced models (Qwen-1.7B): have moderate and stable entropy. Also, each group has distinctively different hidden-state movement and attention dispersion patterns. The analysis demonstrates that truthfulness in SLMs emerges from structured entropy and attention dynamics. Monitoring and optimizing these internal uncertainty patterns can guide the design of a more reliable, hallucination-aware, and application-specific edge SLMs.

With the growing prevalence of multimodal news content, effective news topic classification demands models capable of jointly understanding and reasoning over heterogeneous data such as text and images. Existing methods often process modalities independently or employ simplistic fusion strategies, limiting their ability to capture complex cross-modal interactions and leverage external knowledge. To overcome these limitations, we propose MultiPress, a novel three-stage multi-agent framework for multimodal news classification. MultiPress integrates specialized agents for multimodal perception, retrieval-augmented reasoning, and gated fusion scoring, followed by a reward-driven iterative optimization mechanism. We validate MultiPress on a newly constructed large-scale multimodal news dataset, demonstrating significant improvements over strong baselines and highlighting the effectiveness of modular multi-agent collaboration and retrieval-augmented reasoning in enhancing classification accuracy and interpretability.

This study aimed to leverage graph information, particularly Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) and Co-reference (Coref) graphs, to enhance the performance of our baseline summarization models. Specifically, we experimented with a Graph Attention Network architecture to incorporate graph information. However, this architecture did not enhance the performance. Subsequently, we used a simple Multi-layer Perceptron architecture, which improved the results in our proposed model on our primary dataset, CNN/DM. Additionally, we annotated XSum dataset with RST graph information, establishing a benchmark for future graph-based summarization models. This secondary dataset posed multiple challenges, revealing both the merits and limitations of our models.

Neural operators have emerged as data-driven surrogates for solving partial differential equations (PDEs), and their success hinges on efficiently modeling the long-range, global coupling among spatial points induced by the underlying physics. In many PDE regimes, the induced global interaction kernels are empirically compressible, exhibiting rapid spectral decay that admits low-rank approximations. We leverage this observation to unify representative global mixing modules in neural operators under a shared low-rank template: compressing high-dimensional pointwise features into a compact latent space, processing global interactions within it, and reconstructing the global context back to spatial points. Guided by this view, we introduce Low-Rank Spatial Attention (LRSA) as a clean and direct instantiation of this template. Crucially, unlike prior approaches that often rely on non-standard aggregation or normalization modules, LRSA is built purely from standard Transformer primitives, i.e., attention, normalization, and feed-forward networks, yielding a concise block that is straightforward to implement and directly compatible with hardware-optimized kernels. In our experiments, such a simple construction is sufficient to achieve high accuracy, yielding an average error reduction of over 17\% relative to second-best methods, while remaining stable and efficient in mixed-precision training.

End-to-end planning has emerged as a dominant paradigm for autonomous driving, where recent models often adopt a scoring-selection framework to choose trajectories from a large set of candidates, with diffusion-based decoding showing strong promise. However, directly selecting from the entire candidate space remains difficult to optimize, and Gaussian perturbations used in diffusion often introduce unrealistic trajectories that complicate the denoising process. In addition, for training these models, reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise, but existing end-to-end RL approaches typically rely on a single coupled reward without structured signals, limiting optimization effectiveness. To address these challenges, we propose HAD, an end-to-end planning framework with a Hierarchical Diffusion Policy that decomposes planning into a coarse-to-fine process. To improve trajectory generation, we introduce Structure-Preserved Trajectory Expansion, which produces realistic candidates while maintaining kinematic structure. For policy learning, we develop Metric-Decoupled Policy Optimization (MDPO) to enable structured RL optimization across multiple driving objectives. Extensive experiments show that HAD achieves new state-of-the-art performance on both NAVSIM and HUGSIM, outperforming prior arts by a huge margin: +2.3 EPDMS on NAVSIM and +4.9 Route Completion on HUGSIM.

Single-pixel imaging (SPI) offers a cost-effective route to hyperspectral acquisition but struggles to recover high-fidelity spatial and spectral details under extremely low sampling rates, a severely ill-posed inverse problem. While deep learning has shown potential, existing data-driven methods demand large-scale pretraining datasets that are often impractical in hyperspectral imaging. To overcome this limitation, we propose an end-to-end physics-informed framework that leverages untrained neural networks and RGB guidance for joint hyperspectral reconstruction and super-resolution without any external training data. The framework comprises three physically grounded stages: (1) a Regularized Least-Squares method with RGB-derived Grayscale Priors (LS-RGP) that initializes the solution by exploiting cross-modal structural correlations; (2) an Untrained Hyperspectral Recovery Network (UHRNet) that refines the reconstruction through measurement consistency and hybrid regularization; and (3) a Transformer-based Untrained Super-Resolution Network (USRNet) that upsamples the spatial resolution via cross-modal attention, transferring high-frequency details from the RGB guide. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach significantly surpasses state-of-the-art algorithms in both reconstruction accuracy and spectral fidelity. Moreover, a proof-of-concept experiment using a physical single-pixel imaging system validates the framework's practical applicability, successfully reconstructing a 144-band hyperspectral data cube at a mere 6.25% sampling rate. The proposed method thus provides a robust, data-efficient solution for computational hyperspectral imaging.

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) generate structured chains of thought (CoTs) before producing final answers, making them especially vulnerable to knowledge leakage through intermediate reasoning steps. Yet, the memorization of sensitive information in the training data such as copyrighted and private content has led to ethical and legal concerns. To address these issues, selective forgetting (also known as machine unlearning) has emerged as a potential remedy for LRMs. However, existing unlearning methods primarily target final answers and may degrade the overall reasoning ability of LRMs after forgetting. Additionally, directly applying unlearning on the entire CoTs could degrade the general reasoning capabilities. The key challenge for LRM unlearning lies in achieving precise unlearning of targeted knowledge while preserving the integrity of general reasoning capabilities. To bridge this gap, we in this paper propose a novel LRM unlearning framework that selectively removes sensitive reasoning components while preserving general reasoning capabilities. Our approach leverages multiple LLMs with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to analyze CoT traces, identify forget-relevant segments, and replace them with benign placeholders that maintain logical structure. We also introduce a new feature replacement unlearning loss for LRMs, which can simultaneously suppress the probability of generating forgotten content while reinforcing structurally valid replacements. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and medical datasets verify the desired properties of our proposed method.

Can lifetime learning expand behavioral diversity over evolutionary time, rather than collapsing it? Prior theory predicts that plasticity reduces variance by buffering organisms against environmental noise. We test this in a competitive domain: chess agents with eight NEAT-evolved neural modules, Hebbian within-game plasticity, and a desirability-domain signal chain with imagination. Across 10~seeds per Hebbian condition, a variance crossover emerges: Hebbian ON starts with lower cross-seed variance than OFF, then surpasses it at generation~34. The crossover trend is monotonic (\r{ho} = 0.91, p < 10^{-6): plasticity's effect on behavioral variance reverses over evolutionary time, initially compressing diversity (consistent with prior predictions) then expanding it as evolved Perception differences are amplified through imagination -- a feedback loop that mutation alone cannot sustain. The result is structured behavioral divergence: evolved agents select different moves on the same positions (62\% disagreement), develop distinct opening repertoires, piece preferences, and game lengths. These are not different sampling policies -- they are reproducible behavioral signatures (ICC > 0.8) with interpretable signal chain configurations. Three regimes appear depending on opponent type: exploration (Hebbian ON, heterogeneous opponent), lottery (Hebbian OFF, elitism lock-in), and transparent (same-model opponent, brain self-erasure). The transparent regime generates a falsifiable prediction: self-play systems may systematically suppress behavioral diversity by eliminating the heterogeneity that personality requires. \textbf{Keywords: Baldwin Effect, neuroevolution, NEAT, Hebbian learning, chess, cognitive architecture, personality emergence, imagination

Adaptive reward design for deep reinforcement learning (DRL) in multi-beam LEO satellite scheduling is motivated by the intuition that regime-aware reward weights should outperform static ones. We systematically test this intuition and uncover a switching-stability dilemma: near-constant reward weights (342.1 Mbps) outperform carefully-tuned dynamic weights (103.3+/-96.8 Mbps) because PPO requires a quasistationary reward signal for value function convergence. Weight adaptation-regardless of quality-degrades performance by repeatedly restarting convergence. To understand why specific weights matter, we introduce a single-variable causal probing method that independently perturbs each reward term by +/-20% and measures PPO response after 50k steps. Probing reveals counterintuitive leverage: a +20% increase in the switching penalty yields +157 Mbps for polar handover and +130 Mbps for hot-cold regimes-findings inaccessible to human experts or trained MLPs without systematic probing. We evaluate four MDP architect variants (fixed, rule-based, learned MLP, finetuned LLM) across known and novel traffic regimes. The MLP achieves 357.9 Mbps on known regimes and 325.2 Mbps on novel regimes, while the fine-tuned LLM collapses to 45.3+/-43.0 Mbps due to weight oscillation rather than lack of domain knowledge-output consistency, not knowledge, is the binding constraint. Our findings provide an empirically-grounded roadmap for LLM-DRL integration in communication systems, identifying where LLMs add irreplaceable value (natural language intent understanding) versus where simpler methods suffice.