Violence detection benefits from audio, but real-world soundscapes can be noisy or weakly related to the visible scene. We present CoLoRSMamba, a directional Video to Audio multimodal architecture that couples VideoMamba and AudioMamba through CLS-guided conditional LoRA. At each layer, the VideoMamba CLS token produces a channel-wise modulation vector and a stabilization gate that adapt the AudioMamba projections responsible for the selective state-space parameters (Delta, B, C), including the step-size pathway, yielding scene-aware audio dynamics without token-level cross-attention. Training combines binary classification with a symmetric AV-InfoNCE objective that aligns clip-level audio and video embeddings. To support fair multimodal evaluation, we curate audio-filtered clip level subsets of the NTU-CCTV and DVD datasets from temporal annotations, retaining only clips with available audio. On these subsets, CoLoRSMamba outperforms representative audio-only, video-only, and multimodal baselines, achieving 88.63% accuracy / 86.24% F1-V on NTU-CCTV and 75.77% accuracy / 72.94% F1-V on DVD. It further offers a favorable accuracy-efficiency tradeoff, surpassing several larger models with fewer parameters and FLOPs.

Accurate reconstruction of leaf surfaces from 3D point cloud is essential for agricultural applications such as phenotyping. However, real-world plant data (i.e., irregular 3D point cloud) are often complex to reconstruct plant parts accurately. A wide range of surface reconstruction methods has been proposed, including parametric, triangulation-based, implicit, and learning based approaches, yet their relative performance for leaf surface reconstruction remains insufficiently understood. In this work, we present a comparative study of nine representative surface reconstruction methods for leaf surfaces. We evaluate these methods on three publicly available datasets: LAST-STRAW, Pheno4D, and Crops3D - spanning diverse species, sensors, and sensing environments, ranging from clean high-resolution indoor scans to noisy low-resolution field settings. The analysis highlights the trade-offs between surface area estimation accuracy, smoothness, robustness to noise and missing data, and computational cost across different methods. These factors affect the cost and constraints of robotic hardware used in agricultural applications. Our results show that each method exhibits distinct advantages depending on application and resource constraints. The findings provide practical guidance for selecting surface reconstruction techniques for resource constrained robotic platforms.

Perception plays a central role in connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs), underpinning not only conventional modular driving stacks, but also cooperative perception systems and recent end-to-end driving models. While deep learning has greatly improved perception performance, its statistical nature makes perfect predictions difficult to attain. Meanwhile, standard training objectives and evaluation benchmarks treat all perception errors equally, even though only a subset is safety-critical. In this paper, we investigate safety-aligned evaluation and optimization for 3D object detection that explicitly characterize high-impact errors. Building on our previously proposed safety-oriented metric, NDS-USC, and safety-aware loss function, EC-IoU, we make three contributions. First, we present an expanded study of single-vehicle 3D object detection models across diverse neural network architectures and sensing modalities, showing that gains under standard metrics such as mAP and NDS may not translate to safety-oriented criteria represented by NDS-USC. With EC-IoU, we reaffirm the benefit of safety-aware fine-tuning for improving safety-critical detection performance. Second, we conduct an ego-centric, safety-oriented evaluation of AV-infrastructure cooperative object detection models, underscoring its superiority over vehicle-only models and demonstrating a safety impact analysis that illustrates the potential contribution of cooperative models to "Vision Zero." Third, we integrate EC-IoU into SparseDrive and show that safety-aware perception hardening can reduce collision rate by nearly 30% and improve system-level safety directly in an end-to-end perception-to-planning framework. Overall, our results indicate that safety-aligned perception evaluation and optimization offer a practical path toward enhancing CAV safety across single-vehicle, cooperative, and end-to-end autonomy settings.

Quality inspection in smart manufacturing requires identifying intrinsic material and surface properties beyond visible geometry, yet vision-only methods remain vulnerable to occlusion and reflection. We propose VitaTouch, a property-aware vision-tactile-language model for material-property inference and natural-language attribute description. VitaTouch uses modality-specific encoders and a dual Q-Former to extract language-relevant visual and tactile features, which are compressed into prefix tokens for a large language model. We align each modality with text and explicitly couple vision and touch through contrastive learning. We also construct VitaSet, a multimodal dataset with 186 objects, 52k images, and 5.1k human-verified instruction-answer pairs. VitaTouch achieves the best performance on HCT and the overall TVL benchmark, while remaining competitive on SSVTP. On VitaSet, it reaches 88.89% hardness accuracy, 75.13% roughness accuracy, and 54.81% descriptor recall; the material-description task further achieves a peak semantic similarity of 0.9009. With LoRA-based fine-tuning, VitaTouch attains 100.0%, 96.0%, and 92.0% accuracy for 2-, 3-, and 5-category defect recognition, respectively, and delivers 94.0% closed-loop recognition accuracy and 94.0% end-to-end sorting success in 100 laboratory robotic trials. More details are available at the project page: https://vitatouch.github.io/

Machine learning, especially physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) and their neural network variants, has been widely used to solve problems involving partial differential equations (PDEs). The successful deployment of such methods beyond academic research remains limited. For example, PINN methods primarily consider discrete point-to-point fitting and fail to account for the potential properties of real solutions. The adoption of continuous activation functions in these approaches leads to local characteristics that align with the equation solutions while resulting in poor extensibility and robustness. A general explicit network (GEN) that implements point-to-function PDE solving is proposed in this paper. The "function" component can be constructed based on our prior knowledge of the original PDEs through corresponding basis functions for fitting. The experimental results demonstrate that this approach enables solutions with high robustness and strong extensibility to be obtained.

Deep learning models for COVID-19 detection from chest CT scans generally perform well when the training and test data originate from the same institution, but they often struggle when scans are drawn from multiple centres with differing scanners, imaging protocols, and patient populations. One key reason is that existing methods treat COVID-19 classification as the sole training objective, without accounting for the data source of each scan. As a result, the learned representations tend to be biased toward centres that contribute more training data. To address this, we propose a multi-task learning approach in which the model is trained to predict both the COVID-19 diagnosis and the originating data centre. The two tasks share an EfficientNet-B7 backbone, which encourages the feature extractor to learn representations that hold across all four participating centres. Since the training data is not evenly distributed across sources, we apply a logit-adjusted cross-entropy loss [1] to the source classification head to prevent underrepresented centres from being overlooked. Our pre-processing follows the SSFL framework with KDS [2], selecting eight representative slices per scan. Our method achieves an F1 score of 0.9098 and an AUC-ROC of 0.9647 on a validation set of 308 scans. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Purdue-M2/-multisource-covid-ct.

Attention sinks are defined as tokens that attract disproportionate attention. While these have been studied in single modality transformers, their cross-modal impact in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLM) remains largely unexplored: are they redundant artifacts or essential global priors? This paper first categorizes visual sinks into two distinct categories: ViT-emerged sinks (V-sinks), which propagate from the vision encoder, and LLM-emerged sinks (L-sinks), which arise within deep LLM layers. Based on the new definition, our analysis reveals a fundamental performance trade-off: while sinks effectively encode global scene-level priors, their dominance can suppress the fine-grained visual evidence required for local perception. Furthermore, we identify specific functional layers where modulating these sinks most significantly impacts downstream performance. To leverage these insights, we propose Layer-wise Sink Gating (LSG), a lightweight, plug-and-play module that dynamically scales the attention contributions of V-sink and the rest visual tokens. LSG is trained via standard next-token prediction, requiring no task-specific supervision while keeping the LVLM backbone frozen. In most layers, LSG yields improvements on representative multimodal benchmarks, effectively balancing global reasoning and precise local evidence.

Storyboarding is a core skill in visual storytelling for film, animation, and games. However, automating this process requires a system to achieve two properties that current approaches rarely satisfy simultaneously: inter-shot consistency and explicit editability. While 2D diffusion-based generators produce vivid imagery, they often suffer from identity drift along with limited geometric control; conversely, traditional 3D animation workflows are consistent and editable but require expert-heavy, labor-intensive authoring. We present StoryBlender, a grounded 3D storyboard generation framework governed by a Story-centric Reflection Scheme. At its core, we propose the StoryBlender system, which is built on a three-stage pipeline: (1) Semantic-Spatial Grounding, to construct a continuity memory graph to decouple global assets from shot-specific variables for long-horizon consistency; (2) Canonical Asset Materialization, to instantiate entities in a unified coordinate space to maintain visual identity; and (3) Spatial-Temporal Dynamics, to achieve layout design and cinematic evolution through visual metrics. By orchestrating multiple agents in a hierarchical manner within a verification loop, StoryBlender iteratively self-corrects spatial hallucinations via engine-verified feedback. The resulting native 3D scenes support direct, precise editing of cameras and visual assets while preserving unwavering multi-shot continuity. Experiments demonstrate that StoryBlender significantly improves consistency and editability over both diffusion-based and 3D-grounded baselines. Code, data, and demonstration video will be available on https://engineeringai-lab.github.io/StoryBlender/

Foundation models have revolutionized AI, but adapting them efficiently for multimodal tasks, particularly in dual-stream architectures composed of unimodal encoders, such as DINO and BERT, remains a significant challenge. Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods like Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) enable lightweight adaptation, yet they operate in isolation within each modality, limiting their ability in capturing cross-modal interactions. In this paper, we take a step in bridging this gap with Cross-Modal Low-Rank Adaptation (CoLA), a novel PEFT framework that extends LoRA by introducing a dedicated inter-modal adaptation pathway alongside the standard intra-modal one. This dual-path design enables CoLA to adapt unimodal foundation models to multimodal tasks effectively, without interference between modality-specific and cross-modal learning. We evaluate CoLA across a range of vision-language (RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, RefCOCOg) and audio-visual (AVE, AVS) benchmarks, where it consistently outperforms LORA, achieving a relative gain of around 3\% and 2\%, respectively, while maintaining parameter efficiency. Notably, CoLA enables the first multi-task PEFT framework for visual grounding, bridging a key gap in efficient multimodal adaptation.

Accurate segmentation of cardiac structures in cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) images is essential for reliable diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular diseases. However, manual segmentation remains time-consuming and suffers from significant inter-observer variability. Recent advances in deep learning, particularly foundation models such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM), demonstrate strong generalization but often lack the boundary precision required for clinical applications. To address this limitation, we propose CardioSAM, a hybrid architecture that combines the generalized feature extraction capability of a frozen SAM encoder with a lightweight, trainable cardiac-specific decoder. The proposed decoder introduces two key innovations: a Cardiac-Specific Attention module that incorporates anatomical topological priors, and a Boundary Refinement Module designed to improve tissue interface delineation. Experimental evaluation on the ACDC benchmark demonstrates that CardioSAM achieves a Dice coefficient of 93.39%, IoU of 87.61%, pixel accuracy of 99.20%, and HD95 of 4.2 mm. The proposed method surpasses strong baselines such as nnU-Net by +3.89% Dice and exceeds reported inter-expert agreement levels (91.2%), indicating its potential for reliable and clinically applicable cardiac segmentation.

Accurate assessment of atmospheric nitrogen dioxide (NO$_2$) and sulfur dioxide (SO$_2$) is essential for understanding climate-air quality interactions, supporting environmental policy, and protecting public health. Traditional monitoring approaches face limitations: satellite observations provide broad spatial coverage but suffer from data gaps, while ground-based sensors offer high temporal resolution but limited spatial extent. To address these challenges, we propose PollutionNet, a Vision Transformer-based framework that integrates Sentinel-5P TROPOMI vertical column density (VCD) data with ground-level observations. By leveraging self-attention mechanisms, PollutionNet captures complex spatiotemporal dependencies that are often missed by conventional CNN and RNN models. Applied to Ireland (2020-2021), our case study demonstrates that PollutionNet achieves state-of-the-art performance (RMSE: 6.89 $μ$g/m$^3$ for NO$_2$, 4.49 $μ$g/m$^3$ for SO$_2$), reducing prediction errors by up to 14% compared to baseline models. Beyond accuracy gains, PollutionNet provides a scalable and data-efficient tool for applied climatology, enabling robust pollution assessments in regions with sparse monitoring networks. These results highlight the potential of advanced machine learning approaches to enhance climate-related air quality research, inform environmental management, and support sustainable policy decisions.

Long-range human movement generation remains a central challenge in computer vision and graphics. Generating coherent transitions across semantically distinct motion domains remains largely unexplored. This capability is particularly important for applications such as dance choreography, where movements must fluidly transition across diverse stylistic and semantic motifs. We propose a simple and effective inference-time optimization framework inspired by diffusion-based stochastic optimal control. Specifically, a control-energy objective that explicitly regularizes the transition trajectories of a pretrained diffusion model. We show that optimizing this objective at inference time yields transitions with fidelity and temporal coherence. This is the first work to provide a general framework for controlled long-range human motion generation with explicit transition modeling.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a real-time, differentiable representation for neural scene understanding. However, existing 3DGS-based methods struggle to represent hierarchical 3D semantic structures and capture whole-part relationships in complex scenes. Moreover, dense pairwise comparisons and inconsistent hierarchical labels from 2D priors hinder feature learning, resulting in suboptimal segmentation. To address these limitations, we introduce TreeGaussian, a tree-guided cascaded contrastive learning framework that explicitly models hierarchical semantic relationships and reduces redundancy in contrastive supervision. By constructing a multi-level object tree, TreeGaussian enables structured learning across object-part hierarchies. In addition, we propose a two-stage cascaded contrastive learning strategy that progressively refines feature representations from global to local, mitigating saturation and stabilizing training. A Consistent Segmentation Detection (CSD) mechanism and a graph-based denoising module are further introduced to align segmentation modes across views while suppressing unstable Gaussian points, enhancing segmentation consistency and quality. Extensive experiments, including open-vocabulary 3D object selection, 3D point cloud understanding, and ablation studies, demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our approach.

Standing water in agricultural fields threatens vehicle mobility and crop health. This paper presents a deployed edge architecture for standing-water detection using Raspberry-Pi-class devices with optional Jetson acceleration. Camera input and environmental sensors (humidity, pressure, temperature) are combined in a finite-state machine (FSM) that acts as the architectural decision engine. The FSM-guided control plane selects between local and offloaded inference tiers, trading accuracy, latency, and energy under intermittent connectivity and motion-dependent compute budgets. A multi-model YOLO ensemble provides image scores, while diurnal-baseline sensor fusion adjusts caution using environmental anomalies. All decisions are logged per frame, enabling bit-identical hardware-in-the-loop replays. Across ten configurations and sensor variants on identical field sequences with frame-level ground truth, we show that the combination of adaptive tiering, multi-model consensus, and diurnal sensor fusion improves flood-detection performance over static local baselines, uses less energy than a naive always-heavy offload policy, and maintains bounded tail latency in a real agricultural setting.

Image clustering is one of the crucial techniques in multimedia analytics and knowledge discovery. Recently, the Deep clustering method (DC), characterized by its ability to perform feature learning and cluster assignment jointly, surpasses the performance of traditional ones on image data. However, existing methods rarely consider the role of model learning strategies in improving the robustness and performance of clustering complex image data. Furthermore, most approaches rely solely on point-to-point distances to cluster centers for partitioning the latent representations, resulting in error accumulation throughout the iterative process. In this paper, we propose a robust image clustering method (IDCL) which, to our knowledge for the first time, introduces a model training strategy using density information into image clustering. Specifically, we design a curriculum learning scheme grounded in the density information of input data, with a more reasonable learning pace. Moreover, we employ the density core rather than the individual cluster center to guide the cluster assignment. Finally, extensive comparisons with state-of-the-art clustering approaches on benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method, including robustness, rapid convergence, and flexibility in terms of data scale, number of clusters, and image context.

Recent methods have made notable progress in the visual quality of hand-object interaction video synthesis. However, most approaches rely on 2D control signals that lack spatial expressiveness and limit the utilization of synthetic 3D conditional data. To address these limitations, we propose HVG-3D, a unified framework for 3D-aware hand-object interaction (HOI) video synthesis conditioned on explicit 3D representations. Specifically, we develop a diffusion-based architecture augmented with a 3D ControlNet, which encodes geometric and motion cues from 3D inputs to enable explicit 3D reasoning during video synthesis. To achieve high-quality synthesis, HVG-3D is designed with two core components: (i) a 3D-aware HOI video generation diffusion architecture that encodes geometric and motion cues from 3D inputs for explicit 3D reasoning; and (ii) a hybrid pipeline for constructing input and condition signals, enabling flexible and precise control during both training and inference. During inference, given a single real image and a 3D control signal from either simulation or real data, HVG-3D generates high-fidelity, temporally consistent videos with precise spatial and temporal control. Experiments on the TASTE-Rob dataset demonstrate that HVG-3D achieves state-of-the-art spatial fidelity, temporal coherence, and controllability, while enabling effective utilization of both real and simulated data.

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in image and video understanding, their ability to comprehend the physical world has become an increasingly important research focus. Despite their improvements, current MLLMs struggle significantly with high-level physics reasoning. In this work, we investigate the first step of physical reasoning, i.e., intuitive physics understanding, revealing substantial limitations in understanding the dynamics of continuum objects. To isolate and evaluate this specific capability, we introduce two fundamental benchmark tasks: Next Frame Selection (NFS) and Temporal Coherence Verification (TCV). Our experiments demonstrate that even state-of-the-art MLLMs perform poorly on these foundational tasks. To address this limitation, we propose Scene Dynamic Field (SDF), a concise approach that leverages physics simulators within a multi-task fine-tuning framework. SDF substantially improves performance, achieving up to 20.7% gains on fluid tasks while showing strong generalization to unseen physical domains. This work not only highlights a critical gap in current MLLMs but also presents a promising cost-efficient approach for developing more physically grounded MLLMs. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/andylinx/Scene-Dynamic-Field.

Downlink bottlenecks motivate onboard systems that prioritize hazards without transmitting raw pixels. We study a strict setting where a ground station uplinks only compact embeddings plus metadata, and an onboard system performs vector search to triage new captures. We ask whether this embedding-only pipeline remains useful under explicit remote-sensing shift: cross-time (pre/post-event), cross-event/location (different disasters), cross-site cloud (15 geographic sites), and cross-city AOI holdout (buildings). Using OlmoEarth embeddings on a scaled public multi-task benchmark (27 Sentinel-2 L2A scenes, 15 cloud sites, 5 SpaceNet-2 AOIs; 10 seeds), we find that all effective methods rely on the same uplinked embeddings, but the optimal decision head is task-dependent: kNN retrieval is significantly superior for cloud classification (0.92 vs. centroid 0.91; p<0.01, Wilcoxon), while class centroids dominate temporal change detection (0.85 vs. retrieval 0.48; p<0.01). These results show that embedding-only uplink is the key enabler--once embeddings are onboard, the system can select the best head per task at no additional uplink cost, with all telemetry under 1 KB per query.

3D human pose estimation is a key enabling technology for applications such as healthcare monitoring, human-robot collaboration, and immersive gaming, but real-world deployment remains challenged by viewpoint variations. Existing methods struggle to generalize to unseen camera viewpoints, require large amounts of training data, and suffer from high inference latency. We propose MoViD, a viewpoint-invariant 3D human pose estimation framework that disentangles viewpoint information from motion features. The key idea is to extract viewpoint information from intermediate pose features and leverage it to enhance both the robustness and efficiency of pose estimation. MoViD introduces a view estimator that models key joint relationships to predict viewpoint information, and an orthogonal projection module to disentangle motion and view features, further enhanced through physics-grounded contrastive alignment across views. For real-time edge deployment, MoViD employs a frame-by-frame inference pipeline with a view-aware strategy that adaptively activates flip refinement based on the estimated viewpoint. Evaluations on nine public datasets and newly collected multiview UAV and gait analysis datasets show that MoViD reduces pose estimation error by over 24.2\% compared to state-of-the-art methods, maintains robust performance under severe occlusions with 60\% less training data, and achieves real-time inference at 15 FPS on NVIDIA edge devices.

In the field of Large Language Models (LLMs), Attention Residuals have recently demonstrated that learned, selective aggregation over all preceding layer outputs can outperform fixed residual connections. We propose Cross-Stage Attention Residuals (XAttnRes), a mechanism that maintains a global feature history pool accumulating both encoder and decoder stage outputs. Through lightweight pseudo-query attention, each stage selectively aggregates from all preceding representations. To bridge the gap between the same-dimensional Transformer layers in LLMs and the multi-scale encoder-decoder stages in segmentation networks, XAttnRes introduces spatial alignment and channel projection steps that handle cross-resolution features with negligible overhead. When added to existing segmentation networks, XAttnRes consistently improves performance across four datasets and three imaging modalities. We further observe that XAttnRes alone, even without skip connections, achieves performance on par with the baseline, suggesting that learned aggregation can recover the inter-stage information flow traditionally provided by predetermined connections.

Leveraging 3D information within Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has recently shown significant advantages for indoor scene understanding. However, existing methods, including those using explicit ground-truth 3D positional encoding and those grafting external 3D foundation models for implicit geometry, struggle with the trade-off in 2D-3D representation fusion, leading to suboptimal deployment. To this end, we propose 3D-Implicit Depth Emergence, a method that reframes 3D perception as an emergent property derived from geometric self-supervision rather than explicit encoding. Our core insight is the Implicit Geometric Emergence Principle: by strategically leveraging privileged geometric supervision through mechanisms like a fine-grained geometry validator and global representation constraints, we construct an information bottleneck. This bottleneck forces the model to maximize the mutual information between visual features and 3D structures, allowing 3D awareness to emerge naturally within a unified visual representation. Unlike existing approaches, our method enables 3D perception to emerge implicitly, disentangling features in dense regions and, crucially, eliminating depth and pose dependencies during inference with zero latency overhead. This paradigm shift from external grafting to implicit emergence represents a fundamental rethinking of 3D knowledge integration in visual-language models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method surpasses SOTA on multiple 3D scene understanding benchmarks. Our approach achieves a 55% reduction in inference latency while maintaining strong performance across diverse downstream tasks, underscoring the effectiveness of meticulously designed auxiliary objectives for dependency-free 3D understanding. Source code can be found at github.com/ChushanZhang/3D-IDE.

The control of complex laboratory instrumentation often requires significant programming expertise, creating a barrier for researchers lacking computational skills. This work explores the potential of large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, and LLM-based artificial intelligence (AI) agents to enable efficient programming and automation of scientific equipment. Through a case study involving the implementation of a setup that can be used as a single-pixel camera or a scanning photocurrent microscope, we demonstrate how ChatGPT can facilitate the creation of custom scripts for instrumentation control, significantly reducing the technical barrier for experimental customization. Building on this capability, we further illustrate how LLM-assisted tools can be extended into autonomous AI agents capable of independently operating laboratory instruments and iteratively refining control strategies. This approach underscores the transformative role of LLM-based tools and AI agents in democratizing laboratory automation and accelerating scientific progress.

Reliable visual place recognition (VPR) under dynamic real-world conditions is critical for autonomous robots, yet conventional deep networks remain limited by high computational and energy demands. Inspired by the mammalian navigation system, we introduce SpikeVPR, a bio-inspired and neuromorphic approach combining event-based cameras with spiking neural networks (SNNs) to generate compact, invariant place descriptors from few exemplars, achieving robust recognition under extreme changes in illumination, viewpoint, and appearance. SpikeVPR is trained end-to-end using surrogate gradient learning and incorporates EventDilation, a novel augmentation strategy enhancing robustness to speed and temporal variations. Evaluated on two challenging benchmarks (Brisbane-Event-VPR and NSAVP), SpikeVPR achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art deep networks while using 50 times fewer parameters and consuming 30 and 250 times less energy, enabling real-time deployment on mobile and neuromorphic platforms. These results demonstrate that spike-based coding offers an efficient pathway toward robust VPR in complex, changing environments.

RAG wastes tokens. We propose Knowledge Packs: pre-computed KV caches that deliver the same knowledge at zero token cost. For causal transformers, the KV cache from a forward pass on text F is identical to what a joint pass on F+q would produce - this follows directly from the causal mask. The equivalence is exact but fragile: wrong chat template formatting causes 6-7pp degradation, which we believe explains prior claims of KV outperforming RAG. With correct formatting: zero divergences across 700 questions on Qwen3-8B and Llama-3.1-8B, up to 95% token savings. The KV interface also enables behavioral steering that RAG cannot do. Because RoPE rotates keys but leaves values untouched, contrastive deltas on cached values can nudge model behavior while key arithmetic destroys coherence. The effect sits in mid-layer values (33-66%), independent directions are nearly orthogonal (cos~0) and compose, and both channels - knowledge and steering - run simultaneously at alpha<=0.7 without interference. No training, no weight modification.

In this work we present a novel framework for fire safety management in industrial settings through the implementation of a smart camera platform for jet flames characterization. The approach seeks to alleviate the lack of real-time solutions for industrial early fire segmentation and characterization. As a case study, we demonstrate how a SoC FPGA, running optimized Artificial Intelligence (AI) models can be leveraged to implement a full edge processing pipeline for jet flames analysis. In this paper we extend previous work on computer-vision jet fire segmentation by creating a novel experimental set-up and system implementation for addressing this issue, which can be replicated to other fire safety applications. The proposed platform is designed to carry out image processing tasks in real-time and on device, reducing video processing overheads, and thus the overall latency. This is achieved by optimizing a UNet segmentation model to make it amenable for an SoC FPGAs implementation; the optimized model can then be efficiently mapped onto the SoC reconfigurable logic for massively parallel execution. For our experiments, we have chosen the Ultra96 platform, as it also provides the means for implementing full-fledged intelligent systems using the SoC peripherals, as well as other Operating System (OS) capabilities (i.e., multi-threading) for systems management. For optimizing the model we made use of the Vitis (Xilinx) framework, which enabled us to optimize the full precision model from 7.5 million parameters to 59,095 parameters (125x less), which translated into a reduction of the processing latency of 2.9x. Further optimization (multi-threading and batch normalization) led to an improvement of 7.5x in terms of latency, yielding a performance of 30 Frames Per Second (FPS) without sacrificing accuracy in terms of the evaluated metrics (Dice Score).

Open-domain video platforms offer rich, personalized content that could support health, caregiving, and educational applications, but their engagement-optimized recommendation algorithms can expose vulnerable users to inappropriate or harmful material. These risks are especially acute in child-directed and care settings (e.g., dementia care), where content must satisfy individualized safety constraints before being shown. We introduce SafeScreen, a safety-first video screening framework that retrieves and presents personalized video while enforcing individualized safety constraints. Rather than ranking videos by relevance or popularity, SafeScreen treats safety as a prerequisite and performs sequential approval or rejection of candidate videos through an automated pipeline. SafeScreen integrates three key components: (i) profile-driven extraction of individualized safety criteria, (ii) evidence-grounded assessments via adaptive question generation and multimodal VideoRAG analysis, and (iii) LLM-based decision-making that verifies safety, appropriateness, and relevance before content exposure. This design enables explainable, real-time screening of uncurated video repositories without relying on precomputed safety labels. We evaluate SafeScreen in a dementia-care reminiscence case study using 30 synthetic patient profiles and 90 test queries. Results demonstrate that SafeScreen prioritizes safety over engagement, diverging from YouTube's engagement-optimized rankings in 80-93% of cases, while maintaining high levels of safety coverage, sensibleness, and groundedness, as validated by both LLM-based evaluation and domain experts.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across various tasks, but the billion-scale parameters pose deployment challenges. Although existing methods attempt to reduce the scale of LLMs, they require either special hardware support or expensive post-training to maintain model quality. To facilitate efficient and affordable model slimming, we propose a novel training-free compression method for LLMs, named "SoLA", which leverages \textbf{So}ft activation sparsity and \textbf{L}ow-r\textbf{A}nk decomposition. SoLA can identify and retain a minority of components significantly contributing to inference, while compressing the majority through low-rank decomposition, based on our analysis of the activation pattern in the feed-forward network (FFN) of modern LLMs. To alleviate the decomposition loss, SoLA is equipped with an adaptive component-wise low-rank allocation strategy to assign appropriate truncation positions for different weight matrices. We conduct extensive experiments on LLaMA-2-7B/13B/70B and Mistral-7B models across a variety of benchmarks. SoLA exhibits remarkable improvement in both language modeling and downstream task accuracy without post-training. For example, with a 30\% compression rate on the LLaMA-2-70B model, SoLA surpasses the state-of-the-art method by reducing perplexity from 6.95 to 4.44 and enhancing downstream task accuracy by 10\%.

The ability to rigorously estimate the failure rates of large language models (LLMs) is a prerequisite for their safe deployment. Currently, however, practitioners often face a tradeoff between expensive human gold standards and potentially severely-biased automatic annotation schemes such as "LLM-as-a-Judge" labeling. In this paper, we propose a new, practical, and efficient approach to LLM failure rate estimation based on constrained maximum-likelihood estimation (MLE). Our method integrates three distinct signal sources: (i) a small, high-quality human-labeled calibration set, (ii) a large corpus of LLM-judge annotations, and, most importantly, (iii) additional side information via domain-specific constraints derived from known bounds on judge performance statistics. We validate our approach through a comprehensive empirical study, benchmarking it against state-of-the-art baselines like Prediction-Powered Inference (PPI). Across diverse experimental regimes -- spanning varying judge accuracies, calibration set sizes, and LLM failure rates -- our constrained MLE consistently delivers more accurate and lower-variance estimates than existing methods. By moving beyond the "black-box" use of automated judges to a flexible framework, we provide a principled, interpretable, and scalable pathway towards LLM failure-rate certification.

A promising research direction in enabling LLMs to generate consistently correct code involves addressing their inability to properly estimate program execution, particularly for code they generate. In this work, we demonstrate that Code LLMs can be trained to simulate program execution in a step-by-step manner and that this capability can be leveraged to improve competitive programming performance. Our approach combines supervised fine-tuning on natural language execution traces, textual explanations grounded in true execution, with reinforcement learning using verifiable rewards. We introduce two complementary objectives: output prediction given code and inputs, and solving competitive programming tasks with either ground-truth or self-predicted execution feedback. These objectives enable models to perform self-verification over multiple candidate solutions, and iterative self-fixing by simulating test execution. Across multiple competitive programming benchmarks, our method yields consistent improvements over standard reasoning approaches. We further present ablations and analysis to elucidate the role of execution simulation and its limitations.

The advent of tool-using LLM agents shifts safety monitoring from output moderation to auditing long, noisy interaction trajectories, where risk-critical evidence is sparse-making standard binary supervision poorly suited for credit assignment. To address this, we propose DRAFT (Task Decoupled Latent Reasoning for Agent Safety), a latent reasoning framework that decouples safety judgment into two trainable stages: an Extractor that distills the full trajectory into a compact continuous latent draft, and a Reasoner that jointly attends to the draft and the original trajectory to predict safety. DRAFT avoids lossy explicit summarize-then-judge pipelines by performing evidence aggregation in latent space, enabling end-to-end differentiable training.Across benchmarks including ASSEBench and R-Judge, DRAFT consistently outperforms strong baselines, improving accuracy from 63.27% (LoRA) to 91.18% averaged over benchmarks, and learns more separable representations. Ablations demonstrate a clear synergy between the Extractor and the Reasoner.Overall, DRAFT suggests that continuous latent reasoning prior to readout is a practical path to robust agent safety under long-context supervision with sparse evidence.