Model-based reinforcement learning promises strong sample efficiency but often underperforms in practice due to compounding model error, unimodal world models that average over multi-modal dynamics, and overconfident predictions that bias learning. We introduce WIMLE, a model-based method that extends Implicit Maximum Likelihood Estimation (IMLE) to the model-based RL framework to learn stochastic, multi-modal world models without iterative sampling and to estimate predictive uncertainty via ensembles and latent sampling. During training, WIMLE weights each synthetic transition by its predicted confidence, preserving useful model rollouts while attenuating bias from uncertain predictions and enabling stable learning. Across $40$ continuous-control tasks spanning DeepMind Control, MyoSuite, and HumanoidBench, WIMLE achieves superior sample efficiency and competitive or better asymptotic performance than strong model-free and model-based baselines. Notably, on the challenging Humanoid-run task, WIMLE improves sample efficiency by over $50$\% relative to the strongest competitor, and on HumanoidBench it solves $8$ of $14$ tasks (versus $4$ for BRO and $5$ for SimbaV2). These results highlight the value of IMLE-based multi-modality and uncertainty-aware weighting for stable model-based RL.

Monocular Metric Depth Estimation (MMDE) is essential for physically intelligent systems, yet accurate depth estimation for underrepresented classes in complex scenes remains a persistent challenge. To address this, we propose RAD, a retrieval-augmented framework that approximates the benefits of multi-view stereo by utilizing retrieved neighbors as structural geometric proxies. Our method first employs an uncertainty-aware retrieval mechanism to identify low-confidence regions in the input and retrieve RGB-D context samples containing semantically similar content. We then process both the input and retrieved context via a dual-stream network and fuse them using a matched cross-attention module, which transfers geometric information only at reliable point correspondences. Evaluations on NYU Depth v2, KITTI, and Cityscapes demonstrate that RAD significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on underrepresented classes, reducing relative absolute error by 29.2% on NYU Depth v2, 13.3% on KITTI, and 7.2% on Cityscapes, while maintaining competitive performance on standard in-domain benchmarks.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have significantly advanced the landscape of embodied AI, yet transitioning to synchronized bimanual coordination introduces formidable challenges in multi-stream multimodal integration. We introduce ST-BiBench, a comprehensive multi-tier framework for evaluating spatio-temporal multimodal coordination. Our approach centers on Strategic Coordination Planning, assessing high-level cross-modal reasoning over multiple action and perception streams. To investigate the "proximity paradox"-where semantically coherent plans fail to align with spatially grounded visual inputs-we incorporate Foundational Spatial Grounding to verify workspace awareness and arm-selection logic. Furthermore, we probe model frontiers through Fine-Grained Action Control, investigating whether MLLMs can directly synthesize high-dimensional continuous action modalities (16-Dim) from complex multimodal metadata. Evaluating 30+ state-of-the-art MLLMs, we uncover a persistent and pervasive "coordination paradox"-a significant gap between high-level strategic reasoning and fine-grained physical execution. Results reveal that while frontier MLLMs excel at logic-driven strategy, they frequently suffer from perception-logic disconnection and multi-stream interference during multimodal fusion. ST-BiBench provides a platform for identifying critical bottlenecks in multi-stream multimodal fusion and cross-modal alignment for complex embodied tasks.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models introduce unique challenges for safety alignment due to their sparse routing mechanisms, which can enable degenerate optimization behaviors under standard full-parameter fine-tuning. In our preliminary experiments, we observe that naively applying full-parameter safety fine-tuning to MoE models can reduce attack success rates through routing or expert dominance effects, rather than by directly repairing Safety-Critical Experts. To address this challenge, we propose RASA, a routing-aware expert-level alignment framework that explicitly repairs Safety-Critical Experts while preventing routing-based bypasses. RASA identifies experts disproportionately activated by successful jailbreaks, selectively fine-tunes only these experts under fixed routing, and subsequently enforces routing consistency with safety-aligned contexts. Across two representative MoE architectures and a diverse set of jailbreak attacks, RASA achieves near-perfect robustness, strong cross-attack generalization, and substantially reduced over-refusal, while preserving general capabilities on benchmarks such as MMLU, GSM8K, and TruthfulQA. Our results suggest that robust MoE safety alignment benefits from targeted expert repair rather than global parameter updates, offering a practical and architecture-preserving alternative to prior approaches.

3D hand pose estimation that involves accurate estimation of 3D human hand keypoint locations is crucial for many human-computer interaction applications such as augmented reality. However, this task poses significant challenges due to self-occlusion of the hands and occlusions caused by interactions with objects. In this paper, we propose HandMCM to address these challenges. Our HandMCM is a novel method based on the powerful state space model (Mamba). By incorporating modules for local information injection/filtering and correspondence modeling, the proposed correspondence Mamba effectively learns the highly dynamic kinematic topology of keypoints across various occlusion scenarios. Moreover, by integrating multi-modal image features, we enhance the robustness and representational capacity of the input, leading to more accurate hand pose estimation. Empirical evaluations on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art methods, particularly in challenging scenarios involving severe occlusions. These results highlight the potential of our approach to advance the accuracy and reliability of 3D hand pose estimation in practical applications.

Audio-to-image retrieval offers an interpretable alternative to audio-only classification for bioacoustic species recognition, but learning aligned audio-image representations is challenging due to the scarcity of paired audio-image data. We propose a simple and data-efficient approach that enables audio-to-image retrieval without any audio-image supervision. Our proposed method uses text as a semantic intermediary: we distill the text embedding space of a pretrained image-text model (BioCLIP-2), which encodes rich visual and taxonomic structure, into a pretrained audio-text model (BioLingual) by fine-tuning its audio encoder with a contrastive objective. This distillation transfers visually grounded semantics into the audio representation, inducing emergent alignment between audio and image embeddings without using images during training. We evaluate the resulting model on multiple bioacoustic benchmarks. The distilled audio encoder preserves audio discriminative power while substantially improving audio-text alignment on focal recordings and soundscape datasets. Most importantly, on the SSW60 benchmark, the proposed approach achieves strong audio-to-image retrieval performance exceeding baselines based on zero-shot model combinations or learned mappings between text embeddings, despite not training on paired audio-image data. These results demonstrate that indirect semantic transfer through text is sufficient to induce meaningful audio-image alignment, providing a practical solution for visually grounded species recognition in data-scarce bioacoustic settings.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely documented to be sensitive to minor prompt perturbations and prone to sycophantic alignment, their robustness in consequential, rule-bound decision-making remains under-explored. We uncover a striking "Paradox of Robustness": despite their known lexical brittleness, aligned LLMs exhibit strong robustness to emotional framing effects in rule-bound institutional decision-making. Using a controlled perturbation framework across three high-stakes domains (healthcare, finance, and education), we find a negligible effect size (Cohen's h = 0.003) compared to the substantial biases observed in analogous human contexts (h in [0.3, 0.8]), approximately two orders of magnitude smaller. This invariance persists across eight models with diverse training paradigms, suggesting the mechanisms driving sycophancy and prompt sensitivity do not translate to failures in logical constraint satisfaction. While LLMs may be "brittle" to how a query is formatted, they appear considerably more stable against affective attempts to bias rule-bound decisions. To probe the boundary of this finding, we add two reviewer-driven side studies. A five-scenario immigration extension yields a small but statistically detectable +0.8 percentage point shift that remains within a pre-specified +/-3 percentage point Region of Practical Equivalence (ROPE), while a screening-level adversarial narrative pilot finds no meaningful decision shift under stronger LLM-generated prompts. We release a core benchmark (9 base scenarios x 18 condition variants = 162 unique prompts), code, and data to facilitate replicable evaluation.

This paper presents the web-based platform Machine Learning with Bricks and an accompanying two-day course designed to teach machine learning concepts to students aged 12 to 17 through programming-free robotics activities. Machine Learning with Bricks is an open source platform and combines interactive visualizations with LEGO robotics to teach three core algorithms: KNN, linear regression, and Q-learning. Students learn by collecting data, training models, and interacting with robots via a web-based interface. Pre- and post-surveys with 14 students indicate statistically significant improvements in self-reported understanding of machine learning algorithms, changes in AI-related terminology toward more technical language, high platform usability, and increased motivation for continued learning. This work suggests that tangible, visualization-based approaches can make machine learning concepts accessible and engaging for young learners while maintaining technical depth. The platform is freely available at https://learning-and-dynamics.github.io/ml-with-bricks/, with video tutorials guiding students through the experiments at https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLx1grFu4zAcwfKKJZ1Ux4LwRqaePCOA2J.

Partial Optimal Transport (POT) addresses the problem of transporting only a fraction of the total mass between two distributions, making it suitable when marginals have unequal size or contain outliers. While Sinkhorn-based methods are widely used, their complexity bounds for POT remain suboptimal and can limit scalability. We introduce Accelerated Sinkhorn for POT (ASPOT), which integrates alternating minimization with Nesterov-style acceleration in the POT setting, yielding a complexity of $\mathcal{O}(n^{7/3}\varepsilon^{-5/3})$. We also show that an informed choice of the entropic parameter $γ$ improves rates for the classical Sinkhorn method. Experiments on real-world applications validate our theories and demonstrate the favorable performance of our proposed methods.

Current large language models (LLMs) generally lack an effective runtime memory mechanism,making it difficult to adapt to dynamic and personalized interaction requirements. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel neural memory storage architecture--the Auxiliary Prediction Compression Memory Model (ApCM Model).

Split learning (SL) enables collaborative training of large language models (LLMs) between resource-constrained edge devices and compute-rich servers by partitioning model computation across the network boundary. However, existing SL systems predominantly rely on first-order (FO) optimization, which requires clients to store intermediate quantities such as activations for backpropagation. This results in substantial memory overhead, largely negating benefits of model partitioning. In contrast, zeroth-order (ZO) optimization eliminates backpropagation and significantly reduces memory usage, but often suffers from slow convergence and degraded performance. In this work, we propose HOSL, a novel Hybrid-Order Split Learning framework that addresses this fundamental trade-off between memory efficiency and optimization effectiveness by strategically integrating ZO optimization on the client side with FO optimization on the server side. By employing memory-efficient ZO gradient estimation at the client, HOSL eliminates backpropagation and activation storage, reducing client memory consumption. Meanwhile, server-side FO optimization ensures fast convergence and competitive performance. Theoretically, we show that HOSL achieves an $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{d_c/TQ})$ rate, which depends on client-side model dimension $d_c$ rather than the full model dimension $d$, demonstrating that convergence improves as more computation is offloaded to the server. Extensive experiments on OPT models (125M and 1.3B parameters) across 6 tasks demonstrate that HOSL reduces client GPU memory by up to 3.7$\times$ compared to the FO method while achieving accuracy within 0.20%-4.23% of this baseline. Furthermore, HOSL outperforms the ZO baseline by up to 15.55%, validating the effectiveness of our hybrid strategy for memory-efficient training on edge devices.

Recent advancements in vision-language-action (VLA) models have shown promise in robotic manipulation, yet they continue to struggle with long-horizon, multi-step tasks. Existing methods lack internal reasoning mechanisms that can identify task-relevant interaction cues or track progress within a subtask, leading to critical execution errors such as repeated actions, missed steps, and premature termination. To address these challenges, we introduce PALM, a VLA framework that structures policy learning around interaction-centric affordance reasoning and subtask progress cues. PALM distills complementary affordance representations that capture object relevance, contact geometry, spatial placements, and motion dynamics, and serve as task-relevant anchors for visuomotor control. To further stabilize long-horizon execution, PALM predicts continuous within-subtask progress, enabling seamless subtask transitions. Across extensive simulation and real-world experiments, PALM consistently outperforms baselines, achieving a 91.8% success rate on LIBERO-LONG, a 12.5% improvement in average length on CALVIN ABC->D, and a 2x improvement over real-world baselines across three long-horizon generalization settings.

A key challenge in machine learning is to explain how learning dynamics select among the many solutions that achieve identical loss values in overparameterized models - a phenomenon known as implicit bias. Controlling this bias provides a direct mechanism on learned representations, which are central to interpretability, robustness, and reasoning in modern AI systems. Yet, despite its importance, existing explanations remain largely ad hoc and lack a unifying mechanism. We develop a theoretical and constructive framework in which implicit bias emerges as a geometric correction induced by the interplay between gradient noise and continuous symmetries of the loss. We compute the induced bias across a range of architectures, predicting new behaviors and explaining known ones. The approach also enables inverse design: by engineering predictor - preserving parameterizations, it is possible to shape the bias, with sparsity and spectral sparsity emerging as canonical instances. Numerical experiments support the theory and validate the inverse - design framework in controlled settings.

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have greatly advanced text-to-image generation, but models still struggle to generate the correct spatial relations between objects as specified in the text prompt. In this study, we adopt a mechanistic interpretability approach to investigate how a DiT can generate correct spatial relations between objects. We train, from scratch, DiTs of different sizes with different text encoders to learn to generate images containing two objects whose attributes and spatial relations are specified in the text prompt. We find that, although all the models can learn this task to near-perfect accuracy, the underlying mechanisms differ drastically depending on the choice of text encoder. When using random text embeddings, we find that the spatial-relation information is passed to image tokens through a two-stage circuit, involving two cross-attention heads that separately read the spatial relation and single-object attributes in the text prompt. When using a pretrained text encoder (T5), we find that the DiT uses a different circuit that leverages information fusion in the text tokens, reading spatial-relation and single-object information together from a single text token. We further show that, although the in-domain performance is similar for the two settings, their robustness to out-of-domain perturbations differs, potentially suggesting the difficulty of generating correct relations in real-world scenarios.

Nighttime color constancy still remains a challenging problem in computational photography due to low-light noise and complex illumination conditions. We present RL-AWB, a novel framework combining statistical methods with deep reinforcement learning for nighttime white balance. Our method begins with a statistical algorithm tailored for nighttime scenes, integrating salient gray pixel detection with novel illumination estimation. Building on this foundation, we develop the first deep reinforcement learning approach for color constancy that leverages the statistical algorithm as its core, mimicking professional AWB tuning experts by dynamically optimizing parameters for each image. To facilitate cross-sensor evaluation, we introduce the first multi-sensor nighttime dataset. Experiment results show that our method achieves superior generalization capability across low-light and well-illuminated images. Project page: https://ntuneillee.github.io/research/rl-awb/

Deploying models, especially large language models (LLMs), is becoming increasingly attractive to a broader user base, including those without specialized expertise. However, due to the resource constraints of certain hardware, maintaining high accuracy with larger model while meeting the hardware requirements remains a significant challenge. Model quantization technique helps mitigate memory and compute bottlenecks, yet the added complexities of tuning and deploying quantized models further exacerbates these challenges, making the process unfriendly to most of the users. We introduce the Hardware-Aware Quantization Agent (HAQA), an automated framework that leverages LLMs to streamline the entire quantization and deployment process by enabling efficient hyperparameter tuning and hardware configuration, thereby simultaneously improving deployment quality and ease of use for a broad range of users. Our results demonstrate up to a 2.3x speedup in inference, along with increased throughput and improved accuracy compared to unoptimized models on Llama. Additionally, HAQA is designed to implement adaptive quantization strategies across diverse hardware platforms, as it automatically finds optimal settings even when they appear counterintuitive, thereby reducing extensive manual effort and demonstrating superior adaptability. Code will be released.

Massive datasets often contain redundancy that inflates computational costs without improving generalization. Existing data reduction methods are typically task-agnostic, discarding informative boundary samples and yielding suboptimal performance. We propose Adversarial Soft-Selection Subsampling (ASSS), a differentiable framework that casts data reduction as a minimax game between a learnable selector and a task network. Using Gumbel-Softmax relaxation, ASSS enables end-to-end gradient flow and is theoretically grounded in the information bottleneck principle. Experiments on multiple benchmarks show that ASSS achieves a performance retention rate (PRR) of 98.9% while using only 30% of the data, significantly outperforming random sampling, K-means, and gradient-based methods. Visualizations confirm that ASSS preferentially retains samples near decision boundaries. The framework is scalable, fully differentiable, and easily integrated into existing training pipelines. This work introduces a new paradigm for task-aware data reduction that directly optimizes subset selection for the downstream objective, offering a principled and practical solution to the scalability challenges in modern deep learning.

The paradigm of Earth Observation analysis is shifting from static deep learning models to autonomous agentic AI. Although recent vision foundation models and multimodal large language models advance representation learning, they often lack the sequential planning and active tool orchestration required for complex geospatial workflows. This survey presents the first comprehensive review of agentic AI in remote sensing. We introduce a unified taxonomy distinguishing between single-agent copilots and multi-agent systems while analyzing architectural foundations such as planning mechanisms, retrieval-augmented generation, and memory structures. Furthermore, we review emerging benchmarks that move the evaluation from pixel-level accuracy to trajectory-aware reasoning correctness. By critically examining limitations in grounding, safety, and orchestration, this work outlines a strategic roadmap for the development of robust, autonomous geospatial intelligence.

Recent 3D reconstruction methods achieve impressive results with dense multi-view imagery but struggle when only a few views are available. Various approaches, including regularization techniques, semantic priors, and geometric constraints, have been implemented to address this challenge. Recent diffusion-based approaches further improve performance by generating novel views to augment training data. Despite this progress, we identify three critical limitations in current state-of-the-art approaches: (i) inadequate coverage beyond known view peripheries, (ii) geometric inconsistencies across generated views, and (iii) computational inefficiency due to expensive pipelines. We introduce GaMO (Geometry-aware Multi-view Outpainter), a framework that reformulates sparse-view reconstruction through multi-view outpainting. Instead of generating new viewpoints, GaMO expands the field of view from existing camera poses, which inherently preserves geometric consistency while providing broader scene coverage. Our approach employs multi-view conditioning and geometry-aware denoising strategies in a zero-shot manner without training. Extensive experiments on Replica, ScanNet++, and Mip-NeRF 360 demonstrate strong reconstruction performance across sparse-view settings (3, 6, and 9 input views). Notably, our method is significantly more efficient than existing diffusion-based approaches, reducing the overall runtime to within 10 minutes. Project page: https://yichuanh.github.io/GaMO/

Current language model evaluations measure what models know under ideal conditions but not how robustly they know it under realistic stress. Static benchmarks like MMLU and TruthfulQA cannot distinguish a model that lacks knowledge from one whose verification mechanisms collapse when information degrades or adversaries probe for weaknesses. We introduce the Drill-Down and Fabricate Test (DDFT), a protocol that measures epistemic robustness: a model's ability to maintain factual accuracy under progressive semantic compression and adversarial fabrication. We propose a two-system cognitive model comprising a Semantic System that generates fluent text and an Epistemic Verifier that validates factual accuracy. Our findings, based on evaluating 9 frontier models across 8 knowledge domains at 5 compression levels (1,800 turn-level evaluations), reveal that epistemic robustness is orthogonal to conventional design paradigms. Neither parameter count (r=0.083, p=0.832) nor architectural type (r=0.153, p=0.695) significantly predicts robustness, suggesting it emerges from training methodology and verification mechanisms distinct from current approaches. Error detection capability strongly predicts overall robustness (rho=-0.817, p=0.007), indicating this is the critical bottleneck. We find that flagship models exhibit brittleness despite their scale, while smaller models can achieve robust performance, challenging assumptions about the relationship between model size and reliability. The DDFT framework provides both theoretical foundation and practical tools for assessing epistemic robustness before deployment in critical applications.

Diffusion-based video super-resolution (VSR) methods deliver strong perceptual quality but are often unsuitable for latency-sensitive scenarios due to reliance on future frames and expensive multi-step denoising. We propose Stream-DiffVSR, a causally conditioned diffusion framework for efficient online VSR. Operating strictly on past frames, Stream-DiffVSR integrates a four-step distilled denoiser for fast inference, an Auto-regressive Temporal Guidance (ARTG) module that injects motion-aligned cues during latent denoising, and a lightweight temporal-aware decoder with a Temporal Processor Module (TPM) to enhance detail and temporal coherence. Unlike chunk-wise streaming inference, our strictly frame-by-frame causal design avoids sequence-level waiting, substantially reducing time-to-first-frame and end-to-end latency. Stream-DiffVSR processes 720p frames in 0.328 seconds on an RTX 4090 and consistently outperforms prior diffusion-based baselines. Compared with the online state-of-the-art TMP, it improves perceptual quality (LPIPS +0.095) while reducing latency by over 130x. Moreover, Stream-DiffVSR substantially lowers time-to-first-frame for diffusion-based VSR, reducing initial delay from over 4600 seconds to 0.328 seconds, making diffusion-based VSR markedly more practical for low-latency online and streaming deployment. Project page: https://jamichss.github.io/stream-diffvsr-project-page/

Semantic overlap among land-cover categories, highly imbalanced label distributions, and complex inter-class co-occurrence patterns constitute significant challenges for multi-label remote-sensing image retrieval. In this article, Multi-Label Adaptive Contrastive Learning (MACL) is introduced as an extension of contrastive learning to address them. It integrates label-aware sampling, frequency-sensitive weighting, and dynamic-temperature scaling to achieve balanced representation learning across both common and rare categories. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets (DLRSD, ML-AID, and WHDLD), show that MACL consistently outperforms contrastive-loss based baselines, effectively mitigating semantic imbalance and delivering more reliable retrieval performance in large-scale remote-sensing archives. Code, pretrained models, and evaluation scripts will be released at https://github.com/Amna-128/MARC upon acceptance.

This paper motivates the use of random-bridges -- stochastic processes conditioned to take target distributions at fixed timepoints -- in the realm of generative modelling. Herein, random-bridges can act as stochastic transports between two probability distributions when appropriately initialized, and can display either Markovian or non-Markovian, and either continuous, discontinuous or hybrid patterns depending on the driving process. We show how one can start from general probabilistic statements and then branch out into specific representations for learning and simulation algorithms in terms of information processing. Our empirical results, built on Gaussian random bridges, produce high-quality samples in significantly fewer steps compared to traditional approaches, while achieving competitive Frechet inception distance scores. Our analysis provides evidence that the proposed framework is computationally cheap and suitable for high-speed generation tasks.

Research increasingly leverages audio-visual materials to analyze emotions in political communication. Multimodal large language models (mLLMs) promise to enable such analyses through in-context learning. However, we lack systematic evidence on whether current mLLMs can reliably measure emotions in real-world political settings. This paper closes this gap by evaluating open- and closed-weights mLLMs available as of early 2026 in video-based emotional arousal measurement using two complementary human-labeled datasets: speech actor recordings created under laboratory conditions and real-world parliamentary debates. I find a critical lab-vs-field performance gap. In videos created under laboratory conditions, the examined mLLMs arousal scores approach human-level reliability. However, in parliamentary debate recordings, all examined models' arousal scores correlate at best moderately with average human ratings. Moreover, in each dataset, all but one of the examined mLLMs exhibit systematic gender-differential bias, consistently underestimating arousal more for male than for female speakers, resulting in a net-positive intensity bias. These findings reveal important limitations of current mLLMs for real-world political video analysis and establish a rigorous evaluation framework for tracking future developments.

From content moderation to content curation, applications requiring vision classifiers for visual concepts are rapidly expanding. Existing human-in-the-loop approaches typically assume users begin with a clear, stable concept understanding to be able to provide high-quality supervision. In reality, users often start with a vague idea and must iteratively refine it through "concept deliberation", a practice we uncovered through structured interviews with content moderation experts. We operationalize the common strategies in deliberation used by real content moderators into a human-in-the-loop framework called "Agile Deliberation" that explicitly supports evolving and subjective concepts. The system supports users in defining the concept for themselves by exposing them to borderline cases. The system does this with two deliberation stages: (1) concept scoping, which decomposes the initial concept into a structured hierarchy of sub-concepts, and (2) concept iteration, which surfaces semantically borderline examples for user reflection and feedback to iteratively align an image classifier with the user's evolving intent. Since concept deliberation is inherently subjective and interactive, we painstakingly evaluate the framework through 18 user sessions, each 1.5h long, rather than standard benchmarking datasets. We find that Agile Deliberation achieves 7.5% higher F1 scores than automated decomposition baselines and more than 3% higher than manual deliberation, while participants reported clearer conceptual understanding and lower cognitive effort.

Vehicle edge caching is a promising technology that can significantly reduce the latency for vehicle users (VUs) to access content by pre-caching user-interested content at edge nodes. It is crucial to accurately predict the content that VUs are interested in without exposing their privacy. Traditional federated learning (FL) can protect user privacy by sharing models rather than raw data. However, the training of FL requires frequent model transmission, which can result in significant communication overhead. Additionally, vehicles may leave the road side unit (RSU) coverage area before training is completed, leading to training failures. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a personalized federated distillation assisted vehicle edge caching strategy. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed vehicle edge caching strategy has good robustness to variations in vehicle speed, significantly reducing communication overhead.

Drag-based image editing enables intuitive visual manipulation through point-based drag operations. Existing methods mainly rely on diffusion inversion or pixel-space warping with inpainting. However, inversion inherently introduces approximation errors that degrade texture fidelity, whereas rigid pixel-space operations discard semantic context and produce unnatural deformations. To address these issues, we introduce ContextDrag, to our knowledge the first framework that brings drag-based manipulation into the in-context image editing paradigm. By leveraging the in-context capabilities of editing models (e.g., FLUX-Kontext), ContextDrag enables precise drag editing without inversion or fine-tuning. Specifically, we first propose Context-preserving Token Injection (CTI), which injects VAE-encoded reference features into attention layers at spatially aligned target positions, guided by latent-space correspondences estimated directly from user-specified control points. By operating on clean, directly encoded features rather than noisy inversion outputs, CTI preserves rich texture details and enables precise drag control. Second, we propose Position-Aligned Attention (PAA) to eliminate interference caused by spatial displacement of reference features. PAA re-encodes positional embeddings of displaced reference tokens to match their target locations, and masks overlapping regions between source and destination to prevent conflicting features from degrading visual consistency. Experiments on DragBench-SR and DragBench-DR demonstrate that ContextDrag achieves SOTA editing accuracy and overall quality, and comprehensive ablations validate the effectiveness of each proposed component. Code will be publicly available.

Existing video editing methods face a critical trade-off: expert models offer precision but rely on task-specific priors like masks, hindering unification; conversely, unified temporal in-context learning models are mask-free but lack explicit spatial cues, leading to weak instruction-to-region mapping and imprecise localization. To resolve this conflict, we propose VideoCoF, a novel Chain-of-Frames approach inspired by Chain-of-Thought reasoning. VideoCoF enforces a ``see, reason, then edit" procedure by compelling the video diffusion model to first predict reasoning tokens (edit-region latents) before generating the target video tokens. This explicit reasoning step removes the need for user-provided masks while achieving precise instruction-to-region alignment and fine-grained video editing. Furthermore, we introduce a RoPE alignment strategy that leverages these reasoning tokens to ensure motion alignment and enable length extrapolation beyond the training duration. We demonstrate that with a minimal data cost of only 50k video pairs, VideoCoF achieves state-of-the-art performance on VideoCoF-Bench, validating the efficiency and effectiveness of our approach. Our code, weight, data are available at https://github.com/knightyxp/VideoCoF.

Incomplete node features are ubiquitous in real-world scenarios such as user profiling and cold-start recommendation, which severely hinders the practical deployment of graph learning systems (e.g., GNNs). Existing solutions typically rely on diffusion-based structural smoothing (e.g., feature propagation) to impute missing values. However, we find that these approaches suffer from structural overfitting, leading to three progressive challenges: 1) performance degradation on disjoint graphs, 2) loss of semantic diversity due to over-smoothing, and 3) feature distribution shift when generalizing to unseen graph structures (inductive tasks). To address these challenges, we introduce the \textbf{\DART} framework. It begins by employing {\em Global Structural Augmentation (GSA)}, which establishes global correlations to bridge disjoint components and extend diffusion coverage. Building upon this, we design a semantic rectifier based on masked autoencoding. This module learns the latent feature manifold to recover natural semantic details. Crucially, we introduce a test-time distribution rectification mechanism that projects structurally biased features back onto the learned manifold during inference, effectively bridging the inductive distribution gap. Furthermore, considering that synthetic masking fails to reflect real-world sparsity, we present a new dataset \textbf{Sailing} collected from voyage records with naturally missing attributes. Extensive experiments on six public datasets and Sailing demonstrate that \DART significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both transductive and inductive settings. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/yfsong00/DART.

A core capability towards general embodied intelligence lies in localizing task-relevant objects from an egocentric perspective, formulated as Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding (STVG). Despite recent progress, existing STVG studies remain largely confined to object-centric and descriptive instructions, neglecting the task-oriented reasoning that is crucial for embodied agents to accomplish goal-directed interactions. To bridge this gap, we introduce \textbf{ToG-Bench}, the first task-oriented spatio-temporal video grounding benchmark for egocentric videos. ToG-Bench is characterized by three key features: (1) \textbf{Task-oriented Grounding}, which requires identifying and localizing objects based on intended tasks rather than straightforward descriptions; (2) \textbf{Explicit-Implicit Dual Grounding}, where target objects can be either explicitly mentioned or implicitly inferred by contextual reasoning; (3) \textbf{One-to-Many Grounding}, where a single instruction may correspond to multiple objects involved in task execution. Built upon videos sourced from ScanNet, ToG-Bench comprises 100 annotated clips with 2,704 task-oriented grounding instructions, constructed via a semi-automated pipeline that combines foundation model annotation and human refinement. In addition, we introduce a set of task-level evaluation metrics tailored for multi-object and explicit-implicit object grounding, and systematically benchmark seven state-of-the-art MLLMs. Extensive experiments reveal the intrinsic challenges of task-oriented STVG and substantial performance gaps across explicit-implicit and multi-object grounding, highlighting the difficulty of bridging perception and interaction in embodied scenarios. Data and code will be released at: \href{https://github.com/qaxuDev/ToG-Bench}{https://github.com/qaxuDev/ToG-Bench}..