Face restoration can be formulated as a continuous-time transformation between image distributions via Flow Matching (FM). However, standard FM typically employs independent coupling, ignoring the statistical correlation between low-quality (LQ) and high-quality (HQ) data. This leads to intersecting trajectories and high velocity-field curvature, requiring multi-step integration. We propose Shortcut-constrained Coupling Flow for Face Restoration (SCFlowFR) to address these challenges. By establishing a data-dependent coupling, we explicitly model the LQ-HQ dependency to minimize path crossovers and promote near-linear probability flow. Furthermore, we employ a conditional mean estimator to refine the source distribution's anchor, effectively tightening the transport cost and stabilizing the velocity field. To ensure stable one-step inference, a shortcut constraint is introduced to supervise average velocities over arbitrary intervals, mitigating discretization bias in large-step updates. SCFlowFR achieves state-of-the-art one-step restoration, providing a superior trade-off between perceptual fidelity and computational efficiency.

We introduce ODYN, a novel all-shifted primal-dual non-interior-point quadratic programming (QP) solver designed to efficiently handle challenging dense and sparse QPs. ODYN combines all-shifted nonlinear complementarity problem (NCP) functions with proximal method of multipliers to robustly address ill-conditioned and degenerate problems, without requiring linear independence of the constraints. It exhibits strong warm-start performance and is well suited to both general-purpose optimization, and robotics and AI applications, including model-based control, estimation, and kernel-based learning methods. We provide an open-source implementation and benchmark ODYN on the Maros-Mészáros test set, demonstrating state-of-the-art convergence performance in small-to-high-scale problems. The results highlight ODYN's superior warm-starting capabilities, which are critical in sequential and real-time settings common in robotics and AI. These advantages are further demonstrated by deploying ODYN as the backend of an SQP-based predictive control framework (OdynSQP), as the implicitly differentiable optimization layer for deep learning (ODYNLayer), and the optimizer of a contact-dynamics simulation (ODYNSim).

Influence functions are commonly used to attribute model behavior to training documents. We explore the reverse: crafting training data that induces model behavior. Our framework, Infusion, uses scalable influence-function approximations to compute small perturbations to training documents that induce targeted changes in model behavior through parameter shifts. We evaluate Infusion on data poisoning tasks across vision and language domains. On CIFAR-10, we show that making subtle edits via Infusion to just 0.2% (100/45,000) of the training documents can be competitive with the baseline of inserting a small number of explicit behavior examples. We also find that Infusion transfers across architectures (ResNet $\leftrightarrow$ CNN), suggesting a single poisoned corpus can affect multiple independently trained models. In preliminary language experiments, we characterize when our approach increases the probability of target behaviors and when it fails, finding it most effective at amplifying behaviors the model has already learned. Taken together, these results show that small, subtle edits to training data can systematically shape model behavior, underscoring the importance of training data interpretability for adversaries and defenders alike. We provide the code here: https://github.com/jrosseruk/infusion.

User preferences are increasingly used to personalize Large Language Model (LLM) responses, yet how to reliably leverage preference signals for answer generation remains under-explored. In practice, preferences can be noisy, incomplete, or even misleading, which can degrade answer quality when applied naively. Motivated by the observation that stable personality traits shape everyday preferences, we study personality as a principled ''latent'' signal behind preference statements. Through extensive experiments, we find that conditioning on personality-aligned preferences substantially improves personalized question answering: selecting preferences consistent with a user's inferred personality increases answer-choice accuracy from 29.25% to 76%, compared to using randomly selected preferences. Based on these findings, we introduce PACIFIC (Preference Alignment Choices Inference for Five-factor Identity Characterization), a personality-labeled preference dataset containing 1200 preference statements spanning diverse domains (e.g., travel, movies, education), annotated with Big-Five (OCEAN) trait directions. Finally, we propose a framework that enables an LLM model to automatically retrieve personality-aligned preferences and incorporate them during answer generation.

Adaptive multimodal reasoning has emerged as a promising frontier in Vision-Language Models (VLMs), aiming to dynamically modulate between tool-augmented visual reasoning and text reasoning to enhance both effectiveness and efficiency. However, existing evaluations rely on static difficulty labels and simplistic metrics, which fail to capture the dynamic nature of difficulty relative to varying model capacities. Consequently, they obscure the distinction between adaptive mode selection and general performance while neglecting fine-grained process analyses. In this paper, we propose AdaptMMBench, a comprehensive benchmark for adaptive multimodal reasoning across five domains: real-world, OCR, GUI, knowledge, and math, encompassing both direct perception and complex reasoning tasks. AdaptMMBench utilizes a Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) metric to evaluate the selection rationality of different reasoning modes, isolating this meta-cognition ability by dynamically identifying task difficulties based on models' capability boundaries. Moreover, AdaptMMBench facilitates multi-dimensional process evaluation across key step coverage, tool effectiveness, and computational efficiency. Our evaluation reveals that while adaptive mode selection scales with model capacity, it notably decouples from final accuracy. Conversely, key step coverage aligns with performance, though tool effectiveness remains highly inconsistent across model architectures.

Information-based data selection for instruction tuning is compelling: maximizing the log-determinant of the Fisher information yields a monotone submodular objective, enabling greedy algorithms to achieve a $(1-1/e)$ approximation under a cardinality budget. In practice, however, we identify alleviating gradient conflicts, misalignment between per-sample gradients, is a key factor that slows down the decay of marginal log-determinant information gains, thereby preventing significant loss of information. We formalize this via an $\varepsilon$-decomposition that quantifies the deviation from ideal submodularity as a function of conflict statistics, yielding data-dependent approximation factors that tighten as conflicts diminish. Guided by this analysis, we propose SPICE, a conflict-aware selector that maximizes information while penalizing misalignment, and that supports early stopping and proxy models for efficiency. Empirically, SPICE selects subsets with higher log-determinant information than original criteria, and these informational gains translate into performance improvements: across 8 benchmarks with LLaMA2-7B and Qwen2-7B, SPICE uses only 10% of the data, yet matches or exceeds 6 methods including full-data tuning. This achieves performance improvements with substantially lower training cost.

Despite progress in Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs), object hallucination remains a critical issue in image captioning task, where models generate descriptions of non-existent objects, compromising their reliability. Previous work attributes this to LVLMs' over-reliance on language priors and attempts to mitigate it through logits calibration. However, they still lack a thorough analysis of the over-reliance. To gain a deeper understanding of over-reliance, we conduct a series of preliminary experiments, indicating that as the generation length increases, LVLMs' over-reliance on language priors leads to inflated probability of hallucinated object tokens, consequently exacerbating object hallucination. To circumvent this issue, we propose Language-Prior-Free Verification to enable LVLMs to faithfully verify the confidence of object existence. Based on this, we propose a novel training-free Self-Validation Framework to counter the over-reliance trap. It first validates objects' existence in sampled candidate captions and further mitigates object hallucination via caption selection or aggregation. Experiment results demonstrate that our framework mitigates object hallucination significantly in image captioning task (e.g., 65.6% improvement on CHAIRI metric with LLaVA-v1.5-7B), surpassing the previous SOTA methods. This result highlights a novel path towards mitigating hallucination by unlocking the inherent potential within LVLMs themselves.

Large language models (LLMs) excel across many tasks, yet inference is still dominated by strictly token-by-token autoregression. Existing acceleration methods largely patch this pipeline and miss core human-reading ingredients: content-adaptive foresight, chunk-structure-aware compute allocation, and train-test consistency for preview/skimming. We propose the Fovea-Block-Skip Transformer (FBS), which injects a causal, trainable loop into Transformers via Parafovea-Attention Window (PAW), Chunk-Head (CH), and Skip-Gate (SG). Across diverse benchmarks, FBS improves the quality-efficiency trade-off without increasing parameters, and ablations show the three modules are complementary.

Long-horizon egocentric video presents significant challenges for visual navigation due to viewpoint drift and the absence of persistent geometric context. Although recent vision-language models perform well on image and short-video reasoning, their spatial reasoning capability in long egocentric sequences remains limited. In this work, we study how explicit spatial signals influence VLM-based video understanding without modifying model architectures or inference procedures. We introduce Sanpo-D, a fine-grained re-annotation of the Google Sanpo dataset, and benchmark multiple VLMs on navigation-oriented spatial queries. To examine input-level inductive bias, we further fuse depth maps with RGB frames and evaluate their impact on spatial reasoning. Our results reveal a trade-off between general-purpose accuracy and spatial specialization, showing that depth-aware and spatially grounded representations can improve performance on safety-critical tasks such as pedestrian and obstruction detection.

Agentic intelligence in large language models (LLMs) requires not only model intrinsic capabilities but also interactions with external environments. Equipping LLMs with computers now represents a prevailing trend. However, the computer environment's intrinsic value has not been systematically investigated, particularly its potential to elicit general capabilities. Here we introduce LLM-in-Sandbox, which virtualizes the computer as a code sandbox with only basic functionalities, and demonstrate that this minimal setting elicits computer-based meta-capabilities for general task solving: external resource access, file management, and code execution. Without additional training, strong models achieve substantial gains (up to 15.5%) across mathematics, physics, chemistry, biomedicine, long-context understanding, and instruction following, while reducing token consumption by up to 8 times. Furthermore, we develop LLM-in-Sandbox-RL to train models exclusively on non-agentic data within the sandbox, empowering weaker models to harness the environment and internalize these interactions. Our results demonstrate that computer environments elicit general intelligence, yield efficiency gains, and can be harnessed through training, serving as a promising foundation for generalist agents.

Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are sensitive infrastructure from both safety and economics perspectives, making their reliability critically important. Machine Learning (ML), specifically deep learning, is increasingly integrated in industrial CPS, but the inherent complexity of ML models results in non-transparent operation. Rigorous evaluation is needed to prevent models from exhibiting unexpected behaviour on future, unseen data. Explainable AI (XAI) can be used to uncover model reasoning, allowing a more extensive analysis of behaviour. We apply XAI to improve predictive performance of ML models intended for an industrial CPS use-case. We analyse the effects of components from time-series data decomposition on model predictions using SHAP values. Through this method, we observe evidence on the lack of sufficient contextual information during model training. By increasing the window size of data instances, informed by the XAI findings for this use-case, we are able to improve model performance.

The key-value (KV) cache is a primary memory bottleneck in Transformers. We propose Low-Rank Key-Value (LRKV) attention, which reduces KV cache memory by exploiting redundancy across attention heads, while being compute efficient. Each layer uses a shared full-rank KV projection augmented with low-rank, head-specific residuals, providing a continuous trade-off between complete sharing and full independence. After pretraining models of size 128M to 6.3B parameters, LRKV consistently achieves the lowest test loss among standard MHA, MQA/GQA, and MLA while using only 45-53\% of MHA's KV cache. LRKV reaches equivalent baseline quality 18-25\% faster (measured in training steps). After supervised midtraining, LRKV achieves the highest downstream task performance across ARC-Easy, ARC-Challenge, MMLU, GSM8K, and HumanEval benchmarks.

Large language models increasingly fail in a way that scalar accuracy cannot diagnose: they produce a sound reasoning trace and then abandon it under social pressure or an authoritative hint. We argue that this is a control failure, not a knowledge failure, and that it requires an evaluation surface richer than a single accuracy number. We introduce CAUSALT3, a 454 instance expert curated benchmark for causal reasoning across all three rungs of Pearl's ladder, and a three axis evaluation that decomposes performance into Utility (sensitivity to valid causal claims), Safety (specificity against invalid ones), and Wise Refusal (calibrated abstention on genuinely underdetermined items). On this surface we document three reproducible pathologies: a Skepticism Trap at L1 where capable models over refuse sound links, a Sycophancy Trap at L2 where confident user pressure flips correct answers, and a Scaling Paradox at L3 where a frontier model underperforms an older one on counterfactual Safety by 55 points. To mitigate these failures without retraining, we propose Regulated Causal Anchoring (RCA), an inference time process verifier that audits trace output consistency under a PID style feedback loop and abstains rather than ratifying a detected mismatch. Across CAUSALT3 and a supporting CAP-GSM8K stress test, RCA reduces sycophantic acceptance to near zero while preserving valid hint acceptance, recasting trustworthy reasoning as a question of inference time control rather than scale.

Use cases of sentiment analysis in the humanities often require contextualized, continuous scores. Concept Vector Projections (CVP) offer a recent solution: by modeling sentiment as a direction in embedding space, they produce continuous, multilingual scores that align closely with human judgments. Yet the method's portability across domains and underlying assumptions remain underexplored. We evaluate CVP across genres, historical periods, languages, and affective dimensions, finding that concept vectors trained on one corpus transfer well to others with minimal performance loss. To understand the patterns of generalization, we further examine the linearity assumption underlying CVP. Our findings suggest that while CVP is a portable approach that effectively captures generalizable patterns, its linearity assumption is approximate, pointing to potential for further development. Code available at: github.com/lauritswl/representation-transfer

From Vision-Language-Action (VLA) systems to robotics, existing egocentric datasets primarily focus on action recognition tasks, while largely overlooking the inherent role of motion analysis in sports and other fast-movement scenarios. To bridge this gap, we propose a real-time motion focus recognition method that estimates the subject's locomotion intention from any egocentric video. We leverage the foundation model for camera pose estimation and introduce system-level optimizations to enable efficient and scalable inference. Evaluated on a collected egocentric action dataset, our method achieves real-time performance with manageable memory consumption through a sliding batch inference strategy. This work makes motion-centric analysis practical for edge deployment and offers a complementary perspective to existing egocentric studies on sports and fast-movement activities.

High success rates on navigation-related tasks do not necessarily translate into reliable decision making by foundation models. To examine this gap, we evaluate current models on six diagnostic tasks spanning three settings: reasoning under complete spatial information, reasoning under incomplete spatial information, and reasoning under safety-relevant information. Our results show that the current metrics may not capture critical limitations of the models and indicate good performance, underscoring the need for failure-focused analysis to understand model limitations and guide future progress. In a path-planning setting with unknown cells, GPT-5 achieved a high success rate of 93%; Yet, the failed cases exhibit fundamental limitations of the models, e.g., the lack of structural spatial understanding essential for navigation. We also find that newer models are not always more reliable than their predecessors on this end. In reasoning under safety-relevant information, Gemini-2.5 Flash achieved only 67% on the challenging emergency-evacuation task, underperforming Gemini-2.0 Flash, which reached 100% under the same condition. Across all evaluations, models exhibited structural collapse, hallucinated reasoning, constraint violations, and unsafe decisions. These findings show that foundation models still exhibit substantial failures in navigation-related decision making and require fine-grained evaluation before they can be trusted.

As the complexity of 3D digital content grows exponentially, understanding human visual attention is critical for optimizing rendering and processing resources. Therefore, reliable 3D mesh saliency ground truth (GT) is essential for human-centric visual modeling in virtual reality (VR). However, existing VR eye-tracking frameworks are fundamentally bottlenecked by their underlying acquisition and generation mechanisms. The reliance on zero-area single ray sampling (SRS) fails to capture contextual features, leading to severe texture aliasing and discontinuous saliency signals. And the conventional application of Euclidean smoothing propagates saliency across disconnected physical gaps, resulting in semantic confusion on complex 3D manifolds. This paper proposes a robust framework to address these limitations. We first introduce a view cone sampling (VCS) strategy, which simulates the human foveal receptive field via Gaussian-distributed ray bundles to improve sampling robustness for complex topologies. Furthermore, a hybrid Manifold-Euclidean constrained diffusion (HCD) algorithm is developed, fusing manifold geodesic constraints with Euclidean scales to ensure topologically-consistent saliency propagation. We demonstrate the improvement in performance over baseline methods and the benefits for downstream tasks through subjective experiments and qualitative and quantitative methods. By mitigating "topological short-circuits" and aliasing, our framework provides a high-fidelity 3D attention acquisition paradigm that aligns with natural human perception, offering a more accurate and robust baseline for 3D mesh saliency research.

Large language models (LLMs) are becoming useful in many domains due to their impressive abilities that arise from large training datasets and large model sizes. However, research on LLM-based approaches to document inconsistency detection is relatively limited. We address this gap by investigating evidence extraction capabilties of LLMs for document inconsistency detection. To this end, we introduce new comprehensive evidence-extraction metrics and a redact-and-retry framework with constrained filtering that substantially improves evidence extraction performance over other prompting methods. We support our approach with strong experimental results and release a new semi-synthetic dataset for evaluating evidence extraction.

Multi-step LLM pipelines can solve complex tasks, but jointly optimizing prompts across steps remains challenging due to missing step-level supervision and inter-step dependency. We propose ADOPT, an adaptive dependency-guided joint prompt optimization framework for multi-step LLM pipelines. ADOPT analyzes the dependency between each LLM step and the final output, constructs a global textual gradient from final-task errors, and decomposes it into step-level local textual gradients, providing more precise optimization signals for local prompt updates. It further decouples signal estimation from prompt updating, enabling flexible integration of single-prompt optimizers, and uses a Shapley-based strategy to adaptively allocate optimization resources to high-impact steps. Experiments on real-world datasets and structurally diverse pipelines demonstrate that ADOPT is effective and robust, consistently outperforming strong prompt optimization baselines.

Diffusion Multi-modal Large Language Models (dMLLMs) have recently emerged as a novel architecture unifying image generation and understanding. However, developing effective and efficient Test-Time Scaling (TTS) methods to unlock their full generative potential remains an underexplored challenge. To address this, we propose dMLLM-TTS, a novel framework operating on two complementary scaling axes: (1) trajectory exploration scaling to enhance the diversity of generated hypotheses, and (2) iterative refinement scaling for stable generation. Conventional TTS approaches typically perform linear search across these two dimensions, incurring substantial computational costs of O(NT) and requiring an external verifier for best-of-N selection. To overcome these limitations, we propose two innovations. First, we design an efficient hierarchical search algorithm with O(N+T) complexity that adaptively expands and prunes sampling trajectories. Second, we introduce a self-verified feedback mechanism that leverages the dMLLMs' intrinsic image understanding capabilities to assess text-image alignment, eliminating the need for external verifier. Extensive experiments on the GenEval benchmark across three representative dMLLMs (e.g., Lumina-DiMOO, MMaDA, Muddit) show that our framework substantially improves generation quality while achieving up to 6x greater efficiency than linear search. Project page: https://github.com/Alpha-VLLM/Lumina-DiMOO.

Offline-to-Online Reinforcement Learning (O2O RL) faces a critical dilemma in balancing the use of a fixed offline dataset with newly collected online experiences. Standard methods, often relying on a fixed data-mixing ratio, struggle to manage the trade-off between early learning stability and asymptotic performance. To overcome this, we introduce the Adaptive Replay Buffer (ARB), a novel approach that dynamically prioritizes data sampling based on a lightweight metric we call 'on-policyness'. Unlike prior methods that rely on complex learning procedures or fixed ratios, ARB is designed to be learning-free and simple to implement, seamlessly integrating into existing O2O RL algorithms. It assesses how closely collected trajectories align with the current policy's behavior and assigns a proportional sampling weight to each transition within that trajectory. This strategy effectively leverages offline data for initial stability while progressively focusing learning on the most relevant, high-rewarding online experiences. Our extensive experiments on D4RL benchmarks demonstrate that ARB consistently mitigates early performance degradation and significantly improves the final performance of various O2O RL algorithms, highlighting the importance of an adaptive, behavior-aware replay buffer design. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/song970407/ARB.

City-scale 3D reconstruction from satellite imagery presents the challenge of extreme viewpoint extrapolation, where our goal is to synthesize ground-level novel views from sparse orbital images with minimal parallax. This requires inferring nearly $90^\circ$ viewpoint gaps from image sources with severely foreshortened facades and flawed textures, causing state-of-the-art reconstruction engines such as NeRF and 3DGS to fail. To address this problem, we propose two design choices tailored for city structures and satellite inputs. First, we model city geometry as a 2.5D height map, implemented as a Z-monotonic signed distance field (SDF) that matches urban building layouts from top-down viewpoints. This stabilizes geometry optimization under sparse, off-nadir satellite views and yields a watertight mesh with crisp roofs and clean, vertically extruded facades. Second, we paint the mesh appearance from satellite images via differentiable rendering techniques. While the satellite inputs may contain long-range, blurry captures, we further train a generative texture restoration network to enhance the appearance, recovering high-frequency, plausible texture details from degraded inputs. Our method's scalability and robustness are demonstrated through extensive experiments on large-scale urban reconstruction. For example, in our teaser figure, we reconstruct a $4\,\mathrm{km}^2$ real-world region from only a few satellite images, achieving state-of-the-art performance in synthesizing photorealistic ground views. The resulting models are not only visually compelling but also serve as high-fidelity, application-ready assets for downstream tasks like urban planning and simulation. Project page can be found at https://pku-vcl-geometry.github.io/Orbit2Ground/.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have been driven by their emergent reasoning capabilities, particularly through long chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting, which enables thorough exploration and deliberation. Despite these advances, long-CoT LLMs often exhibit suboptimal reasoning behaviors, such as overthinking and excessively protracted reasoning chains, which can impair performance. In this paper, we analyze reasoning processes through an optimization lens, framing CoT as a gradient descent procedure where each reasoning step constitutes an update toward problem resolution. Building on this perspective, we introduce RePro (Rectifying Process-level Reward), a novel approach to refine LLM reasoning during post-training. RePro defines a surrogate objective function to assess the optimization process underlying CoT, utilizing a dual scoring mechanism to quantify its intensity and stability. These scores are aggregated into a composite process-level reward, seamlessly integrated into reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) pipelines to optimize LLMs. Extensive experiments across multiple reinforcement learning algorithms and diverse LLMs, evaluated on benchmarks spanning mathematics, science, and coding, demonstrate that RePro consistently enhances reasoning performance and mitigates suboptimal reasoning behaviors.

The rapid progress of visual generative models has made AI-generated images increasingly difficult to distinguish from authentic ones, posing growing risks to social trust and information integrity. This motivates detectors that are not only accurate but also forensically explainable. While recent multimodal approaches improve interpretability, many rely on post-hoc rationalizations or coarse visual cues, without constructing verifiable chains of evidence, thus often leading to poor generalization. We introduce REVEAL-Bench, a reasoning-enhanced multimodal benchmark for AI-generated image forensics, structured around explicit chains of forensic evidence derived from lightweight expert models and consolidated into step-by-step chain-of-evidence traces. Based on this benchmark, we propose REVEAL (\underline{R}easoning-\underline{e}nhanced Forensic E\underline{v}id\underline{e}nce \underline{A}na\underline{l}ysis), an explainable forensic framework trained with expert-grounded reinforcement learning. Our reward design jointly promotes detection accuracy, evidence-grounded reasoning stability, and explanation faithfulness. Extensive experiments demonstrate significantly improved cross-domain generalization and more faithful explanations to baseline detectors. All data and codes will be released.

As the number of scientific papers continues to grow, there is a demand for approaches that can effectively convey research findings, with posters serving as a key medium for presenting paper contents. Poster layouts determine how effectively research is communicated and understood, highlighting their growing importance. In particular, a gap remains in understanding how papers correspond to the layouts that present them, which calls for datasets with paired annotations at scale. To bridge this gap, we introduce SciPostGen, a large-scale dataset for understanding and generating poster layouts from scientific papers. Our analyses based on SciPostGen show that paper structures are associated with the number of layout elements in posters. Based on this insight, we explore a framework, Retrieval-Augmented Poster Layout Generation, which retrieves layouts consistent with a given paper and uses them as guidance for layout generation. We conducted experiments under two conditions: with and without layout constraints typically specified by poster creators. The results show that the retriever estimates layouts aligned with paper structures, and our framework generates layouts that also satisfy given constraints. The dataset and code are publicly available at https://omron-sinicx.github.io/paper2layout/.

Recent multimodal reasoning models, inspired by DeepSeek-R1, have significantly advanced vision-language systems. However, in remote sensing (RS) tasks, we observe widespread pseudo reasoning: models narrate the process of reasoning rather than genuinely reason toward the correct answer based on visual evidence. We attribute this to the Glance Effect, where a single, coarse perception of large-scale RS imagery results in incomplete understanding and reasoning based on linguistic self-consistency instead of visual evidence. To address this, we propose RS-EoT (Remote Sensing Evidence-of-Thought), a language-driven, iterative visual evidence-seeking paradigm. To instill this paradigm, we propose SocraticAgent, a self-play multi-agent system that synthesizes reasoning traces via alternating cycles of reasoning and visual inspection. To enhance and generalize these patterns, we propose a two-stage progressive RL strategy: first, RL on fine-grained Grounding tasks to enhance RS-EoT capabilities, followed by RL on RS VQA to generalize to broader understanding scenarios. Experiments show RS-EoT achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple RS VQA and grounding benchmarks. Analyses reveal clear iterative cycles of reasoning and evidence seeking, confirming RS-EoT mitigates the Glance Effect and enables genuine evidence-grounded reasoning. Our code, data, and models are available at https://geox-lab.github.io/Asking_like_Socrates

Cross-view object correspondence, exemplified by the representative task of ego-exo object correspondence, aims to establish consistent associations of the same object across different viewpoints (e.g., egocentric and exocentric). This task poses significant challenges due to drastic viewpoint and appearance variations, making existing segmentation models, such as SAM2, difficult to apply directly. To address this, we present V2-SAM, a unified cross-view object correspondence framework that adapts SAM2 from single-view segmentation to cross-view correspondence through two complementary prompt generators. Specifically, the Cross-View Anchor Prompt Generator (V2-Anchor), built upon DINOv3 features, establishes geometry-aware correspondences and, for the first time, enables coordinate-based prompting for SAM2 in cross-view scenarios, while the Cross-View Visual Prompt Generator (V2-Visual) enhances appearance-guided cues via a novel visual prompt matcher that aligns ego-exo representations from both feature and structural perspectives. To effectively exploit the strengths of both prompts, we further adopt a multi-expert design and introduce a Post-hoc Cyclic Consistency Selector (PCCS) that adaptively selects the most reliable expert based on cyclic consistency. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of V2-SAM, achieving new state-of-the-art performance on Ego-Exo4D (ego-exo object correspondence), DAVIS-2017 (video object tracking), and HANDAL-X (robotic-ready cross-view correspondence).

Globally interpretable models are a promising approach for trustworthy AI in safety-critical domains. Alongside global explanations, detailed local explanations are a crucial complement to effectively support human experts during inference. This work proposes the Calibrated Hierarchical QPM (CHiQPM) which offers uniquely comprehensive global and local interpretability, paving the way for human-AI complementarity. CHiQPM achieves superior global interpretability by contrastively explaining the majority of classes and offers novel hierarchical explanations that are more similar to how humans reason and can be traversed to offer a built-in interpretable Conformal prediction (CP) method. Our comprehensive evaluation shows that CHiQPM achieves state-of-the-art accuracy as a point predictor, maintaining 99% accuracy of non-interpretable models. This demonstrates a substantial improvement, where interpretability is incorporated without sacrificing overall accuracy. Furthermore, its calibrated set prediction is competitively efficient to other CP methods, while providing interpretable predictions of coherent sets along its hierarchical explanation.

Payment networks form the backbone of modern commerce, generating high volumes of transaction records from daily activities. Properly modeling this data can enable applications such as abnormal behavior detection and consumer-level insights for hyper-personalized experiences, ultimately improving people's lives. In this paper, we present TREASURE, TRansformer Engine As Scalable Universal transaction Representation Encoder, a multipurpose transformer-based foundation model specifically designed for transaction data. The model simultaneously captures both consumer behavior and payment network signals (such as response codes and system flags), providing comprehensive information necessary for applications like accurate recommendation systems and abnormal behavior detection. Verified with industry-grade datasets, TREASURE features three key capabilities: 1) an input module with dedicated sub-modules for static and dynamic attributes, enabling more efficient training and inference; 2) an efficient and effective training paradigm for predicting high-cardinality categorical attributes; and 3) demonstrated effectiveness as both a standalone model that increases abnormal behavior detection performance by 111% over production systems and an embedding provider that enhances recommendation models by 104%. We present key insights from extensive ablation studies, benchmarks against production models, and case studies, highlighting valuable knowledge gained from developing TREASURE.

Automatically detecting abnormal events in videos is crucial for modern autonomous systems, yet existing Video Anomaly Detection (VAD) benchmarks lack the scene diversity, balanced anomaly coverage, and temporal complexity needed to reliably assess real-world performance. Meanwhile, the community is increasingly moving toward Video Anomaly Understanding (VAU), which requires deeper semantic and causal reasoning but remains difficult to benchmark due to the heavy manual annotation effort it demands. In this paper, we introduce Pistachio, a new VAD/VAU benchmark constructed entirely through a controlled, generation-based pipeline. By leveraging recent advances in video generation models, Pistachio provides precise control over scenes, anomaly types, and temporal narratives, effectively eliminating the biases and limitations of Internet-collected datasets. Our pipeline integrates scene-conditioned anomaly assignment, multi-step storyline generation, and a temporally consistent long-form synthesis strategy that produces coherent 41-second videos with minimal human intervention. Extensive experiments demonstrate the scale, diversity, and complexity of Pistachio, revealing new challenges for existing methods and motivating future research on dynamic and multi-event anomaly understanding.