Medical Vision-Language Models (VLMs) hold immense promise for complex clinical tasks, but their reasoning capabilities are often constrained by text-only paradigms that fail to ground inferences in visual evidence. This limitation not only curtails performance on tasks requiring fine-grained visual analysis but also introduces risks of visual hallucination in safety-critical applications. Thus, we introduce MedVR, a novel reinforcement learning framework that enables annotation-free visual reasoning for medical VLMs. Its core innovation lies in two synergistic mechanisms: Entropy-guided Visual Regrounding (EVR) uses model uncertainty to direct exploration, while Consensus-based Credit Assignment (CCA) distills pseudo-supervision from rollout agreement. Without any human annotations for intermediate steps, MedVR achieves state-of-the-art performance on diverse public medical VQA benchmarks, significantly outperforming existing models. By learning to reason directly with visual evidence, MedVR promotes the robustness and transparency essential for accelerating the clinical deployment of medical AI.

Recent feed-forward Gaussian reconstruction models adopt a pixel-aligned formulation that maps each 2D pixel to a 3D Gaussian, entangling Gaussian representations tightly with the input images. In this paper, we propose AnchorSplat, a novel feed-forward 3DGS framework for scene-level reconstruction that represents the scene directly in 3D space. AnchorSplat introduces an anchor-aligned Gaussian representation guided by 3D geometric priors (e.g., sparse point clouds, voxels, or RGB-D point clouds), enabling a more geometry-aware renderable 3D Gaussians that is independent of image resolution and number of views. This design substantially reduces the number of required Gaussians, improving computational efficiency while enhancing reconstruction fidelity. Beyond the anchor-aligned design, we utilize a Gaussian Refiner to adjust the intermediate Gaussiansy via merely a few forward passes. Experiments on the ScanNet++ v2 NVS benchmark demonstrate the SOTA performance, outperforming previous methods with more view-consistent and substantially fewer Gaussian primitives.

Modern reasoning models continue generating long after the answer is already determined. Across five model configurations, two families, and three benchmarks, we find that 52--88% of chain-of-thought tokens are produced after the answer is recoverable from a partial prefix. This post-commitment generation reveals a structural phenomenon: the detection-extraction gap. Free continuations from early prefixes recover the correct answer even at 10% of the trace, while forced extraction fails on 42% of these cases. The answer is recoverable from the model state, yet prompt-conditioned decoding fails to extract it. We formalize this mismatch via a total-variation bound between free and forced continuation distributions, yielding quantitative estimates of suffix-induced shift. Exploiting this asymmetry, we propose Black-box Adaptive Early Exit (BAEE), which uses free continuations for both detection and extraction, truncating 70--78% of serial generation while improving accuracy by 1--5pp across all models. For thinking-mode models, early exit prevents post-commitment overwriting, yielding gains of up to 5.8pp; a cost-optimized variant achieves 68--73% reduction at a median of 9 API calls. Code is available at https://github.com/EdWangLoDaSc/know2say.

Previous studies have illustrated the potential of analysing gaze behaviours in collaborative learning to provide educationally meaningful information for students to reflect on their learning. Over the past decades, machine learning approaches have been developed to automatically detect gaze behaviours from video data. Yet, since these approaches often require large amounts of labelled data for training, human annotation remains necessary. Additionally, researchers have questioned the cross-configuration robustness of machine learning models developed, as training datasets often fail to encompass the full range of situations encountered in educational contexts. To address these challenges, this study proposes a scalable artificial intelligence approach that leverages pretrained and foundation models to automatically detect gaze behaviours in face-to-face collaborative learning contexts without requiring human-annotated data. The approach utilises pretrained YOLO11 for person tracking, YOLOE-26 with text-prompt capability for education-related object detection, and the Gaze-LLE model for gaze target prediction. The results indicate that the proposed approach achieves an F1-score of 0.829 in detecting students' gaze behaviours from video data, with strong performance for laptop-directed gaze and peer-directed gaze, yet weaker performance for other gaze targets. Furthermore, when compared to other supervised machine learning approaches, the proposed method demonstrates superior and more stable performance in complex contexts, highlighting its better cross-configuration robustness. The implications of this approach for supporting students' collaborative learning in real-world environments are also discussed.

Nonconvex multi-well energies in cell-induced phase transitions give rise to fine-scale microstructures, low-regularity transition layers and sharp interfaces, all of which pose numerical challenges for physics-informed learning. To address this, we propose biomimetic physics-informed neural networks (Bio-PINNs) for cell-induced phase transitions in fibrous extracellular matrices. The method converts the outward progression of cell-mediated remodelling into a distance-based training curriculum and couples it to uncertainty-driven collocation that concentrates samples near evolving interfaces and tether-forming regions. The same uncertainty proxy provides a lower-cost alternative to explicit second-derivative regularization. We also establish structural guarantees for the adaptive sampler, including persistent coverage under gate expansion and quantitative near-to-far accumulation. Across single- and multi-cell benchmarks, diverse separations, and various regularization regimes, Bio-PINNs consistently recover sharp transition layers and tether morphologies, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art adaptive and ungated baselines.

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has substantially enhanced the reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, existing RLVR approaches typically rely on outcome-driven optimization that updates both perception and reasoning using a shared reward based solely on the final answer. This shared reward blurs credit assignment, frequently improving reasoning patterns while failing to reliably enhance the accuracy of upstream visual evidence extraction. To address this perception bottleneck, we introduce PRCO (Perception-Reasoning Coevolution), a dual-role RLVR framework with a shared policy. PRCO consists of two cooperative roles: an Observer that generates an evidence caption tailored to the question and a Solver that predicts the final answer based on this caption. Crucially, PRCO employs role-specific reward signals: the Solver is optimized using verifiable outcome rewards on the final answer, while the Observer receives a utility reward derived from the Solver's downstream success. Extensive experiments across eight challenging multimodal reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that PRCO yields consistent improvements across model scales by over 7 points on average accuracy compared to the base model, outperforming prior open-source RL-tuned baselines.

This paper argues that continued AI scaling requires repeated efficiency doublings. Classical AI scaling laws remain useful because they make progress predictable despite diminishing returns, but the compute variable in those laws is best read as logical compute, not as a record of one fixed physical implementation. Practical burden therefore depends on the efficiency with which physical resources realize that compute. Under that interpretation, diminishing returns mean rising operational burden, not merely a flatter curve. Sustained progress then requires recurrent gains in hardware, algorithms, and systems that keep additional logical compute feasible at acceptable cost. The relevant analogy is Moore's Law, understood less as a theorem than as an organizing expectation of repeated efficiency improvement. AI does not yet have a single agreed cadence for such gains, but recent evidence suggests trends that are at least Moore-like and sometimes faster. The paper's claim is therefore simple: if AI scaling is to remain active, repeated efficiency doublings are not optional. They are required.

Recommendation ranking is fundamentally an influence allocation problem: a sorting formula distributes ranking influence among competing factors, and the business outcome depends on finding the optimal "exchange rates" among them. However, offline proxy metrics systematically misjudge how influence reallocation translates to online impact, with asymmetric bias across metrics that a single calibration factor cannot correct. We present Sortify, the first fully autonomous LLM-driven ranking optimization agent deployed in a large-scale production recommendation system. The agent reframes ranking optimization as continuous influence exchange, closing the full loop from diagnosis to parameter deployment without human intervention. It addresses structural problems through three mechanisms: (1) a dual-channel framework grounded in Savage's Subjective Expected Utility (SEU) that decouples offline-online transfer correction (Belief channel) from constraint penalty adjustment (Preference channel); (2) an LLM meta-controller operating on framework-level parameters rather than low-level search variables; (3) a persistent Memory DB with 7 relational tables for cross-round learning. Its core metric, Influence Share, provides a decomposable measure where all factor contributions sum to exactly 100%. Sortify has been deployed across two markets. In Country A, the agent pushed GMV from -3.6% to +9.2% within 7 rounds with peak orders reaching +12.5%. In Country B, a cold-start deployment achieved +4.15% GMV/UU and +3.58% Ads Revenue in a 7-day A/B test, leading to full production rollout.

We prove the tightest-known upper bounds on the sample complexity of multi-group learning. Our algorithm extends the one-inclusion graph prediction strategy using a generalization of bipartite $b$-matching. In the group-realizable setting, we provide a lower bound confirming that our algorithm's $\log n / n$ convergence rate is optimal in general. If one relaxes the learning objective such that the group on which we are evaluated is chosen obliviously of the sample, then our algorithm achieves the optimal $1/n$ convergence rate under group-realizability.

Extreme neural network sparsification (90% activation reduction) presents a critical challenge for mechanistic interpretability: understanding whether interpretable features survive aggressive compression. This work investigates feature survival under severe capacity constraints in hybrid Variational Autoencoder--Sparse Autoencoder (VAE-SAE) architectures. We introduce an adaptive sparsity scheduling framework that progressively reduces active neurons from 500 to 50 over 50 training epochs, and provide empirical evidence for fundamental limits of the sparsification-interpretability relationship. Testing across two benchmark datasets -- dSprites and Shapes3D -- with both Top-k and L1 sparsification methods, our key finding reveals a pervasive paradox: while global representation quality (measured by Mutual Information Gap) remains stable, local feature interpretability collapses systematically. Under Top-k sparsification, dead neuron rates reach $34.4\pm0.9\%$ on dSprites and $62.7\pm1.3\%$ on Shapes3D at k=50. L1 regularization -- a fundamentally different "soft constraint" paradigm -- produces equal or worse collapse: $41.7\pm4.4\%$ on dSprites and $90.6\pm0.5\%$ on Shapes3D. Extended training for 100 additional epochs fails to recover dead neurons, and the collapse pattern is robust across all tested threshold definitions. Critically, the collapse scales with dataset complexity: Shapes3D (RGB, 6 factors) shows $1.8\times$ more dead neurons than dSprites (grayscale, 5 factors) under Top-k and $2.2\times$ under L1. These findings establish that interpretability collapse under sparsification is intrinsic to the compression process rather than an artifact of any particular algorithm, training duration, or threshold choice.

The limited context window of contemporary large language models (LLMs) remains a primary bottleneck for their broader application across diverse domains. Although continual pre-training on long-context data offers a straightforward solution, it incurs prohibitive data acquisition and computational costs. To address this challenge, we propose~\modelname, a novel framework based on multi-grained context compression and query-aware information acquisition. SharedLLM comprises two stacked short-context LLMs: a lower model serving as a compressor and an upper model acting as a decoder. The lower model compresses long inputs into compact, multi-grained representations, which are then forwarded to the upper model for context-aware processing. To maximize efficiency, this information transfer occurs exclusively at the lowest layers, bypassing lengthy forward passes and redundant cross-attention operations. This entire process, wherein the upper and lower models are derived from the same underlying LLM layers, is termed~\textit{self-injection}. To support this architecture, a specialized tree-based data structure enables the efficient encoding and query-aware retrieval of contextual information. Despite being trained on sequences of only 8K tokens, \modelname~effectively generalizes to inputs exceeding 128K tokens. Across a comprehensive suite of long-context modeling and understanding benchmarks, \modelname~achieves performance superior or comparable to strong baselines, striking an optimal balance between efficiency and accuracy. Furthermore, these design choices allow \modelname~to substantially reduce the memory footprint and yield notable inference speedups ($2\times$ over streaming and $3\times$ over encoder-decoder architectures).

Scaling test-time compute via long Chain-of-Thought unlocks remarkable gains in reasoning capabilities, yet it faces practical limits due to the linear growth of KV cache and quadratic attention complexity. In this paper, we introduce Accordion-Thinking, an end-to-end framework where LLMs learn to self-regulate the granularity of the reasoning steps through dynamic summarization. This mechanism enables a Fold inference mode, where the model periodically summarizes its thought process and discards former thoughts to reduce dependency on historical tokens. We apply reinforcement learning to incentivize this capability further, uncovering a critical insight: the accuracy gap between the highly efficient Fold mode and the exhaustive Unfold mode progressively narrows and eventually vanishes over the course of training. This phenomenon demonstrates that the model learns to encode essential reasoning information into compact summaries, achieving effective compression of the reasoning context. Our Accordion-Thinking demonstrates that with learned self-compression, LLMs can tackle complex reasoning tasks with minimal dependency token overhead without compromising solution quality, and it achieves a three times throughput while maintaining accuracy on a 48GB GPU memory configuration, while the structured step summaries provide a human-readable account of the reasoning process.

Web agents hold great potential for automating complex computer tasks, yet their interactions involve long-horizon, sequential decision-making with irreversible actions. In such settings, outcome-based supervision is sparse and delayed, often rewarding incorrect trajectories and failing to support inference-time scaling. This motivates the use of Process Reward Models (WebPRMs) for web navigation, but existing approaches remain limited: scalar WebPRMs collapse progress into coarse, weakly grounded signals, while checklist-based WebPRMs rely on brittle template matching that fails under layout or semantic changes and often mislabels superficially correct actions as successful, providing little insight or interpretability. To address these challenges, we introduce WebArbiter, a reasoning-first, principle-inducing WebPRM that formulates reward modeling as text generation, producing structured justifications that conclude with a preference verdict and identify the action most conducive to task completion under the current context. Training follows a two-stage pipeline: reasoning distillation equips the model with coherent principle-guided reasoning, and reinforcement learning corrects teacher biases by directly aligning verdicts with correctness, enabling stronger generalization. To support systematic evaluation, we release WebPRMBench, a comprehensive benchmark spanning four diverse web environments with rich tasks and high-quality preference annotations. On WebPRMBench, WebArbiter-7B outperforms the strongest baseline, GPT-5, by 9.1 points. In reward-guided trajectory search on WebArena-Lite, it surpasses the best prior WebPRM by up to 6.4 points, underscoring its robustness and practical value in complex web tasks.

Training data influence estimation methods quantify the contribution of training documents to a model's output, making them a promising source of information for example-based explanations. As humans cannot interpret thousands of documents, only a small subset of the training data can be presented as an explanation. Although the choice of which documents to include directly affects explanation quality, previous evaluations of such systems have largely ignored any selection strategies. To address this, we propose a novel selection relevance score, a retraining-free metric that quantifies how useful a set of examples is for explaining a model's output. We validate this score through fine-tuning experiments, confirming that it can predict whether a set of examples supports or undermines the model's predictions. Using this metric, we further show that common selection strategies often underperform random selection. Motivated by this finding, we propose a strategy that balances influence and representativeness, enabling better use of selection budgets than naively selecting the highest-ranking examples.

Selecting a single high-quality output from multiple stochastic generations remains a fundamental challenge for large language models (LLMs), particularly in open-ended tasks where no canonical answer exists. While Best-of-N and self-consistency methods show that aggregating multiple generations can improve performance, existing approaches typically rely on external evaluators, reward models, or exact string-match voting, limiting their applicability and efficiency. We propose Mode Extraction (ModeX), an evaluator-free Best-of-N selection framework that generalizes majority voting to open-ended text generation by identifying the modal output representing the dominant semantic consensus among generated texts. ModeX constructs a similarity graph over candidate generations and recursively applies spectral clustering to select a representative centroid, without requiring additional inference or auxiliary models. We further instantiate this selection principle as ModeX-Lite, an improved version of ModeX with early pruning for efficiency. Across open-ended tasks -- including text summarization, code generation, and mathematical reasoning -- our approaches consistently outperform standard single- and multi-path baselines, providing a computationally efficient solution for robust open-ended text generation. Code is released in https://github.com/deeplearning-wisc/ModeX.

We present the first empirical study of machine unlearning (MU) in hybrid quantum-classical neural networks. While MU has been extensively explored in classical deep learning, its behavior within variational quantum circuits (VQCs) and quantum-augmented architectures remains largely unexplored. First, we adapt a broad suite of unlearning methods to quantum settings, including gradient-based, distillation-based, regularization-based and certified techniques. Second, we introduce two new unlearning strategies tailored to hybrid models. Experiments across Iris, MNIST, and Fashion-MNIST, under both subset removal and full-class deletion, reveal that quantum models can support effective unlearning, but outcomes depend strongly on circuit depth, entanglement structure, and task complexity. Shallow VQCs display high intrinsic stability with minimal memorization, whereas deeper hybrid models exhibit stronger trade-offs between utility, forgetting strength, and alignment with retrain oracle. We find that certain methods, e.g. EU-k, LCA, and Certified Unlearning, consistently provide the best balance across metrics. These findings establish baseline empirical insights into quantum machine unlearning and highlight the need for quantum-aware algorithms and theoretical guarantees, as quantum machine learning systems continue to expand in scale and capability. We publicly release our code at: https://github.com/CrivoiCarla/HQML.

Current chart-related tasks, such as chart generation (NL2Chart), chart schema parsing, chart data parsing, and chart question answering (ChartQA), are typically studied in isolation, preventing models from learning the shared semantics that link chart creation and interpretation. We introduce CycleChart, a consistency-based learning framework for bidirectional chart understanding and generation. Unlike conventional multi-task approaches that draw training samples independently across tasks, CycleChart organizes all tasks around each single data instance. From a source table and natural-language query, the model generates a chart specification, renders and executes it, then learns to recover the schema and underlying data from the resulting chart image. This per-instance lifecycle design lets the model capture the full chain of transformations, from raw data through visual encoding to structured recovery, and a generate--parse consistency objective enforces semantic alignment between the forward generation and reverse parsing directions. To support this framework, we construct CycleChart-Bench, a lifecycle-aligned benchmark where every chart sample carries aligned annotations for generation, schema parsing, data parsing, and question answering. CycleChart achieves strong results across all four tasks and transfers effectively to unseen external benchmarks, demonstrating improved cross-task generalization and marking a step toward more general chart understanding models.

Text-to-image (T2I) models have demonstrated remarkable progress in creative image generation, yet they still lack precise control over scene illuminants which is a crucial factor for content designers to manipulate visual aesthetics of generated images. In this paper, we present an illuminant personalization method named LumiCtrl that learns illuminant prompt given single image of the object. LumiCtrl consists of three components: given an image of the object, our method apply (a) physics-based illuminant augmentation along with Planckian locus to create fine-tuning variants under standard illuminants; (b) Edge-Guided Prompt Disentanglement using frozen ControlNet to ensure prompts focus on illumination, not the structure; and (c) a Masked Reconstruction Loss that focuses learning on foreground object while allowing background to adapt contextually which enables what we call Contextual Light Adaptation. We qualitatively and quantitatively compare LumiCtrl against other T2I customization methods. The results show that LumiCtrl achieves significantly better illuminant fidelity, aesthetic quality, and scene coherence compared to existing baselines. A human preference study further confirms the strong user preference for LumiCtrl generations.

Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have significantly enhanced cross-modal understanding and reasoning by incorporating Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning in the semantic space. Building upon this, recent studies extend the CoT mechanism to the visual modality, enabling models to integrate visual information during reasoning through external tools or explicit image generation. However, these methods remain dependent on explicit step-by-step reasoning, unstable perception-reasoning interaction and notable computational overhead. Inspired by human cognition, we posit that thinking unfolds not linearly but through the dynamic interleaving of reasoning and perception within the mind. Motivated by this perspective, we propose DMLR, a test-time Dynamic Multimodal Latent Reasoning framework that employs confidence-guided latent policy gradient optimization to refine latent think tokens for in-depth reasoning. Furthermore, a Dynamic Visual Injection Strategy is introduced, which retrieves the most relevant visual features at each latent think token and updates the set of best visual patches. The updated patches are then injected into latent think token to achieve dynamic visual-textual interleaving. Experiments across seven multimodal reasoning benchmarks and various model architectures demonstrate that DMLR significantly improves reasoning and perception performance while maintaining high inference efficiency.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently enabled robotic manipulation by grounding visual and linguistic cues into actions. However, most VLAs assume the Markov property, relying only on the current observation and thus suffering from temporal myopia that degrades long-horizon coherence. In this work, we view motion as a more compact and informative representation of temporal context and world dynamics, capturing inter-state changes while filtering static pixel-level noise. From this perspective, HiF-VLA equips a motion-centric world model for the VLA, enabling agents to reason about temporal dynamics for future evolution during action generation. Building on this idea, we propose HiF-VLA (Hindsight, Insight, and Foresight for VLAs), a unified framework that leverages motion for bidirectional temporal reasoning. HiF-VLA encodes past dynamics through hindsight priors, anticipates future motion via foresight reasoning, and integrates both through a hindsight-modulated joint expert to enable a ''think-while-acting'' paradigm for long-horizon manipulation. As a result, HiF-VLA surpasses strong baselines on LIBERO-Long and CALVIN ABC-D benchmarks, while incurring negligible additional inference latency. Furthermore, HiF-VLA achieves substantial improvements in real-world long-horizon manipulation tasks, demonstrating its broad effectiveness in practical robotic settings.

We address the problem of fair classification in settings where data is scarce and unbalanced across demographic groups. Such low-data regimes are common in domains like medical imaging, where false negatives can have fatal consequences. We propose a novel approach \emph{OxEnsemble} for efficiently training ensembles and enforcing fairness in these low-data regimes. Unlike other approaches, we aggregate predictions across ensemble members, each trained to satisfy fairness constraints. By construction, \emph{OxEnsemble} is both data-efficient -- carefully reusing held-out data to enforce fairness reliably -- and compute-efficient, requiring little more compute than used to fine-tune or evaluate an existing model. We validate this approach with new theoretical guarantees. Experimentally, our approach yields more consistent outcomes and stronger fairness-accuracy trade-offs than existing methods across multiple challenging medical imaging classification datasets.

Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for representing signals such as images, 3D shapes, signed distance fields, and radiance fields. While significant progress has been made in architecture design (e.g., SIREN, FFC, KAN-based INRs) and optimization strategies (meta-learning, amortization, distillation), existing approaches still suffer from two core limitations: (1) a representation bottleneck that forces a single MLP to uniformly model heterogeneous local structures, and (2) limited scalability due to the absence of a hierarchical mechanism that dynamically adapts to signal complexity. This work introduces Hyper-Coordinate Implicit Neural Representations (HC-INR), a new class of INRs that break the representational bottleneck by learning signal-adaptive coordinate transformations using a hypernetwork. HC-INR decomposes the representation task into two components: (i) a learned multiscale coordinate transformation module that warps the input domain into a disentangled latent space, and (ii) a compact implicit field network that models the transformed signal with significantly reduced complexity. The proposed model introduces a hierarchical hypernetwork architecture that conditions coordinate transformations on local signal features, enabling dynamic allocation of representation capacity. We theoretically show that HC-INR strictly increases the upper bound of representable frequency bands while maintaining Lipschitz stability. Extensive experiments across image fitting, shape reconstruction, and neural radiance field approximation demonstrate that HC-INR achieves up to 4 times higher reconstruction fidelity than strong INR baselines while using 30--60\% fewer parameters.

Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for representing signals such as images, audio, and 3D scenes. However, existing INR frameworks -- including MLPs with Fourier features, SIREN, and multiresolution hash grids -- implicitly assume a \textit{global and stationary} spectral basis. This assumption is fundamentally misaligned with real-world signals whose frequency characteristics vary significantly across space, exhibiting local high-frequency textures, smooth regions, and frequency drift phenomena. We propose \textbf{Neural Spectral Transport Representation (NSTR)}, the first INR framework that \textbf{explicitly models a spatially varying local frequency field}. NSTR introduces a learnable \emph{frequency transport equation}, a PDE that governs how local spectral compositions evolve across space. Given a learnable local spectrum field $S(x)$ and a frequency transport network $F_θ$ enforcing $\nabla S(x) \approx F_θ(x, S(x))$, NSTR reconstructs signals by spatially modulating a compact set of global sinusoidal bases. This formulation enables strong local adaptivity and offers a new level of interpretability via visualizing frequency flows. Experiments on 2D image regression, audio reconstruction, and implicit 3D geometry show that NSTR achieves significantly better accuracy-parameter trade-offs than SIREN, Fourier-feature MLPs, and Instant-NGP. NSTR requires fewer global frequencies, converges faster, and naturally explains signal structure through spectral transport fields. We believe NSTR opens a new direction in INR research by introducing explicit modeling of space-varying spectrum.

Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) require scalable sampling algorithms to approximate posterior distributions over parameters. Existing stochastic gradient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (SGMCMC) methods are highly sensitive to the choice of stepsize and adaptive variants such as pSGLD typically fail to sample the correct invariant measure without addition of a costly divergence correction term. In this work, we build on the recently proposed `SamAdams' framework for timestep adaptation (Leimkuhler, Lohmann, and Whalley 2025), introducing an adaptive scheme: SA-SGLD, which employs time rescaling to modulate the stepsize according to a monitored quantity (typically the local gradient norm). SA-SGLD can automatically shrink stepsizes in regions of high curvature and expand them in flatter regions, improving both stability and mixing without introducing bias. We show that our method can achieve more accurate posterior sampling than SGLD on high-curvature 2D toy examples and in image classification with BNNs using sharp priors.

Bangladesh's low-income population faces major barriers to affordable legal advice due to complex legal language, procedural opacity, and high costs. Existing AI legal assistants lack Bengali-language support and jurisdiction-specific adaptation, limiting their effectiveness. To address this, we developed Mina, a multilingual LLM-based legal assistant tailored for the Bangladeshi context. It employs multilingual embeddings and a RAG-based chain-of-tools framework for retrieval, reasoning, translation, and document generation, delivering context-aware legal drafts, citations, and plain-language explanations via an interactive chat interface. Evaluated by law faculty from leading Bangladeshi universities across all stages of the 2022 and 2023 Bangladesh Bar Council Exams, Mina scored 75-80% in Preliminary MCQs, Written, and simulated Viva Voce exams, matching or surpassing average human performance and demonstrating clarity, contextual understanding, and sound legal reasoning. Even under a conservative upper bound, Mina operates at just 0.12-0.61% of typical legal consultation costs in Bangladesh, yielding a 99.4-99.9\% cost reduction relative to human-provided services. These results confirm its potential as a low-cost, multilingual AI assistant that automates key legal tasks and scales access to justice, offering a real-world case study on building domain-specific, low-resource systems and addressing challenges of multilingual adaptation, efficiency, and sustainable public-service AI deployment.

In this work, we propose a novel framework to enable diffusion models to adapt their generation quality based on real-time network bandwidth constraints. Traditional diffusion models produce high-fidelity images by performing a fixed number of denoising steps, regardless of downstream transmission limitations. However, in practical cloud-to-device scenarios, limited bandwidth often necessitates heavy compression, leading to loss of fine textures and wasted computation. To address this, we introduce a joint end-to-end training strategy where the diffusion model is conditioned on a target quality level derived from the available bandwidth. During training, the model learns to adaptively modulate the denoising process, enabling early-stop sampling that maintains perceptual quality appropriate to the target transmission condition. Our method requires minimal architectural changes and leverages a lightweight quality embedding to guide the denoising trajectory. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly improves the visual fidelity of bandwidth-adapted generations compared to naive early-stopping, offering a promising solution for efficient image delivery in bandwidth-constrained environments. Code is available at: https://github.com/xzhang9308/BADiff.

Despite advancements in SLAM technologies, robust operation under challenging conditions such as low-texture, motion-blur, or challenging lighting remains an open challenge. Such conditions are common in applications such as assistive navigation for the visually impaired. These challenges undermine localization accuracy and tracking stability, reducing navigation reliability and safety. To overcome these limitations, we present SELM-SLAM3, a deep learning-enhanced visual SLAM framework that integrates SuperPoint and LightGlue for robust feature extraction and matching. We evaluated our framework using TUM RGB-D, ICL-NUIM, and TartanAir datasets, which feature diverse and challenging scenarios. SELM-SLAM3 outperforms conventional ORB-SLAM3 by an average of 87.84% and exceeds state-of-the-art RGB-D SLAM systems by 36.77%. Our framework demonstrates enhanced performance under challenging conditions, such as low-texture scenes and fast motion, providing a reliable platform for developing navigation aids for the visually impaired.

Deep neural networks like PhaseNet show high accuracy in detecting microseismic events, but their black-box nature is a concern in critical applications. We apply Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) techniques, such as Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) and Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP), to interpret the PhaseNet model's decisions and improve its reliability. Grad-CAM highlights that the network's attention aligns with P- and S-wave arrivals. SHAP values quantify feature contributions, confirming that vertical-component amplitudes drive P-phase picks while horizontal components dominate S-phase picks, consistent with geophysical principles. Leveraging these insights, we introduce a SHAP-gated inference scheme that combines the model's output with an explanation-based metric to reduce errors. On a test set of 9,000 waveforms, the SHAP-gated model achieved an F1-score of 0.98 (precision 0.99, recall 0.97), outperforming the baseline PhaseNet (F1-score 0.97) and demonstrating enhanced robustness to noise. These results show that XAI can not only interpret deep learning models but also directly enhance their performance, providing a template for building trust in automated seismic detectors. The implementation and scripts used in this study will be publicly available at https://github.com/ayratabd/xAI_PhaseNet.

Transfer entropy measures directed information flow in time series, and it has become a fundamental quantity in applications spanning neuroscience, finance, and complex systems analysis. However, existing estimation methods suffer from the curse of dimensionality, require restrictive distributional assumptions, or need exponentially large datasets for reliable convergence. We address these limitations in the literature by proposing TENDE (Transfer Entropy Neural Diffusion Estimation), a novel approach that leverages score-based diffusion models to estimate transfer entropy through conditional mutual information. By learning score functions of the relevant conditional distributions, TENDE provides flexible, scalable estimation while making minimal assumptions about the underlying data-generating process. We demonstrate superior accuracy and robustness compared to existing neural estimators and other state-of-the-art approaches across synthetic benchmarks and real data.

While Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) excels at zero-shot tasks by aligning image and text embeddings, its performance in few-shot classification is hindered by a critical limitation: intra-modal misalignment. This issue, caused by a persistent modality gap and CLIP's exclusively inter-modal training objective, leaves the embedding spaces uncalibrated, making direct image-to-image comparisons unreliable. Existing methods attempt to address this by refining similarity logits or by computationally expensive per-sample optimization. To overcome these challenges, we introduce SeMoBridge, a lightweight yet powerful approach that directly addresses the misalignment. Our method maps images into the text modality, while keeping their semantic content intact through what we call a Semantic Modality Bridge. SeMoBridge is closed-form and can optionally be trained through multi-modal supervision, combining image and text-alignment losses to optimize the projection. Experiments show that the trained version, SeMoBridge-T, requires only a fraction of the training time while overall outperforming other methods, particularly in low-data scenarios (1, 2, and 4 shots). The code is available at https://github.com/christti98/semobridge.