Evaluating large language models (LLMs) for clinical documentation tasks such as SOAP note generation remains challenging. Unlike standard summarization, these tasks require clinical abstraction, normalization of colloquial language, and medically grounded inference. However, prevailing evaluation methods including automated metrics and LLM as judge frameworks rely on lexical faithfulness, often labeling any information not explicitly present in the transcript as hallucination. We show that such approaches systematically misclassify clinically valid outputs as errors, inflating hallucination rates and distorting model assessment. Our analysis reveals that many flagged hallucinations correspond to legitimate clinical transformations, including synonym mapping, abstraction of examination findings, diagnostic inference, and guideline consistent care planning. By aligning evaluation criteria with clinical reasoning through calibrated prompting and retrieval grounded in medical ontologies we observe a significant shift in outcomes. Under a lexical evaluation regime, the mean hallucination rate is 35%, heavily penalizing valid reasoning. With inference aware evaluation, this drops to 9%, with remaining cases reflecting genuine safety concerns. These findings suggest that current evaluation practices over penalize valid clinical reasoning and may measure artifacts of evaluation design rather than true errors, underscoring the need for clinically informed evaluation in high context domains like medicine.

Educational assistants should spend more computation only when the task needs it. This paper rewrites our earlier draft around the system that was actually implemented and archived in the repository: a sample-level 1B to 7B cascade for the shared-8 EduBench benchmark. The final system, Pangu-ACE, uses a 1B tutor-router to produce a draft answer plus routing signals, then either accepts the draft or escalates the sample to a 7B specialist prompt. We also correct a major offline evaluation bug: earlier summaries over-credited some open-form outputs that only satisfied superficial format checks. After CPU-side rescoring from saved prediction JSONL, the full Chinese test archive (7013 samples) shows that cascade_final improves deterministic quality from 0.457 to 0.538 and format validity from 0.707 to 0.866 over the legacy rule_v2 system while accepting 19.7% of requests directly at 1B. Routing is strongly task dependent: IP is accepted by 1B 78.0% of the time, while QG and EC still escalate almost always. The current archived deployment does not yet show latency gains, so the defensible efficiency story is routing selectivity rather than wall-clock speedup. We also package a reproducible artifact-first paper workflow and clarify the remaining external-baseline gap: GPT-5.4 re-judging is implemented locally, but the configured provider endpoint and key are invalid, so final sampled-baseline alignment with GPT-5.4 remains pending infrastructure repair.

This paper presents an overview of the NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Video Saliency Prediction. The goal of the challenge participants was to develop automatic saliency map prediction methods for the provided video sequences. The novel dataset of 2,000 diverse videos with an open license was prepared for this challenge. The fixations and corresponding saliency maps were collected using crowdsourced mouse tracking and contain viewing data from over 5,000 assessors. Evaluation was performed on a subset of 800 test videos using generally accepted quality metrics. The challenge attracted over 20 teams making submissions, and 7 teams passed the final phase with code review. All data used in this challenge is made publicly available - https://github.com/msu-video-group/NTIRE26_Saliency_Prediction.

In NLP classification tasks where little labeled data exists, domain fine-tuning of transformer models on unlabeled data is an established approach. In this paper we have two aims. (1) We describe our observations from fine-tuning the Finnish BERT model on Finnish medical text data. (2) We report on our attempts to predict the benefit of domain-specific pre-training of Finnish BERT from observing the geometry of embedding changes due to domain fine-tuning. Our driving motivation is the common\situation in healthcare AI where we might experience long delays in acquiring datasets, especially with respect to labels.

Ad hoc wireless networks exhibit complex, innate and coupled dynamics: node mobility, energy depletion and topology change that are difficult to model analytically. Model-free deep reinforcement learning requires sustained online interaction whereas existing model based approaches use flat state representations that lose per node structure. Therefore we propose G-RSSM, a graph structured recurrent state space model that maintains per node latent states with cross node multi head attention to learn the dynamics jointly from offline trajectories. We apply the proposed method to the downstream task clustering where a cluster head selection policy trains entirely through imagined rollouts in the learned world model. Across 27 evaluation scenarios spanning MANET, VANET, FANET, WSN and tactical networks with N=30 to 1000 nodes, the learned policy maintains high connectivity with only trained for N=50. Herein, we propose the first multi physics graph structured world model applied to combinatorial per node decision making in size agnostic wireless ad hoc networks.

Machine unlearning for large language models (LLMs) aims to remove targeted knowledge while preserving general capability. In this paper, we recast LLM unlearning as an asymmetric two-task problem: retention is the primary objective and forgetting is an auxiliary. From this perspective, we propose a retention-prioritized gradient synthesis framework that decouples task-specific gradient extraction from conflict-aware combination. Instantiating the framework, we adapt established PCGrad to resolve gradient conflicts, and introduce SAGO, a novel retention-prioritized gradient synthesis method. Theoretically, both variants ensure non-negative cosine similarity with the retain gradient, while SAGO achieves strictly tighter alignment through constructive sign-constrained synthesis. Empirically, on WMDP Bio/Cyber and RWKU benchmarks, SAGO consistently pushes the Pareto frontier: e.g., on WMDP Bio (SimNPO+GD), recovery of target model MMLU performance progresses from 44.6% (naive) to 94.0% (+PCGrad) and further to 96.0% (+SAGO), while maintaining comparable forgetting strength. Our results show that re-shaping gradient geometry, rather than re-balancing losses, is the key to mitigating unlearning-retention trade-offs.

Recent Large Audio Language Models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in audio understanding. However, they often suffer from perceptual errors, while reliable audio reasoning is unattainable without first grounding the model's perception in structured auditory scenes. Inspired by Auditory Scene Analysis, we first introduce a Perception-Aware Question Answering (PAQA) dataset. PAQA implements a hierarchical decoupling strategy that separates speech from environmental sound and distinguishes multiple speakers, providing explicit perceptual reasoning for training. Building on this, we propose HyPeR, a two-stage Hybrid Perception-Reasoning framework. In Stage I, we finetune the model on PAQA to perceive acoustic attributes in complex audio. In Stage II, we leverage GRPO to refine the model's internal deliberation. We also introduce PAUSE tokens to facilitate latent computation during acoustically ambiguous phases and design perceptual consistency reward to align reasoning rationales with raw audio. Experiments across benchmarks demonstrate that HyPeR achieves absolute improvements over the base model, with performance comparable to large-scale models, stressing the effectiveness of hybrid perception-grounded reasoning for robust and multi-speaker audio understanding.

Grain-edge segmentation (GES) and lithology semantic segmentation (LSS) are two pivotal tasks for quantifying rock fabric and composition. However, these two tasks are often treated separately, and the segmentation quality is implausible albeit expensive, time-consuming, and expert-annotated datasets have been used. Recently, foundation models, especially the Segment Anything Model (SAM), have demonstrated impressive robustness for boundary alignment. However, directly adapting SAM to joint GES and LSS is nontrivial due to 1) severe domain gap induced by extinction-dependent color variations and ultra-fine grain boundaries, and 2) lacking novel modules for joint learning on multi-angle petrographic image stacks. In this paper, we propose Petro-SAM, a novel two-stage, multi-task framework that can achieve high-quality joint GES and LSS on petrographic images. Specifically, based on SAM, we introduce a Merge Block to integrate seven polarized views, effectively solving the extinction issue. Moreover, we introduce multi-scale feature fusion and color-entropy priors to refine the detection.

Effective abstention (EA), recognizing evidence insufficiency and refraining from answering, is critical for reliable multimodal systems. Yet existing evaluation paradigms for vision-language models (VLMs) and multi-agent systems (MAS) assume answerability, pushing models to always respond. Abstention has been studied in text-only settings but remains underexplored multimodally; current benchmarks either ignore unanswerability or rely on coarse methods that miss realistic failure modes. We introduce MM-AQA, a benchmark that constructs unanswerable instances from answerable ones via transformations along two axes: visual modality dependency and evidence sufficiency. Evaluating three frontier VLMs spanning closed and open-source models and two MAS architectures across 2079 samples, we find: (1) under standard prompting, VLMs rarely abstain; even simple confidence baselines outperform this setup, (2) MAS improves abstention but introduces an accuracy-abstention trade-off, (3) sequential designs match or exceed iterative variants, suggesting the bottleneck is miscalibration rather than reasoning depth, and (4) models abstain when image or text evidence is absent, but attempt reconciliation with degraded or contradictory evidence. Effective multimodal abstention requires abstention-aware training rather than better prompting or more agents.

Visual Geometry Foundation Models (VGFMs) demonstrate remarkable zero-shot capabilities in local reconstruction. However, deploying them for kilometer-level Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) remains challenging. In such scenarios, current approaches mainly rely on linear transforms (e.g., Sim3 and SL4) for sub-map alignment, while we argue that a single linear transform is fundamentally insufficient to model the complex, non-linear geometric distortions inherent in VGFM outputs. Forcing such rigid alignment leads to the rapid accumulation of uncorrected residuals, eventually resulting in significant trajectory drift and map divergence. To address these limitations, we present CAL2M (Calibration-free Assistant-eye based Large-scale Localization and Mapping), a plug-and-play framework compatible with arbitrary VGFMs. Distinct from traditional systems, CAL2M introduces an "assistant eye" solely to leverage the prior of constant physical spacing, effectively eliminating scale ambiguity without any temporal or spatial pre-calibration. Furthermore, leveraging the assumption of accurate feature matching, we propose an epipolar-guided intrinsic and pose correction model. Supported by an online intrinsic search module, it can effectively rectify rotation and translation errors caused by inaccurate intrinsics through fundamental matrix decomposition. Finally, to ensure accurate mapping, we introduce a globally consistent mapping strategy based on anchor propagation. By constructing and fusing anchors across the trajectory, we establish a direct local-to-global mapping relationship. This enables the application of nonlinear transformations to elastically align sub-maps, effectively eliminating geometric misalignments and ensuring a globally consistent reconstruction. The source code of CAL2M will be publicly available at https://github.com/IRMVLab/CALM.

Interactive Evolutionary Computation (IEC) provides a powerful framework for optimizing subjective criteria such as human preferences and aesthetics, yet it suffers from a fundamental limitation: in high-dimensional generative representations, defining crossover in a semantically consistent manner is difficult, often leading to a mutation-dominated search. In this work, we explicitly define crossover in diffusion models. We propose Diffusion crossover, which formulates evolutionary recombination as step-wise interpolation of noise sequences in the reverse process of Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs). By applying spherical linear interpolation (Slerp) to the noise sequences associated with selected parent images, the proposed method generates offspring that inherit characteristics from both parents while preserving the geometric structure of the diffusion process. Furthermore, controlling the time-step range of interpolation enables a principled trade-off between diversity (exploration) and convergence (exploitation). Experimental results using PCA analysis and perceptual similarity metrics (LPIPS) demonstrate that Diffusion crossover produces perceptually smooth and semantically consistent transitions between parent images. Qualitative interactive evolution experiments further confirm that the proposed method effectively supports human-in-the-loop image exploration. These findings suggest a new perspective: diffusion models are not only powerful generators, but also structured evolutionary search spaces in which recombination can be explicitly defined and controlled.

Deploying deep neural networks on edge devices requires balancing accuracy, latency, and resource constraints under realistic execution conditions. To fit models within these constraints, two broad strategies have emerged: static compression techniques such as pruning and quantization, which permanently reduce model size, and dynamic approaches such as early-exit mechanisms, which adapt computational cost at runtime. While both families are widely studied in isolation, they are rarely compared under identical conditions on physical hardware. This paper presents a unified deployment-oriented comparison of static compression and dynamic early-exit mechanisms, evaluated on real edge devices using ONNX based inference pipelines. Our results show that static and dynamic techniques offer fundamentally different trade-offs for edge deployment. While pruning and quantization deliver consistent memory footprint reduction, early-exit mechanisms enable input-adaptive computation savings that static methods cannot match. Their combination proves highly effective, simultaneously reducing inference latency and memory usage with minimal accuracy loss, expanding what is achievable at the edge.

Developing an MR sequence is challenging and remains largely constrained by human intuition. Recently, AI-driven approaches have been proposed; however, most require an initial sequence for parameter optimization or extensive training datasets, limiting their general applicability. In this study, we propose "Sequence Search," an automated sequence design framework based on neural architecture search. The method takes tissue properties, imaging parameters, and design objectives as inputs and generates pulse sequences satisfying the design objectives, without requiring prior knowledge of conventional sequence structures. Sequence Search iteratively generates candidate sequences through neural architecture search and optimizes them via a differentiable Bloch simulator and objective-specific loss functions using gradient-based learning. The framework successfully replicated conventional spin-echo, T2-weighted spin-echo, and inversion recovery sequences. Less intuitive solutions were also discovered, such as three-RF spin-echo-like sequences with reduced RF energy and refocusing phases deviating from the conventional Hahn-echo. This work establishes a generalizable framework for automated MR sequence design, highlighting the potential to explore configurations beyond conventional designs based on human intuition.

We propose a compositional method for constructing a complete 3D head avatar from a single image. Prior one-shot holistic approaches frequently fail to produce realistic hair dynamics during animation, largely due to inadequate decoupling of hair from the facial region, resulting in entangled geometry and unnatural deformations. Our method explicitly decouples hair from the face, modeling these components using distinct deformation paradigms while integrating them into a unified rendering pipeline. Furthermore, by leveraging image-to-3D lifting techniques, we preserve fine-grained textures from the input image to the greatest extent possible, effectively mitigating the common issue of high-frequency information loss in generalized models. Specifically, given a frontal portrait image, we first perform hair removal to obtain a bald image. Both the original image and the bald image are then lifted to dense, detail-rich 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) representations. For the bald 3DGS, we rig it to a FLAME mesh via non-rigid registration with a prior model, enabling natural deformation that follows the mesh triangles during animation. For the hair component, we employ semantic label supervision combined with a boundary-aware reassignment strategy to extract a clean and isolated set of hair Gaussians. To control hair deformation, we introduce a cage structure that supports Position-Based Dynamics (PBD) simulation, allowing realistic and physically plausible transformations of the hair Gaussian primitives under head motion, gravity, and inertial effects. Striking qualitative results, including dynamic animations under diverse head motions, gravity effects, and expressions, showcase substantially more realistic hair behavior alongside faithfully preserved facial details, outperforming state-of-the-art one-shot methods in perceptual realism.

Obstacle detection in railway environments is crucial for ensuring safety. However, very few studies address the problem using a complete, modular, and flexible system that can both detect objects in the scene and estimate their distance from the vehicle. Most works focus solely on detection, others attempt to identify the track, and only a few estimate obstacle distances. Additionally, evaluating these systems is challenging due to the lack of ground truth data. In this paper, we propose a modular and flexible framework that identifies the rail track, detects potential obstacles, and estimates their distance by integrating three neural networks for object detection, track segmentation, and monocular depth estimation with LiDAR point clouds. To enable a reliable and quantitative evaluation, the proposed framework is assessed using a synthetic dataset (SynDRA), which provides accurate ground truth annotations, allowing for direct performance comparison with existing methods. The proposed system achieves a mean absolute error (MAE) as low as 0.63 meters by integrating monocular depth maps with LiDAR, enabling not only accurate distance estimates but also spatial perception of the scene.

In continual visual question answering (VQA), existing Continual Learning (CL) methods are mostly built for symmetric, unimodal architectures. However, modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) violate this assumption, as their trainable components are inherently asymmetric. This structural mismatch renders VLMs highly prone to catastrophic forgetting when learning from continuous data streams. Specifically, the asymmetry causes standard global regularization to favor the massive language decoder during optimization, leaving the smaller but critical visual projection layers highly vulnerable to interference. Consequently, this localized degradation leads to a severe loss of compositional reasoning capabilities. To address this, we propose Asymmetric Information Masking (AIM), which balances stability and plasticity by applying targeted masks based on modality-specific sensitivity. Experiments on VQA v2 and GQA under continual VQA settings show that AIM achieves state-of-the-art performance in both Average Performance (AP) and Average Forgetting (AF), while better preserving generalization to novel skill-concept compositions.

While LLMs have demonstrated remarkable potential in Question Answering (QA), evaluating personalization remains a critical bottleneck. Existing paradigms predominantly rely on lexical-level similarity or manual heuristics, often lacking sufficient data-driven validation. We address this by mining Community-Individual Preference Divergence (CIPD), where individual choices override consensus, to distill six key personalization factors as evaluative dimensions. Accordingly, we introduce CoPA, a benchmark with 1,985 user profiles for fine-grained, factor-level assessment. By quantifying the alignment between model outputs and user-specific cognitive preferences inferred from interaction patterns, CoPA provides a more comprehensive and discriminative standard for evaluating personalized QA than generic metrics. The code is available at https://github.com/bjzgcai/CoPA.

The pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm has become the dominant approach for model adaptation. However, conventional pre-training typically yields models at a fixed scale, whereas practical deployment often requires models of varying sizes, exposing its limitations when target model scales differ from those used during pre-training. To address this, we propose an innovative constraint-based pre-training paradigm that imposes structured constraints during pre-training to disentangle size-agnostic knowledge into reusable weight templates, while assigning size-specific adaptation to lightweight weight scalers, thereby reformulating variable-sized model initialization as a multi-task adaptation problem. Within this paradigm, we further introduce WeiT, which employs Kronecker-based constraints to regularize the pre-training process. Specifically, model parameters are represented as compositions of weight templates via concatenation and weighted aggregation, with adaptive connections governed by lightweight weight scalers whose parameters are learned from limited data. This design enables flexible and efficient construction of model weights across diverse downstream scales. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of WeiT, achieving state-of-the-art performance in initializing models with varying depths and widths across a broad range of perception and embodied learning tasks, including Image Classification, Image Generation, and Embodied Control. Moreover, its effectiveness generalizes to both Transformer-based and Convolution-based architectures, consistently enabling faster convergence and improved performance even under full training.

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong mathematical reasoning when trained on high-quality Chain-of-Thought (CoT) that articulates intermediate steps, yet costly CoT curation hinders further progress. While existing remedies such as distillation from stronger LLMs and self-synthesis based on test-time search alleviate this issue, they often suffer from diminishing returns or high computing overhead.In this work, we propose CoTEvol, a genetic evolutionary framework that casts CoT generation as a population-based search over reasoning trajectories.Candidate trajectories are iteratively evolved through reflective global crossover at the trajectory level and local mutation guided by uncertainty at the step level, enabling holistic recombination and fine-grained refinement. Lightweight, task-aware fitness functions are designed to guide the evolutionary process toward accurate and diverse reasoning. Empirically, CoTEvol improves correct-CoT synthesis success by over 30% and enhances structural diversity, with markedly improved efficiency. LLMs trained on these evolutionary CoT data achieve an average gain of 6.6% across eight math benchmarks, outperforming previous distillation and self-synthesis approaches. These results underscore the promise of evolutionary CoT synthesis as a scalable and effective method for mathematical reasoning tasks.

We present a geometric framework for Reinforcement Learning (RL) that views policies as maps into the Wasserstein space of action probabilities. First, we define a Riemannian structure induced by stationary distributions, proving its existence in a general context. We then define the tangent space of policies and characterize the geodesics, specifically addressing the measurability of vector fields mapped from the state space to the tangent space of probability measures over the action space. Next, we formulate a general RL optimization problem and construct a gradient flow using Otto's calculus. We compute the gradient and the Hessian of the energy, providing a formal second-order analysis. Finally, we illustrate the method with numerical examples for low-dimensional problems, computing the gradient directly from our theoretical formalism. For high-dimensional problems, we parameterize the policy using a neural network and optimize it based on an ergodic approximation of the cost.

Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) challenges methods to identify known and novel classes using partially labeled data, mirroring human category learning. Unlike prior GCD methods, which operate within a single modality and require dataset-specific fine-tuning, we propose a modality-agnostic GCD approach inspired by the human brain's abstract category formation. Our $\textbf{OmniGCD}$ leverages modality-specific encoders (e.g., vision, audio, text, remote sensing) to process inputs, followed by dimension reduction to construct a $\textbf{GCD latent space}$, which is transformed at test-time into a representation better suited for clustering using a novel synthetically trained Transformer-based model. To evaluate OmniGCD, we introduce a $\textbf{zero-shot GCD setting}$ where no dataset-specific fine-tuning is allowed, enabling modality-agnostic category discovery. $\textbf{Trained once on synthetic data}$, OmniGCD performs zero-shot GCD across 16 datasets spanning four modalities, improving classification accuracy for known and novel classes over baselines (average percentage point improvement of $\textbf{+6.2}$, $\textbf{+17.9}$, $\textbf{+1.5}$ and $\textbf{+12.7}$ for vision, text, audio and remote sensing). This highlights the importance of strong encoders while decoupling representation learning from category discovery. Improving modality-agnostic methods will propagate across modalities, enabling encoder development independent of GCD. Our work serves as a benchmark for future modality-agnostic GCD works, paving the way for scalable, human-inspired category discovery. All code is available $\href{https://github.com/Jordan-HS/OmniGCD}{here}$

Early identification and removal of polyps can reduce the risk of developing colorectal cancer. However, the diverse morphologies, complex backgrounds and often concealed nature of polyps make polyp segmentation in colonoscopy images highly challenging. Despite the promising performance of existing deep learning-based polyp segmentation methods, their perceptual capabilities remain biased toward local regions, mainly because of the strong spatial correlations between neighboring pixels in the spatial domain. This limitation makes it difficult to capture the complete polyp structures, ultimately leading to sub-optimal segmentation results. In this paper, we propose a novel adaptive spectrum guidance network, called ASGNet, which addresses the limitations of spatial perception by integrating spectral features with global attributes. Specifically, we first design a spectrum-guided non-local perception module that jointly aggregates local and global information, therefore enhancing the discriminability of polyp structures, and refining their boundaries. Moreover, we introduce a multi-source semantic extractor that integrates rich high-level semantic information to assist in the preliminary localization of polyps. Furthermore, we construct a dense cross-layer interaction decoder that effectively integrates diverse information from different layers and strengthens it to generate high-quality representations for accurate polyp segmentation. Extensive quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate the superiority of our ASGNet approach over 21 state-of-the-art methods across five widely-used polyp segmentation benchmarks. The code will be publicly available at: https://github.com/CSYSI/ASGNet.

Large language models still struggle with faithfulness and hallucinations despite their remarkable reasoning abilities. In Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA), semantic parsing-based approaches address the limitations by understanding constraints in a user's question and converting them into a logical form to execute on a knowledge graph. However, existing KGQA benchmarks and methods are biased toward positive and calculation constraints. Negative constraints are neglected, although they frequently appear in real-world questions. In this paper, we introduce a new task, NEgative-conSTrained (NEST) KGQA, where each question contains at least one negative constraint, and a corresponding dataset, NestKGQA. We also design PyLF, a Python-formatted logical form, since existing logical forms are hardly suitable to express negation clearly while maintaining readability. Furthermore, NEST questions naturally contain multiple constraints. To mitigate their semantic complexity, we present a novel framework named CUCKOO, specialized to multiple-constrained questions and ensuring semantic executability. CUCKOO first generates a constraint-aware logical form draft and performs schema-guided semantic matching. It then selectively applies self-directed refinement only when executing improper logical forms yields an empty result, reducing cost while improving robustness. Experimental results demonstrate that CUCKOO consistently outperforms baselines on both conventional KGQA and NEST-KGQA benchmarks under few-shot settings.

Solving non-linear least-squares problem for pose estimation (rotation and translation) is often a time consuming yet fundamental problem in several real-time computer vision applications. With an adequate rotation parametrization, the optimization problem can be reduced to the solution of a~system of polynomial equations and solved in closed form. Recent advances in efficient closed form solvers utilizing resultant matrices have shown a promising research direction to decrease the computation time while preserving the estimation accuracy. In this paper, we propose a new class of resultant-based solvers that exploit Sylvester forms to further reduce the complexity of the resolution. We demonstrate that our proposed methods are numerically as accurate as the state-of-the-art solvers, and outperform them in terms of computational time. We show that this approach can be applied for pose estimation in two different types of problems: estimating a pose from 3D to 3D correspondences, and estimating a pose from 3D points to 2D points correspondences.

Conventional Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) on Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs) relies on blind stochastic augmentations, inadvertently entangling task-relevant signals with noise. We propose SDM-SCR, a robust framework anchored in Approximate Orthogonal Decomposition. First, the Semantic Decoupling Module (SDM) leverages the instruction-following capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to actively parse raw attributes into asymmetric, task-oriented signal and noise views. This shifts the paradigm from random perturbation to semantic-aware disentanglement. Subsequently, Semantic Consistency Regularization (SCR) exploits the spectral observation that semantic signals are topologically smooth while residual noise is high-frequency. SCR functions as a selective spectral filter, enforcing consistency only on the signal subspace to eliminate LLM hallucinations without over-smoothing. This ``Disentangle-then-Refine'' mechanism ensures rigorous signal purification. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SDM-SCR achieves SOTA performance in accuracy and efficiency.

Large-scale renewable energy deployment introduces pronounced volatility into the electricity system, turning grid operation into a complex stochastic optimization problem. Accurate electricity price forecasting (EPF) is essential not only to support operational decisions, such as optimal bidding strategies and balancing power preparation, but also to reduce economic risk and improve market efficiency. Probabilistic forecasts are particularly valuable because they quantify uncertainty stemming from renewable intermittency, market coupling, and regulatory changes, enabling market participants to make informed decisions that minimize losses and optimize expected revenues. However, it remains an open question which models to employ to produce accurate forecasts. Should these be task-specific machine learning (ML) models or Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs)? In this work, we compare four models for day-ahead probabilistic EPF (PEPF) in European bidding zones: a deterministic NHITS backbone with Quantile-Regression Averaging (NHITS+QRA) and a conditional Normalizing-Flow forecaster (NF) are compared with two TSFMs, namely Moirai and ChronosX. On the one hand, we find that TSFMs outperform task-specific deep learning models trained from scratch in terms of CRPS, Energy Score, and predictive interval calibration across market conditions. On the other hand, we find that well-configured task-specific models, particularly NHITS combined with QRA, achieve performance very close to TSFMs, and in some scenarios, such as when supplied with additional informative feature groups or adapted via few-shot learning from other European markets, they can even surpass TSFMs. Overall, our findings show that while TSFMs offer expressive modeling capabilities, conventional models remain highly competitive, emphasizing the need to weigh computational expense against marginal performance improvements in PEPF.

Consumer wearables enable continuous measurement of physiological data related to stress and recovery, but turning these streams into actionable, personalized stress-management recommendations remains a challenge. In practice, users often do not know how a given intervention, defined as an activity intended to reduce stress, will affect heart rate (HR), heart rate variability (HRV), or inter-beat intervals (BBI) over the next 15 to 120 minutes. We present a framework that predicts post-intervention trajectories and the direction of change for these physiological indicators across time windows. Our methodology combines a Transformer model for multi-horizon trajectories of percent change relative to a pre-intervention baseline, direction-of-change calls (positive, negative, or neutral) at each horizon, and an empirical study using wearable sensor data overlaid with user-tagged events and interventions. This proof of concept shows that personalized post-intervention prediction is feasible. We encourage future integration into stress-management tools for personalized intervention recommendations tailored to each person's day following further validation in larger studies and, where applicable, appropriate regulatory review.

Regrasp planning is often required when one pick-and-place cannot transfer an object from an initial pose to a goal pose while maintaining grasp feasibility. The main challenge is to reason about shared-grasp connectivity across intermediate poses, where discrete search becomes brittle. We propose an implicit multi-step regrasp planning framework based on differentiable pose sequence connectivity metrics. We model grasp feasibility under an object pose using an Energy-Based Model (EBM) and leverage energy additivity to construct a continuous energy landscape that measures pose-pair connectivity, enabling gradient-based optimization of intermediate object poses. An adaptive iterative deepening strategy is introduced to determine the minimum number of intermediate steps automatically. Experiments show that the proposed cost formulation provides smooth and informative gradients, improving planning robustness over other alternatives. They also demonstrate generalization to unseen grasp poses and cross-end-effector transfer, where a model trained with suction constraints can guide parallel gripper grasp manipulation. The multi-step planning results further highlight the effectiveness of adaptive deepening and minimum-step search.

To quantify the geometric expressivity of transformers, we introduce a tropical geometry framework to characterize their exact spatial partitioning capabilities. By modeling self-attention as a vector-valued tropical rational map, we prove it evaluates exactly to a Power Voronoi Diagram in the zero-temperature limit. Building on this equivalence, we establish a combinatorial rationale for Multi-Head Self-Attention (MHSA): via the Minkowski sum of Newton polytopes, multi-head aggregation expands the polyhedral complexity to $\mathcal{O}(N^H)$, overcoming the $\mathcal{O}(N)$ bottleneck of single heads. Extending this to deep architectures, we derive the first tight asymptotic bounds on the number of linear regions in transformers ($Θ(N^{d_{\text{model}}L})$), demonstrating a combinatorial explosion driven intrinsically by sequence length $N$, ambient embedding dimension $d_{\text{model}}$, and network depth $L$. Importantly, we guarantee that this idealized polyhedral skeleton is geometrically stable: finite-temperature soft attention preserves these topological partitions via exponentially tight differential approximation bounds.

Vision State Space Models (SSMs) like Vim, VMamba, and SiMBA rely on complex scanning strategies to adapt sequential SSMs to process 2D images, introducing computational overhead and architectural complexity. We propose HAMSA, a scanning-free SSM operating directly in the spectral domain. HAMSA introduces three key innovations: (1) simplified kernel parameterization-a single Gaussian-initialized complex kernel replacing traditional (A, B, C) matrices, eliminating discretization instabilities; (2) SpectralPulseNet (SPN)-an input-dependent frequency gating mechanism enabling adaptive spectral modulation; and (3) Spectral Adaptive Gating Unit (SAGU)-magnitude-based gating for stable gradient flow in the frequency domain. By leveraging FFT-based convolution, HAMSA eliminates sequential scanning while achieving O(L log L) complexity with superior simplicity and efficiency. On ImageNet-1K, HAMSA reaches 85.7% top-1 accuracy (state-of-the-art among SSMs), with 2.2 X faster inference than transformers (4.2ms vs 9.2ms for DeiT-S) and 1.4-1.9X speedup over scanning-based SSMs, while using less memory (2.1GB vs 3.2-4.5GB) and energy (12.5J vs 18-25J). HAMSA demonstrates strong generalization across transfer learning and dense prediction tasks.