Diffusion-based video motion customization facilitates the acquisition of human motion representations from a few video samples, while achieving arbitrary subjects transfer through precise textual conditioning. Existing approaches often rely on semantic-level alignment, expecting the model to learn new motion concepts and combine them with other entities (e.g., ''cats'' or ''dogs'') to produce visually appealing results. However, video data involve complex spatio-temporal patterns, and focusing solely on semantics cause the model to overlook the visual complexity of motion. Conversely, tuning only the visual representation leads to semantic confusion in representing the intended action. To address these limitations, we propose SynMotion, a new motion-customized video generation model that jointly leverages semantic guidance and visual adaptation. At the semantic level, we introduce the dual-embedding semantic comprehension mechanism which disentangles subject and motion representations, allowing the model to learn customized motion features while preserving its generative capabilities for diverse subjects. At the visual level, we integrate parameter-efficient motion adapters into a pre-trained video generation model to enhance motion fidelity and temporal coherence. Furthermore, we introduce a new embedding-specific training strategy which \textbf{alternately optimizes} subject and motion embeddings, supported by the manually constructed Subject Prior Video (SPV) training dataset. This strategy promotes motion specificity while preserving generalization across diverse subjects. Lastly, we introduce MotionBench, a newly curated benchmark with diverse motion patterns. Experimental results across both T2V and I2V settings demonstrate that \method outperforms existing baselines. Project page: https://lucaria-academy.github.io/SynMotion/

Large language models are trained on massive corpora of web data, which may include private data, copyrighted material, factually inaccurate data, or data that degrades model performance. Eliminating the influence of such problematic datapoints on a model through complete retraining -- by repeatedly pretraining the model on datasets that exclude these specific instances -- is computationally prohibitive. To address this, unlearning algorithms have been proposed, that aim to eliminate the influence of particular datapoints at a low computational cost, while leaving the rest of the model intact. However, precisely unlearning the influence of data on a large language model has proven to be a major challenge. In this work, we propose a new algorithm, MSA (Model State Arithmetic), for unlearning datapoints in large language models. MSA utilizes prior model checkpoints -- artifacts that record model states at different stages of pretraining -- to estimate and counteract the effect of targeted datapoints. Our experimental results show that MSA achieves competitive performance and often outperforms existing machine unlearning algorithms across multiple benchmarks, models, and evaluation metrics, suggesting that MSA could be an effective approach towards more flexible large language models that are capable of data erasure.

Compliance is a critical parameter for describing objects in engineering, agriculture, and biomedical applications. Traditional compliance detection methods are limited by their lack of portability and scalability, rely on specialized, often expensive equipment, and are unsuitable for robotic applications. Moreover, existing neural network-based approaches using vision-based tactile sensors still suffer from insufficient prediction accuracy. In this paper, we propose two models based on Long-term Recurrent Convolutional Networks (LRCNs) and Transformer architectures that leverage RGB tactile images and other information captured by the vision-based sensor GelSight to predict compliance metrics accurately. We validate the performance of these models using multiple metrics and demonstrate their effectiveness in accurately estimating compliance. The proposed models exhibit significant performance improvement over the baseline. Additionally, we investigated the correlation between sensor compliance and object compliance estimation, which revealed that objects that are harder than the sensor are more challenging to estimate.

How can we reliably simulate future driving scenarios under a wide range of ego driving behaviors? Recent driving world models, developed exclusively on real-world driving data composed mainly of safe expert trajectories, struggle to follow hazardous or non-expert behaviors, which are rare in such data. This limitation restricts their applicability to tasks such as policy evaluation. In this work, we address this challenge by enriching real-world human demonstrations with diverse non-expert data collected from a driving simulator (e.g., CARLA), and building a controllable world model trained on this heterogeneous corpus. Starting with a video generator featuring a diffusion transformer architecture, we devise several strategies to effectively integrate conditioning signals and improve prediction controllability and fidelity. The resulting model, ReSim, enables Reliable Simulation of diverse open-world driving scenarios under various actions, including hazardous non-expert ones. To close the gap between high-fidelity simulation and applications that require reward signals to judge different actions, we introduce a Video2Reward module that estimates a reward from ReSim's simulated future. Our ReSim paradigm achieves up to 44% higher visual fidelity, improves controllability for both expert and non-expert actions by over 50%, and boosts planning and policy selection performance on NAVSIM by 2% and 25%, respectively.

While predictive accuracy is often prioritized in machine learning (ML) models, interpretability remains essential in scientific and high-stakes domains. However, diverse interpretability algorithms frequently yield conflicting explanations, highlighting the need for consensus to harmonize results. In this study, six ML models were trained on six synthetic datasets with known ground truths, utilizing various model-agnostic interpretability techniques. Consensus explanations were generated using established methods and a novel approach: WISCA (Weighted Scaled Consensus Attributions), which integrates class probability and normalized attributions. WISCA consistently aligned with the most reliable individual method, underscoring the value of robust consensus strategies in improving explanation reliability.

Understanding social interaction, which encompasses perceiving numerous and subtle multimodal cues, inferring unobservable mental states and relations, and dynamically predicting others' behavior, is the foundation for achieving human-machine interaction. Despite rapid advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), the rich and multifaceted nature of social interaction has hindered the development of benchmarks that holistically evaluate and guide their social interaction abilities. Based on social relation theory, which has been widely regarded as a foundational framework for understanding social behavior, we provide SIV-Bench, a novel video benchmark for systematically evaluating MLLMs' capabilities across Social Scene Understanding (SSU), Social State Reasoning (SSR), and Social Dynamics Prediction (SDP). SIV-Bench features 2,792 originally collected video clips and 5,455 meticulously generated question-answer pairs derived from a human-LLM collaborative pipeline. It covers 14 typical relationships, diverse video lengths, genres, presentation styles, and linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Our comprehensive experiments show that leading MLLMs perform relatively well on SSU but remain weak on SSR and SDP, with the systematic confusion in relation inference as a key bottleneck. An in-depth analysis of the reasoning process attributes MLLMs' suboptimal performance to misalignment with human thoughts and insufficient reasoning depth. Moreover, we find audio and subtitles aid in reasoning-intensive SSR and SDP. Together, SIV-Bench offers a unified testbed to measure progress, expose limitations, and guide future research toward more socially intelligent MLLMs. We release the dataset and code at our project website: https://kfq20.github.io/sivbench.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to solve complex tasks where they must retrieve and compose many pieces of in-context information in long reasoning chains. For many real-world tasks it is hard to accurately gauge how model performance and strategy change as task complexity grows. To evaluate models' complex reasoning capability in a scalable and verifiable way, we introduce RELIC (Recognition of Languages In-Context), a framework that evaluates an LLM's ability to decide whether a given string belongs to the context-free language (CFL) generated by a grammar presented in-context. CFL recognition allows us to modulate the intrinsic complexity of the problem by varying grammar size and string length and translate this asymptotic complexity into predictions for ideal LLM performance. We find that even the most advanced reasoning models perform poorly on RELIC, not only failing to appropriately scale their inference compute to keep pace with task difficulty, but even reducing the number of reasoning tokens they use as task complexity increases. We find that these decreases in compute accompany changes in reasoning strategy, as models move from identifying and implementing algorithmic solutions to guessing. For models whose full completions go uninspected, this manifests as ``quiet quitting'' on hard tasks.

A core task in embodied intelligence is ego-centric 3D visual grounding. Existing methods typically adopt two-stage, heterogeneous pipelines that pair a detector with a separate grounding model. Incompatible decoders and box heads hinder the transfer of object-level priors, and the split training causes redundant re-optimization. To overcome these limitations, we present DEGround, a straight, elegant, and effective framework that centers on object-level sharing over detection and grounding. It employs a set of queries that serves as the common object representation for both detection and grounding, which is decoded by a shared transformer and bounding box head. Building on this homogeneous framework, we further introduce two task-specific plug-in modules to enhance fine-grained instruction grounding. The Regional Activation Grounding module improves spatial-textual alignment by highlighting instruction-relevant regions, while the Query-wise Modulation module applies sentence-conditioned affine modulation to generate instruction-aware queries at initialization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DEGround achieves the best performance on multiple benchmarks. Remarkably, it significantly outperforms previous methods by 7.52% at overall precision on the EmbodiedScan dataset.

LLMs are effective at code generation tasks like text-to-SQL, but is it worth the cost? Many state-of-the-art approaches use non-task-specific LLM techniques including Chain-of-Thought (CoT), self-consistency, and fine-tuning. These methods can be costly at inference time, sometimes requiring over a hundred LLM calls with reasoning, incurring average costs of up to \$0.46 per query, while fine-tuning models can cost thousands of dollars. We introduce "N-rep" consistency, a more cost-efficient text-to-SQL approach that achieves similar BIRD benchmark scores as other more expensive methods, at only \$0.039 per query. N-rep leverages multiple representations of the same schema input to mitigate weaknesses in any single representation, making the solution more robust and allowing the use of smaller and cheaper models without any reasoning or fine-tuning. To our knowledge, N-rep is the best-performing text-to-SQL approach in its cost range.

As language and vision-language models (VLMs) become central to information access and online interaction, concerns grow about their potential to amplify misinformation. Human studies show that images boost the perceived credibility and shareability of information, raising the question of whether VLMs exhibit the same vulnerability. We present the first study examining how images influence VLMs' propensity to reshare news content, how this effect varies across model families, and how persona conditioning and content attributes modulate such behavior. We develop a jailbreaking-inspired prompting strategy that bypasses VLMs' default refusals to engage with controversial news, allowing them to generate resharing decisions across diverse topics and elicited traits, including antisocial ones. We evaluate four state-of-the-art VLMs on a novel multimodal dataset of fact-checked political news from PolitiFact, paired with images and ground-truth veracity labels. Our experiments show that image presence increases resharing rates by 14.5% for false news and 5.3% for true news. Persona conditioning further modulates this effect: Dark Triad traits amplify resharing of false news, whereas Republican-aligned profiles reduce sensitivity to veracity. Among the tested models, Claude-3-Haiku demonstrates the greatest robustness to visual misinformation. These findings reveal that VLMs replicate human-like biases in response to images, underscoring emerging risks for multimodal AI systems. They point to the need for evaluation frameworks and mitigation strategies that account for visual influence and persona-driven variability, particularly in sociotechnical settings where AI systems shape public discourse and information sharing.

Distributionally robust reinforcement learning (DR-RL) has recently gained significant attention as a principled approach that addresses discrepancies between training and testing environments. To balance robustness, conservatism, and computational traceability, the literature has introduced DR-RL models with SA-rectangular and S-rectangular adversaries. While most existing statistical analyses focus on SA-rectangular models, owing to their algorithmic simplicity and the optimality of deterministic policies, S-rectangular models more accurately capture distributional discrepancies in many real-world applications and often yield more effective robust randomized policies. In this paper, we study the empirical value iteration algorithm for divergence-based S-rectangular DR-RL and establish near-optimal sample complexity bounds of $\widetilde{O}(|\mathcal{S}||\mathcal{A}|(1-γ)^{-4}\varepsilon^{-2})$, where $\varepsilon$ is the target accuracy, $|\mathcal{S}|$ and $|\mathcal{A}|$ denote the cardinalities of the state and action spaces, and $γ$ is the discount factor. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first sample complexity results for divergence-based S-rectangular models that achieve optimal dependence on $|\mathcal{S}|$, $|\mathcal{A}|$, and $\varepsilon$ simultaneously. We further validate this theoretical dependence through numerical experiments on a robust inventory control problem and a theoretical worst-case example, demonstrating the fast learning performance of our proposed algorithm.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems rely on retrieval models for identifying relevant contexts and answer generation models for utilizing those contexts. However, retrievers exhibit imperfect recall and precision, limiting downstream performance. We introduce RAG-RL, an answer generation model trained not only to produce answers but also to identify and cite relevant information from larger sets of retrieved contexts, shifting some of the burden of identifying relevant documents from the retriever to the answer generator. Our approach uses curriculum learning, where the model is first trained on easier examples that include only relevant contexts. Our experiments show that these training samples enable models to acquire citation and reasoning skills with greater sample efficiency and generalizability, demonstrating strong model performance even as the number of irrelevant passages increases. We benchmark our methods on three open-domain multi-hop question answering datasets and report significant gains in answer and citation accuracy. Our experiments provide empirical insights into how easier training samples can give models stronger signals for learning specific skills (e.g., citation generation) and how different components of post-training (e.g., training set construction, rule-based rewards, training sample ordering, etc.) impact final model performance.

Event annotation is important for identifying market changes, monitoring breaking news, and understanding sociological trends. Although expert annotators set the gold standards, human coding is expensive and inefficient. Unlike information extraction experiments that focus on single contexts, we evaluate a holistic workflow that removes irrelevant documents, merges documents about the same event, and annotates the events. Although LLM-based automated annotations are better than traditional TF-IDF-based methods or Event Set Curation, they are still not reliable annotators compared to human experts. However, adding LLMs to assist experts for Event Set Curation can reduce the time and mental effort required for Variable Annotation. When using LLMs to extract event variables to assist expert annotators, they agree more with the extracted variables than fully automated LLMs for annotation.

High-precision dichotomous image segmentation (DIS) is a task of extracting fine-grained objects from high-resolution images. Existing methods trade efficiency for accuracy: non-diffusion methods are fast but suffer from weak semantics and unstable spatial priors, causing false detections; diffusion-based methods offer high accuracy via strong generative priors but are computationally expensive. In depth maps, a complete object appears as a low variance region with a smooth interior and sharp boundaries, whereas the background exhibits a chaotic, high variance pattern due to disconnected surfaces at varying depths. We refer to this as the depth integrity-prior. Inspired by this, and noting that DIS currently lacks depth maps, we leverage pseudo-depth information from monocular depth estimation models to obtain essential semantic understanding, thereby rapidly revealing spatial differences across target objects and the background. To exploit this prior, we propose the Prior-guided Depth Fusion Network (PDFNet), which fuses RGB and pseudo-depth features for depth-aware structure perception. We further introduce a novel depth integrity-prior loss to enforce depth consistency in segmentation and a fine-grained enhancement module with adaptive patch selection to sharpen boundaries. Notably, PDFNet with DAM-v2 achieves SOTA (Fmax 0.915 on DIS-VD and 0.915 on DIS-TE) using less than half the params of diffusion-based methods. Our code is available at https://tennine2077.github.io/PDFNet.github.io/ .

We study early-stopped mirror descent (ESMD) for high-dimensional Gaussian linear regression over arbitrary convex bodies and design matrices, where the task is to minimize the in-sample mean squared error. Our main result shows that some of the sharpest risk bounds for the least squares estimator (LSE), based on the local Gaussian width, extend to ESMD. We derive sufficient conditions on the potential, expressed via the Minkowski functional, under which our result holds. These conditions allow us to construct new potentials and analyze existing ones. Our results then yield general sufficient conditions for minimax optimality of ESMD, provide a systematic comparison with the LSE, and establish the tightest known risk bound in the $\ell_1$-constrained setting.

Uncertainty quantification (UQ) is a prominent approach for eliciting truthful answers from large language models (LLMs). To date, information-based and consistency-based UQ have been the dominant UQ methods for text generation via LLMs. Density-based methods, despite being very effective for UQ in text classification with encoder-based models, have not been very successful with generative LLMs. In this work, we adapt Mahalanobis Distance (MD) - a well-established UQ technique in classification tasks - for text generation and introduce a new supervised UQ method. Our method extracts token embeddings from multiple layers of LLMs, computes MD scores for each token, and uses linear regression trained on these features to provide robust uncertainty scores. Through extensive experiments on eleven datasets, we demonstrate that our approach substantially improves over existing UQ methods, providing accurate and computationally efficient uncertainty scores for both sequence-level selective generation and claim-level fact-checking tasks. Our method also exhibits strong generalization to out-of-domain data, making it suitable for a wide range of LLM-based applications.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are almost universally built on a single primitive: the neighborhood. Regardless of architectural variations, message passing ultimately aggregates over neighborhoods, which intrinsically limits expressivity and often yields power no stronger than the Weisfeiler-Lehman (WL) test. In this work, we challenge this primitive. We introduce the Grothendieck Graph Neural Networks (GkGNN) framework, which provides a strict algebraic extension of neighborhoods to covers, and in doing so replaces neighborhoods as the fundamental objects of message passing. Neighborhoods and adjacency matrices are recovered as special cases, while covers enable a principled and flexible foundation for defining topology-aware propagation schemes. GkGNN formalizes covers and systematically translates them into matrices, analogously to how adjacency matrices encode neighborhoods, enabling both theoretical analysis and practical implementation. Within this framework, we introduce the cover of sieves, inspired by category theory, which captures rich topological structure. Based on this cover, we design Sieve Neural Networks (SNN), a canonical fixed-cover instantiation that generalizes the adjacency matrix. Experiments show that SNN achieves zero observed failures on challenging graph isomorphism benchmarks (SRG, CSL, BREC) and substantially improves topology-aware evaluation via a controlled label-propagation probe. These results establish GkGNN as a principled foundational framework for replacing neighborhoods in GNNs.

Inspired by the \emph{Well-initialized Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (WLTH)}, we introduce Soft-Transformer (Soft-TF), a parameter-efficient framework for continual learning that leverages soft, real-valued subnetworks over a frozen pre-trained Transformer. Instead of relying on manually designed prompts or adapters, Soft-TF learns task-specific multiplicative masks applied to the key, query, value, and output projections in self-attention. These masks enable smooth and stable task adaptation while preserving shared representations. Combined with a lightweight dual-prompt mechanism, Soft-TF maintains strong knowledge retention and mitigates Catastrophic Forgetting (CF). Across multiple continual learning benchmarks, Soft-TF achieves state-of-the-art performance, consistently outperforming prompt-based, adapter-based, and LoRA-style baselines while requiring minimal additional parameters.

Tactile perception is essential for human interaction with the environment and is becoming increasingly crucial in robotics. Tactile sensors like the BioTac mimic human fingertips and provide detailed interaction data. Despite its utility in applications like slip detection and object identification, this sensor is now deprecated, making many valuable datasets obsolete. However, recreating similar datasets with newer sensor technologies is both tedious and time-consuming. Therefore, adapting these existing datasets for use with new setups and modalities is crucial. In response, we introduce ACROSS, a novel framework for translating data between tactile sensors by exploiting sensor deformation information. We demonstrate the approach by translating BioTac signals into the DIGIT sensor. Our framework consists of first converting the input signals into 3D deformation meshes. We then transition from the 3D deformation mesh of one sensor to the mesh of another, and finally convert the generated 3D deformation mesh into the corresponding output space. We demonstrate our approach to the most challenging problem of going from a low-dimensional tactile representation to a high-dimensional one. In particular, we transfer the tactile signals of a BioTac sensor to DIGIT tactile images. Our approach enables the continued use of valuable datasets and data exchange between groups with different setups.

We consider the problem of estimating the transition dynamics $T^*$ from near-optimal expert trajectories in the context of offline model-based reinforcement learning. We develop a novel constraint-based method, Inverse Transition Learning, that treats the limited coverage of the expert trajectories as a \emph{feature}: we use the fact that the expert is near-optimal to inform our estimate of $T^*$. We integrate our constraints into a Bayesian approach. Across both synthetic environments and real healthcare scenarios like Intensive Care Unit (ICU) patient management in hypotension, we demonstrate not only significant improvements in decision-making, but that our posterior can inform when transfer will be successful.

Mixed precision quantization has become an important technique for optimizing the execution of deep neural networks (DNNs). Certified robustness, which provides provable guarantees about a model's ability to withstand different adversarial perturbations, has rarely been addressed in quantization due to the unacceptably high cost of certifying robustness. This paper introduces ARQ, an innovative mixed-precision quantization method that not only preserves the clean accuracy of the smoothed classifiers, but also maintains their certified robustness. ARQ uses reinforcement learning to find accurate and robust DNN quantization, while efficiently leveraging randomized smoothing, a popular class of statistical DNN verification algorithms. ARQ consistently performs better than multiple state-of-the-art quantization techniques across all the benchmarks and the input perturbation levels. The performance of ARQ quantized networks reaches that of the original DNN with floating-point weights, while using only 1.5% instructions and the highest certified radius. ARQ's code is available at https://github.com/uiuc-arc/ARQ.

Image labeling is a critical bottleneck in the development of computer vision technologies, often constraining machine learning performance due to the time-intensive nature of manual annotations. This work introduces a novel approach that leverages outpainting to mitigate annotated data scarcity by generating artificial contexts and annotations, significantly reducing labeling efforts. We apply this technique to a particularly acute challenge in autonomous driving, urban planning, and environmental monitoring: the lack of diverse, eye-level vehicle images from desired classes. Our dataset comprises AI-generated vehicle images obtained by detecting and cropping vehicles from manually selected seed images, which are then outpainted onto larger canvases to simulate varied real-world conditions. The outpainted images include detailed annotations, providing high-quality ground truth data. Advanced outpainting techniques and image quality assessments ensure visual fidelity and contextual relevance. Ablation results show that incorporating AIDOVECL improves overall detection performance by up to about 10%, and delivers gains of up to about 40% in settings with greater diversity of context, object scale, and placement, with underrepresented classes achieving up to about 50% higher true positives. AIDOVECL enhances vehicle detection by augmenting real training data and supporting evaluation across diverse scenarios. By demonstrating outpainting as an automatic annotation paradigm, it offers a practical and versatile solution for building fine-grained datasets with reduced labeling effort across multiple machine learning domains. The code and links to datasets are available for further research and replication at https://github.com/amir-kazemi/aidovecl.

We introduce Functional Group-Aware Representations for Small Molecules (FARM), a novel foundation model designed to bridge the gap between SMILES, natural language, and molecular graphs. The key idea behind FARM is the incorporation of functional group (FG) annotations at the atomic level, enabling both FG-enhanced SMILES and FG graphs. In this representation, SMILES strings are enriched with functional group information that identifies the group membership of each atom, while the FG graph captures molecular structure by representing how functional groups are connected. This tokenization injects chemical knowledge into SMILES and expands the effective molecular vocabulary, making the representation more suitable for Transformer-based models and more aligned with natural language structure. FARM learns molecular representations from two complementary perspectives to jointly encode functional and structural information. Masked language modeling on FG-enhanced SMILES captures atom-level features enriched with functional context, while graph neural networks model higher-level molecular topology through functional group connectivity. Contrastive learning is then used to align these two views into a unified embedding space, ensuring that both atom-level detail and functional group structure are jointly represented. We evaluate FARM on the MoleculeNet benchmark and achieve state-of-the-art performance on 8 out of 13 tasks. We further validate its generalization ability on a photostability dataset for quantum mechanical properties. These results demonstrate that FARM improves molecular representation learning, supports strong transfer learning across drug discovery and materials science, and enables broad applications in pharmaceutical research and functional material design.

In this study, I investigate how generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems reproduce and reinforce societal biases, with a specific focus on the representation of women, Black individuals, age groups, and people with visible disabilities in AI-generated occupational images. I analyzed 444 images generated by Microsoft Designer, Meta AI, and Ideogram across 37 occupations and found significant disparities in representation. Women are underrepresented in senior and technology roles, Black individuals are nearly absent, and people with visible disabilities are completely absent across all categories. I also observed clear age bias, with younger individuals predominantly depicted. These patterns suggest that generative AI tools replicate, and in some cases amplify, existing workplace inequalities and stereotypes, undermining democratic values of equity and inclusion. My findings highlight the urgent need for algorithmic diversity exposure, and I recommend that AI developers and corporate users audit their tools for equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) risks. I argue for the critical inclusion of diverse groups in AI development and governance to foster more democratic and socially responsible technologies.

Current research in semantic bird's-eye view segmentation for autonomous driving focuses solely on optimizing neural network models using a single dataset, typically nuScenes. This practice leads to the development of highly specialized models that may fail when faced with different environments or sensor setups, a problem known as domain shift. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive cross-dataset evaluation of state-of-the-art BEV segmentation models to assess their performance across different training and testing datasets and setups, as well as different semantic categories. We investigate the influence of different sensors, such as cameras and LiDAR, on the models' ability to generalize to diverse conditions and scenarios. Additionally, we conduct multi-dataset training experiments that improve models' BEV segmentation performance compared to single-dataset training. Our work addresses the gap in evaluating BEV segmentation models under cross-dataset validation. And our findings underscore the importance of enhancing model generalizability and adaptability to ensure more robust and reliable BEV segmentation approaches for autonomous driving applications. The code for this paper available at https://github.com/manueldiaz96/beval .

Semantic segmentation of microscopy cell images by deep learning is a significant technique. We considered that the Transformers, which have recently outperformed CNNs in image recognition, could also be improved and developed for cell image segmentation. Transformers tend to focus more on contextual information than on detailed information. This tendency leads to a lack of detailed information for segmentation. Therefore, to supplement or reinforce the missing detailed information, we hypothesized that feedback processing in the human visual cortex should be effective. Our proposed Feedback Former is a novel architecture for semantic segmentation, in which Transformers is used as an encoder and has a feedback processing mechanism. Feature maps with detailed information are fed back to the lower layers from near the output of the model to compensate for the lack of detailed information which is the weakness of Transformers and improve the segmentation accuracy. By experiments on three cell image datasets, we confirmed that our method surpasses methods without feedback, demonstrating its superior accuracy in cell image segmentation. Our method achieved higher segmentation accuracy while consuming less computational cost than conventional feedback approaches. Moreover, our method offered superior precision without simply increasing the model size of Transformer encoder, demonstrating higher accuracy with lower computational cost.

Uncertainty quantification (UQ) has emerged as a promising approach for detecting hallucinations and low-quality output of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, obtaining proper uncertainty scores is complicated by the conditional dependency between the generation steps of an autoregressive LLM because it is hard to model it explicitly. Here, we propose to learn this dependency from attention-based features. In particular, we train a regression model that leverages LLM attention maps, probabilities on the current generation step, and recurrently computed uncertainty scores from previously generated tokens. To incorporate the recurrent features, we also suggest a two-staged training procedure. Our experimental evaluation on ten datasets and three LLMs shows that the proposed method is highly effective for selective generation, achieving substantial improvements over rivaling unsupervised and supervised approaches.

Aligning large language models (LLMs) behaviour with human intent is critical for future AI. An important yet often overlooked aspect of this alignment is the perceptual alignment. Perceptual modalities like touch are more multifaceted and nuanced compared to other sensory modalities such as vision. This work investigates how well LLMs align with human touch experiences using the "textile hand" task. We created a "Guess What Textile" interaction in which participants were given two textile samples -- a target and a reference -- to handle. Without seeing them, participants described the differences between them to the LLM. Using these descriptions, the LLM attempted to identify the target textile by assessing similarity within its high-dimensional embedding space. Our results suggest that a degree of perceptual alignment exists, however varies significantly among different textile samples. For example, LLM predictions are well aligned for silk satin, but not for cotton denim. Moreover, participants didn't perceive their textile experiences closely matched by the LLM predictions. This is only the first exploration into perceptual alignment around touch, exemplified through textile hand. We discuss possible sources of this alignment variance, and how better human-AI perceptual alignment can benefit future everyday tasks.

We present a comprehensive corpus of Russian primary and secondary legislation adopted between 1991 and 2025, comprising 304,382 texts (194,425,905 tokens). The corpus is available in two versions: the basic version contains texts with simple metadata, while the detailed version includes both the original texts and their equivalents converted to the Universal Dependencies CoNLL-U format, annotated with parts of speech, morphological features, and syntactic dependencies.

Tactile sensing presents a promising opportunity for enhancing the interaction capabilities of today's robots. BioTac is a commonly used tactile sensor that enables robots to perceive and respond to physical tactile stimuli. However, the sensor's non-linearity poses challenges in simulating its behavior. In this paper, we first investigate a BioTac simulation that uses temperature, force, and contact point positions to predict the sensor outputs. We show that training with BioTac temperature readings does not yield accurate sensor output predictions during deployment. Consequently, we tested three alternative models, i.e., an XGBoost regressor, a neural network, and a transformer encoder. We train these models without temperature readings and provide a detailed investigation of the window size of the input vectors. We demonstrate that we achieve statistically significant improvements over the baseline network. Furthermore, our results reveal that the XGBoost regressor and transformer outperform traditional feed-forward neural networks in this task. We make all our code and results available online on https://github.com/wzaielamri/Optimizing_BioTac_Simulation.