Machine unlearning aims to unlearn data points from a learned model, offering a principled way to process data-deletion requests and mitigate privacy risks without full retraining. Prior work has mainly studied unsupervised / supervised machine unlearning, leaving unlearning for sequential decision-making systems far less understood. We initiate the first study of a foundational sequential decision-making problem: offline stochastic multi-armed bandits (MAB). We formalize the privacy constraint for offline MAB and measure utility by the post-unlearning decision quality. We conduct a systematic study of both single- and multi-source unlearning scenarios under two data-generation models, the fixed-sample model and the distribution model. For these settings, our algorithmic design is built on two canonical base algorithms: Gaussian mechanism and rollback, and we propose adaptive algorithms that switch between them according to the data regime and privacy constraint. We further introduce a mixing procedure that elucidates the rationale behind these baselines. We provide performance guarantees across the above settings and establish lower bounds under both dataset models. Experiments validate the predicted tradeoffs and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

Dimensionality reduction (DR) techniques are often characterized by whether they preserve global, high-level structures in the data or local, neighborhood structures. This distinction matters in visualization: global methods can obscure clusters while local methods can over-emphasize them. Yet, even when clusters appear distinct, their relative arrangement in the projection may be arbitrary or misleading, a common issue in techniques such as t-SNE and UMAP. Existing cluster quality metrics either only measure cluster separability or assume spherical, globular clusters in the original space. We introduce the Class Angular Distortion Index (CADI), a metric that uses internal angles among point triples to determine the faithfulness of cluster organization in a projection. We show cases on both real and synthetic data where existing cluster metrics fail, but CADI provides an interpretable result. Since it relies on computing angles, CADI is also differentiable, enabling optimization. We demonstrate this with a CADI-based DR technique.

We introduce Paired-CSLiDAR (CSLiDAR), a cross-source aerial-ground LiDAR benchmark for single-scan pose refinement: refining a ground-scan pose within a 50 m-radius aerial crop. The benchmark contains 12,683 ground-aerial pairs across 6 evaluation sites and per-scan reference 6-DoF alignments for sub-meter root-mean-square error (RMSE) evaluation. Because aerial scans capture rooftops and canopy while ground scans capture facades and under-canopy, the two modalities share only a fraction of their geometry, primarily the terrain surface, causing standard registration methods and learned correspondence models to converge to metrically incorrect local minima. We propose Residual-Guided Stratified Registration (RGSR), a training-free, geometry-only refinement pipeline that exploits the shared ground plane through height-stratified ICP, reversed registration directions, and confidence-gated accept-if-better selection. RGSR achieves 86.0% S@0.75 m and 99.8% S@1.0 m on the primary benchmark of 9,012 scans, outperforming both the confidence-gated cascade at 83.7% and GeoTransformer at 76.3%. We validate RMSE-based pose selection with independent survey control and trajectory consistency, and show that added Fourier-Mellin BEV proposals can reduce RMSE while increasing actual pose error under extreme partial overlap. The dataset and code are being prepared for public release.

Automatic generation of executable Blender code from natural language remains challenging, with state-of-the-art LLMs producing frequent syntactic errors and geometrically inconsistent objects. We present BlenderRAG, a retrieval-augmented generation system that operates on a curated multimodal dataset of 500 expert-validated examples (text, code, image) across 50 object categories. By retrieving semantically similar examples during generation, BlenderRAG improves compilation success rates from 40.8% to 70.0% and semantic normalized alignment from 0.41 to 0.77 (CLIP similarity) across four state-of-the-art LLMs, without requiring fine-tuning or specialized hardware, making it immediately accessible for deployment. The dataset and code will be available at https://github.com/MaxRondelli/BlenderRAG.

We present H-RAG, our submission to SemEval-2026 Task 8 (MTRAGEval), addressing both Task A (Retrieval) and Task C (Generation with Retrieved Passages). Task A evaluates standalone retrieval quality, while Task C assesses end-to-end retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) in multi-turn conversational settings, requiring both accurate answer generation and faithful grounding in retrieved evidence. Our approach implements a hierarchical parent-child RAG pipeline that separates fine-grained child-level retrieval from parent-level context reconstruction during generation. Documents are segmented into overlapping sentence-based child chunks, while full documents are preserved as parent units to provide coherent context. Retrieval combines hybrid dense-sparse search, tunable weighting, and embedding-based similarity rescoring over child chunks. Retrieved evidence is aggregated at the parent level and supplied to an instruction-tuned language model for response generation. H-RAG achieves an nDCG@5 score of 0.4271 on Task A and a harmonic mean score of 0.3241 on Task C (RB_agg: 0.2488, RL_F: 0.2703, RB_llm: 0.6508), underscoring the importance of retrieval configuration and parent-level aggregation in multi-turn RAG performance.

The proliferation of advanced AI video synthesis techniques poses an unprecedented challenge to digital video authenticity. Existing AI-generated video (AIGV) detection methods primarily focus on uni-modal or spatiotemporal artifacts, but they overlook the rich cues within the visual-textual cross-modal space, especially the temporal stability of semantic alignment. In this work, we identify a distinctive fingerprint in AIGVs, termed cross-modal temporal artifact (CMTA). Unlike real videos that exhibit natural temporal fluctuations in cross-modal alignment due to semantic variations, AIGVs display unnaturally stable semantic trajectories governed by given input prompts. To bridge this gap, we propose the CMTA framework, a cross-modal detection approach that captures these unique temporal artifacts through joint cross-modal embedding and multi-grained temporal modeling. Specifically, CMTA leverages BLIP to generate frame-level image captions and utilizes CLIP to extract corresponding visual-textual representations. A coarse-grained temporal modeling branch is then designed to characterize temporal fluctuations in cross-modal alignment with a GRU. In parallel, a fine-grained branch is constructed to capture intricate inter-frame variations from integrated visual-textual features with a Transformer encoder. Extensive experiments on 40 subsets across four large-scale datasets, including GenVideo, EvalCrafter, VideoPhy, and VidProM, validate that our approach sets a new state-of-the-art while exhibiting superior cross-generator generalization. Code and models of CMTA will be released at https://github.com/hwang-cs-ime/CMTA

Scientific literature is expanding at an unprecedented pace, making it increasingly challenging to efficiently organize and access domain knowledge. A high-quality scientific taxonomy offers a structured and hierarchical representation of a research field, facilitating literature exploration and topic navigation, as well as enabling downstream applications such as trend analysis, idea generation, and information retrieval. However, existing taxonomy generation approaches often suffer from structural inconsistencies and semantic misalignment across hierarchical levels. Through empirical analysis, we find that these issues largely stem from inadequate modeling of hierarchical semantic consistency. To address this limitation, we propose a semantic-consistent taxonomy generation (SC-Taxo) framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) with hierarchy-aware refinement stages to ensure semantic consistency. Specifically, SC-Taxo introduces a bidirectional heading generation mechanism that jointly performs bottom-up abstraction and top-down semantic constraint, while further capturing peer-level semantic dependencies to enhance horizontal consistency. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate consistent improvements in hierarchy alignment and heading quality, and additional evaluation on Chinese scientific literature validates its robust cross-lingual generalization.

We investigate the extent to which cosine similarity between paragraph embeddings is invariant under machine translation, using the Manifesto Corpus of over 2,800 political party platforms in 28 languages translated to English via the EU eTranslation service. Rather than measuring translation-induced semantic shift directly we measure the stability of pairwise similarity relationships across embedding models, and use inter-model disagreement on original-language text as a calibrated invariance threshold. This yields a per-language non-inferiority test for four hypotheses about how translation interacts with embedding choice, with verdicts that distinguish languages where translation demonstrably preserves semantic structure from those where it demonstrably degrades it and from those where the available evidence does not resolve the question. The framework is corpus- and pipeline-agnostic and extends naturally to downstream tasks. Applied to our data, it identifies ten languages with translation invariance and four with detectable distortion.

SFT and RLVR represent two fundamental yet distinct paradigms for LLM post-training, each excelling in distinct dimensions. SFT expands knowledge breadth while RLVR enhances reasoning depth. Yet integrating these complementary strengths remains a formidable challenge. Sequential training can cause catastrophic forgetting, and joint optimization often suffers from severe gradient conflicts. We analyze SFT and RLVR through the lens of task vectors and reveal three structural properties behind these failures: a 30* magnitude disparity, 45* sign interference, and heterogeneous module-wise update distributions. These findings show SFT and RLVR are difficult to integrate directly, but they also suggest that the two paradigms modify partly complementary components of the model. Motivated by these observations, we propose Decoupled Test-time Synthesis (DoTS), a post-hoc framework allows SFT and RLVR checkpoints to be trained independently and synthesizes their capabilities only at inference time via task vector arithmetic, without updating model parameters. To reduce interference, DOTS applies selective sparsification with norm-preserving rescaling. It then uses Bayesian optimization on a small set of unlabeled queries to search for combination coefficients on the Pareto frontier of consistency and perplexity. Empirically, \ours matches or exceeds the performance of training-based SFT--RLVR integration methods across multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks, incurring only $\sim$3\% of the computational cost. When applied to stronger post-trained checkpoints, DOTS surpasses SOTA models and generalizes to out-of-domain benchmarks without re-tuning. Code is available at https://github.com/chaohaoyuan/DoTS.

Probing is widely used to study which features can be decoded from language model representations. However, the common decoding probe approach has two limitations that we aim to solve with our new encoding probe approach: contributions of different features to model representations cannot be directly compared, and feature correlations can affect probing results. We present an Encoding Probe that reverses this direction and reconstructs internal representations of models using interpretable features. We evaluate this method on text and speech transformer models, using feature sets spanning acoustics, phonetics, syntax, lexicon, and speaker identity. Our results suggest that speaker-related effects vary strongly across different training objectives and datasets, while syntactic and lexical features contribute independently to reconstruction. These results show that the Encoding Probe provides a complementary perspective on interpreting model representations beyond decodability.

Most recent extreme rescaling methods struggle to preserve semantically consistent structures and produce realistic details, due to the severely ill-posed nature of low- to high-resolution mapping under scaling factors of $16\times$ or higher. To alleviate the above problems, we propose FaithEIR, a diffusion-based framework for extreme image rescaling. Inspired by singular value decomposition, we develop learnable reversible transformation that enables invertible downscaling and upscaling in the latent space. To compensate for information loss due to quantization, we propose an adaptive detail prior, a high-frequency dictionary that captures the empirical average of commonly occurring structures in the training data. Finally, we design a lightweight pixel semantic embedder to provide semantic conditioning for the pretrained diffusion model. We present extensive experimental results demonstrating that our FaithEIR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving superior reconstruction fidelity and perceptual quality. Our code, model weights, and detailed results are released at https://github.com/cshw2021/FaithEIR.

Sparse MoE routing fails at domain transitions, where the current token belongs to one distribution and the next to another. In a controlled experiment (4 experts, 5 seeds), standard affinity routing assigns only 0.006 +/- 0.001 probability to the correct expert at the transition. Three lightweight gate modifications raise this to 0.748 +/- 0.002 (124x), cutting experts needed for 99% coverage from infeasible to a small constant: temporal memory (beta), a per-expert LIF membrane potential accumulating routing context across tokens; precision-weighted gating (Pi), a per-expert inverse variance of recent prediction error, yielding 31x contrast between reliable and unreliable experts; and anticipatory routing, a next-state predictor conditioned on the beta-accumulated hidden state. The mechanisms draw from Friston's Free Energy Principle and use LIF dynamics from spiking neural networks. An ablation across all 2^3 subsets reveals a super-additive beta x Ant interaction: anticipation alone gives nothing (+0.000 +/- 0.001); beta alone gives modest gain (+0.295 +/- 0.013); combined they close 75% of the oracle gap (+0.741 +/- 0.002, exceeding the sum by +0.446 +/- 0.014). This is structural: a stateless predictor cannot detect approaching transitions because pre-transition tokens are distributionally identical to within-domain tokens. In a character-level MoE LM (5 seeds), beta-routing reduces transition-step BPC from 6.56 +/- 0.01 (Standard) to 4.01 +/- 0.15 (beta-MoE); the beta + Ant gate places 0.86 +/- 0.02 probability on the correct domain expert before that domain appears in input, vs 0.42 +/- 0.12 for Standard MoE. Reference implementations (~200 lines each): https://github.com/russellwmy/affinity-is-not-enough

Perception for automated driving is largely based on onboard environmental sensors, such as cameras and radar, which are cost-effective but limited by line-of-sight and field-of-view constraints. These inherent limitations may cause onboard perception to fail under occlusions or poor visibility conditions. In parallel, cooperative awareness via vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication is becoming increasingly available, enabling vehicles and infrastructure to share their own state as object-level information that complements onboard perception. In this work, we study how such V2X information can be integrated into 3D object detection and how robust the resulting system is to realistic V2X imperfections. Using the nuScenes dataset, we emulate object-level cooperative awareness messages from ground truth, injecting controlled noise and object dropout to mimic real-world conditions such as latency, localization errors, and low V2X penetration rates. We convert these messages into a dedicated bird's-eye view (BEV) input and fuse them into a BEVFusion-style detector. Our results demonstrate that while object-level cooperative information can substantially improve detection performance, achieving an NDS of 0.80 under favorable conditions, models trained on idealized data become fragile and over-reliant on V2X. Conversely, our proposed noise-aware training strategy, coupled with explicit confidence encoding, enhances robustness, maintaining performance gains even under severe noise and reduced V2X penetration.

In Machine Learning, an accepted definition of fairness of a decision taken by a classifier is that it should not depend on protected features, such as gender. Unfortunately, when constraints exist between features, such dependencies can be obscured by the constraints. To avoid this problem, we propose that a decision be considered fair if it has a fair explanation. We define a fair explanation as a prime-implicant reason for the decision that does not contain any protected feature (where the constraints are taken into account in the definition of prime-implicant). Surprisingly, ignoring constraints can completely change the fairness of a decision (according to this definition) even in the absence of constraints between protected and unprotected features. Three possible definitions of fairness of a classifier are that for all its decisions (1) there are only fair explanations, (2) there is at least one fair explanation, or (3) changing protected features does not change the outcome. We identify the relationships between these different definitions of fairness and study the computational complexity of testing fairness of classifiers.

Contrastive vision-language models like CLIP exhibit remarkable zero-shot generalization. However, prompt tuning remains highly sensitive to label noise, as mislabeled samples generate disproportionately large gradients that can overwhelm pre-trained priors. We argue that because CLIP already provides a near-optimal initialization, adaptation should be inherently conservative, particularly against the extreme gradient updates common in noisy settings. To this end, we propose Double-Softmax Prompt Tuning (DSPT), a hyperparameter-free method for intrinsic gradient suppression. By applying a sequential probabilistic normalization, DSPT induces a self-adaptive saturation zone that suppresses gradients from high-error noisy samples while maintaining informative updates. We also provide both theoretical analysis and empirical evidence about how this mechanism achieves adaptive suppression. This design transforms ``gradient vanishing'', traditionally a training bottleneck, into a principled noise-filtering shield for label-noise prompt tuning. Extensive experiments confirm that this simple, drop-in design achieves state-of-the-art robustness across various noisy benchmarks, outperforming methods with complex architectures and handcrafted hyperparameters.

The visual modality of vision-language models (VLMs) is an underexplored attack surface for bypassing safety alignment. We introduce four jailbreak attacks exploiting the vision component: (1) encoding harmful instructions as visual symbol sequences with a decoding legend, (2) replacing harmful objects with benign substitutes (e.g., bomb -> banana) then prompting for harmful actions using the substitute term, (3) replacing harmful text in images (e.g., on book covers) with benign words while visual context preserves the original meaning, and (4) visual analogy puzzles whose solution requires inferring a prohibited concept. Evaluating across six frontier VLMs, our visual attacks bypass safety alignment and expose a cross-modality alignment gap: text-based safety training does not automatically generalize to harmful intent conveyed visually. For example, our visual cipher achieves 40.9% attack success on Claude-Haiku-4.5 versus 10.7% for an equivalent textual cipher. To further our insight into the attack mechanism, we present preliminary interpretability and mitigation results. These findings highlight that robust VLM alignment requires treating vision as a first-class target for safety post-training.

Algorithm performance in combinatorial optimization is highly sensitive to parameter settings, while a single globally tuned configuration often fails to exploit the heterogeneity of instances. This limitation is particularly evident in the Electric Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem, where instances differ in structure, demand patterns, and energy constraints. This paper investigates instance-aware parameter configuration for Bilevel Late Acceptance Hill Climbing, a state-of-the-art metaheuristic for the Electric Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem. An offline tuning procedure is used to obtain instance-specific parameter labels, which are then mapped from instance features via a regression model to enable parameter prediction for unseen instances prior to execution. Experimental results on the IEEE WCCI 2020 benchmark and its extensions show that the proposed approach achieves an average objective value reduction of $0.28\%$ across eight held-out test instances relative to a globally tuned configuration. This corresponds to a significant cost reduction in multimillion-dollar transportation operations.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a powerful technique for generating photorealistic renderings of a scene in real-time. However, the volumetric nature of 3DGS limits its ability to accurately capture surface geometry. To address this, 2D Gaussian Splatting (2DGS) was proposed to enable view-consistent and geometrically accurate surface reconstruction from multi-view images. However, 2DGS can be sensitive to the initialization of the Gaussian primitives. Reliance on Structure-from-Motion (SfM) initializations, which can produce poor estimates on challenging image sets, may lead to subpar results. In this work, we enhance 2DGS by incorporating monocular depth and normal priors to improve both geometric accuracy and robustness. We propose a depth-guided initialization strategy for Gaussians and introduce a clustering-based technique for pruning degenerate Gaussians. We evaluate our method on the DTU dataset, where it achieves state-of-the-art results in mesh reconstruction while preserving high-quality novel view synthesis.

The emergence of deep neural networks capable of revealing high-fidelity scene details from sparse 3D point clouds has raised significant privacy concerns in visual localization involving private maps. Lifting map points to randomly oriented 3D lines is a well-known approach for obstructing undesired recovery of the scene images, but these lines are vulnerable to a density-based attack that can recover the point cloud geometry by observing the neighborhood statistics of lines. With the aim of nullifying this attack, we present a new privacy-preserving scene representation called \emph{sphere cloud}, which is constructed by lifting all points to 3D lines crossing the centroid of the map, resembling points on the unit sphere. Since lines are most dense at the map centroid, the sphere cloud mislead the density-based attack algorithm to incorrectly yield points at the centroid, effectively neutralizing the attack. Nevertheless, this advantage comes at the cost of i) a new type of attack that may directly recover images from this cloud representation and ii) unresolved translation scale for camera pose estimation. To address these issues, we introduce a simple yet effective cloud construction strategy to thwart new attack and propose an efficient localization framework to guide the translation scale by utilizing absolute depth maps acquired from on-device time-of-flight (ToF) sensors. Experimental results on public RGB-D datasets demonstrate sphere cloud achieves competitive privacy-preserving ability and localization runtime while not excessively compensating the pose estimation accuracy compared to other depth-guided localization methods.

Scientific discovery is an extended process of ideation--surveying prior work, forming hypotheses, and refining reasoning--yet existing approaches treat this phase as a brief preamble despite its central role in research. We introduce SCISENSE, a sensemaking-grounded framework that operationalizes ideation as a structured sequence of eight cognitive stages (Pirolli \& Card, 2005). We construct SCISENSE-Traj, a 100K-scale dataset of citation-conditioned research trajectories in two modes: Target, where an LLM reconstructs the ideation path leading to a known paper from its cited works, and Infer, where the LLM proposes novel directions from the same citations. We distill these into SCISENSE-LM, a family of sensemaking LLMs spanning 3B to 70B parameters. Contrary to the assumption that looser supervision promotes greater exploration, Target-trained models achieve a 2.0\% improvement in trajectory quality over Infer-trained models while also producing more novel and diverse outputs. This advantage propagates downstream: coding agents conditioned on Target trajectories produce research artifacts with higher executability and quality than those conditioned on Infer trajectories. This suggests that targeted ideation reduces cognitive burden on downstream agents, freeing them to explore more creatively. SCISENSE offers both a practical tool for augmenting LLM-driven research workflows and a principled testbed for studying how planning shapes scientific discovery.

AI agents that interact with graphical user interfaces (GUIs) require effective observation representations for reliable grounding. The accessibility tree is a commonly used text-based format that encodes UI element attributes, but it suffers from redundancy and lacks structural information such as spatial relationships among elements. We propose A11y-Compressor, a framework that transforms linearized accessibility trees into compact and structured representations. Our implementation, Compressed-a11y, applies a lightweight and structured transformation pipeline with modal detection, redundancy reduction, and semantic structuring. Experiments on the OSWorld benchmark show that Compressed-a11y reduces input tokens to 22% of the original while improving task success rates by 5.1 percentage points on average.

Blood vessel segmentation and -tracing are essential tasks in many medical imaging applications. Although numerous methods exist, the prevailing segment-then-fix paradigm is fundamentally limited regarding its suitability for modeling the task of complete and topologically accurate vascular network reconstruction. Here, we propose an approach to extract topologically more accurate vascular graphs from 3D image data, building upon highly successful ideas from the related biomedical tasks of cell segmentation and -tracking. Our approach first predicts voxel-wise vessel direction vectors joint with standard vessel segmentation masks. Second, to extract the vascular graph from these predictions, we introduce a direction-vector-guided extension of the TEASAR algorithm. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on three benchmark datasets, spanning both synthetic and real imagery. We further demonstrate the applicability of our approach to challenging 3D micro-CT scans of rat heart vasculature. Finally, we propose meaningful and interpretable measures of topological error, namely false splits and false merges for graphs. Overall, our approach substantially improves the topological accuracy of reconstructed vascular graphs, being able to separate closely apposed vessel segments and handle multiple vascular trees within a single volume.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances large language models with external knowledge, and tree-based RAG organizes documents into hierarchical indexes to support queries at multiple granularities. However, existing Tree-RAG methods designed for single-document retrieval face critical challenges in scaling to cross-document multi-hop questions: (1) poor distribution adaptability, where $k$-means clustering introduces noise due to rigid distribution assumptions; (2) structural isolation, as tree indexes lack explicit cross-document connections; and (3) coarse abstraction, which obscures fine-grained details. To address these limitations, we propose $Ψ$-RAG, a tree-RAG framework with two key components. First, a hierarchical abstract tree index built through an iterative "merging and collapse" process that adapts to data distributions without a priori assumption. Second, a multi-granular retrieval agent that intelligently interacts with the knowledge base with reorganized queries and an agent-powered hybrid retriever. $Ψ$-RAG supports diverse tasks from token-level question answering to document-level summarization. On cross-document multi-hop QA benchmarks, it outperforms RAPTOR by 25.9% and HippoRAG 2 by 7.4% in average F1 score. Code is available at https://github.com/Newiz430/Psi-RAG.

Suspect face generation remains a technical challenge in crime investigations. Traditional sketch-drawing workflows suffer from low efficiency and quality, while diffusion-based approaches still face intrinsic limitations on conditional ambiguity for text-to-image models and sampling variance for one-shot generation. We proposed IdentiFace, a novel diffusion-based framework for identifiable suspect face generation, which addressed these issues through (1) multi-modal input design to strengthen conditional control, and (2) an iterative generation pipeline enabling identifiable feature adjustment. We additionally contributed a facial identity loss and two task-specific datasets. Comprehensive experiments on synthetic datasets and in real-world scenarios indicate that IdentiFace achieves superior performance over existing methods, especially in terms of identity retrieval, and shows strong potential for practical applications.

Despite substantial progress in text-driven 3D human motion synthesis, generating realistic multi-person interaction sequences remains challenging. Notably, body inter-penetration is a pervasive issue from both data acquisition to the generated results, which significantly undermines the realism and usability. Previous generative models either ignored this issue or introduced computationally expensive mesh-level loss functions to alleviate inter-body collisions. In this paper, we propose a general-purpose and computationally efficient optimization strategy named PhysiGen to explicitly integrate collision-aware physical constraints for human-human interaction generation. Specifically, we simplify the high-resolution human body mesh into geometric primitives to greatly reduce the cost of inter-person collision detection. Moreover, we identify the collision regions as the guidance of the optimization directions. PhysiGen is plug-and-play and can be readily integrated into existing human interaction generation models. Extensive cross-dataset and cross-model experiments show that our method can effectively reduce interpenetration and significantly improve visual coherence and physical plausibility compared to the state-of-the-art methods.

Understanding how people argue across ideological divides online is important for studying political polarization, misinformation, and content moderation. Existing datasets capture only part of this problem: some preserve text but ignore interaction structure, some model structure without rich semantics, and others represent conversations without stable user-level ideological identity. We introduce ControBench, a benchmark for controversial discourse analysis that combines heterogeneous social interaction graphs with rich textual semantics. Built from Reddit discussions on three topics, Trump, abortion, and religion, ControBench contains 7,370 users, 1,783 posts, and 26,525 interactions. The graph contains user and post nodes connected by semantically enriched edges; in particular, user-comment-user edges encode both a reply and the parent comment that it responds to, preserving local argumentative context. User labels are derived from self-declared Reddit flairs, providing a scalable proxy for ideological identity without manual annotation. The resulting datasets exhibit low or negative adjusted homophily (Trump: -0.77, Abortion: 0.06, Religion: 0.04), reflecting the cross-cutting structure of real-world debate. We evaluate graph neural networks, pretrained language models, and large language models on ControBench and observe distinct performance patterns across topics and model families, especially when ideological boundaries are ambiguous. These results position ControBench as a challenging and realistic benchmark for controversial discourse analysis.

Complex physical systems, from supersonic turbulence to the macroscopic structure of the universe, are governed by continuous multiscale dynamics. While modern machine learning architectures excel at mapping the high-dimensional observables of these systems, it remains unclear whether they internalize the governing physical laws or merely interpolate discrete statistical correlations. Standard Explainable AI (XAI) architectures, particularly perturbation-based and gradient-saliency methods, rely on pixel-wise perturbations, which generate unphysical artifacts and push inputs off the valid empirical distribution. To resolve this, we introduce a diagnostic framework driven by Constrained Diffusion Decomposition (CDD), a diffusion-based multiscale data decomposition algorithm that enables physically constrained data generation and model evaluation via scale-aware modifications. Applying this framework to a Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM), we execute deterministic interventions directly within the continuous, CDD-based scale space. We demonstrate that under moderate physical perturbations, the unconstrained generative model exhibits localized structural freezing and non-linear instability rather than continuous PDE-like responses. The network fails to maintain cross-scale continuity, causing the generative trajectory to diverge when pushed into unseen physical states. By synthesizing a continuum of physically coherent states, this scale-informed methodology establishes a controlled test ground to evaluate algorithmic vulnerabilities, providing the rigorous physical constraints necessary for future architectures to respect the multiscale causality of the natural universe.

We present a unique, multitask dataset comprising 143 drug and drug candidate molecules, each evaluated on in vitro, parallel artificial-membrane permeability assays (PAMPA) using six different model membranes. Using this resource, we systematically assess the effectiveness of various molecular descriptors and regression models in predicting passive membrane permeability. The studied models range from simple linear regression to a modern pre-trained transformer architecture. Particular attention is given to the trade-off between predictive performance and model interpretability, highlighting the challenges introduced by machine learning approaches. To our knowledge, this is the most comprehensive study on simultaneous modeling of multiple organ-specific PAMPA membranes to date, offering novel insights into membrane-specific permeability profiles. We found that expert-designed physico-chemical property descriptors are more fitting for a limited sample size permeabilty study than deep learning based representations.

We model utterance production as probabilistic cost-sensitive choice over contextual alternatives, using information-theoretic notions of cost. We distinguish between goal-directed alternatives that realise a fixed communicative intent and goal-agnostic alternatives defined only by contextual plausibility, allowing us to derive speaker- and listener-oriented interpretations of different cost measures. We present a procedure to generate both types of alternative sets using language models. Analysing production choices in open-ended dialogue under both deterministic and probabilistic cost minimisation, we find that surprisal minimisation relative to goal-directed alternatives provides the strongest predictive account under both analyses. By contrast, uniform information density and length-based costs exhibit weaker and less consistent predictive power across conditions. More broadly, our study suggests that alternative-conditioned optimisation with LM-generated alternatives provides a principled framework for studying speaker and listener pressures in naturalistic language production.

Autoregressive image modeling relies on visual tokenizers to compress images into compact latent representations. We design an end-to-end training pipeline that jointly optimizes reconstruction and generation, enabling direct supervision from generation results to the tokenizer. This contrasts with prior two-stage approaches that train tokenizers and generative models separately. We further investigate leveraging vision foundation models to improve 1D tokenizers for autoregressive modeling. Our autoregressive generative model achieves strong empirical results, including a state-of-the-art FID score of 1.48 without guidance on ImageNet 256x256 generation.