Recent advances in autonomous driving (AD) have highlighted the potential of hyperspectral imaging (HSI) for enhanced environmental perception, particularly in challenging weather and lighting conditions. However, efficiently processing high-dimensional spectral data remains a significant challenge. This paper presents an empirical investigation of a Multi-Scale Attention Mechanism (MSAM) for enhanced spectral feature extraction through three parallel 1D convolutions with varying kernel sizes (1-11) and adaptive feature aggregation. By integrating MSAM into UNet's skip connections, we evaluate performance improvements in semantic segmentation across multiple HSI datasets for urban driving scenarios. Comprehensive ablation studies demonstrate that MSAM consistently outperforms baseline UNet-SC, achieving average improvements of 2.32% in mIoU and 2.88% in mF1, while maintaining competitive GPU performance against established attention mechanisms. Our findings reveal that optimal kernel combinations are dataset-specific, with configurations such as (1;5;11) and (3;7;11) demonstrating particularly strong performance. This empirical investigation advances understanding of HSI processing capabilities for AD applications and establishes a foundation for adaptive multi-scale spectral feature extraction in automotive deployment.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely deployed in real-world applications, yet their internal mechanisms remain difficult to interpret and control, limiting our ability to diagnose and correct undesirable behaviors. Mechanistic interpretability addresses this challenge by identifying circuits -- subsets of model components responsible for specific behaviors. However, discovering such circuits in LLMs remains difficult due to their scale and complexity. We frame circuit discovery as identifying parameters that contribute most to model outputs on task-specific inputs, and use Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP) with reference samples to attribute and extract these components via pruning. Building on this, we introduce contrastive relevance to isolate circuits associated with undesired behaviors while preserving general capabilities, enabling targeted model correction. On OPT-125M, we show that pruning as little as ~0.3% of neurons substantially reduces toxic outputs, while pruning approximately 0.03% of weight elements mitigates repetitive text generation without degrading general performance. These results establish attribution-guided pruning as an effective mechanism for identifying and intervening on behavior-specific circuits in LLMs. We further validate our findings on additional small-scale language models, demonstrating that the proposed approach transfers across architectures. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/erfanhatefi/SparC3.

Neural audio compression has emerged as a promising technology for efficiently representing speech, music, and general audio. However, existing methods suffer from significant performance degradation at limited bitrates, where the available embedding space is sharply constrained. To address this, we propose a universal high-fidelity neural audio compression algorithm featuring Residual Experts Vector Quantization (REVQ), which substantially expands the embedding space with minimal impact on bandwidth. A gentle load-balancing strategy is introduced to ensure the full utilization of this expanded space. Furthermore, we develop a novel multi-tiered discriminator that periodically stratifies STFT spectra, guiding the generator to focus on critical spectral regions. To support multiple bitrates without quality loss at the lower end, we adopt an efficient post-training strategy. Our proposed model achieves impressive performance, with PESQ and ViSQOL scores of 2.87 and 4.27, respectively, at 2.67 kbps bandwidth. The approach effectively reduces spectral blur, decreasing the distance to the original mel-spectrogram by 13%. Notably, our post-training strategy achieves performance comparable to dedicated fixed-bitrate models while reducing the required training time by half. Extensive ablation studies confirm the superiority of our method over baselines.

Why and when does depth improve generalization? We study this question in an implementation-agnostic state-transition model, where a depth-$k$ predictor is a readout class $H$ composed with the word ball $B(k,F)$ generated by hidden state transitions. Generalization bounds separate implementation error, approximation error, and statistical complexity, and upper bound the depth-dependent variance term by a Dudley entropy integral over $B(k,F)$, with a conditional lower-bound diagnostic under readout separation. We identify geometric and semigroup mechanisms that keep this entropy contribution saturated or polynomial, and contrast them with separation mechanisms that recover the classical exponential-growth obstruction. Coupling these variance upper bounds with approximation rates gives typical depth trade-off patterns, clarifying that depth is statistically favorable when approximation improves rapidly while the transition semigroup remains geometrically tame.

Traditional saliency map methods, popularized in computer vision, highlight individual points (pixels) of the input that contribute the most to the model's output. However, in time series, they offer limited insights, as semantically meaningful features are often found in other domains. We introduce Cross-domain Integrated Gradients, a generalization of Integrated Gradients. Our method enables feature attributions in any domain that can be formulated as an invertible, differentiable transformation of the time domain. Crucially, our derivation extends the original Integrated Gradients into the complex domain, enabling frequency-based attributions. We provide the necessary theoretical guarantees, namely, path independence and completeness. We validate our method via controlled experiments with mechanistic analysis, quantitative faithfulness tests, and real-world case studies. Our approach reveals interpretable, problem-specific attributions that time-domain methods cannot capture in three real-world tasks across a variety of model architectures, machine-learning tasks, and cross-domain transforms: frequency-based attribution for a regression task in wearable heart rate extraction, independent component analysis in a classification task for electroencephalography-based seizure detection, and seasonal-trend decomposition for a forecasting problem with a zero-shot time-series foundation model. We release an open-source TensorFlow/PyTorch library to enable plug-and-play cross-domain explainability for time-series models. These results demonstrate the ability of Cross-Domain Integrated Gradients to provide semantically meaningful insights into time-series models that are impossible to achieve with traditional saliency in the time domain.

Mean-squared error is the default objective for training autoencoders, yet compressed reconstructions often depend not only on pointwise accuracy but also on preserving local spatial order. We study whether structural auxiliary losses can improve, rather than trade off against, MSE in finite-capacity autoencoders. We introduce finite-difference sign error (FDSE), a local-order auxiliary objective that penalizes disagreements between the signs of neighboring finite differences in the target and reconstruction. FDSE is simple, architecture-agnostic, and differentiable through smooth sign surrogates. Across four tensor reconstruction tasks, we find that moderate mixtures of MSE and FDSE can substantially reduce validation MSE relative to pure MSE training. In coefficient sweeps, FDSE mixtures reduce validation MSE by 2.3$\times$--7.0$\times$ over pure MSE on these tasks, while comparisons with other auxiliary objectives show FDSE to be among the strongest structural objectives tested. The effect is not universal: pure FDSE performs poorly, and gains are largest for coherent spatial fields where local order carries information about the underlying signal. These results suggest that, in compressed-latent reconstruction, appropriately weighted local-structure supervision can guide optimization toward solutions with better pointwise accuracy, rather than merely improving perceptual or structural metrics at MSE's expense.

The proliferation of AI-Generated Content (AIGC), especially deepfake videos, poses a severe threat to social trust by enabling fraud, privacy violations and disinformation. Existing AI-generated video detection (AGVD) benchmarks focus on open-source model generated videos, yet commercial closed-source models produce more realistic, temporally coherent videos that are underexplored in detection research. To fill this gap, we present Chameleon, a commercial-grade dataset with 1,700 AI-generated videos from 600 real-world sources across three key domains (News, Speech, Recommendation), featuring high resolution, rich annotations and 3D consistency metrics for dynamic scene spatial coherence, shifting detection from face-centric forgery to holistic scene forensics. This benchmark assesses models on two core tasks: accurate AI video detection in real-world conditions and forensic backtracking of original sources. Experimental results reveal critical limitations of existing methods in detecting and backtracking high-fidelity, spatiotemporally consistent videos from commercial closed-source models, highlighting current methods' flawed forensic reasoning and establishing Chameleon as a vital challenge for AIGC security research. The code and data are available at https://github.com/lxixim/Chameleon.

Large language models (LLMs) operate as autoregressive predictors over discrete token vocabularies, a formulation that has enabled their adaptation far beyond natural language to vision, robotics, and multimodal reasoning. However, training against one-hot targets disregards metric relationships between tokens and limits effectiveness on tasks where distance is meaningful, such as numerical values, spatial coordinates, or quantized embeddings. We introduce DIST2Loss, a distance-aware objective for discrete autoregressive models that replaces one-hot targets with reward-weighted distributions derived from predefined token distances. DIST2Loss can be interpreted as the closed-form solution to entropy-regularized policy optimization with known per-token rewards, retaining the core mechanism of reinforcement learning while avoiding sampling, rollouts, and instability. Our experiments show that DIST2Loss improves data efficiency and downstream performance across diverse domains. It yields tighter bounding boxes in visual grounding, accelerates robotic manipulation by improving action learning, enhances reward modeling for LLM alignment, and strengthens vector-quantized image generation. These results demonstrate that distance-aware supervision offers a simple and general alternative to one-hot supervision for discrete autoregressive models.

Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with computational efficiency and error propagation in multi-step reasoning tasks. While recent advancements on prompting and post-training have enabled LLMs to perform step-wise reasoning, they still tend to explore unproductive solution paths without effective backtracking or strategy adjustment. In this paper, we propose Meta-Reasoner, a new framework that empowers LLMs to "think about how to think". It optimizes the inference process by dynamically adapting reasoning strategies in real-time. Our approach employs contextual multi-armed bandits (CMABs) to learn an adaptive policy. It learns to evaluate the current state of LLM's reasoning and determine optimal strategy that is most likely to lead to a successful outcome during inference, like whether to backtrack, switch to a new approach, or restart the problem-solving process. This meta-guidance helps avoid unproductive paths exploration during inference and hence improves computational efficiency. We evaluate Meta-Reasoner on math problems (e.g., Game-of-24, TheoremQA) and scientific tasks (e.g., SciBench). Results show that our method outperform previous SOTA methods by 9-12% in accuracy, while reducing inference time by 28-35% under the same compute budget. Additional experiments on creative writing demonstrate the generalizability of our approach to diverse reasoning-intensive tasks.

We present a novel machine learning framework for the optimal control of fluid restless multi-armed bandit problems (FRMABPs) with state equations that are either affine or quadratic in the state variables. By establishing fundamental properties of FRMABPs, we develop an efficient numerical algorithm that generates a comprehensive training set by solving multiple instances with diverse initial states. We further enhance this training set by applying a nonlinear transformation to the feature vectors, leveraging structural properties of FRMABPs. A time-dependent state feedback policy is then learned using Optimal Classification Trees with hyperplane splits (OCT-H). We test our approach on machine maintenance, epidemic control, and fisheries control problems, demonstrating that our method yields high-quality state feedback policies. Furthermore, once a policy is learned, it achieves a speed-up of up to 26 million times compared to the direct numerical algorithm.

Backpropagation remains the dominant algorithm for training deep neural networks, but it incurs substantial memory overhead and relies on global error propagation, which is often regarded as biologically implausible. The Forward-Forward (FF) algorithm is an appealing local-learning alternative to backpropagation, yet it still lags behind backpropagation in accuracy. A central unresolved question is whether this gap arises from FF's locality or from the positive-negative double-pass goodness objective used to train each layer. In this work, we revisit FF under the supervised setting through a decomposition that separates these two design choices. Our analysis suggests that FF's performance limitations are not explained by locality alone, but are also likely influenced by its goodness objective. Motivated by this view, we introduce Mono-Forward (MF), a simplification of FF that preserves its locality while replacing the contrastive goodness objective with a standard multi-class cross-entropy objective applied locally at each layer, serving as a controlled baseline for evaluating local learning under a standard classification objective. Across MLPs and convolutional networks, MF outperforms vanilla FF and remains competitive in multiple FF variants. On MLP-Mixers, MF achieves stronger results on PathMNIST than backpropagation while requiring only 31% of backpropagation's memory.

In this paper we present the first goal-driven query answering technique for first- and second-order dependencies with equality. Our technique transforms the input dependencies so that applying the chase to the output avoids many inferences that are irrelevant to the query. The transformation proceeds in several steps, which comprise the following three novel techniques. First, we present a variant of the singularisation technique by Marnette [59] that can handle function variables and that corrects an incompleteness of a related formulation by ten Cate et al. [73]. Second, we present a relevance analysis technique that can eliminate dependencies that provably do not contribute to query answers. Third, we present a variant of the magic sets algorithm [19] that can handle second-order dependencies with equality. We also present the results of an extensive empirical evaluation, which show that goal-driven query answering can be orders of magnitude faster than computing the full universal model.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved strong performance on implicit and explicit visual grounding and related tasks. However, such abilities are generally tested on simple, single-object phrases. We find that grounding performance degrades for complex, multi-object references. These limitations largely arise from training objectives that leverage image-caption alignment, where direct multi-object references are rare, the number of possible such references is theoretically large (exponential in the number of objects), and attribution is difficult. To address this, without requiring any additional annotations, we propose Compositional Attention-Regularized Training (CompART), which decomposes captions into object-centric phrases and constructs composite phrases by pairing them with conjunctions. We then introduce a composition loss that encourages the attention induced by a composite phrase to equal the sum of the attentions of its constituent phrases, promoting balanced multi-object localization. We evaluate CompART across four VLM architectures, spanning both contrastive-based and generative-based models, on four benchmarks for multi-object grounding and two VQA benchmarks for general visual understanding. CompART consistently improves grounding for both single- and multi-object references across diverse VLM architectures and datasets, and further demonstrates enhanced visual understanding, as evidenced by gains on VQA, despite not being explicitly trained for this task.

Scalable high-quality MAP inference in arbitrary-order Markov Random Fields (MRFs) remains challenging. Approximate message-passing methods are often efficient but can degrade on dense or high-order instances, while exact solvers such as Toulbar2 become increasingly expensive at scale. We present ReMAP, an instance-wise neural reparameterization framework that directly optimizes a differentiable relaxation of the original MRF energy. Instead of relying on supervised labels or amortized training, ReMAP treats each MRF as an independent optimization problem: a Graph Neural Network produces node-wise label distributions, and gradient-based optimization searches for a low-energy discrete solution in an over-parameterized continuous space. The method supports pairwise and arbitrary-order factors, heterogeneous label cardinalities, and efficient GPU execution, without requiring labeled solutions. We show that the relaxed objective is consistent with the discrete MAP problem and analyze how neural over-parameterization can expose low-energy optimization paths unavailable in the original discrete space. Empirically, on synthetic pairwise and high-order MRFs, UAI 2022 inference benchmarks, and real-world Physical Cell Identity (PCI) problems, ReMAP consistently outperforms approximate baselines and often finds lower-energy solutions than Toulbar2 on hard large-scale instances within practical time budgets.

Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training across distributed devices while preserving local data privacy, making it ideal for mobile and embedded systems. However, the decentralized nature of FL also opens vulnerabilities to model poisoning attacks, particularly backdoor attacks, where adversaries implant trigger patterns to manipulate model predictions. In this paper, we propose DeTrigger, a scalable and efficient backdoor-robust federated learning framework that leverages insights from adversarial attack methodologies. By employing gradient analysis with temperature scaling, DeTrigger detects and isolates backdoor triggers, allowing for precise model weight pruning of backdoor activations without sacrificing benign model knowledge. Extensive evaluations across four widely used datasets demonstrate that DeTrigger achieves up to 251x faster detection than traditional methods and mitigates backdoor attacks by up to 98.9%, with minimal impact on global model accuracy. Our findings establish DeTrigger as a robust and scalable solution to protect federated learning environments against sophisticated backdoor threats.

The classical text preprocessing pipeline, comprising Tokenisation, Normalisation, Stop Words Removal, and Stemming/Lemmatisation, has been implemented in many systems for ontology matching (OM). However, the lack of standardisation in text preprocessing creates diversity in the mapping results. In this paper, we investigate the effect of the text preprocessing pipeline on 8 Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI) tracks with 49 distinct alignments. We find that Tokenisation and Normalisation (categorised as Phase 1 text preprocessing) are more effective than Stop Words Removal and Stemming/Lemmatisation (categorised as Phase 2 text preprocessing). We propose two novel approaches to repair unwanted false mappings that occur in Phase 2 text preprocessing. One is a pre hoc logic-based repair approach used before text preprocessing, employing an ontology-specific check to find common words that cause false mappings. The other repair approach is the post hoc large language model (LLM)-based approach, used after text preprocessing, which utilises the strong background knowledge provided by LLMs to repair non-existent and counter-intuitive false mappings. The experimental results indicate that these two approaches can significantly improve the matching correctness and the overall matching performance.

The efficacy of mathematical models heavily depends on the quality of the training data, yet collecting sufficient data is often expensive and challenging. Many modeling applications require inferring parameters only as a means to predict other quantities of interest (QoI). Because models often contain many unidentifiable (sloppy) parameters, QoIs often depend on a relatively small number of parameter combinations. Therefore, we introduce an information-matching criterion based on the Fisher Information Matrix to select the most informative training data from a candidate pool. This method ensures that the selected data contain sufficient information to learn only those parameters that are needed to constrain downstream QoIs. It is formulated as a convex optimization problem, making it scalable to large models and datasets. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach across various modeling problems in diverse scientific fields, including power systems and underwater acoustics. Finally, we use information-matching as a query function within an Active Learning loop for material science applications. In all these applications, we find that a relatively small set of optimal training data can provide the necessary information for achieving precise predictions. These results are encouraging for diverse future applications, particularly active learning in large machine learning models.

To evaluate the safety and usefulness of deployment protocols for untrusted AIs, AI Control uses a red-teaming exercise played between a protocol designer and an adversary. This paper introduces AI-Control Games, a formal decision-making model of the red-teaming exercise as a multi-objective, partially observable, stochastic game. We also introduce reductions from AI-Control Games to a special case of zero-sum partially observable stochastic games that allow us to leverage existing algorithms to find Pareto-optimal protocols. We apply our formalism to model, evaluate and synthesise protocols for deploying untrusted language models as programming assistants, focusing on Trusted Monitoring protocols, which use weaker language models and limited human assistance. To demonstrate the utility of our formalism, we show improvements over empirical studies in existing settings, evaluate protocols in new settings, and analyse how modelling assumptions affect the safety and usefulness of protocols. Finally, we leverage our formalism to precisely describe some of the implicit assumptions in prior control work.

Recently, generative graph models have shown promising results in learning graph representations through self-supervised methods. However, most existing generative graph representation learning (GRL) approaches rely on random masking across the entire graph, which overlooks the entanglement of learned representations. This oversight results in non-robustness and a lack of explainability. Furthermore, disentangling the learned representations remains a significant challenge and has not been sufficiently explored in GRL research. Based on these insights, this paper introduces DiGGR (Disentangled Generative Graph Representation Learning), a self-supervised learning framework. DiGGR aims to learn latent disentangled factors and utilizes them to guide graph mask modeling, thereby enhancing the disentanglement of learned representations and enabling end-to-end joint learning. Extensive experiments on 11 public datasets for two different graph learning tasks demonstrate that DiGGR consistently outperforms many previous self-supervised methods, verifying the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Large Language Models (LLMs) possess vast amounts of knowledge within their parameters, prompting research into methods for locating and editing this knowledge. Previous work has largely focused on locating entity-related (often single-token) facts in smaller models. However, several key questions remain unanswered: (1) How can we effectively locate query-relevant neurons in decoder-only LLMs, such as Llama and Mistral? (2) How can we address the challenge of long-form (or free-form) text generation? (3) Are there localized knowledge regions in LLMs? In this study, we introduce Query-Relevant Neuron Cluster Attribution (QRNCA), a novel architecture-agnostic framework capable of identifying query-relevant neurons in LLMs. QRNCA allows for the examination of long-form answers beyond triplet facts by employing the proxy task of multi-choice question answering. To evaluate the effectiveness of our detected neurons, we build two multi-choice QA datasets spanning diverse domains and languages. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that our method outperforms baseline methods significantly. Further, analysis of neuron distributions reveals the presence of visible localized regions, particularly within different domains. Finally, we show potential applications of our detected neurons in knowledge editing and neuron-based prediction.

This study presents an innovative approach to optimal gait control for a soft quadruped robot enabled by four Compressible Tendon-driven Soft Actuators (CTSAs). Improving our previous studies of using model-free reinforcement learning for gait control, we employ model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) to further enhance the performance of the gait controller. Compared to rigid robots, the proposed soft quadruped robot has better safety, less weight, and a simpler mechanism for fabrication and control. However, the primary challenge lies in developing sophisticated control algorithms to attain optimal gait control for fast and stable locomotion. The research employs a multi-stage methodology, including state space restriction, data-driven model training, and reinforcement learning algorithm development. Compared to benchmark methods, the proposed MBRL algorithm, combined with post-training, significantly improves the efficiency and performance of gait control policies. The developed policy is both robust and adaptable to the robot's deformable morphology. The study concludes by highlighting the practical applicability of these findings in real-world scenarios.

AI has become pervasive in recent years, but state-of-the-art approaches predominantly neglect the need for AI systems to be contestable. Instead, contestability is advocated by AI guidelines (e.g. by the OECD) and regulation of automated decision-making (e.g. GDPR). In this position paper we explore how contestability can be achieved computationally in and for AI. We argue that contestable AI requires dynamic (human-machine and/or machine-machine) explainability and decision-making processes, whereby machines can (i) interact with humans and/or other machines to progressively explain their outputs and/or their reasoning as well as assess grounds for contestation provided by these humans and/or other machines, and (ii) revise their decision-making processes to redress any issues successfully raised during contestation. Given that much of the current AI landscape is tailored to static AIs, the need to accommodate contestability will require a radical rethinking, that, we argue, computational argumentation is ideally suited to support.

The profusion of knowledge encoded in large language models (LLMs) and their ability to apply this knowledge zero-shot in a range of settings makes them promising candidates for use in decision-making. However, they are currently limited by their inability to provide outputs which can be faithfully explained and effectively contested to correct mistakes. In this paper, we attempt to reconcile these strengths and weaknesses by introducing \emph{argumentative LLMs (ArgLLMs)}, a method for augmenting LLMs with argumentative reasoning. Concretely, ArgLLMs construct argumentation frameworks, which then serve as the basis for formal reasoning in support of decision-making. The interpretable nature of these argumentation frameworks and formal reasoning means that any decision made by ArgLLMs may be explained and contested. We evaluate ArgLLMs' performance experimentally in comparison with state-of-the-art techniques, in the context of the decision-making task of claim verification. We also define novel properties to characterise contestability and assess ArgLLMs formally in terms of these properties.

Offshore wind structures are subject to deterioration mechanisms throughout their operational lifetime. Even if the deterioration evolution of structural elements can be estimated through physics-based deterioration models, the uncertainties involved in the process hurdle the selection of lifecycle management decisions. In this scenario, the collection of relevant information through an efficient monitoring system enables the reduction of uncertainties, ultimately driving more optimal lifecycle decisions. However, a full monitoring instrumentation implemented on all wind turbines in a farm might become unfeasible due to practical and economical constraints. Besides, certain load monitoring systems often become defective after a few years of marine environment exposure. Addressing the aforementioned concerns, a farm-wide virtual load monitoring scheme directed by a fleet-leader wind turbine offers an attractive solution. Fetched with data retrieved from a fully-instrumented wind turbine, a model can be trained and then deployed, thus yielding load predictions of non-fully monitored wind turbines, from which only standard data remains available. In this paper, we propose a virtual load monitoring framework formulated via Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) and we provide relevant implementation details needed for the construction, training, and deployment of BNN data-based virtual monitoring models. As opposed to their deterministic counterparts, BNNs intrinsically announce the uncertainties associated with generated load predictions and allow to detect inaccurate load estimations generated for non-fully monitored wind turbines. The proposed virtual load monitoring is thoroughly tested through an experimental campaign in an operational offshore wind farm and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of BNN models for fleet-leader-based farm-wide virtual monitoring.

In the context of multi-modality knowledge distillation research, the existing methods was mainly focus on the problem of only learning teacher final output. Thus, there are still deep differences between the teacher network and the student network. It is necessary to force the student network to learn the modality relationship information of the teacher network. To effectively exploit transfering knowledge from teachers to students, a novel modality relation distillation paradigm by modeling the relationship information among different modality are adopted, that is learning the teacher modality-level Gram Matrix.

Camera sensor RAW data offers intrinsic advantages for object detection, including deeper bit depth, preserved physical information, and freedom from image signal processor (ISP) distortions. However, varying exposure conditions, spectral sensitivities, and bit depths across devices introduce substantially larger domain gaps than sRGB, making sensor-agnostic generalization a fundamental challenge. In this study, we present \textbf{RAWild}, a physics-guided global-local tone mapping framework for sensor-agnostic RAW object detection. By factoring sensor-induced variations into a global tonal correction and a spatially adaptive local color adjustment, both driven by RAW distribution priors, our framework enables a single network to train jointly across heterogeneous sensors. To further support cross-sensor generalization, we construct a physics-based RAW simulation pipeline that synthesizes realistic sensor outputs spanning diverse spectral sensitivities, illuminants, and sensor non-idealities. Extensive experiments across multiple RAW benchmarks covering bit depths from 10 to 24 demonstrate state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance under single-dataset, mixed-dataset, and challenging robustness settings.

Standard knowledge distillation for autoregressive models often suffers from distribution mismatch. While on-policy methods mitigate this by leveraging student-generated outputs, they rely on computationally expensive Reinforcement Learning (RL) frameworks. To improve efficiency, we propose Near-Policy Distillation (NPD), an asynchronous approach that decouples student generation from training. This reformulation enables Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with sequence packing. However, asynchronous updates inevitably introduce policy lag and sample noise, which can cause the behavior to drift from near-policy toward off-policy. To counteract this without sacrificing efficiency, NPD integrates sparse student updates and the $Δ$-IFD filtering mechanism, a heuristic sample selection mechanism that empirically stabilizes the optimization trajectory. By filtering extreme out-of-distribution samples, $Δ$-IFD prevents noise from dominating the gradients, ensuring updates remain within a safe proximal learning zone. Empirically, the NPD framework achieves a 8.1x speedup over on-policy baselines and outperforms SFT by 8.09%. Crucially, by effectively narrowing the exploration space for subsequent RL, our method enables openPangu-Embedded-1B to reach a state-of-the-art score of 68.73%, outperforming the substantially larger Qwen3-1.7B. Codes will be released soon.

Although Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress across many domains, their training on large-scale multimodal datasets raises serious privacy concerns, making effective machine unlearning increasingly necessary. However, existing benchmarks mainly focus on static or short-sequence settings, offering limited support for evaluating continual privacy deletion requests in realistic deployments. To bridge this gap, we introduce ICU-Bench, a continual multimodal unlearning benchmark built on privacy-critical document data. ICU-Bench contains 1,000 privacy-sensitive profiles from two document domains, medical reports and labor contracts, with 9,500 images, 16,000 question-answer pairs, and 100 forget tasks. Additionally, new continual unlearning metrics are introduced, facilitating a comprehensive analysis of forgetting effectiveness, historical forgetting preservation, retained utility, and stability throughout the continual unlearning process. Through extensive experiments with representative unlearning methods on ICU-Bench, we show that existing methods generally struggle in continual settings and exhibit clear limitations in balancing forgetting quality, utility preservation, and scalability over long task sequences. These findings highlight the need for multimodal unlearning methods explicitly designed for continual privacy deletion.

Interpreting quantitative CT biomarkers, such as organ volume and tissue attenuation, requires large-scale healthy reference distributions. However, creating these is challenging because clinical datasets are often heavily enriched with pathology. Here, we develop an evidence-grounded, cross-verified large language model (LLM) ensemble to filter pathological findings from radiology reports, enabling the construction of pathology-reduced cohorts from over 350,000 CT examinations. Five LLMs, first, flag structure-level abnormality candidates grounded in verbatim report evidence and, second, resolve disagreements via cross-verification. Using distribution-aware generalized additive models for location, scale, and shape, we establish comprehensive whole-body reference charts for 106 anatomical structures (volumes and attenuation) across adulthood, accounting for age, sex, contrast enhancement, and acquisition parameters. Longitudinal analyses reveal structure- and contrast-dependent changes distinct from cross-sectional trends. These resources facilitate covariate-adjusted centile scoring from routine CT, supporting standardized quantitative phenotyping, multi-site imaging studies, and scalable opportunistic screening research.

Emerging digital technologies are exacerbating the existing divide in Open Access Data (OAD) between high-and low-resource languages, excluding many communities from participating in the global digital transformation. In this PhD proposal, we aim to address this gap, focusing on the language coverage of Linked Open Data knowledge graphs (LOD KGs). First, we identify key variables that characterize language distribution in LOD, including the number of Wikipedia articles per language edition and the number of language-tagged entities in LOD KGs. These variables are analyzed across three major multilingual LOD KGs, DBpedia, BabelNet, and Wikidata, providing insights into the representation and distribution of languages within LOD. Building on this analysis, we intend to study the impact of cross-lingual transfer candidate selection on the task of multilingual KG completion. In particular, we plan to investigate strategies based on linguistic proximity and the availability of curated annotated alignments between languages. Language proximity also motivates us to explore the benefits of analogical reasoning that relies on (dis)similarities and has not yet been investigated to identify correspondences across languages to improve KG completion performance and enhance language coverage in LOD.