Large language models (LLMs), despite their impressive performance across a wide range of tasks, often struggle to balance two competing objectives in open-ended text generation: fostering diversity and creativity while preserving logical coherence. Existing truncated sampling techniques, including temperature scaling, top-\$p\$ (nucleus) sampling, and min-\$p\$ sampling, aim to manage this trade-off. However, they exhibit limitations, particularly in the effective incorporation of the confidence of the model into the corresponding sampling strategy. For example, min-\$p\$ sampling relies on a single top token as a heuristic for confidence, eventually underutilizing the information of the probability distribution. Toward effective incorporation of the confidence of the model, in this paper, we present **top-H** decoding. We first establish the theoretical foundation of the interplay between creativity and coherence in truncated sampling by formulating an **entropy-constrained minimum divergence** problem. We then prove this minimization problem to be equivalent to an **entropy-constrained mass maximization** (ECMM) problem, which is NP-hard. Finally, we present top-H decoding, a computationally efficient greedy algorithm to solve the ECMM problem. Extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate that top-H outperforms the state-of-the-art (SoTA) alternative of min-\$p\$ sampling by up to **25.63%** on creative writing benchmarks, while maintaining robustness on question-answering datasets such as GPQA, GSM8K, and MT-Bench. Additionally, an *LLM-as-judge* evaluation confirms that top-H indeed produces coherent outputs even at higher temperatures, where creativity is especially critical. In summary, top-H advances SoTA in open-ended text generation and can be *easily integrated* into creative writing applications. The code is available at https://github.com/ErfanBaghaei/Top-H-Decoding.

While transformer models exhibit strong in-context learning (ICL) abilities, they often fail to generalize under simple distribution shifts. We analyze these failures and identify Softmax, the scoring function in the attention mechanism, as a contributing factor. We propose \textbf{Scaled Signed Averaging (SSA)}, a novel attention scoring function that mitigates these failures. SSA significantly improves performance on our ICL tasks and outperforms transformer models with Softmax on several NLP benchmarks and linguistic probing tasks, in both decoder-only and encoder-only architectures.

Time series forecasting is vital in diverse sectors such as energy and transportation, where non-stationary dynamics are deeply intertwined with external events in other modalities such as texts. However, incorporating natural language-based external events to improve non-stationary forecasting remains largely unexplored, as most approaches still rely on a single modality, resulting in limited contextual knowledge and model underperformance. Enabling fine-grained multimodal interactions between temporal and textual data is challenged by two fundamental issues: (1) the gap in modeling interactions among discrete external events and continuous time series in a unified framework; (2) classical uniform diffusion timestep ignores event-induced non-stationary variability, leading to imbalanced denoising difficulty across diffusion stages. In this work, we propose event-aware non-stationary time series forecasting (EventTSF), an autoregressive diffusion framework that integrates historical time series and textual events via step-wise diffusion. To mitigate the imbalanced denoising difficulty of uniform timestep sampling, EventTSF uses an event-aware flow-matching timestep conditioned on event semantics. Extensive experiments on 7 synthetic and real-world datasets show that EventTSF outperforms 12 non-stationary time series forecasting baselines, achieving average gains of 41.3% in probabilistic forecasting and 27.5% in deterministic forecasting across all evaluation metrics.

Decision makers are increasingly relying on machine learning in sensitive situations. Algorithmic recourse aims to provide individuals with actionable and minimally costly steps to reverse unfavorable AI-driven decisions. While existing research focuses on single-individual (i.e., seeker) and single-model (i.e., provider) scenarios, real-world applications involve multiple stakeholders. Optimizing outcomes for seekers under an individual welfare approach overlooks the multi-agent nature of real-world systems, with competition for limited resources. Accordingly, we extend algorithmic recourse to a many-to-many setting with capacity constraints, where individually computed recourse recommendations no longer compose independently and stakeholder interactions affect recourse validity. We model this multi-agent algorithimc recourse as a capacitated weighted bipartite matching problem, based on recourse cost and provider capacity. Edge weights, reflecting recourse costs, are optimized for social welfare while quantifying the welfare gap between individual welfare and this collectively feasible outcome. We propose three optimization layers: capacitated matching, optimal capacity redistribution, and cost-aware optimization. We further model inequality-averse objectives through a concave social-welfare formulation that prioritizes the most disadvantaged seekers. Experiments demonstrate that our framework enables the many-to-many algorithmic recourse to achieve near-optimal welfare with minimum modification in system settings. Our results also show how recourse systems can be designed to balance aggregate welfare with distributive considerations. We extend algorithmic recourse from individual recommendations to system-level design, providing a tractable path toward higher social welfare while maintaining individual actionability.

The most dangerous mistakes a novice counselor makes are not the obvious ones: they are utterances that sound caring while quietly violating professional ethics and leaving vulnerable clients less protected. We build an AI supervisor that does not replace novice counselors, but grows them-teaching them to internalize ethical violations they would otherwise never notice. What makes this supervisor non-trivial is not detection but teaching: it must locate the ethical-violating utterance, diagnose the ethical violation against APA principles, and deliver feedback that explains not just what went wrong, but why it is risky and how to respond differently. The core obstacle is that (1) ethical violations are by nature unlabeled in real clinical data, and (2) existing AI counselors trained only to match correct answers will never learn to teach. We resolve both at once: a controllable AI novice that intentionally enacts predefined mistake categories makes supervision labels a natural byproduct of generation, yielding ETHICSCAFF, a 9,915-instance human-in-the-loop dataset; and GRPO under a Novice Growth Reward (NGR) optimizes the supervisor not for answer correctness but for whether a weaker novice model actually improves after reading its explanation. Experiments show that a novice guided by our supervisor outperforms an unguided peer on clinical metrics, and that teaching-oriented optimization via NGR further sharpens the supervisor's own ethical detection. In a user study with novice counseling-psychology students, participants show significant self-efficacy gains across all eight assessed competencies after receiving AI supervisory feedback, demonstrating that the scaffold transfers from simulation to real-world practice.

Time series forecasting plays a significant role in finance, energy, meteorology, and IoT applications. Recent studies have leveraged the generalization capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to adapt to time series forecasting, achieving promising performance. However, existing studies focus on token-level modal alignment, instead of bridging the intrinsic modality gap between linguistic knowledge structures and time series data patterns, greatly limiting the semantic representation. To address this issue, we propose a novel Semantic-Enhanced LLM (SE-LLM) that explores the inherent periodicity and anomalous characteristics of time series to embed into the semantic space to enhance the token embedding. This process enhances the interpretability of tokens for LLMs, thereby activating the potential of LLMs for temporal sequence analysis. Moreover, existing Transformer-based LLMs excel at capturing long-range dependencies but are weak at modeling short-term anomalies in time-series data. Hence, we propose a plugin module embedded within self-attention that models long-term and short-term dependencies to effectively adapt LLMs to time-series analysis. Our approach freezes the LLM and reduces the sequence dimensionality of tokens, greatly reducing computational consumption. Experiments demonstrate the superiority performance of our SE-LLM against the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods.

In real-world applications, multimodal time-series forecasting faces a key challenge: textual information is often useful but unreliable. Auxiliary texts may contain irrelevant, ambiguous, incomplete, or structurally corrupted content, making direct text integration prone to introducing noisy semantic signals and degrading forecasting performance. Therefore, robust multimodal forecasting requires a model that can exploit useful textual context while suppressing misleading perturbations. To address this challenge, we propose PA-RNet, a carefully designed perturbation-aware residual network for robust multimodal time-series forecasting. Rather than directly fusing textual and numerical representations, PA-RNet first refines multimodal features in a perturbation-aware manner, preserving stable contextual information while reducing unstable or misleading signals. The refined textual representations are then aligned with temporal dynamics, enabling more reliable forecasting under noisy multimodal conditions. Theoretically, we prove that PA-RNet is Lipschitz continuous with respect to textual embeddings and show that the proposed spectral residual correction can reduce the expected prediction error under zero-mean textual perturbations. We further conduct supplementary experiments with injected textual perturbations to examine the robustness of PA-RNet. The results across diverse domains demonstrate that PA-RNet consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and maintains stable forecasting performance under both original and noise-perturbed textual conditions.

Large Language Models (LLMs) enable new possibilities for qualitative research at scale, including annotation and qualitative coding of educational data. While LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) can emulate human coding workflows, their benefits over single LLM agents for coding remain poorly understood. To that end, we conducted an experimental study of how persona and temperature of component agents of a MAS shapes consensus-building and coding accuracy for dialog segments. LLMs were prompted to code these segments deductively using a mature codebook with 8 codes and high inter-rater reliability derived from prior research. Our open-source MAS mirrors deductive human coding through structured agent discussion and consensus arbitration. Using six open-source LLMs (with 3 to 32 billion parameters) and 18 experimental configurations, we analyze over 77,000 coding decisions against a gold-standard dataset of human-annotated transcripts from online math tutoring sessions facilitated by educational software. Temperature significantly impacted whether and when consensus was reached across all six LLMs. MAS with multiple personas (including neutral, assertive, or empathetic) significantly delayed consensus in four out of six LLMs compared to uniform personas. In three of those LLMs, higher temperatures significantly diminished the effects of multiple personas on consensus. However, neither temperature nor persona pairing led to robust improvements in coding accuracy. Single agents matched or outperformed MAS consensus in most conditions. Qualitative analysis of MAS collaboration and coding disagreement may, however, improve codebook design and human-AI coding.

Development of dexterous manipulation hardware has primarily focused on hands and grippers. However, these end-effectors are often paired with bulky and highly stiff wrists that limit performance in human environments. More designs have adopted backdrivable actuation, but are still difficult to model and control due to coupled kinematics or high mechanical inertia from heavy links. We present DexWrist, a robotic wrist that advances manipulation in highly constrained environments and enables dynamic, contact-rich tasks. We achieve this by combining quasi-direct drive actuation with a decoupled parallel kinematic mechanism in a compact design. It delivers 3.75 +/- 0.05 Nm rated torque, 0.33 +/- 0.06 Nm backdrive torque, 10.15 +/- 1.34 Hz torque bandwidth, +/- 40 degrees ROM in both DOFs, and a one-to-one motor-to-DOF mapping in a 0.97 kg package. In practice, these properties increase workspace in cluttered environments and stabilize contact without the need for finely tuned admittance control. We evaluate DexWrist as a drop-in wrist upgrade in simulation and on two robot arms performing representative constrained and contact-rich tasks. In learned policy evaluations, DexWrist achieved 50-76% relative improvements in success rate, and reduced autonomous task completion times by 3-5x. More details about DexWrist can be found at https://dexwrist.csail.mit.edu.

Generative models typically rely on either simple latent priors (e.g., Variational Autoencoders, VAEs), which are efficient but limited, or highly expressive iterative samplers (e.g., Diffusion and Energy-based Models), which are costly and opaque. We introduce the Kolmogorov-Arnold Energy Model (KAEM) to bridge this trade-off and provide new opportunities for latent-space interpretability. Based on a novel adaptation of the Kolmogorov-Arnold Representation Theorem, KAEM imposes a univariate latent structure on the prior, enabling exact inference via the inverse transform method. With a low-dimensional latent space and appropriate inductive biases, importance sampling becomes a tractable, unbiased, and efficient posterior inference method. For settings where this fails, we propose a population-based strategy that decomposes the posterior into a sequence of annealed distributions, a new remedy for poor mixing in Energy-based Models. We compare KAEM against VAEs and the neural latent EBM architecture. KAEM attains the best Fréchet Inception Distance among latent-prior models on SVHN and CIFAR10, while sampling in a single forward pass and exposing an interpretable prior built from 1D densities.

Evaluating feature attribution methods represents a critical challenge in explainable AI (XAI), as researchers typically rely on perturbation-based metrics when ground truth is unavailable. However, recent work reveals that these evaluation metrics can show different performance across predicted classes within the same dataset. These "class-dependent evaluation effects" raise questions about whether perturbation analysis reliably measures attribution quality, with direct implications for XAI method development and evaluation trustworthiness. We investigate under which conditions these class-dependent effects arise by conducting controlled experiments with synthetic time series data where ground truth feature locations are known. We systematically vary feature types and class contrasts across binary classification tasks, then compare perturbation-based degradation scores with ground truth-based precision-recall metrics using multiple attribution methods. Our experiments demonstrate that class-dependent effects emerge with both evaluation approaches, even in simple scenarios with temporally localized features, triggered by basic variations in feature amplitude or temporal extent between classes. Most critically, we find that perturbation-based and ground truth metrics frequently yield contradictory assessments of attribution quality across classes, with weak correlations between evaluation approaches. These findings suggest that researchers should interpret perturbation-based metrics with care, as they may not always align with whether attributions correctly identify discriminating features. By showing this disconnect, our work points toward reconsidering what attribution evaluation actually measures and developing more rigorous evaluation methods that capture multiple dimensions of attribution quality.

In end-to-end autonomous driving,the motion prediction plays a pivotal role in ego-vehicle planning. However, existing methods often rely on globally aggregated motion features, ignoring the fact that planning decisions are primarily influenced by a small number of locally interacting agents. Failing to attend to these critical local interactions can obscure potential risks and undermine planning reliability. In this work, we propose FocalAD, a novel end-to-end autonomous driving framework that focuses on critical local neighbors and refines planning by enhancing local motion representations. Specifically, FocalAD comprises two core modules: the Ego-Local-Agents Interactor (ELAI) and the Focal-Local-Agents Loss (FLA Loss). ELAI conducts a graph-based ego-centric interaction representation that captures motion dynamics with local neighbors to enhance both ego planning and agent motion queries. FLA Loss increases the weights of decision-critical neighboring agents, guiding the model to prioritize those more relevant to planning. Extensive experiments show that FocalAD outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on the open-loop nuScenes datasets and closed-loop Bench2Drive benchmark. Notably, on the robustness-focused Adv-nuScenes dataset, FocalAD achieves even greater improvements, reducing the average colilision rate by 41.9% compared to DiffusionDrive and by 15.6% compared to SparseDrive.

Reward modelling from preference data is a crucial step in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values, requiring robust generalisation to novel prompt-response pairs. In this work, we propose to frame this problem in a causal paradigm, providing the rich toolbox of causality to identify the persistent challenges, such as causal misidentification, preference heterogeneity, and confounding due to user-specific factors. Inheriting from the literature of causal inference, we identify key assumptions necessary for reliable generalisation and contrast them with common data collection practices. We illustrate failure modes of naive reward models and demonstrate how causally-inspired approaches can improve model robustness. Finally, we outline desiderata for future research and practices, advocating targeted interventions to address inherent limitations of observational data.

Effective video tokenization is critical for scaling transformer models for long videos. Current approaches tokenize videos using space-time patches, leading to excessive tokens and computational inefficiencies. The best token reduction strategies degrade performance and barely reduce the number of tokens when the camera moves. We introduce grounded video tokenization, a paradigm that organizes tokens based on panoptic sub-object trajectories rather than fixed patches. Our method aligns with fundamental perceptual principles, ensuring that tokenization reflects scene complexity rather than video duration. We propose TrajViT, a video encoder that extracts object trajectories and converts them into semantically meaningful tokens, significantly reducing redundancy while maintaining temporal coherence. Trained with contrastive learning, TrajViT significantly outperforms space-time ViT (ViT3D) across multiple video understanding benchmarks, e.g., TrajViT outperforms ViT3D by a large margin of 6% top-5 recall in average at video-text retrieval task with 10x token deduction. We also show TrajViT as a stronger model than ViT3D for being the video encoder for modern VideoLLM, obtaining an average of 5.2% performance improvement across 6 VideoQA benchmarks while having 4x faster training time and 18x less inference FLOPs. TrajViT is the first efficient encoder to consistently outperform ViT3D across diverse video analysis tasks, making it a robust and scalable solution.

Existing benchmarks for evaluating the clinical reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) often lack a clear definition of "clinical reasoning" as a construct, fail to capture the full breadth of interdependent tasks within a clinical workflow, and rely on stylized vignettes rather than real-world clinical documentation. As a result, recent studies have found significant discrepancies between LLM performance on stylized benchmarks derived from medical licensing exams and their performance in real-world prospective studies. To address these limitations, we introduce ER-Reason, a benchmark designed to evaluate LLM reasoning as clinical evidence accumulates across decision-making tasks spanning the full workflow of emergency medicine. ER-Reason comprises 25,174 de-identified clinical notes from 3,437 patients, supporting evaluation across all stages of the emergency department workflow: triage intake, treatment selection, disposition planning, and final diagnosis. Crucially, evaluation in ER-Reason extends beyond diagnostic accuracy to include stepwise Script Concordance Test (SCT)-style questions grounded in real patient cases, which assess whether LLMs update their diagnostic beliefs in the correct direction and magnitude as clinical evidence accumulates, scored against 2,555 emergency physician annotations. We evaluate reasoning and non-reasoning LLMs on ER-Reason, and show that our tasks provide a more nuanced view of how LLM reasoning fails on real patient cases than existing benchmarks allow.

Effectively managing missing modalities is a fundamental challenge in real-world multimodal learning scenarios, where data incompleteness often results from systematic collection errors or sensor failures. Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE) architectures have the potential to naturally handle multimodal data, with individual experts specializing in different modalities. However, existing SMoE approach often lacks proper ability to handle missing modality, leading to performance degradation and poor generalization in real-world applications. We propose ConfSMoE to introduce a two-stage imputation module to handle the missing modality problem for the SMoE architecture by taking the opinion of experts and reveal the insight of expert collapse from theoretical analysis with strong empirical evidence. Inspired by our theoretical analysis, ConfSMoE propose a novel expert gating mechanism by detaching the softmax routing score to task confidence score w.r.t ground truth signal. This naturally relieves expert collapse without introducing additional load balance loss function. We show that the insights of expert collapse aligns with other gating mechanism such as Gaussian and Laplacian gate. The proposed method is evaluated on four different real world dataset with three distinct experiment settings to conduct comprehensive analysis of ConfSMoE on resistance to missing modality and the impacts of proposed gating mechanism.

We study the problem of selecting a subset from a large action space shared by a family of bandits. In many natural situations, while the nominal set of actions is large, actions are highly correlated: many yield similar rewards across environments, making it wasteful to maintain the full set. Our aim is to understand whether it is possible -- and how -- to select a smaller set of representative actions that performs nearly as well as the full action space. Our main contribution is a surprisingly simple algorithm: repeatedly sample a bandit instance at random, solve it, and collect the optimal action. This algorithm can significantly reduce the action space when such correlations are present, without the need to know a-priori the correlation structure. We provide theoretical guarantees on the performance of the algorithm and demonstrate its practical effectiveness through empirical comparisons with Combinatorial Bandit, Meta Learning Bandit and Zooming baselines.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are typically trained on data mixtures: most data come from web scrapes, while a small portion is curated from high-quality sources with dense domain-specific knowledge. In this paper, we show that when training LLMs on such data mixtures, knowledge acquisition from knowledge-dense datasets, unlike training exclusively on knowledge-dense data (arXiv:2404.05405), does not always follow a smooth scaling law but can exhibit phase transitions with respect to the mixing ratio and model size. Through controlled experiments on a synthetic biography dataset mixed with web-scraped data, we demonstrate that: (1) as we increase the model size to a critical value, the model suddenly transitions from memorizing very few to most of the biographies; (2) below a critical mixing ratio, the model memorizes almost nothing even with extensive training, but beyond this threshold, it rapidly memorizes more biographies. We attribute these phase transitions to a capacity allocation phenomenon: a model with bounded capacity must act like a knapsack problem solver to minimize the overall test loss, and the optimal allocation across datasets can change discontinuously as the model size or mixing ratio varies. We formalize this intuition in an information-theoretic framework and reveal that these phase transitions are predictable, with the critical mixing ratio following a power-law relationship with the model size. Our findings highlight a concrete case where a good mixing recipe for large models may not be optimal for small models, and vice versa.

Editing presentation slides is a frequent yet tedious task, ranging from creative layout design to repetitive text maintenance. While recent GUI-based agents powered by Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) excel at tasks requiring visual perception, such as spatial layout adjustments, they often incur high computational costs and latency when handling structured, text-centric, or batch processing tasks. In this paper, we propose Talk-to-Your-Slides, a high-efficiency slide editing agent that operates via language-driven structured data manipulation rather than relying on the image modality. By leveraging the underlying object model instead of screen pixels, our approach ensures precise content modification while preserving style fidelity, addressing the limitations of OCR-based visual agents. Our system features a hierarchical architecture that effectively bridges high-level user instructions with low-level execution codes. Experiments demonstrate that for text-centric and formatting tasks, our method enables 34% faster processing, achieves 34% better instruction fidelity, and operates at an 87% lower cost compared to GUI-based baselines. Furthermore, we introduce TSBench, a human-verified benchmark dataset comprising 379 instructions, including a Hard subset designed to evaluate robustness against complex and visually dependent queries. Our code and benchmark are available at https://github.com/KyuDan1/Talk-to-Your-Slides.

Retrosynthesis, the process of breaking down a target molecule into simpler precursors through a series of valid reactions, stands at the core of organic chemistry and drug development. Although recent machine learning (ML) research has advanced single-step retrosynthetic modeling and subsequent route searches, these solutions remain restricted by the extensive combinatorial space of possible pathways. Concurrently, large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable chemical knowledge, hinting at their potential to tackle complex decision-making tasks in chemistry. In this work, we explore whether LLMs can successfully navigate the highly constrained, multi-step retrosynthesis planning problem. We introduce an efficient scheme for encoding reaction pathways and present a new route-level search strategy, moving beyond the conventional step-by-step reactant prediction. Through comprehensive evaluations, we show that our LLM-augmented approach excels at retrosynthesis planning and extends naturally to the broader challenge of synthesizable molecular design.

Sliced optimal transport (SOT), or sliced Wasserstein (SW) distance, is widely recognized for its statistical and computational scalability. In this work, we further enhance computational scalability by proposing the first method for estimating SW from sample streams, called streaming sliced Wasserstein (Stream-SW). To define Stream-SW, we first introduce a streaming estimator of the one-dimensional Wasserstein distance (1DW). Since the 1DW has a closed-form expression, given by the integral of the absolute difference between the quantile functions of the compared distributions, we leverage quantile approximation techniques for sample streams to define a streaming 1DW estimator. By applying the streaming 1DW to all projections, we obtain Stream-SW. The key advantage of Stream-SW is its low memory complexity while providing theoretical guarantees on the approximation error. We demonstrate that Stream-SW achieves a more accurate approximation of SW than random subsampling, with lower memory consumption, when comparing Gaussian distributions and mixtures of Gaussians from streaming samples. Additionally, we conduct experiments on point cloud classification, point cloud gradient flows, and streaming change point detection to further highlight the favorable performance of the proposed Stream-SW.

This paper introduces the first globally optimal algorithm for the empirical risk minimization problem of two-layer maxout and ReLU networks, i.e., minimizing the number of misclassifications. The algorithm has a worst-case time complexity of $O\left(N^{DK+1}\right)$, where $K$ denotes the number of hidden neurons and $D$ represents the number of features. It can be can be generalized to accommodate arbitrary computable loss functions without affecting its computational complexity. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm provides provably exact solutions for small-scale datasets. To handle larger datasets, we introduce a novel coreset selection method that reduces the data size to a manageable scale, making it feasible for our algorithm. This extension enables efficient processing of large-scale datasets and achieves significantly improved performance, with a 20-30\% reduction in misclassifications for both training and prediction, compared to state-of-the-art approaches (neural networks trained using gradient descent and support vector machines), when applied to the same models (two-layer networks with fixed hidden nodes and linear models). The artifacts of the Deep-ICE algorithm can be found in https://github.com/XiHegrt/DeepICE-algorithm-artifacts.

The integration of AI into daily life has generated considerable attention and excitement, while also raising concerns about automating algorithmic harms and re-entrenching existing social inequities. While the responsible deployment of trustworthy AI systems is a worthy goal, there are many possible ways to realize it, from policy and regulation to improved algorithm design and evaluation. In fact, since AI trains on social data, there is even a possibility for everyday users, citizens, or workers to directly steer the AI system's behavior through Algorithmic Collective Action, by deliberately modifying the data they share with a platform to drive its learning process in their favor. This paper considers how these grassroots efforts to influence AI interact with methods used by AI firms and governments to improve model trustworthiness. In particular, we focus on the setting where the AI firm deploys a differentially private model, motivated by the growing regulatory focus on privacy and data protection. We investigate how the use of Differentially Private Stochastic Gradient Descent (DP-SGD) affects the collective's ability to influence the learning process. Our findings show that while differential privacy protects individual data, it introduces challenges for effective algorithmic collective action. We establish this trade-off formally by characterizing lower bounds on the success of algorithmic collective action under differential privacy as a function of the collective's size and the firm's privacy parameters. We then verify these trends experimentally by simulating collective action during the training of deep neural network classifiers across several datasets. Finally, we perform a stylized economic analysis of privacy costs to integrate additional incentives, analyzing how utility and participation costs influence the formation of collectives under private training regimes.

Utilizing pre-trained Text-to-Image (T2I) diffusion models to guide Blind Super-Resolution (BSR) has become a predominant approach in the field. While T2I models have traditionally relied on U-Net architectures, recent advancements have demonstrated that Diffusion Transformers (DiT) achieve significantly higher performance in this domain. In this work, we introduce Enhancing Anything Model (EAM), a novel BSR method that leverages DiT and outperforms previous U-Net-based approaches. We introduce a novel block, $Ψ$-DiT, which effectively guides the DiT to enhance image restoration. This block employs a low-resolution latent as a separable flow injection control, forming a triple-flow architecture that effectively leverages the prior knowledge embedded in the pre-trained DiT. To fully exploit the prior guidance capabilities of T2I models and enhance their generalization in BSR, we introduce a progressive Masked Image Modeling strategy, which also reduces training costs. Additionally, we propose a subject-aware prompt generation strategy that employs a robust multi-modal model in an in-context learning framework. This strategy automatically identifies key image areas, provides detailed descriptions, and optimizes the utilization of T2I diffusion priors. Our experiments demonstrate that EAM achieves state-of-the-art results across multiple datasets, outperforming existing methods in both quantitative metrics and visual quality.

Large language models (LLMs) face significant challenges in specialized biomedical tasks due to the inherent complexity of medical reasoning and the sensitive nature of clinical data. Existing LLMs often struggle with intricate medical terminology and the need for accurate clinical insights, leading to performance reduction when quantized for resource-constrained deployment. To address these issues, we propose Quantized Medical Tree of Thought (QM-ToT), a path-based reasoning framework. QM-ToT leverages a Tree of Thought (ToT) reasoning approach to decompose complex medical problems into manageable subtasks, coupled with evaluator assessment layers. This framework facilitates substantial performance improvements in INT4-quantized models on the challenging MedQAUSMLE dataset. Specifically, we demonstrate a remarkable accuracy increase from 34% to 50% for the LLaMA2-70b model and from 58.77% to 69.49% for LLaMA-3.1-8b. Besides, we also proposed an effect data distillation method based on ToT. Compared to the traditional distillation method, we achieved an improvement of 86. 27% while using only 3.9% of the data.This work, for the first time, showcases the potential of ToT to significantly enhance performance on complex biomedical tasks, establishing a crucial foundation for future advances in deploying high-performing quantized LLM in resource-limited medical settings.

Conventional visuomotor imitation learning usually predicts future robot actions directly in the time domain. Such formulations often have limited physical scene awareness and weak long-horizon memory. In contrast, world-model-based perception and memory-augmented policies can improve world awareness with substantial computation overhead. In this work, we propose Wavelet Policy, a lightweight imitation learning framework that combines World Prior Memory (WPM) with wavelet-based multi-scale action modeling. Our key idea is to encode persistent physical scene structure from static background images into compact memory tokens, which are fused into world-prior tokens and injected into the encoder during forward propagation. Based on this memory-conditioned representation, We further perform wavelet-domain decomposition over horizon-aligned latent action tokens and adopt a Single-Encoder Multiple-Decoder (SE2MD) architecture to model latent components at different temporal scales. The resulting latent subbands are reconstructed through inverse wavelet transform and finally projected into executable action chunks. To facilitate efficient world prior learning, we introduce a world-prior adaptation loss, encouraging the background encoder to retain persistent scene knowledge while remaining lightweight and stable. Extensive experiments on four simulated and six real-world robotic manipulation tasks show that Wavelet Policy consistently outperforms strong baselines. These results demonstrate that combining scale-domain action modeling with world-prior memory provides an effective and efficient solution for long-horizon embodied manipulation. We release the source code, data and model checkpoint of simulation task at https://github.com/lurenjia384/Wavelet_Policy.

To address the challenge of insufficient interactivity and behavioral diversity in autonomous driving decision-making, this paper proposes a Cognitive Hierarchical Agent for Reasoning and Motion Stylization (CHARMS). By leveraging Level-k game theory, CHARMS captures human-like reasoning patterns through a two-stage training pipeline comprising reinforcement learning pretraining and supervised fine-tuning. This enables the resulting models to exhibit diverse and human-like behaviors, enhancing their decision-making capacity and interaction fidelity in complex traffic environments. Building upon this capability, we further develop a scenario generation framework that utilizes the Poisson cognitive hierarchy theory to control the distribution of vehicles with different driving styles through Poisson and binomial sampling. Experimental results demonstrate that CHARMS is capable of both making intelligent driving decisions as an ego vehicle and generating diverse, realistic driving scenarios as environment vehicles. The code for CHARMS is released at https://github.com/chuduanfeng/CHARMS.

Automated feature engineering plays a critical role in improving predictive model performance for tabular learning tasks. Traditional automated feature engineering methods are limited by their reliance on pre-defined transformations within fixed, manually designed search spaces, often neglecting domain knowledge. Recent advances using Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled the integration of domain knowledge into the feature engineering process. However, existing LLM-based approaches use direct prompting or rely solely on validation scores for feature selection, failing to leverage insights from prior feature discovery experiments or establish meaningful reasoning between feature generation and data-driven performance. To address these challenges, we propose LLM-FE, a novel framework that combines evolutionary search with the domain knowledge and reasoning capabilities of LLMs to automatically discover effective features for tabular learning tasks. LLM-FE formulates feature engineering as a program search problem, where LLMs propose new feature transformation programs iteratively, and data-driven feedback guides the search process. Our results demonstrate that LLM-FE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, significantly enhancing the performance of tabular prediction models across diverse classification and regression benchmarks. The code is available at: https://github.com/nikhilsab/LLMFE

Backdoor attacks pose a severe threat to deep neural networks (DNNs) by implanting hidden backdoors that can be activated with predefined triggers to manipulate model behaviors maliciously. Recent studies have extended backdoor attacks to 3D point clouds, but most existing triggers are sample-wise and often cause visible geometric artifacts or high optimization cost. To address these limitations, we propose the Stealthy Patch-Wise Backdoor Attack (SPBA), a patch-wise backdoor attack framework for 3D point clouds. Specifically, SPBA decomposes a point cloud into local patches, where each patch is formed by a Farthest Point Sampling (FPS) center and its K-nearest neighbors (KNN). Candidate patches are ranked using a patch imperceptibility score derived from local curvature variation, and a unified spectral trigger is injected into the selected patches by perturbing only the coordinates of existing points while preserving the original point cardinality. Extensive experiments on ModelNet40 and ShapeNetPart further demonstrate that SPBA achieves state-of-the-art stealthiness among prior methods and reduces spectral-trigger computation by 98.43% relative to a sample-wise spectral baseline, while maintaining competitive attack performance. These results support localized spectral design as an effective and efficient approach to stealthy backdoor attacks in 3D point cloud models. Code is available at https://github.com/HazardFY/SPBA.

As the quantities of data recorded by embedded edge sensors grow, so too does the need for intelligent local processing. Such data often comes in the form of time-series signals, based on which real-time predictions can be made locally using an AI model. However, a hardware-software approach capable of making low-latency predictions with low power consumption is required. In this paper, we present a hardware implementation of an event-graph neural network for time-series classification. We leverage an artificial cochlea model to convert the input time-series signals into a sparse event-data format that allows the event-graph to drastically reduce the number of calculations relative to other AI methods. We implemented the design on a SoC FPGA and applied it to the real-time processing of the Spiking Heidelberg Digits (SHD) dataset to benchmark our approach against competitive solutions. Our method achieves a floating-point accuracy of 92.7% on the SHD dataset for the base model, which is only 2.4% and 2% less than the state-of-the-art models with over 10% and 67% fewer model parameters, respectively. It also outperforms FPGA-based spiking neural network implementations by 19.3% and 4.5%, achieving 92.3% accuracy for the quantised model while using fewer computational resources and reducing latency.