With the growing prevalence of always-on hardware such as smart glasses, body cameras, and home security systems, life-logging visual sensing is becoming inevitable, forming the backbone of persistent, always-on AI systems. Meanwhile, recent advances in proactive agents and world models signal a fundamental shift from episodic, prompt-driven tools to next-generation AI systems that continuously perceive and react to the physical world. Although life-logging video streams can substantially improve utility of these promising systems, they also introduce significant privacy risks by revealing sensitive information, such as behavioral patterns, emotional states, and social interactions, beyond what isolated images expose. If unresolved, these risks may undermine public trust and hinder the sustainable development of always-on AI technologies. Existing privacy protections are either attack-specific or incur substantial utility loss, and fail to consider the entire data exploitation pipeline. We therefore posit that the privacy-utility trade-off in life-logging video streams is a foundational challenge for next-generation AI systems that demands further investigation. We call for novel pipeline-aware privacy-preserving designs that jointly optimize utility and privacy for long-horizon life-logging visual data. In parallel, formal privacy leakage metrics and standardized benchmarks remain important open directions for future research.

Efficient branching policies are essential for accelerating Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) solvers. Their design has long relied on hand-crafted heuristics, and now machine learning has emerged as a promising paradigm to automate this process. However, existing learning-based methods are often hindered by their dependence on expensive expert demonstrations and the gap between training objectives and the solver's end-to-end performance. In this work, we propose LLM4Branch, a novel framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate the discovery of efficient branching policies. Specifically, the discovered policy is an executable program with a program skeleton generated by the LLM and a parameter vector, which is optimized via a zeroth-order method over a few instances with their end-to-end performance feedback. Extensive experiments on standard MILP benchmarks demonstrate that LLM4Branch establishes a new state-of-the-art among CPU-based methods and achieves performance competitive with advanced GPU-based models. Codes are available at https://github.com/hzn18/LLM4Branch.

Visual anomaly detection (VAD) is crucial in many real-world fields, such as industrial inspection, medical imaging, infrastructure monitoring, and remote sensing. However, the specific anomaly definitions, data modalities, and annotation standards across different domains make it difficult to transfer single-domain trained VAD models. Vision-language models (VLMs), pre-trained on large-scale cross-domain data, can perform visual perception under task instructions, offering a promising solution for cross-domain VAD. However, single-inference VLM judgments are unreliable, since they rely more on prior knowledge than on normal-sample references or fine-grained feature evidence. We therefore present AnomalyClaw, a training-free VAD agent that turns anomaly judgment into a multi-round refutation process. In each round, the agent proposes candidate anomalies and refutes each against normal-sample references, drawing on a 13-tool library for visual verification, reference parsing, and frozen expert probing. On the CrossDomainVAD-12 benchmark (12 datasets), AnomalyClaw achieves consistent macro-AUROC improvements over single-step direct inference with +6.23 pp on GPT-5.5, +7.93 pp on Seed2.0-lite, and +3.52 pp on Qwen3.5-VL-27B. We further introduce an optional verbalized self-evolution extension. It builds an online rulebook from internal-branch disagreement without oracle labels. On Qwen3.5-VL-27B, it delivers a +2.09 pp mean gain, comparable to a K = 10 oracle-label supervised baseline (+1.99 pp). These results show that agentic refutation improve anomaly understanding and reasoning of VLMs, rather than merely aggregating tool outputs.

Neural networks have proved an effective means of learning control policies for autonomous systems, but these learned policies are difficult to understand due to the black-box nature of neural networks. This lack of interpretability makes safety assurance for such autonomous systems challenging. The fields of eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) and eXplainable Reinforcement Learning (XRL) aim to interpret the decision making processes of neural networks and autonomous agents, respectively. In particular, work on causal explanations aims to provide "why" and "why not" explanations for why a model made a given decision. However, most of the work on explainability to date utilises a distilled version of the original model. While this distilled policy is interpretable, it necessarily degrades in performance significantly when compared to the original model, and is not guaranteed to be an accurate reflection of the decision making processes in the original model and as such cannot be used to guarantee its safety. Recent work on understanding the geometry of ReLU neural networks shows that a ReLU network corresponds to a piecewise linear function divided into regions defined by an n-dimensional convex polytope. Through this lens, a neural network can be understood as dividing the input space into distinct regions which apply a single linear function for each output neuron. We show that this geometric representation can be used to generate causal explanations for the network's behaviour similar to previous work, but which extracts rules directly from the geometry of Neural Networks with the ReLU activation function, and is therefore an accurate reflection of the network's behaviour.

The detection of sensational content in media items can be a critical filtering mechanism for identifying check-worthy content and flagging potential disinformation, since such content triggers physiological arousal that often bypasses critical evaluation and accelerates viral sharing. In this paper we introduce the task of sensational image detection, which aims to determine whether an image contains shocking, provocative, or emotionally charged features to grab attention and trigger strong emotional responses. To support research on this task, we create a new benchmark dataset (called Sens-VisualNews) that contains 9,576 images from news items, annotated based on the (in-)existence of various sensational concepts and events in their visual content. Finally, using Sens-VisualNews, we study the prompt sensitivity, performance and robustness of a wide range of open SotA Multimodal LLMs, across both zero-shot and fine-tuned settings.

The counting power of Message Passing Neural Networks (MPNN) has been the subject of many recent papers, showing that they can express logic that involves counting up to a threshold or more generally satisfy a linear arithmetic constraint. In this paper, we study the counting capabilities of MPNN beyond linear arithmetic, primarily utilising local and global mean aggregations. In particular, our goal is to tease out conditions required to express extensions of graded modal logic with polynomial counting constraints. We show that global polynomial counting constraints in node-labelled graphs can be checked using mean MPNN under mild assumptions. Checking local constraints is also possible, if we consider formulas with no nested modalities and additionally either (i) permit sum/max aggregations, or (ii) only restrict to regular graphs. We also show how formulas with nested modalities can be captured by mean MPNN over graphs with tree-like structures and similar assumptions.

We introduce Phoenix-VL 1.5 Medium, a 123B-parameter natively multimodal and multilingual foundation model, adapted to regional languages and the Singapore context. Developed as a sovereign AI asset, it demonstrates that deep domain adaptation can be achieved with minimal degradation to broad-spectrum intelligence and alignment. Continued pretraining was performed on Mistral Medium 3.1 using a localized 1-trillion tokens multimodal corpus, followed by a 250-billion tokens long-context extension phase. Subsequent post-training incorporated a novel human-annotated Singapore multimodal dataset and curated textual corpus on Singapore culture, knowledge, and legislation, totaling 22-billion tokens. An additional 5 billion tokens of model alignment was performed through Online Direct Preference Optimization. Phoenix-VL 1.5 Medium achieves state-of-the-art performance for its size on Singapore multimodal, legal, and government policy benchmarks while remaining globally competitive on general multimodal intelligence, multilingual, and STEM benchmarks. We also introduce a novel evaluation suite encompassing localized knowledge benchmarks and an institutionally aligned model behavior and safety framework. We report the data curation principles, training methodology, and highlight benchmark and inference performance.

End to end (E2E) autonomous driving trajectory prediction is often trained with camera frames sampled at the highest available temporal frequency, assuming that denser sampling improves performance. We question this assumption by treating temporal sampling frequency as an explicit training set design variable. Starting from high frequency E2E driving datasets, we construct frequency sweep training sets by temporally subsampling camera frames along each trajectory. For each model dataset pair, we train and evaluate the same model under a fixed protocol, so the frequency response reflects how prediction performance changes with sampling frequency. We analyze this response from a capacity aware perspective. Sparse sampling may miss driving relevant cues, while dense sampling may add redundant visual content and off manifold noise. For finite capacity models, this can create a driving irrelevant capacity burden. We evaluate three smaller E2E models and a larger VLA style AutoVLA model on Waymo, nuScenes, and PAVE. Results show model and dataset dependent frequency responses. Smaller E2E models often show non monotonic or near plateau trends and achieve their best 3 second ADE at lower or intermediate frequencies. In contrast, AutoVLA achieves its best 3 second ADE and FDE at the highest evaluated frequency on all three datasets. Iteration matched controls suggest that the advantage of lower or intermediate frequencies for smaller models is not explained only by unequal training update counts. These findings show that temporal sampling frequency should be reported and tuned, rather than fixed to the highest available value.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly integrated into autonomous driving (AD) systems; however, they remain vulnerable to diverse safety threats, particularly in accident-prone scenarios. Recent safeguard mechanisms have shown promise by incorporating logical constraints, yet most rely on static formulations that lack temporally grounded safety reasoning over evolving traffic interactions, resulting in limited robustness in dynamic driving environments. To address these limitations, we propose GuardAD, a model-agnostic safeguard that formulates AD safety as an evolving Markovian logical state. GuardAD introduces Neuro-Symbolic Logic Formalization, which represents safety predicates over heterogeneous traffic participants and continuously induces them via n-th order Markovian Logic Induction. This design enables the inference of emerging and latent hazards beyond single-step observations. Rather than simply vetoing unsafe actions, GuardAD performs Logic-Driven Action Revision, where inferred safety states actively guide action refinement without modifying the underlying MLLM. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks and AD-MLLMs demonstrate that GuardAD substantially reduces accident rates (-32.07%) while slightly improving task performance (+6.85%). Moreover, closed-loop simulation evaluations, together with physical-world vehicle studies, further validate the effectiveness and potential of GuardAD.

Agentic artificial intelligence (AI) is a natural fit for Internet of Things (IoT) and edge systems, but edge deployments are often constrained to models around 8 billion parameters or smaller. An important question is: How much agentic-task quality is lost when model size is constrained by memory, power, and latency budgets? To address this question, in this paper, we provide an initial empirical study considering edge-focused model scaling, general-purpose versus coder-oriented model effects, and tool-enabled execution under a fixed protocol. We introduce a domain-conditioned evaluation methodology, an implementation-grounded analysis of model-tool interactions, practical guidance for model selection under constraints, and an analysis of failure modes that reveals distinct semantic versus execution failure patterns across model families. Our core finding is that edge-agent quality is not a simple function of parameter count. Robust deployment depends on the joint design of model choice and tool workflow. Domain-conditioned analysis reveals Pareto fronts in the accuracy-latency space that can guide strategy selection based on operational priorities.

LLM-based agents deliver state-of-the-art performance across tasks but incur high end-to-end latency on edge devices. We introduce Agent-X, a software-only, accuracy-preserving framework that accelerates both the prefill and decode stages of on-device agent workloads. Agent-X's two key components rewrite prompts to leverage prefix caching tailored to agent-specific input-token patterns and enable LLM-free speculative decoding for fast token generation with minimal overhead. On representative agentic workloads, Agent-X achieves a 1.61x end-to-end speedup in real systems with no accuracy loss and can be seamlessly integrated into existing on-device AI agents. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first to systematically characterize and eliminate latency bottlenecks in on-device agents.

Large language models (LLMs) have become capable mathematical problem-solvers, often producing correct proofs for challenging problems. However, correctness alone is not sufficient: mathematical proofs should also be clear, concise, insightful, and transferable to other problems. While this proof quality is subjective and depends on the reader and context, many of its components are concrete and broadly valued. In this work, we identify such components and introduce ProofRank, a benchmark curated from challenging mathematical competitions. ProofRank evaluates several scalable proxies of proof quality: (i) conciseness, measuring whether proofs avoid unnecessary steps; (ii) computational ease, measuring the extent to which a proof relies on tedious calculations; (iii) cognitive simplicity, measuring how accessible the used proof techniques are; (iv) diversity, measuring how varied a model's proofs for a single problem are; and (v) adaptivity, measuring whether a model can follow a specified proof technique. Across models, we find substantial differences in proof quality that are not captured by correctness-only benchmarks. We also observe significant trade-offs between proof-quality metrics and correctness, suggesting that future evaluations of mathematical reasoning should measure how useful LLM-generated proofs are.

Cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning often assumes a fixed execution team, yet many decentralized systems must operate with varying numbers of active agents during deployment. We study this setting under episodic roster variation: each episode is executed by a set of homogeneous agents, with the team size varying across episodes. Agents act only from local histories, without execution-time communication, privileged coordinators, or online retraining. Therefore, effective cooperation requires each agent to recover relevant context about the active team and adapt its behavior accordingly. To this end, we propose PC3D (Personalized Central Coordination Context Distillation), a method for training decentralized policies to recover and use personalized coordination context from local interaction histories. During training, a set-structured centralized teacher compresses the active team into coordination tokens and personalizes them into agent-specific contexts, which are distilled into decentralized policies. At execution, each agent predicts its own context from local history and adaptively uses it to condition decision-making. Across three cooperative MARL benchmarks, PC3D achieves higher returns than the evaluated baselines with both seen and unseen roster sizes, and ablations attribute these gains to both context distillation and adaptive context use.

Underwater images captured by Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) are inevitably affected by artificial light sources, which often produce halos in the foreground of the camera and seriously interfere with the quality of the image. The existing underwater image enhancement methods fail to fully consider this key problem, and the robustness of processing images under artificial light scenes is poor. In practical applications, since underwater image enhancement itself is a very challenging task, the influence of artificial light sources will lead to serious degradation of image performance and affect subsequent vision tasks. In order to effectively deal with this problem, this paper designs a single halo image correction method based on an iterative structure. The network is mainly divided into two sub-networks, one is the halo layer separation sub-network which aims to separate the halo by gradient minimization, and the other is the multi-scale recovery sub-network which aims to recover the image information masked by halo. The UIEB and EUVP synthetic datasets are used for training to ensure that the network can fully learn the characteristics and laws of underwater halo images. Then a large number of halo images taken in an underwater environment with real artificial light are collected for testing. In addition, the brightness distribution characteristics of underwater halo images are analyzed and the radial gradient is introduced to constraint eliminate halo to improve the effect of underwater image restoration.

Scientific knowledge on the Web is published as passive assertions and cannot decide when to validate evidence, reconcile contradictions, or update confidence as findings accumulate. Curation depends on centralised middleware and institutional continuity, but when registries close, active stewardship stops even when data remain online. We advance the concept of Autonomous FAIR Digital Objects (aFDOs) from an abstract idea to an operational model, to offer a route from passive scientific publication toward accountable, standards-aligned automation that can outlive its publishing institutions. aFDO augments FDOs with three capabilities anchored in Semantic Web standards, namely 1) a policy layer over RDF-star aligned with PROV-O, SHACL, and ODRL for portable condition-action rules, 2) an announcement layer over ActivityStreams 2.0 that bounds per-announcement evaluation cost, and 3) an agreement layer that resolves multi-source contradictions through reputation and confidence weighted agreement under a bounded adversarial model. We provide a formal definition that distinguishes policy specifications, event handlers, and communication interfaces. We evaluate an open reference implementation on 4,305 FDOs grounded in rare-disease ontologies, namely ClinVar, HPO, and Orphanet, combined with controlled synthetic observations. The consensus mechanism resolves 56.3% of 3,914 naturally occurring ClinVar conflicts where multiple submitters disagree and an expert panel has subsequently adjudicated. Under Sybil, collusion, and poisoning attacks, the mechanism degrades gracefully within its design Byzantine-tolerance bound (f < n/5), and fails as predicted beyond that bound.

Graph reasoning agents operating from natural-language inputs must solve a coupled problem: they must reconstruct a structured graph instance from text, decide whether existing computational assets are sufficient, interact with tools under a strict execution protocol, and satisfy an external verifier that checks structured correctness rather than textual plausibility. Existing approaches usually improve either the instruction side or the tool side in isolation, which leaves unclear what should be updated after failure. We propose EGL-SCA, a verifier-centric dual-space framework that models a graph reasoning agent using two collaborative components: an instruction-side policy space for reasoning strategies, and a tool-side program space for executable algorithmic tools. Our central mechanism is structural credit assignment, which maps trajectory evidence to conditional updates, precisely routing failures to either prompt optimization or tool synthesis and repair. To provide sufficient learning signals for dual-space adaptation, we introduce a training distribution stratified by task family, coupled with a Pareto-style retention strategy to balance success, generality, and parsimony. Experiments on four graph reasoning benchmarks show that EGL-SCA achieves a state-of-the-art 92.0\% average success rate. By effectively co-evolving instructions and tools, our framework significantly outperforms both pure-prompting and fixed-toolbox baselines.

Autonomous agents have rapidly matured as task executors and seen widespread deployment via harnesses such as OpenClaw. Safety concerns have rightly drawn growing research attention, and beneath them lie the values silently steering agent behavior. Existing value benchmarks, however, remain confined to LLMs, leaving agent values largely uncharted. From intuitive, empirical, and theoretical vantage points, we show that an agent's values diverge from those of its underlying LLM, and the agentic modality further introduces dataset-, evaluation-, and system-level challenges absent from text-only protocols. We close this gap with Agent-ValueBench, the first benchmark dedicated to agent values. It features 394 executable environments across 16 domains, offering 4,335 value-conflict tasks that cover 28 value systems and 332 dimensions. Every instance is co-synthesized through our purpose-built end-to-end pipeline and curated per-instance by professional psychologists. Each task ships with two pole-aligned golden trajectories whose checkpoints anchor a trajectory-level rubric-based judge. Benchmarking 14 frontier proprietary and open-weights models across 4 mainstream harnesses, we uncover three concerted findings. Agent values first manifest as a Value Tide of cross-model homogeneity beneath interpretable counter-currents. This tide bends non-additively under harness pull, and yet more decisively under deliberate steering via embedded skills. Together these results signal that the agent-alignment lever is shifting from classical model alignment and prompt steering toward harness alignment and skill steering.

Training AI models for computational pathology currently requires access to expensive whole-slide-image datasets, GPU infrastructure, deep expertise in machine learning, and substantial engineering effort. We present CellDX AI Autopilot, a platform that lets users -- from pathologists with no ML background to ML practitioners running many parallel experiments -- train, evaluate, and deploy whole-slide image classifiers through natural language interaction with an AI agent. The platform provides a structured set of agent skills that guide the user through dataset curation, automated hyperparameter tuning, multi-strategy model comparison, and human-in-the-loop deployment, all on a pre-built dataset of over 32,000 cases and 66,000 H&E-stained whole-slide images with pre-extracted features. We describe the agent skill architecture, the underlying Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) training framework supporting four classification strategies, and an iterative pairwise hyperparameter search (grid or seeded random) that reduces tuning cost by over 30x compared to exhaustive search. CellDX AI Autopilot is, to our knowledge, the first system to expose pathology-specialized agent skills and a pathology-specialized training platform to general-purpose AI agents (e.g. any LLM-based agent runtime), delivering end-to-end automated model training without requiring the agent itself to be domain-specific. The platform addresses both the ML-expertise bottleneck that limits adoption in diagnostic pathology and the engineering bottleneck that limits how many experiments a researcher can run cost-effectively.

Reliable inference requires that artificial intelligence (AI) models provide trustworthy uncertainty estimates, not merely accurate predictions. Recent advances in Bayesian learning have made significant progress toward this goal, and growing concerns about computational overhead have jointly shifted the design criterion from reliability alone to the co-design of reliability and efficiency, i.e., reducing computational overhead while preserving trustworthy uncertainty quantification. This thesis develops a unified framework from two perspectives to address the central question: can we efficiently perform reliable inference?

Annotating bounding boxes is costly and limits the scalability of object detection. This challenge is compounded by the need to preserve high accuracy while minimizing manual effort in real-world applications. Prior active learning methods often depend on model features or modify detector internals and training schedules, increasing integration overhead. Moreover, they rarely jointly exploit the benefits of image-level signals, class-imbalance cues, and instance-level uncertainty for comprehensive selection. We present Portable Active Learning (PAL), a detector-agnostic, easily portable framework that operates solely on inference outputs. PAL combines class-wise instance uncertainty with image-level diversity to guide data selection. At each round, PAL trains lightweight class-specific logistic classifiers to distinguish true from false positives, producing entropy-based uncertainty scores for proposals. Candidate images are then refined using global image entropy, class diversity, and image similarity, yielding batches that are both informative and diverse. PAL requires no changes to model internals or training pipelines, ensuring broad compatibility across detectors. Extensive experiments on COCO, PASCAL VOC, and BDD100K demonstrate that PAL consistently improves label efficiency and detection accuracy compared to existing active learning baselines, making it a practical solution for scalable and cost-effective deployment of object detection in real-world settings.

Geometric differences between cross-view images, such as drone and satellite views, significantly increase the challenge of Cross-View Geo-Localization (CVGL), which aims to acquire the geolocation of images by image retrieval. To further enhance the CVGL performance, this paper proposes a parameter-efficient adaptation framework for bridging the geometric gap across images based on the vision foundation model (VFM) (e.g., DINOv3), termed BGG. BGG not only effectively leverages the general visual representations of VFM and captures the robust and consistent features from cross-view images, but also utilizes the generalization capabilities of the VFM, significantly improving the CVGL performance. It mainly contains a Multi-granularity Feature Enhancement Adapter (MFEA) and a Frequency-Aware Structural Aggregation (FASA) module. Specifically, MFEA enhances the scale adaptability and viewpoint robustness of features by multi-level dilated convolutions, effectively bridging the cross-view geometric gap with small training costs. Additionally, considering the [CLS] token lacks spatial details for precise image retrieval and localization, the FASA module modulates patch tokens in the frequency domain and performs adaptive aggregation for local structural feature enhancement. Finally, BGG fuses the enhanced local features with the [CLS] token for more accurate CVGL. Extensive experiments on University-1652 and SUES-200 datasets demonstrate that BGG has significant advantages over other methods and achieves state-of-the-art localization performance with low training costs.

Streaming video understanding demands more than watching longer videos: assistants must decide when to speak in real time, balancing responsiveness against verbosity. Yet most video-language models (VideoLLMs) are trained for offline inference, and existing streaming benchmarks externalize this timing decision to the evaluator. We address this gap with RealStreamEval, a frame-level multi-turn evaluation protocol that exposes models to sequential observations and penalizes unnecessary responses. Under this protocol, we observed that strong offline VideoLLMs retain useful visual understanding but lack an interaction policy for deciding when to respond. Motivated by this observation, we propose EvoStreaming, a self-evolved streaming adaptation framework in which the base model itself acts as data generator, relevance annotator, and roll-out policy to synthesize streaming trajectories without external supervision. With only $1{,}000$ self-generated samples ($139\times$ less than the leading streaming instruction-tuning approach) and no architectural changes, EvoStreaming consistently improves the overall RealStreamEval score by up to $10.8$ points across five open VideoLLM backbones (Qwen2/2.5/3-VL, InternVL-3.5, MiniCPM-V4.5) while largely preserving offline video performance. These results suggest that data-efficient interaction tuning is a practical path for adapting existing VideoLLMs to streaming assistants.

A LaTeX manuscript that compiles without error is not necessarily publication-ready. The resulting PDFs frequently suffer from misplaced floats, overflowing equations, inconsistent table scaling, widow and orphan lines, and poor page balance, forcing authors into repetitive compile-inspect-edit cycles. Rule-based tools are blind to rendered visuals, operating only on source code and log files. Text-only LLMs perform open-loop text editing, unable to predict or verify the two-dimensional layout consequences of their changes. Reliable typesetting optimization therefore requires a visual closed loop with verification after every edit. We formalize this problem as Visual Typesetting Optimization (VTO), the task of transforming a compilable LaTeX paper into a visually polished, page-budget-compliant PDF through iterative visual verification and source-level revision, and introduce a five-category taxonomy of typesetting defects to guide diagnosis. We present PaperFit, a vision-in-the-loop agent that iteratively renders pages, diagnoses defects, and applies constrained repairs. To benchmark VTO, we construct PaperFit-Bench with 200 papers across 10 venue templates and 13 defect types at different difficulty. Extensive experiments show that PaperFit outperforms all baselines by a large margin, establishing that bridging the gap from compilable source to publication-ready PDF requires vision-in-the-loop optimization and that VTO constitutes a critical missing stage in the document automation pipeline.

The advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has enabled their application in personalized dialogue systems. We present an extended annotation scheme for personal fact classification that addresses limitations in existing approaches, particularly PeaCoK. Our scheme introduces new categories (Demographics, Possessions) and attributes (Duration, Validity, Followup) that enable structured storage, quality filtering, and identification of facts suitable for dialogue continuation. We manually annotated 2,779 facts from Multi-Session Chat and trained a multi-head classifier based on transformer encoders. Combined with the Gemma-300M encoder, the classifier achieves $81.6 \pm 2.6$\% macro F1, outperforming all few-shot LLM baselines (best: GPT-5.4-mini, 72.92\%) by nearly 9 percentage points while requiring substantially fewer computational resources. Error analysis reveals persistent challenges in semantic boundary disambiguation, temporal aspect interpretation, and pragmatic reasoning for followup assessment. The dataset\footnotemark[1] and classifier\footnotemark[2] are publicly available.

Intracranial electrocorticography (ECoG) offers high-signal-to-noise access to cortical activity for brain-computer interfaces, yet limited per-patient data has led most prior work to rely on small, subject-specific decoders that neglect information shared across patients. We investigate whether large pretrained scalp-EEG foundation models (EEG FMs) can be adapted to ECoG, enabling cross-patient learning and competitive decoding performance while calibrating to a held-out patient in 10-30 minutes on a single GPU. We introduce CORTEG, a cross-modality transfer framework that combines a pretrained EEG FM backbone, an electrode-aware KNNSoftFourier spatial adapter, a dual-stream tokenizer for low-frequency and high-gamma activity, and a leave-one-subject-out fine-tuning strategy. We evaluate CORTEG on two challenging regression tasks: public finger trajectory regression (n=9) and private audio envelope regression (n=16). CORTEG matches or exceeds the strongest task-specific baselines on both tasks: it reaches the highest mean correlation among compared methods on the public finger benchmark (gain not statistically significant on n=9 subjects), with larger and statistically significant gains on the audio task and in low-data per-patient calibration. Feature analyses align with neurophysiology, and latent manifolds capture low-dimensional finger-movement structure. CORTEG provides systematic evidence that scalp-EEG pretraining can be repurposed for ECoG decoding, enabling data-efficient intracranial BCIs that can adapt to new patients.

Adaptive optimizers, most notably Adam, have become the default standard for training large-scale neural networks such as Transformers. These methods maintain running estimates of gradient first and second moments, incurring substantial memory overhead. We introduce PowerStep, a memory-efficient optimizer that achieves coordinate-wise adaptivity without storing second-moment statistics. Motivated by steepest descent under an $\ell_p$-norm geometry, we show that applying a nonlinear transform directly to a momentum buffer yields coordinate-wise adaptivity. We prove that PowerStep converges at the optimal $O(1/\sqrt{T})$ rate for non-convex stochastic optimization. Extensive experiments on Transformer models ranging from 124M to 235B parameters demonstrate that PowerStep matches Adam's convergence speed while halving optimizer memory. Furthermore, when combined with aggressive \texttt{int8} quantization, PowerStep remains numerically stable and reduces optimizer memory by $\sim\!8\times$ compared to full-precision Adam. PowerStep thus provides a principled, scalable and resource-efficient alternative for large-scale training. Code is available at https://github.com/yaolubrain/PowerStep.

Recent deepfake detection methods demonstrate improved cross-dataset generalization, yet the underlying mechanisms remain underexplored. We introduce the Alpha Blending Hypothesis, positing that state-of-the-art frame-based detectors primarily function as alpha blending searchers; rather than learning semantic anomalies or specific generative neural fingerprints, they localize low-level compositing artifacts introduced during the integration of manipulated faces into target frames. We experimentally validate the hypothesis, demonstrating that deepfake detectors exhibit high sensitivity to the so-called self-blended images (SBI) and non-generative manipulations. We propose the method BlenD that leverages a large-scale, diverse dataset of real-only facial images augmented with SBI. This approach achieves the best average cross-dataset generalization on 15 compositional deepfake datasets released between 2019 and 2025 without utilizing explicitly generated deepfakes during training. Furthermore, we show that predictions from explicit blending searchers and models resilient to blending shortcuts are highly complementary, yielding a state-of-the-art AUROC of 94.0% in an ensemble configuration. The code with experiments and the trained model will be publicly released.

Embodied agents can benefit from skills that guide object search, action execution, and state changes across diverse environments. Since embodied environments vary across layouts, object states, and other execution factors, these skills must self-evolve from trajectories generated during task execution. However, existing skill self-evolution methods are mainly developed in digital environments and often convert trajectories into coarse skill updates. Directly applying this paradigm to embodied settings is problematic, because a failed task execution may reflect not only incorrect skill content, but also an execution lapse in which the agent fails to follow valid guidance. We propose EmbodiSkill, a training-free framework for embodied skill self-evolution through skill-aware reflection and targeted revision. EmbodiSkill interprets each trajectory with respect to the current skill, uses skill-changing evidence to update the skill body, and uses execution-lapse evidence to preserve and emphasize valid guidance. Experiments on ALFWorld and EmbodiedBench show that EmbodiSkill consistently improves embodied task success. On ALFWorld, EmbodiSkill enables a frozen Qwen3.5-27B executor to reach 93.28% task success, outperforming GPT-5.2 used as a direct agent without skills by 31.58%. These results show that skill-aware self-evolution helps embodied agents accumulate reusable procedural knowledge from their own trajectories.

Layered image assets are widely used in real-world creative workflows, enabling non-destructive iteration and flexible re-composition. Recent advances in layered image generation and decomposition synthesize or recover layered representations, yet controllable editing of layered images remains challenging. Manual editing requires careful coordination across layers to maintain consistent illumination and contact, while AI-based pipelines collapse layers into a flattened image for editing, then decompose them again, introducing background-to-foreground leakage and unstable transparency. To address these limitations, we propose LimeCross, a training-free context-conditioned layered image editing framework that edits user-selected RGBA layers according to text while keeping the remaining layers unchanged. It leverages contextual cues from other layers using a bi-stream attention mechanism to preserve cross-layer consistency, while explicitly maintaining layer integrity to prevent the contamination of edited layers. To evaluate our approach, we introduce LayerEditBench, a benchmark of 1500 layered scenes with paired source/target prompts, along with evaluation protocols that assess both edit fidelity and alpha channel stability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LimeCross improves layer purity and composite realism over strong editing baselines, establishing context-conditioned layered editing as a principled framework for controllable generative creation.

Large language models (LLMs) allow users to query databases using natural language by translating questions into executable queries. Despite strong progress on tasks such as Text2SQL, Text2SPARQL, and Text2Cypher, most existing methods focus on better prompting, fine-tuning, or iterative refinement. However, they often do not explicitly enforce structural constraints, such as syntactic validity and schema consistency. This can reduce reliability, since generated queries must satisfy both syntax rules and database schema constraints to be executable. In this work, we study how structured constraints can be used in test-time inference for Text2Cypher. We focus on post-generation validation to improve query correctness. We extend a confidence-based inference framework with a sequential filtering process that combines confidence scoring, grammar validation, and schema constraints before final aggregation. This lets us analyze how different constraint types affect generated queries. Our experiments with two instruction-tuned models show that grammar-based filtering improves syntactic validity. Schema-aware filtering further improves execution quality by enforcing consistency with the database structure. However, stronger filtering also increases the number of empty predictions and reduces execution coverage. Overall, we show that adding simple structural checks at test time improves the reliability of Text2Cypher generation, and we provide a clearer view of how syntax and schema constraints contribute differently.