Accurately modeling and designing protein complex structures is a central problem in computational structural biology, with broad implications for understanding cellular function and developing therapeutics. This thesis investigates two fundamental aspects of this problem using deep learning: domain-specific architectures that capture the hierarchical nature of protein structures, and search algorithms that efficiently navigate the vast sequence spaces of protein complexes to identify interacting homologs for improving complex structure prediction and to design protein sequences.

Auto-regressive decoding in Large Language Models (LLMs) is inherently memory-bound: every generation step requires loading the model weights and intermediate results from memory (e.g., High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) for GPU servers), making throughput bottlenecked by memory bandwidth rather than compute. Speculative decoding addresses this by enabling parallel verification of multiple draft tokens, effectively amortizing the cost of each target-model call. However, existing speculative decoding methods are designed under the assumption that HBM is sufficiently large to hold both the target model and an auxiliary draft model simultaneously -- an assumption that breaks down on memory-constrained devices such as edge platforms with limited DRAM. We analyze the inference bottleneck in this memory-limited regime and propose CATS, a self-speculative decoding framework that conducts cascaded verification and correction based on the memory budget and parameter offloading patterns on memory-limited devices. This design maximizes token acceptance rate and end-to-end speedup while keeping the peak memory footprint on the device equal to that of the target model alone. We evaluate CATS on different models across five benchmarks on real edge devices. CATS can achieve a wall-clock speedup of up to 5.08x with no degradation in generation quality, outperforming the SOTA method by up to 1.45x under edge memory constraints.

The recent empirical success of the Muon optimizer has renewed interest in non-Euclidean optimization, typically justified by similarities with second-order methods, and linear minimization oracle (LMO) theory. In this paper, we challenge this geometric narrative through three contributions, demonstrating that precise geometric structure is not the key factor affecting optimization performance. First, we introduce Freon, a family of optimizers based on Schatten (quasi-)norms, powered by a novel, provably optimal QDWH-based iterative approximation. Freon naturally interpolates between SGD and Muon, while smoothly extrapolating into the quasi-norm regime. Empirically, the best-performing Schatten parameters for GPT-2 lie strictly within the quasi-norm regime, and thus cannot be represented by any unitarily invariant LMO. Second, noting that Freon performs well across a wide range of exponents, we introduce Kaon, an absurd optimizer that replaces singular values with random noise. Despite lacking any coherent geometric structure, Kaon matches Muon's performance and retains classical convergence guarantees, proving that strict adherence to a precise geometry is practically irrelevant. Third, having shown that geometry is not the primary driver of performance, we demonstrate it is instead controlled by two local quantities: alignment and descent potential. Ultimately, each optimizer must tune its step size around these two quantities. While their dynamics are difficult to predict a-priori, evaluating them within a stochastic random feature model yields a precise insight: Muon succeeds not by tracking an ideal global geometry, but by guaranteeing step-size optimality.

Neural Sheaf Diffusion (NSD) generalizes diffusion-based Graph Neural Networks by replacing scalar graph Laplacians with sheaf Laplacians whose learned restriction maps define a task-adapted geometry. While the diffusion limit of NSD is known to be the space of global sections, the representation-theoretic structure of this harmonic space remains largely implicit. We develop a quiver-theoretic interpretation of NSD by identifying cellular sheaves on graphs with representations of the associated incidence quiver. Under this correspondence, learned sheaf geometries become points in a finite-dimensional representation space. We show that direct-sum decompositions of the underlying incidence-quiver representation induce decompositions of the harmonic space reached in the diffusion limit. This gives an algebraic interpretation of oversmoothing as representation degeneration: learned sheaves may collapse toward low-complexity summands whose global sections fail to preserve discriminative information. Building on this viewpoint, we connect sheaf diffusion to stability and moment-map principles from Geometric Invariant Theory. We introduce moment-map-inspired regularizers that bias restriction maps toward balanced representation geometries, and identify a structural obstruction in equal-stalk architectures: when $d_v = d_e$, admissibility for learnable stability parameters forces the trivial all-object summand onto a stability wall. Non-uniform stalk dimensions remove this obstruction, making adaptive stability meaningful. Experiments on heterophilic benchmarks are consistent with this mechanism: breaking stalk symmetry can reduce variance or improve validation behavior, and adaptive stability becomes more effective in selected rectangular settings. Overall, our framework reframes oversmoothing as a degeneration phenomenon in the representation geometry underlying learned sheaf diffusion.

We introduce SODA, a generalization of Optimistic Dual Averaging, which provides a common perspective on state-of-the-art optimizers like Muon, Lion, AdEMAMix and NAdam, showing that they can all be viewed as optimistic instances of this framework. Based on this framing, we propose a practical SODA wrapper for any base optimizer that eliminates weight decay tuning through a theoretically-grounded $1/k$ decay schedule. Empirical results across various scales and training horizons show that SODA consistently improves performance without any additional hyperparameter tuning.

Large language model agents interleave reasoning, action selection, and observation to solve sequential decision-making tasks. In deployed settings where agents repeatedly handle related multi-step tasks, small action-selection errors can accumulate into wasted tool calls, latency, and reduced reliability. Despite this need for deployment-time improvement, existing inference-time adaptation methods for LLM agents mainly rely on prompting or retrieval, which influence behavior indirectly through context manipulation. For ReAct-style agents, such approaches do not expose an explicit decision layer that can score candidate actions, represent uncertainty, or be updated online from action-level feedback. As a result, they provide limited support for trackable, fine-grained, and uncertainty-aware adaptation during deployment. We propose OLIVIA, an inference-time action adaptation framework for ReAct-style agents. OLIVIA models the LLM's final action-selection layer as a contextual linear bandit over candidate actions, with frozen hidden states as decision contexts. This choice is particularly suitable for deployment because it adapts behavior directly at the action-selection interface, preserves the underlying reasoning process, and provides explicit uncertainty estimates and lightweight online updates from action-level feedback. With upper-confidence-bound exploration, OLIVIA improves the policy sample-efficiently with minimal computational overhead. We instantiate OLIVIA on four benchmarks and show that it consistently improves task performance over static ReAct and prompt-based inference-time baselines. Our results suggest that explicit online decision layers provide an effective alternative to purely prompt- or retrieval-based adaptation for LLM agents during deployment.

Existing multi-model and tool-augmented systems communicate by generating text, serializing every exchange through the output vocabulary. Can two pretrained language models instead coordinate through a continuous, concurrent channel? The Bicameral Model couples two frozen language models through a trainable neural interface on their intermediate hidden states. At every generation step, both models run in lockstep: a primary model drives the task while an auxiliary model operates tools, solves constraints, or executes code, with both conditioning on each other's activations through a translation network and a learned suppression gate ($\sim$1\% of combined parameters). The gate learns a selective communication protocol from task loss alone, without a prescribed format. We demonstrate the mechanism across three tool backends. On arithmetic, coupling two 0.5B models with a calculator raises accuracy from 36\% to 96\%. On logic grid puzzles, coupling two 0.6B models with a Z3 solver achieves $1.7\times$ the unaugmented baseline on ZebraLogic. On mathematical reasoning, coupling with a Python sandbox enables the auxiliary to generate problem-specific code from hidden-state signals alone, without ever seeing the problem text.

Political and social identities structure how people evaluate political information, a finding decades deep in political science and routinely discarded by computational tools that often produce single scores that treat a piece of text, an image, or a video as if it means the same thing to everyone. This paper shows that it does not, and that the difference is consequential. To address this problem, I develop the Perspectivist Visual Political Sentiment (PVPS) classifier, which learns from approximately 82,000 evaluations by 5,575 U.S. adults to predict how audiences defined by political and social identities will evaluate the same image. Unlike standard tools that average systematic disagreement away, PVPS preserves it, returning an evaluative profile that records who agrees, who diverges, and along which identity lines. Applied to several influential studies of visual sentiment, PVPS shows that perceived violence in protest imagery and the emotional mechanisms behind protest image engagement both change substantively once audience identity is taken into account. It follows that what a political image conveys is a moving target, and measuring it requires knowing whom it is moving.

Interpretability aims to explain the behavior of deep neural networks. Despite rapid growth, there is mounting concern that much of this work has not translated into practical impact, raising questions about its relevance and utility. This position paper argues that the central missing ingredient is not new methods, but evaluation criteria: interpretability should be evaluated by actionability--the extent to which insights enable concrete decisions and interventions beyond interpretability research itself. We define actionable interpretability along two dimensions--concreteness and validation--and analyze the barriers currently preventing real-world impact. To address these barriers, we identify five domains where interpretability offers unique leverage and present a framework for actionable interpretability with evaluation criteria aligned with practical outcomes. Our goal is not to downplay exploratory research, but to establish actionability as a core objective of interpretability research.

Knowledge graph completion (KGC) aims to automatically infer missing facts in multi-relational data by mapping entities and relations into continuous representation spaces. Recent region-based embedding models have shown great promise in capturing complex logical patterns by representing relations as geometric regions. However, these models inevitably suffer from absolute boundary constraints during optimization. Conversely, without such constraints, relation regions expand indefinitely. To address the limitation, we propose \textbf{CORE} (Cyclic Orthotope Relation Embedding), a novel KGC model that embeds entities and relations onto a boundary-less torus manifold.CORE represents relations as cyclic orthotopes on the torus manifold, allowing regions to seamlessly wrap around spatial boundaries to ensure smooth gradient conduction. Furthermore, an adaptive width regularization is introduced to prevent unconditional region expansion. Theoretical analysis proves that CORE can capture various complex relation patterns such as subsumption and intersection. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that CORE achieves highly competitive performance, significantly improving link prediction accuracy in dense semantic environments.

We decompose an evolutionary mixture-of-LoRA system on a from-scratch ~150M-parameter widened-D substrate (D=1536, V=32000; D/V approx 0.048; the "widened-1536" substrate) into three factors -- a router rewrite (parallel sigmoid gate with learnable per-adapter floor and bounded temperature anneal, fed post-stack hidden states rather than token-embedding means), a per-domain leave-one-out evaluation scope, and a lifecycle of death plus alpha-blend inheritance plus SVD mutation plus slot reallocation -- and report a 5-of-8 partial 2^3 factorial run at n=3 seeds and 25000 adaptation steps per cell. The attribution chain is sharp on this substrate: the router rewrite carries the entire +0.0426 nat balanced log-PPL improvement (Delta = log PPL_ref - log PPL_test, positive = improvement; t=12.86, p=0.006) attributed to "the full evolutionary system vs the static B3 baseline"; the headline full-system-vs-B3 balanced contrast itself is +0.015 nats, t=1.94, p=0.19 at n=3 and does not clear alpha=0.05. The per-domain evaluation scope is null at seed-resolution, and the lifecycle is a net drag of approx -0.028 nats (t=-4.46,p=0.047 in the primary chain). An auxiliary alpha=0 inheritance counterfactual at n=3 seeds is sign-inconsistent at the headline metric and underpowered for either an equivalence or load-bearing conclusion (corrected from an earlier arithmetic-mean aggregator that erroneously cleared inheritance; see Appendix B.11). A base-perturbation probe directionally refutes a "genomic-context" reframe of the lifecycle role. A controllable synthetic sandbox locates a substrate-conditional regime boundary: evolutionary search on the routing channel is load-bearing only when adapters are pre-aligned to the task; in every other regime tested it underperforms, ties, or actively degrades the gradient solution.

We introduce Forecast-aware Gaussian Splatting (Forecast-GS), a predictive 3D representation framework for language-conditioned robotic manipulation. While recent manipulation systems have made progress by grounding language instructions into robot affordances, value maps, or relational keypoint constraints, they usually reason over the current scene and do not explicitly model the task-completed state. This limitation is critical when success depends on satisfying spatial and semantic goals under partial observations, where the robot must evaluate whether a candidate action leads to a feasible task-consistent outcome. We validate Forecast-GS on real-world pick-and-place manipulation tasks, including Cutter-to-Box, Apple-to-Bowl, and Sponge-to-Tray. For each task, we conduct 25 real-world trials under varied initial object configurations using the same robot platform and sensing setup. Forecast-GS with automatic candidate selection achieves success rates of 21/25, 23/25, and 16/25 on the three tasks, respectively, outperforming the ReKep baseline, which achieves 15/25, 19/25, and 10/25. A diagnostic human-assisted setting further improves success rates to 23/25, 24/25, and 19/25, suggesting that candidate generation is effective while automatic ranking remains imperfect. These results suggest that explicitly forecasting task-completed 3D states enables more reliable action evaluation, while the gap between automatic and human-assisted selection indicates that robust final-state ranking remains an important challenge for fully autonomous manipulation. Overall, Forecast-GS provides an interpretable bridge between language understanding, 3D perception, and robotic manipulation planning.

Reasoning benchmarks measure clinical performance on clean inputs. We evaluate the step before reasoning: retrieval over real EHR notes, where negation, temporality, and family-versus-patient attribution can flip a correct answer to a wrong one. EpiKG carries an assertion label and a temporality tag with every fact in a patient knowledge graph, then routes retrieval by question intent. ClinicalBench is a 400-question test over 43 MIMIC-IV patients across 9 assertion-sensitive categories. A 7-condition ablation tests each piece of EpiKG across six LLMs (Claude Opus 4.6, GPT-OSS 20B, MedGemma 27B, Gemma 4 31B, MedGemma 1.5 4B, Qwen 3.5 35B). Three physicians blindly adjudicated 100 paired items. The author-blind primary endpoint, leave-author-out paired exact McNemar on 50 unanimous-strict items rated by two external physicians, yields +22.0 percentage points (95 percent Newcombe CI [+5.1, +31.5], p=0.0192). The architectural novelty, intent-aware KG-RAG over a Contriever dense-RAG baseline (C2b to C4g_kw on the change-excluded n=362 endpoint), is +8.84 percentage points (paired McNemar p=1.79e-3); +12.43 percentage points under oracle intent. Sensitivities agree directionally: three-rater physician majority +24.0 percentage points (subject to single-author circularity); deterministic keyword reproducibility proxy +39.5 percentage points. Across the six models, the gain shrinks as the LLM-alone baseline rises (beta=-1.123, r=-0.921, p=0.009). With n=6 this looks more like regression to the mean than encoding substituting for model size. Physician adjudication identified 56 percent of auto-generated reference answers as defective, a methodological finding indicating that NLP-pipeline clinical-QA benchmarks require physician adjudication to be usable. ClinicalBench, the frozen evaluator, three-rater adjudication data, and the EpiKG output stack are publicly released.

Graph representation learning has become a standard approach for analyzing networked data, with latent embeddings widely used for link prediction, community detection, and related tasks. Yet a basic design choice, the latent dimension, is still treated as a brittle hyperparameter, fixed before training and tuned by held-out performance. Learned factors are also identifiable only up to rotation and rescaling, so the nominal rank rarely coincides with the quantity that governs model behavior. We propose Spectral Prefix Extraction and Capacity-Targeted Representation Analysis (Spectra), which replaces rank as the unit of analysis with the spectrum of a learned positive semidefinite kernel, trace-normalized so that spectra are comparable across fits. The normalized eigenvalues form a distribution on the simplex, and their Shannon effective rank acts both as a summary of learned capacity and as a controllable training-time coordinate: a single scalar shapes this realized dimension during training, and bisection targets any desired value within the rank cap. To theoretically support that, we show local regularity and monotonicity of the realized-dimension profile. Across collaboration, social, biological, and infrastructure networks, Spectra traces performance--capacity frontiers that make the trade-off between predictive accuracy and realized dimension visible. It performs competitively with strong link-prediction baselines, yields aligned lower-capacity views of the same fitted model through spectral prefixes, and provides a principled handle on capacity in the overparameterized regime. Capacity thus becomes a property of the fitted model rather than a hyperparameter of the training.

We argue that multi-agent test-time evolution is not single-agent evolution replicated N times. A single-agent learner can only evolve its own context and memory. A multi-agent system additionally evolves who collaborates, how they collaborate, and how knowledge flows across the population. These components have no single-agent counterpart and can produce phenomena such as emergent specialization. Yet prior test-time methods either confine experiences to individual agents, forfeiting cross-agent learning, or broadcast symmetrically to all agents, erasing the specialization that makes collaboration valuable. We present EVOCHAMBER, a training-free framework that instantiates test-time evolution at three levels over a coevolving agent pool. At its core is CODREAM (Collaborative Dreaming), a post-task protocol triggered on team failure or disagreement, in which agents collaboratively reflect, distill insights, and route them asymmetrically from strong to weak agents on the failed niche, preserving specialization while filling knowledge gaps. Team-level operators assemble niche-conditioned teams and select collaboration structures online. Population-level lifecycle operators fork, merge, prune, and seed agents under performance pressure. On three heterogeneous task streams with Qwen3-8B, EVOCHAMBER reaches 63.9% on competition math, 75.7% on code, and 87.1% on multi-domain reasoning, outperforming the best baseline by 32% relative on math and confirming asymmetric cross-agent transfer as the primary driver in ablation. Starting from several identically initialized agents, four to five stable niche specialists spontaneously emerge, a structural signature of multi-agent evolution that no single-agent learner can express. See our code at: https://github.com/Mercury7353/EvoChamber

We introduce steerable neural ordinary differential equations on homogeneous spaces $M=G/H$. These models constitute a novel geometric extension of manifold neural ordinary differential equations (NODEs) that transport associated feature vectors transforming under the local symmetry group $H$. We interpret features as sections of associated vector bundles over $M$, and describe their evolution as parallel transport. This results in a coupled system of ODEs consisting of a flow equation on $M$ and a steering equation acting on features. We show that steerable NODEs are $G$-equivariant whenever the vector field generating the flow and the connection governing parallel transport are both $G$-invariant. Furthermore, we demonstrate how steerable NODEs incorporate existing NODE models and continuous normalizing flows on Lie groups. Our framework provides the geometric foundation for learning continuous-time equivariant dynamics of general vector-valued features on homogeneous spaces.

Accurate medical image segmentation is an integral part of the medical image analysis pipeline that requires the ability to merge local and global information. While vision transformers are able to capture global interactions using vanilla self-attention, their quadratic computational complexity in the input size remains a struggle for medical image segmentation tasks. Motivated by the dispersion property of vanilla self-attention and recent development of Mamba form of attention, Scalable and Efficient Mamba like Attention (SEMA) utilizes token localization via local window attention to avoid dispersion and maintain focusing, complemented by theoretically consistent arithmetic averaging to capture global aspect of attention. In this work, we present USEMA, a hybrid UNet architecture that merges the local feature extraction ability of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with SEMA attention. We conduct experiments with USEMA across a variety of modalities and image sizes, demonstrating improved computational efficiency compared to transformer based models using full self-attention, and superior segmentation performance relative to purely convolution and Mamba-based models.

Diversity is essential for language-model applications ranging from creative generation to scientific discovery, yet modern LLMs often collapse into a narrow subset of plausible outputs. While prior work has developed benchmarks for measuring this lack of diversity, less is known about how the step-by-step probability distributions at inference time cause the problem. We introduce a validity--diversity framework that attributes diversity collapse to how an LLM allocates probability mass across valid and invalid continuations during decoding. This framework decomposes the bottleneck into two complementary forms of miscalibration. First, order calibration: valid tokens are not reliably ranked above invalid tokens, so rank-based cutoff rules must trade off between recovering valid continuations and admitting invalid ones. Second, shape calibration: probability mass is overly concentrated only on few valid continuations while having a heavy-tail of mixed valid and invalid tokens, so maintaining high validity limits diversity. We formalize both mechanisms and show that local failures compound across decoding steps, producing strong sequence-level losses in diversity. Empirically, we develop controlled diagnostics for probing these bottlenecks, including tasks with exactly known valid sets and oracle cutoff baselines. Across 14 language models spanning multiple families and scales, we find that diversity collapse is not merely a limitation of particular sampling heuristics, but a consequence of order and shape miscalibration in the LLM distribution.

Indoor infrastructure inspection, such as tunnels and industrial facilities, requires systematic surface coverage to ensure that all inspection targets are properly observed. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) offer an alternative to manual inspection by conducting map-guided surface inspection using prior structural models. However, in practice, indoor inspection often relies on floorplan-derived reference maps that may not reflect unforeseen obstacles, such as temporary structures or equipment, leading to occluded viewpoints and degraded inspection quality. Existing coverage planning methods typically assume a fully known inspection environment and perform deterministic global viewpoint optimization based on accurate prior maps, making them vulnerable to environmental discrepancies during execution. This work presents an adaptive UAV inspection framework for partially known structured indoor environments. The proposed method integrates a segment-based global coverage planner with an inspection-oriented local view-angle adaptation module. The global planner organizes planar inspection targets into surface-aligned clusters to generate compact viewpoint sequences with improved orientation consistency. The local planner generates collision-free trajectories and adjusts the viewing direction online to mitigate occlusion-induced coverage loss while preserving the planned trajectory structure. The simulation results across randomized scene configurations demonstrate that the proposed global planner achieves near-complete coverage while reducing trajectory length compared to representative baselines. Real-world flight experiments further validate that the framework produces usable inspection data for downstream analysis. These results indicate that the proposed framework improves inspection efficiency and adaptability in partially known structured indoor environments.

Scientific discovery can be modeled as a sequence of probabilistic decisions that map physical problems to numerical solutions. Recent agentic AI systems automate individual scientific tasks by orchestrating LLM-driven planners, solvers, and evaluators. Each method is a combination of methodological actions, with many viable combinations for any given problem and structural dependencies between choices. However, existing frameworks treat each problem in isolation, with no shared substrate to accumulate methodological experience across domains. Here we show that GRAFT-ATHENA, a self-improving agentic framework, learns from past problems and autonomously expands its own action space across diverse domains. GRAFT (Graph Reduction to Adaptive Factored Trees) projects combinatorial decision spaces into factored probabilistic trees in which each method is a single path, taking the parameter footprint from exponential to linear. In the lineage of classical Bayesian networks, the factorization is an $I$-map of the policy, and the resulting paths embed as unique fingerprints in a metric space whose closeness lets each new problem learn from similar past ones. On canonical physics-informed machine learning (PIML) benchmarks, GRAFT-ATHENA improves over human and prior agentic baselines, and on production solvers, it tackles complex engineering problems such as reconstructing Mach-10 flow over the Apollo Command Module from a 1968 report and recovering shear-thinning blood-cell rheology. Notably, the system grows its own knowledge substrate, autonomously proposing regularization constraints for ill-posed inverse problems and discovering new numerical methods such as a spectral PINN with exponential convergence. These results provide a foundation for autonomous laboratories that grow more capable with every problem they solve.

High Dynamic Range (HDR) generation remains challenging for generative models, which are largely limited to low dynamic range outputs. Recent diffusionbased approaches approximate HDR by generating multiple exposure-conditioned samples, incurring high computational cost and structural inconsistencies across exposures. We propose LatentHDR, a framework that decouples scene generation from exposure modeling in latent space. A pretrained diffusion backbone produces a single coherent scene representation, while a lightweight conditional latent to-latent head deterministically maps it to exposure-specific representations. This enables the generation of a dense, structurally consistent exposure stack in a single pass. This design eliminates multi-pass diffusion, ensures cross-exposure alignment, and enables scalable HDR synthesis. LatentHDR supports both textand image-conditioned HDR generation for perspective and panoramic scenes. Experiments on synthetic data and the SI-HDR benchmark show that LatentHDR achieves state-of-the-art dynamic range with competitive perceptual quality, while reducing computation by an order of magnitude. Our results demonstrate that high-quality HDR generation can be achieved through structured latent modeling, challenging the need for stochastic multi-exposure generation.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) and imitation-learning policies trained via community toolchains on low-cost hardware frequently fail when deployed outside the training environment. Existing evaluations, including the original ACT and SmolVLA benchmarks, demonstrate high success rates under controlled, fixed backgrounds, yet community practitioners report near-zero transfer to new environments. We present SEVO (Semantic-Enhanced Virtual Observation), a data-centric approach that improves cross-environment manipulation robustness without modifying the policy architecture. SEVO transforms the raw RGB camera stream through three mechanisms: (1) body-fixed cameras whose combined fields of view cover the full manipulation workspace, (2) active red-spectrum illumination that physically normalizes object appearance, and (3) real-time YOLO segmentation overlay that provides a background-invariant semantic cue. Critically, we show that a diversified data collection protocol (systematically varying lighting, backgrounds, and distractors during teleoperation) is the single most important factor for generalization. We target transparent water bottles, objects that visually blend with their surroundings, and select a simple pick-and-place task to enable hundreds of controlled real-robot trials across two mobile platforms. The full pipeline achieves 95% grasp success with ACT and 83% with SmolVLA in the training environment, transferring to novel environments at 85% and 75%. Without SEVO, the same policies achieve only 75%/70% in training and collapse to 30-35% in novel environments. Our results demonstrate that principled observation design and environmental diversity during data collection, not model scaling, enable low-cost robots to operate reliably in everyday household environments.

Vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP and SigLIP 2, are widely used for image classification, yet their vision encoders remain vulnerable to systematic biases that undermine robustness. In particular, correlations between foreground objects and their backgrounds constitute a salient and practically important class of spurious dependencies. In this work, we revisit the well-known property of high linear additivity in VLM embedding spaces and show that it enables a decomposition of scene representations into foreground and background components. Leveraging this insight, we introduce a pre-training approach that exploits this property to construct background-invariant representations using synthetic data. Our method achieves, to our knowledge, the first worst-group accuracy exceeding $90\%$ on Waterbirds under perfect ($100\%$) spurious correlation (i.e., no minority-group examples in the training data). Furthermore, it demonstrates strong sim-to-real transfer and requires no access to real-world debiased data, making it practical for real-world deployment.

Neural warm starts can sharply reduce the number of Newton-Raphson iterations required to solve the AC power flow problem, but existing supervised approaches generalize poorly on heavily loaded instances near voltage collapse. We prove a lower bound on the Newton-Raphson iteration count that depends on the direction of the warm start error rather than on its magnitude, and show as a corollary that the bound becomes vacuous as the smallest singular value of the power-flow Jacobian shrinks, identifying the failure mode of supervised regression near the saddle-node bifurcation. Motivated by this analysis, we introduce Newton's Lantern, a finetuning pipeline that combines group relative policy optimization with a learned reward model trained on perturbations of the base model's predictions, using the iteration count itself as the supervisory signal. Across IEEE 118-bus, GOC 500-bus, and GOC 2000-bus benchmarks, Newton's Lantern is the only method that converges on every test snapshot while attaining the smallest mean iteration count.

Neural speech codecs provide discrete representations for speech language models, but emotional cues are often degraded during quantization. Existing codecs mainly optimize acoustic reconstruction, leaving emotion expressiveness insufficiently modeled at the representation level. We propose an emotion-guided neural speech codec that explicitly preserves emotional information while maintaining semantic fidelity and prosodic naturalness. Our framework combines emotion-semantic guided latent modulation, relation-preserving emotional-semantic distillation, and emotion-weighted semantic alignment to retain emotionally salient cues under compression. Extensive evaluations across speech reconstruction, emotion recognition, and downstream text-to-speech generation demonstrate improved emotion consistency and perceptual quality without sacrificing content accuracy.

Today's inference-time workloads increasingly depend on timely access to a model's internal states. We present DMI-Lib, a high-speed deep model inspector that treats internal observability as a first-class systems primitive, decoupling it from the inference hot path via an asynchronous observability substrate built from Ring^2, a GPU-CPU memory abstraction for capturing and staging tensors, and a policy-controlled host backend that exports them. DMI-Lib enables the placement of observation points across a rich space of internal signals and diverse inference backends while preserving serving optimizations and adhering to tight GPU memory budgets. Our experiments demonstrate that DMI-Lib incurs only 0.4%--6.8% overhead in offline batch inference and an average of 6% in moderate online serving, reducing latency overhead by 2x-15x compared to existing baselines with similar observability features. DMI-Lib is open-sourced at https://github.com/ProjectDMX/DMI.

Automated ASD screening tools remain limited by single-architecture evaluations, axis-restricted assessment, and near-exclusive focus on adult cohorts, obscuring age-specific diagnostic patterns critical for early intervention. We introduce ASD-Bench, a systematic tabular benchmark evaluating ML, deep learning, and foundation model configurations across three age cohorts (children 1-11 yr, adolescents 12-16 yr, adults 17-64 yr) on four axes: predictive performance, calibration, interpretability, and adversarial robustness. Applied to a curated v3 dataset of 4,068 AQ-10 records, our benchmark spans classical models (XGBoost, AdaBoost, Random Forest, Logistic Regression), neural networks (MLP), deep tabular transformers (TabNet, TabTransformer, FT-Transformer), and TabPFN v2. We introduce the Heuristic Aggregate Penalty (HAP): a cost-sensitive metric penalising false negatives more heavily and incorporating cross-validation variance for deployment stability. Adult classification yields high performance (10/17 models achieve perfect F1 and AUC), while adolescents present a harder task (F1 ceiling 0.837 vs. 0.915 for children). Feature hierarchies shift across cohorts: A9 (social motivation) dominates for children, A5 (pattern recognition) leads for adolescents, and adults exhibit a flatter importance profile consistent with developmental social masking. Accuracy and calibration are dissociated: AdaBoost achieves F1=1.000 on adults with ECE=0.302, confirming single-metric evaluation is insufficient for clinical AI. Cohort-specific deployment recommendations are provided. All findings should be interpreted as proof-of-concept evidence on questionnaire-derived labels rather than clinically validated diagnostic performance.

The evolution of visual generative models has long been constrained by fragmented architectures relying on disjoint text encoders and external VAEs. In this report, we present HiDream-O1-Image, a natively unified generative foundation model via pixel-space Diffusion Transformer, that pioneers a paradigm shift from modular architectures to an end-to-end in-context visual generation engine. By mapping raw image pixels, text tokens, and task-specific conditions into a single shared token space, HiDream-O1-Image achieves a structural unification of multimodal inputs within an Unified Transformer (UiT) architecture. This native encoding paradigm eliminates the need for separate VAEs or disjoint pre-trained text encoders, allowing the model to treat diverse generation and editing tasks as a consistent in-context reasoning process. Extensive experiments show that HiDream-O1-Image excels across various generation tasks, including text-to-image generation, instruction-based editing, and subject-driven personalization. Notably, with only 8B parameters, HiDream-O1-Image (8B) achieves performance parity with or even surpasses established state-of-the-art models with significantly larger parameters (e.g., 27B Qwen-Image). Crucially, to validate the immense scalability of this paradigm, we successfully scale the architecture up to over 200B parameters. Experimental results demonstrate that this massive-scale version HiDream-O1-Image-Pro (200B+) unlocks unprecedented generative capabilities and superior performance, establishing new state-of-the-art benchmarks. Ultimately, HiDream-O1-Image highlights the immense potential of natively unified architectures and charts a highly scalable path toward next-generation multimodal AI.

The agricultural field is the natural unit at which crops are planted, managed, regulated, and reported, yet most global remote-sensing products for agriculture are only available at the pixel level. While some high-quality field-level data products exist, they come from parcel registries covering only parts of Europe or from ML-derived products for individual countries. No openly available, globally consistent map of agricultural field boundaries exists to date. Here we present the first global field boundary dataset at 10\,m resolution for the years 2024 and 2025, comprising 3.17 billion remote-sensing field polygons (1.62 B in 2024 and 1.55 B in 2025) across 241 countries and territories, produced by applying a U-Net segmentation model trained on the Fields of The World dataset to cloud-free Sentinel-2 mosaics. Validated against ground-truth field boundaries in 24 countries, the map achieved a mean pixel-level recall of 0.85 with 14 countries exceeding 0.90. Evaluation against full-country ground-truth datasets in Austria, Latvia, and Finland yielded F1 scores of 0.89, 0.88, and 0.74, respectively. Because reference data for global validation is inherently incomplete, we accompanied the map with a 500 m confidence layer that identifies regions where predictions are reliable. We release the dataset openly as three global maps: the confidence-thresholded default field boundary dataset, the full unfiltered dataset, and the continuous-valued confidence raster. These maps provide the first globally consistent field-level unit of analysis for crop monitoring, food security, and downstream agricultural science.

Existing imitation learning methods enable robots to interact autonomously with the physical environment. However, contact-rich manipulation tasks remain a significant challenge due to complex contact dynamics that demand high-precision force feedback and control. Although recent efforts have attempted to integrate force/torque sensing into policies, how to build a simple yet effective framework that achieves robust generalization under multimodal observations remains an open question. In this paper, we propose ForceFlow, a force-aware reactive framework built upon flow matching. For contact-stage policy design, we investigate force signal fusion mechanisms and adopt an asymmetric multimodal fusion architecture that treats force as a global regulatory signal, combined with a joint prediction paradigm that enhances the policy's understanding of instantaneous force and historical information, thereby achieving deep coupling between force and motion. For task-level hierarchical decomposition, we divide manipulation into a vision-dominant approach stage (VLM-based pointing for target localization) and a touch-dominant interaction stage (force-driven contact execution), with a Vision-to-Force (V2F) handover mechanism that explicitly decouples spatial generalization from contact regulation. Experimental results across six real-world contact-rich tasks demonstrate that ForceFlow achieves a 37% success rate improvement over the strong baseline ForceVLA while maintaining significantly lower cost. Moreover, ForceFlow exhibits accurate force signal prediction and demonstrates superior performance in contact force self-regulation and zero-shot out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization.