Illegal gold mining in the Amazon rainforest causes deforestation, water contamination, and long-term ecosystem disruption, yet remains difficult to monitor at fine spatial scales. Satellite imagery supports large-scale observation, but often misses small mining-related structures and subtle land-cover transitions, especially under frequent cloud cover. We introduce ELDOR, a large-scale UAV benchmark for monitoring environmental and landscape disturbance from illegal gold mining in the rainforest. ELDOR contains manually annotated orthomosaic imagery covering over 2,500 hectares, with pixel-level semantic labels for both mining-related activities and surrounding ecological structures. With this unified annotation source, we establish four benchmark tasks: semantic segmentation, segmentation-derived recognition, direct multi-label classification, and class-presence recognition with vision-language models. Across these tasks, we compare generic and remote-sensing-specific segmentation models, vision foundation model-related segmentation methods, direct multi-label classification methods, and vision-language models under a controlled closed-set protocol. Results show that current methods still struggle with rare small-scale mining structures and fine-grained recovery classes, suggesting the need for context-aware and multimodal modeling. To support domain analysis and practical use, we further build an interactive explorer for domain experts that provides a unified interface for data exploration and model inference.

Joint-embedding predictive architectures (JEPAs) propose that a model should learn more useful abstractions when trained to predict latent representations rather than observed outputs. For autoregressive language-model fine-tuning the principle entails a stricter requirement: the induced hidden-state geometry must reach the language-model head \emph{and} improve the decoded task metric. We test that requirement under a fixed Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct LoRA harness on natural-language-to-regex generation, comparing twenty-two training-time auxiliaries across trajectory-shape regularisation, distributional constraints, predictor/target asymmetry, Fisher-metric Jacobi residuals, and a decoder-visible JEPA objective constructed to lie in cross-entropy's positive cone. The empirical answer is a structured null: several auxiliaries clear single-cell paired $α= 0.10$ without correction (T3-Local at $Δ= +2.53$~pp, $p = 0.003$ being the strongest), but none survives Bonferroni or Holm--Bonferroni at the relevant family-wise threshold, even though many change curvature, anisotropy, variance, and gradient direction. Decoder-visible JEPA yields the first positive auxiliary--cross-entropy gradient cosine in the study, yet exact match remains inside seed noise; a full-fine-tuning replication of the same auxiliary at $n = 5$ seeds reproduces the null on both benchmarks (TURK: $Δ= +0.04$~pp, $p_{\text{paired}} = 0.96$; SYNTH: $Δ= +0.52$~pp, $p_{\text{paired}} = 0.28$), so the null is robust across LoRA and full fine-tuning for the decoder-visible construction. Hidden-state representation work and decoded-task accuracy are therefore weakly coupled in this regime; we accordingly reframe LLM-domain JEPA evaluation as a coupling problem, in which the operative question is under which metrics useful hidden geometry becomes decoder-visible task signal.

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed to perform tasks with minimal human oversight, it is crucial that these models operate robustly. In particular, a model that can solve a given problem should not fail simply because certain entities$\unicode{x2013}$such as names, numbers, or other contextual details$\unicode{x2013}$have changed while the underlying problem logic remains the same. Prior work suggests that current LLMs still struggle with this form of robustness: they often succeed on some variations of a problem but fail on others. However, existing evaluations often lack a systematic way to identify which logic-preserving variations are most likely to induce failure. Instead, they typically test a random subset of allowable variations, which can overstate robustness. To address this gap, we introduce logic-preserving difficulty scaling (LPDS), a framework that (i) quantifies the difficulty of a problem variation and (ii) systematically searches the space of allowable variations to find those that maximize difficulty and expose failures. We show that as difficulty increases, performance declines and errors in the models' reasoning chains become more pronounced. We further demonstrate that LPDS efficiently finds difficult problem variations for a model, resulting in performance drops up to 5 times larger compared to random sampling. Finally, we show that fine-tuning on more difficult variations leads to more consistent robustness gains than training on easier ones.

We present PanoWorld, a panoramic video world model that generates geometry-consistent 360$\degree$ video from a single image and a caption. Existing panoramic video methods optimize primarily for visual realism and do not explicitly constrain the underlying 3D scene state, producing outputs that appear plausible yet exhibit inconsistent depth, broken correspondences, and implausible motion across the spherical surface. We address this gap by framing panoramic video generation as a geometry- and dynamics-consistent latent state modeling problem rather than pure visual synthesis. Building on a pre-trained perspective video world model, we introduce two lightweight regularizers: a depth consistency loss against pseudo ground-truth panoramic depth, and a trajectory consistency loss that supervises the 3D world-frame positions of tracked points across time. We further apply spherical-geometry-aware adaptation to the conditioning and positional encoding. We additionally introduce PanoGeo, a unified geometry-aware panoramic video dataset with consistent depth, trajectory, and prompt annotations across diverse real and synthetic sources, used for both training and stratified evaluation. Experiments show that PanoWorld improves geometric consistency over prior panoramic generation methods while maintaining competitive visual realism, establishing that panoramic video generation must be treated as a geometric modeling problem to support the holistic spatial understanding requirements of embodied AI applications. Code is available at https://github.com/ostadabbas/PanoWorld.

Stochastic estimators are fundamental to large-scale optimization, where population quantities must be inferred from noisy oracle observations. Although influential methods such as momentum, SPIDER, STORM, and PAGE have been highly successful, their analyses are largely estimator-specific and expectation-based, obscuring the structural tradeoffs that determine reliability. In this paper, we develop a unified framework for stochastic variance-reduced estimation based on a recursion with three components: memory retention, reset probability, and a correction term for iterate movement. This framework recovers several classical estimators, motivates new second-order variants, and yields a bias-variance decomposition of estimation error. Our main result is a unified high-probability bound proved using a new dimension-free vector-valued Freedman inequality, valid for smooth normed spaces involving random sums of vector martingales. The result applies in both Euclidean and non-Euclidean settings, including the analysis of mirror-descent-based methods in Banach spaces. As applications, we obtain high-probability oracle complexities for unconstrained optimization with mirror descent, establishing the logarithmic dependence on the confidence level. We also derive the first $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\varepsilon^{-3})$ oracle-complexity bounds for stochastic optimization with expectation constraints, improving upon the existing $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\varepsilon^{-4})$ complexity by leveraging variance-reduced estimation for the first time in this setting.

Memory plays a central role in enabling large language models (LLMs) to operate over sequential tasks by accumulating and reusing experience over time. However, existing evaluations of LLM memory mostly rely on aggregate metrics such as final hold-out accuracy or cumulative online performance, which can obscure critical failure modes such as forgetting and negative transfer. In this paper, we introduce SeqMem-Eval, a diagnostic evaluation framework for sequentially evolving LLM memory. Drawing inspiration from continual learning, it targets a test-time setting in which memory is external, prompt-mediated, and updated without modifying model parameters. Rather than focusing only on final performance, SeqMem-Eval evaluates how memory states evolve, generalize, consolidate experience, and retain useful information during sequential inference. Specifically, it measures online utility, hold-out generalization, backward transfer, and forgetting, providing a finer-grained view of memory quality. Through extensive experiments across diverse tasks and memory methods, we show that higher final or cumulative accuracy does not necessarily imply better memory quality: many methods exhibit strong performance gains while suffering from substantial forgetting or negative transfer. Moreover, different memory designs exhibit distinct trade-offs between adaptability and stability that remain invisible under standard evaluation metrics.

Microscopy images contain rich information about how cells respond to perturbations, making them essential to applications like drug screening. To quantify images, researchers often use representation extraction methods, and recent years have seen a proliferation of deep learning methods. While measuring the quality of these representations is essential, evaluation remains fragmented, with each proposed model evaluated on different tasks and datasets, using custom pipelines and metrics, making it difficult to fairly compare models. Here, we introduce MorphoHELM, a comprehensive open benchmark for evaluating feature extraction methods for Cell Painting, the most widely-used morphological profiling assay. MorphoHELM consolidates evaluation standards in the field, extends and corrects them to be more robust, and evaluates on the widest range of methods to date. A defining feature of the benchmark is that each task is evaluated at different degrees of batch effects (or technical noise), directly quantifying how the ability of methods to detect biological signal degrades as noise increases. Together, these properties enable MorphoHELM to detect trade-offs between methods, and we demonstrate that models that excel at certain kinds of biological signal are weaker at others. We show that no existing model outperforms classic computer vision analytic strategies across all settings, which remain the strongest general use-case representations. All datasets, code, and evaluation tools are publicly available at https://github.com/microsoft/MorphoHELM.

Recent advances in generative AI have shown their potential to be leveraged for legal education. Yet, work on the development and deployment of such systems for legal education in the Global South is limited. In this work, we developed Eskwai for Students, a generative AI assistant to help law students with their legal education. Eskwai for Students is a retrieval augmented generation (RAG) system that provides answers to a wide range of legal questions for law students grounded in a curated database of over 12K case laws and 1.4K legislation in Ghana. We deployed Eskwai for Students in a longitudinal study of 30 months (2.5 years) used by 3.1K law students in Ghana who made 32K queries. We evaluated the helpfulness of our AI, and provided insight into the kinds of queries law students submit to this generative AI tool, which raises some ethical concerns. This work contributes to an understanding of how law students in the Global South are using generative AI for their studies and the ways it could be leveraged responsibly to advance legal education.

Sub-Saharan Africa faces persistently high student-teacher ratios and shortages of qualified teachers, limiting students' access to personalized learning support and formative assessment. To address this challenge, we present Adesua, a WhatsApp-based AI Teaching Assistant for science education that extends the Kwame for Science platform. Adesua leverages WhatsApp's widespread adoption in Africa to provide accessible, curriculum-aligned learning support for Junior High School (JHS) and Senior High School (SHS) students across West Africa. The system integrates curated textbooks and 33 years of national examination questions with generative AI to enable conversational question answering and automated assessment with feedback via a WhatsApp bot. Students can ask science questions, take timed or untimed multiple-choice tests by topic or exam year, and receive instant grading and detailed explanations of correct and incorrect responses. A 6-month feasibility deployment in 2025 had 56 active users in Ghana, including students and parents. Quantitative evaluation showed a high perceived usefulness, with a helpfulness score of 93.75\% for AI-generated answers, albeit with a small number of ratings (n=16). These preliminary results provide a basis for more extensive future evaluation of a WhatsApp-based AI assistant to assess its potential to offer scalable, low-cost personalized learning support and formative assessment in resource-constrained educational contexts.

Remote sensing change detection (RSCD) aims to localise changes between two images of the same geographic region. In practice, change masks often follow region-level annotation conventions rather than purely local appearance differences, making them context-dependent and occasionally ambiguous. Most state-of-the-art methods utilise per-pixel discriminative classification, which produces a single prediction per input and fails to explicitly model the changed region as a coherent whole. A natural alternative is generative formulation, which can model a distribution of plausible masks, enabling sampling to capture ambiguity and encourage global consistency. However, existing generative RSCD approaches typically lag behind strong discriminative baselines due to the high computational cost of pixel-space generation and the complexity of their conditioning mechanisms. To address the limitations of prior discriminative and generative methods, we propose ChangeFlow, a generative framework that reformulates change detection as the synthesis of a change mask in latent space via rectified flow. ChangeFlow is guided by a structured yet lightweight conditioning signal, and its stochastic design naturally supports sampling-based prediction ensembling. Namely, aggregating multiple predicted change masks improves robustness, while sample agreement provides a practical confidence estimation that highlights ambiguous regions. Across four benchmarks, ChangeFlow achieves an average F1 of 80.4\%, improving by 1.3 points on average over the previous best method, while maintaining inference speed comparable to recent strong baselines. Project page: https://blaz-r.github.io/changeflow_cd

Group-convolutional neural networks (GCNNs) are among the most important methods for introducing symmetry as an inductive bias in deep learning: In each linear layer, GCNNs sample a transformation group $G$ densely and correlate data and filters in different poses (with suitable anti-aliasing for steerable GCNNs) to maintain equivariance with respect to $G$. Unfortunately, applying filters to many data items resulting from this sampling is expensive (even for translations alone, i.e., in ordinary CNNs), and costs grow exponentially with increasing degrees of freedom (such as translations and rotations in 3D), which often hinders practical applications. In this paper, we propose sampling in feature space, i.e., replacing geometrically dense samples with representative samples selected by feature similarity. This decouples geometric resolution from memory and processing costs during training and inference, providing a novel way to trade off computational effort and accuracy. Our main empirical finding is that a coarse feature-space sampling already preserves classification accuracy remarkably well, which permits precomputation based on geometric similarity, accelerating the training of equivariant 3D classifiers substantially.

Communicating using only a limited vocabulary is a common but challenging cognitive phenomenon, requiring an ideal communicator to plan carefully to optimize for intelligibility while circumventing a constrained lexicon. In this work, we investigate how humans respond to a broad array of questions under variable vocabulary limitations, consisting of only 250 highly frequent words at the most restrictive. We provide theoretically motivated comparisons to greedy and globally optimal sampling algorithms using Sequential Monte Carlo inference with large language models. Humans generally resemble greedy sampling more than globally optimal sampling, though more skilled humans are more likely to backtrack and revise -- a non-greedy behavior. An observed human pattern of leaning on semantically light words in high-constraint settings falls out of both greedy and globally optimal sampling. We discuss the results and their broader implications for resource-rational cognition, psycholinguistics, L2 communication, and language impairments.

Accurate forecasting of residual Physical Resource Blocks (PRBs) is critical for proactive network slice provisioning, energy-efficient operation, and spectrum-aware decision making in cellular systems, where residual PRBs serve as a practical proxy for short- and medium-term spectrum availability. Existing PRB prediction methods typically rely only on historical PRB values and are trained independently per carrier or sector, limiting their ability to capture cross-carrier dependencies and providing no measure of forecast uncertainty. Moreover, point forecasts alone are insufficient for robust spectrum-aware control under highly variable traffic conditions. This paper proposes PRB-RUPFormer, a recursive unified probabilistic Transformer for residual PRB forecasting. The proposed model jointly processes multivariate KPI time series using temporal, seasonal, and carrier-aware embeddings, preserving inter-metric temporal coupling during recursive rollout and stabilizing long-horizon forecasting. A single shared model is trained across all carriers and sectors of an eNB, enabling efficient learning of joint traffic dynamics with low computational overhead. Forecast uncertainty is captured through quantile-based prediction intervals, providing confidence-aware estimates of future PRB availability. Evaluations on six months of commercial LTE network data from multiple U.S. locations demonstrate median MAE below 0.05 and hit probabilities above 0.80 for both one-day and seven-day recursive forecasts. These probabilistic predictions directly support spectrum-aware RAN functions such as dynamic carrier activation, congestion avoidance, and proactive spectrum sharing, making the proposed framework well-suited for dynamic spectrum access scenarios.

Half a billion citation edges extracted from 100.7 million Ukrainian court decisions reveal that judicial citation structure encodes legal domain boundaries without supervision and predicts future legislative importance with near-perfect accuracy. We construct the first large-scale citation graph from the complete EDRSR registry (99.5 million full texts, 1.1 TB), extracting 502 million citation links across six types via regex on commodity hardware in approximately 5 hours, with precision of 1.00 on a 200-decision validation sample (95% Wilson CI: [0.982, 1.000]). Three principal findings emerge. (1) The degree distribution follows a power law (alpha = 1.57 +/- 0.008), placing the Ukrainian court network near the EU Court of Justice and below the US Supreme Court, with hub articles cited by millions of decisions. (2) Louvain community detection on the co-citation projection recovers legal domain boundaries (civil, criminal, administrative, commercial) with modularity Q = 0.44-0.55 and temporal stability (NMI = 0.83-0.86 across periods), constituting an automatically constructed legal ontology grounded in judicial practice. (3) Citation features predict top-1000 articles with AUC = 0.9984, substantially outperforming a naive frequency baseline (P@1000 = 0.655); temporal dynamics detect legislative regime changes as phase transitions and the 2022 invasion as a citation entropy spike (H: 11.02 -> 13.49) with emergent wartime legislation nodes. The citation-derived ontology is operationalized as the domain layer of a workflow memory system for LLM-assisted legal analysis, connecting to the ontology-controlled paradigm. The extraction pipeline, analysis code, and aggregated statistics are released as open data.

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are biologically inspired energy-efficient models that use sparse binary spike-based communication between neurons, making them attractive for resource-constrained edge devices. Federated learning enables such devices to train collaboratively without sharing raw data. In time-series applications, edge devices often collect data at different time resolutions due to hardware and energy constraints. This temporal heterogeneity poses a fundamental challenge for federated learning: parameters learned at one temporal resolution do not necessarily transfer directly to another, which might result in the naive federated averaging being ineffective. Targeting SNNs and, more broadly, deep networks with stateful neurons, we propose a federated learning framework that addresses this temporal resolution mismatch. We investigate how neuron parameters learned from data at different temporal resolutions and model aggregation should be integrated. We evaluate the proposed framework across two SNN-native benchmark datasets (SHD and DVS-Gesture) under a range of resolution heterogeneity scenarios. Our results show that the proposed adaptation methods can substantially recover accuracy lost due to temporal mismatch, hence enabling each client to train at their local temporal resolution while remaining compatible with the global model.

Inferring the structure of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) from data is a central challenge in causal discovery, particularly in modern high-dimensional settings where large-scale interventional data are increasingly available. While interventional data can improve identifiability, existing methods remain limited by soft acyclicity constraints, leading to optimization over invalid cyclic graphs, numerical instability, and reduced scalability. We introduce PACER (Perturbation-driven Acyclic Causal Edge Recovery), a scalable framework for causal discovery that guarantees acyclicity by construction. PACER parameterizes a distribution over DAGs through a joint model of variable permutations and edge probabilities, enabling direct optimization over valid causal structures without surrogate penalties. The framework supports a unified likelihood-based treatment of observational and interventional data, flexible conditional density models, and the incorporation of structural prior knowledge. For linear-Gaussian mechanisms, we derive closed-form expressions for the expected interventional log-likelihood and its gradients, yielding substantial computational gains. Empirically, PACER matches or exceeds state-of-the-art methods on protein signaling and large-scale genetic perturbation benchmarks, while scaling efficiently to networks with thousands of variables and achieving up to two orders of magnitude speedups over penalty-based differentiable approaches. These results demonstrate that exact and scalable causal discovery from high-dimensional perturbation data is achievable through principled search space design.

Opening heavy, self closing doors, especially those that require pulling remains a long standing challenge in robotics. Humans naturally employ both arms in a dexterous manner, rotating the handle, widening the gap, holding the door, switching arms when needed, and moving through while maintaining clearance. To replicate such behaviors, a robot must perform a long sequence of motions spanning multiple stages and interactions with different parts of the door. Traditional approaches rely on state machines that transition between manually defined stages (e.g., pulling after the knob is rotated, passing after the gap is sufficiently wide). While intuitive, these methods lack robustness, as hand crafted trajectories fail to generalize to the diversity of real world conditions without extensive engineering effort. Recent advances in imitation learning offer a scalable alternative, yet no existing visual action model has demonstrated simultaneous coordination of a nonholonomic base and dual arms for the complete door opening and passing task. In this paper, we tackle this complex, highly constrained problem using a diffusion based visuomotor control policy. Our results demonstrate that a single end to end policy can be learned to execute long horizon tasks requiring tight coordination between manipulation and locomotion. The resulting policy not only achieves a high success rate in opening and traversing damped pull doors but also demonstrates strong robustness to external disturbances capabilities that are difficult to realize with traditional methods.

LLM-based agents are increasingly used to simulate deliberative interactions such as negotiation, conflict resolution, and multi-turn opinion exchange. Yet generated transcripts often do not reveal why an agent's stance changes: movement may reflect evidence uptake, anchoring, role drift, echoing, or changed prompt and retrieval context. We introduce the Belief Engine (BE), an auditable belief-update layer that treats "belief" as an evidential state over a proposition and exposes it as scalar stance. BE extracts arguments into structured memory and updates stance with a log-odds rule controlled by evidence uptake u and prior anchoring a. Across multiple base LLMs, parameter sweeps show that these controls reliably shape stance dynamics while preserving an evidence-level update trail. On DEBATE, a human deliberation dataset with pre/post opinions, BE best reconstructs participants whose final stance follows extracted evidence; stable and evidence-opposed cases instead point to anchoring or factors outside the extracted evidence stream. BE provides configurable infrastructure for studying evidence-grounded deliberation, where openness, commitment, convergence, and disagreement can be tied to explicit update assumptions rather than hidden prompt effects.

Video reasoning models are a core component of egocentric and embodied agents. However, standard benchmarks for assessing models provide only evaluation of the output (e.g. the answer to a question), without evaluation of intermediate reasoning steps, and most provide answers only in the text domain. We introduce Minerva-Ego, a benchmark for evaluating complex egocentric visual reasoning. We extend recent high-quality video data sources recorded from egocentric / embodied settings with a set of challenging, multi-step multimodal questions and spatiotemporally-dense human-annotated reasoning traces. Benchmarking experiments show that state-of-the-art models still have a large gap to human performance. To investigate this gap in detail, we annotate each reasoning trace in the dataset with the objects of interest required to solve the question, as spatiotemporal mask annotations. Through extensive evaluations, we identify that prompting frontier models with hints of 'where' and 'when' to look yields substantial improvements in performance. Minerva-Ego can be downloaded at https://github.com/google-deepmind/neptune.

LLMs are increasingly deployed in autonomous laboratories, under the assumption that their domain priors and reasoning over iterative feedback let them converge on good designs in fewer iterations than feedback-only baselines. Current iterative scientific design benchmarks, however, score only outcome snapshots at fixed horizons. This leaves the learning trajectory unmeasured, even though the trajectory is what captures learning efficiency, where each iteration saved is a real saving in cost and time. Motivated by this, we examine three evaluation choices that change the conclusions one draws about LLM learning efficiency in iterative scientific design: what to measure, what baseline to compare against, and what to ground against. We introduce LEAPBench, Learning Efficiency in Adaptive Processes, a 55-task framework that pairs a best-so-far area under the curve (AUC) trajectory metric with a classical Bayesian-optimization reference and an audit grounded in published literature. Applied to eight contemporary LLMs, switching from final-outcome to trajectory scoring changes the best-model decision on 53% of tasks at matched horizons, and exposes efficiency gains overlooked by outcome-based scoring. LLMs do not outperform a classical Bayesian baseline. On 16 biology tasks where the oracle's reward signal is aligned with configurations from the published-best design, domain-aware prompting leads to LLM choices that match the published-best's approximately 10 percentage points less often than domain-agnostic prompting at iteration 30. The pattern is sharpest on 6 tasks where the literature-typical and published-best configurations diverge, and domain-agnostic prompting matches the published-best more often on all 6. The trajectory metric also doubles as a tractable training target. Offline reinforcement learning with the metric as a reward improves performance on 14 of 21 held-out tasks.

A learner does not only fit data; it also determines how strongly the training sample may shape its output and how much distortion it can hedge. We study this relation as a bounded-rational decision problem whose primitive object is the induced channel from samples to outputs. The learner's response law determines which changes in this channel are cheap or costly, and therefore induces both a lower tradeoff curve between training loss and sample dependence and a matched upper certificate curve. When the response law is represented by an $f$-divergence regularizer, these curves live in the regularizer's native information geometry, with KL as the special case corresponding to Shannon mutual information. We show how the hedge and the two curves can be recovered from black-box behavior by observing responses to scaled losses and local loss perturbations. In learning, population loss is empirical loss plus the distortion induced by the particular training sample. The recovered hedge gives a practical certificate when it covers that distortion. Thus generalization is treated as a testable hedging property of the learner's own response law.

The automatic synthesis of a program from any form of specification is regarded as a holy grail of computer science. Fueled by LLMs, NL2Code has achieved tremendous success, yet the fundamentally more challenging task of synthesizing programs from input-output behavior, which we refer to as IO2Code, remains largely unsolved. Whereas NL2Code can exploit the semantic alignment between natural language and code acquired during pretraining, IO2Code requires recovering underlying principles from concrete computational behavior, navigating a vast and underspecified hypothesis space. To address this, we propose DIO-Agent, a discovery agent for IO2Code. Our method frames IO2Code as an evolutionary search over discrete program space, in which an LLM serves as the mutation operator and concrete error signals from execution guide each mutation. To prevent the search from wandering into structurally complex yet incorrect dead ends, we introduce the Transformation Priority Premise as a mutation prior that biases the LLM toward the simplest hypothesis consistent with current evidence, progressively escalating from constants to conditionals to iteration only when simpler constructs are insufficient. To facilitate systematic study, we further construct an IO2CodeBench spanning multiple difficulty levels. Extensive experiments show that DIO-Agent consistently outperforms both traditional program-by-example method and SOTA evolution-agent baselines across all difficulty levels and various LLMs, while substantially surpassing test-time scaling strategies with equivalent sampling budgets.

Large language models have recently reached near-parity with classical planners on well-known planning domains, yet this competence relies on world-knowledge exploitation rather than genuine symbolic reasoning. Goal recognition is a complementary abductive task structurally better suited to LLM strengths: it consists of evaluating consistency with world knowledge rather than generating novel action sequences. This paper provides the first systematic zero-shot evaluation of frontier LLMs as goal recognisers on key classical PDDL benchmarks. Our results show that LLM competence on goal recognition is uneven: some models scale with evidence and approach landmark-based accuracy at full observations, while others remain anchored to world-knowledge priors regardless of how much evidence accumulates. Qualitative analysis of model reasoning traces reveals that this divergence reflects a fundamental difference in evidence integration rather than domain familiarity. These findings position goal recognition as a principled benchmark for the foundational planning knowledge of LLMs.

Fully Connected Neural Networks (FCNNs) are often regarded as simple and intuitive architectures, yet they serve as the foundation for more complex models. Nonetheless, the lack of consensus on their interpretability continues to pose challenges, underscoring the enduring relevance of simpler, attribution-based approaches for understanding even the most advanced neural architectures. In this regard, we explore a novel idea for estimating feature attribution, by applying perturbation to the features' attached weights instead of their values. This method offers a fresh perspective aimed at mitigating common limitations in Occlusion techniques, such as Added Bias and Out-of-Distribution data. The application of this rule leads to the formation of a pair of novel attribution methods we call XWP and XWP_c. Founded on simple rules, our methods achieve competitive performance in identifying image signals for simple DNNs, competing with the most established attribution methods on standard baseline metrics. Our work thus contributes to the field of Explainability by introducing a robust framework that paves the way for addressing these long-standing vulnerabilities, and leads to more reliable and interpretable model explanations.

Reliable detection of humans beneath forest canopy remains a difficult remote-sensing challenge due to sparse, structured, and viewpoint-dependent occlusion. This paper presents a multimodal proof-of-concept pipeline that integrates three complementary approaches: (i) experimental evaluation of LiDAR returns through vegetation to assess the feasibility of active sensing, (ii) visible--thermal image fusion using a multi-scale transform and sparse-representation framework to enhance human saliency, and (iii) synthetic-aperture image formation via Airborne Optical Sectioning (AOS) to suppress canopy clutter. A YOLOv5 detector is fine-tuned on the Teledyne FLIR thermal dataset and evaluated on thermal and fused imagery. Results show that the tested terrestrial LiDAR configuration provides limited penetration for object-level detection, while visible--thermal fusion improves target visibility in low-contrast scenes and AOS enhances ground-plane detection in synthetic forest imagery. The fine-tuned YOLOv5 achieves a mean average precision of $\sim$0.83 on the top three FLIR classes. These findings establish an initial baseline for UAV-deployable search-and-rescue and surveillance systems operating in forested environments, and motivate future work on dedicated forest datasets and real-time multimodal integration.

Vision-language models (VLMs) have shown strong performance in video anomaly detection (VAD) while providing interpretable predictions. However, existing VLM-based VAD methods suffer from a fundamental mismatch between training and inference in both data distribution and model configuration. First, most approaches rely on static post-training adaptation, limiting generalization under distribution shifts such as unseen environments or anomaly types. Second, they train VLMs on sparse frames from long videos, but perform inference on densely sampled short segments, creating inconsistencies between training and testing. To address these limitations, we propose COPRA, a conditional parameter adaptation framework for VLM-based VAD. Instead of fixed prompts or shared parameter updates, COPRA generates input-specific parameter updates to dynamically adapt a frozen VLM for each video segment during both training and inference. Experiments show strong performance on standard VAD benchmarks, consistently outperforming static baselines in both in-domain and cross-domain settings. Moreover, COPRA generalizes beyond VAD to unseen tasks such as multiple-choice Video Question Answering and Dense Captioning. These results highlight COPRA as an effective weight-space generation framework for scalable, adaptive, and context-aware video understanding. The code will be released at https://github.com/THE-MALT-LAB/COPRA

LLM-powered coding agents spend the majority of their token budget reading repository files, yet much of the retrieved code is irrelevant to the task at hand. Existing learned pruners compress this context with a single-objective sequence labeler, collapsing all facets of code relevance into one score and one transition matrix. We show that this formulation creates a modeling bottleneck: a single CRF transition prior must serve heterogeneous retention patterns, including contiguous semantic spans and sparse structural support lines. We propose LaMR (Latent Multi-Rubric), a structured pruning framework that decomposes code relevance into two interpretable quality dimensions, semantic evidence and dependency support, each modeled by a dedicated CRF with dimension-specific transition dynamics. A mixture-of-experts gating network dynamically weights the per-rubric emissions conditioned on the query, and a final CRF layer on the fused emissions produces the aggregate keep-or-prune decision. To supervise each dimension without additional annotation cost, we derive multi-rubric labels from the existing training corpus via AST-based program analysis, simultaneously denoising the teacher's binary labels. By effectively filtering distracting noise, LaMR frequently matches or even outperforms unpruned full-context baselines. Experiments on four benchmarks (SWE-Bench Verified, SWE-QA, LCC, LongCodeQA) show that LaMR wins 12 of 16 head-to-head multi-turn comparisons. It saves up to 31% more tokens on multi-turn agent tasks and improves Exact Match by up to +3.5 on single-turn tasks, while performance is frequently enhanced by denoising the context, and any remaining drops are marginal.

We study nonconvex stochastic optimization under the Blum-Gladyshev ($\mathsf{BG}$-0) noise model, where the stochastic gradient variance grows quadratically with the distance from the initialization. We consider this problem under both standard smoothness and the symmetric generalized-smoothness framework, which captures objectives whose local curvature can scale with the gradient norm. We prove that normalized stochastic gradient descent with momentum, using only one stochastic gradient per iteration, converges under $\mathsf{BG}$-0 noise with oracle complexity $O(\varepsilon^{-6})$. This rate holds both for standard smoothness and for $α$-symmetric generalized smoothness, showing that generalized smoothness is rate-neutral for normalized momentum in this setting. We then study a variance-reduced normalized STORM method. Under mean-square smoothness and sharp initialization, the method achieves the minimax optimal $O(\varepsilon^{-4})$ complexity, matching the lower bound. Under expected $α$-symmetric generalized smoothness, the STORM recursion couples gradient-dependent smoothness with distance-dependent noise, leading to complexity $O(\varepsilon^{-(4+α)})$ for $α\in(0,1)$ and $O(\varepsilon^{-5})$ for $α=1$. When the distance-growth parameter in the noise model vanishes, our guarantees recover the standard bounded-variance rates: $O(\varepsilon^{-4})$ for momentum, $O(\varepsilon^{-3})$ for variance reduction, and $O(\varepsilon^{-2})$ in the deterministic case. To our knowledge, these are the first convergence guarantees for normalized methods in non-convex stochastic optimization under $\mathsf{BG}$-0 noise without bounded domains, increasing batch sizes, or explicit anchoring, covering both standard and generalized smoothness regimes.

The identification and modeling of time-varying systems is a fundamental challenge in signal processing and system identification. To address this challenge, we propose a class of time-varying state-space model (SSM) based neural networks in which the neurons' states are governed by time-varying dynamics. The proposed model provides the learnable time-varying dynamics through a dictionary of basis functions, where each basis function evolves differently over time. We evaluate the proposed approach on both synthetic data from switching systems and a speech denoising task where real audio is corrupted with switching dynamics noise. The results show that the proposed time-varying model consistently outperforms its time-invariant counterparts while maintaining comparable computational complexity. Our investigations also reveal which aspects of the time-varying dynamics of the data most need to be captured by the proposed time-invariant models, how the additional freedom provided by time-varying basis functions should be allocated across model components, and to what extent larger models can compensate for time-invariant limitations.

Despite remarkable progress, image generation is far from solved. The dominant metric, FID, conflates sample fidelity with mode coverage and is close to being saturated. Yet a model can still exhibit mode collapse while achieving a low FID, since a handful of sharp, near-duplicate images can outscore a model that faithfully covers the full data distribution. We argue that precision and recall are essential complements to FID, and that because FID is already saturated, the more meaningful goal is to improve diversity and coverage. Achieving high recall requires a model that explicitly prioritizes mode coverage, unlike most generative models, which optimize sample fidelity. We introduce RTM, which replaces the single-pass latent mapping in style-based generators with an iterative refinement process, and show that this consistently improves both quality and diversity. Integrated with Implicit Maximum Likelihood Estimation (IMLE), which optimizes mode coverage by design, RTM achieves the highest precision and recall among current state-of-the-art approaches while maintaining competitive FID, with improvements across CIFAR-10, CelebA-HQ at 256x256, and nine few-shot benchmarks. RTM also improves StyleGAN2 and StyleGAN2-ADA on CIFAR-10 and AFHQ-v1 at 512x512, demonstrating that the benefit is not specific to IMLE. Unlike flow-matching baselines that achieve competitive FID at the expense of coverage, recursive refinement improves both quality and diversity simultaneously.