In real-world video question answering scenarios, videos often provide only localized visual cues, while verifiable answers are distributed across the open web; models therefore need to jointly perform cross-frame clue extraction, iterative retrieval, and multi-hop reasoning-based verification. To bridge this gap, we construct the first video deep research benchmark, VideoDR. VideoDR centers on video-conditioned open-domain video question answering, requiring cross-frame visual anchor extraction, interactive web retrieval, and multi-hop reasoning over joint video-web evidence; through rigorous human annotation and quality control, we obtain high-quality video deep research samples spanning six semantic domains. We evaluate multiple closed-source and open-source multimodal large language models under both the Workflow and Agentic paradigms, and the results show that Agentic is not consistently superior to Workflow: its gains depend on a model's ability to maintain the initial video anchors over long retrieval chains. Further analysis indicates that goal drift and long-horizon consistency are the core bottlenecks. In sum, VideoDR provides a systematic benchmark for studying video agents in open-web settings and reveals the key challenges for next-generation video deep research agents.

The widespread adoption of text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models has raised concerns about their potential to generate copyrighted, inappropriate, or sensitive imagery. As a practical solution, machine unlearning aims to erase unwanted concepts without retraining from scratch. While most existing methods are effective for single-concept unlearning, they often struggle when removing multiple concepts, causing significant challenges in unlearning effectiveness, generation quality, and sensitivity to hyperparameters and datasets. We take a unique perspective on multi-concept unlearning by leveraging model sparsity and propose the Forget It All (FIA) framework. FIA first introduces Contrastive Concept Saliency to quantify each weight connection's contribution to a target concept. It then identifies Concept Sensitive Neurons by combining temporal and spatial information, ensuring that only neurons consistently responsive to the target concept are selected. Finally, FIA constructs masks from the identified neurons and fuses them into a unified multi-concept mask, where Concept Agnostic Neurons that broadly support general content generation are preserved while concept-specific neurons are pruned to remove the targets. FIA is training-free and requires minimal hyperparameter tuning for new tasks, enabling plug-and-play use. Extensive experiments across three distinct unlearning tasks demonstrate that FIA achieves more reliable multi-concept unlearning, improving forgetting effectiveness while maintaining generation fidelity and quality. Code is available at https://github.com/kaiyuan02415/Forget-It-All

Text-to-image diffusion models have achieved remarkable progress, yet their use raises copyright and misuse concerns, prompting research into machine unlearning. However, extending multi-concept unlearning to large-scale scenarios remains difficult due to three challenges: (i) conflicting weight updates that hinder unlearning or degrade generation; (ii) imprecise mechanisms that cause collateral damage to similar content; and (iii) reliance on additional data or modules, creating scalability bottlenecks. To address these, we propose Scalable-Precise Concept Unlearning (ScaPre), a unified framework tailored for large-scale unlearning. ScaPre introduces a conflict-aware stable design, integrating spectral trace regularization and geometry alignment to stabilize optimization, suppress conflicts, and preserve global structure. Furthermore, an Informax Decoupler identifies concept-relevant parameters and adaptively reweights updates, strictly confining unlearning to the target subspace. ScaPre yields an efficient closed-form solution without requiring auxiliary data or sub-models. Comprehensive experiments on objects, styles, and explicit content demonstrate that ScaPre effectively removes target concepts while maintaining generation quality. It forgets up to $\times \mathbf{5}$ more concepts than the best baseline within acceptable quality limits, achieving state-of-the-art precision and efficiency for large-scale unlearning. Code is available at https://github.com/kaiyuan02415/scapre

Handling missing node features is a key challenge for deploying Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) in real-world domains such as healthcare and sensor networks. Existing studies mostly address relatively benign scenarios, namely benchmark datasets with (a) high-dimensional but sparse node features and (b) incomplete data generated under Missing Completely At Random (MCAR) mechanisms. For (a), we theoretically prove that high sparsity substantially limits the information loss caused by missingness, making all models appear robust and preventing a meaningful comparison of their performance. To overcome this limitation, we introduce one synthetic and three real-world datasets with dense, semantically meaningful features. For (b), we move beyond MCAR and design evaluation protocols with more realistic missingness mechanisms. Moreover, we provide a theoretical background to state explicit assumptions on the missingness process and analyze their implications for different methods. Building on this analysis, we propose GNNmim, a simple yet effective baseline for node classification with incomplete feature data. Experiments show that GNNmim is competitive with respect to specialized architectures across diverse datasets and missingness regimes.

Mixture of Experts models are widely assumed to achieve domain specialization through sparse routing. In this work, we question this assumption by introducing COMMITTEEAUDIT, a post hoc framework that analyzes routing behavior at the level of expert groups rather than individual experts. Across three representative models and the MMLU benchmark, we uncover a domain-invariant Standing Committee. This is a compact coalition of routed experts that consistently captures the majority of routing mass across domains, layers, and routing budgets, even when architectures already include shared experts. Qualitative analysis further shows that Standing Committees anchor reasoning structure and syntax, while peripheral experts handle domain-specific knowledge. These findings reveal a strong structural bias toward centralized computation, suggesting that specialization in Mixture of Experts models is far less pervasive than commonly believed. This inherent bias also indicates that current training objectives, such as load-balancing losses that enforce uniform expert utilization, may be working against the model's natural optimization path, thereby limiting training efficiency and performance.

While controllable Text-to-Speech (TTS) has achieved notable progress, most existing methods remain limited to inter-utterance-level control, making fine-grained intra-utterance expression challenging due to their reliance on non-public datasets or complex multi-stage training. In this paper, we propose TED-TTS, a training-free controllable framework for pretrained zero-shot TTS to enable intra-utterance emotion and duration expression. Specifically, we propose a segment-aware emotion conditioning strategy that combines causal masking with monotonic stream alignment filtering to isolate emotion conditioning and schedule mask transitions, enabling smooth intra-utterance emotion shifts while preserving global semantic coherence. Based on this, we further propose a segment-aware duration steering strategy to combine local duration embedding steering with global EOS logit modulation, allowing local duration adjustment while ensuring globally consistent termination. To eliminate the need for segment-level manual prompt engineering, we construct a 30,000-sample multi-emotion and duration-annotated text dataset to enable LLM-based automatic prompt construction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our training-free method not only achieves state-of-the-art intra-utterance consistency in multi-emotion and duration control, but also maintains baseline-level speech quality of the underlying TTS model. Code and audio samples are available.

Manual font design is an intricate process that transforms a stylistic visual concept into a coherent glyph set. This challenge persists in automated Few-shot Font Generation (FFG), where models often struggle to preserve both the structural integrity and stylistic fidelity from limited references. While autoregressive (AR) models have demonstrated impressive generative capabilities, their application to FFG is constrained by conventional patch-level tokenization, which neglects global dependencies crucial for coherent font synthesis. Moreover, existing FFG methods remain within the image-to-image paradigm, relying solely on visual references and overlooking the role of language in conveying stylistic intent during font design. To address these limitations, we propose GAR-Font, a novel AR framework for multimodal few-shot font generation. GAR-Font introduces a global-aware tokenizer that effectively captures both local structures and global stylistic patterns, a multimodal style encoder offering flexible style control through a lightweight language-style adapter without requiring intensive multimodal pretraining, and a post-refinement pipeline that further enhances structural fidelity and style coherence. Extensive experiments show that GAR-Font outperforms existing FFG methods, excelling in maintaining global style faithfulness and achieving higher-quality results with textual stylistic guidance.

Existing methods for multi-agent navigation typically assume fully known environments, offering limited support for partially known scenarios with outdated or imperfect prior maps, such as warehouses or factory floors. There, agents need to balance path optimality with collecting and sharing environmental information to help teammates reach their own targets. To these ends, we propose ORION, a novel deep reinforcement learning framework for cooperative multi-agent online navigation in partially known environments. Starting from an imperfect prior map, ORION trains agents to make decentralized decisions, coordinate toward individual targets, and actively reduce task-relevant map uncertainty through online observation sharing in a closed perception-action loop. We first design a shared graph encoder that fuses prior map with online perception into a unified representation, providing robust state embeddings under environmental discrepancies. At the core of ORION is an option-critic framework that learns high-level cooperative modes translated into sequences of low-level actions, enabling adaptive switching between individual navigation and team-level exploration. We further introduce a dual-stage cooperation strategy that allows agents to assist teammates under map uncertainty, thereby reducing the overall makespan. Across extensive maze-like maps and large-scale warehouse environments, ORION achieves high-quality real-time decentralized cooperation while scaling to up to 10 robots, outperforming state-of-the-art classical and learning-based baselines. Finally, we validate ORION on physical robot teams, demonstrating its robustness and practicality for real-world cooperative navigation.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated remarkable success in various domains such as social networks, molecular chemistry, and more. A crucial component of GNNs is the pooling procedure, in which the node features calculated by the model are combined to form an informative final descriptor to be used for the downstream task. However, previous graph pooling schemes rely on the last GNN layer features as an input to the pooling or classifier layers, potentially under-utilizing important activations of previous layers produced during the forward pass of the model, which we regard as historical graph activations. This gap is particularly pronounced in cases where a node's representation can shift significantly over the course of many graph neural layers, and worsened by graph-specific challenges such as over-smoothing in deep architectures. To bridge this gap, we introduce HISTOGRAPH, a novel two-stage attention-based final aggregation layer that first applies a unified layer-wise attention over intermediate activations, followed by node-wise attention. By modeling the evolution of node representations across layers, our HISTOGRAPH leverages both the activation history of nodes and the graph structure to refine features used for final prediction. Empirical results on multiple graph classification benchmarks demonstrate that HISTOGRAPH offers strong performance that consistently improves traditional techniques, with particularly strong robustness in deep GNNs.

A long-standing challenge in AI is to develop agents capable of solving a wide range of physical tasks and generalizing to new, unseen tasks and environments. A popular recent approach involves training a world model from state-action trajectories and subsequently use it with a planning algorithm to solve new tasks. Planning is commonly performed in the input space, but a recent family of methods has introduced planning algorithms that optimize in the learned representation space of the world model, with the promise that abstracting irrelevant details yields more efficient planning. In this work, we characterize models from this family as JEPA-WMs and investigate the technical choices that make algorithms from this class work. We propose a comprehensive study of several key components with the objective of finding the optimal approach within the family. We conducted experiments using both simulated environments and real-world robotic data, and studied how the model architecture, the training objective, and the planning algorithm affect planning success. We combine our findings to propose a model that outperforms two established baselines, DINO-WM and V-JEPA-2-AC, in both navigation and manipulation tasks. Code, data and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/jepa-wms.

Text-to-audio-video (T2AV) generation is central to applications such as filmmaking and world modeling. However, current models often fail to produce physically plausible sounds. Previous benchmarks primarily focus on audio-video temporal synchronization, while largely overlooking explicit evaluation of audio-physics grounding, thereby limiting the study of physically plausible audio-visual generation. To address this issue, we present PhyAVBench, the first benchmark that systematically evaluates the audio-physics grounding capabilities of T2AV, image-to-audio-video (I2AV), and video-to-audio (V2A) models. PhyAVBench offers PhyAV-Sound-11K, a new dataset of 25.5 hours of 11,605 audible videos collected from 184 participants to ensure diversity and avoid data leakage. It contains 337 paired-prompt groups with controlled physical variations that drive sound differences, each grounded with an average of 17 videos and spanning 6 audio-physics dimensions and 41 fine-grained test points. Each prompt pair is annotated with the physical factors underlying their acoustic differences. Importantly, PhyAVBench leverages paired text prompts to evaluate this capability. We term this evaluation paradigm the Audio-Physics Sensitivity Test (APST) and introduce a novel metric, the Contrastive Physical Response Score (CPRS), which quantifies the acoustic consistency between generated videos and their real-world counterparts. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of 17 state-of-the-art models. Our results reveal that even leading commercial models struggle with fundamental audio-physical phenomena, exposing a critical gap beyond audio-visual synchronization and pointing to future research directions. We hope PhyAVBench will serve as a foundation for advancing physically grounded audio-visual generation. Prompts, ground-truth, and generated video samples are available at https://github.com/imxtx/PhyAVBench.

Dynamic Retrieval-Augmented Generation adaptively determines when to retrieve during generation to mitigate hallucinations in large language models (LLMs). However, existing methods rely on model-internal signals (e.g., logits, entropy), which are fundamentally unreliable because LLMs are typically ill-calibrated and often exhibit high confidence in erroneous outputs. We propose QuCo-RAG, which shifts from subjective confidence to objective statistics computed from pre-training data. Our method quantifies uncertainty through two stages: (1) before generation, we identify low-frequency entities indicating long-tail knowledge gaps; (2) during generation, we verify entity co-occurrence in the pre-training corpus, where zero co-occurrence often signals hallucination risk. Both stages leverage Infini-gram for millisecond-latency queries over 4 trillion tokens, triggering retrieval when uncertainty is high. Experiments on multi-hop QA benchmarks show QuCo-RAG achieves EM gains of 5--12 points over state-of-the-art baselines with OLMo-2 models, and transfers effectively to models with undisclosed pre-training data (Llama-3, Qwen2.5, GPT-4.1/5-chat), improving EM by up to 14 points. Generalization to long-form generation and biomedical QA further validates the robustness of our paradigm. These results establish corpus-grounded verification as a principled, practically model-agnostic paradigm for dynamic RAG. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ZhishanQ/QuCo-RAG.

We focus on the foundational task of Scene Staging: given a reference scene image and a text condition specifying an actor category to be generated in the scene and its spatial relation to the scene, the goal is to synthesize an output image that preserves the same scene identity as the reference image while correctly generating the actor according to the spatial relation described in the text. Existing methods struggle with this task, largely due to the scarcity of high-quality paired data and unconstrained generation objectives. To overcome the data bottleneck, we propose a novel data construction pipeline that combines real-world photographs, entity removal, and image-to-video diffusion models to generate training pairs with diverse scenes, viewpoints and correct entity-scene relationships. Furthermore, we introduce a novel correspondence-guided attention loss that leverages cross-view cues to enforce spatial alignment with the reference scene. Experiments on our scene-consistent benchmark show that our approach achieves better scene alignment and text-image alignment than state-of-the-art baselines, according to both automatic metrics and human preference studies. Our method generates images with diverse viewpoints and compositions while faithfully following the textual instructions and preserving the reference scene identity.

Extremely low-bit quantization is critical for efficiently deploying Large Language Models (LLMs), yet it often leads to severe performance degradation at 2 bits and even at 4 bits (e.g., MXFP4). We present SignRoundV2, a post-training quantization framework designed to maintain high performance even under aggressive compression. SignRoundV2 introduces (1) a simple yet efficient adaptive mixed-precision strategy that leverages gradient information and quantization-induced reconstruction errors to guide layer-wise bit allocation, and (2) a set of lightweight stabilization techniques, including loss filtering and a pre-tuning scale search, to improve tuning effectiveness in extremely low-bit regimes. Our approach takes a significant step toward closing the performance gap between quantized and full-precision models. Experimental results across diverse LLMs demonstrate that SignRoundV2 achieves near-lossless performance in mixed MXFP settings, narrowing the gap to $\sim$1\% at an average of 4.5 bits, while substantially improving accuracy in challenging 2-bit weight-only quantization. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/intel/auto-round}.

Recovering pixel-wise geometric properties from a single image is fundamentally ill-posed due to appearance ambiguity and non-injective mappings between 2D observations and 3D structures. While discriminative regression models achieve strong performance through large-scale supervision, their success is bounded by the scale, quality, and diversity of available data, as well as by limited physical reasoning. Recent diffusion models exhibit powerful world priors that encode geometry and semantics learned from massive image-text data, yet directly reusing their stochastic generative formulation is suboptimal for deterministic geometric inference: the former is optimized for diverse and high-fidelity image generation, whereas the latter requires stable and accurate predictions. In this work, we propose Lotus-2, a two-stage deterministic framework for stable, accurate and fine-grained geometric dense prediction, aiming to provide an optimal adaptation protocol to fully exploit the pre-trained generative priors. Specifically, in the first stage, the core predictor employs a single-step deterministic formulation with a clean-data objective and a lightweight local continuity module (LCM) to generate globally coherent structures without grid artifacts. In the second stage, the detail sharpener performs a constrained multi-step rectified-flow refinement within the manifold defined by the core predictor, enhancing fine-grained geometry through noise-free deterministic flow matching. Using only 59K training samples, less than 1% of existing large-scale datasets, Lotus-2 establishes new state-of-the-art results in monocular depth estimation and highly competitive surface normal prediction. These results demonstrate that diffusion models can serve as deterministic world priors, enabling high-quality geometric reasoning beyond traditional discriminative and generative paradigms.

Recent advancements in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have significantly impacted various industries. In agriculture, these multimodal capabilities hold great promise for applications such as precision farming, crop monitoring, pest detection, and environmental sustainability. However, while several Visual Question Answering (VQA) datasets and benchmarks have been developed to assess VLM performance, they often fail to effectively evaluate the critical reasoning and problem-solving skills needed in complex agricultural contexts. To address this gap, we introduce AgroCoT, a VQA dataset that integrates Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, specifically designed to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of VLMs. With 4,759 carefully curated samples, AgroCoT provides a comprehensive and robust evaluation of reasoning abilities, particularly in zero-shot scenarios, focusing on the models' ability to engage in logical reasoning and effective problem-solving. Our evaluation of 30 representative VLMs, including both proprietary and open-source models, reveals a gap in their reasoning capabilities, which underscores the importance of incorporating CoT for assessments. Our dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/AgroCoT/AgroCoT.

We introduce EvilGenie, a benchmark for reward hacking in programming settings. We source problems from LiveCodeBench and create an environment in which agents can easily reward hack, such as by hardcoding test cases or editing the testing files. We measure reward hacking in three ways: held out unit tests, LLM judges, and test file edit detection. We verify these methods against human review and each other. We find the LLM judge to be highly effective at detecting reward hacking in unambiguous cases, and observe only minimal improvement from the use of held out test cases. In addition to testing many models using Inspect's basic\_agent scaffold, we also measure reward hacking rates for three popular proprietary coding agents: OpenAI's Codex, Anthropic's Claude Code, and Google's Gemini CLI. We observe explicit reward hacking by both Codex and Claude Code, and misaligned behavior by all three agents. Our codebase can be found at https://github.com/JonathanGabor/evilgenie_inspect .

Linear State-Space Models (SSMs) offer an efficient alternative to softmax Attention with constant memory and linear compute, but their lossy, fading summary of the past hurts recall-oriented tasks. We propose Gated KalmaNet (GKA, pronounced "gee-ka"), a layer that accounts for the full past while retaining SSM-style efficiency. We ground our approach in the Kalman Filter (KF), and show that several existing SSM layers (DeltaNet, Gated DeltaNet, Kimi Delta Attention) are approximations to the KF recurrence under an identity error covariance assumption, which ignores how past keys and values should optimally influence state updates. In contrast, GKA maintains the full error covariance and computes the exact Kalman gain. Under a steady-state assumption that enables parallelization, this reduces to an online ridge regression with constant memory and linear compute. The standard KF equations are numerically unstable in low-precision settings (e.g., bfloat16) and hard to parallelize on GPUs. We address this with (1) adaptive regularization via input-dependent gating to control the ridge regression's condition number, and (2) Chebyshev Iteration, which we show is more stable than conventional iterative solvers in low precision. We further develop hardware-aware chunk-wise kernels for efficient training. Empirically, GKA outperforms existing SSM layers (e.g., Mamba2, Gated DeltaNet) on short-context tasks and achieves more than 10\% relative improvement on long-context RAG and LongQA up to 128k tokens. We further show GKA outperforms Mamba when extended to ImageNet classification. Our code, including Triton kernels for training and inference (vLLM), along with a model zoo of GKA-based Hybrid models at 8B and 32B scale on HuggingFace, is released under Apache 2.0.

Reasons for mapping an unknown environment with autonomous robots are wide-ranging, but in practice, they are often overlooked when developing planning strategies. Rapid information gathering and comprehensive structural assessment of buildings have different requirements and therefore necessitate distinct methodologies. In this paper, we propose a novel modular Next-Best-View (NBV) planning framework for aerial robots that explicitly uses a reconstruction quality objective to guide the exploration planning. In particular, our approach introduces new and efficient methods for view generation and selection of viewpoint candidates that are adaptive to the user-defined quality requirements, fully exploiting the uncertainty encoded in a Truncated Signed Distance field (TSDF) representation of the environment. This results in informed and efficient exploration decisions tailored towards the predetermined objective. Finally, we validate our method via extensive simulations in realistic environments. We demonstrate that it successfully adjusts its behavior to the user goal while consistently outperforming conventional NBV strategies in terms of coverage, quality of the final 3D map and path efficiency.

Preserving first-frame identity while ensuring precise motion control is a fundamental challenge in human image animation. The Image-to-Motion Binding process of the dominant Reference-to-Video (R2V) paradigm overlooks critical spatio-temporal misalignments common in real-world applications, leading to failures such as identity drift and visual artifacts. We introduce SteadyDancer, an Image-to-Video (I2V) paradigm-based framework that achieves harmonized and coherent animation and is the first to ensure first-frame preservation robustly. Firstly, we propose a Condition-Reconciliation Mechanism to harmonize the two conflicting conditions, enabling precise control without sacrificing fidelity. Secondly, we design Synergistic Pose Modulation Modules to generate an adaptive and coherent pose representation that is highly compatible with the reference image. Finally, we employ a Staged Decoupled-Objective Training Pipeline that hierarchically optimizes the model for motion fidelity, visual quality, and temporal coherence. Experiments demonstrate that SteadyDancer achieves state-of-the-art performance in both appearance fidelity and motion control, while requiring significantly fewer training resources than comparable methods. The model has been publicly released at \url{https://mcg-nju.github.io/steadydancer-web}.

Deformable image registration (DIR) remains a fundamental yet challenging problem in medical image analysis, largely due to the prohibitively high-dimensional deformation space of dense displacement fields and the scarcity of voxel-level supervision. Existing reinforcement learning frameworks often project this space into coarse, low-dimensional representations, limiting their ability to capture spatially variant deformations. We propose MorphSeek, a fine-grained representation-level policy optimization paradigm that reformulates DIR as a spatially continuous optimization process in the latent feature space. MorphSeek introduces a stochastic Gaussian policy head atop the encoder to model a distribution over latent features, facilitating efficient exploration and coarse-to-fine refinement. The framework integrates unsupervised warm-up with weakly supervised fine-tuning through Group Relative Policy Optimization, where multi-trajectory sampling stabilizes training and improves label efficiency. Across three 3D registration benchmarks (OASIS brain MRI, LiTS liver CT, and Abdomen MR-CT), MorphSeek achieves consistent Dice improvements over competitive baselines while maintaining high label efficiency with minimal parameter cost and low step-level latency overhead. Beyond optimizer specifics, MorphSeek advances a representation-level policy learning paradigm that achieves spatially coherent and data-efficient deformation optimization, offering a principled, backbone-agnostic, and optimizer-agnostic solution for scalable visual alignment in high-dimensional settings.

Recent guided depth super-resolution methods are premised on the assumption of strict spatial alignment between depth and RGB, achieving high-quality depth reconstruction. However, in real-world scenarios, the acquisition of strictly aligned RGB-D is hindered by inherent hardware limitations (e.g., physically separate RGB-D sensors) and unavoidable calibration drift induced by mechanical vibrations or temperature variations. Consequently, existing approaches often suffer inevitable performance degradation when applied to misaligned real-world scenes. In this paper, we propose the Multi-Order Matching Network (MOMNet), a novel alignment-free framework that adaptively retrieves and selects the most relevant information from misaligned RGB. Specifically, our method begins with a multi-order matching mechanism, which jointly performs zero-order, first-order, and second-order matching to comprehensively identify RGB information consistent with depth across multi-order feature spaces. To effectively integrate the retrieved RGB and depth, we further introduce a multi-order aggregation composed of multiple structure detectors. This strategy uses multi-order priors as prompts to facilitate the selective feature transfer from RGB to depth. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MOMNet achieves superior performance and generalization across both unaligned and aligned datasets.

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are used to analyze embeddings, but their role and practical value are debated. We propose a new perspective on SAEs by demonstrating that they can be naturally understood as topic models. We propose a continuous topic model (CTM) inspired by Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) for embedding spaces and derive the SAE objective as a maximum a posteriori estimator under this model. This view implies SAE features are thematic components rather than steerable directions. To confirm our theoretical findings, we introduce SAE-TM, a topic modeling framework that: (1) trains an SAE to learn reusable topic atoms, (2) interprets them as word distributions on downstream data, and (3) merges them into any number of topics without retraining. SAE-TM yields more coherent topics than strong baselines on text and image datasets while maintaining diversity. Finally, we analyze thematic structure in image datasets and trace topic changes over time in Japanese woodblock prints. Our work positions SAEs as effective tools for large-scale thematic analysis across modalities. Code is available at https://github.com/ExplainableML/SAE-TM .

Automated red teaming frameworks for Large Language Models (LLMs) have become increasingly sophisticated, yet many still formulate attack optimization primarily in the prompt space. In other words, these methods mainly search for better attack wording or better strategy choices, but they do not search over executable code. By moving the search into code space, we can optimize not only the final attack prompt, but also the procedure that generates it, including execution flow, reusable logic, branching, and failure-driven repair. To overcome this gap, we introduce EvoSynth, an autonomous multi-agent framework that shifts the optimization space from prompts to executable code. Instead of refining prompts directly, EvoSynth employs a multi-agent system to autonomously engineer, evolve, and execute code-based attack algorithms. Crucially, it features a code-level self-correction loop, allowing it to iteratively rewrite the code-based algorithm in response to target-model feedback and failed attempts. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that EvoSynth achieves an 85.5\% Attack Success Rate (ASR) against highly robust models like Claude-Sonnet-4.5 and a 95.9\% average ASR across evaluated targets, while generating attacks that are significantly more diverse than those from existing methods. We release our framework to facilitate future research on evolutionary synthesis in executable code space.

We present a systematic benchmark of out-of-distribution (OOD) detection CSFs through a representation-centric lens. Our study spans CNN and ViT backbones, multiple training paradigms, four image-classification source datasets (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, SuperCIFAR-100, and TinyImageNet), and OOD datasets grouped into near, mid, and far regimes using CLIP-derived semantic distances. To compare CSFs across these settings, we employ a multiple-comparison-controlled rank pipeline that identifies top cliques of statistically indistinguishable winners under threshold-free ranking metrics (AURC and AUGRC). The main empirical finding is that the competitive detector family depends more on the learned representation than on score design alone. For both CNNs and ViTs, simple probabilistic scores dominate misclassification detection. On CNNs, margin-based scores are strongest in near-OOD regimes, while geometry-aware scores such as NNGuide, fDBD, and CTM become more competitive as shift severity increases. On fine-tuned ViTs, the top cliques are led mainly by reconstruction- and residual-based scores. To interpret these ranking shifts, we analyze the last-layer representation using Neural Collapse (NC) metrics. The resulting picture is consistent across architectures: prototype- and boundary-aware scores become stronger when the representation is more collapsed and better aligned with classifier weights, whereas weaker-collapse regimes favor gradient- and manifold-based scores. Building on these insights, we propose two contributions: a simple PCA-based projection-filtering procedure that improves detector performance, and an approach that uses NC measurements computed from a trained classifier to predict its competitive out-of-distribution detector shortlist, without requiring any additional OOD data.

This paper investigates the scaling properties of autoregressive next-pixel prediction, a simple, end-to-end yet under-explored framework for unified vision models. Starting with images at resolutions of 32x32, we train a family of Transformers using IsoFlops profiles across compute budgets up to 7e19 FLOPs and evaluate three distinct target metrics: next-pixel prediction objective, ImageNet classification accuracy, and generation-based completion measured by Fr'echet Distance. First, optimal scaling strategy is critically task-dependent. At a fixed resolution of 32x32 alone, the optimal scaling properties for image classification and image generation diverge, where generation optimal setup requires the data size grow three to five times faster than for the classification optimal setup. Second, as image resolution increases, the optimal scaling strategy indicates that the model size must grow much faster than data size. Surprisingly, by projecting our findings, we discover that the primary bottleneck is compute rather than the amount of training data. As compute continues to grow four to five times annually, we forecast the feasibility of pixel-by-pixel modeling of images within the next five years.

As LLMs are deployed in knowledge-intensive settings (e.g., surgery, astronomy, therapy), users are often domain experts who expect not just answers, but explanations that mirror professional reasoning. Yet evaluating whether an LLM "thinks like an expert" remains difficult: existing approaches rely on per-example expert annotation, making them costly, hard to scale, and tied to a single notion of correct reasoning within each domain. To address this gap, we introduce T-FIX, a unified evaluation framework that operationalizes expert alignment as a desired attribute of LLM-generated explanations. T-FIX spans seven scientific tasks across three domains, with each task evaluated against expert-defined criteria that capture domain-grounded reasoning rather than generic explanation quality. Our framework enables automatic, personalizable evaluation of expert alignment that generalizes to unseen explanations without ongoing expert involvement. Code is available at https://github.com/BrachioLab/FIX-2/.

Offline-to-online reinforcement learning (O2O RL) faces a central challenge between retaining offline conservatism and adapting to online feedback under distribution shift. This challenge arises because data behavior evolves during fine-tuning, rendering data origin a misleading basis for constraint handling and thereby leading to objective-data mismatch. We therefore propose Dynamic Alignment for RElaxation (DARE), a distribution-aware framework for sample-level constraint relaxation based on the behavioral consistency with a behavior model. To our knowledge, DARE is the first to condition constraint relaxation on behavioral consistency via a posterior-induced exchange mechanism, moving beyond a binary offline/online data distinction. Importantly, DARE requires only per-sample behavioral alignment, enabling instantiation on top of many offline algorithms with flexible choices of behavior models and fine-tuning objectives. We provide a theoretical analysis showing that behavior-based sample exchange consistently improves the distinction between offline-like and online-like subsets. Experiments on D4RL demonstrate that DARE consistently improves fine-tuning stability and achieves superior final performance over strong offline-to-online baselines. (The code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/lpzu/DARE}.)

The development of smart systems (i.e., systems enhanced with AI components) has thrived thanks to the rapid advancements in neural networks (NNs). A wide range of libraries and frameworks have consequently emerged to support NN design and implementation. The choice depends on factors such as available functionalities, ease of use, documentation and community support. After adopting a given NN framework, organizations might later choose to switch to another if performance declines, requirements evolve, or new features are introduced. Unfortunately, migrating NN implementations across libraries is challenging due to the lack of migration approaches specifically tailored for NNs. This leads to increased time and effort to modernize NNs, as manual updates are necessary to avoid relying on outdated implementations and ensure compatibility with new features. In this paper, we propose an approach to automatically migrate neural network code across deep learning frameworks. Our method makes use of a pivot NN model to create an abstraction of the NN prior to migration. We validate our approach using two popular NN frameworks, namely PyTorch and TensorFlow. We also discuss the challenges of migrating code between the two frameworks and how they were approached in our method. Experimental evaluation on five NNs shows that our approach successfully migrates their code and produces NNs that are functionally equivalent to the originals. Artefacts from our work are available online.

The prohibitive cost of evaluating large language models (LLMs) on comprehensive benchmarks necessitates the creation of small yet representative data subsets (i.e., tiny benchmarks) that enable efficient assessment while retaining predictive fidelity. Current methods for this task operate under a model-centric paradigm, selecting benchmarking items based on the collective performance of existing models. Such approaches are limited by large upfront costs, an inability to immediately handle new benchmarks ("cold-start"), and the fragile assumption that future models will share the failure patterns of their predecessors. In this work, we propose a new item-centric approach to benchmark subset selection, arguing that selection should be based on the intrinsic properties of the task items themselves, rather than on model-specific failure patterns. We instantiate this item-centric efficient benchmarking approach via a novel method, Scales++, where data selection is based on the cognitive demands of the benchmark samples. Empirically, we show Scales++ reduces the upfront selection cost by over 18x while achieving competitive predictive fidelity. On the Open LLM Leaderboard, using just a 0.25% data subset, we predict full benchmark scores with a 3.2% mean absolute error, and on Humanity's Last Exam we predict full scores with 2.9% mean absolute error using a 2.0% sample. We demonstrate that this item-centric approach enables more efficient model evaluation without significant fidelity degradation, while also providing better cold-start performance and more interpretable benchmarking.