Structural equation modeling is widely used in IS research. However, inconsistent construct definitions impede the cumulative development of knowledge. In this work, we present an approach that aims at the integration of structural equation models into a unified model: We use a combination of task-adapted text embeddings and clustering to produce a candidate set of construct groupings. Subsequently, we select the optimal solution using a loss function that explicitly trades off semantic purity and parsimony in the number of clusters. By making this trade-off explicit, our approach allows to analyze how construct groupings and their relations change as one shifts the priority from purity to parsimony. Empirically, we evaluate and explore the proposed methodology on two datasets from the IS domain.

A key question in psycholinguistics is how inferences about the meaning of linguistic input unfold incrementally a comprehender's mind. In this work, we study reading dynamics for ``noisy-channel garden-path'' sentences, which temporarily appear well-formed but feature late-appearing violations of expectation that can be resolved not by inferring an alternative syntactic structure, but by inferring the presence of an error. We find evidence for targeted regressions -- eye movements towards regions that are promising loci of possible errors in light of later-arriving information, showing patterns consistent with the posterior inferences of a model of noisy-channel processing with reanalysis. We discuss the implications of these findings for theories of noisy-channel language comprehension and information-theoretic explanations of reading dynamics.

The brain learns abstract representations of high-dimensional sensory input, but the plasticity rules that enable such learning are unknown. We study biologically plausible algorithms on the Random Hierarchy Model (RHM), an artificial dataset designed to investigate how deep neural networks learn the intrinsic hierarchical structure of high-dimensional data. We focus on two types of local learning rules that avoid both a long convergence time and the use of a symmetric error network. The first type uses direct feedback signals to approximate error propagation from the output layer. The second type uses layerwise self-supervised contrastive or non-contrastive loss functions that do not explicitly approximate errors at the output layer. We show that all rules of the first type fail to solve the tasks of the RHM and trace this failure back to input-specific nonlinearities (`masking') that are implemented in full backpropagation and are essential for learning complex tasks. However, algorithms of the second type are able to learn the hierarchical hidden structure of the RHM tasks and are as data-efficient as supervised backpropagation training, while being compatible with known rules of synaptic plasticity in cortex.

Embodied control increasingly requires models to follow compositional language instructions while reasoning over dynamic visual states. However, current vision-language-action policies and world-action models often couple linguistic knowledge with visual computation in a shared backbone or conditioning pathway, leading to modality competition and making knowledge extension dependent on backbone updates. In this paper, we introduce Key-Gram, a conditional-memory framework that separates language-derived world knowledge from visual-state reasoning for embodied control. At its core is a memory module that decomposes an instruction into task-specific key-grams, retrieves static linguistic priors through deterministic hashed lookup, and injects the retrieved entries into selected hidden layers through context-aware gating and lightweight convolutional fusion. This design allows the backbone to devote its main capacity to visual reasoning and action inference, while reusable instruction knowledge is stored in an extensible external memory. The logical memory table can be conveniently partitioned during training and, due to its $O(1)$ lookup pattern, efficiently placed on host memory during inference. Across RoboTwin2.0, LIBERO/LIBERO-Plus, and real-world dual-arm manipulation, Key-Gram consistently improves both $π_{0}$ and $π_{0.5}$ backbones, with average relative gains of $29.5\%/9.9\%$ on RoboTwin2.0, $35.8\%/4.5\%$ on LIBERO-Plus transfer without target-domain fine-tuning, and $15.4\%/8.1\%$ on real-world long-horizon tasks. These results demonstrate that externalized linguistic memory provides an effective and extensible mechanism for improving compositional grounding, transfer, and real-world manipulation.

Federated Bayesian neural networks require fixing a prior on the model parameters together with a likelihood. Eliciting meaningful priors on the weight space of modern overparameterized models is notoriously difficult, and misspecification of either component can severely degrade accuracy and calibration. Motivated by the rapid progress of predictive models such as large language models, the martingale posterior, also known as predictive Bayes, replaces the prior--likelihood pair with a predictive distribution and recovers parameter uncertainty by repeatedly drawing predictive samples and refitting the model. A direct federated implementation, however, would require clients to share the local data sets. This letter proposes {federated martingale posterior} (FMP) sampling, a one-shot embarrassingly parallel protocol in which each client uploads a small set of trainable data embeddings and the server runs the predictive sampler centrally. Experiments on MNIST, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100 show that FMP closely matches the centralized counterpart and significantly improves calibration over consensus-style baselines.

Recovering world space 4D motion of two interacting hands from egocentric video is a fundamental capability for supervising robot policy learning, where wrist trajectories track the end-effector and finger articulations specify the grasp pose. Two major challenges arise in this setting: hands frequently leave the camera view for extended periods due to head motion, and persistent hand-object interactions cause severe occlusions of one or both hands. Existing methods uniformly condition on noisy hand motion observations without accounting for their per-frame reliability, leading to substantial performance degradation. Our key insight is that accurate world space hand motion estimation is tightly coupled with the quality of per-frame hand observations. To this end, we decompose the quality of hand motion observations extracted from an off-the-shelf hand pose estimator into four channels: wrist global translation and finger articulations for both hands. We propose StableHand, a quality-aware flow-matching framework conditioned on these four-channel quality signals, which are predicted by a learned quality network. We naturally incorporate the quality signals into the flow-matching process through a per-channel forward schedule, a quality-adjusted velocity target, AdaLN modulation of the DiT denoiser, and a quality-aware ODE initialization. This unified generative process preserves high-quality observations while reconstructing unreliable ones using a learned bimanual motion prior. Experiments on HOT3D and ARCTIC, two egocentric benchmarks featuring long missing-hand spans and persistent hand-object occlusions, show that StableHand achieves state-of-the-art performance across all reported metrics, reducing W-MPJPE by 20-25% compared to the strongest baseline, with the largest gains on heavily occluded ARCTIC sequences.

Classifying protein topology is essential for deciphering biological function, but progress is held back by the lack of large-scale benchmarks that avoid duplicates and by models that do not scale well. We introduce TEDBench, a large-scale, non-redundant benchmark for protein fold classification constructed from the Encyclopedia of Domains (TED) and Foldseek-clustered AlphaFold structures. We show that on TEDBench, current protein representation learning methods either require very large models or fail to deliver strong performance. To address this challenge, we propose Masked Invariant Autoencoders (MiAE), a self-supervised framework for protein structure representation learning. MiAE uses an extremely high masking ratio of up to 90% with an $\mathrm{SE(3)}$-invariant encoder and a lightweight decoder that reconstructs backbone coordinates from the latent representation and mask tokens. MiAE scales well and outperforms supervised counterparts and state-of-the-art baselines on TEDBench, establishing a strong recipe for protein fold classification. To test transfer beyond AlphaFold structures, we further benchmark on a curated dataset from experimental structures of CATH v4.4. TEDBench is available at https://github.com/BorgwardtLab/TEDBench.

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) introduce new opportunities for safety monitoring through their Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning. However, CoT is not always faithful to the model's final output, undermining its reliability as a monitoring tool. To address this, we investigate the hidden representations of LRMs to determine whether future behavior can be predicted from prompt and CoT representations. By evaluating a probe at each generated token, we construct a probe trajectory, the continuous evolution of a concept's probability across the reasoning process. We find that future model behavior is more distinguishable when examined over the full trajectory than from a single static prediction. To characterize these temporal dynamics, we extract signal-processing features that capture volatility, trend, and steady-state behavior, significantly improving the separation of future model states. We also present two methodological insights. First, template-based training data achieves near-parity with dynamically generated model responses, eliminating the need for a costly initial inference and labeling. Second, the choice of pooling operation is critical: average-pooling and last-token methods collapse to near-random performance, while max-pooling achieves up to 95% AUROC and yields stable probe trajectories. Using four datasets and four reasoning models across the domains of safety and mathematics, we demonstrate that trajectory features encode task-specific dynamics that improve outcome separability. These findings establish probe trajectories as a complementary framework for monitoring LRM behavior. Warning: This article contains potentially harmful content.

Large language models (LLMs) deployed in real-world agentic applications must be capable of replanning and adapting when mid-task disruptions invalidate their prior decisions. Existing dynamic benchmarks primarily measure whether LLMs can detect temporal changes in a timely manner, leaving the complementary challenge of adaptive replanning under spatio-temporal dynamics largely unexplored. We introduce STT-Arena (Spatio-Temporal Tool-Use Arena), a benchmark of 227 high-quality interactive tasks spanning nine spatio-temporal conflict types and four solvability levels. Each task is grounded in a realistic, executable environment equipped with injected spatio-temporal triggers that can abruptly invalidate an ongoing plan, forcing the model to detect the state shift and construct a revised execution strategy. Extensive evaluation of frontier LLMs reveals that even the SOTA proprietary models, including Claude-4.6-Opus, achieves less than 40\% overall accuracies, highlighting the fundamental difficulty of spatio-temporal dynamic reasoning. Systematic analysis of failure trajectories uncovers three recurring error modes of existing models: Stale-State Execution, Misdiagnosis of Dynamic Triggers, and Missing Post-Adaptation Verification. Guided by these findings, we propose an iterative trajectory refinement technique that eliminates these failure patterns from training data, and combine it with online RL to produce STT-Agent-4B which outperforms frontier LLMs on STT-Arena.

Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC) is essential for effective human-machine interaction, aiming to identify speakers' emotional states in multi-turn dialogues. Early text-based methods struggle with complex scenarios like sarcasm because they inherently neglect vital non-verbal information. While recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) address this by analyzing video directly, they are not inherently tailored for ERC and often focus on emotionally irrelevant background regions or passive listeners rather than the active speaker. Furthermore, fine-tuning these large models incurs prohibitive computational costs. Additionally, isolated visual signals are frequently ambiguous or technically compromised without the context of linguistic content and vocal prosody. To address these challenges, we propose VISAFF, a speaker-centered VISual AFFective feature learning framework for ERC. VISAFF consists of two stages: Speaker-Centered Affective Grounding and Reliability-Guided Affective Complementation. VISAFF utilizes a tuning-free approach to unlock the reasoning capabilities of frozen VLMs, efficiently steering them to focus on the active speaker's emotional visual cues without heavy training overheads. In the second stage, we introduce a reliability-guided affective complementation mechanism that dynamically leverages textual and acoustic modalities to compensate for visual uncertainty. Experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that VISAFF achieves highly competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art methods in a tuning-free setting, significantly enhancing computational efficiency by eliminating the need for expensive fine-tuning of large VLMs. The source code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/speaker-2365/.

Autonomous ground vehicles operating in shallow water or flood-prone terrains require dynamic models that account for hydrodynamic forces. However, the simulation and planning tools currently available either lack the physical fidelity or are too computationally expensive to run in real time. This work presents a per-surface neural network surrogate that bridges this gap by predicting geometry-resolved hydrodynamic forces at real-time rates, trained entirely on high-fidelity CFD data from two geometrically distinct vehicles. A vehicle specific Signed Distance Field (SDF) provides per-surface submergence inputs, allowing the model to resolve how loading varies with vehicle geometry, depth, and flow direction. On held-out CFD data, the surrogate achieves a longitudinal-force symmetric MAPE (sMAPE) of 13\% and a vertical-force sMAPE of 3-12\%, with inference running under 0.9\,ms per sample. To evaluate the model under real-world conditions, water wading trials of a full-scale vehicle at different submersion depths are used. Motion capture derived kinematics serve as the surrogate inputs, and the resulting predictions are tested to reproduce known physical relationships between force, speed, and depth. The predicted drag follows quadratic speed scaling ($R^2 \geq 0.97$) and the buoyancy intercepts scale linearly with depth ($R^2 = 0.973$). Neither relationship is encoded in the model training loss, both emerge from the per-surface architecture summing individually predicted surface forces. The resulting framework provides a pathway for embedding physically grounded hydrodynamics into the simulation and planning loops that autonomous ground vehicles depend on in amphibious environments.

Modeling hyperspectral imagery (HSI) across different sensors presents a fundamental challenge due to variations in wavelength coverage, band sampling, and channel dimensionality. As a result, models trained under a fixed spectral configuration often fail to generalize to other sensors. Existing Vision Transformer (ViT) approaches either rely on implicit spectral modeling with fixed channel assumptions or adopt explicit spatial-spectral attention with prohibitive computational cost, leading to a fundamental trade-off between efficiency and expressiveness. In this work, we introduce Low-rank Efficient Spatial-Spectral ViT (LESSViT), a sensor-flexible architecture for cross-spectral generalization. LESSViT is built on LESS Attention, a structured low-rank factorization that models joint spatial-spectral interactions through separable spatial and spectral components, reducing the complexity of full spatial-spectral attention from $O(N^2 C^2)$ to $O(rNC)$, where $N$ is the number of spatial tokens, $C$ is the number of spectral channels, and $r$ is the rank of the low-rank approximation. We further incorporate channel-agnostic patch embedding and wavelength-aware positional encoding to support flexible spectral inputs. To enable efficient and robust pretraining, we introduce a hyperspectral masked autoencoder (HyperMAE) with decoupled spatial-spectral masking and hierarchical channel sampling. We evaluate LESSViT under a cross-spectral generalization setting that simulates cross-sensor variability. Experiments on the SpectralEarth benchmark demonstrate that LESSViT improves robustness under spectral shifts while remaining competitive in-distribution, and explicit and efficient spatial-spectral modeling is essential for scalable and generalizable hyperspectral representation learning.

This paper introduces the Manifold Probe, a supervised method for discovering representation manifolds in superposition. The method generalizes linear regression probes by learning the space of features of a concept that can be linearly predicted from the representations, and then learning the directions used to encode them. We demonstrate the probe on representations of time and space in Llama 2-7b, finding manifolds which linearly represent an interpretable set of features in each case. In the case of time, we show that by steering along the manifold, we can influence the model's completions about the years in which famous songs, movies and books were released, providing evidence that the Manifold Probe can discover manifolds which are causally involved in model behaviour.

The bottleneck of useful agentic intelligence has shifted from compressing world knowledge into a single model to executing a coordinated system. This position paper argues that personal-agent architecture must move to the edge because the core properties of agentic intelligence tasks, particularly their structural coupling with high-fidelity local context and the need for zero-latency execution loops, do not sit well with cloud-centric designs. We develop this claim through three structural shifts. First, the Prefrontal Turn: the main marginal lever of capability has moved from pre-training scale to framework-level executive control. Such control must remain physically close to the environment of action if the agent is to preserve cognitive alignment. Second, the Data-Geography Paradox, the ``dark matter'' of agentic data (local file hierarchies, real-time sensor streams, and transient OS states) degrades, disappears, or loses meaning once prepared for cloud transmission, thereby cutting the agent off from ground-truth context. Third, the interaction-alignment loop, the only economically and ecologically sustainable source of agentic refinement data is the high-fidelity implicit preference signal produced through real-time local interaction. Third, the interaction-alignment loop, the only economically and ecologically sustainable source of agentic refinement data is the high-fidelity implicit preference signal produced through real-time local interaction. We conclude with falsifiable predictions for the next deployment cycle of personal agents.

Multivariate time-series analysis involves extracting informative representations from sequences of multiple interdependent variables, supporting tasks such as forecasting, imputation, and anomaly detection. In real-world scenarios, these variables are typically collected from a shared context or underlying phenomenon, suggesting the presence of latent dependencies across time and channels that can be leveraged to improve performance. However, recent findings show that channel-independent (CI) models, which assume no inter-variable dependencies, often outperform channel-dependent (CD) models that explicitly model such relationships. This surprising result indicates that current CD models may not fully exploit their potential due to limitations in how dependencies are captured. Recent studies have revisited channel dependence modeling with various approaches; however, these methods often employ indirect modeling strategies, which can lead to meaningful dependencies being overlooked. To address this issue, we introduce XCTFormer, a transformer-based channel-dependent (CD) model that explicitly captures cross-temporal and cross-channel dependencies via an enhanced attention mechanism. The model operates in a token-to-token fashion, modeling pairwise dependencies between every pair of tokens across time and channels. The architecture comprises (i) a data processing module, (ii) a novel Cross-Relational Attention Block (CRAB) that increases capacity and expressiveness, and (iii) an optional Dependency Compression Plugin (DeCoP) that improves scalability. Through extensive experiments on three time-series benchmarks, we show that XCTFormer achieves strong results compared to widely recognized baselines; in particular, it attains state-of-the-art performance on the imputation task, outperforming the second-best method by an average of 20.8% in MSE and 15.3% in MAE.

While diffusion has drawn considerable recent attention from the language modeling community, continuous diffusion has appeared less scalable than discrete approaches. To challenge this belief we revisit Plaid, a likelihood-based continuous diffusion language model (DLM), and construct RePlaid by aligning the architecture of Plaid with modern discrete DLMs. In this unified setting, we establish the first scaling law for continuous DLMs that rivals discrete DLMs: RePlaid exhibits a compute gap of only $20\times$ compared to autoregressive models, outperforms Duo while using fewer parameters, and outperforms MDLM in the over-trained regime. We benchmark RePlaid against recent continuous DLMs: on OpenWebText, RePlaid achieves a new state-of-the-art PPL bound of $22.1$ among continuous DLMs and superior generation quality. These results suggest that continuous diffusion, when trained via likelihood, is a highly competitive and scalable alternative to discrete DLMs. Moreover, we offer theoretical insights to understand the advantage of likelihood-based training. We show that optimizing the noise schedule to minimize the ELBO's variance naturally yields linear cross-entropy (information loss) over time. This evenly distributes denoising difficulty without any case-specific time reparameterization. In addition, we find that optimizing embeddings via likelihood creates structured geometries and drives the most significant likelihood gain.

The alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) for complex reasoning heavily relies on Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR). However, standard algorithms like GRPO apply sequence-level rewards uniformly to all tokens, creating a severe credit-assignment bottleneck. While on-policy self-distillation attempts to resolve this by conditioning a self-teacher on privileged contexts, direct exposure to raw oracle solutions often induces over-conditioned teacher distributions, implicit answer leakage, and late-stage training collapse. To overcome these limitations, we propose Asymmetric Meta-Reflective Self-Distillation (AMR-SD). Instead of conditioning directly on raw reference traces, AMR-SD inserts a reflection bottleneck: it compresses diagnostic signals -- from verifier outcomes, peer rollouts, or reference feedback -- into concise, self-generated Socratic hints and critiques. Furthermore, we introduce Causal Information Gain (CIG) with an asymmetric, ReLU-gated threshold to translate these reflections into sparse, highly precise token-level advantage modulations. Combined with temporal annealing, this mechanism preserves the base environmental reward while filtering out distributional noise. Experiments across scientific, mathematical, and tool-use benchmarks demonstrate that AMR-SD significantly outperforms existing baselines, achieving robust long-horizon stability and successfully preventing late-stage collapse.

In histopathology, human experts primarily rely on color as a means of enhancing contrast to interpret tissue morphology, whereas machine vision models process color as raw statistical information. This distinction raises a fundamental question: to what extent can pixel intensity alone, independent of structural and morphological cues, support cancer classification? To address this question, we systematically evaluated the standalone discriminative power of global color features while deliberately excluding all morphological information. Specifically, we extracted statistical color moments and discretized RGB and HSV color histograms, and assessed their performance across ten diverse experimental settings using classical machine learning classifiers. Our results demonstrate that color features alone can achieve strong performance in binary diagnostic tasks (e.g., benign versus malignant), with classification accuracies reaching up to 89%. This performance is likely attributable to global chromatic shifts associated with malignancy. Importantly, these simple color-based representations consistently outperformed random baselines by a substantial margin, indicating that raw color distributions encode a non-random and diagnostically relevant signal for cancer detection. Consequently, this study suggests that simple, computationally efficient color features can serve as an effective pre-screening tool. By identifying samples with strong chromatic indicators of malignancy, these lightweight models could function as a first-pass triage system, reducing the computational burden on complex deep learning architectures.

In-context learning (ICL) is highly sensitive to which demonstrations appear in the prompt, but selecting them is expensive because the space of possible demonstration contexts and combinations is enormous. We argue that demonstration selection is \emph{easier to judge than to find}: predicting whether a specific query--context pair $(q,D)$ will succeed is cheaper and more general than searching for an optimal $D^\star$. Based on this insight, we propose DiSP, a sample-and-judge framework that stratifies queries by difficulty. DiSP runs random demonstration trials to estimate success rate of each training query, trains a lightweight router to predict difficulty from the query, and trains level-specific judges for sampled demonstrations. At inference, DiSP performs stop-on-acceptance judging under an explicit budget, emitting diagnostic risk tags when no suitable context is found. Across five classification datasets with Llama~3--8B and Qwen~2.5--7B, DiSP achieves the best average accuracy, improving over strong learned selection baselines by up to 3.4\%, while achieving up to $23\times$ end-to-end wall-clock speedup.

A lightweight and reproducible denoising pipeline for high-throughput Raman spectroscopy is presented. The approach relies on a one-dimensional convolutional autoencoder trained using a Noise2Noise strategy, requiring neither external spectral libraries nor high signal-to-noise reference spectra for training. From a reduced training subset composed of repeated short-exposure acquisitions, the model learns to reconstruct Raman spectra while efficiently suppressing stochastic noise. The method is evaluated on a heterogeneous mineral sample, using both quantitative spectral fidelity metrics (RMSE, SNR, SSIM) and task-oriented criteria based on unsupervised K-means classification. Results demonstrate that integration times as short as 5 ms per spectrum, which are typically insufficient for reliable interpretation, yield denoised spectra with high fidelity to the reference data while preserving chemically coherent maps. This work provides a practical trade-off between spectral quality and acquisition speed, enabling fast, adaptable Raman workflows compatible with routine laboratory use. It also offers a transferable framework for other one-dimensional spectroscopic modalities.

Automated decision-making algorithms drive applications such as recommendation systems and search engines. These algorithms often rely on off-policy contextual bandits or off-policy learning (OPL). Conventionally, OPL selects actions that maximize the expected reward from an existing action set. However, in many real-world scenarios, actions, such as news articles or video content, change continuously, and the action space evolves over time after data collection. We define actions introduced after deploying the logging policy as new actions and focus on OPL with new actions. Existing OPL methods identify optimal actions from the existing set effectively but cannot learn and select new actions because no relevant data are logged. To address this limitation, we propose a new OPL method that leverages action features. We first introduce the Local Combination PseudoInverse (LCPI) estimator for the policy gradient, generalizing the PseudoInverse estimator initially proposed for off-policy evaluation of slate bandits. LCPI controls the trade-off between reward-modeling condition and the condition for data collection regarding the action features, capturing the interaction effects among different dimensions of action features. Furthermore, we propose a generalized algorithm called Policy Optimization for Effective New Actions (PONA), which integrates LCPI, a component specialized for new action selection, with Doubly Robust (DR), which excels at learning within existing actions. We define PONA as a weighted sum of the LCPI and DR estimators, optimizing both the selection of existing and new actions, and allowing the proportion of new action selections to be adjusted by the weight parameter. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that PONA efficiently selects new actions while maintaining the overall policy performance as opposed to most existing methods that cannot select new actions.

Programmatic reinforcement learning (PRL) offers an interpretable alternative to deep reinforcement learning by representing policies as human-readable and -editable programs. While gradient-based methods have been developed to optimize continuous relaxations of programs, they face a significant performance drop when converting the continuous relaxations back into discrete programs. Post-hoc discretization can discard optimized branches and parameters in a program, which results in a collapse of policy expressivity and lowered task performance, leading in turn to a need for additional fine-tuning. To overcome these limitations, we propose Differentiable Discrete Programmatic Reinforcement Learning (DiPRL), a method that learns programmatic policies that become nearly discrete during training, avoiding a separate post-hoc fine-tuning stage. We first analyze the inherent risks of performance drop introduced by post-hoc discretization of gradient-based methods. Then, we introduce programmatic architecture entropy regularization, which enables smooth, differentiable training that encourages convergence toward a discrete program. DiPRL maintains the efficiency of gradient-based optimization while mitigating the risks of post-hoc discretization. Our experiments across multiple discrete and continuous RL tasks demonstrate that DiPRL can achieve strong performance via interpretable programmatic policies.

Machine Translation (MT) for Ancient Greek (AG) to Modern Greek (MG) is a low-resource task, constrained by the lack of large-scale, high-quality parallel data. We address this gap by introducing the AG-MG Parallel Corpus, a new resource containing 132,481 sentence-aligned pairs derived from literary, historical, and biblical texts. We present a novel corpus creation pipeline that combines web-scraped, excerpt-level data with a multi-stage sentence-level alignment, and refinement process. Our method uses VecAlign with LaBSE embeddings, which we first fine-tune on a manually-aligned AG-MG subset, followed by an LLM-based error/misalignment correction phase using Gemini 2.5 Flash to ensure high alignment quality. Furthermore, we provide the first comprehensive benchmark of modern MT models on this task, evaluating three fine-tuning strategies across NMT models (NLLB, M2M100) and a Greek LLM (Llama-Krikri-8B). Our experiments show that fine-tuning yields significant improvements over base models, increasing performance by up to +10.3 BLEU points. Specifically, full-parameter fine-tuning of Llama-Krikri-8B achieves the highest overall performance with a BLEU score of 13.16, while the QLoRA-adapted M2M100-1.2B model demonstrates the largest relative gains and highly competitive results. Our dataset and models represent a significant contribution to Greek NLP.

Large language models (LLMs) have increasingly leveraged tool invocation to enhance their reasoning capabilities. However, existing approaches typically tightly couple tool invocation with immediate execution. Such immediate tool interaction may disrupt the reasoning coherence of LLMs and constrain their expressivity, ultimately degrading reasoning performance. To this end, for the first time, we propose and formalize the problem of decoupling tool invocation from execution during reasoning, and introduce delayed execution with explicit control to enhance tool-integrated reasoning (TIR). Furthermore, we propose a hierarchical control framework and theoretically derive a surrogate loss that enables an implicitly hierarchical policy to learn behavior equivalent to that of an explicit hierarchical policy, leading to the proposed IH-GRPO algorithm. Extensive experiments on IH-GRPO achieve absolute improvements of 1.87\%, 2.16\%, and 2.53\% on Qwen3-1.7B, Qwen3-4B, and Qwen3-8B across six out-of-domain mathematical reasoning benchmarks over the strongest baseline method, while also yielding consistent performance gains in other domains. Our code is available at https://github.com/Lumina04/IH-GRPO-01.

Expert specialization in Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models remains poorly understood, with traditional evaluations conflating architectural load-balancing with functional specialization. We introduce DBES, a comprehensive diagnostic framework combining a multi-domain benchmark with five theoretically grounded metrics: Routing Specialization, Normalized Effective Rank, Domain Isolation, Routing Stiffness Score, and N-gram Expertise measures. Critical findings demonstrate distinct specialization paradigms across models: Qwen-series exhibit modular specialization with high domain isolation, while DeepSeek and GLM employ distributed collaboration. However, we emphasize that specialization is a diagnostic dimension, necessary but not sufficient for downstream performance. Most crucially, interventional evidence validates the actionability of these metrics: by using DBES to identify high-specialization expert paths during domain-specific post-training, we achieved 66% to 94.48% improvement in specialized domains with only 15% of original training resources, demonstrating that these diagnostic tools can be converted into concrete optimization operators. This work provides the first systematic methodology for evaluating expert specialization independently of accuracy metrics, offering crucial insights for the design and post-training optimization of next-generation MoE systems.

Methods: Nine SSL methods spanning four pretext-task families were pretrained from scratch using the same 10{,}412 3D CT scans (1.89~M 2D axial slices) covering varied disease sites. The pretrained Swin Transformer encoder from each method was integrated into a SwinUNETR-style segmentation network (Swin encoder with a 3D CNN decoder and skip connections) and fine-tuned on nine public segmentation tasks of varying complexity, including large abdominal organs, head-and-neck structures, and tumors from CT and MRI. Performance was assessed using Dice similarity coefficient (DSC). Fine-tuning convergence speed, transferability across modalities (CT-to-MRI), and feature-reuse patterns between few- and many-shot fine tuning were further analyzed using centered kernel alignment. Results: Self-distilled masked image transformer (SMIT), which combines masked image modeling (MIM) with local and global self-distillation, achieved the highest overall segmentation accuracy across the nine tasks, the fastest fine-tuning convergence, and the smallest few-shot-to-many-shot performance gap, indicating the strongest data efficiency. SMIT also showed the most consistent feature-reuse patterns between few- and many-shot fine tuning. MIM-based SimMIM and self-distillation methods (DINO, iBOT) outperformed contrastive learning and rotation prediction, which rely on image-level global representations. Differences between SSL methods were largest in the few-shot setting and narrowed as the size of the labeled fine-tuning dataset increased, indicating that the choice of SSL pretraining matters most under limited annotation budgets.

We preregistered a comparison of two ways to help an LLM answer questions over a small research corpus: a single-round Vector RAG system and an LLM-compiled markdown wiki. Both systems answered the same 13 questions over 24 papers using the same answer-generating model, and their answers were scored by blinded LLM judges. The wiki scored much better at connecting findings across papers, but its advantage in answer organization was not strong after judge adjustment. RAG met the preregistered test for single-fact lookup questions. The clean query-side cost result went against the expected wiki advantage: under the tested setup, the wiki used far more query tokens than RAG, so it could not recover any upfront build cost through cheaper queries. Two exploratory analyses changed how we interpret the result. First, claim-level citation checking favored the wiki: its cited pages more often supported the exact claims being made, even though RAG scored better on the overall groundedness rubric. Second, a decomposition-based RAG variant recovered most of the wiki's advantage on cross-paper synthesis at lower LLM-token cost, but it did not recover the wiki advantage in claim-by-claim citation support. The main conclusion is that grounded research synthesis is not a single capability. Systems can differ in how well they organize evidence, how well their citations support each claim, and how much they cost to run. In this study, no architecture was best on all three.

Time series classification (TSC) of biological signals has progressed from handcrafted, modality-specific approaches to deep architectures capable of representing the diverse waveform structures of underlying physiological processes (i.e., morphology). This review introduces a unified morphology--modality framework that connects waveform structure to a methodological design, revealing how spikes, bursts, oscillations, slow drift, and hierarchical rhythms inform model design. By analyzing electroencephalography, electromyography, electrocardiography, photoplethysmography, and ocular modalities (electrooculography, pupillometry, eye-tracking), the review demonstrates how morphology determines preprocessing and modeling strategies. Integrating evidence across these biological signals, the framework reveals that morphology, not model class, most strongly determines performance and interpretability. This provides insight into why deep models succeed when their inductive biases align with underlying waveform dynamics. This review also identifies future work including morphological data augmentation and evaluation metrics to improve generalization. Together, these insights position morphology-aware modeling as a unifying principle for developing generalizable, interpretable, and physiologically meaningful TSC models across biological signals.

The growing adoption of lattice-based structures in soft robotics creates a need for advanced sensing solutions capable of monitoring their global deformation, particularly compression and extension. In this work, we address this challenge by introducing a novel optical sensor based on two patterned waveguides arranged in an ellipsoidal geometry. This Bidirectional Optical sensor for Actuation Tracking (BOAT) is seamlessly co-printed with a lattice structure actuated by an embedded pneumatic artificial muscle (PAM), and its performance is assessed. During PAM elongation or contraction, the bending of the embedded BOAT waveguides induces output signal variations that enable a clear discrimination between compression and extension states. The designs of both each specific waveguide structure (by surface patterning) and of the sensorized lattice-based unit embedding two BOATs are supported by numerical simulations. Experimental calibration over 100 consecutive pressure cycles ranging from +50 kPa to $-$40 kPa demonstrates a highly repeatable response, allowing a reliable distinction between extension and compression. Finally, sensor feedback is used to implement a digital shadow, enabling continuous synchronization between the whole sensorized unit and its virtual counterpart. These results establish BOAT as a powerful and reliable approach for deformation monitoring in soft lattice-based robotic systems.

Interpreting the decisions of deep image classifiers remains challenging, particularly in black-box settings where model internals are inaccessible. We introduce OCCAM, a framework for open-set causal concept explanation and ontology induction in vision models. OCCAM discovers visual concepts in an open-set manner, localizes them via text-guided segmentation, and performs object-level interventions by removing concepts to measure changes in class confidence, estimating each concept's causal contribution. Beyond local explanations, OCCAM aggregates interventional evidence across a dataset to induce a structured concept ontology that captures how classifiers globally organize visual concepts. Reasoning over this ontology reveals consistent dependencies between concepts, exposes latent causal relations, and uncovers systematic model biases. Experiments on Broden and ImageNet-S across multiple classifiers show that OCCAM improves explanation quality in open-set black-box settings while providing richer global insight than per-image attribution methods.