Bayesian conformal optimisation methods often use the same held-out data both to search for efficient prediction sets and to certify coverage or risk. This coupling is natural for high-probability risk-control guarantees, but it is not necessary when the target is standard finite-sample marginal conformal coverage. We propose Decoupled Conformal Optimisation (DCO), a train-tune-calibrate design principle that uses an independent tuning split for efficiency-oriented structural selection and a fresh calibration split for the final conformal quantile. Conditional on the tuned structure, standard split-conformal exchangeability yields finite-sample marginal coverage for any candidate class, without a confidence parameter or multiple-testing correction. DCO therefore targets a different finite-sample guarantee from PAC-style methods: marginal conformal coverage rather than high-probability risk control. Under consistency assumptions on the coupled risk bound, the two approaches nevertheless converge to the same population threshold. Across classification and regression benchmarks, including ImageNet-A, CIFAR-100, Diabetes, California Housing, and Concrete, DCO tracks the nominal coverage level closely while often reducing average prediction-set size or interval width relative to PAC-style calibration. On ImageNet-A, for example, the average set size decreases from $26.52$ to $25.26$ and the 95th-percentile set size from $58.95$ to $53.73$; on Diabetes, the average interval width decreases from $2.098$ to $1.914$.

Presupposition projection in conditionals is central to theories of meaning and pragmatics, yet it remains largely unevaluated in large language models. We address this gap through a parallel behavioral study comparing human judgments and LLM predictions on a normed dataset of conditional sentences that controls the relation between the antecedent and the projected presupposition. We collect likelihood ratings from 120 participants and four LLMs under matched contextual conditions. Results show that humans integrate probabilistic and pragmatic cues in their judgment, whereas LLMs show variable alignment with human patterns. Using a linguistically motivated checklist within an LLM-as-a-Judge framework, we further evaluate model reasoning. We observe models that best match human ratings often lack coherent pragmatic reasoning, while models with stronger reasoning produce less human-like judgments. These findings suggest that LLMs' performance on such tasks may result from surface pattern matching rather than pragmatic competence. Our findings highlight the importance of benchmarks grounded in linguistic theory for comparing humans and models.

Occupancy estimation and crowd counting are critical tasks in designing smart and efficient public transport vehicles. Given that public transport loading can vary from sparse to crowded, classical models for occupancy estimation must be adapted to suit this purpose. Attention mechanisms have shown remarkable capability in enhancing the representational power of deep neural networks for crowd counting in congested scenes with occlusion, complex backgrounds, and perspective distortion. However, conventional approaches, often implemented as parameterized sub-networks within convolutional layers, inevitably increase model size and computational cost, limiting deployment on resource-constrained edge devices. This paper investigates the effectiveness of state-of-the-art parameter-free attention mechanisms for crowd counting and density map estimation in highly congested scenes. We evaluate channel-wise (PFCA), spatial-wise (SA), and 3-D (SimAM) modules and compare their performance with parameterized attention modules constrained to introduce no more than 1% additional parameters. Furthermore, we present a novel combination of attention mechanisms that combines the strengths of PFCA and SA (PFCASA) customized for analyzing video streams onboard public transport systems. Using CSRNet as the backbone, experiments on the ShanghaiTech dataset demonstrate that parameter-free attention mechanisms achieve comparable or superior accuracy without introducing additional model parameters. A detailed performance analysis further reveals that PFCASA outperforms other attention modules in scenes with fewer than 40 individuals, while PFCA shows greater effectiveness as crowd density increases, underscoring their potential applicability for integration into smart public transport modalities.

Recent advances in autoregressive video diffusion have enabled sequential and streaming video generation. However, long-horizon generation requires increasingly large KV caches, making efficient compression without sacrificing quality challenging. Existing methods mostly select historical frames based on attention scores, but their context decisions remain coarse. When multiple frames are generated in the same chunk, these methods often apply a shared history selection to the whole chunk, score historical frames solely by attention, and assign head-wise budgets either uniformly or by attention-pattern heuristics rather than explicit head-importance estimation. We show that frames within the same generated chunk can depend on distinct historical frames, that the same historical frame can receive different attention scores as its relative temporal distance to the current frames changes, and that masking different heads induces unequal generation degradation. Motivated by these findings, we propose \textbf{Focused Forcing}, a training-free KV selection method that focuses cached history along both generated-frame and head dimensions. For each generated frame, Focused Forcing preserves the most relevant and distinctive historical frames by combining attention scores with diversity scores of historical frames, while assigning larger budgets to heads with higher estimated importance. Across multiple autoregressive generation paradigms, Focused Forcing achieves up to $\textbf{1.48}\times$ end-to-end acceleration without training, while \textbf{improving visual quality and text alignment}. \textit{Our code will be released on GitHub.}

Large-scale news corpora support a wide range of research in Computational Social Science and NLP, yet access remains constrained: commercial archives impose prohibitive costs and licensing restrictions, while open alternatives like Common Crawl's CC-News require terabyte-scale storage and computationally intensive processing. We present Infini-News, a retrieval toolkit and index for the entire CC-News archive from August 2016 to the latest available snapshot. Our contributions are threefold. First, we extract, clean the text, and parse the structured metadata of over 1.35B articles. Second, we enrich the corpus with language detection using three frontier language classifiers (GlotLID, lingua, and CommonLingua), and with multi-source geographic attribution that resolves a country of origin for 83.4% of articles across 222 countries. Third, we construct Infini-gram indexes: suffix-array structures that let researchers search the full archive for arbitrary text patterns in sub-second time. Together, these resources lower the barrier to longitudinal, cross-national media research.

While 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has revolutionized real-time photorealistic view synthesis, its fundamental reliance on symmetric Gaussian distributions introduces visual artifacts that hinder accurate spatial data exploration. Specifically, symmetric kernels struggle to capture shape and color discontinuities , which cause blurriness and primitive redundancy that mislead human perception during visual analysis. To address these visualization barriers, we introduce 3D Skew Gaussian Splatting (3DSGS), a novel framework that significantly enhances the structural fidelity and compactness of explicit scene representations. Our key insight lies in extending the standard primitive to a general Skew Gaussian counterpart. This generalized primitive inherits the highly efficient rasterization properties of standard Gaussians while gaining intrinsic asymmetric modeling capabilities. We couple this with an enhanced opacity representation to better handle complex transparency, alongside a depth-aware densification strategy that intelligently manages primitive allocation. Furthermore, to make these advancements actionable for real-world visual analytics, we re-derive the CUDA rasterization pipeline to universally support both symmetric and skew Gaussians, integrating it into a decoupled, free-camera interactive visualization engine. Extensive experiments demonstrate that 3DSGS achieves superior rendering quality and structural compactness, particularly in regions with intricate details, while maintaining the real-time frame rates necessary for fluid interactive exploration. Supplementary derivations and visual results are available at \textbf{\textit{https://3d-skew-gs.github.io/}}.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have experienced significant growth and development in recent years. However, performing inference on LLMs remains costly, especially for long-context inference or in resource-constrained devices. This motivates the development of new post-training pruning (PTP) methods. These methods reduce LLMs' requirements by removing a substantial part of the model's parameters. The discarded weights are selected depending on their impact on the models performance. Current PTP methods prune the models by removing the less informative hidden nodes from the FFN layers, and the least important attention layers. We propose Putri, a PTP method that introduces three changes to the State- of-the-art. First, we update the un-pruned weights of the FFN to compensate for the introduced pruning error. Second, the FFN layers are pruned sequentially, taking into account the updates done to the previous layers. Third, instead of removing full attention layers, we remove individual attention-heads. We extend this method such that it can also address Grouped-Query Attention. In summary, Putri is a structure pruning method which remains simple while showing SOTA performance. Pruning experiments on multiple models with a wide variety of sparsity ranges and on different datasets, validate the generality of Putri. Notably, we demonstrate that, unlike previous methods, Putri can prune LLMs on extreme sparsity ratios. The code is available at: https://github.com/Coello-dev/Putri.

LED Virtual Production (VP) uses large LED volumes to render backgrounds in real time, enabling in-camera visual effects but making post-shot changes labor-intensive. We address this with CineMatte, a robust background matting framework for VP and beyond. CineMatte employs a cross-attention-conditioned design. Instead of concatenating the background with the input, CineMatte employs a Siamese, frozen DINOv3 Vision Transformer with shared weights to encode the input frame and the captured background separately. A cross-attention module compares the two streams to predict the foreground, preserving pretrained semantics and improving robustness to background shifts. Previous ViT-based matting models use a parallel convolutional "detail branch" to recover fine details, which can cause boundary artifacts in real-world samples due to semantic misalignment with the backbone. We instead replace it with a pretrained, image-guided feature upsampler, which largely mitigates the problem. We also introduce CineMatte-4K, a 4K HDR image-video dataset captured on a professional LED VP stage. To the best of our knowledge, the image subset is the first dataset for VP matting and is non-synthetic, obtained via green-screen insertion; the video subset includes camera motion with tracked trajectories so that arbitrary backgrounds can be rendered later with correct parallax. Across CineMatte-4K and public benchmarks (VideoMatte240K, YouTubeMatte), CineMatte not only excels in VP but also generalizes robustly to real-world footage.

AI agents deployed into SRE workflows currently derive their understanding of environment state from raw observability telemetry at query time, paying a semantic-interpretation tax in tokens, latency, and inferential reliability. We propose Causely, a causal intelligence layer that maintains a structured representation of environment topology, attribute dependencies, and causal relationships that are anchroed to a ontological representation of the managed environment. Causely transforms raw telemetry into a live, queryable model providing the semantic and causal foundation AI agents require to diagnose, evaluate impact, and act safely in production. We evaluate this value proposition through a benchmark study conducted in a controlled setting with injected faults in a 24-microservice OpenTelemetry demo application. Our experiments compare four agent configurations (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, HolmesGPT with Sonnet and Gemini backends). Experiments are run with and without access to Causely under two scenarios: an active incident and a healthy baseline. On the active-fault scenario, causal grounding reduces mean time-to-diagnosis by 63\%, mean token consumption by 60\%, and mean tool-call count by 78\%, compressing the investigation footprint by 4.8$\times$ and lowering direct API cost per run by 57\%; root-cause-diagnosis accuracy rises from 75\% to 100\%.

Representation Autoencoders (RAE) replace traditional VAE with pretrained vision encoders. In this paper, we systematically investigate several design choices and find three insights which simplify and improve RAE. First, we study a generalized formulation where the representation is defined as sum of the last k encoder layers rather than solely the final layer. This simple change greatly improves reconstruction without encoder finetuning or specialized data (e.g., text, faces). Second, we study the prevalent assumption that RAE (using pretrained representation as encoder) replaces representation alignment (REPA), which distills the same representation to intermediate layers instead. Through large-scale empirical analysis, we uncover a surprising finding: RAE and REPA exhibit complementary working mechanisms, allowing the same representation to be used as both encoder and target for intermediate diffusion layers. Finally, the original RAE struggles with classifier-free guidance (CFG) and requires training a second, weaker diffusion model for AutoGuidance (AG). We show that REPA itself can be viewed as x-prediction in RAE latent space. By simply re-parameterizing the output of the DiT model, it can provide guidance for "free". Overall, RAEv2 leads to more than 10x faster convergence over the original RAE, achieving a state-of-the-art gFID of 1.06 in just 80 epochs on ImageNet-256. On FDr^k, RAEv2 achieves a state-of-the-art 2.17 at just 80 epochs compared to the previous best 3.26 (800 epochs) without any post-training. This motivates EP_FID@k (epochs to reach unguided gFID <= k) as a measure of training efficiency. RAEv2 attains an EP_FID@2 of 35 epochs, versus 177 for the original RAE. We also validate our approach across diverse settings for text-to-image generation and navigation world models, showing consistent improvements. Code is available at https://raev2.github.io.

Offline reinforcement learning methods typically enforce strict constraints to ensure safety; yet this rigidity often prevents the discovery of optimal behaviors outside the immediate support of the behavior policy. To address this, we propose Implicit Support Expansion via stochastic Policy optimization (ISEP), which leverages a value function interpolated between in-distribution data and policy samples to implicitly expand the feasible action support. This mechanism "densifies" high-reward regions, creating a navigable path for policy improvement while theoretically guaranteeing bounded value error. However, optimizing against this expanded support creates a multimodal landscape where standard deterministic averaging leads to mode collapse and invalid actions. ISEP mitigates this via a stochastic action selection strategy, optimizing the policy by stochastically alternating between conservative cloning and optimistic expansion signals. We instantiate this framework as ISEP-FM using Conditional Flow Matching utilizing classifier-free guidance to effectively capture the interpolated value signal.

We develop a framework for analyzing parameter symmetries in deep ReLU networks and obtain a complete characterization of the generic parameter fibers for three-layer bottleneck architectures. Our approach provides explicit semi-algebraic descriptions of these fibers and yields a polynomial time algorithm for deciding functional equivalence of two parameters. The symmetries include discrete and continuous transformations arising from layer composition, and depend on whether deeper layers hide or preserve geometric structure from preceding layers. Finally, we show that some of these symmetries induce local conservation laws along gradient flow, while others do not.

Inferring time-varying graph structures from high-dimensional nodal observations is a fundamental problem arising in neuroscience, finance, climatology, and beyond. Two intrinsic challenges govern this problem: maintaining the \emph{temporal coherence} of the latent graph across successive observation windows, and respecting the \emph{intrinsic Riemannian geometry} of the symmetric positive definite manifold on which precision matrices naturally reside, a curved space whose geodesic structure departs fundamentally from that of the ambient Euclidean space. In this paper we propose dynamic estimation on the Grassmann manifold with a factor model (\textsc{Degfm}), a novel algorithm that jointly addresses both challenges. We model the time-varying precision matrix sequence as a low-rank-plus-diagonal structure governed by a latent elliptical graph factor model, which drastically reduces the effective parameter count and enables reliable estimation in the challenging small-sample regime. Temporal coherence is enforced through a Riemannian geodesic penalty defined on the Grassmann manifold, ensuring that the estimated graph trajectory is smooth with respect to the intrinsic geometry rather than the ambient Euclidean space. To solve the resulting non-convex optimization problem over Grassmann-manifold-valued sequences subject to the LRaD constraint, we derive an efficient Riemannian gradient descent algorithm that respects the manifold structure at every iterate and rigorously establish its convergence to a stationary point. Extensive experiments on both synthetic benchmarks and real-world datasets demonstrate that \textsc{Degfm} consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across all evaluation metrics, confirming the practical effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Small vision-language models (2-8B) are well-suited for clin- ical deployment due to privacy constraints, limited connectivity, and low-latency requirements favouring on-device or on-premise inference. However, their limited capacity exacerbates the generation of plausible but incorrect outputs. We extend game-theoretic decoding, previously restricted to text-only, closed-ended NLP tasks, to vision-language mod- els for open-ended Medical VQA. We introduce a semantically aware Wasserstein stopping criterion that replaces lexical order matching, en- abling convergence based on semantic consensus among near-synonymous candidate answers and avoiding unnecessary iterations caused by clini- cally equivalent ranking swaps. On VQA-RAD and PathVQA, we ob- tain consistent, statistically significant improvements over greedy and discriminative baselines. On VQA-RAD, we improve Qwen3-VL-2B by +3.5 percentage points (p < 0.01), surpassing the greedy 4B model, with similar trends at larger scales. On PathVQA, Gemma-3-4B with BDG matches MedGemma-4B under greedy decoding despite no domain- specific fine-tuning. At accuracy parity with classic BDG, the Wasser- stein criterion reduces average convergence iterations by approximately 20%, improving inference efficiency while preserving the game-theoretic equilibrium behaviour. Code is available at https://github.com/luca-hagen/ Wasserstein-BDG-medical-VQA.

Although Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong alignment through supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning from human feedback, the alignment is often fragile under subsequent fine-tuning. Existing explanations either attribute alignment fragility to gradient geometry or characterize it as a distributional shift in model outputs, yet few provide a unified account that bridges parameter-space learning dynamics with function-space alignment behavior during fine-tuning. In this work, we introduce a tractable alignment score and derive its closed-form update during fine-tuning, yielding a unified framework for alignment dynamics. Our analysis decomposes alignment updates into two competing components: a \textbf{\color{red!60!black} Rebound Force}, governed jointly by the current alignment state and the narrowness of model distribution, and a \textbf{\color{green!60!black} Driving Force}, determined by how the training distribution aligns with outcome-conditioned posteriors over aligned and non-aligned completions. This decomposition explains why prior alignment can be reversed by later fine-tuning and why narrower posterior structure strengthens such reversal. Moreover, our framework predicts a \textbf{Rehearsal Priming Effect}: prior alignment leaves a latent posterior imprint that amplifies the effective Driving Force upon re-exposure, leading to faster re-alignment. We validate these predictions across safety alignment, emergent misalignment, and sentiment settings, demonstrating consistent alignment reversal and accelerated re-alignment under re-exposure. In addition, controlled experiments in safety alignment confirm the predicted dependence of rebound strength on posterior narrowness. Together, these results provide a unified dynamical perspective on how alignment is disrupted and reactivated during LLM fine-tuning.

World models built on recurrent state space architectures enable efficient latent imagination, yet remain physically unstructured, producing dynamics that violate conservation and dissipative principles. We introduce a unified Port-Hamiltonian framework that remedies this through three synergistic mechanisms. First, we embed implicit physical priors into recurrent transitions by modeling projected latent evolution as action controlled energy routing governed by flow and dissipation, biasing the projected PH phase space toward a more compact and physically structured representation. Second, we develop a kinematics aware energy world model that estimates the Hamiltonian and power balance from proprioceptive observations, providing an explicit physical signal for thermodynamic reasoning. Third, leveraging these energy gradients, we establish an energy guided Actor-Critic that uses Lagrangian multipliers to regularize policy optimization toward lower energy and smoother control. Across visual control benchmarks, this paradigm not only attains superior asymptotic returns but also elevates internal simulator fidelity by establishing a tighter, lower variance alignment between imagined and real rewards, all while reducing latent phase space volume by 4.18-8.41%, energy consumption by up to 7.80%, and mean squared jerk by up to 9.38%.

Search-augmented reasoning agents interleave internal reasoning with calls to an external retriever, and their performance relies on the quality of each issued query. However, under outcome-reward reinforcement learning, every search decision in a rollout shares the same trajectory-level reward, leaving individual queries without step-specific credit. Recent process-supervision approaches address this gap by drawing step-level signals from outside the policy, relying either on a much larger teacher model, or on sub-question annotations produced by a stronger external system. In contrast, we propose SD-Search, which derives step-level supervision from the policy itself through on-policy hindsight self-distillation, requiring neither an external teacher nor additional annotations. In SD-Search, a single model plays two roles that differ only in conditioning: a student that sees only the context available at inference time, and a teacher that additionally conditions on a compact hindsight block summarizing the search queries and final outcomes of a group of rollouts sampled from the same question. Since the teacher knows how each rollout unfolded and which ones succeeded, its query distribution implicitly marks which decisions were worth making, and the student is trained to recover this behavior by minimizing the token-level Jensen--Shannon divergence to the teacher at search-query positions. This layers a dense, step-level signal on top of GRPO's coarse trajectory reward. Crucially, this signal is produced by the policy itself within the standard RL training loop, without external model inference, auxiliary annotation pipeline, or additional training stage.

Foundation models pre-trained through masked reconstruction on large-scale EEG data have emerged as a promising paradigm for learning generalizable neural representations across diverse brain-computer interface applications. However, a critical yet overlooked challenge is that EEG encoders must learn representations invariant to incomplete observations-when different masked views of the same signal have minimal overlap, existing methods fail to constrain them to a consistent latent subspace, leading to degraded transferability. To address this, we propose DARE-EEG, a self-supervised foundation model that explicitly enforces the mask-invariance property through dual-aligned representation learning during pre-training. Specifically, we introduce mask alignment that constrains representations from multiple masked views of the same EEG sample via contrastive learning, complementing anchor alignment that aligns masked representations to momentum-updated complete features for semantic stability. Additionally, we propose conv-linear-probing, a parameter-efficient strategy that adapts pre-trained representations to heterogeneous electrode configurations and sampling rates through decoupled spectro-spatial projections. Extensive experiments across diverse EEG benchmarks demonstrate that DARE-EEG consistently achieves state-of-the-art in accuracy performance while maintaining relatively low parameter complexity and superior cross-dataset portability compared to existing methods. Furthermore, DARE-EEG contributes to effectively discovering and utilizing the rich potential representations in EEG.

Robust pedestrian safety is crucial to the next-generation of intelligent transportation systems. Such systems rely on active pedestrian localization and predictive collision alerts. Pedestrian localization can be supported by Ultra-Wideband technology and Bluetooth 6.0, which offer high-precision ranging and low-latency communication, making them promising candidates for vehicular collision warning systems. This paper assesses the localization accuracy of these technologies for pedestrian alerting and benchmarks their performance against Global Navigation Satellite Systems. Experimental evaluations performed in this paper focused on key performance metrics, including localization accuracy and robustness to environmental conditions. Preliminary results suggest that Ultra-Wideband and Bluetooth 6.0 can serve as viable alternatives or complements to Global Navigation Satellite Systems in certain scenarios, improving situational awareness and enabling timely pedestrian alerts.

Unsupervised fine-grained image hashing aims to learn compact binary codes that preserve subtle visual differences among highly similar instances without manual annotations. However, most existing methods neglect collision resistance, leading to identical hash codes for slightly semantically different samples. In this paper, we propose Collision-Resistant Single-Pass Self-Supervised Semantic Hashing (CS3H), a collision-resistant framework that directly optimizes Hamming-space similarity via a single-pass normalized Hamming distance loss to produce well-separated binary representations. We further introduce a collision-sensitive attention module to emphasize rare and discriminative local patterns, reducing hash collisions and improving fine-grained discrimination. Experiments on multiple benchmarks show that CS3H consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in retrieval accuracy while achieving superior collision resistance with minimal computational overhead.

It is infeasible to encompass all possible disturbances within the training dataset. This raises a critical question regarding the robustness of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models when encountering unseen real-world visual disturbances, particularly under imperfect visual conditions. In this work, we conduct a systematic study based on recent state-of-the-art VLA models and reveal a significant performance drop when visual disturbances absent from the training data are introduced. To mitigate this issue, we propose a lightweight adapter module grounded in information theory, termed the Information Bottleneck Adapter (IB-Adapter), which selectively filters potential noise from visual inputs. Without requiring any extra data or augmentation strategies, IB-Adapter consistently improves over the baseline by an average of 30%, while adding fewer than 10M parameters, demonstrating notable efficiency and effectiveness. Furthermore, even with a 14x smaller backbone (0.5B parameters) and no pre-training on the Open X-Embodiment dataset, our model StableVLA achieves robustness competitive with 7B-scale state-of-the-art VLAs. With negligible parameter overhead (<10M), our approach maintains accuracy on long-horizon tasks and surpasses OpenPi under both synthetic and physical visual corruptions.

Modern deep learning science often assumes that neural networks learn from a fixed data distribution. However, many practically important learning problems involve data distributions that change throughout training. How does such non-stationarity impact the inductive biases of deep learning towards models with different structural, generalisation, and safety properties? A fruitful testbed for studying inductive bias is in-context linear regression sequence modelling, where small transformers display strikingly different generalisation patterns depending on the diversity of the (fixed) training task distribution. In this paper, we explore the effect of diversifying the task distribution across training time, finding that such temporal diversity leads to an increased bias towards generalisation over memorisation.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables real-time novel view synthesis with high visual quality. However, existing methods struggle with semi-transparent specular surfaces that exhibit both complex reflections and clear transmission, often producing blurry reflections or overly occluded transmission. To address this, we present RT-Splatting, a framework that disentangles each Gaussian's geometric occupancy from its optical opacity. This factorization yields a unified surface-volume scene representation with a single set of Gaussian primitives. Our hybrid renderer interprets this representation both as a surface to capture high-frequency reflections and as a volume to preserve clear transmission. To mitigate the ambiguity in jointly optimizing reflection and transmission, we introduce Specular-Aware Gradient Gating, which suppresses misleading gradients from highly specular regions into the transmission branch, effectively reducing distracting floaters. Experiments on challenging semi-transparent scenes show that RT-Splatting achieves state-of-the-art performance, delivering high-fidelity reflections and clear transmission with real-time rendering. Moreover, our factorization naturally enables flexible scene editing. The project page is available at https://sjj118.github.io/RT-Splatting.

Accurate pedestrian trajectory prediction is crucial for autonomous systems operating in complex environments, such as modular buses and delivery robots in suburban or semi-structured areas. Social Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Neural Networks (Social-STGCNN) have shown strong performance by modeling social interactions; however, producing diverse and well-calibrated future trajectories remains challenging. In this work, we build on a Social-STGCNN backbone and introduce a Conditional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE)-based probabilistic formulation to explicitly model multimodal future trajectories. We evaluate the method on the ETH and UCY pedestrian trajectory datasets as well as on a real-world pedestrian dataset collected by a mobile robot. Results show moderate gains on public benchmarks, but more consistent endpoint accuracy and improved trajectory diversity across different crowd configurations. Evaluation on robot-collected data further demonstrates the approach's effectiveness beyond curated benchmarks and supports its applicability in practical deployments.

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has demonstrated promising potential to enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in domains such as mathematics and coding. However, its applications on knowledge-intensive domains have not been effectively explored due to the scarcity of high-quality verifiable data. Furthermore, current RLVR focuses solely on the correctness of final answers, leading to the limitations of flawed reasoning and sparse reward signals. In this work, we propose Knowledge-to-Verification (K2V), a framework that extends RLVR to knowledge-intensive domains through automated verifiable data synthesis, while enabling verification of the LLM's reasoning process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that K2V enhances the reasoning of LLM in knowledge-intensive domains without significantly compromising the model's general capabilities. This study also suggests that integrating automated data synthesis with reasoning verification is a promising direction to enhance model capabilities in these broader domains. Code is available at https://github.com/SeedScientist/K2V.

Multimodal representation alignment is pivotal for large language models and robotics. Traditional methods are often hindered by cross-modal information discrepancies and data scarcity, leading to suboptimal alignment spaces that overlook modality-unique features. We propose CodeBind, a framework that optimizes multimodal representation spaces through a modality-shared-specific codebook design. By incrementally aligning target and bridging modalities, CodeBind bypasses the need for fully paired data. Unlike traditional hard alignment, CodeBind decomposes features into shared components for semantic consistency and specific components for modality-unique details. This design utilizes a compositional vector quantization scheme, where a shared codebook bridges modality gaps and modality-specific codebooks mitigate representation bias by preventing dominant modalities from overshadowing others. Validated across nine modalities (text, image, video, audio, depth, thermal, tactile, 3D point cloud, EEG), CodeBind achieves state-of-the-art performance in multimodal classification and retrieval tasks.

Recent masked diffusion language models (MDLMs), such as LLaDA and Dream, have achieved performance comparable to autoregressive large language models. Unlike autoregressive models, which generate text sequentially, MDLMs generate text by iteratively denoising masked positions in parallel. During fine-tuning, MDLMs learn to recover responses from masked response states conditioned on a prompt, thereby shifting their predictions from a prompt-masked unconditional distribution toward a prompt-conditional distribution. Despite this distinct generative and fine-tuning mechanism, machine unlearning for MDLMs remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we propose Masked Diffusion Unlearning (MDU), the first unlearning framework for MDLMs, by revisiting the process of learning specific knowledge in terms of diffusion. Specifically, MDU minimizes a forward KL divergence from the prompt-conditional prediction to a prompt-masked unconditional anchor at every masked response position, with a temperature scaling parameter to control the privacy-utility trade-off. Our empirical results on standard benchmarks and MDLM backbones show that MDU achieves high unlearning performance compared to existing LLM unlearning methods. Code is available at https://github.com/leegeoru/MDU.

We introduce GaussianZoom, a generative zoom-in 3D reconstruction system with an iterative progressive framework that combines geometry-consistent scene modeling and multi-scale semantic reasoning to enable high-fidelity extreme zoom-in rendering from low-resolution inputs. To achieve this, we develop a novel multi-view consistent super-resolution module with depth-based feature warping and VLM-driven detail synthesis, ensuring accurate multi-view correspondence while enriching fine-scale appearance beyond the observed resolution. To support zooming across large magnification ranges, we further introduce a new expandable continuous Level-of-Detail hierarchy that dynamically modulates Gaussian visibility for smooth, alias-free cross-scale rendering. Experiments on Mip-NeRF360 and Tanks\&Temples demonstrate that GaussianZoom achieves superior perceptual quality, multi-view consistency, and robustness under extreme magnification, establishing a strong baseline for generative zoom-in 3D scene reconstruction.

We study reinforcement learning (RL) in multi-dimensional continuous state and action spaces with one-sided feedback, where the agent receives partial observations of the state and obtains reward information for only a subset of the state-action space at each time step. This setting introduces substantial challenges in both learning efficiency and privacy preservation. To address these challenges, we propose POOL, a novel privacy-preserving RL algorithm. We conduct a comprehensive theoretical analysis of POOL, deriving a sample complexity bound that matches the known lower bounds for non-private RL. Here, E_rho denotes the privacy parameter, H is the time horizon, and alpha is the optimality-gap parameter. Our findings show that it is possible to enforce strong privacy guarantees while maintaining high learning efficiency, marking a significant step toward practical, privacy-aware RL in multi-dimensional environments with one-sided feedback.

Large Language Models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to jailbreak attempts that circumvent safety guardrails. We investigate whether multi-turn conversations using low-resource African languages (Afrikaans, Kiswahili, isiXhosa, and isiZulu) can bypass safety mechanisms across commercial LLMs. We translated prompts from existing datasets and evaluated ChatGPT, Claude, DeepSeek, Gemini, and Grok through automated testing and human red-teaming with native speakers. Single-turn translation attacks proved ineffective, while multi-turn conversations achieved English harmful response rates from 52.7% (Claude 3.5 Haiku) to 83.6% (GPT-4o-mini), Afrikaans from 60.0% (Claude 3.5 Haiku) to 78.2% (GPT-4o-mini), and Kiswahili from 41.8% (Claude 3.5 Haiku) to 70.9% (DeepSeek). Human red-teaming increased jailbreak rates compared to automated methods. Over all evaluated languages, the average jailbreak rate increased from 59.8% to 75.8%, with improvements of +20.0% (Afrikaans), +12.7% (isiZulu), +12.3% (isiXhosa), and +1% (Kiswahili), demonstrating that poor translation quality limits jailbreak success. These findings suggest that vulnerabilities in LLMs persist in multilingual contexts and that translation quality is the critical factor determining jailbreak success in low-resource languages.