This paper demonstrates the computational design of soft elastomeric pneumatic actuators using nonlinear topology optimization. An existing density- and porohyperelasticity-based topology optimization framework was extended from 2D to 3D and used to generate two manufacturable actuator designs, which were then studied numerically and experimentally. For both designs, the objective was to maximize the bending response for a prescribed actuation pressure under two different allowable strain limits. A key advantage of the employed topology optimization framework is that it can consistently, during the optimization, account for the very large deformations induced upon pressurization. The two optimized 3D designs were fabricated using stereolithography and experimentally tested to validate their performance.

Multi-modal remote sensing images are vital for Earth observation, yet complete paired observations are often scarce in practice. Existing generative methods commonly address this problem through isolated pairwise modality translation, but their versatility and scalability remain limited as the number of modalities and generation tasks increases. Here, we develop a generative foundation model MetaEarth-MM for multi-modal remote sensing imagery, enabling paired joint generation and any-to-any translation across five modalities within a unified model. Recognizing the intrinsic scene consistency underlying multi-modal observations, we introduce a scene-centered joint modeling paradigm in MetaEarth-MM. Unlike previous methods that rely on direct appearance-level cross-modal mapping, our model organizes the generation around the underlying scene content. Specifically, MetaEarth-MM adopts a decoupled architecture that first infers a latent scene representation from available observations, and then generates target modalities conditioned on this intermediate state. To support training, we further construct EarthMM, a large-scale dataset comprising 2.8 million multi-resolution global images with 2.2 million aligned pairs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MetaEarth-MM not only exhibits strong generative capability and robust generalization across diverse generation tasks, but also supports downstream tasks at both data and representation levels, highlighting its potential as a general foundation model for cross-modal Earth observation. The code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/YZPioneer/MetaEarth-MM.

Discovering shapelets -- i.e., discriminative temporal patterns within time series -- has been widely studied to address the inherent complexity of time-series classification (TSC) and to make model decision-making processes more transparent. However, existing methods primarily focus on population-level shapelets optimized across the entire dataset, which leads to two fundamental limitations: (i) population-level patterns often misalign with instance-specific features, resulting in suboptimal performance and potentially misleading interpretations, and (ii) most methods treat shapelets as independent entities, overlooking important temporal dependencies and interactions among multiple patterns. To address these limitations, we propose INSHAPE, an interpretable TSC framework that discovers variable-length, discriminative temporal patterns specific to each time series. INSHAPE identifies these patterns as non-overlapping segments and models their temporal dependencies, thereby providing clear instance-level interpretations while achieving strong predictive performance. Furthermore, INSHAPE bridges local and global interpretability through a bottom-up approach, aggregating instance-level shapelets into prototypical (population-level) shapelets. Extensive experiments on 128 UCR and 30 UEA benchmark datasets show that INSHAPE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art shapelet-based methods while providing more intuitive and interpretable insights.

Recent work pairs LLMs with evolutionary search to iteratively generate, modify, and select code using task-specific feedback. These systems have produced strong results in mathematical discovery and algorithm design, yet a fundamental question remains: what do they actually evolve? Progress is typically summarized by the best score a run reaches under a task-specific evaluator, but that score can reflect several different mechanisms: new algorithmic structure, re-tuning an existing strategy, recombining ideas already in the model's internal knowledge, or overfitting to the evaluator. Distinguishing these mechanisms requires inspecting the search process itself, not only its final outcome. We introduce EvoTrace, a dataset of evolutionary coding traces spanning four evolutionary frameworks, reasoning and non-reasoning models, and 16 tasks across mathematics and algorithm design. To analyze these traces, we develop EvoReplay, a replay-based methodology that reconstructs the local search states behind high-scoring solutions and tests controlled interventions, including adjusting constants, removing program components and substituting models or prompting contexts. We annotate every code edit in EvoTrace with one of nine recurring edit types using an LLM-as-judge pipeline validated against blind human re-annotation. Across EvoTrace, most score gains come from a small subset of these edit types. We further find a deterministic cycling pattern: about 30% of code lines added during search are byte-identical re-introductions of previously-deleted lines, present throughout nearly every run. These results show that benchmark gains in evolutionary coding agents can arise from qualitatively different mechanisms, only some of which correspond to new algorithmic structure. EvoTrace enables more diagnostic evaluation of evolutionary coding agents beyond final benchmark scores.

Robotic manipulation is often specified through language instructions or task identifiers, yet cluttered environments with similar objects are better handled by spatially indicating what to move and where to place it. Addressing the vision-centric challenge of object and goal specification, we present, to the best of our knowledge, the first formalization of Spatially Prompted Visual Trajectory Prediction (SP-VTP). This novel setting utilizes initial spatial prompts (like bounding boxes or points) to define task objectives, tasking the model with forecasting future end-effector trajectories from egocentric streams. To study this problem, we collect and annotate EgoSPT, a dataset of egocentric spatially prompted manipulation trajectories with first-frame object and target grounding annotations and recovered 3D end-effector motion. SP-VTP is challenging because the task specification is static, while the scene configuration evolves over time. To solve this problem, we propose SPOT(Spatially Prompted Object-Target Policy), which combines a task encoder for first-frame visual and coordinate spatial prompts, an observation encoder for current visual and history context, and a trajectory generator for future end-effector motion. Experiments under strict scene-level splits show that SPOT improves cross-scene trajectory prediction over non-prompted or single-source prompted baselines. Together, EgoSPT and SPOT establish a new spatial prompting problem SP-VTP, as a simple and scalable task condition for egocentric manipulation.

Large language models (LLMs) can enhance factuality via retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), but applying RAG to every query is unnecessary when the model-only answer is reliable. This motivates cascaded RAG: each query is first handled by an LLM-only branch, escalated to a RAG fallback only if the primary branch is uncertain, and abstained from when neither branch is sufficiently trustworthy. However, calibrating such cascades stage by stage may be conservative, since the final utility depends on joint uncertainty thresholding of LLM-only and RAG. In this work, we develop BalanceRAG to certify threshold pairs at a target risk level. Given uncertainty scores from the two branches, BalanceRAG frames each threshold pair as an operating point on a two-dimensional lattice and identifies safe operating points using sequential graphical testing. This enables risk-adaptive threshold calibration, controlling the system-level error rate among accepted points, while retaining more examples. Furthermore, BalanceRAG extends to multi-risk calibration, allowing retrieval usage to be bounded together with the selection-conditioned risk. Experiments on three open-domain question answering (QA) benchmarks across multiple LLM backbones demonstrate that BalanceRAG meets prescribed risk levels, preserves higher coverage and more accepted correct examples, and reduces unnecessary retrieval calls compared with always-on RAG.

The rapid growth of autonomous driving datasets has enabled the scaling of powerful motion forecasting models. While large-scale pretraining provides strong performance, the standard imitation objective may not fully capture the complex nuances of human driving preferences. Meanwhile, recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning and commonsense understanding. Building on these capabilities, this paper presents VL-DPO, a vision-language-guided framework that aligns ego-vehicle motion forecasting models with human preferences. Our approach leverages a VLM as a zero-shot reasoner to automatically generate preference pairs from a pretrained model's rollouts, which are then used to finetune the model via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). We finetune our models on the Waymo Open End-to-End Driving Dataset (WOD-E2E) and evaluate performance against held-out human preference annotations using rater feedback score (RFS) and average displacement error (ADE). Our experiments confirm that the VLM's trajectory selection is a high-quality proxy for human preference. Our final model, VL-DPO, yields an 11.94% increase in RFS and a 10.01% reduction in ADE over the pretrained model.

Diffusion and flow-based generative models dominate visual synthesis, with guidance aligning samples to user input and improving perceptual quality. However, Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) and extrapolation-based methods are heuristic linear combinations of velocities/scores that ignore the generative manifold geometry, breaking probability conservation and driving samples off the learned manifold under strong guidance. We analyse guidance through the continuity equation and show its effect decomposes into a divergence term and a score-parallel term defined invariantly across parameterisations. We prove the divergence term blows up structurally as sampling approaches the data manifold, motivating a time-dependent schedule alongside score-parallel attenuation. The resulting plug-and-play rule, Adaptive Manifold Guidance (AdaMaG), bounds both terms at no additional inference cost. Finally, we show that most empirical heuristics for reducing saturation or improving generation quality correspond directly to the two terms in our decomposition. Across image generation benchmarks, AdaMaG improves realism, reduces hallucinations, and induces controlled desaturation in high-guidance regimes.

Chain-of-thought (CoT) is a standard approach for eliciting reasoning capabilities from large language models (LLMs). However, the common CoT paradigm treats thinking as a prerequisite for answering, which can delay access to plausible answers and incur unnecessary token costs even when the model is able to identify an answer before extended thinking, a behavior known as performative reasoning. In this paper, we introduce CopT, a reformulated reasoning pipeline that reverses the usual order of thinking and answering. Instead of thinking before answering, CopT first elicits a draft answer and then invokes subsequent on-policy thinking conditioned on its own draft answer for reflection and correction. To assess whether the draft answer should be trusted, CopT recasts continuous embeddings as inference-time contrastive verifiers. Specifically, it contrasts the model's support for the same generated tokens under discrete-token inputs and continuous-embedding inputs, yielding a sequence-level reverse KL estimator for answer reliability. Our analysis shows that under certain assumptions, the expected estimate equals the mutual information between the unresolved latent state and the emitted answer token, explaining why it captures answer-relevant uncertainty rather than arbitrary uncertainty in the latent state. When the answer is deemed insufficiently reliable, CopT performs further on-policy thinking, where a second KL estimator dynamically controls draft-answer visibility, preserving useful partial information while reducing the risk of being misled by unreliable content. Across mathematics, coding, and agentic reasoning tasks, CopT improves peak accuracy by up to 23% and reduces token usage by up to 57% at comparable or higher accuracy, without any additional training. The code is available at https://github.com/sdc17/CopT.

Distillation transfers knowledge from a large model trained on broad data to a smaller, more efficient model suitable for deployment. In structured prediction settings, prior knowledge about the task can guide the choice of a target architecture that is algorithmically aligned with the underlying problem. Building on recent learning-theoretic analyses of decision-tree (DT) distillation (Boix-Adsera, 2024), we study when distillation succeeds for combinatorial optimization tasks. We focus on the case where the target model is a graph neural network whose architecture is aligned with a dynamic programming (DP) algorithm for the task. Assuming that the source model is sufficiently rich, formalized through the linear representation hypothesis (LRH) (Elhage et al., 2022; Park et al., 2024), we show that the distillation problem can be solved efficiently in the complexity parameters of the DP transition function, represented as a DT. Our results provide a rigorous sufficient condition for successful distillation in the flavour of algorithmic alignment.

This work proposes a pixel-classification approach for vessel segmentation in x-ray angiograms. The proposal uses textural features such as anisotropic diffusion, features based on the Hessian matrix, mathematical morphology and statistics. These features are extracted from the neighborhood of each pixel. The approach also uses the ELEMENT methodology, which consists of creating a pixel-classification controlled by region-growing where the result of the classification affects further classifications of pixels. The Random Forests classifier is used to predict whether the pixel belongs to the vessel structure. The approach achieved the best accuracy in the literature (95.48%) outperforming unsupervised state-of-the-art approaches.

Large Language Models are increasingly proposed as cognitive components for robotic systems, yet their opaque decision processes make it difficult to explain success or failure in closed-loop embodied tasks. Following an empirical AI methodology, we study embodied LLM agents behaviorally by varying the information available to the agent and measuring the resulting changes in behavior. Using the Lockbox, a sequential mechanical puzzle with hidden interdependencies, we evaluate LLMs across RGB, RGB-D, and ground-truth symbolic observations in a physical robotic setup and use controlled simulation to probe the resulting behavior. Counterintuitively, agents perform best under raw RGB input and worst under perfect ground-truth observations. In simulation, we probe this effect by randomly flipping perceived action outcomes and find that moderate noise improves performance, peaking at a 40% flip probability with a 2.85-fold success rate increase over the noise-free baseline. Further analysis links this gain to a reduction in repetitive action loops. These findings suggest that success rates alone are insufficient for evaluating LLMs, as measured performance may reflect the interaction between perceptual errors and reasoning failures rather than robust problem solving.

Standard generative models struggle with heavy-tailed data: Lipschitz architectures cannot produce power-law tails from Gaussian noise, and interpolating between heavy-tailed data and Gaussians is ill-posed. We propose a simple fix: apply the soft-log transform $ϕ(x) = \mathrm{sign}(x) \cdot \log(1 + |x|)$ coordinate-wise to data before training, then exponentiate samples after generation. A Hill diagnostic decides per-coordinate whether to transform, leaving light-tailed margins untouched at no added complexity. This compresses heavy tails into a range where standard flow matching succeeds, without heavy-tailed base distributions or architectural modifications. We provide theoretical intuition for why this works: the log-transform maps Pareto tails to exponentials, and the induced dynamics implement a form of tail annealing via power transformations. On a 144-configuration multivariate benchmark (3 copulas, $d$ up to 100, 4 tail indices), Log-FM dominates specialized baselines on $W_1$, CVaR$_{99}$, and extreme-quantile metrics, and is the only method with zero severe divergences across 2{,}880 runs.

Knowledge graph question answering seeks to translate natural language questions into executable queries over knowledge graphs, but existing approaches often rely on large models or full supervision in the form of gold query annotations. This study examines whether reinforcement learning with outcome-based rewards can train a small instruction-tuned language model to perform zero-shot Text-to-SPARQL generation in the scholarly domain. Group-Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is applied to the Qwen3-1.7B model on DBLP-QuAD, using prompts that combine natural language questions with symbolic hints about entities and relations. Training relies on execution feedback, structural constraints, and answer-level rewards, with an additional variant that incorporates gold-query-based shaping. The resulting models are compared to the unmodified zero-shot baseline and to a supervised DoRA-finetuned baseline across answer-level accuracy, execution accuracy, category-wise scores, and generalization to held-out templates. GRPO substantially improves over the zero-shot baseline and exhibits competitive generalization, while supervised DoRA finetuning achieves higher overall accuracy on the same model scale. Ablation analyses indicate that execution-based rewards account for most gains, with additional shaping yielding limited additional benefit, suggesting that outcome-based reinforcement learning is a viable training strategy when gold queries are unavailable for token-level supervision.

In recent years, research has highlighted the association between increased adipose tissue surrounding the human heart and elevated susceptibility to cardiovascular diseases such as atrial fibrillation and coronary heart disease. However, the manual segmentation of these fat deposits has not been widely implemented in clinical practice due to the substantial workload it entails for medical professionals and the associated costs. Consequently, the demand for more precise and time-efficient quantitative analysis has driven the emergence of novel computational methods for fat segmentation. This study presents a novel deep learning-based methodology that offers autonomous segmentation and quantification of two distinct types of cardiac fat deposits. The proposed approach leverages the pix2pix network, a generative conditional adversarial network primarily designed for image-to-image translation tasks. By applying this network architecture, we aim to investigate its efficacy in tackling the specific challenge of cardiac fat segmentation, despite not being originally tailored for this purpose. The two types of fat deposits of interest in this study are referred to as epicardial and mediastinal fats, which are spatially separated by the pericardium. The experimental results demonstrated an average accuracy of 99.08% and f1-score 98.73 for the segmentation of the epicardial fat and 97.90% of accuracy and f1-score of 98.40 for the mediastinal fat. These findings represent the high precision and overlap agreement achieved by the proposed methodology. In comparison to existing studies, our approach exhibited superior performance in terms of f1-score and run time, enabling the images to be segmented in real time.

Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) is a promising paradigm for improving large language model (LLM) agents on long-horizon interactive tasks. However, in partially observable environments, incomplete observations cause agent beliefs to drift over time, while delayed rewards obscure the causal impact of intermediate decisions, exacerbating temporal credit assignment challenges. To address this, we propose ReBel (Reward Belief), a process-level reinforcement learning algorithm that explicitly models structured belief states to summarize interaction history and guide subsequent policy learning. ReBel introduces belief-consistency supervision, converting discrepancies between predicted beliefs and observed feedback into dense self-supervised signals without requiring external step-wise annotations or verifiers. It also employs belief-aware grouping to compare trajectories under similar belief states, yielding more robust and lower-variance advantage estimates. We evaluate ReBel on challenging long-horizon benchmarks, including ALFWorld and WebShop. ReBel improves task success by up to $20.4$ percentage points over the episode-level baseline GRPO and increases sample efficiency by $2.1\times$. These results suggest that belief-aware self-supervision is a promising direction for reliable long-horizon decision-making under partial observability. Code is available at: https://github.com/Fateyetian/Rebel.git.

Explicit software architecture models are essential artifacts for communicating, analyzing, and evolving complex software-intensive systems. In ROS~2-based robotic systems, however, structural (de-)composition and integration semantics are often only implicitly encoded across distributed artifacts such as source code and launch files, making recovery of hierarchical architecture particularly difficult. Existing approaches mainly focus on node-level entities and communication wiring, while providing limited support for recovering hierarchical structural (de-)composition across multiple abstraction levels. In this paper, we extend our previously proposed blueprint-guided LLM-assisted architecture recovery pipeline for ROS~2 systems through two major enhancements: (1) refined prompting to improve the consistency and controllability of architecture synthesis, and (2) a staged recovery strategy based on multi-level intermediate architectural representations that incorporate the atomic ROS node list and launch file dependencies, thereby enabling structurally constrained reconstruction across multiple abstraction levels. The approach is evaluated on a real-world automated product disassembly system based on cooperative robotic arms and heterogeneous ROS~2 artifacts. Compared to our previous work, the considered case study exhibits substantially higher integration complexity and richer functionality. The results demonstrate improved structural consistency, scalability, and robustness of architecture recovery, while also revealing remaining challenges related to dynamic integration semantics in large-scale ROS~2 systems.

This study investigates how language mutations affect the persistent diffusion of conspiracy theories on social media. Drawing on a three-year dataset of conspiracy-related posts from X, and applying computational linguistic analysis alongside survival modelling, we find that conspiracy claims with greater semantic mutations have substantially longer lifespans. Mutations in psycholinguistic properties, including pronouns, social reference words, cognitive process terms, risk- and health- related vocabularies, are associated with extended lifespans. Mutations in actor, action and target (AAT) categories are associated with longer lifespans as well. Qualitative analysis identifies two predominant mutation patterns: simplification and assimilation, at both linguistic and AAT structural levels. Taken together, the results advance our understanding of how language mutations contribute to conspiracy persistence online and shed lights on longitudinal content moderation strategies. We argue that content moderation should consider the mutability of conspiracy claims and focus on the core claims that can address their potential variations.

As autonomous coding agents see rapid adoption, their evaluation has primarily focused on task completion rates holding the target codebase fixed. This leaves a critical question unanswered: does the structural and stylistic quality, or ``cleanliness'' of the underlying code affect an agent's ability to navigate and modify it? To isolate the effect of code cleanliness from agent capability, we introduce an evaluation protocol built around minimal pairs: repositories that match on architecture, dependencies, and external behaviour, but differ on static-analysis rule violations and cognitive complexity. The pairs are constructed in both directions, by agent pipelines that either degrade a clean repository or clean a messy one. We author 33 tasks across six such pairs, evaluated through hidden tests at the application's public surface. Across 660 trials with Claude Code, code cleanliness does not change the agent's pass rate. However, it substantially alters the agent's operational footprint: agents working on cleaner code use 7 to 8% fewer tokens and reduce file revisitations by 34%. Our findings suggest that traditional maintainability principles remain highly relevant in the era of AI-driven development, shaping the computational cost and navigational efficiency of coding agents. Code cleanliness joins model choice, harness, and prompting as a factor that materially affects agent behaviours.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) provides an explicit and efficient scene representation, but its primitives lack inherent object-level identity, hindering downstream tasks such as open-vocabulary scene understanding. Existing methods typically address this by either distilling high-dimensional feature embeddings into Gaussians or by lifting 2D mask labels into 3D via heuristic refinement. However, feature-based approaches incur heavy storage and decoding overhead, while lifting-based pipelines remain vulnerable to label contamination: Gaussians necessary for appearance reconstruction often receive incorrect object labels during 2D-to-3D projection. We propose OP2GS, an object-aware Gaussian representation that augments each primitive with an explicit instance identity and a dedicated instance opacity $σ^{*}$ for object-mask rendering. The original opacity $σ$ remains responsible for visual reconstruction, while $σ^{*}$ models whether a Gaussian should contribute to a particular object mask. This dual-opacity formulation decouples visual existence from instance occupancy: mislabeled Gaussians can remain available for image rendering while becoming transparent in the object-mask branch. To learn this representation, we introduce a random object loss that optimizes the 1D instance occupancy field using the standard transmittance-based visibility of 3DGS. Semantic descriptors are then attached at the object level through multi-view aggregation, eliminating per-Gaussian feature storage. Compared with feature-training approaches, OP2GS achieves competitive open-vocabulary performance while significantly reducing computational overhead. Compared with training-free pipelines, it leverages physically consistent occupancy learning to resolve visibility ambiguities.

We study the contextual multi-armed bandit problem with a finite context space (a.k.a. subpopulations), where the learner recommends a best action for each context and is evaluated by context-weighted simple regret. Our guarantees are worst-case over the reward distributions, while remaining instance-dependent with respect to the context distribution vector $p$. Akin to experimental design problems where the population of interest is fixed but the sampled subpopulation can be controlled, we allow the learner to actively choose which context to sample from. For a known $p$, we characterize tight regret rates: passive sampling where contexts are randomly revealed achieves regret of order $\sqrt{n/T \, \lVert p \rVert_{1/2}}$, whereas active sampling with allocation $q_j \propto p_j^{2/3}$ achieves the tight rate $\sqrt{n/T} \, \lVert p \rVert_{2/3}$. The resulting improvement can be as large as $Θ(k^{1/4})$, where $k$ is the number of contexts. We further extend the analysis to budgeted active sampling, characterize the corresponding tight rate, and identify when a limited active budget suffices to recover the fully active rate. When $p$ is unknown, we propose the Explore-Explore-Then-Commit (EETC) algorithm, which optimally balances estimating the context distribution and the time to switch to active allocation, such that for large horizons, it matches the known-$p$ active rate up to constants. Experiments on synthetic and real-world data support our theoretical findings.

Reward-poisoning attacks present a significant risk to learning-based wireless control systems. Given this, we propose a Disagreement-Guided Reward Poisoning (DGRP) adaptive attack on a Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) agent. In a Cognitive Radio Network (CRN) environment assisted by Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS), the SAC agent is tasked with maximizing the long-term secondary users' (SUs) rate by simultaneously optimizing the transmission power of the SU transmitter and the RIS phase shifts. DGRP corrupts rewards, particularly when the SAC dual critics exhibit substantial disagreement-especially in high-leverage, high-uncertainty states-resulting in distorted value estimations and guiding the policy towards suboptimal actions. Our findings demonstrate that DGRP substantially diminishes the performance improvements typically provided by RIS and degrades transmission quality. We further investigate key attack parameters and determine their impact on learning. In comparison to periodic-timing and exploration-triggered baselines, DGRP consistently causes greater damage, highlighting the necessity of considering disagreement-aware threats when evaluating the robustness of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) in RIS-assisted networks.

Omni-modal large language models (om-LLMs) achieve unified audio-visual understanding by encoding video and audio into temporally aligned token sequences interleaved at the window level. However, processing these dense non-textual tokens throughout the LLM incurs substantial computational overhead. Although training-free token selection can reduce this cost, existing methods either focus on visual-only inputs or prune om-LLM tokens only before the LLM with fixed per-modality ratios, failing to capture how cross-modal token importance evolves across layers. To address this limitation, we first analyze the layer-wise token dependency of om-LLMs. We find that visual and audio dependencies follow a block-wise pattern and gradually weaken with depth, indicating that many late-layer non-textual tokens become redundant after cross-modal fusion. Motivated by this observation, we propose SEATS, a training-free, stage-adaptive token selection method for efficient om-LLM inference. Before the LLM, SEATS removes spatiotemporal redundancy via attention-weighted diversity selection. Inside the LLM, it progressively prunes tokens across blocks and dynamically allocates the retention budget from temporal windows to modalities using query relevance scores. In late layers, it removes all remaining non-textual tokens once cross-modal fusion is complete. Experiments on Qwen2.5-Omni and Qwen3-Omni demonstrate that SEATS effectively improves inference efficiency. Retaining only 10% of visual and audio tokens, it achieves a 9.3x FLOPs reduction and a 4.8x prefill speedup while preserving 96.3% of the original performance.

Multimodal large language models often generate reasoning chains containing subtle errors that lead to incorrect answers. Current verification approaches have notable limitations. Learned critics need extensive labeled data and show inconsistent performance across different tasks. Meanwhile, existing training-free methods simply average scores from different sources, missing a key insight: when these scores disagree, that disagreement itself carries important information about whether a reasoning step is truly valid or not. We propose a training-free verification approach that treats step-wise verification as a coordination problem among specialized judges. We formalize these judges' interaction as a Nash equilibrium game where agreement signals valid steps while disagreement reveals instability. Our method computes equilibrium scores through a closed-form solution, enabling both disagreement-aware filtering and stability-conscious ranking of reasoning steps. Evaluated across six benchmarks, our approach achieves consistent improvements of 2.4% to 5.2% over baseline models and shows competitive performance against learned critics, demonstrating that cross-modal agreement (not just average confidence) provides robust verification signals without task-specific adaptation.

Text-attributed graph fraud detection (TAGFD) plays a critical role in preventing fraudulent activities on online social and e-commerce platforms. However, to evade detection, fraudsters continuously evolve their camouflaging strategies by deliberately mimicking textual responses of benign users, thereby concealing their malicious purposes. This phenomenon, referred to as semantic camouflage, fundamentally undermines commonly relied assumptions on how structural and attribute cues can be exploited to identify fraudsters, and makes it difficult to spot fraudsters with unsupervised TAGFD. To bridge the gaps, we propose a Case-Adaptive Multi-cue Expert fRAmework (CAMERA) for unsupervised TAGFD. CAMERA employs an ego-decoupled mixture-of-experts architecture, where each expert specializes in modeling a distinct type of fraud-indicative cue. A context-informed gating model is introduced to jointly consider the ego node representation and its local neighborhood context for adaptive integration of cues learned by different experts. Furthermore, CAMERA leverages the inherent rarity of fraudsters to support unsupervised one-class learning with expert-level objectives that encourage modeling dominant benign patterns, thereby enabling reliable unsupervised detection of camouflaged fraudsters. Experiments on 4 challenging datasets show that CAMERA consistently outperforms competitors, showing its effectiveness against semantically camouflaged fraudsters. Code available at https://github.com/CampanulaBells/CAMERA

Bayesian filtering is a well-known problem that aims to estimate plausible states of a dynamical system from observations. Among existing approaches to solve this problem, particle filters are theoretically exact for non-linear dynamics and observations, but suffer from poor scalability in high dimensions. In this work, we show that diffusion-based emulators of dynamical systems can be used to implement, without additional training, an optimal variant of particle filters that has remained largely unexplored due to implementation challenges with classical numerical solvers. Experiments on nonlinear chaotic systems, including atmospheric dynamics, demonstrate that the proposed approach successfully scales particle filtering to high-dimensional settings.

Speculative decoding accelerates memory-bound LLM inference without quality degradation by using a fast drafter to propose multiple candidate tokens and the target model to verify them in parallel. However, conventional sequential speculative decoding suffers from mutual waiting between drafting and verification, and repeated exchange of intermediate states further increases memory access overhead. Parallel speculative decoding addresses this limitation by performing drafting and verification within a single target forward pass, allowing future drafts to be prepared while current candidates are being verified. Although effective at small batch sizes, existing parallel speculative decoding methods either require costly continual pretraining with quality degradation or suffer from low acceptance rates. More importantly, this paradigm inherently suffers from uncertainty in both the bonus token and the accepted length, leading to draft verification mismatch and causing throughput gains to collapse at large batch sizes. To address these limitations, we introduce FlexDraft, a lossless speculative decoding framework that flexibly adapts to varying batch sizes through three key designs. (1) Attention Tuning enables block diffusion drafting by tuning only the attention projectors of the final few layers on mask tokens, while keeping the autoregressive path frozen to preserve the target distribution and produce high quality drafts with minimal trainable parameters. (2) Bonus-guided Calibration uses a lightweight MLP conditioned on the resolved bonus token to calibrate draft logits, mitigating draft verification mismatch caused by bonus token uncertainty. (3) Flex Decoding dynamically switches between parallel draft and verify at small batch sizes and sequential draft then verify at large batch sizes, and adjusts verification length based on draft confidence to eliminate redundant computation.

Short-form video poses new challenges to the quality assessment of user-generated content (UGC) due to its complex generation pipeline, rapid content variation, and mixed distortions. To address this challenge, we propose an end-to-end video quality assessment (VQA) framework that employs a dense visual encoder based on CLIP, and incorporates compression priors derived from the frequency domain to generate artifact- and structure-aware weight maps for feature aggregation. By explicitly decomposing artifact, structure, and original visual feature branches and adaptively fusing them over time through a learned gating module, the proposed method achieves accurate and efficient quality prediction. Experimental results show that our method achieves strong performance on short-form video datasets in terms of average rank and linear correlation (SRCC: 0.736, PLCC: 0.787), while maintaining efficient inference runtime. The code and additional results are available at: https://github.com/xinyiW915/FGSVQA.

Audio-to-score alignment is a long-standing challenge in music information retrieval and arguably the most widely applicable alignment task for music research. Alignment algorithms match two versions of a piece of music, and for this to work these versions need to be in comparable formats. Audio-to-audio alignment matches audio features; when matching audio files to scores, they must either synthesize the score or derive audio-like features by means of piano rolls or similar feature sequences. Symbolic alignment, by contrast, matches symbolically encoded notes; in an audio-to-score scenario these would be obtained by a transcription of the audio file. In this article, we present an algorithm that bridges audio-like and symbol-level features directly. Sequential audio features encoding onset and spectral activation are matched to score positions by a bespoke dynamic programming-based matching algorithm derived from symbolic alignment methods. The resulting method is both precise - surpassing widely used audio-to-audio approaches based on synthesized scores -, and remains flexible in its digital signal processing components, i.e., the method is adaptable to diverse timbral characteristics without requiring a separate transcription model. Furthermore it inherits some of the symbolic alignment runtime advantages with an algorithmic complexity that is at worst linear in the length of the (typically short) symbolic score and (typically long) audio feature sequence. In the following sections, we provide a detailed algorithm description and evaluate its alignment quality on a large-scale dataset of solo piano recordings.

Backpropagation with gradient descent is a common optimization strategy employed by most neural network architectures in machine learning. However, finding optimal hyperparameters to guide training has proven challenging. While it is widely acknowledged that selecting appropriate parameters is crucial for avoiding overfitting and achieving unbiased outcomes, this choice remains largely based on empirical experiments and experience. This paper presents a new probabilistic framework for the learning rate, a key parameter in stochastic gradient descent. The framework develops classic Bayesian statistics into a double-Bayesian decision mechanism involving two antagonistic Bayesian processes. A theoretically optimal learning rate can be derived from these two processes and used for stochastic gradient descent. Experiments across various classification, segmentation, and detection tasks corroborate the practical significance of the theoretically derived learning rate. The paper also discusses the ramifications of the proposed double-Bayesian framework for network training and model performance.