Training very deep neural networks requires controlling the propagation of magnitudes across depth. Without such control, activations and gradients may vanish, explode, or enter unstable regimes that make optimization fail. Modern architectures often mitigate this problem through Batch Normalization, residual connections, or other normalization layers, which repeatedly re-scale or bypass intermediate representations. However, these mechanisms are not always appropriate. In Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs), the network represents a continuous physical field and its input derivatives define the training objective, making batch-dependent normalization problematic because it can introduce non-local dependencies into the predicted field and its derivatives. We propose StableGrad, an optimizer-level scale-control mechanism that corrects layer-wise weight-gradient imbalances without modifying the forward model. Because the normalization is applied only after backpropagation and before the optimizer update, the network output, its derivatives, and the physical residual remain unchanged. We analyze the effective training dynamics induced by this rescaling and evaluate StableGrad on deep PINNs as the target application, with BatchNorm-free convolutional networks serving as a diagnostic stress test. On PINN benchmarks, StableGrad improves matched-depth solution accuracy and makes deeper models more reliable under standard optimization. On ResNet and EfficientNet architectures, where removing Batch Normalization normally leads to training collapse, StableGrad stabilizes optimization without introducing any other architectural change. These results show that optimizer-level control of weight-gradient scale can provide a practical alternative when forward normalization is unavailable or undesirable.

Concept-based Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) interprets deep learning models using human-understandable visual features (e.g., textures or object parts) by linking internal representations to class predictions, thereby bridging the gap between low-level image data and high-level semantics. A major challenge, however, is the reliance on large sets of labeled images to represent each concept, which limits scalability. In this work, we investigate the use of zero-shot Text-to-Image (T2I) generative models as a source of synthetic concept datasets for concept-based XAI methods. Specifically, we generate concepts using predefined prompts and evaluate their faithfulness to real ones through four complementary analyses: (1) comparing synthetic vs. real concept images via concept representation similarity; (2) evaluating their intra-similarity by comparing pairs of subsets of the same concept with progressively increasing size; (3) evaluating their performance for downstream explanation tasks using relevant class images; (4) evaluating how removing a concept from tested class images affects explanations of generated concepts. While current T2I generative models promise a shortcut to concept-based XAI, our study highlights challenges and raises open questions about the use of synthetic data generated by zero-shot pipelines in model analyses. The resulting dataset is available at https://github.com/DataSciencePolimi/ZeroShot-T2I-Concepts.

We propose a scalable tensorization framework for neural network compression based on slice-wise feature distillation. Unlike conventional tensor decomposition methods that rely on costly global finetuning, our approach decomposes the network into slices consisting of either individual layers or blocks (e.g., convolutional layers or MLPs), or small groups of consecutive layers, and tensorizes each slice independently to reproduce the intermediate representations of the original pretrained model. This modular strategy improves accuracy recovery, reduces data requirements, and enables efficient parallel optimization. Experiments on ResNet-34 show significant gains over conventional global tensorization, achieving near-lossless compression at moderate compression rates with faster optimization. Results on GPT-2 XL further demonstrate the scalability of the method and its applicability to large-scale models, particularly in distributed settings.

For most of human history, we have not thought systematically about how and why we incorporate aspects of the natural world into our designs. The lack of a systematic approach has resulted in inconsistencies in motivations and methods that make it difficult to predict or evaluate the success of bio-inspired design. This mismatch between expectations and results can lead to disappointment when a reader considers a bio-inspired design to be superficial, weak, or incomplete. This is especially true in the field of Robotics, in which similarity to a biological system might be the driving motivation for construction. In an effort to assist robotics researchers justify their specific bio-inspired approach and to assist funding program managers with discerning the value of different bio-inspired approaches, here we propose a taxonomy of motivations for bio-inspired design and describe the potential significant contributions that are likely to result from different approaches.

Adverse weather (rain, fog, sand, and snow) degrades camera-based object detection in autonomous vehicles. Existing enhancement-then-detect approaches stall the safety-critical perception loop, violating hard real-time requirements. Progress on this problem is also constrained by an under-recognized evaluation ceiling: ground truth annotated on degraded images cannot credit a detector that recovers objects the annotators themselves could not see, so a genuinely useful enhancement can register as a near-flat F1 gain. This paper presents CADENet (Condition-Adaptive Asynchronous Dual-stream Enhancement Network), a training-free three-thread system: Thread S (YOLOv11n) delivers detections at full frame rate with zero added latency; Thread Q applies condition-adaptive enhancement (CAPE) and fuses results via entropy-guided NMS (EG-NMS) without blocking Thread S; Thread E provides CLIP zero-shot weather classification, so new weather categories require only a new text prompt, with no labeled data and no retraining. Evaluated on 1327 DAWN images (YOLOv11m, IoU = 0.5, confidence = 0.25), CADENet achieves Recall = 0.0103 (micro), F1 = 0.0230 on snow, and F1 = 0.0038 on rain. We formalize the annotation completeness bias on DAWN-class data, so the reported F1 values are lower bounds on the true gain; recall is the annotation-gap-immune headline metric. Thread S sustains approximately 44 FPS regardless of enhancement load. No model retraining or additional sensor hardware is required.

To support operations and passenger-facing services, transit agencies need reliable passenger load trajectories. Currently, load estimates are typically inferred from imperfect sensing systems rather than fully observed, and the accuracy of modern automatic passenger counting (APC) systems still varies with station layout, flow intensity, and operating conditions. To address the challenges of robust passenger load estimation from heterogeneous data streams, including incremental count errors, evidence conflicts, and context-dependent sensor reliability, we propose a closed-loop, state-centric, multi-agent framework. This method enforces physical feasibility at every step, allocates trust dynamically among evidence sources, and feeds physics-derived violation residuals back into training for robustness improvement. The architecture consists of a unified stop-event backbone, a coupled Perception--Physical--Fusion loop for stop-by-stop inference, and optional trip-level macro-correction and closed-loop calibration modules.

Despite rapid advances in automatic speech recognition (ASR) and large audio-language models, robust recognition in real-world environments remains limited by an "acoustic robustness bottleneck": models often lose acoustic grounding and produce omissions or hallucinations under severe, compositional distortions. We propose Mega-ASR, a unified ASR-in-the-wild framework that combines scalable compound-data construction with progressive acoustic-to-semantic optimization. We introduce Voices-in-the-Wild-2M, covering 7 classic acoustic phenomena and 54 physically plausible compound scenarios, and train Mega-ASR with Acoustic-to-Semantic Progressive Supervised Fine-Tuning and Dual-Granularity WER-Gated Policy Optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Mega-ASR achieves significant advantages over prior state-of-the-art systems on adverse-condition ASR benchmarks (45.69% vs. 54.01% on VOiCES R4-B-F, and 21.49% vs. 29.34% on NOIZEUS Sta-0). On complex compositional acoustic scenarios, Mega-ASR further delivers over 30% relative WER reduction against strong open- and closed-source baselines, establishing a scalable paradigm for robust ASR in-the-wild.

Conventional treatment policies map patient covariates to a single recommended intervention in order to maximize expected clinical outcomes. Although a rich body of causal inference methods has been developed to estimate such policies, point-valued recommendations can be highly sensitive to estimation uncertainty, model specification, and finite-sample variability, while typically providing little guidance about how confident one should be in the recommended action. In this work, we propose a set-valued policy learning paradigm for the multiple-treatment setting, in which policies output a set of plausible treatments rather than a single recommendation. This formulation enables intrinsic uncertainty quantification, with the size of the predicted set reflecting the degree of decision ambiguity. We extend the learning-to-defer framework to multiple treatments via a novel \textit{greatest Lower Bound} method, and introduce \textit{conformal policy learning}, which bridges the gap between unobserved ground-truth optimal treatments and estimated optimal treatment rules. Drawing on insights from the noisy-label literature, we develop a randomness-injection approach that guarantees marginal coverage without requiring assumptions on underlying black-box optimal treatment rules. Through experiments on synthetic data and a real-world application to In-Vitro Fertilization (IVF), we demonstrate that our methods produce robust and actionable policies that naturally incorporate clinical considerations while effectively balancing performance and reliability.

Operators of safety-critical industrial processes increasingly rely on digital twins to screen control interventions, but such simulators rarely carry certified safety guarantees. Wastewater treatment plants exemplify the gap: operators face a daily safety-efficiency trade-off where aerating too little risks effluent violations and nitrous-oxide (N2O) spikes, and aerating too much wastes energy. We develop an explainable digital twin for aeration and dosing setpoints. CCSS-IX, the simulator, is a bank of interpretable locally linear state-space "experts" adaptively mixed by a context-aware gating network, building on a continuous-time regime-switching scaffold. A runtime decision layer applies conformal risk control to abstain, reopen, or return a falsifying temporal witness for any operator-proposed action that cannot be statistically certified. The artificial-intelligence contribution is twofold: an identifiable, context-conditioned structured surrogate that retains operator-readable dynamics, and a self-falsifying decision rule with finite-sample coverage guarantees. The engineering contribution is a validated, end-to-end decision-support pipeline, tested on a 1000-step slice of the Avedøre full-scale plant (42.6% sensor missingness, 2-minute sampling), the Agtrup/BlueKolding full-scale plant in Denmark, and the Benchmark Simulation Model No. 2 (BSM2) international benchmark, under a matched ten-seed protocol. The static structured ensemble lies within 0.78% root-mean-square error of an unconstrained black-box reference, and the adaptive variant within 1.08%. The calibrated reopen rule cuts aggregate two-plant regret by 43.6% at an unsafe-action cost weight of 4 and eliminates unsafe chosen actions on the BSM2 main slice. Event-aligned temporal witnesses prevent 93 of 187 false-safe N2O approvals, about 4.65x the dyadic baseline (paired McNemar p < 1e-21).

Recent attempts to support high-level scene interpretation and planning in Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) using ensembles of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) continue to treat time as a secondary property. This lack of temporal grounding leads to inconsistencies in reasoning about continuous actions, undermining both safety and interpretability. This work explores whether temporal conditioning within inter-agent communication can preserve or enhance coherence without introducing degradation in semantic or logical consistency. To investigate this, we introduce three planner architectures with progressively increasing temporal integration and evaluate them on curated subsets of the BDD-X dataset using semantic, syntactic, and logical metrics. Results show that while temporal conditioning reshapes reasoning style, it yields no statistically significant improvements in standard NLP-based correctness metrics. However, qualitative analysis reveals predictive hazard reasoning, stable corrective behavior, and strategic divergence in the Sentinel. These findings clarify the limits of prompt-based temporal grounding and establish the first empirical benchmark for temporal scene-to-plan reasoning.

Neural operators have achieved strong performance in learning solution operators of partial differential equations (PDEs), but their inherently continuous representations struggle to capture discontinuities and sharp transitions. Existing approaches typically approximate such features within continuous function spaces, often requiring increased model capacity and high-resolution data. In this work, we propose Cut-DeepONet, a two-stage training framework that explicitly models discontinuities while reducing learning complexity. Our approach reformulates the problem via a lifting strategy, partitioning the domain into smooth subregions while representing discontinuities as boundaries in a higher-dimensional space. This separation aligns the operator learning task with the inductive bias of neural networks and avoids directly approximating discontinuities. An additional network predicts input-dependent discontinuity locations for unseen inputs, which are then used to guide the neural operator in generating smooth components within each region. Experiments on benchmark PDEs show that Cut-DeepONet outperforms state-of-the-art methods, even when trained on low-resolution datasets. The method excels on problems with discontinuities and sharp transitions, while using fewer trainable parameters. Our results highlight the benefits of changing the representation of operator learning rather than increasing model complexity.

Temporal graph neural networks (TGNNs) have gained significant traction for solving real-world temporal graph tasks. However, their interpretability remains limited, as most TGNNs fail to identify which historical interactions most influence a given prediction. Despite promising progress on interpretable TGNNs, existing methods predominantly focus on previously seen historical interactions, which we term stability patterns, while overlooking newly emerging first-time interactions, which we term transition patterns. Both types of patterns are essential for faithful temporal explanations. To address this limitation, we propose ST-TGExplainer, a self-explainable TGNN that disentangles Stability and Transition patterns in temporal graphs for a more faithful Temporal GNN Explainer. Guided by a disentangled information bottleneck objective, ST-TGExplainer learns a compact explanatory subgraph that remains predictive of the event label while explicitly suppressing label-conditioned redundancy between stability and transition patterns. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ST-TGExplainer achieves strong predictive performance and yields more faithful explanations. Code is available at https://github.com/hjchen-hdu/ST-TGExplainer.

Facial Expression Recognition (FER) in the wild is still challenging due to uncontrolled variations in pose, occlusion, and illumination. Most existing attention-based methods primarily rely on visual appearance cues, suffering from attention redundancy and instability, which limits their performance in complex scenarios. To address these issues, we propose a novel landmark-guided contrastive learning network with vision-language enhancement for FER (LaCoVL-FER), which integrates geometric priors from facial landmarks and semantic priors from a vision-language model. Specifically, a Landmark-Guided Adaptive Encoder (LGAE) is designed to introduce geometric priors through a Bi-branch Gated Cross Attention (BGCA) mechanism, which achieves adaptive fusion of landmark-based geometric and visual appearance features to produce expression-relevant features, thereby focusing on key facial regions and suppressing noise interference. In parallel, a Vision-Language Enhancement Strategy (VLES) is presented to leverage the expression-relevant features to refine the generalizable visual features extracted by the frozen pretrained CLIP image encoder, yielding expression-specific visual representations. Based on these representations, an Expression-Conditioned Prompting (ECP) mechanism is utilized to further adapt the textual features of fixed class-level prompts from the frozen pretrained CLIP text encoder, generating more instance-aware textual representations. These visual-textual representations are aligned as semantic priors to enhance the robustness and generalization of FER. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that our LaCoVL-FER outperforms state-of-the-art methods on three representative real-world FER datasets, including RAF-DB, FERPlus, and AffectNet. The code is available at https://github.com/ylin06804/LaCoVL-FER.

Legal proposition generation is central to legal reasoning and doctrinal scholarship, yet remain under-examined in Legal NLP. This paper investigates the automatic generation and evaluation of legal propositions from decisions of the Court of Justice of the European Union using large language models (LLMs). We introduce LP-Eval, a three-step evaluation rubric co-designed with legal experts that decomposes legal proposition quality into formal validity and substantive dimensions. Using this rubric, we release a dataset of two experts' annotations for 100 LLM-generated legal propositions. Our results show that LLMs can generate predominantly well-formed and high-quality propositions, while expert evaluations reveal higher quality for propositions derived from well established cases than from recent ones. We further examine LLMs as evaluators and find that rubric-guided LLM judgments align more closely with expert assessments than direct overall scoring, but remain insensitive to finer-grained distinctions captured by human experts.

We prove a general lower bound for differentially private federated learning protocols with arbitrary public-transcript interactions. The protocol may use any number of adaptive rounds, and each client's local samples may be reused across rounds. For parameter estimation under squared \(\ell_2\) loss, we establish a federated van Trees lower bound for every estimator satisfying a total clientwise sample-level zero-concentrated differential privacy (zCDP) constraint. The main technical ingredient is a privacy-information contraction inequality for complete public transcripts. We illustrate the bound through applications to mean estimation, linear regression, and nonparametric regression.

We introduce FLUXtrapolation, a benchmark for extrapolating ecosystem fluxes under progressively harder distribution shifts. Ecosystem fluxes are central to understanding the carbon, water, and energy cycles, yet they can only be measured directly at sparsely located measurement towers. Producing global flux estimates therefore requires training models on observed sites using globally available covariates and predicting in unobserved regions, that is, upscaling. Flux upscaling is a challenging domain generalization problem that is affected by a shift in covariate distribution across climates, ecosystem types, and environmental conditions, as well as by conditional shift: important drivers remain unobserved at global scale. We provide a quantitative analysis of both these shifts in $P_X$ and $P_{Y\mid X}$. FLUXtrapolation is designed based on domain expertise on flux upscaling: it defines temporal, spatial, and temperature-based extrapolation scenarios and evaluates performance across held-out domains, temporal aggregations, and tail errors. In a pilot study, we find that baselines perform similarly under median hourly RMSE, but separate under the proposed tail-focused and multi-scale evaluation. FLUXtrapolation therefore poses a realistic and thus relevant challenge for machine learning methods under distribution shift; at the same time, progress on this benchmark would directly support the scientific goal of improving flux upscaling.

In large-scale optimization, the cheapness and effectiveness of update steps are the most crucial factors for a successful optimizer. Sign-based optimizers like Lion or Signum produce cheap per-step updates, whereas Muon's spectral matrix-sign update gives a much stronger direction at a substantially higher per-step cost. In this work, we propose LionMuon, which retains the effectiveness of Muon steps while considerably cutting the averaged iteration cost, similar to sign-based methods. It alternates between Lion's and Muon's updates on a fixed period P, sharing a single dual-EMA momentum buffer between them. The optimizer state memory therefore matches Lion and is exactly half of AdamW's. A simpler single-EMA variant, SignMuon, by itself already outperforms pure Muon. At P = 2, LionMuon Pareto-dominates Muon, Lion, Signum, and AdamW on every dataset and architecture we tested at 124M model size, reaching lower validation loss at lower compute, and the same advantage persists at 355M and 720M scale. On the theory side, we prove sharp complexity bounds under heavy-tailed noise which are governed by period-averaged smoothness and noise that interpolate between Muon's and Lion's constants. These bounds predict the compute-optimal period and the conditions under which LionMuon outruns Muon and Lion. Code: https://github.com/brain-lab-research/lion-muon

For practical use, diffusion- or flow-based generative models must be aligned with task-specific rewards, such as prompt fidelity or aesthetic preference. That alignment is challenging because the reward is defined for clean output images, but the alignment procedure requires value function estimates at noisy intermediate latents. Existing methods resort to Tweedie-style or Monte Carlo approximations, trading off estimator bias against computational cost: Tweedie estimates are efficient but biased, while Monte Carlo estimates are more accurate but require expensive rollouts. A natural alternative would be a learned value function, but it remains an open question how to effectively train a strong and general value model specifically for noisy latents. Here, we propose StitchVM, a model stitching framework that efficiently transfers reward models pretrained for clean images to the noisy latent regime. StitchVM starts from an existing, truncated pixel-space reward model and attaches a frozen diffusion backbone to it as its head. From the pixel-space model, the resulting hybrid retains a carefully pretrained, robust reward capability; from the diffusion backbone, it inherits its native ability to handle noisy latents. The stitching procedure is exceptionally lightweight, e.g., stitching and finetuning CLIP ViT-L and SD 3.5 Medium takes only 10 GPU-hours. By lifting powerful pixel-space reward models to latent space, StitchVM opens up a new style of diffusion alignment: instead of rough, yet costly per-sample approximation of the value function, the correct function for the actual, noisy latents is constructed once and then amortized over many samples and iterations. We show that this approach yields improvements across a broad range of downstream steering and post-training methods: DPS becomes $3.2\times$ faster while halving peak GPU memory, and DiffusionNFT becomes $2.3\times$ faster.

We present a semi-supervised framework for joint segmentation and classification of fetal cardiac ultrasound images. Built upon the EchoCare multi-task backbone, our method integrates SAM-Med2D for boundary refinement and leverages DINOv3 to enhance pseudo-label quality. We introduce view-specific hard masking along with a two-stage optimization strategy: an EMA phase to consolidate segmentation capabilities, followed by a Classification Fine-Tuning phase that freezes segmentation parameters and resets the classification head to recover classification performance without compromising segmentation gains. Evaluated on the FETUS 2026 leaderboard, our method achieves a Dice Similarity Coefficient at 79.99%, Normalized Surface Distance at 61.62%, and F1-score at 41.20%, validating the effectiveness of our approach for prenatal congenital heart disease screening. Source code is publicly available at: https://github.com/2826056177/zcst_fetus2026.

As Socially Interactive Agents (SIAs) become increasingly integrated into daily life, the ability to calibrate user trust to an agent's actual capabilities would help ensure appropriate usage of these agents. In this paper, we explore the capacity of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate multimodal behaviors (verbal, vocal, gestural, and facial expression modalities) that reflect varying levels of ability and benevolence, two key dimensions of trustworthiness. We propose a novel method for automatically generating behaviors aligned with specific levels of these traits, a first step towards enabling nuanced and trust-calibrated interactions. By analyzing a large dataset of multimodal transcripts generated by LLMs, we demonstrate that GPT-5.4 is able to produce coherent behavior across different modalities (text, intonation, facial expression, and gesture). Using Random Forest feature importance analysis, we show that the generated behaviors align with theoretical expectations for ability and benevolence. However, we also find that when gender is specified in the prompt, LLMs tend to reproduce societal gender stereotypes, associating male agents' behaviors with high ability and female agents' behaviors with high benevolence. To validate our approach, we conducted a user study on Prolific using a within-subjects design. Participants perceived different levels of ability and benevolence in the generated behaviors align with the intended instructions.

Monocular depth estimation has improved significantly in recent years, driven by increasingly powerful models and large-scale training data. Predicted depth is increasingly used as an input signal for downstream tasks such as Structure-from-Motion (SfM), visual localization, and SLAM. However, monocular depth estimators (MDEs) are still primarily evaluated in terms of depth accuracy. Standard metrics aggregate errors globally and may not reflect the usefulness of depth for downstream geometric tasks. We therefore propose Depth2Pose, a framework for evaluating MDEs in the context of downstream tasks. By combining depth predictions with feature correspondences in depth-aware geometric solvers, we use relative camera pose estimation accuracy as a task-driven proxy for depth quality. Traditional benchmarks require dense ground truth in the form of per-pixel depth, which is expensive to obtain. In contrast, our formulation requires only camera poses, which can be estimated efficiently, e.g., using Structure-from-Motion pipelines. As a result, our framework can be applied to scenes where ground-truth depth is difficult to obtain, for example due to large scene scale or heavy occlusions (e.g., vegetated environments). Leveraging this, we introduce the D2P dataset, which contains challenging scenes outside the distribution of commonly used training data. We show that methods performing well under standard depth error metrics on existing benchmarks also perform well under our pose-based metric when evaluated on the same datasets, but do not necessarily generalize to our more challenging dataset. Finally, we provide a simple and extensible evaluation framework. The dataset and code are available at kocurvik.github.io/depth2pose.

Visually-grounded language models (VLMs) are highly effective in linking visual and textual information, yet they often struggle with basic classification and localization tasks. While classification mechanisms have been studied more extensively, the processes that support object localization remain poorly understood. In this work, we investigate two representative families, LLaVA-1.5 and InternVL-3.5, using a suite of mechanistic interpretability tools, including token ablations, attention knockout, and causal mediation analysis. We find that localization is driven by a containerization mechanism in which object-aligned tokens define the spatial extent of the object, while the semantic arrangement of tokens within those boundaries is largely irrelevant to the predicted box. Only a very small set of attention heads mediates the causal effect for both classification and localization, concentrating in early-mid layers for LLaVA and mid-late layers for InternVL. The two tasks share some early processing but ultimately depend on largely distinct specialized heads. Overall, we provide the first layer- and head-level account of localization in VLMs, revealing narrow computational pathways that can guide future model design and grounding objectives.

4D mesh generation has recently emerged as a powerful paradigm for recovering dynamic 3D structure from videos, but existing methods remain slow, computationally expensive, and difficult to scale to longer sequences. We introduce a training-free approach that accelerates 4D mesh generation while improving temporal correspondence quality. Our key observation is that temporal correspondences emerge inside a 4D backbone long before its generated meshes become visually accurate. We exploit this with a general framework we call Spatio-Temporal Attention Chain which propagates information across space and time. Starting from vertices on an anchor mesh, the chain maps vertices to latent tokens. It then follows temporal correspondences in latent space, and recovers frame-specific vertices through latent-to-vertex attention. This design avoids expensive explicit matching while preserving anchor mesh details and thereby improving dynamic mesh geometry and temporal consistency. Compared to state-of-the-art, our method generates a 4D mesh in 9 seconds, achieving a $13\times$ speedup while producing higher-quality results. Moreover, our approach scales to videos up to $16\times$ longer without degrading mesh quality. Beyond generation, the improved correspondences enable competitive zero-shot performance on two downstream tasks: 2D object tracking and 4D tracking. We further show that our framework enables reliable camera estimation, a capability not supported by prior 4D mesh generation methods.

LLM discovery and optimization systems are increasingly applied across domains, implementing a common propose-evaluate-revise loop. Such optimization or discovery progresses via context conditioning on received feedback from an environment. However, as modern LLM agents are increasingly complex in their structure, it is difficult to evaluate which components contribute the most, and when and how this exploration may fail. We answer these questions through three controlled experiments. Our findings: (1) In pure black-box optimization, LLMs act as greedy optimizers. (2) In zero-shot kernel generation, providing explicit input-size information has no measurable effect, models converge to the same kernel parameters regardless of size or temperature, as though the size instruction were invisible. Moreover, when tasked to perform kernel optimization for uncommon kernel sizes, performance sharply degrades regardless of the language used. (3) In feedback-loop kernel optimization, CUDA improves monotonically under iterative feedback, while TVM IR actively degrades, which demonstrates that kernel optimization degrades when models operate with low-density language. Our results conclude that LLMs in code optimization tasks highly depend on pretrained priors rather than provided feedback or agentic structure.

Modern optimizers, like Muon, impose matrix-wise geometry constraints on their updates. These matrix-wise constraints can be unified under Linear Minimization Oracle (LMO) theory. However, all current methods impose fixed LMO geometries for the update rules, chosen by-design or empirically, which are not necessarily optimal according to the problem's geometry. We introduce a novel efficient datadriven criterion for dynamically choosing proxy-optimal update LMO geometries on individual Deep Neural Network layers. Derived in closed form from gradient and activation statistics using a single-step random feature regression surrogate model, our criterion navigates a design space interpolating from SGD to Muon updates. Moreover, integrating parameter-wise preconditioning allows our framework to recover SGD, Muon, Adam, and MuAdam as specific extrema. To make this adaptive approach scalable, we pair it with efficient computational strategies, achieving only a $\sim$ 3% runtime overhead on highly optimized baselines. As a proof of concept, we show that this data-driven optimizer beats or remains competitive with the performance of the best performing optimizer between Muon and AdamW across three different training scenarios. Ultimately, this work provides evidence that LMO geometry can be successfully and efficiently adapted from runtime data, opening a new pathway for optimizer design beyond static geometries.

We adapt split conformal prediction and adaptive conformal inference (ACI) to continuous AI agent evaluation, providing distribution-free coverage guarantees for forecasted quality scores. Conformal intervals achieve calibration error below 0.02 across all nominal levels at the 24h horizon, while ACI correctly widens intervals by 35% following agent releases then reconverges. We further develop compositional uncertainty bounds for multi-agent pipelines (validated via simulation across inter-stage correlations rho in [-0.5, 0.9]), a conformal abstention rule for pairwise rankings with controlled false-ranking rate, and FDR-corrected abstention for leaderboard-scale multiple testing. Evaluating 50 agents via 18 real-time signals collected hourly, we show that per-agent conditional coverage is well-concentrated around the nominal level (mean 80.4%, 90% of agents within [72%, 90%]), and that cross-source sentiment divergence predicts ranking instability (r=0.64, p<0.01). A circularity-controlled validation confirms the framework captures signal beyond benchmarks (rho_s=0.52, p<0.01, n=35). Code and data are released under CC BY 4.0.

In recent years, transformer architectures have revolutionized the field of language processing, opening the door to previously unforeseen possibilities. However, from a theoretical point of view, the mathematical models proposed in the literature often lack direct contact with the actual architectures and depend on strong simplifying assumptions. In this paper, we reduce this gap by modelling the data flow in multi-headed transformer architectures as time-dependent gradient flows for a suitable interaction energy capturing the design of the attention mechanism. The explicit dependence on time allows us to consider different weights for each head and for each layer, without imposing constraints on the initialization method. Moreover, we prove that, under a suitable integrability assumption on the evolution of the weights, each element of the $ω$-limit set of the gradient flows is a stationary point of the interaction energy at a limiting weight distribution. Finally, we analyse the stability of the gradient flows considering perturbations of both the initial data and the weights. Specifically, on the one hand, we study the robustness of the proposed models with respect to noisy inputs, establishing a continuous dependence of the gradient flows on the initial data and uniqueness of the flows. On the other hand, we prove the $Γ$-convergence of the perturbed interaction energy to the unperturbed one, leading to the convergence of the corresponding gradient flows. We complement these theoretical results with numerical experiments that confirm the predicted energy-dissipation identity and clarify the asymptotic behavior of the dynamics in both the autonomous-like (Ornstein--Uhlenbeck) and the genuinely non-autonomous (oscillating-weights) regimes.

We present LongLive-2.0, an NVFP4-based parallel infrastructure throughout the full training and inference workflow of long video generation, addressing speed and memory bottlenecks. For training, we introduce sequence-parallel autoregressive (AR) training, instantiated as Balanced SP, which co-designs the efficient teacher-forcing layout with SP execution by pairing clean-history and noisy-target temporal chunks on each rank, enabling a natural teacher-forcing mask with SP-aware chunked VAE encoding. Combined with NVFP4 precision, it reduces GPU memory cost and accelerates GEMM computation during training, the proportion of which increases as video length grows. Moreover, we show that a high-quality infrastructure and dataset enable a remarkably clean training pipeline. Unlike existing Self-Forcing series methods that rely on ODE initialization and subsequent distribution matching distillation (DMD), LongLive-2.0 directly tunes a diffusion model into a long, multi-shot, interactive auto-regressive (AR) diffusion model. It can be further converted to real-time generation (4 to 2 denoising steps) with standalone LoRA weights. For inference on Blackwell GPUs, we enable W4A4 NVFP4 inference, quantize KV cache into NVFP4 for memory savings, and boost end-to-end throughput with asynchronous streaming VAE decoding. On non-Blackwell GPU architectures, we deploy SP inference to match the speed on Blackwell GPUs, while the quantized KV cache can lower inter-GPU communication of SP. Experiments show up to 2.15x speedup in training, and 1.84x in inference. LongLive-2.0-5B achieves 45.7 FPS inference while attaining strong performance on benchmarks. To our knowledge, LongLive-2.0 is the first NVFP4 training and inference system for long video generation.

Constrained machine learning enables fairness-aware training, physics-informed neural networks, and integration of symbolic domain knowledge into statistical models. Despite its practical importance, no general method exists for the non-convex, non-smooth, stochastic setting that arises naturally in deep learning. We propose the Stochastic Penalty-Barrier Method (SPBM), which extends classical penalty and barrier methods to this setting via exponential dual averaging, a stabilized penalty schedule, and the Moreau envelope to handle non-smoothness. Experiments across multiple settings show that SPBM matches or outperforms existing constrained optimization baselines while incurring only linear runtime overhead compared to unconstrained Adam for up to 10,000 constraints.

Real-world agents operate over long and evolving horizons, where information is repeatedly updated and may interfere across memories, requiring accurate recall and aggregated reasoning over multiple pieces of information. However, existing benchmarks focus on static, independent recall and fail to capture these dynamic interactions between evolving memories. In this paper, we study how current memory-augmented agents perform in realistic, interference-heavy, long-horizon settings across diverse domains and question types. We introduce MINTEval (Long-Horizon Memory under INTerference Evaluation), a benchmark featuring (1) long, highly interconnected contexts with frequently updated information that induces substantial interference, (2) diverse domains (state tracking, multi-turn dialogue, Wikipedia revisions, and GitHub commits), enabling evaluation of domain generalization, and (3) diverse question types that assess robustness to interference, including (i) single-target recall tasks requiring retrieval of a specific target from long contexts, and (ii) multi-target aggregation tasks requiring reasoning over multiple relevant pieces of information. Overall, MINTEval has 15.6k question-answering pairs over long-horizon contexts averaging 138.8k tokens and extending up to 1.8M tokens per instance. We evaluate 7 representative systems, including vanilla long-context LLMs, RAG, and memory-augmented agent frameworks. Across all systems, we observe consistently low performance (avg. 27.9% accuracy), especially on questions requiring aggregated reasoning over multiple pieces of evidence. Our analysis shows that performance is primarily limited by retrieval and memory construction. Furthermore, current memory systems struggle to recall and reason over earlier facts that are revised or interfered with by subsequent context, with accuracy degrading as the number of intervening updates increases.