The eigenvalue distribution of the Hessian matrix plays a crucial role in understanding the optimization landscape of deep neural networks. Prior work has attributed the well-documented ``bulk-and-spike'' spectral structure, where a few dominant eigenvalues are separated from a bulk of smaller ones, to the imbalance in the data covariance matrix. In this work, we challenge this view by demonstrating that such spectral Bifurcation can arise purely from the network architecture, independent of data imbalance. Specifically, we analyze a deep linear network setup and prove that, even when the data covariance is perfectly balanced, the Hessian still exhibits a Bifurcation eigenvalue structure: a dominant cluster and a bulk cluster. Crucially, we establish that the ratio between dominant and bulk eigenvalues scales linearly with the network depth. This reveals that the spectral gap is strongly affected by the network architecture rather than solely by data distribution. Our results suggest that both model architecture and data characteristics should be considered when designing optimization algorithms for deep networks.

Despite their empirical success, neural network classifiers remain difficult to interpret. In softmax-based models, class regions are defined implicitly as solutions to systems of inequalities among logits, making them difficult to extract and visualize. We introduce Partition of Unity Neural Networks (PUNN), an architecture in which class probabilities arise directly from a learned partition of unity, without requiring a softmax layer. PUNN constructs $k$ nonnegative functions $h_1, \ldots, h_k$ satisfying $\sum_i h_i(x) = 1$, where each $h_i(x)$ directly represents $P(\text{class } i \mid x)$. Unlike softmax, where class regions are defined implicitly through coupled inequalities among logits, each PUNN partition function $h_i$ directly defines the probability of class $i$ as a standalone function of $x$. We prove that PUNN is dense in the space of continuous probability maps on compact domains. The gate functions $g_i$ that define the partition can use various activation functions (sigmoid, Gaussian, bump) and parameterizations ranging from flexible MLPs to parameter-efficient shape-informed designs (spherical shells, ellipsoids, spherical harmonics). Experiments on synthetic data, UCI benchmarks, and MNIST show that PUNN with MLP-based gates achieves accuracy within 0.3--0.6\% of standard multilayer perceptrons. When geometric priors match the data structure, shape-informed gates achieve comparable accuracy with up to 300$\times$ fewer parameters. These results demonstrate that interpretable-by-design architectures can be competitive with black-box models while providing transparent class probability assignments.

Modern voice cloning, also known as zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS), can synthesize speech that closely matches a target speaker from only seconds of reference audio, enabling applications such as personalized speech interfaces and dubbing. In practice, these systems often face noisy reference audio, imperfect text prompts, multilingual and long-form generation, post-processing, and adversarial perturbations, all of which can weaken robustness. Despite rapid progress in codec-token language models and diffusion-based TTS, robustness under realistic deployment shifts remains underexplored. This paper introduces RVCBench, a comprehensive dataset and benchmark for evaluating robustness in voice cloning. RVCBench provides task-aligned tests covering controlled text-audio pairing, multilingual and long-form scenarios, expressive prompts, post-processing conditions, and passive or proactive audio perturbations. Across 18 robustness evaluations, 225 speakers, and 14,370 utterances, RVCBench supports unified evaluation of input sensitivity, generation stability, output resilience, perturbation robustness, speaker similarity, and deepfake detectability. We evaluate 18 representative open-source voice cloning models and reveal systematic vulnerabilities in content consistency, speaker similarity, long-form stability, post-processing resilience, adversarial robustness, and detector-facing separability. We release the code and dataset to support reproducible evaluation and future research on robust voice cloning, speech synthesis, and audio generation. Code: https://github.com/Nanboy-Ronan/RVCBench. Dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Nanboy/RVCBench.

We study the stochastic linear bandits with parameter noise model, in which the reward of action $a$ is $a^\top θ$ where $θ$ is sampled i.i.d. We show a regret upper bound of $\widetilde{O} (\sqrt{d T \log (K/δ) σ^2_{\max})}$ for a horizon $T$, general action set of size $K$ of dimension $d$, and where $σ^2_{\max}$ is the maximal variance of the reward for any action. We further provide a lower bound of $\widetildeΩ (d \sqrt{T σ^2_{\max}})$ which is tight (up to logarithmic factors) whenever $\log (K) \approx d$. For more specific action sets, $\ell_p$ unit balls with $p \leq 2$ and dual norm $q$, we show that the minimax regret is $\widetildeΘ (\sqrt{dT σ^2_q)}$, where $σ^2_q$ is a variance-dependent quantity that is always at most $4$. This is in contrast to the minimax regret attainable for such sets in the classic additive noise model, where the regret is of order $d \sqrt{T}$. Surprisingly, we show that this optimal (up to logarithmic factors) regret bound is attainable using a very simple explore-exploit algorithm.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) achieve strong multimodal performance but are costly to deploy, and post-training quantization often causes significant accuracy loss. Despite its potential, quantization-aware training for VLMs remains underexplored. We propose GRACE, a framework unifying knowledge distillation and QAT under the Information Bottleneck principle: quantization constrains information capacity while distillation guides what to preserve within this budget. Treating the teacher as a proxy for task-relevant information, we introduce confidence-gated decoupled distillation to filter unreliable supervision, relational centered kernel alignment to transfer visual token structures, and an adaptive controller via Lagrangian relaxation to balance fidelity against capacity constraints. Across extensive benchmarks on LLaVA and Qwen families, our INT4 models consistently outperform FP16 baselines (e.g., LLaVA-1.5-7B: 70.1 vs. 66.8 on SQA; Qwen2-VL-2B: 76.9 vs. 72.6 on MMBench), nearly matching teacher performance. Using real INT4 kernel, we achieve 3$\times$ throughput with 54% memory reduction. This principled framework significantly outperforms existing quantization methods, making GRACE a compelling solution for resource-constrained deployment. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/ForeverBlue816/GRACE.

We study online transfer reinforcement learning (RL) in episodic Markov decision processes, where experience from related source tasks is available during learning on a target task. A fundamental difficulty is that task similarity is typically defined in terms of rewards or transitions, whereas online RL algorithms operate on Bellman regression targets. As a result, naively reusing source Bellman updates introduces systematic bias and invalidates regret guarantees. We identify one-step Bellman alignment as the correct abstraction for transfer in online RL and propose re-weighted targeting (RWT), an operator-level correction that retargets continuation values and compensates for transition mismatch via a change of measure. RWT reduces task mismatch to a fixed one-step correction and enables statistically sound reuse of source data. This alignment yields a two-stage RWT $Q$-learning framework that separates variance reduction from bias correction. Under RKHS function approximation, we establish regret bounds that scale with the complexity of the task shift rather than the target MDP. We further show the required density ratios admit a constructive RKHS estimator with finite-sample guarantees, and empirically validate robustness to estimated and mis-specified ratios. Empirical results in both tabular and neural network settings demonstrate consistent improvements over single-task learning and naïve pooling, highlighting Bellman alignment as a model-agnostic transfer principle for online RL.

Neural networks adapt through first-order parameter updates, yet it remains unclear whether such updates preserve logical coherence. We investigate the geometric limits of the Linear Propagation Assumption (LPA), the premise that local updates coherently propagate to logical consequences. To formalize this, we adopt relation algebra and study three core operations on relations: negation flips truth values, converse swaps argument order, and composition chains relations. For negation and converse, we prove that guaranteeing direction-agnostic first-order propagation necessitates a tensor factorization separating entity-pair context from relation content. However, for composition, we identify a fundamental obstruction. We show that composition reduces to conjunction, and prove that any conjunction well-defined on linear features must be bilinear. Since bilinearity is incompatible with negation, this forces the feature map to collapse. These results suggest that failures in knowledge editing, the reversal curse, and multi-hop reasoning may stem from common structural limitations inherent to the LPA.

Existing speech editing detection (SED) datasets are predominantly constructed using manual splicing or limited editing operations, resulting in restricted diversity and poor coverage of realistic editing scenarios. Meanwhile, current SED methods rely heavily on frame-level supervision to detect observable acoustic anomalies, which fundamentally limits their ability to handle deletion-type edits, where the manipulated content is entirely absent from the signal. To address these challenges, we present a unified framework that bridges speech editing detection and content localization through a generative formulation based on Audio Large Language Models (Audio LLMs). We first introduce AiEdit, https://huggingface.co/datasets/JunXueTech/AiEdit, a large-scale bilingual dataset (approximately 140 hours) that covers addition, deletion, and modification operations using state-of-the-art end-to-end speech editing systems, providing a more realistic benchmark for modern threats. Building upon this, we reformulate SED as a structured text generation task, enabling joint reasoning over edit type identification, and content localization. To enhance the grounding of generative models in acoustic evidence, we propose a prior-enhanced prompting strategy that injects word-level probabilistic cues derived from a frame-level detector. Furthermore, we introduce an acoustic consistency-aware loss that explicitly enforces the separation between normal and anomalous acoustic representations in the latent space. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach consistently outperforms existing methods across both detection and localization tasks.

Biased gradient compression with error feedback (EF) reduces communication in federated learning (FL), but under non-IID data, the residual error can decay slowly, causing gradient mismatch and stalled progress in the early rounds. We propose step-ahead partial error feedback (SA-PEF), which integrates step-ahead (SA) correction with partial error feedback (PEF). SA-PEF recovers EF when the step-ahead coefficient $α=0$ and step-ahead EF (SAEF) when $α=1$. For non-convex objectives and $δ$-contractive compressors, we establish a second-moment bound and a residual recursion that guarantee convergence to stationarity under heterogeneous data and partial client participation. The resulting rates match standard non-convex Fed-SGD guarantees up to constant factors, achieving $O((η,η_0TR)^{-1})$ convergence to a variance/heterogeneity floor with a fixed inner step size. Our analysis reveals a step-ahead-controlled residual contraction $ρ_r$ that explains the observed acceleration in the early training phase. To balance SAEF's rapid warm-up with EF's long-term stability, we select $α$ near its theory-predicted optimum. Experiments across diverse architectures and datasets show that SA-PEF consistently reaches target accuracy faster than EF.

Recovering 3D human poses from a monocular camera view is a highly ill-posed problem due to the depth ambiguity. Earlier studies on 3D human pose lifting from 2D often contain incorrect-yet-overconfident 3D estimations. To mitigate the problem, emerging probabilistic approaches treat the 3D estimations as a distribution, taking into account the uncertainty measurement of the poses. Falling in a similar category, we proposed FMPose, a probabilistic 3D human pose estimation method based on the flow matching generative approach. Conditioned on the 2D cues, the flow matching scheme learns the optimal transport from a simple source distribution to the plausible 3D human pose distribution via continuous normalizing flows. The 2D lifting condition is modeled via graph convolutional networks, leveraging the learnable connections between human body joints as the graph structure for feature aggregation. While trade-offs between processing time and precision exist, already in the equal-accuracy comparison, FMPose exhibits significantly faster processing time than the diffusion model, and also offers another faster and more accurate configuration. Experimental results show major improvements of our FMPose over current state-of-the-art methods on two common benchmarks for 3D human pose estimation, namely Human3.6M, MPI-INF-3DHP. Additionally, FMPose shows competitive performance on the more challenging 3DPW dataset. The code implementation is available at https://github.com/cuongle1206/FMPose

Continual Test-Time Adaptation (CTTA) seeks to update a pretrained model during deployment using only the incoming, unlabeled data stream. Although prior approaches such as Tent, EATA etc. provide meaningful improvements under short evolving shifts, they struggle when the test distribution changes rapidly or over extremely long horizons. This challenge is exemplified by the CCC benchmark, where models operate over streams of 7.5M samples with continually changing corruption types and severities. We propose RDumb++, a principled extension of RDumb that introduces two drift-detection mechanisms i.e entropy-based drift scoring and KL-divergence drift scoring, together with adaptive reset strategies. These mechanisms allow the model to detect when accumulated adaptation becomes harmful and to recover before prediction collapse occurs. Across CCC-medium with three speeds and three seeds (nine runs, each containing one million samples), RDumb++ consistently surpasses RDumb, yielding approx 3% absolute accuracy gains while maintaining stable adaptation throughout the entire stream. Ablation experiments on drift thresholds and reset strengths further show that drift-aware resetting is essential for preventing collapse and achieving reliable long-horizon CTTA.

This paper addresses unsupervised diffusion-based single-channel speech enhancement (SE). Prior work in this direction combines a score-based diffusion model trained on clean speech with a Gaussian noise model whose covariance is structured by non-negative matrix factorization (NMF). This combination is used within an iterative expectation-maximization (EM) scheme, in which a diffusion-based posterior-sampling E-step estimates the clean speech. We first revisit this framework and propose to explicitly model both speech and acoustic noise as latent variables, jointly sampling them in the E-step instead of sampling speech alone as in previous approaches. We then introduce a new semi-supervised SE framework that replaces the NMF noise prior with a diffusion-based noise model, learned jointly with the speech prior in a single conditional score model. Within this framework, we derive two variants: one that implicitly accounts for noise and one that explicitly treats noise as a latent variable. Experiments on WSJ0-QUT and VoiceBank-DEMAND show that explicit noise modeling systematically improves SE performance for both NMF-based and diffusion-based noise priors. Under matched conditions, the diffusion-based noise model attains the best overall quality and intelligibility among unsupervised methods, while under mismatched conditions the proposed NMF-based explicit-noise framework is more robust and suffers less degradation than several supervised baselines. Code, demo, and supplementary materials are publicly available.

Ruminal acidosis is a prevalent metabolic disorder in dairy cattle causing significant economic losses and animal welfare concerns. Current diagnostic methods rely on invasive pH measurement, limiting scalability for continuous monitoring. We present FUME (Fused Unified Multi-gas Emission Network), the first deep learning approach for rumen acidosis detection from dual-gas optical imaging under in vitro conditions. Our method leverages complementary carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) emission patterns captured by infrared cameras to classify rumen health into Healthy, Transitional, and Acidotic states. FUME employs a lightweight dual-stream architecture with weight-shared encoders, modality-specific self-attention, and channel attention fusion, jointly optimizing gas plume segmentation and classification of dairy cattle health. We introduce the first dual-gas OGI dataset comprising 8,967 annotated frames across six pH levels with pixel-level segmentation masks. Experiments demonstrate that FUME achieves 80.99% mIoU and 98.82% classification accuracy while using only 1.28M parameters and 1.97G MACs--outperforming state-of-the-art methods in segmentation quality with 10x lower computational cost. Ablation studies reveal that CO2 provides the primary discriminative signal and dual-task learning is essential for optimal performance. Our work establishes the feasibility of gas emission-based livestock health monitoring, paving the way for practical, in vitro acidosis detection systems. Codes are available at https://github.com/taminulislam/fume.

Multimodal large language models have demonstrated strong ability in capturing semantic representations for multimodal sentiment analysis. Their capacity to learn stable and generalizable multimodal features is limited, however, by the scarcity of high-quality training data. To address this, we propose QASA (Quality-Aware Semantic Augmentation), which uses diffusion models to generate augmented visual and auditory samples, thereby enlarging the training dataset and supporting multimodal learning. The generated samples can vary in quality and may exhibit cross-modal inconsistencies. To manage this, we introduce a decoupled quality-aware scoring module that assigns training weights based on the reliability of each augmented sample. This approach reduces the influence of low-quality data and contributes to more stable and robust model training. The framework combines the generative capabilities of diffusion models with the semantic reasoning of multimodal large models, providing an automated data augmentation strategy that does not require human annotation while improving generalization and robustness under limited high-quality data. Experiments on the CH-SIMS dataset show that QASA yields a relative increase of 18.0\% and 5.9\% in five-class accuracy (Acc5) and binary accuracy (Acc2), respectively, and it also outperforms existing methods on the CMU-MOSI and MUStARD benchmarks.

Traditional Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) effectively supports single-hop question answering with large language models but faces significant limitations in multi-hop question answering tasks, which require combining evidence from multiple documents. Existing chunk-based retrieval often provides irrelevant and logically incoherent context, leading to incomplete evidence chains and incorrect reasoning during answer generation. To address these challenges, we propose SentGraph, a sentence-level graph-based RAG framework that explicitly models fine-grained logical relationships between sentences for multi-hop question answering. Specifically, we construct a hierarchical sentence graph offline by first adapting Rhetorical Structure Theory to distinguish nucleus and satellite sentences, and then organizing them into topic-level subgraphs with cross-document entity bridges. During online retrieval, SentGraph performs graph-guided evidence selection and path expansion to retrieve fine-grained sentence-level evidence. Extensive experiments on four multi-hop question answering benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of SentGraph, validating the importance of explicitly modeling sentence-level logical dependencies for multi-hop reasoning.

We introduce $\texttt{PairFlow}$, a lightweight preprocessing step for training Discrete Flow Models (DFMs) to achieve few-step sampling without requiring a pretrained teacher. DFMs have recently emerged as a new class of generative models for discrete data, offering strong performance. However, they suffer from slow sampling due to their iterative nature. Existing acceleration methods largely depend on finetuning, which introduces substantial additional training overhead. $\texttt{PairFlow}$ addresses this issue with a lightweight preprocessing step. Inspired by ReFlow and its extension to DFMs, we train DFMs from coupled samples of source and target distributions, without requiring any pretrained teacher. At the core of our approach is a closed-form inversion for DFMs, which allows efficient construction of paired source-target samples. Despite its extremely low cost, taking only up to 1.7% of the compute needed for full model training, $\texttt{PairFlow}$ matches or even surpasses the performance of two-stage training involving finetuning. Furthermore, models trained with our framework provide stronger base models for subsequent distillation, yielding further acceleration after finetuning. Experiments on molecular data as well as binary and RGB images demonstrate the broad applicability and effectiveness of our approach.

Accurate fetal growth assessment from ultrasound (US) relies on precise biometry measured by manually identifying anatomical landmarks in standard planes. Manual landmarking is time-consuming, operator-dependent, and sensitive to variability across scanners and sites, limiting the reproducibility of automated approaches. There is a need for multi-source annotated datasets to develop artificial intelligence-assisted fetal growth assessment methods. To address this bottleneck, we present an open, multi-centre, multi-device benchmark dataset of fetal US images with expert anatomical landmark annotations for clinically used fetal biometric measurements. These measurements include head bi-parietal and occipito-frontal diameters, abdominal transverse and antero-posterior diameters, and femoral length. The dataset comprises 4,513 de-identified US images from 1,904 subjects acquired at three clinical sites using seven different US devices. We provide standardised, subject-disjoint train/test splits, evaluation code, and baseline results to enable fair and reproducible comparison of methods. Using an automatic biometry model, we quantify domain shift and demonstrate that training and evaluation confined to a single centre substantially overestimate performance relative to multi-centre testing. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first publicly available multi-centre, multi-device, landmark-annotated dataset that covers all primary fetal biometry measures, providing a robust benchmark for domain adaptation and multi-centre generalisation in fetal biometry and enabling more reliable AI-assisted fetal growth assessment across centres. All data, annotations, training code, and evaluation pipelines are made publicly available.

Despite initial successes and a variety of architectures, retrieval-augmented generation systems still struggle to reliably retrieve and connect the multi-step evidence required for complicated reasoning tasks. Most of the standard RAG frameworks regard all retrieved information as equally reliable, overlooking the varying credibility and interconnected nature of large textual corpora. GraphRAG approaches offer potential improvement to RAG systems by integrating knowledge graphs, which structure information into nodes and edges, capture entity relationships, and enable multi-step logical traversal. However, GraphRAG is not always an ideal solution, as it depends on high-quality graph representations of the corpus. Such representations usually rely on manually curated knowledge graphs, which are costly to construct and update, or on automated graph-construction pipelines that are often unreliable. Moreover, systems following this paradigm typically use large language models to guide graph traversal and evidence retrieval. In this paper, we propose a novel RAG framework that uses a spreading activation algorithm to retrieve information from a corpus of documents connected by an automatically constructed heterogeneous knowledge graph. This approach reduces reliance on semantic knowledge graphs, which are often incomplete due to information loss during information extraction, avoids LLM-guided graph traversal, and improves performance on multi-hop question answering. Experiments show that our method achieves better or comparable performance to several state-of-the-art RAG methods and can be integrated as a plug-and-play module with different iterative RAG pipelines. When combined with chain-of-thought iterative retrieval, it yields up to a 39% absolute improvement in answer correctness over naive RAG, while achieving these results with small open-weight language models.

Recent advancements in artificial intelligence have sparked interest in industrial agents capable of supporting analysts in regulated sectors, such as finance and healthcare, within tabular data workflows. A key capability for such systems is performing accurate arithmetic operations on structured data while ensuring sensitive information never leaves secure, on-premises environments. Here, we introduce an error-driven optimization framework for arithmetic reasoning that enhances a Code Generation Agent (CGA), specifically applied to on-premises small language models (SLMs). Through a systematic evaluation of a leading SLM (Qwen3 4B), we find that while the base model exhibits fundamental limitations in arithmetic tasks, our proposed error-driven method, which clusters erroneous predictions to refine prompt-rules iteratively, dramatically improves performance, elevating the model's accuracy to 70.8\%. Our results suggest that developing reliable, interpretable, and industrially deployable AI assistants can be achieved not only through costly fine-tuning but also via systematic, error-driven prompt optimization, enabling small models to surpass larger language models (GPT-3.5 Turbo) in a privacy-compliant manner.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress on various vision-language tasks, yet their visual perception remains limited. Humans, in comparison, perceive complex scenes efficiently by dynamically scanning and focusing on salient regions in a sequential "blink-like" process. Motivated by this strategy, we first investigate whether MLLMs exhibit similar behavior. Our pilot analysis reveals that MLLMs naturally attend to different visual regions across layers and that selectively allocating more computation to salient tokens can enhance visual perception. Building on this insight, we propose Blink, a dynamic visual token resolution framework that emulates the human-inspired process within a single forward pass. Specifically, Blink includes two modules: saliency-guided scanning and dynamic token resolution. It first estimates the saliency of visual tokens in each layer based on the attention map, and extends important tokens through a plug-and-play token super-resolution (TokenSR) module. In the next layer, it drops the extended tokens when they lose focus. This dynamic mechanism balances broad exploration and fine-grained focus, thereby enhancing visual perception adaptively and efficiently. Extensive experiments validate Blink, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing visual perception and multimodal understanding.

Scene recovery from real-world images degraded by scattering effects, such as haze, sandstorm, underwater, and remote sensing conditions, remains a fundamental yet challenging problem in computer vision. Existing methods either rely on a single prior, which is inherently insufficient to characterize diverse scattering degradations, or employ deep networks trained on synthetic data, which often suffer from limited generalization to real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose Spatial and Frequency Priors (SFP) for real-world scene recovery under scattering-induced degradations. In the spatial domain, we observe that the inverse of a scattering-degraded image reveals a projection along its spectral direction that correlates with the underlying scene transmission. Based on this observation, a spatial prior is formulated to estimate the transmission map, enabling effective recovery of scene radiance under scattering effects. In the frequency domain, we design an adaptive frequency enhancement strategy guided by two novel priors. The first prior assumes that the mean intensity of the direct current (DC) components across channels in degraded images approximates that of the corresponding clear images. The second prior is based on the observation that, in clear images, low radial frequencies within a narrow band contribute only a small proportion of the overall spectrum. These priors enable targeted compensation for scattering-induced attenuation across different frequency bands. Finally, a weighted fusion of the spatial and frequency domain results is performed to obtain the final recovered image. Extensive experiments on diverse real-world scattering-degraded scenarios verify that our SFP achieves superior performance and strong generalization capability compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Large language models (LLMs) achieve high accuracy on many reasoning benchmarks but remain brittle under structural perturbations of rule-based systems. We introduce a diagnostic framework with four stress tests -- redundant vs. essential rule deletion, contradictory-rule injection, logic-preserving rewrites, and multi-law stacking -- and use it to expose Logic Inertia: the tendency of generative LLMs (Qwen2/3, TinyLlama, GPT-4o, Gemma-3-4B-IT) and the encoder-only BERT baseline to persist along learned deductive trajectories under inconsistent premises. The collapse is sharp: untreated baselines fall from accuracy 1.00 on the base task to 0.00 on contradiction injection (instance-level exact match), and GPT-4o resolves only 56.0% of contradiction cases. We propose Conflict-Aware Fusion, a four-stage training pipeline that enforces verification-before-deduction as a learned structural prior: (i) SFT establishes the verification preamble; (ii) DPO sharpens the halt-on-contradiction decision boundary; (iii) Logical Invariance REgularisation (LIRE) penalises divergence between logically equivalent rule formulations via symmetric KL; (iv) Reinforcement Learning from Verification Feedback (RLVF) uses a symbolic forward-chaining engine as a deterministic oracle reward, jointly optimising invariance and sensitivity. The pipeline saturates all four primary stress tests for both 1.5B and 8B backbones. We further validate a Phase 2 extension that replaces the propositional oracle with a Lean 4 kernel, attaining 99.0% kernel agreement on the 105 classically-derivable (T) questions within a stratified 187-question Lean-translated sample (overall 71.7% across both polarities), providing a sound upgrade path to formally verified RL training. Code and benchmark: https://github.com/14H034160212/lemo

In this paper we argue that influential critiques dismissing Large Language Models (LLMs) as a dead end for AGI misidentify the bottleneck: they confuse the ocean with the net. Pattern repositories are the necessary System-1 substrate; the missing component is a System-2 coordination layer that recruits relevant patterns, verifies their use, preserves state, and governs convergence. We separate two uses of control that are often conflated. Semantic anchoring, formalized by UCCT (Unified Contextual Control Theory), binds labels and task intent to learned pattern regions through a phase transition governed by effective support (rho_d), representational mismatch (d_r), and an adaptive anchoring budget (gamma log k). Trace-answer verification, implemented by Recursive Causal Audit (RCA), tests whether a final causal judgment is warranted by its own reasoning trace under pressure. We translate these ideas into MACI, a multi-agent coordination stack that integrates diversity and control via baiting (PID-modulated debate), filtering (Socratic and causal audit), and persistence (transactional memory). Empirical validation on causal judgment and the sycophancy-paranoia trade-off demonstrates that static prompting fails where adaptive control succeeds. By reframing common objections as testable coordination failures, we argue that the path to AGI runs through LLMs, not around them. Capability is not coordination.

Exemplar-guided Image Editing (EIE) aims to modify a source image according to a visual reference. Existing approaches often require large-scale pre-training to learn relationships between the source and reference images, incurring high computational costs. As a training-free alternative, inversion techniques can be used to map the source image into a latent space for manipulation. However, our empirical study reveals that standard inversion is sub-optimal for EIE, leading to poor quality and inefficiency. To tackle this challenge, we introduce \textbf{Reversible Inversion ({ReInversion})} for effective and efficient EIE. Specifically, ReInversion operates as a two-stage denoising process, which is first conditioned on the source image and subsequently on the reference. Besides, we introduce a Mask-Guided Selective Denoising (MSD) strategy to constrain edits to target regions, preserving the structural consistency of the background. Both qualitative and quantitative comparisons demonstrate that our ReInversion method achieves state-of-the-art EIE performance with the lowest computational overhead.

Existing motion planning methods often struggle with rapid-motion obstacles due to an insufficient understanding of environmental changes. To address this, we propose integrating motion planners with Doppler LiDARs, which provide not only ranging measurements but also instantaneous point velocities. However, this integration is nontrivial due to the requirements of high accuracy and high frequency. To this end, we introduce Doppler Planning Network (DPNet), which tracks and reacts to rapid obstacles via Doppler model-based learning. We first propose a Doppler Kalman neural network (D-KalmanNet) to track obstacle states under a partially observable Gaussian state space model. We then leverage the predicted motions of obstacles to construct a Doppler-tuned model predictive control (DT-MPC) framework for ego-motion planning, enabling runtime auto-tuning of controller parameters. These two modules allow DPNet to learn fast environmental changes from minimal data while remaining lightweight, achieving high frequency and high accuracy in both tracking and planning. Experiments on high-fidelity simulator and real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of DPNet over extensive benchmark schemes. Code available at https://github.com/UUwei-zuo/DPNet

Machine learning, particularly deep learning, is transforming industrial quality inspection. Yet, training robust machine learning models typically requires large volumes of high-quality labeled data, which are expensive, time-consuming, and labor-intensive to obtain in manufacturing. Moreover, defective samples are intrinsically rare, leading to severe class imbalance that degrades model performance. These data constraints hinder the widespread adoption of machine learning-based quality inspection methods in real production environments. Synthetic data generation (SDG) offers a promising solution by enabling the creation of large, balanced, and fully annotated datasets in an efficient, cost-effective, and scalable manner. This paper presents a hybrid SDG framework that integrates simulation-based rendering, domain randomization, and real background compositing to enable zero-shot learning for computer vision-based industrial part inspection without manual annotation. The SDG pipeline generates 12,960 labeled images in one hour by varying part geometry, lighting, and surface properties, and then compositing synthetic parts onto real image backgrounds. A two-stage architecture utilizing a YOLOv8n backbone for object detection and MobileNetV3-small for quality classification is trained exclusively on synthetic data and evaluated on 300 real industrial parts. The proposed approach achieves an mAP@0.5 of 0.995 for detection, 96% classification accuracy, and 90.1% balanced accuracy. Comparative evaluation against few-shot real-data baseline approaches demonstrates significant improvement. The proposed SDG-based approach achieves 90-91% balanced accuracy under severe class imbalance, while the baselines reach only 50% accuracy. These results demonstrate that the proposed method enables annotation-free, scalable, and robust quality inspection for real-world manufacturing applications.

This paper presents a systematic topology optimization framework for designing a soft pneumatic gripper (SPG), explicitly considering the design-dependent nature of the actuating load. The load is modeled using Darcy's law with an added drainage term. A 2D soft arm unit is optimized by formulating it as a compliant mechanism design problem using the robust formulation. The problem is posed as a min-max optimization, where the output deformations of blueprint and eroded designs are considered. A volume constraint is imposed on the blueprint part, while a strain-energy constraint is enforced on the eroded part. The MMA is employed to solve the optimization problem and obtain the optimized soft unit. Finite element analysis with the Ogden material model confirms that the optimized 2D unit outperforms a conventional rectangular design under pneumatic loading. The optimized 2D unit is extruded to obtain a 3D module, and ten such units are assembled to create a soft arm. Deformation profiles of the optimized arm are analysed under different pressure loads. Four arms are 3D-printed and integrated with a supporting structure to realize the proposed SPG. The gripping performance of the SPG is demonstrated on objects with different weights, sizes, stiffness, and shapes.

Humans learn by observing, interacting with environments, and internalizing physics and causality. Here, we aim to ask whether an agent can similarly acquire human-like reasoning from interaction and keep improving with more experience. To study this, we introduce a Game-to-Unseen (G2U) benchmark of 1,000+ heterogeneous games that exhibit significant visual domain gaps. Existing approaches, including VLMs and world models, struggle to capture underlying physics and causality since they are not focused on core mechanisms and overfit to visual details. VLM/VLA agents reason but lack look-ahead in interactive settings, while world models imagine but imitate visual patterns rather than analyze physics and causality. We therefore propose IPR (Interactive Physical Reasoner), using world-model rollouts to score and reinforce a VLM's policy, and introduce PhysCode, a physics-centric action code aligning semantic intent with dynamics to provide a shared action space for prediction and reasoning. Pretrained on 1,000+ games, our IPR performs robustly on levels from primitive intuition to goal-driven reasoning, and even surpasses GPT-5 overall. We find that performance improves with more training games and interaction steps, and that the model also zero-shot transfers to unseen games. These results support physics-centric interaction as a path to steadily improving physical reasoning. Further demos and project details can be found at https://mybearyzhang.github.io/ipr-1.

Autonomous agents operating in sequential decision-making tasks under uncertainty can benefit from external action suggestions, which provide valuable guidance but inherently vary in reliability. Existing methods for incorporating such advice typically assume static and known suggester quality parameters, limiting practical deployment. We introduce a framework that dynamically learns and adapts to varying suggester reliability in partially observable environments. First, we integrate suggester quality directly into the agent's belief representation, enabling agents to infer and adjust their reliance on suggestions through Bayesian inference over suggester types. Second, we introduce an explicit ``ask'' action allowing agents to strategically request suggestions at critical moments, balancing informational gains against acquisition costs. Experimental evaluation demonstrates robust performance across varying suggester qualities, adaptation to changing reliability, and strategic management of suggestion requests. This work provides a foundation for adaptive human-agent collaboration by addressing suggestion uncertainty in uncertain environments.

We propose a novel projection method that guarantees the conservation of integral quantities in Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs). While the soft constraint that PINNs use to enforce the structure of partial differential equations (PDEs) enables necessary flexibility during training, it also permits the discovered solution to violate physical laws. To address this, we introduce a projection method that guarantees the conservation of the linear and quadratic integrals, both separately and jointly. We derived the projection formulae by solving constrained non-linear optimization problems and found that our PINN modified with the projection, which we call PINN-Proj, reduced the error in the conservation of these quantities by three to four orders of magnitude compared to the soft constraint and marginally reduced the PDE solution error. We also found evidence that the projection improved convergence through improving the conditioning of the loss landscape. Our method holds promise as a general framework to guarantee the conservation of any integral quantity in a PINN if a tractable solution exists.