Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as proposal generators for evolutionary robot design, yet most loops remain memoryless: simulator results shape the next population but are not preserved as reusable design knowledge. We present Auto-Robotist, a self-evolving LLM agent that distills morphology-search traces into an explicit natural-language skill library. Each skill stores a structural archetype, evidence-grounded positive and negative rules, and the evaluated designs that support them, making design memory inspectable rather than implicit in a population. During search, the agent retrieves skills to condition LLM edits of elite bodies while retaining a Genetic Algorithm (GA) mutation path for exploration; after evaluation, it updates the library through Add, Diagnose, and Merge. Across seven EvoGym tasks spanning locomotion, traversal, and object interaction, Auto-Robotist improves cold-start 5x5 search and transfers learned skills to 10x10 design spaces, where reference-conditioned transfer outperforms GA on every task. These results suggest that LLM agents can convert expensive physical evaluations into reusable, auditable design principles. Our code will be released upon acceptance.

Large language models (LLMs) define a distribution over text, which can be viewed as a probabilistic representation of uncertainty: sampling K responses yields a belief state - responses a model deems plausible. Existing work exploits this representation for narrow tasks like either decoding or selective prediction, and often requires manual interventions, not controlling generation directly. We propose Belief-Augmented Generation (BAG): grounding LLMs in their own belief state via the prompt and letting them reason over these K samples to decide on a conversational strategy: answer, clarify, or abstain. In a multi-turn ambiguous QA setting, we find that LLMs by default rarely clarify or abstain, ignoring uncertainty about the input or facts. BAG improves QA accuracy across six models and yields strategy decisions more faithful to the belief state than prompt-only baselines. Disentangling when to clarify from when to abstain, however, remains challenging.

Recent vision-language-action (VLA) models and world action models (WAMs) advance robotic manipulation by enriching intermediate representations with auxiliary spatial features or future visual-state prediction. However, these representations largely remain within the observation space and do not share the rigid-body geometry of the action space, forcing the action decoder to implicitly recover this geometry. We propose OASIS, a visuomotor policy that aligns the intermediate representation with the action space via $SE(3)$ end-effector trajectory prediction. OASIS couples a 3D-aware feature encoder that fuses vision-language and metric-depth features with an $SE(3)$ trajectory predictor that produces a camera-frame end-effector trajectory. Conditioned on the predictor's pose-supervised hidden states, the action decoder generates action chunks consistent with rigid-body motion. Across simulation and real-world experiments, OASIS outperforms VLA and WAM baselines in success rate and out-of-distribution generalization. Our project page is available at https://npuhandsome.github.io/OASIS_web.

Vision-Language Models such as CLIP exhibit strong zero-shot recognition capability by aligning images with textual concepts, yet they often underperform on multi-label recognition where multiple objects co-exist. A key bottleneck is that the [CLS] token, as a single global visual representation, is insufficient to faithfully encode diverse targets with varying scales, contexts, and co-occurrence patterns. To address this limitation, we present a new multi-label image recognition framework, termed PIAA, which formulates prediction as Patch-level Inference followed by Adaptive Aggregation. Specifically, we first enhance patch-wise predictions from two complementary perspectives: (i) mitigating semantic entanglement in the visual encoder to obtain more discriminative patch representations, and (ii) learning an unsupervised visual classifier to narrow the vision-language modality gap. We then introduce an adaptive aggregation module that consolidates patch-level scores into the final multi-label prediction. Notably, the entire pipeline is fully training-free, requiring no gradient updates or parameter fine-tuning. Experiments show that our method achieves strong improvements with minimal extra computation, exceeding a 6% mAP gain on the challenging NUS-WIDE benchmark over representative baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/akang-wang/PIAA.

Membership inference attacks (MIAs) are popular methods for empirically assessing the leakage of sensitive information in the training data through models or statistics learned from the data. The MIA vulnerability is often evaluated through false positive rate (FPR) and true positive rate (TPR) of a binary classifier that tries to predict whether a particular sample was in the training data. However, in order to reliably estimate the TPR especially for low FPR values, a lot of observations are needed, which in case of MIA translates to many target models, leading to large computational cost. To avoid excessive compute requirements, the MIA scores are often averaged over multiple individuals and multiple targeted models. We demonstrate two key weaknesses in this efficient MIA evaluation pipeline. First, we show that evaluating the TPR based on MIA scores concatenated across multiple individuals, commonly used to study vulnerabilities in the very low FPR regime, is not calibrated across the per-sample FPRs. This makes it unreliable as a tool for auditing differential privacy. To solve this, we propose a post-processing method to effectively calibrate the FPR across different samples. Second, we identify a finite population bias in the commonly used efficient likelihood-ratio attack (LiRA) implementation proposed by Carlini et al. 2022, leading to a positive bias in the per-sample vulnerability.

Dirty entity resolution (ER), which identifies records referring to the same real-world entity from a single, messy dataset, is a fundamental task in data management and mining. However, the dominant blocking-matching-clustering paradigm for ER suffers from critical flaws. Its cascaded, decoupled workflow essentially produces a static, sparse graph plagued by missing edges (due to blocking failures) and noisy links (due to matching errors), causing error propagation and yielding suboptimal clusters, particularly when rigid transitivity is imposed in the clustering. We contend that matching and clustering are fundamentally synergistic, both optimizing for the construction of an ideal entity graph. Building upon this insight, we propose Alper, a unified framework that integrates these steps into an iterative probabilistic label propagation process over a global, evolving graph. Unlike disjoint blocking, Alper refines the graph structure and labels dynamically by adaptively integrating "weak but cheap" signals from graph propagation with "strong but expensive" LLM-based pairwise queries. For higher cost-effectiveness, we formulate the signal selection as a constrained optimization problem maximizing cumulative marginal gain under a query budget, solved via our greedy algorithm with provable theoretical guarantees. Our extensive experiments over eight benchmark datasets demonstrate that Alper is consistently superior to state-of-the-art cascaded pipelines.

Embodied Question Answering (EQA) connects perception, reasoning, and interaction within embodied environments. However, existing datasets and benchmarks remain fragmented, each focusing on a limited subset of reasoning skills such as spatial understanding or procedural reasoning, without offering a unified large-scale framework for comprehensive evaluation. We present EQA-Decision, a large-scale embodied QA dataset that systematically covers four complementary dimensions of embodied reasoning: static scene construction, spatial understanding, task dynamics reasoning, and instant decision. The dataset contains over four million question-answer pairs with hierarchical annotations across diverse embodied scenarios. In addition, we develop RoboDecision, a strong baseline model aligned with the EQA-Decision Benchmark, providing a unified framework that jointly evaluates perception, reasoning, and action-level decision-making in embodied environments. Results demonstrate that EQA-Decision effectively benchmarks and enhances VLM capabilities in spatial and interaction reasoning, providing a solid foundation for advancing embodied intelligence research.

We present the first data-driven approach to model temporal gaze-head coordination from large-scale in-the-wild facial videos. To obtain training data for generalizable learning, we propose an automatic pipeline that extracts natural yet diverse gaze and head motions with off-the-shelf appearance-based gaze estimators. To capture the probabilistic correlation and temporal dynamics of gaze-head coordination, we build our model on a generative conditional Variational Autoencoder for plausible yet diverse gaze-conditioned head motion generations. We further apply our framework to gaze-controlled facial video generation, where we enable video generation with natural and realistic head motion correlated to the input gaze - an aspect that has not been emphasized before. Human evaluation and quantitative comparisons demonstrate our method's effectiveness and validate our design choices, with evaluators showing statistically significant preference for our approach over baseline methods.

Event cameras offer significant advantages over conventional frame-based counterparts, including high temporal resolution, low latency, and energy efficiency. These characteristics make them suitable for high-speed and high-dynamic range scene acquisition scenarios; however, the lack of dense intensity frames limits the direct applicability of conventional computer vision methods for scene understanding. Event-to-video (E2V) reconstruction seeks to bridge this gap by converting asynchronous event streams into a sequence of synchronous video frames. Existing E2V reconstruction methods based on convolutional neural networks and transformers operate primarily in the spatial domain and often struggle to recover fine structural details while suppressing severe reconstruction artifacts. To address these issues, we propose MSFET-E2V, a novel multiscale frequency-enhanced transformer model. At its core lies a cross-domain attention module, which fuses spatio-temporal features with frequency-aware representations derived from the discrete wavelet transform. Unlike prior methods relying solely on spatial attention, our approach effectively captures both local and global structures by taking into account low- and high-frequency components, enhancing detail preservation and robustness across various motion scenarios. Furthermore, we propose a lightweight wavelet-enhanced skip block that serves as a skip connection, facilitating artifact suppression and structural detail refinement through joint spatial-frequency domain processing. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MSFET-E2V achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art methods on multiple real-world event datasets, offering significant gains in reconstruction quality. Moreover, compared to the existing transformer-based method, our proposed model significantly reduces the number of parameters, the GPU memory usage, and inference time.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models widely adopt pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) as policy backbones, yet it remains unclear what kind of pretrained VLM representation is useful as a VLA initialization. In this paper, we study VLA initialization as a controlled representation-design problem along three axes: capability-level embodied VQA supervision, parameter-update strategy, and robot-data pretraining. Our experiments show that the original pretrained VLM representation is a key source of action performance. However, embodied VQA adaptation does not yield uniform gains: its benefit depends on downstream bottlenecks, and gains from different capability domains are not simply additive. For update strategy, LoRA provides a more reliable initialization than Full Finetune, indicating that overly reshaping the pretrained representation can weaken VLA initialization. Robot-data pretraining further improves VLA initialization, with the strongest variant obtained by staged LoRA-based training. Together, these findings suggest that effective VLM-to-VLA adaptation should inject action-relevant embodied and robot-trajectory signals while preserving the pretrained VLM representation that remains useful for action learning.

High-resolution video generation faces a coupled bottleneck of optimization instability and prohibitive computational costs. The massive expansion of the token sequence not only biases optimization toward local textures at the expense of global coherence, leading to structural collapse, but also imposes prohibitive training costs and severe inference latency. To address this, we propose PixelWizard, a framework that hierarchically decouples global structure modeling from fine-grained detail synthesis. PixelWizard first establishes a compact spatiotemporal anchor to concentrate dense structural priors, which then guides fine-grained generation at high resolution. This mitigates the local optimization bias to ensure structural stability without compromising high-frequency details. Leveraging this structural stability, we introduce Noise-Span Aligned Shortcut Training to break the inference bottleneck. By explicitly modeling the step size, this mechanism allows the model to traverse the generation trajectory with large steps. Crucially, we incorporate Exponential Index-Biased Sampling and Adaptive Noise-Span Calibration to align optimization with the shifted noise schedules of high-resolution grids, ensuring robust few-step inference without incurring the heavy overhead of distillation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PixelWizard achieves superior visual quality while accelerating the generative sampling of native 2K/4K videos by over 10x.

Vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP have shown impressive generalization capabilities, yet their potential for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning (CDFSL) remains underexplored, where the model needs to transfer source-domain information to target domains with scarce training data. While the attention sink phenomenon has been observed in VLMs for certain tasks, its role in CDFSL scenarios has not been studied. In this paper, we uncover a critical issue overlooked by prior works: standard target-domain few-shot fine-tuning in CDFSL significantly exacerbates the attention sink problem, leading to poor discriminability across classes. To understand this phenomenon, through extensive experiments, we interpret it as the model's shortcut learning for domain adaptation: to overcome the huge domain gap between the source and target domains, the model shows a high tendency to push tokens that are initially closer to target-domain classes (i.e., simple tokens) to be even closer to these classes, exacerbating the attention sink and wasting the capability of learning other discriminative but initially further tokens (i.e., hard tokens). To address this, we propose a novel approach to dynamically re-weight tokens according to their relevance with target-domain classes during the target-domain finetuning, which explicitly suppresses the model's reliance on these simple tokens and enhances the learning of hard tokens, reducing sink tokens and enhancing discriminability. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets validate the rationale of our method, demonstrating new state-of-the-art performance. Our codes are available at https://github.com/shuaiyi308/TIR.

Early-warning models built from Learning Management System (LMS) logs aim to predict end-of-course outcomes early enough to enable timely learner support. However, reported "early" performance is often inflated by temporal leakage. This occurs when the pipeline uses information that would not yet be available at the time of prediction. We formalize cutoff-based early outcome prediction under a temporal availability constraint and introduce LEAP (Leakage-Excluded Early-Availability Protocol), which enforces cutoff-first truncation prior to joins and aggregation and audits feature provenance to prevent post-cutoff evidence from entering the benchmark. We instantiate LEAP on the public Open University Learning Analytics Dataset (OULAD) as a multi-step protocol for leakage-controlled evaluation across weekly cutoffs. Using several standard learning methods, we evaluate performance using ROC-AUC, PR-AUC, Brier score, and F1@0.5. Results show improving performance as the observation window expands, with a marked gain around week~3; Random Forest performs best at the earliest cutoffs, while Gradient Boosting dominates thereafter. Leakage ablations further show that temporal violations, especially through assessment information, can inflate apparent "early" performance.

The increasing use of drones in human-centric applications highlights the need for designs that can survive collisions and recover rapidly, minimizing risks to both humans and the environment. We present HoLoArm, a quadrotor with compliant arms inspired by the nodus structure of dragonfly wings. This design provides natural flexibility and resilience while preserving flight stability, which is further reinforced by the integration of a Reinforcement Learning (RL) control policy that enhances both recovery and hovering performance. Experimental results demonstrate that HoLoArm can passively deform in any direction, including axial one, and recover within 0.3-0.6 s depending on the direction and level of the impact. The drone can survive collisions at speeds up to 7.6 m/s and carry a 540 g payload while maintaining stable flight. This work contributes to the morphological design of soft aerial robots with high agility and reliable safety, enabling operation in cluttered and human shared environments, and lays the groundwork for future fully soft drones that integrate compliant structures with intelligent control.

We study a stochastic multi-armed bandit problem where an agent is granted a free exploration budget before regret accumulates, a setting not captured by the classic regret minimization or pure exploration paradigms. The goal is to design an adaptive policy that strategically explores the bandit instance in the initial free exploration phase and minimizes the cumulative regret in the subsequent phase. We formalize this regret minimization with free exploration problem and identify an interesting regime where the free exploration budget scales logarithmically with the time horizon. To quantify the amount of regret saved with high probability as a result of the availability of the free exploration phase, we introduce a novel set of policies known as $(α,β)$-probably saving policies. We propose a two-phase, probably saving algorithm, UFE-KLUCB-H, which consists of a principled free exploration policy, UFE, and a history-aware regret minimization policy KLUCB-H. Instance-dependent upper bounds on UFE-KLUCB-H are derived, showing that UFE-KLUCB-H accumulates strictly less regret than policies that do not have access to a free exploration phase. Complementarily, we derive instance-dependent lower bounds based on novel multi-instance perturbation arguments tailored to the free-exploration setting, demonstrating the near-optimality of UFE-KLUCB-H for two-valued bandits. Our upper and lower bounds reveal sharp phase transitions in the accumulated regret depending on the amount of available free exploration. Simulations are conducted to demonstrate that forced exploration and adaptivity in the algorithm lead to greater regret savings.

Efficiently solving Poisson equations on complex, irregular domains remains a fundamental challenge in scientific computing, as classical iterative solvers often suffer from prohibitive runtime due to ill-conditioned systems. While neural operators offer a fast alternative, they typically rely on large-scale labeled datasets or struggle with unstable training dynamics when using physics-informed residual losses. We propose \textsc{NPSolver}, a neural Poisson solver trained without solution labels via iterative physics supervision. Instead of relying on fully converged numerical solutions or raw PDE residuals, \textsc{NPSolver} utilizes a small number of preconditioned conjugate gradient (PCG) steps to refine its own predictions, providing a more stable and well-scaled training signal. Theoretical analysis confirms that this iterative supervision serves as a well-conditioned error proxy and that a stop-gradient design is essential for optimization stability. To better capture boundary-driven features under mixed boundary conditions, we further introduce the Boundary-Aware Transolver (\textsc{BA-Transolver}) architecture that explicitly separates interior and boundary tokenization. Extensive evaluations on 2D and 3D irregular geometries demonstrate that \textsc{NPSolver} outperforms both physics-informed and data-driven baselines. Furthermore, a downstream thermal control task highlights the model's capability for conducting efficient and reliable gradient-based boundary control. We will release our codes and data at https://github.com/intell-sci-comput/NPSolver.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently shown promising progress in geospatial reasoning. However, existing remote sensing benchmarks remain largely 2D-centric, evaluating models primarily on optical appearance. In natural environments, this paradigm breaks down due to severe spectral confusion, where ecologically distinct regions share similar textures but differ fundamentally in vertical structure. In such cases, explicit 3D structural data, such as Canopy Height Models (CHMs), become essential geometric evidence for semantic disambiguation. Yet, it remains unclear whether current MLLMs can genuinely leverage vertical cues to resolve appearance-level ambiguity. To address this gap, we introduce VertiCue-Bench, the first diagnostic benchmark for CHM-grounded geospatial reasoning. VertiCue-Bench comprises 1,534 carefully curated instances across 17 tasks, explicitly disentangling low-level height perception from ambiguity-aware semantic reasoning. Evaluations on 14 state-of-the-art general and remote-sensing-specialized MLLMs, combined with counterfactual modality testing, reveal a striking perception-reasoning dissociation. While models exhibit emerging competence in reading raw CHM height cues, they largely fail to translate geometric perception into reliable semantic reasoning, often underperforming RGB-only baselines when joint constraints are required. Overall, VertiCue-Bench exposes a critical geometry-to-semantics gap in natural scene understanding, offering actionable insights for advancing geospatial MLLMs.

Evaluating structured-information extraction from historical documents at scale requires high-precision ground-truth annotations, yet traditional manual labeling is expensive and fully automated pipelines built on large language models are prone to hallucination. We propose Double Triangle Annotation, a two-layer human-in-the-loop framework that leverages cross-model consensus to automate the majority of annotation work while ensuring high-precision outputs. In the first layer, two architecturally independent Multimodal Large Language Models annotate each document in parallel; when they agree, the label is auto-accepted, and disagreements are routed to a human jury. A second layer cross-checks two such systems against each other, escalating residual conflicts to a domain expert. The framework rests on a single assumption -- error independence between models -- requires no distributional priors or task-specific calibration, and becomes more autonomous as model capability improves. On the Guides Rosenwald, a corpus of French medical directories spanning 1887-1906, the framework achieves a final Word Error Rate of 0.003. Applied at scale, model consensus auto-accepts over 85% of 13,595 fields. We release the resulting benchmark -- the first structured-extraction ground truth for the Rosenwald Guides -- to support future work on historical document processing.

We propose OMGTex, an end-to-end diffusion-based framework for reconstructing high-quality and editable facial UV textures from multi-style facial images. Existing texture reconstruction methods face two major limitations: (1) Fragility due to reliance on 3D geometry priors, which are difficult to estimate accurately, especially under facial occlusions or in stylized domains; and (2) A lack of semantic disentanglement, inhibiting region-specific texture editing and style transfer. Our work addresses both challenges simultaneously. Our core innovation is a geometry-free pipeline that directly maps a 2D face image to its corresponding editable UV texture. We introduce two key techniques: First, to address the challenge of UV misalignment common in diffusion generation, we introduce a gradient-guided refinement strategy at inference time, which explicitly corrects structural consistency. Second, we leverage the inherent semantic distribution capability of diffusion models and design a novel training paradigm to enhance this tendency, enabling semantic-aware editing of facial texture. Furthermore, to address the data scarcity in multi-style texture reconstruction, we construct CANVAS, the first comprehensive paired texture reconstruction dataset covering realistic and diverse stylized domains. To the best of our knowledge, OMGTex is the first geometry-free inference framework that achieves robust, style-consistent, and editable facial texture reconstruction across diverse domains. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple facial texture benchmarks.

Infrared and visible video fusion is essential for achieving comprehensive perception in dynamic scenes. However, maintaining temporal consistency remains a formidable challenge. Conventional methods relying on optical flow often suffer from geometric rigidity and ghosting artifacts. Moreover, standard diffusion-based fusion models typically operate in a frame-by-frame manner; when extended to autoregressive settings, they lack intrinsic temporal constraints and are prone to severe error accumulation and drifting, where minor artifacts amplify over time. To address these limitations, we propose a drift-resilient video fusion method that reformulates the task as history-conditioned motion generation. We introduce Stabilized History Guidance and Soft Temporal Anchoring to reframe temporal consistency as spectral filtering, implicitly aggregating motion dynamics without rigid alignment. Furthermore, our Decoupled Structure-Motion Adaptation strategy bridges pre-trained priors and structural constraints via two-stage training and latent refinement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both fusion quality and temporal stability.

Multi-domain graph pre-training is a crucial step in constructing foundational graph models with cross-domain generalization capabilities. However, existing methods predominantly rely on jointly training all source domain graphs, resulting in high computational costs. Furthermore, it remains unclear whether all source domain graph data contribute equally to effective transfer. This paper empirically reveals significant data redundancy in multi-domain graph pre-training. Based on this finding, we propose the Multi-domain Graph Pre-training Framework, MDGMIX, which combines boundary-aware subgraph mixing with hierarchical discrimination. By selecting boundary nodes to construct challenging mixed-domain subgraphs, MDGMIX employs coarse-grained domain discrimination and fine-grained domain decomposition losses to decouple shared patterns from domain-specific patterns. During adaptation, MDGMIX employs a lightweight prompt weighting mechanism to transfer source domain knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MDGMIX consistently outperforms strong baselines in few-shot classification tasks while exhibiting superior time and memory efficiency. The code is available at: https://github.com/zhengziyu77/MDGMIX.

Concept unlearning aims to erase a target concept from a pretrained text-to-image diffusion model without retraining. Closed-form methods are attractive in this setting because they apply a single deterministic edit to the cross-attention weights and add no inference-time cost. Existing closed-form methods, however, represent the target concept through the text encoder's response to a few short anchor prompts that name it, and paraphrased prompts that evoke the concept without naming it consistently bypass the edit. We argue that the target should instead be represented in the cross-attention activation space. Text embeddings describe the user's prompt, while cross-attention activations describe what the model is about to render, and the latter generalize to paraphrase the anchor templates do not cover. Building on this observation, we propose PURE (Projection in U-Net Rendering for Erasure), a closed-form method that builds the forget and retain bases from per-layer cross-attention activations captured along a short denoising trajectory and applies a single linear projector to the cross-attention key and value weights. On a recent holistic concept-unlearning benchmark covering ten concepts across artistic style, intellectual property, celebrity, and NSFW categories, PURE significantly reduces target leakage under paraphrased and adversarial prompts while preserving retain concepts close to the unedited model, yielding the best overall forget-retain trade-off among evaluated methods.

Pathology foundation models (PFMs) have emerged as a core approach for learning transferable representations from whole slide images (WSIs), and they are typically benchmarked through downstream clinical endpoints. While such task level evaluations are indispensable, they offer limited insight into what the representations themselves encode, particularly whether PFM embeddings can distinguish meaningful tissue regions and capture their spatial relationships. We present SpaPath-Bench, a representation level benchmark designed to diagnose spatial representation capability in PFMs. SpaPath-Bench formulates spatial domain identification (SDI) on paired whole slide image and spatial transcriptomics (ST) data as a diagnostic task. It curates 42 public paired WSI and ST slides, enables large scale evaluation across 19 encoders and seven SDI methods, and measures partition quality using three complementary criteria: unsupervised spatial coherence, transcriptomics referenced agreement, and expert referenced agreement. Across 83K runs, SpaPath-Bench reveals that different pretraining paradigms capture distinct aspects of tissue spatial architecture, and it provides practical guidance for building the next generation of spatially aware computational pathology models. Code and data pipelines are publicly available at https://bokai-zhao.github.io/SpaPath-benchboard/.

Large-scale text-to-image foundation models have achieved remarkable visual realism, yet generating human images with correct anatomical structures remains challenging. Existing approaches enforce anatomical constraints through part-specific modules or localized loss weighting during supervised fine-tuning on high-quality human photos, but such datasets are limited and often provide ambiguous optimization signals due to confounding factors such as lighting, pose, and background. Preference-based alignment offers an alternative, but standard Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) treats all pixels equally and therefore fails to exploit the localized nature of anatomical artifacts. To address this, we propose the framework of Alignment via Synthetic Anatomical Preference (ASAP), which constructs controlled preference pairs through a localized degradation mechanism applied to high-fidelity human images. This mechanism performs a controlled experiment on images by introducing explicit anatomical errors in targeted regions while preserving the remaining content. With this mechanism, we create the Human Anatomical Preference (HAP) dataset with over 10K curated pairs for effective anatomical alignment of text-to-image human image generative models. To better leverage the locality of these controlled preference pairs, we introduce a localized and margin-bounded variant of DPO that prioritizes optimization in targeted anatomical regions while enforcing a finite preference margin to prevent over-optimization and preserve global semantics. We further introduce HAF-Bench, a benchmark for systematic evaluation of anatomical fidelity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ASAP consistently reduces anatomical errors across multiple foundation models while maintaining overall image quality.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) provides an efficient method for high-quality scene reconstruction using anisotropic Gaussians. Recently, 3DGS-based methods have significantly improved the rendering quality of human avatars while enabling real-time performance. However, existing methods suffer from a magnitude mismatch in the number of Gaussians generated by image-based and 3DMM-based approaches. This discrepancy results in reconstructed expressions that lack fine-grained detail. In this paper, we introduce a novel method for reconstructing an animatable head avatar from a single image. We propose a Graph splitting network to progressively generate Gaussians from coarse to fine using an autoregressive architecture. To address the graph inconsistency caused by split Gaussians, we employ a mesh topology extension method to align the GNN's connectivity with the increased Gaussian count. Furthermore, we introduce a novel density control method that includes a gating mechanism that generates soft masks for Gaussians, preventing over-densification after the splitting operation. This allows for dynamic control over Gaussian density across different facial regions. For smooth and rapid training, we employ a delayed filtering strategy to avoid re-computing the graph topology during training. Experimental results demonstrate that our autoregressive structure effectively improves expression representation ability by progressively splitting Gaussians. This process, enabled by the GNN-guided splitting, synthesizes more precise facial details and achieves higher reconstruction quality.

Message-passing neural networks (MPNNs) are a powerful framework for learning representations of graph-structured domains. However, weights in MPNNs act on features only, limiting their ability to capture structural patterns. We introduce a novel structure-aware weight sharing principle that explicitly incorporates information inherent to the graph structure. Weights are indexed directly by user-chosen graph invariants, i.e., functions preserved under node permutations, enabling systematic reuse across structurally equivalent subgraphs. We present ShareGNNs, which instantiate this principle within a simple encoder-decoder architecture, resulting in an MPNN with learnable adjacency and transformer-like connectivity. We show that their expressivity is at least as strong as the discriminative power of the chosen invariants, providing explicit control over the model complexity. Experiments on synthetic and real-world data, as well as subgraph counting tasks, demonstrate consistent improvements over standard MPNNs, competitive expressivity beyond the 1-WL test, and scalability to large datasets.

Trajectory prediction methods have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in capturing complex motion patterns. However, existing methods rely on global state assumptions, suffer from insufficient belief inference under partial observability, and lack cognitive behavioral constraints in prediction. These limitations severely compromise both deployment feasibility and physical plausibility in real-world settings. In this work, we propose FEP-Diff, an agent-centric trajectory prediction framework grounded in the Free Energy Principle, aimed at achieving cognitively plausible predictions under realistic constraints. Specifically, a dual-branch spatiotemporal encoder extracts ego-motion dynamics and social interaction cues from local observations. Building upon this, a goal-conditioned belief learner infers multimodal latent belief distributions optimized via a free-energy objective, with a social consistency constraint on the local neighborhood graph to promote cognitive alignment among neighboring agents. Finally, a residual diffusion trajectory generator is conditioned on the learned belief representations with token-level proxy conditioning, producing precise and diverse future predictions. Extensive experiments on five public benchmarks demonstrate that FEP-Diff consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods under restricted observability. Code: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FEP-Diff-8876.

Explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning substantially improves the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs), but incurs high inference cost due to lengthy autoregressive traces. Existing latent reasoning methods offer a promising alternative, yet they often treat reasoning as uniformly compressible, causing precision-critical intermediate steps to be overly compressed and thereby degrading reasoning accuracy. In this work, we propose Selective Latent Thinking (SLT), a framework that selectively compresses redundant reasoning spans into latent representations while preserving precision-critical spans as explicit CoT within the same reasoning trajectory. Specifically, SLT first uses a lightweight decoder to anticipate a short upcoming reasoning span, and then applies confidence-based gating to determine the longest span that can be reliably compressed. The accepted span is encoded into a compact latent representation to improve reasoning efficiency, while uncertain or precision-critical reasoning remains in explicit CoT form to preserve accuracy. To learn this selective compression policy, SLT adopts a three-stage training strategy that combines span-level latent compression, reliability-aware future reasoning prediction, and trajectory-level reinforcement learning to optimize the trade-off between answer correctness and reasoning cost. Extensive experiments across four mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that SLT achieves 22.7\% higher accuracy than latent reasoning baselines at comparable compression ratios, while reducing reasoning chain length by 58.4\% with only 2.8\% accuracy degradation compared to explicit CoT,Our code can be found in https://github.com/hunshi34/SLT.

Offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) provides a practical framework for obtaining goal-reaching policies from fixed datasets. However, learning a reliable goal-conditioned value function in long-horizon tasks remains challenging. In this paper, we identify erroneous generalization in goal-conditioned value functions as a fundamental bottleneck, and demonstrate that appropriate inductive bias in the value function is crucial for addressing the bottleneck. Building on these findings, we propose Latent-Aligned Value Learning (LAVL), an offline GCRL algorithm that integrates latent-representation-based value generalization with hierarchical planning in a unified framework. Extensive experiments on OGBench demonstrate that LAVL consistently outperforms existing offline GCRL methods, achieving the highest performance on 20 out of 22 datasets. Notably, LAVL exhibits strong performance in long-horizon tasks and trajectory stitching datasets, where prior methods suffer significant performance degradation. Our code is available at https://github.com/oh-lab/LAVL.git.

We prove that no reinforcement learning policy with confidence-gated autonomy can simultaneously achieve maximum helpfulness, optimal calibration, and full autonomy under rational oversight, whenever some tasks exceed the agent's reliable competence: the Behavioral Credibility Trilemma. The impossibility is geometric -- adding any non-affine autonomy incentive to a strictly proper scoring rule destroys strict properness, so an agent rewarded for both calibrated confidence and autonomous action systematically inflates its reported confidence on tasks below the principal's approval threshold. The Behavioral Perturbation Lemma quantifies the inflation (scaling as $w_A/(2 w_C)$ for the Brier score) and shows detection requires $Ω(1/Δ^2)$ observations. We prove the principal's optimal oversight rule is necessarily non-affine, making the impossibility unconditional and optimizer-independent across log-concave-density policy families. We formalize the Confidence-Gated Decision Problem, map existing methods onto the trilemma, and identify two constructive resolution pathways (commitment, domain separation). A 540-configuration Best-of-N experiment tests five pre-registered hypotheses, all strongly confirmed (effect sizes $d = 1.10$ to $5.32$), and adds a descriptive analysis of the achievable-$(H, C, A)$ surface geometry showing a plateau-truncated frontier consistent with the predicted inflation saturation.