Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used in multi-image, multi-turn agentic settings where decisions depend on visual changes. However, in existing open-weight VLMs, visual comparisons happen only inside the language model, while the visual encoder itself remains stateless: each image is encoded independently, without access to the prior visual context. As a result, small but task-critical changes may be attenuated before the language model has a chance to compare them, especially when those changes do not affect the high-level semantics of the scene. We introduce a Stateful Visual Encoder, which conditions each visual representation on prior visual features. Under supervised finetuning, VLMs equipped with stateful encoders achieve consistent improvements on controlled tasks involving cross-image spatial aggregation, multi-object visual differencing, and visual trajectory behavior cloning. These improvements are consistent across input resolutions, language model sizes, and VLM backbones. Finally, we validate our model on real-world tasks, including longitudinal radiology, fine-grained image comparison, and remote sensing, where stateful encoders consistently improve generalist VLM baselines and can match or surpass specialized models in selected domains. Project page: https://statefulvisualencoders.github.io/

Video diffusion transformers have achieved state-of-the-art visual quality, but their high inference cost remains a major bottleneck for real-time applications. Recent distillation frameworks produce autoregressive video diffusion models with reduced latency, yet these models still use a fixed number of denoising steps per frame, wasting computation on predictable frames and under-refining challenging ones. We present DSA, a confidence-guided adaptive computation framework for AR video diffusion. DSA introduces a lightweight confidence head, trained jointly with the generator under a distribution-matching distillation objective, to estimate per-frame denoising reliability. At inference, this confidence signal dynamically adjusts the number of diffusion steps: simple frames terminate early for speed, while complex frames receive additional refinement. Our method requires no extra video data, no heuristics, and little architectural modification. Experiments show that DSA achieves real-time autoregressive video generation, reaching 22.63 FPS with sub-second latency on H100 GPUs, while maintaining competitive or superior VBench quality compared to recent autoregressive and bidirectional video diffusion models. Our results demonstrate that confidence-guided adaptive sampling provides an effective and practical path toward interactive video generation.

A common heuristic used to explain the generalization of first-order gradient methods on non-convex neural networks is that "flat interpolators generalize well" (Hochreiter and Schmidhuber, 1994; Keskar et al., 2017), where flatness can be measured by the trace of the Hessian of the empirical loss. However, Dinh et al. 2017) showed that, using symmetry of the network that can change flatness while keeping the population and empirical losses unchanged, any interpolator can be made sharper or flatter. This result makes the earlier heuristic statement vacuous. In this paper, we show that for learning an unknown multi-index model with $2$-layer non-convex homogeneous neural networks, there is a connection between flatness and generalization, despite the existence of symmetries. This connection pertains to the "flattest" interpolators, i.e., the interpolators that have orderwise minimum flatness among all interpolators. First, we show that there exists a natural class of non-generalizing interpolators whose flatness cannot be made closer to the flattest possible, even using symmetries. Second, we show that for data generated by a sum of single-index models, if the approximation error and label noise are low, any flattest interpolator achieves small population loss, i.e., the flattest interpolators always generalize. This establishes a direct link between flatness and generalization which applies to a large class of activations and realistic data distributions.

Image segmentation remains fundamentally limited by boundary ambiguity arising from sampling-induced information loss and inherent uncertainty in pixel-wise labeling. Although encoder-decoder architectures such as U-Net achieve strong performance, they often produce overconfident predictions that fail to capture transition-region ambiguity. To address this issue, we propose \textbf{NoiseUNet}, a simple yet effective framework that injects bounded perturbations into skip connections to regularize cross-scale feature fusion. This mechanism enforces robustness to local feature variations and promotes boundary-aware representations. Theoretically, the perturbation induces an implicit fuzzification effect, yielding soft, data-driven memberships without requiring explicit fuzzy modeling. We further introduce \textbf{ThyR}, a real-world thyroid ultrasound dataset with inherently ambiguous boundaries. Experiments demonstrate that NoiseUNet consistently improves both segmentation accuracy and boundary fidelity.

Modern agentic systems transform LLMs from session-bounded assistants into stateful systems that persist and evolve shared world state across sessions through memories, filesystems, tools, and other long-lived contextual artifacts. This shift fundamentally expands the attack surface of prompt injection. However, prior works on prompt injection have largely focused on model-level threats within a single session, overlooking how cross-session persistent system state fundamentally changes the system-level risk of agentic systems. Inspired by stored cross-site scripting in web systems, we introduce cross-session stored prompt injection, where a successful injection can persist within agentic system state and silently influence future executions long after the original attacker interaction has ended. To systematically study this threat, we formalize stored prompt injection and develop a taxonomy of how adversarial content persists and affects agentic systems across sessions. We further develop a benchmark and sandbox toolkit to evaluate the risks of stored prompt injection, enabling quantitative analysis of attack success across different models, attack goals, and persistence channels. Our findings highlight that persistence transforms prompt injection from an ephemeral model-level threat into a long-lived system-level vulnerability embedded within agent execution state. We hope this work draws broader attention to this emerging threat and motivates the community to systematically study and mitigate system risks arising from persistence in agentic systems.

We show every multi-group learner in the transductive setting may incur a multiplicative penalty in its error rate on some group relative to the error rate achievable in the single-group setting, and the penalty can increasing linearly with the number of groups, up to roughly the square-root of the sample size. This stands in stark contrast to optimal multi-group learners in an analogous (group-realizable) statistical setting, where the penalty is always at most logarithmic in the sample size and independent of the number of groups.

Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) approximate solutions of ODEs and PDEs by minimising a weighted combination of residual, boundary, initial, and data losses. Their performance is often dominated by the choice of loss weights: a poor weighting can drive training to a degenerate solution in which one physical constraint is satisfied while another is ignored. Existing methods select or adapt a single good set of weights. We take a different view: instead of tuning one weight vector, we explore the entire weight space during training. We introduce LC-PINN, which adapts the loss-conditional training of Dosovitskiy and Djolonga (2020) to the PDE-residual setting: the conditioning vector (either the loss weights or a scalar physical coefficient) is treated as a network input and sampled from a simple prior at every optimisation step. This turns PINN training into learning a continuous family of solutions indexed by that vector, with no solver-generated paired data. LC-PINN thus lies between classical PINNs and operator learning: it stays fully physics-informed but amortises training over a parametric family. Our contribution is not the loss-conditional construction itself, but its extension to PINNs, the unification of the loss-weight and parametric-coefficient regimes under one architecture (concatenation for loss weights, FiLM for coefficients), and a fixed-quadrature L-BFGS finishing protocol that makes the parametric-coefficient regime trainable. We give a lambda-invariance result for the conditional optimum and study LC-PINN on parametric Helmholtz, Schrodinger, viscous Burgers, and Buckley-Leverett equations. A single LC-PINN matches or improves retrained per-weight PINN baselines while parameterising the full family in one model, at a total cost that amortises favourably against per-instance retraining.

MRI provides excellent soft-tissue contrast without ionizing radiation, but long acquisition times increase patient discomfort while also raising exam costs and limiting scanner throughput. A common approach to reduce scan time is to acquire fewer measurements, which yields an ill-posed linear inverse problem; recovering diagnostic-quality images therefore requires incorporating prior knowledge beyond the measured data. In follow-up exams, the most recent prior scan of a patient can provide a highly informative subject-specific context, but practical use is complicated by temporal changes (including pathology progression), misalignment between scans, and protocol drift across acquisitions. In this work, we introduce L-TGVN, a Longitudinal Trust-Guided Variational Network that leverages prior scans as side information to reconstruct the current scan from heavily undersampled measurements. Crucially, L-TGVN constrains the influence of prior scans to be consistent with the acquired measurements. Unlike many existing longitudinal reconstruction methods, it does not require explicit pre-registration between prior and current scans. It further accommodates differences in acquisition protocols across visits (e.g., changes in sequence parameters). We evaluate L-TGVN against matched-capacity baselines, including prior-guided methods and methods that do not use longitudinal priors, and observe consistent improvements in standard quantitative metrics together with better preservation of fine structures at challenging accelerations. Source code is available at github.com/sodicksonlab/L-TGVN.

Neural audio codecs are a key component of speech processing pipelines, compressing audio into discrete tokens for downstream modeling. However, existing codecs struggle to balance reconstruction quality with token efficiency, often encoding perceptually irrelevant information such as background noise and recording artifacts at the expense of linguistically and acoustically meaningful content. We reframe audio tokenization as a selective information bottleneck problem and propose CleanCodec, a denoising audio codec which learns to encode only perceptually important features and discard imperceptible information. At just 12.5 tokens per second, CleanCodec achieves state-of-the-art tokenization efficiency, substantially outperforming existing codecs in speaker similarity and speech intelligibility. Evaluations on downstream text-to-speech and voice conversion tasks further demonstrate improved performance and up to 17x faster inference, highlighting significant efficiency gains.

Multi-view cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging provides complementary anatomical information and is widely used for noninvasive disease assessment. Recent transformer-based models have demonstrated strong representation learning capabilities for CMR analysis; however, they typically learn unified latent embeddings that entangle view-specific anatomical variations with disease-related features. Such entanglement biases classifiers toward structural attributes rather than view-invariant pathological patterns. This issue is exacerbated in low-data regimes, particularly for underrepresented cardiac conditions, where limited samples increase the susceptibility to shortcut learning and view-dependent decision boundaries. To address this, we propose a Motion-Guided View--Disease Disentanglement framework MoViD built upon a ViT-MAE backbone. The model explicitly factorizes latent representations into view-specific and disease-discriminative components using dual-branch supervised contrastive objectives and a gradient-reversal adversarial constraint that minimizes disease leakage into the view embedding. Additionally, an annotation-free temporal motion feature, derived from inter-frame difference maps, is introduced to localize the beating heart region and suppress background artifacts. A focal reweighting mechanism is incorporated into the contrastive loss to mitigate class imbalance. We evaluate the framework on a private clinical venous thrombosis dataset and two public benchmarks (M&Ms, M&Ms2). Across disease classification and cardiac segmentation tasks, our approach consistently outperforms standard transformer baselines and demonstrates competitive performance against large-scale pretrained foundation models, validating the efficacy of structural disentanglement in medical image analysis.

Helpful-only models, that is, models that are trained to always follow user intent, are valuable for dangerous capability evaluations and other areas of AI R&D where refusals would be an obstacle. Little is known about the generalization properties of helpful-only training: helpful-only models refuse less than their harmless counterparts, but previous work has not studied other dimensions of their alignment. We study the shortcomings of existing helpful-only models. We find that some show emergent misalignment, others have residual refusal behaviors, and most show poor steerability, sycophancy, and incoherent character. We show that simple anti-refusal training can cause many of these issues. None of these problems are necessary consequences of helpful-only training, though: we show that synthetic document fine-tuning and adding character-related questions to SFT and RL can mitigate them.

While neural video codecs (NVCs) have demonstrated superior compression ratio, their prohibitive computational complexity remains a critical barrier to real-world deployment. This paper introduces a chunk-based coding framework designed to significantly improve the rate-distortion-complexity trade-off. Instead of processing frames sequentially, our approach encodes a chunk of multiple frames into a single compact latent representation and decodes them simultaneously. This is enabled by cross-frame interaction modules for joint spatial-temporal modeling and frame-specific decoders for parallel reconstruction. This paradigm not only dramatically enhances coding throughput but also facilitates more effective modeling of long-term temporal correlations. To further boost speed, we propose a streamlined entropy coding mechanism that consolidates bit-stream interactions into a single step, substantially reducing decoding overhead. Building on these innovations, we present DCVC-UF (Ultra-Fast), a new NVC that sets a new SOTA in performance. Our experiments show that DCVC-UF can achieve ultra-fast encoding and decoding speeds, significantly outperforming previous leading codecs. DCVC-UF serves as a notable landmark in the journey of NVC evolution. The code is at https://github.com/microsoft/DCVC.

High-dimensional and incomplete (HDI) data are prevalent in many real-world big data scenarios. Latent factor models serve as a common representation learning approach, capable of uncovering informative latent factors from such data. Nevertheless, most existing latent factor models rely solely on gradient descent for optimization, which may lead to insufficient and biased representations, particularly when dealing with heterogeneous HDI data. Thus, this study proposes an Ensembled Latent Factor Model via Differential Evolution and Gradient Descent Optimization (ELFM-DEGDO) with two-fold designed: 1) two diverse latent factor models are independently modeled via differential evolution and gradient descent optimization, respectively, and 2) the two diverse latent factor models are combined via a customized self-adaptive weighting mechanism to effectively fuse their strengths. By leveraging the complementary advantages of both optimization paradigms, ELFM-DEGDO is able to produce more comprehensive and less biased representations for HDI data. Three HDI datasets are tested to show that ELFM-DEGDO consistently performs better than related several latent factor models.

Modern Transformer architectures frequently employ normalization mechanisms such as RMSNorm and Query-Key Normalization, making parts of the model approximately scale-invariant with respect to weight magnitudes. In this regime, standard Frobenius-norm weight decay acts purely along the radial direction of the weight space and cannot directly simplify the function represented by the normalized layer. We study grokking in small algorithmic tasks through this lens and propose \emph{Low-Rank Decay} (LRD), a nuclear-norm-like spectral regularizer whose subgradient -- the polar factor $UV^\top$ -- retains a tangential component even in the scale-invariant setting. This distinction has a concrete dynamical consequence: after the model memorizes the training set and task gradients vanish, L2 decay can no longer reshape the weight spectrum, whereas LRD continues to compress singular values in an $\ell_1$-like fashion. On modular arithmetic tasks, we find that LRD induces rapid effective-rank collapse in Query/Key matrices and expands the data-fraction boundary at which delayed generalization (grokking) occurs. We further provide a spectral-geometric interpretation through the ``needle-to-fan'' expansion of the nuclear-norm subdifferential near low-rank strata.

The deep neural network is a widely used framework in machine learning that has been widely applied in various fields. However, deep neural networks often involve a large number of parameters and inputs, many of which may be irrelevant to the goal or true output. These parameters and \textcolor{black}{input variables} not only increase computational complexity, but also contribute to additional computational cost. One solution to this problem is knockoff methods, which have proven successful in controlling false discovery rates in high-dimensional regression. Building on the knockoff methods and using the regularised neural network, this paper proposes three variable screening methods under the condition of controlling false discovery rates: \textit{one layer filter}, \textit{multiple layers filter}, \textit{variable weight aggregation filter}. In comparison with existing algorithms, we find that our algorithms show satisfactory performance.

Modern reasoning models can allocate different amounts of test-time computation, such as thinking tokens, model calls, or compute budget, to different tasks. Existing methods generally drive this allocation by predicted difficulty and spend more compute where it is expected to raise accuracy. This implicitly assumes that all failures cost the same, since an accuracy objective weights every task equally. However, such an assumption does not hold in deployment: A typo in a log message and a migration that corrupts a production database both count as one benchmark failure, but their real-world costs are fundamentally different. To fill this gap, we propose consequence-aware test-time compute allocation. Instead of routing compute only by predicted difficulty, we use a lightweight predictor to estimate from the issue text how costly a task would be if solved incorrectly. The scheduler then routes higher-consequence tasks to larger compute tiers or higher thinking budgets under the same total budget. We conduct main experiments on SWE-bench Lite and evaluate cross-dataset behavior on Multi-SWE-bench mini, covering 700 software-engineering tasks in total. Our results reveal that consequence and difficulty are approximately orthogonal under various annotations, and that current thinking models do not allocate compute sufficiently according to consequence. Moreover, our issue-only predictor never misclassifies a high-consequence task as low-consequence across the 300 SWE-bench tasks. Under matched compute budgets, our consequence-aware scheduler reduces cost-weighted loss by 22% to 33% relative to difficulty-aware routing; in particular, the priority-aware variant, which routes by per-task cost scaled by the marginal-utility signal, crosses 30%, and its deployable predictor-driven version retains over 90% of the oracle gain.

The capabilities of large language models (LLMs) significantly depend on training data drawn from various domains. Optimizing domain-specific mixture ratios can be modeled as a bi-level optimization problem, which we simplify into a single-level penalized form and solve with twin networks: a proxy model trained on primary data and a dynamically updated reference model trained with additional data. Our proposed method, Twin Networks for bi-level DatA mixturE optiMization (TANDEM), measures the data efficacy through the difference between the twin models and up-weights domains that benefit more from the additional data. TANDEM provides theoretical guarantees and wider applicability, compared to prior approaches. Furthermore, our bi-level perspective suggests new settings to study domain reweighting such as data-restricted scenarios and supervised fine-tuning, where optimized mixture ratios significantly improve the performance. Extensive experiments validate TANDEM's effectiveness in all scenarios.

In the paradigm of decentralized learning, a group of agents collaborate to train a global model using distributed datasets without a central server. Although the power of collaboration has been verified by many state-of-the-art studies, it entails extensive gradient information exchanging among the agents and thus induces high risk of privacy leakage for the individual agents. Moreover, in real-world applications, the training data are usually non-identically and independently distributed across the agents, inducing more challenges to enable privacy-preserved decentralized learning. To address these issues, we propose a privacy-preserved decentralized learning algorithm with non-IID data, DPDL, which leverages the notion of Differential Privacy (DP) in cross-gradient aggregation through a similarity-based calibration technique. Specifically, in each round, each agent perturbs the cross-gradients (i.e., the derivatives of its neighbors' local model in its private local data) by Gaussian noise mechanism before sharing them with its neighbors; it then adopt cosine similarity to calibrate the received perturbed cross-gradients such that the aggregation of the calibrated cross-gradients can be utilized to effectively update local model in a momentum-like manner. Our rigorous theoretical analysis not only reveals the minimum noise level required to achieve a specific level of privacy preservation, but also illustrates that our algorithm still achieves a linear speedup in training with non-IID data. We finally conduct extensive experiments on real-world dataset to validate the effectiveness of our algorithm in defending privacy attacks and in training accurate models.

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) generate responses by iteratively unmasking and revising many positions in parallel. This process leaves a rich denoising trace depicting which tokens become confident, which remain unstable, and when commitments form. Existing dLLM reinforcement learning methods use this signal only weakly. Flat rollouts are cheap, but assign a single outcome reward to the whole trajectory. Tree rollouts provide finer, verifiable training signals by branching partial trajectories and propagating leaf rewards upward, but are compute intensive. We ask whether the denoising trace itself can provide tree-like supervision without tree-level compute. We introduce CAPR (Cached-Amortized Path Refinement), a dLLM-RL algorithm that summarizes the denoising trace into a compact path state, uses cached trajectory states to generate cheap sibling continuations, and trains a block-level value head for local block-wise supervision. Under a block-wise unmasking schedule, CAPR records path-state and block-progress features, then redistributes the final outcome reward across blocks according to the tokens revealed in each block. This trains the value head to convert one sparse reward into block-level PPO weights. CAPR therefore recovers much of the granularity of tree search while avoiding full tree expansion, reducing rollout-generation cost to roughly 0.75x that of flat rollouts and 0.6x that of tree rollouts (under standard settings). Across 4x4 Sudoku, Countdown, GSM8K, and Math500, on dense and mixture-of-experts LLaDA backbones, CAPR sets a new state of the art for RL-tuned dLLMs at 256- and 512-token budgets. On Sudoku, it matches the strongest tree-structured baseline at less than one third of the per-step compute.

This study develops a two-domain physics-informed neural network framework for contaminant transport through a GCL/SL composite liner system, in which the thin GCL layer is treated using a steady-state advection-dispersion-biodegradation formulation and the underlying soil liner is modeled as a transient transport domain. Two formulations are evaluated against analytical and finite-element reference solutions under different leachate-head conditions: a standard PINN with soft constraint enforcement (Std-PINN) and a hard-constrained PINN (H-PINN), in which selected boundary and initial conditions are embedded directly into the trial solutions. The Std-PINN captures the overall breakthrough behavior but shows larger errors during the early transport stage, particularly under higher leachate heads where advective transport becomes more pronounced. The H-PINN reduces the optimization burden associated with penalty-based constraint enforcement and provides more accurate and stable concentration predictions, lowering the MAE from approximately 0.058-0.067 for the Std-PINN to about 0.011-0.023 for the H-PINN, while reducing the MRE from approximately 9.10%-19.16% to about 2.08%-3.14%. Parametric analyses confirm that the H-PINN with the tanh activation function and an optimized network structure provides the best predictive accuracy. The H-PINN is further extended to inverse modeling for identifying the SL degradation half-life from limited concentration observations, showing reliable convergence toward prescribed values and acceptable robustness under low-to-moderate observation noise.

Language agents increasingly rely on reusable skills to improve multi-step web automation across related tasks. A growing line of work studies online skill learning, where agents continually induce skills from previous task trajectories and reuse them in future tasks on the fly. However, existing methods mainly reuse skills at the task-level: a fixed set of skills is retrieved based on the initial task instruction and then held fixed throughout execution. This static strategy is misaligned with web execution, where the appropriate next action depends not only on the task goal but also on the current webpage state, which often transitions into situations that the initial skills fail to cover. To address this gap, we propose State-Grounded Dynamic Retrieval (SGDR), an online skill learning method that enables stepwise skill reuse for web agents. SGDR consists of three components: a sliding-window extraction process that turns completed trajectories into reusable sub-procedures invokable at intermediate execution states, a dual text-code representation that connects skill retrieval with executable action, and a state-grounded dynamic retrieval mechanism that matches skills to both the task goal and the current webpage state. Experiments on WebArena across five domains show that SGDR consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving average success rates of 37.5% with GPT-4.1 and 24.3% with Qwen3-4B, corresponding to relative gains of 10.6% and 10.0% over the strongest baseline, respectively. The code is available at https://github.com/plusnli/skill-dynamic-retrieval.

We find the asymptotic ratio between the storage capacities when enforcing real pre-activations in a complex hypothesis class as opposed to complex ones in the same class. Our methods depend on Gardner volume comparisons at critical capacity. Our proof relies on an application of the Harish-Chandra-Itzykson-Zuber (HCIZ) formula, nonstandard in literature. With the HCIZ formula, we may obtain a more robust approximation for the final asymptotic ratio. This strategy is applicable to our work specifically since we integrate over the unitary and orthogonal compact manifolds, facilitated via the Weyl integration formula and the Haar measure.

Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise in psychological counseling, yet existing benchmarks rely heavily on highly cooperative simulated clients. We observe a critical counselor-following phenomenon: these clients often rapidly shift from resistance to compliance after only a few turns, creating an illusion of therapeutic progress and inflating scores under current evaluation protocols through superficial empathy. To address this evaluation mismatch, we propose a Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)-grounded resistance-aware framework. We introduce CARS, a client simulator that explicitly models dynamic resistance via Cognitive Conceptualization Diagrams (CCDs). We present STREAMS, a dual-module framework that decouples strategic reasoning (Thinker) from response generation (Presenter) and optimizes it via reinforcement learning. We further propose EWTS-MI, an entropy-weighted metric for evaluating responsiveness under high-friction interactions. Experiments across resistant and non-resistant counseling settings validate our findings on evaluation mismatch and demonstrate the effectiveness of resistance-aware training for improving strategic robustness under challenging counseling interactions.

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as an effective paradigm for collaborative intelligence while preserving data privacy. However, data heterogeneity arising from non-IID distributions and decentralized security threats remain significant challenges, particularly in resource-constrained enterprise environments. This paper presents TITAN-FedAnil+, a Trust-Based Adaptive Network for blockchain-enabled federated learning in intelligent enterprises. The proposed framework introduces affinity propagation-based adaptive clustered aggregation to identify and filter malicious updates without requiring prior knowledge of the number of attackers. In addition, GPU-accelerated vectorization is employed to improve computational efficiency, while a signed state jump mechanism enables lightweight blockchain resynchronization. Experimental results demonstrate substantial reductions in memory overhead, achieving up to 81% savings across 50 communication rounds on constrained 8 GB edge devices compared with the baseline framework. The results indicate that TITAN-FedAnil+ effectively improves robustness, scalability, and resource efficiency for secure federated learning deployments in intelligent enterprise environments.

Sales lead conversion in high-stakes domains (e.g., automotive, real estate) differs fundamentally from e-commerce recommendation due to prolonged decision cycles and multi-stage funnels. Traditional lead scoring methods rule-based scorecards, machine learning, or pointwise CTR models face severe challenges: sparse supervision, a semantic gap in unstructured CRM logs, and inability to capture relative lead priority. While Large Language Models(LLMs) offer superior semantic understanding of customer interactions, general-purpose LLMs are ill-suited for lead ranking: they generate text rather than comparable scores, and lack alignment with the hierarchical priorities of sales funnels. We introduce an LLM-based discriminative framework for sales lead scoring, which supports joint modeling of structured CRM features and unstructured customer interactions. On top of this framework, we propose HPRO (Hierarchical Preference Ranking Optimization), which augments sales lead scoring with a hierarchical preference ranking objective. HPRO employs a margin-aware Bradley-Terry formulation to transform sparse binary labels into dense, funnel-aware preference pairs, enabling lead scoring to leverage both pointwise and pairwise supervision. Experiments on large-scale data from a leading NEV brand demonstrate state-of-the-art classification (AUC 0.8161) and ranking performance (+39.7% precision among top-ranked leads). A 132-day online A/B test validates 9.5% sales volume uplift, confirming real-world commercial impact.

Foundation models have driven rapid progress in computer vision, yet the two dominant paradigms, vision-language foundation models (VLMs) and vision-only foundation models (VFMs), remain only partially compatible. VLMs offer language-grounded semantic alignment but are often visually coarse, while VFMs learn discriminative perceptual geometry but lack semantic grounding. We propose GPUA (Geometry-Preserving Unsupervised Alignment), a framework that integrates the complementary strengths of VFMs and VLMs. Inspired by cross-lingual alignment, GPUA treats VFM features as a visual language and learns an orthogonal mapping that translates the VFM space into the VLM semantic space, preserving geometry and narrowing the modality gap without labels or model parameter updates. GPUA is task-agnostic and requires only feature-level access to pretrained models. Experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate improved cross-model compatibility and strong gains in downstream zero-shot recognition and segmentation with negligible overhead. Code is available at https://github.com/Yuteam14/GPUA

Machine learning's reliance on sensitive data necessitates privacy-preserving techniques like Differentially Private Stochastic Gradient Descent (DPSGD). However, DPSGD suffers from substantial utility degradation and slow convergence due to gradient clipping and noise injection. Prior works have attempted to improve DPSGD from various perspectives; notably, the Differentially Private Selective Update and Release (DPSUR) algorithm has achieved remarkable model utility. However, the privacy accounting in DPSUR overlooks the variation in sampling probability introduced by the selective release mechanism, which compromises the rigor of its privacy guarantees. To address these limitations, we re-evaluate the privacy analysis of the selective release mechanism and propose a novel algorithm: Differentially Private Selective Release based on Clipped Gradients (DPSR-CG). Through a rigorous, newly derived privacy analysis and extensive experiments on multiple datasets (MNIST, CIFAR-10, IMDB, and FMNIST), we demonstrate that our DPSR-CG mechanism maintains strict privacy guarantees while achieving exceptional model performance.

Automated subject cataloging assigns controlledvocabulary headings to bibliographic records, but LCSH has no standard public benchmark. We introduce LCSHBench: 22,346 books in 15 languages from the openly licensed Harvard, Columbia, and Princeton catalogs. Records enter only when at least two independent cataloging agencies assigned LCSH; we release per-catalog provenance plus union and unanimous answer views. A concordance study of 465,187 works cataloged by all three libraries shows why this design matters: libraries usually agree on the underlying topic (93.3% share a concept-level heading) but often differ in exact expression (39.4% have identical heading sets). LCSHBench therefore scores both exact and concept matches, with set and rank metrics broken down by language and heading type, across open-vocabulary generation and full-vocabulary retrieval. As a first demonstration, a low-rank fine-tune of a 300M on-device embedder improves cross-lingual retrieval and beats a 3,072-dimensional hosted embedder on development exact recall@200 (0.659 vs 0.623). The language panel shows the gain is not uniform, and held-out-test and end-to-end confirmation remain future work.

Recent large language models (LLMs) often appear to exhibit spatial reasoning ability; however, this capability is largely \emph{symbolic}, arising from pattern matching over spatial language rather than true \emph{geometric} reasoning over space. Because LLMs operate on discrete tokens, they lack native support for continuous spatial representations, explicit geometric computation, and structured spatial operators. To address this limitation, we introduce the \emph{Spatial Language Model (SLM)}, the first multimodal LLM that treats location information as a first-class modality and enables geometric spatial reasoning within the model's inference process. SLM directly operates on learned spatial representations rather than textual descriptions of spatial relations. To support effective training, we construct a \emph{Spatial Instruction Dataset} that aligns spatial representations, atomic geometric operations, and natural language instructions. We further propose a new benchmark named \emph{SpatialEval}, which is designed to evaluate spatial reasoning across attributes, distance, topology, and relative-position tasks. Extensive experiments show that SLM significantly outperforms existing LLM-based approaches that rely on symbolic reasoning via prompt engineering or textual abstraction, demonstrating the benefits of integrating geometric spatial representations for robust spatial reasoning. Our instruction dataset, evaluation benchmark, model training codes, and models' checkpoints can be found at: \hyperlink{https://github.com/chuchen2017/SLM}{https://github.com/chuchen2017/SLM}.

Forecast reconciliation usually starts from a fixed measurement system and asks how forecasts should be projected onto a coherent space. We ask a different question: which additional linear measurements should be forecast and included in the reconciliation system? We propose REGAIN, a reconciliation-gain framework that learns normalized auxiliary directions, forecasts the induced series with a frozen forecasting oracle, and selects directions by their target-weighted loss reduction after augmented generalized least-squares reconciliation. Unlike variance-based components or predictability-based auxiliary selection, REGAIN optimizes the downstream effect of an auxiliary measurement on the final reconciled forecasts. We provide a statistical characterization showing that useful auxiliary directions must provide complementary information about unresolved target uncertainty, rather than merely being easy to forecast. The analysis also clarifies the covariance-risk reduction mechanism, the role of bias changes in realized quadratic risk, and the stability of estimated gain signals. A stagewise learning algorithm with held-out gain screening is developed, together with an optional joint refinement step. Experiments on Beijing PM2.5 and Australian Tourism data show that gain-selected measurements can improve both ordinary multivariate and hierarchical forecasts, especially when they reveal residual uncertainty not captured by the original measurement system.