Conversational agents that serve as lifelong companions must maintain persistent memory across all interactions. However, simply expanding context windows with raw retrieval degrades reasoning quality, while training memory agents via standard reinforcement learning creates a severe credit assignment bottleneck in a multi-stage pipeline. To solve this, we introduce SALIMORY, a framework that trains a single language model to manage a cognitively-structured memory-spanning user facts, preferences, and working memory. By introducing a hierarchical stage-wise process reward and reward-decomposed contrastive refinement, SALIMORY provides isolated supervision for distinct memory operations (selective filtering, consolidation, and cue-driven recall) end-to-end. SALIMORY cuts memory-attributed failures by one-third, outperforms the state-of-the-art by over 10% in end-to-end accuracy, and more than doubles the Good Personalization rate.

This article situates large language models (LLMs) within the longer history of computational approaches to concept analysis in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science (HPSS). We examine what LLMs add to existing methods, how they inherit longstanding problems, and review recent case studies that employ them. In the first part, we reconstruct computational conceptual history before LLMs by bringing together three strands of work: early digital methods in HPSS, distributional approaches from digital history and related research, and lexical semantic change detection. We provide an overview of the main challenges and opportunities, focusing on corpus construction, operationalization and modelling choices, and evaluation and interpretation. In the second part, we turn to the era of LLMs, starting with a short introduction to LLMs before reviewing LLM-based work on lexical semantic change detection and relevant case studies in HPSS. We then revisit the earlier methodological questions, showing how issues of corpus construction, model choice and training data, operationalization trade-offs, and evaluation and interpretation play out in LLM-based workflows.

Quantizing large language models (LLMs) to low-precision floating-point representations is central to efficient deployment, yet applying a single bit-width uniformly across all layers is sub-optimal in terms of both performance and accuracy. This work introduces dMX, a differentiable mixed-precision quantization framework for learnable floating-point bit-width assignment. We study its application for the microscaling floating-point (MXFP) family of data types defined by the Open Compute Project (OCP) standard. The per-layer bit-width assignment is formulated as a continuous optimization problem in which each layer's floating-point format format is parameterized by a scalar parameter, folding the multi-variate design space into a single learnable offset. During training this offset takes continuous values, avoiding sudden oscillations between discrete quantization formats. A temperature-based annealing schedule progressively discretizes the learned offsets, ensuring that the final configuration maps to hardware-compatible MXFP formats without abrupt transitions between training and inference behavior. A target-aware regularization term steers the average bit-width toward a user-specified budget, serving as a coarse-grained proxy for inference cost and balancing model quality against deployment efficiency. We performed experiments on different families of LLM, such as Llama, Qwen3, and SmolLM2, evaluating perplexity on WikiText-2 and accuracy on four zero-shot reasoning benchmarks. Across these settings, dMX consistently yields Pareto-dominating models and improves over Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence-based layer-selection heuristics, efficiently navigating trade-offs between model quality and average bit-width.

Indoor UAV navigation requires efficient exploration, scene understanding, and reliable trajectory execution under limited field-of-view observations. Existing vision-based navigation frameworks typically rely on single-view observations, limiting their ability to reason about occlusions, target visibility, and global scene structure. In this work, we propose AgenticDiffusion, a multi-view UAV navigation framework that coordinates language-guided reasoning, open-vocabulary target grounding, vision-based diffusion planning, and NMPC within a unified aerial navigation pipeline. Given a natural language instruction and synchronized first-person-view (FPV) and top-view observations, the framework determines the most informative viewpoint for navigation and generates a mission plan prior to trajectory execution. The targets are localized using an open-vocabulary grounding model, after which viewpoint-specific diffusion planners generate navigation trajectories for UAV execution. Using complementary viewpoints, the proposed framework reduces repeated target exploration and improves navigation efficiency in cluttered indoor environments. The framework was validated in four real-world UAV navigation scenarios involving adaptive viewpoint selection, multi-stage mission execution, long-horizon navigation, and safe landing-site selection. The experimental results demonstrated an overall mission success rate of 80% in 40 real-world trials, while the diffusion planners achieved a trajectory generation success rate of 100%.

Online evaluation of ranking and retrieval systems often relies on downstream monetization metrics such as app revenue or creator earnings. These metrics are typically heavy-tailed, with a small fraction of users dominating both mean and variance, leading to low statistical power and unreliable conclusions in A/B experiments -- especially under limited traffic. We present a practical framework for variance reduction in online experiments by combining post-stratification with CUPED. Our approach leverages pre-experiment covariates to improve the sensitivity of monetization experiments without requiring additional traffic. Deployed at ShareChat across ranking-driven monetization experiments, the method substantially reduces variance and improves decision stability, achieving equivalent statistical confidence with ~45\% less traffic than standard metrics. We further discuss practical design choices, guardrails, and limitations, providing guidance on when post-stratification is appropriate for real-world information retrieval and Recommendation systems.

Single-view 3D generative models have achieved impressive visual quality, yet they are not designed to satisfy structural or functional requirements, and in practice, often fall short. Symmetry is one such requirement: violations, even subtle ones, on symmetry can render a model physically unusable. We present SymTRELLIS, a method that enforces arbitrary finite point group symmetries (rotational, reflectional, and polyhedral) during the flow-based 3D generation of TRELLIS.2, without retraining the underlying VAE or flow model. Our key idea is to approximate the latent-space action of spatial transformations as a learned linear operator on voxel latents, implemented as a lightweight spatial-transform latent mapper trained on generic, non-symmetric 3D data. At generation time, we enforce symmetry by averaging predicted flow velocities across all symmetry-equivalent transformations at each ODE step, a process we call velocity symmetrization. The symmetry specification can be estimated automatically from an initial TRELLIS.2 generation or supplied by the user, enabling deliberate fold manipulation beyond what the input image suggests. On a curated benchmark of 266 strictly symmetric objects spanning 2- to 20-fold rotations and polyhedral symmetry groups, SymTRELLIS substantially reduces all symmetry error metrics compared to TRELLIS.2, Hunyuan3D-2.1, and TripoSG, while maintaining reconstruction accuracy comparable to the base model.

Single-image reflection separation is highly challenging under extreme conditions like glare or weak reflections. Existing methods often struggle to recover both layers in glare or weak-reflection scenarios because of insufficient information. This paper presents a diffusion model explicitly fine-tuned for this task, leveraging generative diffusion priors for robust separation. Our method simultaneously generates transmission and reflection layers through a unified diffusion model, incorporating a novel cross-layer self-attention mechanism for better feature disentanglement. We further introduce a disjoint sampling strategy to iteratively reduce interference between the layers during diffusion and a latent optimization step with a learned composition function for improved results in complex real-world scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach surpasses state-of-the-art methods on multiple real-world benchmarks. Project page: https://brian90709.github.io/diff-reflection-separation/

Foundation models achieve generalization through massive-scale training on diverse data, but have limitations with transfer to truly unseen domains without paired training data. We propose principle-driven foundation models that encode signal-theoretic principles (Fourier decomposition, energy conservation, symmetry) rather than learn untethered statistical correlations. We hypothesize that domains differ not in fundamental physics, but in learnable transformations in time, frequency, magnitude, or phase. Training exclusively on radio-frequency (RF) data with co-designed architecture and losses incorporating these principles, we achieve cross-modal transfer to audio, images, text, and video using only frozen representations learned from RF data, requiring no fine-tuning of the encoder on target domains. Our 1.99M parameter frozen encoder achieves 77.7% average accuracy (91.9% top-3) across 15 diverse tasks via linear probing, with systematic variation: 84.5 on physically-grounded tasks (speaker recognition, seismology, RF fingerprinting) versus 70.0% on semantic tasks (music genre, language recognition). This reveals that principle-driven and scale-driven approaches offer complementary paths: physical principles enable efficient cross-modal transfer while naturally establishing the boundary between physical and semantic understanding.

Agent systems execute through runtimes with very different control points: local coding tools, framework SDKs, managed agent platforms, API gateways, and observer-only integrations. A high-risk action such as publishing data externally may therefore appear as a shell command in one runtime, a tool call in another, and a hosted session transition in a third. This makes it difficult to answer a basic governance question consistently: what action was authorized, under whose authority, with what approval semantics, and with what evidence after execution? This paper presents Proof-Carrying Agent Actions (PCAA), a runtime-neutral governance model centered on an action certificate rather than on a vendor-native session record. PCAA organizes control around five checkpoints: pre-action admissibility, action open, assumption capture, approval, and outcome closure. It binds these checkpoints to a portable action envelope, runtime and approval receipts, and replay-ready proof. The model is extended in two practical ways: the certificate is externality-aware, carrying boundary facts such as destination visibility and account provenance, and approval is described by explicit enforceability classes rather than by a single reviewed or unreviewed bit. We study the model through a reference implementation in a heterogeneous agent control plane and a disclosure-bounded evaluation protocol. On a protected benchmark expanded from 24 executable seeds to 96 traces across four runtime families, PCAA preserves route quality while exposing distinct failure modes under ablation. The paper contributes a systems formulation of runtime governance around certificate-bearing actions and an implementation-grounded account of how that formulation can remain portable under runtime churn without collapsing into vendor-specific control surfaces.

Conventional hearing aids rely on fixed, frequency-dependent amplification and compression to manage reduced sensitivity, which often fails to provide sufficient listening support in complex environments, such as situations with multiple speakers (the ``cocktail party'' problem). To more comprehensively address the underlying encoding dysfunctions of hearing loss, we introduce the Differentiable Auditory Loop (DAL), a new open-source framework for personalized hearing aid design and fitting. Our first implementation of DAL incorporates CARFAC, a differentiable model of human cochlear function, which we ported to JAX, to optimize a deep neural network to match impaired auditory neural activity patterns with a normal-hearing reference. To build a hearing aid with the fine-grained spectro-temporal signal processing required, we adopt SEANet, a waveform-to-waveform fully convolutional UNet generator. We fine-tune the network by comparing the outputs of a CARFAC model fitted to normal hearing with that of a CARFAC model fitted to match each subject's individual hearing impairment. The comparison is done using loss functions derived from the respective CARFAC neural activity pattern (NAP) outputs and stabilized auditory images (SAIs), the latter providing a 2D representation that captures phase-insensitive temporal structure in the auditory nerve output. Through gradient descent, the SEANet model learns to both denoise the input and compensate for the hearing loss modelled by the impaired CARFAC model. Across neural-representation and signal-fidelity metrics, the DAL-optimized SEANet model outperformed the tested master hearing aid (MHA) baselines. The DAL framework provides a practical path toward model-based, machine-learning-driven personalization of hearing aid signal processing. Next steps include hardware deployment to enable real-world clinical testing.

Machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) enable efficient and accurate atomistic simulations but depend critically on the quality and diversity of the training data. We introduce Stein kernelized molecular dynamics (SKMD), an enhanced sampling method that uses interacting particle dynamics to acquire informative training configurations for the active learning and fine-tuning of MLIPs. SKMD corresponds to a stochastic variant of Stein variational gradient descent that is adapted for molecular dynamics by incorporating asynchronous particle updates and a kernel of global atomic descriptors, which provides a symmetry-aware measure of configurational similarity. Unlike other enhanced samplers used in molecular dynamics, SKMD preserves the Boltzmann distribution as the asymptotic distribution of the dynamics. This property enforces a balance between the exploration of diverse configurations and attraction toward high-probability regions of the energy landscape. We further propose an approach to efficient online data acquisition using an adaptive stopping criterion that selects non-redundant training data over the course of simulation. We demonstrate SKMD for the active learning of a neural network model of the Müller-Brown potential and the fine-tuning of a MACE interatomic potential for alanine dipeptide. Compared to active learning baselines, our method achieves higher model accuracy in fewer training iterations with the same number of acquired training samples.

Video misinformation increasingly operates at the semantic and evidential level: authentic footage may be selectively edited, temporally reordered, spliced across sources, or augmented with AI-generated content to construct false narratives. Such evidence-dependent manipulations cannot be reliably verified from the input video alone, because the missing, reordered, replaced, or recontextualized evidence lies outside the video itself. We introduce \textbf{EVID-Bench}, a benchmark for search-grounded video misinformation detection, where a system must search the open web for related videos and identify what information is false through cross-video comparison. EVID-Bench comprises 222 videos spanning 9 manipulation types across 3 categories: AI generation, single-source editing, and multi-source editing. All samples are verified to be undetectable by frontier models through visual inspection alone. We evaluate nine frontier multimodal models using a retrieval-augmented verification baseline. The best system achieves only 61.43\% point-level accuracy and 43.24\% video-level accuracy, while AI-generated manipulations remain especially challenging. Error analysis reveals recurring challenges: models fixate on irrelevant anchors, misattribute synthetic content to editorial splicing, and terminate search prematurely before fully explaining the manipulation.

Small open-weight models struggle at long-form creative writing: their generated stories either fall far short of the requested length, or their quality significantly degrades as length increases, especially when compared to frontier models. We present POLARIS (Policy Optimization with LLM-as-a-judge rewards and Anchored-Reference Injection for Storywriting), a lower-compute GRPO recipe with two key ingredients: a frontier LLM judge with a structured Story Quality rubric as the online reward, and human-reference injection (HRI), where a teacher-forced human-written story serves as a high-reward anchor within each GRPO group. By applying our training recipe to Qwen3.5-9B, using a dataset of approximately 1.4K prompt-story pairs derived from 100 short-story anthologies and 4 A100 GPUs, we obtain POLARIS-9B. Across five benchmarks spanning in-distribution and out-of-distribution prompts and rubrics, POLARIS-9B is competitive with much larger open-weight models while following length instructions more closely. A blinded human evaluation confirms that POLARIS-9B is preferred to the base Qwen3.5-9B and on par with Qwen3.5-27B. Despite training only on stories up to 4k words, POLARIS-9B preserves quality on prompts requesting stories up to 3 times the training length, a regime where most open-weight models degrade substantially in quality, length adherence, or both. More broadly, our results suggest that length generalization is a meaningful stress test for creative-writing models and a useful lens for distinguishing otherwise close models.

Flow matching models learn to transport samples from a simple prior distribution to a complex data distribution. When prior-data pairs are coupled via optimal transport (OT), the learned trajectories are straight and non-crossing, enabling fast, even single-step, generation. However, computing the OT coupling in high dimensions is intractable, and existing methods attempt to solve the OT problem, at the cost of persistent bias or significant overhead. Rather than solving for the OT coupling, we reformulate the problem. Once the prior is treated as a design choice rather than a fixed input, the OT coupling between prior and data is no longer unique. Many priors admit an OT-optimal identity coupling to the data, leaving us free to choose one that is also tractable to sample. We identify low-frequency projection of natural images as such a choice. The identity coupling between data and its low-frequency representation is empirically OT-optimal, the prior is structured enough to be sampled by a lightweight model at inference, and the remaining flow-matching task reduces to synthesizing high-frequency detail. Interpolating the prior with Gaussian noise further improves generation quality while preserving the OT coupling. The approach requires no modifications to the flow model itself, and integrates naturally with latent-space models, classifier-free guidance, and one-step generation frameworks. Across all benchmarks, our method reduces trajectory curvature by more than $2\times$ compared to existing flow matching methods, yielding better generation quality in the few-step regime.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a dominant post-training paradigm, enabling large language models (LLMs) to learn from rewards. We observe that societal regulations are structurally similar to reward functions. They define measurable outcomes, thresholds, and exceptions, while often leaving institutional intent only partially specified. We hypothesise that the RL training process may exploit these gaps and therefore ask whether models' well-known tendency to hack reward functions during RL can scale into a more consequential failure mode named societal hacking: discovering loopholes in the rules society runs on. To study this phenomenon, we introduce SocioHack, a sandbox of 72 societal environments, and find that within these environments, reward hacking naturally emerges and leads to regulatory loophole discovery. Models learn to hack the social rules and generate strategies that remain technically compliant while defeating regulatory intent, and current LLM safeguards provide only limited mitigation. Therefore, collecting in-the-wild feedback for model training requires greater caution, and we need a next-generation post-training paradigm for safely iterating LLMs in real society.=

Adaptive patching is a recent and compelling proposal for time-series Transformers: allocate finer patches where the sequence looks locally informative. This paper asks under what conditions a content-adaptive patching operator should outperform a tuned uniform one. Local heterogeneity alone is not enough: under pointwise forecasting losses, a complex-looking region is not automatically one where finer patching reduces the loss. We model patching as a budgeted bitrate allocation and derive an explicit threshold that a dynamic patching rule must satisfy to beat a well-tuned uniform baseline, then bound the achievable improvement both locally (a quadratic surrogate) and globally (a strong-convexity bound under the model's assumptions). Two structural results follow: without a coupling constraint, scalar local complexity cannot produce a non-uniform optimum under a common loss landscape; and once the backbone is trained to its representation-aware optimum, the alignment gain collapses around a well-tuned uniform patch size. To test these predictions, we run a controlled isolation study on three representative architectures, replacing each adaptive mechanism with a uniform patch-size sweep while keeping the backbone, data, and training protocol fixed. On standard long-horizon forecasting benchmarks, the validation-selected uniform baseline is competitive with the dynamic counterpart, with per-setting effects concentrated near zero and no consistent directional advantage once results are aggregated by dataset. The larger gains we do observe are method- and dataset-specific. Adaptive patching should therefore be evaluated against a tuned uniform baseline; its value depends on whether a cheap and reliable routing signal can identify where finer patches actually reduce forecasting loss.

This paper proposes a two-stage pseudo anomaly-guided anomaly detection method (\textbf{T}wo-stage \textbf{P}seudo \textbf{A}nomaly-guided \textbf{A}nomaly \textbf{D}etection, \textbf{TPA-AD}) for axle-box bearing time-series anomaly detection (time series anomaly detection, TSAD) under the setting where only normal samples are available for training. The method first generates pseudo-anomalous windows near the normal boundary using a reconstruction model and per-feature target-error control. It then learns anomaly-sensitive representations through contrastive learning between normal and pseudo-anomalous windows, and finally produces window-level and point-level anomaly scores using k-nearest neighbors (KNN). Compared with existing methods that rely on known fault categories, real anomaly priors, or random anomaly injection, TPA-AD improves the separability of the normal boundary by constructing pseudo-anomalies in boundary neighborhoods and can jointly handle continuous and discrete features in mixed-variable scenarios. The main experiments are conducted on bearing fault detection datasets and degradation-process datasets, with an additional exploratory extension on $13$ public TSAD datasets. The results show that the proposed method yields relatively stable anomaly responses, is sensitive to degradation evolution, and demonstrates a certain degree of broader applicability on public TSAD benchmarks and real high-speed-train-related bearing data.

Deep learning models are increasingly central to autonomous vehicle (AV) pipelines, yet their integration has traditionally followed a monolithic design where perception, planning, and control execute on a single onboard computer. This design overlooks the emerging paradigm of cooperative autonomy, where vehicles interact with roadside units (RSUs), edge servers, and cloud-hosted intelligence through vehicle-to-everything (V2X) connectivity. Cooperative perception and control improve safety and efficiency, but also introduce systems-level challenges: network latency, compute heterogeneity, and multi-tenant contention, all critically affect real-time decision-making. These challenges are further amplified by the increasing reliance on large foundation models, whose scale necessitates cloud deployment. We present CADET (Cooperative Autonomy through Distributed Experimentation Toolkit), a modular platform for systematic and reproducible evaluation of distributed cooperative autonomy systems under realistic deployment conditions. CADET decouples the AV stack into composable modules that can be flexibly deployed across vehicles, infrastructure, and edge/cloud tiers. The framework integrates state-of-the-art models, incorporates trace-driven network and workload emulation, and provides synchronized model-, system-, and task-level instrumentation. Through V2V and V2I experiments, we show that distributed deployment choices fundamentally shape safety, with V2V intent packets outperforming cloud-based perception and RSU-assisted perception sustaining safety until overloaded by concurrent requests. Although designed for AV pipelines, CADET also supports dataset-driven experimentation, enabling systems and ML researchers to benchmark distributed inference workloads independently of full vehicle simulation. CADET is open source, with code and demo available at https://nesl.github.io/cadet-web.

As language models increasingly consume one another's outputs, covert influence -- a phenomenon where a sender's payload (the behavioral disposition it is conditioned to propagate) transfers to a receiver through carriers undetectable by humans -- becomes a growing risk. We characterize this risk across three interfaces: supervised fine-tuning, on-policy distillation, and in-context learning, and find that they vary in the scale of influence achievable without leaving behind human-visible traces. Using inference-time per-sample attribution scores, we study covert influence across all three interfaces with the ability to select carriers that amplify training-time influence, unlocking payload transfers that prior work could not achieve. We further provide evidence that covert influence with natural-language carriers is a distinct phenomenon from prior studies using number carriers, as the latter is more resistant to human detection and less portable across model families. Together, these results suggest that the risk surface for covert influence is broader than previously recognized, and we study pointwise attribution scoring methods as a tool to investigate and mitigate it.

Existing privacy analyses for Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) largely inherit assumptions from non-graph settings, overlooking structural correlations and stochastic training-graph sampling. In particular, node-dependent priors make type-I and type-II errors alone insufficient to characterize the best membership inference test. To address this, we introduce Bayesian Membership Privacy (BMP), a sampling-aware formulation of node-level membership privacy that incorporates node-dependent priors and treats graph sampling probabilities as part of the adversary's knowledge. BMP casts membership inference as a Bayesian hypothesis test and accordingly quantifies membership privacy in terms of posterior membership probability. We explore theoretical properties of BMP in relation to the existing definitions in the literature. We further propose a practical, sampling-aware auditing mechanism to estimate the parameters of BMP as a measure of node-level privacy leakage in GNNs. We conduct experiments on benchmark graph datasets and show that BMP yields fine-grained privacy insights that are not visible through global attack accuracy alone.

As LLMs become increasingly woven into everyday workflows, user queries sent to cloud hosted LLMs routinely mix task-essential content with task non-essential sensitive disclosures, yet type based PII redaction is context agnostic and may raise two issues: over disclosing untyped sensitive context and over removing answer bearing spans. We recast privacy preserving query rewriting under Contextual Integrity: a span should be forwarded only if it is necessary for the task. We introduce DelegateCI-Bench, the first task based Contextual Integrity benchmark for privacy-conscious delegation, comprising 3,167 samples that combine high quality synthetic data spanning 11 tasks and 20 task types, WildChat based real user queries, and a medical challenge set with dense sensitive information. Building on this benchmark, we propose a CI-guided reinforcement learning framework that converts essential and non-essential sensitive spans into verifiable optimization signals, and train a query rewriter to preserve task critical information while suppressing unnecessary sensitive disclosure. Experiments show that our learned rewriter achieves the best privacy-utility tradeoff, achieving up to +10.1 average utility over on-device baselines.

Understanding how structural connections are associated with tau propagation in Alzheimer's disease (AD) remains a central open question, yet existing computational models either rely heavily on biophysical assumptions or lack neurobiologically interpretable pathway maps. We present SC-TauPath, a structural connectivity (SC) attribution framework that maps tau propagation pathways from in vivo neuroimaging data. SC-TauPath combines a Network Diffusion Model (NDM)-augmented multilayer perceptron with gradient $\times$ input attribution to score each SC edge's contribution to tau prediction, then translates these attribution scores into multi-scale pathway maps (backbone edges, high-traffic routes, and hub ROIs), which validates established Braak staging anatomy. Applied to 234 ADNI participants with paired DTI SC and 18F-Flortaucipir PET, SC-TauPath achieves strong cross-validated tau prediction and yields attribution-based pathway maps consistent with established Braak staging anatomy, demonstrating that SC encode spatially specific information about regional tau distribution in AD.

We study simultaneous alternating power iteration for fixed-order asymmetric rank-one spiked tensor models. Our main contribution is a finite-iteration local theory that is independent of any particular initialization. Once the iterates enter a sufficiently small neighborhood of the planted rank-one direction, their error decomposes into a geometrically decaying transient and an intrinsic noise floor caused by fixed orthogonal noise contractions at the planted point. The deterministic finite-sample conditions are stated explicitly, but under a coarse fixed-order multilinear noise event they reduce to a conservative high-signal regime for fixed or slowly expanding local radii. We then separate the warm-start mechanism from any specific spectral construction. A generic one-sweep principle shows that, if a sign-compatible initializer has correlation \(γ_N\), first-sweep noise level \(a_N\), and \(a_N/(γ_N^{d-1}ω_{N,d})\to0\), then one can choose an expanding radius \(r_N=o(ω_{N,d})\) for which the first sweep enters the local basin. After entry, the local affine contraction yields convergence to the unique informative local fixed point in that basin. For centered-Gram initialization, we verify the required correlation and same-sample first-sweep noise bound under i.i.d. finite-fourth-moment noise by a signal-preserving noise-only leave-one comparison and an averaged leave-one slice-contraction estimate, which we call a pressed-back estimate. The leave-one comparison keeps the spike fixed and averages over the deleted coordinate, so planted coordinates enter through \(\ell_2\)-weighted sums rather than worst-case incoherence bounds.

Deploying large language models (LLMs) is challenging due to their significant memory and computational requirements. While some methods address this by developing small or tiny language models from scratch, these approaches demand extensive GPU training. Compressing pre-trained LLMs for edge devices offers a compelling alternative. Beyond pruning and quantization, Neural Architecture Search (NAS) enables effective compression, yet prior NAS approaches often limit the search space and decouple architecture from quantization. We introduce a differentiable NAS framework that explores the entire space and jointly optimizes architectural configurations alongside mixed-precision quantization for linear layers of LLMs. Experiments demonstrate superior accuracy-latency trade-offs: our models achieve up to 1.4x faster inference than sequential NAS-then-quantization baselines at comparable accuracy, or up to 6% higher average accuracy across seven reasoning tasks at equivalent latency.

Large-scale web-harvested datasets have fueled the progress of cross-modal retrieval but inevitably suffer from noisy correspondence, which severely degrades model generalization. Existing methods primarily address this by filtering out noise or seeking a substitute label, yet they predominantly remain bound by a "Discrete Selection" paradigm. We argue that relying on a single discrete proxy induces Single-Point Fragility and Discretization Error. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel framework, Intra-modal Neighbor-aware Noise Rectification (IN2R), which shifts the paradigm from searching for a substitute to synthesizing a reliable supervision target. Leveraging the intrinsic geometric stability of intra-modal data, IN2R employs a Graph Refiner to perform relational reasoning over neighbors retrieved from a dynamic Cross-Model Memory. Instead of propagating discrete labels, our method synthesizes a continuous, soft prototype that reflects the consensus of the local semantic neighborhood, effectively rectifying inter-modal misalignment. Extensive experiments on Flickr30K, MS-COCO, and CC152K demonstrate that IN2R significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Our code and pre-trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/liuyyy111/IN2R.

Weakly Incremental Learning for Semantic Segmentation (WILSS) suffers from the continuous introduction of noisy supervision, which progressively corrupts class-level representations, leading to severe feature drift and semantic corruption, thereby causing newly learned classes to overwrite old ones. To address these issues, we propose a drift-resilient WILSS approach, named SASA, designed to stabilize semantic learning via Semantic Anchors and Spatial Arbitration. Specifically, at the representation level, we introduce semantic anchors of learnable tokens as rigid class-level references to preserve long-term semantic identity. Complementary to this, an elastic residual adaptation facilitates controlled, instance-specific refinement, ensuring a stable yet flexible learning trajectory. At the supervision level, we develop a Spatial Label Arbitration mechanism that performs geometry-aware decisions to directly filter unreliable signals and enforce a strict "one object, one class" constraint. By synergistically stabilizing representations and improving supervision reliability, SASA effectively mitigates feature drift under weak supervision. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, particularly in challenging multi-step incremental settings. The code is available at https://github.com/ZhonggaiWang/SASA.

Large language models (LLMs) now generate substantial production code, often for tasks with multiple valid algorithmic solutions. Incidental prompt cues, meaning contextual words or metadata outside the task specification, can steer which algorithm the model selects, even when all outputs pass the same tests. Prompt sensitivity is well studied as a tool to improve output quality. Here, output policy means algorithm choice under fixed correctness. We define algorithm steering as cue-induced shifts in algorithm-family distributions and run 46,535 controlled experiments across 11 tasks, 19 cue types (18 channels plus a memoization semantic-vs-surface ablation that preserves meaning while changing typography and punctuation), and 15 model configurations. We find large, systematic shifts in algorithm-family distributions (up to 100 pp), largely consistent with cue semantics, including in applied tasks such as rate limiting. Direct algorithm naming is the most reliable mitigation we tested. Accidental context therefore creates an "invisible lottery" over performance, security, and maintainability.

The Boolean Task Algebra (BTA) provides a principled framework for zero-shot task composition in reinforcement learning by equipping goal-reaching tasks with Boolean operations. We revisit its structural assumptions and formalize a collapse in the space of optimal extended Q-value functions: in deterministic MDPs, every such function is fully determined by the universal and empty tasks. This makes the logarithmic set of base tasks proposed in the original BTA formulation redundant. Building on this observation, we introduce a goal-set-based composition method that performs logical operations on goal sets and reconstructs composed value functions by selecting slices from the universal and empty value functions. This reduces learning costs for standard BTA and reduces composition time for both BTA and Skill Machines, while preserving policy performance. Experiments across tabular, visual, function-approximation, and continuous-control domains show that learning additional base tasks does not yield better performance. Finally, we study the stochastic setting and provide a counterexample showing that this collapse need not hold, that is, optimal composition may require accounting for exponentially many policies in the number of goals. Code is available at https://github.com/EduardoTerres/bta_paper.

The evolution of LLMs into tool-enabled agents creates a new class of safety challenges associated with real-world execution rather than simple text generation. Existing alignment methods often rely on coarse refusal signals or static supervision, making it difficult to balance safety with useful tool execution across diverse agentic risks. We introduce RUBAS, a rubric-based reinforcement learning framework for agent safety. RUBAS decomposes agent behavior into four dimensions: tool-use safety, argument safety, response safety, and helpfulness. These structured rubrics provide fine-grained and interpretable rewards over complete agent trajectories, enabling reinforcement learning to optimize safe tool use while preserving task completion. Extensive experiments across multiple agent safety benchmarks and models show that RUBAS improves safety over standard alignment baselines, reduces tool-grounded hallucinations, and maintains competitive utility. Our results suggest that multi-dimensional rubric rewards provide an effective training signal for aligning LLM agents in safety-critical tool-use settings.

Existing quantization methods are fundamentally limited by rigid, integer-based bit-widths (e.g., 2, 3-bit), resulting in a ``deployment gap" where Large Language Models cannot be optimally fitted to specific memory budgets. To bridge this gap, we introduce LiftQuant, a novel framework that enables continuous bit-width control for true Pareto-optimal deployment. The core innovation is a ``lift-then-project" mechanism which approximates low-dimensional weight vectors by projecting a simple 1-bit lattice from a higher-dimensional ``lifted" space. Crucially, the effective bit-width is determined simply by the ratio of the lifted dimension to the original dimension, which allows the bit-width to be tuned quasi-continuous as the dimension is a flexible structural parameter. This projection generates a structured yet non-uniform codebook, capturing the expressive power of Vector Quantization (VQ). While beneficial over VQ, LiftQuant's decoding path relies solely on linear transformations and 1-bit uniform quantizers, retaining hardware-friendly nature. This flexibility is transformative: LiftQuant enables a 70B LLM to be compressed to 2.4 bits to precisely fit a 24GB GPU, where its performance significantly surpasses state-of-the-art 2-bit models fitted on the same device. Our code and ckpt is available at https://github.com/Heliulu/LiftQuant.