In this work, we focus on extending SHARP, the popular photorealistic view synthesis method, for universal monocular rendering across a continuum of camera systems, from conventional perspective cameras to wide-field-of-view, fisheye and omnidirectional panoramic settings. To overcome the pinhole-specific assumptions of SHARP, our key idea is to align various images in a unified omnidirectional latent space. Thus, we propose UniSHARP, which performs implicit alignment in both feature and Gaussian spaces. Specifically, Gaussian primitives are arranged along rays and radial distances in a ray-based universal representation, while 2D semantic and 3D spatial features extracted from UniK3D-inspired encoders are jointly decoded to generate the complete Gaussian cloud. To comprehensively evaluate our method, we construct a benchmark covering diverse imaging systems across various scenes. The benchmark is further stratified by field of view (FoV) to enable fine-grained assessment of the universal monocular rendering task. Extensive experiments on the proposed benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of UniSHARP, outperforming alternative methods by a large margin. The project page can be found at: https://insta360-research-team.github.io/Unisharp-website/

Humans learn from social life. Simulating this process with LLM-powered agents represents a promising research direction, raising a natural question: whether LLMs can learn from such simulated social experience to better understand and replicate human behavior. However, prior agent society simulations typically operate at the scale of days, limiting the depth of social interactions and long-term growth. In this paper, we study long-term life simulation and LLM learning in agent societies, with two goals: (1) investigating social behaviors that emerge from life-long simulation, and (2) developing anthropomorphic capabilities in LLMs, particularly intelligence in social life, through years of simulated social experience. Specifically, we present Agentopia, a comprehensive framework for long-term life simulation in multi-agent societies, where 100 agents autonomously pursue personal growth, develop social relationships, and fulfill their needs and goals over 10 simulated years. We define life reward to mirror human well-being, and leverage this reward to train LLMs via rejection sampling. Extensive experiments show that agents exhibit rich emergent social behaviors. Furthermore, life reward training effectively enhances the underlying LLM, which leads to improved agent well-being in simulation, and generalizes to downstream role-playing benchmarks with +15.6% improvement.

We introduce StreamForce, a streaming video generation framework that enables physically grounded control through continuous force inputs. Unlike prior video models that train separate models for different force types, assume fixed forces, or rely on non-causal processing, StreamForce is a causal and unified model that responds instantly and coherently to both local and global, time-varying forces. To achieve this, we design a unified force representation as a control signal and develop a distillation pipeline for force-controllable video generation. Our model combines autoregressive efficiency with force responsiveness, sustaining stable photometric and dynamic realism. StreamForce runs at up to 16.6 FPS on a single GPU, achieving state-of-the-art performance in both force adherence and motion realism. Project website: https://neu-vi.github.io/StreamForce/

The object manipulation capabilities of quadruped robots is an open research challenge. While previous studies have focused on low-level policy learning, task execution still relies on expert-designed high-level trajectories. Autonomous selection of both an affordable interaction point on the target object and an affordable robot base pose removes the need for pre-designed trajectories. This study proposes a three-level hierarchical reinforcement learning (RL) framework that utilizes pose affordances to guide the navigation policy, while the navigation policy drives the locomotion policy. In addition, the pedipulation policy is guided by interaction-point affordances, enabling object-centric pose alignment of the quadruped robot and effective end-effector manipulation planning. We train the proposed framework in the IsaacSim ecosystem and evaluate it in both simulation and real-world settings. We investigate the effectiveness of pose affordance across multiple scenarios in simulation while various object interaction tasks are validated on real-world setting forming an object-interaction dataset. The results show that the proposed framework can autonomously identify candidate poses based on their affordance and successfully execute object manipulation tasks in the real world without human guidance.

We propose Differences in Detection (DnD), an intuitive method to compare two object detection models. Based on the same matching algorithm, it complements the standard metrics of mean Average Precision ($mAP$) and TIDE error analysis with the ability to compare two models directly. More specifically, we calculate the intersection of ground truth labels that are recognized by both models, followed by the corresponding difference sets and the complement set of ground truth labels that are missed by both models. The resulting comparison is more direct and intuitive than a comparison of independent summary statistics. It reveals individual and shared mistakes and becomes particularly interesting when combined with error types. In this case, the differences in detection errors can be analyzed naturally in a standard confusion matrix. While valuable in itself, we believe that one of the best applications of DnD is to guide explainability methods such as ODAM towards metric-relevant examples, grounded in structured subsets. The code for our method is available here: https://github.com/JohannesTheo/differences-in-detection

Large language models exhibit impressive zero-shot capabilities across a wide range of downstream tasks. However, they struggle to function as off-the-shelf embedding models, leading to suboptimal performance on massive text embedding benchmarks. In this paper, we identify a potential cause underlying this deficiency. Our motivation stems from an unexpected observation: text embeddings tend to align with frequent but uninformative tokens when projected onto the vocabulary space. We argue that this excessive expression of high-frequency tokens suppresses the model's ability to capture nuanced semantics. To address this, we introduce EmbedFilter, a simple linear transformation designed to refine text embeddings derived from LLMs directly. Specifically, we uncover that the unembedding matrix within LLMs encodes a latent space that is actively writing these frequent tokens into embedding space. By filtering out this subspace, EmbedFilter suppress the influence of high-frequency tokens, thereby enhancing semantic representations. As a compelling byproduct, this enables an inherent dimensionality reduction, lowering index storage and speedup retrieval while fully preserving the refined embedding quality. Our experiments across multiple LLM backbones demonstrate that LLMs equipped with EmbedFilter achieve superior zero-shot downstream performance even with significantly reduced embedding dimensions. We hope our findings provide deeper insights into the mechanisms of LLM-based representations and inspire more principled designs to improve text embeddings training. Our code is available at https://github.com/CentreChen/EmbFilter.

Continual learning in Large Language Models (LLMs) is hindered by the plasticity-stability dilemma, where acquiring new capabilities often leads to catastrophic forgetting of previous knowledge. Existing methods typically treat parameters uniformly, failing to distinguish between specific task knowledge and shared capabilities. We introduce Mixture of Sparse Experts for Task Agnostic Continual Learning (SETA), a framework that resolves the plasticity-stability conflict through adaptive sparse subspace decomposition into task-specific expert modules. Unlike standard updates, where tasks compete for the same parameters, SETA separates knowledge into unique experts, designed to isolate task-specific patterns, and shared experts, responsible for capturing common features. This structure is maintained through adaptive elastic anchoring and a routing-aware regularization that jointly protect shared knowledge at both the weight and routing levels and enable a unified gating network to automatically retrieve the correct expert combination during inference. Extensive experiments across diverse domain-specific benchmarks demonstrate that SETA achieves competitive or superior overall performance relative to state-of-the-art continual learning baselines, with particularly strong retention of early-task knowledge and improved backward transfer on LLaMA-2 7B and Qwen3-4B.

Scientific observations generate large quantities of unlabeled data which is laborious to hand-label, making unsupervised learning techniques valuable for processing datasets. Among these approaches, contrastive learning provides a convenient mechanism for extracting structural representations from unannotated datasets. For natural imagery, the general approach is to use a variety of data-space augmentation methods in order to generate synthetic samples; however, for scientific observations data-space perturbations can fundamentally alter the underlying data. Our proposed method is to generate contrastive samples by perturbing the network weights rather than the underlying data, thus more closely preserving the structure of the data. We demonstrate this technique using a SimCLR-based pipeline applied over radar observations of meteors, and show performance gains under matched protocols.

Decentralized stochastic optimization is a fundamental paradigm for large-scale learning over networks, where agents communicate only with their neighbors and no central coordinator is required. For strongly convex problems, communication efficiency is mainly determined by the condition number \(κ=L/μ\) and the network spectral gap \(1-β\). Although deterministic decentralized methods can simultaneously achieve accelerated \(\sqrtκ\) and \(1/\sqrt{1-β}\) dependences, no existing stochastic method attains both improvements at once. In this paper, we propose \emph{Multi-Gossip Accelerated DSGD} (MG-ADSGD), a decentralized stochastic algorithm that combines Nesterov-type primal--dual extrapolation with multi-round fast gossip averaging. The key idea is to couple the gossip depth with the mini-batch size so that additional communication rounds simultaneously improve consensus accuracy and reduce gradient variance. We show that MG-ADSGD achieves the communication complexity \[ \widetilde{\mathcal O}\!\left( \frac{σ^2}{μnε}\log\frac{1}ε + \sqrt{\fracκ{1-β}}\log\frac{1}ε \right), \] where \(ε\) denotes the target accuracy, \(n\) is the number of nodes, and \(σ^2\) is the gradient variance. To the best of our knowledge, this bound yields the best currently available communication complexity for decentralized stochastic strongly convex optimization, up to logarithmic factors that are independent of $ε$.

Understanding how training data shape neural network predictions is a central problem in modern learning theory. In 2020, Pedro Domingos proposed an interpolation formula valid for every model learned by deterministic gradient descent. It expresses the model's prediction as an integral, along the optimization path, of a data-dependent kernel that aligns the model's gradients at the test and training data. Such a first-order characterization remains valid for models trained with batch-based stochastic optimization. In this paper, we develop second-order forms of these interpolation formulas. We show that the leading path-kernel interpolation is supplemented by a curvature-weighted interpolation term. For stochastic gradient descent, an additional sampling-induced component appears, coupling the curvature of the prediction with the covariance of mini-batch gradient noise. We also extend the representation to stochastic gradient descent with momentum, where the interpolation structure is preserved but with the weights modified by a memory-related factor. Moreover, we establish a concentration estimate for the terminal prediction, identifying the fluctuation scale around the expected second-order representation. Together, these results provide a refinement of the path-kernel interpretation of neural network prediction.

Recent neural audio codec-based speech generation (CodecFake) produces highly realistic audio, posing a challenge to existing deepfake countermeasure models. While using codec resynthesized speech (CoRS) as proxy data improves performance, it often suffers from limited generalization. We propose Domain-Shift Feature Augmentation (DSFA), which simulates "in-the-wild" variations by transforming deterministic feature statistics into stochastic distributions during fine-tuning. To evaluate generalization, we further introduce Codec-based Speech Generation Extension Evaluation (CoSG ExtEval) dataset, a more challenging extension of the CoSG Eval (from CodecFake+) dataset, featuring 40 unseen generative models and long-form audio. Experimental results demonstrate that combining a post-trained SSL backbone with DSFA effectively narrows the proxy-to-wild domain gap. This approach achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse CodecFake attacks in both CoSG Eval and CoSG ExtEval.

Personalized virtual heart simulations face challenges in model personalization and computational cost. While neural surrogates offer state-of-the-art solutions, they typically address either efficient personalization or training generalizable models. Recent work reframes this by learning the process of personalizing a surrogate using limited subject-specific context data, through few-shot generative modeling with set-conditioned surrogates and meta-learned amortized inference. These methods, however, assume a static and diverse training distribution with known task identifiers. When new data becomes available, they require costly retraining with all prior data to avoid catastrophic forgetting - a phenomena where the model forgets earlier tasks when trained on new ones. This is a major limitation in clinical settings where often unlabeled data arrives sequentially and full retraining is infeasible. This paper presents a new continual meta-learning framework to achieve personalized neural surrogates able to not only continually integrate information but also identify whether incoming data stems from a known or unknown dynamics source. By leveraging a continual Bayesian Gaussian Mixture Model over a memory buffer, our framework can infer the identifiers and relationships of data over time - required for effective meta-learning. Empirical results on synthetic cardiac data demonstrate superior simulation forecasting, computational scalability, and resilience to catastrophic forgetting compared to existing baselines.

Many important outcomes unfold as dynamic cascades, including product adoption, disease spread, financial distress, and information diffusion. A central challenge is to recover the hidden influence network behind these cascades. Existing methods typically assume a specific diffusion model, and their performance degrades substantially when that assumption is misspecified. We propose CascadeNet, a Jacobian-based machine learning framework for network recovery that does not require specifying a diffusion mechanism. The key idea is that the underlying influence structure can be characterized by the Jacobian of the one-step transition function. CascadeNet first constructs a flexible estimator of the transition function, and further applies Neyman-orthogonal debiasing via the Riesz representer, so that the debiased Jacobian is $\sqrt{n}$-consistent and asymptotically normal, enabling formal inference on the network structure. We validate CascadeNet in both a simulation exercise and a real-world empirical application. In simulations, where the data-generating process is known, CascadeNet achieves the highest network recovery accuracy across nine common data-generating processes. In an empirical application to COVID-19 transmission across Spain's 52 provinces, CascadeNet recovers transmission networks that are significantly correlated with the true inter-province mobility network, whereas networks recovered by baseline methods show no significant alignment with the ground truth.

While Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) provides high-fidelity flow fields for optimizing indoor environments, its computational cost limits rapid exploration. To solve this problem generative surrogates offer better distribution modeling than deterministic networks, but iterative sampling is slow. To enable high-quality, single-pass generation, we adapt the novel generative drifting framework to fluid mechanics. We introduce a conditional architecture that performs drifting in a learned VAE latent space and uses label-aware masking to align generated samples with their boundary conditions. Our label-conditioned model matches iterative diffusion in accuracy and flow consistency while running two orders of magnitude faster. Additionally, we propose a spatial-conditioning variant that establishes a promising path towards generalization to unseen geometries. Ultimately, conditional drifting serves as a highly efficient alternative to diffusion based approaches, unlocking real-time CFD surrogates where inference speed is critical.

Turkish idiomatic light verb constructions (LVCs) are challenging for multiword expression processing because they often share the same surface form as fully literal verb-object combinations while functioning as a single, partially idiomatic predicate. We frame Turkish LVC detection as a binary classification task (literal meaning vs. idiomatic meaning) and evaluate on a manually created controlled set (N=147) with matched negatives: out-of-domain random sentences and in-domain literal controls (NLVC), alongside LVC positives. We compare a supervised Turkish encoder baseline (BERTurk with a classifier head) to three instruction-tuned LLMs from different families under zero-shot, one-shot, and few-shot prompting, and analyze how demonstrations shift error profiles. In zero-shot, LLMs perform well on negatives but show very low LVC recall. One-shot prompting sharply improves LVC detection but can induce strong, model-specific biases, leading models to overpredict or underpredict LVCs. A richer few-shot prompt improves calibration and yields robust overall performance for GPT-OSS-20B and Qwen 2.5-14B. Overall, the results highlight substantial prompt sensitivity in Turkish metalinguistic classification: the supervised baseline remains competitive, while prompted LLMs can match or exceed it on LVCs with carefully constructed demonstrations.

Node classification in graph neural networks (GNNs) has been widely applied in various fields of graph analysis. GNNs achieve high-accuracy node classification in homophilous graphs, where nodes with the same class label tend to be connected. However, their performance remains limited in heterophilous graphs, where nodes with different class labels are more likely to be connected. In particular, current GNNs derived from graph convolutional networks cannot capture higher-order class label connectivity, which is frequently observed in real-world heterophilous graphs. To address this issue, we propose a novel classifier, Label Context Classifier (LCC), designed to capture higher-order class label connectivity in directed graphs. LCC estimates the class label of a target node by leveraging label context embeddings that are generated through four distinct types of walks. In addition, our approach allows the integration of LCC and any GNN by adaptively learning their importance. Experimental results demonstrate that GNNs integrated with LCC outperform SOTA methods and the label context embeddings improve the node classification performance in heterophilous directed graphs.

Unsupervised Continual Learning (UCL) aims to enable neural networks to learn sequential tasks without labels or access to past data. A major challenge in this setting is Catastrophic Forgetting, where models forget previously learned tasks upon learning new ones. This challenge is amplified in UCL due to the absence of labels to guide learning and memory retention. Existing mitigation strategies, such as knowledge distillation and replay buffers, often raise memory and privacy concerns. Moreover, current UCL methods largely overlook clustering-specific objectives. To fill this gap, we introduce Unsupervised Continual Clustering (UCC) and propose Forward-Backward Knowledge Distillation for Continual Clustering (FBCC). FBCC employs a continual teacher network with a clustering projector and lightweight task-specific students. Through a dual-phase forward-backward distillation process, the teacher learns new clusters while preserving previously discovered cluster structure without storing past data. FBCC represents a pioneering approach to UCC, demonstrating improved clustering performance across sequential tasks. Experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that FBCC consistently outperforms existing continual learning baselines in clustering accuracy while significantly reducing catastrophic forgetting.

Whisper, a widely adopted ASR model, is known to suffer from hallucinations - coherent transcriptions generated for non-speech audio entirely disconnected from the input. We investigate whether hallucinations can be detected and mitigated through Whisper's internal representations. We extract audio encoder activations and evaluate two representation spaces: raw Whisper activations and Sparse AutoEncoder (SAE) latents. We show that both spaces encode linearly separable hallucination-related information, with discriminative power concentrated in a sparse feature subset and increasing toward deeper encoder layers. We propose two steering strategies: activation-space steering and SAE latent-space steering. SAE-based steering reduces hallucination rate from 72.63% to 14.11% for Whisper small and from 86.88% to 27.33% for Whisper large-v3 on the full non-speech test set, with small WER degradation on speech data, approaching the performance of fine-tuning-based methods.

Monolithic vision-action models represent an emerging paradigm in autonomous driving. However, this architecture produces token sequences that quickly exceed real-time computational budgets when encoding extended temporal context for complex interactions. While approaches like linear transformers and external memory try to make the context lightweight, token compression is most compatible with the architecture as it requires no backbone modifications. Yet existing compression adopts rule-based heuristics like temporal decay, decoupled from planning, risking loss of decision-critical information. We propose COMPACT-VA, a planning-aligned working memory framework built on conditional VQ-VAE, compressing extended context into bounded representations. Compression is conditioned on both historical trajectory and a learned planning intent that the posterior encoder distills from future trajectories during training, while the prior encoder learns to predict it from compressed observations. The compressed memory, concatenated with the predicted latent, feeds the policy for end-to-end optimization, planning with retained decision-critical information. We evaluate on high-signal dynamic scenarios where historical context is most critical for behavior correctness (e.g., stop, yield, or proceed), and accordingly design behavioral metrics. Under comparable token budgets, we achieve $>$6% improvement (68.3%) on success rates with consistent gains across metrics. Ablations validate planning-aligned coupling effectiveness. Closed-loop evaluation confirms that COMPACT-VA maintained general driving performance with 3.3* speedup and 2.7* memory reduction over uncompressed processing.

As foundation models advance and agent scaffolding becomes increasingly sophisticated, agents have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in complex, long-horizon coding tasks and even autonomous experiment execution. Despite their evolution from research assistants into autonomous research agents, these systems still exhibit significant limitations in field sensitivity, research ethics, and nuanced scientific judgment. Consequently, frontier agents remain unable to fully replace human researchers. To bridge this gap, we conceptualize the AARR (Act As a Real Researcher) benchmark series. Unlike existing benchmarks that primarily assess macro-level execution capabilities, AARR focuses on whether agents can emulate the professionalism, thoroughness, and nuanced reasoning that characterize human researchers in granular research scenarios. In this work, we propose AARRI-Bench (Act As a Real Research Intern), the first benchmark in this series. We conduct extensive experiments across frontier models and agentic systems, revealing that even the best-performing configuration (Mini-SWE-Agent with Claude Opus 4.7) achieves only 68.3\% success rate, frequently overlooking subtle yet critical details that are obvious to real human researchers. Our results indicate that developing researcher-like AI requires further exploration of research behavior, rather than merely complex scaffolding. Our data is released at https://github.com/AARR-bench/AARRI-bench.

At commissioning time, Photovoltaic (PV) operators must forecast production before target-site observations are available, limiting the direct use of standard supervised forecasters. This cold-start setting is addressed with a zero-shot pipeline that generates a synthetic production history from plant metadata and meteorological covariates, enabling time-series foundation models (TSFMs) to forecast through inference-time conditioning. Five TSFMs are benchmarked against classical baselines under strict Cold-Start Baseline, Real Feedback, and Self-Forecast Feedback strategies. The evaluation spans $440$ PV sites across four datasets and diverse climate regimes. Covariate-aware foundation models outperform baselines by approximately $1.7-2\times$: TabPFN-TS achieves the lowest error under Real Feedback (MAE $0.514$, RMSE $0.721$ $kWh$ ${kWp}^{-1}$ ${d}^{-1}$), while Chronos-2 is most robust under Self-Forecast Feedback. Performance is largely insensitive to the synthetic-history source, indicating that accuracy is driven more by the availability of plausible temporal context than by the specific generator.

Vision-language models such as CLIP are highly useful for diverse tasks due to their shared image-text embedding space. Despite this, the image and text embeddings are often poorly aligned, affecting downstream performance. Recent work has shown that this can be attributed to an information imbalance: images contain more information than their captions describe. In this work, we propose TEVI, a framework that uses captions as a signal for what to retain from image embeddings. Specifically, we use sparse autoencoders to disentangle image embeddings and train a masking module to selectively reconstruct the embedding based on a given caption. In a controlled setup with synthetic captions, we show that TEVI is effective at preserving caption-described attributes while discarding others. By applying TEVI to CLIP models trained on natural images, we further achieve improved retrieval performance across coarse-grained short-caption (MS COCO, Flickr) and fine-grained long-caption (IIW, DOCCI) benchmarks, with stronger gains on richer captions, and improved robustness on the RoCOCO benchmark.

Sycophancy in language models is typically studied as excessive agreement or validation, while explicit praise and flattery have received comparatively little attention. We argue that sycophantic praise is a distinct alignment problem that cannot be reliably measured using current methods. We introduce a parameterized framework that measures whether praise is excessive relative to contribution quality and expected user ability. We show that our framework substantially outperforms generic LLM judges in agreement with human annotations, and that sycophantic praise occurs far more frequently in social and interpretive domains than in objective reasoning settings. Together, these findings position praise calibration as a distinct alignment challenge.

The ISO 26262 standard defines functional safety for road vehicles through risk assessments based on Severity, Exposure, and Controllability, grounded in a human-driven vehicle paradigm. In the context of autonomous vehicles (AVs), the absence of a human driver necessitates revisiting these principles. This paper decomposes the Controllability placeholder into two auditable evidence dimensions of ISO 26262 by introducing two measurable sub-concepts: Transferability and Predictability. Transferability extends Controllability to capture AV systems' ability to hand off control to dedicated fallback safety mechanisms, while Predictability captures how easily external agents can anticipate AV behavior. Predictability is formally defined from human-robot interaction-inspired principles, and a mathematical framework is provided to quantify it. A designed-versus-achievable gap is introduced to distinguish architectural fallback claims from scene-conditioned achievable fallback capability. The proposed metrics align with ISO 26262 and ISO/PAS 21448 (SOTIF), rendering fallback and interaction claims falsifiable and traceable across ODD slices. These dimensions complement rather than replace existing standards, and the enhancements preserve the structure of ISO 26262 while extending its applicability to driverless automated systems operating at SAE Levels 4 and 5.

Video understanding is being rapidly transformed by multimodal large language models (MLLMs), as research moves from short clips to long, multimodal, and knowledge-intensive video scenarios. These scenarios require models to handle sparse evidence, long-range dependencies, multimodal alignment, and reliable inference under limited computational budgets. This work presents a human-view perspective on LLM-based video understanding, organized around three functional abilities: watching, remembering, and reasoning. Rather than treating video tasks as isolated benchmarks, this view provides a unified structure for analyzing how video MLLMs acquire evidence, preserve context, and produce grounded outputs. We introduce a formulation that characterizes video understanding systems by their perceptual representations, memory states, reasoning traces, and final predictions. Based on this formulation, we identify challenges in spatio-temporal perception, efficient long-video processing, memory modeling, streaming understanding, and faithful reasoning. Representative methods are organized by their roles in video MLLM systems. Watching covers fine-grained, comprehensive, audio-visual, and efficient perception. Remembering includes offline and streaming memory, while reasoning covers text-only reasoning and thinking with videos. We further examine application domains such as egocentric, sports, instructional, medical, and narrative videos, and cover training datasets and evaluation benchmarks across task types, supervision formats, modalities, and capability dimensions. Finally, we outline open problems and future directions for scalable, memory-aware, and evidence-grounded video intelligence. Related works will be continuously traced at https://github.com/marinero4972/Awesome-HumanView-VideoUnderstanding.

A fundamental problem in science is identifying underlying patterns of complex systems in the form of concise mathematical formulas. Current Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based methods have shown strong performance in single-scale systems, yet remain limited in identifying scale-specific formulas in multiscale complex systems. We present Deflex, an end-to-end AI method to automatically extract multiscale formulas with potentially different forms, including invariants and distributions, from complex systems. Deflex consists of two subsystems named Deflexformer and Deflexpressor. Deflexpressor is a lambda-calculus symbolic regression model for higher-order formulas. Deflexformer is a decomposable deep energy model for learning unified representations across scales. Deflexpressor generates synthetic data to pre-train Deflexformer, which then guides formula discovery by decoupling multiscale latent relationships. Across six representative complex systems with diverse behaviors, Deflex achieves up to 7-fold higher efficiency than the state-of-the-art methods while enabling automated multiscale discovery. Our work could be a useful tool for scientific discovery across disciplines.

Designing high-performance legged robots requires jointly optimizing morphology and control. Model-free Reinforcement Learning (RL) offers an alternative to model-predictive control for developing robust controllers without explicitly specifying robot dynamics. Thus, we have seen theuse of RL to train controllers and evaluate designs for robot morphology optimization. While RL has shown success inlocomotion, using it in the co-design inner loop is expensive due to repeated policy training. Universal policies conditioned on morphology offer a promising alternative, but suffer from behavioral diversity collapse, converging to a single strategy that performs sub-optimally across designs. On the other hand, end-to-end Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures fail due to a collapse in its representation. We propose Gaussian Evolutionary Specialists (GES), a framework that decouples design-space partitioning from policy learning to capture diverse behaviors explicitly. GES assigns specialist policies to evolving Gaussian regions and iteratively refines them via training, probing, and territory expansion. The resulting specialists are integrated into a design sampling loop, replacing costly re-training with direct evaluation. When tested on the Buoyancy-Assisted Light Legged Unit (BALLU), GES discovers designs with 5 - 25% higher performance than naive universal policies. On hardware, a GES optimized design overcomes a 24 cm tall obstacle - 3x improvement over the baseline BALLU design. Moreover, GES curtails design optimization time by 37%.

Atmospheric plasma spraying (APS) is a widely used coating process in which in-flight particle temperature and velocity strongly influence coating quality. However, these particle characteristics are difficult to monitor continuously during operation, motivating the development of non-invasive data-driven diagnostic methods. In this work, we investigate the predictive potential of high-speed video observations of the plasma plume for estimating in-flight particle characteristics in APS. We introduce three different video-derived feature representations and evaluate them using Tabular Prior-Data Fitted Networks (TabPFN), convolutional neural networks (CNN), and classical regression baselines including Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, Support Vector Regression, and XGBoost. Experiments are conducted using grouped leave-one-out cross-validation on 126 labeled pre- and post-spray video recordings from 63 APS spray runs. Across the engineered feature experiments, TabPFN achieves the most consistent performance for temperature prediction, reaching R2 = 0.86 using the combined feature representation. CNN models particularly perform stronger for velocity prediction, achieving R2 of 0.81. In addition, we evaluate models operating directly on raw video frames using pretrained CNNs and find that the highest performance is achieved by a pretrained CNN with a regression head with R2 of 0.90 and 0.82 for temperature and velocity, respectively. The results demonstrate that video-derived plume information provides a promising and scalable foundation for non-invasive APS diagnostics and real-time process monitoring.

Sparsity allows scaling model parameters without proportionally increasing computational cost. While mixture of experts (MoE) models are made increasingly sparse, individual experts typically remain large and dense. Here, we demonstrate that further increasing sparsity by shrinking each expert to consist of a single neuron and selecting a tiny fraction of many available neurons can improve compute efficiency and interpretability. Counterintuitively, the key to achieving both is removing the nonlinearity typically applied to the experts, resulting in a network of sparsely gated linear neurons (sgatlin). In an isoflop comparison, we find that replacing all transformer feedforward layers with sgatlin improves perplexity in language models across different compute budgets. At the same time, the sparsity and linearity of the resulting feedforward circuits present new opportunities for model interpretability. In a small-scale case study, we demonstrate that feedforward circuits in sgatlin can be interpreted without having to train additional replacement models. We find that they form semantically structured clusters and are causally implicated in factual recall. Our findings paint a possible path towards compute-efficient and interpretable transformer feedforward layers.

The emergence of "Aha moments" in large language models, particularly DeepSeek-R1-0120, has raised the question of whether these systems genuinely reason or merely imitate the appearance of reasoning. We conduct a comprehensive empirical comparison between model and human reasoning across all 30 problems from AIME 2025, exhaustively annotating 10,247 reasoning steps into five functional categories: Analysis, Inference, Branch, Backtrace, and Reflection. We find a clear structural difference. Human solutions maintain a compact alternation between analysis and deduction, whereas DeepSeek-R1 frequently revisits intermediate results, performs shallow and often unnecessary verification, and loops through local checks without meaningful logical progress. We describe this as topological mimicry: reproducing the surface form of reasoning without its functional role. Despite this, we identify two signals of genuine reasoning. First, successful traces exhibit stable use of branching and backtracking, while failed traces either underuse or overuse exploratory actions. Second, reflection is only effective when placed within deductive inference; reflections trapped in analysis loops focus on local numerical details while missing global logical errors. These findings suggest that current long-CoT models may be rewarded more for the appearance of reasoning than for genuine deductive progress. We discuss directions for improving evaluation and training, including measuring cross-trace stability, penalising "spinning-wheel" traces, encouraging deeper logical correction, and reallocating inference-time compute toward deduction and backtracking. Overall, reasoning quality depends not simply on how much reflection occurs, but on whether reflection appears consistently and at the appropriate logical scale.