Video world models that maintain 3D spatial consistency across generated frames typically rely on explicit point cloud memory constructed in RGB space. This design is both computationally expensive, requiring repeated rendering and VAE encoding, and inherently lossy, as the round trip through pixel space discards rich features of the learned latent representation. In this paper, we introduce \emph{latent spatial memory} for video world models, a persistent 3D cache that stores scene information directly in the diffusion latent space, avoiding pixel-space reconstruction. Building on this, we propose Mirage, a latent-space spatial memory framework that constructs the memory by lifting latent tokens into 3D via depth-guided back-projection and queries it by synthesizing novel views through direct latent-space warping. This unified formulation eliminates both the information loss of pixel-space reconstruction and the computational burden of repeated encoding and rendering. Experiments show that latent spatial memory achieves up to \textbf{10.57}$\times$ faster end-to-end video generation and \textbf{55}$\times$ reduction in memory footprint relative to explicit 3D baselines. Leveraging the geometric prior of the diffusion model, Mirage attains state-of-the-art performance on WorldScore and strong reconstruction quality on RealEstate10K.

Temporal modeling is essential for robotic manipulation, as effective control requires both memory of past interactions and imagination of future states. However, most VLA models rely primarily on the current observation and therefore struggle with long-horizon, temporally dependent tasks. Cognitive science suggests that humans rely on working memory to buffer short-lived context, the hippocampal system to preserve episodic memory of past experience, and internal models to imagine possible future state evolution. Inspired by these mechanisms, we propose MemoryVLA++, a full temporal modeling framework that equips VLA models with memory and imagination for robotic manipulation. A pretrained VLM encodes the current observation into perceptual and cognitive tokens, forming working memory. These tokens query a Perceptual-Cognitive Memory Bank to retrieve relevant historical context. This bank stores low-level details and high-level semantics from past interactions, and is updated through redundancy-aware consolidation. A world model imagines future states in a denoising latent space, and the imagined latents are integrated under memory guidance to form full temporal-aware tokens. The resulting tokens condition a diffusion action expert to predict temporally consistent action sequences. We conduct extensive experiments on 5 simulation benchmarks and 3 categories of real-robot tasks across 3 robots, covering general manipulation, long-horizon temporal tasks, robustness, and generalization. Our method achieves strong performance across Libero, SimplerEnv, Mikasa-Robo, Calvin, Libero-Plus, and diverse real-robot tasks, validating the effectiveness of full temporal modeling with memory and imagination. For example, on real robots, it achieves +9%, +26%, +28% gains on general, memory-dependent, and imagination-dependent tasks. Project Page: https://shihao1895.github.io/MemoryVLA-PP-Web

Vision-language model (VLM) agents are increasingly deployed in interactive game environments. Yet game benchmarks for VLM agents typically report a single first-attempt score per (agent, game) pair, focus on single-agent Solo play, and lack unified protocols for evaluating heterogeneous agent classes (commercial VLMs, open-weight VLMs, and specialized game policies) on the same footing. We address these gaps with OmniGameArena, a real-time benchmark of twelve newly built Unreal Engine 5 games spanning Solo (7), PvP (3), and Coop (2) with unified action interfaces, and the Improvement Dynamics Curve (IDC), an agentic-reflection harness in which a tool-using reflector LLM autonomously refines a bounded skill prompt across multiple rounds. Beyond cold-start leaderboard scores, IDC exposes two additional observables for each (agent, game) pair: how the score evolves across reflection rounds, and how the learned skill behaves on held-out task variants. We report these observables for twelve VLM agents on the cold-start leaderboard and four top agents under IDC.

Training reinforcement learning (RL) policies from scratch is costly: it requires careful reward and environment design, extensive tuning, and substantial computation. Yet many control problems already have a functional but suboptimal policy available as a baseline. This paper proposes a method for embedding such a baseline into the RL training process, simultaneously improving training efficiency relative to from-scratch methods and producing a learning policy that outperforms the baseline. At each step, the method arbitrates between the baseline policy and a trainable learning policy, initially relying strongly on the baseline policy and then progressively transferring agency to the learning policy. By the end of training, the learning policy is a standalone neural network that operates without baseline policy support. The paper formalizes what it means for the baseline policy to be functional: under this policy, the agent reaches a goal set and remains there with high probability. The proposed arbitration mechanism is designed to exploit this property during training, yielding high goal-reaching rates right from the beginning of training. A theoretical analysis provides a formal interpretation of this behavior under stated assumptions and extends it to the final baseline-free regime, where explicit lower bounds are derived for the goal-reaching probability of the standalone learning policy. Empirical results on continuous-control benchmarks show that the proposed method achieves returns that match or exceed those of competitive approaches, while maintaining the highest goal-reaching rates throughout training among the compared methods -- including in the final stage, where the learning policy operates without any baseline support.

Language models, as multi-task learners, acquire a wide range of abilities during training. A fundamental question is how much task-specific data is needed to learn a given task. Answering this for natural language is difficult: tasks are hard to delineate and can confound one another. To rigorously investigate the relationship between data frequency and learnability, we turn to a controlled setting using formal languages induced from probabilistic finite automata. These serve as a methodological testbed to demonstrate that standard correlational evaluation practices are inherently flawed. To enable causal analysis, we introduce the binning semiring, an algebraic object that lets us control how often a targeted property occurs in a sampled corpus. We formulate the experimental pipeline as a causal graphical model and derive decomposed Kullback-Leibler divergence metrics to measure the learnability of specific sub-tasks. Our experiments show that evaluating learnability without causal intervention leads to incorrect conclusions due to confounders in correlational analysis, and serve as a warning about correlational pitfalls in natural-language settings.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a key component of post-training large language models (LLMs). In practice, LLM RL is often off-policy because of training-inference mismatch and policy staleness, making trust-region control essential for stable optimization. Mainstream methods such as PPO and GRPO approximate this control with a ratio-clipping mechanism, but the importance ratio can be a poor proxy for distributional shift in long-tailed vocabularies. Recent work such as DPPO addresses this mismatch by replacing ratio-based clipping with a divergence-based mask, yielding a trust region defined by the sampled token's absolute probability shift. However, DPPO still relies on a hard mask: once a token crosses the trust-region boundary in a harmful direction, its gradient is discarded rather than corrected. To address this, we propose Divergence Regularized Policy Optimization (DRPO), which replaces the hard mask with a smooth advantage-weighted quadratic regularizer on policy shift. DRPO preserves the same trust-region geometry as DPPO while inducing bounded, continuous gradient weights that attenuate diverging updates and provide corrective signals beyond the boundary. Experiments across model scales, architectures, and precision settings show that DRPO improves the stability and efficiency of LLM RL training.

We generalize the universal approximation theorem for functional input neural networks (FNN) to differentiable maps by including the approximation of the derivatives. A FNN maps the input from a possibly infinite-dimensional weighted manifold to the real-valued hidden layer, on which a non-linear scalar activation function is applied, and then returns the output into a Banach space via some linear readouts. By proving a weighted Nachbin theorem, we establish a universal approximation theorem (UAT) for differentiable maps, which goes beyond the usual formulation on compact sets and also includes the approximation of the derivatives. This leads us to approximation results for non-anticipative functionals including the horizontal and vertical derivatives. As a further application, we show that linear functions of the signature are able to approximate path space functionals including their directional derivatives.

Standard diffusion models typically use a single time-homogeneous Gaussian terminal distribution as the reference law for generation. While this choice is analytically convenient and empirically powerful, it provides little explicit structure for data concentrated near low-dimensional manifolds, where different regions of the data distribution may correspond to distinct local geometric or semantic factors. As a result, the reverse model must recover manifold-level structure almost entirely from an unstructured terminal reference distribution. We propose PTL-Diffusion, a proof-of-concept diffusion framework whose forward noising process converges to a nonconstant periodic family of Gaussian terminal laws rather than to a single invariant law. Unlike a phase-conditioned DDPM, where phase information only enters the denoising network while the forward process remains unchanged, PTL-Diffusion embeds phase structure directly into the forward noising dynamics. The proposed construction remains close to standard denoising diffusion models: for a periodically forced Ornstein--Uhlenbeck-type forward process, we derive closed-form forward marginals, the limiting periodic Gaussian terminal family, and explicit Gaussian reverse posteriors, enabling standard noise-prediction training. We also introduce an invariant-average regularization term coupling the phase-conditioned reverse dynamics through the averaged periodic reference law. Experiments on torus and cylinder point-cloud benchmarks and the Olivetti face dataset show that PTL-Diffusion improves manifold-level distributional matching over matched DDPM baselines, reducing phase-conditioned errors, feature-space covariance errors, and nearest-neighbour manifold distances. These results suggest structured terminal reference laws as a promising direction, while motivating more expressive phase constructions and larger-scale evaluations.

Embodied world models have emerged as a pivotal paradigm for visual robotic decision-making and interactive environment simulation. However, conventional embodied frameworks rely on low-dimensional structured action vectors (e.g., joint angles and end-effector poses), which suffer from limited expressive capacity, poor generalization across diverse embodiments, and unnatural dynamic modeling for complex physical interactions. To address these limitations, this paper proposesiMac (Image as Action Control), a novel unified control paradigm that treats raw visual images as native action representations for embodied world models. Departing from traditional explicit kinematic action encoding, iMac formulates continuous visual manipulation as image-based action tokens, which inherently encapsulate spatial motion intentions, interactive geometric constraints and subtle physical dynamics. We construct a dual-branch embodied architecture consisting of an image-action encoder and a dynamic world predictor: the encoder compresses target-driven visual images into compact action embeddings, while the predictor learns environment transition rules conditioned on image actions to achieve high-fidelity future state prediction and closed-loop embodied control. Extensive experiments are conducted on public embodied manipulation benchmarks and real-world robotic scenarios. The results demonstrate that iMac outperforms vector-based action control baselines in prediction accuracy, task success rate and cross-scene generalization ability. Moreover, our image-action design eliminates the reliance on manually defined action spaces, realizing flexible and universal control for heterogeneous embodied agents. This work provides an innovative visual-action perspective for embodied world models, offering a simple yet effective paradigm for scalable robotic perception and manipulation.

World-action models have emerged as a promising paradigm for robot manipulation, jointly modeling visual scene dynamics and actions to inject physical priors into policy learning. However, existing world-action models couple world prediction and action execution at the same temporal resolution, forcing the world branch to model near-term frame variations that are redundant and weakly informative. We posit that strictly binding world prediction and action execution to the same temporal rhythm may underutilize the potential of the video branch for embodied control. Therefore, we propose AHA-WAM, an Asynchronous Horizon-Adaptive World-Action Model built on a dual Diffusion Transformer (DiT) architecture that reorganizes world-action modeling around this temporal asymmetry. AHA-WAM instantiates the video DiT as a low-frequency world planner that maintains rolling key-value memory over past observations and exposes reusable layerwise latent context encoding long-horizon scene evolution, while a high-frequency action DiT executes short action chunks in closed loop by querying this context through layerwise joint attention. To support asynchronous execution, we introduce horizon-adaptive offset training and Observation-Guided Video-Context Routing (OVCR), which together let the action expert exploit long-horizon world context while remaining responsive to real-time execution state without rerunning the video DiT. Experiments on RoboTwin and real-world manipulation tasks show that AHA-WAM achieves state-of-the-art performance without any robot-data pretraining, attaining 92.80% average success on RoboTwin and 78.3% success across 4 real-world tasks, while reaching 24.17 Hz closed-loop control with a 4.59x speedup over Fast-WAM.

We introduce Topological Neural Operators (TNOs), a principled framework for operator learning on cell complexes that lifts neural operators (NOs) from functions on points and/or edges to topological domains. TNOs represent data as features defined on cells of varying dimension and model their interactions through Discrete Exterior Calculus, enabling explicit cross-dimensional coupling via gradient-, curl-, and divergence-type operators. The key design principle is to decouple where information flows, as governed by fixed topological operators, from how it is transformed (which is learned), yielding models that respect the geometric support of physical quantities and expose conservation and compatibility structure. We further propose Hierarchical TNOs (HTNOs), which incorporate learned coarse complexes to propagate long-range and topology-dependent information. Our framework subsumes existing NOs as a special case, providing a unified perspective on operator learning across discretizations. Across a range of PDE benchmarks, including irregular-geometry flow problems, TNOs and HTNOs improve accuracy; controlled studies further isolate the benefits of native higher-rank and topological structure. Project page: https://circle-group.github.io/research/TNO

We present \textbf{Echo-Memory}, a controlled study of memory mechanisms in action-conditioned world models. These models generate multi-segment videos from a first frame, text prompt, and camera-action sequence, but their central failure is often memory rather than local image synthesis: after the camera leaves and returns, the scene or salient object may silently change. Existing memory designs are hard to compare because gains are entangled with backbone, training, retrieval, and evaluation differences. Echo-Memory fixes the action-to-video interface and varies only how history is stored and read by the generator. Under a shared video diffusion backbone, optimizer, camera-action representation, sampler, and evaluation pipeline, we compare raw context, compression-based memory, spatial summaries with different read-out paths, and state-space recurrence. This matched matrix separates four otherwise conflated axes: \emph{capacity}, \emph{compression}, \emph{read-out}, and \emph{recurrence}. We also evaluate memory through a three-branch protocol: replay quality, in-domain loop revisit, and open-domain return probes. The branches routinely disagree, showing that replay fidelity is not a sufficient proxy for remembering a world. Three findings follow. Raw context is a strong capacity baseline and improves open-domain return far more than it improves replay metrics. Compactness is not a free substitute for capacity: aggressive spatial and hybrid-compression memories lose the salient evidence needed for return. Finally, block-wise state-space recurrence is the strongest open-domain return mechanism in our matrix, showing that the structure of implicit memory matters as much as the decision to use it. These results provide a compact protocol for studying memory in action world models beyond isolated replay metrics.

We consider a variant of the linear contextual stochastic multi-armed bandits, where the learner must provide recommendations to a group of users, each having its personalized preference vector, and in the presence of context distributions that are drifting over time. Under practitioner-friendly assumptions, we reduce this setting to linear bandit with stationary mean but heteroskedastic and non-stationary noise. We further study the case when the learner must ensure the mean reward of each decision must exceed that of a baseline strategy $\boldsymbolπ_0$ at each decision step. We introduce Dri-MED, an algorithm inspired from the linear version of the MED strategy, and carefully adapted to handle the non-stationary heteroskedastic noise. We show that the instance-dependent regret scales as $\tilde{\mathcal O}\left(\fracκ{\tildeΔ}d^2(\log(T)\right)$, where $\tildeΔ$ is the constraint-aware sub-optimality gap subject to policy $π_0$, with variance-aware multiplicative term $κ$ that we carefully handle using heteroskedastic regression. We further show Dri-MED enjoys $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(d)$ expected constraint violations. Our numerical results suggest that Dri-MED significantly outperforms conservative baselines that ignores the drift and preference structure.

For graphs $F$ and $H$, the generalized Turán number $\mathrm{ex}(n,F,H)$ denotes the maximum number of copies of $F$ in an $H$-free graph on $n$ vertices. We prove that if $s\in \{2,3\}$, $s< a\leq b$ and $t$ is sufficiently large, then $\mathrm{ex}(n,K_{a,b},K_{s,t})=Θ(n^s)$. The $s=2$, $a=b=3$ case of this result answers a question of Spiro. Proving another conjecture of Spiro, we show that for every graph $F$ with at least one edge, there exist infinitely many real numbers $r$ such that $\mathrm{ex}(n,F,H)=Θ(n^r)$ holds for some graph $H$.

Multi-agent code generation offers a promising paradigm for autonomous software development by simulating the human software engineering lifecycle. However, system reliability remains hindered by LLM hallucinations and error propagation across interacting agents. While semantic entropy provides a principled way to quantify uncertainty without ground-truth answers, current methods often rely on costly LLM-driven equivalence checks. In this work, we introduce Fast Adaptive Semantic Entropy (FASE), a novel metric that approximates functional correctness based on the minimum spanning tree of structural and semantic dissimilarity graphs. Evaluations on HumanEval and BigCodeBench demonstrate that FASE outperforms state-of-the-art semantic entropy by LLM entailment, achieving a 25% average improvement in Spearman correlation and a 19% increase in ROCAUC score against Pass@1 from ground-truth test cases when using the Qwen3-Embedding-8B model. Furthermore, by eliminating costly LLM-driven equivalence evaluation, FASE incurs negligible computational overhead, requiring only approximately 0.3% of the runtime cost of traditional semantic entropy approaches. These results position FASE as a practical, cost-effective solution for optimizing uncertainty quantification in real-world multi-agent workflows.

Human hand-object interactions encode functional intent, but direct transfer to robotic hands often fails under morphology, contact, and reachability constraints. We present SynManDex, a synthetic pipeline that uses generated human pre-grasps as affordance-aware proposals and resolves the final contacts with robot-native optimization. SynManDex samples object-conditioned digital human pre-grasps, retargets them to dexterous robotic hand poses, optimizes force-closure contacts on the target embodiment, and admits trajectories that pass checks from each step. The resulting keyframes support both grasp-and-lift demonstrations and various prehensile manipulation tasks such as tea pouring, photo taking, and flute playing, designed via VLM agents. As a result, SynManDex combines high grasp quality (86.4\% grasp stability) with 4.67/5 human-likeness (93.4\%). It achieves 80.7\% successes in simulation and 25/30 (83.3\%) real-robot successes when applied to a 36-DOF bimanual dexterous robotic platform.

Dedekind's problem counts monotone Boolean functions, equivalently downsets of a Boolean lattice. We recast this enumeration as a finite layer-ratio reconstruction problem for the Whitney numbers of the ranked ideal lattice. An exact adjacent-layer double count expresses each layer ratio through local averages of the number of addable elements and the number of removable elements. Reversible fixed-layer Markov chains estimate these averages and hence estimate the Dedekind number M(n). Backtests at M(8) and M(9) calibrate seed-level variability under the fixed protocol and measure the observed Monte Carlo budget scaling. The resulting estimate probes the Whitney-number sequence of the ideal lattice. Although these rows have previously been described empirically as unimodal, the high-precision n=9 estimate has a shallow two-shoulder feature around the central rank, contrary to that empirical description; n=11 and n=13 center-window estimates show a larger-contrast analogous pattern. The protocol estimate for M(10) is \[ \widehat M(10)=(8.9360\pm0.0010)\times 10^{78}, \] where the displayed uncertainty is the budget-based forecast scale from the cross-n scaling law under the production budget.

View-dependent appearance modeling remains a challenging problem in novel-view synthesis and reconstruction. Accurately representing complex angular effects often requires substantial memory and computational resources. For new learning-based methods, a common approach is to rely on SH. However, capturing high-frequency phenomena such as specular reflections demands high-order expansions, which increase memory usage and computational cost. Consequently, most methods employ low-order SH, which limits the ability to model complex view-dependent effects, resulting in overly smooth or diffuse representations. To address these limitations, we systematically evaluate a wide range of spherical functions in the context of scene reconstruction. Some of them are introduced to graphics and computer vision for the first time in this paper. Based on the insights from the experiment, we develop a novel spherical formulation, the Normalized Anisotropic Spherical Gabor function that enables efficient modeling and learning of high-frequency appearance effects while maintaining compact representation. Compared to existing approaches, our function achieves higher-quality reconstruction of view-dependent phenomena such as glints, while being up to five times more memory-efficient and more efficient to evaluate. We validate its performance in radiance-field reconstruction tasks.

End-to-end co-optimization of optical front-ends (e.g. metasurfaces) and neural network back-ends has been widely applied to imaging tasks, yet a formalism characterizing when and why such systems outperform conventional lens-based imaging is largely lacking. This paper focuses on object classification, a central imaging task, and asks when end-to-end optimization of a phase mask for incoherent imaging improves performance over a conventional focusing lens. We find that these gains arise primarily under constrained detector readout and are limited under full detector readout. In the latter setting, we prove that no incoherent phase mask exceeds the ideal-channel mutual information between detector measurements and class labels; a conventional focusing lens approaches this ceiling, and joint optimization yields no empirical gain. When detector readout is constrained -- by coarse spatial sampling or a limited number of measurements -- optimized optics can substantially improve classification by increasing class separability in the detector measurements. These gains are largest under low detector noise and shrink as noise grows, because the optics shape the signal before it reaches the detector but cannot remove noise added afterward. The advantage also depends on the spectral structure of the task: co-design helps most when class-discriminative content is concentrated at lower spatial frequencies than within-class variation. We develop a theoretical framework formalizing these distinctions and test its predictions on synthetic data and standard benchmarks (MNIST, FashionMNIST, SVHN).

Clinical artificial intelligence (AI) systems routinely produce predictions without principled quantification of uncertainty, limiting their trustworthiness in high-stakes medical environments. This paper presents an integrated research programme addressing two interconnected problems: (1) the development of a fully end-to-end Bayesian uncertainty modelling framework for multimodal clinical data, and (2) the application of calibrated uncertainty estimates as a formal measure of algorithmic equity across patient subgroups. We construct a probabilistic deep learning architecture comprising modality-specific variational encoders, a precision-weighted late fusion mechanism, and a decomposed uncertainty output head that separates aleatoric from epistemic uncertainty. The system is trained with a composite Bayesian loss incorporating binary cross-entropy, Kullback-Leibler divergence regularisation, and an uncertainty calibration penalty. We evaluate model calibration using Expected Calibration Error (ECE = 0.096) and conduct a subgroup equity audit across facility type, socioeconomic status, age group, and biological sex on a dataset of 1,000 simulated patients. Results demonstrate that epistemic uncertainty systematically identifies underserved populations: primary/rural facility patients show a 15.3% uncertainty equity gap (p < 0.001, effect size = 0.698), low socioeconomic status patients exhibit a 6.8% gap (p < 0.001), and elderly patients show a 3.9% gap (p < 0.001), whilst no significant sex-based disparity is detected. These findings establish that calibrated uncertainty is not merely a technical property of probabilistic models but constitutes an actionable equity signal with direct clinical relevance.

Large-scale document processing requires contextually aware table extraction (TE) that is both accurate and efficient. Yet current approaches require billions of parameters, hundreds of autoregressive steps, or costly API inference. Motivated by this, we introduce the Page-Object Table Transformer (POTATR), a lightweight 29M parameter image-to-graph model that extends the Table Transformer (TATR) for contextualized page-level TE. POTATR outperforms all models tested on the PubTables-v2 Single Pages benchmark -- including frontier MLLMs -- achieving $\textrm{GriTS}_\textrm{Con}$ of 0.964 while running over 130$\times$ faster at roughly 300$\times$ lower cost. Further, POTATR's output is spatially grounded: every recognized element has a bounding box, enabling visual verification and geometric text assignment. As a result, POTATR performs unified page-level TE while composing with other models, enabling extension to scanned documents via external OCR and to full-document TE via techniques like cross-page merging. Code and models will be released.

The Cloud-Edge Continuum (CEC) enables latency-critical applications by distributing resources to the far edge, but its extreme volatility makes proactive Zero Touch Management via time-series forecasting essential. However, orchestrators face a severe "cold start" problem: newly discovered nodes lack the historical data required to train localized predictive models, while generalized models fail to capture unique hardware and microservice behaviors. To solve this, we propose a fully automated time-series prediction architecture driven by a novel data-mixing methodology. At the infrastructure level, we introduce a lightweight, technology-agnostic Resource Exposer (RE) that dynamically discovers nodes and continuously collects customizable telemetry (e.g., compute, network, energy). To overcome the sparsity of these initial local samples, our framework automatically merges them with TimeTrack, our publicly available, high-resolution dataset collected at 45-second intervals. This synergizes TimeTrack's foundational, high-frequency temporal patterns with the precise calibration of the local node data. Processed through a Neural Architecture Search (NAS) engine, the system automatically generates highly accurate baseline models. Experimental results demonstrate that merging the target data with TimeTrack effectively mitigates the cold start challenge. This integration significantly improves forecasting accuracy measured in Mean Squared Error (MSE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE), and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) and accelerates convergence compared to training on the sparse local samples alone, training solely on generic datasets, or mixing the target data with standard alternative datasets, establishing a robust foundation for continuous MLOps deployment.

A biclique decomposition of a graph is a partition of its edges into complete bipartite subgraphs. We consider graphs whose vertices can be ordered such that the neighborhood of every vertex is the union of a sublinear number of intervals. We observe that these graphs admit compact representations in the form of biclique decompositions of small size. Here, the size of a decomposition is measured as the sum of the number of vertices of its bicliques. Combining this result with the existence of suitable vertex orderings for graphs of low neighborhood complexity, as proven by Welzl in 1988, we recover and extend several known results up to logarithmic factors. These results include upper bounds on the Zarankiewicz problem, matrix multiplication, quantum circuit complexity, and shortest path algorithms in ``well-structured'' instances.

Many web-based visualizations are deployed as Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), a format that faithfully preserves visual appearance but typically omits the higher-level semantic structure needed for machine interpretation. Once rendered and published, information about a visualization's components, roles, and encodings is no longer explicitly available, limiting downstream operations such as querying, accessibility augmentation, explanation, personalization, and transformation. To address this gap, we introduce CSL, an AI-enabled, multi-stage pipeline for automatically recovering visualization semantics from deployed SVGs through two complementary mechanisms: (1) cohort-based decomposition, which organizes heterogeneous SVG primitives into structurally coherent subsets that reduce the semantic assignment space, and (2) hybrid semantic grounding, which combines model-based inference with deterministic structural validation and propagation to make labeling both context-sensitive and structurally anchored. CSL produces Semantic SVG (SSVG), a representation in which SVG elements are annotated with graphical mark type, visualization role, and data role. We implemented CSL as an end-to-end prototype and evaluated it on 102 SVG visualizations, achieving global macro-averaged accuracies of 0.822 for mark type, 0.853 for visualization role, and 0.860 for data-role recovery. An ablation against a non-cohort whole-chart baseline showed that cohorting significantly improves accuracy (paired t-test: t > 20, p < 0.001; Cohen's d > 2.0), and repeated labeling of a randomly selected SVG over 100 runs yielded mean agreement above 91.9% across all three attributes. These results provide strong evidence that CSL can transform deployed SVGs into machine-usable semantic representations, enabling more accessible, adaptive, and user-steerable visualization systems.

This study addresses the challenges composers and sound designers face in creating and refining tools to achieve their musical goals. Using evolutionary processes to promote diversity and foster serendipitous discoveries, we automate the search through uncharted sonic spaces for sound discovery, arguing that diversity-promoting algorithms can bridge the gap between the theoretical realisation and practical accessibility of sounds. We describe a system for generative sound synthesis combining Quality Diversity (QD) algorithms with a supervised discriminative model, inspired by the Innovation Engine algorithm, and explore different configurations and the interplay between the chosen synthesis approach and the discriminative model. We examine the interaction between Compositional Pattern Producing Networks (CPPNs) and Digital Signal Processing (DSP) graphs, introducing a novel approach that uses multiple specialised CPPNs for different frequency ranges; this yields simpler networks while maintaining performance comparable to single-CPPN setups. We also investigate evolutionary stepping stones by analysing goal switches between musical and non-musical contexts, revealing how lineages traverse unlikely paths to current elites. Expanding the behaviour space of a previous study to include various sound durations, we uncover specialisation within temporal niches. Results indicate that CPPN and DSP graphs coupled with a Multi-dimensional Archive of Phenotypic Elites (MAP-Elites) and a deep learning classifier can generate a substantial variety of synthetic sounds, diverse and innovative across temporal and contextual dimensions. We present the generated sound objects through an online explorer and as rendered sound files, and, in the context of music composition, an experimental application that showcases their creative potential across various durations and contexts.

Hard safety filters are increasingly placed downstream of learned controllers to guarantee constraint satisfaction at run time. Yet a filtered controller that never violates a constraint may still have learned nothing about safety: the filter can silently repair an incompetent upstream policy, so that post-filter success measures the filter, not the policy. We argue that safe policy learning should ask who earns the safety - the policy or its protective layers - and we make this question measurable. We introduce Intervention-Aware Variational Quantum Differentiable Predictive Control (IA-VQC-DPC), which (i) trains a compact variational quantum circuit (VQC) policy under a primal-dual intervention budget that penalizes reliance on a differentiable Control-Barrier-Function (CBF) projection, and (ii) is evaluated with a safety-attribution protocol that decomposes the executed-trajectory correction into a CBF term and a deployment runtime-guard term, and stress-tests the policy with guard-off evaluation. On closed-loop, high-fidelity BOPTEST building-control emulators (5 seeds, 60 episodes per method), intervention-aware training significantly lowers the quantum policy's raw pre-filter violation and total safety-layer reliance (both p < 10^-4) with no significant energy regression; at an equal approximately 400-parameter budget the quantum policy is significantly safer and more comfortable than a matched classical policy. Guard-off evaluation confirms the improvement is policy-level and exposes a valuable negative result: a learned differentiable energy head is only safe when paired with a distribution-aware runtime guard. The attribution protocol is general beyond quantum policies and buildings.

Force and tactile sensing are indispensable in contact-rich manipulation. However, force-aware robot learning faces critical challenges due to the incompatible assembly of tactile and force sensors in handheld or wearable devices. To address these limitations, we first introduce AetheRock for gripper-force, vision, and tactile data collection, which is an arm-worn device featuring a modular and easily manufactured visuo-tactile sensor, GelSlim-MiniFab, at the fingertip, a resistive pressure sensor at the human finger contact region, a customized PCB module, and a wearable kit for comfortable and robust collection. Building on this, we propose ForceVT, a representation learning framework that uses force and vision to guide fidelity-agnostic tactile learning, enabling robust inference in any tactile situation. Real-world experiments show that AetheRock achieves qualified data efficiency and that ForceVT effectively alleviates inefficiencies when visuo-tactile sensors exhibit manufacturing and utilization inconsistencies. Overall, our work mitigates the limitations of gripper-force vision-tactile robot learning through innovative hardware design and algorithms.

Advanced scientific simulators expose specialized input languages that turn simulation goals into executable configurations, but learning them can cost domain scientists hours to days. We study simulator setup as a problem of agent-tool interface grounding: what minimal simulator-specific adaptations are needed for an off-the-shelf coding agent to operate real scientific software? Our intuition is that coding agents already know how to navigate files, edit code, run commands, and repair outputs, but they lack the simulator's executable contract: its vocabulary, structural constraints, validation rules, and termination conditions. We introduce SIGA, a Simulator-Interface Grounding Adapter that supplies this contract through retrieval, procedural memory, in-trajectory validation, and validation-enforced termination. We primarily evaluate SIGA on GEOS, an open-source multiphysics simulator used in subsurface science. SIGA produces a complete GEOS deck in about five minutes with TreeSim above 0.90, matching an extended-budget human expert who took about three hours, a roughly 36x wall-clock speedup. On a harder held-out set, grounding raises TreeSim from 0.720 to 0.789, a roughly 10% relative gain over the bare agent, and can reduce the across-seed standard deviation by 16x. Self-evolution further improves SIGA by rewriting adapter contents from prior trajectories, yielding the highest held-out GEOS mean and matching or outperforming the strongest hand-designed configuration. Transfers to OpenFOAM and LAMMPS show that the dominant mechanism shifts by interface: validation matters most when structural completeness is the bottleneck, while memory and retrieval matter most when domain correctness is the bottleneck. These results suggest that lightweight, self-improvable grounding layers can turn general coding agents into practical operators of scientific software.

Semantic change detection (SCD) aims to simultaneously locate land-cover changes and identify semantic categories before and after transition. However, existing methods suffer from insufficient cross-temporal alignment, weak multi-scale representation, and poor robustness to pseudo-changes caused by illumination, season, and registration noise. To address these issues, we propose a novel end-to-end semantic change detection network named SemDINO, which integrates a dual-branch encoder, multi-scale temporal interaction, semantic purification, change enhancement, and decoupled multi-task prediction into a unified framework. Specifically, we construct a dual-branch encoder that combines a CNN backbone and frozen DINOv3 features via gated pyramid fusion, enabling rich multi-scale semantic representation. Then, a multi-scale temporal bidirectional transformer interaction (M-TBTT) module is proposed to achieve global cross-temporal feature alignment and information interaction. To further enhance genuine changes and suppress pseudo-variations, we introduce semantic purification (SCP), bidirectional change enhancement (BiChangeEnhance), and multi-scale change enhancement (MCE) modules collaboratively. Finally, a multi-branch CD prediction head is designed to jointly output binary change mask, bi-temporal semantic maps, and edge constraint. Extensive experiments on public remote sensing CD datasets demonstrate that SemDINO achieves superior performance and generalization ability against state-of-the-art methods, especially in complex scenarios with interference factors.

Nearby neurons in cortex share similar response profiles, producing systematic spatial organization across sensory and cognitive systems. Recent topographic models reproduce aspects of this structure but remain unimodal and spatially constrain each layer separately, yielding fragmented maps that capture neither the contiguity of cortical processing streams nor their integration across modalities. We introduce Topo-Omni, a topographic multimodal model in which visual, auditory, and language/cognitive processing share a single contiguous in-silico sheet. Built by fine-tuning a pretrained foundation model with a spatial smoothness objective, this architecture develops clusters across modalities that are consistent with human neuroimaging, from sensory to cognitive systems. Driving or suppressing a cluster selectively biases or impairs perception, paralleling human intervention studies. Finally, we use our model to screen for novel clusters in-silico and discover new natural landscape and animal networks which we validate in human data. A single spatial principle thus organizes representations across modalities and processing stages, yielding testable hypotheses about cortical organization.