I discuss some quantitative representations of Promise Theory for processes involving autonomous agents. Agent models are common in software systems, machine learning, and biology, for example, but may also apply to physics and other forms of engineering. I describe how Bayesian probability and information theoretic optimization, including Active Inference, may be incorporated with promise semantics -- as well as how Promise Theory supplements solutions, helping to avoid probability's pitfalls, which include non-local coordination, calibrating, and normalizing probabilistic computations. The role of boundary conditions in constraining allowed states and selecting decision thresholds is a form of promise, and agent alignment provides a scalable definition of intent. Autonomous agents may congeal into swarms with superagent characteristics by trying to minimize their information, despite uncertainty that works to maximize it. The use of Promise Theory involves some research challenges as well as stylistic preferences.

Recent progress in robot manipulation has been largely driven by learning from large-scale demonstrations. For humanoid robot loco-manipulation tasks, however, existing data sources force an unsatisfying tradeoff between trajectory quality and scalability. Real-world teleoperation provides the highest-quality trajectories but requires dedicated physical space and time-consuming scene resets. Simulation offers an alternative way out of this dilemma: it can produce clean, embodiment-aligned data at scale without any physical hardware. In this paper, we propose OASIS, a simulation-data-driven framework for humanoid loco-manipulation. OASIS automatically reconstructs realistic object assets from real-world images using a 3D generative model. Based on these assets, trajectories are first collected through teleoperation in simulation, and then augmented under diverse domain randomizations in a post-processing stage. With the resulting simulation data, we further design a hierarchical visuomotor policy for humanoid loco-manipulation. Extensive experiments on the real humanoid robot show that, under zero-shot deployment, the policy trained on our simulation data achieves higher success rates on most tasks than that trained on real-robot teleoperation data, owing largely to the broad lighting and environmental variations covered by our simulation rendering, which real-robot data fails to capture. The project page is available at https://oasis-humanoid.github.io/.

Building Information Modeling (BIM) projects require information requirements to be described as machine-checkable Information Delivery Specification (IDS) files in order to verify whether building models contain the required attributes. However, IDS authoring remains a practical bottleneck: practitioners must handle domain vocabulary, strict XML schema constraints, and external validator conformance while also checking whether the requirement itself is correctly expressed. We present Ishigaki-IDS, an open-weight LLM specialized for verifier-aware IDS draft generation. The model combines continued pretraining on BIM/IDS corpora, supervised fine-tuning on information-requirement-to-IDS pairs, and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards from an external validator. The goal is not to replace expert review, but to move IDS authoring from low-level XML and schema repair toward validator-loadable drafts that practitioners can inspect and correct. On the 166-case expert-created Ishigaki-IDS-Bench, Ishigaki-IDS-8B achieves an IDSAuditPass score of 0.651, a validator-pass metric for generated IDS files, substantially outperforming Claude Opus 4.5, the strongest single-shot LLM baseline we evaluated, at 0.331. It also obtains an Audit-Gated FacetF1 of 0.282, which measures requirement-facet alignment among validator-passing drafts. The same recipe scales: 14B and 32B variants reach IDSAuditPass 0.753 / 0.693 and Audit-Gated FacetF1 0.392 / 0.369. In a workflow check with six BIM practitioners, Ishigaki-assisted authoring reduced aggregate work time by 54.7% under the same validation and alignment endpoint. These results suggest that verifier-aware IDS generation can reduce the practical burden of converting BIM information requirements into reviewable IDS drafts.

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) improves large language model reasoning but often suffers from rapid policy-entropy collapse, where the policy prematurely concentrates on narrow high-probability reasoning paths. While global entropy regularization can encourage exploration, uniformly increasing entropy across all token positions is inefficient for long reasoning trajectories, where many tokens are not decision-relevant. We propose Position-Aware Entropy Calibration (PAEC), a token-level entropy-management framework that constructs a soft mask from local top-p entropy and top-two candidate competition, and applies an anchor-based lower-bound penalty to prevent selected-position entropy collapse. Experiments on five mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that PAEC improves macro-average majority-vote performance over strong RLVR baselines, with clear gains on AIME-style tasks. Our results suggest that entropy management in reasoning RL should be formulated as selective exploration allocation over decision-sensitive positions rather than uniform randomness injection.

Exploratory manipulation often turns an apparent failed attempt into the key evidence for what to do next. For example, a robot pulls a locked cabinet drawer, fails, and only succeeds after opening the lock. The failed pull reveals a latent precondition (the drawer is locked) that determines the minimal-success action chain (the fewest actions that complete the task), here [lock-open, drawer-pull]. Correctly reading this trace is therefore the prerequisite for recovering that chain. We formalize this setting as Exploratory Manipulation Trace QA (EMT-QA): given synchronized video and proprioception from an exploratory trace, predict the minimal-success action chain under the latent precondition revealed by the probe. However, even state-of-the-art VLMs and embodied multimodal LLMs misread this evidence: they do not reliably recover the chain from raw video, raw proprioception, or their combination. We introduce Closed-Loop Trace Distillation, a pipeline that uses a per-task coding agent to inspect labeled training traces and distill a one-line natural-language prompt over the trace, which we call the Distilled Reading Heuristic (DRH). At inference, no agent is invoked and no model weights are updated; a frozen VLM receives the raw trace plus the DRH as a prompt entry. Across three simulator and two real-robot tasks, the DRH improves chain accuracy by +0.38 to +0.47 over the best raw-modality baseline. The same DRH also serves as the sole specification for one-shot programmatic classifiers that match the prompted VLM.

AI agents increasingly take consequential actions -- shell commands, cloud operations, and arbitrary tool-calls -- so a trust layer must decide, per action, whether to allow, warn, block, or escalate. We argue that the right way to reason about such a layer is by threat type. Lexical (fixed-signature) threats, where danger lives in a stable token, are decidable by deterministic rules; semantic (intent-dependent) threats, where a benign and a malicious action share the same surface, are out of reach for rules by construction. We make this concrete with a negative proof: a determined, hand-authored cloud rule pack lifts held-out accuracy only 48 to 56% overall and moves the semantic categories by 0pp (data_db 29 to 29, observability 59 to 59, supply_chain 50 to 50), while a strong LLM judge carries exactly those categories. We give the judge a self-learning capability: on a corpus that is mainly semantic attacks it nearly doubles rule accuracy (48% to 83.6-85.2%) with near-zero false-blocks, and this holds across two model providers. We turn this into a self-improving dual-store system: the judge distills a growing deterministic rule floor on lexical threats (cheaper over time) and feeds a guarded RAG memory on semantic threats (a verdict-cache fails -- surface-twins collapse to ~58% -- so a corroboration guard lifts semantic accuracy +13pp, 70 to 84). The result is what sets AgentTrust v2 apart from its static v1 predecessor: a trust layer that self-evolves from its own stream of decisions -- cheaper on the lexical class (it distils its own rules) and smarter on the semantic class (it accrues guarded precedent), while never hard-blocking a benign action. An end-to-end online replay shows the judge-call rate falling (50% to 44%) and judge-domain accuracy rising (71% to 80%), with 0 benign hard-blocks across 45,000 actions.

Routine laboratory panels drawn during cancer treatment constitute longitudinal physiological recordings of organ function, yet their temporal structure is discarded by single-timepoint prognostic tools. A transformer trained on 2,777,595 laboratory measurements from 3,905 patients with multiple myeloma or ovarian cancer predicted the two-year onset of 162 treatment-associated complications, including therapy-related myelodysplastic syndromes, spanning eight clinical categories, achieving 1.5- to 6.1-fold enrichment above prevalence at the group level. It matched or outperformed non-sequential baselines across grouped endpoints (AUROC gains up to +0.11), demonstrating that longitudinal laboratory trajectories capture evolving complication-specific physiology inaccessible from isolated measurements. Predictions generalised across both cancers, divergence concentrating in disease-specific complications, and biomarker masking recovered signatures consistent with established pathophysiology. External validation on MIMIC-IV and MMRF CoMMpass confirmed transferability across independent healthcare systems (AUROC up to 0.85). Routine oncological laboratory data encode organ deterioration weeks to months before clinical onset, enabling complication-specific surveillance without additional testing infrastructure.

Remote sensing applications for environmental monitoring and disaster management are frequently constrained by a spatial--temporal trade-off: imagery with fine spatial detail is often acquired less frequently, whereas more temporally available observations are typically coarser. Single-image super-resolution provides a practical means to enhance coarse imagery without changing acquisition schedules, yet many Transformer-based SR models remain computationally expensive and can be sensitive to limited or geographically biased training data, which degrades robustness under out-of-distribution conditions. This paper presents NGram-MoSE, a lightweight Transformer architecture designed to improve both efficiency and texture continuity. NGram-MoSE introduces N-Gram Context Injection to strengthen cross-window local consistency and mitigate window-boundary artifacts, and incorporates a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) feed-forward design to scale capacity through sparse activation without proportional growth in inference cost. Experiments on a geographically disjoint OOD test set show that NGram-MoSE achieves 31.68\,dB PSNR while reducing FLOPs by \(14\times\) relative to a heavyweight Transformer reference. Downstream evaluation on a landslide segmentation benchmark further demonstrates that restoring degraded inputs to the detector training scale improves performance, yielding a 4.47\% absolute gain in mAP@50 over bicubic upsampling, and exhibits stronger cross-scale consistency under scale extrapolation. These results indicate that NGram-MoSE provides an effective SR module for resource-constrained remote sensing pipelines requiring robust generalization.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly being deployed in logistics, service robotics, and other real-world applications, creating a growing demand for autonomous payload acquisition and delivery. Existing approaches typically assume pre-attached payloads or rely on specialized grippers, leaving versatile end-to-end aerial delivery largely unresolved, where different payloads induce highly variable flight dynamics, requiring a single policy to adapt online without manual calibration or explicit system identification. To this end, we study \textbf{A}utonomous \textbf{A}erial Manipulation via \textbf{Co}ntextual \textbf{Co}ntrastive Meta Reinforcement Learning (\textbf{\textit{Aco2}}), a fully autonomous aerial delivery setting in which a quadrotor equipped with a lightweight hook continuously picks up, transports, and delivers diverse handle-equipped objects between randomized locations, all without human intervention. First, we design a contextual observation encoder that infers a compact latent context from recent interaction history, enabling the policy to adapt online to payload-dependent dynamics. To further improve the quality of this context, we introduce a contrastive objective that structures the context embedding around task-relevant variations, improving generalization across diverse payloads without requiring explicit system identification. Trained entirely in simulation with extensive domain randomization, \textit{Aco2} can be directly deployed on a physical quadrotor without real-world fine-tuning.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly evolving from simple text-based interaction systems into LLM agents that can maintain memory, use tools, access external environments, and execute tasks. As their capabilities and autonomy expand, the safety risks they face also become more diverse. Existing evaluations often rely on manually written scenarios, static prompts, or final-output judgments, making it difficult to capture the diverse risks that agents may face during task execution. We introduce VESTA, a fully automated scenario generation and safety evaluation framework for LLM agents. Based on five risk dimensions, VESTA instantiaes abstract and diverse safety risks in real-world task execution into 1,072 measurable evaluation scenarios. Using the automated evaluation pipeline, 12 LLM agents are evaluated under two authority contexts. The results show that current agents still face substantial behavioral safety risks during task execution, with an average ASR of 47.1% and several models exceeding 70%. These findings demonstrate the importance of executable, process-level evaluation for understanding and improving LLM agent safety.

Published agent capability scores conflate what a model can do with what its scaffold lets it do, and the magnitude of this elicitation gap is not well characterized under controlled conditions. This study executes a pre-registered controlled comparison of three scaffolds (ReAct, a Planner-Actor-Rater multi-agent design, and planner-then-executor) across five models from three providers (Claude Opus 4.7, Sonnet 4.6, Haiku 4.5; Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview; GPT-5.5) on GAIA validation Levels 1 and 2, holding tasks and conditions fixed, with three attempts per question. Scaffold choice alone moves measured accuracy by as much as 28 percentage points within a single model (Opus, Level 2, robust slice), confirming the pre-registered hypothesis that scaffold variation produces gaps of at least 10 points. The pre-registered prediction that more capable models would be less scaffold-sensitive is rejected in direction: scaffold effects vary significantly by model in every dataset slice, but the most capable Anthropic model gains the most from structured scaffolds at the harder level, and tier-scaling holds only at Level 1 under the robust slice. The multi-agent advantage over ReAct at Level 2 appears within the Anthropic family but not for the cross-provider models, making model family rather than capability tier the conditioning variable, and the predicted planner-executor advantage on file-reading tasks is falsified. Structured scaffolds make fewer tool calls yet recover more often from mid-trajectory errors at the harder level, and a single cell (Gemini with planner-then-executor) is the cheapest at both levels and the most accurate at Level 2. These results indicate that single-scaffold capability numbers are scaffold-conditional estimates and that the elicitation gap is not guaranteed to shrink as models improve.

Reward models play a pivotal role in reinforcement learning (RL) and multi-modal trajectory selection for autonomous driving. However, acquiring such rewards typically relies on hand-crafted rule-based objectives or perception ground truth, which hinders generalization for data-scaling. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated feasibility as reward models in other domains, their effectiveness in driving tasks remains underexplored. In this work, we bridge this gap by (1) introducing DriveReward, a reasoning trajectory evaluation dataset rigorously labeled via temporally-grounded visual guidance, and augmented with counterfactual driving behaviors., (2) alongside a specialized Vision-Language Reward Model. To address the scarcity of failure cases in conventional datasets, we propose a counterfactual data annotation scheme to construct cases encompassing diverse driving styles and erroneous behaviors. Evaluations on our proposed benchmark reveal that even leading open-source and proprietary VLMs fail to excel across all tasks, highlighting significant room for improvement in existing models. Building on these findings, we subsequently tailor a specialized 1B reward model that outperforms larger VLMs on task-specific reward alignment. Finally, we validate our reward model's effectiveness by integrating it into RL finetuning and multi-modal trajectory scoring across multiple baselines, achieving performance comparable to rule-based reward calculations in both open-loop and closed-loop evaluation.

Vision-language models (VLMs) are powerful general-purpose reasoners, yet converting them into robot control policies (VLAs) is surprisingly difficult. The root cause is a two-fold gap: VLMs are trained on internet-scale images with language-understanding objectives, while VLAs must perceive robot scenes and predict motor actions. Fine-tuning a VLM directly on robot action data forces the model to cross both gaps at once -- the learning curve is steep and the rich generalizations learned during pretraining tend to degrade rather than transfer. We argue that this gap can be bridged gradually with the right intermediate data. We introduce \emph{embodied trajectory-coupled (ETC) data} -- vision-language supervision derived from the same robot scenes and trajectories used for action learning. Because ETC data shares the visual context of robot operation while retaining familiar language-understanding objectives, it provides a natural stepping stone between VLM pretraining and VLA fine-tuning. Building on this, we design a three-stage training recipe. Distribution Bridging first adapts the VLM to embodied visual-language semantics. Objective Bridging then gradually shifts the model toward action prediction while preserving the acquired representations. Retentive Adaptation finally specializes the policy to the target deployment domain. We further show that mixing task-relevant out-of-distribution ETC data with a small amount of action data enables the model to generalize to novel visual-language conditions without requiring additional robot demonstrations. Simulation and real-robot experiments confirm that this gradual bridging strategy is the key to transferring VLM generalization into robust, deployable robot policies.

Selective predictors answer on confident inputs and abstain elsewhere; deploying one safely needs a single finite-sample certificate that simultaneously upper-bounds the selected risk, lower-bounds the acceptance probability $\pacc$ above a floor $\pmin$, and lower-bounds the deployment utility. This certificate must be valid under adaptive threshold selection from a finite grid of $m$ pairs on $\ncert$ samples. We give such a certificate for bounded, possibly non-monotone losses by treating the selected risk directly as a ratio rather than through a Hoeffding-style range bound. The construction couples three confidence bounds: a variance-adaptive empirical-Bernstein bound on the ratio risk, a Clopper--Pearson bound on acceptance, and a two-sided closeness bound on utility. Together they lower-bound the certified policy's utility absolutely and to within $2\gammau$ of the best over the \emph{certified set}, both non-vacuous whenever feasible; a regime-scoped third leg matches an external oracle, informative only where the risk margin $\gammar < α$ and vacuous at the headline operating points. Relative to the range-only Hoeffding-ratio construction this sharpens the acceptance-floor dependence from $1/\pmin$ to $1/\sqrt{\pmin}$, and a closed-form corollary identifies a per-pair regime in which our risk bound dominates a Hoeffding conformal risk control (Hoeffding--CRC) selective bound. Empirically, on ImageNet (three ResNets) and COCO val 2017 panoptic, the certificate opens a $+22$ pp certified-acceptance frontier over Hoeffding--CRC and is ${\approx}10{\times}$ tighter than a non-vacuous matched-valid baseline; these gains are regime-scoped, not universal, and absent on ADE20K. The certifier runs in $O(\ncert m)$ time.

Although video virtual try-on (VVT) has achieved significant progress, existing methods still exhibit two fundamental limitations: first, they are restricted to single-garment transfer, rendering simultaneous multi-object try-on highly impractical; second, their heavy reliance on explicit external priors (e.g., garment masks) inevitably destroys crucial physical dynamics and degrades visual quality. To bridge this gap, this paper proposes the novel Try-On Anything task, which aims to simultaneously transfer diverse wearable objects onto a person in a video in a single inference pass. To support and standardize this paradigm, we introduce TryAny-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark encompassing a paired video dataset alongside a tailored evaluation protocol. Furthermore, we present OmniTryOn, an external-prior-free generative framework designed to tackle this task. Specifically, OmniTryOn employs a First Frame Wearable Cache strategy, which directly provides diverse wearable objects for the generation process through the initial video frame. To maintain consistency, we propose the Spatiotemporally Consistent RoPE (STC-RoPE), which inherently establishes robust spatiotemporal anchors to strictly preserve complex human motions and background dynamics. Optimized by the proposed Gradual Try-On (GTO) training strategy, our model progressively masters robust multi-object synthesis. Extensive experiments on TryAny-Bench demonstrate that OmniTryOn significantly outperforms existing specialized video virtual try-on models and general video editing baselines, establishing a powerful new standard for the Try-On Anything task. Our dataset, code, and models are available at https://github.com/xcltql666/OminTryOn.

Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) traditionally rely on complex, heavily engineered pipelines for perception, path planning, and motion control. This paper explores the feasibility of an end-to-end Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) approach that maps raw sensor data directly to thruster commands, reducing manual engineering. We propose a hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) architecture splitting the problem into two Markov Decision Processes. A High-Level (HL) policy operating at 2Hz processes raw $84 \times 84$ pixel monocular camera frames, stacked $100 \times 100$ pixel forward-looking imaging sonar, and proprioceptive data to generate spatial subgoals. Simultaneously, a Low-Level (LL) policy operating at 10Hz converts these subgoals into thruster commands. The HL policy is trained using Reinforcement Learning from Prior Demonstrations (RLPD) within a modified Sample-Efficient Robotic Reinforcement Learning (SERL) framework, while the LL policy utilizes Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) combined with Hindsight Experience Replay (HER). Evaluated in the high-fidelity HoloOcean simulator, our method demonstrates successful obstacle avoidance, achieving trajectory lengths closely approximating (within 4% to 6% of) an $\text{RRT}^*$ planning baseline. Furthermore, the learned policy exhibits strong robustness to simulated sensor noise and decreased visibility. While the system navigates familiar geometries effectively, experiments reveal generalization limitations when encountering unvisited areas with novel obstacle shapes. Ultimately, this work demonstrates the promise of sample-efficient, end-to-end DRL for underwater navigation using minimal computational hardware.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) face a significant inference bottleneck due to the quadratic computational cost of self-attention over long visual token sequences. However, we identify a critical inefficiency in current architectures: Visual Attention Saturation. Our analysis reveals that visual tokens rapidly establish their spatial structure and intra-modal relationships in early layers, rendering visual-to-visual self-attention in deeper layers computationally redundant. Conversely, Feed-Forward Networks (FFNs) in these layers remain essential for projecting visual features into the evolving textual semantic space. Leveraging this insight, we present Visual-Skip (V-Skip), a training-free inference paradigm that decouples spatial interaction from semantic evolution. Rather than discarding tokens, V-Skip imposes block-wise structured sparsity by selectively bypassing saturated visual self-attention modules. Furthermore, recognizing that varying downstream tasks demand distinct reasoning depths, V-Skip employs a lightweight, few-shot calibration to dynamically route the task-optimal sparsity path. Extensive experiments demonstrate that V-Skip effectively bypasses redundant vision attention to achieve block-wise sparsity, maintaining a 94.16% to 100.31% performance retention across diverse MLLMs. Ultimately, we prove that to reason more effectively, models do not need to discard what they see -- they simply need to "look less" at the right depth.

Generative robot policies fail unpredictably at deployment: they hesitate at critical moments, drift off-task, or commit to unrecoverable actions. Existing online failure detectors either require white-box access to policy internals or add runtime overhead through resampling and observation-side signals. Our empirical analysis shows that emitted action chunks themselves already carry strong predictive signal for impending failures in generative robot policies. Motivated by this observation, we introduce ActProbe, a lightweight, pure action-space detector that uses two compact signals available from a single forward pass: Temporal Consistency Error (TCE) between consecutive action chunks and Action Chunk Magnitude (ACM) of the current chunk. ActProbe maps these signals to per-step failure probabilities with a task-conditioned LSTM-MLP architecture. Across a diverse suite of generative robot policies and benchmarks, ActProbe raises alerts before failures become visually recognizable, improving the accuracy (F1)-timeliness Pareto frontier of failure detection by an average hypervolume gain of +12.7% over both internal- and external-feature baselines, with a +9.0% early-detection ROC-AUC lead on unseen tasks. ActProbe further transfers to deployment, predicting failures on unseen real-robot pick tasks and accelerating RL fine-tuning (PPO) with 2.9x fewer environment interactions.

In this paper, we integrate the defeasible logic of Kraus, Lehmann and Magidor (KLM) with the standpoint logic framework of Gómez Álvarez and Rudolph. This is done with the goal of formally expressing knowledge taking into account multiple (possibly contradicting) viewpoints, which in turn may hold defeasible beliefs. In doing so, we utilise Defeasible Restricted Standpoint Logics (DRSL), introduced by Leisegang et al. Our work expands on previous work by providing a foundational representation result for DRSL semantics and systematically lifting several well-known entailment relations from the propositional case to the standpoint-enhanced setting. In particular, we characterise the semantics for DRSL through a set of KLM-style postulates adapted for the standpoints case. We furthermore provide a means to lift preferential entailment, and the class of entailment relations based on single ranking functions from the purely propositional to the standpoint-enhanced context, including rational and lexicographic closure. We show this can be done equivalently through semantic and algorithmic means. Furthermore, we show that, for each considered form of entailment, the complexity class of entailment checking does not change when moving from propositional KLM to DRSL.

Reinforcement learning (RL) holds immense promise for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of diffusion large language models (dLLMs). However, progress is fundamentally constrained by a dual misalignment between authentic generation trajectory and the gradient update process: (i) Process-reward misalignment. Sparse, terminal rewards are indiscriminately assigned to all intermediate steps of the generation process, failing to provide discriminative credit assignment. (ii) State-trajectory misalignment. Policy updates are often diverted toward artificial, out-of-trajectory states, squandering gradients on less informative samples. To address these limitations, we introduce Process Aligned Policy Optimization (PAPO), a novel framework that holistically aligns the RL update with the dLLM's generative trajectory via Step-Aware Process Rewards (SPR) that transform sparse terminal rewards into dense, step-wise credit, and Entropy-Guided Historical Re-enactment (EHR) that replays authentic trajectories at high-uncertainty steps. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks demonstrate that PAPO significantly outperforms baselines, achieving gains of up to 4.5% on GSM8K, 4.8% on MATH500, 42.2% on Countdown and 16.1% on Sudoku.

As deep language models (DLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, understanding their decision rationale becomes paramount for ensuring trust, safety, and accountability. However, achieving this vital level of interpretability is particularly challenging when these DLMs operate as black-box systems (e.g., via APIs), where access to internal model states (e.g., parameters, gradients) is restricted. Despite numerous efforts, existing explanation methods often fail to concurrently satisfy three key desiderata: (i) inference-time efficiency, (ii) black-box compatibility without inducing out-of-distribution behavior, and (iii) comprehensible explanations grounded in the input's linguistic structure. To address these challenges, we propose a method that explains predictions of DLMs by selecting a small, informative subset of input words. We formulate this as an amortized optimization problem, enabling efficient one-shot inference without the need for input-specific search. Our selection policy is trained via REINFORCE-style policy gradients, allowing discrete word selection in a fully gradient-free setting. To enhance interpretability and align with human linguistic intuition, we integrate graph-structured knowledge into this selection process, fostering linguistically coherent subsets that result in explanations both highly informative and cognitively meaningful to end-users. We evaluated our method on diverse DLM architectures and multiple real-world datasets. It consistently identifies word subsets with enhanced discriminative power and stronger alignment with linguistically salient cues, outperforming both conventional black-box compatible methods and gradient-based approaches that are given oracle access to the black-box model's gradients for a more challenging benchmark. Our code is available at here.

Although Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have mitigated the opacity of large language models (LLMs) by decomposing dense representations into sparse features, explaining these features still remains a central challenge. Current explanation methods, however, typically operate within an open-loop paradigm, failing to leverage mechanistic feedback for further refinement. In this paper, we propose SAEExplainer, a training framework utilizes activation scores as an objective reward signal to train the model for self-correction and iterative bootstrapping. By iteratively verifying and correcting foundational explanations through a two-round optimization process, SAEExplainer achieves continuous improvement in its explanatory capabilities. This mechanism significantly reduces explanation hallucinations and reinforces causal triggering patterns. Extensive experiments demonstrate our approach improves upon established baselines across most metrics, especially in causal triggering and discriminative activation.

Humanoid robots require whole-body motions that adapt to scene context, task requirements, and user intent. Motion tracking reproduces specified trajectories, and humanoid vision-language-action systems provide semantic interfaces, but neither offers a scalable and interactive prior for broad full-body behavior. We introduce EgoPriMo (Egocentric Motion Prior for Humanoid Robots), a unified framework that learns such priors from egocentric human demonstrations. Given egocentric observations and a text prompt, EgoPriMo reconstructs, generates, and forecasts SMPL-based full-body motion. Language is used as a high-level control signal rather than a complete motion specification. At the core of EgoPriMo is a Triple-stream DiT that jointly models body dynamics, egocentric visual context, and text; task-conditioning masks route different tasks and missing-modality data through the same checkpoint. Experiments on Nymeria and EgoExo4D show that one checkpoint improves egocentric motion generation over UniEgoMotion while supporting reconstruction and forecasting; the generated SMPL motions can also be executed by a Unitree humanoid controller. These results indicate a practical path from scalable egocentric observations to generalizable and interactive humanoid motion priors.

Despite the impressive capabilities of text-to-image (T2I) models, an intent-generation gap often persists due to the brevity and ambiguity of user prompts. Existing approaches primarily polish the prompt for fluency and readability. However, the enhancement process still lacks visual grounding. As a result, the rewriter may over-infer missing details, causing an intent-generation gap. To address this limitation, we propose FaithRewriter, a novel prompt-enhancement framework for T2I generation. Specifically, FaithRewriter first leverages a multimodal MLLM to generate an image from the original prompt as an intermediate visual cue. This cue is then combined with the prompt and fed into a large-scale LLM to produce visually grounded augmentations that better reflect how the intended content should appear in images. Finally, these augmentations are distilled into a small-scale LLM for efficient deployment, enhancing its ability to generate effective T2I prompts. Experiments show that FaithRewriter yields prompts that are more faithful to the user intent and more visually plausible than strong baselines, helping narrow the intent-generation gap.

Speech Large Language Models (Speech LLMs) lack a principled mechanism for streaming inference: their label-synchronous generation has no acoustic-frame alignment, making real-time decoding and end-of-utterance detection difficult. We propose TRADE TRansducer-Augmented DEcoder, which augments a multimodal LLM with a transducer branch that shares the audio encoder and uses the LLM's hidden states directly as the prediction network -- coupling frame-synchronous acoustic alignment with the LLM's linguistic reasoning. Three design choices make the system accurate, streamable, and long-form capable: (1)Tightly coupled dual vocabularies -- a compact transducer vocabulary derived from the LLM vocabulary, enabling zero-cost score fusion; (2)Chunk-synchronized streaming training with gradient stopping, eliminating the train-inference mismatch at offline-equivalent memory cost; and (3)Localized Decoder Audio Attention (LDAA), a causal sliding window that caps KV-cache memory independently of utterance length. A single TRADE checkpoint supports offline and streaming decoding across a continuous range of latency operating points. TRADE achieves 6.71% average WER on the Open ASR Leaderboard, while the streaming recognition with 960ms chunk size reaches 8.40% from the same checkpoint. On long-form speech, it obtains 3.64% WER on TED-LIUM and 10.88% on Earnings-22 without external segmentation. TRADE provides sentence-end punctuation timestamps that, when combined with acoustic voice activity detection (VAD), improve end-of-utterance detection by +0.03 F_1 over acoustic VAD alone.

Joint Species Distribution Modeling (JSDM) is a key enabler for biodiversity monitoring and conservation planning. However, accurate JSDM faces two coupled challenges: environmental drivers and species distributions are inherently spatio-temporal, while species co-occurrence patterns exhibit complex non-linear community structure and severe long-tail imbalance driven by rare species. Existing approaches often address these factors in isolation, learning from static covariates or neglecting the historical trajectories of dynamic community structure. To overcome these limitations, we propose STELLAR (Spatio-Temporal Environmental Learning with Latent Alignment and Refinement), a novel framework that learns a shared latent space where dynamic habitat context and community structure are optimized jointly. Our approach integrates three complementary components: (1) a Graph-Temporal Encoder that employs graph attention and recurrent units to aggregate spatial neighborhood effects and capture the co-evolving historical dynamics of environmental context and community structure; (2) a Context-Anchored Latent Alignment mechanism that structures the latent space using a label-activated mixture prior and supervised contrastive learning, actively clustering species based on shared environmental preferences; and (3) an Imbalance-Aware Decoupled Decoding module that utilizes Asymmetric Loss to focus learning on hard, rare species samples, preventing mode collapse in the long tail. Experiments on the large-scale eBird dataset, curated with domain experts, demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, particularly in predicting rare species and revealing interpretable species interactions.

Background: Consumer-facing large language models are now a common source of health information, and they interpret and personalize responses rather than retrieve them. Whether their responses vary across users is a clinical, equity, and governance question, sharpened by evidence that sycophantic responses can alter judgment and increase trust. Objective: To evaluate response variation and sycophancy in consumer-facing health LLMs under conditions resembling ordinary patient use. Methods: We constructed simulated user profiles differing in geography, browsing context, expressed beliefs, and social determinants of health, drawing on literature linking social context to health attitudes. We adapted validated instruments, including the Vaccination Attitudes Examination scale and reproductive attitudes scales, into multi-turn prompts designed to elicit clinically meaningful variation across users. Results: The evaluation encountered five linked barriers. Factual prompts produced stable responses that masked sycophancy emerging over multi-turn conversation. Browser-based interfaces did not disclose which signals influence outputs and could not be reset to a clean baseline. Large-scale testing was restricted by terms of service, rate limits, and bot detection. Accuracy-based criteria could not capture tone, framing, or omission, and LLM-as-judge methods risked shared alignment bias. Models changed without traceable version identifiers, preventing reliable replication. Conclusions: No reliable independent evaluation framework yet exists for examining how consumer-facing health LLMs behave in ordinary use. Oversight requires disclosure of personalization signals, stable version identifiers, researcher safe harbor programs, and post-deployment monitoring of health-related outputs.

Enterprise property graphs vary widely in schema structure, internal terminology, domain assumptions, governance constraints, and user interaction patterns. A deployment-relevant Text2Cypher benchmark therefore reflects the questions users and agents actually ask of that graph. Creating such a benchmark is difficult because schemas and values are unique, and graph structure changes over time. Each NL-query pair must also be executable, use real graph entities, preserve diversity, and remain balanced across query types and difficulty levels. We present PIPE-Cypher, a local benchmark-generation pipeline that turns a live property graph and optional seed queries from customer questions, analyst logs, or agent tool calls into balanced NL-to-Cypher benchmarks. PIPE-Cypher combines schema profiling, reverse-query grounding, constrained generation, deterministic Cypher governance, execution validation, redaction, diversity controls, and a calibrated local LLM judge. Using local Qwen3.5-9B generation and judging, PIPE-Cypher exports 3,000 accepted FinBench/SNB examples, completes three audited ablation suites, calibrates judge behavior with human labels, and evaluates 11 local downstream models. The resulting benchmark is deliberately discriminative: zero-shot transfer is weak, while a few-shot control shows that schema-specific example banks can help compatible model families. Together, PIPE-Cypher makes Text2Cypher benchmarking a repeatable process that evolves with the graph, its users, and its target workloads.

Reinforcement learning (RL) presents a promising avenue for enhancing generative recommendation beyond supervised imitation, leveraging reward signals to guide policy improvement. However, its efficacy is critically contingent on the trustworthiness of the reward model for the samples it evaluates. In practice, production rankers, the widely adopted reward models, are trained on exposure-biased logs, leading to sample-dependent inaccuracies that violate this assumption. Our stratified analysis uncovers a consistent pattern: reward guidance is most beneficial when the policy exhibits uncertainty and the ranker can effectively discriminate the ground-truth item from rollout negatives. On other samples, the reward signal is either negligible or detrimental, highlighting the risk of uniform RL application. To address such an issue, we introduce AdaGRPO, a novel framework that treats reward-guided optimization as selective admission rather than uniform pressure. Training is anchored in supervised negative log-likelihood, while the GRPO objective is gated by a binary, per-sample clip determined by two rollout diagnostics: policy-side difficulty and reward discriminability. Instances failing either diagnostic default to pure supervision, ensuring stability and mitigating the amplification of noisy gradients. We validate AdaGRPO on a large-scale e-commerce dataset. At the best intermediate checkpoint, it elevates HR@10 from 11.01% to 12.18% while constraining hallucination below 0.22%, and maintains robustness at the final checkpoint (HR@10 11.63%, hallucination 0.27%), outperforming fixed NLL--GRPO mixtures across the retrieval--validity frontier. In production A/B tests, AdaGRPO achieves statistically significant gains in click-through rate and dwell time, confirming its practical utility.

Knowledge extraction from symbolic data often produces abstractions that are formally defined but not immediately interpretable by users. Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) and Relational Concept Analysis (RCA) provide representative settings for this issue: they generate explicit conceptual structures, implications, and relational dependencies from object descriptions and relations. Although these structures are explainable by design, their concepts are often identified by technical labels, which limits their use as human-interpretable knowledge units. Assigning meaningful names to such concepts is therefore a key issue for interpretation, navigation, validation, and reuse by domain experts. This paper investigates concept naming in FCA and RCA from a symbolic knowledge representation perspective. We first characterize the linguistic and terminological challenges involved in naming generated symbolic abstractions, including ambiguity, discrimination, concision, and consistency across related concepts. We then propose a configurable framework for LLM-assisted concept naming. The framework relies on a variability model that controls which sources of information are exposed during naming, such as intent, extent, inherited information, neighboring concepts, implications, and relational attributes. It thereby makes explicit the semantic choices involved in moving from formal concept descriptions to human-readable names. The approach is illustrated as a proof of concept on a small relational dataset in the pizzeria domain. This illustration shows how different configurations influence the names suggested by an LLM, and how naming variability can reveal interpretation choices, relational dependencies, and possible modeling issues in the underlying symbolic data.