Accurate and efficient long-term multivariate time series forecasting requires capturing recurring temporal structure while keeping inference cheap across many variables and horizons. Frequency-space models represent long-range and periodic variation compactly, but they typically process the real and imaginary spectral components as weakly coupled streams and treat periodic cues as ordinary input features, even when such cues are unreliable. This paper proposes FRWKV-Plus, a lightweight periodic-aware frequency-space forecasting model built on the efficient FRWKV backbone. FRWKV-Plus introduces a cross-branch spectral gate that reweights each spectral branch using a summary of its sibling branch, and a trust-gated residual correction that converts compact within-period context into a bounded, sign-flexible adjustment of these gates under a learned, data-dependent trust score. By construction, the correction is identity-preserving at initialization and strictly bounded, so periodic evidence can refine but never dominate or invert the base interaction. On seven standard benchmarks, FRWKV-Plus is consistently competitive with strong linear, frequency-domain, recurrent-style, and Transformer-based forecasters while preserving the lightweight profile of the backbone. Controlled three-seed ablations show that each component contributes, that the benefit is modest on strongly periodic data and pronounced on the harder Exchange and ILI datasets, and that the within-period context is the most influential single component. The implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/yangqingyuan-byte/FRWKV-plus.

Layer pruning removes entire Transformer decoder blocks from large language models, but introduces a mismatch between the hidden state received by the next surviving layer and the distribution it was trained to process, leading to significant performance degradation. We propose Ghosted Layers, a training-free recovery module that addresses this issue by solving a boundary activation alignment problem. Our method derives a closed-form optimal linear operator from a small calibration set to reconstruct the activation discrepancy introduced by the pruned layers. We show that this solution corresponds to the unconstrained optimum of the alignment objective, whereas existing methods are restricted to constrained solutions over limited operator subspaces. Experiments across multiple LLM backbones and pruning strategies demonstrate that our method consistently improves accuracy and perplexity over prior training-free baselines, while preserving the efficiency gains of layer pruning. Official code repository: https://github.com/daniel-eai/ghosted_layers_official_repository/.

Learning predictive world models from unlabelled video is a foundational challenge in artificial intelligence. While Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPA) have set new benchmarks in semantic classification, they often remain physics-blind, failing to capture the causal dynamics necessary for downstream reasoning. We hypothesize that this stems from standard patch-based masking strategies, which prioritize visual texture over rare but informative kinematic events. We propose Interaction-Aware JEPA (IA-JEPA), which utilizes a self-supervised motion-centric masking strategy to prioritize physical interactions. By specifically targeting entities engaged in collisions or momentum transfers, we force the architecture to reconstruct latent trajectories rather than static background features. Evaluated on the CLEVRER benchmark, IA-JEPA achieves 14.26% accuracy on causal reasoning tasks, a significant lead over the 3.22% achieved by standard patch-masked baselines. Crucially, we demonstrate that IA-JEPA breaks the "static bias" of standard self-supervision by inducing a higher-entropy, more discriminative latent space (+10% entropy gain) that linearizes physical energy ($R^2=0.43$). We show that this interaction bias generalizes to real-world human actions (Something-Something V2) and zero-shot physical puzzles (PHYRE-Lite). Our results provide a scalable, fully self-supervised path toward building foundational world models that begin to internalize the causal structure of the physical world.

Jung et al. (2025) introduce a hypothesis testing framework for guaranteeing agreement between large language models (LLMs) and human judgments, relying on the assumption that the model's estimated confidence is monotonic with respect to human-disagreement risk. In practice, however, this assumption may be violated, and the generalization behavior of the confidence estimator is not explicitly analyzed. We mitigate these issues by learning a dedicated confidence estimator instead of relying on heuristic confidence signals. Our approach leverages simulated annotator diversity and a margin-based ranking formulation to explicitly model how confidently an LLM distinguishes between human-agreement and human-disagreement cases. We further derive generalization guarantees for this estimator, revealing a margin-dependent trade-off that informs the design of an adaptive estimator training procedure. When integrated into fixed-sequence testing, the learned confidence estimator yields improved ranking accuracy and empirically strengthens the monotonic relationship between confidence and disagreement risk, leading to higher success rates in satisfying target agreement levels across multiple datasets and judge models.

This work reformulates language generation as a stochastic optimal control problem, providing a unified theoretical perspective to analyze autoregressive and diffusion models and explain their limitations (Efficiency-Fidelity Paradox, Irreversibility Error Propagation, Optimization Tractability and Fidelity) in terms of combination of trajectory singularity, adjoint state vanishing, and gradient absence. To address these issues, we approximate the solution to the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation, yielding an optimal policy that acts as a closed-loop controller. To bypass the intractability of directly solving the HJB PDE, we employ Flow Matching as the optimal trajectory solver within the rectified latent control space. This allows our Manta-LM with Global Integral Operator to approximate the global vector field, effectively realizing a model that simultaneously achieves high-fidelity text generation and efficient, low-cost parallel sampling. Empirically, our method achieves strong performance on language modeling and conditional generation tasks, while exhibiting improved stability, efficiency, and controllability.

The rapid growth of molecular foundation models and large language models (LLMs) has encouraged a scale centred view of AI in drug discovery, in which larger pretrained models are expected to supersede compact cheminformatics models. We test this assumption across 26 ADME, toxicity and bioactivity endpoints, covering 165,541 endpoint level compound label records. The benchmark contains 78 endpoint and split entries evaluated under random, Murcko scaffold and structure separated 5-fold cross validation protocols, representing increasing chemical generalization difficulty. Across 156 task and metric comparisons, classical machine learning (ML) provides the largest share of best performing entries (47.4%), followed by pretrained molecular sequence models (28.8%), graph neural networks (21.8%) and LLM based SAR baselines (1.9%). Classical ML dominates random split interpolation and remains the largest winner family overall. GNN and sequence models are competitive in selected harder splits, but their strict winner shares decrease under a fixed final-window readout, indicating sensitivity to training settings and model selection. Paired bootstrap analyses show that small numerical differences between individual models should not be read as decisive victories. SAR knowledge from training folds improves GPT5.5-SAR and Opus4.7-SAR metrics but does not make rule based reasoning a universal substitute for supervised predictors. Compact specialized models remain highly effective, and predictive performance depends on the fit among model, task and validation scenario, not on scale alone.

This is the second part of the work investigating quantized matrix multiplication (MatMul). In part I we considered the case of calibration-free quantization, whereas here we discuss the setting where covariance matrix $Σ_X$ of the columns of the second factor is available. This setting arises in the ubiquitous task of weight-only post-training quantization of LLMs. Weight-only quantization is related to the problem of weighted mean squared error (WMSE) source coding, whose classical (reverse) waterfilling solution dictates how one should distribute rate between coordinates of the vector. We show how waterfilling can be used to improve practical LLM quantization algorithms (GPTQ), which at present allocate rate equally. A recent scheme (known as ``WaterSIC'') that only uses scalar INT quantizers is analyzed and its high-rate performance is shown to be (a) basis free (i.e., characterized by the determinant of $Σ_X$ and, thus, unlike existing schemes, is immune to applying random rotations); and (b) within a multiplicative factor of $\frac{2πe}{12}$ (or 0.25 bit/entry) of the information-theoretic distortion limit. GPTQ's performance, in turn, is affected by the choice of basis, but for a random rotation and actual $Σ_X$ from Llama-3-8B we find it to be within 0.1 bit (depending on the layer type) of WaterSIC, suggesting that GPTQ with random rotation is also near optimal, at least in the high-rate regime.

Computer-use agents (CUAs) rely on visual observations of graphical user interfaces, where each screenshot is encoded into a large number of visual tokens. As interaction trajectories grow, the token cost increases rapidly, limiting the amount of history that can be incorporated under fixed context and compute budgets. This has resulted in no or very limited improvement in the performance when using history unlike other domains. We address this inefficiency by introducing ReVision, which is used to train multimodal language models on trajectories where redundant visual patches are removed using a learned patch selector that compares patch representations across consecutive screenshots while preserving spatial structure required by the model. Across three benchmarks, OSWorld, WebTailBench, and AgentNetBench, when processing trajectories with 5 history screenshots using Qwen2.5-VL-7B, ReVision reduces token usage by 46% on average while improving success rate by 3% over the no drop baseline. This establishes a clear efficiency gain, enabling agents to process longer trajectories with fewer tokens. With this improved efficiency, we revisit the role of history in CUAs and find that performance continues to improve as more past observations are incorporated when redundancy is removed.

LLM-based conversational AI agents struggle to maintain coherent behavior over long horizons due to limited context. While RAG-based approaches are increasingly adopted to overcome this limitation by storing interactions in external memory modules and performing retrieval from them, their effectiveness in answering challenging questions (e.g., multi-hop, commonsense) ultimately depends on the agent's ability to reason over the retrieved information. However, existing methods typically retrieve memory based on semantic similarity to the raw user utterance, which lacks explicit reasoning about missing intermediate facts and often returns evidence that is irrelevant or insufficient for grounded reasoning. In this work, we introduce Goal-Mem, a goal-oriented reasoning framework for RAG-based agentic memory that performs explicit backward chaining from the user's utterance as a goal. Rather than progressively expanding from retrieved context, Goal-Mem decomposes each goal into atomic subgoals, performs targeted memory retrieval to satisfy each subgoal, and iteratively identifies what information from memory should be retrieved when intermediate goals cannot be resolved. We formalize this process in Natural Language Logic, a logical system that combines the verifiability of reasoning provided by FOL with the expressivity of natural language. Through extensive experiments on two datasets and comparing to nine strong memory baselines, we show that Goal-Mem consistently improves performance, particularly on tasks requiring multi-hop reasoning and implicit inference.

Sequence learning is dominated by Transformers and parallelizable recurrent neural networks (RNNs) such as state-space models, yet learning long-term dependencies remains challenging, and state-of-the-art designs trade power consumption for performance. The Bistable Memory Recurrent Unit (BMRU) was introduced to enable hardware-software co-design of ultra-low power RNNs: quantized states with hysteresis provide persistent memory while mapping directly to analog primitives. However, BMRU performance lags behind parallelizable RNNs on complex sequential tasks. In this paper, we identify gradient blocking during state updates as a key limitation and propose a cumulative update formulation that restores gradient flow while preserving persistent memory, creating skip-connections through time. This leads to the Cumulative Memory Recurrent Unit (CMRU) and its relaxed variant, the $α$CMRU. Experiments show that the cumulative formulation dramatically improves convergence stability and reduces initialization sensitivity. The CMRU and $α$CMRU match or outperform Linear Recurrent Units (LRUs) and minimal Gated Recurrent Units (minGRUs) across diverse benchmarks at small model sizes, with particular advantages on tasks requiring discrete long-range retention, while the CMRU retains quantized states, persistent memory, and noise-resilient dynamics essential for analog implementation.

In this work, we introduce GELATO (Geometry-preserving Embeddings via Locked Aligned TOwers), a novel approach to multimodal embedding models. We build on the VLM-style architecture, in which non-text encoders are adapted to produce input for a language model, which in turn generates embeddings for all varieties of input. We present the result: the jina-embeddings-v5-omni suite, a pair of models that encode text, image, audio, and video input into a single semantic embedding space. GELATO extends the two Jina Embeddings v5 Text models to support additional modality by adding encoders for images and audio. The backbone text embedding models and the added non-text modality encoders remain frozen. We only trained the connecting components, representing 0.35% of the total weights of the joint model. Training is therefore much more efficient than full-parameter retraining. Additionally, the language model remains effectively unaltered, producing exactly the same embeddings for text inputs as the Jina Embeddings v5 Text models. Our evaluations show that GELATO produces results that are competitive with the state-of-the-art, yielding nearly equal performance to larger multimodal embedding models.

Accurately and consistently indexing biomedical literature by publication type and study design is essential for supporting evidence synthesis and knowledge discovery. Prior work on automated publication type and study design indexing has primarily focused on expanding label coverage, enriching feature representations, and improving in-domain accuracy, with evaluation typically conducted on data drawn from the same distribution as training. Although pretrained biomedical language models achieve strong performance under these settings, models optimized for in-domain accuracy may rely on superficial lexical or dataset-specific cues, resulting in reduced robustness under distributional shift. In this study, we introduce an evaluation framework based on controlled semantic perturbations to assess the robustness of a publication type classifier and investigate robustness-oriented training strategies that combine entity masking and domain-adversarial training to mitigate reliance on spurious topical correlations. Our results show that the commonly observed trade-off between robustness and in-domain accuracy can be mitigated when robustness objectives are designed to selectively suppress non-task-defining features while preserving salient methodological signals. We find that these improvements arise from two complementary mechanisms: (1) increased reliance on explicit methodological cues when such cues are present in the input, and (2) reduced reliance on spurious domain-specific topical features. These findings highlight the importance of feature-level robustness analysis for publication type and study design classification and suggest that refining masking and adversarial objectives to more selectively suppress topical information may further improve robustness. Data, code, and models are available at: https://github.com/ScienceNLP-Lab/MultiTagger-v2/tree/main/ICHI

Task completion in digital and physical environments increasingly involves complex temporal interaction, where actions and observations unfold over different time scales rather than align with fixed observation--action steps. To model such interactions, we propose \emph{Engagement Process} (EP), an interaction formalism that inherits the decision-theoretic structure of POMDPs while making time explicit in the action--observation interface. EP represents actions and observations as decoupled event streams along time, rather than updates paired at fixed decision steps. This interface captures single-agent timing issues such as deliberation latency, delayed feedback, and persistent actions, while supporting richer agent-side organization, multi-rate coordination, and compositional interaction among subsystems. Across toy, LLM-agent, and learning experiments, EP exposes temporal behaviors hidden by step-based interfaces and enables policies to adapt under explicit time costs.

While recent video diffusion models (VDMs) produce visually impressive results, they fundamentally struggle to maintain 3D structural consistency, often resulting in object deformation or spatial drift. We hypothesize that these failures arise because standard denoising objectives lack explicit incentives for geometric coherence. To address this, we introduce VideoGPA (Video Geometric Preference Alignment), a data-efficient self-supervised framework that leverages a geometry foundation model to automatically derive dense preference signals that guide VDMs via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). This approach effectively steers the generative distribution toward inherent 3D consistency without requiring human annotations. VideoGPA significantly enhances temporal stability, geometric plausibility, and motion coherence using minimal preference pairs, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art baselines in extensive experiments.

This work presents a novel and efficient nonlinear programming framework that tightly integrates hierarchical decision-making with whole-body inverse kinematic planning and control. Decision-making plays a central role in many aspects of robotics, from sparse inverse kinematic control with a minimal number of joints, to inverse kinematic planning while simultaneously selecting a discrete end-effector location from multiple candidates. Current approaches often rely on heavy computations using mixed-integer nonlinear programming, separate decision-making from inverse kinematics (some times approximated by reachability methods), or employ efficient but less versatile $\ell_1$-norm formulations of linear sparse programming, without addressing the underlying nonlinear problem formulations. In contrast, the proposed sparse hierarchical nonlinear programming solver is efficient, versatile, and accurate by exploiting sparse hierarchical structure and leveraging the $\ell_0$-norm which is rarely used in robotics. The solver efficiently tackles complex nonlinear hierarchical decision-making problems previously unaddressed in the literature, such as inverse kinematic planning with simultaneous prioritized selection of end-effector locations from a large set of candidates, or inverse kinematic control with simultaneous selection of bi-manual grasp locations on a randomly rotated box.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents that execute tool-augmented, multi-step tasks, where latency is a critical factor for real-world applications. Yet an overlooked threat is Reasoning-Level Denial-of-Service (R-DoS), in which an attacker preserves task correctness but degrades availability by inflating an agent's reasoning depth or tool-use budget. We introduce OTora, the first unified, two-stage red-teaming framework for instantiating R-DoS attacks. Stage I optimizes an adversarial trigger that induces targeted tool invocations using insertion-aware scoring and dynamic target co-evolution, supporting both black-box and white-box settings. Stage II generates agent-aware reasoning payloads via an ICL-guided genetic search that amplifies overthinking while maintaining correct task outcomes. Across WebShop, Email, and OS agents built on multiple backbone models such as LLaMA-70B and GPT-OSS-120B, OTora achieves up to 10 times increases in reasoning tokens and order-of-magnitude latency slowdowns, all while preserving near-baseline task accuracy. Finally, we discuss mitigation strategies for detecting and constraining abnormal reasoning and latency spikes. The code is available at https://github.com/llm2409/OTora.

LLM post-training typically propagates task gradients through the full depth of the model. Although this end-to-end structure is simple and general, it couples task adaptation to full-depth activation storage, long-range backward dependencies and direct task-gradient access to pretrained representations. We argue that this full-depth backward coupling can be unnecessarily expensive and intrusive, particularly when post-training supervision is much narrower than pre-training. To this end, we propose \textbf{LoPT}: Local-Learning Post-Training, a simple post-training strategy that makes gradient reach an explicit design choice. LoPT places a single gradient boundary at the transformer midpoint: the second-half block learns from the task objective, while the first-half block is updated by a lightweight feature-reconstruction objective to preserve useful representations and maintain interface compatibility. LoPT shortens the task-induced backward path while limiting direct interference from narrow task gradients on early-layer representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LoPT achieves competitive performance with lower memory cost, higher training efficiency and better retention of pretrained capabilities. Our code is available at: https://github.com/HumyuShi/LoPT

Many operations on sensory data -- comparison, memory, retrieval, and reasoning -- are naturally expressed over discrete symbolic structures. In language this interface is given by tokens; in audio, it must be learned. Existing audio tokenizers rely on quantization, clustering, or codec reconstruction, assigning tokens locally, so sequence consistency, compactness, length control, termination, and edit similarity are rarely optimized directly. We introduce PairAlign, a framework for compact audio tokenization through sequence-level self-alignment. PairAlign treats tokenization as conditional sequence generation: an encoder maps speech to a continuous condition, and an autoregressive decoder generates tokens from BOS, learning token identity, order, length, and EOS placement. Given two content-preserving views, each view's sequence is trained to be likely under the other's representation, while unrelated examples provide competing sequences. This gives a scalable surrogate for edit-distance preservation while discouraging many-to-one collapse. PairAlign starts from VQ-style tokenization and refines it with EMA-teacher targets, cross-paired teacher forcing, prefix corruption, likelihood contrast, and length control. On 3-second speech, PairAlign learns compact, non-degenerate sequences with broad vocabulary usage and strong cross-view consistency. On retrieval tests, it preserves edit-distance search while reducing archive token count by 55%. A continuous-sweep probe shows lower local overlap than a dense geometric tokenizer, but stronger length control and bounded edit trajectories under 100 ms shifts. PairAlign is a sequence-symbolic predictive learner: like JEPA-style objectives, it predicts an abstract target from another view as a learned variable-length symbolic sequence, not a continuous latent.

Domain Generalization (DG) aims to learn representations that remain robust under out-of-distribution (OOD) shifts and generalize effectively to unseen target domains. While recent invariant learning strategies and architectural advances have achieved strong performance, explicitly discovering a structured domain-invariant subspace through second-order statistics remains underexplored. In this work, we propose CPCANet, a novel framework grounded in Common Principal Component Analysis (CPCA), which unrolls the iterative Flury-Gautschi (FG) algorithm into fully differentiable neural layers. This approach integrates the statistical properties of CPCA into an end-to-end trainable framework, enforcing the discovery of a shared subspace across diverse domains while preserving interpretability. Experiments on four standard DG benchmarks demonstrate that CPCANet achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in zero-shot transfer. Moreover, CPCANet is architecture-agnostic and requires no dataset-specific tuning, providing a simple and efficient approach to learning robust representations under distribution shift. Code is available at https://github.com/wish44165/CPCANet.

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has become a common way to improve explicit reasoning in large language models, but final-answer correctness alone does not reveal whether the reasoning trace is faithful, reliable, or useful to the model that consumes it. This outcome-only signal can reinforce traces that are right for the wrong reasons, overstate reasoning gains by rewarding shortcuts, and propagate flawed intermediate states in multi-step systems. To this end, we propose TraceLift, a planner-executor training framework that treats reasoning as a consumable intermediate artifact. During planner training, the planner emits tagged reasoning. A frozen executor turns this reasoning into the final artifact for verifier feedback, while an executor-grounded reward shapes the intermediate trace. This reward multiplies a rubric-based Reasoning Reward Model (RM) score by measured uplift on the same frozen executor, crediting traces that are both high-quality and useful. To make reasoning quality directly learnable, we introduce TRACELIFT-GROUPS, a rubric-annotated reason-only dataset built from math and code seed problems. Each example is a same-problem group containing a high-quality reference trace and multiple plausible flawed traces with localized perturbations that reduce reasoning quality or solution support while preserving task relevance. Extensive experiments on code and math benchmarks show that this executor-grounded reasoning reward improves the two-stage planner-executor system over execution-only training, suggesting that reasoning supervision should evaluate not only whether a trace looks good, but also whether it helps the model that consumes it. Our code is available at: https://github.com/MasaiahHan/TraceLift

LiDAR point cloud compression is vital for autonomous systems to handle massive data from high-resolution sensors. While learned entropy modeling built upon octree structures yields high compression gains, it faces two critical bottlenecks: 1) prohibitive latency, particularly during decoding, caused by causal, multi-stage context modeling; and 2) a rigid performance-latency trade-off, preventing a single model from adapting to varying constraints. These limitations stem from the tight coupling between the context aggregation backbone and probability prediction. To address this, we propose PACE, a new framework that reformulates ancestral context aggregation as a non-causal backbone and confines causality to a lightweight, stage-scalable predictor, eliminating repetitive backbone executions and reducing computational overhead. The predictor supports an arbitrary number of prediction stages, enabling seamless adaptation across diverse performance-latency trade-offs without reloading parameters. Experiments demonstrate that PACE sets a new state-of-the-art in compression efficiency, achieving notable BD-BR savings and reducing decoding latency by over 90\% in autoregressive mode, making it attractive for practical applications.

Despite recent progress, recovering parametric CAD construction sequences from geometric input, such as meshes or point clouds, is a key challenge for design and manufacturing, as existing CAD reconstruction and generation methods are largely restricted to difficult-to-edit formats like meshes or Breps or editable simple sketch-and-extrude pipelines and low-complexity datasets. We introduce CADFit, a hybrid optimization-based CAD reconstruction framework that recovers complex, editable CAD construction sequences from meshes by incrementally fitting and validating parametric operations using geometric feedback. Our approach is distinguished by formulating reconstruction as an IoU-driven optimization over structured CAD programs and supporting a rich set of operations, including extrusions, revolutions, fillets, and chamfers. Experiments on multiple CAD benchmarks show that CADFit outperforms state-of-the-art mesh-to-CAD methods in volumetric Intersection-over-Union and Chamfer Distance, while substantially reducing the Invalid Ratio of reconstructed CAD programs, particularly for complex designs. We further present a multimodal pipeline that enables end-to-end reconstruction of CAD construction sequences from images by combining image-based geometry reconstruction with CADFit. By enabling accurate reconstruction of higher-complexity CAD models, CADFit provides a practical foundation for generating richer datasets and advancing future learning-based approaches to CAD reverse engineering. The code is available at: https://github.com/ghadinehme/CADFit.

The increasing ubiquity of video content and the corresponding demand for efficient access to meaningful information have elevated video summarization and video highlights as a vital research area. However, many state-of-the-art methods depend heavily either on supervised annotations or on attention-based models, which are computationally expensive and brittle in the face of distribution shifts that hinder cross-domain applicability across datasets. We introduce a pioneering self-supervised video summarization model that captures both spatial and temporal dependencies without the overhead of attention, RNNs, or transformers. Our framework integrates a novel set of Markov process-driven loss metrics and a two-stage self supervised learning paradigm that ensures both performance and efficiency. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on the SUMME and TVSUM datasets, outperforming all existing unsupervised methods. It also rivals the best supervised models, demonstrating the potential for efficient, annotation-free architectures. This paves the way for more generalizable video summarization techniques and challenges the prevailing reliance on complex architectures.

Automated pediatric electrocardiogram (ECG) interpretation remains challenging because developmental differences in heart rate, intervals, and waveforms limit the transferability of models trained mainly on adult data, while expert-labeled pediatric ECG cohorts are scarce. We propose PEACE (Pediatric-Adult ECG Alignment via Cross-modal Enhancement), an adult-to-pediatric ECG transfer framework pretrained on MIMIC-IV ECGs and adapted to pediatric targets. PEACE integrates label-specific bidirectional contrastive learning (LSBC) to align ECG representations with diagnostic semantics and curriculum adaptive fusion (CAF) to stabilize optimization under limited pediatric supervision. Label-conditioned short text descriptors provide auxiliary semantic supervision during training, whereas inference requires ECG signals only. On ZZU-pECG, PEACE achieves macro-average AUCs of 59.39%, 81.74%, and 91.56% under zero-shot, 50-shot, and full fine-tuning settings, respectively, outperforming ECG-only, multimodal, and generic domain adaptation baselines including DANN and MMD. On PTB-XL, it reaches 96.90% macro-average AUC after full fine-tuning over nine harmonized labels with nonzero mapped incidence. Gradient-based attention maps show increased saliency around QRS voltage and morphology regions for chamber-related RVH and around QRS-to-T/repolarization intervals for LQTS, broadly consistent with ECG regions commonly inspected during routine interpretation. These results suggest that adult-scale ECG pretraining coupled with rhythm, morphology, and ST-T repolarization semantic descriptors improves transferable pediatric diagnosis under label scarcity while preserving clinically interpretable waveform focus.

LLM parameter editing methods commonly rely on computing an ideal target hidden-state at a target layer (referred as anchor point) and distributing the target vector to multiple preceding layers (commonly known as backward spreading) for cooperative editing. Although widely used for a long time, its underlying basis have not been systematically investigated. In this paper, we first conduct a systematic study of its foundations, which helps clarify its capability boundaries, practical considerations, and potential failure modes. Then, we propose a simple and elegant alternative that replaces backward spreading with forward-propagation. Instead of optimizing the target at the last editing layer, we optimize the anchor point at the first editing layer, and then propagate it forward to obtain accurate and mutually compatible target hidden-states for all subsequent editing layers. This approach achieves the same computational complexity as existing methods while producing more accurate layer-wise targets. Our method is simple, without interfering with either the computation of the initial target hidden state or any other components of the subsequent editing pipeline, and thus constituting a benefit for a wide range of LLM parameter editing methods.

Text-to-image diffusion models achieve impressive visual fidelity, yet they remain unreliable in multi-object generation. Despite extensive empirical evidence of these failures, the underlying causes remain unclear. We begin by asking how much of this limitation arises from the data itself. To disentangle data effects, we consider two regimes across different dataset sizes: (1) concept generalization, where each individual concept is observed during training under potentially imbalanced data distributions, and (2) compositional generalization, where specific combinations of concepts are systematically held out. To study these regimes, we introduce mosaic (Multi-Object Spatial relations, AttrIbution, Counting), a controlled framework for dataset generation. By training diffusion models on mosaic, we find that scene complexity plays a dominant role rather than concept imbalance, and that counting is uniquely difficult to learn in low-data regimes. Moreover, compositional generalization collapses as more concept combinations are held out during training. These findings highlight fundamental limitations of diffusion models and motivate stronger inductive biases and data design for robust multi-object compositional generation.

Computational molecular representations underpin virtual screening, property prediction, and materials discovery. Conventional fingerprints are efficient and deterministic but lose structural information through hash-based compression, particularly at low dimensionalities. Learned representations from graph neural networks recover this expressiveness but require task-specific training and substantial computational resources. Here we introduce hyperdimensional fingerprints (HDF), which replace the learned transformations of message-passing neural networks with algebraic operations on high-dimensional vectors, producing deterministic molecular representations without any training. Across diverse property prediction benchmarks, HDF outperforms conventional fingerprints in the majority of tasks while exhibiting greater consistency across datasets and models. Crucially, HDF embeddings preserve molecular similarity faithfully: at 32 dimensions, distances in HDF space achieve a 0.9 Pearson correlation with graph edit distance, compared to 0.55 for Morgan fingerprints at equivalent size. This structural fidelity persists at low dimensions where hash-based methods degrade, allowing simple nearest-neighbor regression to remain predictive with as few as 64 components. We further demonstrate the practical impact in Bayesian molecular optimization, where HDF-based surrogate models achieve substantially improved sample efficiency in regimes where Morgan fingerprints perform comparably to random search. HDF thus provides a general-purpose, training-free alternative to conventional molecular fingerprints, suggesting that the information loss long accepted as inherent to fixed-length fingerprints is a limitation of the hash-based encoding scheme rather than the fingerprint paradigm itself.

Vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated strong applicability in edge industrial applications, yet their deployment remains severely constrained by requirements for deterministic low latency and stable execution under resource limitations. Existing frameworks either rely on bloated general-purpose designs or force developers into opaque, hardware-specific closed-source ecosystems, leading to hardware lock-in limitation and poor cross-platform adaptability. Observing that modern AI agents can efficiently search and tune configurations to generate highly optimized low-level kernels for standard LLM operators, we propose EdgeFM, a lightweight, agent-driven VLM/LLM inference framework tailored for cross-platform industrial edge deployment. EdgeFM removes non-essential features to reduce single-request latency, and encapsulates agent-tuned kernel optimizations as a modular library of reusable skills. By allowing direct invocation of these skills rather than waiting for closed-source implementations, it effectively closes the performance gap long dominated by proprietary toolchains. The framework natively supports mainstream platforms including x86 and NVIDIA Orin SoCs, and represents the first end-to-end VLA deployment on the domestic Horizon Journey platform, enhancing cross-platform portability. In most cases, it yields clearly better inference performance than conventional vendor-specific toolchains, achieving up to 1.49 times speedup over TensorRT-Edge-LLM on the NVIDIA Orin platform. Experimental results show that EdgeFM delivers favorable end-to-end inference performance, providing an open-source, production-grade solution for diverse edge industrial scenarios.

Synthetic accented speech is a promising way to improve automatic speech recognition (ASR) when real accented recordings are scarce. We ask what makes such data useful for ASR fine-tuning: target-accent phoneme edits that expose the recognizer to accent-specific pronunciations, or random phoneme perturbations that act as augmentation in phoneme space. In a few-shot TTS pipeline, we compare LLM-generated accent edits with matched-rate random substitutions and oracle controls using ground-truth accented phonemes and prosody. Random substitutions recover much of the ASR gain: LLM target-accent edits improve over random by only a small margin, ground-truth phonemes stay close to the random baseline and nearly converge with it as the synthetic ASR fine-tuning set grows larger, and adding ground-truth prosody yields only a modest further gain. Mixing synthetic with real accented speech also stabilizes low-resource fine-tuning, but a fixed synthetic budget can later dilute the information in real data, showing that the real--synthetic ratio matters.

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) generate discrete sequences by iterative denoising under an absorbing masking process. In standard masked diffusion, if a token remains masked after a reverse update, the model discards its clean-state prediction for that position. Thus, still-masked positions must be repeatedly inferred from the mask token alone. This design choice limits cross-step refinement. To address this limitation, this paper proposes a simple, yet effective, post-training adaptation for MDMs that conditions each denoising step on the model's own previous clean-state predictions. The resulting method, called Self-Conditioned Masked Diffusion Models (SCMDM), requires minimal architectural change, does not introduce a recurrent latent-state pathway, does not rely on an auxiliary reference model, and adds no extra denoiser evaluations during sampling. This is an important departure from partial self-conditioning approaches which requires expensive model training from scratch. In particular, the paper shows that partial self-conditioning, including the commonly used 50% dropout strategy for training self-conditioned models from scratch, is suboptimal in the post-training regime. Instead, once the model's self-generated clean-state estimates become informative, the specialization to refinement is preferable to mixing conditional and unconditional objectives. SCMDM is evaluated across multiple domains, demonstrating consistent improvement over vanilla MDM baselines, achieving nearly a 50% reduction in generative perplexity on OWT-trained models (42.89 to 23.72), alongside strong improvements in discretized image synthesis quality, small molecular generation, and enhanced fidelity in genomic distribution modeling.