Autonomous high-fidelity object reconstruction is fundamental for creating digital assets and bridging the simulation-to-reality gap in robotics. We present ObjSplat, an active reconstruction framework that leverages Gaussian surfels as a unified representation to progressively reconstruct unknown objects with both photorealistic appearance and accurate geometry. Addressing the limitations of conventional opacity or depth-based cues, we introduce a geometry-aware viewpoint evaluation pipeline that explicitly models back-face visibility and occlusion-aware multi-view covisibility, reliably identifying under-reconstructed regions even on geometrically complex objects. Furthermore, to overcome the limitations of greedy planning strategies, ObjSplat employs a next-best-path (NBP) planner that performs multi-step lookahead on a dynamically constructed spatial graph. By jointly optimizing information gain and movement cost, this planner generates globally efficient trajectories. Extensive experiments in simulation and on real-world cultural artifacts demonstrate that ObjSplat produces physically consistent models within minutes, achieving superior reconstruction fidelity and surface completeness while significantly reducing scan time and path length compared to state-of-the-art approaches. Project page: https://li-yuetao.github.io/ObjSplat-page/ .

Prescriptive Process Monitoring (PresPM) recommends interventions during running business processes to optimize key performance indicators (KPIs). In realistic settings, interventions are rarely isolated: organizations need to align sequences of interventions to jointly steer the outcome of a case. Existing PresPM approaches only partially address this challenge. Many focus on a single intervention decision, while others treat multiple interventions independently, ignoring how they interact over time. Methods that do address these dependencies depend either on simulation or data augmentation to approximate the process to train a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent, which may create a reality gap and introduce bias. We introduce SCOPE (Sequential Causal Optimization of Process Interventions), a PresPM approach that learns aligned sequential intervention recommendations. SCOPE employs backward induction to estimate the effect of each candidate intervention action, propagating its impact from the final decision point back to the first. By leveraging causal learners, our method can utilize observational data directly, unlike methods that require constructing process approximations for RL. Experiments on both an existing synthetic dataset and a new semi-synthetic dataset show that SCOPE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art PresPM techniques in optimizing the KPI. The novel semi-synthetic setup, based on a real-life event log, is provided as a reusable benchmark for future work on sequential PresPM.

Monocular shape-from-polarization (SfP) leverages the intrinsic relationship between light polarization properties and surface geometry to recover surface normals from single-view polarized images, providing a compact and robust approach for three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction. Despite its potential, existing monocular SfP methods suffer from azimuth angle ambiguity, an inherent limitation of polarization analysis, that severely compromises reconstruction accuracy and stability. This paper introduces a novel segmentation-driven monocular SfP (SMSfP) framework that reformulates global shape recovery into a set of local reconstructions over adaptively segmented convex sub-regions. Specifically, a polarization-aided adaptive region growing (PARG) segmentation strategy is proposed to decompose the global convexity assumption into locally convex regions, effectively suppressing azimuth ambiguities and preserving surface continuity. Furthermore, a multi-scale fusion convexity prior (MFCP) constraint is developed to ensure local surface consistency and enhance the recovery of fine textural and structural details. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets validate the proposed approach, showing significant improvements in disambiguation accuracy and geometric fidelity compared with existing physics-based monocular SfP techniques.

Recent multimodal LLMs have shown promise in chart-based visual question answering, but their performance declines sharply on unannotated charts-those requiring precise visual interpretation rather than relying on textual shortcuts. To address this, we introduce ChartAgent, a novel agentic framework that explicitly performs visual reasoning directly within the chart's spatial domain. Unlike textual chain-of-thought reasoning, ChartAgent iteratively decomposes queries into visual subtasks and actively manipulates and interacts with chart images through specialized actions such as drawing annotations, cropping regions (e.g., segmenting pie slices, isolating bars), and localizing axes, using a library of chart-specific vision tools to fulfill each subtask. This iterative reasoning process closely mirrors human cognitive strategies for chart comprehension. ChartAgent achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on the ChartBench and ChartX benchmarks, surpassing prior methods by up to 16.07% absolute gain overall and 17.31% on unannotated, numerically intensive queries. Furthermore, our analyses show that ChartAgent is (a) effective across diverse chart types, (b) achieves the highest scores across varying visual and reasoning complexity levels, and (c) serves as a plug-and-play framework that boosts performance across diverse underlying LLMs. Our work is among the first to demonstrate visually grounded reasoning for chart understanding using tool-augmented multimodal agents.

Recent work on activation and latent steering has demonstrated that modifying internal representations can effectively guide large language models (LLMs) toward improved reasoning and efficiency without updating model parameters. However, most existing approaches rely on fixed steering policies and static intervention strengths, which limit their robustness across problem instances and often result in over- or under-steering. We propose Adaptive Test-time Latent Steering (ATLAS), a lightweight framework that dynamically controls steering decisions at inference time using a trained, lightweight verifier over the latent states. Given intermediate hidden states, the verifier predicts the quality of ongoing reasoning and adaptively selects which steering action to apply, enabling per-example and per-step adjustment with minimal overhead. ATLAS provides a unified framework for combining learned latent verification with test-time activation steering, enabling adaptive reasoning control without additional LLM decoding or inference-time process reward model calls. Experiments on multiple mathematical and coding reasoning benchmarks show that ATLAS consistently outperforms both vanilla decoding and fixed steering baselines, achieving higher accuracy while substantially reducing test-time token usage. These results demonstrate that verifier-guided latent adaptation provides an effective and scalable mechanism for controlling reasoning efficiency without sacrificing solution quality. All source code will be publicly available.

Spatial perception and reasoning are crucial for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models to accomplish fine-grained manipulation tasks. However, existing approaches often lack the ability to understand and reason over the essential 3D structures necessary for precise control. To address this limitation, we propose QDepth-VLA, a general framework that augments VLA models with an auxiliary depth prediction task. A dedicated depth expert is designed to predict quantized latent tokens of depth maps obtained from a VQ-VAE encoder, enabling the model to learn depth-aware representations that capture critical geometric cues. Experimental results on the simulation benchmarks and real-world tasks demonstrate that QDepth-VLA yields strong spatial reasoning and competitive performance on manipulation tasks.

One-dimensional NMR spectroscopy is one of the most widely used techniques for the characterization of organic compounds and natural products. For molecules with up to 36 non-hydrogen atoms, the number of possible structures has been estimated to range from $10^{20} - 10^{60}$. The task of determining the structure (formula and connectivity) of a molecule of this size using only its one-dimensional $^1$H and/or $^{13}$C NMR spectrum, i.e. de novo structure generation, thus appears completely intractable. Here we show how it is possible to achieve this task for systems with up to 40 non-hydrogen atoms across the full elemental coverage typically encountered in organic chemistry (C, N, O, H, P, S, Si, B, and the halogens) using a deep learning framework, thus covering a vast portion of the drug-like chemical space. Leveraging insights from natural language processing, we show that our transformer-based architecture predicts the correct molecule with 60.4% accuracy within the first 15 predictions using only the $^1$H and $^{13}$C NMR spectra, thus overcoming the combinatorial growth of the chemical space while also being extensible to experimental data via fine-tuning.

Many practical decision-making problems involve tasks whose success depends on the entire system history, rather than on achieving a state with desired properties. Markovian Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches are not suitable for such tasks, while RL with non-Markovian reward decision processes (NMRDPs) enables agents to tackle temporal-dependency tasks. This approach has long been known to lack formal guarantees on both (near-)optimality and sample efficiency. We contribute to solving both issues with QR-MAX, a novel model-based algorithm for discrete NMRDPs that factorizes Markovian transition learning from non-Markovian reward handling via reward machines. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first model-based RL algorithm for discrete-action NMRDPs that exploits this factorization to obtain PAC convergence to $\varepsilon$-optimal policies with polynomial sample complexity. We then extend QR-MAX to continuous state spaces with Bucket-QR-MAX, a SimHash-based discretiser that preserves the same factorized structure and achieves fast and stable learning without manual gridding or function approximation. We experimentally compare our method with modern state-of-the-art model-based RL approaches on environments of increasing complexity, showing a significant improvement in sample efficiency and increased robustness in finding optimal policies.

This paper presents WorldPlay, a streaming video diffusion model that enables real-time, interactive world modeling with long-term geometric consistency, resolving the trade-off between speed and memory that limits current methods. WorldPlay draws power from three key ingredients. 1) We use a Dual Action Representation to enable robust action control in response to the user's keyboard and mouse inputs. 2) To enforce long-term consistency, our Reconstituted Context Memory dynamically rebuilds context from past frames and uses temporal reframing to keep geometrically important but long-past frames accessible, effectively alleviating memory attenuation. 3) We also propose Context Forcing, a novel distillation method designed for memory-aware model. Aligning memory context between the teacher and student preserves the student's capacity to use long-range information, enabling real-time speeds while preventing error drift. Taken together, WorldPlay generates long-horizon streaming 720p video at 24 FPS with superior consistency, comparing favorably with existing techniques and showing strong generalization across diverse scenes. Project page and online demo can be found: https://3d-models.hunyuan.tencent.com/world/ and https://3d.hunyuan.tencent.com/sceneTo3D.

While many vision-language models (VLMs) are developed to answer well-defined, straightforward questions with highly specified targets, as in most benchmarks, they often struggle in practice with complex open-ended tasks, which usually require multiple rounds of exploration and reasoning in the visual space. Such visual thinking paths not only provide step-by-step exploration and verification as an AI detective but also produce better interpretations of the final answers. However, these paths are challenging to evaluate due to the large exploration space of intermediate steps. To bridge the gap, we develop an evaluation suite, ``Visual Reasoning with multi-step EXploration (V-REX)'', which is composed of a benchmark of challenging visual reasoning tasks requiring native multi-step exploration and an evaluation protocol. V-REX covers rich application scenarios across diverse domains. V-REX casts the multi-step exploratory reasoning into a Chain-of-Questions (CoQ) and disentangles VLMs' capability to (1) Planning: breaking down an open-ended task by selecting a chain of exploratory questions; and (2) Following: answering curated CoQ sequentially to collect information for deriving the final answer. By curating finite options of questions and answers per step, V-REX achieves a reliable quantitative and fine-grained analysis of the intermediate steps. By assessing SOTA proprietary and open-sourced VLMs, we reveal consistent scaling trends, significant differences between planning and following abilities, and substantial room for improvement in multi-step exploratory reasoning.

High-quality geometric diagram generation presents both a challenge and an opportunity: it demands strict spatial accuracy while offering well-defined constraints to guide generation. Inspired by recent advances in geometry problem solving that employ formal languages and symbolic solvers for enhanced correctness and interpretability, we propose GeoLoom, a novel framework for text-to-diagram generation in geometric domains. GeoLoom comprises two core components: an autoformalization module that translates natural language into a specifically designed generation-oriented formal language GeoLingua, and a coordinate solver that maps formal constraints to precise coordinates using the efficient Monte Carlo optimization. To support this framework, we introduce GeoNF, a dataset aligning natural language geometric descriptions with formal GeoLingua descriptions. We further propose a constraint-based evaluation metric that quantifies structural deviation, offering mathematically grounded supervision for iterative refinement. Empirical results demonstrate that GeoLoom significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in structural fidelity, providing a principled foundation for interpretable and scalable diagram generation.

Large language models (LLMs) tackle complex tasks by generating long chains of thought or "reasoning traces" that act as latent variables in the generation of an output given a query. A model's ability to generate such traces can be optimized with reinforcement learning (RL) to improve their utility in predicting an answer. This optimization comes at a high computational cost, especially for narrative-related tasks that involve retrieving and processing many tokens. To this end, we propose LiteReason, a latent reasoning method that can be interleaved with standard token sampling and easily combined with RL techniques. LiteReason employs a lightweight Reasoning Projector module, trained to produce continuous latent tokens that help the model 'skip' reasoning steps. During RL, the policy model decides when to activate the projector, switching between latent and discrete reasoning as needed. Experimental results on plot hole detection and book chapter generation show that our method outperforms latent reasoning baselines and comes close to matching non-latent RL training, while reducing final reasoning length by 77-92%. Overall, LiteReason guides RL training to a more efficient part of the performance-computation tradeoff curve.

Operator-learning systems are not governed solely by total parameter count; for one query, the relevant bottleneck can be the model that must be loaded and evaluated. We study this distinction for classical neural operators on compact Sobolev subsets through a constructive comparison between routed mixtures of neural operators (MoNOs) and a fixed single-neural-operator construction. The comparison concerns expert-active complexity relative to that baseline, with total stored size and routing search accounted separately. A MoNO routes each input function through a tree to one expert. Our main theorem shows that every scalar uniformly continuous nonlinear operator with bounded output Sobolev radius on the approximation set admits a MoNO approximation whose active expert has smaller depth, width, and rank scaling than the analyzed single-neural-operator construction; for Lipschitz targets these expert quantities are bounded by $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-1})$. The theorem turns localization into an operator-level accounting of active expert size, routing depth, and number of experts. We also prove a quantitative universal approximation theorem for the underlying neural-operator architecture, with explicit dependence on compact-set diameter and modulus of continuity.

Bilevel optimization minimizes an objective function, defined by an upper-level problem whose feasible region is the solution of a lower-level problem. We study the oracle complexity of finding an $ε$-stationary point with first-order methods when the upper-level problem is nonconvex, and the lower-level problem is strongly convex. Recent works (Ji et al., ICML 2021; Arbel and Mairal, ICLR 2022; Chen et al., JMLR 2025) achieve a $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\bar κ_y^4 ε^{-2})$ upper bound that is near-optimal in $ε$, which can be reduced to $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\bar κ_y^{7/2} ε^{-2})$ by a naive application of Nesterov acceleration in the inner loop, where $\bar κ_y$ is the global condition number. However, the optimal dependency on the condition number is unknown. In this work, we establish a new $Ω(κ_y^{5/2} ε^{-2})$ lower bound, where $κ_y < \bar κ_y$ is the lower-level condition number that is of the same order as $\bar κ_y$ when the smoothness constants are $\mathcal{O}(1)$. Our lower bound establishes the first provable gap in terms of condition number dependency between bilevel problems and minimax problems in this setup. Our lower bounds can be extended to various settings, including high-order smooth functions, stochastic oracles, and convex hyper-objectives: (1) For second-order and arbitrarily smooth problems, we show lower bounds of $Ω({κ_y^{31/14}} ε^{-12/7})$ and $Ω(κ_y^{21/10} ε^{-8/5})$, respectively. (2) For convex-strongly-convex problems, we improve the previously best lower bound (Ji and Liang, JMLR 2022) from $Ω(κ_y /\sqrtε)$ to $Ω(κ_y^{3/2} / \sqrtε)$. (3) For smooth stochastic problems, we also show a lower bound of $Ω(κ_y^4 ε^{-4})$.

While promising, graph reasoners based on Large Language Models (LLMs) lack built-in invariance to symmetries in graph representations. Operating on sequential graph serializations, LLMs can produce different outputs under node reindexing, edge reordering, or formatting changes, raising robustness concerns. We systematically analyze these effects, studying how fine-tuning impacts encoding sensitivity as well generalization on unseen tasks. We propose a principled decomposition of graph serializations into node labeling, edge encoding, and syntax, and evaluate LLM robustness to variations of each of these factors on a comprehensive benchmarking suite. We also contribute a novel set of spectral tasks to further assess generalization abilities of fine-tuned reasoners. Results show that larger (non-fine-tuned) models are more robust. Fine-tuning reduces sensitivity to node relabeling but may increase it to variations in structure and format, while it does not consistently improve performance on unseen tasks.

Passive acoustic monitoring offers the potential to enable long-term, spatially extensive assessments of coral reefs. To explore this approach, we deployed underwater acoustic recorders at ten coral reef sites around Singapore waters over two years. To mitigate the persistent anthropogenic and current-induced noise masking the low-frequency reef soundscape, we trained a convolutional neural network denoiser. Analysis of the acoustic data reveals distinct morning and evening choruses. Though the correlation with environmental variates was obscured in the low-frequency part of the noisy recordings, the denoised data showed correlations of acoustic activity indices such as sound pressure level and acoustic complexity index with diver-based assessments of reef health such as live coral richness and cover, and algal cover. Furthermore, the shrimp snap rate, computed from the high-frequency acoustic band, is robustly correlated with the reef parameters, both temporally and spatially. This study demonstrates that passive acoustics holds valuable information that can help with reef monitoring, provided the data is effectively denoised and interpreted. This methodology can be extended to other marine environments where acoustic monitoring is hindered by persistent noise.

Pancreatic cancer is projected to be the second-deadliest cancer by 2030, making early detection critical. Intraductal papillary mucinous neoplasms (IPMNs), key cancer precursors, present a clinical dilemma, as current guidelines struggle to stratify malignancy risk, leading to unnecessary surgeries or missed diagnoses. Here, we introduce Cyst-X, a multi-center MRI benchmark and a federated learning framework for IPMN malignancy-risk stratification. The dataset comprises 1,461 abdominal MRI scans from 764 patients at seven international centers, with three-tier malignancy labels anchored in histopathology or three-year imaging follow-up and expert pancreas segmentations. The pipeline couples the PanSegNet pancreas segmenter with a 3D DenseNet-121 classifier and a parallel radiomics predictor. On internal cross-validation, the deep learning classifier reached a mean area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.85 (95% confidence interval 0.84-0.86) on T2-weighted MRI for high-risk versus low- or no-risk discrimination, with the average precision rising from a prevalence baseline of 0.23 to 0.64. This performance was preserved (AUC 0.85, FedProx) when training was distributed across institutions without exchange of raw patient images. Benchmarked against three blinded radiologists on a 629-case reader subset evaluated under imaging-only conditions, the classifier matched or exceeded sensitivity at comparable specificity. To accelerate research in early pancreatic cancer detection, we publicly release the Cyst-X dataset, segmentation masks, and trained models as the first large-scale, multi-centre MRI resource for pancreatic cystic neoplasm analysis.

While benchmarks measure the accuracy of LLM-powered agents, they mostly assume full automation, failing to represent the collaborative nature of real-world use cases. In this paper, we make two major steps towards the rigorous assessment of human-agent interactions. First, we propose PULSE, a framework for more efficient human-centric evaluation of agent designs, which comprises collecting user feedback, training an ML model to predict user satisfaction, and computing results by combining human satisfaction ratings with model-generated pseudo-labels. Second, we deploy PULSE in software engineering -- one of the highest-impact, real-world domains for LLM agents -- via a large-scale web platform built around the open-source agent OpenHands. Across 15k users, we evaluate how three agent design decisions impact developer satisfaction rates. We also show how PULSE can lead to more robust conclusions about agent design, reducing confidence intervals by 40\% compared to a standard A/B test. Finally, we find substantial discrepancies between in-the-wild results with benchmark performance (e.g., the anti-correlation between claude-sonnet-4 and gpt-5), underscoring the limitations of benchmark-driven evaluation. Our framework PULSE provides guidance for future evaluations, and our findings identify opportunities for better software agent designs.

Solving large-scale Generalized Eigenvalue Problems (GEPs) is a fundamental yet computationally prohibitive task in science and engineering. As a promising direction, contour integral (CI) methods offer an efficient and parallelizable framework. However, their performance is critically dependent on the selection of integration contours -- improper selection without reliable prior knowledge of eigenvalue distribution can incur significant computational overhead and compromise numerical accuracy. To address this challenge, we propose Deepcontour, a novel hybrid framework that integrates a deep learning-based spectral predictor with Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) for principled contour design. Specifically, Deepcontour utilizes its specialized Eigen-Neural-Operator (ENO) to provide rapid spectral distribution priors, driving a KDE module to automatically construct the optimized integration contours, which guide the CI solver to efficiently find the desired eigenvalues. Deepcontour achieves up to a 5.63x speedup across diverse scientific datasets while maintaining strict numerical rigor. By merging the predictive power of deep learning with the numerical rigor of classical solvers, this work establishes an efficient and robust paradigm for solving large-scale GEPs.

Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) management is a complex task due to many variability factors. Artificial Pancreas (AP) systems have alleviated patient burden by automating insulin delivery through advanced control algorithms. However, the effectiveness of these systems depends on accurate modeling of glucose-insulin dynamics, which traditional mathematical models often fail to capture due to their inability to adapt to patient-specific variations. This study introduces a Biological-Informed Recurrent Neural Network (BIRNN) framework to address these limitations. The BIRNN leverages a Gated Recurrent Units (GRU) architecture augmented with physics-informed loss functions that embed physiological constraints, ensuring a balance between predictive accuracy and consistency with biological principles. The framework is validated using the commercial UVA/Padova simulator, outperforming traditional linear models in glucose prediction accuracy and reconstruction of unmeasured states, even under circadian variations in insulin sensitivity. The results demonstrate the potential of BIRNN for personalized glucose regulation and future adaptive control strategies in AP systems.

Musculoskeletal disorders pose significant risks to athletes, and early risk assessment is essential for prevention. However, most existing methods are designed for controlled settings and fail to reliably assess risk in complex environments due to their reliance on a single type of data. This research introduces ViSK-GAT (Visual-Skeletal Geometric Attention Transformer), a novel multimodal deep learning framework that classifies musculoskeletal risk using both visual and skeletal coordinate-based features. A custom multimodal dataset (MusDis-Sports) was created by combining images and skeletal coordinates, with each sample labeled into eight risk categories based on the Rapid Entire Body Assessment (REBA) system. ViSK-GAT integrates two innovative modules: the Fine-Grained Attention Module (FGAM), which refines intra-modal features through self-attention before fusion, and the Multimodal Geometric Correspondence Module (MGCM), which enhances cross-modal alignment between image features and coordinates. The model achieved robust performance, with all key metrics exceeding 93%. Probability distribution error metrics also showed a low Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) of 0.1205 and a Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 0.0156. ViSK-GAT consistently outperformed state-of-the-art (SOTA) deep learning backbones and showed its potential to advance artificial intelligence-driven musculoskeletal risk assessment and enable timely interventions in sports.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved notable success in tasks such as social and transportation networks. However, recent studies have highlighted the vulnerability of GNNs to backdoor attacks, raising significant concerns about their reliability in real-world applications. Despite initial efforts to defend against specific graph backdoor attacks, existing defense methods face two main challenges: either the inability to establish a clear distinction between triggers and clean nodes, resulting in the removal of many clean nodes, or the failure to eliminate the impact of triggers, making it challenging to restore the target nodes to their pre-attack state. Through empirical analysis of various existing graph backdoor attacks, we observe that the triggers generated by these methods exhibit over-similarity in both features and structure. Based on this observation, we propose a novel graph backdoor defense method SimGuard. We first utilizes a similarity-based metric to detect triggers and then employs contrastive learning to train a backdoor detector that generates embeddings capable of separating triggers from clean nodes, thereby improving detection efficiency. Extensive experiments conducted on real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed method effectively defends against various graph backdoor attacks while preserving performance on clean nodes. The code will be released upon acceptance.

Current training data attribution (TDA) methods treat the influence one sample has on another as static, but neural networks learn in distinct stages that exhibit changing patterns of influence. In this work, we introduce a framework for stagewise data attribution grounded in singular learning theory. We predict that influence can change non-monotonically, including sign flips and sharp peaks at developmental transitions. We first validate these predictions analytically and empirically in a toy model, showing that dynamic shifts in influence directly map to the model's progressive learning of a semantic hierarchy. Finally, we demonstrate these phenomena at scale in language models, where token-level influence changes align with known developmental stages.

Software requirements are derived from a variety of elicitation techniques, many of which have a conversational nature, like interviews. However, evaluating whether those derived requirements faithfully reflect the stakeholders' needs remains a challenging manual task. In this paper, we formalize the task of aligning the transcript of an interview with a collection of requirements represented as user stories. We propose two heuristic metrics for alignment, called (i) requirements faithfulness: the proportion of stories supported by the transcript, and (ii) interview coverage: the proportion of transcript supported by at least one story. Then, we run experiments with large language models and embedding models that assess the ability of evaluating these metrics automatically. Experiments over four datasets show that an LLM-based solution achieves 0.86 macro-F1 on manually labeled chunk-story pairs. We also show how embedding models can be used as blockers to make the approach more scalable. This work paves the way for more research on linking conversational artifacts with requirements. The formal framework and the automated matching techniques are basic components that can be used for emerging tasks such as tracing requirements to interviews and generating requirements from conversations.

While automatic metrics drive progress in Machine Translation (MT) and Text Summarization (TS), existing metrics have been developed and validated almost exclusively for English and other high-resource languages. This narrow focus leaves Indian languages, spoken by over 1.5 billion people, largely overlooked, casting doubt on the universality of current evaluation practices. To address this gap, we introduce ITEM, a large-scale benchmark that systematically evaluates the alignment of 29 automatic metrics with human judgments across six major Indian languages, enriched with fine-grained annotations. Our extensive evaluation, covering agreement with human judgments, sensitivity to outliers, language-specific reliability, inter-metric correlations, and resilience to controlled perturbations reveals four central findings: (1) LLM-based evaluators show the strongest alignment with human judgments at both segment and system levels; (2) outliers exert a significant impact on metric-human agreement; (3) In TS, metrics are more effective at capturing content fidelity, whereas in MT, they better reflect fluency; and (4) Metrics differ in their robustness and sensitivity when subjected to diverse perturbations. Collectively, these findings offer critical guidance for advancing metric design and evaluation in Indian languages.

Given a map description through global traversal navigation instructions, an LLM can often infer the implicit spatial layout and answer user queries by providing shortest paths. However, such context-dependent querying becomes incapable as environments grow larger, motivating the need for incremental map construction that builds a complete topological graph from stepwise observations. We propose LLM-MapRepair, a framework for LLM-driven construction and map repair, designed to detect, localize, and correct structural inconsistencies in incrementally constructed navigation graphs. Our contributions include a Version Control mechanism for graph construction, an Edge Impact Score for repair prioritization, and a cleaned variant of the MANGO benchmark tailored for LLM-driven map construction and repair. We evaluate the framework on four evaluation settings: a synthetic per-component ablation (gpt-4.1, n=20 seeds per cell), a cross-vendor sweep over seven LLMs from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google on both synthetic and TextWorld procedurally-generated text-adventure games, a repair-stage evaluation on all 42 cleaned-MANGO games with non-zero residual conflicts (534 conflicts; three vendors x three modes plus two non-LLM references), and an end-to-end natural-text deployment on Chapters 16-17 of Dream of the Red Chamber. On the DRC deployment, LLM-MapRepair achieves 94.3% node recall (+8.6 pp over direct LLM mapping) and 88.2% edge recall (+55.8 pp), using GPT-4.1; the recall improvements come with predicted node and edge counts that are roughly 4x the ground-truth counts (Table 4), reflecting the discretization-driven over-generation trade-off we discuss in the Limitations.

Prompt-based continual learning (CL) offers a parameter-efficient way to adapt large language models (LLMs) across task sequences. However, existing methods often rely on task-aware inference and maintain an expanding set of task-specific prompts, leading to (1) severe performance degradation on earlier tasks when task identifiers are unavailable for prompt selection at inference time, and (2) limited scalability as task sequence grows. We propose GRID, a unified framework designed to address these challenges. GRID incorporates an output-space-aware decoding mechanism that enhances backward transfer by leveraging representative inputs and automatic label semantic normalization, alongside a gradient-guided prompt selection strategy that compresses less informative prompts into a single aggregated representation for scalable, memory-efficient continual learning. Extensive experiments on long-sequence and negative-transfer benchmarks show that GRID improves backward transfer, achieves competitive forward transfer, and substantially reduces prompt memory across encoder-decoder and decoder-only architectures, including T5, Qwen, and LLaMA. Source code is available at https://github.com/AnushkaTi/GRID.

While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance on factoid question answering, they are still prone to hallucination and untruthful responses, particularly when tasks demand information outside their parametric knowledge. Indeed, truthfulness requires more than accuracy -- models must also recognize uncertainty and abstain when unsure to avoid hallucinations. This presents a fundamental challenge for existing methods: approaches that optimize for accuracy often amplify hallucinations, while those that encourage abstention can become overly conservative, sacrificing correct answers. Both extremes ultimately compromise truthfulness. In this work, we present TruthRL, a general reinforcement learning (RL) framework that directly optimizes the truthfulness of LLMs. Specifically, we implement TruthRL using GRPO with a simple yet effective ternary reward that distinguishes correct answers, hallucinations, and abstentions. It incentivizes models to reduce hallucinations not only by providing correct responses, but also by enabling abstention when uncertain, thereby improving truthfulness. Extensive experiments across four knowledge-intensive benchmarks show that TruthRL significantly reduces hallucinations (e.g., 43.5% $\rightarrow$ 19.4%) and improves truthfulness (e.g., 5.3% $\rightarrow$ 37.2%), with consistent gains across various backbone models. Analysis shows that the improvement of TruthRL arises from enhanced capability of LLMs to recognize their knowledge boundary, hence avoiding being overly conservative as the baselines are.

Wildfires are among the most severe natural hazards, posing a significant threat to both humans and natural ecosystems. The growing risk of wildfires increases the demand for forecasting models that are not only accurate but also reliable. Deep Learning (DL) has shown promise in predicting wildfire danger; however, its adoption is hindered by concerns over the reliability of its predictions, some of which stem from the lack of uncertainty quantification. To address this challenge, we present an uncertainty-aware DL framework that jointly captures epistemic (model) and aleatoric (data) uncertainty to enhance short-term wildfire danger forecasting. In the next-day forecasting, our best-performing model improves the F1 Score by 2.3% and reduces the Expected Calibration Error by 2.1% compared to a deterministic baseline, enhancing both predictive skill and calibration. Our experiments confirm the reliability of the uncertainty estimates and illustrate their practical utility for decision support, including the identification of uncertainty thresholds for rejecting low-confidence predictions and the generation of well-calibrated wildfire danger maps with accompanying uncertainty layers. Extending the forecast horizon up to ten days, we observe that aleatoric uncertainty increases with time, showing greater variability in environmental conditions, while epistemic uncertainty remains stable. Finally, we show that although the two uncertainty types may be redundant in low-uncertainty cases, they provide complementary insights under more challenging conditions, underscoring the value of their joint modeling for robust wildfire danger prediction. In summary, our approach significantly improves the accuracy and reliability of wildfire danger forecasting, advancing the development of trustworthy wildfire DL systems.

Score-based diffusion models are a highly effective method for generating samples from a distribution of images. We consider scenarios where the training data comes from a noisy version of the target distribution, and present an efficiently implementable modification of the inference procedure to generate noiseless samples. Our approach is motivated by the manifold hypothesis, according to which meaningful data is concentrated around some low-dimensional manifold of a high-dimensional ambient space. The central idea is that noise manifests as low magnitude variation in off-manifold directions in contrast to the relevant variation of the desired distribution which is mostly confined to on-manifold directions. We introduce the notion of an extended score and show that, in a simplified setting, it can be used to reduce small variations to zero, while leaving large variations mostly unchanged. We describe how its approximation can be computed efficiently from an approximation to the standard score and demonstrate its efficacy on toy problems, synthetic data, and real data.