Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as judges of chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, yet it remains unclear whether they can reliably assess process faithfulness rather than merely answer plausibility. We introduce C2-Faith, a benchmark built from PRM800K that explicitly decomposes faithfulness into two complementary dimensions: causality (whether each step logically follows from prior context) and coverage (whether essential intermediate inferences are present). Using controlled perturbations, we construct examples with known causal error positions by replacing a single step with a logically inconsistent variant, and with controlled coverage deletions at varying rates, enabling direct measurement against reference labels. We evaluate three frontier LLM judges across three tasks: binary causal detection, causal step localization, and coverage scoring. Our results reveal that judge reliability is highly task-dependent, with no single model dominating across settings. While models often detect that an error exists, they struggle to accurately localize it, indicating a substantial gap between detection and attribution. Moreover, all judges systematically overestimate reasoning completeness, assigning high coverage scores even when substantial portions of intermediate reasoning are missing. These findings expose fundamental limitations of LLM judges in process-level evaluation and highlight the need for more reliable and calibrated methods when using LLMs to assess reasoning quality.

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards ( RLVR ) has emerged as a transformative paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models ( LLMs), yet its potential in 3D scene understanding remains under-explored. Existing approaches largely rely on Supervised Fine-Tuning ( SFT), where the token-level cross-entropy loss acts as an indirect proxy for optimization, leading to a misalignment between training objectives and task performances. To bridge this gap, we present Reinforcement Fine-Tuning for Video-based 3D Scene Understanding (3D-RFT ), the first framework to extend RLVR to video-based 3D perception and reasoning. 3D-RFT shifts the paradigm by directly optimizing the model towards evaluation metrics. 3D-RFT first activates 3D-aware Multi-modal Large Language Models ( MLLM s) via SFT, followed by reinforcement fine-tuning using Group Relative Policy Optimization ( GRPO) with strictly verifiable reward functions. We design task-specific reward functions directly from metrics like 3D IoU and F1-Score to provide more effective signals to guide model training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that 3D-RFT-4B achieves state-of-the-art performance on various video-based 3D scene understanding tasks. Notably, 3D-RFT-4B significantly outperforms larger models (e.g., VG LLM-8B) on 3D video detection, 3D visual grounding, and spatial reasoning benchmarks. We further reveal good properties of 3D-RFT such as robust efficacy, and valuable insights into training strategies and data impact. We hope 3D-RFT can serve as a robust and promising paradigm for future development of 3D scene understanding.

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is increasingly being integrated into complex business workflows, fundamentally shifting the boundaries of managerial decision-making. However, the reliability of its strategic advice in ambiguous business contexts remains a critical knowledge gap. To address this gap, this study compares multiple GenAI models in their ability to detect ambiguity, examines whether a systematic ambiguity-resolution process improves response quality, and investigates their susceptibility to sycophantic behavior when confronted with flawed managerial directives. Using a novel four-dimensional business ambiguity taxonomy, we conducted a human-in-the-loop experiment across strategic, tactical, and operational scenarios. The resulting decisions were assessed through a human-validated automated evaluation framework based on agreement, actionability, justification quality, and constraint adherence. The results show that our approach not only distinguishes different types of ambiguity, but also reveals how ambiguity resolution systematically changes model behavior. In particular, resolving ambiguities improved decision quality across all managerial levels, with the strongest gains observed in constraint adherence. The analysis further showed that sycophantic behavior is not uniform across models: some models challenged flawed assumptions, whereas others tended to comply with them. This study contributes to the bounded rationality literature by positioning GenAI as a cognitive scaffold that can detect and resolve ambiguities managers might overlook, while demonstrating that its artificial limitations require human oversight to ensure its reliability as a strategic partner.

While recent advances have demonstrated strong performance in individual humanoid skills such as upright locomotion, fall recovery and whole-body coordination, learning a single policy that masters all these skills remains challenging due to the diverse dynamics and conflicting control objectives involved. To address this, we introduce X-Loco, a framework for training a vision-based generalist humanoid locomotion policy. X-Loco trains multiple oracle specialist policies and adopts a synergetic policy distillation with a case-adaptive specialist selection mechanism, which dynamically leverages multiple specialist policies to guide a vision-based student policy. This design enables the student to acquire a broad spectrum of locomotion skills, ranging from fall recovery to terrain traversal and whole-body coordination skills. To the best of our knowledge, X-Loco is the first framework to demonstrate vision-based humanoid locomotion that jointly integrates upright locomotion, whole-body coordination and fall recovery, while operating solely under velocity commands without relying on reference motions. Experimental results show that X-Loco achieves superior performance, demonstrated by tasks such as fall recovery and terrain traversal. Ablation studies further highlight that our framework effectively leverages specialist expertise and enhances learning efficiency.

Self-correction is an effective technique for maintaining parallel sampling in discrete diffusion models with minimal performance degradation. Prior work has explored self-correction at inference time or during post-training; however, such approaches often suffer from limited generalization and may impair reasoning performance. GIDD pioneers pretraining-based self-correction via a multi-step BERT-style uniform-absorbing objective. However, GIDD relies on a continuous interpolation-based pipeline with opaque interactions between uniform transitions and absorbing masks, which complicates hyperparameter tuning and hinders practical performance. In this work, we propose a Self-Correcting Discrete Diffusion (SCDD) model to reformulate pretrained self-correction with explicit state transitions and learn directly in discrete time. Our framework also simplifies the training noise schedule, eliminates a redundant remasking step, and relies exclusively on uniform transitions to learn self-correction. Experiments at the GPT-2 scale demonstrate that our method enables more efficient parallel decoding while preserving generation quality.

Spatial semantic segmentation of sound scenes (S5) consists of jointly performing audio source separation and sound event classification from a multichannel audio mixture. Evaluating S5 systems with separation and classification metrics individually makes system comparison difficult, whereas existing joint metrics, such as the class-aware signal-to-distortion ratio (CA-SDR), can conflate separation and labeling errors. In particular, CA-SDR relies on predicted class labels for source matching, which may obscure label swaps or misclassifications when the underlying source estimates remain perceptually correct. In this work, we introduce the class and source-aware signal-to-distortion ratio (CASA-SDR), a new metric that performs permutation-invariant source matching before computing classification errors, thereby shifting from a classification-focused approach to a separation-focused approach. We first analyze CA-SDR in controlled scenarios with oracle separation and synthetic classification errors, as well as under controlled cross-contamination between sources, and compare its behavior to that of the classical SDR and CASA-SDR. We also study the impact of classification errors on the metrics by introducing error-based and source-based aggregation strategies. Finally, we compare CA-SDR and CASA-SDR on systems submitted to Task 4 of the DCASE 2025 challenge, highlighting the cases where CA-SDR over-penalizes label swaps or poorly separated sources, while CASA-SDR provides a more interpretable separation-centric assessment of S5 performance.

End-to-end backpropagation requires storing activations throughout all layers, creating memory bottlenecks that limit model scalability. Existing block-wise training methods offer means to alleviate this problem, but they rely on ad-hoc local objectives and remain largely unexplored beyond classification tasks. We propose $\textit{DiffusionBlocks}$, a principled framework for transforming transformer-based networks into genuinely independent trainable blocks that maintain competitive performance with end-to-end training. Our key insight leverages the fact that residual connections naturally correspond to updates in a dynamical system. With minimal modifications to this system, we can convert the updates to those of a denoising process, where each block can be learned independently by leveraging the score matching objective. This independence enables training with gradients for only one block at a time, thereby reducing memory requirements in proportion to the number of blocks. Our experiments on a range of transformer architectures (vision, diffusion, autoregressive, recurrent-depth, and masked diffusion) demonstrate that DiffusionBlocks training matches the performance of end-to-end training while enabling scalable block-wise training on practical tasks beyond small-scale classification. DiffusionBlocks provides a theoretically grounded approach that successfully scales to modern generative tasks across diverse architectures. Code is available at https://github.com/SakanaAI/DiffusionBlocks .

Effective exploration is a key challenge in reinforcement learning for large language models: discovering high-quality trajectories within a limited sampling budget from the vast natural language sequence space. Existing methods face notable limitations: GRPO samples exclusively from the root, saturating high-probability trajectories while leaving deep, error-prone states under-explored. Tree-based methods blindly disperse budgets across trivial or unrecoverable states, causing sampling dilution that fails to uncover rare correct suffixes and destabilizes local baselines. To address this, we propose Deep Dense Exploration (DDE), a strategy that focuses exploration on $\textit{pivots}$-deep, recoverable states within unsuccessful trajectories. We instantiate DDE with DEEP-GRPO, which introduces three key innovations: (1) a lightweight data-driven utility function that automatically balances recoverability and depth bias to identify pivot states; (2) local dense resampling at each pivot to increase the probability of discovering correct subsequent trajectories; and (3) a dual-stream optimization objective that decouples global policy learning from local corrective updates. Experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms GRPO, tree-based methods, and other strong baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/AgentCombo/DEEP-GRPO

We propose a sequential test for detecting arbitrary distribution shifts that allows conformal test martingales (CTMs) to work under a fixed, reference-conditional setting. Existing CTM detectors construct test martingales by continually growing a reference set with each incoming sample, using it to assess how atypical the new sample is relative to past observations. While this design yields anytime-valid type-I error control, it suffers from test-time contamination: after a change, post-shift observations enter the reference set and dilute the evidence for distribution shift, increasing detection delay and reducing power. In contrast, our method avoids contamination by design by comparing each new sample to a fixed null reference dataset. Our main technical contribution is a robust martingale construction that remains valid conditional on the null reference data, achieved by explicitly accounting for the estimation error in the reference distribution induced by the finite reference set. This yields anytime-valid type-I error control together with guarantees of asymptotic power one and bounded expected detection delay. Empirically, our method detects shifts faster than standard CTMs, providing a powerful and reliable distribution-shift detector.

While moral reasoning has emerged as a promising research direction for large language models (LLMs), achieving robust generalization remains a critical challenge. This challenge arises from the gap between what is said and what is morally implied. In this paper, we build on metapragmatic links and Moral Foundations Theory to close this gap. Specifically, we develop a pragmatic inference approach that enables LLMs, given a moral situation, to acquire the metapragmatic links between moral reasoning objectives and the social variables that influence them. We adapt this approach to three different moral reasoning tasks to demonstrate its adaptability and generalizability. Experimental results show that our approach significantly enhances LLMs' generalization in moral reasoning, paving the way for future research to leverage pragmatic inference across a wide range of moral reasoning tasks.

Estimating longitudinal treatment effects is essential for sequential decision-making but is challenging due to treatment-confounder feedback. While Iterative Conditional Expectation (ICE) G-computation offers a principled approach, its recursive structure suffers from error propagation, corrupting the learned outcome regression models. We propose D3-Net, a framework that mitigates error propagation in ICE training and then applies a robust final correction. First, to interrupt error propagation during learning, we train the ICE sequence using Sequential Doubly Robust (SDR) pseudo-outcomes, which provide bias-corrected targets for each regression. Second, we employ a multi-task transformer with a covariate simulator head for auxiliary supervision, regularizing representation learning, and a target network to stabilize training dynamics. For the final estimate, we discard the SDR correction and instead use the uncorrected nuisance models to perform Longitudinal Targeted Minimum Loss-Based Estimation (LTMLE) on the original outcomes. This second-stage, targeted debiasing ensures robustness and optimal finite-sample properties. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our model, D3-Net, robustly reduces bias and variance across different horizons, counterfactuals, and time-varying confoundings, compared to existing state-of-the-art ICE-based estimators.

Deployed graph neural networks (GNNs) are frozen at deployment yet must fit clean data, generalize under distribution shifts, and remain stable to perturbations. We show that static inference induces a fundamental tradeoff: improving stability requires reducing reliance on shift-sensitive features, leaving an irreducible worst-case generalization floor. Instance-conditional routing can break this ceiling, but is fragile because shifts can mislead routing and perturbations can make routing fluctuate. We capture these effects via two decompositions separating coverage vs selection, and base sensitivity vs fluctuation amplification. Based on these insights, we propose STEM-GNN, a pretrain-then-finetune framework with a mixture-of-experts encoder for diverse computation paths, a vector-quantized token interface to stabilize encoder-to-head signals, and a Lipschitz-regularized head to bound output amplification. Across nine node, link, and graph benchmarks, STEM-GNN achieves a stronger three-way balance, improving robustness to degree/homophily shifts and to feature/edge corruptions while remaining competitive on clean graphs.

Agentic reasoning enables large reasoning models (LRMs) to dynamically acquire external knowledge, but yet optimizing the retrieval process remains challenging due to the lack of dense, principled reward signals. In this paper, we introduce InfoReasoner, a unified framework that incentivizes effective information seeking via a synthetic semantic information gain reward. Theoretically, we redefine information gain as uncertainty reduction over the model's belief states, establishing guarantees, including non-negativity, telescoping additivity, and channel monotonicity. Practically, to enable scalable optimization without manual retrieval annotations, we propose an output-aware intrinsic estimator that computes information gain directly from the model's output distributions using semantic clustering via bidirectional textual entailment. This intrinsic reward guides the policy to maximize epistemic progress, enabling efficient training via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Experiments across seven question-answering benchmarks demonstrate that InfoReasoner consistently outperforms strong retrieval-augmented baselines, achieving up to 5.4% average accuracy improvement. Our work provides a theoretically grounded and scalable path toward agentic reasoning with retrieval. The code is available at https://github.com/dl-m9/InfoReasoner

Self-evolving large language model (LLM) agents continually improve by accumulating and reusing past experience, yet it remains unclear whether they faithfully rely on that experience to guide their behavior. We present the first systematic investigation of experience faithfulness, the causal dependence of an agent's decisions on the experience it is given, in self-evolving LLM agents. Using controlled causal interventions on both raw and condensed forms of experience, we comprehensively evaluate four representative frameworks across 13 LLM backbones and 9 environments. Our analysis uncovers a striking asymmetry: while agents consistently depend on raw experience, they often disregard or misinterpret condensed experience, even when it is the only experience provided. This gap persists across single- and multi-agent configurations and across backbone scales. We trace its underlying causes to three factors: the semantic limitations of condensed content, internal processing biases that suppress experience, and task regimes where pretrained priors already suffice. These findings challenge prevailing assumptions about self-evolving methods and underscore the need for more faithful and reliable approaches to experience integration.

Entity state tracking is a necessary component of world modeling that requires maintaining coherent representations of entities over time. Previous work has benchmarked entity tracking performance in purely text-based tasks. We introduce MET-Bench, a multimodal entity tracking benchmark designed to evaluate the ability of vision-language models to track entity states across modalities. Using three domains, we assess how effectively current models integrate textual and image-based state updates. Our findings reveal a significant performance gap between text-based and image-based entity tracking. We empirically show this discrepancy primarily stems from deficits in visual reasoning rather than perception. We further show that explicit text-based reasoning strategies improve performance, yet limitations remain, especially in long-horizon multimodal tasks. We apply reinforcement learning to improve entity tracking in open-source VLMs. This yields substantial in-modality gains, but does not transfer robustly across input modalities. Our results highlight the need for improved multimodal representations and reasoning techniques to bridge the gap between textual and visual entity tracking.

Advances in AIGC technologies have enabled the synthesis of highly realistic audio deepfakes capable of deceiving human auditory perception. Although numerous audio deepfake detection (ADD) methods have been developed, most rely on local temporal/spectral features or pairwise relations, overlooking high-order interactions (HOIs). HOIs capture discriminative patterns that emerge from multiple feature components beyond their individual contributions. We propose HyperPotter, a hypergraph-based framework designed to capture high-order relations associated with synergistic patterns through clustering-based hyperedges with class-aware prototype initialization. Extensive experiments on 13 test sets show that HyperPotter improves over the baseline on 11 sets, yielding an average relative EER reduction of 12.68\% across all test sets and 22.15\% on the improved sets. These results demonstrate strong cross-scenario generalization, while also revealing robustness limits under severe codec or channel distortion.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a cornerstone for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs), with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) serving as the de facto standard algorithm. Despite its ubiquity, we argue that the core ratio clipping mechanism in PPO is structurally ill-suited for the large vocabularies inherent to LLMs. PPO constrains policy updates based on the probability ratio of sampled tokens, which serves as a noisy single-sample Monte Carlo estimate of the true policy divergence. This creates a sub-optimal learning dynamic: updates to low-probability tokens are aggressively over-penalized, while potentially catastrophic shifts in high-probability tokens are under-constrained, leading to training inefficiency and instability. To address this, we propose Divergence Proximal Policy Optimization (DPPO), which substitutes heuristic clipping with a more principled constraint based on a direct estimate of policy divergence (e.g., Total Variation or KL). To avoid huge memory footprint, we introduce the efficient Binary and Top-K approximations to capture the essential divergence with negligible overhead. Extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate that DPPO achieves superior training stability and efficiency compared to existing methods, offering a more robust foundation for RL-based LLM fine-tuning. Our code is available at https://github.com/sail-sg/Stable-RL.

Ground reaction forces (GRFs) provide fundamental insight into human gait mechanics and are widely used to assess joint loading, limb symmetry, balance control, and motor function. Despite their clinical relevance, the use of GRF remains underutilised in clinical workflows due to the practical limitations of force plate systems. In this work, we present a force-plate-free approach for estimating GRFs using only marker-based motion capture data. This kinematics only method to estimate and decompose GRF makes it well suited for widespread clinical depolyment. By using kinematics from sixteen body segments, we estimate the centre of mass (CoM) and compute GRFs, which are subsequently decomposed into individual components through a minimization-based approach. Through this framework, we can identify gait stance phases and provide access to clinically meaningful kinetic measures without a dedicated force plate system. Experimental results demonstrate the viability of CoM and GRF estimation based solely on kinematic data, supporting force-plate-free gait analysis.

Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) is essential for deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) on memory-constrained devices, yet it renders models static and difficult to fine-tune. Standard fine-tuning paradigms, including Reinforcement Learning (RL), fundamentally rely on backpropagation and continuous weights to compute gradients. Thus they cannot be used on quantized models, where the parameter space is discrete and non-differentiable. While Evolution Strategies (ES) offer a backpropagation-free alternative, optimization of the quantized parameters can still fail due to vanishing or inaccurate gradient estimation. This paper introduces Quantized Evolution Strategies (QES), an optimization paradigm that performs full-parameter fine-tuning directly in the quantized space. QES is based on two innovations: (1) it integrates accumulated error feedback to preserve high-precision weight updating signals, and (2) it utilizes a stateless seed replay to reduce memory usage to low-precision inference levels. QES significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art zeroth-order fine-tuning methods on a variety of tasks, making direct fine-tuning for quantized models possible. It therefore opens up the possibility for scaling up LLMs entirely in the quantized space. The source code is available at https://github.com/dibbla/Quantized-Evolution-Strategies .

Macro-micro manipulators combine a macro manipulator with a large workspace, such as an industrial robot, with a lightweight, high-bandwidth micro manipulator. This enables highly dynamic interaction control while preserving the wide workspace of the robot. Traditionally, position control is assigned to the macro manipulator, while the micro manipulator handles the interaction with the environment, limiting the achievable interaction control bandwidth. To solve this, we propose a novel control architecture that incorporates the macro manipulator into the active interaction control. This leads to a increase in control bandwidth by a factor of 2.1 compared to the state of the art architecture, based on the leader-follower approach and factor 12.5 compared to traditional robot-based force control. Further we propose surrogate models for a more efficient controller design and easy adaptation to hardware changes. We validate our approach by comparing it against the other control schemes in different experiments, like collision with an object, following a force trajectory and industrial assembly tasks.

Autoregressive video diffusion models enable streaming generation, opening the door to long-form synthesis, video world models, and interactive neural game engines. However, their core attention layers become a major bottleneck at inference time: as generation progresses, the KV cache grows, causing both increasing latency and escalating GPU memory, which in turn restricts usable temporal context and harms long-range consistency. In this work, we study redundancy in autoregressive video diffusion and identify three persistent sources: near-duplicate cached keys across frames, slowly evolving (largely semantic) queries/keys that make many attention computations redundant, and cross-attention over long prompts where only a small subset of tokens matters per frame. Building on these observations, we propose a unified, training-free attention framework (FAST-AR) for FAST-AutoRegressive diffusion, consisting of three components: TempCache compresses the KV cache via temporal correspondence to bound cache growth; AnnCA accelerates cross-attention by selecting frame-relevant prompt tokens using fast approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) matching; and AnnSA sparsifies self-attention by restricting each query to semantically matched keys, also using a lightweight ANN. Together, these modules reduce attention, compute, and memory and are compatible with existing autoregressive diffusion backbones and world models. Experiments demonstrate up to x5 - x10 end-to-end speedups while preserving near-identical visual quality and, crucially, maintaining stable throughput and nearly constant peak GPU memory usage over long rollouts, where prior methods progressively slow down and suffer from increasing memory usage.

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to purely autoregressive language models because they can decode multiple tokens in parallel. However, state-of-the-art block-wise dLLMs rely on a "remasking" mechanism that decodes only the most confident tokens and discards the rest, effectively wasting computation. We demonstrate that recycling computation from the discarded tokens is beneficial, as these tokens retain contextual information useful for subsequent decoding iterations. In light of this, we propose Residual Context Diffusion (RCD), a module that converts these discarded token representations into contextual residuals and injects them back for the next denoising step. RCD uses a decoupled two-stage training pipeline to bypass the memory bottlenecks associated with backpropagation. We validate our method on both long CoT reasoning (SDAR) and short CoT instruction following (LLaDA) models. We demonstrate that a standard dLLM can be efficiently converted to the RCD paradigm with merely ~300 million tokens. RCD consistently improves frontier dLLMs by 4-11 percentage points in accuracy with minimal extra computation overhead across a wide range of benchmarks. Notably, on the most challenging AIME tasks, RCD nearly doubles baseline accuracy and attains up to 4-5x fewer denoising steps at baseline's peak accuracy.

Continued pretraining is optimized with fixed self-supervised tasks but selected by downstream performance, creating a coarse feedback loop in which practitioners evaluate checkpoints, change data mixtures or objectives, and restart runs, while individual updates remain blind to target capabilities. We ask whether a small set of verifiable downstream examples can provide step-level feedback without directly supervising the learner. We introduce V-pretraining, which decouples a learner trained only with a self-supervised loss from a lightweight task designer that constructs targets or views for unlabeled batches. Given the current learner and batch, V-pretraining scores a candidate construction by predicting the first-order reduction in downstream loss after the induced self-supervised update. The designer maximizes this value; the learner then applies the update with targets or views detached, so downstream labels never update learner parameters. We instantiate V-pretraining as adaptive top-K soft targets for language modeling and learned views or masks for self-supervised vision. Across both modalities, V-pretraining improves target capabilities without degrading generalization. Under wall-clock-matched continued pretraining, it improves GSM8K Pass@1 for Qwen models using 1,024 GSM8K examples only as feedback, including a +7.4 point single-run gain for Qwen2.5-0.5B. In vision, it improves DINOv3 transfer to ADE20K semantic segmentation and NYUv2 depth estimation while preserving ImageNet linear accuracy, suggesting that feedback-guided task construction can improve target capabilities without collapsing general-purpose representations.

This work studies the challenging problem of acquiring high-quality underwater images via 4-D light field (LF) imaging. To this end, we propose GeoDiff-LF, a novel diffusion-based framework built upon SD-Turbo to enhance underwater 4-D LF imaging by leveraging its spatial-angular structure. GeoDiff-LF consists of three key adaptations: (1) a modified U-Net architecture with convolutional and attention adapters to model geometric cues, (2) a geometry-guided loss function using tensor decomposition and progressive weighting to regularize global structure, and (3) an optimized sampling strategy with noise prediction to improve efficiency. By integrating diffusion priors and LF geometry, GeoDiff-LF effectively mitigates color distortion in underwater scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework outperforms existing methods across both visual fidelity and quantitative performance, advancing the state-of-the-art in enhancing underwater imaging. The code will be publicly available at https://github.com/linlos1234/GeoDiff-LF.

This paper argues that interpretability research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) is fundamentally ill-posed as existing definitions of interpretability fail to describe how interpretability can be formally tested or designed for. We posit that actionable definitions of interpretability must be formulated in terms of *symmetries* that inform model design and lead to testable conditions. Under a probabilistic view, we hypothesise that four symmetries (inference equivariance, information invariance, concept-closure invariance, and structural invariance) suffice to (i) formalise interpretable models as a subclass of probabilistic models, (ii) yield a unified formulation of interpretable inference (e.g., alignment, interventions, and counterfactuals) as a form of Bayesian inversion, and (iii) provide a formal framework to verify compliance with safety standards and regulations.

Neural algorithmic reasoning (NAR) is a paradigm that trains neural networks to execute classic algorithms by supervised learning. Despite its successes, important limitations remain: inability to construct valid solutions without post-processing and to reason about multiple correct ones, poor performance on combinatorial NP-hard problems, and inapplicability to problems for which strong algorithms are not yet known. To address these limitations, we reframe the problem of learning algorithm trajectories as a Markov decision process, which imposes structure on the solution construction procedure and unlocks the powerful tools of imitation and reinforcement learning (RL). We propose the GNARL framework, encompassing the methodology to translate problem formulations from NAR to RL and a learning architecture suitable for a wide range of graph-based problems. We achieve very high graph accuracy results on several CLRS-30 problems, performance matching or exceeding much narrower NAR approaches for NP-hard problems and, remarkably, applicability even when lacking an expert algorithm.

Unsupervised pre-training can equip reinforcement learning agents with prior knowledge and accelerate learning in downstream tasks. A promising direction, grounded in human development, investigates agents that learn by setting and pursuing their own goals. The core challenge lies in how to effectively generate, select, and learn from such goals. Our focus is on broad distributions of downstream tasks where solving every task zero-shot is infeasible. Such settings naturally arise when the target tasks lie outside of the pre-training distribution or when their identities are unknown to the agent. In this work, we (i) optimize for efficient multi-episode exploration and adaptation within a meta-learning framework, and (ii) guide the training curriculum with evolving estimates of the agent's post-adaptation performance. We present ULEE, an unsupervised meta-learning method that combines an in-context learner with an adversarial goal-generation strategy that maintains training at the frontier of the agent's capabilities. On XLand-MiniGrid benchmarks, ULEE pre-training yields improved exploration and adaptation abilities that generalize to novel objectives, environment dynamics, and map structures. The resulting policy attains improved zero-shot and few-shot performance, and provides a strong initialization for longer fine-tuning processes. It outperforms learning from scratch, DIAYN pre-training, and alternative curricula. Code is available at: https://github.com/Octavio-Pappalardo/ulee-jax

With large-scale text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models achieving significant advancements in open-domain image creation, increasing attention has been focused on their natural extension to the realm of text-driven image-to-image (I2I) translation, where a source image acts as visual guidance to the generated image in addition to the textual guidance provided by the text prompt. We propose FBSDiff, a novel framework adapting off-the-shelf T2I diffusion model into the I2I paradigm from a fresh frequency-domain perspective. Through dynamic frequency band substitution of diffusion features, FBSDiff realizes versatile and highly controllable text-driven I2I in a plug-and-play manner (without need for model training, fine-tuning, or online optimization), allowing appearance-guided, layout-guided, and contour-guided I2I translation by progressively substituting low-frequency band, mid-frequency band, and high-frequency band of latent diffusion features, respectively. In addition, FBSDiff flexibly enables continuous control over I2I correlation intensity simply by tuning the bandwidth of the substituted frequency band. To further promote image translation efficiency, flexibility, and functionality, we propose FBSDiff++ which improves upon FBSDiff mainly in three aspects: (1) accelerate inference speed by a large margin (8.9$\times$ speedup in inference) with refined model architecture; (2) improve the Frequency Band Substitution module to allow for input source images of arbitrary resolution and aspect ratio; (3) extend model functionality to enable localized image manipulation and style-specific content creation with only subtle adjustments to the core method. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments verify superiority of FBSDiff++ in I2I translation visual quality, efficiency, versatility, and controllability compared to related advanced approaches.

This study investigates whether professional translators without prior specialized training can reliably identify short stories generated in Italian by artificial intelligence (AI). Sixty-nine translators took part in an in-person experiment, where they assessed three anonymized short stories - two written by ChatGPT-4o and one by a human author. For each story, participants rated the likelihood of AI authorship and provided justifications for their choices. While average results were inconclusive, a statistically significant subset (16.2%) successfully distinguished the synthetic texts from the human text, suggesting that their judgements were informed by analytical skill rather than chance. However, a nearly equal number misclassified the texts in the opposite direction, often relying on subjective impressions rather than objective markers, possibly reflecting a reader preference for AI-generated texts. Low burstiness and narrative contradiction emerged as the most reliable indicators of synthetic authorship, with unexpected calques, semantic loans and syntactic transfer from English also reported. In contrast, features such as grammatical accuracy and emotional tone frequently led to misclassification. These findings raise questions about the role and scope of synthetic-text editing in professional contexts.

Machine learning-based surrogate models have emerged as more efficient alternatives to numerical solvers for physical simulations over complex geometries, such as car bodies. Many existing models incorporate the simulation mesh as an additional input, thereby reducing prediction errors. However, generating a simulation mesh for new geometries is computationally costly. In contrast, mesh-free methods, which do not rely on the simulation mesh, typically incur higher errors. Motivated by these considerations, we introduce SMART, a neural surrogate model that predicts physical quantities at arbitrary query locations using only a point-cloud representation of the geometry, without requiring access to the simulation mesh. The geometry and simulation parameters are encoded into a shared latent space that captures both structural and parametric characteristics of the physical field. A physics decoder then attends to the encoder's intermediate latent representations to map spatial queries to physical quantities. Through this cross-layer interaction, the model jointly updates latent geometric features and the evolving physical field. Extensive experiments show that SMART is competitive with and often outperforms existing methods that rely on the simulation mesh as input, demonstrating its capabilities for industry-level simulations.