Passive models for long video understanding typically rely on a "watch-it-all" paradigm, processing frames uniformly regardless of query difficulty, causing computational cost to grow with video duration. Although interactive frameworks have emerged, they often rely on global pre-scanning, and their context cost still scales with video length. We propose OmniAgent, the first native omni-modal agent that formulates video understanding as a POMDP-based iterative Observation-Thought-Action cycle. OmniAgent executes on-demand actions to selectively distill audio-visual cues into a persistent textual memory, effectively decoupling reasoning complexity from raw video duration. To operationalize this, we introduce (1) Agentic Supervised Fine-Tuning to bootstrap native active perception via best-of-N trajectory synthesis with dual-stage quality control, and (2) Agentic Reinforcement Learning with TAURA (Turn-aware Adaptive Uncertainty Rescaled Advantage), which leverages turn-level entropy to steer credit assignment toward pivotal discovery turns. Crucially, OmniAgent exhibits positive test-time scaling, where performance improves as the number of reasoning turns increases, validating the efficacy of active perception. Empirical results across ten benchmarks (e.g., VideoMME, LVBench) demonstrate that OmniAgent achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source models. Notably, on LVBench, our 7B agent outperforms the 10$\times$ larger Qwen2.5-VL-72B (50.5% vs. 47.3%).

We present a zero-shot framework for long-horizon dexterous manipulation that grounds language instructions into executable 3D task plans from calibrated multi-view RGB images. Rather than training an end-to-end policy, our system uses a vision-language model (VLM) to produce reference-frame task grounding and primitive-level 2D keypoints, then lifts them into 3D via multi-view fusion. This lifting combines triangulation of view-wise VLM groundings with reference-view ray voting, which searches along a semantic camera ray for geometrically consistent candidates across neighboring views. The resulting 3D keypoints support both pick-and-place and tool-use: for tool-use, we retrieve an object-centric atomic action corresponding to the inferred skill category and align its stored 6D tool trajectory to the scene; for dexterous execution, we expand the lifted grasp keypoint into a task-conditioned grasp affordance region and generate feasible grasp-motion pairs with an arm-hand motion generator. Real-world experiments show improved 3D grounding accuracy and execution reliability over single-view RGB-D grounding and fine-tuned VLA baselines. We further demonstrate long-horizon manipulation through closed-loop status verification and replan, enabling zero-shot execution on unseen objects and tool-use tasks in novel scenes.

Deploying multimodal foundation models as closed-loop policies increasingly requires conditioning actions on observations that are no longer visible. However, existing benchmarks either expose the full state, conflate hidden-state reconstruction with other agent skills, or test recall only after an episode has ended. We introduce RNG-Bench (Reconstructive Non-Markov Games), a benchmark suite designed to isolate a base model's ability to reconstruct past observations and act on them during multi-step interaction. RNG-Bench includes two complementary games: Matching Pairs, where card identities briefly revealed at specific locations must later be recalled, and 3D Maze, where egocentric views must be integrated into a spatial map. Both games are evaluated under a unified harness with three controlled difficulty axes: grid size, visual pattern, and observation modality. The benchmark further introduces a head-to-head duel protocol to control for instance-level variance and a Memory Gap metric that disentangles forgetting from poor action selection. The hardest configurations require contexts of roughly 128K tokens and 350 image inputs per episode, and remain far from saturated by frontier MLLMs. Memory Gap analysis shows that most residual errors stem from forgetting earlier observations rather than from suboptimal decision making. Finally, fine-tuning Qwen3.5-9B on optimal-policy rollouts and filtered model demonstrations improves performance on RNG-Bench and transfers to existing benchmarks without degrading general multimodal capability.

Learning to simulate human users in interactive settings could advance the training of agent assistants, evaluation of personalization systems, research in the social sciences, and more. Existing approaches generally do so by training a large language model (LLM) to match a single ground truth response, either by maximizing the log probability or by using a similarity reward. We instead propose {Turing-RL}: a Turing-Test-based reinforcement learning approach for training user simulator models. {Turing-RL} uses a discriminative Turing reward with an LLM judge to score how indistinguishable a generated response is from the real user's given the user's history, and the user simulator LLM learns to produce responses indistinguishable from what the user could have said with such rewards. Across two different domains--conversational chat and Reddit forum discussion--we find that {Turing-RL} consistently outperforms baseline methods on both LLM and human evaluation metrics. Our study suggests that optimizing for indistinguishability, rather than response matching, is effective for learning user simulators.

Progress in legal AI increasingly depends on access to authoritative legal text at scale. Yet one of the most consequential layers of American law remains largely absent from existing machine-readable corpora: local ordinances. Local codes govern zoning, housing, business licensing, public health, noise, animal control, and many other domains of everyday regulation, but they are fragmented across vendor platforms designed for human browsing rather than bulk research access. We introduce LOCUS - the Local Ordinance Corpus for the United States - a comprehensive corpus and county-harmonized access layer for U.S. municipal and county ordinance codes. The raw corpus, available for release to researchers, represents nearly all publicly available municipal and county ordinance codes. The resulting raw corpus contains codes from 9,239 cities and counties. A smaller county-harmonized LOCUS access layer provides coverage for the largest 2,309 of 3,144 U.S. counties, accounting for a majority of the population. We use OCR to handle the myriad of document formats that have kept the law from being a public resource. We release the corpus with coverage metadata to support reproducibility, downstream legal AI research, and the incremental expansion of machine-readable access to local law. We train a collection of ModernBERT-based classifiers and scorers to facilitate analyzing U.S. local law among several dimensions, such as opacity and paternalism, that have not previously been studied at this scale. LOCUS-v1 and its derivative models are available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/LocalLaws/LOCUS-v1

How can we scalably generate data for robotic manipulation, especially on human-like platforms such as dexterous multi-fingered hands? Learning from human videos has recently emerged as a likely answer to this question. However, difficulties in estimating hand-object interaction and crossing the human-to-robot embodiment gap have hindered the adoption of abundant monocular RGB-only human videos as the primary source of robot manipulation data. In this work, we present DO AS I DO, an algorithm to reconstruct and retarget monocular RGB human videos to multi-fingered dexterous robotic hands. DO AS I DO reconstructs hand-object interactions from various egocentric and exocentric in-the-wild video sources. The algorithm then retargets these hand-object interaction estimates into a sequence of actions executable in the real world, yielding robot-complete manipulation data from disparate human videos. Overall, DO AS I DO outperforms previous state of the art in estimating hand-object interactions and extracting dexterous manipulation trajectories from RGB videos, as we show in experiments on datasets with ground truths and on a dataset of video clips collected online. Our experiments enable us to propose an efficacy playbook for practitioners collecting human data for manipulation.

Preference-based RL provides an approach to learning reward models from pairwise comparisons of behaviors, bypassing the need for explicit reward design. However, existing methods typically rely on passive data collection and suffer from poor sample efficiency, especially during the early stages of learning. We introduce a model-based approach that actively directs exploration by jointly reasoning over uncertainties in the reward, dynamics, and value functions. Our method, Uncertainty-Balanced Preference Planning (UBP2), uses ensembles of reward, dynamics, and value function models to evaluate candidate trajectories according to a unified score that combines expected reward, terminal value, and epistemic uncertainty. Planning under this objective yields an explicit tradeoff between exploitation and information acquisition without requiring ad hoc exploration heuristics. Under standard regularity assumptions, we establish sublinear regret guarantees for both finite-horizon and infinite-horizon settings. Empirically, experiments on the Meta-World benchmark show UBP2 achieves substantially higher sample efficiency than model-free preference-based methods and non-optimistic model-based baselines.

Post-training of reasoning language models is commonly driven by supervised distillation and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards. Distillation often relies on chain-of-thought annotations that are expensive to obtain and may themselves be noisy, incomplete, or partially incorrect; even when the final solution is correct, an imperfect rationale can interfere with learning. Reinforcement learning with verified rewards, on the other hand, typically compresses evaluative feedback into a scalar signal, obscuring which aspects of a response should be improved. We propose \textbf{Rubric-Conditioned Self-Distillation}, a framework that incorporates rubrics as structured, fine-grained feedback for on-policy self-distillation. Our method conditions the teacher model on criterion-level rubrics and uses it to provide token-level guidance on the student's own sampled trajectories. This design avoids treating a single reference rationale as the sole supervision target. Instead, rubrics specify what a strong response should satisfy, enabling more fine-grained credit assignment over the reasoning process than scalar reward optimization. We instantiate this framework with a two-stage pipeline that first learns to generate task-specific rubrics and then trains a rubric-guided reasoner. We evaluate on a diverse suite of science reasoning benchmarks and results show that rubric-conditioned self-distillation effectively converts rubric-level criteria into token-level guidance over the reasoning process, surpassing GRPO by 1.0 points and OPSD by 0.9 points on average.

Existing multi-speaker dialogue systems bind speakers to utterances through structured supervision: per-turn tags, multi-stream transcriptions, or learnable speaker embeddings. These systems operate within speech-only pipelines that produce clean vocal sequences without the ambient texture of real conversations. We take a different approach. Our method, ScenA, conditions a text-to-audio flow-matching foundation model, pretrained on large-scale in-the-wild data, directly on multiple reference voices and a free-form natural language prompt that describes an entire multi-speaker audio scene. Leveraging such a foundational model allows us to inherit its capacity for natural, non-studio audio: background noise, room acoustics, overlapping dialogue, and spontaneous paralinguistic events, while adding multi-speaker control without any per-turn structure. Concretely, reference latents are concatenated into the model's token sequence and distinguished by lightweight identity-aware positional encodings. However, we identify a critical obstacle to this approach: the \textit{Reference Shortcut}. During training under standard noise schedules, the model can identify the matching reference by acoustic similarity to the noisy target, bypassing the text prompt entirely. We address this with a high-noise-biased timestep distribution that forces the model to rely on the text prompt for speaker assignment. We evaluate ScenA on the CoVoMix2-Dialogue benchmark, showing that it outperforms existing multi-speaker systems on speaker-binding metrics while generating rich conversational audio with overlapping speech, emotional vocalizations, and ambient sound. Our results demonstrate the advantage of using a general-purpose audio model conditioned on a free-form scene description, rather than passing structured dialog scripts through a speech-only pipeline.

A longstanding goal of research on interpretable deep learning is to replace opaque neural computations with human-meaningful symbolic descriptions. In this paper, we propose an approach for approximating the behavior of components of deep networks with executable programs. We focus on attention heads in transformer language models. For a given head, we first compute its associated attention matrices on a collection of randomly selected training examples. Next, we prompt a pre-trained language model with a summary of these matrices, and instruct it to generate a set of Python programs that can reproduce the associated attention patterns given only text from the input sentence. Finally, we re-rank programs according to how well our final set of programs predict behavior on held-out inputs. We demonstrate that a set of fewer than 1,000 such generated programs can reproduce the attention patterns of heads in GPT-2, TinyLlama-1.1B, and Llama-3B, achieving an average Intersection-over-Union similarity above 75% on TinyStories. Moreover, the best-fit programs can replace neural attention heads without substantially affecting model behavior: replacing 25% of attention heads with programmatic surrogates across the three models incurs only a 16% average perplexity increase, while maintaining performance on a variety of downstream question answering benchmarks. This work contributes a scalable pipeline for reverse-engineering attention heads in transformer models using human-readable, executable code, advancing a path toward symbolic transparency in neural models.

Recently neural implicit rendering techniques have evolved rapidly and demonstrated significant advantages in novel view synthesis and 3D scene reconstruction. However, existing neural rendering methods for editing purposes offer limited functionalities, e.g., rigid transformation and category-specific editing. In this paper, we present a novel mesh-based representation by encoding the neural radiance field with disentangled geometry, texture, and semantic codes on mesh vertices, which empowers a set of efficient and comprehensive editing functionalities, including mesh-guided geometry editing, designated texture editing with texture swapping, filling and painting operations, and semantic-guided editing. To this end, we develop several techniques including a novel local space parameterization to enhance rendering quality and training stability, a learnable modification color on vertex to improve the fidelity of texture editing, a spatial-aware optimization strategy to realize precise texture editing, and a semantic-aided region selection to ease the laborious annotation of implicit field editing. Extensive experiments and editing examples on both real and synthetic datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method on representation quality and editing ability. Project page: https://zju3dv.github.io/neumeshplusplus/

Enhancing the formal math reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) has become a key focus in both mathematical and computer science communities in recent years. While significant progress has been made in using state-of-the-art Auto-Regressive (AR) LLMs for formal theorem proving, these models suffer from inherent limitations. Their next-token prediction generation methods may yield suboptimal performance due to the challenges of long-range coherence and the compounding of errors over long sequences. Recent advancements in diffusion LLMs (dLLMs), which generate text through iterative denoising of a multi-token block, offer a promising alternative. However, the application of dLLMs to formal mathematics, where maintaining long-range coherence is critical, remains largely understudied. To address the challenges above, we propose **Diffusion-Proof**, to the best of our knowledge, the first framework to train and apply dLLMs for formal theorem proving. Our frameworks contain training and inference methods for two models. The first one is *dLLM-Prover-7B*, which performs whole-proof writing with long-range coherent tactic usage. The second one is *dLLM-Corrector-7B*, which is a novel large block diffusion-based correction model. It leverages the in-filling capabilities of dLLMs to perform local proof correction using bi-directional information. Extensive experiments demonstrate that **Diffusion-Proof** relatively significantly outperforms the AR LLM baseline trained under the same dataset. **Diffusion-Proof** achieves an absolute improvement of **1.61%** on ProofNet-Test and **6.14%** on MiniF2F-Test benchmarks compare to the baseline. Notably, **Diffusion-Proof** successfully resolves one IMO problem that more advanced thinking model DeepSeek-Prover-V2-7B could not solve, showcasing the unique advantage of dLLMs in formal theorem proving.

This study presents a method for modeling diverse plant branches by iteratively estimating material parameters to support delicate branch manipulation. Branch manipulation is necessary in agricultural robotics for plant repositioning, stabilizing, and clearing visual obstructions in dense foliage. The proposed method builds a tetrahedral branch model from point-cloud data and simulates its behavior using the finite element method. Using real observed deformation data, it iteratively estimates branch parameters and then computes an optimal path with a deformation-aware motion planner to move and stabilize branches within another robot's field of view. Across 30 trials on branches with varying geometries and material properties, the proposed method reduced the deformation energy by 35.69% while increasing the path length by 8.10% on average.

Large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems (MAS) have demonstrated great potential in solving tasks with execution complexity, by distributing subtasks across cooperative agents. However, this divide-and-conquer paradigm falls short on decision-making tasks that are also prevalent in the real world. These tasks require simultaneous reasoning from the stances of all involved stakeholders whose decisions are mutually dependent and thus cannot be solved in isolation. We characterize this challenge as stance entanglement, a form of decision complexity distinct from execution complexity. To address it, we propose Multi-Agent Fictitious Play (MAFP), a novel MAS paradigm that represents stakeholder stances as agents and formulates decision-making as an equilibrium-seeking process. Built on the game-theoretic principle of fictitious play, MAFP iteratively updates each agent's decision by best responding to the empirical mixture of other agents' past decisions. This enables agents to expose and address one another's weaknesses, progressively improving decision quality and robustness. We evaluate MAFP on challenging decision-making tasks that test the capability of deciding strategies for competitive scenarios prior to acting. MAFP outperforms both single-round and multi-round baselines on two complementary metrics, tournament strength and robustness, demonstrating its effectiveness in addressing stance entanglement.

This paper presents an analysis of the observability and consistency properties of filtering-based visual-inertial navigation systems (VINS) that utilize anchored feature representations. The unobservable subspace of VINS with anchored landmark parameterizations is shown to be independent of the estimated landmark state, which leads to improved estimator consistency properties without any additional modifications. However, the unobservable subspace is still found to depend on the estimated navigation state, necessitating additional consistency-enforcing techniques. Two methods to improve the consistency of VINS with anchored feature representations are presented. Simulation results showcase that all estimators employing anchored feature paramterizations exhibit improved consistency properties compared to algorithms that estimate features resolved in a global reference frame, especially in scenarios where feature initialization may be poor. Real-world experiments on the TUM-VI dataset showcase that the use of anchored feature representations alone can yield comparable performance to consistency-improved estimators employing a global feature representation, demonstrating the benefit of using anchored feature parameterizations for VINS.

High-fidelity simulation of spatiotemporal dynamics is computationally prohibitive, necessitating efficient super-resolution techniques to reconstruct high-resolution data from coarse-grained inputs. Traditional data-driven methods often lack physical constraints, and simple physics-informed learning struggles with irregular spatial geometries and intricately evolving temporal dynamics. To tackle these challenges, we propose a Physics-augmented Koopman-enhanced Graph Convolutional Network (P-K-GCN) for spatiotemporal super-resolution on irregular geometries. Specifically, a continuous spline-based GCN is first designed to extract spatial dependencies directly from coarse graph, and Koopman operator theory is incorporated to project the nonlinear dynamics into a compact latent space where temporal progression is linearized. Second, we augment the optimization objective with a physics-based loss to force the data-driven reconstructions to adhere to physical laws for improving predictive fidelity and robustness. Finally, we provide a rigorous theoretical analysis, establishing that the physics augmentation and Koopman regularization mathematically guarantees a reduction in super-resolution error by diminishing Rademacher complexity and tightening generalization bounds. We evaluate our framework on reconstructing spatially high-resolution cardiac electrodynamics across a 3D heart geometry from sparse low-resolution measurements. Numerical experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior accuracy compared to baseline models.

Glioma segmentation in multiparametric MRI is a critical component of treatment planning. A segmentation model that fails silently on treatment-critical sub-regions represents a patient safety risk that overlap-based metrics such as Dice scores cannot expose. We ask whether voxel-level uncertainty estimation via Monte Carlo (MC) Dropout can reliably identify segmentation errors in clinically critical sub-regions, and whether calibration failure modes are detectable from standard reporting metrics alone. In an empirical two-model case study on 126 BraTS21 patients, we evaluate a high-performance pretrained SegResNet and a locally trained UNet with residual units (UNet-Res). MC dropout preserved segmentation accuracy ($|Δ\text{Dice}|$ $<0.01$) while achieving strong uncertainty-error alignment (AUROC for entropy (H) $\approx$0.97), indicating uncertainty correctly ranks erroneous voxels above correct ones. Entropy-based patient stratification identified a high-uncertainty subgroup with substantially lower segmentation performance (median whole-tumour Dice $0.835$ vs. $0.925$), supporting uncertainty as a practical triage signal. However, global alignment can mask important region-specific differences. Despite similar AUROC, UNet-Res exhibited near-zero enhancing tumour entropy ($0.054$) and Expected Calibration Error (ECE) of $0.915$, with a Dice of only $0.714$, indicating severely miscalibrated confidence on the most clinically critical sub-region, a failure mode invisible to standard Dice and AUROC reporting. These findings demonstrate that strong uncertainty-error alignment is necessary but insufficient for clinical safety: sub-region-specific calibration assessment must accompany AUROC evaluation when selecting models for clinical deployment.

Embodied Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are typically obtained by fine-tuning powerful pretrained VLMs on robotics data, yet it is unclear how much commonsense and factual knowledge they retain after adaptation. Failures on knowledge-sensitive tasks are ambiguous, conflating missing knowledge with poor generalization of low-level control. We introduce Act2Answer, a lightweight protocol that adapts VLM knowledge benchmarks to VLA evaluation by requiring agents to answer through action. Each question becomes a short tabletop episode where the agent performs a single object-placement action to select among candidate answers, yielding an action-grounded success rate with reduced control confounds. We curate a test suite of such environments across diverse commonsense and world-knowledge categories and introduce layerwise intent probing to localize answer-relevant information across the VLM backbone and action head. In a large-scale study of 7 VLA models and 9 VLM baselines, we systematically rank models across categories, finding that VLAs show solid performance on simple concepts while exhibiting larger gaps on richer semantic categories relative to their source VLMs, that VQA co-training is associated with better knowledge retention, and that answer-relevant signals peak in middle VLA layers but attenuate in upper layers. Act2Answer is available at https://tttonyalpha.github.io/act2answer/.

Delirium is a common and serious complication in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), associated with increased morbidity, prolonged hospital stays, and higher healthcare costs. Despite its prevalence, early prediction and prevention remain challenging. Environmental factors such as ambient sound and light may influence the onset of delirium, yet they are often overlooked in risk assessments. In this study, we examined whether light intensity and sound pressure levels can independently predict delirium across multiple prediction horizons. We evaluated four efficient sequential neural network models on data collected from 9 ICUs across 309 patients to predict delirium for 10 prediction-window sizes. We reported feature importance and direction of influence using Shapley Additive Explanations analysis. The convolutional model achieved the strongest discrimination, with AUC = 0.80 on sound data and on combined data. Sound features were the dominant predictors overall. Integrating sound with light improved short-term ($<1$ week) prediction, with the combined model assigning the highest risk immediately after the sensing period. These findings suggest that passive ambient sensing, especially sound, can add a clinically meaningful, interpretable signal for delirium risk estimation and offer a practical pathway to enrich multimodal ICU prediction and prevention strategies.

Visual Question Answering (VQA) in the Remote Sensing (RS) domain presents unique challenges due to the high resolution, multi scale object distribution, and semantic complexity of aerial imagery. While general domain Foundation Models have achieved remarkable success, their direct application to RSVQA is hindered by massive domain shifts and the computationally prohibitive nature of full fine tuning. This study presents a comparative analysis of RS Adapter, a Parameter Efficient Fine Tuning (PEFT) strategy, applied across three distinct Vision Language Model (VLM) architectures: the Dual Encoder CLIP, the Encoder Decoder BLIP, and the Hybrid FLAVA. We introduce a unified architectural surgery pipeline that injects lightweight bottleneck adapters into the attention and MLP layers of frozen backbones, enabling rapid adaptation with less than 5 percent of trainable parameters. Experimental results on the high resolution RSVQA x dataset demonstrate that while all adapted models achieve convergence, the Hybrid FLAVA architecture offers a superior balance of multimodal reasoning and retrieval capabilities compared to its unimodal counterparts. Our findings establish a new baseline for resource efficient VQA in disaster assessment and urban monitoring.

Training-free anomalous sound detection (ASD) scores a test clip against a memory bank of normal embeddings from a frozen pretrained audio encoder. Recent work attributes domain-shift robustness mainly to how frame-level features are pooled over time; the scoring backend applied on top of the pooled embedding has received far less systematic attention. Using a single frozen BEATs encoder on the DCASE 2023 Task 2 development set (all seven machine types), we cross four classical backends -- nearest-neighbor cosine distance, Mahalanobis distance, locally density-normalized kNN, and PCA-subspace reconstruction residual -- with three temporal poolings (mean, GeM, max). Switching the backend moves target-domain AUC by 13.8 points on average (up to 53.8), whereas switching the pooling moves it by only 3.2 points: in this training-free regime, the backend, not the pooling, dominates domain-shift robustness. No backend wins everywhere, but the machine-dependent pattern reproduces on the DCASE 2025 development data (fan, bearing). Exploiting this, we propose a label-free score fusion that z-normalizes each backend with its training-bank self-scores and takes the minimum; it reaches a harmonic-mean target AUC of 63.3% versus 64.4% for the per-machine oracle, surpassing every fixed single backend while preserving source-domain accuracy. We also report a negative result: selecting a backend by source-domain pseudo-validation with proxy outliers fails, because all backends saturate on the proxy task.

We propose a mixed-reality, hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testbed for autonomous vehicles that seamlessly integrates a physical testbed of mobile robots with a high-fidelity simulation environment. The virtual simulation enables the creation of diverse, safety-critical driving scenarios to validate state-of-the-art perception, planning, and control algorithms, while augmenting simulations with physical robots equipped with multimodal sensors in photorealistic virtual environments further facilitating rigorous validation. Our testbed also features vehicular connectivity using wireless communication and can accommodate a large number of agents through the combination of physical robots and virtual simulated agents, supporting research on multi-agent systems including Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs). Finally, we present a safety-guaranteed framework combining perception, planning and a novel online learning-based controller using Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) for CAVs. Experiments using the proposed framework are used to validate and demonstrate the key functionalities and the overall utility of the testbed to bridge the gap between simulation and real-world hardware deployment.

The development of large language models (LLMs) has led to an increased focus on their adaptation to specialized domains and languages, yet the effectiveness of domain adaptation strategies remains unclear. We present a study of medical domain adaptation using French medical question-answering (QA) as a case study. We compare continual pretraining (CPT), supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and their combination across three model families, multiple sizes, and three initialization types, explicitly disentangling adaptation effects from base model choice. We evaluate both multiple-choice (MCQA) and open-ended QA (OEQA) under greedy and constrained decoding using automatic metrics and LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation. For MCQA, CPT+SFT most often achieves the best scores, but gains over SFT are small and frequently not statistically significant, making SFT a strong and cost-effective default. For OEQA, CPT consistently improves overlap-based metrics, while SFT often degrades generation quality; instruction tuning and CPT+SFT are preferred by LLM-based evaluation. Cross-lingual experiments further show effective transfer from French adaptation to English benchmarks. Overall, we provide practical guidelines for selecting adaptation strategies under computational constraints.

Continuum robots offer a promising approach for minimally invasive and natural-orifice surgical procedures due to their inherent compliance and dexterity. However, this flexibility also makes estimating the current shape of the robot challenging. Several approaches have been used to reconstruct the shape of these robots, including imaging, optical sensing, magnetic sensing, and resistive sensing. Strain sensors fabricated using direct laser writing (DLW) could provide an alternative sensing method. This technique involves using a laser to induce carbonization of certain polymers to create graphene patterns, such as strain sensors. In this paper, we demonstrate how a flexible continuum joint and a DLW sensor can be machined as one monolithic structure using the same laser and the same setup. The fabricated sensors are characterized using linear and nonlinear models, which are used to predict the joint angle with error as low as 1.76 degrees. Furthermore, we demonstrate how a DLW sensor can be used to implement closed-loop control in a robotic joint, achieving tracking error under 3 degrees.

Hardware-enabled monitoring of GPU workloads underpins many proposals for AI compute governance, but if developers can defeat monitoring mechanisms, such schemes are unworkable. We evaluate the adversarial robustness of GPU workload classification using only zero-overhead, privacy-preserving NVML telemetry: content-agnostic signals that observe physical effects of computation without accessing model weights, training data, or hyperparameters. Across 5 rounds of monitor-evader iteration, we evaluate 20 evasion strategy families on 9 GPU models spanning 4 architecture generations. We develop a classifier that achieves 98.2% binary accuracy at identifying training workloads across the whole corpus, and 43-87% accuracy against the most challenging unexpected workloads even when they are adversarially disguised.

Cloud-hosted large multimodal models (LMMs) can provide strong open-vocabulary perception for Vehicle-to-Everything systems, but naively transmitting full-resolution frames from edge to cloud causes severe communication overhead and high cloud-side prefill latency. We present CABLE, a cloud-assisted bandwidth-efficient LMM-based encoding framework for edge-cloud perception. CABLE propagates the previous cloud segmentation mask on the edge using ego-motion compensation, refines it with residual-motion cues, and consolidates disconnected regions via a corridor envelope to form a robust region of interest (ROI). Only ROI-masked images are uploaded, while the cloud segmentation output is fed back as the prior for the next frame, forming a mask-to-ROI-to-LMM feedback loop. Experiments on five datasets (nuScenes, WOD-ZB, Waymo, KITTI, and CADC) show consistent communication savings while largely preserving perception, achieving $73$--$87\%$ ROI pixel-coverage reduction with $5$--$8\times$ estimated LMM prefill speedup at a modest detection-quality trade-off relative to full-frame inference.

Block diffusion language models accelerate decoding through parallel block-wise denoising, yet whether they can be reliably scaled for long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning remains unresolved. To this end, we develop DreamReasoner-8B, an open-source block diffusion reasoning model, and conduct a systematic study of how training and inference block sizes affect long-CoT reasoning. Our analysis reveals a stark performance disparity: training with large block sizes yields remarkably poor reasoning, whereas small block sizes preserve effective reasoning. To bridge this granularity gap, we propose block-size curriculum learning, which gradually transitions training from fine-grained to coarse-grained block sizes, thereby overcoming this limitation and enabling strong reasoning performance that generalizes across diverse inference block sizes. On mathematical and code reasoning benchmarks, DreamReasoner-8B achieves results competitive with leading open autoregressive models such as Qwen3-8B. This work establishes a practical foundation for efficient, reasoning-capable diffusion language models. We release our model at https://github.com/DreamLM/DreamReasoner.

Time series anomaly detection plays a crucial role in a wide range of real-world applications. Reconstruction-based methods have become the mainstream paradigm, but they suffer from over-generalization and under-generalization problems, which are challenging to balance. To address this, we introduce multi-scale clustering to enhance reconstruction-based methods. At the representation level, we integrate the cluster center representations of normal patterns to constrain the model to target representative normal patterns for reconstruction, preventing dominance of powerful capacity and representation capability. At the anomaly criterion level, we derive anomaly confidence score based on cluster membership probability and combine it with reconstruction error, providing dual criteria for detection. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the cluster center representations and anomaly confidence score depends on the clustering performance. Accordingly, we extract neighborhood-centered representations for multi-view clustering to improve clustering performance. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets from diverse application domains demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of SCAN.

Existing approaches to 3D scene understanding in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) either rely on complex, model-specific geometry encoders or large training budgets in pursuit of spatial reasoning. Instead, OneCanvas aggregates patch features from all views onto a single equirectangular panoramic canvas. Namely, each patch is unprojected to a 3D world coordinate using its depth and camera pose, then placed on the canvas at the continuous longitude and latitude of that point as seen from the canvas origin, with no rasterization or aggregation across overlapping views. A 3D position embedding of the patch's metric coordinates is added to its feature, restoring the depth lost when collapsing the world position to an angular canvas coordinate. Patches from all frames thus share one spatial coordinate system with no fusion or major architectural modifications of the backbone. The pretrained VLM consumes this representation as if it were an ordinary image. Because the canvas can be centered on any pose of interest, the same representation directly supports situated reasoning from a specific viewpoint, a common requirement in robotics and embodied AI. Thanks to this representation, we can also introduce a spatial pretraining curriculum: by procedurally placing patch features of objects, drawn from real images, at chosen 3D world positions on an otherwise empty canvas, we generate on-the-fly supervision spanning a broad range of spatial reasoning tasks, with answer distributions controlled to reduce spatial reasoning shortcuts. OneCanvas achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on SQA3D and VSI-Bench, and generalizes to out-of-distribution data on SPBench, using an order of magnitude less training compute than the strongest competing methods.

Despite the widespread adoption of Vision Transformers (ViTs) and their success across numerous computer vision applications, the fundamental understanding of their dimensional and representational geometry remains relatively underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce Transformer Geometry Observatory (TGO), a systematic framework of experiments and analysis pipelines designed to investigate the representational geometry and dynamics of Vision Transformers. TGO-I, the first installment of the framework, focuses on the spectral geometry of ViT representations. Using a ViT-Small/16 model trained on ImageNet-100, we analyze Effective Rank, Stable Rank, Participation Ratio, Spectral Entropy, Spectral Flatness, Spectral Anisotropy, covariance structure, eigenspectra, and singular value spectra throughout training. Our results reveal a consistent increase in dimensional utilization, accompanied by decreasing anisotropy, increasing spectral entropy, increasing participation ratio, and progressively flatter eigenspectra. Contrary to the common intuition that training should concentrate information into a small number of dominant directions, we observe a progressive redistribution of variance across representational dimensions. This phenomenon is particularly pronounced in the final CLS token representation, which exhibits the highest effective dimensionality and lowest anisotropy within the network.