Target Safety Assessment (TSA) requires systematic integration of genetic, transcriptomic, target homology, pharmacological, and clinical data to evaluate potential safety liabilities of therapeutic targets. This process is labor-intensive and expert-dependent, posing challenges in scalability and reproducibility. We present TSAssistant, a human-in-the-loop multi-agent framework that decomposes TSA report generation into a workflow of specialized subagents: Research Subagents that each ground and cite a single TSA domain, and Synthesis Subagents that integrate findings across domains. Subagents retrieve and synthesize evidence from curated biomedical sources through standardized tool interfaces and produce individually citable, evidence-grounded sections, with behavior shaped by a hierarchical instruction architecture that separates coordination logic from domain expertise and user intent. To complement these soft constraints, programmatic execution hooks and persistent memory stores enforce hard constraints across the workflow, while an interactive refinement loop allows experts to review and revise individual sections with full conversational context preserved across iterations. Rather than a single holistic comparison, we decompose report quality into reproducibility, evidential grounding, task-level accuracy, and controllability under expert oversight, finding high reproducibility and grounding, substantial agreement with the human reference, and net-positive expert-driven refinement.

The systemic, metabolic, lifestyle factors have established associations with Alzheimer's Disease (AD) through epidemiologic and AD-specific biomarker studies. Whether colored fundus photography (CFP) contains retinal structural signatures corresponding to these AD-related risk domains remains unclear. To determine whether deep learning (DL) models can predict 12 AD-related risk factors from CFP and to characterize the retinal structures underlying these predictions, thereby assessing whether CFP reflects pathways to AD vulnerability. Using 62,876 CFPs from 44,501 unique participants from the UK Biobank, DL models were trained to predict 12 factors linked to AD incidence: 6 categorical (sex, smoking, sleeplessness, economic status, alcohol use, depression) and 6 continuous (age, age at completing education, BMI, systolic, diastolic blood pressure, HbA1c). Model performance, model saliency, and saliency-derived scores (CAM-Score) were evaluated and compared to retinal morphometry. The scores were also compared between incident-AD cases (average 8.55 years before onset) and matched controls. Performance of DL ranged from AUROC= 0.5654-0.9480 for categorical and R2=-0.0291-0.7620 for continuous factors, outperforming most of the morphometry-machine learning models. Saliency-based score consistently highlighted biologically meaningful regions, particularly the optic nerve head and retinal vasculature. It also aligned with present morphometric variations. Several saliency-based scores differed significantly between incident AD and matched controls, suggesting potential overlap between retinal correlates of risk factors and preclinical AD-associated changes. CFP encodes retinal signatures linked to AD risk factors. Although not diagnostic, DL-derived retinal representations may uncover biologically meaningful risk-related structural changes mirroring the potential AD vulnerability.

We introduce Flickering Multi-Armed Bandits (FMAB) to model sequential decision-making in environments with changing action availability, where accessibility of the next action is restricted to a subset dependent on the agent's current choice. We formalize these constraints through stochastically evolving graphs where actions are limited to local neighborhoods. This mobility-constrained structure imposes a dual challenge: the statistical requirement of information acquisition and the physical overhead of navigation. We analyze FMAB under i.i.d. Erdős--R'enyi and Edge-Markovian process, proposing a two-phase lazy random walk algorithm for robust exploration. We establish high-probability sublinear regret bounds and prove near-optimality via a matching information-theoretic lower bound. Our results characterize the intrinsic cost of learning under local-move constraints, complemented by a robotic disaster-response simulation.

Face Anti-Spoofing (FAS) remains challenging due to the requirement for robust domain generalization across unseen environments. While recent trends leverage Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for semantic supervision, these multimodal approaches often demand prohibitive computational resources and exhibit high inference latency. Furthermore, their efficacy is inherently limited by the quality of the underlying visual features. This paper revisits the potential of vision-only foundation models to establish a highly efficient and robust baseline for FAS. We conduct a systematic benchmarking of 15 pre-trained models, such as supervised CNNs, supervised ViTs, and self-supervised ViTs, under severe cross-domain scenarios including the MICO and Limited Source Domains (LSD) protocols. Our comprehensive analysis reveals that self-supervised vision models, particularly DINOv2 with Registers, significantly suppress attention artifacts and capture critical, fine-grained spoofing cues. Combined with Face Anti-Spoofing Data Augmentation (FAS-Aug), Patch-wise Data Augmentation (PDA) and Attention-weighted Patch Loss (APL), our proposed vision-only baseline achieves state-of-the-art performance in the MICO protocol. This baseline outperforms existing methods under the data-constrained LSD protocol while maintaining superior computational efficiency. This work provides a definitive vision-only baseline for FAS, demonstrating that optimized self-supervised vision transformers can serve as a backbone for both vision-only and future multimodal FAS systems. The project page is available at: https://gsisaoki.github.io/FAS-VFMbenchmark-CVPRW2026/ .

How does the choice of training data influence an AI model? This broad question is of central importance to interpretability, privacy, and basic science. At its technical core is the data deletion problem: after a reasonable amount of precomputation, quickly predict how the model would behave in a given situation if a given subset of training data had been excluded from the learning algorithm. We present a data deletion scheme capable of predicting model outputs with vanishing error $\varepsilon$ and failure probability $δ$ in the deep learning setting. Our precomputation and prediction algorithms are only $\tilde{O}(\log(1/δ)/\varepsilon^2)$ factors slower than regular training and inference, respectively. The storage requirements are those of $\tilde{O}(\log(1/δ)/\varepsilon^2)$ models. Our proof is based on an assumption that we call stability. In contrast to the assumptions made by prior work, stability appears to be fully compatible with learning powerful AI models. In support of this, we show that stability is satisfied in a minimal set of experiments with microgpt. Our code is available at https://github.com/SamSpo1/microgpt-sketch. At a technical level, our work is based on a new method for locally sketching an arithmetic circuit by computing higher-order derivatives in random complex directions. Forward-mode automatic differentiation allows cheap computation of these derivatives.

Tactile dexterous manipulation is essential to automating complex household tasks, yet learning effective control policies remains a challenge. While recent work has relied on imitation learning, obtaining high quality demonstrations for multi-fingered hands via robot teleoperation or kinesthetic teaching is prohibitive. Alternatively, with reinforcement we can learn skills in simulation, but fast and realistic simulation of tactile observations is challenging. To bridge this gap, we introduce PTLD: sim-to-real Privileged Tactile Latent Distillation, a novel approach to learning tactile manipulation skills without requiring tactile simulation. Instead of simulating tactile sensors or relying purely on proprioceptive policies to transfer zero-shot sim-to-real, our key idea is to leverage privileged sensors in the real world to collect real-world tactile policy data. This data is then used to distill a robust state estimator that operates on tactile input. We demonstrate from our experiments that PTLD can be used to improve proprioceptive manipulation policies trained in simulation significantly by incorporating tactile sensing. On the benchmark in-hand rotation task, PTLD achieves a 182% improvement over a proprioception only policy. We also show that PTLD enables learning the challenging task of tactile in-hand reorientation where we see a 57% improvement in the number of goals reached over using proprioception alone. Website: https://akashsharma02.github.io/ptld-website/.

Distribution shift severely degrades the performance of deep forecasting models. While this issue is well-studied for individual time series, it remains a significant challenge in the spatio-temporal domain. Effective solutions like instance normalization and its variants can mitigate temporal shifts by standardizing statistics. However, distribution shift on a graph is far more complex, involving not only the drift of individual node series but also heterogeneity across the spatial network where different nodes exhibit distinct statistical properties. To tackle this problem, we propose Reversible Residual Normalization (RRN), a novel framework that performs spatially-aware invertible transformations to address distribution shift in both spatial and temporal dimensions. Our approach integrates graph convolutional operations within invertible residual blocks, enabling adaptive normalization that respects the underlying graph structure while maintaining reversibility. By combining Center Normalization with spectral-constrained graph neural networks, our method captures and normalizes complex Spatio-Temporal relationships in a data-driven manner. The bidirectional nature of our framework allows models to learn in a normalized latent space and recover original distributional properties through inverse transformation, offering a robust and model-agnostic solution for forecasting on dynamic spatio-temporal systems.

Advances in radiance fields have enabled photorealistic novel view synthesis. In several domains, large-scale real-world datasets have been developed to support comprehensive benchmarking and to facilitate progress beyond scene-specific reconstruction. However, for distractor-free radiance fields, a large-scale dataset with clean and cluttered images per scene remains lacking, limiting the development. To address this gap, we introduce DF3DV-1K, a large-scale real-world dataset comprising 1,048 scenes, each providing clean and cluttered image sets for benchmarking. In total, the dataset contains 89,924 images captured using consumer cameras to mimic casual capture, spanning 128 distractor types and 161 scene themes across indoor and outdoor environments. A curated subset of 41 scenes, DF3DV-41, is systematically designed to evaluate the robustness of distractor-free radiance field methods under challenging scenarios. Using DF3DV-1K, we benchmark nine recent distractor-free radiance field methods and 3D Gaussian Splatting, identifying the most robust methods and the most challenging scenarios. Beyond benchmarking, we demonstrate an application of DF3DV-1K by fine-tuning a diffusion-based 2D enhancer to improve radiance field methods, achieving average improvements of 0.96 dB PSNR and 0.057 LPIPS on the held-out set (e.g., DF3DV-41) and the On-the-go dataset. We hope DF3DV-1K facilitates the development of distractor-free vision and promotes progress beyond scene-specific approaches. The dataset and leaderboard are available at https://johnnylu305.github.io/df3dv1k_web/.

Mapping the spatial distribution of species is essential for conservation policy and invasive species management. Species distribution models (SDMs) are the primary tools for this task, serving two purposes: achieving robust predictive performance while providing ecological insights into the driving factors of distribution. However, the increasing complexity of deep learning SDMs has made extracting these insights more challenging. To reconcile these objectives, we propose the first implementation of concept-based Explainable AI (XAI) for SDMs. We leverage the Robust TCAV (Testing with Concept Activation Vectors) methodology to quantify the influence of landscape concepts on model predictions. To enable this, we provide a new open-access landscape concept dataset derived from high-resolution multispectral and LiDAR drone imagery. It includes 653 patches across 15 distinct landscape concepts and 1,450 random reference patches, designed to suit a wide range of species. We demonstrate this approach through a case study of two aquatic insects, Plecoptera and Trichoptera, using two Convolutional Neural Networks and one Vision Transformer. Results show that concept-based XAI helps validate SDMs against expert knowledge while uncovering novel associations that generate new ecological hypotheses. Robust TCAV also provides landscape-level information, useful for policy-making and land management. Code and datasets are publicly available.

Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training has recently driven major gains in long chain-of-thought reasoning large language models (LLMs), but the high inference cost of such models motivates distillation into smaller students. Most existing knowledge distillation (KD) methods are designed for supervised fine-tuning (SFT), relying on fixed teacher traces or teacher-student Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence-based regularization. When combined with RL, these approaches often suffer from distribution mismatch and objective interference: teacher supervision may not align with the student's evolving rollout distribution, and the KL regularizer can compete with reward maximization and require careful loss balancing. To address these issues, we propose RL-aware distillation (RLAD), which performs selective imitation during RL -- guiding the student toward the teacher only when it improves the current policy update. Our core component, Trust Region Ratio Distillation (TRRD), replaces the teacher-student KL regularizer with a PPO/GRPO-style likelihood-ratio objective anchored to a teacher--old-policy mixture, yielding advantage-aware, trust-region-bounded distillation on student rollouts and naturally balancing exploration, exploitation, and imitation. Across diverse logic reasoning and math benchmarks, RLAD consistently outperforms offline distillation, standard GRPO, and KL-based on-policy teacher-student knowledge distillation.

Mathematical benchmarks consisting of a range of mathematics problems are widely used to evaluate the reasoning abilities of large language models, yet little is known about how their structural properties influence model behaviour. In this work, we investigate two structural length variables, prompt length and solution length, and analyse how they relate to model performance on a newly constructed adversarial dataset of expert-authored mathematics problems. We find that both prompt and solution lengths correlate positively with increased model failure across models. We also include a secondary, exploratory analysis of cross-model disagreement. Under a difficulty-adjusted normalised analysis, both variables retain weak negative associations with realised model separation, slightly stronger for prompt length. Overall, our main robust finding is that structural length is linked to empirical difficulty in this dataset.

Conformal prediction provides distribution-free prediction intervals with finite-sample coverage guarantees, and recent work by Snell \& Griffiths reframes it as Bayesian Quadrature (BQ-CP), yielding powerful data-conditional guarantees via Dirichlet posteriors over thresholds. However, BQ-CP fundamentally requires the i.i.d. assumption. Meanwhile, weighted conformal prediction handles distribution shift via importance weights but remains frequentist, producing only point-estimate thresholds. We propose \textbf{Weighted Bayesian Conformal Prediction (WBCP)}, which generalizes BQ-CP to arbitrary importance-weighted settings by replacing the uniform Dirichlet $\Dir(1,\ldots,1)$ with a weighted Dirichlet $\Dir(\neff \cdot \tilde{w}_1, \ldots, \neff \cdot \tilde{w}_n)$, where $\neff$ is Kish's effective sample size. We prove four theoretical results: (1)~$\neff$ is the unique concentration parameter matching frequentist and Bayesian variances; (2)~posterior standard deviation decays as $O(1/\sqrt{\neff})$; (3)~BQ-CP's stochastic dominance guarantee extends to per-weight-profile data-conditional guarantees; (4)~the HPD threshold provides $O(1/\sqrt{\neff})$ improvement in conditional coverage. We instantiate WBCP for spatial prediction as \emph{Geographical BQ-CP}, where kernel-based spatial weights yield per-location posteriors with interpretable diagnostics. Experiments on synthetic and real-world spatial datasets demonstrate that WBCP maintains coverage guarantees while providing substantially richer uncertainty information.

Quantum-inspired tensor networks algorithms have shown to be effective and efficient models for machine learning tasks, including anomaly detection. Here, we propose a highly parallelizable quantum-inspired approach which we call SMT-AD from Superposition of Multiresolution Tensors for Anomaly Detection. It is based upon the superposition of bond-dimension-1 matrix product operators to transform the input data with Fourier-assisted feature embedding, where the number of learnable parameters grows linearly with feature size, embedding resolutions, and the number of additional components in the matrix product operators structure. We demonstrate successful anomaly detection when applied to standard datasets, including credit card transactions, and find that, even with minimal configurations, it achieves competitive performance against established anomaly detection baselines. Furthermore, it provides a straightforward way to reduce the weight of the model and even improve the performance by highlighting the most relevant input features.

What does it take to build a visual reasoner that works across charts, science, spatial understanding, and open-ended tasks? The strongest vision-language models (VLMs) suggest that broad visual reasoning is within reach, yet their closed data and reinforcement learning (RL) pipelines make their gains difficult to study, reproduce, or extend. We introduce Vero, a family of fully open VLMs that match or exceed existing open-weight models across diverse visual reasoning tasks. We scale RL data and rewards across six broad task categories, constructing Vero-600K, a 600K-sample dataset from 59 datasets, and designing task-routed rewards that handle heterogeneous answers. Across VeroEval, our 30-benchmark suite, Vero-600K outperforms existing RL datasets under controlled comparisons. Applied to five starting models, Vero variants gain 2.9-5.4 points on average over their initial models. Notably, Vero-Qwen3I-8B, trained on the Instruct model, surpasses Qwen3-VL-8B-Thinking by 3.8 points on average without additional distillation. Systematic ablations reveal that different task categories elicit distinct reasoning patterns and that broad gains depend on learning them jointly rather than in isolation. All data, code, and models are publicly available.

Incomplete or inconsistent discharge documentation drives care fragmentation and avoidable readmissions. Despite its critical role in patient safety, auditing discharge summaries relies on manual review and does not scale. We propose an automated framework for auditing discharge summaries using large language models (LLMs). Our approach operationalizes the DISCHARGED framework into a checklist of 46 questions. Using 50 summaries from the MIMIC-IV database, with clinician ground-truth labels, we benchmark 11 LLMs. Model-assessed mean documentation completeness ranges from 54.9% to 74.2%, and the best-performing models achieve a Cohen's kappa values around 0.5 against clinician labels, indicating moderate agreement. All models struggle to identify ambiguous documentation (Unclear), highlighting a key gap in current automated auditing. This work provides a clinician-validated benchmark and zero-shot baselines for systematic quality improvement in clinical documentation.

Artistic styles often embed abstraction beyond surface appearance, involving deliberate reinterpretation of structure rather than mere changes in texture or color. Conventional style transfer methods typically preserve the input geometry and therefore struggle to capture this deeper abstraction behavior, especially for illustrative and nonphotorealistic styles. In this work, we introduce Abstraction in Style (AiS), a generative framework that separates structural abstraction from visual stylization. Given a target image and a small set of style exemplars, AiS first derives an intermediate abstraction proxy that reinterprets the target's structure in accordance with the abstraction logic exhibited by the style. The proxy captures semantic structure while relaxing geometric fidelity, enabling subsequent stylization to operate on an abstracted representation rather than the original image. In a second stage, the abstraction proxy is rendered to produce the final stylized output, preserving visual coherence with the reference style. Both stages are implemented using a shared image space analogy, enabling transformations to be learned from visual exemplars without explicit geometric supervision. By decoupling abstraction from appearance and treating abstraction as an explicit, transferable process, AiS supports a wider range of stylistic transformations, improves controllability, and enables more expressive stylization.

Trustworthy clinical AI requires that performance gains reflect genuine evidence integration rather than surface-level artifacts. We evaluate 12 open-weight vision-language models (VLMs) on binary classification across two clinical neuroimaging cohorts, \textsc{FOR2107} (affective disorders) and \textsc{OASIS-3} (cognitive decline). Both datasets come with structural MRI data that carries no reliable individual-level diagnostic signal. Under these conditions, smaller VLMs exhibit gains of up to 58\% F1 upon introduction of neuroimaging context, with distilled models becoming competitive with counterparts an order of magnitude larger. A contrastive confidence analysis reveals that merely \emph{mentioning} MRI availability in the task prompt accounts for 70-80\% of this shift, independent of whether imaging data is present, a domain-specific instance of modality collapse we term the \emph{scaffold effect}. Expert evaluation reveals fabrication of neuroimaging-grounded justifications across all conditions, and preference alignment, while eliminating MRI-referencing behavior, collapses both conditions toward random baseline. Our findings demonstrate that surface evaluations are inadequate indicators of multimodal reasoning, with direct implications for the deployment of VLMs in clinical settings.

Learning domain adaptive policies that can generalize to unseen transition dynamics, remains a fundamental challenge in learning-based control. Substantial progress has been made through domain representation learning to capture domain-specific information, thus enabling domain-aware decision making. We analyze the process of learning domain representations through dynamical prediction and find that selecting contexts adjacent to the current step causes the learned representations to entangle static domain information with varying dynamical properties. Such mixture can confuse the conditioned policy, thereby constraining zero-shot adaptation. To tackle the challenge, we propose DADP (Domain Adaptive Diffusion Policy), which achieves robust adaptation through unsupervised disentanglement and domain-aware diffusion injection. First, we introduce Lagged Context Dynamical Prediction, a strategy that conditions future state estimation on a historical offset context; by increasing this temporal gap, we unsupervisedly disentangle static domain representations by filtering out transient properties. Second, we integrate the learned domain representations directly into the generative process by biasing the prior distribution and reformulating the diffusion target. Extensive experiments on challenging benchmarks across locomotion and manipulation demonstrate the superior performance, and the generalizability of DADP over prior methods. More visualization results are available on the https://outsider86.github.io/DomainAdaptiveDiffusionPolicy/.

We present Smol-GS, a novel method for learning compact representations for 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). Our approach learns highly efficient splat-wise features to model 3D space, which capture abstracted cues, including color, opacity, transformation, and material properties. We propose octree-derived positional encoding, which explicitly models spatial locality and enhances representation efficiency. We further apply entropy-based compression to exploit feature redundancy and compress splat coordinates using a recursive voxel hierarchy. This design enables orders-of-magnitude reduction in storage while preserving representation flexibility. Smol-GS achieves state-of-the-art compression performance on standard benchmarks with high-level rendering quality.

Unsupervised learning of latent motion from Internet videos is crucial for robot learning. Existing discrete methods generally mitigate the shortcut learning caused by extracting excessive static backgrounds through vector quantization with a small codebook size. However, they suffer from information loss and struggle to capture more complex and fine-grained dynamics. Moreover, there is an inherent gap between the distribution of discrete latent motion and continuous robot action, which hinders the joint learning of a unified policy. We propose CoMo, which aims to learn more precise continuous latent motion from internet-scale videos. CoMo employs an early temporal difference (Td) mechanism to increase the shortcut learning difficulty and explicitly enhance motion cues. Additionally, to ensure latent motion better captures meaningful foregrounds, we further propose a temporal contrastive learning (Tcl) scheme. Specifically, positive pairs are constructed with a small future frame temporal offset, while negative pairs are formed by directly reversing the temporal direction. The proposed Td and Tcl work synergistically and effectively ensure that the latent motion focuses better on the foreground and reinforces motion cues. Critically, CoMo exhibits strong zeroshot generalization, enabling it to generate effective pseudo action labels for unseen videos. Extensive simulated and real-world experiments show that policies co-trained with CoMo pseudo action labels achieve superior performance with both diffusion and auto-regressive architectures.

Block-diffusion language models offer a promising path toward faster-than-autoregressive generation by combining block-wise autoregressive decoding with within-block parallel denoising. However, in the few-step regime needed for practical acceleration, standard confidence-thresholded decoding is often brittle: aggressive thresholds hurt quality, while conservative thresholds require unnecessary denoising steps. Existing approaches that address this issue either require additional training or incur extra test-time compute. We present S2D2, a training-free self-speculative decoding framework for block-diffusion language models. Our key observation is that a block-diffusion model becomes autoregressive when the block size is reduced to one, allowing the same pretrained model to act as both drafter and verifier. S2D2 inserts a speculative verification step into standard block-diffusion decoding and uses lightweight routing policies to decide when verification is worth its cost. This yields a hybrid decoding trajectory in which diffusion proposes tokens in parallel, while the autoregressive mode acts as a local sequence-level critic. Across three mainstream block-diffusion families, S2D2 consistently improves the accuracy-speed tradeoff over strong confidence-thresholding baselines. On SDAR, we observe up to $4.7\times$ speedup over autoregressive decoding, and up to $1.57\times$ over a tuned dynamic decoding baseline while improving accuracy by up to $4.5$ points. On LLaDA2.1-Mini, S2D2 remains complementary to built-in self-correction, including a conservative setting where it is $4.4\times$ faster than the static baseline with slightly higher accuracy.

Recently, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have been widely integrated into diffusion frameworks primarily as text encoders to tackle complex tasks such as spatial reasoning. However, this paradigm suffers from two critical limitations: (i) MLLMs text encoder exhibits insufficient reasoning depth. Single-step encoding fails to activate the Chain-of-Thought process, which is essential for MLLMs to provide accurate guidance for complex tasks. (ii) The guidance remains invariant during the decoding process. Invariant guidance during decoding prevents DiT from progressively decomposing complex instructions into actionable denoising steps, even with correct MLLM encodings. To this end, we propose Endogenous Chain-of-Thought (EndoCoT), a novel framework that first activates MLLMs' reasoning potential by iteratively refining latent thought states through an iterative thought guidance module, and then bridges these states to the DiT's denoising process. Second, a terminal thought grounding module is applied to ensure the reasoning trajectory remains grounded in textual supervision by aligning the final state with ground-truth answers. With these two components, the MLLM text encoder delivers meticulously reasoned guidance, enabling the DiT to execute it progressively and ultimately solve complex tasks in a step-by-step manner. Extensive evaluations across diverse benchmarks (e.g., Maze, TSP, VSP, and Sudoku) achieve an average accuracy of 92.1%, outperforming the strongest baseline by 8.3 percentage points. The code and dataset are publicly available at https://internlm.github.io/EndoCoT/.

Existing dialogue systems rely on query suggestion to enhance user engagement. Recent approaches mainly optimize generative models using click-through rate (CTR) models to align with user preferences. However, these methods are less effective in early-stage deployment scenarios, where click feedback is sparse and insufficient for training a reliable CTR model. To bridge this gap, we propose QualEQS, a quality-first iterative reinforcement learning framework for e-commerce query suggestion. We formalize actionable suggestion quality along three dimensions that directly affect downstream usability: answerability, factuality, and information gain. To continuously improve from online traffic without click supervision, we further propose group-level disagreement among candidate suggestions to identify ambiguous query contexts and mine hard training cases for iterative refinement. We also introduce EQS-Benchmark, a dataset of 16,949 real-world e-commerce queries for offline training and evaluation. Experiments show that our quality-based offline metrics correlate strongly with online performance, providing a practical evaluation recipe for sparse-feedback deployment. In both offline and online settings, QualEQS consistently outperforms strong baselines, yielding a 6.81% improvement in online ChatPV in a real-world enterprise-level conversational shopping assistant system.

Cross-lingual sentence encoders typically cover only a few hundred languages and often trade downstream quality for stronger alignment, limiting their adoption. We introduce OmniSONAR, a new family of omnilingual, cross-lingual and cross-modal sentence embedding models that natively embed text, speech, code, and mathematical expressions in a single semantic space, while delivering state-of-the-art downstream performance at the scale of thousands of languages, from high-resource to extremely low-resource varieties. To reach this scale without representation collapse, we use progressive training. We first learn a strong foundational space for 200 languages with an LLM-initialized encoder-decoder, combining token-level decoding with a novel split-softmax contrastive loss and synthetic hard negatives. Building on this foundation, we expand to several thousands language varieties via a two-stage teacher-student encoder distillation framework. Finally, we demonstrate the cross-modal extensibility of this space by seamlessly mapping 177 spoken languages into it. OmniSONAR halves cross-lingual similarity search error on the 200-language FLORES dataset and reduces error by a factor of 15 on the 1,560-language BIBLE benchmark. It also enables strong translation, outperforming NLLB-3B on multilingual benchmarks and exceeding prior models (including much larger LLMs) by 15 chrF++ points on 1,560 languages into English BIBLE translation. OmniSONAR also performs strongly on MTEB and XLCoST. For speech, OmniSONAR achieves a 43% lower similarity-search error and reaches 97% of SeamlessM4T speech-to-text quality, despite being zero-shot for translation (trained only on ASR data). Finally, by training an encoder-decoder LM, Spectrum, exclusively on English text processing OmniSONAR embedding sequences, we unlock high-performance transfer to thousands of languages and speech for complex downstream tasks.

Enabling efficient deep neural network (DNN) inference on edge devices with different hardware constraints is a challenging task that typically requires DNN architectures to be specialized for each device separately. To avoid the huge manual effort, one can use neural architecture search (NAS). However, many existing NAS methods are resource-intensive and time-consuming because they require the training of many different DNNs from scratch. Furthermore, they do not take the resource constraints of the target system into account. To address these shortcomings, we propose PrototypeNAS, a zero-shot NAS method to accelerate and automate the selection, compression, and specialization of DNNs to different target microcontroller units (MCUs). We propose a novel three-step search method that decouples DNN design and specialization from DNN training for a given target platform. First, we present a novel search space that not only cuts out smaller DNNs from a single large architecture, but instead combines the structural optimization of multiple architecture types, as well as optimization of their pruning and quantization configurations. Second, we explore the use of an ensemble of zero-shot proxies during optimization instead of a single one. Third, we propose the use of Hypervolume subset selection to distill DNN architectures from the Pareto front of the multi-objective optimization that represent the most meaningful tradeoffs between accuracy and FLOPs. We evaluate the effectiveness of PrototypeNAS on 12 different datasets in three different tasks: image classification, time series classification, and object detection. Our results demonstrate that PrototypeNAS is able to identify DNN models within minutes that are small enough to be deployed on off-the-shelf MCUs and still achieve accuracies comparable to the performance of large DNN models.

Motion forecasting enables autonomous vehicles to anticipate scene evolution by predicting the future trajectories of dynamic agents. However, existing approaches typically assume a closed-world setting with a fixed object taxonomy and access to high-quality perception, limiting their applicability in the real world where perception is imperfect, and new object classes may emerge over time. In this work, we introduce class-incremental motion forecasting, a novel setting in which new object classes are sequentially introduced over time and future object trajectories are predicted directly from camera images. We propose the first end-to-end framework for this setting, which adapts to newly introduced classes while mitigating catastrophic forgetting of previously learned ones. Our method generates motion forecasting pseudo-labels for known classes and matches them with 2D instance masks from an open-vocabulary segmentation model. This 3D-to-2D keypoint voting mechanism filters inconsistent and overconfident predictions, while a query feature variance-based replay strategy samples informative past sequences to preserve prior knowledge. Extensive evaluations on nuScenes and Argoverse 2 show that our approach successfully preserves performance on known classes while effectively adapting to novel ones. We further demonstrate zero-shot transfer to real-world driving and show that the framework extends naturally to open- and closed-loop end-to-end class-incremental planning on nuScenes and NeuroNCAP. Code and models will be made publicly available at https://omen.cs.uni-freiburg.de.

We study conditional generation in diffusion models under hard constraints, where generated samples must satisfy prescribed events with probability one. Such constraints arise naturally in safety-critical applications and in rare-event simulation, where soft or reward-based guidance methods offer no guarantee of constraint satisfaction. Building on a probabilistic interpretation of diffusion models, we develop a principled conditional diffusion guidance framework based on Doob's h-transform, martingale representation and quadratic variation process. Specifically, the resulting guided dynamics augment a pretrained diffusion with an explicit drift correction involving the logarithmic gradient of a conditioning function, without modifying the pretrained score network. Leveraging martingale and quadratic-variation identities, we propose two novel off-policy learning algorithms based on a martingale loss and a martingale-covariation loss to estimate h and its gradient using only trajectories from the pretrained model. We provide non-asymptotic guarantees for the resulting conditional sampler in both total variation and Wasserstein distances, explicitly characterizing the impact of score approximation and guidance estimation errors. Numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods in enforcing hard constraints and generating rare-event samples. The code of the numerical experiments can be found at https://github.com/ZhengyiGuo2002/CDG_Finance.

Foundation models are transitioning from offline predictors to deployed systems expected to operate over long time horizons. In real deployments, objectives are not fixed: domains drift, user preferences evolve, and new tasks appear after the model has shipped. This elevates continual learning and instant personalization from optional features to core architectural requirements. Yet most adaptation pipelines still follow a static weight paradigm: after training (or after any adaptation step), inference executes a single parameter vector regardless of user intent, domain, or instance-specific constraints. This treats the trained or adapted model as a single point in parameter space. In heterogeneous and continually evolving regimes, distinct objectives can induce separated feasible regions over parameters, forcing any single shared update into compromise, interference, or overspecialization. As a result, continual learning and personalization are often implemented as repeated overwriting of shared weights, risking degradation of previously learned behaviors. We propose HY-WU (Weight Unleashing), a memory-first adaptation framework that shifts adaptation pressure away from overwriting a single shared parameter point. HY-WU implements functional (operator-level) memory as a neural module: a generator that synthesizes weight updates on-the-fly from the instance condition, yielding instance-specific operators without test-time optimization.

Molecules are often represented as SMILES strings, which can be readily converted to hand-crafted descriptors or fingerprints (FP) for molecular property prediction. Research has demonstrated that SMILES can be converted to molecular graphs $G = (V, E)$, with atoms as nodes $(V)$ and bonds as edges $(E)$. These molecular graphs can subsequently be used to train graph neural networks (GNN) models. Despite the recent surge in application of GNN (existing and novel architectures) for molecular property prediction, a rigorous benchmark is still lacking. We propose MolGraphBench, a comprehensive benchmark of four commonly used GNN models for molecular property prediction. Benchmarking results demonstrate graph convolutional network (GCN) and graph isomorphism networks (GIN) as the optimal GNN architectures for molecular graph regression tasks, based on absolute performance, training efficiency, transfer learning and prediction quality. The study also indicates the non-complementary nature of molecular fingerprints in the fusion (GNN-FP) framework. Furthermore, our GNN models achieved performance superior or comparable performance to current state-of-the-art GNN baselines across three datasets (GCN with RMSE of $0.518$ on B3DB, GIN-FP with RMSE of $1.022$ on FreeSolv and GIN with MAE of $63.783$ on RT datasets). Findings from this study indicate that type of GNN-layer, should be treated as a tunable hyperparameter rather than a fixed design choice to achieve superior performance.

We investigate the use of zero-shot text-to-speech (ZS-TTS) as a data augmentation source for low-resource personalized speech synthesis. While synthetic augmentation can provide linguistically rich and phonetically diverse speech, naively mixing large amounts of synthetic speech with limited real recordings often leads to speaker similarity degradation during fine-tuning. To address this issue, we propose ZeSTA, a simple domain-conditioned training framework that distinguishes real and synthetic speech via a lightweight domain embedding, combined with real-data oversampling to stabilize adaptation under extremely limited target data, without modifying the base architecture. Experiments on LibriTTS and an in-house dataset with two ZS-TTS sources demonstrate that our approach improves speaker similarity over naive synthetic augmentation while preserving intelligibility and perceptual quality. Audio samples are available on our web page.