Papers

Thinking has emerged as a critical capability for Large Language Models (LLMs) tackling complex tasks. However, its reactive nature, where reasoning is passively triggered only upon receiving a user response, inevitably introduces latency that compromises conversational fluidity. This stands in sharp contrast to human dialogue, where speakers proactively anticipate and plan future content during natural pauses to ensure seamless interaction. To bridge this gap, we propose Proactive Thinking, a framework that empowers models to pre-compute potential response elements during conversational downtime instead of waiting idly for the next input. We then introduce a training-free baseline that can think ahead by anticipating future states, balancing efficiency and quality through speculative continual thinking. To evaluate this approach in practice, we adapt three benchmarks of varying complexity into time-aware environments that simulate real-time conversational flow. We demonstrate that proactive thinking effectively improves interaction efficiency without compromising performance. Ultimately, this work advocates for a fundamental shift toward more intelligent, anticipatory, and real-time conversational AI.

Silicon sampling-using large language models (LLMs) to simulate human survey respondents-has emerged as a promising approach for augmenting traditional survey research. However, most evaluations rely on distributional comparisons rather than individual-level prediction, which risks conflating pattern matching with coherent respondent-level prediction. We propose cross-survey transfer, a more rigorous evaluation framework in which an LLM is given a respondent's answers to one set of questions and must predict their answers to entirely different questions from the same survey. Using data from the Taiwan Election and Democratization Study (TEDS) 2024, three open-weight LLMs (27B-120B parameters), and supervised machine learning baselines, we find that: (1) zero-shot LLMs achieve 52% accuracy on genuinely unseen items, closing to within 6 percentage points (pp) of a supervised random forest trained on same-population data; (2) a stable construct predictability hierarchy emerges, from 67% for partisan attitudes to 23% for sovereignty; and (3) variance collapse and safety alignment effects-two commonly cited LLM limitations-turn out to be more nuanced than previously reported, with variance collapse affecting supervised models as well and alignment effects varying dramatically across model families. These findings clarify both the promise and boundaries of silicon sampling.

HAR is increasingly expected to run continuously on edge devices, yet recent LLM-based methods remain hard to deploy: raw sensor prompts are long, cloud inference adds latency and privacy risk, and fine-tuned LLM pipelines turn general-purpose models into task-specific classifiers. We present STELLA, an efficient sensor-to-LLM translation framework for on-device HAR that shifts the burden from LLM adaptation to sensor tokenization. A lightweight hierarchical tokenizer compresses an entire multi-channel inertial window into a fixed set of compact latent sensor tokens, which are projected into the embedding space of a frozen pretrained LLM and combined with a natural-language prompt for label scoring. This preserves activity-relevant temporal and cross-channel structure while keeping LLM-side computation predictable across sensor configurations. STELLA also supports on-device personalization, adapting only the lightweight tokenizer on small amounts of user-specific labelled data and augmenting inference with a local retrieval context, keeping the LLM, user data, and retrieval on device. Across seven public HAR datasets and eight benchmark settings, STELLA achieves new state-of-the-art performance, improving over prior methods by up to 11.83% F1; on-device personalization yields up to a further 21.91% F1 as user data accumulates after deployment. STELLA also outperforms representative time-series tokenizers under the same LLM pipeline and achieves real-time inference under practical mobile and edge budgets, showing that efficient sensor tokenization is a practical path toward accurate, private, and personalized LLM-based HAR on edge devices.

Criminal identification from surveillance imagery has become a critical research area in intelligent forensic surveillance systems due to the increasing deployment of CCTV cameras in public and private environments. However, surveillance-based face recognition remains highly challenging because of low image resolution, illumination variation, motion blur, pose changes, facial occlusion, and background clutter. To address these limitations, this paper proposes an Attention-Guided EfficientNet (AG-EfficientNet) framework for precise criminal identification in surveillance images. The proposed framework integrates EfficientNet-B0 with Convolutional Block Attention Modules (CBAM) to enhance discriminative facial feature learning under degraded surveillance conditions. In addition, a multi-scale surveillance feature fusion strategy is introduced to preserve both local texture information and high-level semantic identity representations. A hybrid Softmax-Triplet optimization mechanism is further employed to improve inter-class separability and intra-class compactness for robust criminal identity discrimination. The proposed framework was experimentally evaluated using the Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) and SCFace datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed AG-EfficientNet framework achieved superior surveillance recognition performance with an identification accuracy of 98.2%, Precision of 97.9%, Recall of 97.6%, F1-Score of 97.7%, and ROC-AUC of 0.99, outperforming conventional deep learning architectures including AlexNet, VGG16, ResNet50, MobileNetV2, and standard EfficientNet-B0. Furthermore, Grad-CAM visualization and ablation analysis confirm the effectiveness of the proposed attention-guided feature learning strategy.

Can a simple labeled-pixel contrastive branch improve semi-supervised segmentation with a strong pretrained encoder? We study this question with PixCon, which adds a class-wise memory bank to a DINOv2-Base implementation of UniMatch V2. The bank stores ground-truth-labeled features only where the student prediction agrees with the label. A multi-positive contrastive loss uses these features to train the shared encoder-decoder; the head and bank are discarded at inference. This simplifies earlier labeled-pixel banks by removing confidence thresholds and learned ranking. On Pascal VOC with 183 labels, PixCon improves all three paired seeds by 0.20, 0.64 and 1.83 mIoU points, raising the mean from 87.01 to 87.90. With 92 labels the mean gain is 0.40 points; single-seed differences on Cityscapes and ADE20K range from -0.08 to +0.14 points. A predicted-label contrastive control reaches nearly the same Pascal accuracy, so these results support the added branch rather than an accuracy benefit from its correctness filter. An exact gradient decomposition distinguishes mislabeled-positive counts from their similarity-weighted influence. Separate teacher diagnostics find retained-pixel error rates of 1.8% on Pascal and 10.6% on ADE20K. These diagnostics do not measure the training bank or predict final accuracy. PixCon adds 15.3-19.7% iteration time in the measured runs and no inference computation. We report paired seeds, training cost and the limits of the evidence.

Reinforcement learning has become a standard post-training recipe for large language models, but dense full-parameter updates create two deployment-relevant bottlenecks: suppressed reasoning performance, often reflected by premature saturation of test-time scaling, and interference when consolidating multiple capabilities through multi-domain training or model merging. We show that the reasoning-effective component of these updates is largely concentrated in the base model's spectral space, motivating Subspace-Aligned Rewiring (SAR), a post-hoc editing method that retains this spectral core while removing orthogonal components. SAR therefore preserves reasoning gains and filters residual update directions that suppress performance or amplify cross-domain interference. Across several model families and scales, SAR extracts compact reasoning cores using as little as approximately 0.58% of total parameters: it preserves over 99% of post-training performance and improves high-k exploration in mathematical reasoning, and generalizes to agentic coding by improving six of seven open benchmarks on an in-house model. SAR also purifies mixed-domain training updates by releasing suppressed coding capability while maintaining math reasoning and instruction following. It further enables model merging across experts, yielding cross-domain generalization that surpasses previous merging baselines and even the best single-domain experts. Overall, SAR shows that extracting reasoning-effective updates from parameter geometry can serve as a training-free mechanism to improve reasoning and multi-domain performance.

The rapid growth in the parameter scale of large language models (LLMs) has created a strong demand for efficient compression techniques. As a hardware-agnostic and highly compatible approach, low-rank compression has been widely adopted to reduce both memory footprint and computational cost. However, existing SVD-based methods are still largely driven by local reconstruction objectives, overlooking two critical limitations: rank budgets are often allocated without explicitly considering layer-wise loss sensitivity, and local approximation errors can propagate and accumulate through the residual stream, leading to amplified global deviations from the original model. To address these issues, we propose LACE-SVD, a Loss-Aware SVD framework with Cumulative Error correction for LLM compression. LACE-SVD first estimates the calibration negative-log-likelihood increase induced by candidate layer-wise compression ratios and solves a budget-constrained allocation problem to assign rank budgets. It then refines the compressed model with closed-form local updates and introduces a propagation-aware correction for residual-stream output modules, reducing layer-output discrepancy as a proxy for cumulative error propagation. Experimental results demonstrate that at a high compression ratio (0.6), the WikiText-2 PPL of our method on LLaMA-7B (32.57) is significantly better than that of Dobi-SVD (46.18).

Omni modal large language models (OmniLLMs) have attracted wide attention for their ability to jointly process audio and video, but they generate large token sequences under audio-visual inputs, leading to substantial inference cost. Existing audio-visual token compression methods often rely on unimodal guidance, overlooking the temporal locality of query-relevant evidence in audio-visual inputs and implicitly assuming that the two modalities share a temporally aligned information density distribution. We propose OmniFocus, a training-free query-guided token compression method for OmniLLMs that performs independent importance estimation for video and audio, enabling a modality-symmetric compression design that preserves modality-specific salient evidence while maintaining audio-visual alignment, thereby mitigating the modality bias issue that can arise from unimodal-guided compression. Experiments on the Qwen2.5-Omni model family across four audio-visual benchmarks show that OmniFocus maintains strong compressed performance at low token retention ratios and outperforms existing baselines on several major benchmark scores at 25% token retention. On DailyOmni with Qwen2.5-Omni-7B at 25% token retention, OmniFocus maintains 59.40 accuracy while delivering up to 1.38$\times$ prefill speedup relative to the full-token baseline, highlighting a favorable practical accuracy-efficiency trade-off.

The use of Large Language Models (LLMs) across diverse areas of human activity-ranging from everyday tasks to safety-critical applications-aims to enhance decision-making effectiveness with minimal human feedback. Concurrently, it seeks to align decisions with human expectations, preferences, and needs while mitigating risks associated with AI non-determinism. However, humans frequently over- or under-rely on AI recommendations, and current AI systems remain poorly calibrated to human expectations. To address these challenges, we introduce a human-AI collaborative decision-making framework designed to augment human capabilities and align AI agents with human preferences and expectations. Specifically, this paper (a) formulates the collaborative decision-making task as a stochastic game between an AI agent and a human player, and (b) proposes the Human-Centric Reflective Architecture (HCRA), which integrates human-calibrated models with reinforcement learning agents that leverage linguistic feedback in an iterative, reflective process. Evaluation results demonstrate that HCRA enhances decision-making effectiveness and delivers high-quality recommendations.

Forecasting future events has attracted growing attention as a testbed for general-purpose AI. A natural way to ground this evaluation is let the models trade in the prediction markets. Trading, however, requires more than forecasting. Moreover, recent benchmarks report a substantial gap between calibrated probability scores and the trading results. We propose Raven-Agent, to the best of our knowledge, the first autonomous trading agent for prediction markets. On a controlled replay over an archived decision set, our architecture achieves the only positive return and the only positive risk-adjusted return among all tested policies. We have released our code in https://github.com/Alchemist-X/predict-raven .

Images captured by consumer electronic devices, such as mobile phones and digital cameras, often suffer from low-light degradation due to sensor limitations and imaging pipelines, which degrades visual quality and affects downstream vision tasks. Existing methods based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Transformers have dominated current low-light image enhancement (LIE) due to their excellent ability to model hierarchical features. However, CNNs operate in local receptive fields that cannot model long-range dependencies, while Transformers overcome this problem but incur substantial computational costs. To address these challenges, we propose MambaLIE, a Scene Light Intensity-Boosted Low-Light Image Enhancement method based on a State Space Model (SSM). We first introduce scene light intensity to improve the structural distribution of illumination, which is then gated with the low-light input to guide enhancement. To better model the illumination while maintaining computational efficiency, we propose the Locally Enhanced State Space Model (LESSM) for efficient light enhancement. Our LESSM contains two branches: an SSM branch and a Local Enhanced branch, where the former is used to model the long-range dependencies with linear time complexity, while the latter is used to enhance local feature representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MambaLIE outperforms state-of-the-art CNN-based and Transformer-based LIE methods on four widely used synthetic benchmarks and five publicly available real-world benchmarks in terms of accuracy, speed, and model size, making it suitable for practical deployment on resource-constrained devices.

Video Diffusion Transformers (VDiTs) have demonstrated significant capabilities in high-fidelity video generation. However, their ability to produce long-duration videos is fundamentally constrained by the quadratic complexity of the self-attention mechanism. Recent clustering-based sparse attention methods improve the quality-speed trade-off by grouping semantically similar tokens, but their practical efficiency remains limited by two bottlenecks: substantial clustering overhead and low CTA utilization caused by irregular cluster-induced blocks. We propose HyperVAttention (HVA), a training-free sparse attention framework that addresses both bottlenecks jointly. To reduce clustering overhead, we introduce 3D local-window clustering, which exploits the spatio-temporal locality of video tokens to restrict centroid search to fixed local neighborhoods, and implement it with a custom Triton kernel for efficient execution. We further propose a hybrid clustering strategy that performs full clustering only at anchor steps and updates only subset tokens at intermediate steps, leveraging the temporal stability of cluster assignments across denoising steps. To improve CTA utilization, we present hardware-aware cluster merging that minimizes CTA-aligned execution cost through parallel agglomerative merging, improving block density and approximation fidelity by utilizing idle tile capacity. Together, these components reduce clustering overhead, avoid redundant updates, and better align sparse attention with the fixed tile structure of modern GPU kernels. Experiments on video generation show that HVA advances the Pareto frontier of training free sparse attention, achieving higher fidelity than SVG2 at comparable latency and a $2.13\times$ speedup over full attention on HunyuanVideo, or $2.23\times$ with its faster variant HVA-Flash.

Model merging techniques, which aggregate independently finetuned models into one to combine their capabilities, have become a topic of significant interest in recent years, with a broad array of methods having been proposed to tackle this problem. Simultaneously, an emerging trend in distributed learning has been the use of methods such as local SGD and DiLoCo, which greatly reduce communication costs by periodically aggregating the independently trained local models. However, these communication-efficient methods have been shown to degrade in performance relative to the FLOP-matched data-parallel gold standard as the number of independent local models grows and as the number of local training steps before global communication is increased. In this work, we draw an explicit analogy between the pseudo-gradient aggregation step in local SGD/DiLoCo and task arithmetic-based model merging, establishing a straightforward way to utilize merging methods in the context of distributed optimization. We then evaluate multiple state-of-the-art model merging methods in this setting and identify one method in particular, Iso-C, as a promising approach for improving DiLoCo. We find that DiLoCo SGD with Iso-C aggregation outperforms not only simple pseudo-gradient averaging but even the momentum-based DiLoCo, despite lacking a momentum mechanism itself. Building on this finding, we propose IsoLoCo, which adapts Iso-C for distributed training by equipping it with Nesterov momentum. Our empirical evaluations on language model pre-training across varying numbers of local workers show that IsoLoCo significantly outperforms DiLoCo, with the gap between them widening as the number of workers increases. This advantage remains present across model sizes and inner step counts, confirming that merging-inspired aggregation is an effective strategy for low-communication distributed training.

Recent advances in molecular large language models have led to strong performance on molecular understanding and generation tasks, yet these gains often come without reliable structural grounding. In particular, existing approaches conflict with the chemistry principle that structure determines function: despite their downstream success, current molecular LLMs perform poorly on basic structure recognition, suggesting that they fail to capture molecular graphs from canonical SMILES. To remedy this, we propose MolBasic, a structure-first framework that strengthens structural comprehension via SMILES-Graph translation. MolBasic is built around a multi-level structure perception benchmark, where bidirectional SMILES-Graph conversion serves as the core task to align sequential and topological representations. On top of this foundation, we employ a progressive learning scheme with a standardized Chain-of-Thought (CoT) to steer models from structure acquisition toward higher-level molecular reasoning. Experiments show that MolBasic substantially improves structural understanding and yields robust gains on downstream tasks, including property prediction and objective optimization, supporting our structure-first paradigm.

Text-rich image models can now design poster-scale layouts, but we lack ways to measure whether they honor scientific communication contracts: legible labels, prescribed aspect ratios, and – above all – abstaining from fabricated scientific figures. We present POSTERHARNESS, an auditable harness reframing poster generation as measurable instruction-following tasks, with a pilot benchmark and failure taxonomy. POSTERHARNESS uses a placeholder-first contract to separate two jobs models otherwise conflate. The model performs visual-summary design: typography, reading path, color, and background – but never draws data-bearing figures. Every figure region must be an empty labeled placeholder; a deterministic compositor inserts real source-paper figures at detected coordinates. This makes properties measurable: placeholder count and ID accuracy, blankness, aspect-ratio compliance, abstention from synthesized graphics, public-text hygiene, and source-figure provenance – with failures logged as explicit rejections, not hidden in plausible-looking output. We instantiate the harness on 12 papers (6 HEP, 6 AI/ML-adjacent) and report three findings. (i) A counterfactual probe shows the placeholder contract drives VLM-counted synthesized figures from 34 to 0 across three papers. (ii) A failure taxonomy identifies blocking contracts: placeholder geometry, placeholder QA, template critic, and public text. (iii) Comparison with Paper2Poster shows a trade-off: PosterHarness yields higher-resolution artifacts, lower white-canvas fraction, and stronger VLM visual preference; the deterministic baseline retains slightly more PosterQuiz-style information and runs faster. We report this as regime characterization, not a superiority claim. All artifacts, prompts, manifests, and audit scripts are released as a reusable evaluation component.

Controllable generative models of 3D medical images can synthesize volumes with specified clinical attributes, but this demands samples that are simultaneously high-fidelity, natively 3D, and faithful to the requested conditioning. We present CONFLUX, a latent diffusion model for chest computed tomography (CT): a 3D variational autoencoder compresses each volume, and a rectified-flow transformer generates in the latent space. Generation is conditioned on structured radiological metadata (18 abnormality findings, sex, age, and reconstruction kernel) through adaptive layer normalization. The model leads strong volumetric baselines on tri-planar Frechet distance (FID 32.3 vs. 74.6 for MAISI) while exposing direct control over clinical attributes. To strengthen that control we add an online reinforcement-learning post-training stage (group-relative policy optimization) that rewards how reliably a classifier recovers the requested findings from each generated volume. Judged by a separate, independent classifier, post-training removes 47% of the shortfall relative to real-scan reliability. We release the model and a ~200k synthetic chest-CT dataset with conditioning metadata spanning a wide variety of clinical findings.

Vision-language models can exhibit visual concept-conditioned divergence: given images containing demographic features, corporate logos, or ideological symbols, some models produce unusually uniform responses that differ from what peer models say about the same input. These behaviors evade text-only audits because visual concepts cannot be isolated or substituted the way text tokens can. We present VISTA (Visual Inconsistency Screening Through Analysis), a black-box cross-model audit that couples semantic entropy with distribution-based divergence to flag model-specific anomalies. In a controlled study, we implant concept-conditioned stances in three VLMs via fine-tuning on small biased datasets and confirm that VISTA detects them. Auditing six VLMs across 19 topics, VISTA surfaces 142 high-suspicion cases (1.2%) and identifies selective refusal as a previously unreported divergence pattern, where models refuse demographic queries at rates varying from 0 to 65% across groups.

Recent reasoning-centric Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant strides, yet they predominantly operate on a passive-inference pattern that assumes complete information. In contrast, real-world clinical intelligence is inherently an iterative investigative process requiring strategic evidence acquisition. To bridge this gap, we formalize medical diagnosis as an Iterative Evidence-Seeking Task. We leverage Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) to elicit intrinsic reasoning within a closed-loop environment, guided by a novel suite of rewards that enforce diagnostic precision and examination consistency. To facilitate this, we introduce the Retrieval-Augmented Generation-based Examination Simulator (RAGES), a high-fidelity clinical oracle that provides realistic, knowledge-grounded follow-up evidence. Empirical results across diverse datasets demonstrate that our framework enables LLMs to transition from passive responders to autonomous assistants. Notably, our model demonstrates comparable performance to larger and reasoning-enhanced baselines, while RAGES proves superior to vanilla LLMs in generating biologically plausible clinical feedback.

Recent advancements in the Internet of Things (IoT) emphasize the urgent need for advanced network security, as IoT networks feature dynamic topologies, imbalanced traffic, and complex attack patterns. Unlike general IT networks, IoT environments exhibit extreme heterogeneity and sparse topologies. Traditional GNN-based intrusion detection methods often struggle to efficiently model node and edge features or capture fine-grained anomalies in such settings. To address this, we propose SKGFusionKAN, a novel IoT-tailored approach enhancing GraphSAGE with a multi-scale selective kernel attention mechanism. This enables adaptive extraction of node and edge features under diverse traffic conditions. Specifically, our edge-oriented message passing strengthens information propagation, while selective kernel attention adaptively weights edge-derived information from different scales to handle heterogeneity. We also introduce a gated fusion process to dynamically integrate multi-scale features, improving robustness against evolving attacks. Finally, we leverage Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KAN) for classification, offering superior nonlinear modeling capabilities essential for detecting intricate, low-frequency attacks. To our knowledge, this work presents a comprehensive integration of GNNs and KAN with dedicated architectural innovations for IoT intrusion detection. Extensive experiments on four NIDS benchmarks show that SKGFusionKAN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in binary and multiclass tasks, demonstrating its potential for IoT security.

Scaling modern large language models (LLMs) to long contexts is limited by the quadratic computation cost, and poor length extrapolation of dense attention. Chunk-wise sparse attention offers a promising alternative, but all existing methods fall short of full attention because of their inaccurate chunk selection. We propose Hierarchical Landmark Sparse (HiLS) Attention, a chunk-wise sparse attention mechanism that learns chunk selection end-to-end under the language-modeling (LM) loss. HiLS factorizes attention hierarchically: each query performs attention independently with each retrieved chunk to extract chunk-specific information, and the resulting outputs are fused according to chunk retrieval scores. By incorporating retrieval scores into the forward attention computation, HiLS optimizes them directly with the LM loss, enabling end-to-end retrieval learning and native sparse training. Experimental results show that HiLS-Attention achieves performance comparable to, and in some cases better than, full attention at in-domain context lengths. Meanwhile, HiLS-Attention extrapolates more than $64\times$ the training context length with 90% retrieval accuracy, far beyond full attention. Moreover, existing full-attention models can be converted to HiLS-Attention with lightweight continued pretraining, preserving in-domain performance while acquiring ultra-long-context extrapolation. Together with its sparse KV access and computation, HiLS-Attention breaks the usual efficiency-performance trade-off, enabling long-context LLMs that are both more efficient and more effective on general long-context tasks than their full-attention counterparts.

Most agent benchmarks put facts, tools and permissions behind one interface. Real organizations spread them across people. Incognita asks what happens when the task and success criterion stay fixed but access does not. We transform eighteen customer-service tasks into three settings: direct access, one known intermediary, and six role-isolated participants whose capabilities must be discovered. Across 864 trials with four models, social access reduced success for every model; the pre-specified intervals excluded zero for two. The latest tested model, gpt-5.6-sol, achieved the highest social-access success at 0.65, a 0.11 decrease from centralized indirect access with an interval that included zero. Exploratory comparisons separated five of six model pairs under social access, while neither centralized setting separated any at this sample size. In post-hoc task-blocked tests, three pairwise interaction $p$-values remained significant after multiplicity adjustment. A reference-relative reader associates the wider gaps with failures to obtain needed information. Because the data cannot distinguish ineffective requests by the evaluated agent from inaccurate replies by simulated participants, the reader's labels describe where trajectories stopped, not why models differed.

A central goal of mechanistic interpretability is to understand how neural networks work and what each individual component does. Dominant circuit-finding approaches focus on a specific behavior and reverse-engineer the role of components on the associated sub-distribution. However, past work has shown that components can have different functions that are active on different subsets of the input distribution. In this work we ask whether a single weight can be understood globally across the full training distribution by characterizing when it matters (the inputs on which ablating it changes the model's predictions). We introduce an automated LLM pipeline that writes a short, human-readable description of when a weight matters and verifies it on held-out text, crediting a weight only if its description generalizes. Across two sparse and two dense transformers, the fraction of weights that are interpretable (in this sense) is higher in sparse transformers than in dense ones, a gap that widens once unreliable descriptions are discarded. Our results show that a meaningful fraction of a sparse transformer model's weights can be interpreted: 12 to 31% of weights have a single short description that identifies what the weight is used for.

Dense video captioning aims to generate temporally grounded descriptions of video events, benefiting both event-level video understanding and generation. In this domain, autoregressive video large language models have emerged as a prevalent paradigm due to their strong generative and cross-modal modeling capacity. However, generating dense captions under the token-by-token paradigm severely limits inference efficiency and hinders scalability as video length and event density increase. In this work, we propose a parallelized autoregressive framework that not only improves generation efficiency but also enhances temporally grounded captioning performance. Our key insight is to exploit the weak local dependencies across temporally distinct events to restructure the causal dependency graph, thereby enabling lossless parallel generation. Specifically, tokens with weak cross-event dependencies can be decoded in parallel, while tightly coupled tokens within each event retain sequential decoding to preserve local semantic coherence. To realize this insight, we introduce two key components for lossless parallel decoding: (1) a latent global planning mechanism that automatically learns the event-level structure and produces compact tokens encoding global inter-event causality while adaptively aggregating event-level audio-visual semantics, guiding subsequent dependency restructuring and parallel decoding; and (2) an event-factorized parallel decoding mechanism that effectively balances local focus with global inter-event awareness. Experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate the clear advantage of our approach in both efficiency and performance in omni-modal event grounding and captioning. Project website: https://github.com/showlab/PadCaptioner.

We argue that AI systems used in conducting foreign policy tasks - broadly enacting 'statecraft' - should be a priority test case for technical AI governance research. In enacting foreign policy, we refer to the formulation and implementation of external objectives by political actors. Statecraft is a high-consequence deployment domain, with extreme downside risks and structural properties that standard evaluation practices handle poorly. These features include partial observability, unbounded action spaces, contested ground truth, and multidimensional objectives. This paper advocates for a literature-grounded research agenda. Our contribution is threefold: (i) a claim about the structural conditions of foreign policy that combine catastrophic tail risk with technical evaluation complexities, (ii) an ECOSYSTEM review that highlights the asymmetric focus on ASSESSMENT features over ACCESS, VERIFICATION, SECURITY, and OPERATIONALIZATION, and (iii) a demand-side evaluation framework that decomposes foreign-policy workflows into bounded, evaluable sub-tasks with human recombination. As AI systems are already being deployed in the conduct of war and peace, amid limited public evaluation infrastructure from the technical AI governance community, this agenda is an urgent priority.

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) achieve strong denoising performance by exploiting spatial context from neighboring pixels. Deep Image Prior (DIP) leverages this property to restore images from a single noisy input without requiring large datasets. However, the over-parameterized architecture of DIP often leads to noise fitting during optimization. In this paper, we propose Pool-DIP, a convolution-free architecture that incorporates pooling-based contrast modeling to capture spatial context efficiently. Pool-DIP improves denoising performance while significantly reducing the number of parameters and computational complexity compared to convolution-based DIP models. Experimental results show that Pool-DIP achieves competitive performance across multiple datasets, including a real-world benchmark. Spectral analysis further reveals that Pool-DIP stabilizes the evolution of high-frequency components during optimization and suppresses erroneous high-frequency signals. The proposed architecture also generalizes well to other image restoration tasks such as super-resolution and inpainting.

We propose PRECEDE, a precedent-guided co-scientist for side-effect-aware drug redesign that revises a parent compound to mitigate a specified side effect while preserving therapeutic function. Rather than isolated molecular generation, PRECEDE frames redesign as evidence-grounded reasoning over drug–side-effect associations, biomedical knowledge graphs, and precedents of safety-driven optimization, coordinated by an LLM orchestrator with explicit policies and human-review checkpoints. We position PRECEDE as a human-supervised AI-for-science workflow in which hypotheses remain auditable, falsifiable, and bounded by prior pharmacology.

Multi-product kitting delivery imposes significant challenges for real-time scheduling in hybrid manufacturing systems that integrate processing and assembly, as dynamic order arrivals simultaneously alter supply dependencies and the set of feasible job-machine assignments. This paper proposes a sliding-window-based reinforcement learning (SWRL) framework for end-to-end online scheduling in the flexible assembly flow shop scheduling problem with complex kitting constraints. The problem is formulated as a heterogeneous graph-based Markov decision process that captures the dual-layer kitting structure and the tail-product bottleneck dynamics that produce a sparse reward landscape. To address the resulting challenges, SWRL integrates a sliding-window filtering mechanism that filters inactive nodes and prioritizes kitting-critical operations, a spatiotemporal graph encoding network that tracks bottleneck shifts across consecutive decision states, and a dynamic action mapping module with a constrained waiting strategy that adapts to the changing action space under variable topologies. Experiments on real-world instances from a home appliance manufacturer demonstrate that SWRL achieves consistent tardiness reductions over classical dispatching rules and existing deep reinforcement learning methods, and exhibits robust performance across varying resource configurations, order loads, and arrival concentrations.

Materials phase diagrams are a core knowledge representation in materials science, encoding temperature,composition, phase stability, and phase transformation pathways, with their full understanding requiring thermodynamic mechanism analysis and scientific reasoning. Although VLMs have shown promise in scientific image understanding, their systematic evaluation on such logically complex images demanding deep mechanistic interpretation remains limited, and phase diagrams provide a challenging testbed for this purpose. We introduce MatPhaseBench, a high-quality, high-reliability benchmark for complex scientific image understanding, focused on materials phase diagrams. MatPhaseBench is constructed from 3681 papers in classical materials science journals, from which 200 high-quality diagram-text pairs were selected, covering 189 material systems and 70 elements. The benchmark has three key features: (1)targeting complex scientific image understanding-it moves beyond simple objective tests to open-ended tasks requiring deep comprehension; (2)comprehensive image-text alignment-semantic information associated with images is fully preserved during literature mining and matching; (3) high-quality human-supervised text acquisition-all descriptions undergo strict manual validation. Experimental results show that current VLMs remain substantially behind expert-level understanding: they are largely limited to surface visual perception, lack deep reasoning grounded in thermodynamic mechanisms, have limited domain awareness and expert analytical experience, and perform poorly in distinguishing fine-grained differences in composite or multi-diagram settings. Overall, MatPhaseBench constitutes a challenging research-grade benchmark, providing a foundational platform for complex scientific image understanding, phase diagram analysis, and trustworthy multi-modal AI in science.

Privacy is an important challenge when users interact with AI chatbots, since users may share sensitive information, explicitly or implicitly, and AI chatbots can use this information for user profiling. In this paper, we aim to protect user privacy via a user-side mechanism that transforms sensitive information in a user prompt, while preserving enough information to elicit a useful response from the chatbot. This approach faces an inherent tradeoff between protecting privacy (i.e., avoiding profiling) and preserving utility (i.e., getting personalized and task-specific responses). To that end, we consider, evaluate, and compare four different obfuscation actions, namely redaction, abstraction, replacement, and a novel noising/denoising scheme that we introduce. Additional novel insights include: utilizing a data type taxonomy to both identify and obfuscate sensitive information and explicitly taking into account the utility of chat responses in making the obfuscation decision. First, we systematically optimize and evaluate each obfuscation action independently in terms of the privacy-utility tradeoff it achieves. Second, we propose PROMPTPET, an LLM-based agent that selects the best obfuscation action for each sensitive part of the prompt, using a reinforcement-learning inspired rule optimizer, applied for the first time in this context. Using a real-world chat dataset, we show that PROMPTPET matches the best privacy-utility tradeoff attainable by any single obfuscation action and significantly outperforms prior state-of-the-art approaches.

AI tools are accelerating scientific publication while the systems that review it struggle to keep up, and independent verification of published research has become both harder and more important. As manual replication is slow and expensive, a growing line of work uses coding agents to automate parts of the process. Existing efforts are largely packaged as benchmarks with companion agents that only run inside the benchmark's own pipeline, and no general-purpose replication tool exists. We present VERITAS, a domain-agnostic replication framework built around CLI coding agents. Given a paper, a code repository, or both, VERITAS extracts the paper's claims, runs the methodology while resolving issues as they arise, and judges each claim against the evidence from experiment runs. The pipeline returns an importance-weighted Replication Score, a severity-rated log of every fix applied, and the patched codebase. We evaluate VERITAS on CORE-Bench and ReplicationBench, 65 papers spanning computer science, social science, medicine, and astrophysics. Against two strong Claude Code baselines on the same model and host environment, VERITAS achieves state-of-the-art performance and leads on every metric on both benchmarks.