Papers

Traditional malware detection methods struggle to generalize to obfuscated or previously unseen threats. This paper introduces ThreatVisionAI, a hybrid malware family classification framework that integrates a raw-image CNN, a wavelet-based CNN, and a Vision Transformer (ViT) to capture complementary spatial, frequency-domain, and global relational features in malware images. The wavelet-based CNN captures multi-scale frequency information that helps distinguish closely related families, while the ViT branch models long-range dependencies across the image. Evaluated on the Malimg dataset, ThreatVisionAI achieves 98.01% accuracy and a weighted F1 score of 0.9742, with wavelet-domain features providing measurable gains on minority and visually similar families. These results confirm that frequency-aware and transformer-based representations improve image-based malware family classification.

While traditional hub capacity planning models optimize effectively for quantitative inputs, they often fail to digest qualitative business context. We propose a novel framework where a large language model (LLM) agent iteratively proposes hub capacity decisions guided by natural-language business context descriptions. The key mechanism is a chain-of-thought reasoning protocol: the LLM constructs a structured decision table that maps each contextual item to specific capacity adjustments based on the implied direction and magnitude of changes. The new capacity decision is then validated through a feedback loop with an optimization model, which provides routing-based performance metrics to guide the agent's selection. On a real-world 13-hub freight network in the southeastern US, our framework achieves a 2.8% optimality gap relative to the hidden ground-truth, a significant improvement over the 11.0% gap produced by the traditional optimization model without textual business inputs. This demonstrates that LLMs can serve as a contextual bridge, integrating qualitative business insights into Operations Research workflows.

The deployment of Federated Learning (FL) in multi-center clinical networks faces the challenge of "knowledge dominance," where high-volume hubs naturally overwhelm minority community nodes, implicitly treating the distinct clinical patterns of smaller cohorts as outliers. Existing geometric defenses provide a security baseline but leave this efficiency-fairness dilemma unresolved. To bridge this gap, we propose Fed-Equilibrium, a framework that advances the paradigm from simple defense to topological equilibrium. Unlike traditional aggregators, Fed-Equilibrium implements a sequential architectural synergy. It utilizes a two-stage gradient control cascade: Stage I (geometric quality assurance) enforces directional consistency via a cosine similarity funnel to filter malicious noise, creating a stabilized manifold; Stage II (topological Pareto control) then actively modulates verified contributions by identifying the optimal Pareto knee point. We validated this framework on a bi-national simulation integrating Canadian (CNODES) and U.S. (SyntheticMass) registries. Experimental results demonstrate that the system simultaneously secures the network against adversarial divergence while accommodating underrepresented signals. Notably, the minority U.S. spoke (representing less than 3% of data volume) achieved deep convergence comparable to the data-rich Canadian hub. This confirms that Fed-Equilibrium effectively counters "knowledge dominance," establishing a true "knowledge commons" where global generalizability does not come at the cost of local clinical representation.

Large Language Model (LLM) serving has become a critical cloud workload, and realistic traces are essential for motivating and benchmarking serving systems. However, existing LLM serving workload studies remain limited in scale and scope. They often observe short time periods and provide limited visibility into how users interact with models in production. As a result, they do not fully capture how LLM serving workloads evolve over time or how user-model interactions shape production traffic. In this work, we further the understanding of real-world LLM serving workloads through both a global characterization and a longitudinal study of a one-year production trace from CompanyX. Unlike prior studies, our trace captures full production behavior across many models and users, including both popular and long-tail models. We analyze the workload from aggregate, temporal, model-level, and user-level perspectives, revealing workload evolution and user-model structure that are typically hidden behind aggregate views. To support future research, we publicly release the full one-year trace, enabling downstream studies of production behavior without relying on sampled or synthetically generated workloads. The trace is available at https://github.com/HarvardMadSys/chutes_workload.

This paper presents an information-gain-guided reinforcement-learning sensor-selection framework for single-vessel tracking in heterogeneous maritime sensor networks. The proposed approach is motivated by information-theoretic sensor management: instead of activating all sensors or repeatedly performing computationally expensive online expected-information-gain evaluation, a learned policy selects one tracking-relevant sensor at each decision epoch. A Bayesian sequential Monte Carlo tracker estimates the vessel state from noisy measurements and provides a belief representation for scheduling under nonlinear and non-Gaussian conditions. A Proximal Policy Optimization agent selects one of five sensors in a georeferenced simulation of the CMMI Smart Marina testbed at Ayia Napa Marina, Cyprus. The policy is trained on the testbed's actual five-sensor configuration. The agent observes belief-state, detection-history, coverage, sensor-geometry, and realized-information-gain features. The reward is defined as a realized-information-gain term gated by an observability mask. Final-test simulations compare the proposed framework with random single-sensor selection, always-on sensing using all sensors simultaneously, and the expected-information-gain sensor-selection baseline proposed in our previous work. Results show that the learned policy achieves tracking performance close to always-on sensing while activating only one sensor per decision time step and avoiding the computationally expensive online entropy search required by expected-information-gain selection. Additional zero-shot evaluation without retraining on ten moderately perturbed versions of actual layout configuration showed broadly stable tracking, with any increase in positional tracking error remaining below 1 meter across all perturbations.

We prove that two canonical local synaptic learning rules, the potentiation arm of spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP$^+$) and homeostatic plasticity (instantiated here via flashlight granule-cell-like neurons), together can implement the exact gradient of a SIGReg-like self-supervised learning objective. The equivalence requires no gradient calculations, no global error signals, no weight transport, and no label information: the only inputs are pre- and post-synaptic firing rates, local firing statistics, and the temporal contiguity of natural sensory streams. On a synthetic clustering task designed to probe whether class structure can be recovered from temporal ordering of inputs alone, ordered presentation raised cluster separation (CSR) to 2.49 while random ordering left it near baseline (0.83), a roughly threefold ($\approx 3.5\sigma$) separation attributable solely to input ordering. On temporally ordered MNIST, a two-layer network trained entirely with these rules achieved 87.3% linear-probe accuracy, showing that the mechanism functions end-to-end.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for program-aided reasoning, agentic decision making, and structured task execution, but these settings often incur substantial inference cost. Many such requests share similar computational structures while differing in variables, constraints, or contexts, creating opportunities for program-level caching. Since program caches need to reapply reusable computation logic to new requests, their key steps often involve lightweight and structured operations such as variable extraction, program binding, and generation acceleration, which are well suited for small models. We propose CacheSpec, an inference optimization framework centered on reusable program caches. The framework converts Program-of-Thoughts (PoT)-style programs from one-time reasoning artifacts into reusable cache objects, and reuses the same small model for two roles: semantic variable extraction on the cache-hit path and speculative drafting during target-LLM generation. Experiments on shopping-style request datasets, WebShop, Formula, and CodeTAT-QA show that CacheSpec reduces inference latency and improves effective cache reuse while preserving comparable or better task quality than existing caching and generation baselines, achieving up to about 3.1$\times$ latency speedup; in parallel serving experiments, it improves throughput by about 2.8$\times$ over PoT-style methods. These results suggest that the sweet spot for small models in large-model inference systems lies not in solving complex tasks independently, but in performing lightweight, structured, and verifiable auxiliary operations.

Small language models are attractive backbones for interactive agents, but direct distillation from strong teacher trajectories often turns rich multi-turn behavior into one-shot imitation targets. This is inefficient in long-horizon environments, where early decisions shape later states and rewards. We propose Prefix-GRPO, a reinforcement learning framework that decomposes teacher trajectories into replay-aligned prefix queries and online continuations. Each prefix is replayed in the environment to recover a valid intermediate state, after which the student continues online interaction and receives task reward. Unlike response-only GRPO, Prefix-GRPO also applies clipped policy updates to historical assistant tokens inside the replayed prefix, using a policy-distilled SFT checkpoint to estimate their old log-probabilities. This unifies prefix learning and continuation learning within the same policy-optimization form. Experiments on TextCraft, BabyAI, and ALFWorld show that Prefix-GRPO improves small-model agents over distillation and standard RL baselines, while ablations show that replay alone is insufficient without explicit prefix-token optimization. The implementation and reproduction scripts are available at https://github.com/HappynessI/Prefix_GRPO.

Generalizing across subjects remains challenging in invasive neural recordings because electrode configurations, anatomical structures, and neural signal patterns vary substantially across individuals. To investigate such inter-subject variability, we propose a cross-subject semantic decoding framework that aligns neural responses to speech perception from multiple subjects into a shared latent space and learns a mapping from the aligned neural representations to contextual embeddings. More specifically, using electrocorticography data collected during natural language comprehension, we estimate the shared space using the shared response model and train a decoder to predict contextual semantic embeddings from projected neural responses. For a held-out subject, we estimate a subject-specific projection into the predefined shared space, and directly apply the pretrained decoder without any retraining. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently outperforms baseline methods across evaluation settings and exhibits a reduced performance drop from source subject to held-out subject testing, indicating improved cross-subject generalization. These results suggest that aligning neural activity into a shared latent space, while decoding in a semantic embedding space, provides an effective strategy for improving cross-subject generalization by reducing subject-specific differences in neural responses while effectively capturing shared stimulus-related representations.

Existing approaches for reasoning about action and change provide expressive semantics for modeling dynamic systems, in most cases built on top of logic programming systems. We introduce a modular framework for transition and trajectory verification based on Tiles and implemented in Soda, which is an efficient functional programming language. The framework operationalizes action language semantics through executable verification pipelines that process states, actions, transitions, and rules as compositional functional components. Verification procedures are represented as typed functional pipelines, enabling modular specifications, reusable reasoning components, and transparent execution workflows with guaranteed pipeline termination. The framework includes an executable specification layer that allows users to define domain descriptions in YAML, which are operationalized into the underlying verification model and executable pipeline structure. We provide an open-source implementation and illustrate the framework through examples that involve misinformation and emotional reasoning.

Foundation models have recently emerged as a powerful paradigm for learning transferable representations from large scale biomedical data, yet existing approaches for physiological waveforms primarily optimize reconstruction or forecasting objectives that do not explicitly preserve clinically meaningful waveform morphology. Electrocardiograms (ECGs) and pulse oximetry (SpO2) waveforms encode rich cardiovascular and hemodynamic information through their morphological structure. In this work, we introduce MorphologyFM, a multimodal foundation model pretrained on paired ECG and SpO2 waveforms from the MIMIC critical care database using a morphology aware self supervised learning objective. MorphologyFM combines morphology guided masking, cross modal representation learning, and contrastive latent alignment to learn representations that capture clinically relevant physiological structure without requiring manual annotations. We evaluate MorphologyFM across multiple downstream prediction tasks, including arrhythmia classification, hypoxemia prediction, mortality prediction, and length of stay estimation, demonstrating consistent improvements over representative self supervised learning methods, including Masked Autoencoders (MAE), contrastive learning, Barlow Twins, and Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPA). Furthermore, we show that jointly modeling ECG and SpO2 waveforms produces more transferable representations than single modality pretraining. Our results establish waveform morphology as a powerful inductive bias for self supervised physiological representation learning and introduce MorphologyFM as a general purpose foundation model for continuous physiological monitoring.

This paper introduces SupplyNetPy, an open-source, well-documented Python library for modeling and discrete-event simulation of supply chain networks with arbitrary multi-echelon structures. It supports multiple replenishment policies, perishable inventory, node disruptions, and stochastic demand and lead times. All components are extensible via inheritance. Users describe a supply chain as a graph with node and link attributes, while the library handles simulation, providing logs and extensive node and network level performance reports. This paper presents the motivation, design, key features, and architecture of SupplyNetPy, along with detailed validation results (against analytical benchmarks, a commercial tool, and a published case study). A key motivation behind SupplyNetPy's development is programmatic generation and simulation of complex models, enabling design-space exploration, what-if analysis, training data generation, and supply chain digital twins.

We study how to recover candidate circadian-clock regulators of pituitary hormone genes that are important for women's health but do not show a clear 24-hour rhythm in bulk tissue, aiming to nominate clock-linked regulatory targets that could inform future chronopharmacologic and chronotherapeutic strategies. We propose rwMagLap, which builds a graph on rhythmic backbone genes. For each edge, we combine 24-hour fit quality with peak-time phase, represented as a complex unit-circle value, yielding a Hermitian adjacency matrix and a magnetic Laplacian. We insert arrhythmic hormone genes, treated as anchors, by a reliability-weighted nearest-neighbor projection. The projected anchor-neighbor weights are pooled into a soft teleport distribution, and complex personalized PageRank then ranks rhythmic backbone genes by the magnitude of their PageRank scores. In pituitary data, we find that all 11 women's-health anchors are arrhythmic. Even so, we find that the top-50 list is $7.95\times$ enriched for the 13-gene KEGG circadian set (7 of the 8 set genes in the 454-gene backbone; corrected Benjamini-Hochberg (BH) $p_{\mathrm{BH}}=4\times10^{-6}$) and $4.54\times$ enriched for the 111-gene Reactome set (8 of 16 genes; $p_{\mathrm{BH}}=1.6\times10^{-4}$), while a phase-blind real-valued baseline recovers none. We recover candidates through reliability weighting and phase-aware seeding rather than through magnetic propagation. The magnetic phase adds a different capability: it represents temporal order. On pituitary backbone, the magnetic embedding recovers measured peak-time order of connected pituitary genes with accuracy $0.971$, while $q{=}0$, i.e., no magnetic charge, is at chance.

Many all-atom generative protein models can in principle design large multimeric complexes by jointly modelling all chains, but their quadratic token- and atom-pair representations quickly exceed single-GPU memory as the number of chains and residues modelled grows. We introduce Design-CP, two context-parallel (CP) inference strategies for RFdiffusion 3 (1D row-sharding and 2D grid sharding with ring attention) that distribute the quadratic activations across a multi-GPU mesh while preserving pretrained weights. We characterise their scaling when sampling icosahedral assemblies, showing that the maximum feasible asymmetric subunit (ASU) size grows with the expected square-root trend in GPU count and that 2D sharding achieves better wall-clock scaling. Moreover, we show how strong point-group symmetry constraints make CP usable out of the box for end-to-end, all-atom design of icosahedral nanoparticles, yielding favourable in silico structural and interface metrics. Finally, we demonstrate octahedral nanoparticle design on a small cluster of workstation-grade 16GB GPUs, illustrating how Design-CP can be a practical path towards democratising large-assembly protein design.

The rapid scaling of over-parameterized machine learning architectures, particularly LLMs, raises a profound crisis: do these systems exhibit genuine intelligence, or are they merely sophisticated statistical pattern matchers? Classical flat Euclidean statistics cannot differentiate continuous interpolation from the autonomous discovery of novel causal laws. To resolve this, we introduce Statistically Meaningful Geometry (SMG), a framework modeling over-parameterized learning systems as infinite-dimensional non-parametric Orlicz fiber bundles. We prove that under persistent out-of-distribution (OOD) stimuli governed by unmodeled causal mechanisms, continuous optimization fails. Unmodeled variance is rejected by the visible horizontal base manifold, leaking into the unobservable vertical fiber space and generating an accumulation of Active Acausal Tension. Driven by the statistical manifold's non-linear curvature, this tension inevitably strikes a conjugate focal boundary ($T_{\text{crit}} = \pi^2 / K_{\text{max}}$), triggering localized volumetric collapse and a catastrophic matrix singularity ($[G_f]^{-1} \to \infty$). We demonstrate this geometric breakdown acts as the strict non-equilibrium trigger for a Gauge Symmetry Break (GSB). The system purges hidden tension from unobservable gauge redundancies, spontaneously crystallizing a new, mathematically independent horizontal coordinate axis. This non-parametric phase transition registers as a discrete $+1.0$ integer step-jump in observable Structural G-Entropy. By decoupling parameter charts and subjecting emergent axes to a Minimal Energy Path Criterion and a Causal Invariance Filter, we distinguish genuine discovery from malignant hallucinations. Ultimately, SMG provides a parameter-free, falsifiable dashboard to mathematically certify true intelligence, transforming AI for Science into an engine of autonomous paradigm shifts.

The manifold hypothesis posits that high-dimensional data are concentrated near a low-dimensional embedded manifold. Recent advances in mixture variational autoencoders (VAEs) provide a powerful tool for extracting such underlying structure in a faithful manner. The resulting geometric structure naturally introduces local and global relationships among variables, thereby providing a systematic way of imputing missing data. We propose a model-based imputation method that enables sampling from \( p(\bm{x}_{\mathrm{mis}} \mid \bm{x}_{\mathrm{obs}}) \) via a sampling-importance-resampling (SIR) procedure, which can be further augmented with a joint diffusion model in the latent space. Our method imputes missing data while respecting the underlying geometry, achieves competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art procedures, quantifies uncertainty in the imputations, and is model-based, thereby enabling on-the-fly imputation without rerunning the entire procedure.

Fine-tuning can give a language model a hidden behavior–it may give false answers under a narrow condition, or give harmful advice only when a prompt touches a particular topic. We introduce the Stabilized Adapter for self-Report (SAR), a lightweight LoRA adapter that makes a fine-tuned model describe its own hidden behavior in plain language, using only the model and the dataset it was trained on. Across seven implanted behaviors, SAR detects the hidden behavior in every one–even when the model has generalized into broad misalignment that the training data alone does not predict. Introspection Adapters (IA), the closest existing baseline, detects some behaviors from our suite but misses others entirely–and where it misses, it hallucinates, consistently reporting wrong behaviors. SAR retains positive signal on every setting where IA fails and roughly halves the rate of hallucinations. This gives practitioners a more reliable tool to audit a fine-tuned model and answer “what did it actually learn?” type of questions.

Recent advances in generative modeling have enabled the efficient computation of Schrödinger bridges (SB) in high-dimensional settings by leveraging partially simulation-free training methods inspired by flow matching. However, these have not covered SBs with reflecting dynamics, a useful model choice with built-in guarantees that generated samples stay in the data domain. Existing alternatives for reflected SBs instead rely on more complex training based on forward–backward SDE theory, requiring expensive higher-order derivatives and sampling entire paths during training. In this article, we introduce a partially simulation-free framework that allows reflected SBs to be trained similarly to flow matching, using a new sampling method and regression target. We demonstrate our results by coupling pairs of well-known high-dimensional image datasets. Using reflected dynamics incurs negligible additional wall-clock time during both training and inference while maintaining or slightly improving generative performance.

This paper challenges the assumption that vision-language models (VLMs) require fixed patch-based 2D vision features. Analyzing fine-tuned vision encoders, we find that representations become increasingly abstract and less spatially coherent during VLM training. Notably, models trained with image-text alignment (such as SigLIP2) develop a small number of specialized tokens that effectively summarize global image content. Building on this, we introduce RADIO1D, which compresses images into a compact, variable-length 1D token sequence using multi-teacher knowledge distillation and an autoencoder design. The resulting representations exhibit strong hierarchical summarization, enabling accurate scene understanding - even with a single token - and support improved composition-aware image retrieval. In VLMs, RADIO1D provides flexible accuracy-efficiency tradeoffs through adjustable token counts, delivering competitive performance on diverse multimodal benchmarks with lower computational overhead and better accuracy.

We study the implicit bias of noisy stochastic gradient descent in training wide two-layer ReLU networks for multivariate regression. In a mean-field regime, the training dynamics are approximated by a Wasserstein gradient flow that converges to a unique stationary measure. We characterize the structure of this stationary measure and the predictor it represents. We show that, despite the network being infinitely overparameterized, the learned predictor admits an effectively finite representation: the input weights and biases align along finitely many directions, leading to an effective width collapse. In particular, the solution function is continuous piecewise affine, with affine regions determined by the cells of a finite hyperplane arrangement. The number of learned directions, and hence hyperplanes, is bounded above by $2\mathcal{P}-1$, where $\mathcal{P}$ denotes the number of linear dichotomies realizable on the training inputs. We further establish a non-redundancy property of the learned representation by proving that each learned direction induces a unique ternary activation pattern on the training data. Consequently, the complexity of the learned predictor is governed by the combinatorial geometry of the training data.

Feed-forward 3D reconstruction (F3R) transformers have recently achieved remarkable success. However, scaling them to long image sequences remains challenging, as the quadratic complexity of cross-view global attention quickly becomes the dominant computational bottleneck. While recent efforts attempt to improve efficiency through compressed or sparse attention, they fail to fully exploit the inherent sparsity and dynamic behavior of global attention. In this work, we present a comprehensive analysis of global attention across multiple F3R transformers and reveal that attention patterns are highly heterogeneous, dynamic, and extremely sparse across layers and attention heads. Motivated by these findings, we propose SAF3R, a training-free dynamic sparse attention framework tailored to F3R transformers. SAF3R integrates tailored sparse attention mechanisms with offline head profiling and an efficient online adaptation strategy to match input-dependent attention behaviors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SAF3R achieves high sparsity ratios while preserving camera pose estimation and 3D reconstruction quality, translating into substantial end-to-end speedup on F3R transformers compared to existing methods. Code is available at https://github.com/jndeng/SAF3R

When a person shares something with a language model, the model often answers the surface of the message rather than what the sender was doing by sending it: share a finished project and it critiques the code; share a raw late-night line and it runs a wellness check. We treat the sender's communicative intent, the Gricean what-was-meant, as a first-class interpretability object, and show the failure is one of readout on top of a robust representation. A linear probe decodes the sender's intent, whether they want a thing recognized or evaluated, from a model's default-pass hidden states, cleanly and surface-independently, across six models and four families and in the base checkpoints. The representation generalizes further, to intent that is only pragmatically inferred, and to a second, lexically clean intent (support versus help). The behavioral half of the story, and every causal test, is established on the recognize/evaluate contrast, where what varies is whether the default output acts on the intent. The readout lags the representation in depth within a model (the intent is decodable several layers before it drives the output); across models, which ones act on it by default is model-specific, an observed stratification (three of six show the failure) that we do not read as a scaling law. Where the gap is open, a direction closely tied to the representation, the discriminative direction at a searched-for layer, is a causal handle: steering it recovers the intended behavior, as well as an explicit instruction does and with no prompt at all. This direction is near-orthogonal to the feedback-offering axis, so it routes a represented intent rather than a generic feedback knob, though at the recovery dose the routed intent can override an explicit request. We support each link with controls against obvious deflations and report the nulls as plainly as the confirmations.

We propose NetinfoGC, a framework for graph classification that extends the Network Usable Information (NUI) paradigm to graph-level learning. Unlike conventional graph neural network approaches that rely on end-to-end training of black-box embeddings, NetinfoGC constructs a family of permutation-invariant graph representations derived from propagation-based mechanisms and classical structural descriptors, including graph centrality measures. To evaluate representation quality, we introduce a training-free NUI estimation procedure based on clustering consistency with ground-truth labels, providing a proxy for task-relevant information without supervised learning. We further exploit the same representations using sparse-group LASSO regularization, enabling automatic selection of informative structural descriptors while suppressing redundant ones. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that classical centrality measures are highly competitive with learned propagation-based representations, and in several cases yield superior performance. Moreover, we observe a strong correlation between estimated NUI and downstream classification accuracy, validating NUI as an effective measure of representation utility. Overall, NetinfoGC provides a unified and interpretable framework for evaluating and exploiting graph representations without requiring end-to-end neural training.

Engineering Digital Twins and Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) systems rely on robust perception modules to extract actionable information from heterogeneous and non-stationary time-series data. However, most existing approaches remain task-specific, data-hungry, and difficult to integrate into scalable monitoring and decision-making pipelines. Moreover, purely data-driven models often lack robustness and transferability across varying operating conditions. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a modular foundation model for time-series perception based on a collection of pretrained representation encoders. The framework leverages self-supervised learning on heterogeneous datasets to learn transferable and task-agnostic representations, which can be reused across multiple PHM tasks. A gating mechanism is introduced to dynamically select relevant encoders for a given target dataset, enabling conditional computation and adaptive model composition. The selected representations are projected into a shared latent space and aggregated using a Transformer-based self-attention module that explicitly models cross-encoder interactions. The resulting architecture supports multiple downstream tasks, including imputation, long-term forecasting, and few-shot learning, through lightweight task-specific heads, while keeping pretrained encoders frozen during adaptation. Extensive ablation studies demonstrate the complementary roles of self-supervised pretraining, encoder selection, representation alignment, and adaptive aggregation. Experimental results on the ETT benchmark show competitive performance across tasks, while a real-world industrial case study on virtual sensing for hydro-generator rotor temperature highlights the practical relevance of the approach.

Diffusion architectures now encompass convolutional UNets as well as transformer-based designs such as Diffusion Transformers (DiTs), inspired by Vision Transformers (ViTs), yet the effects of structured geometric perturbations within these architectures remain poorly understood. We study this question through a unified framework that applies reflection-based elements of the dihedral group to intermediate hidden states as controlled internal interventions, contrasting geometrically consistent and inconsistent variants. Using activation-level diagnostics, including Self-Consistency Shift (SCS), Activation Mass Scatter (AMS), and Drift, we analyze feature stability and geometric drift. We find that consistent transformations improve stability, while inconsistent ones induce predictable, architecture-specific failures. In the main Stable Diffusion 2.1 U-Net study, we evaluate seven intervention modes over three seeds and complement the internal diagnostics with image-level FID, KID, CLIP score, and LPIPS diversity. Taken together with supporting ViT and controlled DiT analyses, these results establish geometric consistency as a key principle for stable hidden-state interventions in spatially structured vision and diffusion models.

AI systems increasingly propose executable scientific models whose value depends on both their symbolic structure and their fitted continuous parameters. This makes parameter calibration the bottleneck of program-and-parameter co-search: an outer loop can generate thousands of candidate programs, but each needs an inner gradient-based optimization before it can be assessed. Staging each candidate into its own differentiable graph makes individual models fast but sacrifices the program-as-data property that keeps search fluid; interpreter-based approaches preserve programs as runtime data but pay interpreter overhead that dominates the numerical work. We present the Native Differentiable Virtual Machine (NDVM), a runtime representation that differentiates executable programs without compiling each candidate into a separate graph. NDVM separates symbolic structure from differentiable numeric state: tags, symbols, environments, and control remain native runtime data, while numeric payloads live in dense batched buffers with exact reverse-mode gradients recorded along the realized execution trace, so one evaluator walk is amortized across large populations of parameter vectors. A locked cost model of a real differentiable self-hosted Scheme interpreter motivates the design. We realize NDVM as a native runtime with forward and gradient equivalence to the reference backend, about 60x per-lane batch amortization, near-linear multicore scaling, and two independent front ends. In fixed-budget co-search over LLM-proposed programs, NDVM reaches high-quality solutions about 24x sooner in wall-clock time, suggesting runtime differentiation as a practical systems foundation for scientific discovery workflows.

Knowledge distillation is usually framed as a choice of what to match in the teacher - its logits, hidden features, or sample relations - which presupposes that the teacher's representation has absolute coordinates to match. It does not: a pretrained representation is identifiable only up to an orthogonal-and-isotropic-scaling equivalence class, so a student should learn the teacher's equivalence class, not its features. The organizing fact is that capability is the teacher's output function, a class invariant that factors through the quotient by the class action, so an objective recovers capability exactly when it is defined there. This makes absolute feature matching ill-posed, and admissible supervision a matter of targeting class invariants (Gram structure, CKA, principal subspaces) or aligning coordinates first, unifying feature matching, relational distillation, alignment, and grafting in one geometric account. We validate our framework on Qwen2.5 and Llama-3.1. A restoration study recovers a corrupted model's representation (CKA ~ 0.99) but not its capability, and an ablation isolates the cause: output-function (logit) matching drives capability, while matching hidden representations aligns geometry without restoring function. Recovery is confined to the corpus-covered region, and a graft study confirms that boundary overlap predicts transplant success but is necessary, not sufficient.

As AI models continue to develop powerful capabilities, it becomes critical that we are able to verify that their output is aligned with our intentions. A recent line of work focuses on verification via debate, a model of interactive proofs where two competing powerful provers, or AI models, debate each other to convince a weak verifier, or a human, of the correctness of their claim. However, debate assumes that the two AI models possess equal abilities and that one of them is truthful, which may not be realistic. In this work, we show how to avoid debate: we initiate the study of single-prover interactive proofs for AI safety. Prior results in single-prover interactive proofs do not immediately carry over to the AI safety setting: for example, they do not work when the computation has access to an oracle, such as to human judgment or an external database such as the web. We present doubly-efficient single-prover interactive proofs and arguments for oracle-aided computations (also known as relativizing proofs), in the settings where (1) the computation is robust, in the sense that the output does not change if at most a small fraction of the answers to oracle queries are incorrect, or (2) the oracle is a low-degree polynomial. These results suggest that interactive verification is possible even without debate, under structured or noise-tolerant oracle access.

Continuous video anomaly detection is dominated by reactive Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) that collapses spatiotemporal features into scalar scores. We introduce PULS (Predictive Unified Latent Space), a continuous semantic world-model pipeline comprising two modules: a 490M-parameter KSD Bridge (Kinematic-to-Semantic Distillation) and a 16.8M-parameter Anticipatory State Predictor (ASP). The KSD Bridge maps V-JEPA 2 physical tensors into the 2048-d Qwen3-VL-Embedding-2B text-aligned hypersphere, trained on a subset of UCF-Crime. This translation alone yields a chunk-level AUROC of 0.8994 for UCF-Crime and 0.8162 for out-of-distribution XD-Violence without MIL or hierarchical fusion. We introduce and validate the Latent Clarity Hypothesis: because JEPA's temporal predictor discards aleatoric pixel noise while preserving kinematics, anticipated future representations are more semantically separable than observed presents. The ASP sharpens these anticipated future latents, achieving 44.5% mean 14-way zero-shot VQA accuracy (exceeding observation baseline by +9.6 pp). Applying the ASP to Observation Tensors collapses accuracy to 7.3% (random chance), proving Anticipation and Observation occupy distinct sub-manifolds. A Triple-Track Lead-Time protocol with an L1-surprise gate yields a peak +8.9 pp anticipatory advantage at T-0.5s (p < 0.001, N = 1,000 permutation), separating physical anticipation from static scene priors. Zero-shot transfer to XD-Violence confirms that Newtonian-invariant kinematic representations generalize out-of-distribution.

Weight space learning aims to learn representations of neural network (NN) weights, enabling different downstream tasks. Existing approaches show promising performance, but lacking a way to shape these weight-space representations using information about the datasets the models were trained on, thus limiting downstream applications. We propose WeightCLIP, a method for learning a dataset-aligned latent space for neural networks, where datasets information is induced during training. The NNs are encoded as latent representations using an autoencoder, while dataset samples are encoded using a dataset encoder. The two representations are aligned using a contrastive objective, effectively reshaping the weight-space representations according to the datasets. We demonstrate that such representations can be used for different downstream tasks, including mapping dataset information to a weight-space representation that decode to strong models. In addition, we introduce a latent refinement process for generating models that outperforms standard fine-tuning. Overall, our results demonstrate that explicitly incorporating dataset information improves what can be achieved with weight-space representations across retrieval, generation, and refinement. Code will be available at https://github.com/HSG-AIML/WeightCLIP.