Papers

This paper describes the participation of the BIT.UA team from the University of Aveiro in the 14th edition of the BioASQ Task B challenge on biomedical question answering. Building on our previous submissions, we introduced a substantially refactored and modular codebase, and made significant changes to both the retrieval and generation components of the pipeline. For Phase~A document retrieval, we replaced the PyTerrier PISA index with PostgreSQL-based pg\_textsearch for BM25 retrieval and adopted Qdrant for dense embedding indexing, enabling more efficient storage and GPU-accelerated similarity search. We explored HyDE-based query expansion alongside a Context-1 retrieval strategy. A new reranker training pipeline was developed, incorporating dense retrieval for negative sampling. For Phases A+ and B answer generation, we introduced an LLM-as-a-judge framework and a novel agent quorum mechanism, where multiple agents with diverse prompts debate and iteratively converge on a consensus answer using adaptive document retention. We also participated in the snippets generation subtask for the first time. Our systems achieved competitive results across all batches, with Phase~A systems achieving MAP ranks of 5 (Batch~1,3). We discuss the impact of these architectural changes, lessons learned, and outline directions for future work including SPLADE and ColBERT integration. All code is openly available: https://github.com/bioinformatics-ua/BioASQ14b.

Deep Imbalanced Regression (DIR) is pervasive in continuous prediction tasks across diverse modalities, such as age estimation, depth prediction, and protein mutation activity prediction, where label-scarce tail samples often carry higher practical value. However, most existing methods still learn deterministic point mappings under mean squared error or its simple variants, implicitly assuming a uniform uncertainty level across all samples and thereby overlooking the instance-wise heteroscedasticity that is widespread in long-tailed data. We further point out that even heteroscedastic negative log-likelihood suffers from a gradient coupling issue, which, under DIR scenarios, weakens the learning signal of hard tail samples and leads to optimization inertia as well as tail underfitting. To address this, we propose DUO, an uncertainty-aware long-tailed regression framework. Specifically, the proposed method models the regression target as a conditional Gaussian distribution to explicitly characterize instance-level predictive uncertainty, and transforms uncertainty into a dynamic enhancement signal for tail samples through decoupled mean-variance optimization. Furthermore, we design a distribution-guided contrastive learning mechanism that adaptively constructs positive and negative pairs based on the overlap between sample distributions, thereby alleviating feature looseness and cross-label semantic entanglement. Across visual and biological DIR benchmarks, DUO achieves the best few-shot bMAE and GM on IMDB-WIKI-DIR, AgeDB-DIR, and AAV2-DIR while remaining competitive on few-shot MAE.

In the field of computer vision and graphics, high-quality reconstruction of the human body in static scenes has been achieved in recent years by a single multilayer perceptron (MLP) in a number of approaches. However, MLPs have capacity limitations, requiring substantial training time and computational resources for dynamic scene reconstruction. And the quality of reconstruction is significantly constrained. This paper proposes a method for effectively processing complex spatiotemporal signals in dynamic scene human 3D modeling. The proposed method uses Temporal Residual Neural Radiance Fields to achieve novel view rendering and new pose synthesis of human bodies.To address the problem of representing temporal signals in video sequences, we construct a temporal residual field which is not related to the MLP architecture. Secondly, to improve reconstruction efficiency, we propose an integrated approach that reduces trainable parameters and accelerates rendering, thereby enhancing the network's feature representation capability. Finally, we design a multi-dimensional loss function to accurately measure the loss between predicted and actual spatial pixel values. The experimental results show that our proposed approach improves the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity index (SSIM) accuracy metrics compared to the latest representative methods. It maintains similar accuracy to Anim-NeRF and Neural Body while achieving a nearly 780-fold increase in time efficiency.

Mixed-initiative Visual Analytics (VA) systems empower human users by interleaving human intuition with software agents and their machine intelligence. However, the development and rigorous evaluation of such systems remain constrained by engineering overhead. Developers must, e.g., implement complex, low-level state synchronization to manage asynchronous agent behaviors, while researchers struggle to capture the multimodal provenance required to study and evaluate human-AI collaboration. We present MIVAIS, a dual-layered research platform designed to abstract the structural complexities of mixed-initiative VA. First, it contributes a computational Infrastructure that standardizes human-software agent interaction, state synchronization, and communication between the agents. Second, it provides a declarative Study Environment that automatically logs multimodal human-AI telemetry - including application/system state, screen capture, audio, and additional sensor data - enabling seamless, in-situ user studies and post-session analysis. We technically validate our infrastructure by replicating three state-of-the-art systems (Podium, Voyager 2, and ProactiveVA). Furthermore, we evaluate the framework's expressiveness and efficiency through expert case studies with HCI and VA researchers, demonstrating how MIVAIS effectively lowers the barrier to prototyping and evaluating intelligent, co-adaptive interfaces.

Recent structured RAG methods leverage tree- or graph-based reasoning structures to improve multi-hop QA. However, they face key limitations in evidence-intensive QA, where answering a question requires synthesizing information scattered across dozens or even hundreds of documents: structural rigidity, which limits adaptive reasoning expansion, and topology-ignorant evidence gathering, which prevents effective integration of evidence across different reasoning nodes. To address these issues, we propose APT-RAG, an Adaptive Planning and Topology-aware evidence gathering RAG framework. Adaptive planning dynamically expands the reasoning structure based on question dependencies and evidence requirements, while topology-aware evidence gathering improves evidence coverage through sibling evidence reuse, direct retrieval, and evidence aggregation from child nodes. We further introduce evidence-guided batched answer generation to reduce significant generation overhead in evidence-intensive QA. In the experiments on evidence-intensive QA benchmarks, APT-RAG outperforms existing structured RAG methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/hyudsl/APT-RAG.

Graph pooling aims to compress the graph, including both node embeddings and their underlying topological patterns, into a more compact representation. Previous works focus primarily on the overly fine-grained representation of nodes, progressively coarsening the graph by removing nodes or merging them into clusters, thus neglecting the global-to-local patterns and adaptive granularity of the graph's topological structure. In the real scenario, graphs as a whole can be considered the coarsest level of granularity, encapsulating the global topological structure, with progressively finer-grained local topological structures represented from top to bottom. This process continues until the adaptive granularity for each subdomain is reached. To this end, we propose a novel Topology-Preserving Adaptive Graph Pooling (TPAGP) method that dynamically partitions graphs into granular balls by integrating node features and topological information, enabling the generation of multi-granularity representations that effectively capture both local and global structural patterns. Additionally, we design a multi-granularity graph network model that facilitates feature interaction and optimization across different granularities, significantly enhancing performance in graph classification tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that TPAGP outperforms existing pooling methods across various benchmark datasets, effectively mitigating information loss caused by fixed-granularity strategies.

Personalization models generate new images guided by a few subject references, while style transfer methods aim to produce images aligned with a global style derived from a reference image. Recent approaches perform well when the reference image contains a single object, effectively capturing a global style that encompasses all implicit attributes. However, when applied to complex real-world scenes containing multiple objects with distinct attribute characteristics, these methods, due to their global-level guidance, fail to localize relevant elements in the reference image. The global guidance restricts their ability to generate new images based on the local attributes in the reference image. Moreover, existing methods typically employ a single identifier token to capture all details from the reference, resulting in a lack of individual, attribute-level control. Motivated by these limitations, we propose RefDiT, a novel framework for reference-guided image generation. RefDiT takes as input a reference image, a text prompt, and an optional user-provided guidance context. RefDiT employs local region guidance using the attributes of local elements. It constructs an attribute-aware conditioning signal from the reference image by performing attribute-level decomposition of the identifier token and performs context adjustment in the inference prompt to train low-rank adapter (LoRA) blocks of a diffusion transformer (DiT)-based generative model. RefDiT learns the correspondence between identifier tokens and local regions in the reference image, enabling more effective local guidance.

Spatial audio editing modifies an existing soundfield according to a user's instruction while preserving the rest of the scene. Unlike conventional audio editing, it must reason jointly about audio events, spatial information, dynamic changes, and environmental information in first-order Ambisonic (FOA) waveforms. Existing language-guided editors mainly target conventional audio or rely on sequential operations, and therefore do not directly support one-stage editing for complex 3D spatial instructions. We present SwanWeave, the first one-stage multi-task framework for instruction-guided 3D FOA spatial audio editing. We build paired FOA supervision from open-source speech and sound-effect corpora using controllable room simulation, covering more than ten single-operation and compound tasks across the four editing axes. To handle this heterogeneous edit space, SwanWeave uses Spatial Edit Mixture-of-Experts (SE-MoE) with dual-level routing, selecting task-aware expert combinations for compound instructions and frame-level routed/null experts for local edit decisions. We further introduce Spatial Preference Optimization (SPO), a Direct Preference Optimization (DPO)-based alignment objective with edit-specific negative targets, and adopt staged training to improve natural-language grounding. Experiments show that SwanWeave achieves better editing quality than existing general audio editors and spatial audio baselines across all tasks. Spatial audio editing demos can be found at https://swanaigc.github.io/#swanweave, code can be found at: https://github.com/MM-Speech/SwanWeave.

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) achieve superior problem-solving through extended Chain-of-Thought (CoT) generation, but the resulting key-value (KV) cache grows linearly with sequence length and creates severe memory bottlenecks, often exceeding GPU capacity for long reasoning traces. Existing KV cache compression methods rely on recent queries to estimate future token importance, implicitly assuming these serve as reliable proxies for future attention patterns. We demonstrate that this assumption fails in long-horizon reasoning: certain decoding steps generate Thought Revisiting Tokens (TRT) that re-attend to distant previous context, such as task-solving plans formulated early in the trace. Through systematic analysis, we discover that queries corresponding to the TRT cluster into a small number of similarity groups in the embedding space. Based on this insight, we propose BeaconKV, a training-free KV cache compression method that maintains beacon queries, compact representatives for each global query cluster, to anticipate which KV pairs will be revisited without storing the entire query history. Across four open-source LRMs and diverse reasoning benchmarks, BeaconKV generally outperforms existing compression methods, achieving up to $5.8\times$ memory reduction while nearly preserving full cache accuracy and improving throughput by over $4.3\times$.

Linguistic steganography enables covert communication through natural language. Existing methods heavily rely on token-level operations and struggle to maintain reliability under word- and sentence-level textual perturbations. Moreover, variable-length coding-based schemes are highly susceptible to bit-slippage under minor disturbances, as perturbations cause desynchronization between embedded and extracted bit sequences. To address these issues, we propose a robust coverless steganographic framework that operates in the sentence embedding space rather than the token space. Specifically, secret messages are encoded as hierarchical clustering paths in the sentence embedding space, which enhances decoding stability against word- and sentence-level textual perturbations. To tackle the bit-slippage problem, we introduce a Global Resynchronization Mechanism (GRM) that reframes variable-length bitstreams as discrete symbols anchored to semantic subspaces, decoupling local embedding failures from global message recovery. Experimental results demonstrate that under word- and sentence-level perturbations, our approach achieves substantial improvements in robustness, while maintaining effective embedding capacity and exhibiting strong resistance to statistical analysis.

Cross-view localization (CVL) estimates the pose of a ground image by matching it to a geo-referenced satellite image. To bridge the extreme viewpoint gap, mainstream pipelines rely on Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) transformations or 2D-to-3D lifting. However, deriving 3D structures from a single ground image is fundamentally ill-posed, causing these methods to endure geometric distortions and computational costs during 3D lifting or BEV projection. Furthermore, relying on external depth foundation models to resolve this introduces latency and remains susceptible to noisy predictions. In this work, we present a different approach inspired by a human navigation technique called resection, that can perform direct ground to satellite image matching and localization without relying on external depth foundation models. The key insights of our method are that (i) ground keypoints can be translated into azimuthal rays on the satellite map, and (ii) these rays ideally converge at the user location. Exploiting this geometric constraint through direct line-to-point correspondences, we introduce a minimal Azimuthal Ray Convergence (ARC) solver to identify the intersection, alongside an ARC loss to optimize the matching network. By eliminating dependencies on computationally heavy BEV transformations and external depth foundation models, our approach achieves faster, memory-efficient inference, while its explicit feature matching ensures straightforward compatibility with existing frameworks. Experiments on VIGOR and KITTI demonstrate that ARC-Loc maintains competitive localization accuracy compared to recent approaches, highlighting its practicality.

Reasoning allows artificial intelligence models to revisit and correct their mistakes, enabling recent frontier advances in mathematical theorem solving, software engineering, and autonomous task planning. Reasoning models are widely observed to reason for longer on harder tasks, but the general mechanism responsible for these slowdowns is unknown. Here, we show that reasoning models exhibit transient chaos, a physical consequence of the computational complexity of difficult tasks. As a consequence, we show that diverse leading reasoning models are dynamical systems with fractal basins, with fractality increasing with task difficulty across diverse tasks like Sudoku and maze solving, visual puzzles, and mathematical logic. We show that transient chaos emerges due to reasoning becoming trapped for extended durations near saddle points, which we show correspond to nearly-correct attempted solutions of the underlying problem. Our results show that reasoning slowdowns are an inevitable consequence of problem hardness in modern artificial intelligence models, and establish reasoning traces as a rich new class of dynamical system.

What is the relation between understanding and compression, and why does human understanding take such a heavily compressed form? Across information theory, machine learning, and AI research, a substantial tradition identifies understanding with compression-a thought captured in Gregory Chaitin's dictum that "comprehension is compression." Philosophers, by contrast, have characterized understanding in terms of grasping connections, giving explanations, and handling novelty. This paper bridges the two pictures through three interlocking theses. The first concerns the concept of understanding: it serves as an efficient proxy for a distinctive form of robust competence, enabling us to identify whom to trust and whom to learn from. The second concerns the state of understanding: to understand a domain is to possess a mental model of its relational structure that enables prediction, and what enables prediction enables compression, because what becomes predictable need not be stored separately. Compression is therefore not identical with comprehension, but its representational shadow. The third concerns the characteristically human form of understanding: the fiduciary and transmission functions highlighted by the first thesis impose pressures of demonstrability and transmissibility that drive human understanding toward principled simplicity. The resulting framework explains both the appeal and the limits of compressionist accounts of understanding while shedding light on the inscrutability of AI systems.

E-commerce search often suffers from vocabulary mismatch between user queries and merchant-authored product titles, since short titles cannot fully cover diverse user expressions or visual product attributes. Although Doc2Query alleviates this issue by generating pseudo-queries for document expansion, traditional methods are text-only and not optimized for e-commerce business objectives. As a result, they may produce semantically plausible but commercially ineffective expansions and miss key attributes present in product images. To this end, we propose E-commerce Search-Aligned Multimodal Doc2Query (SAM-D2Q), a business-aligned multimodal document expansion framework for e-commerce search under Boolean retrieval constraints. SAM-D2Q consists of three stages: (1) task-adapted multimodal supervised fine-tuning to enhance vision-language understanding of product titles, images, and user queries; (2) multimodal data augmentation to improve perception of key visual attributes and expansion coverage; and (3) reinforcement-learning-based preference alignment toward search business objectives, encouraging the model to generate pseudo-queries that better match user intent and commercial value. Offline experiments show that SAM-D2Q substantially improves retrieval performance over traditional Doc2Query methods. Deployed in the AliExpress production search system, SAM-D2Q improves online business metrics, increasing GMV by +3.38% and Pay Count by +2.27%.

Recent calls for harder machine translation benchmarks have not clarified what difficulty should mean. We argue that one meaningful and currently unmeasured axis is referential reach, the distance a segment must look back into its document to resolve the entities and pronouns it contains. We formalize this as discourse dependency (DDP), a metric-free, source-side measure computed from named entity re-mentions and pronominal coreference. Validated against gold coreference, DDP errs one-sidedly in 99.2% of segments, so a high-DDP segment is certified to require long-range context. Applying DDP to WMT24++ and WMT25 shows that both are heavily skewed toward low-DDP segments, which domain labels do not distinguish. Building on DDP, we compare five context injection strategies in an English-Korean post-editing setup, varying context size and selection. As DDP grows, no strategy keeps pace with human post-editing. On segments with DDP >= 15 raters prefer human translations, while automatic metrics register no difference. As frontier systems saturate aggregate scores, DDP shifts evaluation from how well models score to how far they can reach.

Recovering camera and hand motion in world coordinates from egocentric video is a key capability for activity understanding, robot learning, and augmented reality. Existing systems typically decompose this problem into separate stages for camera motion, depth estimation, hand reconstruction, and trajectory refinement, resulting in substantial computational overhead and preventing the joint modeling of camera and hand motion. We introduce MINT (Minting IN-the-Wild Trajectories), a foundation model for world-space hand motion reconstruction from ego-centric RGB video. From a single shared spatiotemporal video representation, MINT jointly predicts the camera trajectory, field of view (FoV), camera-frame hand states, and per-frame hand observability, and then produces world-space hand motion via explicit coordinate transformations. Training such a model at scale is challenging, since paired world-space camera and hand annotations are scarce. We therefore develop an open-source labeling EGOPIPELINE that converts large collections of public egocentric videos into structured camera-and-hand trajectory supervision. MINT is first pretrained on these large-scale pseudo-labels and then fine-tuned on a small set of high-quality camera-and-hand annotations. Across public benchmarks MINT approaches state-of-the-art accuracy without seeing either benchmark in training, reaching 0.945 frame accuracy, 13.646 mm PA-MPJPE-p and 55.058 px EPE-p for camera-frame bimanual reconstruction on HOT3D, 4.690 mm RPE-T and 0.284 degrees RPE-R for camera trajectory, and a 3.67x end-to-end speedup over the labeling pipeline that supervises it. We release the model, training and inference code, labeling pipeline, and a curated 1,021-hour egocentric trajectory dataset.

A colorful graph relation enhances the minor relation by merging color sets along contractions and by allowing the removal of colors; it generalizes rooted minors and models problems on graphs with several, possibly overlapping, annotated vertex sets. A graph has the Erdős-Pósa property for minors if and only if it is planar, by a classical theorem of Robertson and Seymour. In this work we determine, for the colorful minor relation, exactly which colorful graphs have the Erdős-Pósa property. Our characterization takes three equivalent forms. The first is structural: the colorful graphs with the property are those that can be drawn with all their colored vertices on one face and whose colors are, in a precise sense, laid out along that face without interleaving. The second is given by an obstruction set: they are those excluding every member of an explicit infinite family $\mathcal{O},$ of which only $\mathbf{O}(|I|^{4})$ members have colors that are a subset of $I,$ for every finite set $I$ of colors. The third is grid-like: they are exactly the colorful minors of unions of particular families of segregated grids, the colorful analogues of the grids that drive the classical proof.

Distributed DNN inference is increasingly deployed in containerized edge-cloud environments, where workloads run on-device or are exposed to remote clients over the network. Accurate online power estimation on resource-constrained ARM nodes without hardware power counters such as RAPL remains a challenge, and CPU-only models fail to capture multi-resource behavior. We present GreenPipe, an automated profiling-training-validation pipeline that builds multi-resource regression models from external power meter measurements and attributes power to containers proportionally. GreenPipe is evaluated on a Raspberry Pi 4 edge node in a K3s edge-cloud testbed, covering DNN inference with three vision models, multiple precisions, thread counts, and both local and serving scenarios. System-level MAPE is 6.3-9.4%, improving over CPU-stress and utilization-only baselines by 26.9% MAPE on average. We jointly report inference latency and energy per inference, exposing performance-energy trade-offs across workload configurations.

For a finite abelian group $G$ and $k \geq 1$, the generalized Davenport constant $D_k(G)$ is the least $\ell$ such that every sequence over $G$ of length at least $\ell$ has $k$ pairwise disjoint nonempty zero-sum subsequences. A theorem of Freeze and Schmid gives $D_k(C_5^3) \geq 5k+10$ for every $k \geq 2$. We prove the matching upper bound: $D_4(C_5^3)=30$, and hence $D_k(C_5^3)=5k+10$ for every $k \geq 2$, so the Freeze–Schmid bound is attained by $C_5^3$ from $k=2$ onward, as it is by $C_2^3$ and unlike $C_3^3$. The proof is finite and computer-assisted. The remaining case reduces to showing that every zero-sum sequence of length $31$ over $C_5^3$ contains a nonempty zero-sum subsequence of length at most five. A saturation argument confines the multiplicities of a hypothetical counterexample to $\{1,2,4\}$, its support pattern to one of $60$ solutions of two linear equations, and its geometry to one of $78$ rank/plane branches normalized to a standard basis; an exhaustive search exhausts every branch with no survivor. The search was carried out by three independently written implementations, and the branch cover was regenerated by separate programs from the lemmas alone; two further machine-verified values, $D_3(C_5^3)=25$ and $s_{\leq 6}(C_5^3)=24$, enter the second statement, and their records accompany the paper.

Multi-expert models have become the dominant paradigm for long-tailed learning, largely attributed to their presumed ability to benefit from expert diversity. However, we revisit this central assumption and reveal that diversity induced by logit adjustment or explicit regularizers does not guarantee better ensemble accuracy. Our work suggests that multi-expert models benefit more from variance reduction than diversity maximization. We introduce VICAL, a VIcinal Consistency ALignment framework that improves long-tailed recognition not by enforcing expert diversity, but by reducing prediction variance. Specifically, our approach comprises two key components: Self-Consistency Learning and Deep Ensemble Distillation. Self-Consistency Learning discourages reliance on unstable high-frequency information, smoothing the local loss landscape and mitigating overfitting, especially for tail classes. Deep Ensemble Distillation promotes cross-expert low-frequency semantic agreement using a low-resolution view, thereby sidestepping optimization conflicts with established knowledge. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-LT, ImageNet-LT, and iNaturalist 2018 show that VICAL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, validating the effectiveness of our consistency-driven design. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/FlamieZhu/Vicinal-Consistency-Alignment}{VICAL}.

Recently, multimodal large-scale reasoning models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in solving complex tasks through long Chains-of-Thought (M-CoT). However, excessively long reasoning trajectories incur substantial computational costs and significant KV-cache pressure. Existing CoT compression and alignment paradigms mainly rely on static rules or single-dimensional preferences, lacking fine-grained cross-modal constraints; as a result, they are prone to inducing visual laziness and hallucinatory reasoning. To address these issues, we propose Modality-Contrastive Preference Optimization (MCPO), a highly sample-efficient two-stage length-compression method that requires fewer than 900 training samples. In the compression stage, we introduce a step-level Normalized Cross-Modal Mutual Information (NCMI) pruning algorithm, which automatically identifies and removes visual-independent reasoning steps by comparing the reasoning discrepancies between with-image and no-image contexts. This significantly reduces redundancy and hallucinatory content in the reasoning chains. In the alignment stage, the model first undergoes supervised fine-tuning to achieve domain-adaptive initialization, followed by optimization using an asymmetric multimodal length-controlled preference loss. This objective adopts a highly nonlinear odds-ratio formulation that provides steep gradients in the with-image context to reinforce length constraints for preferred trajectories, while applying a scaled, flat-gradient linear difference in the no-image context to maintain modality consistency, thereby achieving stable cross-modal preference alignment. Extensive experiments on mainstream base models such as Qwen3-VL-Thinking show that our method can reduce CoT length by up to 69.5% and achieve up to 3.34x end-to-end inference speedup while preserving original accuracy.

Recent benchmarks such as PowerGraph provide large collections of power-grid graphs for cascading-failure classification. Graph neural networks (GNNs) achieve strong predictive performance on this task, but typically require end-to-end training and model-specific tuning, while their latent representations can be difficult to relate to physically meaningful propagation patterns. Random Walk Fingerprints (RWF) offer a scalable and interpretable alternative, but existing variants primarily emphasise topology and node-level information, leaving grid-relevant operational edge states in the walk dynamics. We propose Multi-Channel Physics-Aware Random Walk Fingerprints (MC-PA-RWF) for power systems, a lightweight graph-level representation framework that introduces physical edge states into random-walk propagation. The method constructs multiple edge-weighted channels from domain-relevant attributes, extracts a channel-specific fingerprint from each weighted graph, and concatenates the resulting vectors into a compact representation. Experiments on three PowerGraph benchmark systems show substantial improvements over topology-only RWF and competitive balanced accuracy against strong GNN baselines, including Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN), Graph Attention Networks (GAT), Graph Isomorphism Networks with edge features (GINE), and Transformer-based Graph Convolutional Networks (TransformerConv). At the largest evaluated settings, the node-edge extension MC-PA-RWF+ achieves around 98.04% - 99.32% balanced accuracy and improves failure-class F1 over the strongest GNN baseline by 1.60 – 5.84 percentage points, with statistically significant gains across all three systems.

Instruction-guided 3D editing is essential for interactive content creation, yet it faces a significant bottleneck: the severe scarcity of high-quality paired training data. Existing approaches attempt to bypass this by either relying on slow test-time optimization or training on pseudo-pairs constructed via complex pipelines, which often introduce structural drift and geometric artifacts. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that learns feed-forward 3D editing without paired 3D supervision via Generative Prior Distillation. Instead of relying on ground-truth 3D pairs, our core idea is to distill visual, semantic, and geometric knowledge from powerful foundation models directly into a 3D editing model. Specifically, through a differentiable rendering pipeline, we supervise the 3D representation using two complementary signals: a 2D visual prior from an image editing model at the main editing view, and a semantic prior from a Vision-Language Model at novel views to ensure strict instruction following and source identity preservation. Crucially, to address the geometric collapse and multi-view inconsistencies inherent in 2D projection supervision, we introduce a 3D-aware Distribution Matching regularization. Acting as a geometric prior, this term operates in the 3D latent space, constraining the edited output to remain within the manifold of realistic 3D assets defined by a pretrained image to 3D teacher model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior instruction fidelity and cross-view consistency, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art baselines. Our project is available at: https://github.com/thiamine128/PriorEdit3D.

We revisit the kinetic electrostatic electron nonlinear (KEEN) waves studied by Afeyan et. al in 2014 using a hybrid flow-mapping strategy that combines the characteristic mapping method (CMM) with numerical flow iteration (NuFi). The study extends the classical setup to dynamical ions, comparing their impact on the long-time KEEN dynamics with the static-ion case. To this end, we extend the CMM-NuFI framework with a multi-map strategy, assigning one map to the ion and one to the electron characteristic flow. The resulting problem exhibits a wide separation of spatial and temporal scales, driven by the fine structures generated by the ponderomotive force and by the large ion-to-electron mass ratio, which renders it computationally prohibitive for conventional grid-based methods. Our multi-map CMM-NuFI method efficiently resolves these disparate scales, enabling long-time simulations of KEEN dynamics with fully dynamical ions.

The visual aesthetics of photographs are deeply influenced by lens characteristics such as aperture shape, optical vignetting and optical diffraction, which together define a camera's unique optical style. Existing lens effect rendering methods primarily focus on accurately simulating the blur transition from small to large apertures but overlook the stylistic aspects of lens effects. As a result, they fail to produce diverse bokeh effects under large apertures or capture distinctive photographic phenomena such as starbursts that emerge under small apertures. In this work, we introduce LensStyle, a unified framework for controllable stylized lens effect rendering that explicitly models lens aesthetics through joint continuous-discrete control. Our model incorporates a Dual-Path Controller that disentangles continuous optical parameter modulation (e.g., focus distance and blur strength) from discrete lens-style conditioning (e.g., circular, polygonal, donut, cat-eye, and starburst effects), enabling fine-grained, interpretable, and physically grounded lens manipulation within a single unified framework. To support model training, we curate a comprehensive MultiLens dataset containing multi-lens image pairs synthesized under real optical constraints. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LensStyle achieves superior realism, controllability, and aesthetic quality compared with existing lens effect rendering approaches and diffusion-based image editing models, advancing computational photography toward multiple-lens-style simulation.

The widespread adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) within real-world applications has raised a lot of concerns regarding their trustworthiness, especially in critical applications. The field of eXplainable AI (XAI) has emerged with the objective of providing explanations to the users about the decisions made by AI systems. Several explanations for boolean classifiers have been introduced in the literature, including abductive and contrastive explanations, each giving a different insight on the decision of the classifier. However, computing an explanation for a decision of a boolean classifier is a hard problem in general. One way to deal with this complexity is to rely on a compiled representation of the classifier for which each explanation can be computed efficiently. Unfortunately, we prove in this paper that several classes of abductive explanations, remain hard to compute even for Ordered Binary Decision Diagrams, one of the most tractable subsets of the knowledge compilation map. Included in such classes are shorter abductive explanations or abductive explanations that include the explainee's preferences. To recover the benefits of working with compiled representations, we show that a proper representation of the dual-rail encoding of the classifier can be used to compute efficiently these classes of explanations.

We analyze the numerical approximation of time-harmonic scattering by highly heterogeneous penetrable obstacles. These problems are especially challenging in the high-frequency regime, where the size of the scatterer $L$ is much larger than the wavelength, i.e., the wavenumber $k$ is such that $kL \gg 1$. Here, we further consider the situation where the scatterer contains different materials, with a characteristic size $\varepsilon$ such that $k\varepsilon \ll 1$. We propose a high-order multiscale finite element method, and provide an error analysis that is explicit in both $k$ and $\varepsilon$. Crucially, our error estimates suggest that using a high-order method should reduce the computational cost for large frequencies, which is corroborated by numerical examples.

In this letter, we study finite-horizon linear-quadratic Stackelberg difference games with coupled-affine state-control inequality constraints. Under the stated assumptions, we show that generalized open-loop Stackelberg equilibria admit an exact reformulation as an optimal control problem subject to a discrete-time linear complementarity system. Eliminating the dynamic variables yields a large-scale linear complementarity quadratic program, together with an explicit recovery map for the follower strategy. This reformulation enables the numerical computation of these equilibria. We illustrate the proposed approach using a constrained network-flow game.

We present a unifying framework to construct local Fortin operators for conforming mixed finite element pairs for the Stokes equations. The operators are constructed to satisfy the divergence-preservation property, local stability and approximation properties, and certain trace-preservation properties. For the latter, some of the finite element pairs require an enrichment of the velocity space. We present the construction for the $P_d-P_0$ element, the Bernardi-Raugel element, the conforming Crouzeix-Raviart element, a modified MINI element and generalised Taylor-Hood elements. Furthermore, we discuss implications of the existence of such a Fortin operator beyond inf-sup stability. These include applications to non-Newtonian fluid flow, problems with inhomogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions, as well as uniform inf-sup stability relevant for domain approximation and moving domains.

Blocking is a widely used tool that helps people manage unwanted interactions on social platforms. We study the problem of predicting block events on Bluesky: whether a given user will block a particular account, given recent interaction, network, activity, and content signals. Using more than three million block events and over 260 million user interactions, we examine several formulations of the directed block prediction problem, differing in which possible targets are considered and how negative examples are selected. We observe that only about 5% of user blocks are preceded by a recent direct interaction. Expanding the set of possible targets to include accounts connected through a common neighbor raises the share to about 22%, once high-degree accounts are excluded as intermediaries. Conditional on candidate inclusion, Hits@1 ranges from 61.3% to 72.4%, compared with a random baseline of 16.7%. However, predictive performance and the signals used by the models depend strongly on how candidates and comparison examples are constructed. Although our goal is to empirically analyze user behavior rather than to propose a deployable system, these findings are relevant to user-facing moderation tools that might help users identify accounts they may wish to avoid or block. In such tools, candidate generation would be a substantive design and evaluation choice rather than merely a preprocessing step.