Papers

Generative AI inverts the typical periodization of literary history: the periodizing tag Victorian can now come first and influence what is written. Generative periodization, defined and tested here, describes the use of literary-period designations in generating texts. I test this approach on 100 book-length novels produced under Victorian and Zero-Style conditions using GPT, Qwen, and Llama workflows. The Period Alignment Score (PAS), trained on nineteenth-century literature and benchmarked against human Zero-Style prose, assesses alignment using topic-reduced grammatical features. Victorian prompts produce consistent historical-direction shifts in GPT and Qwen, but not robustly in Llama. Victorian-only recalibration and harder comparison corpora preserve the GPT and Qwen effects. Cross-model transfer also shows a shared direction of grammatical change. The measurable target is the broader nineteenth century rather than the Victorian period per se.

The transition from traditional High Performance Computing (HPC) to the Computing Continuum emphasizes efficient resource management and sustainable practices across Multi-Scale hybrid architectures. This paper introduces a multidimensional metric framework to characterize these systems and guide deployment strategies for modern workloads. The framework combines Architectural Performance metrics (such as Throughput, Latency, Scalability), System Utilization, and key Sustainability and Accuracy indicators (such as Energy Efficiency and Power Consumption). Using a modular hybrid testbed, experiments reveal complex relationships among metrics, especially the trade-offs between accuracy and energy, and the efficiency of hybrid nodes. The guidelines help identify optimal operating points and lay the groundwork for improving orchestrators and schedulers (e.g., Kubernetes) to assign demanding applications, including AI and Quantum Computing, to suitable system modules, ensuring high performance and sustainability.

We investigate the query complexity of fairly allocating $m$ indivisible chores among $n$ agents with additive cost functions. We depart from the standard cardinal model and assume only comparison access: an algorithm may ask an agent which of two bundles is less costly, but never observes numerical costs. Our first results concern proportionality up to one item (PROP1). We design comparison-based algorithms that compute PROP1 allocations using $O(n^3\log m)$ comparison queries. When the chores are arranged in a fixed order and allocations are required to be contiguous, we compute a contiguous PROP1 allocation using $O(n^3 \log^2 m)$ comparison queries. Our main result concerns the maximin share (MMS) guarantee. We show that for any fixed number of agents $n$ and constant $\varepsilon>0$, a $\left(13/11 +\varepsilon\right)$-MMS allocation can be computed with a comparison complexity logarithmic in $m$. Remarkably, comparison access suffices to match the state-of-the-art $13/11$ cardinal-access guarantee of Huang and Segal-Halevi up to an arbitrarily small loss. Furthermore, our result implies that the MMS distortion of comparison access (i.e., the worst-case multiplicative loss in MMS fairness incurred by observing only comparisons rather than numerical costs) is at most $13/11$. Finally, we show that, for three agents, an allocation satisfying envy-freeness up to one item (EF1) can be computed using $O(\log m)$ comparison queries.

Long-form instructional videos require automatic chaptering to support browsing, navigation, and knowledge access. Recent long-context language models can perform chaptering from textualized video inputs, but they remain costly and brittle for content-dense lecture videos with long transcripts, smooth topic transitions, and detailed chapter outputs. A scalable segment-then-caption paradigm reduces this cost, but introduces two new challenges: boundary error propagation and fragmented cross-chapter context. We propose CausalChapter, an intervention-inspired framework for long-video chaptering that estimates prediction-level influence through lightweight masking and removal interventions. For boundary localization, our Local Dependency Shift module detects drops in predictive dependency between adjacent temporal windows; for chapter description generation, our Cross-Segment Support Selection module reranks historical contexts according to their support for the current prediction. Experiments on long-video chaptering benchmarks show that CausalChapter improves boundary localization, chapter description quality, and cross-chapter coherence.

Standard open-set node classification methods rely on the homophily assumption, where connected nodes share labels. However, real-world graphs are often heterophilic, exposing the limitations of current methods and posing new challenges to open-set node classification. On the one hand, cross-class connectivity causes representations from different known or unknown classes to become intertwined after aggregation, undermining their discriminative capacity. On the other hand, structural mixture invalidates threshold-based open-set methods and cross-class feature interpolation, leading to unreliable unknown-class rejection. To address these challenges, we propose HOPE, a Heterophily-aware Open-set node classification method with Pseudo-Extrapolation. To adapt open-set graph neural networks (GNNs) to heterophilic scenarios, HOPE uses a structure-augmented feature initialization layer to capture multi-hop structural patterns. Meanwhile, we design a trustworthy neighborhood aggregation mechanism for standard GNNs to dynamically filter noisy cross-class neighbors. To enhance unknown-class rejection, we introduce a heterophily-guided pseudo-extrapolation strategy. It dynamically maintains known-class centers and extrapolates along cross-class neighborhood displacement directions, synthesizing pseudo-unknown proxies near structurally ambiguous regions. Finally, we optimize the network with joint classification and logit margin regularization, routing synthetic proxies into a dedicated rejection slot without imposing geometric margin constraints in the representation space. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets show that HOPE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models, validating its effectiveness, robustness, and efficiency.

Adversarial robustness in computer vision is still largely achieved through adversarial training or test-time adversarial purification, both of which introduce significant computational overhead by generating adversarial examples during training or performing iterative denoising at test time. We study whether empirical robustness can instead emerge from architectural and representation-learning inductive biases. We introduce Oscillatory Predictive Learning (OPL), a two-stage framework that combines Artificial Kuramoto Oscillatory Neurons (AKOrN) with predictive self-supervised pretraining using X-PhiNet. Because our default checkpoint uses randomized initial oscillator states, we compare it with other randomized adversarial defense methods that provide precise, reproducible, and strong attack protocols. Experiments on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, with additional corruption evaluation on CIFAR-10-C, demonstrate that our method achieves competitive results under the AutoAttack-rand evaluation protocol. On CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, OPL attains 76.63$\pm$0.76$\%$ and 50.44$\%$ robust accuracy, respectively, under $\ell_\infty$, $\epsilon=8/255$, AutoAttack-rand with EoT $K=20$.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures have become a key technique for scaling Large Language Models (LLMs), enabling high model capacity with reduced computational cost. However, this efficiency comes at the expense of increased memory capacity and bandwidth demands. Recent 3D Near-Memory Processing (NMP) architectures, which vertically integrate memory and compute through hybrid bonding, provide high internal bandwidth and energy efficiency, making them attractive for accelerating MoE inference. Nevertheless, the distributed memory and compute organization of NMP systems introduces new challenges for mapping MoE workloads. Existing parallelization strategies, such as Tensor Parallelism (TP) and Expert Parallelism (EP), suffer from either high communication costs or unbalanced computation utilization, leading to inferior efficiency. In addition, the dynamic routing behavior of MoE models further complicates efficient deployment. To address these challenges, we present HDA-MoE, a framework that optimizes MoE execution on NMP architectures through hybrid parallel deployment and runtime scheduling. HDA-MoE integrates an offline hybrid parallel mapping algorithm with an online dynamic and adaptive scheduling mechanism to reduce communication overhead while improving computation utilization. Experimental results show that HDA-MoE achieves a speedup of 1.1x–3.4x over TP, 1.1x–1.5x over EP, 1.1x–3.7x over the Hybrid TP-EP compute-balanced baseline, and 1.1x–1.3x over HD-MoE. Source code is available at https://github.com/PKU-SEC-Lab/HDA-MoE-TCAD26.

Software Fault Injection (SFI) supports testing of cloud systems by introducing software defects and observing their manifestation. Rule-based injectors such as ProFIPy provide controlled and reproducible source-level mutations but require fault patterns to be encoded manually. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a data-driven alternative by generating context-dependent software faults. We compare two code LLMs, Qwen2.5-Coder and DeepSeek-Coder, with ProFIPy in OpenStack's Nova and Cinder services. On shared injection targets, activation and observable-failure rates are comparable, but operational profiles differ: LLM-generated faults produce more Catastrophic outcomes on Nova, whereas ProFIPy produces more Silent and Multi-component effects. The sampled LLM outputs also differ in how they manifest failure, while showing greater agreement in their propagation scope. These findings show that LLM-based fault injection extends the behavioral coverage of fixed fault models without establishing general superiority, and that practical adoption still requires controlled generation, runtime validation, system-level oracles, and reproducible experimental provenance.

In multi-party human-robot interaction, a robot must continuously decide whom to address and what to say to participate effectively in the conversation. In real-world interactions, this is challenging because several behaviours may be plausible at the same time: a robot might continue a topic with one participant, involve another through a question, or address the whole group, with the appropriate choice depending on both whom it addresses and the interaction context. Current approaches remain limited in representing uncertainty when several behaviours are plausible and in structuring decisions into semantically meaningful intermediate steps that make robot decisions easier to interpret. Addressing these, we present HiBRIDGE, a hierarchical Bayesian neural network framework for group-robot dialogue management. Its Bayesian formulation enables uncertainty-aware prediction and robust learning from limited interaction data, while the hierarchical approach formulates behaviour selection as a structured, multi-stage decision process. We further use decision-tree surrogates to investigate whether this structure can support more interpretable explanations. Across three offline group-HRI datasets, our findings show that Bayesian formulations outperform their deterministic counterparts and several state-of-the-art baselines. Next, through an online study (N=20), we show that explanations derived from the hierarchical model are rated as more helpful for understanding robot behaviour and are preferred over those derived from the flat model. Finally, through our in-person study (N=12), we demonstrate the feasibility of HiBRIDGE for autonomous real-time group interaction, with both hierarchical and flat Bayesian variants positively perceived. Overall, HiBRIDGE combines strong predictive performance with a structured decision process that supports more interpretable explanations of robot behaviour.

We study risk-sensitive evolutionary learning dynamics and their long-run equilibrium selection behaviors in coordination games. Agents' risk attitudes enter through the classical entropic risk measure, which evaluates opponent-induced payoff uncertainty and feeds into noisy best responses under two standard revision protocols: best response with mutations and logit choice. We first analyze $2\times 2$ coordination games in both single-population symmetric and two-population asymmetric settings. In the single-population setting, unlike the risk-neutral case where the dynamics are known to favor the risk-dominant equilibrium, we show that risk sensitivity can change the stochastically stable outcome: a greater risk-seeking attitude favors the payoff-dominant equilibrium, while a greater risk-averse attitude favors the maximin equilibrium. Thus, the population's risk attitude may act as a control knob for long-run equilibrium selection. In both population settings, we also identify a robust regime: any super-dominant equilibrium is stochastically stable for all risk attitudes, under both protocols, and across populations. We further extend the single-population analysis to symmetric $k$-action games, which include symmetric $k$-action coordination games as a special case, under risk-sensitive best response with mutations. In this setting, we show that, for sufficiently large populations, sufficiently risk-seeking agents uniquely select the strongly payoff-dominant equilibrium when it exists, whereas sufficiently risk-averse agents uniquely select the strongly maximin equilibrium when it exists. These results show that entropic risk sensitivity may serve as a systematic mechanism for steering equilibrium selection in evolutionary games, beyond the classical risk-neutral benchmark.

Vision-based tactile sensors provide high-resolution contact information for robotic perception and contact-rich manipulation, advancing embodied intelligence through more reliable physical interaction. However, device-specific sensing mechanisms cause tactile foundation models to degrade on unfamiliar hardware. Existing cross-sensor methods often require calibration data, paired observations, or iterative training. To address this problem, we propose Brain-Inspired Data-Efficient Tactile Adaptation (BIDETA), a gradient-free framework that uses a frozen tactile encoder and a few labeled target contacts to jointly predict labels for an unlabeled query batch. Inspired by the brain's rapid sensory adaptation, BIDETA combines rapid support memory, support-conditioned spectral graphs, and reliability-gated recurrence to preserve pretrained representations, repair sensor-dependent feature neighborhoods, and integrate reliable cross-query evidence. Experiments on SITR, TacVerse Shape, and TacQuad show that BIDETA substantially improves adaptation to unknown sensors: with only 10% labeled target data on SITR, it raises mean Sparsh accuracy from 6.86% for the frozen source classifier to 87.09%, exceeding the strongest implemented prior comparison by 47.22 percentage points, and these gains generalize across datasets, pretrained backbones, and tactile tasks. In the SITR timing benchmark with TVL, BIDETA also achieves approximately 20x faster target-sensor adaptation than the best baseline. BIDETA thus offers a gradient-free, data-efficient route to deploying tactile models on new hardware.

Streaming automatic speech recognition (ASR) for real-time voice agents and full-duplex dialogue must provide accurate partial transcripts with low commit latency. Existing systems commonly use a fixed chunk size, look-ahead, or target delay, or encourage emissions near estimated acoustic boundaries. These approaches do not directly optimize how much additional context to use at each output position under a single-pass, hard-commit constraint. We propose X2Streaming-ASR, which decomposes streaming recognition into when to commit and what to commit. Its three-stage training procedure first establishes streaming recognition ability, then warm-starts the commit policy with automatically probed trajectories, and finally refines the policy using character-level, segment-assigned group-relative rewards for recognition accuracy and latency. Across ten Chinese and English test sets, X2Streaming-ASR attains the lowest mean commit latency relative to forced-aligned endpoints, 32–109ms on Chinese characters and 12–85ms on English words, while recognition accuracy remains comparable to existing systems.Code is available at https://github.com/X-Square-Robot/X2Streaming-ASR.

In this paper, we consider the scalar-on-function linear regression model under a realistic sampling scheme in which the functional covariates are observed on a regular grid and contaminated by additive noise. We propose a two-step estimation procedure: first, the underlying curves are reconstructed from the discrete noisy observations using a Fourier-based projection method; second, the slope function is estimated by a penalized least-squares criterion over finite-dimensional trigonometric spaces, with data-driven selection of the model dimension. We establish oracle-type inequalities for the prediction error, both with respect to the reconstructed curves and to the true latent curves. Under regularity assumptions on the slope function and polynomial decay of the eigenvalues of the covariate, we derive convergence rates for the prediction error and show that our estimator attains the minimax rate when the number of grid points is sufficiently large. Finally, the proposed method is illustrated on simulated data and on a real meteorological dataset.

Robotic construction offers the potential to use materials more efficiently and create complex geometries, but current methods rely on rigid, high-precision plans that cannot accommodate the tolerances, inaccuracies, and unexpected changes inherent in physical fabrication. In this work, we introduce a reinforcement learning approach that forgoes predefined plans entirely, instead generating construction sequences adaptively as the structure is built. Our method operates on graph-structured state representations and a mixed (parameterized) action space, requiring both discrete block selection and continuous placement parameters. Because the stability simulation of a structure is computationally heavy, we develop an efficient exploration strategy by incorporating unilateral edges into graph neural networks, extending soft actor-critic (SAC) to this hybrid setting. We evaluate our algorithm, HSAC, against the prior method hybrid-PPO (HPPO), demonstrating significantly higher asymptotic performance and good sample efficiency. We also demonstrate HSAC's robustness to hyperparameter choices and its exploration capability, handling up to 10 discrete actions without performance degradation. Finally, we validate our approach on a physical two-robot setup, successfully building a spanning arch with 3D-printed blocks in closed-loop execution, confirming that policies trained in simulation transfer to real hardware.

We study the localization of $s$ distinct planar point scatterers from sparsely sampled single-incidence, single-frequency acoustic far-field data over a limited receiver aperture. Under the first Born approximation, the coherent data form a two-dimensional off-grid exponential sum and admit a low-rank Hankel representation. A limited aperture generally admits multiple aperture-admissible Hankel pencils with different lifted dimensions, sampling multiplicities, and Vandermonde conditioning. Hence, the choice of the Hankel pencil affects both data completion and subsequent localization. In this work, we introduce a unified framework for structured completion and off-grid localization based on general aperture admissible Hankel pencils. We establish exact recovery in the noiseless case and stable recovery under bounded noise from a number of random aperture samples that is linear in $s$, up to factors determined by the pencil geometry, source conditioning, and logarithmic terms, together with an explicit localization bound in terms of the completion error. The analysis separates the contribution of the pencil geometry from the conditioning induced by the source configuration and provides verifiable sufficient conditions for stable completion and MUSIC resolution. These results yield quantitative criteria for selecting sample efficient Hankel pencils under a prescribed physical aperture. Numerical experiments on connected and disconnected apertures demonstrate the effects of pencil geometry, sampling, and noise.

Universal multimodal embedding (UME) increasingly demands encoder's capacity for handling a broad range of tasks and modalities with increased complexity. Prior scaling methods either increase the representation size, retrieval effort, or scales the encoder into a heavy multimodal LLM. Recent works, such as Think-Then-Embed (TTE), explore scaling via reasoning tokens. However, embedding models are hard to scale up: increasing parameters directly tradeoffs for the large training batch size that contrastive learning needs, and retrieval has to be served under tight latency. Moreover, UME tasks are diverse in complexity, where scaling up embedders can bring significant redundant computation. In this work, we propose MOEMB, which instead scales UME along the expert axis through mixture-of-experts (MoE), growing encoder capacity while preserving single-vector, non-autoregressive encoding. Through a systematic study of the design space and training recipes for MoE-based UME, MoEMB sets a new state of the art on both MMEB-V2 and MRMR among models trained on public MMEB-family data: with only 3B active parameters, MoEMB surpasses TTE-based methods with >4x active parameters, using significantly less computes. To further improve the scalability and efficiency, we conduct the first comprehensive study of adaptive computation for MoE-based embedding, spanning diverse strategies across training-based and inference-only methods. Together, these results support expert scaling as an effective and efficient direction for UME, with adaptive computation further improving efficiency for MLLM-based embedding models towards large-scale retrieval and recommendation systems.

We derive linear programming (LP) bounds on the minimum distance of binary and ternary linear complementary dual (LCD) codes by imposing arithmetic constraints on their weight enumerators. Special values of the weight enumerator give finitely many Gauss phases, each of which yields linear equations in the ordinary weight-distribution variables. The resulting bounds strengthen the real-valued LCD counting LP without introducing additional variables; both the number of branches and the number of added equations per branch are bounded independently of the code length. Exact certificates establish strict improvements for 62 binary parameter pairs of length at most 20 and 39 ternary pairs of length at most 14. For four binary pairs, the bounds also improve the joint-weight-enumerator LP while using fewer variables per branch. These comparisons show that Gauss-phase information provides a compact strengthening of existing LP relaxations for LCD codes.

Semantic segmentation on very-high-resolution images remains challenging due to the high computational cost and the difficulty of capturing fine-grained details. We propose CoordFormer, a novel coordinate-based architecture for semantic segmentation that predicts labels at arbitrary spatial locations through a Coordinate Decoder equipped with a Localized Cross-Attention mechanism. The decoder combines coordinate embeddings with high-resolution local patch features and interacts with global tokens extracted from a downsampled image processed by a ViT foundation encoder, enabling rich semantic context while preserving pixel-level precision. This design enables flexible inference at arbitrary resolutions while keeping memory low on very-high-resolution inputs, and supports an efficient semantic-edge-focused strategy that concentrates computation along boundaries, maintaining fine-grained accuracy while reducing latency and computational cost. CoordFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance on MaSS13K and outperforms comparably sized and higher-parameter methods on DIS5K and KPIs, demonstrating its effectiveness for high-quality, very-high-resolution semantic segmentation.

Onboard object detection in Earth observation is constrained by limited computational resources and the absence of fully corrected imagery. While convolutional detectors are hardware-efficient, they often struggle to extract robust representations from raw and noisy data. Conversely, transformer-based models provide stronger global reasoning capabilities but remain difficult to deploy on FPGA accelerators due to quadratic attention complexity and non-compatible operations. We introduce TriCCOT, a tri-part architecture for robust and deployable onboard object detection. TriCCOT combines a convolutional region proposal network, a conformal prediction stage, and Aper-GATES, our hardware-friendly attention-based classifier. The region proposal network generates candidate bounding boxes, which are subsequently enlarged via conformal prediction, providing a distribution-free probabilistic coverage guarantee. The resulting crops are processed by Aper-GATES, which reformulates self-attention through convolutional projections, global channel statistics, and hardware-friendly gating operations, avoiding standard transformer operations that are poorly suited to CNN-oriented accelerators. Experiments on the DIOR and VDVRaw datasets demonstrate competitive detection performance and improved robustness to spatial blur and signal-dependent noise when compared to FPGA-compatible architectures. Finally, we report full deployment on a Xilinx Versal VCK190 FPGA without modifying the underlying DPU architecture, enabling unified CNN-Transformer inference for spaceborne embedded applications.

Charts are structured visual compositions whose elements have distinct functional roles, semantic correspondences, and visibility relations. This structural view motivates evaluating whether models can understand and manipulate charts at the layer level. Existing chart benchmarks, however, primarily assess the correctness or fidelity of final outputs and do not directly evaluate these layer-wise behaviors. We present LayerWiseBench, a benchmark organized around three core concepts, layer attribution, layer binding, and visibility ordering, that structure its chart-understanding and chart-editing evaluations. Generated from executable chart programs, LayerWiseBench pairs each rendered chart with spatially aligned per-layer RGBA assets and construction-derived labels for functional roles, semantic bindings, and visibility relations. From this layer-wise representation, we derive controlled understanding questions, editing targets, reference images, and evaluation regions. It contains 2,800 source charts across 14 chart paradigms, from which we derive 7,329 layer-wise understanding questions and 53,791 instruction-guided editing variants. Among the evaluated VLMs, Qwen3.5-27B, which achieves the highest QA macro-average, obtains 93.04% accuracy on layer attribution and 97.46% on layer binding, but only 61.46% on visibility ordering. Across the four evaluated image editors, overall mIoU ranges from 1.49% to 4.93%, and visibility-constrained edits have the lowest mIoU for every editor, ranging from 0.37% to 2.00%. Taken together, these results identify tasks involving front-to-back relations between overlapping components as a recurring challenge across understanding and editing, motivating more explicit modeling of component identity and visibility relations.

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has been central to the recent success of Large Reasoning Models. However, while RLVR significantly improves single-sample accuracy, it often fails to expand the model's intrinsic reasoning coverage (pass@k) due to limited exploration during training. To address this, we optimize the structural design of train-time rollouts to enhance pass@k. Our analysis identifies three key design principles: (1) difficulty-adaptive rollout can play an important role in expanding pass@k, beyond serving as an efficiency heuristic; (2) tree-based rollout outperforms parallel sampling in discovering correct answers; and (3) sentence-entropy-guided forking overcomes the localization phenomenon of token-level branching to maximize semantic diversity. Building on these insights, we propose DATPO (Difficulty-Adaptive Sentence-entropy-guided Tree-structured Policy Optimization). DATPO integrates difficulty-adaptive tree search with a sibling-diversity advantage term, explicitly promoting semantic diversity to expand reasoning coverage during training. Experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that DATPO outperforms baselines especially in pass@k, which directly translates to superior test-time scaling performance.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed with hierarchical instructions, yet they remain vulnerable to conflicts in which user directives override system-level constraints. Existing defense mechanisms predominantly focus on static input inspection and therefore fail to detect Response Drift, a phenomenon in which the model's final response violates system-level constraints despite seemingly compliant inputs. To bridge this gap, we introduce ELCD, a response-level latent conflict detector for post-generation, pre-delivery verification. Given the full generated output, ELCD constructs a composite hidden-state representation by concatenating the final-token embedding with the mean-pooled response embedding. It then optimizes a pairwise margin ranking objective to separate compliant and drifting responses in latent space. Extensive experiments across five mainstream LLMs ranging from 1.5B to 14B parameters demonstrate that ELCD significantly outperforms competitive baselines. Notably, it improves the PR-AUC on Llama-2-7B by approximately 30 percentage points and reduces the False Positive Rate at 95% TPR (FPR95) on Mistral-7B to 2.67%. These results suggest that ELCD provides a promising approach for latent instruction-conflict detection in open-weight or self-hosted LLM deployments.

Exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) remains a fundamental challenge. Recent goal-conditioned RL strategies (which select goals to encourage broader state coverage) have shown promising results, but none scores a goal by novelty and reachability jointly: the two signals are traded off by hand, applied in sequence, or one is neglected outright. In this paper, we introduce a reachability-aware goal-selection framework that explicitly integrates these two aspects, and that can be seamlessly incorporated into any off-policy RL algorithm. To this aim, we propose SUccessor-to-Novelty (SUN), an indicator derived from successor value functions to identify goals that are both novel and reachable. We prove that SUN is the value of a count-scaled goal-reaching reward, bounds short-horizon hitting probabilities, and rejects unreachable goals. We further present an adaptive goal-selection strategy that leverages these properties, along with an accurate yet lightweight pseudocount to avoid the overhead of classic methods. We back up all our claims with thorough benchmarks: SUN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in standard and novel environments with unreachable or hard-to-reach states, irreversible transitions, obstacles, mazes, and unbounded spaces. Code at https://github.com/sparisi/rl-anvil

An action chunk can span several stages of a manipulation task, yet a label for its first step describes only the current stage. We introduce Chunk-Aligned Semantic Distillation (CASD), which derives semantic targets for entire action chunks. An offline vision–language model segments demonstrations into described stages. Their occupancy within each action chunk determines a weighted semantic target, including transitions between stages. A CASD generator learns to predict this target from the current observation, robot state, and task instruction. We then freeze the generator and train a policy conditioned on its predictions. The semantic branch runs once per policy query, without online VLM calls or reasoning-trace decoding. Teacher matching on annotated LIBERO training episodes is above chance for both single-stage and boundary-crossing chunks. We evaluate three Fast-WAM variants and a DreamZero integration across four benchmarks, including distribution shifts on LIBERO-Plus. Compared with published references, IDM+CASD reaches 98.9% versus 98.0% average success on LIBERO, while Uncond falls below its reference. Joint+CASD reaches 93.0% versus 90.6% on RoboTwin 2.0, and DreamZero+CASD reaches a 47.9% four-category MolmoSpaces manipulation average versus 40.7%. Performance varies across backbone integrations.

Large Language Models are increasingly deployed as information intermediaries, yet measuring their political behavior remains fragile because questionnaire results mix model dispositions with measurement artifacts and response-elicitation biases. We introduce a robust Political Compass Test evaluation framework that samples 300 configurations across an eight-dimensional perturbation space varying language, framing, instructions, answer format, option order, and persona wording. We evaluate eight Gemma 3 and Qwen 3 models across 14 languages and three quantization levels, obtaining design-averaged political coordinates with quantified uncertainty. Most models lean Libertarian-Left on average, but instruction phrasing, language, and answer format significantly affect recovered coordinates. Cross-lingual differences primarily reflect coordinate drift rather than distinct cultural reasoning. Reverse-engineering the test also exposes axis-weighting imbalances and the collapse of degenerate responses toward the center, so near-origin estimates for the smallest models can reflect weak signal rather than centrism. Free-text reasoning and chat-then-classify elicitation alter recovered coordinates, and larger models show clearer persona separation, with a specific failure of the Authoritarian-Left persona to move most models in the intended social direction. In downstream tasks, persona effects are modest relative to model size and target group for hate-speech detection, while base and centrist prompts give the highest agreement for topic-level sentiment. Political role prompting therefore has measurable but task- and dataset-specific downstream effects.

Egocentric 4D interaction forecasting aims to anticipate both where future interactions will occur in 3D and how the human body will move to realize them, providing an important capability for assistive robotics and human-computer interaction. Existing methods struggle to translate semantic understanding into precise continuous 3D localization and to balance motion diversity with structural consistency in pose forecasting. More fundamentally, these tasks are often modeled separately, leaving the continuous geometric and temporal correspondence between interaction locations and body motion insufficiently captured. To address these challenges, we introduce Coherent4D, a large-scale egocentric dataset for continuous 4D interaction forecasting, comprising approximately 233K samples across three domains. Each sample pairs a sequence of future 3D interaction locations with corresponding full-body poses, aligned in time and expressed in a shared coordinate system. We also provide evaluation metrics in continuous space. Building on this formulation, we propose HIGFlow, a Hand Interaction Guided Residual Flow framework that models forecasting as a cascaded where-to-how process. HIGFlow first forecasts continuous future interaction locations by combining semantic grounding with short-horizon visual dynamics, and then uses the predicted location sequence to condition a deterministic motion anchor and residual Flow Matching for diverse yet structurally consistent full-body motion forecasting. Extensive experiments across all three domains demonstrate consistent improvements over representative baselines on both location and pose forecasting, while ablations validate the contributions of the proposed components. The project page is available at https://corrineqiu.github.io/from-where-to-how/.

Integrating robust safety guardrails into Large Language Models (LLMs) is essential for delivering helpful yet harmless responses. While proprietary systems exhibit reliable safety controls, their underlying methodologies and trade-offs remain largely undisclosed. Achieving comparable security in open-weight models remains a persistent challenge, as post-trained variants frequently suffer from over-refusal and degraded general quality. To overcome these drawbacks, we introduce Suan, a novel preference optimization algorithm. Unlike existing methods, we formulate the optimization objective directly at the gradient level, bypassing the standard variational derivation. As a result, we obtain more interpretable and robust training dynamics. Extensive evaluations across a diverse suite of competitive baselines and benchmarks demonstrate that Suan achieves superior safety alignment while fully preserving response utility.

Extreme learning machines (ELMs) are a class of machine learning algorithms that randomly intialize and subsequently fix the hidden layer parameters, and solve for the last layer coefficients using a least squares method. ELMs have been successfully applied to the solution of various partial differential equations, but the cost of solving large least squares problems limits their use in large scale problems or when high accuracy is desired. To address this limitation, domain decomposition methods (DDMs) have been developed for ELMs, reducing training times via parallel computation. Yet these methods, even those incorporating a coarse space, have struggled with scalability. This paper introduces a novel nonoverlapping DDM for ELMs that treats and enforces continuity and flux conditions equally. Additive Schwarz preconditioners and GenEO (Generalized Eigenvalues problems in the Overlaps) coarse spaces are constructed to accelerate the method. Numerical experiments show the new method outperforms previous DDMs for ELMs in both iteration count and accuracy, especially for the Stokes and wave equations. Furthermore, weak scalability has been observed in up to 4,096 subdomains when employing GenEO coarse spaces.

In proton therapy, plans are typically optimized on a single planning CT, making robustness evaluation essential under anatomical changes. However, current scenarios often rely on simplified perturbations that poorly capture complex, patient-specific variability. We propose SynthRCT, a scalable conditional generative framework for 3D anatomical deformation synthesis. Based on a conditional variational autoencoder, SynthRCT learns a latent deformation space and decodes sampled latent codes into local stationary velocity fields conditioned on an input anatomy. Local fields are assembled into coherent full-volume transformations, enabling memory-scalable generation for large field-of-view CT data. We validate the approach on respiratory 4DCT data with multiple breathing-phase anatomies per subject. SynthRCT enables patient-specific sampling of plausible anatomical transformations beyond predefined robustness scenarios. Code available at: https://github.com/TomasGuija/SynthRCT.

A simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) method using a monocular camera and a low-cost inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensor is an effective way to fulfill a low-cost sensor configuration. Using this sensor configuration, visual-inertial system (VINS) focuses on fusing data from a camera and an IMU sensor to estimate the six degrees-of-freedom (DOF) of the sensor pose. Typically, VINS uses only a single camera as visual input, which lead to problems such as error accumulation due to occlusion, various illumination, and textureless environments. In this paper, we propose a new multiple fisheye camera-based visual-inertial system called MFVINS. We present an IMU-aided FAST feature tracker for multiple cameras that enables efficient extraction and robust matching of local features. Then, the proposed method filters out outliers caused by fisheye distortion on the normalized image plane. Subsequently, a new reprojection error with physical validity constraints is proposed for bundle adjustment using learning-based depth estimation. The proposed method is applied to various scenarios, and its effectiveness is demonstrated by comparing previous VINS methods. In particular, MFVINS is implemented in real-time process to leverage the advantages of using multiple cameras – robustness against occlusion and textureless regions – while reducing the computational burden.