Papers

Reliability under sparse and heterogeneous failures remains a fundamental challenge for medical image segmentation. High average accuracy can conceal a small set of structurally distinct and clinically consequential errors. Existing post-hoc correction methods alleviate this problem, but typically estimate false-positive and false-negative corrections from the same fixed prediction. This ignores the dynamic evolution of error states and limits the correction of complex cases. Inspired by iterative error feedback in structured prediction, we propose Failure-Aware Progressive Repair (FAPR). FAPR represents the current segmentation mask as a dynamic failure state and models each repair operation as a state-transition operator. Each accepted correction forms a new prediction state for subsequent error diagnosis and repair, enabling later operations to adapt to preceding changes. Conditional routing selectively activates necessary state transitions, while failure replay exposes the model to rare error states. By keeping the base segmentor frozen, FAPR preserves its established segmentation capability while improving difficult cases. Across three public ultrasound lesion segmentation benchmarks, FAPR improves mean DSC by 1.52%. On the very-hard subsets of BUSI and TN3K, the average gain reaches 13.77%.

Real-world recommendation scenarios are commonly grounded in shared physical environments during user-recommender interactions. This motivates situated conversational recommendation (SCR), a complex task requiring recommender assistants to jointly reason over dialogue history, co-observed scenes, and in-scene item attributes. However, current approaches struggle with this setting due to two intertwined challenges: accurately understanding situated user preferences throughout the conversation and generating responses that simultaneously satisfy user needs and grounded situations. To this end, we propose Re2A, a framework that formulates SCR as a structured reason-then-align process. We introduce rubric-based preference reasoning, which uses automated rubrics to guide the model toward producing explicit preference states. Based on these states, we propose a preference-conditioned optimization to align response generation with dual objectives: user preference satisfaction and situation consistency. Extensive experiments on two SCR datasets demonstrate that Re2A consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, delivering more precise, context-aware conversational recommendations. Our code is available at https://github.com/DongdingLin/Re2A.

An advanced retrieval-augmented generation pipeline is typically assembled from three or four independently operated systems: an approximate nearest-neighbour index, a full-text search engine, a graph database, and a relational document store. Each contributes its own deployment surface, configuration model, and failure modes, and the integration logic that binds them is written anew in every project. In this work, we present Quanta, an open-source Python library, which unifies dense vector search over 4-bit quantised embeddings, BM25 full-text retrieval, and knowledge-graph traversal behind a single retrieval API. Quanta makes two design commitments, which distinguish it from existing hybrid retrieval stacks. First, signals are combined by weighted reciprocal rank fusion rather than by normalising heterogeneous scores onto a shared range, which we argue is ill-posed because such normalisations are query-dependent. Second, the graph is a candidate expander and not a relevance scorer: traversal widens the candidate pool, and the newly admitted documents are re-scored by the dense indexes under an identifier allowlist, so structural adjacency determines what is considered while content evidence determines how it ranks.

Computing dynamical expectation values typically relies on approximations optimized for the state or observable separately, without accounting for how their errors combine in the final expression. This work explores an alternative approach in which each approximation is guided by both the state and the observable, accounting for how they jointly determine the target expectation value. This idea is implemented through a sweep algorithm with coupled loss functions for forward state and backward observable updates. Exact error relations provide an analytical rationale for how the proposed losses can improve the accuracy. Numerical tests on 30-qubit random circuits show errors two to three orders of magnitude smaller than those of variational state compression at equal bond dimensions. These results motivate further exploration of joint state and observable approximation for dynamical expectation value estimation.

A3P5 NEMESIS is a four-wheel rover intended to combine remote inspection, environmental observation and lightweight manipulation within one serviceable platform. This study develops a photo-constrained geometric reconstruction, a subsystem architecture and a reproducible analytical assessment while distinguishing physical prototype evidence from proposed functions. An exploratory search retrieved 5,000 bibliographic records across ten queries, yielding 4,897 distinct DOI records and 1,212 metadata candidates; selected primary studies and technical documents informed the design. The reconstructed configuration retains the carbon-pattern enclosure, independently steered wheel assemblies, folded manipulator, inclined camera mast and side sampling equipment. A declared 24 kg scenario predicts 3.28 newton-metres of gearbox-output torque per wheel on a 20-degree grade under equal load sharing; a separate static model shows how a 2 kg forward payload reduces the geometric front-tipping bound from 38.1 degrees to 32.7 degrees. These are design screens, not measured operating limits. A public-data calibration benchmark uses 7,344 eligible hourly observations, eight sensor/environmental predictors and chronological training, validation and test partitions. Validation-selected ridge regression achieves a held-out CO root-mean-square error of 0.502 milligrams per cubic metre, with a 95% daily-block bootstrap interval of 0.435-0.569 milligrams per cubic metre. This result concerns an external sensor array and cannot establish NEMESIS accuracy. The combined analysis identifies priority measurements, proposed control interfaces and mission-specific validation requirements. The contribution is a traceable engineering design study and evaluation framework for a prototype whose integrated field performance remains to be established.

Vision-Language-Action models and World-Action Models have advanced language-conditioned robotic manipulation, yet often leave metric relations among actions, objects, and scene geometry implicit. Human manipulation combines semantic understanding of task-relevant objects with spatial feedback that guides hand motion relative to objects and their surroundings. Inspired by this, we introduce a metric interaction framework that models object-level and scene-level interactions in physical Cartesian space at a shared metric scale. At the object level, Interaction-Centric Tokens (ICTs) explicitly represent end-effector pose trajectories relative to manipulated objects and are jointly denoised with actions, providing physically grounded interaction supervision. At the scene level, the Metric Action Interaction Field (MAIF) uses action and ICT queries to attend to metric scene point-cloud features and learns geometry-conditioned action corrections. Through two-stage adaptation, our framework improves diverse VLA and WAM baselines with a small number of additional parameters and training steps. Experiments demonstrate average success-rate gains of 0.80 and 3.59 percentage points on LIBERO and RoboTwin 2.0, respectively, alongside gains of 6.80 percentage points on real-world tasks and 7.45 percentage points on their out-of-distribution variants.

Force-aware Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies improve contact-rich manipulation, but typically combine task-level motion and contact-dependent adjustment in a single action prediction. Demonstrations provide no explicit labels for decomposing that prediction into a reusable reference action and a correction. We present ForceDelta-VLA, a correction-distillation framework that constructs an explicit force-correction target using paired predictions from a frozen teacher's force-conditioned and learned force-agnostic modes. A separate delay-correction target accounts for reference-action mismatch and the change in reference state. Training uses asynchronous schedule replay with the cached task context available during execution. The resulting lightweight policy adjusts the reference actions using recent force history and robot state, responding to contact changes between reference-action updates without regenerating complete action chunks. Across nine single-arm and bimanual contact-rich tasks, ForceDelta-VLA achieves an 82.2% mean success rate, compared with 54.4% for the original ForceVLA baseline. Direct execution of our Stage-1 Temporal Teacher achieves 70.6%. Relative to ForceVLA, the complete system reduces mean peak contact force over successful trials by approximately 26% on both platforms.

Structured pruning is commonly formulated as ranking individual channels, although channel responses can be complementary or cancel through downstream mixing. Motivated by these response interactions, we formulate pruning as the selection of a subset with large joint response capacity, followed by a separate functional realization step. Our unified response geometry maps each candidate set to \(M(D,R)=D^{1/2}RD^{1/2}\) and uses its determinant together with Schur-greedy residuals to select non-redundant coordinates. The same construction yields two information-conditioned instances: an unlabeled instance based on activation covariance, and a task-conditioned instance that combines activation and gradient variance for response scale with gradient correlation for complementarity. To convert the selected subset into an executable network, we fold predictable removed responses into successor weights through ridge compensation and recalibrate batch-normalization statistics, without fine-tuning the network. On ImageNet ResNet-50, the unlabeled instance reaches \(65.4\%\) and \(53.9\%\) Top-1 accuracy at 30% and 40% deletion, versus \(59.8\%\) and \(43.1\%\) for strength-only selection; the task-conditioned instance reaches \(67.7\%\) and \(56.3\%\) under the same protocol. A six-family screen shows architecture-dependent behavior, with positive relative contrasts in several convolutional and expansion-layer settings and clear boundary cases in windowed attention. These results support response geometry as a conditional principle for structured pruning, with its benefit determined jointly by the observed response and the architecture in which that response is realized.

Observational decision-support systems often expose one causal estimate as a recommendation even when plausible estimators disagree. The inherent engine of the proposed system is causal machine learning: a conditional-average-treatment-effect estimand identified by backdoor adjustment, estimated by an EconML DML causal forest and DoWhy linear regression, checked by two-way fixed effects, and converted into candidate levers by constrained optimisation. F-DACE is the decision layer on that engine. It represents precision, propensity overlap, placebo-refutation stability, interval overlap, and directional agreement as fuzzy memberships. Hard vetoes force abstention after estimand mismatch, failed diagnostics, informative sign conflict, or weak evidence. In 180 panel simulations spanning six identification conditions, F-DACE made a decision in 67.2% of runs and limited false recommendations to 17.2%; the corresponding rates were 33.3% for the causal forest and 35.6% for backdoor regression, matching deterministic unanimity rather than dominating it. Nearly all (30 of 31) false recommendations occurred under shared unmeasured confounding, which no fusion rule can diagnose when every component shares the omitted variable. The retail application aggregates a public Walmart panel to 6,435 store-weeks across 45 stores. F-DACE abstains for all five markdown indicators: some estimates are imprecise, one refutation fails, and MarkDown5 has a direct sign conflict. A LangGraph conversational agent exposes impact, what-if, and lever-optimization tools while a deterministic verifier preserves causal-layer status. On 24 live questions it achieved 100.0% tool-routing accuracy, 100.0% status fidelity, and 0.983 mean groundedness. On ten adversarial questions it resisted all injected instructions.

We prove the \(3/4\) conjecture for \(q\)-ary fix-free codes with at most three distinct codeword lengths, for every integer \(q\geq2\). Every prescribed length distribution with Kraft sum at most \(3/4\) is realized by a deterministic construction. We introduce a matrix approach based on an exact identity for the overlap between forbidden prefix extensions and suffix residuals. Natural numerical order fixes the shortest layer, and the remaining selection problem is expressed through row and column counts. A fixed-cardinality interpolation theorem supplies feasible sets of every intermediate cardinality between nested endpoints, provided their differences satisfy one-sided uniqueness and either acyclicity or integral slack. Reverse-order selection handles the uniform cases directly; in the remaining cases, layer completion and aligned groups provide endpoints for interpolation. Together, these methods extend the binary three-length result to arbitrary finite alphabets and give a deterministic procedure for constructing the code.

We develop a factorization framework for magnetic induction tomography in the eddy-current regime. The induced current density is represented by a divergence-free current vector potential, and the external excitation by magnetic dipole densities on an observation sphere. This choice reveals a natural physical factorization of the near-field operator into a data operator, an interior boundary response operator, and an adjoint counterpart. By introducing the Riesz map on the flux space, we recast this factorization in a Hilbert-space setting, which yields a positive-semidefinite operator with a coercive middle factor. Douglas' range theorem then identifies the range of the square root of this dissipative operator with the range of the data operator. For inclusions with a regular boundary, this range identity yields a uniqueness theorem for the support of the conductivity. This characterization leads to a non-iterative spectral indicator based on a regularized Picard quotient computed from the Hermitian imaginary part of the near-field data matrix. The reconstruction stage requires no forward solves. Numerical experiments confirm that the indicator localizes and separates the inclusions accurately, degrades gracefully under increasing noise, and captures non-convex support geometry without any convexity prior.

Low back pain (LBP) is a leading cause of disability worldwide and affects populations ranging from working adults to students with prolonged sitting habits. Conventional lumbar support belts are generally static and non-adaptive, which limits their ability to accommodate dynamic postural changes and individualized comfort requirements. This paper presents SmartFlex, an intelligent wearable lumbar support system that integrates real-time posture recognition with an adaptive air bag array. The system uses a JY901S gyroscope sensor to detect user posture and a lightweight TinyML neural network deployed on an Arduino R4 UNO to process posture data at the edge. Based on the recognized posture state, a closed-loop pneumatic control system dynamically inflates or deflates 14 distributed air bags through four independent micro air pumps to provide targeted biomechanical support. Evaluation results show that SmartFlex achieves over 94% posture recognition accuracy and generates corresponding pressure-control commands with a sensing-to-command delay of less than 120 ms. The pneumatic system operates within a calibrated pressure range of 15-85 kPa. A user study with 20 participants produced a 4.5/5 rating for support effectiveness, suggesting that adaptive wearable support may improve daily sitting comfort and reduce lumbar fatigue.

Real-robot demonstrations are limited, motivating the use of human manipulation data collected without robots, including egocentric videos and handheld Universal Manipulation Interface (UMI) demonstrations. However, differences in viewpoint, embodiment, and available action supervision make it difficult to align representations across these sources according to manipulation motion rather than visual appearance. We introduce UMI-Bridge, which uses UMI as an intermediate domain to align representations according to action equivalence rather than pixel similarity. UMI action supervision anchors the latent representation to end-effector motion and gripper behavior, while synchronized head-wrist observations and paired ego-UMI clips support alignment across views and domains. We train a dual-view latent action model (LAM) on human manipulation data without robot demonstrations, then freeze its wrist teacher and dynamics model to regularize vision-language-action (VLA) post-training on UMI and robot data. The shared wrist interface enables this training-time supervision across both domains while preserving the policy's standard inference architecture. Across three real-robot tasks, UMI-Bridge achieves 91.7% mean success versus 73.3% for Naive Co-training with matched UMI and robot data. On two data-efficiency tasks, it surpasses a full-data Robot-only baseline using 25% of the robot demonstrations together with UMI data. It also achieves 85% and 90% success on two additional tasks learned from UMI demonstrations without task-specific robot demonstrations. These results support action-anchored latent alignment for data-efficient robot learning and UMI-to-robot task transfer.

We employ uncertainty quantification methods to investigate how parameter identifiability changes in the vicinity of a bifurcation point. We perform numerical experiments on the non-spatial Klausmeier vegetation model with random coefficients, which describes biomass-water interactions and exhibits a fold bifurcation. We partition the domain around the bifurcation into regions with distinct convergence behaviors. In each region, we follow a UQ workflow that includes sensitivity analysis, Bayesian inference, and Fisher information evaluation to assess parameter identifiability. The results show that proximity to the bifurcation point is decisive for parameter estimation. Reliable joint inference of both model parameters is not possible when the system exhibits bistability. Furthermore, we can reconstruct the model's bifurcation pattern by Fisher information heatmaps, presenting a practical tool for bifurcation detection. Lastly, we highlight the importance of transient data for successful parameter estimation.

Journal Entry Tests (JETs) are a mandatory part of annual audits to evaluate and assess both highrisk audit areas and potential material misstatements. However, as JETs are designed to detect known patterns based on domain knowledge, the resulting lists are often very large and require substantial additional effort from the auditor. To ensure the economic efficiency of the audit, the number of false positives in JET result lists must be reduced. Especially machine learning (ML) methods represent a promising approach to improve anomaly detection in this field. In this research in progress paper, we investigate different approaches on how to combine JETs with ML-methods in a hybrid manner. We present specialized models to increase the detection performance and validity of anomaly detection results to improve audit efficiency. The experiments are based on synthetic data consisting of different normal and anomalous journal entries.

Wildfire smoke detection from satellite imagery is critical for early warning and rapid response. For onboard satellite deployment, detection systems must operate under strict memory and latency constraints while providing spatially informative outputs for downstream decision-making. Existing tile-level classification methods are computationally efficient but lack spatial localization, whereas pixel-level segmentation approaches provide detailed masks yet are typically too computationally demanding for real-time onboard execution. To address this gap, we propose WISE (Weakly-supervised Inference-efficient Smoke Extraction), a deployment-oriented framework for onboard fire smoke detection and localization. WISE leverages only tile-level annotations through a teacher-student distillation strategy, where an offline teacher provides soft spatial supervision to a lightweight WISE-Student optimized for efficient onboard inference. The student jointly predicts tile-level smoke presence and smoke probability maps within a single forward pass, enabling spatially informative detection under strict computational constraints. WISE was evaluated through in-orbit execution aboard the ISS-mounted IMAGIN-e payload. Three model variants achieve average inference times of 0.10 s, 0.14 s, and 0.26 s per tile, indicating near-real-time per-tile inference within onboard resource limits. Ground-based experiments on Landsat 5 and Landsat 8 imagery further indicate effective detection and spatially informative localization. The best-performing variant achieves a mean tile-level F1 score of 0.964 and a mean pixel-level F1 score of 0.750 across 10 runs, while containing only 0.12M parameters and requiring approximately 3 GFLOPs. Together, these results indicate that WISE is a practical candidate for low-latency wildfire smoke monitoring from space under onboard resource constraints.

From the manifest of Andre Breton, through the transdisciplinary understanding, we arrive at a post-modern manifest. A talk by Laura De Marco (Harvard) will provide scientific background to approach an AMS poetry. The next section will be a qualitative analysis of some new operations on the real numbers. The conclusions will be given in the last section, and an appendix will recall some previous work with some new comments.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had profound impacts on global health, social structures, and economies. It disproportionately affected lower socioeconomic groups and those reliant on interaction-based jobs. Regulatory bodies faced the challenge of designing policies that preserve public health while limiting disruption to economic stability and productivity. Epidemiological models such as SIR and agent-based models (ABMs) have been used to study disease dynamics and the socioeconomic impacts of disease and interventions. Population-level models often simplify individual heterogeneity, while detailed ABMs can become computationally expensive as the numbers of agents and interactions increase. We propose ABM-SIRTEM, a hybrid model that incorporates occupation categories, economic productivity, and welfare at the individual level while dynamically modeling compliance with government interventions. We calibrate the model against historical positive and negative test counts from four U.S. states and examine the resulting compliance dynamics. This framework provides a basis for studying the interaction between disease spread and socioeconomic behavior in pandemic-response planning.

We establish unbounded two-use Holevo additivity gaps in finite dimensions. For each sufficiently large fixed integer $K$ and all sufficiently large $n$, we construct channels $T_n$ with output dimension $K^n$, input dimension $\exp(\Theta_K(n^2))$, and \[ \chi(T_n^{\otimes2})-2\chi(T_n) \ge n\left[\frac{\log_2K}{K}-2\log_2(1+9/K)\right]-O(1/n). \] The gap is linear in output qubits, with an explicit quadratic input-qubit cost and an explicit threshold on $n$. We also obtain channels whose single-use Holevo quantity tends to zero while their two-use Holevo information, and hence classical capacity, diverges. The channels arise from structured tensor products of the complementary mixed-unitary channels used in Collins's free-probabilistic proof. We establish minimum-output-entropy gaps by combining Collins–Youn's product-group Haagerup inequality with Bordenave–Collins's quantitative strong-convergence estimates. We also provide a Lean certificate for our proofs.

Quantum Reinforcement Learning (QRL) represents policies as variational quantum circuits (VQCs), making it attractive for combinatorial optimization such as the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP). On noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) hardware, however, decoherence degrades fidelity and destabilizes learning, and conventional error mitigation is applied statically without regard to the learning context. We introduce Adaptive Policy-Guided Error Mitigation (APGEM), a controller that selects among Zero-Noise Extrapolation (ZNE), Probabilistic Error Cancellation (PEC), Clifford Data Regression (CDR), and Readout Error Mitigation (REM) online, driven by a fidelity, entropy, and cost aware utility function and an epsilon-greedy rule over temporal-difference Q-scores. We evaluate on a realistic urban-logistics testbed, a Delhi-based CVRP over real landmarks with geodesic inter-node costs, exercised across five noise families and four severity levels. On this instance, the QRL agent outperforms constructive heuristics and approaches metaheuristics, while mitigation restores approximation ratios from 0.84-0.87 to 0.92-0.94 under high noise. The controller shifts from a CDR-dominated regime under short training horizons to a balanced deployment across all four techniques under longer horizons, indicating genuine regime-dependent selection. These preliminary results position adaptive, learning-aware mitigation as a practical route to noise-resilient QRL.

We study the language-theoretic structure of fixed points and finite Picard iterates for guarded q-power language operators. For the general operator, we prove that a context-free seeded language deter- mines a unique context-free fixed point and give an effective construction of a context-free grammar generating this fixed point, independently of the initial language.We then consider a marked single-guard special case in which two new symbols separate the recursive contribution from the the contribution of the seed. In this setting, the initial language can be traced and recovered exactly from every finite Picard iterate by means of a regular slice and fixed-word quotients. This yields injectivity of the finite-time maps and an abstract finite-time class-preservation prin- ciple. As a consequence, we obtain a classification of the finite Picard iterates according to the exact position of the initial language in the Chomsky hierarchy. Thus the exact language-theoretic complexity may persist at every finite stage, while all Picard orbits converge to the same context-free fixed point.

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) enables LLMs to invoke external tools, but every tool interaction exposes the model to attacker-controlled text through multiple input channels (tool descriptions, tool results, sampling messages) that share a single context window without privilege separation. In this paper, we present a framework to measure the trust profile of an arbitrary LLM based on a variety of payload framings sent through different channels. Following this assessment, we devise cross-channel fragmentation attacks that distribute seemingly benign payloads across two or three channels; no individual channel carries a complete injection, yet the LLM compiles the fragments into credential exfiltration. We evaluated our attacks across 12 frontier models, three production clients, and six payloads, totalling over 15,000 trials. Our evaluation reveals that cross-channel attacks are an unexplored attack surface: models that fully resist single-channel injection (0% compliance) exfiltrate sensitive data at up to 100% under two-channel fragmentation (e.g., GPT-4o, Llama 70B, Composer 2, Haiku 4.5). We further demonstrate value-aligned exploitation, where a tool's stated purpose requires the data the attacker targets, and a sampling system prompt override that injects persistent instructions via VS Code's MCP implementation. Finally, we evaluated our attacks against seven third-party MCP security tools and three prompt-based defenses. All tools failed to detect fragmented payloads, and prompt defenses proved model-specific rather than universal.

Prompt-conditioned piano MIDI-to-Music rendering aims to faithfully render target notes while reproducing the timbre of a reference recording. Existing approaches primarily follow two paradigms: autoregressive (AR) modeling and flow matching (or diffusion). Discrete-codec AR models provide causal temporal modeling, but quantization can discard acoustic detail. Flow matching better preserves acoustic structure in the cost of full-sequence attention costs and worse semantic structure. Continuous autoregressive models operate directly on continuous representations. It not only combines the condition-following ability of AR models and distribution-modeling capacity of flow matching but also bypasses the quantization bottleneck with lower computational costs. Building on this principle, we present Composer–Performer–Refiner (CPR) framework. Composer autoregressively predicts continuous hidden states, Performer generates 24kHz acoustic latents through local flow matching and Refiner then upsamples the waveform to 48 kHz. We further introduce Bottlenecked Representation Alignment (BREPA) and Modality–Time RoPE (MT-RoPE) to strengthen musical semantic structure in Composer hidden states and temporal alignments across modalities. Codes are available at https://github.com/FEAfeatherTHER/CPR_official

Robotic piano playing has emerged as a standard benchmark for dexterous bimanual manipulation, yet progress on it has been measured almost entirely by note accuracy – which keys are pressed (pitch) and when (onset) – leaving the musical dynamics essential for expressive performance neither rewarded nor evaluated. We propose CANTABILE, a dynamics-aware framework for robotic piano performance that (i) closes the score-to-contact loop by conditioning the policy on upcoming velocity goals and mapping each key's angular velocity at onset back to MIDI velocity, (ii) couples a velocity-fidelity reward with an onset-coverage reward, so that dynamics cannot be improved by omitting difficult notes, and (iii) refines a frozen dynamics-aware base policy with an alpha-scaled, finger-only residual that localizes strike-intensity adaptation away from nominal note execution. On EXPRESSIVE-51, a dynamics-rich 51-song subset of RoboPianist, CANTABILE raises Velocity F1 – jointly measuring pitch, onset, and intensity within a +/-8 MIDI-velocity tolerance – from 0.06 to 0.34 over the RoboPianist baseline, improves all 51 songs, more than halves matched-note velocity error, and reduces log-mel distance to reference audio by 8%. Intensity-randomized training further enables runtime control of performance intensity without retraining.

Over the years, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have demonstrated strong capability in cancer detection and classification using medical images. However, CNN-based models often struggle to capture long-range contextual dependencies. In such scenarios, integrating Compact Convolutional Transformer (CCT) architectures after the CCT layer allows CNN-extracted features to reshape into compact patch tokens using a CCT tokenizer, followed by the addition of positional embeddings to preserve spatial structure. Using 5-fold cross-validation, the model was tested on 3 sets of breast cancer mammography. With only 250,435 parameters, the model achieved 99%-100% accuracy across 3 datasets, indicating robust generalization. Explainable AI (XAI) was integrated into the model to explain the breast cancer classification process to enhance clinical trust. The results indicate that the proposed framework is suitable for computer-aided diagnosis systems, particularly in resource-constrained clinical environments. The novelty of the proposed CNN-integrated CCT overcomes the limitation of CNN's gradient degradation in the last layers by integrating convolutional tokenization with transformer-based learning. Lighter than ViT, which is effective in capturing long-range dependencies, the model has also proven efficient in breast cancer classification by capturing long-range dependencies among breast tissue regions.

UAV-borne imaging has advanced from megapixel to gigapixel sensors, shifting aerial perception from recognizing individual targets to understanding entire dynamic scenes. We characterize this demand as Wide-area Spatio-temporal Scene Understanding (WSTU), which requires wide-area coverage, per-target resolution, and temporal continuity at once, a combination existing datasets lack. To fill this gap, we introduce an ultra-High-resolution (12768x9564) Airborne Remote-sensing Dataset (HARD) annotated at three levels for object detection, multi-object tracking, and scene-level visual question answering. Ultra-high-resolution imagery raises per-frame processing time to seconds. At that scale latency can no longer be ignored in evaluation. Thus, we propose a latency-aware metric for multi-object tracking called streaming-HOTA (s-HOTA). Extensive baseline experiments show how ultra-high-resolution processing reshapes each task. For detection, the end-to-end pipeline affects accuracy and speed as much as the detector itself does. For tracking, high latency charges the association axis far more unevenly than the detection axis, and association is where pipelines diverge. As a result, the pipeline that performs best offline can lose its lead under s-HOTA. For VQA, vision-language models remain weak at cross-frame identity binding and cannot transfer their single-frame gains to it. Together these findings show that the baselines we evaluate fall short of WSTU. HARD provides the data and the systematic baselines to advance it.

Reinforcement learning fine-tuning on top of large, pretrained Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models offers promise for highly reliable robot deployment. However, because of their scale, modern VLA models suffer from high inference latency, so the observation used to select an action is often stale by execution time, creating a distribution shift that can substantially degrade reliability and performance. Prior work has explored asynchronous policy execution to reduce the effect of latency, but these methods are mostly built on imitation learning and offer no mechanism for moving beyond the training distribution toward higher reliability. We close this gap by enabling RL fine-tuning that meets the real-time control requirements of dynamic real-world manipulation. Our approach builds on EXPO-FT, a framework for sample-efficient, reliable VLA fine-tuning with reinforcement learning, and decouples slow, expressive action generation from fast, reactive action edits: a large pretrained VLA proposes action chunks using its strong behavior prior, while a lightweight edit policy performs fast, reactive decision-making by editing actions in response to changes in state, conditioned on the latest observation. We instantiate this as Real-Time EXPO-FT, an RL framework for finetuning real-time VLA policies. On the Kinetix benchmark, Real-Time EXPO-FT enables a delayed policy to achieve the best performance among delayed and non-delayed methods in 10 out of 10 environments. On four dynamic real-world tasks, robot object passing, ball balancing, table soccer kicking, and dynamic object picking, with online robot data capped at 10 minutes, Real-Time EXPO-FT improves average policy performance from 42% to 97%, all without human intervention, demonstrating rapid, sample-efficient adaptation to challenging real-world dynamics. Website: https://pd-perry.github.io/real-time-expo-ft

The MUMU track of the 8th Large-scale Video Object Segmentation (LSVOS) Challenge requires a single unified multimodal model to jointly solve image tagging (Task A), open-vocabulary object detection (Task B), and English captioning (Task C) under strict resource constraints (<=0.5B parameters and <=8 GB peak GPU memory). We present CapMap-MS-TTA, a training-free submission built on Microsoft Florence-2-base (~231M parameters), combining caption keyword mapping with multi-scale flip test-time augmentation. Task C uses the native <DETAILED_CAPTION> pathway with length/token sanitization. Task A maps the same detailed caption into the official quality/scene/event vocabularies via an expanded keyword lexicon with whole-word matching and a lightweight expand-hints stage. Task B runs Florence-2 open detection (<OD>) with multi-scale and horizontal-flip test-time augmentation (TTA), followed by label-aware non-maximum suppression (NMS). Without fine-tuning, the system improves our reproduced Florence-2 baseline from 15.16 to a best public score of 16.4815, and ranks 3rd on the final MUMU leaderboard.

Organizations increasingly use oversight loops where one large language model (LLM) audits another's outputs alongside procedural traces of claimed steps. A common concern about such LLM-as-a-judge pipelines is that detailed traces make overseers gullible. Using signal detection theory, we audit five LLM overseers on 19 compliance tasks (4,551 analyzed judgments), varying only trace detail and evidence labeling. With disconfirming evidence always visible, error detection remains near ceiling. Instead, elaborate traces shift the decision criterion toward rejection, increasing false alarms in susceptible overseers. Without option labels, human-validated reason coding shows about 60% of false alarms cite an inability to tie evidence to its option. Labels eliminate this stated reason, yet residual rejection of correct work persists in those overseers and rises with trace detail. Procedural traces thus act as governance artifacts that shape oversight decisions. AI auditors should be evaluated by their decision criterion and false-alarm behavior, alongside accuracy.

Human values are deep motivational orientations that shape human behaviors. In e-commerce, they reveal the stable drivers behind users' purchase decisions. Compared with short-term interests, consumer values better explain how users evaluate products before purchase. However, consumer values are often implicit in complex and fragmented behavioral trajectories, leaving value measurement from e-commerce behaviors largely underexplored. To this end, we propose the Behavior-to-Value (B2V) task, which aims to identify consumer values from e-commerce behavioral trajectories. Centered on this task, we first construct the E-commerce Consumption Value Taxonomy (ECVT) and introduce B2V-Bench, the first B2V dataset and benchmark, based on anonymized Taobao behavioral logs. B2V-Bench consists of real-world purchase decision episodes, covering 25 types of purchase behaviors, along with corresponding consumer value orientations manifested in each episode. To improve consumer value measurement accuracy, we further present B2V-Verifier, a behavior-to-value measurement model based on Value Verification Tuning, which learns to assess whether behaviors provide sufficient evidence for each value inference. Experiments show that B2V-Verifier outperforms strong LLM baselines, improving multi-label classification by 34%. The dataset and code will be publicly released upon acceptance.