Papers

Purpose: Accurate 6 DoF pose estimation of surgical tools is critical for automa- tion, robotic proprioception, and safe interaction with the tissue operated on. Kinematics-based approaches suffer from accumulated errors due to the cable- driven nature of robotic arms, while vision-based methods often rely on external markers or trackers. Although more recent vision-based advances have been pro- posed, these two-stage pose estimation methods often lack real-time robustness due to accumulated errors and computational overhead. Methods: We propose a novel end-to-end trainable model, PICO. Our model employs a multi-task learning architecture to predict segmentation and depth maps, alongside regression of translation and rotation parameters. We define two proxy tasks that enforce geometric consistency in both 2D and 3D spaces, improving accuracy and robustness. For this, we propose a projection loss, and a point-to-point loss. Results: We evaluate our method on the SurgRIPE dataset, benchmarking its performance against state-of-the-art approaches using standard 6DoF pose esti- mation metrics. Our results demonstrate consistently strong performance across all four subsets, specifically in rotation, ranking second even under occlusion. It also demonstrates comparable translational performance, remaining competitive, especially in occluded cases. Conclusion: PICO demonstrates the effectiveness of multi-task learning and geometry-aware proxy tasks for robust and reliable surgical tool pose estimation, especially in occluded scenarios, highlighting potential for future applications.

Real-world image super-resolution (SR) requires recovering perceptually realistic high-resolution images from complex low-resolution observations while preserving faithful content. Diffusion-based SR benefits from strong generative priors but incurs substantial computational overhead, whereas feed-forward CNN and Transformer SR models are efficient yet often struggle to recover realistic high-frequency details. This motivates a natural question: can diffusion priors be transferred to existing diffusion-free SR networks without introducing diffusion components at inference time? To this end, we propose PhoenixSR, a generative heterogeneous distillation framework that transfers diffusion priors to independently designed feed-forward SR networks through score-based distribution matching. Rather than aligning heterogeneous features or imitating sampled diffusion outputs, PhoenixSR uses the pretrained diffusion model as distribution-level supervision, while paired SR supervision preserves reconstruction fidelity. To make distribution matching effective for fidelity-sensitive SR, we introduce Heterogeneous Distribution Adaptation, which adapts the target score to the SR domain, improves tracking of the evolving student distribution, and anchors training with paired supervision. We further employ Directional Reliability Weighting, a lightweight residual-consistency-based reweighting strategy that reduces unstable distributional guidance. All diffusion-related components are removed after training, leaving the original student architecture and inference cost unchanged. Experiments on three SR benchmarks and six feed-forward backbones, including SwinIR, HAT, Real-ESRGAN, and SeeMoRe, show consistent perceptual improvements with largely preserved reconstruction fidelity.

Self-supervised monocular depth estimation (MDE) enables depth prediction from monocular images without requiring ground-truth supervision, making it attractive for large-scale and real-world applications. Despite steady improvements in accuracy, most existing methods remain difficult to interpret, as depth is inferred from RGB representations that obscure the impact of individual perceptual image components. This lack of transparency limits systematic analysis of failure cases and reduces confidence in safety-critical settings. This paper presents a self-supervised framework for perceptually interpretable monocular depth estimation (PIMDE), designed to associate depth predictions with distinct perceptual components of the input image. Rather than operating directly on RGB inputs, the proposed method decomposes each image into a set of perceptual feature maps (PFMs), each encoding a specific visual cue. Distinct depth estimation branches process these PFMs independently to produce depth estimates (PIDEs), which are subsequently combined through an explicit fusion strategy. This formulation allows us to examine directly the contribution of each perceptual cue to the final depth prediction. Experiments conducted on the KITTI benchmark dataset demonstrate that PIMDE achieves performance comparable to established self-supervised MDE methods while providing additional insight into how different perceptual cues influence depth estimation. These results indicate that perceptual decomposition can support interpretability without sacrificing depth estimation accuracy.

As large language models increasingly mediate information access, factually accurate and independent answers are critical. However, these models can exhibit sycophancy by aligning their responses with users' stated beliefs even when those beliefs are incorrect, potentially presenting misinformation as independently verified and reinforcing users' confidence in false claims. Prior work leaves unresolved whether introducing user beliefs causes correct responses to become incorrect or uncertain, or causes uncertain responses to become belief-aligned incorrect answers. It also remains unclear whether anti-sycophancy interventions preserve or restore factual accuracy or merely shift responses toward uncertainty. We analyze factual sycophancy in Chinese-language information seeking using yes/no fact-checking questions. Our analysis covers 364,941 responses from three frontier Chinese-based LLMs (DeepSeek, Qwen, and Doubao) to 12,165 factual questions derived from real-world Chinese search queries. We evaluate the models with and without reasoning across baseline, belief-conditioned, and anti-sycophancy prompting, tracing matched shifts among correct, incorrect, and uncertain responses. Under incorrect user beliefs, we distinguish belief-aligned errors from losses of factual confidence, in which initially correct answers become uncertain. Patterns vary across models and reasoning settings: reasoning is not a consistent safeguard, and anti-sycophancy instructions can reduce incorrect agreement while increasing uncertainty. In Chinese-language factual question answering, avoiding agreement with false beliefs is therefore not equivalent to preserving factual accuracy, highlighting the value of transition-level evaluation. Such behavior may undermine the reliability of LLM-mediated information access by reinforcing misinformation or weakening users' confidence in factually correct answers.

Text-to-speech needs written text in spoken form, and speech recognition output needs the reverse. For Khmer, neither direction has a maintained open-source tool, and the script makes both harder: words are not separated by spaces, and number words occur inside ordinary words. We present Tha, a Khmer text normalization and inverse text normalization toolkit built from weighted finite-state transducers. It segments and classifies a whole line in one shortest-path search, and a second transducer rejects token boundaries inside a Khmer syllable. On Google's Khmer test suite, Tha agrees with the reference on all 274 cardinals up to one spelling variant, and on 2,906 real TTS prompts, 153 of the 158 sentences it rewrites are correct. Tha is open source under the Apache 2.0 license.

Recent audio deepfake detectors separate bona fide speech from synthetic speech, yet it remains unclear which stage of a text-to-speech system supplies the detection evidence. We address this with controlled resynthesis and detector adaptation in an F5-TTS-BigVGAN pipeline. Since vocoder reconstruction of a real mel can itself be separable from the source utterance, we fix the vocoder and trace the larger change in detector separation to acoustic generation. Adversarially fine-tuning the acoustic model, with no detector in its objective, raises EER against fixed detectors at comparable quality. However, adapting a detector only on the tuned model's VCTK outputs lowers its LibriSpeech EER from 19.42% to 7.46% and improves detection of unseen base F5-TTS outputs. These results suggest that acoustic-model updates can reduce the detection evidence available to fixed detectors, while detector adaptation keeps the updated outputs detectable in this pipeline.

Modern AI image generators are increasingly deployed as opaque APIs, where customers can query the deployed service, but cannot inspect model weights or architecture. This creates a practical challenge: a provider may pass governance certification with one generator and later silently switch to a cheaper and lower-quality one for deployment, compromising public trust or even safety in high-stakes domains. We study integrity auditing at deployment time and propose FARE (Forensic Acceptance Region Estimation). A certified generator is enrolled by training FARE on images sampled from that generator. After deployment, FARE can determine whether a generated image is consistent with the enrolled generator—using only that image. FARE's features are based on image generator-specific artifacts that have been proposed for forensic applications. FARE amplifies these features during training by finding hard samples that tighten the acceptance region and increase sensitivity to subtle changes in the certified generator. Across generator swaps, including substitutions with similar model versions and model variants, FARE is effective at detecting swaps, consistently outperforming existing baselines at strict operating points, and remains effective under the exact-model and decision-only attacks evaluated in this work.

Reliable online video question answering requires tracking state transitions while selectively abstaining when visual evidence is insufficient. Existing benchmarks focus on static recognition or long-range retrieval, rarely evaluating these coupled capabilities under evolving and incomplete evidence. We present STORM-Bench, comprising 5,736 questions across 630 compact, change-dense episodes spanning five egocentric domains (STORM-Real) and two controlled simulation subsets (STORM-Sim) at 1 FPS. Questions are stratified by a proxy for accumulated change intensity (Low, Medium, High) and query-time answerability (Known, Uncertain). To measure reliability, we introduce STORM-BR, a harmonic metric over joint answer-status correctness that exposes abstention failures masked by aggregate accuracy, alongside STORM-BR-ATTR for uncertainty attribution. Across 14 video LLMs, online accuracy peaks at 60.3% (mean 51.7%), whereas STORM-BR ranges from 5.7% to 35.6% (mean 18.8%), driven by pervasive overconfidence on uncertain queries. STORM-Bench shows that task accuracy masks these gaps in epistemic reliability and state tracking. Benchmark and code are available at https://github.com/siruzhong/STORM-Bench.

Text-to-image diffusion models enable data-efficient "mimicry" attacks, wherein adversaries fine-tune the model on a handful of public photos to synthesize convincing forgeries of a target individual. A common countermeasure is to embed imperceptible, low-energy watermarks, yet recent studies show these signatures are brittle: modest post-processing or lightweight adversarial perturbations readily suppress detection, exposing a fundamental tension between imperceptibility and robustness. We introduce FeatMark, a watermarking framework that shifts from pixel-level, energy-starved perturbations to inconspicuous semantic features: small, scene-consistent micro-features that remain natural to humans while providing a stronger, machine-verifiable provenance signal. FeatMark builds domain-specific feature banks that encode each watermark as a compact concept program, pairing open-vocabulary semantic cues with reliable edit regions and instruction templates. It then automatically selects features that are both feasible and executable and injects them through modular, mask-guided concept editing, yielding highly localized, scene-consistent micro-edits that are difficult to perceive. We conduct extensive experiments across VGGFace2, CelebA-HQ, and WikiArt, evaluating against 10 strong watermark removal/purification attacks (including regeneration-style purification) and several bespoke adaptive attacks tailored to FeatMark, to assess perceptual fidelity, watermark detection accuracy, and robustness. We further demonstrate FeatMark's extensibility to video mimicry attacks. The results show FeatMark remains virtually impervious, withstanding all evaluated attacks with negligible bit-accuracy and fidelity degradation.

Vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated excellent performance in visual tasks, but their visual causal reasoning capabilities still lack reliable evaluation. Existing evaluations struggle to distinguish whether a model is performing causal reasoning based on visual evidence or relying on statistical correlations for shortcut learning, thereby potentially overestimating their actual capabilities. This paper proposes CCRV-Bench, a constraint-driven visual causal reasoning benchmark for single-image physical scenarios. We construct an orthogonal framework that evaluates four causal task dimensions: causal relation discovery, state prediction, causal diagnosis, and intervention-outcome prediction. We further introduce entity symbolization, spatial grounding, the factual adversarial constraint, and minimalist output constraints to reduce shortcut cues while preserving the physical commonsense required by the task. Experiments across 14 multimodal models show that constraint sensitivity is task- and model-dependent: intervention-outcome prediction has the largest average effective degradation among the four causal tasks, spatial grounding is the most damaging constraint on average, and the factual adversarial constraint improves DCR for all evaluated models. These results show that unconstrained performance does not determine constrained robustness and that a single aggregate score can obscure distinct failures in causal identification, spatial grounding, and constraint-compliant expression. CCRV-Bench provides a standardized framework for diagnosing image-grounded causal reasoning under controlled constraints. The code is available at https://github.com/0815linyuan/CCRVBench

Uniform discrete diffusion models (UDMs) commonly use explicit time conditioning, but we find that it can often be unnecessary in practice. In this paper, we first show that the population-optimal UDM predictor generally depends on time: time controls how much the model should trust the observed context. We then show that this dependence can become negligible in finite-data settings relevant to language. When a corrupted training sequence remains much closer to its original clean sequence than to competing training sequences, the empirical-optimal predictor is nearly insensitive to time over most of the diffusion trajectory, where the guarantee weakens toward the high-noise endpoint. Empirically, trained language UDMs exhibit limited time sensitivity over most of the trajectory, while time-agnostic predictors remain competitive with, and often outperform, time-conditioned models across datasets and training objectives. These results challenge the use of explicit time conditioning in UDMs: although the population optimum depends on time, explicitly conditioning on it may often be unnecessary in practice.

Speech content representations are central to voice conversion, speech-to-speech translation, and multimodal language models, yet they are rarely compared under a common generative framework that directly measures what each representation contains. We address this by training a generative model conditioned solely on each representation and evaluating the generated audio along the content, speaker identity, and prosody axes. Across SSL features, supervised tokens, posteriorgrams, and neural audio codecs, we find two distinct regimes: representations that nearly reconstruct the original audio, and representations that effectively disentangle speaker identity. These results show that disentanglement depends not on supervision alone, but on the interaction between the training objective and the representation's information capacity: supervised representations only disentangle speaker identity when their capacity is sufficiently constrained.

Lexical semantic change is usually summarized by a scalar distance between independently sampled period distributions. This measures how much a word changed, but does not reveal when it changed, which mechanisms and component movements carried the change, or which usages support the attribution. We introduce Coupled Usage–Sense Processes (CUSP), which derives these answers from a single marginal preserving temporal process. A hierarchical coupling relates contextual distributions through latent usage components, while Markov composition makes adjacent and longer span correspondences compatible. Displacement operators quantify change magnitude and timing, split variation exactly between movement of component centers and reorganization within components, and attribute it to transported component pairs. Word-local modes resolve distinct directions of change and their activity over time, while representative passages from attributed components ground the analysis in text. Under a Gaussian mixture specialization, we prove parametric recovery of the operators and squared distances. Synthetic experiments support the predicted rate. CUSP remains competitive on English and German DWUG and recovers controlled Janus profiles while maintaining compositionally coherent transport. A large corpus of US court opinions demonstrates transition, mode, and passage attribution in unlabeled natural text. CUSP thus makes magnitude, timing, mechanism, movement, modes, and textual evidence compatible views of one lexical history.

Lipschitz continuity is a fundamental principle in the design of certifiably robust deep neural networks (DNNs), wherein adjusting the Lipschitz constant, which quantifies network robustness, is of central theoretical importance. A standard approach to enforcing Lipschitz continuity requires each layer of a DNN to be Lipschitz continuous, thereby guaranteeing overall Lipschitz continuity. However, this layer-wise approach typically imposes overly conservative restrictions by producing a loose estimate of the overall Lipschitz constant, which limits the expressive capacity of the DNN and degrades empirical performance at a prescribed level of robustness. To overcome this loose estimation, the recently proposed LipKernel transfers information across layers to yield a much tighter overall Lipschitz bound than conventional layer-wise construction. In this paper, we extend this concept to cascaded state-space models (SSMs) to construct Lipschitz-continuous DNNs capable of modeling longer-term dependencies. The proposed architecture, named LipSSM, is theoretically justified and empirically evaluated.

Convolutional neural networks (CNN) are widely used to predict the remaining useful life (RUL) of rolling bearings from time-frequency representations (TFRs) of vibration signals. However, during degradation, characteristic structures in TFRs align predominantly along the frequency or time axis, making it challenging for conventional CNN isotropic kernels to capture directional structure. Furthermore, global average pooling (GAP) averages across axes, potentially obscuring the locations and concentrations of salient activations. This study introduces a factorized-axis convolutional gated recurrent unit (GRU) that employs multiscale anisotropic convolution and dual-axis convolution block attention module to enhance directional features and highlight salient time-frequency regions. Dynamic adaptive pooling (DAP) adaptively aggregates the time-frequency-axis information from the extracted feature maps, whereas a GRU captures temporal dynamics in the latent representations and Monte Carlo dropout enables predictive uncertainty estimation. Experiments on two public bearing datasets demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms existing RUL prediction methods across operating conditions. Ablation experiments demonstrate that the factorized axis-wise design achieves lower mean errors than convolutional isotropic kernels. DAP yields clear improvements on one dataset while matching GAP on the other, highlighting the importance of anisotropic feature extraction and adaptive feature aggregation for TFR-based RUL prediction.

Embodied agents offer a promising route to automating scientific experimentation, yet their progress is constrained by the lack of reliable and systematic evaluation environments. Existing simulation-based laboratory benchmarks rely heavily on manual task engineering, making it challenging to systematically compile diverse scientific protocols into executable and verifiable embodied tasks at scale. To address this challenge, we introduce SciHorizon-eLab, an agentic protocol-to-task compiler that formulates scientific embodied task construction as a compilation problem. Given a natural-language protocol of scientific experiments, SciHorizon-eLab progressively compiles laboratory protocols into semantic-preserving embodied tasks through semantic grounding, executable task synthesis, and multi-stage simulation-based certification. The system generates semantically grounded environments, executable manipulation programs, and step-level success specifications, while enabling reproducible generation of expert demonstrations and execution traces. Using this pipeline, we further construct \BenchName, a ready-to-use benchmark comprising 300 certified tasks across diverse laboratory operations. It supports HIL task execution, reproducible expert-demonstration generation, and ordered step-level evaluation. Across representative tasks, the strongest policy attains an average success rate of only 49.7%, with further evaluations revealing pronounced weaknesses in human and embodied agent coordination. We publicly release the code, benchmark data, and evaluation toolkit at https://github.com/SciHorizon-elab/SciHorizon-elab.

Tactile information is essential for contact-rich manipulation tasks in robotics. Vision-based tactile sensors make it particularly easy to design end-to-end manipulation policies with tactile sensing, as they enable the use of existing encoders from computer vision. However, this has led to a huge variety of architectures, training datasets, and evaluation protocols, making it difficult to determine which design choices best encode touch. In this work, we address this gap and present a comprehensive study of tactile encoders and fusion strategies across various contact-rich manipulation tasks in real-world experiments. To enable a controlled comparison, we train and evaluate all models under the same pipeline and experimental setup, comprising more than 2000 real-world rollouts. Our results go beyond other studies that only compare simulation performance, which does not necessarily translate to real-world settings, where large-scale evaluations are needed to obtain reliable statistics. Our key finding is that there is no universally optimal representation or fusion strategy for encoding visual-tactile. Instead, the best encoder backbone and fusion scheme depend strongly on the task.

Large language models are increasingly used as personalized writing assistants, but adapting a model across many authors can compromise individual writing style by pulling author-specific signals toward a shared register. Federated parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) offers a data-local setting for this multi-author adaptation problem: clients keep author text local while sharing compact adapter updates. However, we show that standard aggregation can preserve continuation utility while making different authors' generations less distinguishable in style space, a failure mode we define as author-style homogenization. We evaluate author-style retention with Angular Style Classification Encoder (ASCE)-based diagnostics on our main BlogText benchmark and ASCE-independent external authorship verification. Using this protocol, we find that common federated PEFT baselines can preserve semantic utility while averaging out author-specific signals. To address this homogenization, we instantiate FAVoR (Federated Authorial Voice Retention), an author-style residual mechanism for federated PEFT. FAVoR uses a shared-private adapter design: clients upload shared-adapter updates while retaining author-specific residual corrections locally. Across BlogText and external Mythos-Reddit validation, FAVoR improves author-style retention over standard and personalized federated PEFT baselines. These gains come with small continuation-utility trade-offs and are supported by component ablations, external verification, and cold-start transfer.

Most work on improving large language models treats accuracy as the sole objective. We argue that the harness, the Python code surrounding the model that constructs prompts, routes calls, and parses outputs, is a first-class design surface whose quality is inherently multi-objective: an accurate harness that refuses no unsafe request, or that consumes an order of magnitude more tokens, is not a good harness. We present Meta-Harness, a system that casts harness design as search over three per-domain objectives (accuracy, behavioural safety, and token cost) solved by an agentic proposer (Claude Code) with full filesystem access to prior harness source, execution traces, and scoring artifacts. Our central finding is that a singlephase joint-reward proposer (MoMHa) outperforms every alternative, including a two-phase "accuracy then tokens" ablation, scalar-only feedback, and an accuracy-only baseline. We evaluate on seventeen domains: seven synthetic capability suites, seven real-world public benchmarks (HumanEval, MBPP, Spider, FEVER, MMLU-Pro, LawBench, NuminaMath), and three U-SafeBench-derived user-specific safety domains, using a 12-model fleet spanning four families. On the synthetic track MoMHa achieves a joint mean of 0.482 versus 0.198-0.422 for ten baselines, winning $7 / 10$ per-domain columns; on the real-world track it scores 0.461 versus 0.377 for the strongest baseline (DSPy), winning 5/7 columns, demonstrating that harness strategies transfer to unseen benchmarks without retraining on 8 of 12 target models. MoMHa attains the highest measured behavioral safety composite (U-SafeBench, 0.781) and uses 95 fewer tokens per example than the two-phase alternative. We will release all harness code, evaluation infrastructure, and crossmodel logs.

Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) are trained by optimising a composite objective that combines data fitting with physics-based constraints, typically resulting in a highly imbalanced multi-task optimisation problem. Under these conditions, existing optimisation strategies are affected by conflicting task gradients, leading to slow convergence and unstable training, particularly for stiff and high-frequency partial differential equations. We analyse gradient conflicts throughout training of PINNs with standard optimiser and investigate Multi-Task Deep Learning (MTDL) optimisation methods. In our analysis across four benchmark problems we observed that PINN optimisation exhibits three distinct phases in which angle- and magnitude-based gradient conflicts alternate, with only one present at a time. Building on these observations, we propose PAM-GS, a physics-aware gradient surgery method that adaptively mitigates task interference during training according to the observed conflict types. Experiments on four representative PDE benchmarks demonstrate that PAM-GS combines competitive solution accuracy with consistently strong task-balanced performance, outperforming existing methods on most problems.

Vision-Language-Action models achieve strong performance in robot manipulation, but often require large numbers of parameters. In this work, we propose the Future Representation Action Model (FRAM), a small policy that explicitly links the future end-effector trajectory to the current visual input. FRAM uses the image coordinates of the predicted trajectory as spatial pointers and reads local visual features related to the motion from the current image. This organizes the information for action generation into the reference position (Where), the visual state (What), and the future motion (Future). Trajectory labels are generated automatically from demonstrations and camera geometry, so no manual annotation is needed. With 138.7M parameters, including a frozen language encoder, FRAM reaches an average success rate of 92.2% over the four standard LIBERO suites, close to the 94.2% of $\pi_0$ with 3.3B parameters. Without extra training, it also reaches an average of 67.3% on LIBERO-Plus. Ablations confirm that both the future trajectory and the local visual features improve performance and robustness. On a real dual-arm UR5e, FRAM stacks cups using only wrist cameras, including choosing and switching between the left and right arms. These results show that selecting visual information based on future motion is an effective way to obtain both high performance and robustness in a small robot policy.

Audio-driven streaming avatar generation requires real-time synthesis of speech-synchronized videos with dynamic and diverse motion. Self Forcing uses Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) to distill bidirectional video diffusion models into causal, few-step generators for real-time streaming. However, DMD minimizes a reverse KL divergence, which is inherently mode-seeking: it causes the student to discard high-dynamic modes and collapse onto static outputs, compressing both dynamics and diversity of generated videos. We find that this collapse is region-heterogeneous: person regions involving pose and gesture variations suffer the largest diversity loss, the audio-driven mouth region shows a small loss, and the background remains nearly stable. Based on this observation, we propose Routed Forcing, which routes the distillation objective by semantic region and noise stage to improve dynamics and diversity while preserving visual quality. Specifically, (1) Where to Force: Semantic-Region Routing applies Data-Forcing Distillation (DFD), which supervises the student with real videos, to the person region where diversity collapse is most severe, while retaining DMD for the mouth and background to preserve lip synchronization and scene stability. (2) When to Force: Noise-Stage Routing activates DFD at high noise stages, where real video serves as effective supervision to inject diverse and dynamic motion patterns. At low noise stages, DMD is used to refine details, avoiding blur and artifacts from spatial differences between real video and student-generated video. Experiments show that Routed Forcing improves dynamics by up to 45% and diversity by 7-25% over Self Forcing, while preserving video quality and lip synchronization.

Low-light image enhancement (LLIE) remains challenging for lightweight models because illumination restoration and color fidelity are difficult to optimize simultaneously in the RGB color space. Although recent color-decoupled methods separate luminance and chrominance representations, they primarily optimize luminance as an enhancement target, leaving its potential as an explicit guidance prior largely unexplored during feature reconstruction. To address this limitation, we propose IDM-Net, a lightweight Illumination-Decoupled Modulation Network for low-light image enhancement. IDM-Net adopts a dual-encoder architecture consisting of a structure encoder that extracts multi-scale appearance features from the RGB image and a lightweight illumination encoder that learns illumination priors from the decoupled luminance (Y) channel. To effectively exploit these priors, we introduce an Illumination-Guided Modulation (IGM) module that injects multi-scale illumination cues into the decoder through spatially adaptive affine modulation, enabling accurate brightness restoration while preserving natural color consistency. Furthermore, we design a lightweight Feature Refinement Block (FRB) to progressively suppress degradation artifacts and recover fine-grained image details during reconstruction. Extensive experiments on multiple standard low-light image enhancement benchmarks demonstrate that IDM-Net achieves competitive performance among lightweight LLIE methods while maintaining an excellent balance between restoration quality and computational efficiency.

This paper examines input/output buffered crossbar switches under combined packet and cell data. Our switch architecture uses input buffering with Virtual Output Queues to avoid Head of Line Blocking. The switch fabric is a crossbar with no speedup. We use a modified iSlip [McKeown] crossbar scheduler geared towards packet data, called piSlip. Cell ports are largely unmodified from standard iSlip behavior. For packet output ports, we introduce changes to the grant pointer which minimizes output latency caused by packet reassembly. Our model uses several output states, including packet cut-through. From simulation results, we show that piSlip with virtual cut-through offers latency characteristics significantly better than unmodified iSlip with similar packet port interfaces. Simulation further shows that piSlip and iSlip have similar maximum and average buffering requirements.

Human demonstrations are a cheap source of data for dexterous manipulation, but co-training a robot policy on them requires closing the human–robot gap in every modality the policy consumes. We present VisTacAlign, a framework for co-training 3D-visual-tactile dexterous policies on human and robot demonstrations. Glove-tracked human hand motion is retargeted to a 17-DoF tactile robot hand with a one-time fingertip correction. The human hand is then erased from both stereo views and replaced by a posed robot-hand mesh painted with pixels from robot recordings, and a real-time stereo foundation model is re-run on the composite, so the human point clouds carry the same stereo errors and visibility as the robot ones. Finally, a capacitive tactile glove is aligned to the robot's fingertip sensors in its signal space, giving one interpretable per-finger force representation. A diffusion transformer consumes point-cloud, proprioceptive, and per-finger tactile tokens. On three real-world tasks requiring precise force – Lego assembly, plucking strawberries of varying size, and activating and lifting a power drill – adding aligned human demonstrations to existing robot data improves over robot-only policies, and ablations show that both tactile input and visual alignment are necessary. Project page: https://vis-tac-align.github.io

The empirical success of pretraining large language models has inspired a deeper investigation into the underlying loss landscapes and the optimization dynamics. Recent empirical and theoretical study suggest that the training loss landscape often exhibits a "river-valley" structure, which features a low-loss manifold (river) flanked by sharp orthogonal directions with higher loss (mountains). In the long term, the optimization progress is determined primarily by the progress along the river. Within such a landscape, gradient descent with large learning rates can move faster along the river despite high apparent loss due to vertical oscillations, while a subsequent sharp decay in the learning rate suppresses these oscillations, revealing genuine optimization progress. This explains the recent success of warmup-stable-decay (WSD) learning rate scheduler which, unlike cosine scheduling, keeps stable high learning rate and decays before producing intermediate checkpoints. Building on this foundation, in this work we take a step further and study the role of momentum within such a loss landscape. We establish theoretical analysis that characterizes how momentum accelerates optimization by stabilizing large learning rates that can not be tolerated by vanilla GD without deviating significantly from the river. The enabled large learning rate in-turn gives greater speed along the river and makes faster essential progress in the long run. Another intriguing observation from theory is that for a river-valley landscape with very flat and slow-spinning river, the momentum itself does not contribute directly to acceleration in terms of the speed of tracking the river, while the main acceleration comes from the admissible larger learning rate.

Query containment is a fundamental decision problem in database theory: given two queries, determine whether, over all database instances, every answer produced by the first is also produced by the second. For conjunctive queries under set semantics, the problem is understood through the classical homomorphism-based characterisation. Under bag semantics, the interpretation underlying real relational databases, containment becomes a quantitative comparison of answer multiplicities. Despite decades of work, the decidability of bag containment for conjunctive queries remains open. This frontier is fragile: for slightly more expressive classes, bag containment is undecidable, with negative results relying on reductions from variants of Hilbert's 10th problem. This work develops a unified framework for bag containment of conjunctive queries that subsumes two previously studied decidable cases: projection-free and join-on-free containee queries. The framework yields decidability for a broader class, called join-uniform queries, while leaving the containing query arbitrary. This contrasts with techniques that impose restrictions on the containing query. The approach identifies tractable classes based on the internal unification structure of the query whose multiplicities must be bounded. Specifically, it reduces containment to a controlled Diophantine problem. Starting from the containee query, one builds a canonical model generated by all its possible unifications, over which multiplicities admit a finite arithmetic characterisation. Containment is proved equivalent to the non-existence of solutions of a corresponding Diophantine inequality system. Although these problems are undecidable in general, we show that the systems arising from join-uniform containment form a decidable subclass. Thus, the standard source of undecidability for bag containment becomes the core of the decision procedure.

Robust curve fitting is essential in computer-aided design for transforming noisy, discrete data into accurate geometric models that ensure numerical stability across engineering workflows. B-spline models have become the industry standard for this task, offering a flexible and reliable framework characterized by local control and smooth shape representation. This paper presents flow-TAG–a data-driven framework based on a generative flow model with a 1D U-Net backbone capable of mapping the geometry of a curve to the optimal parametrization for cubic B-splines. By leveraging learned geometric patterns, flow-TAG exhibits superior parameterization performance, robustness to noise in the input data, and strong generalization capability to previously unseen 2D and 3D curves drawn from distinct data distributions. Flow-TAG yields fitted curves that achieve the lower root-mean-square error (55% lower on average) and Hausdorff distance (52% lower on average) relative to state-of-the-art data-driven methods. In addition, we investigate the practical applicability of our generative framework in the compression of ECG signals for wearable devices. The proposed compression setup provides a compression ratio of 13 with the signal distortion of around 5%, which is acceptable in the field.

Large language models operating in multilingual contexts must resolve target response languages early in generation, yet the causal circuitry governing first-token language identity decisions remains poorly mapped. We present an end-to-end structural circuit analysis across six model architectures spanning four families: GPT-2, BLOOM-560M, Pythia-1B/2.8B, and Qwen2.5-1.5B Base/Instruct. Using Edge Attribution Patching (EAP) with FP16 active clamping, followed by exact activation patching verification with a 2,000-candidate-edge search ceiling, we extract directed acyclic graphs driving first-token language broadcasting. Across the standalone models, we observe deep or mid-to-deep broadcasting hubs, though the evidence is strongest for Pythia-2.8B and BLOOM-560M because GPT-2 and Pythia-1B leave few out-of-graph heads for comparison, while both Qwen2.5-1.5B variants invert the necessity check. Scaling from Pythia-1B to 2.8B expands node participation while maintaining a similar verified edge budget, producing sparser topology. The Qwen2.5-1.5B base and instruct circuits retain 84.7% Jaccard similarity, including the Layer 27 hub, indicating that first-token routing is largely established during pretraining and preserved by instruction tuning. Finally, EAP scores correlate weakly with exact patching deltas across most models, showing that linear gradient approximations can diverge from causal interventions in FP16 and motivating exact-patching verification for reliable circuit discovery.

Commit messages are essential for understanding software changes, yet automatic commit message generation typically treats a message as an unstructured text sequence. This limits its ability to support standardized development workflows, where commit messages are often expected to follow the Conventional Commits Specification (CCS) in the form type (scope): subject. In this paper, we study conventional commit message generation under the complete CCS format. We construct a new benchmark of 86,688 high-quality commits collected from open-source GitHub repositories, with each message normalized into type, scope, and subject through structural normalization and semantic quality filtering. Based on this benchmark, we propose a two-dimensional consistency-based reranking framework named CoCoRerank for LLM-based generation. CoCoRerank exploits horizontal consistency among the code change, type, scope, and subject, as well as vertical consensus across multiple generated candidates. Experiments with representative CMG baselines, LLM generators, reranking strategies, and ablation variants show that CoCoRerank improves both structural component prediction and subject generation quality. The results demonstrate that complete CCS supervision and multidimensional consistency modeling provide an effective foundation for accurate and standardized commit message generation. The artifact is publicly released at https://github.com/bluewhalebug/CoCoRerank.