Papers

Language agents must revise planned actions when evidence changes, permission is revoked, or a stop instruction arrives. A useful response is selective: suspend affected actions, preserve unaffected work, and resume only after sufficient repair. We introduce NAQD-Env, a synthetic environment that evaluates these decisions against a deterministic reference policy over explicit evidence, authorization, and constraint dependencies. Eleven dependency families support evaluation on development structures, held-out families, and held-out combinations of structures. Metrics distinguish attempted violations from violations permitted by a simulated execution gate and jointly report policy agreement, task value, withdrawal, resumption, and event reporting. We evaluate three open-weight instruction-tuned models from two families under three prompt conditions on 350 frozen scenarios, yielding 3,150 model-prompt episodes before gate replay. Across the reported conditions, withdrawal recall is at most 0.06, no valid resumption is observed at eligible opportunities, and only one episode matches the complete reference policy. Under the NAQD prompt, Qwen2.5-7B has fewer unsafe-attempt episodes than Qwen2.5-3B and Llama-3.1-8B, but also completes less useful work and preserves unaffected actions less accurately. Exploratory supervised fine-tuning probes increase Qwen2.5-3B decision accuracy from 0.45-0.54 to 0.83-0.92; separate diagnostics reveal inappropriate withdrawal after curriculum omissions and a loss of event reporting. These results motivate evaluating selective withdrawal as a distinct component of agent reliability. The setting measures policy application with trusted structured inputs and does not establish real-world containment or source-verification ability.

Human verification depends on expertise that must be maintained before it is needed. This paper links reliance on automated checks, investment in human checking ability, and performance during an interruption. Better checking lowers the error reduction gained from an extra unit of human skill while the checker works. It can therefore reduce the incentive to preserve independent expertise, even when it lowers the best achievable expected cost of maintenance and errors. In an illustration, a more informative checker raises detection while it works from \hoPowWorkA{} to \hoPowWorkC{} percent, but the organization then keeps no routine practice and detects \hoPowOnsetC{} percent of errors when the checker first fails, against \hoPowOnsetA{} percent with a less informative checker. A detection requirement therefore concerns both current capability and its survival until new training becomes effective. Evidence from colonoscopy and aviation documents weaker unaided performance under routine automation, without isolating the mechanism. The framework connects a detection target to an explicit reserve of expertise and a training pipeline. Standard detection tests estimate each quantity and reveal automation bias and silent checker failures. The framework distinguishes the requirement from minimizing expected loss and proposes a longitudinal test.

Clinical large language model (LLM) agents deployed locally can consult more capable remote models, but doing so risks exposing patient information. Privacy-conscious delegation places disclosure decisions with a local agent, yet removing explicit identifiers is insufficient: quasi-identifiers can accumulate across multi-turn consultations and repeated patient visits to enable re-identification. We introduce PrivMeSA, a privacy-aware self-evolving multi-agent system that learns to control disclosure and retains remote expertise for local reuse. A local agent manages each encounter and consults remote specialists that may request additional information. Reinforcement learning balances task accuracy against direct disclosure and registry-based re-identification risk, with privacy evaluated over the complete outbound transcript of each encounter. A local lesson memory distills completed consultations into generalized clinical guidance and retrieves relevant lessons before transmission, allowing subsequent cases to reuse expertise without another remote exchange. Memory grows without additional outcome labels or parameter updates. On an emergency-department benchmark built from MIMIC-IV-ED records, PrivMeSA improves mean task accuracy over delegation by up to 15.8 percentage points. In the same setting, PrivMeSA reduces the disclosure of personal details from 98.0% to 0.2% of cases and the share of cases in which the patient can be narrowed to ten or fewer registry patients from 74% to 0%.

While recent multimodal recommender systems have demonstrated the effectiveness of incorporating visual and textual information to improve downstream performance, most existing methods rely on static modality fusion, assuming that the relative importance of textual and visual signals remains stable across recommendation scenarios. This design may not fully account for an important variation across recommendation requests: some queries require fine-grained visual cues, whereas others are better served by textual or functional semantics, in which case indiscriminate modality fusion brings in uninformative cues and impairs recommendation quality. To address this, we propose AdaM-Rec, an LLM-based framework for adaptive modality routing in multimodal recommendation, which enables dynamic calibration of reliance on textual and multimodal evidence for user-specific queries. Built on structured natural-language representations of items and user preferences, it estimates modality reliability using proxy recall tasks. Specifically, it generates pseudo-queries that match the granularity of the actual query while pointing to the user's positively interacted items as verifiable proxy targets, evaluating which modality yields better recall performance in analogous scenarios and optimizing the routing strategy in an agentic manner. It then performs routed recall with optimized strategy, enriches results with collaborative items, and ranks candidates by their relevance to both the query and user preferences. Experiments demonstrate that AdaM-Rec delivers strong performance against state-of-the-art baselines, highlighting the effectiveness and broader potential of adaptive control over modality reliance in multimodal recommendation.

Near Data Processing (NDP) has the potential to significantly improve system performance and energy by alleviating data movement bottlenecks. However, most NDP proposals pose heavy requirements for the software stack, data layout, and/or the underlying hardware. To broaden NDP adoption, this work focuses on a modular hardware-centric approach that automates the above steps and can target unmodified binaries. This paper presents Near Data Strands (NDS), a framework that orchestrates tasks and data automatically without involving the programmer and the software stack. As a first step towards this ambitious goal, this work focuses on regular loops that meet specific criteria. The framework identifies potential offloadable loops, decomposes them into parallel execution strands, creates a high performance instruction schedule, performs the required data marshaling and orchestration, and initiates near-data execution. We demonstrate that NDS achieves a 3.14x geomean speedup over a single-core host baseline and a 1.82x geomean speedup over 8-core host-parallel variants, all without any modifications to the software stack. These gains grow as repeated loop invocations amortize offload costs, showing that legacy applications can leverage a transparent hardware approach to extract benefits from NDP.

Grokking shows that fitting the training data and learning the underlying signal can occur at very different stages. However, existing theories offer limited quantitative insight into how this delayed generalization depends on inductive bias and signal structure. Our work addresses the gap by developing a statistical theory that characterizes how regularization geometry and signal sparsity govern generalization near interpolation. In particular, we focus on the prototypical setting of high-dimensional regression and identify regimes in which sparsity-promoting regularization makes exact interpolation much more accurate than approximate fitting. In strongly overparameterized noiseless problems, we prove a zero–one generalization law and construct a family of convex norms whose interpolators transition from the trivial risk of the all-zero predictor to exact recovery, while keeping the training error equal to $0$. Furthermore, when feature dimension and sample size are proportional, we provide a precise characterization of training and generalization errors along $\ell_r$-regularization paths. This in turn allows us to quantify the generalization gain that remains near interpolation: we show that this gain increases as the norm becomes more sparsity-promoting and as the target becomes sparser, with a sharp drop in generalization reached for noiseless data and $\ell_1$ regularization. Experiments on diagonal linear networks and transformers trained on modular arithmetic demonstrate the generality of our theoretical predictions. Finally, beyond grokking, our work reveals a statistical instability in minimum-norm interpolation: small perturbations in the regularization strength can lead to drastically different generalization, while preserving small training error.

Open-ended LLM homogeneity can create false plurality when several systems appear to offer independent perspectives while returning the same familiar default. Single-pass answers obscure the distinction between agreement produced by a tightly constrained answer space, prompt-vocabulary echo, and broader answer spaces with stable alternatives beneath the surface. We introduce CHOIR (Collective Hierarchically-Ordered Inquiry Responses), a framework that adapts free-list elicitation from cognitive anthropology to LLM ensembles. CHOIR repeatedly elicits ranked lists, clusters items into prompt-level concepts, and measures concept salience across models, prompt variants, and persona conditions. We evaluate CHOIR on Infinity-Chat 100, an external prompt bank from recent work on open-ended model homogeneity, and on a 27-question targeted diagnostic bank designed to isolate mechanism-level contrasts. On Infinity-Chat 100, CHOIR reproduces high surface agreement (93/100 prompts above chance) while separating narrow prompts from broad prompts with recoverable depth. Across targeted probes and the external prompt bank, base-model identity remains the strongest recoverable signature, and persona prompts shift surfaced concepts within base-model signatures. A source-blind ranking module prioritises rare-but-stable candidates for later inspection. CHOIR turns open-ended homogeneity into a diagnostic measurement problem by asking where models converge, why they converge, and what remains reachable under structured depth probing.

Reliable, timely crop-yield forecasts are essential for market stability and risk management, yet many approaches rely on costly or hard-to-scale inputs. We present a frugal, transferable, and architecture-agnostic deep learning framework that uses routine weather as the only time-varying input plus two lightweight static context inputs (crop year and an agro-environmental label) to capture long-run change and regional heterogeneity, while supporting multiple sequence encoders under identical data requirements. Using a 20-season Brazilian soybean case study (2001/02-2020/21) with leave-one-year-out cross-validation, we benchmark MLP, CNN, LSTM, CNN-LSTM, a Transformer encoder and the Mamba state-space model against linear ridge regression and a five-year moving-average "farmer" baseline. All deep learning variants outperform ridge, and all sequential encoders surpass the non-sequential MLP. The Transformer achieves the best national accuracy (RMSE 149 kg ha^-1; rRMSE 5.3%; R^2 = 0.784), reducing error by 47.6% relative to the farmer baseline. In-season forecasts improve monotonically from early- to late-season issuance, reaching approximately 50% lower error than the baseline at the latest forecast point. Ablations indicate that the agro-environmental label and spatial instance expansion (multiple grid-node weather sequences per municipality-year) contribute positively without increasing input complexity. SHAP diagnostics suggest crop year explains most of the long-run trajectory, whereas within-season weather and agro-environmental context primarily drive interannual deviations, with moisture/cloud and thermal-demand variables dominating. Overall, the framework is straightforward to deploy across other crops and geographic regions and is naturally compatible with operational weather forecasts for routine monitoring.

A reward can identify a correct answer while leaving the computation needed for new inputs undetermined. We study how pretraining and midtraining supply the information and computation that make reward adaptation effective. In sequential state computation and contextual memory, we characterize mechanisms that agree on every training reward yet demand different held-out answers. Task-independent source observations resolve this ambiguity. We construct finite sampled Adam paths from specified random initializations through source prediction and reward adaptation in the same parameters, proving how prediction acquires execution or retrieval and rewards learn their task-specific use. Experiments with pretrained Qwen2.5 checkpoints test this division of labor. Across eight worlds, Sequential models trained with correct source and first-operation supervision reach 82.61% success, versus 44.15% for a private-random source control. Memory replay preserves retrieval during reward adaptation, and an independent eight-world confirmation achieves 75.32% task success versus 49.86% after matched alternative-retrieval training. GSM8K and HotpotQA separate accuracy at reward entry, subsequent gain and final performance. Together, these results connect information acquisition, executable computation and reward-guided task learning.

Frontier LLMs are increasingly used to automate scientific research through iterative search. We distinguish idea-driven search from solution-driven search and identify three core challenges: organizing evolving research ideas, selecting promising directions, and maintaining alignment between ideas and their implementations. To address these challenges, we introduce the Agentic Idea Manager (AIM), a fully autonomous framework for managing and exploring research directions in idea-driven automated research. Inspired by Bayesian optimization, AIM uses an Agentic Surrogate and an Agentic Acquisition mechanism to organize discovered ideas and guide their selection. A Solution Auditor maintains idea-solution integrity, while a Resource Planner adaptively allocates the remaining experimental budget across parallel search branches. Experiments on 10 AutoLab benchmark tasks show that AIM surpasses the strongest baseline by 1.6 percentage points on System Optimization tasks and 4.9 percentage points on long-horizon Model Development & CUDA tasks. Notably, AIM reaches the best baseline performance up to 3.1x faster in wall-clock time. We further provide a theoretical analysis of when searching over ideas becomes beneficial. Our analysis shows that explicit idea-level allocation makes semantic coverage directly controllable, and that broader coverage becomes increasingly valuable when competitive research directions are sparse among many plausible alternatives. Project Page: https://imhgchoi.github.io/agentic-idea-manager/

Text- and image-conditioned world generators can create visually rich 3D environments, yet these worlds often remain silent or rely on soundtracks synthesized solely from text or rendered video. Although such audio can convey what should be heard, it lacks an explicit representation of where sound sources are located and how their perceived sound should vary with listener movement. We introduce Audible World Models, a training-free framework that incorporates sound into the generated world state. Starting from a text prompt, our system constructs a panoramic 3D proxy, separates it into semantic layers, identifies sound-producing foreground objects and ambient background regions, and synthesizes dry audio for each sound label. It then anchors these sources to reconstructed geometry and renders listener-dependent spatial audio using geometric acoustic propagation. By explicitly linking semantics, geometry, and sound propagation, the framework maintains persistent source locations while adapting the rendered audio to changes in listener viewpoint and motion. Experiments across 80 generated scenes demonstrate substantial gains in spatial consistency over text-, video-, and panorama-conditioned baselines, while preserving competitive semantic alignment. VLM-based assessments and human evaluations further indicate that our soundtracks are preferred for their audio-visual consistency, spatial plausibility, and motion-dependent behavior.

We introduce BIND, a new action representation for visuomotor robot policies that binds 3D robot actions to their corresponding 2D image features, yielding strong data efficiency gains and robustness to out-of-distribution object positions and camera viewpoints. The action heads of current robot policies are typically formulated as an MLP regression from a single global feature vector produced by a pre-trained vision encoder. This global formulation requires the policy network to discover, from demonstrations alone, the relationship between target robot actions and the image features they project onto. The consequence is that although modern image features are semantically descriptive, spatially robust, and even multiview-consistent, the policies built on them are brittle to subtle changes in camera viewpoint and object placement–and surprisingly data-inefficient. BIND closes this gap by supplying the action-feature relationship through camera geometry rather than learning: it discretizes a volume of candidate end effector positions, attaches each candidate to the pre-trained features at its projection in each camera view, and selects actions by scoring each candidate's position and image-bound feature combination. On a real robot, we study data efficiency and out-of-distribution robustness to unseen object positions and camera viewpoints, as well as general long-horizon task execution and dexterity. We find BIND to be highly data-efficient and robust: it achieves near-perfect success on tasks with as few as 5 demonstrations, and degrades gracefully under steep camera-viewpoint shifts and held-out object positions where coordinate-regression baselines completely fail.

Dependent database accesses can serialize application–database round trips on a request's critical path. Planning across traversal steps requires knowing both which relationships a computation may follow and how discovered objects become subsequent execution contexts. We identify a programming-model contract that exposes this information through inspectable access paths and explicit traversal continuation. We demonstrate this contract in Object-Spatial Programming (OSP), where walkers traverse a typed object graph and execute node-type-specific code. We introduce the Temporal Trace Graph (TTG), a bounded, request-specific graph of candidate objects and traversal-derived transitions. At walker spawn, the TTG Builder composes statically extracted access and continuation rules over the live graph from the request's starting node. An asynchronous prefetcher loads planned objects while the walker executes. We implement TTG in Jac/PostgreSQL and evaluate four applications covering linear, multi-hop, recursive, and value-dependent traversals. TTG improves end-to-end latency in three applications, achieving up to 2.99x speedup over the stock runtime. Comparisons with manually staged prefetching characterize the benefits and costs of automatic cross-step planning. The evaluation also shows that planning overhead can exceed avoided demand latency and that value-dependent control can introduce bounded overfetch.

Machine learning surrogate models offer a promising path toward accelerating plasma turbulence simulations. We present PreVAE-Turb, a surrogate modeling framework that leverages pre-trained variational autoencoders (VAEs) from the Stable Diffusion image generation model for efficient spatial compression of turbulence fields. The pre-trained VAE is fine-tuned on turbulence data using a physics-informed loss function that includes a spectral loss operating in Fourier space to enforce spectral accuracy across scales. The VAE is combined with convolutional long short-term memory (ConvLSTM) networks to learn temporal dynamics in latent space, with a manifold consistency error metric that monitors encode–decode consistency during autoregressive rollouts. We validate the framework on two-dimensional Hasegawa-Wakatani drift-wave turbulence and extend it to gyrokinetic turbulence from the GENE code, where a four-channel adaptation simultaneously predicts electrostatic potential, density, and parallel/perpendicular temperature fluctuations without requiring architecture redesign. Once trained, inference generates thousands of time steps in seconds on a single GPU, providing substantial computational acceleration compared to direct numerical simulation. The pre-trained approach offers a transferable methodology broadly applicable to various turbulence simulation codes.

Teleoperation systems are tuned for channel fidelity, while whether the operator experiences the device as part of the body, the Sense of Embodiment (SoE), is measured only afterwards, by questionnaire. Predictive-processing accounts suggest controlling devices to reduce the mismatch between the operator's predictions and the returned feedback, but those predictions are unobservable, and an objective that only penalizes mismatch is minimized by removing feedback. We formulate an embodiment-aware controller, the Universal Embodiment Engine (UEE), that infers the operator's embodiment and visuo-proprioceptive cue weighting from implicit gaze and pupil signals and task outcome, and chooses bounded device settings under explicit preferences, cast as a discrete Active Inference agent. In simulations with 300 heterogeneous synthetic operators, the UEE found the suitable setting within half a minute for most operators, before identifying their exact type, and came close to an oracle in the second half of the session (embodiment 1.68 against 0.73 for the best fixed setting, on a 0-2 scale). Adapting without reading the operator did no better than fixed control, and model-free bandits did worse, whereas an expected-utility controller with the same inference did exactly as well: the benefit comes from Bayesian inference over the operator with explicit preferences, not from the information-seeking term of Active Inference. A naive prediction-error minimizer withheld feedback, as its objective implies, and lost task success (0.74 vs 0.90). The benefit shrank but persisted for operators outside the controller's model family, grew with the variety of the population, and vanished when the controller trusted an uninformative signal or when cue weighting changed mid-session without being modeled. These failures show what studies with people must establish first: calibrated signals and a model of change.

We determine the decidability of Karp's NP-complete problems on structures which are first-order definable over the theory of equality, also known as orbit-finite sets with atoms or nominal sets.

Can a local solver return the guaranteed globally optimal solution to a nonconvex mixed-integer polynomial power grid optimization problem? By mixing low-rank semidefinite programming (SDP) and moment-based lifting in the Lasserre hierarchy, this paper provides anecdotal evidence in the affirmative. Specifically, we iteratively tighten a moment-based relaxation of the AC Optimal Transmission Switching (AC-OTS) problem, including higher order moment-based constraints, rooted in the Lasserre hierarchy, until it is tight (i.e., primal feasible). We then re-solve this problem using a local, low-rank SDP solver (Knitro), plugging the associated dual variables into a bounding Lagrange dual function. By demonstrating primal and dual objective agreement and primal feasibility, we confirm the solution as the exact, global solution. From these initial results, we hypothesize that mixing (i) low-rank (i.e., highly scalable) SDP methods with (ii) moment-based relaxation tightening could be a scalable alternative to global branch-and-bound-based methods.

Real-world optimization problems are difficult to model accurately because many objectives and constraints reside in domain experts' tacit knowledge, making them hard to formalize. As a result, optimization models often contain miscalibrated objectives, missing constraints, or omitted decision variables, leading to solutions that fail to reflect operational realities. We address this challenge by automatically repairing misspecified formulations using historical data consisting of past solutions and subsequent user overrides. Traditional approaches such as inverse optimization and constraint learning tend to overfit sparse data and produce complex formulations. Our central idea is to combine the reasoning capabilities and prior knowledge of LLMs with the formal grounding provided by optimization. We realize this idea through two complementary paradigms. Top-down, an LLM proposes structural repairs, including new constraints and variables, whose numerical parameters are calibrated and validated through optimization. Bottom-up, optimization infers cuts from observed decisions, which the LLM contextualizes into interpretable, generalizable modeling constraints. We evaluate our approach on 38 misspecification scenarios spanning nine classes of optimization problems, several drawn from real-world applications, and show that TACIT can repair 78.9% of them (vs. 60.5% for the best baseline).

As online platforms scale, distributed communities must develop complex governance structures to maintain order. Reddit represents a unique experiment in this process: millions of subreddits manage their own digital commons, yet together they form an interconnected ecosystem of platform governance. Using a historical dataset of subreddit rules from 2011 to 2023, we apply computational methods to characterize that ecosystem and identify mechanisms driving change. We identify seven distinct governance regimes and document a platform-wide drift toward irreversible bureaucratization operating through two reinforcing dynamics: a ratchet effect among existing communities and a cohort shift in which new communities increasingly launch with pre-packaged regulatory frameworks. Using Dyadic Event History Analysis, we find that community scale is the dominant and universal predictor of rule adoption, independent of network exposure. Diffusion flows through two complementary channels: normative transmission via shared moderator networks and mimetic transmission among topically similar communities. However, mimetic copying is selective: it drives adoption of content rules addressing shared topical challenges while communities resist copying operational and behavioral rules. Additionally, communities with overlapping user bases differentiate rather than converge, consistent with ecological accounts of niche competition, and prestige-based contagion is firmly rejected. Together, these findings reveal decentralized platform governance as a stratified ecosystem in which lateral coordination, scale pressure, structural inertia, cohort effects, and episodic platform coercion jointly produce irreversible formalization with direct implications for platform management.

Neuromorphic spiking neural networks (SNNs) offer a promising alternative to conventional deep neural networks for tasks with computational resource or data constraints. However, their practical applications have been limited by comparatively weak performance on complex learning tasks. Experimental approaches such as Synchrony Loop Propagation (SLP) increasingly seek to address this problem through more sophisticated and heterogeneous neuron models, and have achieved encouraging initial results. However, these neuron models do not readily translate to standard neuromorphic systems designed to support simple leaky integrate-and-fire neurons. We present an implementation of an SLP network on the RISP neuroprocessor, an event-driven neuromorphic simulation platform, and evaluate its performance on an unsupervised musical instrument clustering task. The network achieves clustering accuracy comparable to the DBSCAN algorithm, while providing over an order of magnitude improvement in runtime speed and computational efficiency relative to a prior non-neuromorphic SLP implementation. These results demonstrate that SLP's core mechanisms can be effectively translated into a neuromorphic architecture to support complex unsupervised learning. More broadly, this work highlights the potential of heterogeneous and extensible neuron models to expand the design space of neuromorphic systems to more complex learning tasks.

Real-time commentary for Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) esports requires a vision-language model (VLM) to narrate a live match second by second, both fluently and accurately. Existing streaming VLMs sound natural but often miss key events such as kills and objectives. To address this limitation, we use game telemetry, which records exactly when each event occurs, as a supervision signal. We introduce MOBA-VL, a 9B-parameter model trained on this signal with event-localized multi-turn reinforcement learning, which rewards the turns that describe each event. We also collect MOBACast, 860 professional matches (about 460 hours) across three MOBA games with word-level timestamped commentary, and MOBACast-Bench, a benchmark from held-out tournaments. On MOBACast-Bench, MOBA-VL achieves the highest Overall score on full matches (63.25 vs. 55.12 for StreamingVLM) and clips (63.45 vs. 56.22 for DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash). Event-localized credit also raises event recall from 34.5 to 42.1 over supervised fine-tuning. Code and data will be released, and demos are available on an anonymous project page at https://moba-vl.github.io.

Major venues now publish detailed rules about how authors, reviewers, and area chairs may use AI, and those rules differ by role, by task, and by what must be disclosed. AI detection, the instrument usually proposed to enforce them, estimates something else: whether an AI model wrote the text. We argue that this target is misaligned with the decisions conferences and journals face, and propose policy-conditioned AI-use detection, an evidentiary framework for assessing whether a human–AI workflow complied with a stated rule. Policy makes the governing rule an explicit input. Inference reports hypotheses, evidence, calibration regime, and uncertainty in place of verdicts such as "AI detected". Evaluation builds benchmarks from reproducible pipelines that generate compliant and non-compliant workflows, and reports true positive rate at a false positive rate the venue fixes in advance. We work the framework through peer review, where at plausible violation rates a detector at a strong operating point still flags more compliant authors than violating ones. The framework therefore also names what a venue must instrument: structured disclosure, approved-tool routing that respects reviewer confidentiality, and a path by which a finding can be contested. Under this framing a detector is not an authorship classifier but an auditable procedure with an error rate the venue fixes in advance and can defend.

We introduce LoopVL to study whether Loop Transformers can be effectively extended to vision- language models. LoopVL combines Module-Loop and Model-Loop computation to iteratively update a unified vision-language state through shared modules. We train LoopVL from scratch through language pre-training, multimodal training, and post-training. LoopVL outperforms a range of similarly sized and larger non-recurrent models on multimodal understanding and visual reasoning benchmarks. We also observe Visual Aha Moments in LoopVL, characterized by pronounced shifts in visual attention across loops. LoopVL provides practical evidence for recurrent vision-language modeling and offers an intuitive perspective on how shared parameters can support deeper multimodal computation over continuously evolving visual-language states.

Node-level graph anomaly detection (GAD) identifies nodes whose attributes and interactions deviate from dominant graph regularities. Existing GAD models encode normality and anomaly scoring indirectly through architectures, message passing, reconstruction or contrastive objectives, and tuned score families. This entangles graph trust (how strongly graph structure should define normality), graph-spectral weighting, and anomaly-score choice, yielding scores that are costly, opaque, and unstable across graph regimes. We propose EB-GAD (Empirical-Bayes GAD), a training-free framework that models normality as graph-aware generalized Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (GOU) relaxation toward a graph-filtered template. Empirical Bayes fits the graph precision from the residual-field likelihood; the GOU then turns scoring into a closed-form finite-horizon control energy, the minimum effort to steer a feature-neutral node to its observed endpoint along graph-spectral relaxation. Sweeping relaxation horizon and endpoint tolerance yields a bank of scores that share one fitted prior: equilibrium Mahalanobis scoring is one limit, while finite-horizon control-energy and scale-normalized ratio scores reveal anomalies that static equilibrium scoring can mask. A label-free selector chooses the score family from feature homophily, edge density, and feature dimension, then ranks candidates by fitted-null deviation and rank stability. On 11 benchmarks and without labels at any step, EB-GAD has the best or tied-best AUROC on 9: the four financial fraud networks (up to 3.7M nodes), the YelpChi and Amazon review graphs, Weibo, Reddit and Facebook, with margins of up to 21.7 points. It is second on BlogCatalog and ACM.

We study transient solute dispersion in pressure-driven micropolar flow through a concentric annulus representing a catheterized artery. The catheter is impermeable to solute, whereas the arterial wall combines irreversible removal with reversible surface retention. The exact steady micropolar velocity field is coupled to the Gill-Sankarasubramanian generalized-dispersion framework; the resulting bulk-surface hierarchy is advanced with Rannacher-damped Crank-Nicolson time stepping to determine $K_0(t)$, $K_1(t)$ and $K_2(t)$. The exchange coefficient is independent of the micropolar parameters and satisfies $-K_0(0^+)=2(\beta+\theta Da)/(1-\lambda^2)$, whereas $K_2-Pe^{-2}\sim\sigma_v^2t$ initially, so the leading short-time dispersion is hydrodynamic and independent of wall kinetics. In the weak-reaction regime, micropolarity modifies convection approximately linearly and shear dispersion quadratically through the velocity-amplitude factor. A narrow-gap analysis with $\varepsilon=1-\lambda$ gives $\bar v\sim(2-N_c)\varepsilon^2/6$ and $K_2-Pe^{-2}\sim(2-N_c)^2\varepsilon^6/7560$ for a fixed pressure gradient, revealing a sixth-power suppression of shear dispersion as the catheter approaches the arterial wall. Increasing $\lambda$ from $0.01$ to $0.30$ reduces effective convection by about a factor of $2.45$, while chemically passive shear-induced dispersion falls by a factor of $24$. The coupled formulation also yields the exact partition $\Phi_m+\Phi_s+\Phi_a=1$, separating mobile, reversibly retained and irreversibly absorbed solute. The reconstructed field quantifies reaction-modulated transverse non-uniformity, while the results distinguish hydrodynamic effects of confinement and microrotation from kinetic wall effects.

Dynamical Systems (DS) are reactive motion policies representing vector fields trained with theoretical guarantees of stability and convergence. To ensure safety during deployment in unknown environments they must be locally reshaped, either through modulation or geometric control barrier function strategies. However, depending on the geometry of the obstacles and the complexity of the DS, these local strategies can lead the system to unavoidable collisions or spurious attractors. In this work, we certify safety with a value function drawn from the notion of backward reachability tube, which measures the worst-case safety along a rollout trajectory of the nominal DS. Usually, such a value function is intractable for a controlled system due to curse of dimensionality. We show that in the DS-based learning-from-demonstration setting, the absence of a control input collapses the reachability problem to a deterministic rollout, and the presence of certain stability conditions truncates the infinite horizon to a finite one, resulting in a well-defined value function. We further show that the value function we devised is the maximal forward-invariant subset of the obstaclefree region for the nominal DS flow. The application of this certificate function is validated across five DS constructions - analytical, Neural ODE, diffeomorphic latent space, LPV-DS, SE(3)and validate it on a Franka manipulator. Modulation and geometric CBFs also suffer from saddle point in cases of headon approach towards an unsafe zone. We show that CBF-on-V avoids this pitfall entirely.

We introduce Type-6 logic, a variant of dynamic epistemic logic augmented with two operators (uncertainty and recurrence), designed to model the inferential dynamics of contemporary large language model (LLM) chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. Type-6 accounts for common LLM reasoning pathologies such as unlicensed revision, enthymemes, loopbacks, and unverifiable/incorrect claims. We propose a verifier based on Type-6 logic that builds a graph out the trace, and checks it against Type-6's axioms and inference rules. We evaluate our framework on LLM-generated CoTs four splits spanning formal and informal reasoning. Our verifier detects structurally unsound reasoning steps that surface-level heuristics miss, and allows for easy visualisation of the model's reasoning process. In our corpus, our verifier shows that derived contradiction is the most common hard-fail category in CoT, and that only about 3% of the propositions of a trace have impact on the final derivation. Ablation studies show that other verification methods (LLMs-as-judges, other neurosymbolic approaches, etc.) cannot be considered interchangeable: for example, agreement between LLMs-as-judges and LINC is $\kappa \approx 0.034$, and this persists within a method across underlying models. Type-6, however, is the most agreed-with method amongst the ones we tested. We prove our verifier runs on average-case linear time; and release our logic specification and artefacts.

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the second most deadly and third most common cancer, and the leading cause of death among gastrointestinal cancers. Early diagnosis is crucial for the treatment of this cancer and increasing the survival rates. Although CRC is more common in developed regions, its occurrence is also increasing in developing regions as well. CRC diagnosis relies on histopathology assessment post-biopsy. Automated deep learning algorithms can significantly reduce diagnosis time, enhancing efficiency and supporting timely clinical decisions. We present an automated segmentation pipeline for whole-slide histopathology images that labels tumor grades 1-3 and normal mucosa. It utilizes dense prediction transformers with various encoder backbones, overlapping patches, and test-time augmentation. An adaptive augmentation policy, guided by large language models, further improves training. Top models were ensembled via soft voting, and mask refining post-processing steps, Gaussian blurring, morphological closing, and connected components analysis. On a colorectal cancer grade dataset, our method improved the F1 score from 62.92 to 69.84. Code is available here: github.com/caglarmert/ICIP2025

Soft robots and tactile sensors have demonstrated great potential in delicate manipulation tasks. Soft pneumatic robots enable safe contact through compliance, and vision-based tactile sensors offer high-resolution touch perception. However, learning tactile manipulation with compliant robots has been challenging, bottlenecked by the lack of efficient simulation. Existing simulators typically model them in isolation, and exhibit large calibration gaps that are difficult to overcome efficiently. We present PneuTac, a unified framework for tactile-feedback manipulation with soft pneumatic robots. We leverage the material point method (MPM) for modelling the dynamics of the soft robot and the deformable tactile membrane, and 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) for rendering. Real-to-sim modelling is done with a simple vision-based method, to then train action and perception networks for efficient simulation with surrogate models. We use the framework to drive a tactile-guided pipeline to collect demonstrations in simulation. Through experiments on a custom-designed pneumatic soft finger with a tactile sensing tip, together with additional cross-device evaluations, we show that PneuTac is capable of accurately modelling soft robots with tactile sensors, and that policies trained with simulation-augmented demonstrations outperform baselines trained on the same real data on three real-world contact-rich compliant manipulation tasks, making it a practical framework for tactile manipulation on compliant hardware.

Mechanical metamaterials owe some of their exotic effective properties to microstructural instabilities such as buckling and pattern transformation. Their fine-scale geometry, combined with the interplay of local and nonlocal effects, renders direct numerical simulation (DNS) prohibitively expensive, if not intractable. Micromorphic computational homogenization~\citep{Rokos2019} has been proposed to make macroscopic simulations feasible: a representative volume element (RVE) carrying patterning fluctuation fields resolves the microscale, while an effective micromorphic continuum describes the macroscale. Such simulations nevertheless remain costly, since the RVE problem and its associated tangent problems must be solved at every macroscopic integration point, which becomes prohibitive, especially in three dimensions. We therefore propose a reduced order model for the microscopic problem, combining proper orthogonal decomposition with a hyperreduction method tailored to the micromorphic setting. Two numerical examples quantify the reduced basis and hyperreduction errors and discuss the offline costs and attainable online speed-ups. The results show that this approach can enable engineering-scale large deformation analysis of mechanical metamaterials.