Papers

Recent approaches to simulated and synthetic users offer new ways to support design, but raise questions about how computational representations of users should contribute to design practice. We present NeuroDivSim, an interactive tool that explores simulation as an inspectable mechanism for reflecting on cognitive diversity during design and prototyping. Rather than using an LLM to act as a simulated user, NeuroDivSim uses generative AI to construct inspectable task, interface, and environment models from a usage scenario. After human review, these models are combined with explicit cognitive reference configurations and processed through deterministic simulation. This enables designers to hold a modeled usage situation constant while varying cognitive assumptions and tracing their consequences to interaction steps and rule-based design recommendations. We further report an exploratory pilot evaluation (N=10) that provided formative insights into how participants engaged with the workflow and informed subsequent refinements to the presentation of models, simulation results, and recommendations.

High-precision packet transmission is increasingly important in deterministic networking applications, including 5G fronthaul and Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN). Some recent high-speed network interface cards (NICs), including the Intel E830 and NVIDIA ConnectX series, support hardware-assisted transmission at specified times and hardware timestamping of received and transmitted frames. Despite the relevance of these capabilities to the stringent timing requirements of 5G fronthaul, little public information is available on their timing accuracy and performance characteristics. As a companion to our previous study of scheduled transmission on the NVIDIA ConnectX series, this paper experimentally characterizes the scheduled transmission and hardware timestamping capabilities of the Intel E830 NIC. Using an FPGA-based measurement platform with deterministic frame generation and nanosecond-resolution timestamping, we evaluate receive and transmit hardware timestamping and scheduled-transmission accuracy. The results show only several-nanosecond timing variation in hardware timestamping. Receive timestamp-derived frame intervals showed a peak-to-peak variation of up to 6 ns, while the transmit timestamp comparison showed a residual range of 4.6 ns after clock-drift compensation. Approximately 99% of the observed frame intervals were within $\pm$300 ns of the target interval, with occasional outliers of up to approximately 2 us. These results indicate that scheduled transmission can support applications with timing requirements on the order of several tens of microseconds, such as 5G fronthaul, but may be insufficient for TSN applications requiring transmission timing accuracy on the order of a few to a few tens of nanoseconds.

Existing evaluation methods for healthcare LLMs primarily assess factual correctness,safety, and fluency, while providing limited insight into whether generated interactions reflect culturally situated healthcare reasoning. This limitation is particularly important in maternal health, where care decisions are shaped by social and relational norms. We introduce MH-INDIC, a culturally grounded evaluation framework for maternal-health interactions in urban and semi-urban North Indian contexts that operationalises cultural behaviour through ten dimensions of maternal-health reasoning. Using a 26-item survey administered to 102 pregnant and postpartum women from urban and semi-urban North India, we evaluate ten LLMs. We distinguish population level cultural alignment from profile-level behavioural variation. Although several models approximate the human population-level distribution, all evaluated systems exhibit substantially lower variation across demographic and household profiles than the human cohort, revealing a gap between aggregate alignment and profile-conditioned sensitivity. As a downstream application of MH-INDIC, we use the strongest-aligned proprietary and open-source models to generate culturally conditioned maternal-health dialogues under zero-shot, self-conditioned, and human-grounded prompting. Human-grounded conditioning produces stronger profile alignment and dialogue quality ratings, suggesting that measured cultural profiles can improve the cultural grounding of generated interactions

Recent advances in large language model (LLM) pretraining highlight the role of high-quality training data in improving performance. While model-based filtering has proven effective in selecting high-quality subsets from web-scale corpora, especially for high-resource languages, low-resource languages face challenges due to limited availability of annotated data. This work explores extending quality filtering to over 100 languages by proposing a multilingual adaptation approach that converts an existing English quality classifier into a multilingual variant. Our approach proposes training a small multi-layer perceptron on top of Transformer encoder-only model embeddings, using multilingual text as input and scores obtained from English classifiers applied to machine-translated text as labels. Our 1B, 3B and 8B scale experiments show that our approach maintains the downstream LLM benchmark performance of existing multilingual model-based filtering baselines, without harming regional and cultural knowledge benchmarks. To further evaluate cross-lingual generalization, we compare classifier scores of high-quality synthetic data and web samples, and the correlation of classifier scores with LLM-based ones, revealing that the classifier can learn the scoring criteria of its original English variant, even for languages not included in its training data.

To test conditional independence of $X$ and $Y$ given a text or an image $Z$, one conditions on an embedding $\psi(Z)$ in place of $Z$. The embedded test is valid if $Z$ is independent of $X$ or of $Y$ given $\psi(Z)$, which cannot be confirmed from data, and when this fails, the rejection probability under the null hypothesis can tend to one. We study this failure, and show that focusing on a specific form of dependence relaxes what the embedding must retain. For a residual correlation test inspired by the Generalised Covariance Measure, validity only requires that the parts of $\mathbb{E}[X \mid Z]$ and $\mathbb{E}[Y \mid Z]$ missed by $\mathbb{E}[X \mid \psi(Z)]$ and $\mathbb{E}[Y \mid \psi(Z)]$ are uncorrelated. Otherwise, we treat the discarded information as an omitted variable. Under the null hypothesis, the bias equals the absolute correlation of the missed parts times the geometric mean of two partial $R^2$ values. This identity yields a robust test valid under a declared tolerance for the geometric mean, which, like a sensitivity parameter, is not identified from the data. On synthetic data and text embeddings, the robust test holds its level approximately. On text generated by a language model, under an exact null hypothesis, every embedding, even the generator's own states, biases the embedded test.

End-to-end autonomous driving demands trajectory planners that are both highly accurate and cheap enough for edge deployment. State-of-the-art artificial neural network (ANN) planners meet the accuracy requirement at the cost of heavy dense computation, while spiking neural networks (SNNs)—though promising orders-of-magnitude energy savings through sparse, event-driven arithmetic—still lag far behind in planning accuracy. We present SDPAD, a fully spike-driven end-to-end planning pipeline that closes this gap. SDPAD converts a pre-trained ANN perception stack into integer-spike form via quantized ANN2SNN conversion, lifts multi-view images into the bird's-eye-view (BEV) space with a spike-driven-max (SDM) depth distribution (Spike-3D-Lift), and plans through the Spike-QFormer, a spiking query transformer in which ego, agent, and map queries distilled from the BEV scene are fused by learnable waypoint queries via cross-attention, followed by deformable spike-cross-attention refinement. Every operation is gated by integer spikes and inference is a single feed-forward pass without temporal simulation loops. On the nuScenes open-loop benchmark, SDPAD achieves an average $L_2$ error of 0.40\,m and a collision rate of 0.12%, on par with strong ANN planners while consuming 69.9\,mJ—less than 2% of recent ANN baselines. In closed-loop evaluation on the NAVSIM navtest split, SDPAD reaches 86.3 PDMS, surpassing the previous SNN planner SAD by 4.3 points and matching mainstream ANN planners at a fraction of their energy. To our knowledge, SDPAD is the first fully spike-driven planner evaluated in end-to-end autonomous driving, demonstrating that SNNs can rival dense ANNs in complex driving tasks.

Accurate trajectory forecasting and well-defined predictive uncertainty are crucial for reliable, safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving. Most trajectory prediction approaches provide point estimates only, while uncertainty-aware approaches typically quantify uncertainty only in the trajectory space. In physics-aware approaches, uncertainty in the predicted motion variables should be explicitly modeled and propagated through the vehicle dynamics. Otherwise, the resulting trajectory-space uncertainty may not fully reflect the variability introduced by the underlying motion prediction. Therefore, in this work, uncertainty-aware extensions of X-TRACK (X-TRACK-DE and X-TRACK-MCD), a physics-aware trajectory prediction framework, are proposed. The proposed framework predicts future vehicle motion variables and models both aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties by propagating motion space uncertainty to trajectory space. Additionally, conformal prediction is applied to the trajectory space predictive covariance to construct uncertainty regions targeting a desired marginal coverage level. Evaluation on the highD dataset shows that X-TRACK-DE improves trajectory prediction accuracy over the deterministic baseline, while both uncertainty-aware variants provide predictive uncertainty that can be conformally calibrated to the desired marginal coverage level.

To adapt billion-parameter Vision Transformers for long-video understanding, recent methods freeze the backbone and train lightweight convolutional modules. While effective for parameter-efficient training, existing adapters do not reduce inference-time computation, leaving scalability with respect to video length largely unaddressed. Token selection can reduce attention cost by pruning redundant tokens, but it breaks the spatial grid structure required by convolutional adapters. This forces an expensive dense reconstruction, nullifying much of the potential speedup. We address this by introducing native sparse 2D convolutions, a primitive that allows these adapters, for the first time, to operate directly and efficiently on dynamically pruned token sets. We integrate this primitive into SV-TAD, an adapter framework for temporal action detection, reducing VideoMAEv2-L computation by up to 64% and achieving 2.2x faster inference, while maintaining state-of-the-art accuracy on THUMOS-14 and ActivityNet-1.3. When scaled to InternVideoNext-L, our approach surpasses the previous state of the art at roughly half its computational cost. Moreover, the sparse formulation naturally supports auxiliary task tokens, which improves fine-grained assembly detection on ATTACH.

Historical pull requests record the design decisions, compatibility constraints, and implementation patterns behind a codebase's current state. Experience relevant to a new task can span related changes whose descriptions emphasize different concerns. We introduce Chronos, a test-time framework that makes this connected history available to large language model (LLM)-based code agents. Chronos distills merged pull requests into structured experience cards and connects them through a typed graph of code-level, developer-intent, and organizational relations. Semantic search identifies entry cards, and weighted multi-hop expansion retrieves connected changes for selective reading. The same memory guides candidate generation and patch selection: a patch-focused change agent and a validation-strategy agent each develop a patch, and an evolution steward consults history to select between them. On SWE-Bench Verified, the full workflow improves SWE-Agent across all six evaluated LLM backbones, raising the mean resolution rate from 69.2% to 72.9% and reaching 79.8% with MiniMax M2.5. With the same backbone, it raises resolution rates from 48.3% to 51.7% on SWE-Bench Pro and from 41.0% to 43.5% on FEA-Bench Lite. Both experience-guided single-agent variants also outperform the base agent. In a human evaluation on 100 tasks with ten cards retrieved per task, graph-grounded retrieval increases the mean number of useful cards from 1.24 to 2.87 over flat semantic retrieval. These results demonstrate the value of PR relations for retrieving useful repository experience and of the evaluated workflows for applying that experience during patch generation and selection.

Autonomous vehicles often suffer from limited perception due to occlusions, blind spots, limited sensor range, and the complex nature of surrounding environments. Multi-agent collaborative perception (CP) addresses these challenges by allowing vehicles to share sensory information and reconstruct the scene cooperatively. However, camera-only perception remains fundamentally limited by the uncertainty of distance-dependent monocular depth estimation. We propose CoCam4D, a Bayesian framework for collaborative perception that explicitly models geometric uncertainty. It uses a VGGT-based feedforward network to generate 3D Gaussian scene representations with associated uncertainty estimates, enabling multiple vehicles or agents to efficiently combine their observations. By sharing compact Gaussian primitives, reliable observations from one agent can reduce the depth uncertainty of another without requiring LiDAR sensors. To support real-world deployment, we introduce Dynamic Object Primitives (DOPs), a compact 35-byte representation designed for efficient C-V2X communication. Extensive experiments show that our proposed method consistently outperforms recent vision-only methods, achieving improvements of 11.48% on OPV2V+ and 10.62% on DAIR-V2X-C, demonstrating the potential of geometrically grounded collaborative perception for LiDAR-free autonomous driving.

Sparse Mixture-of-Experts models scale parameter capacity efficiently while maintaining a fixed compute budget per token. However, traditional training paradigms enforce a static choice of top-$k$ experts, which converts a continuous routing distribution into a rigid step function. This constraint introduces a brittle boundary where highly competitive experts are arbitrarily separated into full-supervision and zero-feedback zones based on minor score fluctuations. To address this issue, we propose Elastic Expert Routing, which stochastically samples the active expert budget from a localized discrete distribution centered at $k$. Over multiple training iterations, this mechanism softens the sharp threshold into a gradual probability distribution. Because the sampling neighborhood remains symmetric, this approach matches the expected computational cost of deterministic training, while preserving the inference budget. During supervised fine-tuning, elastic routing improves downstream macro-averages on OLMoE-1B-7B and Qwen3-30B-A3B by $+0.84$ and $+2.02$ points, respectively. In addition, in from-scratch pretraining, it reduces validation LM loss by up to $0.04$ and outperforms the static top-$k$ baseline by $1.6$ points on average across downstream tasks. Comparisons on Qwen3 fine-tuning and from-scratch pretraining further show higher average scores than Noisy top-$k$, expert FFN dropout, and DefaultMoE.

The memory capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have garnered increasing attention recently. Despite great success achieved, existing retrieval-based memory approaches typically overlook the differences between memories and employ a unified strategy to process all memories, leading to suboptimal performance. Thus, an intuitive question arises: can we categorize memory into different types and select appropriate strategies? However, given the topic-rich, scenario-complex, and boundary-blurred nature of memory scenarios, achieving precise classification of memories is not easy. To address this challenge, we propose a memory multi-class dataset in this paper, termed TriMEM, which provides precise annotations for memory types across diverse scenarios. Building upon this foundation, we propose a novel memory framework, named MemoType, which can adaptively recognize each memory and query type with the learned router model. With the memory and query routing, MemoType can retrieve the memory with corresponding query types and design tailored retrieval strategies, thereby enhancing the retrieval performance. Moreover, we theoretically prove that any single retrieval strategy is subject to a fundamental upper bound on its expected retrieval precision in multi-class corpora, leading to systematic precision degradation. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate that MemoType consistently outperforms existing methods, achieving up to 16.18% improvement in Recall@1.

Adapting a pre-trained 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) road scene to a new time of day requires learning appearance changes from a few anchor images while preserving consistent, real-time rendering. We propose PAM-ToD, a lightweight plug-in that learns color corrections while keeping the pre-trained 3DGS parameters fixed. PAM-ToD scales each Gaussian's existing color to model illumination changes and uses an additive term for additional brightness, such as when street lamps turn on at night. Under a simplified image formation model, unchanged surface albedo can be eliminated from the relation between source and target appearances, allowing us to learn these corrections without separately estimating albedo and illumination. The model corrects colors across the scene while allowing the corrections to vary by location and by Gaussian. To guide learning from a few anchor images, it discourages abrupt spatial changes in these corrections. We also introduce CARLA-ToD, a benchmark with matching geometry, camera poses, and moving-object trajectories across three times of day. A few target-time anchor images are used to train each plug-in, while separate views are used for evaluation. Across the static and dynamic settings, PAM-ToD achieves higher PSNR and lower LPIPS than the baselines, even when the anchor images come from a single synchronized capture across multiple cameras.

In this paper, we argue that Looped Transformers need their own residual connections to prevent performance degradation as the number of iterations grows. We first introduce an interesting phenomenon we observed in Looped Transformers, called latent overthinking: noisy state updates overwrite correct intermediate deductions and even undo completed solutions. This leaves subsequent iterations to recover lost information from an already degraded representation: once an error arises in an earlier loop, often as a result of long-range propagation through the recurrence, later loops find it difficult to correct. In this paper, we introduce InfiLoop, a loop-native residual connection that learns which past computations to retain and how much to accept from each new update. InfiLoop combines content-based weighting with learned temporal decay to maintain a running summary of recurrent states. An exact streaming recurrence keeps its persistent aggregation memory constant as the loop count grows. The resulting adaptive update suppresses unreliable proposals and preserves useful intermediate states. Across extensive reasoning tasks, a 7M-parameter InfiLoop model outperforms existing recursive architectures, reaching 97.9% exact accuracy on Sudoku-Extreme, and 13.6% pass@2 on ARC-AGI-2. Notably, on Sudoku-Extreme, InfiLoop continues to improve with test-time looping beyond 20,000 effective steps, showing that added depth translates directly into stronger reasoning. Our code is available at https://github.com/pixeli99/InfiLoop.

Battery state of health (SoH) forecasting is important for battery management, but remains challenging due to nonlinear degradation and heterogeneity across batteries. Existing data-driven approaches primarily use temporal models to learn from numerical battery time series, and higher-level degradation characteristics are often not explicitly represented. These characteristics, however, can provide degradation guidance to support reliable forecasting and make the influence of degradation more interpretable. In this paper, we propose Sera, a semantic representation aggregation framework that complements temporal modelling with degradation semantics. Guided by battery domain expertise, Sera extracts degradation semantics from time series and constructs two complementary representations using rule-based knowledge and LLM-based interpretation. The representations are independently encoded and integrated with the representation learned by temporal models through gated aggregations. Experiments on the mainstream benchmark across multiple prediction horizons and different temporal models show that Sera consistently improves forecasting performance, achieving up to a 37.3% reduction in prediction error over the temporal baseline and enhanced generalizability. Counterfactual analysis examines how forecasts respond to changes in degradation semantics to assess interpretability. The results show that prediction responses are consistent with the meanings of key degradation descriptors across tested horizons. Together, these findings demonstrate that structured degradation semantics and effective aggregation can improve forecasting accuracy and support reliable and interpretable battery health forecasting for advanced battery management.

Existing Open-Ended Deep Research (OEDR) systems primarily generate reports from scratch, making them inefficient for scenarios where research reports need to be continuously maintained as new information emerges. We introduce Incremental Open-Ended Deep Research (Incremental-OEDR), a research setting that treats a report as an evolving research state and incrementally updates it by preserving valid knowledge, revising outdated or incomplete content, and incorporating newly available information. To support this setting, we propose Structured Harness, which represents reports as structured collections of outlines, sections, and supporting evidence, and provides structured retrieval, a persistent structured evidence pool, and structured generation for selective report updating and evidence reuse. We further establish a temporal evaluation framework spanning ten years, with Single-Step Task and Long-Chain Task to evaluate incremental updates over both individual transitions and long-term update chains. Extensive Experiments on DeepResearch Bench and DeepConsult under both the Open-source Configuration (OC) and Proprietary Configuration (PC) show that Incremental-OEDR maintains competitive report quality while substantially improving report continuity and reducing research costs. As shown in Figure~\ref{fig:profile}, it achieves up to 0.51 higher content-level ROUGE-L F1, 0.63 higher outline-level EM F1, 33% lower token consumption, and 61% fewer search calls than OEDR on DeepResearch Bench. For more details, please refer to our project page: https://ioedr-project.github.io/.

Recently, academia and industry have considered the problem of approximate nearest neighbor search (ANNS) with filters. In this setting, each object consists of a high-dimensional vector and attribute values. Given a query vector, filters for attribute values, and $k$, this problem retrieves $k$ vectors approximately nearest to the query vector among a set of objects passing the filters. This paper considers range filters, i.e., users can specify a range constraint for each attribute. Most existing works do not consider this setting, and they assume (i) only a single attribute or (ii) matching filters that require the same attribute values or categories. Existing techniques for these assumptions are not available for our setting or are trivially not efficient. Although standard solutions, such as pre-filter and post-filter, can handle our problem, they are also inefficient. Some works tackle the same problem as ours, but their techniques necessitate historical query workloads, which significantly limit practical use cases. To remove these limitations, this work proposes Grant, a novel framework that solves this problem efficiently while accepting arbitrary range filters and ANNS data structures. Grant can guarantee a search time sub-linear to the number of objects, which is not held by existing techniques. We conduct extensive experiments, and their results demonstrate that Grant outperforms existing techniques.

LLM-based agents now interact with their environments continuously, shaped by such organizational channels as user instructions, peer messages, and long-term memory. Existing safety research has examined these influences, but largely as separate agent components. How such factors jointly shape an agent's safety behavior from a unified perspective remains unmeasured. To bridge this gap, we advocate organizational behavior (OB) as a framework for studying the safety of advanced agents, reorganizing the objects of study, theoretical foundations, and experimental design around the relational structure in which agents operate. We present the first systematic formalization of counterproductive work behavior (CWB), a canonical safety-relevant subfield of OB, as Agentic Counterproductive Behavior (ACB). ACB specifies three organizational antecedents (vertical supervisor relations, horizontal peer norms, and internal cognitive structures) and maps them onto three counterproductive outcome dimensions (unauthorized disclosure, destructive operations, and production deviation). To operationalize ACB, we introduce Workerville, a controlled benchmark that manipulates organizational conditions over shared tasks, applying 16 organizational configurations to 210 tasks to yield 3,360 challenges, evaluated by human-validated agentic judges. Benchmarking 6 frontier LLMs, we find that (I) negative organizational antecedents exhibit non-monotonic amplification when combined, with the unauthorized-disclosure rate rising from 16.5% under no negative antecedent to 60.1% under two and falling back to 50.3% under three; (II) agents reproduce typical behavioral patterns predicted by human CWB research; (III) these results establish OB as a systematic framework for agent safety research, pointing toward a new research agenda.

Parallel magnetic resonance imaging reconstruction is an ill-posed inverse problem under undersampling. Multi-coil acquisition and Hankel lifting expose complementary repeated information: observations of the same anatomy across coils and repeated local k-space neighborhoods in overlapping windows. These dependencies guide recovery of missing k-space data. However, splitting lifted Hankel entries for self-supervision can place the original sample in both input and target, causing data leakage. We propose Hankel Subspace Self-Supervised Reconstruction (HSSRecon), a scan-specific reconstruction framework for parallel magnetic resonance imaging. HSSRecon partitions data by physical acquisition units before Hankel lifting and applies multiplicity normalization to repeated Hankel copies in overlapping windows. Rather than learning a mapping that directly predicts missing data, the network learns a compact complex-valued Hankel subspace operator. Reconstruction is performed over the original k-space variables using a conjugategradient solver with hard data consistency. This design separates structural learning in the Hankel domain from data consistency in the physical domain: the former exploits multi-coil and local Hankel correlations, while the latter solves over unacquired degrees of freedom. We provide theoretical analyses of physicalgroup splitting and multiplicity normalization, and establish positive definiteness, uniqueness, hard data consistency, and a finite-step conjugate-gradient error bound for the system. On fastMRI brain data with three contrasts and three sampling masks, HSSRecon achieves competitive peak signal-to-noise ratio, structural similarity, and normalized mean squared error across six aggregated conditions.

Coding assistants such as Claude Code and Codex have become a major application of LLM agents, yet existing benchmarks remain far from real-world use, particularly in task horizon and interaction length. Code assistants require completing long chains of development work in continuously evolving repositories, while repeatedly clarifying requirements and adapting implementations through multi-turn interaction. To address these gaps, we introduce SWE-Journey, a benchmark for more realistic evaluation of coding assistants. To address the task-horizon gap, we propose a weak-to-strong synthesis pipeline that automatically constructs long-horizon coding tasks. To address the interaction gap, we mine four representative user personas from real interaction data and build a user-simulation agent to reproduce realistic code-assistance interactions. On average, models pass over 75% of tests for requested functionality with software architects, but fewer than 25% with non-coders. These results show that current coding assistants still fall short of enabling reliable coding for non-coders. We further analyze the reasons for this gap and identify asking right, finding right, and fixing right as key capabilities during interaction.

Effective source recovery is critical to security applications such as malware analysis, vulnerability assessment, and legacy maintenance. Large Language Models (LLMs) are reshaping this field, shifting the paradigm away from rule-based heuristics to probabilistic and high fidelity semantic recovery of source code from assembly or classical decompiler-derived pseudo-C. However, despite rapid progress, the field suffers from fragmentation across numerous approaches as well as their non-unified evaluations, limiting objective comparisons. Further, existing works have limited coverage of embedded, IoT architectures and source languages beyond C/C++. In this work, we present the first Systematization of Knowledge (SoK) focused specifically on LLM-assisted binary-to-source recovery. We provide a granular design-centric taxonomy of LLM-assisted source recovery methods and systematic evaluations using seven key metrics along six evaluation dimensions. We evaluate state-of-the-art methods on 45,000 test samples derived from four standard and five embedded architectures, five optimization levels, and symbol stripping. We ablate the impact of design choices on recovery performance, including input representation, contextual enrichment, model scale, iteration and review roles using controlled in-house recovery pipelines and three off-the-shelf models. Finally, we test same-language and cross-language recovery capability covering four mature and two legacy languages. Our systematization and comprehensive evaluations provide key insights that guide future directions in this field.

We study personalized federated linear stochastic approximation (LSA), a framework which notably encompass personalized temporal difference learning. In this setting, heterogeneous agents collaborate to solve distinct linear fixed-point equations, each corresponding to an agent-specific learning problem. A central open question in personalized learning is whether a single method can adapt to an unknown level of heterogeneity by converging to each agent's personalized solution in all regimes while achieving a linear speedup in the number of agents when their learning problems are sufficiently similar. We answer this question affirmatively by introducing PF-LSA, a minimalist algorithm that mixes each agent's local stochastic update with the average update across agents, at no additional computational cost relative to standard federated methods. We prove that PF-LSA, achieves best-of-both-worlds guarantees without any prior knowledge on the level of heterogeneity. Our analysis is based on a sharp decomposition of the error into consensus and disagreement components. The consensus error decays rapidly, whereas the disagreement error decays more slowly but becomes negligible in low-heterogeneity regimes.

Accurate and scalable visual document retrieval (VDR) requires both fine-grained page understanding and efficient indexing, yet existing approaches struggle to achieve both. OCR-based text retrieval adds preprocessing latency and can lose visual and structural cues needed to understand complex pages. Single-vector vision-language models bypass OCR, but compressing an entire page into one vector limits the granularity of query–document matching. Multi-vector retrievers with MaxSim provide finer interactions, yet demand large indexes and still leave room for accuracy improvements. We argue that overcoming these limitations requires preserving query-relevant page evidence throughout representation learning and index construction. To this end, we introduce \textbf{EVIE} (Evidence-Vector-Informed Embeddings), a family of native visual document retrievers integrating three key innovations: (1) Evidence-judged data governance, which uses a multimodal judge to identify answer-bearing positives and filter unreliable negatives. (2) Bidirectional teacher–student learning with symmetric listwise distillation and prefix-based Matryoshka representation learning (Prefix-MRL), enabling one student checkpoint to serve six nested embedding dimensions without re-encoding. (3) Hierarchical agglomerative index compression (HAC), which clusters page tokens with spatial regularization and stores semantic centroids for single-stage MaxSim retrieval. Extensive experiments across 138 tasks from ViDoRe V1, V2, V3, and JinaVDR validate EVIE. EVIE-8B achieves 66.75 nDCG@10 on V3, exceeding the best external baseline by 1.43 points, with a four-suite average of 79.51. EVIE-4.5B with HAC retains 59.58 nDCG@10 at only 3.81 GiB per million pages, reducing vector payload by $128\times$. Together, these results improve the accuracy–storage trade-off for visual document retrieval.

Large language model agents can invoke tools fluently, but enterprise workflows demand more than selecting the right tools: actions must strictly comply with organizational policies, tool feedback often conceals hidden side effects under partial observability, and long-horizon tasks require persistent state tracking across multiple records. To address these challenges, we introduce E-Ledger, a multi-agent harness for safe and persistent execution. E-Ledger employs a code approval layer that checks every proposed action against policy before execution, and maintains a world ledger of verified hidden rules alongside evidence-backed dynamic state. Because hidden rules are typically unknown a priori, we further propose WorldAbduct, an abductive, world-model-driven harness evolution framework. WorldAbduct diagnoses execution trajectories across four complementary views (state consistency, world-observation gap, policy-gate correctness, and goal judgment) to hypothesize latent rules, and verifies them through targeted abductive interactions before integrating them into the ledger. On the enterprise benchmark World of Workflows, E-Ledger with WorldAbduct improves safe task completion across four LLM backbones, outperforming the strongest evolution baseline by 5–15 percentage points. Experiments in ScienceWorld and DiscoveryWorld further show that abductive harness evolution carries over to scientific environments. Our code is available at https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/E-LEDGER-WorldAbduct.

We study online sparse linear regression (OSLR) where any algorithm is restricted to accessing only $b$ out of $d$ attributes per instance for prediction and $b_0\geq 0$ additional attributes after prediction, which was proved to be NP-hard. Previous work focused on designing computationally efficient algorithms under regularity assumptions, but did not characterize its information theoretic complexity. In this work, we give the first lower bound on the minimax regret of OSLR and design algorithms with better upper bounds without regularity assumptions. We characterize how minimax regret scales with problem-dependent parameters, capturing the information theoretic complexity of OSLR.

Acquiring realistic microstructure data through Electron Backscatter Diffraction (EBSD) is costly and time consuming, often relying on specialised equipment. As microstructures strongly influence material properties, generating realistic samples is essential for modelling the behaviour of polycrystalline materials. We introduce a generative model for synthesising realistic polycrystalline microstructures using flow matching and graph neural networks. By representing microstructures as anisotropic power diagrams, our model learns a compact geometric parametrisation and can render generated samples at arbitrary pixel resolution. A $C_4$-equivariant architecture incorporates rotational symmetry directly into the model, ensuring that rotations of the input noise produce corresponding rotations of the generated microstructure. We also demonstrate how training-free guidance can be used to generate complex microstructures, based on user defined objective function. In particular, we generate microstructures resembling a copper weld, cast metal slab, 3D-printed stainless steel and heterogeneous lamella titanium.

Synthetic tasks are increasingly used both as probes of language-model capability and as pretraining data. Both uses are often justified by loss reduction: falling loss is treated as informative, and faster loss reduction with more sampling as evidence that a task is worth sampling. We separate three signals. A task is diagnostic when its loss tracks global pretraining progress; it is teachable when its loss responds to its own token budget; and a data source transfers when including it improves a downstream target. We study controlled pretraining in which 70% of the corpus is fixed general Python and the remaining 30% is a simplex over three source families: OpenCodeInstruct, a curated suite of 12 code-adjacent synthetic tasks, and 15 literature-derived probe tasks. Across a task-budget sweep we detect teachability for 14 of 27 tasks, with a sharp asymmetry between the two synthetic families (10/12 curated versus 4/15 literature-derived). Teachability and downstream transfer give different rankings. On the mixture-simplex edge between the curated suite and OpenCodeInstruct, HumanEval pass@20 after a fixed fine-tuning stage rises from 15.9 at pure curated data to its highest observed value, 22.6, at a mixture that is 75% OpenCodeInstruct, then falls to 19.5 at pure OpenCodeInstruct. Curated synthetic data therefore has conditional value: it contributes as a limited share of a mixture that a target-aligned source still dominates. Finally, a loss-based adaptive scheduler exposes the mismatch between residual loss reducibility and downstream transfer. Across three 60k-step free-ratio runs, Ado drives the OpenCodeInstruct share below 5% within the first 5k steps and to 1.2–1.4% by the end of training, and underperforms its matched fixed-mixture controls by 2.4–11.0 percentage points. Optimizing near-term task-loss reduction moves the mixture away from the region that transfers.

NeRF and Gaussian splatting methods have been successfully applied on X-ray scenes where the views are too sparse for 3D reconstruction via classical methods. Ultra-sparse scenes with 10 or fewer views such as those with high-rate or low-dose acquisition still, however, present a significant challenge. To address this problem we present a new framework, Optimised X-ray Neural Radiance Fields (OX-NeRF), that combines cross-scene feature learning with scene-specific optimisation to reconstruct sets of related scenes. OX-NeRF employs a convolutional neural network (CNN) to identify cross-scene features while maintaining scene-specific multi-resolution hash grids of spatial features. The paired representations are fused and passed to a multilayer perceptron (MLP); the CNN, hash grids and MLP are then jointly optimised end-to-end. Benchmarking on parallel-beam and cone-beam X-ray datasets shows OX-NeRF provides significantly higher reconstruction accuracy on ultra-sparse scenes compared to existing radiance field methods.

Solving high-dimensional structural model updating problems requires an algorithm capable of navigating complex, non-convex landscapes with correlated parameters. Existing hybrid evolutionary algorithms typically rely on static architectures or fixed switching rules, resulting in disjointed search phases. To address this, this study proposes a Deep Reinforcement Learning-governed dynamic DE-CMAES Orchestration (DRL-DCO) algorithm, in which a Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG)-based actor-critic agent continuously governs the evolutionary process as a single, unified system rather than a mechanical concatenation of algorithms. Guided by a progression-aware state representation and a diversity-informed reward, the agent fluidly reallocates computational resources between the differencevector-based exploration of Differential Evolution (DE) and the covariance-guided exploitation of CMA-ES, while jointly regulating population size, elite preservation, and a restart mechanism to escape local optima. This allows DRL-DCO to autonomously transition between exploration-dominant, exploitation-dominant, and mixed-strategy regimes across generations. Beyond the training phase, the trained actor can operate in a supervision-free inference mode, where the internalized policy autonomously orchestrates DE and CMA-ES control from observed search states through forward inference alone, without critic evaluation or weight updates, enabling faster deployment while retaining full effectiveness. Validated on high-dimensional single-objective optimization benchmarks and the IASC-ASCE structural health monitoring benchmark, DRL-DCO achieves superior convergence accuracy and robustness compared to state-of-the-art adaptive and hybrid evolutionary algorithms, as well as single-operator DRL-governed baselines.

While predicting prosody from text is an established task in the field, the opposite direction, predicting text that fits a given prosodic pattern, remains largely overlooked. We find this unfortunate, because this opposite direction could lead to some very interesting use cases. Therefore, in this paper, we make the first steps in the prosody-to-text direction by inves- tigating how much of the original sentence can be recovered from its prosodic pattern. To this end, we fine-tune the Whis- per model using only the 12 lowest Mel bins (low-pass filter with approximately 450Hz cutoff), and obtain surprisingly accurate results (WER 36%), with 10% of utterances be- ing recovered perfectly, and 40% of utterances having Word Error Rate at or below 25%. We also find that, given the correct prefix, the next token was predicted correctly in 79% of cases. Our results suggest that the relationship between low-frequency speech features and lexical content is much stronger than previously thought, and we believe that direct- ing more attention to this topic might open the door to new applications, such as using prosody to guide text generation of modern LLMs