Papers

Representation alignment with pretrained visual encoders improves diffusion transformer training but requires auxiliary encoders and extra training overhead. Recent approaches instead exploit representations from the generative model's own variational autoencoder (VAE). However, reconstruction-oriented VAE features are not optimized for the semantic discrimination and spatial structure needed for generative learning. We introduce CoVA (Composed VAE Representations), a lightweight framework that composes VAE features online into stage-wise guidance for flow-matching training. A small latent composer is jointly trained with class supervision, masked latent reconstruction, and horizontal-flip consistency, yielding semantically discriminative, spatially structured dense features and sample-dependent class posteriors. CoVA aligns intermediate SiT features with the composed representations early in training, then removes the increasingly detrimental alignment and reuses detached composer posteriors for sample-dependent soft label conditioning. We further uncover a hidden confound in soft label conditioning: averaging class embeddings attenuates their magnitude, coupling semantic interpolation with conditioning strength. This attenuation alone can substantially improve FID while degrading Recall, revealing a non-semantic source of the apparent gain. CoVA corrects this confound by restoring the hard-label magnitude, isolating posterior-dependent directional semantics. CoVA adds only 8.5M training-only auxiliary parameters (1.3% of SiT-XL/2) and introduces no inference-time overhead. On ImageNet 256$\times$256, CoVA reduces SiT-XL/2 FID from 17.2 to 7.4 (57%) in 400K steps. With classifier-free guidance, it achieves an FID of 2.03 in only 400 epochs, versus 2.06 after 1,400 epochs for vanilla SiT-XL/2.

Web crawling is a major source of large language model (LLM) pretraining data, yet data-selection pipelines discard a large share of crawled pages. We investigate how a crawler should allocate its budget across and within hosts to collect more high-quality pretraining data. Combining document-level quality classifier scores, web-graph centrality metrics, and Common Crawl's per-host crawl coverage, we find that roughly half of the variation in classifier scores occurs between hosts. In the crawls we analyze, a few pages from a host also provide a useful estimate of the quality of its remaining pages. Common Crawl uses harmonic centrality, a graph centrality metric, to guide its crawl allocation. In our simulations, using centrality to choose which hosts to crawl yields limited gains over random ordering and performs worse for some classifiers. For deciding how deeply to crawl each host, sampling a few pages and then fetching more from hosts with higher-scoring samples collects several times more high-quality pages per fetch than uniform depth or centrality-based allocation. Finally, Common Crawl's observed per-host coverage has little correlation with the evaluated quality signals. We estimate that tens of millions of high-quality pages remain among known but uncrawled URLs in each crawl examined, with most concentrated on a small share of hosts.

The road transportation sector is undergoing a radical transformation, working for a future where all vehicles will be autonomous and connected. A key challenge in this vision concerns intersections, which will no longer rely on traffic lights or traditional right-of-way rules. Instead, algorithms and communication protocols will be employed to optimize traffic flow. In this context, we are developing a testbed where cars equipped with wireless connectivity exchange information with a remote controller and coordinate their maneuvers. As the vehicles navigate through different types of intersections with various routes, they communicate with the controller, adjusting their speed to pass through intersections without stopping. This demo specifically showcases a hardware-in-the-loop (HiL) implementation of such intelligent intersection, using the SUMO traffic simulator to emulate vehicle positions. Real hardware and software components, which are designed for use in vehicles and roadside infrastructure, are employed to enable real-time data exchange of contextual and control information, running the cooperative coordination algorithm.

We present a training framework for developing core competencies in the practical operationalisation of AI ethics: (1) identifying ethical concerns; (2) determining which standard ethics requirements they implicate; (3) selecting and prioritising concrete technical and organisational measures to address them; and (4) recognising ethics tensions and reasoning about trade-offs where such tensions cannot be fully resolved. The framework is intended for researchers and engineers in AI, Research Ethics Committee members, policymakers, and students, providing them with practical tools for translating abstract ethical requirements into concrete actions. The framework provides a step-by-step approach organised around four interconnected tasks: issue identification, requirement mapping, measure selection, and tension identification. These tasks are supported by a suite of training materials, including an Ethics Checklist and a Portfolio of Measures. Here, we complement them with a set of practical exercises of three different types as well as trainer guides. We also discuss lessons learned in pilot training sessions and offer recommendations for trainers.

The efficiency of serverless computing fundamentally depends on rapid function startup, a challenge increasingly addressed by restoring from virtual machine snapshots. However, because content deduplication techniques can open timing-channel attacks that leak sensitive tenant data, production platforms like AWS Lambda instead enforce strict, zero-sharing isolation between snapshots of different tenants. While secure, this isolation precludes the deduplication of common infrastructure components, wasting per-worker cache capacity and exacerbating cold-start latency through inefficient remote fetching. Our characterization reveals that non-sensitive, shareable infrastructure accounts for roughly 70% of a typical snapshot's contents and, on average, about 50% of its working set. We present SnapShare, a cluster-wide snapshot management system that co-designs storage and caching to exploit this commonality without compromising sensitive data isolation. SnapShare classifies a snapshot page as shareable only when its full content matches that of a page from a provider-approved source; any non-matching content is treated as isolated private content. Common infrastructure components are selectively deduplicated and pinned across the cluster's worker nodes, while private data remains strictly isolated and is eagerly fetched as part of the tracked working set, falling back to on-demand retrieval only for pages that fall outside it. Implemented as an extension to Knative, SnapShare reduces end-to-end tail request slowdowns by 10-29% compared to traditional working-set and chunk-based platforms. It also reduces remote storage requirements by 39% and local cache footprints by 38%, reducing network retrieval payloads and bounding worst-case fetch delays by 10x.

Partial differential equation (PDE) surrogate modeling often relies on either dense observations or access to governing equations/physics constraints. In practice, observations can be sparse and partial, and the underlying physics may be partially specified or unavailable. We introduce SBNO, an equation-free paired-data diffusion bridge matching framework that learns conditional operators for both forward and inverse PDE problems under partial observations. SBNO uses diffusion Schrödinger bridge matching to learn a pair of time-dependent drifts from a mask-aware endpoint coupling that preserves empirical input-solution pairing during training and supports both PDE-task directions within a single framework. At inference time, SBNO produces a deterministic point reconstruction by integrating the probability-flow ODE constructed from the learned drift pair, without inference-time observation or PDE guidance-weight tuning. On five PDE benchmarks with 5% observations, SBNO achieves superior or comparable accuracy to baselines while demonstrating lower test-instance error dispersion. Furthermore, SBNO is at least $9.7 \times$ faster and reduces GPU memory by at least $4.3 \times$ compared to guided-diffusion baselines.

Drag-based image editing provides an intuitive interface for spatially controlled image manipulation by allowing users to specify handle and target points. Existing methods have made substantial progress through optimization-based, one-step, and feed-forward formulations, but they often interpret drag instructions as geometric displacements. This limits their effectiveness when the desired edit depends on interpreting image content and inferring a plausible semantic transformation from sparse point constraints. We introduce ThinkDrag, a unified multimodal framework for drag-based image editing with visual reasoning. ThinkDrag is trained to associate point constraints with meaningful object- and scene-level transformations, and can optionally produce an explicit reasoning trace that interprets the intended edit before image generation. This reasoning trace improves interpretability, particularly for ambiguous drags. Drag Endpoint Markers, motivated by an analysis of cross-image attention, provide an explicit correspondence signal that grounds each drag in image space. To support this framework, we construct a supervised dataset of semantic drag transformations paired with reasoning traces and introduce DragBench++, a benchmark targeting challenging drag-based editing scenarios with reference edit solutions. Experiments show that ThinkDrag achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving generation quality and plausibility while maintaining competitive point-following precision.

This paper considers channel state information (CSI) prediction using neural networks for time-varying multi-antenna channels from noisy historical observations. The main challenge is to exploit temporal correlation while distinguishing channel evolution from observation noise. We propose JEPA-kMMVAE, which combines a joint-embedding predictive architecture with a k-memory Markov variational autoencoder to predict future CSI through temporally structured latent representations. The framework supports direct prediction and residual corrections relative to the latest latent state and noisy CSI observation. Simulation results show that the residual configuration outperforms the evaluated baselines at moderate and high input CSI signal-to-noise ratios, while sequence baselines remain more accurate under stronger noise.

Memory retrieval aims to identify evidence from stored records to answer a query. Stored records with different factual details may share topics, entities, or events. Such shared contents would make records without the required evidence more likely to receive high similarity scores and outrank the correct evidence. In this paper, we use the information shared by these records to construct local references for query-memory matching. We propose NEighborhood-Aware Residuals (NEAR), a training-free framework that uses these references to construct residual representations that complement the original embeddings. Specifically, each memory derives a reference direction from its neighbors, and each query obtains its reference from a precomputed table. Using these references, NEAR constructs projection residuals for both queries and memories. These residuals are combined with the original embeddings for a single approximate nearest-neighbor search over a fixed memory index. Experiments on eight long-context retrieval benchmarks show consistent improvements across nine embedding models. Downstream evaluations show that NEAR improves question-answering performance.

Speech anonymization is evaluated with automatic speaker verification attackers whose performance depends on the attribute distribution of both their training and evaluation data, which may bias privacy estimates for some speaker groups. To alleviate this issue, we introduce VoxAnon, a dataset built from VoxCeleb1 and 2 with training and evaluation splits balanced across gender, age, accent, and pitch. We extract and cross-check attributes using two complementary methods, balance trial lists per subgroup, and draw test/enrollment utterances from distinct video sources in order to limit linguistic and session bias. Comparing VoxAnon with unbalanced training and test data across four attackers and three anonymizers, we show that attribute imbalance changes which subgroups appear hardest to re-identify, in directions that depend on the attribute. In the balanced setting, residual disparities persist, mostly tied to accent and pitch, and depend on the anonymizer/attacker pair. Code and trial lists are publicly available.

Inside a federated learning system a participant can quietly study the shared model and learn about others' private data. The usual defense, differential privacy, often adds so much noise that the model is no longer worth training. In cross-silo FL, where participants are a few accountable organizations and the server is trusted, we ask whether the server can instead interrogate clients. Each round it sends a secret challenge batch and asks every client to return a checksum of the gradient that batch induces, together with a timing. A client that mutated the model state, as an active generative-adversarial-network discriminator attacker does, returns a wrong checksum. We make this checksum robust to benign cross-platform floating-point non-determinism with a quantized fingerprint compared under a small tolerance. It flags two distinct active attacks at a true-positive rate of $1.0$ with no false positives on the checksum axis, stable across the fingerprint's parameters and up to $50$ clients at malicious ratios to $40\%$, for $32\,\mathrm{ms}$ of server work and $4.35\,\mathrm{kB}$ per response. Against a purely passive attacker the only signal is timing, and it is not robust: a cohort-relative test detects only in low-jitter conditions while a false-positive-free per-client baseline is blind, so no configuration delivers both. An attacker that answers the challenge on an untouched copy of the model while tampering with a replica evades the audit entirely. Therefore the checksum is a reliable in-band signal against attackers that do not decouple the audited computation from the attacked one, and it composes with differential privacy, whose accuracy cost we quantify on Texas100, rather than replacing it.

6D pose estimation of novel objects without CAD models remains an open challenge: model-free methods must build the object representation from scratch during onboarding and have long trailed their model-based counterparts. We present NovaSplat, a model-free pipeline that closes this gap. From a short smartphone video captured at onboarding, we train a 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) model that serves both as a template source for detection and coarse pose estimation and as a differentiable backbone for pose refinement. Our refiner optimizes the object-to-camera pose with combined photometric and geometric losses under a continuous rotation parametrization free of gradient singularities. On a household-object benchmark, NovaSplat surpasses all model-based methods. On a challenging industrial benchmark with textureless and specular surfaces, it outperforms all model-free competitors while substantially narrowing the gap to model-based ones. We further introduce NovaSplat-Lite, an inference variant that is $3.1\times$ faster at negligible accuracy cost. Code will be made available at \href{https://github.com/POSE-Lab/novasplat}{https://github.com/POSE-Lab/novasplat}.

The escalating environmental footprint of the Information and Communication Technol- ogy (ICT) sectorwith global Data Center electric- ity usage potentially reaching 3% by 2030 and the imperative for real-time responsiveness in smart buildings demand a foundational shift towards Edge Computing. This article proposes a holis- tic architectural and algorithmic approach for cre- ating autonomous, resilient, and privacy-preserving learning systems within smart buildings, advancing the core concept of the building itself as the data center. Our contributions, demonstrating originality compared to conventional centralized systems, are structured around three main pillars: 1) Validation of resilient data acquisition chains using the af- fordable Arduino ecosystem (Uno R4 WiFi/BME280) and secure persistence solutions including centralized archiving (Node-RED/MySQL) and secure remote transfer (Python/rsync/SSH). 2). The proposal of a lightweight, KOptim orchestration framework, inter- operable with the FIWARE standard, for the dynamic management of Service Level Agreements (SLA). 3) The adaptation and experimental valida- tion of the Generalized Hebbian Algorithm (GHA) for Principal Component Analysis (PCA) on low- power microcontrollers,We introduce and compare an iterative learning strategy using data buffers, featuring sorting and explicit preservation of extreme samples to maintain diversity. Experimental results on the high-dimensional Tour Perret sensor data confirm that this novel method, despite introducing a necessary temporal complexity of O(W log W ) due to sorting, achieves convergence and final result quality that is visually equivalent to processing the entire dataset in full memory, reliably identifying two distinct operational states.

Local online training on resource-constrained platforms requires low computational and training-state overhead. We study the numerical stability and computational efficiency of half-precision proximal policy optimization (PPO) on commodity GPUs. Directly converting PPO training to FP16 is unreliable because numerical errors feed back through policy updates and subsequent data collection, while PPO repeatedly compares a current policy with a fixed behavior policy. We propose PPO-FP16 with three structure-aware modules. Global scalar protection stabilizes statistics shared across a minibatch or parameter update. Policy-change residual protection extracts and preserves small differences between the current and behavior policies. Efficient persistent-update protection stabilizes optimizer state and parameter writeback while reducing state storage. These changes preserve the PPO objective, hyperparameters, and training budget. Across six continuous-control tasks and five seeds, PPO-FP16 achieves the lowest mean return-AUC rank (1.90) among the four methods and ranks first in 17 of 30 environment-seed comparisons. Eight of nine performance configurations yield PPO update speedups ranging from 1.16 to 2.03 times. Relative to Full FP32 Adam, optimizer-state memory is reduced by 71.7 to 74.9 percent, and peak allocated GPU memory is reduced by up to 44.5 percent. The results show that protecting a small set of structurally important quantities can deliver stable, efficient FP16 PPO without retuning.

We introduce MORAD, an online reinforcement learning framework for backbone-conditioned RNA diffusion models that trains a single shared policy across diverse target backbones. Structure-conditioned RNA inverse design seeks nucleotide sequences compatible with a target three-dimensional backbone, yet existing reinforcement learning approaches either optimize a separate policy for each target backbone or rely on offline preference optimization, leaving online post-training of a reusable backbone-conditioned model largely unexplored. MORAD combines backbone-conditioned group sampling, group-relative reward normalization, and a forward-process diffusion objective. Beyond existing RL rewards that primarily target tertiary structural quality, MORAD jointly optimizes six measurements spanning tertiary geometry, base pairing, ensemble behavior, and sequence composition. To aggregate these heterogeneous objectives despite differences in scale and optimization direction, MORAD maps each measurement to a bounded desirability score and combines them with a weighted geometric mean. Compared with a tertiary-structure-only reward, this multi-objective formulation improves 10 of the 11 evaluation metrics that have a preferred direction. Applied to pretrained RIDE, MORAD improves GDT-TS by 16.0% (from 0.3300 to 0.3827) and pairing MCC by 19.4% (from 0.6110 to 0.7295), while reducing normalized ensemble defect by 27.5% (from 0.3906 to 0.2830). On the test set, MORAD outperforms RiboDiffusion, gRNAde, and RDesign across tertiary structural accuracy, secondary-structure pairing, and thermodynamic quality, establishing a new state of the art in structure-conditioned RNA inverse design.

DAG structures can be learned from observations by incorporating acyclicity via smooth constraints, such as DAGMA's log-determinant function. Typically, observations and the underlying DAG are related through linear structural equation models, with Gaussianity assumption on the disturbances at each node. Extending DAG learning methods that account for scale and tail behavior of disturbances that vary across nodes remains a challenge. We propose a node-varying Student-$t$ DAGMA that jointly estimates the graph structure, node-specific disturbance scales, and the degrees-of-freedom parameter. A Gaussian scale-mixture representation yields an iteratively reweighted formulation that down-weights large standardized residuals. Building on existing results, we also establish identifiability of the graph and disturbance parameters. Synthetic experiments demonstrate improved structural recovery under heterogeneous heavy-tailed disturbances, and experiments on real finance data show that the proposed method yields lower test negative log-likelihood than the evaluated baselines.

LLM judges are increasingly deployed as panels, and disagreement among panel members is often read as a symptom of an unclear rubric. We test a label-free procedure that turns this disagreement into rubric repairs. The procedure decomposes each rubric into sub-criteria, ranks them by cross-judge disagreement on a development split, and has an editor model rewrite only the most contested ones. An additional stage that moves text-checkable sub-criteria to deterministic checkers transferred none in our evaluation. Human labels are never used to select or edit clauses; they are used only to evaluate the outcome. We pre-specified four hypotheses in a version-controlled protocol and evaluated six rubric conditions with a panel of five judges from three providers on SummEval, the HealthBench meta-evaluation, and USR Topical-Chat, for a total of 129,770 judge requests, excluding retries. On SummEval, the procedure raised inter-judge Krippendorff's $\alpha$ by 0.069 (95% CI 0.046 to 0.092) over the original rubric and by 0.074 over a control that applied the same edits to an equal number of randomly chosen clauses that were not selected. Agreement with expert ratings showed no detectable change (Kendall $\tau$ difference -0.007, 95% CI -0.037 to 0.021). On HealthBench and USR, neither inter-judge agreement nor human agreement met the preregistered effect criteria. In a preregistered secondary comparison, human agreement after editing the contested clauses was lower than after editing the control clauses on all three datasets in point estimate, although no interval excluded zero. Selecting clauses by disagreement makes judges agree with each other more than editing arbitrary clauses does, but in our setting the added consensus did not bring the judges closer to human annotators. We will release code, frozen rubrics, item identifiers, and judge scores.

Co-speech gesture video generation aims to synthesize realistic, audio-driven portrait videos from a single reference image and a speech signal. Despite advances in visual quality, diffusion-based approaches still suffer from degraded local details and imperfect audio-visual alignment. We present PAGE (Parts-Aware GuidancE), a general, backbone-agnostic optimization framework for diffusion-based generation that enhances local spatial fidelity and global audio-visual consistency at both the training-objective and denoising-trajectory levels. During training, we propose Parts-Specific Reweighting (PSR), which adaptively increases supervision in semantically important regions such as lips, eyes, and hands, improving visual fidelity in perceptually critical areas. During inference, we introduce Consistency Classifier Guidance (CCG), an audio-conditioned latent classifier that identifies and corrects audio-visual inconsistencies in the generated video. We further design Differential Guidance (DG), an efficient inference strategy that refines facial and body motion separately while avoiding cross-region interference. To enable large-scale evaluation, we construct the Chinese Announcer Speech (CAS) dataset, the first comprehensive Chinese benchmark for co-speech gesture portrait video generation. Compared with the widely used PATS dataset, CAS includes substantially more identities, video clips, and scene diversity. Extensive experiments on both PATS and CAS demonstrate that PAGE achieves state-of-the-art performance in perceptual quality, gesture diversity, and audio-visual alignment. Project page: https://aigc-explorer.github.io/PAGE/.

Modeling human reactions to spatial audio requires understanding both what is heard and where it comes from. Prior work generates motion offline from complete acoustic and spatial input sequences. Humans, however, react to sounds without knowing what they will hear next. We present Sonic-AMG, to our knowledge the first framework for streaming human motion generation from spatial audio. The model encodes acoustic content and body-relative source geometry as separate tokens. Conditioned on these tokens, a causal transformer with a flow head generates continuous motion latents, from which a causal decoder reconstructs motion segments. Standard teacher-forced training derives motion histories and body-relative source locations from ground-truth motion, whereas streaming inference relies on generated motion for both, resulting in a training-inference mismatch. To reduce this history discrepancy, we introduce rehearsal training, which combines full-sequence teacher-forced supervision with supervised prediction along short autoregressive self-rollouts. To keep spatial conditioning consistent with generated motion, we propose spatial feedback, which recomputes body-relative source locations from generated root poses during both rehearsal training and inference. On SAM, Sonic-AMG achieves state-of-the-art FID and R-precision. It further supports real-time online generation of coherent reactions across sound events and source locations. Project page: https://jingchengni.com/sonic-amg/.

Pretrained vision transformers learn structured image representations spanning spatial patch tokens and non-spatial tokens. Recent analyses suggest that non-spatial register tokens encode global scene properties such as illumination, blur, and style. Yet patch-based image decoders discard these outputs, leaving the decoder to recover image appearance from patches alone. We investigate whether retaining register features improves decoding when the complete spatial patch representation is already available. We study this question using representation autoencoders (RAEs) with frozen register-equipped encoders. Our decoder processes four register tokens together with all patch tokens through joint self-attention. Appearance probes, paired reconstruction-error analysis, and fixed-decoder register substitutions examine which global image properties are accessible from registers and how their values affect reconstructed pixels. For generation, we train a multi-head attention pooling (MHAP) predictor to recover register features from sampled patches, keeping the pretrained diffusion model and its samples unchanged. On ImageNet-1K, our ViT-B decoders achieve mean reconstruction FIDs of 0.472 with DINOv2 and 0.442 with DINOv3, reductions of 9.5% and 5.2% relative to their respective patch-only baselines. The corresponding PSNRs are 19.73 and 20.54 dB. For generation, our DINOv2 models achieve a mean FID of 1.641, 9.8% below the patch-only baseline on identical sampled patches.

Multi-source semantic information fusion enables edge networks to support global inference using observations collected by distributed terminals. However, limited communication and computation resources restrict semantic uploading, leaving the edge server with incomplete tokens that differ in modality, semantic granularity, arrival time, and channel condition. The value of these tokens also depends on the complementary or redundant information provided by other terminals. In this paper, we propose a multi-source and multi-dimensional semantic information fusion framework that coordinates terminal uploading and edge-side fusion under resource constraints. We develop Hyper-Slot to combine semantic content with available token attributes through iterative token-to-slot assignment and slot-to-token feedback, producing a compact representation for global inference. To encourage useful semantic uploading, we further design a contribution-based incentive mechanism that uses Hyper-Slot assignments to evaluate information coverage and cross-type complementarity. A bi-level Stackelberg-Nash game determines the server reward pool and terminal transmission-quality strategies while accounting for computation and communication energy costs. Experiments on a tri-modal extension of COCO2014 and image-text retrieval on Flickr30K show that Hyper-Slot improves mAP by 3.66 percentage points and RSum by 15.9 points over the strongest evaluated baselines, respectively, while reducing the number of parameters by more than 80% compared with a naive concatenation-based fusion baseline.

High-precision retrieval over external knowledge bases is essential for LLM agents to operate effectively. However, existing Information Retrieval (IR) research primarily optimizes query-side retrievers (e.g., ColBERT, BGE) and generators (e.g., Self-RAG, GraphRAG), while reducing corpus-side representation to chunking. This leaves index-side quality an underexplored lever. We propose Pre-Retrieval Index Modeling & Enhancement (PRIME), an index-side optimization framework built on two complementary tracks: an LLM-driven Semantic Restructuring (SR) track that transforms long documents into structured, information-dense sections, and a deterministic Metadata Synthesis (MS) and Hierarchical Retrieval (HR) track that extracts semantic anchors and heading structure for coarse-to-fine section retrieval. Our evaluations show that deterministic metadata matches structure-aware chunking's retrieval quality while cutting embedding computation by 45.8 $\times$ and index vector count by 22.4 $\times$. On top of these gains, Semantic Restructuring (SR) further improves Answer-F1 by 13.7% in full deployment, with characterized quality-fidelity-cost trade-offs. Across QASPER, BRIGHT, and NFCorpus, we further characterize three qualitative regimes that determine whether index-side optimization helps or degrades retrieval, while showing that these index-side effects are neutralized under a strong reranker.

Lagrangian Neural Networks (LNNs) learn mechanical systems from trajectory data by parameterizing a scalar Lagrangian and deriving the dynamics through the Euler-Lagrange equations, biasing the model toward motion that respects the variational structure of mechanics. The interactions studied so far have been pairwise-additive, leaving open whether LNNs can recover an irreducible many-body interaction from motion alone. We address this using the Axilrod-Teller triple-dipole interaction, the leading three-body dispersion term, whose dependence on the collective geometry of three particles cannot be represented by any sum of pairwise terms. We prescribe the kinetic energy exactly and learn only the potential, as a function of interparticle distances and angles. Combined with a signal-aware sampling strategy that concentrates training data where the three-body signal is strongest while preserving broad coverage of configuration space, this recovers the interaction from accelerations alone. The learned potential reproduces the radial scaling, angular dependence, and characteristic sign reversal of the Axilrod-Teller interaction, and generates stable trajectories. Embedding it within a pairwise Lennard-Jones potential lets us examine its observability: the three-body term is recovered once its dynamical signature exceeds the residual modeling error, which it does cleanly at amplified coupling but not at the coupling of a real noble gas, bracketing the transition between the two. Finally, symbolic regression on the trained potential, with no assumed functional form, returns the Axilrod-Teller expression with angular numerator, radial law, and coupling constant intact. An LNN with domain-specific structure can thus recover an irreducible three-body interaction from trajectories as a closed-form law, pointing toward learning interaction laws whose structure is not known a priori.

Prompt optimizers rewrite a prompt to raise one target metric, but prompts also state requirements the metric does not score, such as an output format, citations, or abstention. In a preregistered study, we run GEPA, MIPROv2, and TextGrad on HotpotQA, SQuAD 2.0, and IFEval and count per-item violations of unscored requirements with deterministic checks. By the preregistered criterion, all three optimizers produce regressions, substantially on HotpotQA, where net regression in citation validity reaches 10.7 to 41.6 points while exact match rises by 21 to 34 points. A post-hoc decomposition changes this reading. The optimized prompts elicit reasoning before the required JSON object, and under the 200-token output cap used throughout, 13.9% to 47.0% of responses end before any answer appears. Among parseable outputs, net regression is within 3 points of zero. With a 1,024-token cap, extraction failures disappear, content regression stays below 1 point, and exact match rises further. Two simple gates fail the preregistered criterion. The side effect is narrower than hypothesized: optimized prompts are more accurate and break an explicit output contract, and a lenient target metric does not show the cost.

Distilling long-chain reasoning trajectories from large teacher models provides an effective way to improve the reasoning ability of small language models. However, existing methods typically select a fixed training set before distillation, overlooking that the usefulness of a reasoning example changes as the student evolves. This mismatch becomes especially costly when only a small number of teacher trajectories can be used for training. Besides, examples already mastered provide little new supervision, while examples far beyond the capability of student may be difficult to learn from. Training data should therefore adapt as model capability evolves, yet reliable data selection is difficult when the student is initially weak. To address these challenges, our key idea is to first establish the basic reasoning capability and then adapt the training data to the evolving capability boundary of the student. We propose BoundaryEvo, a two-stage data–model co-evolution framework. In Capability Priming, we directly distill a small set of teacher-generated long reasoning trajectories without using a separate model to judge and filter them, allowing the student to acquire an initial reasoning capability before capability-aware data selection. In Capability-Boundary Co-Evolution, we repeatedly select questions that the current student has not mastered but the expert can reliably solve, and update the training data as the student evolves. With only 1,000 training examples, BoundaryEvo consistently outperforms static and dynamic data selection baselines across 11 reasoning benchmarks, raising the original Qwen3.5-4B accuracy from 62.9 to 75.3 on IMO-AnswerBench and from 26.8 to 46.0 on AMO-Bench. The code and data will be made publicly available.

This paper describes our systems for the Track 1 time-stamped speaker-attributed ASR task of the SmartGlasses Challenge. To handle overlapping speech, background noise and far-field conditions in two-person conversations, we employ SoulX-Transcriber, a multimodal large language model that takes full-length audio as input and generates structured transcriptions. In addition, we investigate the effect of speech frontend processing, including a rule-based Guided Source Separation method and a data-driven speech separation model, both of which improve performance on the validation set. Considering inference stability, our final submission uses the fine-tuned SoulX-Transcriber system, achieving a tcpCER of 6.22 on the test set.

Skeleton-based human action recognition has gained increasing attention due to the stability of skeleton data across diverse environments and advances in motion capture technologies. Following the success of supervised learning approaches, self-supervised learning approaches, particularly contrastive learning ones, have achieved impressive performance. However, they remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks. In this work, we propose a plug-in robustification module via quantization for contrastive learning in self-supervised skeleton-based human action recognition (QCLR), which enhances the robustness of representations against adversarial attacks while preserving their representational capability. Specifically, we employ a dual-level quantization scheme across the encoding pipeline, which breaks the gradient propagation and absorbs small adversarial perturbations within the quantization bins. To mitigate the impact of inevitable quantization error, we further design an attention-guided multi-faceted quantization strategy to maintain the representation quality. Experiments on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that integrating QCLR into a progressive lineage of mainstream contrastive learning models substantially improves robustness against both gradient-based white-box and gradient-free black-box adversarial attacks, while preserving highly competitive classification accuracy.

We study investigative subgraph extraction for Anti-Money Laundering (AML) transaction graphs using the Shortest Paths Network Search Algorithm (SPNSA), which aggregates shortest paths among a small input feed of entities. Since SPNSA is highly sensitive to the feed choice, we evaluate several graph-only feed selection strategies and propose a motif-based coherent feed selection method. Experiments on the IBM-AML benchmark (HI-Small, LI-Small, HI-Medium) and the Elliptic Bitcoin transaction graph show that the proposed strategy yields markedly higher illicit ratios in the extracted subgraph than random and degree-based heuristics on Elliptic and the IBM-AML HI variants, while keeping the output compact.

Vision-language models (VLMs) exhibit complementary capabilities, yet selecting the most suitable expert for a given image-question query remains challenging due to heterogeneous multimodal inputs and varying expert strengths. Existing routing approaches rely on text-based cues or static model profiles, failing to capture fine-grained visual evidence and expert-specific failure patterns. To address this, we propose MHR-Router, a multimodal heterogeneous retrieval-enhanced adaptive routing framework for VLM inference. It accurately dispatches each multimodal query to the most suitable VLM expert via local retrieval evidence. MHR-Router consists of two stages: (1) Multimodal Routing Representation, which fuses frozen multimodal features into a comprehensive query representation; and (2) Heterogeneous Retrieval-Enhanced Adaptive Routing, which retrieves expert-specific success and failure memories as local evidence and employs a shared scorer to adaptively select the optimal expert. Experiments show that MHR-Router effectively achieves heterogeneous modality routing and consistently improves accuracy over traditional baselines.

Memory-augmented assistants retrieve evidence from stored conversations and documents to answer queries. Most embedding-based retrievers compare single-vector representations of queries and memories, even when relevance depends on a small part of the content. Such local evidence can be matched to queries using the contextual token representations already computed by the same embedding models. Our method uses sparse token matching to improve retrieval without additional training. Each query token retrieves a small set of matching tokens across candidate memories. The matching scores are aggregated for each memory and combined with whole-memory similarity to rank memories. An optional low-rank query adapter can be trained with supervision while keeping the encoder and stored memory representations fixed. Our method improves retrieval across eight benchmarks and multiple model families without additional training. Query adaptation further increases the gains to 13.3 and 14.3 percentage points in average Recall@10 and NDCG@10 on Qwen3-Embedding-4B. These retrieval gains translate into higher question-answering accuracy on long-term memory benchmarks.