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Tuesday 29 September

Information Retrieval

Optimizing VLP-aligned Multimodal Intent Representation with Correct Visual Instantiation for Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval

ZS-CIR aims to retrieve a target image from a reference image and a modification text without paired supervision, typically by encoding composed queries as text-dominant representations within the image-text matching space of VLPs. However, queries reconstructed by visual pseudo-word learning or MLLM-based target reasoning often deviate from the native VLP representation space due to reference noise and coarse text fusion in the former, and verbose, weakly visually grounded descriptions in the latter. In this paper, we propose a unified ZS-CIR framework (named VMIR-CVI) to reconstruct multimodal composite queries from two complementary perspectives for optimizing VLP-compatible multimodal intent representation. First, it reasons and converts the multimodal intent into a unified textual description, aligning with the native text space of the VLP backbones to produce more retrieval-compatible textual queries. Second, it reconstructs the query representation with correctly decoupled visual instance cues, reducing reference noise while preserving target-relevant content. Specifically, a VLP-aligned Multimodal Intent Reasoning (VMIR) module injects few-shot VLP-style exemplars into chain-of-thought prompts, guiding the MLLM to generate target-consistent intent queries. A Training-free Visual Instance Disentanglement (TVID) module decouples fine-grained visual instances from global reference features without additional optimization. Finally, a lightweight Hybrid-modal Intent Alignment and Fusion (HIAF) module integrates the reasoned textual intent and disentangled visual cues into a unified hybrid-modal representation for robust ZS-CIR. Extensive experiments on three CIR benchmarks, namely CIRR, CIRCO and FashionIQ, show that VMIR-CVI significantly outperforms existing baselines and achieves new state-of-the-art performance. Code and trained models will be publicly released.
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All authors Xuri Ge, Chunhao Wang, Junchen Fu, Haokun Wen, Zhiwei Xu, Ying Zhou, Zhumin Chen, Pengjie Ren, Zhaochun Ren, Xin Xin

Machine Learning

Fine-Tuning on Self-Generated and Reward-Weighted Data: Learning Dynamics, Convergence Rates, and Benefits of Off-Policyness

We study the learning dynamics of fine-tuning a policy model on self-generated and reward-weighted data, with particular focus on a generalized version of REINFORCE – referred to as RE(S) – that updates the rollout distribution once every $S \ge 1$ gradient steps. Prior work in bandits and reinforcement learning has developed rich theory for policy gradient methods, and on-policy sampling (i.e., a small $S$, ideally $1$) is often viewed as crucial to their success; yet in prominent application like post-training large language models, reward-guided self-training has proved to be effective even when the rollout distribution is updated infrequently, but theoretical understanding remains limited for the convergence properties of these off-policy methods. To bridge these gaps, we develop a unified theory for RE(S) that covers the full spectrum of $S \ge 1$: it can be interpreted as a stage-wise optimization process, where each stage takes $S$ gradient steps for minimizing the Kullback-Leibler distance to a fixed reward-weighted rollout distribution. For multi-arm bandits with softmax policies, our in-depth analysis and numerical experiments reveal three key findings: (1) for any fixed $S$, RE(S) enjoys global convergence to the optimal policy as the number of rollout distribution updates $B = \lfloor T / S \rfloor \rightarrow \infty$, where $T$ denotes the number of gradient steps; (2) we prove tight two-sided bounds showing that the suboptimality gap of RE(S) achieves an asymptotic $\Theta(1 / T)$ convergence rate, while $S$ only affects the length of a burn-in phase; (3) when initialized at a weak policy with a small optimal-action probability, RE(1) gets trapped around suboptimal policies for a long period, whereas RE(S) with a suitable $S$ avoids the detour and achieves significantly faster convergence to the global optimum, highlighting the benefits of off-policyness in this case.
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All authors Zhiwei Wang, Yanxi Chen, Yaliang Li, Bolin Ding

Artificial Intelligence

Dual-Channel Robust Group-Relative Policy Optimization via Advantage and Sequence-Weight Estimation

Group-relative policy optimization relies on reward-derived advantages and sequence-level likelihood weights, both of which can be sensitive to localized outliers. Extreme rewards can collapse the contrast among clean responses after group normalization, while token-level log-ratio perturbations can alter sequence weights and clipping decisions. We introduce RoVR-GSPO, a dual-channel robust optimizer that addresses these failure modes separately. Its reward channel combines robust reference estimation with bounded residual credit, while its ratio channel uses differentiable SoftRoVR aggregation to construct robust sequence weights. We provide stability and efficiency analyses for both channels. Experiments on mathematical reasoning, long-context summarization, and tool-call annotation show consistent improvements over GSPO, while controlled perturbation studies demonstrate stronger robustness to reward contamination and token-ratio anomalies.
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All authors Zhongyi Li, Wan Tian, Xiang Xu, Yutian Xiao, Yikun Ban, Yijie Peng, Fuzhen Zhuang

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Cosmological extra dimensions can mimic dark matter II. Growth of cosmological structures

This is the second paper of this series in which we prove we can do without dark matter using spacetime with extra dimensions compactified to a hypersphere with radius R. Here we prove cosmological structures can grow even in a Universe without dark matter, provided that extra dimensions are contracting.
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Machine Learning

Safe-by-Design Learning via Energy-based Neural Networks

Learning neural-network models of dynamical systems with safety guarantees is a fundamental requirement for their deployment in safety-critical settings. Safety is commonly established by proving the invariance of a desired subset in state-space, ensuring that every trajectory initialized in this subset remains confined to it for all time under admissible inputs. Existing frameworks, however, either rely on computationally expensive post-hoc verification or employ safety-enforcing mechanisms without formal correctness guarantees. In this paper, we introduce a novel neural architecture grounded in energy-based modern Hopfield networks to guarantee safety-by-design while retaining sufficient expressiveness to model complex nonlinear dynamics. Specifically, we integrate modern Hopfield networks with a port-Hamiltonian neural ODE, enabling by design the construction of barrier functions yielding explicit admissible-input sets and quantitative robustness radii. Across several benchmarks, including an 12-dimensional nanodrone model, our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance while producing certified invariant sets that are more robust to external solicitations than comparable existing approaches.
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Cryptography and Security

Practical Secrets Extraction against Black-box LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly power autonomous coding agents such as Codex and Claude Code, yet their training corpora may contain confidential credentials exposed in public repositories or collected from private development artifacts, creating risks of memorization and subsequent leakage. Existing extraction audits, however, largely assume access to model weights or token probabilities. In this work, we present a black-box secret extraction framework for commercial, API-based LLMs under output-only access. It comprises (i) Cross-Validated Secret Knowledge Distillation, which uses semantics-preserving prompt variants, response cross-validation, and provider-specific format filtering to distill secret-relevant behavior into a local white-box proxy; and (ii) Proxy-Guided Secret Extraction and Candidate Filtering, which combines truncated top-$p$ sampling with local token entropy, $N$-gram frequency profiling, and provider-specific structural priors. On controlled API-key benchmarks, our framework improves recovery effectiveness and real-key rates over representative baselines while reducing extraction latency. A responsible real-world evaluation further recovers masked provider-specific credentials from three independently deployed black-box LLM systems spanning OpenAI and Claude Code, showing that memorized secrets can be exposed under output-only access.
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All authors Shiqian Zhao, Siwei Jiang, Xinfeng Li, Runyi Hu, Yandan Zheng, Congyu Guo, Tianwei Zhang, Anh Tuan Luu

Computer Vision

DispFlow-GS: Displacement Flow Supervision with Motion Disentangling for Monocular Deformable 3D Gaussian Splatting

Accurate dynamic scene reconstruction is important for robotic perception, where temporally consistent representations of dynamic environments are essential. Deformable 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) models dynamic scenes through deformation fields, and recent methods incorporate motion supervision by aligning rendered Gaussian flow with optical flow. However, we find that such Gaussian-flow-based supervision provides only limited improvements in motion modeling. We identify a fundamental limitation of this supervision paradigm, namely a domain gap between rendered Gaussian flow and optical flow. To address this limitation, we propose a motion supervision framework built on Displacement Flow, which splats per-Gaussian 3D displacements onto the image plane to provide direct and stable optimization signals. We further disentangle scene motion from camera motion via intermediate-view rendering, enabling more reliable motion priors and targeted constraints on deformation and geometry. We also observe a discrepancy between motion fidelity and image-based evaluation, where improved motion awareness does not necessarily translate into better rendered image quality or higher image-based metric scores. Motivated by this mismatch, we introduce Deformation-Rendering Consistency (DRC), a motion-aware metric that measures the alignment between predicted deformation and rendering improvement. Experiments on dynamic scene benchmarks show substantial improvements in motion localization and motion–rendering consistency, reaching up to 39% and 6%, respectively, while image-based metrics change by only about 0.1%. These results confirm the observed mismatch between motion fidelity and image-based evaluation, demonstrating the significance of DRC for motion-aware evaluation.
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Artificial Intelligence

SCA: Spatial Credit Assignment for Reinforcement Learning of GUI Agents

GUI agents automate tasks on digital devices by grounding language instructions in visual interfaces. Existing group-relative reinforcement learning improves GUI action prediction by comparing the rewards of multiple responses sampled from the same GUI state. However, binary evaluation treats spatially different failed clicks as identical and provides no relative signal when all sampled clicks fail. To address these limitations, we propose Spatial Credit Assignment (SCA), which uses the screen coordinates of sampled clicks to refine group-relative credit. Specifically, SCA predicts each held-out response's reward from the other responses in groups containing both successes and failures, then uses the prediction residual to adjust credit. When all sampled clicks fail, SCA instead orders them by distance to the annotated target. These spatial references are used only to construct the training update; the deployed policy remains unchanged. We evaluate whether this correction improves the policy update itself by comparing its error and directional alignment with the exact return gradient in a controlled synthetic study. Across GUI grounding and offline action-prediction benchmarks, SCA improves grounding across professional domains and achieves the strongest results among reinforcement-fine-tuned models on most action-prediction metrics, with consistent gains across the reported GUI suites.
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All authors Shengtian Yang, Ziyu Xiong, Kaibing Yang, Guangfeng Cai, Yewen Li, Peng Jiang, Gai Kun, Qingpeng Cai, Lei Feng

Distributed Computing

Efficient Agentic LLM Serving over SSD-based Sparse KV Storage

Agentic sessions driven by Large language models (LLMs) often alternate between model inference and tool use, accumulating long histories across successive rounds. Serving these sessions efficiently requires reducing attention computation and retaining history key-value (KV) caches to avoid recomputation. Recently, frontier open-source LLMs adopt sparse attention to reduce computation by selecting only part of the history, while SSDs provide a cheaper alternative to CPU DRAM for storing KV caches. However, sparse KV selection depends on the ad hoc intermediate values during model inference, so it forces SSD reads to lie on the inference critical path. These reads are further slowed by fragmented accesses and read-write interference in SSDs. To address these challenges, we present Janus, an agentic serving framework for sparse attention LLMs with SSD-centric KV storage. Janus focuses on append prefill, which processes each round's newly added inputs and accounts for most history KV loading. To move SSD reads out of the critical path, Janus runs the model's own KV selection module on earlier intermediate values, predicting KV demand without additional training. The predicted reads overlap with model computation, and any prediction misses are fetched before attention executes to preserve model outputs. To improve SSD efficiency, Janus coalesces adjacent reads, packs scattered KV pages into sequential writes on the CPU, and limits background writes while reads are active. Across three models and three agentic traces, Janus outperforms existing works by up to 1.57-3.69 times (1.22-1.85 times on average) in terms of the time to first token latency, while maintaining decode efficiency.
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All authors Wenhao He, Ping Zhang, Xiaohe Hu, Chutian Wang, Jinlong Hou, Yuan Cheng, Peng Sun, Fangcheng Fu

Computer Vision

WeLike2Party! In-Context Motion Transfer for Multi-Human Image Animation

Human image animation aims to transfer motion from a driving video to subjects in a reference image. Despite remarkable progress in video generation, achieving high-fidelity animation of multiple interacting subjects remains a challenge. Many existing approaches rely on explicit motion representations such as 2D skeletons or parametric body meshes and struggle to preserve identity-motion binding under inter-person occlusion. To address this limitation, we propose WeLike2Party, a multi-human animation framework built on direct in-context video conditioning without explicit pose or mesh extraction at inference. We further introduce Reference Asymmetric RoPE Conditioning to preserve fine-grained appearance details, and Identity Binding Supervision to associate each reference identity with its intended motion trajectory. To support cross-identity training, we construct MotionTwin, a large-scale synthetic dataset comprising 14.4K cross-identity video pairs with shared subject and camera motions, totaling 84.3 hours of photorealistic video. We additionally present MotionTwin-Bench, a cross-identity benchmark specifically designed to evaluate subject-level visual fidelity and identity-motion binding. Extensive experiments on MotionTwin-Bench and real-world videos demonstrate that WeLike2Party outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods in subject-level visual fidelity, identity-motion binding, and overall perceptual quality, particularly in multi-person interactions with substantial occlusion.
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All authors Sangeyl Lee, Seunghyun Shin, Seungho Park, Wooseok Jeon, Hae-Gon Jeon

Strongly Correlated Electrons

Ergodicity in a hole-doped Anderson spin insulator

An interacting many-body system being localized in the presence of disorder can fail to serve as its own bath. In an electronic system, the charge and spin degrees of freedom can act as thermal baths for each other. In this paper, we study the stability of an Anderson insulator in the spin sector with respect to charge doping. We consider one-dimensional two-component fermions in a lattice with large onsite repulsion ($t-J_{XX}$ model) and with a single hole in a random magnetic field. In the absence of the hole the spin sector is localized in arbitrarily weak random magnetic fields. We argue that a single hole thermalizes the spin chain in the weak disorder limit. In this regime our numerical results indicate ergodicity of the system as a whole and delocalization of the hole. At larger magnetic fields the hole eventually localizes with a finite localization length, and the Anderson spin insulator is restored.
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Artificial Intelligence

CoEM: Empowering Long-Context Reasoning with Commit-on-Evidence Memory

Long-context reasoning is essential for complex and long-horizon tasks, yet the performance of large language models (LLMs) degrades as context length increases. Recent approaches address this by processing input chunk by chunk while maintaining a bounded textual memory in model context. However, premature information compression can discard critical details essential for subsequent reasoning. In this paper, we introduce Commit-on-Evidence Memory (CoEM), which learns when to convert source evidence into compact memory facts. Specifically, under a fixed context-memory budget, CoEM preserves potentially useful source excerpts verbatim in a pending set, allowing subsequent context to clarify their relevance before irreversible compression. As new context arrives, a learned policy revisits each pending excerpt and decides whether to promote it to the committed memory, retain it for further consideration, or discard it. A frozen verifier ensures proposed facts are accepted only if supported by retained excerpts and current context. To further guide effective memory management, we train this policy using reinforcement learning by combining fine-grained, step-level evidence rewards with final answer rewards. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CoEM consistently improves long-context reasoning. When evaluated on 6,400 documents long-context input, CoEM outperforms the strongest memory baseline by 10.4-11.4 F1 points on Qwen3.5-9B. Code repository: https://github.com/benmagnifico/CoEM.
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All authors Jingguang Li, Yebo Wu, Zuyi Guo, Kailang Ma, Xianjie Dai, Han Zheng, Benwang Chen, Li Li, Can Rong, Heye Huang

Artificial Intelligence

VLALight: A Vision-Language-Action Model for Traffic Signal Control

Traffic signal control (TSC) is essential for improving urban mobility and reducing congestion. Although roadside cameras are widely deployed at signalized intersections and provide rich visual observations of evolving traffic, existing TSC methods typically rely on manually engineered traffic states or separate perception modules, creating a gap between physical observations and control decisions. We present VLALight, the first vision-language-action (VLA) model for end-to-end traffic signal control from multi-view roadside videos. VLALight directly maps visual observations to coordinated signal actions through multi-target spatiotemporal traffic reasoning and topology-aware cooperative perception across intersections. To establish this capability, we develop a two-stage supervised cold-start training strategy for visual traffic understanding and signal decision-making, followed by cooperative agentic reinforcement learning that jointly optimizes local control and network-wide traffic efficiency. Furthermore, VLALight introduces adaptive fast and slow reasoning modes, enabling the policy to allocate deeper reasoning only when additional deliberation provides sufficient control benefits. Through balanced mode-aware rollouts and relative advantage optimization, VLALight learns to trade off decision quality and inference cost. Extensive experiments on seven real-world traffic-flow datasets across three urban networks demonstrate that VLALight consistently outperforms transportation-based, RL-based, and LLM/VLM-based baselines. Ablation studies validate the effectiveness of cooperative perception, network-level optimization, and adaptive reasoning. These results demonstrate the potential of VLA models for real-world physical traffic control. Our project is available at https://github.com/usail-hkust/VLALight.git.
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All authors Pan Zhang, Siqi Lai, Kemu Dong, Hao Liu

High Energy Physics (Phenomenology)

Flavor-resolved four-fermion probes at the FCC-ee $Z$ pole

The electron-positron Future Circular Collider will provide an unprecedented opportunity for precision studies at the $Z$ pole. In addition to improving the electroweak measurements pioneered at LEP, Tera-$Z$ statistics and modern jet flavor reconstruction could make rare, flavor-resolved final states accessible as precision observables. We study the exclusive four-body processes $e^+e^-\to Z\to Q\bar Q\ell^+\ell^-$ with $ Q=c,\,b$ and $\ell=\mu,\,\tau$ as probes of flavor-specific new physics contact interactions. A fast analysis yields representative multi-TeV reaches for vector-current interactions involving bottom or charm quarks and muons or taus, providing a baseline for future detector-level studies. For charm-current interactions, the projected direct sensitivities are comparable to those obtained indirectly from electroweak precision observables. Two-dimensional fits further show that these processes retain quark-flavor information that can be poorly resolved by the renormalization-group-induced electroweak response. These results illustrate how flavor-resolved four-body $Z$ processes can bridge the electroweak and flavor programs at FCC-ee, opening a new class of complementary precision observables.
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Artificial Intelligence

Learn from the Gap: Differential-Aware Advantage Pruning with Adaptive Rollout Sampling for GRPO

Recently, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) and its variants have been developed for policy optimization and demonstrated notable performance gains. However, these methods usually incur substantial computational overhead due to per-question multi-rollout sampling and repeated per-token probability evaluation across rollouts. Furthermore, low-information or highly homogeneous trajectories can degrade downstream learning signal efficiency, hindering model optimization and limiting final performance. To address these issues, we propose FastRL, a novel plug-and-play reinforcement learning framework that simultaneously improves training efficiency and the effectiveness of policy learning. Specifically, 1) We introduce an advantage-aware pruning strategy to selectively preserve high-advantage trajectories while maximizing inter-trajectory gradient diversity. 2) Then, we design an adaptive rollout sampling mechanism to dynamically adjust the sampling scale across different training stages based on historical pruning distributions, balancing exploration adequacy and computational efficiency. Experiments demonstrate that FastRL can be seamlessly integrated into GRPO, DAPO, and GSPO variants, achieving an average 2.07$\times$ training speedup on Geometry3K and GeoQA8K-R1V, along with an approximately 1.64% improvement in average accuracy on visual reasoning benchmarks. Source codes will be available at https://github.com/Nicozwy/FastRL.
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All authors Jiahua Yang, Zhiwei Yang, Xianpeng Zhang, Dongyu Chen, Xing Chen, Tianhuang Su, Haonan Lu, Quanlong Guan, Kai Tang, Chuangchuang Wang

Computation and Language

Dating the Model: Hidden Dates in System Prompts Affect LLM Evaluation

Reproducibility is essential for scientific research, yet prior work shows that LLM outputs vary with hardware and batching. We identify an overlooked factor: the hidden injection of the current date into system prompts, which users cannot control and which changes every day. Across 9 recent LLMs and 6 datasets spanning multiple-choice QA (MCQA), math reasoning, code generation, and machine translation, performance varies solely with the current date, with deltas of up to 6% on MCQA, 14% on math reasoning, 7% on code generation, and 2.84 BLEU on machine translation. Model rankings also shift, affecting leaderboards. This date effect exceeds other sources of non-determinism, such as batch size and numerical precision. Standard prompting techniques – chain-of-thought and few-shot prompting – do not reduce the sensitivity; chain-of-thought even amplifies it. Our findings underscore the need for careful evaluation protocols to ensure reproducibility and fair comparisons in LLM research.
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All authors Mario Sanz-Guerrero, Minh Duc Bui, Manuel Mager, Katharina von der Wense

Physics and Society

NuPaD: A Generative AI Framework for Fostering Deep Learning in Subatomic Physics

The rapid adoption of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in higher education has introduced a critical pedagogical paradox: while these systems possess extraordinary capacity for information retrieval and synthesis, their default operational mode of supplying immediate, unprompted answers actively undermines the cognitive processes upon which genuine scientific understanding is built. This paper presents NuPaD (Nuclear & Particle Physics – Deep Learning Tutor), a novel pedagogical framework designed for the graduate-level subatomic physics curriculum. For such advanced courses, instruction naturally shifts toward inquiry-driven, problem-based learning, making it an ideal environment to use GenAI to explore complex, open-ended physical questions rather than merely querying established facts. The framework consists of three tightly coupled and easy-to-use components: a primary agent instruction file that enforces a structured problem-based learning protocol, a purpose-built textbook optimized for precise parsing by privacy-preserving local GenAI, and a concise companion file that bridges the knowledge gap between the textbook and GenAI, alongside a comprehensive dynamic skill set for specialized tasks. We explain in detail the architectural principles of the modular NuPaD framework, the design philosophy of the Markdown-native textbook format, and the underlying GenAI regulation principles. By redefining the interaction loop between student and model, this framework transforms GenAI from a passive answer engine into an active, personalized tutor, ensuring that it accelerates rather than bypasses the development of deep learning and scientific reasoning.
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Computer Vision

SFE-VGGT: Source-Free VGGT Distillation for Event-Based Monocular Depth Estimation

Recent event-based depth estimation methods successfully transfer geometric priors from vision foundation models via cross-modal distillation. However, their reliance on synchronized RGB-event pairs or depth annotations during training severely restricts practical deployment. To overcome this bottleneck, we propose SFE-VGGT, a novel source-free framework that distills the geometric priors of VGGT to the event domain without any paired RGB observations. Our core idea is to reconstruct surrogate frames directly from the target event stream to act as a frozen geometric teacher, entirely eliminating the need for genuine source RGB data. Crucially, as these surrogate frames inherently yield imperfect and spatially varying supervision, directly distilling from them propagates artifacts. To resolve this, we introduce a novel reliability-aware distillation strategy. This includes Density-Aware Feature Distillation to emphasize informative event regions, and Confidence-Weighted Depth Distillation to dynamically regulate supervision based on relative teacher-student prediction confidence. Meanwhile, we propose a Cross-Frame Relational Consistency loss that enforces temporal geometric stability using reliable inter-frame correspondences, bypassing the need for temporally consistent teacher's depth. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, despite source-free, our SFE-VGGT closely matches the accuracy of RGB-dependent baselines under standard conditions and significantly surpasses them in challenging nighttime scenarios. Across MVSEC nighttime sequences, SFE-VGGT reduces the average 10 m depth error by 15.3% compared with EventVGGT. Moreover, our method exhibits robust zero-shot generalization across real-world datasets, proving that highly effective geometric priors can be transferred to event cameras using strictly source-free supervision.
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Robotics

ComManip: Overfitting Manipulation Policies to Comfortable Regions

Training robot manipulation policies relies on costly robot demonstrations, making large-scale data collection impractical. Meanwhile, to improve policy generalization, existing approaches seek greater diversity in visual observations by varying object placements, viewpoints, and robot configurations during data collection. However, under a limited demonstration budget, this strategy forces the policy to model diverse visual observations, providing insufficient supervision to learn reliable observation-action correspondences under similar local conditions. Our study reveals that policies trained under this strategy achieve lower task success rates than those trained within a compact, visually and kinematically stable region. We refer to these stable regions as comfortable manipulation regions. To exploit this finding, we propose ComManip, a learning paradigm that specializes manipulation policies to comfortable manipulation regions. During inference, ComManip repositions the mobile base until the detected target center enters the familiar image-space range estimated from comfortable-region demonstrations. It then executes the same manipulation policy, enabling effective manipulation across diverse target locations. We conduct extensive experiments across multiple manipulation tasks, demonstration budgets, and policy families including ACT, $\pi_{0.5}$, RDT, OpenVLA-OFT, and SmolVLA. The results demonstrate that ComManip improves task success by roughly 20 percentage points or more across different policy architectures in large workspaces under limited demonstration budgets, suggesting that specializing manipulation policies to comfortable regions provides a more data-efficient learning paradigm for manipulation.
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All authors Yidan Lai, Xinyi Chen, Shuquan Man, Huiping Zhuang

Artificial Intelligence

Neuro-Symbolic Computer Use: Learning Reusable Policies for Reliable and Efficient Execution

Many computer tasks recur: the same workflow runs many times, with new inputs and from different starting states. Current computer-use agents re-plan every step of every run, which makes them costly and unreliable on such tasks. We introduce neuro-symbolic computer use, in which a recurring workflow is executed by a learned policy rather than re-derived by an agent on each run. The policy fixes the decisions that are stable across runs (ordering, variables, loops, and branches) in executable code, and delegates observation-dependent decisions, such as grounding and state checks, to neural models. We learn these policies with neuro-symbolic policy iteration: starting from one agent trajectory, it executes the policy, diagnoses failures with task-completion and step-level judges, and revises the code with a coding model informed by an agent's continuation from the point of failure, without access to the benchmark evaluator. Iterating on generated parameter and initial-state variants makes the policy reusable, and a pre-action verifier guards each state-mutating step at deployment. On OSWorld-Verified and ScienceBoard, the learned policies achieve the highest Pass^3 of all methods in all four settings, 3.6-15.8 points above the base agent, while cutting per-run cost by 15-217$\times$ and latency by 3.4-5.1$\times$. On OSWorld-Verified, policies built only on variants transfer to the held-out original tasks, exceeding AutoRPA by 8.6-17.5 points in Pass^3.
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All authors Hyewon Suh, Thanh Minh Nguyen, Chih-Lun Lee, Darrow Hartman, Lizhao Liu, Xin Eric Wang, Ang Li, Jiachen Yang

Machine Learning

State Transport Routing for Short-horizon Adaptation in Multi-horizon Photovoltaic Forecasting

Recent power measurements provide valuable information for photovoltaic(PV) power forecasting, but directly extrapolating short-term trends can introduce substantial errors over longer forecast horizons. To address this challenge, we propose state transport routing (STR), a lightweight adapter that refines the predictions of a frozen forecasting model. STR combines the original forecast with two complementary trajectories derived from the latest measured power level and its recent trend. A horizon-conditioned router adjusts their contributions over the first 120 min, while leaving subsequent predictions unchanged. Experiments on four public PV datasets show that STR consistently outperforms a parameter-matched residual adapter. On PVDAQ, the same approach improves five neural forecasting backbones, reducing all-horizon normalized mean absolute error by 0.0201-0.2364 percentage points, with paired 95% confidence intervals excluding zero. No reliable improvement is observed for LightGBM. These findings demonstrate the potential of structured state adaptation to improve short-term forecasting across different neural architectures without retraining the underlying models or altering their longer-horizon predictions.
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All authors Xu Yuqing, Zhou Liguo, Sun Ze, Yu Lei, Jiang Mingming

High Energy Physics (Phenomenology)

Spin-2 $QQ\bar Q\bar s$ Tetraquarks in QCD Sum Rules

The $J^{P}=2^{+}$ $cc\bar c\bar s$ and $bb\bar b\bar s$ tetraquarks are studied in parallel within the two-point QCD Sum Rules framework using the same symmetric axial-vector$\otimes$axial-vector interpolating current. The current-specific OPE sectors retained through dimension seven within the stated background-field truncation are evaluated with a common symbolic construction, with the bottom channel obtained by the heavy-flavour replacement $c\to b$. The same pole-dominance and OPE-convergence criteria are imposed in both channels. The adopted charm region is $\sqrt{s_0}=5.7\GeV$ with $3.6\le M_B^2\le4.3\GeVsq$, whereas the bottom region is $\sqrt{s_0}=14.3\GeV$ with $9.8\le M_B^2\le10.8\GeVsq$. At representative Borel points, the extracted masses are $5.239\GeV$ and $13.832\GeV$, respectively. After the QCD-input, continuum-threshold, and Borel-window variations are combined, the final results are $m_{cc\bar c\bar s,\,2^+}=5.239\pm0.061\GeV$ and $m_{bb\bar b\bar s,\,2^+}=13.832\pm0.059\GeV$.
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Robotics

Track-and-Complete: Learning Humanoid Skills from a Single Failed Human Video

Learning humanoid skills from videos typically requires a successful human demonstration, which often demands custom data collection. Although failures have traditionally been treated only as negative examples in robot learning, they can still reveal a usable trajectory prefix before the task fails, as well as the intended outcome. To leverage this information from a failed-attempt video, we propose TRACC, a pipeline that imitates the useful portion of the motion trajectory and then completes the task based on the inferred task outcome. The usable motion prefix serves as prior knowledge until the failure occurs, after which the task-completion reward guides the policy to learn the intended task goal without requiring a successful task trajectory. We evaluate our method on six in-the-wild failed human tasks from the Oops! dataset. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach for learning from failed attempts when no successful demonstration is available. Thus, these findings establish failed human videos as a viable source of supervision for humanoid skill learning.
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Artificial Intelligence

PrecogUI: Proactive GUI Agents via Pre-cognitive Simulation and Experience Retrieval

Existing reactive Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents often fail in long-horizon, dynamic scenarios, where unexpected disturbances trigger attention-diverting and cascading failures. To address this, we propose PrecogUI, a pre-cognitive architecture that shifts the paradigm from reactive execution to proactive decision-making. Specifically, we design a Proactive Experience Pool (PEP), which caches recurring anomaly and success patterns as "state-action-result" tuples in a dual-memory repository. Furthermore, we introduce a Proactive Simulation Executor (PSE) that learns to forecast the next symbolic UI layout given a candidate action, enabling early anomaly avoidance and ranking candidate actions by predicted reliability. Finally, a Pre-cognitive Execution Controller (PEC) fuses these priors and predictions, prioritizes handling of foreseen anomalies, and ensures execution robustness through a closed-loop error correction mechanism. For robust evaluation, we develop AutoTraj, an automatic data-generation engine, to construct InterfereBench, a benchmark for long-horizon tasks with strong disturbances. Experiments demonstrate that PrecogUI surpasses state-of-the-art methods on InterfereBench while maintaining competitive performance on public benchmarks. The code will be publicly available.
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All authors Bin Kang, Jiarui Ouyang, Li Jiang, Bin Chen, Zhuotao Tian

Algebraic Geometry

Degenerations of shifted symplectic moduli stacks of sheaves

Let $S$ be a smooth, affine noetherian $\mathbb{C}$-scheme, and let $X/S$ be a smooth, quasi-projective family of Calabi–Yau $d$-folds. We prove that the derived moduli stack of flat families of properly supported coherent sheaves on $X/S$ has a relative $(2-d)$-shifted symplectic structure by generalizing a construction of Brav–Dyckerhoff. The main points are to show that the category $\mathrm{IndCoh}(X)$ is a smooth, compact $\mathrm{QCoh}(S)$-module and to identify our moduli stack of interest as a substack of the moduli of pseudo-perfect objects in $\mathrm{IndCoh}(X)$. Finally, we discuss two examples of families of smooth, quasi-projective Calabi–Yau threefolds that are potentially useful for applications in enumerative geometry.
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Sound

When Capabilities Fail to Compose: Diagnosing the Compositionality Gap in Large Audio-Language Models

Large audio-language models (LALMs) perform strongly on individual audio tasks, but whether these capabilities can be reliably composed remains underexplored. We conduct a controlled diagnostic study of capability composition in LALMs, requiring models to integrate audio-attribute recognition, cue-conditioned segment selection, and downstream ASR or question answering. We construct two-utterance inputs with distinct acoustic cues to evaluate composition across environmental sound, gender, and emotion cues, with ASR, Math QA, and Factual QA as downstream tasks. Across four open-source LALMs, compositional QA accuracy decreases in 39 of 40 model-task-cue settings, by an average of 26.7 percentage points. ASR exhibits a similarly consistent degradation, with WER increasing in 39 of 40 settings by an average of 28.5 percentage points, while the magnitude of degradation varies across models, cue types, and cue salience. We further probe these failures through output format, positional preference, and chain-of-thought (CoT) analyses. Our study reveals a systematic gap between possessing individual audio capabilities and reliably composing them.
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All authors Chien-Feng Liu, Chih-Kai Yang, Bo-Han Feng, Yu-Hsuan Li Liang, Hung-yi Lee, Cheng-Fu Chou

Computation and Language

Benchmarking Automatic Speech Recognition Tools for Iberian Languages

Comprehensive evaluations of automatic speech recognition (ASR) for Iberian languages remain limited, and low-resource languages, biases, and efficiency trade-offs are underexplored. We benchmark eleven systems, ten open-weight models and one commercial API, across five Iberian languages (Basque, Catalan, Galician, Portuguese, Spanish), with German and Turkish as controls. Evaluation uses an 85-hour dataset covering read speech, broadcast media, and audiobooks, assessing accuracy and efficiency via word error rate (WER) and real-time factors (RTF/RTFx). Results show no single model dominates: accuracy, efficiency, and language coverage present clear trade-offs. Low-resource languages, especially Basque, degrade significantly, highlighting the role of training coverage. We observe consistent sex disparities across most systems, highlighting fairness challenges in multilingual ASR. Overall, the benchmark provides practical guidance for real-world model selection.
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All authors Fernando López, Pablo Gómez, David Solans, Paulo Villegas, Jordi Luque

Materials Science

Tuning the secondary electron yield and electronic conductivity of MgZnO multilayers synthesized by Atomic layer deposition

Secondary electron emission (SEE), arising from the interaction of energetic electrons with material surfaces, can induce deleterious effects in vacuum radio-frequency (RF) systems, notably multipacting, thereby degrading performance and threatening device integrity. Despite extensive efforts, effective and widely adopted mitigation strategies remain limited. Here, we report an approach to simultaneously tailor SEE and electrical conductivity using nanometric multi-element multilayers deposited by atomic layer deposition (ALD). The design and fabrication of these heterostructures are presented, and a range of films is systematically characterized to establish correlations between emission properties, electrical conductivity, chemical and structural features. We demonstrate that such heterostructures enable combinations of total electron emission yield (TEEY) and conductivity unattainable in single-phase materials, including regimes combining high TEEY with relatively high conductivity and low TEEY with low conductivities. These results open new avenues for the rational design of functional surfaces for vacuum electronic applications.
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All authors Mathieu Lafarie, Sarah Dadouch, Fréderic Miserque, Yunlin Zheng, Jocelyne Leroy, Mohamed Belhaj, Thomas Proslier

Computer Vision

Seg3DParts: Segmentation-Grounded Controllable Part-Level 3D Generation

Part-level 3D assets are essential for editing, reassembly, and interaction, yet recovering such structure from a single image remains challenging due to occlusion, ambiguous boundaries, and the need for coherent multi-part reasoning. Existing approaches struggle to achieve both controllable part-level generation and coherent multi-part structure, as part identity and spatial allocation are typically inferred implicitly. We present Seg3DParts, a segmentation-grounded framework for controllable part-level 3D generation from a single image. By treating segmentation as an explicit grounding signal, our method defines part identity during generation, enabling each component to be anchored to a corresponding image region. To ensure coherent assemblies, we introduce structured cross-part interaction that allows components to exchange global context throughout the generative process. As a result, Seg3DParts directly generates well-aligned part meshes in a shared canonical space without post-hoc alignment, supporting flexible and controllable decomposition. We further introduce PartObjectNet, a large-scale dataset with over 200K objects and 1M annotated parts. Experiments demonstrate that Seg3DParts achieves superior geometry quality, cross-part coherence, and part-level controllability over existing methods.
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All authors Jiantao Lin, Meixi Chen, Yingjie Xu, Chenbo Fu, Leyi Wu, Hao Chen, Yinchuan Li, Ying-Cong Chen

Optics

Transverse Faraday Effect in Multimode Fibres

The weak guidance approximation suppresses the longitudinal field component $E_z$, and with it an entire class of linear magneto-optic interactions. We derive and experimentally verify a transverse Faraday effect in step-index multimode fibres that couples $E_y$ into $E_z$. Using speckle decorrelation we isolate the linear Faraday signal from the quadratic Cotton-Mouton background, confirming four predictions: the effect vanishes without a strong index step, scales with launch angle, is completely polarisation-selective relative to the field, and tracks Verdet dispersion. Under 0.24 T we observe $\Delta\rho \approx 0.16$ for perpendicular input and a complete null for parallel input.
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