We study the fundamental and timely problem of learning long sequences in autoregressive modeling and next-token prediction under model misspecification, measured by the joint Kullback--Leibler (KL) divergence. Our goal is to characterize how the sequence horizon \(H\) affects both approximation and estimation errors in this joint-distribution, sequence-level regime. By establishing matching upper and lower bounds, we provide, to our knowledge, the first complete characterization of long-horizon error behavior under the natural joint KL objective, with improved rates and optimality justification relative to existing work. On the approximation side, we show that joint KL admits a horizon-free approximation factor, in sharp contrast to Hellinger-based analyses that exhibit an \(Ω(H)\) dependence for computationally efficient methods; this isolates the choice of divergence as the source of approximation amplification. On the estimation side, we prove a fundamental information-theoretic lower bound of order \(Ω(H)\) that holds for both decomposable policy classes and fully shared policies, matching the \(\widetilde O(H)\) upper bounds achieved by computationally efficient algorithms. Our analysis clarifies the landscape of recent autoregressive learning results by aligning the log-loss training objective, the sequence-level evaluation metric, and the approximation metric {\color{black}through a sharp joint-KL oracle theory}. We further show that these joint-KL guarantees imply policy learning regret bounds at rates matching prior imitation learning literature.

Multi-hop question answering (QA) remains a significant challenge in the biomedical domain, requiring systems to integrate information across multiple sources to answer complex questions. To address this problem, the BioCreative IX MedHopQA shared task was designed to benchmark in multi-hop reasoning for large language models (LLMs). We developed a novel dataset of 1,000 challenging QA pairs spanning diseases, genes, and chemicals, with particular emphasis on rare diseases. Each question was constructed to require two-hop reasoning through the integration of information from two distinct Wikipedia pages. The challenge attracted 48 submissions from 13 teams. Systems were evaluated using both surface string comparison and conceptual accuracy (MedCPT score). The results showed a substantial performance gap between baseline LLMs and enhanced systems. The top-ranked submission achieved an 89.30% F1 score on the MedCPT metric and an 87.30% exact match (EM) score, compared with 67.40% and 60.20%, respectively, for the zero-shot baseline. A central finding of the challenge was that retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and related retrieval-based strategies were critical for strong performance. In addition, concept-level evaluation improved answer assessment when correct responses differed in surface form. The MedHopQA dataset is publicly available to support continued progress in this important area. Challenge materials: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/research/bionlp/medhopqa and benchmark https://www.codabench.org/competitions/7609/

Random delays weaken the temporal correspondence between actions and subsequent state feedback, making it difficult for agents to identify the true propagation process of action effects. In cross-task scenarios, changes in task objectives and reward formulations further reduce the reusability of previously acquired task knowledge. To address this problem, this paper proposes a transferable delay-aware reinforcement learning method based on implicit causal graph modeling. The proposed method uses a field-node encoder to represent high-dimensional observations as latent states with node-level semantics, and employs a message-passing mechanism to characterize dynamic causal dependencies among nodes, thereby learning transferable structured representations and environment dynamics knowledge. On this basis, imagination-driven behavior learning and planning are incorporated to optimize policies in the latent space, enabling cross-task knowledge transfer and rapid adaptation. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms baseline methods on DMC continuous control tasks with random delays. Cross-task transfer experiments further demonstrate that the learned structured representations and dynamics knowledge can be effectively transferred to new tasks and significantly accelerate policy adaptation.

Singing Voice Conversion (SVC) aims to transform a source singing voice into a target singer while preserving lyrics and melody. Most existing SVC methods depend on F0 extractors to capture the lead melody from clean vocals. However, no existing method can reliably extract clean vocals from accompanied recordings without leaving residual harmonies behind. In this paper, we innovatively propose Poly-SVC, a zero-shot, cross-lingual singing voice conversion system designed to process residual harmonies. Poly-SVC is composed of three key components: a Constant-Q Transform (CQT)-based pitch extractor to preserve both the lead melody and residual harmony, a random sampler to reduce interference information from the CQT and a diffusion decoder based on Conditional Flow Matching (CFM) that fuses pitch, content, and timbre features into natural-sounding polyphonic outputs. Experiments demonstrate that Poly-SVC surpasses the baseline models in naturalness, timbre similarity and harmony reconstruction across both harmony-rich and single-melody recordings.

Critical transitions - abrupt, often irreversible changes in system dynamics - arise across human and natural systems, often with catastrophic consequences. Real-world observations of such shifts remain scarce, preventing the development of reliable early warning systems. Conventional statistical and spectral indicators, such as increasing variance, tend to fail under realistic conditions of limited data and correlated noise, whereas existing deep learning classifiers do not extrapolate beyond their training data distribution. In this work, we introduce TipPFN, an in-context learning (ICL) framework that uses a prior-data fitted network to infer a system's proximity to a critical transition. Trained on our novel synthetic data generator, which is based on canonical bifurcation scenarios coupled to diverse, randomized stochastic dynamics, TipPFN flexibly capitalizes on contexts of various sizes, complexity and dimensionalities. We demonstrate robust, state-of-the-art early detection of critical transitions in previously unseen tipping regimes, sim-to-real examples, and real-world observations in both ICL and zero-shot settings.

Catastrophic forgetting remains the central obstacle in continual learning (CL): parameters shared across tasks interfere with one another, and existing regularization methods such as EWC and SI apply uniform penalties without awareness of which input region a parameter serves. We propose KAN-CL, a continual learning framework that exploits the compact-support spline parameterization of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) to perform importance-weighted anchoring at per-knot granularity. Deployed as a classification head on a convolutional backbone with standard EWC regularization on the backbone (bbEWC) KAN-CL achieves forgetting reductions of 88% and 93% over a head-only KAN baseline on Split-CIFAR-10/5T and Split-CIFAR-100/10T respectively, while matching or exceeding the accuracy of all baselines on both benchmarks. We further provide a Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) analysis showing that KAN's spline locality induces a structural rank deficit in the cross-task NTK, yielding a forgetting bound that holds even in the feature-learning regime. These results establish that combining an architecture with natural parameter locality (KAN head) with a complementary backbone regularizer (bbEWC) yields a compositional and principled approach to catastrophic forgetting.

While recent advancements in multimodal language models have enabled image generation from expressive multi-image instructions, existing methods struggle to maintain performance under complex interleaved instructions. This limitation stems from the structural separation of images and text in current paradigms, which forces models to bridge difficult long-range dependencies to match descriptions with visual targets. To address these challenges, we propose \texttt{I}mages i\texttt{N} \texttt{SE}n\texttt{T}ences (\textit{a.k.a}, INSET), a unified generation model that seamlessly embeds images as native vocabulary within textual instructions. By positioning visual features directly at their corresponding semantic slots, INSET leverages the contextual locality of transformers for precise object binding, effectively treating images as dense, expressive language tokens. Furthermore, we introduce a scalable data engine that synthesizes 15M high-quality interleaved samples from standard image and video datasets, utilizing VLMs and LLMs to construct rich, long-horizon sequences. Evaluation results on InterleaveBench demonstrate that INSET significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in multi-image consistency and text alignment, with performance gaps widening as input complexity increases. Beyond standard generation, our approach inherently extends to multimodal image editing, integrating visual content as part of the instruction to facilitate highly expressive and creative visual manipulations.

Operator learning has been highly successful for continuous mappings between infinite-dimensional spaces, such as PDE solution operators. However, many operators of interest-including differential operators-are discontinuous or set-valued, and lie outside classical approximation frameworks. We propose a paradigm shift by formulating approximation via graph convergence (Painlevé-Kuratowski convergence), which is well-suited for closed operators. We show that uniform and $L^p$ approximation are fundamentally inadequate in this setting. Focusing on maximally monotone operators, we prove that any such operator can be approximated in the sense of local graph convergence by continuous encoder-decoder architectures, and further construct structure-preserving approximations that retain maximal monotonicity via resolvent-based parameterizations.

Recent works have analyzed the impact of individual components of neural networks on gendered predictions, often with a focus on mitigating gender bias. However, mechanistic interpretations of gender tend to (i) focus on a very specific gender-related task, such as gendered pronoun prediction, or (ii) fail to distinguish between the production of factually gendered outputs (the correct assumption of gender given a word that carries gender as a semantic property) and gender biased outputs (based on a stereotype). To address these issues, we curate \gknow, a benchmark to assess gender knowledge and gender bias in language models across different types of gender-related predictions. \gknow allows us to identify and analyze circuits and individual neurons responsible for gendered predictions. We test the impact of neuron ablation on benchmarks for disentangling stereotypical and factual gender (DiFair and the test set of GKnow), as well as StereoSet. Results show that gender bias and factual gender are severely entangled on the level of both circuits and neurons, entailing that ablation is an unreliable debiasing method. Furthermore, we show that benchmarks for evaluating gender bias can hide the decrease in factual gender knowledge that accompanies neuron ablation. We curate GKnow as a contribution to the continuous development of robust gender bias benchmarks.

Egocentric 3D hand pose estimation and gesture recognition are essential for immersive augmented/virtual reality, human-computer interaction, and robotics. However, conventional frame-based cameras suffer from motion blur and limited dynamic range, while existing event-based methods are hindered by ego-motion interference, monocular depth ambiguity, and the lack of large-scale real-world stereo datasets. To overcome these limitations, we propose EgoEV-HandPose, an end-to-end framework for joint 3D bimanual pose estimation and gesture recognition from stereo event streams. Central to our approach is KeypointBEV, a flexible stereo fusion module that lifts features into a canonical bird's-eye-view space and employs an iterative reprojection-guided refinement loop to progressively resolve depth uncertainty and enforce kinematic consistency. In addition, we introduce EgoEVHands, the first large-scale real-world stereo event-camera dataset for egocentric hand perception, containing 5,419 annotated sequences with dense 3D/2D keypoints across 38 gesture classes under varying illumination. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EgoEV-HandPose achieves state-of-the-art performance with an MPJPE of 30.54mm and 86.87% Top-1 gesture recognition accuracy, significantly outperforming RGB-based stereo and prior event-camera methods, particularly in low-light and bimanual occlusion scenarios, thereby setting a new benchmark for event-based egocentric perception. The established dataset and source code will be publicly released at https://github.com/ZJUWang01/EgoEV-HandPose.

Modern GUI agents typically rely on a model-centric and step-wise interaction paradigm, where LLMs must re-interpret the UI and re-decide actions at every screen, which is fragile in long-horizon tasks. In this paper, we propose Executable Agentic Memory (EAM), a structured Knowledge Graph (KG) that shifts GUI planning from free-form generation to a robust retrieval-and-execution process. Our approach includes a sample-efficient memory construction pipeline using state-aware DFS and action-group mining to compress multi-step routines. To ensure efficient planning, we introduce a value-guided graph search where a lightweight Q-function model steers Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) over the KG. We theoretically establish bias-consistency for the Q-model and derive sample complexity bounds for path recovery. Empirically, EAM outperforms state-of-the-art baselines like UI-TARS-7B by up to $19.6\%$ on AndroidWorld, while reducing token costs $6\times$ relative to GPT-4o. With a $2.8$s average latency, EAM enables reliable, quick, and long-horizon GUI automation.

Benchmarking tabular learning has revealed the benefit of dedicated architectures, pushing the state of the art. But real-world tables often contain string entries, beyond numbers, and these settings have been understudied due to a lack of a solid benchmarking suite. They lead to new research questions: Are dedicated learners needed, with end-to-end modeling of strings and numbers? Or does it suffice to encode strings as numbers, as with a categorical encoding? And if so, do the resulting tables resemble numerical tabular data, calling for the same learners? To enable these studies, we contribute STRABLE, a benchmarking corpus of 108 tables, all real-world learning problems with strings and numbers across diverse application fields. We run the first large-scale empirical study of tabular learning with strings, evaluating 445 pipelines. These pipelines span end-to-end architectures and modular pipelines, where strings are first encoded, then post-processed, and finally passed to a tabular learner. We find that, because most tables in the wild are categorical-dominant, advanced tabular learners paired with simple string embeddings achieve good predictions at low computational cost. On free-text-dominant tables, large LLM encoders become competitive. Their performance also appears sensitive to post-processing, with differences across LLM families. Finally, we show that STRABLE is a good set of tables to study "string tabular" learning as it leads to generalizable pipeline rankings that are close to the oracle rankings. We thus establish STRABLE as a foundation for research on tabular learning with strings, an important yet understudied area.

Language models are instruction-tuned to refuse harmful requests, but the mechanisms underlying this behavior remain poorly understood. Popular steering methods operate on the residual stream and degrade output coherence at high intervention strengths, limiting their practical use. We introduce contrastive neuron attribution (CNA), which identifies the 0.1% of MLP neurons whose activations most distinguish harmful from benign prompts, requiring only forward passes with no gradients or auxiliary training. In instruct models, ablating the discovered circuit reduces refusal rates by over 50% on a standard jailbreak benchmark while preserving fluency and non-degeneracy across all steering strengths. Applying CNA to matched base and instruct models across Llama and Qwen architectures (from 1B to 72B parameters), we find that base models contain similar late-layer discrimination structures but steering these neurons produces only content shifts, not behavioral change. These results demonstrate that neuron-level intervention enables reliable behavioral steering without the quality tradeoffs of residual-stream methods. More broadly, our findings suggest that alignment fine-tuning transforms pre-existing discrimination structure into a sparse, targetable refusal gate.

Leveraging the rich world knowledge of Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents offers a promising path toward general intelligence. However, a fundamental prior-dynamics mismatch hinders existing approaches: static LLM knowledge cannot directly adapt to the complex transition dynamics of long-horizon tasks. Using LLM priors as fixed policies limits exploration diversity, as the prior is blind to environment-specific dynamics; while end-to-end fine-tuning suffers from optimization instability and credit assignment issues. To bridge this gap, we propose PriorZero, a unified framework that integrates LLM-derived conceptual priors into world-model-based planning through a decoupled rollout-training design. During rollout, a novel root-prior injection mechanism incorporates LLM priors exclusively at the root node of Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), focusing search on semantically promising actions while preserving the world model's deep lookahead capability. During training, PriorZero decouples world-model learning from LLM adaptation: the world model is continuously refined on interaction data to jointly improve its dynamics, policy, and value predictions, its value estimates are then leveraged to provide fine-grained credit assignment signals for stable LLM fine-tuning via alternating optimization. Experiments across diverse benchmarks, including text-based adventure games in Jericho and instruction-following gridworld tasks in BabyAI, demonstrate that PriorZero consistently improves both exploration efficiency and asymptotic performance, establishing a promising framework for LLM-empowered decision-making. Our code is available at https://github.com/opendilab/LightZero.

Farmland Semantic Change Detection (SCD) is essential for cultivated land protection, yet existing benchmarks and models remain insufficient for fine-grained farmland conversion monitoring. Current datasets often lack dedicated "from-to" annotations, while visual change detection models are easily disturbed by phenology-induced pseudo-changes caused by crop rotation, seasonal variation, and illumination differences. To address these challenges, we construct HZNU-FCD, a large-scale fine-grained farmland SCD benchmark with a unified five-class farmland-to-non-farmland annotation protocol. It contains 4,588 bitemporal image pairs with pixel-level labels for practical farmland protection. Based on this benchmark, we propose a large-small collaborative SCD framework that integrates a task-driven small visual model with a frozen large vision-language model. The small model, Fine-grained Difference-aware Mamba (FD-Mamba), learns dense change representations for boundary preservation and small-region localization. The large-model pathway, Cross-modal Logical Arbitration (CMLA), introduces CLIP-based textual priors for prompt-guided semantic arbitration and pseudo-change suppression. To enable effective collaboration, we design a hard-region co-training strategy that supervises the CMLA semantic score map only on low-confidence pixels. Experiments show that our method achieves 97.63% F1, 96.32% IoU, and 96.35% SCD_IoU_mean on HZNU-FCD with only 6.65M trainable parameters. Compared with the multimodal ChangeCLIP-ViT, which leverages vision-language information for change detection, our method improves F1 by 10.19 percentage points on HZNU-FCD. It also achieves 91.43% F1 and 84.21% IoU on LEVIR-CD, and 93.85% F1 and 88.41% IoU on WHU-CD, demonstrating strong robustness and generalization. The code is available at https://github.com/Lovelymili/FD-Mamba.

What makes a word difficult to learn, and how does the difficulty depend on the learner's native language? We computationally model vocabulary difficulty for English learners whose first language is Spanish, German, or Chinese with gradient-boosted models trained on features related to a word's familiarity (e.g., frequency), meaning, surface form, and cross-linguistic transfer. Using Shapley values, we determine the importance of each feature group. Word familiarity is the dominant feature group shared by all three languages. However, predictions for Spanish- and German-speaking learners rely additionally on orthographic transfer. This transfer mechanism is unavailable to Chinese learners, whose difficulty is shaped by a combination of familiarity and surface features alone. Our models provide interpretable, L1-tailored difficulty estimates that can be used to design vocabulary curricula.

Dynamic feature selection (DFS) is a machine learning framework in which features are acquired sequentially for individual samples under budget constraints. The exponential growth in the number of possible feature acquisition paths forces a DFS model to balance fitting specific scenarios against maintaining general performance, even when the feature space is moderate in size. In this paper, we study the structural limitations of existing DFS approaches to achieve an optimal solution. Then, we propose \textsc{Hyper-DFS}, a hypernetwork-based DFS approach that generates feature subset-specific classifier parameters on demand. We show that the use of hypernetworks compared to mask-embedding methods results in a smaller structural complexity bound. We also use a Set Transformer encoding to create a smooth conditioning space for the hypernetwork, so that functionally similar tasks are also geometrically close. In our benchmarks, \textsc{Hyper-DFS} outperforms all state-of-the-art approaches on synthetic and real-life tabular data. It is also competitive or superior across all image datasets tested, and shows substantially stronger zero-shot generalisation to feature subsets never seen during training than existing DFS approaches.

Geospatial foundation models have primarily focused on raster data such as satellite imagery, where self-supervised learning has been widely studied. Vector geospatial data instead represent the world as discrete geoentities with explicit geometry, semantics, and structured spatial relations, including metric proximity and topological relationships. These relations jointly determine how entities interact within space, yet existing representation learning methods remain fragmented, often restricted to specific geometry types or partial spatial relations, limiting their ability to capture unified spatial context across heterogeneous geoentities. We propose NARA (Neural Anchor-conditioned Relation-Aware representation learning), a self-supervised framework for vector geoentities. NARA learns context-dependent representations by jointly modeling semantics, geometry, and spatial relations within a unified framework and captures relational spatial structure beyond proximity alone, enabling rich contextualized representations across heterogeneous geoentities of points, polylines, and polygons. Evaluation on building function classification, traffic speed prediction, and next point-of-interest recommendation shows consistent improvements over prior methods, highlighting the benefit of unified relational modeling for vector geospatial data.

Graph-based machine learning has emerged as a promising approach for manufacturability analysis by learning directly from CAD models represented as Boundary Representations (B-reps), exploiting both surface geometry and topological connectivity. However, purely geometric representations often lack the process-specific semantics required for accurate manufacturability prediction: many manufacturing factors, such as surface roles or bend intent, are not explicitly encoded in shape alone and are difficult for data-driven models to infer reliably. We propose a hybrid approach that addresses this challenge by enriching B-rep attributed adjacency graphs with manufacturing features recognized through a rule-based module. Applied to sheet metal bending, recognized features, such as bend characteristics, flange lengths, and surface roles are integrated as node attributes, concentrating the learning signal on process-relevant geometric patterns. Experiments on both a large-scale synthetic manufacturability benchmark and a real-world industrial dataset with measured bending times, one of the first such validations on genuine production data, demonstrate that combining domain knowledge with graph-based learning improves prediction accuracy across both tasks. The results demonstrate that hybrid modeling offers a feasible and effective path toward deployable tools for manufacturability assessment and effort estimation in industrial CAD environments.

Using prompted language models as classifiers enables classification in domains with limited training data, but misses some of the robustness and performance benefits that fine-tuning can bring. We study whether training on multiple classification tasks, each with its own prompt, improves performance on new domains with new classification prompts. We show that such training partially generalizes to adjacent domains, improving classification performance on tasks that are unseen during training. However, we identify specific edge cases where the fine-tuned models fail to follow prompts, such as when the classification prompt changes completely while the data domain remains the same as during training. We show that classification training can be mixed with general instruction following training, and that (when done well) such training keeps the benefits of classification training and mitigates its generalization failures. Surprisingly, we see that this no-thinking supervised classification training can generalize to with-thinking classification and summarization, suggesting that no-thinking classification training might be instrumentally useful in building other kinds of classifiers and monitoring systems.

We introduce missingness-MDPs (miss-MDPs), a novel subclass of partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) that incorporates the theory of missing data. A miss-MDP is a POMDP whose observation function is a missingness function, specifying the probability that individual state features are missing (i.e., unobserved) at a time step. The literature distinguishes three canonical missingness types: missing (1) completely at random (MCAR), (2) at random (MAR), and (3) not at random (MNAR). Our planning problem is to compute near-optimal policies for a miss-MDP with an unknown missingness function, given a dataset of action-observation trajectories. Achieving such optimality guarantees for policies requires learning the missingness function from data, which is infeasible for general POMDPs. To overcome this challenge, we exploit the structural properties of different missingness types to derive probably approximately correct (PAC) algorithms for learning the missingness function. These algorithms yield an approximate but fully specified miss-MDP that we solve using off-the-shelf planning methods. We prove that, with high probability, the resulting policies are epsilon-optimal in the true miss-MDP. Empirical results confirm the theory and demonstrate superior performance of our approach over two model-free POMDP methods.

Many real-world tasks involve delayed effects, where the outcomes of actions emerge after varying time lags. Existing delay-aware reinforcement learning methods often rely on state augmentation, prior knowledge of delay distributions, or access to non-delayed data, limiting their generalization. Hierarchical reinforcement learning, by contrast, inherently offers advantages in handling delays due to its hierarchical structure, yet existing methods are restricted to fixed delays. To address these limitations, we propose Delay-Empowered Causal Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (DECHRL). DECHRL explicitly models both the causal structure of state transitions and their associated stochastic delay distributions. These are then incorporated into a delay-aware empowerment objective that drives proactive exploration toward highly controllable states, thereby improving performance under temporal uncertainty. We evaluate DECHRL in modified 2D-Minecraft and MiniGrid environments featuring stochastic delays. Experimental results show that DECHRL effectively models temporal delays and significantly outperforms baselines in decision-making under temporal uncertainty.

Image hashing provides compact representations for efficient storage and retrieval but is inherently limited to global comparison and cannot reason about where changes occur. This limitation prevents hashing from being directly applicable to scene change detection, where spatial localization is essential. In this work, we revisit hashing from a scene change detection perspective and propose HashSCD, a patch-wise hashing framework that enables both efficient global change detection and localized change identification. HashSCD encodes spatially aligned patches into compact hash codes and aggregates them through an XOR-like operation, allowing change detection and localization to be performed directly in the Hamming space without repeated inference on previous images. The model is trained in an unsupervised manner using contrastive learning at both patch and global levels. Experiments demonstrate that HashSCD achieves competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art unsupervised hashing and scene change detection methods, while significantly reducing computational cost and storage requirements.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress, yet the object hallucination remains a critical challenge for reliable deployment. In this paper, we present an in-depth analysis of instruction token embeddings and reveal that they implicitly encode visual information while effectively filtering erroneous information introduced by misleading visual embeddings. Building on this insight, we propose the Instruction Lens Score (InsLen), which combines a Calibrated Local Score with a Context Consistency Score that measures context consistency of the object tokens. The proposed approach serves as a plug-and-play object hallucination detector without relying on auxiliary models or additional training. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks and diverse MLLM architectures demonstrate that InsLen consistently outperforms existing hallucination detection methods, highlighting its effectiveness and robustness. The code is available at https://github.com/Fraserlairh/Instruction-Lens-Score.

When people share the same documents and observations yet reach different conclusions, the disagreement often shifts into a judgment that the other party is cognitively defective, irrational, or acting in bad faith. This paper argues that such divergence is better described as a form of non-identifiability inherent in inference and learning, rather than as a defect of the other party. We organize the phenomenon into two levels: (i) $θ$-level non-identifiability, where conclusions diverge under the same world model $W$ because inference settings differ; and (ii) $W$-level non-identifiability, where repeated use of an inference setting $θ$ biases data exposure and update rules, causing the learned world model $W$ itself to diverge. We introduce an inference profile $θ= (R, E, S, D)$, consisting of Reference, Exploration, Stabilization, and Horizon, and show how outputs can split even for the same observation $o$ and the same $W$. We further explain why disagreements tend to project onto a small number of bases -- abstract versus concrete, externalizability, and order versus freedom -- as a consequence of general constraints on learning systems: computational, observational, and coordination constraints. Finally, we relate the framework to deep representation learning, including representation hierarchy, latent-state estimation, and regularization-exploration trade-offs, and illustrate the framework through a case study on AI regulation debates.

Metal artifacts in computed tomography (CT) severely degrade image quality, compromising diagnostic accuracy and radiotherapy planning, especially in cancer patients with high-density implants. We propose H3D-MarNet, a two-stage framework for artifact-aware CT domain transformation from kilo-voltage CT (kVCT) to mega-voltage CT (MVCT). In the first stage, a wavelet-based preprocessing module suppresses metal-induced artifacts through frequency-aware denoising while preserving anatomical structures. In second stage, Domain-TransNet performs kVCT-to-MVCT domain transformation using a hybrid volumetric learning architecture. Domain-TransNet integrates a CNN-based encoder to capture fine-grained local anatomical details and a transformer-based encoder to model long-range volumetric dependencies. The complementary representations are fused through an attention-based feature fusion mechanism to ensure spatial and contextual coherence across slices. A multi-stage, attention-guided decoder, supported by deep supervision, progressively reconstructs artifact-suppressed MVCT volumes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that H3D-MarNet achieves 28.14 dB PSNR and 0.717 SSIM on artifact-affected slices from full dataset, indicating effective metal artifact suppression and anatomical preservation, highlighting its potential for reliable CT modality transformation in clinical radiotherapy workflows.

Contact-rich assembly is fundamental in robotics but poses significant challenges due to uncertainties in relative poses, such as misalignments and small clearances in peg-in-hole tasks. Existing approaches typically address search and high-precision insertion separately, because these tasks involve distinct action patterns. However, supporting both tasks within a single model, without switching models or weights, is desirable for intelligent assembly systems. In this work, we propose SI-Diff, a framework that learns both search and high-precision insertion through a force-domain diffusion policy. To this end, we introduce a new mode-conditioning mechanism that enables the policy to capture distinct action behaviors under a single framework. Moreover, we develop a new search teacher policy that can generate diverse trajectories. By training on successful and efficient demonstrations provided by the teacher policy, the model learns the mapping from tactile and end-effector velocity observations to effective action behaviors. We conduct thorough experiments to show that SI-Diff extends the tolerance to x-y misalignments from 2 mm to 5 mm compared to the state-of-the-art baseline, TacDiffusion, while also demonstrating strong zero-shot transferability to unseen shapes.

NVFP4 has recently emerged as an efficient 4-bit microscaling format for large language models (LLMs), offering superior numerical fidelity with native hardware support. However, existing methods often yield suboptimal performance due to inflexible scale selection and the coupled treatment of quantization and dequantization scales. To address these issues, we propose Scale Optimization for Accurate Reconstruction (SOAR), a novel post-training quantization framework that improves the accuracy of NVFP4 quantization. At its core, SOAR features Closed-form Joint Scale Optimization (CJSO), which jointly optimizes global and block-wise scales via analytical solutions derived from reconstruction error minimization. Furthermore, it incorporates Decoupled Scale Search (DSS). DSS decouples the high-precision quantization scale from its constrained dequantization counterpart, and performs discrete search to mitigate precision loss from scale quantization. Extensive experiments across multiple LLMs show that our method consistently outperforms existing NVFP4 quantization baselines, achieving superior accuracy under the same memory footprint with no additional hardware overhead. The code and models will be available at https://github.com/steven-bao1/SOAR.

Conversational scams, such as romance and investment scams, are emerging as a major form of online fraud. Unlike one-shot scam lures such as fake lottery or unpaid toll messages, they unfold through multi-turn conversations in which scammers gradually manipulate victims using evolving psychological techniques. However, existing research mainly focuses on static scam detection or synthetic scams, leaving open whether language models can understand how real-world scams progress over time. We introduce PreScam, a benchmark for modeling scam progression from early conversations. Built from user-submitted scam reports, PreScam filters and structures 177,989 raw reports into 11,573 conversational scam instances spanning 20 scam categories. Each instance is hierarchically structured according to the scam lifecycle defined by the proposed scam kill chain, and further annotated at the turn level with scammer psychological actions and victim responses. We benchmark models on two tasks: real-time termination prediction, which estimates whether a conversation is approaching the termination stage, and scammer action prediction, which forecasts the scammer's subsequent actions. Results show a clear gap between surface-level fluency and progression modeling: supervised encoders substantially outperform zero-shot LLMs on real-time termination prediction, while next-action prediction remains only moderately successful even for strong LLMs. Taken together, these results show that current models can capture some scam-related cues, yet still struggle to track how risk escalates and how manipulation unfolds across turns.

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) transcripts often contain disfluencies, such as fillers, repetitions, and false starts, which reduce readability and hinder downstream applications like chatbots and voice assistants. If left unaddressed, such disfluencies can significantly degrade the reliability of downstream systems. Most existing approaches rely on classical models that focus on identifying disfluent tokens for removal. While this strategy is effective to some extent, it often disrupts grammatical structure and semantic coherence, leading to incomplete or unnatural sentences. Recent literature explored the use of large language models (LLMs); however, these efforts have primarily focused on disfluency detection or data augmentation, rather than performing comprehensive correction. We propose a multilingual correction pipeline where a sequence tagger first marks disfluent tokens, and these signals guide instruction fine-tuning of an LLM to rewrite transcripts into fluent text. To further improve reliability, we add a contrastive learning objective that penalizes the reproduction of disfluent tokens, encouraging the model to preserve grammar and meaning while removing disfluent artifacts. Our experiments across three Indian languages, namely Hindi, Bengali, and Marathi show consistent improvements over strong baselines, including multilingual sequence-to-sequence models. These results highlight that detection-only strategies are insufficient. Combining token-level cues with instruction tuning and contrastive learning provides a practical and scalable solution for multilingual disfluency correction in speech-driven NLP systems. We make the codes publicly available at https://github.com/deepak-kumar-98/Mind-the-Pause.