Surrogate endpoints are used in place of long-term outcomes in randomized experiments when observing the real outcome for a large enough cohort is prohibitively expensive or impractical. A short-term surrogate is good if the result of an experiment using the surrogate is predictive of the result of a hypothetical study using the real outcome. Much attention has been paid to formalizing this property in causal terms, but most criteria are unidentifiable and cannot be turned into practical algorithms for learning surrogate endpoints from data. To address this, we study plug-in composite surrogates, functions of post-treatment variables that may be substituted directly for the primary outcome in a randomized experiment. We propose two methods for learning plug-in surrogates that maximize effect predictiveness, and characterize the possibility of finding endpoints that yield unbiased effect estimates in representative scenarios. Finally, in both synthetic experiments with known effects and in data from a real-world experiment, we find that our method, based on directly modeling the surrogate effect, returns plug-in endpoints more predictive of the primary effect than established methods.

Cortical neurons are complex, multi-timescale processors wired into recurrent circuits, shaped by long evolutionary pressure under stringent biological constraints. Mainstream machine learning, by contrast, predominantly builds models from extremely simple units, a default inherited from early neural-network theory. We treat this as a normative architectural question. How should one split a fixed parameter budget $P$ between the number of units $N$, per-unit effective complexity $k_e$, and per-unit connectivity $k_c$? What controls the optimal allocation? This calls for a model in which per-unit complexity can be tuned independently of width and connectivity. Accordingly, we introduce the ELM Network, whose recurrent layer is built from Expressive Leaky Memory (ELM) neurons, chosen to mirror functional components of cortical neurons. The architecture allows for individually adjusting $N$, $k_e$, and $k_c$ and trains stably across orders of magnitude in scale. We evaluate the model on two qualitatively different sequence benchmarks: the neuromorphic SHD-Adding task and Enwik8 character-level language modeling. Performance improves monotonically along each of the three axes individually. Under a fixed budget, a clear non-trivial optimum emerges in their tradeoff, and larger budgets favor both more and more complex neurons. A closed-form information-theoretic model captures these tradeoffs and attributes the diminishing returns at two ends to: per-neuron signal-to-noise saturation and across-neuron redundancy. A hyperparameter sweep spanning three orders of magnitude in trainable parameters traces a near-Pareto-frontier scaling law consistent with the framework. This suggests that the simple-unit default in ML is not obviously optimal once this tradeoff surface is probed, and offers a normative lens on cortex's reliance on complex spatio-temporal integrators.

Is child-directed language (CDL) optimized to support language learning, and which aspects of linguistic development does it facilitate? We investigate this question using neural language models trained on CDL versus adult-directed language (ADL). We selectively remove syntactic or lexical co-occurrence information from the model training data, and evaluate the impact of these manipulations on verb meaning acquisition. While disrupting syntax impairs learning across all datasets, models trained on CDL and spoken ADL show significantly higher resilience than those trained on written input. Tracking semantic and syntactic performance over training, we observe a semantic-first trajectory, with verb meanings emerging prior to robust syntactic proficiency, an asynchrony most pronounced in the spoken domain, especially CDL. These results suggest that the advantage for verb learning previously attributed to CDL may instead reflect broader properties of the spoken register, rather than a uniquely CDL-specific optimization.

Skill libraries enable large language model agents to reuse experience from past interactions, but most existing libraries store skills as isolated entries and retrieve them only by semantic similarity. This leads to two key challenges for compositional tasks. Firstly, an agent must identify not only relevant skills but also how they depend on and build upon each other. Secondly, it also makes library maintenance difficult, since the system lacks structural cues for deciding when skills should be merged, split, or removed. We propose SKILLGRAPH, a framework that represents reusable skills as nodes in a directed graph, with typed edges encoding prerequisite, enhancement, and co-occurrence relations. Given a new task, SKILLGRAPH retrieves not just individual skills, but an ordered skill subgraph that can guide multi-step decision making. The graph is continuously updated from agent trajectories and reinforcement learning feedback, allowing both the skill library and the agent policy to improve together. Experiments on ALFWorld, WebShop, and seven search-augmented QA tasks show that SKILLGRAPH achieves state-of-the-art performance against memory-augmented RL methods, with especially large gains on complex tasks that require composing multiple skills.

Cross-embodiment video generation aims to transfer motions across different humanoid embodiments, such as human-to-robot and robot-to-robot, enabling scalable data generation for embodied intelligence. A major challenge in this setting is that motion dynamics are partly transferable across embodiments, whereas appearance and morphology remain embodiment-specific. Existing approaches often entangle these factors, and many require paired data for every target embodiment, which limits scalability to new robots. We present OmniHumanoid, a framework that factorizes transferable motion learning and embodiment-specific adaptation. Our method learns a shared motion transfer model from motion-aligned paired videos spanning multiple embodiments, while adapting to a new embodiment using only unpaired videos through lightweight embodiment-specific adapters. To reduce interference between motion transfer and embodiment adaptation, we further introduce a branch-isolated attention design that separates motion conditioning from embodiment-specific modulation. In addition, we construct a synthetic cross-embodiment dataset with motion-aligned paired videos rendered across diverse humanoid assets, scenes, and viewpoints. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks show that OmniHumanoid achieves strong motion fidelity and embodiment consistency, while enabling scalable adaptation to unseen humanoid embodiments without retraining the shared motion model.

Multimodal deep learning has shown strong potential in medical applications by integrating heterogeneous data sources such as medical images and structured clinical variables. However, most existing approaches implicitly assume complete modality availability, an assumption that rarely holds in real-world clinical settings where entire modalities and individual features are frequently missing. In this work, we propose a multimodal transformer framework for joint vision-tabular learning explicitly designed to operate under pervasive modality missingness, without relying on imputation or heuristic model switching. The architecture integrates three components: a vision, a tabular, and a multimodal fusion encoder. Unimodal representations are weighted through learnable modality tokens and fused via intermediate fusion with masked self-attention, which excludes missing tokens and modalities from information aggregation and gradient propagation. To further enhance resilience, we introduce a modality-dropout regularization strategy that stochastically removes available modalities during training, encouraging the model to exploit complementary information under partial data availability. We evaluate our approach on the MIMIC-CXR dataset paired with structured clinical data from MIMIC-IV for multilabel classification of 14 diagnostic findings with incomplete annotations. Two parallel systematic stress-test protocols progressively increase training and inference missingness in each modality separately, spanning fully multimodal to fully unimodal scenarios. Across all missingness regimes, the proposed method consistently outperforms representative baselines, showing smoother performance degradation and improved robustness. Ablation studies further demonstrate that attention-level masking and intermediate fusion with joint fine-tuning are key to resilient multimodal inference.

We describe our system for SemEval-2026 Task 8 (MTRAGEval), participating in Task A (Retrieval) across four English-language domains. Our approach employs a three-stage pipeline: (1) query rewriting via a LoRA-fine-tuned Qwen 2.5 7B model that transforms context-dependent follow-up questions into standalone queries, (2) hybrid BM25 and dense retrieval combined through Reciprocal Rank Fusion, and (3) cross-encoder reranking with BGE-reranker-v2-m3. On the official test set, the system achieves nDCG@5 of 0.531, ranking 8th out of 38 participating systems and 10.7% above the organizer baseline. Development comparisons reveal that domain-specific temperature tuning for query generation, where technical domains benefit from deterministic decoding and general domains from controlled randomness, provides consistent gains, while more complex strategies such as domain-aware prompting and multi-query expansion degrade performance.

Reconstructing dynamic 4D scenes from monocular videos is a fundamental yet challenging task. While recent 3D foundation models provide strong geometric priors, their performance significantly degrades in dynamic environments. This degradation stems from a fundamental tension: the inherent coupling of camera ego-motion and object motion within global attention mechanisms. In this paper, we propose a novel, training-free progressive decoupling framework that disentangles dynamics from statics in a principled, coarse-to-fine manner. Our core insight is to resolve the tension by first stabilizing the camera pose, followed by geometric refinement. Specifically, our approach consists of three synergistic components: (1) a Dynamic-Mask-Guided Pose Decoupling module that isolates pose estimation from dynamic interference, yielding a stable motion-free reference frame; (2) a Topological Subspace Surgery mechanism that orthogonally decomposes the depth manifold, safely preserving dynamic objects while injecting refined, mask-aware geometry into static regions; and (3) an Information-Theoretic Confidence-Aware Fusion strategy that formulates depth integration as a heteroscedastic Bayesian inference problem, adaptively blending multi-pass predictions via inverse-variance weighting. Extensive experiments on standard 4D reconstruction benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves consistent and substantial improvements across principal point-cloud metrics. Notably, our approach shows competitive performance in robust 4D scene reconstruction without requiring fine-tuning, suggesting the potential of mathematically grounded dynamic-static disentanglement.

Neural operators provide a framework for learning solution operators of partial differential equations (PDEs), enabling efficient surrogate modeling for complex systems. While universal approximation results are now well understood, approximation analysis specific to nonlinear reaction-diffusion systems remains limited. In this paper, we study neural operators applied to the solution mapping from initial conditions to time-dependent solutions of a generalized Gierer-Meinhardt reaction-diffusion system, a prototypical model of nonlinear pattern formation. Our main results establish explicit approximation error bounds in terms of network depth, width, and spectral rank by exploiting the Laplacian spectral representation of the Green's function underlying the PDE. We show that the required parameter complexity grows at most polynomially with respect to the target accuracy, demonstrating that Laplacian eigenfunction-based neural operator architectures alleviate the curse of parametric complexity encountered in generic operator learning. Numerical experiments on the Gierer-Meinhardt system support the theoretical findings.

Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on standard knowledge evaluation benchmarks, yet recent work shows that their knowledge capabilities remain brittle under question variants that test the same knowledge in different forms. Robustness augmentation of existing knowledge evaluation benchmarks is therefore necessary, but current LLM-assisted generate-then-verify pipelines are costly and difficult to scale due to low-yield variant generation and unreliable variant verification. We propose SAGE (Scalable Automated Generation of Robustness BEnchmarks), a framework for scalable robustness augmentation of knowledge evaluation benchmarks using fine-tuned smaller models. SAGE consists of VariantQual, a rubric-based verifier trained on human-labeled seed data, and VariantGen, a variant generator initialized with supervised fine-tuning and further optimized with reinforcement learning using VariantQual as the reward model. Experiments on HellaSwag show that SAGE constructs a large-scale robustness-augmented benchmark with quality comparable to the human-annotated HellaSwag-Pro at substantially lower cost, while the fine-tuned models further generalize to MMLU without benchmark-specific fine-tuning.

Many image understanding tasks involve identifying what is present and where it appears. However, tasks that address where, such as object discovery, detection, and segmentation, are often considerably more complex than image classification, which primarily focuses on what. One possible reason is that classification-oriented backbones tend to emphasize semantic information about what, while implicitly entangling or suppressing information about where. In this work, we focus on an inductive bias termed what-where separation, which encourages models to represent object appearance and spatial location in a decomposed manner. To incorporate this bias throughout an attentive backbone in the style of Vision Transformer (ViT), we propose the What-Where Transformer (WWT). Our method introduces two key novel designs: (1) it treats tokens as representations of what and attention maps as representations of where, and processes them in concurrent feed-forward modules via a multi-stream, slot-based architecture; (2) it reuses both the final-layer tokens and attention maps for downstream tasks, and directly exposes them to gradients derived from task losses, thereby facilitating more effective and explicit learning of localization. We demonstrate that even under standard single-label classification-based supervision on ImageNet, WWT exhibits emergent multiple object discovery directly from raw attention maps, rather than via additional postprocessing such as token clustering. Furthermore, WWT achieves superior performance compared to ViT-based methods on zero-shot object discovery and weakly supervised semantic segmentation, and it is transferable to various localization setups with minimal modifications. Code will be published after acceptance.

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) is a core task in pervasive computing systems, where models must operate under strict computational constraints while remaining robust to heterogeneous and evolving deployment conditions. Recent advances based on Transformer architectures have significantly improved recognition performance, but typically rely on task-specific models trained from scratch, resulting in high training cost, large data requirements, and limited adaptability to domain shifts. In this paper, we propose a paradigm shift that reuses large pretrained language models (LLMs) as generic temporal backbones for sensor-based HAR, instead of designing domain-specific Transformers. To bridge the modality gap between inertial time series and language models, we introduce a structured convolutional projection that maps multivariate accelerometer and gyroscope signals into the latent space of the LLM. The pretrained backbone is kept frozen and adapted using parameter-efficient Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), drastically reducing the number of trainable parameters and the overall training cost. Through extensive experiments on standard HAR benchmarks, we show that this approach enables rapid convergence, strong data efficiency, and robust cross-dataset transfer, particularly in low-data and few-shot settings. At the same time, our results highlight the complementary roles of convolutional frontends and LLMs, where local invariances are handled at the signal level while long-range temporal dependencies are captured by the pretrained backbone. Overall, this work demonstrates that LLMs can serve as a practical, frugal, and scalable foundation for adaptive HAR systems, opening new directions for reusing foundation models beyond their original language domain.

Deep Learning has revolutionized machine learning, reaching unprecedented levels of accuracy, but at the cost of reduced interpretability. Especially in image processing systems, deep networks transform local pixel information into more global concepts in a highly obscured manner. Explainable AI methods for image processing try to shed light on this issue by highlighting the regions of the image that are important for the prediction task. Among these, Class Activation Mapping (CAM) and its gradient-based variants compute attributions based on the feature map and upscale them to the image resolution, assuming that feature map locations are influenced only by underlying regions. Perturbation-based methods, such as CorrRISE, on the other hand, try to provide pixel-level attributions by perturbing the input with fixed patches and checking how the output of the network changes. In this work, we propose Feature Activation Map Explanation (FAME), which combines both worlds by using network gradients to compute changes to the input image, manipulating it in a gradient-driven way rather than using fixed patches. We apply this technique on two common tasks, image classification and face recognition, and show that CAM's above-mentioned assumption does not hold for deeper networks. We qualitatively and quantitively show that FAME produces attribution maps that are competitive state-of-the-art systems. Our code is available: {\footnotesize https://github.com/AIML-IfI/fame.}

One hundred years ago Vygotsky and his circle were exploring the nature of consciousness and defining what would become psychology in the Soviet Union. They concluded that children develop "scientific thinking" through interacting with enculturated adults in Zones of Proximal Development or ZPDs. The proposal is that, contrary to the claims of some, the LLM mechanism is not doing thinking with "distributed representations," but rather the completion model is doing "primitive thinking" in terms of *practices*. Viewed from this perspective, it would seem our large language models don't hallucinate, but rather dream, and that what is needed is not "guard rails" but an investigation of the set of cognitive tools that enable us to do things that look like common-sense. The proposal here is that *interaction* is core to human communication rather than just an add-on to "real" understanding.

Pixel diffusion models have recently regained attention for visual generation. However, training advanced pixel-space models from scratch demands prohibitive computational and data resources. To address this, we propose the Latent-to-Pixel (L2P) transfer paradigm, an efficient framework that directly harnesses the rich knowledge of pre-trained LDMs to build powerful pixel-space models. Specifically, L2P discards the VAE in favor of large-patch tokenization and freezes the source LDM's intermediate layers, exclusively training shallow layers to learn the latent-to-pixel transformation. By utilizing LDM-generated synthetic images as the sole training corpus, L2P fits an already smooth data manifold, enabling rapid convergence with zero real-data collection. This strategy allows L2P to seamlessly migrate massive latent priors to the pixel space using only 8 GPUs. Furthermore, eliminating the VAE memory bottleneck unlocks native 4K ultra-high resolution generation. Extensive experiments across mainstream LDM architectures show that L2P incurs negligible training overhead, yet performs on par with the source LDM on DPG-Bench and reaches 93% performance on GenEval.

Learning governing dynamics from data is a common goal across the sciences, yet it is only well-posed when the underlying mechanisms are identifiable. In practice, many data-driven methods implicitly assume identifiability; when this assumption fails, estimated models can yield spurious predictions and invalid mechanistic conclusions. Classical identifiability guarantees for controlled linear time-invariant (LTI) systems provide sufficient conditions -- controllability and persistent excitation -- but leave open whether identifiability holds when these conditions fail, and which parts of the system remain identifiable without full identifiability. We show that the experimental setup, i.e., the realized initial state and control input, dictates a fundamental limit on the information recoverable from the observed trajectory. We develop a geometric characterization of this limit and derive a closed-form description of all systems consistent with the experimental setup. Crucially, we prove that even when the full system is not identifiable, the restricted dynamics on the subspace reachable by the experiment remain uniquely determined.

We propose a subgraph importance estimation method for pretrained Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) on graph-level tasks, formulated as a linear Group Lasso regression problem in the embedding space. Our method effectively leverages prior domain knowledge of graph substructures, while remaining independent of the specific form of the output layer or readout function used in the GNN architecture, and it does not require access to ground-truth target labels. Experiments on real-world graph datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing baselines in subgraph importance estimation. Furthermore, we extend our method to identify important nodes within the graph.

The performance of promptable video object segmentation (PVOS) models substantially degrades under input corruptions, which prevents PVOS deployment in safety-critical domains. This paper offers the first comprehensive study on robust PVOS (RobustPVOS). We first construct a new, comprehensive benchmark with two real-world evaluation datasets of 351 video clips and more than 2,500 object masks under real-world adverse conditions. At the same time, we generate synthetic training data by applying diverse and temporally varying corruptions to existing VOS datasets. Moreover, we present a new RobustPVOS method, dubbed Memory-object-conditioned Gated-rank Adaptation (MoGA). The key to successfully performing RobustPVOS is two-fold: effectively handling object-specific degradation and ensuring temporal consistency in predictions. MoGA leverages object-specific representations maintained in memory across frames to condition the robustification process, which allows the model to handle each tracked object differently in a temporally consistent way. Extensive experiments on our benchmark validate MoGA's efficacy, showing consistent and significant improvements across diverse corruption types on both synthetic and real-world datasets, establishing a strong baseline for future RobustPVOS research. Our benchmark is publicly available at https://sohyun-l.github.io/RobustPVOS_project_page/.

Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) for Large Language Models (LLMs) critically depends on the exploration capability of the base policy, as training signals emerge only within its in-capability region. For tasks where the base policy cannot reach reward states, additional training or external guidance is needed to recover effective learning signals. Rather than relying on costly iterative supervised fine tuning (SFT), we exploit the abundant action data generated in everyday human interactions. We propose \textsc{ActGuide-RL}, which injects action data as plan-style reference guidance, enabling the agentic policy to overcome reachability barriers to reward states. Guided and unguided rollouts are then jointly optimized via mixed-policy training, internalizing the exploration gains back into the unguided policy. Motivated by a theoretical and empirical analysis of the benefit-risk trade-off, we adopt a minimal intervention principle that invokes guidance only as an adaptive fallback, matching task difficulty while minimizing off-policy risk. On search-agent benchmarks, \textsc{ActGuide-RL} substantially improves over zero RL (+10.7 pp on GAIA and +19 pp on XBench with Qwen3-4B), and performs on par with the SFT+RL pipeline without any cold start. This suggests a new paradigm for agentic RL that reduces the reliance on heavy SFT data by using scalable action guidance instead.

Text-guided inpainting has made image forgery increasingly realistic, challenging both SID and IFL. However, existing methods often struggle to point out suspicious signals across domains. To address this problem, we propose EDGER, a patch-based, dual-branch framework that localizes manipulated regions in arbitrary resolution images without sacrificing native resolution. The first branch, Edge-Guided Segmentation, introduces a Frequency-based Edge Detector to emphasize high-frequency inconsistencies at manipulation boundaries, and fine-tunes a SegFormer to fuse RGB and edge features for pixel-level masks. Since edge evidence is most informative only when patches contain both authentic and manipulated pixels, we complement Edge-Guided Segmentation with a Synthetic Heatmapping branch, a classification-based localizer that fine-tunes a CLIP-ViT image encoder with LoRA to flag fully synthetic patches. Together, Synthetic Heatmapping provides coarse, patch-level synthetic priors, while Edge-Guided Segmentation sharpens boundaries within partially manipulated patches, yielding comprehensive localization. Evaluated in the MediaEval 2025, SynthIM challenge, Manipulated Region Localization Task's setting, our approach scales to multi-megapixel imagery and exhibits strong cross-domain generalization. Extensive ablations highlight the complementary roles of frequency-based edge cues and patch-level synthetic priors in driving accurate, resolution-agnostic localization.

Recent knowledge graph (KG)-enhanced large language models (LLMs) move beyond purely textual knowledge augmentation by encoding retrieved subgraphs into continuous soft prompts via graph neural networks, introducing a graph-conditioned channel that operates alongside the standard text interface. However, existing backdoor attacks are largely designed for the textual channel, and their effectiveness against this dual-channel architecture remains unclear. We show that this architecture creates a robustness gap: text-channel backdoor attacks that readily compromise textual KG prompting systems become largely ineffective against soft-prompt-based counterparts. We interpret this gap through semantic anchoring, whereby graph-derived soft prompts bias the generation-driving hidden state toward query-consistent semantics and suppress surface-level malicious instructions. Because this anchoring effect is itself induced by the graph channel, an attacker who manipulates graph-level representations can in turn redirect it toward adversarial semantics. To demonstrate this risk, we propose BadSKP, a backdoor attack that targets the graph-to-prompt interface through a multi-stage optimization strategy: it constructs adversarial target embeddings, optimizes poisoned node embeddings to steer the induced soft prompt, and approximates the optimized representations with fluent adversarial node attributes. Experiments on two soft-prompt KG-enhanced LLMs across four datasets show that BadSKP achieves high attack success under both frozen and trojaned settings, while text-only attacks remain unreliable even under perplexity-based defenses.

Movie subtitle translation is inherently multimodal, yet text-only systems often miss visual cues needed to convey emotion, action, and social nuance, especially for low-resource Indic languages (English to Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil and Kannada). We present a case study on five full-length films and compare two lightweight visual grounding strategies: structured attribute summaries from a 5-minute sliding window and free-text summaries of inter-subtitle visual gaps. Our analysis shows that temporal misalignment between subtitles and frames is a major obstacle in long-form video, often rendering indiscriminate visual grounding ineffective. However, oracle selective grounding, which replaces only the lowest-quality 20-30\% of baseline segments with visual-enhanced outputs, consistently improves COMET over the text-only baseline while requiring far less visual processing. Among the two approaches, coarse attribute-based visual context summarization is more robust, capturing scene-level emotion and contextual subtle cues that text alone often misses

Uncertainty quantification has become an important factor in understanding the data representations produced by Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). Despite their predictive capabilities being ever useful across industrial workspaces, the inherent uncertainty induced by the nature of the data is a huge mitigating factor to GNN performance. While aleatoric uncertainty is the result of noisy and incomplete stochastic data such as missing edges or over-smoothing, epistemic uncertainty arises from lack of knowledge about a system or model (e.g., a graph's topology or node feature representation), which can be reduced by gathering more data and information. In this paper, we propose an original new framework in which node-level epistemic uncertainty is modelled in a belief function (finite random set) formalism. The resulting Random-Set Graph Neural Networks have a belief-function head predicting a random set over the list of classes, from which both a precise probability prediction and a measure of epistemic uncertainty can be obtained. Extensive experiments on 9 different graph learning datasets, including real-world autonomous driving benchmarks as such Nuscene and ROAD, demonstrate RS-GNN's superior uncertainty quantification capabilities

This article analyzes the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) as support for the conceptual modeling of relational databases through the automatic generation of Entity-Relationship (ER) diagrams from natural language requirements. The approach combines different language models with prompt engineering techniques to evaluate their ability to identify entities, relationships, and attributes in a conceptually consistent manner. The experimental evaluation involved three LLMs, each subjected to three prompting techniques (Zero-Shot, Chain of Thought, and Chain of Thought + Verifier), applied to the same requirements scenario with progressively increasing complexity. The generated diagrams were qualitatively analyzed through direct comparison with the textual requirements, considering the structural and semantic adherence of the modeled elements. The results indicate that, although LLMs show reasonable performance in less complex scenarios, their reliability decreases as the complexity of the requirements increases, with a rise in inconsistencies, ambiguities, and failures in representing constraints. These findings reinforce that, in their current state, LLMs are not sufficiently mature for reliable use in complex scenarios, and the cost of validation may offset the apparent productivity gains.

Learning generative models in settings where the source and target distributions are only specified through unpaired samples is gaining in importance. Here, one frequently-used model are Schrödinger bridges (SB), which represent the most likely evolution between both endpoint distributions. To accelerate training, simulation-free SBs avoid the path simulation of the original SB models. However, learning simulation-free SBs requires paired data; a coupling of the source and target samples is obtained as the solution of the entropic optimal transport (OT) problem. As obtaining the optimal global coupling is infeasible in many practical cases, the entropic OT problem is iteratively solved on minibatches instead. Still, the repeated cost remains substantial and the locality can distort the global transport geometry. We propose quantized diffusion Schrödinger bridges (QDSB), which compute the endpoint coupling on anchor-quantized endpoint distributions and lift the resulting plan back to original data points through cell-wise sampling. We show that the regularized optimal coupling is stable w.r.t. anchor quantization, with an error controlled by the quality of the anchor approximation. In real-world experiments, QDSB matches the sample quality of existing baselines, requiring substantially less time. Code and data are available at github.com/mathefuchs/qdsb.

The performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) on downstream tasks is fundamentally constrained by the capabilities acquired during pre-training. However, traditional benchmarks like MMLU often fail to reflect a base model's plasticity in complex open-ended scenarios, leading to inefficient model selection. We address this by introducing a new task of predicting post-training potential - forecasting a base model's performance before post-training. We propose RuDE (Rubric-based Discriminative Evaluation), a unified framework that bypasses the generation gap of base models by leveraging response discrimination. Guided by our systematic 4C Taxonomy, RuDE constructs controlled contrastive pairs across diverse domains by fine-grained rubric violations. Extensive experiments demonstrate a correlation greater than 90% with post-training performance. Crucially, validation via Reinforcement Learning (RL) confirms that RuDE effectively identifies high-potential smaller models that outperform larger counterparts, offering a compute-efficient mechanism for foundation model development.

We present a unified framework for 3D geometric abstraction using a single continuous 4D wire, parameterized as a B-spline with spatial coordinates and variable width $(x,y,z,w)$. Existing approaches typically represent shapes as collections of many independent curve segments, which often leads to fragmented structures and limited physical realizability. In contrast, we show that a single continuous spline is sufficiently expressive to capture complex volumetric forms while enforcing global topological coherence. By imposing continuity, our method transforms 3D sketching from a local density-accumulation process into a global routing problem, providing a strong inductive bias toward cleaner aesthetics and improved structural coherence. To enable gradient-based optimization, we introduce a differentiable rendering pipeline that efficiently rasterizes variable-width curves with bounded projection error. This formulation supports robust optimization using modern guidance signals such as Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) or CLIP. We demonstrate applications including image-to-3D abstraction, multi-view wire art generation, and differentiable stylized surface filling. Experiments show that our unified representation produces structures with higher semantic fidelity and improved structural coherence compared to approaches based on collections of discrete curves.

Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer from order bias, where their performance is affected by the arrangement order of input elements. This unfairness limits the model's applications in scenarios such as in-context learning and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Recent studies attempt to obtain optimal or suboptimal arrangements based on statistical results or using dataset-based search, but these methods increase inference overhead while leaving the model's inherent order bias unresolved. Other studies mitigate order sensitivity through supervised fine-tuning using augmented training sets with multiple order variants, but often at the cost of accuracy, trapping the model in consistent yet incorrect hallucinations. In this paper, we propose \textbf{D}ual \textbf{G}roup \textbf{A}dvantage \textbf{O}ptimization (\textbf{DGAO}), which aims to improve model accuracy and order stability simultaneously. DGAO calculates and balances intra-group relative accuracy advantage and inter-group relative stability advantage, rewarding the policy model for generating order-stable and correct outputs while penalizing order-sensitive or incorrect responses. This marks the first time reinforcement learning has been used to mitigate LLMs' order sensitivity. We also propose two new metrics, Consistency Rate and Overconfidence Rate, to reveal the pseudo-stability of previous methods and guide more comprehensive evaluation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DGAO achieves superior order fairness while improving performance on RAG, mathematical reasoning, and classification tasks. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Hyalinesky/DGAO.

Collisions at non-line-of-sight (NLOS) intersections remain a major safety concern because drivers have limited visibility of approaching traffic. V2X based warnings can reduce these risks, yet many vehicles are not equipped with V2X and drivers may ignore in vehicle alerts. Collective perception (CP) can compensate for low V2X penetration by extending the awareness of connected vehicles, but it cannot influence unconnected vehicles. To fill this gap, our work introduces a complementary concept that adds a cooperative humanoid robot as an active traffic moderator capable of physically stopping a vehicle that attempts to merge into an unseen traffic stream. The system operates on two parallel perception pathways. A dual camera infrastructure unit detects the position, speed and motion of approaching vehicles and transmits this information to the robot as a collective perception message (CPM). The robot also receives cooperative awareness messages (CAM) from connected vehicles through its onboard V2X unit and can act as a relay for decentralized environmental notification messages (DENM) when safety events originate elsewhere along the road. A fusion module combines these streams to maintain a robust real time view of the main road. A Zone of Danger (ZoD) is defined and used to predict whether an approaching vehicle creates a collision risk for a merging road user. When such a risk is detected, the robot issues a human-like STOP gesture and blocks the merging path until the hazard disappears. The full system was deployed at the Future Mobility Park (FMP) in Rotterdam. Experiments show that the combined vision and V2X perception allows the robot to detect approaching vehicles early, predict hazards reliably and prevent unsafe merges in real world NLOS conditions.

Hierarchical 3D grouping aims to recover scene groups across multiple granularities, from fine object parts to complete objects, without relying on semantic labels or a fixed vocabulary. The main challenge is to transform 2D foundation-model cues into coherent hierarchy supervision and embed that hierarchy in a 3D representation. We propose H2G, a hyperbolic affinity field for hierarchical 3D grouping. Our method derives semantically organized tree supervision by interpreting foundation-model affinities through Dasgupta's objective for similarity-based hierarchical clustering. This supervision is distilled into a single Lorentz hyperbolic feature field, whose geometry is well suited for tree-like branching structures. A hierarchy-aware objective aligns the field with fine-level assignments, coarse object structure, compact feature clusters, and LCA (Lowest Common Ancestor) ordering. This formulation represents multiple grouping levels in one feature space, enabling semantic hierarchical grouping grounded in 2D foundation-model knowledge.