Computer-use agents (CUAs) automate on-screen work, as illustrated by GPT-5.4 and Claude. Yet their reliability on complex, low-frequency interactions is still poor, limiting user trust. Our analysis of failure cases from advanced models suggests a long-tail pattern in GUI operations, where a relatively small fraction of complex and diverse interactions accounts for a disproportionate share of task failures. We hypothesize that this issue largely stems from the scarcity of data for complex interactions. To address this problem, we propose a new benchmark CUActSpot for evaluating models' capabilities on complex interactions across five modalities: GUI, text, table, canvas, and natural image, as well as a variety of actions (click, drag, draw, etc.), covering a broader range of interaction types than prior click-centric benchmarks that focus mainly on GUI widgets. We also design a renderer-based data-synthesis pipeline: scenes are automatically generated for each modality, screenshots and element coordinates are recorded, and an LLM produces matching instructions and action traces. After training on this corpus, our Phi-Ground-Any-4B outperforms open-source models with fewer than 32B parameters. We will release our benchmark, data, code, and models at https://github.com/microsoft/Phi-Ground.git

Reconstructing the absolute 3D pose and shape of the hands from the user's viewpoint using a single head-mounted camera is crucial for practical egocentric interaction in AR/VR, telepresence, and hand-centric manipulation tasks, where sensing must remain compact and unobtrusive. While monocular RGB methods have made progress, they remain constrained by depth-scale ambiguity and struggle to generalize across the diverse optical configurations of head-mounted devices. As a result, models typically require extensive training on device-specific datasets, which are costly and laborious to acquire. This paper addresses these challenges by introducing EgoForce, a monocular 3D hand reconstruction framework that recovers robust, absolute 3D hand pose and its position from the user's (camera-space) viewpoint. EgoForce operates across fisheye, perspective, and distorted wide-FOV camera models using a single unified network. Our approach combines a differentiable forearm representation that stabilizes hand pose, a unified arm-hand transformer that predicts both hand and forearm geometry from a single egocentric view, mitigating depth-scale ambiguity, and a ray space closed-form solver that enables absolute 3D pose recovery across diverse head-mounted camera models. Experiments on three egocentric benchmarks show that EgoForce achieves state-of-the-art 3D accuracy, reducing camera-space MPJPE by up to 28% on the HOT3D dataset compared to prior methods and maintaining consistent performance across camera configurations. For more details, visit the project page at https://dfki-av.github.io/EgoForce.

Visual perception connects high-level semantic understanding to pixel-level perception, but most existing settings assume that the decisive evidence for identifying a target is already in the image or frozen model knowledge. We study a more practical yet harder open-world case where a visible object must first be resolved from external facts, recent events, long-tail entities, or multi-hop relations before it can be localized. We formalize this challenge as Perception Deep Research and introduce WebEye, an object-anchored benchmark with verifiable evidence, knowledge-intensive queries, precise box/mask annotations, and three task views: Search-based Grounding, Search-based Segmentation, and Search-based VQA. WebEyes contains 120 images, 473 annotated object instances, 645 unique QA pairs, and 1,927 task samples. We further propose Pixel-Searcher, an agentic search-to-pixel workflow that resolves hidden target identities and binds them to boxes, masks, or grounded answers. Experiments show that Pixel-Searcher achieves the strongest open-source performance across all three task views, while failures mainly arise from evidence acquisition, identity resolution, and visual instance binding.

Autoregressive video generation aims at real-time, open-ended synthesis. Yet, cinematic storytelling is not merely the endless extension of a single scene; it requires progressing through evolving events, viewpoint shifts, and discrete shot boundaries. Existing autoregressive models often struggle in this setting. Trained primarily for short-horizon continuation, they treat long sequences as extended single shots, inevitably suffering from motion stagnation and semantic drift during long rollouts. To bridge this gap, we introduce CausalCine, an interactive autoregressive framework that transforms multi-shot video generation into an online directing process. CausalCine generates causally across shot changes, accepts dynamic prompts on the fly, and reuses context without regenerating previous shots. To achieve this, we first train a causal base model on native multi-shot sequences to learn complex shot transitions prior to acceleration. We then propose Content-Aware Memory Routing (CAMR), which dynamically retrieves historical KV entries according to attention-based relevance scores rather than temporal proximity, preserving cross-shot coherence under bounded active memory. Finally, we distill the causal base model into a few-step generator for real-time interactive generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CausalCine significantly outperforms autoregressive baselines and approaches the capability of bidirectional models while unlocking the streaming interactivity of causal generation. Demo available at https://yihao-meng.github.io/CausalCine/

In this paper, we propose AlphaGRPO, a novel framework that applies Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to AR-Diffusion Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) to enhance multimodal generation capabilities without an additional cold-start stage. Our approach unlocks the model's intrinsic potential to perform advanced reasoning tasks: Reasoning Text-to-Image Generation, where the model actively infers implicit user intents, and Self-Reflective Refinement, where it autonomously diagnoses and corrects misalignments in generated outputs. To address the challenge of providing stable supervision for real-world multimodal generation, we introduce the Decompositional Verifiable Reward (DVReward). Unlike holistic scalar rewards, DVReward utilizes an LLM to decompose complex user requests into atomic, verifiable semantic and quality questions, which are then evaluated by a general MLLM to provide reliable and interpretable feedback. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AlphaGRPO yields robust improvements across multimodal generation benchmarks, including GenEval, TIIF-Bench, DPG-Bench and WISE, while also achieving significant gains in editing tasks on GEdit without training on editing tasks. These results validate that our self-reflective reinforcement approach effectively leverages inherent understanding to guide high-fidelity generation. Project page: https://huangrh99.github.io/AlphaGRPO/

Surface reconstruction with differentiable rendering has achieved impressive performance in recent years, yet the pervasive photometric ambiguities have strictly bottlenecked existing approaches. This paper presents AmbiSuR, a framework that explores an intrinsic solution upon Gaussian Splatting for the photometric ambiguity-robust surface 3D reconstruction with high performance. Starting by revisiting the foundation, our investigation uncovers two built-in primitive-wise ambiguities in representation, while revealing an intrinsic potential for ambiguity self-indication in Gaussian Splatting. Stemming from these, a photometric disambiguation is first introduced, constraining ill-posed geometry solution for definite surface formation. Then, we propose an ambiguity indication module that unleashes the self-indication potential to identify and further guide correcting underconstrained reconstructions. Extensive experiments demonstrate our superior surface reconstructions compared to existing methods across various challenging scenarios, excelling in broad compatibility. Project: https://fictionarry.github.io/AmbiSuR-Proj/ .

Long-term memory is crucial for agents in specialized web environments, where success depends on recalling interface affordances, state dynamics, workflows, and recurring failure modes. However, existing memory benchmarks for agents mostly focus on user histories, short traces, or downstream task success, leaving open how to directly evaluate whether memory systems effectively internalize environment-specific experience. To address this gap, we introduce LongMemEval-V2 (LME-V2), a benchmark for evaluating whether memory systems can help agents acquire the experience needed to become knowledgeable colleagues in customized environments. LME-V2 contains 451 manually curated questions covering five core memory abilities for web agents: static state recall, dynamic state tracking, workflow knowledge, environment gotchas, and premise awareness. Questions are paired with history trajectories containing up to 500 trajectories and 115M tokens. We use a context gathering formulation: memory systems consume history trajectories and return compact evidence for downstream question answering. We propose a suite of two memory methods: AgentRunbook-R, an efficient RAG-based memory with knowledge pools for raw state observations, events, and strategy notes, and AgentRunbook-C, which stores trajectories as files and invokes a coding agent to gather evidence in an augmented sandbox. Experiments show that AgentRunbook-C achieves the best performance with 72.5% average accuracy, outperforming the strongest RAG baseline (48.5%) and the off-the-shelf coding agent baseline (69.3%). Despite the strong performance gains, coding agent based methods have high latency costs. While AgentRunbook-C advances the accuracy-latency Pareto frontier, substantial room for improvement remains. Together, these results establish LME-V2 as a challenging testbed for developing long-term memory systems for environment experience.

We introduce Pion, a spectrum-preserving optimizer for large language model (LLM) training based on orthogonal equivalence transformation. Unlike additive optimizers such as Adam and Muon, Pion updates each weight matrix through left and right orthogonal transformations, preserving its singular values throughout training. This yields an optimization mechanism that modulates the geometry of weight matrices while keeping their spectral norm fixed. We derive the Pion update rule, systematically examine its design choices, and analyze its convergence behavior along with several key properties. Empirical results show that Pion offers a stable and competitive alternative to standard optimizers for both LLM pretraining and finetuning.

Vision Transformers (ViTs) achieve strong data-driven scaling by leveraging all-to-all self-attention. However, this flexibility incurs a computational cost that scales quadratically with image resolution, limiting ViTs in high-resolution domains. Underlying this approach is the assumption that pairwise token interactions are necessary for learning rich visual-semantic representations. In this work, we challenge this assumption, demonstrating that effective visual representations can be learned without any direct patch-to-patch interaction. We propose VECA (Visual Elastic Core Attention), a vision transformer architecture that uses efficient linear-time core-periphery structured attention enabled by a small set of learned cores. In VECA, these cores act as a communication interface: patch tokens exchange information exclusively through the core tokens, which are initialized from scratch and propagated across layers. Because the $N$ image patches only directly interact with a resolution invariant set of $C$ learned "core" embeddings, this yields linear complexity $O(N)$ for predetermined $C$, which bypasses quadratic scaling. Compared to prior cross-attention architectures, VECA maintains and iteratively updates the full set of $N$ input tokens, avoiding a small $C$-way bottleneck. Combined with nested training along the core axis, our model can elastically trade off compute and accuracy during inference. Across classification and dense tasks, VECA achieves performance competitive with the latest vision foundation models while reducing computational cost. Our results establish elastic core-periphery attention as a scalable alternative building block for Vision Transformers.

We explore the effectiveness of an LLM-guided query refinement paradigm for extending the usability of embedding models to challenging zero-shot search and classification tasks. Our approach refines the embedding representation of a user query using feedback from a generative LLM on a small set of documents, enabling embeddings to adapt in real time to the target task. We conduct extensive experiments with state-of-the-art text embedding models across a diverse set of challenging search and classification benchmarks. Empirical results indicate that LLM-guided query refinement yields consistent gains across all models and datasets, with relative improvements of up to +25% in literature search, intent detection, key-point matching, and nuanced query-instruction following. The refined queries improve ranking quality and induce clearer binary separation across the corpus, enabling the embedding space to better reflect the nuanced, task-specific constraints of each ad-hoc user query. Importantly, this expands the range of practical settings in which embedding models can be effectively deployed, making them a compelling alternative when costly LLM pipelines are not viable at corpus-scale. We release our experimental code for reproducibility, at https://github.com/IBM/task-aware-embedding-refinement.

Computer Use Agents (CUAs) can act through both atomic GUI actions, such as click and type, and high-level tool calls, such as API-based file operations, but this hybrid action space often leaves them uncertain about when to continue with GUI actions or switch to tools, leading to suboptimal execution paths. This difficulty stems from the scarcity of high-quality interleaved GUI-Tool trajectories, the cost and brittleness of collecting real tool trajectories, and the lack of trajectory-level supervision for GUI-Tool path selection. In this paper, we propose ToolCUA, an end-to-end agent designed to learn optimal GUI-Tool path selection through a staged training paradigm. We first introduce an Interleaved GUI-Tool Trajectory Scaling Pipeline that repurposes abundant static GUI trajectories and synthesizes a grounded tool library, enabling diverse GUI-Tool trajectories without manual engineering or real tool-trajectory collection. We then perform Tool-Bootstrapped GUI RFT, combining warmup SFT with single-turn RL to improve decisions at critical GUI-Tool switching points. Finally, we optimize ToolCUA with Online Agentic RL in a high-fidelity GUI-Tool environment, guided by a Tool-Efficient Path Reward that encourages appropriate tool use and shorter execution paths. Experiments on OSWorld-MCP show that ToolCUA achieves 46.85% accuracy, a relative improvement of approximately 66% over the baseline, establishing a new state of the art among models of comparable scale. It also improves by 3.9% over GUI-only settings, demonstrating effective GUI-Tool orchestration. The results further suggest that training in a hybrid action space is a promising paradigm for real-world digital agents. Open-sourced here: https://x-plug.github.io/ToolCUA/

Recent advances in joint audio-video generation have been remarkable, yet real-world applications demand strong per-modality fidelity, cross-modal alignment, and fine-grained synchronization. Reinforcement Learning (RL) offers a promising paradigm, but its extension to multi-objective and multi-modal joint audio-video generation remains unexplored. Notably, our in-depth analysis first reveals that the primary obstacles to applying RL in this stem from: (i) multi-objective advantages inconsistency, where the advantages of multimodal outputs are not always consistent within a group; (ii) multi-modal gradients imbalance, where video-branch gradients leak into shallow audio layers responsible for intra-modal generation; (iii) uniform credit assignment, where fine-grained cross-modal alignment regions fail to get efficient exploration. These shortcomings suggest that vanilla RL fine-tuning strategy with a single global advantage often leads to suboptimal results. To address these challenges, we propose OmniNFT, a novel modality-aware online diffusion RL framework with three key innovations: (1) Modality-wise advantage routing, which routes independent per-reward advantages to their respective modality generation branches. (2) Layer-wise gradient surgery, which selectively detaches video-branch gradients on shallow audio layers while retaining those for cross-modal interaction layers. (3) Region-wise loss reweighting, which modulates policy optimization toward critical regions related to audio-video synchronization and fine-grained alignment. Extensive experiments on JavisBench and VBench with the LTX-2 backbone demonstrate that OmniNFT achieves comprehensive improvements in audio and video perceptual quality, cross-modal alignment, and audio-video synchronization.

LLM-based agents increasingly operate in persistent environments where they must store, update, and reason over information across many sessions. While prior benchmarks evaluate only single-entity updates, MEME defines six tasks spanning the full space defined by the multi-entity and evolving axes, including three not scored by prior work: Cascade and Absence (dependency reasoning) and Deletion (post-removal state). Evaluating six memory systems spanning three memory paradigms on 100 controlled episodes, we find that all systems collapse on dependency reasoning under the default configuration (Cascade: 3%, Absence: 1% in average accuracy) despite adequate static retrieval performance. Prompt optimization, deeper retrieval, reduced filler noise, and most stronger LLMs fail to close this gap. Only a file-based agent paired with Claude Opus 4.7 as its internal LLM partially closes the gap, but at ~70x the baseline cost, indicating closure currently depends on configurations that are not practical at scale. Code and data are available on the project page: https://seokwonjung-jay.github.io/meme-eval/.

Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE) models enable scaling language models efficiently, but training them remains challenging, as routing can collapse onto few experts and auxiliary load-balancing losses can reduce specialization. Motivated by these hurdles, we study how routing decisions in SMoEs are formed mechanistically. First, we reveal a geometric coupling between routers and their corresponding experts. For a given token, the router weights for the selected expert and the expert weights processing it receive gradients along the same input direction, differing only in scalar coefficients. Thus, matched router--expert directions accumulate the same routed token history. This theoretical coupling also appears empirically in routing dynamics. In a $1$B SMoE trained from scratch, higher router scores predict stronger expert neuron activations, showing that routing decisions are mirrored inside the selected expert. Next, we analyze the effects of auxiliary load balancing on the router--expert geometric coupling, showing that such losses break this structure by spreading input-directed gradients across router weights, making distinct router directions nearly three times more similar to each other. Last, we demonstrate the centrality of geometric coupling for effective routing with a parameter-free online K-Means router, in which each expert maintains a running average of the hidden states routed to it and tokens are assigned based on cosine similarity. Compared with auxiliary-loss and loss-free balancing, this router achieves the lowest load imbalance with only a modest perplexity increase, indicating that geometric coupling captures a substantial part of what the router learns. Overall, our results explain how routers form assignment geometry that supports an effective division of labor.

We introduce KV-Fold, a simple, training-free long-context inference protocol that treats the key-value (KV) cache as the accumulator in a left fold over sequence chunks. At each step, the model processes the next chunk conditioned on the accumulated cache, appends the newly produced keys and values, and passes the enlarged cache forward; the same one-step update is applied repeatedly, analogous to foldl in functional programming. Building on the KV cache concatenation primitive introduced for latent multi-agent communication, we repurpose it as a chunk-to-chunk recurrence for long-context inference. When processing chunk t, the model attends to the KV cache carried from earlier chunks as a prefix, reusing its internal state across segments without modifying or retraining the model. Despite its simplicity, the induced recurrence is stable: per-step drift rises briefly and then saturates into a flat plateau that persists across deep chains. This plateau is insensitive to a 10,000x change in numerical precision, robust across chunk sizes, and consistent across model families. At the task level, KV-Fold preserves exact information over long distances. On a needle-in-a-haystack benchmark, it achieves 100% exact-match retrieval across 152 trials spanning contexts from 16K to 128K tokens and chain depths up to 511 on Llama-3.1-8B, while remaining within the memory limits of a single 40GB GPU. Compared to streaming methods, which trade fidelity for bounded memory, KV-Fold maintains long-range retrieval while operating as a sequence of tractable forward passes. Overall, our results show that frozen pretrained transformers already support a stable form of KV-cache recurrence, providing a practical route to long-context inference without architectural changes or training.

Looped Transformers offer a promising alternative to purely feed-forward computation by iteratively refining latent representations, improving language modeling and reasoning. Yet recurrent architectures remain unstable to train, costly to optimize and deploy, and constrained to small, fixed recurrence depths. We introduce Attractor Models, in which a backbone module first proposes output embeddings, then an attractor module refines them by solving for the fixed point, with gradients obtained through implicit differentiation. Thus, training memory remains constant in effective depth, and iterations are chosen adaptively by convergence. Empirically, Attractor Models outperform existing models across two regimes, large-scale language-model pretraining and reasoning with tiny models. In language modeling, Attractor Models deliver a Pareto improvement over standard Transformers and stable looped models across sizes, improving perplexity by up to 46.6% and downstream accuracy by up to 19.7% while reducing training cost. Notably, a 770M Attractor Model outperforms a 1.3B Transformer trained on twice as many tokens. On challenging reasoning tasks, we show that our model with only 27M parameters and approximately 1000 examples achieves 91.4% accuracy on Sudoku-Extreme and 93.1% on Maze-Hard, scaling favorably where frontier models like Claude and GPT o3, fail completely, and specialized recursive reasoners collapse at larger sizes. Lastly, we show that Attractor Models exhibit a novel phenomenon, which we call equilibrium internalization: fixed-point training places the model's initial output embedding near equilibrium, allowing the solver to be removed at inference time with little degradation. Together, these results suggest that Attractor Models make iterative refinement scalable by turning recurrence into a computation the model can learn to internalize.

Quantization has emerged as a standard technique for accelerating inference for generative models by enabling faster low-precision computations and reduced memory transfers. Recently, GPU accelerators have added first-class support for microscaling Block Floating Point (BFP) formats. Standard BFP algorithms use a fixed scale based on the maximum magnitude of the block. We observe that this scale choice can be suboptimal with respect to quantization errors. In this work, we propose ScaleSearch, an alternative strategy for selecting these scale factors: using a fine-grained search leveraging the mantissa bits in microscaling formats to minimize the quantization error for the given distribution. ScaleSearch can be integrated with existing quantization methods such as Post Training Quantization and low-precision attention, and is shown to improve their performance. Additionally, we introduce ScaleSearchAttention, an accelerated NVFP4-based attention algorithm, which uses ScaleSearch and adapted prior techniques to ensure near-0 performance loss for causal language modeling. Experiments show that ScaleSearch reduces quantization error by 27% for NVFP4 and improves language model PTQ by up to 15 points for MATH500 (Qwen3-8B), while ScaleSearchAttention improves Wikitext-2 PPL by upto 0.77 points for Llama 3.1 70B. The proposed methods closely match baseline performance while providing quantization accuracy improvements.

Extreme weather and volatile wholesale electricity markets expose residential consumers to catastrophic financial risks, yet demand response at the distribution level remains an underutilized tool for grid flexibility and energy affordability. While a demand-response program can shield consumers by issuing financial credits during high-price periods, optimizing this sequential decision-making process presents a unique challenge for reinforcement learning despite the plentiful offline historical smart meter and wholesale pricing data available publicly. Offline historical data fails to capture the dynamic, interactive feedback loop between an electric utility's pricing signals and customer acceptance and adaptation to a demand-response program. To address this, we introduce DR-Gym, an open-source, online Gymnasium-compatible environment designed to train and evaluate demand-response from the electric utility's perspective. Unlike existing device-level energy simulators, our environment focuses on the market-level electric utility setting and provides a rich observational space relevant to the electric utility. The simulator additionally features a regime-switching wholesale price model calibrated to real-world extreme events, alongside physics-based building demand profiles. For our learning signal, we use a configurable, multi-objective reward function for specifying diverse learning objectives. We demonstrate through baseline strategies and data snapshots the capability of our simulator to create realistic and learnable environments.

The continued improvements in language model capability have unlocked their widespread use as drivers of autonomous agents, for example in coding or computer use applications. However, the core of these systems has not changed much since early instruction-tuned models like ChatGPT. Even advanced AI agents function on message exchange formats, successively exchanging messages with users, systems, with itself (i.e. chain-of-thought) and tools in a single stream of computation. This bottleneck to a single stream in chat models leads to a number of limitations: the agent cannot act (generate output) while reading, and in reverse, cannot react to new information while writing. Similarly, the agent cannot act while thinking and cannot think while reading or acting on information. In this work, we show that models can be unblocked by switching from instruction-tuning for sequential message formats to instruction-tuning for multiple, parallel streams of computation, splitting each role into a separate stream. Every forward pass of the language model then simultaneously reads from multiple input streams and generates tokens in multiple output streams, all of which causally depend on earlier timesteps. We argue that this data-driven change remedies a number of usability limitations as outlined above, improves model efficiency through parallelization, improves model security through better separation of concerns and can further improve model monitorability.

Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate fluent political text at scale, raising concerns about synthetic discourse during crises and social conflict. Existing AI-text detection often focuses on sentence-level cues such as perplexity, burstiness, or token irregularities, but these signals may weaken as generative systems improve. We instead adopt a Computational Social Science perspective and ask whether synthetic political discourse behaves like an observed online population. We construct a paired corpus of 1,789,406 posts across nine crisis events: COVID-19, the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, the 2020 and 2024 U.S. elections, Dobbs/Roe v. Wade, the 2020 BLM protests, U.S. midterms, the Utah shooting, and the U.S.-Iran war. For each event, we compare observed discourse from social platforms with synthetic discourse generated for the same context. We evaluate four dimensions: emotional intensity, structural regularity, lexical-ideological framing, and cross-event dependency, using mean gaps and dispersion evidence. Across events, synthetic discourse is fluent but population-level unrealistic. It is generally more negative and less dispersed in sentiment, structurally more regular, and lexically more abstract than observed discourse. Observed discourse instead shows broader emotional variation, longer-tailed structural distributions, and more context-specific, colloquial lexical markers. These differences are event-dependent: larger for fast-moving, decentralized crises and smaller for formal or institutionally mediated events. We summarize them with a simple event-level measure, the Caricature Gap. Our findings suggest that the main limitation of synthetic political discourse is not grammar or fluency, but reduced population realism. Population-level auditing complements traditional text-detection and provides a CSS framework for evaluating the social realism of generated discourse.

While self-supervised pretraining has reduced vision systems' reliance on synthetic data, simulation remains an indispensable tool for closed-loop optimization and rigorous out-of-distribution (OOD) evaluation. However, modern simulation platforms often present steep technical barriers, requiring extensive expertise in computer graphics and game development. In this work, we present LychSim, a highly controllable and interactive simulation framework built upon Unreal Engine 5 to bridge this gap. LychSim is built around three key designs: (1) a streamlined Python API that abstracts away underlying engine complexities; (2) a procedural data pipeline capable of generating diverse, high-fidelity environments with varying out-of-distribution (OOD) visual challenges, paired with rich 2D and 3D ground truths; and (3) a native integration of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) that transforms the simulator into a dynamic, closed-loop playground for reasoning agentic LLMs. We further annotate scene-level procedural rules and object-level pose alignments to enable semantically aligned 3D ground truths and automated scene modification. We demonstrate LychSim's capability across multiple downstream applications, including serving as a synthetic data engine, powering reinforcement learning-based adversarial examiners, and facilitating interactive, language-driven scene layout generation. To benefit the broader vision community, LychSim will be made publicly available, including full source code and various data annotations.

Large language models (LLMs) often produce answers with high certainty even when they are incorrect, making reliable confidence estimation essential for deployment in real-world scenarios. Verbalized confidence, where models explicitly state their confidence in natural language, provides a flexible and user-facing uncertainty signal that can be applied even when token logits are unavailable. However, existing verbalized-confidence methods often optimize answer generation and confidence generation jointly, which can cause confidence-alignment objectives to interfere with answer accuracy. In this work, we propose a decoupled and order-aware framework for verbalized confidence calibration. Our method first generates an answer and then estimates confidence conditioned on the fixed question--answer pair, allowing confidence optimization without directly perturbing the answer-generation process. To align confidence with correctness likelihood, we construct a sampling-based surrogate from multiple model completions and optimize rank-based reinforcement learning objectives that encourage responses with higher estimated correctness likelihood to receive higher verbalized confidence. Experiments on reasoning and knowledge-intensive benchmarks show that our method improves calibration and failure prediction performance while largely preserving answer accuracy. These results demonstrate that verbalized confidence can be more reliably aligned by decoupling confidence estimation from answer generation and optimizing the relative ordering of confidence across responses.

When adapting an encoder to a new domain, the standard approach is to continue training with Masked Language Modeling (MLM). We show that temporarily switching to Causal Language Modeling (CLM) followed by a short MLM decay improves downstream performance. On biomedical texts with ModernBERT, this CLM detour outperforms MLM baselines trained on identical data and compute across 8 French and 11 English biomedical tasks, by +1.2-2.8pp and +0.3-0.8pp respectively, depending on model size. We investigate the reasons for these gains. We find that CLM's dense supervision impacts low transformer layers (0-7) far more than MLM does. Freezing low layers during CLM eliminates the downstream benefit; freezing mid layers preserves it. The representational changes persist through the MLM decay phase, even when it matches the CLM phase in length, and they scale with model capacity. We release ModernCamemBERT-bio and ModernBERT-bio as state-of-the-art biomedical encoders in Base and Large sizes.

Retrospective novel view synthesis (NVS) of dynamic scenes is fundamental to applications such as sports. Recent dynamic 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) approaches introduce temporally coupled formulations to enforce motion coherence across time. In this paper, we argue that, in a synchronized multi-view (MV) setting typical of sports, the dynamic scene at each time step is already strongly geometrically constrained. We posit that the availability of calibrated, synchronized viewpoints provides sufficient spatial consistency, and therefore, explicit temporal coupling, or complex multi-body constraints seems unnecessary for retrospective NVS. To this end, we propose an approach tailored for synchronized MV dynamic scene. By initializing the SfM-derived point cloud at the start time and propagating optimized Gaussians over time, we show that efficient retrospective NVS can be achieved without imposing a temporal deformation constraint. Complementing our methodological contribution, we introduce a Dynamic MV dataset framework built on Blender for reproducible NeRF and 3DGS research. The framework generates high-quality, synchronized camera rigs and exports training-ready datasets in standard formats, eliminating inconsistencies in coordinate conventions and data pipelines. Using the framework, we construct a dynamic benchmark suite and evaluate representative NeRF and 3DGS approaches under controlled conditions. Together, we show that, under a synchronized MV setup, efficient retrospective dynamic scene NVS can be achieved using 3DGS. At the same time, the dataset-generation framework enables reproducible and principled benchmarking of dynamic NVS methods.

With the vast amount of content uploaded every hour, along with the AI generated content that can include hallucinations, Automated Fact-Checking (AFC) has become increasingly vital, as it is infeasible for human fact-checkers to manually verify the sheer volume of information generated online. Professional fact-checkers have identified several gaps in existing AFC systems, noting a misalignment between how these systems operate and how fact-checking is performed in practice. In this paper, we introduce CAAFC (Chronological Actionable Automated Fact-Checker), a frame-work designed to bridge these gaps. It surpasses SOTA AFC and hallucination detection systems across multiple benchmark datasets. CAAFC operates on claims, conversations, and dialogues, enabling it not only to detect factual errors and hallucinations, but also to correct them by providing actionable justifications supported by primary information sources. Furthermore, CAAFC can update evidence and knowledge bases by incorporating recent and contextual information when necessary, thereby enhancing the reliability of fact verification.

Predicting rare extreme events such as wildfires from meteorological data requires models that remain reliable under evolving environmental conditions. This problem is inherently long-tailed: wildfire events are rare but high-impact, while most observations correspond to non-fire conditions, causing standard learning objectives to underemphasize the minority class (fire) that matters most. In addition, models trained on historical distributions often fail under distribution shifts, exhibiting degraded performance in new environments. To this end, we propose Environment-Adaptive Preference Optimization (EAPO), a framework that adapts prediction to the target environment with long-tail distribution. Given a new input distribution, we first construct distribution-aligned datasets via $k$-nearest neighbor retrieval. We then perform a hybrid fine-tuning procedure on this local manifold, combining supervised learning with preference optimization, as well as emphasizing on rare extreme events. EAPO refines decision boundaries while avoiding conflicting signals from heterogeneous training data. We evaluate EAPO on a real-world wildfire prediction task with environmental shifts. EAPO achieves robust performance (ROC-AUC 0.7310) and improves detection in extreme regimes, demonstrating its effectiveness in dynamic wildfire prediction systems.

Conventional gait de-identification methods often encounter an inherent trade-off: they either provide insufficient identity suppression or introduce spatiotemporal distortions that impede structure-sensitive downstream applications. We propose GaitProtector, an impersonation-driven gait de-identification framework that formulates privacy protection as a unified objective with two tightly coupled components: (i) obfuscation, which repels the protected gait from the source identity, and (ii) impersonation, which attracts it toward a selected target identity. The target identity serves as a semantic anchor that biases optimization toward structurally plausible gait patterns under the pretrained diffusion prior, helping preserve dominant body shape and motion dynamics. We instantiate this idea through a training-free diffusion latent optimization pipeline. Instead of retraining a generator for each dataset, we invert each input silhouette sequence into the latent trajectory of a pretrained 3D video diffusion model and iteratively optimize latent codes with a differentiable adversarial objective to synthesize protected gaits. Experiments on the CASIA-B dataset show that GaitProtector achieves a 56.7% impersonation success rate under black-box gait recognition and reduces Rank-1 identification accuracy from 89.6% to 15.0%, while maintaining favorable visual and temporal quality. We further evaluate downstream utility on the Scoliosis1K dataset, where diagnostic accuracy decreases only from 91.4% to 74.2%. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to leverage pretrained 3D diffusion priors in a training-free manner for silhouette-based gait de-identification.

Segmentation models in automated optical inspection of wire-bonded semiconductors are typically device-specific and must be re-trained when new devices or distribution shifts appear. We introduce AOI-SSL, a training-efficient framework for semantic segmentation of wire-bonded semiconductors by combining small-domain self-supervised pre-training of vision transformers with in-context inference that minimizes the need of labeled examples. We pre-train SOTA self-supervised algorithms in a small industrial inspection dataset and find that Masked Autoencoders are the most effective in this small-data setting, improving downstream segmentation while reducing the labeled fine-tuning effort. We further introduce in-context, patch-level retrieval methods that predict masks directly from dense encoder embeddings with negligible additional training. We show that, in this setting, simple similarity-based retrieval performs on par with more complex attention-based aggregation used currently in the literature. Furthermore, our experiments demonstrate that self-supervised pre-training significantly improves segmentation quality compared to training from scratch and to ImageNet pre-trained backbones under a fixed fine-tuning computational budget. Finally, the results reveal that retrieval based segmentation outperforms fine-tuning when targeting single device images, allowing for near-instant adaptation to difficult samples.

For minimally rigid graphs, the same edge-length data can admit multiple realizations (up to translations and rotations). Finding graphs with exceptionally many realizations is an extremal problem in rigidity theory, but exhaustive search quickly becomes infeasible due to the super-exponential growth of the number of candidate graphs and the high cost of realization-count evaluation. We propose a reinforcement-learning approach that constructs minimally rigid graphs via 0- and 1-extensions, also known as Henneberg moves. We optimize realization-count invariants using the Deep Cross-Entropy Method with a policy parameterized by a Graph Isomorphism Network encoder and a permutation-equivariant extension-level action head. Empirically, our method matches the known optima for planar realization counts and improves the best known bounds for spherical realization counts, yielding new record graphs.

How do transformer language models memorize factual associations? A common view casts internal weight matrices as associative memories over pairs of embeddings, requiring parameter counts that scale linearly with the number of facts. We develop a theoretical and empirical account of an alternative, \emph{geometric} form of memorization in which learned embeddings encode relational structure directly, and the MLP plays a qualitatively different role. In a controlled setting where a single-layer transformer must memorize random bijections from subjects to a shared attribute set, we prove that a logarithmic embedding dimension suffices: subject embeddings encode \emph{linear superpositions} of their associated attribute vectors, and a small MLP acts as a relation-conditioned selector that extracts the relevant attribute via ReLU gating, and not as an associative key-value mapping. We extend these results to the multi-hop setting -- chains of relational queries such as ``Who is the mother of the wife of $x$?'' -- providing constructions with and without chain-of-thought that exhibit a provable capacity-depth tradeoff, complemented by a matching information-theoretic lower bound. Empirically, gradient descent discovers solutions with precisely the predicted structure. Once trained, the MLP transfers zero-shot to entirely new bijections when subject embeddings are appropriately re-initialized, revealing that it has learned a generic selection mechanism rather than memorized any particular set of facts.