Causal interventions in language model representations have largely targeted discrete features, like grammatical number. However, language models must also make use of features that are graded. We introduce a method for causal intervention on continuous variables: given activation vectors paired with a graded target variable, we localize a low-dimensional direction for that variable and use this direction to edit a vectors toward counterfactual target values. We apply this method to a continuous feature that is well-studied in psycholinguistics, namely verb bias (which reflects which syntactic structures tend to follow a given verb). We show that verb bias is causally represented in steering vectors extracted from large language models: counterfactual edits to verb bias systematically shift downstream structural preferences. Verb bias has also previously been linked to in-context learning; in further analyses, we find that steering vectors encode error signals that could drive the error-driven update behavior seen in in-context learning but that these aspects of the steering vectors are not causally used in downstream production. Overall, these results show causal interventions can be applied to continuous variables, though connecting continuous variables to in-context learning remains a challenge.

Marine lead (Pb) and its isotopes are critical tracers for ocean circulation and anthropogenic pollution, yet in-situ observations remain costly and sparse. While vast historical records exist, they lie buried within the unstructured content of academic papers, creating "data silos" inaccessible to comprehensive analysis. Manual extraction is unscalable, while general-purpose Large Language Models (LLMs) lack the necessary domain-specific knowledge, leading to hallucinations and scientifically invalid outputs. To address this, we introduce an expert-guided adaptation approach that enables LLMs to perform rigorous scientific data extraction without fine-tuning. We operationalize this approach through Compass, an LLM agent framework enhanced by a Knowledge Tree co-designed with marine scientists, which decomposes complex tasks into verifiable steps, guiding the agent's reasoning to ensure scientific validity. Deploying Compass across a corpus of over 230,000 relevant open-access papers, we successfully extract 3,751 previously unincorporated Pb records. This effort establishes the largest integrated marine Pb database to date. Beyond standard metrics, Compass demonstrates superior reliability through multi-layered validation, achieving 92% accuracy as confirmed through expert manual verification. The newly integrated data expand coverage in previously under-sampled regions such as the East China Sea and the Southern Ocean, providing an enriched data foundation for future scientific discoveries. We release an interactive visualization platform to facilitate open scientific access. Our work demonstrates that expert-guided agents can effectively bridge the gap between general-purpose LLMs and high-stakes scientific domains, enabling scalable data discovery in geosciences.

The development of temporal extensions of Answer Set Programming (ASP) has led to the emergence of non-monotonic linear-time (TEL), dynamic (DEL), and metric (MEL) temporal equilibrium logics. However, the inherent rigidity of highly optimized ASP systems often hinders the rapid exploration and implementation of alternative logical designs. In this work, we propose a flexible meta-programming framework that operationalizes the semantics of varied temporal logics through a unified, declarative framework. Our approach extends standard ASP meta-programming by augmenting clingo's theory grammar with formal type specifications and nesting capabilities. To ensure semantic correctness, we introduce a transformation pipeline that protects nested modalities from stable-model-based simplifications during grounding. We demonstrate the extensibility of our framework by implementing meta-encodings for TEL, MEL, and DEL. We provide a comprehensive account of TEL and highlight the key features for managing the interval constraints of MEL and the Fischer-Ladner closure in DEL. Finally, we introduce the metasp system, a versatile tool that encapsulates this workflow.

We present AutoformBot, a multi-agent system for building an Autoformalized Textbook Library At Scale (Atlas) in Lean 4. AutoformBot orchestrates thousands of LLM agents, equipped with formal verification tools, dependency-aware task scheduling, and collaborative version control, to translate informal textbook prose into machine-checked definitions and proofs. We apply our methods to a corpus of 26 open-access textbooks spanning analysis, algebra, topology, combinatorics, and probability, producing Atlas: a verified library of over 45,000 Lean 4 declarations and 500 thousand lines of code. We release two artifacts: (i) AutoformBot, the open-source multi-agent framework; and (ii) Atlas, the resulting formal library. Our results suggest that autoformalizing the core content of graduate-level mathematics at scale is now economically and technically feasible. This opens the door to the automated verification of both human- and machine-generated mathematics at a research level.

Sparse vision transformers have gained popularity as efficient encoders for medical volumetric segmentation, with Swin emerging as a prominent choice. Swin uses local attention to reduce complexity and yields excellent performance for many tasks but still tends to overfit on small datasets. To mitigate this weakness, we propose a novel architecture that further enhances Swin's inductive bias by introducing Inception blocks in the feed-forward layers. The introduction of these multi-branch convolutions enables more direct reasoning over local, multi-scale features within the transformer block. We have also modified the decoder layers in order to capture finer details using fewer parameters. We demonstrate a performance improvement on eleven different medical datasets through extensive experimentation. We specifically showcase advancements over the previous state-of-the-art backbones on benchmark challenges like the Medical Segmentation Decathlon and Beyond the Cranial Vault. By showing that the existing inductive bias in Swin can be further improved, our work presents a promising avenue for enhancing the capabilities of sparse vision transformers for both medical and natural image segmentation tasks. Code and pre-trained weights can be accessed at https://github.com/Eiphodos/SwInception.

Multi-view multi-person 3D pose estimation in team sports scenarios remains challenging due to player occlusions, appearance similarity caused by team uniforms, and the scarcity of annotated multi-view data, all of which limit the effectiveness and generalization capability of learning-based methods. In contrast, the performance of training-free approaches is inherently constrained by the accuracy of 2D keypoint detection and the robustness of cross-view association. To address these challenges, we propose Mesh-Aware Epipolar Matching (MAEM), a training-free framework for multi-view multi-person 3D pose estimation. Our method employs a monocular 3D human mesh recovery model as the frontend and introduces a two-stage epipolar matching strategy based on the recovered mesh outputs. Specifically, the proposed framework combines disjoint-set-union-based clustering with per-joint triangulation to achieve robust cross-view association and accurate 3D pose reconstruction. Experiments on two public multi-view basketball datasets demonstrate that MAEM consistently outperforms existing training-free association baselines while achieving competitive RGB-only performance in both indoor and outdoor basketball scenarios. MAEM achieves MPJPE/PA-MPJPE scores of 59.8/40.7 mm on SportCenter EPFL and 74.0/51.8 mm on Human-M3 Basketball, highlighting the effectiveness of dense mesh geometry for cross-view association without requiring target-domain training or fine-tuning.

Accurate long-range prediction of geophysical systems is difficult due to strongly nonlinear dynamics, the high computational cost of full-physics simulations, and the error accumulation that arise when one-step autoregressive surrogates are rolled out over decades. Deep neural network can serve as efficient emulators, but most are trained only for next-step prediction and often drift or become unstable as the forecast horizon grows. We propose a multi-horizon graph neural network emulator that learns state-to-state transitions from a single current time to multiple future lead times within one unified model. The physical domain is represented as a graph, where nodes correspond to spatial locations with time-varying geophysical attributes and edges encode local spatial interactions. Given the current graph state, the model predicts the future evolution of key fields, ice thickness and ice velocities at all nodes, using a shared graph backbone with separate output branches for each target variable. To improve stability, the network predicts state increments relative to the current state, which are then added back to reconstruct future states. Training jointly optimizes all lead times with a unified regression objective, and inference uses a coarse-to-fine rollout that advances with larger jumps and selectively refines with shorter jumps to reduce drift and avoid redundant computation. Experiments on multi-decadal Pine Island Glacier simulations show that our approach achieves higher long-range accuracy and improved stability than both (i) an initial-state baseline that predicts each future time directly from the starting state and (ii) a standard single-step autoregressive rollout, producing a more reliable emulator for downstream climate and sea-level studies.

Understanding how harm emerges from interaction between otherwise benign image-text pairs requires intent-aware cross-modal reasoning beyond surface-level features. Existing vision-language models (VLMs) excel at literal reasoning over perceptual cues but often fail to derive harmful semantics that rely on implicit, context-dependent reasoning. To evaluate VLMs on compositional harm detection and reasoning, we introduce Multimodal Pragmatic Harm Interpretation (MuPHI), a dataset containing image-text pairs where harm is encoded in subtle multimodal cues. MuPHI spans diverse harm categories and includes annotated harm rationales for assessing VLM reasoning chains. To improve both detection and reasoning in VLMs, we propose MuPHIRM, a reasoning-augmented training framework which learns joint semantics by optimizing multi-perspective rewards. MuPHIRM improves both harm detection and reasoning quality of VLMs while demonstrating superior out-of-distribution robustness compared to both trained and inference-time baselines. Our findings suggest that reasoning-oriented reward optimization offers a promising direction towards building multimodal systems that generalize beyond benchmark-specific shortcuts.

Large language models (LLMs) have been widely adopted for synthetic data generation, significantly reducing annotation costs. However, most existing studies treat synthesis as a set of isolated tasks and overlook a more fundamental question: whether a model can learn to synthesize by accumulating experience from past tasks and transferring it to future ones. In this work, we introduce StreamSynth, a new setting in which synthesis tasks arrive sequentially and experience from historical tasks provides informative signals for future synthesis. To address this setting, we propose SynLearner, a general framework that enables synthesis models to acquire reusable synthesis experience over a task stream. Instead of generating data independently for each task, SynLearner encourages the model to explore diverse synthesis patterns, learn from feedback, and balance sample quality with set-level diversity as tasks evolve. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks show that SynLearner effectively leverages experience from earlier tasks to improve synthesis performance on later ones, exhibiting consistent cross-task transferability. These findings provide evidence for the feasibility of StreamSynth and highlight synthetic data generation as an experience-driven process that can benefit from task streams.

Diffusion models are effective for waypoint prediction in visual navigation, but standard sampling and test time guidance can produce unreliable or inefficient trajectories when updates drift off the training manifold. We propose Fisher Preserving Guidance with Outer Product Span Projection, a training-free inference method that avoids large Fisher drift associated with off-distribution actions while optimizing a task objective. Our method computes the Fisher-preserving update via a low-rank Jacobian factorization, requiring only a single backward pass per step and enabling real-time use. We further introduce Truncated Fisher Denoising Sensitivity as an uncertainty signal and use it for robust multi-sample action blending. Experiments on toy and realistic navigation benchmarks, including Maze2D with TSDF-based guidance, PushT with official Diffusion Policy weights, and visual navigation in simulation and on real robots, demonstrate consistent improvements in performance over strong diffusion-policy baselines without additional training.

Autonomous driving systems are commonly trained and evaluated within limited geographic regions, which hinders their scalability when deployed in new cities. However, significant domain shifts in appearance, road topology, and traffic patterns often cause severe performance degradation under cross-city deployment. Existing approaches based on domain adaptation, data augmentation, or synthetic data generation typically rely on labeled target data, city-specific annotations, or task-specific designs, limiting their scalability and effectiveness for holistic evaluation. In this paper, we introduce CityTransfer-Bench, a geographically disjoint benchmark for evaluating cross-city generalization across perception, segmentation, and planning, and propose CityGen, a diffusion-based generative framework that performs zero-label city adaptation via HD-map-conditioned synthesis guided by city-level visual prompts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CityGen consistently improves cross-city robustness across multiple tasks, establishing a scalable and label-efficient foundation for generalizable autonomous driving.

Clustering is a fundamental problem in data science with a long-standing research history, yielding numerous insightful algorithms. Despite this progress, a systematic and large-scale empirical evaluation that jointly considers conventional algorithms, deep learning-based methods, and recent foundation model-based clustering remains largely absent, leading to limited guidance on algorithm selection and deployment. To address this gap, we introduce CLUBench, a comprehensive clustering benchmark comprising 24 algorithms of diverse principles evaluated on 131 datasets across tabular, text, and image data, involving 178,815 experiments. Importantly, our analyses of (i) the impact of hyperparameter tuning,(ii) the impact of data types and characteristics,(iii) the impact of pretrained embeddings,(iv) large language model-based clustering,(v) the similarity of algorithms, and (vi) the low-rank structures of performance matrices, yield meaningful insights and promising pathways for clustering research. For instance, our study reveals that: 1) All evaluated deep clustering methods do not exhibit a significant advantage compared with the top-performing conventional clustering algorithms (e.g., KMeans, SpeClu) in terms of average performance; 2) For image and text clustering tasks, combining pretrained embeddings with conventional clustering algorithms (e.g., KMeans, SpeClu) offers effective and efficient clustering; 3) Clustering remains a challenging and nontrivial problem, even in the era of increasingly dominant foundation models. Moreover, we propose to use the low-rank structure in cross-model performance matrices to efficiently approximate the overall performance evaluation in practical applications. We further demonstrate the feasibility of model selection based on the performance matrices across all hyperparameter configurations.

Forecasting the progression of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson's disease, is essential for effective long-term planning and personalized therapeutic intervention. Existing systems typically produce scalar clinical scores that ignore the rich structure of longitudinal neuroimaging, while traditional generative approaches suffer from a loss of anatomical details and blurring subtle progression patterns. To address this, we introduce a novel treatment-conditioned diffusion framework that predicts high-fidelity future brain states by conditioning the generative process on patients' screening DaTscan images and levodopa equivalent daily dose over one year. The pipeline uses a Transformer-based encoder to represent non-linear, time-dependent pharmacological dynamics and optimizes generation through a multi-weight region-of-interest mask that focuses on biologically critical areas. Experimental evaluation shows that our framework maintains sharp anatomical boundaries and significantly improves clinical fidelity relative to the baseline, achieving 14.0% lower MSE, 7.2% lower MAE, and 4.9% higher SSIM.

In this paper, we present the results of an ethnographic study into the impact of AI and automated tools on music production workflow. Focusing specifically on professional participants who identified as recording engineers, mixers, and producers, we discuss their usage of common AI and automated software, as well as their sentiments on the proliferation of these tools. We discuss tensions that may be created between users and automated tools in key areas such as the need for speed and efficiency, controllability, and maintaining creative agency, and how these tensions may be alleviated through tool design.

Despite recent advances, LLM-based web agents still struggle with limited exploration, omission of critical steps, and sensitivity to task constraints. Prior work suggests that many of these failures stem from weaknesses in planning, yet the impact of alternative natural language plan representation remains unexplored. To address this, we introduce PlanAhead, a static planner-executor framework that evaluates the impact of plan representation in agent performance. We first automatically categorize WebArena tasks into 3 difficulty levels, enabling consistent difficulty grading without human annotation. Then we systematically evaluate 4 different plan representations on the tasks categorized as hard: sequential subgoals, narrative, pseudocode, and checklist; across different families of multimodal LLM powered agents (OpenAI, Alibaba, and Google). To account for stochastic variability, we introduce two novel evaluation metrics: Achievement Rate (AR) and Solved-Task Consistency (STC). Our results show that both, the plan formulation and the underlying LLM generating the plan, significantly influence web-agent robustness and task success.

Accurate prediction of drug-target interactions (DTI) is critical for drug discovery. Existing methods often rely on single-modal representations (e.g., sequences or graphs) or combine only two modalities, overlooking 3D structural features. To address this challenge, we propose TriMod-DTI, a triple-modal contrastive learning framework that incorporates 1D sequences, 2D graphs, and 3D structures of drugs and proteins, obtaining the universal and complementary feature representations for DTI prediction. We design a Feature Extractor to capture drug and target features across the three modalities, thereby enriching their representations. We further propose a triple-modal contrastive learning strategy to align different modal representations of the same drug or protein in the latent space. By constructing cross-modal positive and negative sample pairs, this approach enhances the model's discriminative ability. Experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that TriMod-DTI outperforms state-of-the-art methods. The ablation studies validate the contributions of each modality. Moreover, case studies highlight its practical potential for DTI prediction and drug discovery.

A central challenge in game theory and learning systems such as GANs is understanding which algorithms can efficiently compute equilibria across the heterogeneous landscape of games. Equilibrium computation is typically studied solver by solver and game class by game class, yielding strong local guarantees but a fragmented view of solver behaviour. Existing discrete taxonomies often provide an incomplete account of where algorithms succeed. We study this problem through a solver-game map linking games to effective solver dynamics. Classical theory identifies isolated regions of this map but provides limited insight into intermediate or overlapping regimes, suggesting that solvability is governed by latent structural properties defining a continuous solver-aligned geometry of games. We formalise this perspective through structure-aware solver synthesis. A learned structure recogniser maps each game to a low-dimensional solver-aligned representation, and a policy maps this representation to effective primitive mechanisms, adapting solver behaviour across regimes. This reveals regions where particular solver dynamics are effective and where mixtures of primitives are required rather than a single dominant solver. A bounded residual acts as a local corrector and diagnostic signal for incomplete solver bases or representations. The framework yields both an adaptive solver and an analytical lens: games with similar optimisation dynamics cluster together, revealing continuous regions of algorithmic validity and overlapping solver behaviour. Empirically, we show that fixed primitives exhibit systematic regime mismatch, while the learned representation organises game space into a structured cartography aligned with solver behaviour. These results suggest viewing equilibrium computation as the joint problem of learning solver mechanisms and mapping the geometry of solvability.

We propose a machine learning approach for image regression from sparse experimental measurements. We show the application of the proposed method on film cooling studies in propulsion system development, aiming to reduce the need for extensive physical testing. Our method employs a lightweight feed-forward neural network with positional encoding to generate images conditioned by input parameters. Validated on real and synthetic data, it achieves high image similarity (RMSE < 8 %, SSIM > 93 %) while maintaining accuracy with a 30 \% reduction of measurements. We further propose a knowledge-informed extension for local adaptability of the generated images. This approach significantly reduces required tests while preserving high-quality data, enabling efficient optimization of coolant injector configurations with applications beyond aerospace.

Contrastive learning is effective for aligning paired views or modalities, but alignment beyond two modalities remains non-trivial and comparatively underexplored. Pairwise CLIP-style losses decompose multi-modal alignment into independent two-way comparisons and therefore do not explicitly model higher-order dependencies among multiple modalities. Recent beyond-pairwise objectives approach this problem from statistical or geometric perspectives, but arbitrary-modality alignment still lacks a principled criterion for defining what each modality should preserve and compress relative to the others. We revisit arbitrary-modality alignment through the Information Bottleneck principle. In multi-modal learning, sufficiency should preserve information predictable from the remaining modalities, while minimality should compress modality-specific information not supported by them. This naturally leads to a One-vs-All view, where each modality is characterized with respect to the remaining modalities. We propose OVA-IB, an Information Bottleneck framework for arbitrary-modality alignment. OVA-IB optimizes a tractable One-vs-All contrastive lower bound for sufficiency connected to a Dual Total Correlation-style objective, uses a parameter-free geometry-aware projection score, and derives a tractable upper-bound regularizer for minimality by bounding each representation's dependence on its own input with representation distributions induced by the remaining modalities. Experiments on classification, regression, modality-agnostic evaluation, and cross-modal retrieval benchmarks demonstrate strong and robust performance.

Evaluating the cultural awareness of large language models is crucial to ensure the fairness of generated text and the generalizability of applications across the world. Recent benchmarks explore cultural goods like food or values like behavior in stressful situations through the lens of question answering or text generation tasks. However, creating these benchmarks requires time-intensive and costly human annotations. Also, benchmarks that evaluate cultural awareness in free text are scarce and often rely on dated evaluation mechanisms. To address this gap, we introduce ExCAM, an Explainable Cultural Awareness Metric, which is, to our knowledge, the first dedicated evaluation metric that identifies, rates and explains cultural errors in instruction-output pairs. To train and evaluate ExCAM, we introduce ExCAM40k, a dataset comprised of nine existing benchmarks that we reformat and enhance with synthetic errors. Compared to several baselines, including GPT-5, ExCAM achieves the highest error detection rate with up to 80% accuracy on a balanced test set. Therefore, ExCAM opens the pathway towards fine-grained and explainable cultural evaluation of free text.

Recent progress in computer vision has produced a wide range of powerful specialized models for detection, segmentation, counting, and other visual tasks. However, these models are usually optimized for isolated task formulations, making it difficult to directly support general-purpose visual intelligence, especially when a task requires complex language understanding and dense small-object perception. In this paper, we propose VisHarness, a trainable visual agent that decouples high-level perception, reasoning, and decision-making from low-level task execution. Instead of training a model to solve a specific visual task, VisHarness learns to harness a set of carefully designed heterogeneous visual experts. This paradigm preserves the general intelligence of the agent while fully leveraging the precision advantages of specialized visual models in concrete visual tasks. With only lightweight training, VisHarness learns a generalizable visual expert-harnessing policy and can solve common fundamental vision tasks under various complex conditions through multi-turn interactions with visual expert models. To enable efficient on-policy reinforcement learning training in a live environment, we introduce dynamic visual memory archiving, which mitigates the rapidly accumulating visual-token overhead caused by multi-turn interactions with visual expert models. Experiments on four representative benchmarks covering reasoning segmentation, generalized referring segmentation, dense small-object detection, and referring counting demonstrate that VisHarness substantially outperforms existing general-purpose models and achieves competitive or superior performance compared with task-specific models.

LLM-based agents have demonstrated strong capabilities in solving complex tasks through multi-step reasoning and tool use. However, existing evaluation protocols primarily focus on task success, overlooking a critical aspect of agent behavior: execution efficiency. In practice, agent trajectories often contain redundant steps that consume substantial resources while contributing little to task completion. In this work, we propose and formulate a new research area: \textbf{redundant step detection} for agent trajectories. To support this initiative, we introduce \textbf{RedundancyBench}, a new benchmark that contains diverse tasks with carefully annotated trajectories, where each step is labeled according to its contribution to task completion. Using RedundancyBench, we develop and evaluate 3 representative methods to answer whether a step within trajectory is redundant or necessary. Our results show that even the best-performing method achieves only 24.88\% score in detecting redundant steps, while some methods perform worse than random guessing. These results highlight the task's complexity and the need for further research in this area. \footnote{Code and dataset in this paper are both available in \href{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/RedundancyBench}{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/RedundancyBench}.}

Recent Large View Synthesis Models (LVSMs) advocate an encoder-decoder architecture that separates reconstruction and rendering into distinct networks. We re-examine this design. Through controlled experiments, we show that a decoder-only architecture, which represents scenes implicitly as a KV-cache, outperforms encoder-decoder variants while using fewer parameters at identical rendering complexity. Further analysis shows that sharing weights between the color-input reconstruction network and the camera-only rendering network better aligns their features at the same viewpoint, facilitating image synthesis. Building on this finding, our model, dubbed DVSM, further incorporates foundation model priors and stage-wise patch sizing for an improved efficiency-quality tradeoff. Our results establish a new state of the art for novel-view synthesis across multiple benchmarks, in some cases even outperforming per-scene-optimized 3DGS under dense input views.

Patient-voiced clinical-triage benchmarks report high under-triage rates for consumer LLMs for constrained multiple-choice output, yet the same cases score differently with free-text. We ask whether output format changes the model's \emph{clinical representation} or only the mapping from a preserved representation to an answer. Using sparse-autoencoder (SAE) features in Gemma 3 4B/12B IT and Qwen3-8B, we find the same medical features fire on the shared clinical narrative under both formats but go {silent} at the multiple-choice decision token in all the cases at every model. Three independent methods (natural-language autoencoder verbalization, decision-token logit attribution, and top-feature characterization) agree that scaffold and format features, but not medical features, drive the decision logits. Behaviorally, the multiple-choice penalty inverts under both structured and natural-language input, option-order shuffle rules out positional bias, and the gap is dominated by off-by-one decision (the model picks an adjacent acuity letter to the gold answer) rather than knowledge failure. Thus, the failure originates in the output format and not in the clinical representation.

Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training has shown to improve reasoning in large language models (LLMs). However, there has been little exploration on the problem of data contamination in RL post-training, potentially undermining generalization and evaluation reliability of the training process itself. Existing detection methods primarily rely on output-level signals such as likelihood or entropy, which become unreliable for RL-trained models since RL shapes behavior through trajectory-level rewards rather than token likelihoods. We propose LaRA, a layer-wise representation analysis framework for detecting contamination in RL post-trained LLMs. LaRA introduces three complementary metrics, measuring perturbation sensitivity, directional collapse, and local representation rigidity under controlled perturbations. We find that contamination produces progressive geometric deviations across layers, including amplified perturbation sensitivity, stronger directional collapse, and enhanced local rigidity. Based on our findings, we also develop a contamination detection protocol that aggregates representation-level deviations across layers and metrics. Experiments on RL-trained reasoning models show that our protocol outperforms existing output-level baselines for contamination detection.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) improves knowledge-intensive question answering by incorporating external evidence. However, existing RAG methods still suffer from hallucinations and subtle reasoning errors. Recent studies introduce external critics to refine RAG outputs, yet they often provide coarse-grained and weakly structured feedback, exhibit over-aggressive intervention, and lead to noisy and unreliable refinement, limiting their effectiveness for correction. To tackle these issues, we propose CRITIC-R1, a structured critic framework that formulates and learns RAG critique as an explicit error diagnosis problem using reinforcement learning (RL). Our framework categorizes common RAG errors into multiple diagnostic dimensions, including verdict, error location, reasoning analysis, and fix generation. To learn these capabilities, we design two reward functions: Conservative Judgement Alignment (CJA) first encourages calibrated high-level judgements while mitigating the over-aggressive phenomenon, whereas Diagnostic Quality Alignment (DQA) further improves fine-grained diagnostic feedback through gated rewards. We train the critic model using GRPO-based RL with process-level supervision collected from external LLM teacher models. Experiments across five QA benchmarks show that CRITIC-R1 consistently improves answer quality over strong RAG baselines. Our source code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/critic-r1-FCB0

Modern statistical learning theory and deep learning characterize generalization primarily in terms of continuous capacity control (e.g., norm-based regularization, margin maximization, low-rank bias). While highly successful in continuous domains, deep learning consistently fails to extrapolate exact algorithmic or discrete algebraic rules, reflecting a missing inductive bias toward algorithmic complexity minimization. We propose the Cayley-table completion as the canonical testbed for this missing bias, serving as the discrete algebraic counterpart to matrix completion. Just as matrix factorization combined with weight decay yields an implicit geometric bias toward low linear rank, recent results demonstrate that operator-valued tensor factorizations paired with a flatness prior yield an implicit algorithmic bias toward exact discrete associativity. We pose the open problem of establishing formal exact recovery bounds for Cayley-table completion, and challenge the community to generalize continuous flatness priors to autonomously discover broader discrete algorithmic axioms without combinatorial search.

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) often hallucinate objects that are not present in the input image, largely because visual grounding weakens as decoding progresses. Existing inference-time mitigation methods modify logits or hidden states throughout generation, but they suffer from three key limitations: they lack an explicit grounding objective, intervene even when the model is already well-grounded, and use fixed correction strengths that do not adapt to the severity of grounding failure. We propose BRACS (Barrier-Regulated Adaptive Closed-form Steering), a training-free steering framework that addresses these issues through barrier-regulated adaptive closed-form steering. BRACS monitors the model's own attention to measure visual grounding and applies corrections to the hidden states only when grounding deteriorates. The corrective update is computed analytically in closed form, requiring no training of auxiliary networks or model retraining. Experiments on LLaVA-1.5-7B and Qwen-VL-Chat show that BRACS consistently outperforms prior methods on hallucination benchmarks, reducing CHAIR$_s$ by 9.4 points and improving POPE F1 by 2.7 points, while matching or improving performance on four general multimodal benchmarks. BRACS also remains efficient, operating at 80% of greedy decoding throughput and achieving 1.3 times higher speed on average than the baselines.

Key-Value (KV) cache remains a major bottleneck for deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) in long-generation tasks. Prior work often applies uniform compression across both prefill and decoding caches, but compressing the prefill cache degrades performance by corrupting critical context. While preserving the prefill cache is essential, decoding-phase compression remains underexplored, with existing methods relying on rigid recency windows or instantaneous attention. Our analysis of attention dynamics reveals strong temporal patterns: critical tokens receive sustained attention over long horizons, while local reasoning involves short-lived bursts. Static heuristics fail to capture this behavior, leading to premature eviction of important tokens or retention of stale ones. We propose Moment-KV, a decoding-time KV cache compression method based on momentum-driven temporal attention aggregation. Our method models token importance as a continuously evolving state, where attention is aggregated with decay, capturing both long-term influence and recent relevance. Experiments show that Moment-KV significantly improves generation fidelity in long-generation tasks (2.3-3.2 %) while maintaining decoding latency.

Multi-step robot manipulation requires acting under uncertainty about how the scene will evolve, making exploration and policy adaptation challenging. We study whether short-horizon, task-consistent future videos can provide useful structured priors for control and reinforcement-learning fine-tuning. We formalize this idea through Future-Experience Conditioning (FEC), a simple interface that conditions closed-loop policies on a latent representation of a short future video. In our simulation setup, future clips are generated in three stages, an LLM reasoner operating over a task ontology initialized from the current scene state, a robot-free digital-twin rollout of the intended object motion, and a mask-free video diffusion model that synthesizes a robot-consistent future clip without requiring segmentation at inference. We instantiate this future-conditioning interface primarily with BC and BC+RL, and compare against a future-conditioned Streaming Flow Policy (SFP) baseline on RoboCasa and CALVIN under NoFuture, GTFuture, GenFuture, and WrongFuture. Generated futures improve performance over no-future conditioning, while mismatched futures degrade it, and our BC+RL instantiation achieves the strongest overall results. An average BC+RL learning-curve analysis across 8 CALVIN tasks further shows that GTFuture improves fastest, GenFuture improves earlier and to a higher level than NoFuture, and WrongFuture remains at zero throughout training. These results suggest that short-horizon future videos can serve as useful structured priors for exploration and policy adaptation under imperfect future predictions. https://enact2026.github.io/