We envision a proactive multi-modal assistant system which gives users real-time step-by-step guidance on a procedural task, autonomously deciding \textit{when} to interrupt, and \textit{how} to coach. However, progress is limited by the absence of large-scale, cross-domain benchmarks that reflect realistic conditions, particularly the common case in which users deviate from the expected step sequence. We address this gap with four contributions: \textbf{(1)}~we release \textbf{EgoProactive}, a large-scale wearable-egocentric dataset for proactive procedural assistance with explicit Out-of-Plan (OOP) annotations and recovery steps; \textbf{(2)}~we augment five established benchmarks (Ego4D, EPIC-KITCHENS, EgoExo4D, HoloAssist, HowTo100M) into \textbf{Pro\textsuperscript{2}Bench} under a unified proactive-guidance schema; \textbf{(3)}~we propose a \textbf{decoupled planner--interaction architecture} specialized for procedural state, visual cues, and recovery injection; \textbf{(4)}~we introduce a post-training recipe that transfers across model families, validated by cross-backbone replication on Llama~4 and Qwen-3.6-VL. In extensive experiments, our trained Llama-4 system substantially improves objective intervention quality over strong proprietary baselines (Claude Opus~4.6, Gemini~3.1~Pro, GPT~5.2) and open-weight baselines (Qwen3~VL~235B) baselines across all six datasets. Oracle-plan experiments further show that, when plan quality is controlled, the trained duplex model produces high-quality guidance and large gains on Out-of-Plan recovery.

Large vision-language-action (VLA) policies are increasingly trained as conditional generative models over action chunks. Yet deployment produces mixed-quality experience-successful demonstrations, partial completions, recoverable mistakes, and failures-that is difficult to use with standard imitation. Full behavior cloning (BC) imitates failures, filtered BC discards useful sub-trajectories, and offline reinforcement learning adds a large critic. We introduce ForesightFlow, a self-guided flow-matching policy that augments each generated action chunk with a learned success-potential trajectory. The same flow proposes and scores candidate actions, enabling best-of-$K$ inference without an external critic. The key issue is that policy improvement and value calibration require different supervision: advantage weighting should emphasize high-quality actions, but applying the same weights to potential coordinates suppresses failure gradients and creates overconfident scores. We address this with decoupled advantage-weighted flow matching, applying exponentiated advantage weights only to action velocities while training potential velocities uniformly. We further derive a one-step boundary estimator for conditional flow matching, allowing advantage computation with a single stop-gradient forward pass. Across five BEHAVIOR-1K simulation tasks and five real-world bimanual tasks, ForesightFlow improves over imitation baselines, matches the strongest separate-critic baseline in simulation success, improves real-world success, and reduces training compute by $38\%$. Ablations show that decoupling prevents value hallucination, the one-step estimator preserves candidate-ranking fidelity, and self-guided sampling improves long-horizon execution.

Diffusion language models (DLMs) generate text through iterative denoising, and blockwise decoding improves their practicality by committing tokens in local blocks. However, existing blockwise methods typically rely on fixed block sizes or delimiter-based runtime signals, which do not necessarily align with semantic boundaries. In this paper, we propose SemBlock, a semantic-boundary-driven dynamic block decoding framework for diffusion LLMs. SemBlock formulates dynamic block construction as semantic boundary prediction and trains lightweight predictors on frozen LLaDA hidden states. To provide supervision, we construct SemBound, a semantic-boundary dataset that derives boundary labels from discourse units, reasoning steps, and implementation spans across natural language, math, and code tasks. During inference, SemBlock uses predicted boundary probabilities to select the ending position of each dynamic block. Experiments on GSM8K, IFEval, MATH, and HumanEval show that SemBlock consistently improves over fixed-block decoding and AdaBlock. Our code is publicly available: https://github.com/TH-AI-Lab-PKU/SemBlock.

Mean-based algorithms are a class of online learning algorithms that assign low probability to actions with low average rewards. Recent work indicates these algorithms converge favorably to serially undominated actions, which approximate Nash equilibria in economic games. However, empirical studies also show slower convergence compared to established algorithms in bandit-feedback scenarios. We study mean-based algorithms when the time horizon is unknown and only bandit feedback is available. In this setting, we provide the first lower bound on the algorithm-defining sequence $γ_t$ that formally establishes a limit on how fast these algorithms can learn. Additionally, we propose two mean-based algorithms: one generalizes $ε$-greedy, and the other extends the mean-based Exp3 to unknown horizons. Our experiments show that mean-based algorithms, although slightly slower, can perform competitively with other bandit-feedback algorithms. We further analyze the relationship to no-regret algorithms. Depending on the choice of $γ_t$, the intersection with no-regret algorithms is non-trivial, and we show that algorithms exist that are both mean-based and no-regret. This adds context to the "exploitability" of this class of algorithms that previous contributions suggest.

Real-time data analysis requires the ability to accurately and adaptively address nonlinear dynamics in a nonstationary data stream while preserving computational efficiency. However, nonlinear dynamics are so complex that capturing dynamically changing nonlinear patterns and utilizing them for downstream tasks under strict time constraints is nontrivial. To bridge the gap between nonlinear complexity and computational tractability, this study applies Koopman operator theory, which states that nonlinear dynamics can be represented as linear transitions in an infinite-dimensional space. Building upon finite-dimensional approximations of this operator, we present AdaKoop, an efficient streaming algorithm for modeling nonlinear dynamics over nonstationary data streams. Our approach utilizes a probabilistic framework grounded in Koopman operator theory, treating both raw observations and reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) features as emissions from latent vectors. This dual-view formulation allows nonlinear dynamics to be expressed as a tractable linear system. Therefore, AdaKoop enables the efficient and stable modeling of nonlinear dynamics in a streaming fashion, avoiding the prohibitive computational costs of iterative nonlinear optimization. Furthermore, to address nonstationarity in data streams, AdaKoop adaptively detects the switching of patterns via statistical hypothesis testing for abrupt pattern shifts and incrementally updates model parameters to handle continuous changes. Extensive experiments on a total of 71 practical benchmark datasets across various domains demonstrate that AdaKoop outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of real-time forecasting accuracy and computational efficiency.

LLM post-training proceeds through multiple stages, e.g., supervised fine-tuning (SFT) followed by reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) or direct preference optimization (DPO), where each stage draws data from different, potentially untrusted sources. Existing literature assumes data poisoning attacks may occur at each training stage, but neglects the possibility of multiple attackers. To study the trustworthiness of the entire post-training pipeline, we propose the threat model of sequential data poisoning, where multiple adversaries separately poison the SFT and preference datasets. Under this threat model, we identify the single-attacker illusion: each adversary, evaluated in isolation, appears to pose a negligible threat. Yet when adversaries collaborate across stages, the true vulnerability is revealed. In the SFT $\to$ DPO pipeline, their contributions are additive: splitting a fixed poison budget across stages outperforms concentrating it in either stage alone. In the SFT $\to$ PPO pipeline, their contributions are complementary: neither SFT nor reward model poisoning succeeds individually, yet their combination does. These findings show that security analyses of individual post-training stages systematically underestimate compound vulnerabilities that emerge only from their interaction. Code is available at https://github.com/jcksanderson/sequential-poisoning.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed across diverse applications, raising critical questions for governance, accountability, and data provenance. Understanding which training data most influenced a model's output remains a fundamental open problem. We address this challenge through training data attribution (TDA) for auto-regressive LLMs by expanding upon the inverse formulation: How would training data be affected if the model had seen the generated output during training? Our method perturbs the base model using bidirectional gradient optimization (gradient ascent and descent) on a generated text sample and measures the resulting change in loss across training samples. Our framework supports attribution at arbitrary data granularity, enabling both factual and stylistic attribution. We evaluate our method against baselines on pretrained models with known datasets, and show that it outperforms previous work on influence metrics, thereby enhancing model interpretability, an essential requirement for accountable AI systems.

Video panoptic segmentation (VPS) aims to jointly detect, segment, and track all objects while partitioning the video into semantically consistent regions. We introduce the task setting of unsupervised VPS, omitting any human supervision. Existing unsupervised scene understanding works mainly focused on image segmentation tasks; the video domain remains underexplored. We propose VideoCUPS, the first unsupervised VPS approach. VideoCUPS generates temporally consistent panoptic video pseudo-labels from scene-centric videos by exploiting unsupervised depth, motion, and visual cues. Training on these pseudo-labels using a novel Video DropLoss yields an accurate, unsupervised VPS model. To benchmark progress, we introduce a comprehensive evaluation protocol and four competitive baselines, extending state-of-the-art unsupervised panoptic image and instance video segmentation models to VPS. VideoCUPS outperforms all baselines and demonstrates strong label-efficient learning. With VideoCUPS, our evaluation protocol, and baselines, we provide a strong foundation for future research on unsupervised VPS.

The widespread use of Large Language Models (LLMs) as writing tools challenges the validity of crowdsourced data, as crowdworkers may outsource tasks to models. To better understand how this is addressed, we surveyed 155 researchers in NLP and related disciplines about their experiences and opinions on collecting free-text responses via crowdsourcing. This paper provides an overview of practitioners' challenges, mitigation strategies, and the foreseen implications on data quality. 44% of respondents reported observing LLM usage in their crowdsourced data. While 93% of them had anticipated this, half were unsure what precautions to take. The most prevalent detection strategies are distinctive textual style patterns and unusually fast completion times. Overall, survey responses show that the research community is aware of the problem and taking measures, but existing efforts remain insufficient to fully address it. Finally, we derive a set of considerations to guide future crowdsourced free-text data collection in the era of LLMs.

Rubric-based reinforcement learning (RL) uses an LLM-as-a-Judge (LaaJ) to score model outputs according to rubrics as rewards. However, policy models may exploit latent biases in the judge, leading to reward hacking and ineffective or unsafe training outcomes. In real-world rubric-based RL, such hacking behaviors are often subtle and entangled with multiple judge biases, making them difficult to analyze, detect, and mitigate. In this paper, we introduce CHERRL, a controllable hacking environment for rubric-based RL. By injecting known biases into LaaJ, CHERRL enables stable reproduction of reward hacking, explicit observation of reward divergence, and precise identification of hacking onset. This provides a clean experimental testbed for studying the mechanisms and mitigations of reward hacking in rubric-based RL. To demonstrate its utility, we analyze different judge biases from the perspectives of discoverability and exploitability, and explore an agent-based system for automatically detecting reward hacking onset from training logs. The code and environment are publicly available at https://github.com/THUAIS-Lab/CHERRL.

Current prompt-based and adapter-based tuning of vision-language models (VLMs) is attractive for medical imaging, where clinical data sensitivity favors frozen backbones and annotations are limited. However, these methods typically optimize only the ground-truth class, treating all other classes as equally incorrect, ignoring clinically meaningful class relations and yielding unstable decision boundaries in limited-supervision settings. We propose Omni-Geometry Knowledge Distillation (OGKD), a new framework that injects class-relation structure into the teacher to produce directional targets that preserve the ground truth while respecting inter-class geometry. Using these targets, we develop two distillation losses: Global Geometry-Aware Distillation (GAD) operates on the global image token, and Label-Guided Geometry Distillation (LGD) applies the same geometry to attentive patch tokens to improve fine-grained alignment. Across comprehensive experiments and analyses on 11 widely-used medical datasets for base-to-novel and few-shot evaluations, our OGKD achieves substantially better performance, consistently improving accuracy by an average absolute gain of 1.7%-2.8% over all prior state-of-the-art VLM adaptation counterparts. It also robustly generalizes to unseen classes and yields more reliable predictions than other approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/tientrandinh/OGKD.

The goal of single-channel source separation is to reconstruct $K$ sources given their mixture. In supervised settings where vast amounts of clean source data are available, this challenging, ill-posed problem has been addressed successfully by generative diffusion and flow-based prior models. However, access to such clean source samples is often limited, and even when available, supervised models are vulnerable to domain shifts. To bridge this gap, we present Separation via Unsupervised Remixing Flow (SURF), an unsupervised flow matching approach for source separation that learns directly from observed mixtures. This method relies on a novel combination of state-of-the-art supervised flow matching and regression-based self-supervised techniques. At a high level, starting from a teacher model, we utilize a "remixing" step to bootstrap the learning of a student flow model from the teacher's estimates. We provide insights into the objectives optimized by this approach and draw a novel connection to the Wake-Sleep algorithm. Empirical evaluations on image and audio benchmarks demonstrate that SURF establishes a new state-of-the-art, significantly outperforming existing unsupervised methods. See our demo page for examples. https://google.github.io/df-conformer/surf/

Worker utility is not observed -- only its consequence is. Each gig transaction produces a single bit: accepted or rejected. We argue this structure points directly to the Preisach hysteresis model as the natural representation of latent worker preferences. The Preisach operator models aggregate output as an integral over a population of binary threshold elements -- precisely the structure that emerges when heterogeneous workers each carry a private acceptance wage. We estimate two latent utility surfaces: acceptance utility U_1(X) and rejection utility U_0(X), via a dual-output neural network (shared layers 256->128, margin loss enforcing U_1 >= U_0). Classification reduces to the Preisach gap U_1(X) - U_0(X), passed into an XGBoost classifier alongside clip-stabilised price-to-threshold encodings. On 36,891 gig transactions, this pipeline achieves Jaccard = 0.827 and ROC AUC = 0.799. The price-to-threshold encoding accounts for +11.0 pp AUC over raw utility features. The model confirms the directional asymmetry hysteresis predicts: price decreases depress completion rates more than equivalent increases raise them. Applied to the full dataset, the model's recommendations simultaneously reduce the total wage bill by 21.3% and increase expected fill rate by 9.7 pp. For 74.2% of transactions, P(accept) already exceeds 0.80; reducing the wage keeps it above threshold (mean post-cut P = 0.972), releasing cost savings (median 31%). For the remaining 25.4%, a median 7% wage increase recovers +43 pp acceptance. A model without an explicit indifference zone cannot execute both moves simultaneously.

Large language models reach 50 to 70% accuracy on causal reasoning benchmarks such as CLadder, but it is unclear whether this reflects structural reasoning or lexical pattern matching. We introduce Caliper, a controlled perturbation that replaces semantic variable names with placeholder tokens while preserving the causal graph and probabilistic specification of each question. Across nine instruction-tuned LLMs from 3.8B to 671B and three causal reasoning benchmarks, lexical anonymization yields robust accuracy drops of +7.6, +27.0, and +11.1 pp on a local 3.8B-14B set, rising to +29.6 and +18.0 pp on CRASS and e-CARE across nine frontier models spanning the 2024-2026 generations. Of 40 engaged model-by-benchmark cells, 39 show a positive gap, and the gap collapses by 17x on CLadder's pseudoword subset. Structured scaffolding and few-shot in-context learning each narrow the gap, but mainly by lowering P0 accuracy on smaller models rather than recovering P1. Current instruction-tuned LLMs, evaluated zero-shot, show little evidence of structural causal reasoning once lexical anchors are removed.

Breast cancer remains a leading cause of cancer-related mortality among women. Its clinical management requires multimodal reasoning across a clinical workflow that spans \textit{screening}, \textit{diagnosis} and \textit{treatment planning}, where each stage involves distinct imaging modalities, task objectives, and reasoning patterns. However, constrained by data scarcity and model versatility, existing medical MLLMs are typically evaluated on isolated modalities or narrow task families, limiting their ability to support workflow-level clinical reasoning. In this work, we first introduce \textbf{BreastStage}, a workflow-aligned breast imaging instruction corpus comprising 1.86M instruction-following pairs curated from 17 sub-datasets across 5 imaging modalities and 136 task templates. Its held-out split, \textbf{BreastStage-Bench}, provides a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating multimodal reasoning across the breast cancer care continuum. Building on this corpus, we propose \textbf{BreastGPT}, a unified MLLM equipped with a dual-branch visual encoder and concept-preserving token compression to bridge the scale gap between standard radiology and gigapixel pathology. On BreastStage-Bench, BreastGPT achieves 75.66\% closed-ended accuracy and 89.92\% open-ended score, outperforming both general-purpose and medical-specific MLLMs across clinical stages and task formats. These results suggest that workflow-aligned data and cross-scale visual modeling are critical for clinically grounded medical MLLMs. All data, code, and model checkpoints are released at https://yangyy-liu.github.io/BreastGPT.io.

Although it is generally agreed that AI-generated text poses a broad societal risk, there is no common understanding in the AI-generated text detection literature on what constitutes harmful use. Rather, existing datasets and approaches often define their own criteria and make their own assumptions, sometimes implicitly, and often only loosely related to real-world needs and applications. To address this gap, we here systematically define various notions of AI-generated text and their characteristics. To study these, we collect AITDNA - a new benchmark of human-machine co-constructed texts that is annotated with detailed genesis information, such as the entire edit and AI-interaction history. We benchmark various machine-generated text detectors and find that they often only perform well for specific notions but not as broad detectors. We release code and data publicly.

Anatomical landmark detection is a fundamental task in medical image analysis supporting a wide range of diagnostic and interventional workflows. Although recent methods have achieved sub-millimetric localisation, accuracy alone is not sufficient for clinical deployment, requiring reliability and robustness in prediction. Despite its clinical relevance, the impact of representation learning in this context is still underexplored. In this work, we introduce CDPM-align, a multi-scale guidance-aligned conditional diffusion pre-training for anatomical landmark detection. Our experimental setup focuses on a few images and a few annotation regimes. Specifically, we employ three popular heterogeneous small-scale benchmark datasets for representation learning via conditional generative pre-training. Furthermore, we consider low-annotation scenarios for the downstream task of landmark detection, with 10 and 25 annotated images, reflecting realistic trade-offs between clinical effort and resource constraints for annotations. Our results confirm that generative pre-training enables the model to learn a robust representation. This improves both accuracy and uncertainty on the downstream tasks, advancing towards safe and efficient clinical deployment.

Generating compact polygonal models from point clouds is a key problem in 3D vision and computer graphics. However, due to inherent limitations of LiDAR scanning (e.g. range constraints and occlusions), critical scene information is often missing, leading to degraded reconstruction accuracy. To address this, we propose a plane assembling strategy that effectively recovers missing details while maintaining model compactness. We classify all the planes extracted from the scene into three categories: highly visible, barely visible, and invisible. The invisible planes, which are recovered by scene structure analysis, indicate the missing details. The three types of planes correspond to the three growth priorities. Each plane grows according to the priority level, and the space is partitioned progressively, namely, the hierarchical partition. Subsequently, we generate a watertight polygonal mesh from the partition via a min-cut-based optimization. Finally, comparisons on public datasets show the effectiveness and superiority of our method against mainstream approaches. The project page is available at https://hsr-3dv.github.io/.

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (e.g. GRPO) is now a common way to improve mathematical reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs). However, current methods usually broadcast one sequence-level advantage to all tokens, or use costly process reward models (PRMs) for step-level supervision. Uniform advantage distribution assumes that all tokens contribute equally to the final reward. This dilutes the gradient signal, since flawed reasoning steps and filler words are updated as strongly as valid logical inferences. To address this, we introduce Gradient-Reweighted Advantage (GRAIL), an intrinsic token-wise advantage reweighting method. GRAIL uses gradient-activation saliency to place more weight on tokens that are more locally sensitive to the final answer. Evaluations across five models from the Qwen3, R1-distilled and OctoThinker families show that GRAIL consistently outperforms GRPO. GRAIL achieved an average improvement of 3.60% in accuracy and 3.05% in Pass@3, demonstrating that fine-grained reasoning alignment can be achieved without process-level supervision.

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) ocular inspection provides empirical cues for assessing scleral surface anomalies, but its clinical use remains subjective and difficult to quantify. To support intelligent and quantifiable ocular inspection, this study presents the TCM-inspired Artificial Intelligence Ocular Auxiliary Diagnosis System (TAO) and focuses on pixel-level scleral surface anomaly segmentation. For clinical and user-acquired images affected by multi-source distributional discrepancies, diverse anomaly morphologies, and scleral specular reflection (SSR), we propose HD-DinoMoE, a class-aware hierarchical dual mixture-of-experts network. HD-DinoMoE combines class-aware dual-stream DINOv3 feature fusion with class-specific multi-expert decoding to segment Vessels, Yellow and Black Spots, and Blood Spots. A three-stage backbone-frozen routing strategy stabilizes dual-backbone adaptation; Progressive Confidence Penalty (PCP) Loss reduces high-confidence false positives and segmentation leakage in SSR regions; and Class-Aware Adaptive Sample Weighting (CA-ASW) balances sample- and class-level training contributions. We further construct the Multi-label Scleral Anomaly Segmentation Dataset (ML-SASD), a new benchmark with Clinical, Wild, and Mix settings and pixel-wise annotations for three anomaly categories. On ML-SASD-Mix, HD-DinoMoE achieves a mean Dice of 72.11% and a mean Intersection-over-Union of 58.44%, while maintaining favorable boundary localization and specular-region false-positive control. It also shows competitive generalization on the Vessels subset of the public SBVPI dataset. These results indicate that HD-DinoMoE provides a feasible segmentation solution for TAO under complex acquisition scenarios. The code and data access information are available at https://github.com/FX-CMX/HD-DinoMoE.

Traditional end-to-end autonomous driving frameworks frequently suffer from the "style-averaging" dilemma when trained on high-variance human demonstrations, yielding homogenized, style-uncontrollable, and even kinematically unsafe policies. To overcome this limitation, we present D$^3$-MoE (Dual Disentangled Diffusion Mixture-of-Experts), which disentangles trajectory modeling along two complementary axes. On the behavioral axis, generation is decoupled from selection: a style-conditioned diffusion process synthesizes multi-style candidate trajectories in parallel within a single scene, allowing a downstream module to select the optimal trajectory based on user preference or an evaluation score. On the physical axis, decoupled longitudinal and lateral routers activate their respective experts during inference time, trained without manual labels using self-supervised targets from orthogonal ground-truth kinematics. These activated experts, architected as Diffusion Transformers (DiT) and equipped with style-conditioned AdaLN and asymmetric lateral-fusion cross-attention, independently predict their corresponding physical state before being reassembled into a unified, kinematically coherent trajectory. Extensive evaluations on the challenging NAVSIM benchmark demonstrate that D$^3$-MoE achieves state-of-the-art planning performance, reaching 88.2 PDMS and 84.3 EPDMS by default. Moreover, our Best-of-Three ensemble strategy effectively broadens the multi-modal solution space, raising performance to 91.3 PDMS and 87.5 EPDMS. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses jointly confirm the framework's advantages in planning quality and style controllability.

Face aging plays an important role in long-term biometric analysis, cross-age identity verification, and forensic identity analysis. Since the same subject may exhibit multiple plausible appearances at a target age due to genetic, environmental, and lifestyle factors, face aging is inherently a one-to-many generation problem. However, pluralism alone is insufficient for reliable face aging: a model should provide appearance-level candidate diversity within each age group while maintaining sequence-level ordinal reliability across ordered age groups. Existing deterministic aging methods can synthesize visually plausible age-progressed faces, but usually lack stochastic diversity. In contrast, pluralistic aging methods introduce local appearance variations, but often fail to explicitly regulate the identity evolution of the full aging sequence. In this paper, we propose \textbf{DiverAge}, a hierarchical pluralistic face aging framework based on diffusion autoencoding. DiverAge preserves appearance-level diversity through stochastic diffusion decoding and age-conditioned semantic modulation. To improve sequence-level reliability, we introduce a Cross-age Identity Relation Regulator (CARR), an inference-time guidance strategy that jointly denoises multiple target age groups. CARR is guided by a Cross-age Identity Similarity (CIS) prior estimated from real same-identity cross-age pairs, and suppresses excessive cross-age identity drift through one-sided sampling-time guidance without modifying the training objective or introducing extra trainable parameters. Experiments demonstrate that DiverAge improves sequence-level ordinal reliability while maintaining identity preservation, age accuracy, image quality, and appearance-level diversity.

Selection is a core operation in interactive image editing. To be practical, a user should be able to specify and disambiguate the desired selection region through either text or click-based interactions, and the system should support selecting not only objects but also other criteria, such as materials. Material-based selection is valuable for tasks like re-texturing surfaces or editing instances of a specific material. However, existing vision-language-model (VLM) based selection methods are object-centric and typically support a single interaction modality, limiting their applicability. In this work, we thus present Mask Any Object And Material (MAOAM), a unified selection framework that enables precise object and material-level selection across both text- and click-based interactions. MAOAM leverages a VLM with a segmentation head to produce pixel-accurate masks from user prompts: the VLM interprets the user's selection intent (object or material-level) and encodes visual entities, attributes, and spatial relations, while the segmentation head decodes the output token into a mask. A key challenge is the lack of material selection datasets with text annotations. We propose a scalable data generation pipeline: we collect real and synthetic images with material masks, and leverage VLMs to generate material descriptions with rich visual-semantics. We train MAOAM with a multi-task objective over click and text-based selection, along with an auxiliary VQA task derived from the material descriptions to facilitate deeper material understanding. Despite being trained with uni-modal prompts, our model exhibits an emergent improvement in selection when combining text and clicks at inference, enabling flexible image editing workflows. Experiments demonstrate accurate and coherent selections across diverse objects, materials, and interaction scenarios, highlighting robustness in practice.

Tabular foundation models, such as TabPFN, achieve strong performance on tabular datasets with numerical and categorical data, but do not natively handle high-cardinality text features. Standard pipelines, therefore, embed text with a language model and compress the resulting vectors with PCA into a small number of scalar features before inputting them into TabPFN. This creates an information bottleneck: most embedding dimensions are discarded, and the compressed representation must then be expanded again by TabPFN's feature encoder. End-to-end alternatives can avoid PCA, but they require large amounts of pretraining data containing text cells and usually perform subpar compared to tabular foundation models that were pretrained on large amounts of synthetic data. Inspired by modality-alignment approaches like LLaVA (vision-to-LLM token projection) and TableGPT-style systems (table-to-LLM token projection), we introduce the TabPFN Text Adapter (text-to-TFM token projection). We freeze both the sentence encoder and TabPFN, and train only a lightweight adapter that maps text embeddings into a short sequence of tokens in TabPFN's embedding space. This design removes the PCA bottleneck, preserves TabPFN's numerical strengths, and is more efficient to train than end-to-end text-tabular pipelines.

The selection of an appropriate 3D representation is a fundamental design decision that dictates the efficiency, quality, and capabilities of modern computer vision and graphics pipelines for tasks such as 3D reconstruction, novel-view synthesis and rendering, shape and motion analysis, recognition, and generation. While traditional representations (\eg meshes, point clouds, and volumetric grids) remain standard outputs of 3D sensors (\eg LiDAR and 3D scanners) and are widely used in downstream applications (\eg editing and simulation), recent neural and primitive-based representations (\eg 3D Gaussian Splatting) offer compact and differentiable alternatives opening a wide range of opportunities in applications such as games, AR/VR, autonomous driving, robot navigation, and medical imaging, to name a few. The goal of this paper is to survey the main families of 3D representations from discrete explicit formats to continuous implicit fields based either on neural rendering or primitive splatting. For each type of representation, we present the general formulation and its variants, discuss its benefits and limitations, and highlight key applications. We conclude the paper by outlining the open challenges and potential directions for future research. Distinct from recent surveys that broadly cover 3D object and scene reconstruction, this paper provides a focused analysis on the evolution of 3D representations themselves. We specifically emphasize the paradigm shift toward implicit representations, offering a novel perspective on how these emerging formats fundamentally alter 3D/4D workflows.

As AI companion platforms such as Replika and Character.AI rapidly grow, concerns about unsafe human-AI interactions have intensified. This study introduces AICompanionBench, to our knowledge the first publicly available benchmark dataset of human-AI companion conversations annotated with fine-grained safety risk categories. The dataset contains 2,123 real-world Replika conversations collected from Reddit and annotated through human-AI collaboration across nine categories: sexual behavior, antisocial behavior, physical aggression, verbal aggression, substance abuse, self-harm and suicide, control, manipulation, and no-harm. Using this benchmark, we evaluate 20 state-of-the-art open-source and closed-source LLMs under an LLM-as-judge framework for detecting unsafe interactions. Results show substantial variation in model performance, with stronger models achieving high overall accuracy but still struggling with nuanced categories such as manipulation, as well as benign conversations that are incorrectly identified as harmful. Our findings suggest that while current LLMs can effectively detect explicit harmful content, they remain limited in identifying implicit unsafe interactions. Overall, our work contributes a new benchmark dataset for AI companionship safety research and offers insights into monitoring AI companion systems using LLMs. The dataset is publicly available at: https://github.com/anonymousresearcher2026/AICompanionBench/blob/main/AICompanionBench.xlsx

Large-scale hyperparameter optimization (HPO) in automated machine learning (AutoML) consumes substantial computational resources, raising growing concerns about scalability and energy efficiency. Existing methods use prior information heuristically to accelerate both black-box and multi-fidelity settings, but they lack a characterization of how prior informativeness quantitatively reduces sample complexity. In this work, we provide the first distribution-dependent sample complexity bounds for multi-fidelity HPO with priors through the formal lens of fixed-budget best-arm identification. By modeling priors directly over arm means as configuration performance, we derive explicit, distribution-dependent error bounds that quantify the relationship between priors and evaluation budget. Our analysis shows that informative priors, which concentrate probability mass on near-optimal arms, yield reductions in the number of required evaluations, whereas baseline performance is recovered with uninformative or misleading priors. We conduct proof-of-concept experiments on a synthetic benchmark and on LCBench, a common multi-fidelity HPO benchmark for deep learning, to confirm our theoretical results, achieving up to 90% budget reduction while retaining solution quality. Together, our results provide a principled foundation for prior-guided and compute-efficient green AutoML.

We introduce IRIS-GAN, a specialist forensic detector for synthetic face images under cross-generator shift. Rather than addressing universal synthetic-image detection, we focus on faces generated by generative adversarial networks (GANs), which are state-of-the-art in deepfake content, and train the detector through staged exposure to increasingly demanding GAN families while retaining earlier generators. The final model reaches fake-detection rates above 99% across the GAN families considered and classifies an external real-face dataset with 98.9% accuracy. Grad-CAM analysis further reveals measurable generator-dependent spatial response patterns, which remain informative for a secondary heatmap-only classifier. Out-of-family tests on diffusion-generated faces confirm that IRIS-GAN is a specialist detector, with some capability to reach non-GAN deepfakes. These results establish staged training as an effective strategy for robust GAN-face forensics.

Finding optimal solution paths for combinatorial puzzles like the Rubik's Cube, sliding tile puzzles, and Lights Out remains a classical challenge in artificial intelligence. Heuristic search algorithms, such as A* , guarantee path optimality only when using an admissible heuristic-one that never overestimates the true remaining cost-to-go. Deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods like DeepCubeA train deep neural networks to approximate cost-to-go heuristics. However, standard mean-squared error (MSE) training regularly yields overestimations, violating admissibility and compromising solution optimality. In this paper, we introduce a generalizable framework for learning validation-calibrated admissible neural heuristics. We train a value network using an underestimating Admissible Bellman Operator combined with an Asymmetric Loss function to penalize overestimation. To account for residual neural function approximation errors, we propose a post-hoc calibration safety offset computed over validation scrambles. We demonstrate that our calibrated neural heuristics achieve no observed admissibility violations under the evaluation protocol and preserve path optimality in practice while reducing search node expansions by up to 83.0% on a 2 by 2 Rubik's Cube, 19.9% on a 3 by 3 Lights Out grid, and 1.9% on an 8-Puzzle compared to standard analytical baselines.

Standard IMVC evaluation retrains separate models for different missing-data configurations. We show that this paradigm obscures a fundamental vulnerability: missing rate alone is insufficient to characterize data incompleteness. Specifically, we show that protocols with identical nominal missing rates can differ by up to $50\times$ in their proportion of fully observed samples, inducing drastically different learning regimes. We formalize this phenomenon as incompleteness divergence, providing measures that capture structural disparities across missing-data protocols. We further prove that for a broad class of reconstruction-based objectives, learning becomes structurally ill-posed when the proportion of complete samples falls below a critical threshold, leading to near-random performance. To bypass this theoretical bound, we propose CRAFT (Complete-data Robust Attention-masked Fusion Transformer). CRAFT shifts the burden of robustness from the loss function to the architecture via two key properties: (i) per-sample independence, which removes reliance on complete-sample co-occurrence, and (ii) mask-aware variable-length fusion, which aggregates only observed views through attention masking. This design allows a single model, trained once on complete data, to generalize to diverse missing patterns at inference time without retraining. Extensive experiments on seven benchmarks show that CRAFT matches or outperforms per-configuration baselines while reducing training overhead by $8.8\times$, demonstrating that robustness to missing data can be achieved as an inherent architectural property. Code (CRAFT) and our imvc-audit toolkit are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CRAFT-BF80/ and https://anonymous.4open.science/r/imvc-audit-8263/.