Knowledge extraction from symbolic data often produces abstractions that are formally defined but not immediately interpretable by users. Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) and Relational Concept Analysis (RCA) provide representative settings for this issue: they generate explicit conceptual structures, implications, and relational dependencies from object descriptions and relations. Although these structures are explainable by design, their concepts are often identified by technical labels, which limits their use as human-interpretable knowledge units. Assigning meaningful names to such concepts is therefore a key issue for interpretation, navigation, validation, and reuse by domain experts. This paper investigates concept naming in FCA and RCA from a symbolic knowledge representation perspective. We first characterize the linguistic and terminological challenges involved in naming generated symbolic abstractions, including ambiguity, discrimination, concision, and consistency across related concepts. We then propose a configurable framework for LLM-assisted concept naming. The framework relies on a variability model that controls which sources of information are exposed during naming, such as intent, extent, inherited information, neighboring concepts, implications, and relational attributes. It thereby makes explicit the semantic choices involved in moving from formal concept descriptions to human-readable names. The approach is illustrated as a proof of concept on a small relational dataset in the pizzeria domain. This illustration shows how different configurations influence the names suggested by an LLM, and how naming variability can reveal interpretation choices, relational dependencies, and possible modeling issues in the underlying symbolic data.

False data injection attacks (FDIAs) introducing small measurement perturbations can still cause large deviations in power system state estimation when the injected signals align with the pseudo-null space of the system model. Existing model- and data-driven detectors may fail to identify such low-magnitude but high-impact attacks because residual tests ignore changes hidden in the pseudo-null space, while subspace learning methods capture correlation patterns without enforcing physical consistency. This paper proposes Physically Consistent Null Space Alignment (PCNSA), a framework that detects stealthy FDIAs by preserving, through preprocessing, the geometric correspondence between the physical null space and the measurement-derived pseudo-null space. The key point is a Pseudo-null Space Conserved data Preprocessing (PSCP) step that re-expresses measurements in the physical coordinate frame before subspace extraction. We prove that PSCP preserves the separation between row space and its orthogonal complement, a property that conventional per-feature standardization violates. This keeps the singular value decomposition (SVD)-derived pseudo-null subspace aligned with the physical residual space without explicit knowledge of H. Experiments on IEEE 14-, 30-, 57-, and 118-bus systems confirm this principle in practice: stealthy attacks that evade XTM, LSTM, AE and Isolation Forest baselines appear as clear deviations in the aligned subspace, yielding higher F1-score and detection accuracy while remaining robust under partial observability and realistic PMU noise.

Recently, language models have made rapid progress across various domains and applications. However, their capability for self-improvement, i.e., whether they are adept at recognising and correcting flaws in their own reasoning, remains dubious. In this study, we address this question by constructing a sufficiency test to rigorously examine the self-correction capabilities of small language models (SLMs). We propose a minimal three-step self-correction pipeline that collects initial SLM answers, prompts the same model to generate hints for its incorrect responses given the ground truth, and feeds the model the same question with its own feedback to refine the initial answer. We evaluate a variety of instruction-tuned and reasoning SLMs in this experimental setup on arithmetic and logical reasoning benchmarks. Our findings show that SLMs with injected hint sentences yield only a 4.4 percent gain over initial question-answering accuracy. Even though the correct answer was provided alongside the model's incorrect reasoning, the evaluated SLMs fail to understand what was missing in their reasoning and show minimal semantic difference between hints that lead to corrections and ones that do not. Furthermore, our experiments show that longer hints are positively correlated with incorrect final answers, suggesting that longer deliberation on problems can hinder the reasoning process, meaning that SLMs do not necessarily scale in performance with a larger compute budget.

While large language models (LLMs) offer promising reasoning capabilities, their integration into safety-critical driving systems is hindered by limited reasoning diversity, high computational overhead, and static learning paradigms. To address these challenges, we propose LUNA-AD, a lightweight uncertainty-aware language model with lifelong learning for autonomous driving (AD). LUNA-AD features a tri-system architecture that reconciles complex multimodal behavioral reasoning, efficient deployment, and continual refinement. We design a multi-agent analytical system to generate uncertainty-aware decision-making demonstrations through diverse hypothesis exploration. A dual-head lightweight heuristic model is distilled to unify the inference of decision distributions and textual explanations while enabling efficient deployment. Furthermore, a reflection-driven lifelong learning mechanism operates on multimodal decision outputs and preserves strategic diversity, allowing for the refinement of candidate decisions and rationales via closed-loop feedback to enhance driving robustness. Extensive experiments on nuPlan benchmarks demonstrate that LUNA-AD achieves state-of-the-art success rates under both non-reactive and reactive modes, with drastically reduced inference latency compared to existing knowledge-driven AD frameworks.

While confidence calibration is essential for trustworthy decision-making in safety-critical applications, the robustness of calibrated GNNs to adversarial structural perturbations remains largely unexplored. However, studying calibration attacks on graphs presents unique technical challenges: (1) the discrete nature of graph structures complicates gradient-based optimization, (2) existing underconfidence objectives fail to drive predictions toward uniform distributions, and (3) GNNs are highly sensitive to edge perturbations, often causing unintended label changes that violate attack constraints. To address these challenges, we propose a \textbf{Unified Graph Calibration Attack (UGCA)} framework designed for \textbf{worst-case (white-box) analysis} of GNN calibration robustness. UGCA introduces a KL-divergence loss to encourage uniform predictive distributions, a reranking mechanism to reduce label flipping, a hybrid loss to recover labels when violations occur, and beam search to explore a broader adversarial search space. We further provide theoretical insights linking model generalization, dataset complexity, and calibration vulnerability, showing that models with higher accuracy or trained on datasets with more classes are more susceptible under this threat model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UGCA substantially increases Expected Calibration Error while preserving classification accuracy. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/CaptainCuong/Graph-Calibration-Attack.git.

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has proven effective for enhancing problem-solving in large language models. However, when applied to multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), existing CoT approaches suffer from a fundamental limitation: they perform reasoning entirely in text without accessing visual features during the reasoning process. After initial visual encoding, image information becomes inaccessible, forcing models to reason based solely on whatever was captured in the initial description, which forms a `vision-blind reasoning' paradigm that limits fine-grained visual extraction, error verification, and adaptive attention. We propose Text-Visual Interleaved Chain-of-Thought (TVI-CoT), a framework that enables explicit interleaving of textual reasoning and visual feature access through learnable control tokens <THINK>, <LOOK> and <ANSWER>. These tokens allow dynamic switching between reasoning and visual grounding, attending to relevant image regions conditioned on the evolving reasoning state. Experiments on eight benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art results among MLLM-based CoT methods and notable performance boost compared to the baseline: +6.1% on MMMU, +3.8% on MathVerse, +3.4% on MathVista, and +3.4% on ScienceQA. Code is available at https://github.com/hulianyuyy/TVI-CoT.

Proactive robot assistance in household environments requires accurate prediction of human activities and object usage under dynamic and noisy conditions. Existing approaches often rely on complex spatio-temporal models, which can be computationally expensive and sensitive to environmental variability. In this paper, we propose GLOBE, a lightweight framework that combines n-gram Markov models for capturing temporal behavioral patterns with uncertainty-guided large language model (LLM) reasoning. The framework performs sequential prediction efficiently while selectively invoking LLM reasoning only when the model confidence is low. To evaluate performance under realistic conditions, we introduce HOMER-Noise, a noisy extension of the HOMER+ dataset that simulates structured disturbances such as object movements caused by humans, pets, and toddlers. Experimental results show that GLOBE achieves competitive performance with state-of-the-art methods while improving robustness and computational efficiency across both clean and noisy settings. The framework is further validated through a proof-of-concept integration with a Stretch 3 mobile manipulator, demonstrating its potential application in real-world human-robot interaction scenarios.

Activation steering provides a lightweight inference-time mechanism for controlling large language models (LLMs) by modifying their internal activation vectors toward desired behaviors. Most existing methods compute a fixed steering direction in the original activation space, typically from pairs of contrastive examples using mean differences, linear probes, or arbitrary separability criteria. While effective to a certain extent, these methods treat behavioral control as a global, linear, additive offset: the same direction is applied across inputs, and behaviors are linearly separable. This can be restrictive when behavioral features vary nonlinearly across the activation space or lie on curved and anisotropic manifolds, where the optimal intervention may be input-dependent. To address this limitation, we propose INNSteer, a nonlinear activation steering framework based on invertible latent transformations. Rather than searching for a better steering vector in the original representation space, INNSteer learns a lightweight invertible neural network $ϕ$ that maps an LLM's activations into a latent space where behavioral classes are more amenable to linear control. At inference time, activations are mapped through $ϕ$, steered in the latent space, and mapped back through the exact inverse transformation $ϕ^{-1}$. This makes a simple latent-space translation become a nonlinear, input-dependent intervention in the original activation space. Across experiment settings on multiple LLM families, scales, behavioral traits, and safety benchmarks, INNSteer consistently improves model control over linear, transport-based, and nonlinear steering baselines while largely preserving generation fluency.

In many real-world settings, data streams are nonstationary and arrive sequentially, requiring learning systems to adapt continuously without retraining from scratch. Continual learning (CL) addresses this challenge by incorporating new tasks while mitigating catastrophic forgetting, where learning new information degrades performance on previously acquired knowledge. We introduce a control-theoretic perspective on CL that explicitly regulates the evolution of forgetting, framing adaptation as a controlled process subject to long-term stability constraints. We focus on replay-based CL, where a finite memory buffer stores representative samples from prior tasks. We propose COntinual Learning with Drift-Plus-Penalty (COLD), a continual learning framework based on the Drift-Plus-Penalty (DPP) principle from stochastic optimization. To facilitate analysis, we also consider an oracle variant, COLD-ORACLE, as a reference benchmark. At each task, both methods minimize the current task loss while maintaining a virtual queue that tracks deviations from long-term stability on previously learned tasks, capturing the stability-plasticity trade-off as a regulated dynamical process. We establish stability and convergence guarantees that characterize this trade-off through a tunable control parameter. Experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that COLD consistently outperforms a broad range of state-of-the-art CL methods while providing competitive and controllable forgetting behavior through explicit regulation of stability and plasticity.

Safety-aligned large language models often exhibit sycophancy, which is the tendency to affirm users' opinions regardless of factual accuracy. Although well-studied in English, its manifestation in other languages remains largely unexamined, leaving billions of non-English speakers potentially vulnerable to model-validated misinformation. We present the first large-scale, multi-model evaluation of cross-lingual sycophancy, benchmarking \textbf{six instruction-tuned models} across \textbf{1.1 million instances} spanning \textbf{38 languages} and \textbf{33 topic categories}. We identify a consistent resource-tier effect: sycophancy rates spike sharply in low-resource and zero-shot language settings. Critically, this degradation is topic-agnostic, as models fail uniformly across both benign and safety-critical prompts, offering no additional protection where it is most needed. We further identify tokenizer fertility as a structural driver of this alignment collapse. Collectively, our results demonstrate that prevailing alignment methodologies generalize poorly beyond high-resource languages, underscoring the urgent need for equitable multilingual safety techniques.

Financial portfolio trading is naturally formulated as a reinforcement learning problem, where an agent sequentially rebalances assets under changing market conditions to balance return, risk, and transaction costs. Yet in non-stationary markets, raw OHLCV states and short-horizon return rewards often provide an under-specified learning interface, motivating large language models as a way to inject financial knowledge into state and reward design while constraining open-ended generation. To this end, we propose GIFT, an LLM-guided framework for state-reward interface design in PPO-based financial reinforcement learning. Rather than using the LLM to make trading decisions, GIFT uses Factor-guided State Enhancement to generate state features from financial-factor primitives, Risk-rule-guided Reward Shaping to generate auxiliary rewards from portfolio-risk rules, and Diagnostic-guided Refinement to revise candidate interfaces using PPO rollout diagnostics. After refinement, GIFT fixes the selected state-reward interface before evaluation, with no further LLM queries or interface updates at test time. Comprehensive rolling-window experiments across diverse market regimes and portfolio scenarios demonstrate that GIFT improves learning-signal quality and out-of-sample risk-adjusted portfolio performance over baselines. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/KAG778/GIFT .

One of the critical limitations of artificial neural networks is their lack of ability to continually learn: training on new tasks often leads to interference and forgetting of the previous ones. While several algorithms have been proposed to protect old memories from interference, they are typically applied during or immediately after each new episode of training. In contrast, humans and animals can learn continuously, acquiring multiple new memories during active learning before consolidating all of them into long-term storage. Here we show that multiple new tasks can be trained sequentially before an unsupervised sleep-like replay phase is applied to partially restore performance across all previously learned tasks. Our study further suggests that task-specific information remains resilient to new training but decays gradually as network is trained on new tasks. These findings point to novel principles for developing a broad range of continual learning AI solutions.

Despite being powerful, reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) induces extremely long COT, making it computationally expensive. Since RLVR per-step cost is dominated by long-context rollout generation, sparse attention offers a promising way to accelerate dense rollout. However, sparse rollouts require a delicate stability-efficiency tradeoff: overly aggressive sparsity causes collapse, while overly lenient sparsity gives insufficient speedup. In this work, we study this tradeoff through sparse-to-dense actor-policy mismatch. We first observe that sparse rollout collapse is not driven by uniform degradation across tokens: most sparse tokens align perfectly with dense even under aggressive sparsity. Motivated by this, we hypothesize that sparse rollout training remains stable if the lower tail of per-token actor-policy mismatch stays above a critical threshold throughout the trajectory. We introduce a dynamic sparsity schedule that keeps this tail statistic constant during generation and validate our hypothesis. Across Qwen3 thinking-family models, keeping the tail mismatch statistic near a consistent threshold generally enables stable training. We then use a cost model to find the sparsity schedule for maximum speedup under this mismatch threshold, achieving 2.2x, 2.4x, and 2.0x rollout speedups when training Qwen3-1.7B, Qwen3-4B, and Qwen3-8B. Empirically, we show the thresholds generalize to a larger model (Qwen3-14B) and another RL domain (coding). Finally, our analysis naturally motivates DistillSparse: lightweight LoRA-based distillation on sparse rollout lets more aggressive sparsity reach the same sparse-to-dense mismatch threshold, yielding higher speedup.

Meeting documents are challenging to summarize due to their length and complex conversational structure. Existing approaches typically adopt multi-stage pipelines that extract information prior to summarization; however, these approaches often suffer from cumulative error propagation without intermediate validation, a limitation further amplified by short and low-quality reference summaries. We propose segment-level summarization via Monte Carlo Tree Search (S3), a training-free framework that constructs a final summary by composing segment-level summary candidates. S3 partitions a long document into segments and generates multiple summary candidates per segment, forming nodes of a search tree. The best-scoring combination is selected via self-reward-guided tree search and refined into the final output. Despite using a 7B model, S3 achieves performance comparable to larger 72B models while producing length-appropriate summaries.

Robotic grasping is a fundamental capability in robotic manipulation. Yet grasping remains challenging under partial observations. Reliable grasping depends on both local contact cues and object-level 3D structure. Existing geometry-aware grasping methods recognize the value of reconstruction, but they typically treat geometry as an intermediate prediction rather than a reusable object prior for grasping. In this paper, we present GraspFoM, a unified framework that leverages 3D foundation priors (SAM3D) to build a shared 3D object latent for both reconstruction and grasp pose prediction. Built on this shared object latent, we introduce an anchor-initialized truncated pose-reasoning diffuser that predicts continuous and multimodal grasp poses without directly relying on discrete grasp candidates. We further investigate the interaction between reconstruction and grasping through a reconstruction-aware scorer and a residual latent updater. Reconstruction provides grounded geometric cues, while grasp supervision refines the shared object latent toward grasp-relevant affordances. GraspFoM jointly predicts grasp poses and reconstructs high-fidelity 3D assets in mesh and 3DGS forms. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that GraspFoM achieves state-of-the-art results on both reconstruction and grasping. Notably, these improvements require only a small number of additional trainable parameters. Component-wise ablation studies also demonstrate the contribution of each component.

On-policy distillation (OPD) has become a central post-training tool for large language models (LLMs), providing dense per-token teacher supervision along the student's own rollouts. In this work, we identify a common structural cause underlying OPD, which we call prefix failure. Under prefix failure, dense per-token supervision induces a bimodal teacher mixture and fragmented gradients that token-level loss truncation or reweighting fail to address. This observation motivates us to move beyond token-level loss interventions toward trajectory-level output corrections. We thus propose Trajectory-Refined Distillation (TRD), a trajectory-level correction method that revises the student's rollout under the teacher guidance while within on-policy support. By correcting problematic prefixes before distillation, TRD mitigates prefix failure at its source. Moreover, TRD improves the exploration by exposing the student to alternative valid derivations under teacher guidance, even when the original rolls are already correct. TRD can also be applied to on-policy self-distillation (OPSD), a parameter-sharing variant that uses the student model conditioned on privileged informations as the teacher. Across a wide range of benchmarks and base models at multiple scales, TRD consistently outperforms prior baselines, improving single-attempt accuracy and broadening reasoning coverage. Code is available at https://github.com/louieworth/trd

Current advancements in Audio Reasoning rely on massive Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs), hindering deployment in resource-constrained environments. We introduce TinyGiantALM, a compact 1.5B efficiency-oriented alternative. Instead of brute-force scaling, we propose an Instruction-Aware Feature Refinement framework using a Query-guided Projector and Semantic Gating to filter acoustic signals based on user intent. On the MMAR benchmark, TinyGiantALM achieves 46.4% zero-shot accuracy, significantly outperforming 7B-13B baselines. While a reasoning gap in logical narrative remains versus 30B+ models and certain trade-offs exist in overly dense or spatial scenes, our approach notably surpasses models up to 8x larger in disentangling mixed-modality environments. These findings demonstrate that architectural precision offers a tangible pathway to secure robust perception capabilities on edge-friendly scales.

Multi-contrast brain MRI provide complementary soft-tissue characteristics that aid in the screening and diagnosis of diseases. However, limited scanning time, image corruption and various imaging protocols often result in incomplete multi-contrast images. While current approaches excel in image synthesis, they often struggle to synthesize critical tumor regions and exploit contextual information in multi-contrast brain MRI effectively. To address this issue, we propose a synthesis-centric, segmentation-assisted closed-loop framework with retrieval augmentation synthesis. Our method overall takes a generative adversarial architecture, which aims to synthesize missing contrasts from any combination of available ones with a single model. To explicitly capture tumor semantics and focus synthesis on tumor regions, we add an auxiliary segmentation branch that predicts tumor masks and feeds them back as semantic conditioning in synthesis branch, thereby learning tumor-aware representations in the model and improving synthesis fidelity. Furthermore, we propose a dual-bank retrieval augmentation strategy. It dynamically queries two external knowledge bases, namely a tumor masks memory bank for crucial tumor context and cross-image contrast feature memory bank for global style information, to augment synthesis. Verified on two public multi-contrast magnetic resonance brain datasets: BraTs2020 and UCSF-BMSR, the proposed method is effective in handling medical brain images synthesis tasks and shows superior performance compared to previous methods. Code is available at:https://github.com/iBizzard/SSCF.git

Vision-language models (VLMs) pretrained on large-scale image-text pairs demonstrate strong image-level understanding, but are primarily optimized for global alignment and do not explicitly encode fine-grained anatomical structure, limiting their suitability for spatially precise tasks such as segmentation. We introduce CheXanatomy, a framework that integrates explicit anatomical knowledge into a pretrained VLM through autoregressive token-space supervision. Instead of adding task-specific decoder heads, the model is trained to generate anatomical segmentation masks via next-token prediction. To enable scalable supervision, we synthesize realistic chest radiographs from CT volumes and forward-project CT segmentation labels to obtain anatomically consistent 2D masks. We evaluate the approach on synthetic and real chest radiographs against a U-Net baseline, including ablations on model scale, input resolution, and vision encoder fine-tuning. Autoregressive anatomical supervision achieves performance comparable to specialized convolutional models in-distribution and demonstrates improved geometric robustness under domain shift to real CXR data. In addition, anatomy-pretrained models exhibit improved sample efficiency when adapting to novel localization tasks under limited supervision. Larger models and higher input image resolution improve performance, while vision encoder fine-tuning has limited effect. These results show that embedding anatomical structure directly into the generative objective promotes spatially grounded representations and supports anatomy-aware medical vision-language modeling.

Diffusion policies have achieved remarkable success in robotic manipulation, yet they often fail to satisfy strict physical constraints required for safe deployment. Existing approaches impose safety either prematurely during training or reactively via external guardrails at test time, limiting policy expressivity and overall scalability. We propose Physical safety Alignment for Constrained Trajectories (PACT), a self-evolving post-training framework that projects pretrained diffusion policies onto constraint-feasible regions without accessing demonstration data or task rewards. PACT distills constraint gradients into the diffusion model through a reverse-KL objective with dense supervision across timesteps. It incorporates a curriculum that progressively tightens constraints while maintaining theoretically bounded policy shift and monotone improvement, mitigating the safety-performance trade-off from catastrophic forgetting. On simulated and real-world embodied manipulation benchmarks, PACT significantly reduces safety violations by 31.0% on average while improving task success by 30.7%.

Block-wise semi-autoregressive decoding is the standard inference paradigm for diffusion large language models (DLMs), but it imposes a strict dependency between blocks: the next block cannot begin until the current block is fully decoded or its denoising budget is exhausted. We observe that once a block exposes a reliable delimiter boundary or stable semantic prefix, continuation generation need not wait for every residual token to be resolved. We propose AsyncLane, a training-free decoding scheduler that decouples refinement from advancement. AsyncLane forks a generate lane at observed delimiter boundaries into a refine lane and a continuation generate lane: the prefix remains editable, while the continuation advances before prefix refinement finishes. The resulting lane tree records decoding dependencies and output order, while execution proceeds over the active lane set. To make this asynchronous schedule efficient under bidirectional attention, AsyncLane combines shared-prefix lane batching, lookahead draft reuse, cascading termination, and compact cache refresh with refresh-logit reuse, preventing model-call cost from scaling directly with the number of lanes. AsyncLane is a drop-in replacement for block-wise DLM samplers and requires no retraining. Experiments on mathematical reasoning and code generation show that AsyncLane consistently improves throughput while maintaining competitive quality. Across LLaDA and Dream backbones, AsyncLane achieves the highest TPS in all evaluated benchmark-length settings; relative to the fastest competing baseline, it reaches peak speedups of 2.95x on LLaDA and 3.04x on Dream, with especially large gains under longer generation budgets.

Personalized decision-making in multi-objective bandits requires learning user-specific trade-offs among competing objectives. Since arm utility depends on both unknown rewards and unknown preferences, existing methods infer preferences only from utility feedback, entangling preference learning with reward exploration. In practice, however, users often reveal their priorities through proactive conversational queries (e.g., "cheap and clean hotel"), yet this structured signal is not leveraged. We formalize a proactive query-based framework in which user queries provide structured preference signals. Modeling these signals via a Plackett-Luce subset choice model, we show that query-only learning is insufficient due to a fundamental shift-invariance barrier. To resolve this, we introduce MO-PQUCB, a hybrid algorithm that integrates query-based preference anchoring with bandit feedback through shift-invariant regularization and dual-exploration UCB. We prove that proactive queries accelerate preference estimation and yield improved regret scaling over prior preference-aware MO-MAB methods. Under corrupted queries, we further characterize statistical limits and design a robust estimator achieving near-optimal performance when the corruption is sparse. Experiments validate both theoretical and practical gains.

We extend activation steering to diffusion language models (DLMs) and study a novel problem that arose due to the inference mechanism of DLMs: Modifying a text in-place to manifest a different concept. We propose TimpaTeks, an automatic in-place text modification mechanism using DLMs. Experiments on IMDB movie reviews (sentiment) and a synthetic Cats and Dogs Dataset (arbitrary, more unconventional concept steering) show that TimpaTeks provides a feasible novel mechanism to steer diffusion language model outputs in-place. TimpaTeks enables in-place modification while simultaneously lowers sentence perplexity and retaining the original sentence structre without the need of instruction tuned models. TimpaTeks is also computationally cheaper than prompt-based DLM steering, as it performs denoising in-place rather than constructing an additional prompt-conditioned output sequence.

While data-intensive deep reinforcement learning can optimize complex control policies, scientific discovery in physical systems fundamentally requires an interpretable chain of reasoning that connects physical evidence to structured control architectures. Here, we present a self-evolving scientific-agent workflow, driven by large language models and iterative code generation, that automates controller construction while preserving strict interpretability and rigorous physical reasoning. Instead of adjusting weights, the agent deploys candidate strategies into physical simulations, actively diagnoses dynamic behaviors from multimodal evidence, and translates these observations into progressive source-code refinements. We demonstrate this framework on a highly non-linear fluid-structure interaction problem: an underactuated, two-joint dogfish swimmer tasked with spatial target reaching using only joint angular accelerations. Starting from a propulsive seed policy that exhibits a one-sided steering bias, the agent autonomously discovers and refines a unified controller that robustly captures all canonical targets. Remarkably, without any retraining or target-specific branching, the synthesized control policy generalizes to unseen static targets and dynamically curved pursuit trajectories. The auditable evolve log reveals an emergent control architecture built upon traveling-wave propulsion, body-frame target guidance, yaw-rate feedback, signed mean-tail curvature, and adaptive cadence relief. Our results show that an autonomous scientific agent can successfully transform accumulated physical evidence into robust, mathematically readable control policy, while maintaining a fully traceable process of scientific discovery.

Cortical folding reflects coordinated neurodevelopmental processes and is increasingly recognized as a sensitive marker of neurological disease. However, most existing analyses rely on indirect scalar summaries that do not explicitly model folding geometry itself. In juvenile myoclonic epilepsy (JME), a common genetic epilepsy, cortical abnormalities are often subtle, spatially distributed, and difficult to detect using conventional morphometric measures. We introduce a Poisson-equation-based framework that models cortical folding as a geometry-driven flow derived from mean curvature on the cortical manifold. By treating folding patterns as a stationary source-sink structure, the proposed approach yields a smooth, globally balanced potential field whose surface gradient defines a physically interpretable flux. This framework enables spatially coherent analysis of sulcal-gyral folding organization and provides a principled representation of geometry-driven cortical structure in JME.

Large language models answer knowledge-intensive questions using both parametric memory and retrieved evidence, but neither source is uniformly reliable. Retrieval can fill knowledge gaps, yet distracting passages may override correct closed-book answers. We study this post-generation conflict as answer-level source arbitration: given Direct and RAG answers from the same frozen model, decide which source to trust. We propose TRUSTMARGIN, a training-free, plug-and-play arbitration layer that scores the two existing candidates with the model's own likelihoods. It combines a parametric-prior margin, which tests whether memory accepts the retrieved answer, with an evidence-binding margin, which discounts passage-only salience and measures question-specific support. TRUSTMARGIN selects between Direct and RAG without fine-tuning, external judges, or additional generation. Across 2WIKIMQA and CWQA with three LLaMA scales, TRUSTMARGIN consistently improves over Direct generation and BM25-RAG, recovers part of the Direct/RAG oracle gap, and generalizes to multiple training-free RAG pipelines.

Multimodal language models are typically evaluated through external behavior: selecting the correct image--text match, rejecting unsupported captions, or answering visual queries correctly. However, correct behavior alone does not show that the model's internal decision state remains stable under controlled semantic stress. We study this gap through S$^3$E (Structured Semantic Stress Evaluation), a framework for analyzing behavior-internal decoupling in multimodal language models. S$^3$E uses a positive-anchored A/B forced-choice setup in which an image-supported caption is contrasted against semantic stress candidates under both original and swapped option orders, while hidden states are extracted at the pre-answer decision state. We focus on strict-correct trials, where the model consistently selects the correct caption across both orders. Rather than treating arbitrary hidden-state variation as evidence of instability, we measure whether semantic-conflict candidates induce excess decision-state displacement relative to meaning-preserving controls. Across Qwen3VL, Gemma3, and InternVL3, semantic stress consistently produces positive selected-layer excess displacement over lexical controls despite correct forced-choice behavior, while comparisons against random negatives are model-dependent. We interpret this as a scoped decision-state stress-sensitivity signal rather than evidence of downstream failure or hallucination. Our results suggest that forced-choice correctness alone is not a sufficient certificate of invariant internal decision geometry.

When a neural time-series model reports that one variable modulates another's effect on a target, is the discovered interaction a property of the data or an artifact of model flexibility? We argue that this is fundamentally a question of identifiability, governed by the geometry of the observed input support rather than by the specific neural architecture. We study the problem in a multiplicative-gating extension of neural additive vector autoregression (GNAVAR), in which source contributions are modulated by other lagged variables. We show that representational capacity is not identifiability: dependent inputs induce leakage between edge-specific interaction terms, and low-dimensional support permits distinct interaction decompositions that agree on the observed data while differing elsewhere. We then prove a population identifiability theorem for normalized minimal GNAVAR decompositions under explicit support conditions, including settings with shared modulators. The theory yields a simple practitioner-facing diagnostic: the effective rank of the joint lag-block covariance predicts, before fitting, whether interaction recovery is feasible for a given candidate set. When the candidate set is unknown, a two-seed stability check provides a practical operational test. The same support condition organizes empirical outcomes into the three states predicted by the theory. Our results show that interaction recoverability depends on support geometry, that effective rank provides a practical pre-fit diagnostic, and that instability across independent fits is a characteristic signature of non-identifiable interaction discovery. The identifiability phenomenon, the support condition, and the instability signature are model-agnostic; GNAVAR is the vehicle that makes them provable.

Muon replaces a matrix gradient $G=UΣV^\top$ by its polar factor $UV^\top$. This keeps the singular directions selected by the gradient, but makes the update spectrum flat. We study the optimization bias created by this operation. Under explicit alignment assumptions, we prove that the polar update is the one-step entropy-maximizing choice among bounded updates that use the gradient singular directions and do not adapt to the current weight spectrum. In an underdetermined regression model, we derive exact singular-value dynamics for continuous-time Muon and identify a measurement-dependent condition under which the normalized spectrum moves toward equal nonzero singular values. This geometry also rules out a common low-rank interpretation: at fixed Frobenius norm, Muon's distinguished state has a flat spectrum, whereas nuclear-norm minimization favors spectral concentration. Controlled matrix-sensing experiments separate the effect from simple gradient rescaling, show that norm-matched gradient descent does not reproduce Muon, and recover the predicted flattening trend across broad ablations. In small NanoGPT pretraining, Muon preserves stable rank, has a broad learning-rate plateau, and improves validation loss relative to AdamW; in a matched small-ViT control, the ranking reverses. The resulting picture is regime-dependent: Muon is not universally superior, but its flat-spectrum bias can help when many spectral directions need to remain active.

Low-rank projection has emerged as a promising approach for compressing the KV cache by exploiting hidden-dimension redundancy. However, prior methods rely on fixed or heuristic rank selection and struggle to achieve aggressive compression with minimal accuracy degradation. We propose STAR-KV, an adaptive low-rank KV cache compression framework with fine-grained rank control. STAR-KV encompasses 1) a differentiable thresholding mechanism that enables optimal rank selection at both attention-head and block levels, 2) a hybrid decomposition strategy that applies different low-rank factorizations according to the sensitivity of key and value projections, and 3) a low-rank-aware mixed precision quantization that leverages data statistics for near lossless low-bit quantization. Evaluated across multiple LLMs and benchmarks, STAR-KV achieves up to 75% KV cache compression and up to 20x overall KV cache reduction when combined with quantization. Enabled by custom Triton-based GPU kernels, STAR-KV delivers up to 6.9x speedup for the attention module and 3.1x end-to-end generation throughput. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/PriyanshBhatnagar/STAR-KV.