Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) offer parallel decoding and bidirectional context, but state-of-the-art dLLMs require billions of parameters for competitive performance. While existing distillation methods for dLLMs reduce inference steps within a single architecture, none address cross-architecture knowledge transfer, in which the teacher and student differ in architecture, attention mechanism, and tokenizer. We present TIDE, the first framework for cross-architecture dLLM distillation, comprising three modular components: (1) TIDAL, which jointly modulates distillation strength across training progress and diffusion timestep to account for the teacher's noise-dependent reliability; (2) CompDemo, which enriches the teacher's context via complementary mask splitting to improve predictions under heavy masking; and (3) Reverse CALM, a cross-tokenizer objective that inverts chunk-level likelihood matching, yielding bounded gradients and dual-end noise filtering. Distilling 8B dense and 16B MoE teachers into a 0.6B student via two heterogeneous pipelines outperforms the baseline by an average of 1.53 points across eight benchmarks, yielding notable gains in code generation, where HumanEval scores reach 48.78 compared to 32.3 for the AR baseline.

Breakthrough progress in vision-based navigation through unknown environments has been achieved by using multimodal large language models (MLLMs). These models can plan a sequence of motions by evaluating the current view at each time step against the task and goal given to the agent. However, current zero-shot Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) agents powered by MLLMs still tend to drift off course, halt prematurely, and achieve low overall success rates. We propose Three-Step Nav to counteract these failures with a three-view protocol: First, "look forward" to extract global landmarks and sketch a coarse plan. Then, "look now" to align the current visual observation with the next sub-goal for fine-grained guidance. Finally, "look backward" audits the entire trajectory to correct accumulated drift before stopping. Requiring no gradient updates or task-specific fine-tuning, our planner drops into existing VLN pipelines with minimal overhead. Three-Step Nav achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on the R2R-CE and RxR-CE dataset. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZoeyZheng0/3-step-Nav.

We introduce ProcFunc, a library for Blender-based procedural 3D generation in Python. ProcFunc provides a library of easy-to-use Python functions, which streamline creating, combining, analyzing, and executing procedural generation code. ProcFunc makes it easy to create large-scale diverse training data, by combinatorial compositions of semantic components. VLMs can use ProcFunc to edit procedural material and geometry code and can create new procedural code with significantly fewer coding errors. Finally, as an example use case, we use ProcFunc to develop a new procedural generator of indoor rooms, which includes a collection of new compositional procedural materials. We demonstrate the detail, runtime efficiency, and diversity of this room generator, as well as its use for 3D synthetic data generation. Please visit https://github.com/princeton-vl/procfunc for source code.

We introduce Hyper Input Convex Neural Networks (HyCNNs), a novel neural network architecture designed for learning convex functions. HyCNNs combine the principles of Maxout networks with input convex neural networks (ICNNs) to create a neural network that is always convex in the input, theoretically capable of leveraging depth, and performs reliable when trained at scale compared to ICNNs. Concretely, we prove that HyCNNs require exponentially fewer parameters than ICNNs to approximate quadratic functions up to a given precision. Throughout a series of synthetic experiments, we demonstrate that HyCNNs outperform existing ICNNs and MLPs in terms of predictive performance for convex regression and interpolation tasks. We further apply HyCNNs to learn high-dimensional optimal transport maps for synthetic examples and for single-cell RNA sequencing data, where they oftentimes outperform ICNN-based neural optimal transport methods and other baselines across a wide range of settings.

Vision-language models (VLMs) have shown strong performance on static visual understanding, yet they still struggle with dynamic spatial reasoning that requires imagining how scenes evolve under egocentric motion. Recent efforts address this limitation either by scaling spatial supervision with synthetic data or by coupling VLMs with world models at inference time. However, the former often lacks explicit modeling of motion-conditioned state transitions, while the latter incurs substantial computational overhead. In this work, we propose World2VLM, a training framework that distills spatial imagination from a generative world model into a vision-language model. Given an initial observation and a parameterized camera trajectory, we use a view-consistent world model to synthesize geometrically aligned future views and derive structured supervision for both forward (action-to-outcome) and inverse (outcome-to-action) spatial reasoning. We post-train the VLM with a two-stage recipe on a compact dataset generated by this pipeline and evaluate it on multiple spatial reasoning benchmarks. World2VLM delivers consistent improvements over the base model across diverse benchmarks, including SAT-Real, SAT-Synthesized, VSI-Bench, and MindCube. It also outperforms the test-time world-model-coupled methods while eliminating the need for expensive inference-time generation. Our results suggest that world models can serve not only as inference-time tools, but also as effective training-time teachers, enabling VLMs to internalize spatial imagination in a scalable and efficient manner.

In Orabona and Pál [2016], we introduced the shifted KT potentials, to remove the $\ln \ln T$ factor in the parameter-free learning with expert bound. In this short technical note, I show that this is equivalent to changing the prior in the Krichevsky--Trofimov algorithm. Then, I show how to use the same idea to remove the $\ln \ln T$ factor in the data-independent bound for the Squint algorithm.

Learning curves are a fundamental primitive in supervised learning, describing how an algorithm's performance improves with more data and providing a quantitative measure of its generalization ability. Formally, a learning curve plots the decay of an algorithm's error for a fixed underlying distribution as a function of the number of training samples. Prior work on revenue-maximizing learning algorithms, starting with the seminal work of Cole and Roughgarden [STOC, 2014], adopts a distribution-free perspective, which parallels the PAC learning framework in learning theory. This approach evaluates performance against the hardest possible sequence of valuation distributions, one for each sample size, effectively defining the upper envelope of learning curves over all possible distributions, thus leading to error bounds that do not capture the shape of the learning curves. In this work we initiate the study of learning curves for revenue maximization and provide a near-complete characterization of their rate of decay in the basic setting of a single item and a single buyer. In the absence of any restriction on the valuation distribution, we show that there exists a Bayes-consistent algorithm, meaning that its learning curve converges to zero for any arbitrary valuation distribution as the number of samples $n \to \infty$. However, this convergence must be arbitrarily slow, even if the optimal revenue is finite. In contrast, if the optimal revenue is achieved by a finite price, then the optimal rate of decay is roughly $1/\sqrt{n}$. Finally, for distributions supported on discrete sets of values, we show that learning curves decay almost exponentially fast, a rate unattainable under the PAC framework.

The task of capturing and rendering 3D dynamic scenes from 2D images has become increasingly popular in recent years. However, most conventional cameras are bandwidth-limited to 30-60 FPS, restricting these methods to static or slowly evolving scenes. While overcoming bandwidth limitations is difficult for general scenes, recent years have seen a flurry of computational imaging methods that yield high-speed videos using conventional cameras for specific applications (e.g., motion capture and particle image velocimetry). However, most of these methods require modifications to a camera's optics or the addition of mechanically moving components, limiting them to a single-view high-speed capture. Consequently, these methods cannot be readily used to capture a 3D representation of rapid scene motion. In this paper, we propose a novel method to capture and reconstruct a volumetric representation of a high-speed scene using only unaugmented low-speed cameras. Instead of modifying the hardware or optics of each individual camera, we encode high-speed scene dynamics by illuminating the scene with a rapid, sequential color-coded sequence. This results in simultaneous multi-view capture of the scene, where high-speed temporal information is encoded in the spatial intensity and color variations of the captured images. To construct a high-speed volumetric representation of the dynamic scene, we develop a novel dynamic Gaussian Splatting-based approach that decodes the temporal information from the images. We evaluate our approach on simulated scenes and real-world experiments using a multi-camera imaging setup, showing first-of-a-kind high-speed volumetric scene reconstructions.

Can Neural Assemblies -- groups of neurons that fire together and strengthen through co-activation -- learn the direction of causal influence between variables? While established as a computationally general substrate for classification, parsing, and planning, neural assemblies have not yet been shown to internalize causal directionality. We demonstrate that the inherent operations of neural assemblies -- projection, local plasticity control, and sparse winner selection -- are sufficient for directional learning. We introduce DIRECT (DIRectional Edge Coupling/Training), a mechanism that co-activates source and target assemblies under an adaptive gain schedule to internalize directed relations. Unlike backpropagation-based methods, DIRECT relies solely on local plasticity, making the resulting causal claims auditable at the mechanism level. Our findings are verified through a dual-readout validation strategy: (i) synaptic-strength asymmetry, measuring the emergent weight gap between forward and reverse links, and (ii) functional propagation overlap, quantifying the reliability of directional signal flow. Across multiple domains, the framework achieves perfect structural recovery under a supervised, known-structure setting. These results establish neural assemblies as an auditable bridge between biologically plausible dynamics and formal causal models, offering an "explainable by design" framework where causal claims are traceable to specific neural winners and synaptic asymmetries.

Recent advances in 4D content generation have attracted increasing attention, yet creating high-quality animated 3D models remains challenging due to the complexity of modeling spatio-temporal distributions and the scarcity of 4D training data. We present AnimateAnyMesh++, a feed-forward framework for text-driven animation of arbitrary 3D meshes with substantial upgrades in data, architecture, and generative capability. First, we expand the DyMesh-XL dataset by mining dynamic content from Objaverse-XL, increasing the number of unique identities from 60K to 300K and substantially broadening category and motion diversity. Second, we redesign DyMeshVAE-Flex with power-law topology-aware attention and vertex-normal enhanced features, which significantly improves trajectory reconstruction, local geometry preservation, and mitigates trajectory-sticking artifacts. Third, we introduce architectural changes to both DyMeshVAE-Flex and the rectified-flow (RF) generator to support variable-length sequence training and generation, enabling longer animations while preserving reconstruction fidelity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AnimateAnyMesh++ generates semantically accurate and temporally coherent mesh animations within seconds, surpassing prior approaches in quality and efficiency. The enlarged DyMesh-XL, the upgraded DyMeshVAE-Flex, and variable-length RF together deliver consistent gains across benchmarks and in-the-wild meshes. We will release code, models, and the expanded DyMesh-XL upon acceptance of this manuscript to facilitate research in 4D content creation.

This paper presents a planning pipeline framework for locomotion in rope-assisted robots climbing vertical surfaces. The proposed framework is formulated as a bi-level optimization scheme that addresses a mixed-integer problem: selecting feasible terrain regions for landing while simultaneously optimizing the control inputs, namely rope tensions and leg forces, and landing location. The outer level of the optimization is solved using the Cross-Entropy Method, while the inner level relies on gradient-based nonlinear optimization to compute dynamically feasible motions. The approach is validated on a novel climbing robot platform, ALPINE, across a variety of challenging terrain configurations.

Origami-inspired robotic grippers have shown promising potential for object manipulation tasks due to their compact volume and mechanical flexibility. However, robust capture of objects with random shapes in dynamic working environments often comes at the cost of additional actuation channels and control complexity. Here, we introduce a tendon-driven origami tentacle gripper capable of universal object gripping by exploiting a synergy between local, deterministic deformation programming and global, stochastic entanglements. Each origami tentacle is made by cutting thin Mylar sheets; It features carefully placed holes for routing an actuation tendon, origami creases for controlling the deformation, and a tapered shape. By tailoring these design features, one can prescribe the shrinking, bending, and twisting deformation, eventually creating deterministic coiling with a simple tendon pull. Then, when multiple coiling tentacles are placed in proximity, stochastic entanglement emerges, allowing the tentacles to braid, knot, and grip objects with random shapes. We derived a simulation model by integrating origami mechanics with Cosserat rods to correlate origami design, tendon deformation, and their collective gripping performance. Then, we experimentally tested how these coiling and entangling origami tentacles can grasp objects under gravity and in water. A stow-and-release deployment mechanism was also tested to simulate in-orbit grasping. Overall, the entertaining origami tentacle gripper presents a new strategy for robust object grasping with simple design and actuation.

Fine-grained RGBT image semantic segmentation is crucial for all-weather unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) scene understanding. However, UAV RGBT semantic segmentation faces two coupled challenges: cross-modal spatial misalignment caused by sensor parallax and platform vibration, and severe semantic confusion among fine-grained ground objects under top-down aerial views. To address these issues, we propose a Graph-based Semantic Calibration Network (GSCNet) for unaligned UAV RGBT image semantic segmentation. Specifically, we design a Feature Decoupling and Alignment Module (FDAM) that decouples each modality into shared structural and private perceptual components and performs deformable alignment in the shared subspace, enabling robust spatial correction with reduced modality appearance interference. Moreover, we propose a Semantic Graph Calibration Module (SGCM) that explicitly encodes the hierarchical taxonomy and co-occurrence regularities among ground-object categories in UAV scenes into a structured category graph, and incorporates these priors into graph-attention reasoning to calibrate predictions of visually similar and rare categories.In addition, we construct the Unaligned RGB-Thermal Fine-grained (URTF) benchmark, to the best of our knowledge, the largest and most fine-grained benchmark for unaligned UAV RGBT image semantic segmentation, containing over 25,000 image pairs across 61 categories with realistic cross-modal misalignment. Extensive experiments on URTF demonstrate that GSCNet significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, with notable gains on fine-grained categories. The dataset is available at https://github.com/mmic-lcl/Datasets-and-benchmark-code.

This paper extends and explains the Multiple Additive Neural Networks (MANN) methodology, an enhancement to the traditional Gradient Boosting framework, utilizing nearly shallow neural networks instead of decision trees as base learners. This innovative approach leverages neural network architectures, notably Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Capsule Neural Networks, to extend its application to both structured data and unstructured data such as images and audio. For structured data the advantages of capsule neural networks as feature extractors are used and combined with MANN as a classifier. MANN's unique architecture promotes continuous learning and integrates advanced heuristics to combat overfitting, ensuring robustness and reducing sensitivity to hyperparameter settings like learning rate and iterations. Our empirical studies reveal that MANN surpasses traditional methods such as Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGB) in accuracy across well-known datasets. This research demonstrates MANN's superior precision and generalizability, making it a versatile tool for diverse data types and complex learning environments.

Synthesizing a target concept from a single reference image is challenging in diffusion-based personalized text-to-image generation, particularly for sticker personalization where prompts often require explicit attribute edits. With only one reference, test-time fine-tuning (TTF) methods tend to overfit, producing \textit{visual entanglement}, where background artifacts are absorbed into the learned concept, and \textit{structural rigidity}, where the model memorizes reference-specific spatial configurations and loses contextual controllability. To address these issues, we introduce \textbf{SE}mantic-aware single-image sticker person\textbf{AL}ization (\textbf{SEAL}), a plug-and-play, architecture-agnostic adaptation module that integrates into existing personalization pipelines without modifying their U-Net-based diffusion backbones. SEAL applies three components during embedding adaptation: (1) a Semantic-guided Spatial Attention Loss, (2) a Split-merge Token Strategy, and (3) Structure-aware Layer Restriction. To support sticker-domain personalization with attribute-level control, we present StickerBench, a large-scale sticker image dataset with structured tags under a six-attribute schema (Appearance, Emotion, Action, Camera Composition, Style, Background). These annotations provide a consistent interface for varying context while keeping target identity fixed, enabling systematic evaluation of identity disentanglement and contextual controllability. Experiments show that SEAL consistently improves identity preservation while maintaining contextual controllability, highlighting the importance of explicit spatial and structural constraints during test-time adaptation. The code, StickerBench, and project page will be publicly released.

Patient portals now give individuals direct access to their electronic health records (EHRs), yet access alone does not ensure patients understand or act on the complex clinical information contained in these records. The ArchEHR-QA 2026 shared task addresses this challenge by focusing on grounded question answering over EHRs, and this paper presents the system developed by the HealthNLP_Retrievers team for this task. The proposed approach uses a multi-stage cascaded pipeline powered by the Gemini 2.5 Pro large language model to interpret patient-authored questions and retrieve relevant evidence from lengthy clinical notes. Our architecture comprises four integrated modules: (1) a few-shot query reformulation unit which summarizes verbose patient queries; (2) a heuristic-based evidence scorer which ranks clinical sentences to prioritize recall; (3) a grounded response generator which synthesizes professional-caliber answers restricted strictly to identified evidence; and (4) a high-precision many-to-many alignment framework which links generated answers to supporting clinical sentences. This cascaded approach achieved competitive results. Across the individual tracks, the system ranked 1st in question interpretation, 5th in answer generation, 7th in evidence identification, and 9th in answer-evidence alignment. These results show that integrating large language models within a structured multi-stage pipeline improves grounding, precision, and the professional quality of patient-oriented health communication. To support reproducibility, our source code is publicly available in our GitHub repository

We propose UAPAR, an Uncertainty-Aware Pedestrian Attribute Recognition framework. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first EDL-based uncertainty-aware framework for pedestrian attribute recognition (PAR). Unlike conventional deterministic methods, which fail to assess prediction reliability on low-quality samples, UAPAR effectively identifies unreliable predictions and thus enhances system robustness in complex real-world scenarios. To achieve this, UAPAR incorporates Evidential Deep Learning (EDL) into a CLIP-based architecture. Specifically, a Region-Aware Evidence Reasoning module employs cross-attention and spatial prior masks to capture fine-grained local features, which are further processed by an evidence head to estimate attribute-wise epistemic uncertainty. To further enhance training robustness, we develop an uncertainty-guided dual-stage curriculum learning strategy to alleviate the adverse effects of severe label noise during training. Extensive experiments on the PA100K, PETA, RAPv1, and RAPv2 datasets demonstrate that UAPAR achieves competitive or superior performance. Furthermore, qualitative results confirm that the proposed framework generates uncertainty estimates that are predictive of challenging or erroneous samples.

We present KAYRA, an end-to-end karyotyping system that operates inside the operational constraints of a clinical cytogenetic laboratory. KAYRA is architected as a containerized microservice pipeline whose ML stack combines an EfficientNet-B5 + U-Net semantic segmenter, a Mask R-CNN (ResNet-50 + FPN) instance detector, and a ResNet-18 classifier, orchestrated through a cascaded ROI-narrowing strategy that focuses each downstream model on the chromosome-bearing region. The same container images are deployed both as a cloud service and as an on-premise installation, supporting clinical environments where patient-data egress is not permitted as well as those where it is. A pilot clinical evaluation against two commercial reference karyotyping systems on 459 chromosomes from 10 metaphase spreads shows segmentation accuracy of 98.91 % (vs. 78.21 % / 40.52 %), classification accuracy of 89.1 % (vs. 86.9 % / 54.5 %), and rotation accuracy of 89.76 % (vs. 94.55 % / 78.43 %). KAYRA improves over the older density-thresholding reference on all three axes (p < 0.0001 for segmentation and classification by Fisher's exact test on chromosome-level counts), and on segmentation also against the modern AI- supported reference (p < 0.0001); on classification the difference vs. the modern AI reference is not statistically significant at the present test-set size (p = 0.34). The system reaches TRL 6 maturity and integrates the human-in-the-loop expert-review workflow that diagnostic cytogenetic practice requires. The thesis of this paper is that a multi-model cytogenetic AI service can be packaged as a microservice architecture supporting flexible deployment - cloud-hosted or on-premise - while delivering strong empirical performance on a pilot clinical evaluation.

Existing 3D anomaly detection methods are built on a rigid prior: normal geometry is pose-invariant and can be canonicalized through registration or alignment. This prior does not hold for articulated objects with hinge or sliding joints, where valid pose changes induce structured geometric variations that cannot be collapsed to a single canonical template, causing pose-induced deformations to be misidentified as anomalies while true structural defects are obscured. No existing benchmark addresses this challenge. We introduce ArtiAD, the first large-scale benchmark for articulated 3D anomaly detection, comprising 15,229 point clouds across 39 object categories with dense joint-angle variations and six structural anomaly types. Each sample is annotated with its joint configuration and part-level motion labels, enabling explicit disentanglement of pose-induced geometry from structural defects. ArtiAD also provides a seen/unseen articulation split to evaluate both interpolation and extrapolation to novel joint configurations. We propose Shape-Pose-Aware Signed Distance Field (SPA-SDF), a baseline that replaces the rigid prior with a continuous pose-conditioned implicit field, factorized into an articulation-independent structural prior and a Fourier-encoded joint embedding. At inference, the articulation state is recovered by minimizing reconstruction energy, and anomalies are identified as point-wise deviations from the learned manifold. SPA-SDF achieves 0.884 object-level AUROC on seen configurations and 0.874 on unseen configurations, substantially outperforming all rigid-based baselines. Our code and benchmark will be publicly released to facilitate future research.

Large language models (LLMs) acquire most of their factual knowledge during the pre-training stage, through next token prediction. Subsequent stages of post-training often introduce new facts outwith the parametric knowledge, giving rise to hallucinations. While it has been demonstrated that supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on new knowledge may exacerbate the problem, the underlying mechanisms are still poorly understood. We conduct a controlled fine-tuning experiment, focusing on closed-book QA, and find latent directions that causally contribute to hallucinations. Specifically, we fine-tune Llama 3.1 8B, Gemma 2 9B and Mistral 7B v03 on seven distinct single QA datasets, controlling for the percentage of new knowledge and number of training epochs. By measuring performance on the test set, we validate that incrementally introducing new knowledge increases hallucinations, with the effect being more pronounced with prolonged training. We leverage pre-trained sparse autoencoders (SAEs) to analyze residual stream activations across various checkpoints for each model and propose Monotonic Relationship Feature Identification (MoRFI) for capturing causally relevant latents. MoRFI filters SAE features that respond monotonically to controlled fine-tuning data mixtures of a target property. Our findings show that exposure to unknown facts disrupts the model's ability to retrieve stored knowledge along a set of directions in the residual stream. Our pipeline reliably discovers them across distinct models, recovering knowledge through single-latent interventions.

Deploying accurate object detection for Vulnerable Road User (VRU) safety on edge hardware requires balancing model capacity against computational constraints. Large models achieve high accuracy but fail under INT8 quantization required for edge deployment, while small models sacrifice detection performance. This paper presents a knowledge distillation (KD) framework that trains a compact YOLOv8-S student (11.2M parameters) to mimic a YOLOv8-L teacher (43.7M parameters), achieving 3.9x compression while preserving quantization robustness. We evaluate on full-scale BDD100K (70K training images) with Post-Training Quantization to INT8. The teacher suffers catastrophic degradation under INT8 (-23% mAP), while the KD student retains accuracy (-5.6% mAP). Analysis reveals that KD transfers precision calibration rather than raw detection capacity: the KD student achieves 0.748 precision versus 0.653 for direct training at INT8, a 14.5% gain at equivalent recall, reducing false alarms by 44% versus the collapsed teacher. At INT8, the KD student exceeds the teacher's FP32 precision (0.748 vs. 0.718) in a model 3.9x smaller. These findings establish knowledge distillation as a requirement for deploying accurate, safety-critical VRU detection on edge hardware.

Many of the thousands of attested languages share common configurations of features, creating a spectrum from typologically very rare (e.g., object-verb-subject word order) or impossible languages to very common combinations of features (e.g., subject-object-verb word order). One central question is under what conditions such typological tendencies can be predicted, and specifically whether the learning bias of language models (LMs) is sufficient to reproduce such patterns. In this study, we add one dimensionality to such analysis -- the learning scenario for LMs -- to explore its interaction with the inductive bias of LMs. Specifically, as a first study, we examine the effect of curriculum learning (CL), as a developmentally motivated learning scenario, i.e., starting with simpler sentences rather than randomly-ordered input. We expand existing LM-based exploration (El-Naggar et al., 2025a,b) with a simple CL variant and find that CL substantially impacts the apparent inductive bias of LMs.

When do language diffusion models memorize their training data, and how to quantitatively assess their true generative regime? We address these questions by showing that Uniform-based Discrete Diffusion Models (UDDMs) fundamentally behave as Associative Memories (AMs) $\textit{with emergent creative capabilities}$. The core idea of an AM is to reliably recover stored data points as $\textit{memories}$ by establishing distinct basins of attraction around them. Historically, models like Hopfield networks use an explicit energy function to guarantee these stable attractors. We broaden this perspective by leveraging the observation that energy is not strictly necessary, as basins of attraction can also be formed via conditional likelihood maximization. By evaluating token recovery of $\textit{training}$ and $\textit{test}$ examples, we identify in UDDMs a sharp memorization-to-generalization transition governed by the size of the training dataset: as it increases, basins around training examples shrink and basins around unseen test examples expand, until both later converge to the same level. Crucially, we can detect this transition using only the conditional entropy of predicted token sequences: memorization is characterized by vanishing conditional entropy, while in the generalization regime the conditional entropy of most tokens remains finite. Thus, conditional entropy offers a practical probe for the memorization-to-generalization transition in deployed models.

Assisting humans in open-world outdoor environments requires robots to translate high-level natural-language intentions into safe, long-horizon, and socially compliant navigation behavior. Existing map-based methods rely on costly pre-built HD maps, while learning-based policies are mostly limited to indoor and short-horizon settings. To bridge this gap, we propose Walk with Me, a map-free framework for long-horizon social navigation from high-level human instructions. Walk with Me leverages GPS context and lightweight candidate points-of-interest from a public map API for semantic destination grounding and waypoint proposal. A High-Level Vision-Language Model grounds abstract instructions into concrete destinations and plans coarse waypoint sequences. During execution, an observation-aware routing mechanism determines whether the Low-Level Vision-Language-Action policy can handle the current situation or whether explicit safety reasoning from the High-Level VLM is needed. Routine segments are executed by the Low-Level VLA, while complex situations such as crowded crossings trigger high-level reasoning and stop-and-wait behavior when unsafe. By combining semantic intent grounding, map-free long-horizon planning, safety-aware reasoning, and low-level action generation, Walk with Me enables practical outdoor social navigation for human-centric assistance.

Long-context LLM serving is bottlenecked by the cost of attending over ever-growing KV caches. Dynamic sparse attention promises relief by accessing only a small, query-dependent subset of the KV state per decoding step and extending the KV storage to CPU memory. In practice, however, these algorithmic savings rarely translate into end-to-end system-level gains because sparse methods typically operate at different granularities and thus rely on ad hoc, per-algorithm implementations. At the same time, hierarchical KV storage introduces a new systems bottleneck: retrieving fine-grained, irregular KV subsets across the GPU-CPU boundary can easily erase the benefits of sparsity. We present SPIN, a sparse-attention-aware inference framework that co-designs the execution pipeline with hierarchical KV storage through three techniques: (1) a unified partition abstraction that maps different sparsity granularities onto a shared page-based KV substrate; (2) a locality-aware KV cache manager that dynamically sizes per-request HBM budgets and uses a GPU-friendly bucketed LRU policy to cut PCIe round-trips; and (3) a two-level hierarchical metadata layout sized to the active working set rather than the worst-case address space. Built on vLLM with three representative sparse attention algorithms, SPIN delivers 1.66-5.66x higher end-to-end throughput and 7-9x lower TTFT than vLLM, and reduces TPOT by up to 58% over the original sparse-attention implementations.

We introduce HalluCiteChecker, a toolkit for detecting and verifying hallucinated citations in scientific papers. While AI assistant technologies have transformed the academic writing process, including citation recommendation, they have also led to the emergence of hallucinated citations that do not correspond to any existing work. Such citations not only undermine the credibility of scientific papers but also impose an additional burden on reviewers and authors, who must manually verify their validity during the review process. In this study, we formalize hallucinated citation detection as an NLP task and provide a corresponding toolkit as a practical foundation for addressing this problem. Our package is lightweight and can perform verification in seconds on a standard laptop. It can also be executed entirely offline and runs efficiently using only CPUs. We hope that HalluCiteChecker will help reduce reviewer workload and support organizers by enabling systematic pre-review and publication checks. Our code is released under the Apache 2.0 license on GitHub and is distributed as an installable package via PyPI. A demonstration video is available on YouTube.

This paper presents a hierarchical decision-making framework for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) missions motivated by search-and-rescue (SAR) scenarios under limited simulation training. The framework combines a fixed rule-based high-level advisor with an online goal-conditioned low-level reinforcement learning (RL) controller. To stress-test early adaptation, we also consider a strict no-pretraining deployment regime. The high-level advisor is defined offline from a structured task specification and compiled into deterministic rules. It provides interpretable mission- and safety-aware guidance through recommended actions, avoided actions, and regime-dependent arbitration weights. The low-level controller learns online from task-defined dense rewards and reuses experience through a mode-aware prioritized replay mechanism augmented with rule-derived metadata. We evaluate the framework on two tasks: battery-aware multi-goal delivery and moving-target delivery in obstacle-rich environments. Across both tasks, the proposed method improves early safety and sample efficiency primarily by reducing collision terminations, while preserving the ability to adapt online to scenario-specific dynamics.

I propose the \emph{Random Cloud} method, a training-free approach to neural architecture search that discovers minimal feedforward network topologies through stochastic exploration and progressive structural reduction. Unlike post-training pruning methods that require a full train-prune-retrain cycle, this method evaluates randomly initialized networks without backpropagation, progressively reduces their topology, and only trains the best minimal candidate at the end. I evaluate on 7 classification benchmarks against magnitude pruning and random pruning baselines. The Random Cloud matches or outperforms both baselines in 6 of 7 datasets, achieving statistically significant improvements on Sonar ($+4.9$pp accuracy, $p{=}0.017$ vs magnitude pruning) with 87\% parameter reduction. Crucially, the method is faster than both pruning baselines in 4 of 5 datasets (0.67--0.94$\times$ the cost of full training), since it avoids training the full-size network entirely.

Detectors often suffer from degraded performance, primarily due to the distributional gap between the source and target domains. This issue is especially evident in single-source domains with limited data, as models tend to rely on confounders (e.g., illumination, co-occurrence, and style) from the source domain, leading to spurious correlations that hinder generalization. To this end, this paper proposes a novel Basis-driven framework for domain generalization, namely \textbf{\textit{Bridge}}, that incorporates causal inference into object detection. By learning the low-rank bases for front-door adjustment, \textbf{\textit{Bridge}} blocks confounders' effects to mitigate spurious correlations, while simultaneously refining representations by filtering redundant and task-irrelevant components. \textbf{\textit{Bridge}} can be seamlessly integrated with both discriminative (e.g., DINOv2/3, SAM) and generative (e.g., Stable Diffusion) Vision Foundation Models (VFMs). Extensive experiments across multiple domain generalization object detection datasets, i.e., Cross-Camera, Adverse Weather, Real-to-Artistic, Diverse Weather Datasets, and Diverse Weather DroneVehicle (our newly augmented real-world UAV-based benchmark), underscore the superiority of our proposed method over previous state-of-the-art approaches. The project page is available at: https://mingbohong.github.io/Bridge/.

This paper proposes a novel algorithm for semisupervised learning. This algorithm learns graph cuts that maximize the margin with respect to the labels induced by the harmonic function solution. We motivate the approach, compare it to existing work, and prove a bound on its generalization error. The quality of our solutions is evaluated on a synthetic problem and three UCI ML repository datasets. In most cases, we outperform manifold regularization of support vector machines, which is a state-of-the-art approach to semi-supervised max-margin learning.