Week beginning 1st June 2026

Training Data Attribution (TDA) seeks to trace a model's predictions back to its training data. The gold standard for TDA relies on causal interventions, observing how a model changes when data is added or removed, but repeated retraining is computationally challenging for Large Language Models (LLMs). Consequently, most approaches approximate this effect in the parameter space using gradients. However, tracking gradients across billions of parameters is not only prohibitively expensive but relies on local approximations. In this work, we propose a shift: rather than estimating parameter changes, we model the functional effect of training data in the activation space. We introduce STRIDE (Steering-based Training Data Influence Decomposition), a framework that formulates TDA as a sparse recovery problem in the spirit of compressive sensing. STRIDE learns lightweight "steering operators" that mimic the behavioral shift caused by training on data subsets. By measuring how these operators perturb test predictions, we recover individual training example influences via sparse linear decomposition. STRIDE achieves state-of-the-art for LLM pre-training attribution while being an order of magnitude ($13\times$) faster than previous art. We further validate its practical utility through downstream applications including data selection, data contamination, and qualitative analysis.

We introduce T2Mo, a feed-forward framework for controllable dynamic 3D shape generation conditioned on 3D trajectories and text. Due to the inherent ambiguity of language, generating precisely intended motions using text alone remains challenging. To address this, we adopt 3D trajectories as controllable spatial guidance, specifying the exact paths along which selected points should move. By combining both, T2Mo generates object motions that spatially adhere to the given trajectories while globally reflecting the text semantics. To robustly handle trajectory inputs with arbitrary configurations, ranging from dense to sparse and unevenly distributed, we further propose a shape-grounded trajectory embedding that maps an input trajectory set into a shape-aware token set covering the entire object. We conduct extensive comparisons against text-based baselines and cascaded video-based baselines that combine trajectory-guided video generation with video-to-dynamic mesh generation. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations, along with user studies, demonstrate that our approach produces motions that more faithfully follow the given prompts with higher expressiveness while preserving motion quality.

Audio-language models (ALMs) often follow text that conflicts with audio, even when the audio evidence is clear. This raises a basic question: is the audio-supported answer unavailable, or is it represented but overridden by the conflicting text? We examine this question using a same-audio counterfactual that keeps the audio fixed, removes only the conflicting text, and measures the resulting shift in model preference. Across five ALMs and four conflict tasks, 64.1% of conflict samples show a sign flip: the same-audio branch prefers the audio-supported answer, whereas the joint branch prefers the text-supported answer. This pattern suggests that the relevant audio evidence is encoded but loses in arbitration. Activation patching further localizes the reversal to answer-position computation, and patching effects closely track output candidate-score differences (Spearman rho=0.93). Using this diagnostic, we propose Gated Audio Counterfactual Logit Correction (GACL), a training-free decoding rule that interpolates between joint and same-audio scores. Under a strict 5 pp faithfulness-drop budget, GACL improves nAUC by 17.8 points over the best contrastive baseline and transfers without retuning to vision-text arbitration (up to +40.5 pp).

Scaling humanoid loco-manipulation requires robot-compatible demonstrations across diverse objects, whole-body motions, and scene geometries, but teleoperation and motion capture are difficult to scale because each collection depends on physical setups, instrumented actors, and robot operation. We present GRAIL, a digital generation pipeline that remains fully virtual until deployment: it composes 3D assets, simulator-ready scenes, and priors from video foundation models (VFMs) to synthesize interactions without rebuilding physical environments or teleoperating the robot. Rather than reconstructing unconstrained in-the-wild videos, GRAIL starts from fully specified 3D configurations in which object geometry, camera parameters, metric scale, environment depth, and a robot-proportioned character are known before video generation and reused during reconstruction. This privileged setup better conditions 4D recovery, allowing model-based object tracking, human motion estimation, and interaction-aware optimization to reconstruct metric 4D human-object interaction (HOI) trajectories with reduced depth ambiguity and morphology mismatch. We retarget the recovered motions to a humanoid robot and train complementary task-general trackers: an object-aware latent adaptor for manipulation and a scene-aware tracker for terrain traversal. GRAIL produces over 20,000 sequences spanning pick-up, object manipulation, sitting, and terrain traversal. Using only GRAIL-generated data, we train egocentric visual policies through a sim-to-real pipeline and deploy them on a Unitree G1 humanoid, achieving 84\% real-world success on diverse object pick-up and 90\% success on stair-climbing.

Rigorous evaluation of learning-based robotic systems is an essential prerequisite for deployment. However, real-world test data is expensive to gather; moreover, in a typical iterative development context, data gathered from the latest policy is necessarily limited in scale. This motivates evaluation methodologies that make use of heterogeneous data sources, including simulation, historical policy logs, and data collected from related platforms or environments. While such auxiliary data are abundant and inexpensive, they are generally not directly representative of real-world outcomes -- for example, performance in simulation may differ substantially from performance in the real world -- making their principled use for high-confidence performance estimation challenging. In this paper, we introduce X4Val, a general framework for variance-reduced real-world metric estimation in the presence of non-paired, multi-domain data. X4Val embeds samples from real and auxiliary domains into a shared representation space and learns a transferable predictor of real-world metrics; this learned predictor is then incorporated into a control-variates estimator, enabling variance reduction even when paired samples are unavailable. We provide theoretical analysis and empirical evaluations on autonomous driving and real-world robot manipulation tasks, domains across which X4Val achieves up to 38.4% variance reduction and demonstrates consistent improvements over strong baselines. These results show that non-paired, heterogeneous data can be leveraged to substantially improve the sample efficiency of rigorous robotic system validation.

Multi-agent reasoning systems adopt a "generate-then-transfer" paradigm that forces end-to-end latency to scale linearly with pipeline depth. We introduce StreamMA, a multi-agent reasoning system that streams each reasoning step to downstream agents as soon as it is generated, pipelining adjacent agents and thus reducing latency. Surprisingly, this pipelining also improves effectiveness: because multi-step reasoning quality is non-uniform and early steps are more reliable than later ones, working with these reliable early steps instead of the full chain prevents error-prone late steps from misleading downstream agents. We formalize both advantages with the first closed-form joint analysis of stream, serial, and single protocols, deriving the effectiveness ordering, speedup upper bound, and cost ratio. Across eight reasoning benchmarks spanning mathematics, science, and code, two frontier LLMs (Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.4), and three topologies (Chain, Tree, Graph), StreamMA outperforms both baselines (avg. +7.3 pp, max +22.4 pp on HMMT 2026; Claude Opus 4.6-high). Beyond these contributions, we discover a "step-level scaling law": increasing per-agent steps consistently improves both effectiveness and efficiency, a new scaling dimension orthogonal to and composable with agent-count scaling.

A temporal graph is a graph in which every edge carries a non-empty set of time labels, and it is temporally connected if for every two vertices $u$ and $v$, there exists a $u$-$v$-path with non-decreasing time labels. A spanner is a subset of its edges preserving temporal connectivity. Unlike static graphs, temporally connected graphs need not admit sparse spanners; nonetheless, minimizing spanner size is a central and widely studied problem. A particularly intriguing question is whether temporal cliques admit spanners of linear size. Despite considerable effort over the past years, the best known upper bound remained $O(n \log n)$. We finally resolve this question, proving that every temporal clique on $n$ vertices admits a spanner of size $7n$. Moreover, such a spanner can be computed in polynomial time.

Reasoning models have advanced rapidly, but the dominant reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) recipe remains surprisingly narrow: sample many responses and reward each with a single bit indicating whether the final answer is correct. Yet many settings provide rich feedback, including execution traces, tool outputs, expert corrections, and model self-evaluations. We study how to use such feedback through a distributional variant of the classic imitation learning algorithm DAgger, where the learner has local access to an expert distribution on states visited by the current policy. This yields a simple forward cross-entropy objective that admits a blackbox expert and whose sequence-level gradient {conduct rich credit assignment by propagating} future expert-student disagreement back to earlier decisions. We show that prior RL with self-distillation objectives based on reverse KL or Jensen-Shannon fail to guarantee monotonic policy improvement: even when the expert has higher reward, their updates may increase probability on worse actions. In contrast, we show that forward cross-entropy admits monotonic policy improvement and enjoys guarantees on regret. We further show that our objective optimizes a lower bound on teacher-weighted likelihood of success, leading to improved Pass@N. Empirically, our approach, DistIL, improves over RLVR and RL with self-distillation baselines across a variety of domains: scientific reasoning, coding, and solving hard mathematical problems.

The radial basis function neural network (RBFN) trained with a gradient descending algorithm provides an effective fully connected structure in both shallow and deep networks. The error correction (ErrCor), a state-of-the-art gradient-based training method, selects optimal hidden units to improve accuracy. Alternatively, as a population-based algorithm, the particle swarm optimization algorithm (PSO) uses the swarm experience to optimize RBFN parameters, offering global search and robustness to local minima. Adaptive PSO (APSO) has emerged as an improved variant of PSO. APSO algorithm improves convergence speed by dynamically adjusting swarm parameters during optimization. Both ErrCor and PSO demonstrate improved results and competitive convergence. However, with large datasets, these methods face scalability challenges such as excessive kernel computations and large hidden layer structures. A recent multi-column RBFN approach (MCRN) improves ErrCor performance by deploying small RBFNs in a parallel system. Inspired by MCRN's success, we propose two novel approaches to improve PSO performance: the multi-column RBFN with PSO (MC-PSO) and the multi-column RBFN with APSO (MC-APSO). These methods introduce parallel RBFN structures trained using evolutionary swarm methods. Each RBFN is independently trained on a specific spatial subset of the dataset using either PSO or APSO algorithms. These resulting specialist-trained RBFNs are tailored to their respective subsets. During testing, only selected RBFNs, where the test instance neighbors are located, contribute to the multi-column output. This specialization improves accuracy, while parallelism enhances speed. We evaluate the proposed methods on various benchmark datasets. The MC-PSO and MC-APSO outperform ErrCor, PSO, APSO, and MCRN in terms of accuracy and recall. They also demonstrate faster training and testing times in most experiments.

Vehicle body type is a significant determinant of cyclist injury severity in overtaking crashes, yet automated tools for classifying vehicles into injury-risk-relevant categories from naturalistic roadway video do not exist in the open literature. Standard object detection benchmarks provide only coarse vehicle labels (car, truck, bus, motorcycle), while existing fine-grained recognition systems are trained on controlled imagery and lack evaluation for deployment robustness across recording sites. This paper presents an open-source two-stage computer vision pipeline combining a pre-trained RT-DETR detector for coarse vehicle localization with a fine-tuned Vision Transformer (ViT-Base/16) for six-category body-type classification: passenger car, SUV, pickup truck, minivan, large van, and commercial truck. A confidence-based abstention mechanism withholds Stage 2 predictions when softmax output falls below 0.60, producing unknown labels rather than silent misclassifications. Evaluated on 3,805 annotated overtaking events from a bicycle-lane corridor in Ann Arbor, Michigan (in-distribution), the pipeline achieved 0.94 accuracy with per-class F1 scores from 0.91 (minivan) to 0.97 (SUV). On an independent out-of-distribution evaluation of 311 events from an open cycling dataset without retraining, accuracy was 0.89. Three of four well-represented categories maintained F1 at or above 0.90 under domain shift. The largest degradation was observed for minivan (F1 = 0.72), driven by abstention rate rising from 2.4% to 25.0% rather than active misclassification, consistent with the mechanism propagating genuine model uncertainty. The full pipeline, including inference scripts, training code, evaluation utilities, and model weights, is released as open-source software to support reproducibility and reuse across roadside video archives and cycling safety research.

When post-trained language models fail on reasoning problems, the common test-time-scaling response is to spend more compute on additional attempts, and the failed traces play no further role. We argue this discards a crucial signal; some failures come from unlucky sampling, where more rollouts help, while others are structural and resist resampling regardless of budget. We propose that failed traces encode recoverability structure: the inference-time signature of which test-time interventions can rescue a given failure. Three problem-level trajectory features, derived from the structure of available interventions, recover this structure from the distributional signature of failed rollouts, not their text. They cluster failures into stable regimes, characterize the failure topography of different post-training methods ($84.3{\pm}4.3\%$ accuracy, $+20\%$ over a majority-class baseline), and support a training-free routing rule that lifts rescue by $+12.2\%$ on the deployment-relevant Steerable-Hard subset (failures where retry is insufficient and a bounded intervention is reachable). The features and the routing rule transfer across two cross-family probes. The same three features thus convert failed traces from discarded data into a diagnostic object, supporting test-time routing and post-training analysis without training-time or weight-space access.

Scaling robust robot policies requires more than broader randomization, because physical-domain experience must remain organized and learnable throughout training. We study when a policy can benefit from harder physics and identify recoverability as a central constraint in on-policy physical-domain scaling. In on-policy training, new dynamics are useful only insofar as they remain close enough to the current policy to generate corrective on-policy data, rather than collapsing rollouts into unrecoverable failures. Using quadruped locomotion as a physically demanding benchmark for embodied generalization, we introduce HORIZON, a checkpointed frontier curriculum that expands physical domains only within the current policy's recoverable boundary. HORIZON uses rollback and boundary refinement to govern each expansion step, turning fixed randomization into a continual process of physical-domain growth. Experiments reveal three regularities of physical-domain expansion. First, direct domain widening is uneven across physical axes and often unlearnable without staged ordering. Second, domain composition is non-monotonic, and adding more domains beyond a compact core can dilute recoverable joint samples and reduce overall robustness. Third, offline distillation of isolated experts cannot substitute for the joint interaction generated by on-policy curriculum. Together, these results frame physical-domain generalization as a continual growth problem for embodied control, with recoverability as the organizing principle for on-policy expansion.

Recent developments in multi-view image editing with generative models have brought us a step closer toward general 3D content generation and customization. Most existing works focus on rigid or appearance-only edits by utilizing the geometry of the unedited scene. This naturally limits these methods to edits that preserve the underlying scene structure. Other approaches are trained for specific image editing tasks, such as object removal and addition. Despite this progress, general nonrigid edits, i.e., edits that substantially change the scene geometry, remain challenging for existing methods. We propose GeM-NR, a fast and flexible training-free approach for general multi-view consistent image editing, including edits that drastically change the geometry and appearance of the scene. Given an anchor image edited with a chosen backbone editor (such as FLUX, Qwen, BrushNet) and a query unedited image, GeM-NR edits the query image consistently with the anchor edit. The method incorporates multiple stages: (i) depth map estimation, where we propose a strategy to maximize the alignment between the 3D point clouds of the edited and unedited scenes, (ii) projection onto a query viewpoint, and (iii) refinement of the obtained image conditioned on the unedited query. The conditioning-based formulation scales well from two to many views of an object. We demonstrate the ability of our method to handle edits with significant changes in geometry and appearance, something that existing methods struggle with. We perform an extensive evaluation showing that our method improves consistency for a wide variety of edit tasks, including generating 3D representations of the edited scene. Both quantitative and qualitative results indicate the state-of-the-art performance of our method in terms of edit quality as well as geometric and photometric consistency across multiple views.

The rapid advancement of high-throughput sequencing has led to large, high-dimensional omics datasets. Deep unsupervised learning architectures, particularly Autoencoders (AEs), are increasingly used for dimensionality reduction and representation learning in this domain. However, AEs are highly sensitive to architectural choices and hyperparameters, and unsupervised optimization typically relies on reconstruction loss, which may be a poor proxy for downstream utility. Exhaustive hyperparameter optimization (HPO) is computationally expensive, leading researchers to frequently rely on suboptimal default configurations. To democratize access to large-scale unsupervised HPO research, we introduce $\textbf{BBOmix}$, the first open-source tabular benchmark for unsupervised representation learning on real-world biological data. Our benchmark includes 105,000 evaluations across four AE architectures and seven multi-omics modalities from the TCGA and SCHC datasets. We quantify the correlation between reconstruction loss and downstream task performance and provide an extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art single-fidelity, multi-fidelity, and transfer learning HPO methods, establishing a rigorous baseline for future research in unsupervised biological representation learning.

Generating realistic financial time series is challenging as training data is often limited to a single historical path. With such scarce data, overfitting is hard to avoid, especially under adversarial training where a trained discriminator can memorize the training samples. To mitigate this, recent approaches train generators to minimize the discrepancy between untrained feature representations of real and generated time series. In these works, the feature maps are based on path signatures, which can fail to capture relevant time series properties at tractable truncation depths. In this work, we instead train generators by matching random convolutional features of real and generated time series. Existing random convolutional feature maps, such as Rocket and Hydra, have been shown to provide informative representations of real-world time series, but cannot supervise generative models because they are non-differentiable. We introduce SOCK (SOft Competing Kernels), a fully differentiable random convolutional feature map, suited to train generative time series models. We show that generators trained by matching random SOCK features consistently outperform signature and diffusion baselines across a wide range of small-sample financial datasets. We further demonstrate SOCK's expressiveness on two-sample hypothesis testing and time series classification tasks, where SOCK matches or outperforms existing unsupervised feature maps.

Deep active learning has previously been explored for LLM in-context sample selection, but not with methods that utilise recent advances in understanding of transformer activations. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that model activations could provide a fine-grained signal to optimise the selection of in-context examples. We present the most comprehensive analysis to date of MLP activation-based deep active learning methods applied to in-context learning, including how different attention masking strategies impact active learning across diverse classification and generative datasets, using both Llama-3.2-3B and Qwen2.5-3B base models. However, we find a negative result: MLP outputs, viewed through the lenses of massive activations or the first four moments, do not correlate with example quality or task performance. Specifically, the absolute Spearman correlation coefficient is at most 0.33 for all tasks and models we tested, showing that such activation-based sampling should not be used for in-context learning. We hypothesise that this may be due to superposition, whereby models represent more features than they have dimensionality, suggesting that methods like Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) may be a promising future direction.

Koopman theory turns nonlinear dynamics into a linear spectral problem. In computation, however, everything depends on a hard finite-dimensional choice: the observables must be expressive, nearly invariant under the dynamics, and, ideally, compatible with composition. Deep Koopman methods learn flexible coordinates, whereas structure-preserving methods enforce operator identities on fixed dictionaries. We combine these ideas by introducing Deep Embedded Multiplicative Dynamic Mode Decomposition (DeepMDMD), a method that learns a latent space and a partition of it, while enforcing the Koopman product rule as an exact algebraic constraint. Training alternates between an exact multiplicative operator update and a differentiable latent-clustering step that promotes Koopman closure. The result is a finite transition map on learned latent cells. Its nonzero spectrum lies on the unit circle, its dictionary is shaped by the dynamics rather than by ambient geometry, and forecasts are made in latent coordinates before being decoded to physical space. Across Hamiltonian, chaotic, and fluid examples, DeepMDMD learns dictionaries that are far more compact and dynamically coherent than those produced by geometric MDMD partitions. It reduces spectral pollution, reveals richer continuous-spectrum structure, and gives stable forecasts under severe noise. In high-dimensional flows, including a 158,624-dimensional cylinder wake and a noisy $Re=20,000$ lid-driven cavity, it preserves coherent structures and long-time spectral statistics where state-space MDMD fails. These results suggest a practical rule for Koopman learning: learn the coordinates, constrain the algebra.

Individual-level mobility prediction is central to urban simulation, transportation planning, and policy analysis. Supervised sequence models achieve strong accuracy but require task-specific training and offer limited decision-level transparency. Recent LLM-based methods improve interpretability, yet mostly rely on static prompts and single-pass inference, limiting their ability to seek additional evidence when mobility signals are weak or conflicting. We propose \method{}, a training-free LLM-driven agent framework that formulates next-location prediction as adaptive evidence-controlled decision making. \method{} resolves routine cases through a fast path based on historical regularity, while ambiguous cases trigger iterative tool use over recent trajectories, historical behavior, stay-move likelihood, and geographical evidence. Across three mobility datasets, AgentMob achieves the strongest overall performance among training-free LLM-based methods, with GPT-5.4 reaching 71.42\% Acc@1 on BW, 33.14\% on YJMob100K, and 33.50\% on Shanghai ISP. On BW non-fast-path cases, the LLM controller improves Acc@1 from 30.65\% to 48.62\% over a same-tool statistical baseline, showing that its main benefit lies in resolving ambiguous predictions through adaptive evidence gathering. Our code is available at https://github.com/Unknown-zoo/AgentMob.

Preserving data privacy is an important topic in structural data management and data mining. However, the issue of privacy leakage in distributed causal structure learning is a persistent challenge, especially in cases where data transmission and computation are required. In this paper, we propose a method based on fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) that performs calculations on ciphertexts, keeping data encrypted in transition and computation. Nevertheless, adopting FHE to causal structure learning is challenging due to the high computation cost and limited support on division as well as logarithm operations in FHE. To tackle this challenge, we propose a series of novel techniques including (i) circuit simplification for better efficiency, (ii) approximation of division and logarithm through Newton-Raphson Reciprocal and Taylor expansion, and (iii) a batching technique with SIMD-acceleration to enhance the whole learning process. Additionally, our method can be easily extended beyond FHE by demonstration of its portability to support differential privacy. Empirical results show that our method achieves high consistency and comparable causal structure with the plaintext version in the datasets tested. Last, our method is efficient and practical to complete learning causal structures in tens of minutes even under the privacy protection of FHE.

Liveness detection has evolved from a safeguard against presentation and replay attacks in biometric authentication to a broader requirement for distinguishing human users from non-human agents in modern digital systems. The emergence of generative and agentic AI further amplifies this need, positioning liveness as a fundamental security primitive. Existing approaches face key limitations, including reliance on explicit user interaction, specialized hardware, vulnerability to increasingly realistic spoofing, and limited scalability in real-world deployments. We present A-Live, a passive liveness detection framework that operates solely on inertial measurement unit (IMU) signals available in commodity devices. A-Live is based on the observation that neuromuscular micro-motions inherent to human motor control produce subtle but measurable signatures in inertial data, which are often treated as noise in prior work. We design a lightweight feature extraction pipeline and a compact classifier suitable for real-time on-device deployment, and introduce a controllable physical micro-motion platform to evaluate robustness against engineered non-human motion. Extensive evaluation across Android and iOS devices, including both automated and real-user settings, shows that A-Live achieves over 99.5\% accuracy with low false acceptance and rejection rates. Our results demonstrate that neuromuscular micro-motion signatures provide a scalable and passive foundation for liveness detection under emerging AI-driven threat models.

After the success of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) for novel view synthesis, many works have explored how to also use it for geometric surface representation. However, extracting accurate geometric information directly from 3DGS remains challenging and can often reduce the appearance rendering quality. In this work, we show that 3DGS in its default form is inheritedly unsuited to represent texture and geometry at the same time, by training with complete ground-truth texture and geometry information. We also propose a simple solution by applying a single additional geometry opacity parameter to each splat, together with an optional transparency-curated optimization pipeline. Our experiments, both with ground-truth and vision foundation model geometric input, show that this change leads to improved rendering and geometry performance on a wide variety of dataset, and especially complex scenes with transparent objects benefit significantly from our method.

Large language models are increasingly evaluated by other models, raising a natural question: can a model predict how a judge will score its own output? We find that the ability is largely present before any targeted training: prompted few-shot, a base model already predicts an external judge's multi-attribute quality scores on open-ended responses well above chance across three benchmarks. We introduce Self-Evaluation Elicitation (SEE), a method that surfaces this latent ability through a short cycle comprising a calibration-coupled reinforcement learning phase that improves the answer and predicts the judge, followed by a masked distillation phase that sharpens the prediction while leaving the answer untouched. From 160 unique examples, roughly 31x fewer than a reinforcement learning baseline, SEE improves held-out calibration across three benchmarks while preserving answer quality. The elicited self-evaluation is sharply localized within the model's own token distribution and stable across judges it was never trained against, indicating a transferable notion of quality rather than a single judge's preference. These results reframe judge-aligned self-evaluation as a problem of elicitation rather than acquisition.

Audio is an inherently interactive modality, yet today's Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) are offline, and streaming audio models each handle only a single task such as streaming ASR or voice chatting. It is time to unify them into one online LALM: a model that, through an always-on perceive-decide-respond loop, listens to sound, environment, and instructions in real time and reacts on the fly. We formalize this regime as the Audio Interaction Model, and realize it with Audio-Interaction, a unified streaming model that retains offline task execution while adding online general audio instruction following, from dialogue to full voice chatting, deciding when to respond from the semantics of the stream. To enable this, we propose SoundFlow, a framework that instantiates the perceive-decide-respond loop end to end, from data to training to deployment, through streaming-native data construction, comprehension-aware training, and asynchronous low-latency inference for stable real-time interaction. We further construct StreamAudio-2M, a 2.6M-item streaming corpus spanning 7 fundamental abilities and 28 sub-tasks, and Proactive-Sound-Bench for evaluating proactive audio intervention. Across 8 benchmarks, Audio-Interaction preserves competitive performance on mainstream audio tasks while unlocking capabilities inaccessible to offline LALMs, including real-time ASR, streaming audio instruction following, and proactive help.

This paper examines whether and how artificial intelligence (AI) advances scientific creativity. Drawing on scientific publications, the primary output of researchers, we analyze over one million publications from OpenAlex to investigate the relationship between AI adoption and multiple dimensions of scientific creativity, including novelty (recombinant novelty and object novelty) and impact (3-year short-run citation impact and 10-year long-run citation impact). We find that AI publications are significantly more likely to achieve top-decile creativity relative to non-AI publications, with 5.5 to 10.2 percentage point higher likelihood to rank in the top creativity decile. Critically, we uncover substantial heterogeneity across AI research modes. Tool-oriented AI research, which applies existing AI models to domain tasks, is associated with the largest gains in recombinant-based creativity, while Adaptation-oriented AI research, modifying AI models for domain-specific problems, is associated with relatively higher object-based creativity. These findings reveal that AI does not advance science through a single mechanism but through structurally distinct creative pathways that depend on how AI is incorporated into the research process. Our results contribute to ongoing debates about AI's role in science and carry direct implications for research evaluation and science policy, highlighting the need for assessment frameworks that can distinguish between recombinant and conceptual forms of creativity and that recognize how different modes of AI adoption produce fundamentally different types of scientific contribution.

We introduce the Graph Set Transformer (GST), a neural network architecture for learning on sets of graphs, designed for tasks in which per-element predictions depend on set-wide context as well as local structure. Existing architectures, including DeepSets and SetTransformer, require pre-encoded graph embeddings from a separate GNN, creating a bottleneck between feature extraction and set-level contextualisation. In contrast, GST interleaves node-level feature propagation and cross-graph contextual modelling at every layer, fusing the two levels of information through a gating mechanism. We evaluate GST on a controlled synthetic suite designed to isolate set-conditional structural reasoning and on three real-data benchmarks spanning per-atom reaction-centre identification, reaction yield prediction, and image classification. Under matched parameter budgets, GST performs better than the baselines across these settings. An architectural ablation strongly suggests that the interleaving of local and set context contributes substantially to this advantage.

Children learn the meanings of words from a continuous, temporally structured stream of egocentric experience. Recent work shows that neural networks can also learn word-referent mappings from a child's egocentric video recordings, but they cycle through the shuffled data for hundreds of epochs, contrasting with how children actually encounter their environment. We introduce BabyCL, a continual multimodal learning framework that processes the SAYCam dataset in a single chronological pass, combining streaming visual representation learning with an image-text contrastive objective. BabyCL combines a multi-stage temporal segmentation of the stream with a dual replay buffer that independently manages visual and multimodal histories, and it is jointly trained with three contrastive losses on a shared backbone. Under a matched optimization budget, BabyCL outperforms streaming learning baselines on the SAYCam Labeled-S 4AFC benchmark, substantially narrowing the gap to an upper bound of offline training. Ablations show that the gains are robust to the length of the online temporal segmentation window and the eviction rule of the replay buffer. Together, these results show that meaningful word-referent mappings can emerge under training conditions much closer to a child's actual experience.

Large language models are increasingly becoming part of software engineering education, including activities involving empirical software engineering and evidence synthesis. This paper reports an educational experience involving the integration of reflective LLM use into an empirical methods assignment in a third-year software architecture course. Students were asked to develop a short research paper using either a rapid review or a gray literature review methodology and to disclose how LLMs were used throughout the assignment. We analyzed 146 student disclosure statements using a cross-analysis process combining LLM-assisted categorization with manual verification and refinement by the researchers. The reflections describe how students incorporated LLMs during activities such as brainstorming, methodological clarification, organization of findings, and writing refinement, while also reporting concerns regarding inaccuracies and verification of generated content. This experience report discusses lessons learned and educational implications for integrating AI-assisted technologies into empirical software engineering education.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly proposed as clinical agents, yet static, single-turn benchmarks cannot capture how a model dynamically delivers care across an encounter: gathering information, planning treatment, and adapting longitudinal management across successive patient states. Medical education has long addressed an analogous challenge through standardized patients (SPs): trained actors who consistently portray clinical cases, enabling realistic practice and objective, scripted assessment. Here we introduce MedSP1000, an SP-derived interactive benchmark for clinical-agent evaluation, including 1,638 SP cases with 24,602 trajectory-level peer-reviewed rubrics. MedSP1000 converts peer-reviewed SP teaching cases into executable scenarios with defined SP case scripts, clinical environment contexts, and human-validated structured rubric. In each simulation evaluation run, a clinical agent interacts in closed loop with a patient agent and an environment controller, and its behaviour is scored throughout the encounter against expert criteria specified in the original materials. Applying MedSP1000 to a range of general-purpose and medically specialized LLMs, we find that performance on static benchmarks does not reliably translate to such educational scenarios. The best-performing model, GPT-5.5, completes only 60.4% of expert-defined rubric items, whereas the strongest medically specialized model reaches 40.0%; increasing test-time compute produces no measurable gain. These results suggest that current LLMs, including agentic systems tuned for medicine, are not yet reliable enough to be safely integrated into actual clinical practice. More broadly, MedSP1000 shows how process-level, SP-style evaluation can reveal clinically relevant failure modes that single-turn benchmarks miss.

We provide faster deterministic and randomized algorithms for exactly solving discounted Markov Decision Processes (DMDPs). We obtain our results by efficiently reducing computing optimal values and policies in DMDPs to the easier tasks of policy evaluation and computing approximately optimal values in DMDPs. We provide both a straightforward deterministic reduction and a more efficient randomized variant that, together with advances in approximately solving DMDPs, yield our results.

To leverage the full potential of multimodal data, we need representations that go beyond the state-of-the-art alignment and fusion approaches and exploit all cross-modal interactions without sacrificing modality-specific information. Learning disentangled representations is a principled way to identify these underlying shared and unique factors that are hidden in observational data. However, while multimodal disentanglement is a compelling paradigm, existing methods are largely confined to the two-modality regime due to its inherent scalability bottleneck. To address this, we propose RePercENT, a self-supervised framework designed to surpass these limitations and unlocks scalable pairwise disentanglement beyond two modalities. Through a multimodal `plug-and-play' architecture, our approach operates directly on pre-extracted embeddings, eliminating the need for extensive joint pre-training while making no assumptions regarding the underlying modalities or foundation model backbones. Moreover, we introduce a joint optimization objective for simultaneously deriving the shared and unique components, and provide formal theoretical guarantees that characterize the optimality of our solution. Across diverse modalities and tasks, RePercENT successfully recovers disentangled components while maintaining competitive performance and significantly reducing computational complexity.

We show that in discretised first-price auctions with complete information, if the buyers learn to bid with online gradient ascent, in time-average the outcome is (almost) the efficient outcome of the second-price auction. Our proof rests on two novel innovations in the analysis of online gradient ascent in normal-form games, which may be useful in a wider range of applications. First, we develop a potential-function-based argument for the analysis of gradient ascent in normal-form games, allowing us to deduce that certain strategies will not be played in time-average. We provide sufficient conditions which ensure this argument can be applied iteratively, resulting in a procedure reminiscent of iterative elimination of dominated strategies. Second, we develop a novel class of cubic "candidate potential functions", classifying a family of quadratic strategy modifications on the probability simplex against which online gradient ascent incurs no regret.

We propose a label-free approach to adapt powerful but generic vision foundation models to specialized scientific domains. Standard supervised fine-tuning is often ill-suited to these settings: labels are scarce, and task-specific training can collapse the model's generality and hurt robustness. We instead leverage metadata to adapt representations to new domains in a self-supervised manner. Our method, FINO, combines a standard self-supervised objective with flexible metadata guidance that handles both highly granular discrete metadata and continuous metadata. It encourages the representation to preserve informative factors while suppressing spurious ones. Across subcellular fluorescence microscopy, Earth observation, wildlife monitoring, and medical imaging, FINO consistently outperforms standard unsupervised domain adaptation and fully supervised adaptation. It also exceeds highly-specialized domain-specific state of the art, while using no task labels for backbone adaptation and only lightweight probes for supervision.

We investigate whether methods of human mathematics pedagogy can guide the training of language models toward arithmetic reasoning. Building on the GASING method -- an Indonesian pedagogy that solves basic arithmetic through a left-to-right procedure aligned with the causal order of token generation -- we operationalize each operation as a computational procedure whose execution trace is serialized into natural-language Chain-of-Thought (CoT) supervision. A small GPT-2 decoder (86M parameters) with a syllabic-agglutinative TOBA tokenizer for Indonesian is trained from scratch on this data using only a next-token prediction objective, without reinforcement learning or reward-based optimization. Monitoring training reveals three distinct learning phases, and mechanistic analyses -- attention-masking interventions on the CoT information graph, residual-stream probing, and logit-lens inspection -- show that the model first internalizes a procedural pathway and subsequently develops an associative, ``mental-arithmetic'' capacity that retrieves intermediate results without explicit step-by-step computation. The trained model reaches over 80% accuracy on held-out problems and attains competitive performance against substantially larger language models, indicating that targeted, pedagogically grounded training can yield strong and economical arithmetic capability at small scale.

Knowledge benchmarks for LLMs face three issues: scaling-driven designs that do not operationalize disciplinary representativeness; flat-payment annotation that permits lazy consensus; and unaudited ranking instability under bounded test budgets. We introduce KINA, an 899-item benchmark across 261 fine-grained disciplines, with two formal results. First, we cast representativeness as a coverage-style objective over expert-elicited anchors and operationalize disciplinary representativeness through a proxy, yielding a (1-1/e) greedy approximation (Proposition 1); the guarantee applies to the proxy, not to population representativeness. Second, we prove a bonus-on-bar tournament weakly FOSD-dominates flat payment in released-review quality, with incentive-compatibility threshold B > Delta C / Delta p_min (Theorem 1). Evaluating 42 models from 13 labs, the top model, Gemini-3.1-Pro-Preview, reaches 53.17%, followed by Claude-Opus-4.6 at 49.92% and GPT-5.4 at 48.55%, leaving substantial headroom below saturation. The full leaderboard shows a tiered structure rather than a smooth total order: a small frontier tier lies above 48%, a dense strong-model tier spans roughly 38-45%, and low-performing models remain only modestly above the 10% chance baseline. Tool augmentation adds up to 5.17 points across the five tool-use evaluations, with gains varying substantially across models. We report bootstrap ranking-stability statistics to make bounded-budget variance explicit and to discourage over-interpretation of adjacent ranks.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (Roman), set for launch as early as September 2026, will conduct wide-field infrared imaging surveys with unprecedented spatial resolution and cadence, enabling the discovery of millions of astronomical transients. Hence, it is necessary to have automated pipelines for generating alerts in place so that the telescope can begin discovering reliable transients and variable objects soon after it is launched. However, no real Roman data currently exist, making the development of such pipelines difficult. In this work, we present a machine learning model $RuBR$ and a general methodology for distinguishing genuine transient and variable detections from spurious (bogus) detections within the RAPID pipeline. In particular, we present three models using this methodology: $RuBR_{comb}$ trained and tested on combined locally injected and OpenUniverse2024 transients, $RuBR_{loc}$ trained on locally injected transients and tested on OpenUniverse2024 transients, and $RuBR_{DA}$ that combines locally injected transients with a fraction of OpenUniverse2024 transients in domain-adaptation mode for training. This paves the way for strategies to adapt the $RuBR_{comb}$ model to real observations in the absence of any ground-truth labels during the early phases of the Roman mission. While the image differencing pipeline continues to be improved, our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach and its promise for robust real-bogus classification in the Roman era.

Feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting methods reconstruct a scene from posed or pose-free images in a single forward pass, yet current approaches predict one Gaussian per input pixel, tying the representation budget to camera resolution rather than scene complexity. A flat wall and a richly textured object thus produce equally many Gaussians despite very different geometric needs. We propose ZipSplat, a token-based feed-forward model that decouples Gaussian placement from the pixel grid. A multi-view backbone extracts dense visual tokens, and k-means clustering compresses them into a compact set of scene tokens. Cross- and self-attention refine these tokens, and a lightweight MLP decodes each into a group of Gaussians with unconstrained 3D positions. Because clustering is applied at inference, a single trained model spans the quality-efficiency curve without retraining. ZipSplat operates without ground-truth poses or intrinsics, yet sets a new state of the art on DL3DV and RealEstate10K with ${\sim}6{\times}$ fewer Gaussians than pixel-aligned methods, surpassing the best pose-free baseline by 2.1dB and 1.2dB PSNR, respectively. It further generalizes zero-shot to Mip-NeRF360 and ScanNet++, outperforming all comparable baselines. Our project page is at ${\href{https://veichta.com/zipsplat}{https://veichta.com/zipsplat}}$.