Week beginning 16th March 2026

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models excel in static manipulation but struggle in dynamic environments with moving targets. This performance gap primarily stems from a scarcity of dynamic manipulation datasets and the reliance of mainstream VLAs on single-frame observations, restricting their spatiotemporal reasoning capabilities. To address this, we introduce DOMINO, a large-scale dataset and benchmark for generalizable dynamic manipulation, featuring 35 tasks with hierarchical complexities, over 110K expert trajectories, and a multi-dimensional evaluation suite. Through comprehensive experiments, we systematically evaluate existing VLAs on dynamic tasks, explore effective training strategies for dynamic awareness, and validate the generalizability of dynamic data. Furthermore, we propose PUMA, a dynamics-aware VLA architecture. By integrating scene-centric historical optical flow and specialized world queries to implicitly forecast object-centric future states, PUMA couples history-aware perception with short-horizon prediction. Results demonstrate that PUMA achieves state-of-the-art performance, yielding a 6.3% absolute improvement in success rate over baselines. Moreover, we show that training on dynamic data fosters robust spatiotemporal representations that transfer to static tasks. All code and data are available at https://github.com/H-EmbodVis/DOMINO.

Scaling depth is a key driver for large language models (LLMs). Yet, as LLMs become deeper, they often suffer from signal degradation: informative features formed in shallow layers are gradually diluted by repeated residual updates, making them harder to recover in deeper layers. We introduce mixture-of-depths attention (MoDA), a mechanism that allows each attention head to attend to sequence KV pairs at the current layer and depth KV pairs from preceding layers. We further describe a hardware-efficient algorithm for MoDA that resolves non-contiguous memory-access patterns, achieving 97.3% of FlashAttention-2's efficiency at a sequence length of 64K. Experiments on 1.5B-parameter models demonstrate that MoDA consistently outperforms strong baselines. Notably, it improves average perplexity by 0.2 across 10 validation benchmarks and increases average performance by 2.11% on 10 downstream tasks, with a negligible 3.7% FLOPs computational overhead. We also find that combining MoDA with post-norm yields better performance than using it with pre-norm. These results suggest that MoDA is a promising primitive for depth scaling. Code is released at https://github.com/hustvl/MoDA .

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for robotic manipulation, in which reliable action prediction critically depends on accurately interpreting and integrating visual observations conditioned on language instructions. Although recent works have sought to enhance the visual capabilities of VLA models, most approaches treat the LLM backbone as a black box, providing limited insight into how visual information is grounded into action generation. Therefore, we perform a systematic analysis of multiple VLA models across different action-generation paradigms and observe that sensitivity to visual tokens progressively decreases in deeper layers during action generation. Motivated by this observation, we propose \textbf{DeepVision-VLA}, built on a \textbf{Vision-Language Mixture-of-Transformers (VL-MoT)} framework. This framework enables shared attention between the vision foundation model and the VLA backbone, injecting multi-level visual features from the vision expert into deeper layers of the VLA backbone to enhance visual representations for precise and complex manipulation. In addition, we introduce \textbf{Action-Guided Visual Pruning (AGVP)}, which leverages shallow-layer attention to prune irrelevant visual tokens while preserving task-relevant ones, reinforcing critical visual cues for manipulation with minimal computational overhead. DeepVision-VLA outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods by 9.0\% and 7.5\% on simulated and real-world tasks, respectively, providing new insights for the design of visually enhanced VLA models.

Can AI make progress on important, unsolved mathematical problems? Large language models are now capable of sophisticated mathematical and scientific reasoning, but whether they can perform novel research is still widely debated and underexplored. We introduce HorizonMath, a benchmark of over 100 predominantly unsolved problems spanning 8 domains in computational and applied mathematics, paired with an open-source evaluation framework for automated verification. Our benchmark targets a class of problems where discovery is hard, requiring meaningful mathematical insight, but verification is computationally efficient and simple. Because these solutions are unknown, HorizonMath is immune to data contamination, and most state-of-the-art models score near 0%. Existing research-level benchmarks instead rely on formal proof verification or manual review, both of which are expensive to scale. Using this platform, we find two problems for which GPT 5.4 Pro proposes solutions that improve on the best-known published results, representing potential novel contributions (pending expert review). We release HorizonMath as an open challenge and a growing community resource, where correct solutions to problems in the unsolved problem classes could constitute novel results in the mathematical literature.

Generating accurate glyphs for visual text rendering is essential yet challenging. Existing methods typically enhance text rendering by training on a large amount of high-quality scene text images, but the limited coverage of glyph variations and excessive stylization often compromise glyph accuracy, especially for complex or out-of-domain characters. Some methods leverage reinforcement learning to alleviate this issue, yet their reward models usually depend on text recognition systems that are insensitive to fine-grained glyph errors, so images with incorrect glyphs may still receive high rewards. Inspired by Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), we propose GlyphPrinter, a preference-based text rendering method that eliminates reliance on explicit reward models. However, the standard DPO objective only models overall preference between two samples, which is insufficient for visual text rendering where glyph errors typically occur in localized regions. To address this issue, we construct the GlyphCorrector dataset with region-level glyph preference annotations and propose Region-Grouped DPO (R-GDPO), a region-based objective that optimizes inter- and intra-sample preferences over annotated regions, substantially enhancing glyph accuracy. Furthermore, we introduce Regional Reward Guidance, an inference strategy that samples from an optimal distribution with controllable glyph accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed GlyphPrinter outperforms existing methods in glyph accuracy while maintaining a favorable balance between stylization and precision.

Existing behavioral alignment techniques for Large Language Models (LLMs) often neglect the discrepancy between surface compliance and internal unaligned representations, leaving LLMs vulnerable to long-tail risks. More crucially, we posit that LLMs possess an inherent state of moral indifference due to compressing distinct moral concepts into uniform probability distributions. We verify and remedy this indifference in LLMs' latent representations, utilizing 251k moral vectors constructed upon Prototype Theory and the Social-Chemistry-101 dataset. Firstly, our analysis across 23 models reveals that current LLMs fail to represent the distinction between opposed moral categories and fine-grained typicality gradients within these categories; notably, neither model scaling, architecture, nor explicit alignment reshapes this indifference. We then employ Sparse Autoencoders on Qwen3-8B, isolate mono-semantic moral features, and targetedly reconstruct their topological relationships to align with ground-truth moral vectors. This representational alignment naturally improves moral reasoning and granularity, achieving a 75% pairwise win-rate on the independent adversarial Flames benchmark. Finally, we elaborate on the remedial nature of current intervention methods from an experientialist philosophy, arguing that endogenously aligned AI might require a transformation from post-hoc corrections to proactive cultivation.

Recent video diffusion models have made remarkable strides in visual quality, yet precise, fine-grained control remains a key bottleneck that limits practical customizability for content creation. For AI video creators, three forms of control are crucial: (i) scene composition, (ii) multi-view consistent subject customization, and (iii) camera-pose or object-motion adjustment. Existing methods typically handle these dimensions in isolation, with limited support for multi-view subject synthesis and identity preservation under arbitrary pose changes. This lack of a unified architecture makes it difficult to support versatile, jointly controllable video. We introduce Tri-Prompting, a unified framework and two-stage training paradigm that integrates scene composition, multi-view subject consistency, and motion control. Our approach leverages a dual-condition motion module driven by 3D tracking points for background scenes and downsampled RGB cues for foreground subjects. To ensure a balance between controllability and visual realism, we further propose an inference ControlNet scale schedule. Tri-Prompting supports novel workflows, including 3D-aware subject insertion into any scenes and manipulation of existing subjects in an image. Experimental results demonstrate that Tri-Prompting significantly outperforms specialized baselines such as Phantom and DaS in multi-view subject identity, 3D consistency, and motion accuracy.

We present HSImul3R, a unified framework for simulation-ready 3D reconstruction of human-scene interactions (HSI) from casual captures, including sparse-view images and monocular videos. Existing methods suffer from a perception-simulation gap: visually plausible reconstructions often violate physical constraints, leading to instability in physics engines and failure in embodied AI applications. To bridge this gap, we introduce a physically-grounded bi-directional optimization pipeline that treats the physics simulator as an active supervisor to jointly refine human dynamics and scene geometry. In the forward direction, we employ Scene-targeted Reinforcement Learning to optimize human motion under dual supervision of motion fidelity and contact stability. In the reverse direction, we propose Direct Simulation Reward Optimization, which leverages simulation feedback on gravitational stability and interaction success to refine scene geometry. We further present HSIBench, a new benchmark with diverse objects and interaction scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HSImul3R produces the first stable, simulation-ready HSI reconstructions and can be directly deployed to real-world humanoid robots.

Reinforcement learning for code generation relies on verifiable rewards from unit test pass rates. Yet high-quality test suites are scarce, existing datasets offer limited coverage, and static rewards fail to adapt as models improve. Recent self-play methods unify code and test generation in a single model, but face a inherent dilemma: white-box access leads to self-collusion where the model produces trivial tests for easy rewards, yet black-box restriction yields generic tests that miss implementation-specific bugs. We introduce Code-A1, an adversarial co-evolution framework that jointly optimizes a Code LLM and a Test LLM with opposing objectives. The Code LLM is rewarded for passing more tests, while the Test LLM is rewarded for exposing more defects. This architectural separation eliminates self-collusion risks and safely enables white-box test generation, where the Test LLM can inspect candidate code to craft targeted adversarial tests. We further introduce a Mistake Book mechanism for experience replay and a composite reward balancing test validity with adversarial difficulty. Experiments on Qwen2.5-Coder models demonstrate that Code-A1 achieves code generation performance matching or exceeding models trained on human-annotated tests, while significantly improving test generation capability.

Researchers increasingly use data on social and economic networks to study a range of social science questions, but releasing statistics derived from networks can raise significant privacy concerns. We show how to release network connectedness indices that quantify assortative mixing across node attributes under edge-adjacent differential privacy. Standard privacy techniques perform poorly in this setting both because connectedness indices have high global sensitivity and because a single node's attribute can potentially be an input to connectedness in thousands of cells, leading to poor composition. Our method, which is straightforward to apply, first adds noise to node attributes, then analytically debiases downstream statistics, and finally applies a second layer of noise to protect the presence or absence of individual edges. We prove consistency and asymptotic normality of our estimators for both discrete and continuous labels and show our method works well in simulations and on real networks with as few as 200 nodes collected by social scientists.

Explainability is widely regarded as essential for trustworthy artificial intelligence systems. However, the metrics commonly used to evaluate counterfactual explanations are algorithmic evaluation metrics that are rarely validated against human judgments of explanation quality. This raises the question of whether such metrics meaningfully reflect user perceptions. We address this question through an empirical study that directly compares algorithmic evaluation metrics with human judgments across three datasets. Participants rated counterfactual explanations along multiple dimensions of perceived quality, which we relate to a comprehensive set of standard counterfactual metrics. We analyze both individual relationships and the extent to which combinations of metrics can predict human assessments. Our results show that correlations between algorithmic metrics and human ratings are generally weak and strongly dataset-dependent. Moreover, increasing the number of metrics used in predictive models does not lead to reliable improvements, indicating structural limitations in how current metrics capture criteria relevant for humans. Overall, our findings suggest that widely used counterfactual evaluation metrics fail to reflect key aspects of explanation quality as perceived by users, underscoring the need for more human-centered approaches to evaluating explainable artificial intelligence.

Autonomous exploration in unknown environments typically relies on onboard state estimation for localisation and mapping. Existing exploration methods primarily maximise coverage efficiency, but often overlook that visual-inertial odometry (VIO) performance strongly depends on the availability of robust visual features. As a result, exploration policies can drive a robot into feature-sparse regions where tracking degrades, leading to odometry drift, corrupted maps, and mission failure. We propose a hierarchical perception-aware exploration framework for a stereo-equipped unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that explicitly couples exploration progress with feature observability. Our approach (i) associates each candidate frontier with an expected feature quality using a global feature map, and prioritises visually informative subgoals, and (ii) optimises a continuous yaw trajectory along the planned motion to maintain stable feature tracks. We evaluate our method in simulation across environments with varying texture levels and in real-world indoor experiments with largely textureless walls. Compared to baselines that ignore feature quality and/or do not optimise continuous yaw, our method maintains more reliable feature tracking, reduces odometry drift, and achieves on average 30\% higher coverage before the odometry error exceeds specified thresholds.

Battery-powered multirotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can rapidly map unknown environments, but mission performance is often limited by energy rather than geometry alone. Standard exploration policies that optimise for coverage or time can therefore waste energy through manoeuvre-heavy trajectories. In this paper, we address energy-aware autonomous 3D exploration for multirotor UAVs in initially unknown environments. We propose Energy-Aware Autonomous Exploration (EAAE), a modular frontier-based framework that makes energy an explicit decision variable during frontier selection. EAAE clusters frontiers into view-consistent regions, plans dynamically feasible candidate trajectories to the most informative clusters, and predicts their execution energy using an offline power estimation loop. The next target is then selected by minimising predicted trajectory energy while preserving exploration progress through a dual-layer planning architecture for safe execution. We evaluate EAAE in a full exploration pipeline with a rotor-speed-based power model across simulated 3D environments of increasing complexity. Compared to representative distance-based and information gain-based frontier baselines, EAAE consistently reduces total energy consumption while maintaining competitive exploration time and comparable map quality, providing a practical drop-in energy-aware layer for frontier exploration.

SAM 3D Body (3DB) achieves state-of-the-art accuracy in monocular 3D human mesh recovery, yet its inference latency of several seconds per image precludes real-time application. We present Fast SAM 3D Body, a training-free acceleration framework that reformulates the 3DB inference pathway to achieve interactive rates. By decoupling serial spatial dependencies and applying architecture-aware pruning, we enable parallelized multi-crop feature extraction and streamlined transformer decoding. Moreover, to extract the joint-level kinematics (SMPL) compatible with existing humanoid control and policy learning frameworks, we replace the iterative mesh fitting with a direct feedforward mapping, accelerating this specific conversion by over 10,000x. Overall, our framework delivers up to a 10.9x end-to-end speedup while maintaining on-par reconstruction fidelity, even surpassing 3DB on benchmarks such as LSPET. We demonstrate its utility by deploying Fast SAM 3D Body in a vision-only teleoperation system that-unlike methods reliant on wearable IMUs-enables real-time humanoid control and the direct collection of manipulation policies from a single RGB stream.

Accurate process supervision remains a critical challenge for long-horizon robotic manipulation. A primary bottleneck is that current video MLLMs, trained primarily under a Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) paradigm, function as passive "Observers" that recognize ongoing events rather than evaluating the current state relative to the final task goal. In this paper, we introduce PRIMO R1 (Process Reasoning Induced Monitoring), a 7B framework that transforms video MLLMs into active "Critics". We leverage outcome-based Reinforcement Learning to incentivize explicit Chain-of-Thought generation for progress estimation. Furthermore, our architecture constructs a structured temporal input by explicitly anchoring the video sequence between initial and current state images. Supported by the proposed PRIMO Dataset and Benchmark, extensive experiments across diverse in-domain environments and out-of-domain real-world humanoid scenarios demonstrate that PRIMO R1 achieves state-of-the-art performance. Quantitatively, our 7B model achieves a 50% reduction in the mean absolute error of specialized reasoning baselines, demonstrating significant relative accuracy improvements over 72B-scale general MLLMs. Furthermore, PRIMO R1 exhibits strong zero-shot generalization on difficult failure detection tasks. We establish state-of-the-art performance on RoboFail benchmark with 67.0% accuracy, surpassing closed-source models like OpenAI o1 by 6.0%.

Recent conversational memory systems invest heavily in LLM-based structuring at ingestion time and learned retrieval policies at query time. We show that neither is necessary. SmartSearch retrieves from raw, unstructured conversation history using a fully deterministic pipeline: NER-weighted substring matching for recall, rule-based entity discovery for multi-hop expansion, and a CrossEncoder+ColBERT rank fusion stage -- the only learned component -- running on CPU in ~650ms. Oracle analysis on two benchmarks identifies a compilation bottleneck: retrieval recall reaches 98.6%, but without intelligent ranking only 22.5% of gold evidence survives truncation to the token budget. With score-adaptive truncation and no per-dataset tuning, SmartSearch achieves 93.5% on LoCoMo and 88.4% on LongMemEval-S, exceeding all known memory systems under the same evaluation protocol on both benchmarks while using 8.5x fewer tokens than full-context baselines.

Existing video-to-audio (V2A) generation methods predominantly rely on text prompts alongside visual information to synthesize audio. However, two critical bottlenecks persist: semantic granularity gaps in training data, such as conflating acoustically distinct sounds under coarse labels, and textual ambiguity in describing micro-acoustic features. These bottlenecks make it difficult to perform fine-grained sound synthesis using text-controlled modes. To address these limitations, we propose AC-Foley, an audio-conditioned V2A model that directly leverages reference audio to achieve precise and fine-grained control over generated sounds. This approach enables fine-grained sound synthesis, timbre transfer, zero-shot sound generation, and improved audio quality. By directly conditioning on audio signals, our approach bypasses the semantic ambiguities of text descriptions while enabling precise manipulation of acoustic attributes. Empirically, AC-Foley achieves state-of-the-art performance for Foley generation when conditioned on reference audio, while remaining competitive with state-of-the-art video-to-audio methods even without audio conditioning.

We study linear contextual bandits under adversarial corruption and heavy-tailed noise with finite $(1+ε)$-th moments for some $ε\in (0,1]$. Existing work that addresses both adversarial corruption and heavy-tailed noise relies on a finite variance (i.e., finite second-moment) assumption and suffers from computational inefficiency. We propose a computationally efficient algorithm based on online mirror descent that achieves robustness to both adversarial corruption and heavy-tailed noise. While the existing algorithm incurs $\mathcal{O}(t\log T)$ computational cost, our algorithm reduces this to $\mathcal{O}(1)$ per round. We establish an additive regret bound consisting of a term depending on the $(1+ε)$-moment bound of the noise and a term depending on the total amount of corruption. In particular, when $ε= 1$, our result recovers existing guarantees under finite-variance assumptions. When no corruption is present, it matches the best-known rates for linear contextual bandits with heavy-tailed noise. Moreover, the algorithm requires no prior knowledge of the noise moment bound or the total amount of corruption and still guarantees sublinear regret.

Deep search capabilities have become an indispensable competency for frontier Large Language Model (LLM) agents, yet the development of high-performance search agents remains dominated by industrial giants due to a lack of transparent, high-quality training data. This persistent data scarcity has fundamentally hindered the progress of the broader research community in developing and innovating within this domain. To bridge this gap, we introduce OpenSeeker, the first fully open-source search agent (i.e., model and data) that achieves frontier-level performance through two core technical innovations: (1) Fact-grounded scalable controllable QA synthesis, which reverse-engineers the web graph via topological expansion and entity obfuscation to generate complex, multi-hop reasoning tasks with controllable coverage and complexity. (2) Denoised trajectory synthesis, which employs a retrospective summarization mechanism to denoise the trajectory, therefore promoting the teacher LLMs to generate high-quality actions. Experimental results demonstrate that OpenSeeker, trained (a single training run) on only 11.7k synthesized samples, achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks including BrowseComp, BrowseComp-ZH, xbench-DeepSearch, and WideSearch. Notably, trained with simple SFT, OpenSeeker significantly outperforms the second-best fully open-source agent DeepDive (e.g., 29.5% v.s. 15.3% on BrowseComp), and even surpasses industrial competitors such as Tongyi DeepResearch (trained via extensive continual pre-training, SFT, and RL) on BrowseComp-ZH (48.4% v.s. 46.7%). We fully open-source the complete training dataset and the model weights to democratize frontier search agent research and foster a more transparent, collaborative ecosystem.

There have been numerous attempts to distill quadratic attention-based large language models (LLMs) into sub-quadratic linearized architectures. However, despite extensive research, such distilled models often fail to match the performance of their teacher LLMs on various downstream tasks. We set out the goal of lossless distillation, which we define in terms of tolerance-corrected Win-and-Tie rates between student and teacher on sets of tasks. To this end, we introduce an effective distillation pipeline for xLSTM-based students. We propose an additional merging stage, where individually linearized experts are combined into a single model. We show the effectiveness of this pipeline by distilling base and instruction-tuned models from the Llama, Qwen, and Olmo families. In many settings, our xLSTM-based students recover most of the teacher's performance, and even exceed it on some downstream tasks. Our contributions are an important step towards more energy-efficient and cost-effective replacements for transformer-based LLMs.

Data movement overheads increase the inference latency of state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs). These models commonly use the bfloat16 (BF16) format for stable training. Floating-point standards allocate eight bits to the exponent, but our profiling reveals that exponent streams exhibit fewer than 3 bits Shannon entropy, indicating high inherent compressibility. To exploit this potential, we propose LEXI, a novel lossless exponent compression scheme based on Huffman coding. LEXI compresses activations and caches on the fly while storing compressed weights for just-in-time decompression near compute, without sacrificing system throughput and model accuracy. The codecs at the ingress and egress ports of network-on-chip routers sustain the maximum link bandwidth via multi-lane LUT decoders, incurring only 0.09 percent area and energy overheads with GF 22 nm technology. LEXI reduces inter-chiplet communication and end-to-end inference latencies by 33-45 percent and 30-35 percent on modern Jamba, Zamba, and Qwen LLMs implemented on a homogeneous chiplet architecture.

This article presents an overview of approaches to modeling the human psyche in the context of constructing an artificial one. Based on this overview, a concept of cognitive architecture is proposed, in which the psyche is viewed as the operating system of a living or artificial subject, comprising a space of states, including the state of needs that determine the meaning of a subject's being in relation to stimuli from the external world, and intelligence as a decision-making system regarding actions in this world to satisfy these needs. Based on this concept, a computational formalization is proposed for creating artificial general intelligence systems for an agent through experiential learning in a state space that includes agent's needs, taking into account their biological or existential significance for the intelligent agent, along with agent's sensations and actions. Thus, the problem of constructing artificial general intelligence is formalized as a system for making optimal decisions in the space of specific agent needs under conditions of uncertainty, maximizing success in achieving goals, minimizing existential risks, and maximizing energy efficiency. A minimal experimental implementation of the model is presented.

Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) and neural operators (NOs) for solving the problem of diffraction of Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) electromagnetic waves from contemporary lithography masks are presented. A novel hybrid Waveguide Neural Operator (WGNO) is introduced, based on a waveguide method with its most computationally expensive components replaced by a neural network. To evaluate performance, the accuracy and inference time of PINNs and NOs are compared against modern numerical solvers for a series of problems with known exact solutions. The emphasis is placed on investigation of solution accuracy by considered artificial neural systems for 13.5 nm and 11.2 nm wavelengths. Numerical experiments on realistic 2D and 3D masks demonstrate that PINNs and neural operators achieve competitive accuracy and significantly reduced prediction times, with the proposed WGNO architecture reaching state-of-the-art performance. The presented neural operator has pronounced generalizing properties, meaning that for unseen problem parameters it delivers a solution accuracy close to that for parameters seen in the training dataset. These results provide a highly efficient solution for accelerating the design and optimization workflows of next-generation lithography masks.

What if a world simulation model could render not an imagined environment but a city that actually exists? Prior generative world models synthesize visually plausible yet artificial environments by imagining all content. We present Seoul World Model (SWM), a city-scale world model grounded in the real city of Seoul. SWM anchors autoregressive video generation through retrieval-augmented conditioning on nearby street-view images. However, this design introduces several challenges, including temporal misalignment between retrieved references and the dynamic target scene, limited trajectory diversity and data sparsity from vehicle-mounted captures at sparse intervals. We address these challenges through cross-temporal pairing, a large-scale synthetic dataset enabling diverse camera trajectories, and a view interpolation pipeline that synthesizes coherent training videos from sparse street-view images. We further introduce a Virtual Lookahead Sink to stabilize long-horizon generation by continuously re-grounding each chunk to a retrieved image at a future location. We evaluate SWM against recent video world models across three cities: Seoul, Busan, and Ann Arbor. SWM outperforms existing methods in generating spatially faithful, temporally consistent, long-horizon videos grounded in actual urban environments over trajectories reaching hundreds of meters, while supporting diverse camera movements and text-prompted scenario variations.

Four-dimensional scanning transmission electron microscopy (4D-STEM) provides rich, atomic-scale insights into materials structures. However, extracting specific physical properties - such as polarization directions essential for understanding functional properties of ferroelectrics - remains a significant challenge. In this study, we systematically benchmark multiple machine learning models, namely ResNet, VGG, a custom convolutional neural network, and PCA-informed k-Nearest Neighbors, to automate the detection of polarization directions from 4D-STEM diffraction patterns in ferroelectric potassium sodium niobate. While models trained on synthetic data achieve high accuracy on idealized synthetic diffraction patterns of equivalent thickness, the domain gap between simulation and experiment remains a critical barrier to real-world deployment. In this context, a custom made prototype representation training regime and PCA-based methods, combined with data augmentation and filtering, can better bridge this gap. Error analysis reveals periodic missclassification patterns, indicating that not all diffraction patterns carry enough information for a successful classification. Additionally, our qualitative analysis demonstrates that irregularities in the model's prediction patterns correlate with defects in the crystal structure, suggesting that supervised models could be used for detecting structural defects. These findings guide the development of robust, transferable machine learning tools for electron microscopy analysis.

This paper develops new variance-reduction techniques for the forward-reflected-backward splitting (FRBS) method to solve a class of possibly nonmonotone stochastic composite inclusions. Unlike unbiased estimators such as mini-batching, developing stochastic biased variants faces a fundamental technical challenge and has not been utilized before for inclusions and fixed-point problems. We fill this gap by designing a new framework that can handle both unbiased and biased estimators. Our main idea is to construct stochastic variance-reduced estimators for the forward-reflected direction and use them to perform iterate updates. First, we propose a class of unbiased variance-reduced estimators and show that increasing mini-batch SGD, loopless-SVRG, and SAGA estimators fall within this class. For these unbiased estimators, we establish a $\mathcal{O}(1/k)$ best-iterate convergence rate for the expected squared residual norm, together with almost-sure convergence of the iterate sequence to a solution. Consequently, we prove that the best oracle complexities for the $n$-finite-sum and expectation settings are $\mathcal{O}(n^{2/3}ε^{-2})$ and $\mathcal{O}(ε^{-10/3})$, respectively, when employing loopless-SVRG or SAGA, where $ε$ is a desired accuracy. Second, we introduce a new class of biased variance-reduced estimators for the forward-reflected direction, which includes SARAH, Hybrid SGD, and Hybrid SVRG as special instances. While the convergence rates remain valid for these biased estimators, the resulting oracle complexities are $\mathcal{O}(n^{3/4}ε^{-2})$ and $\mathcal{O}(ε^{-5})$ for the $n$-finite-sum and expectation settings, respectively. Finally, we conduct two numerical experiments on AUC optimization for imbalanced classification and policy evaluation in reinforcement learning.

The practical deployment gap -- transitioning from controlled multi-view 3D skeleton capture to unconstrained monocular 2D pose estimation -- introduces a compound domain shift whose safety implications remain critically underexplored. We present a systematic study of this severe domain shift using a novel Gym2D dataset (style/viewpoint shift) and the UCF101 dataset (semantic shift). Our Skeleton Transformer achieves 63.2% cross-subject accuracy on NTU-120 but drops to 1.6% under zero-shot transfer to the Gym domain and 1.16% on UCF101. Critically, we demonstrate that high Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) detection AUROC does not guarantee safe selective classification. Standard uncertainty methods fail to detect this performance drop: the model remains confidently incorrect with 99.6% risk even at 50% coverage across both OOD datasets. While energy-based scoring (AUROC >= 0.91) and Mahalanobis distance provide reliable distributional detection signals, such high AUROC scores coexist with poor risk-coverage behavior when making decisions. A lightweight finetuned gating mechanism restores calibration and enables graceful abstention, substantially reducing the rate of confident wrong predictions. Our work challenges standard deployment assumptions, providing a principled safety analysis of both semantic and geometric skeleton recognition deployment.

Solid-state storage architectures based on NAND or emerging memory devices (SSD), are fundamentally architected and optimized for both reliability and performance. Achieving these simultaneous goals requires co-design of memory components with firmware-architected Error Management (EM) algorithms for density- and performance-scaled memory technologies. We describe a Machine Learning (ML) for systems methodology and modeling for co-designing the EM subsystem together with the natural variance inherent to scaled silicon process of memory components underlying SSD technology. The modeling analyzes NAND memory components and EM algorithms interacting with comprehensive suite of synthetic (stress-focused and JEDEC) and emulation (YCSB and similar) workloads across Flash Translation abstraction layers, by leveraging a statistically interpretable and intuitively explainable ML algorithm. The generalizable co-design framework evaluates several thousand datacenter SSDs spanning multiple generations of memory and storage technology. Consequently, the modeling framework enables continuous, holistic, data-driven design towards generational architectural advancements. We additionally demonstrate that the framework enables Representation Learning of the EM-workload domain for enhancement of the architectural design-space across broad spectrum of workloads.

Scaling inference-time compute has emerged as an important driver of LLM performance, making inference efficiency a central focus of model design alongside model quality. While the current Transformer-based models deliver strong model quality, their quadratic compute and linear memory make inference expensive. This has spurred the development of sub-quadratic models with reduced linear compute and constant memory requirements. However, many recent linear models trade off model quality and capability for algorithmic efficiency, failing on tasks such as state tracking. Moreover, their theoretically linear inference remains hardware-inefficient in practice. Guided by an inference-first perspective, we introduce three core methodological improvements inspired by the state space model (SSM) viewpoint of linear models. We combine: (1) a more expressive recurrence derived from SSM discretization, (2) a complex-valued state update rule that enables richer state tracking, and (3) a multi-input, multi-output (MIMO) formulation for better model performance without increasing decode latency. Together with architectural refinements, our Mamba-3 model achieves significant gains across retrieval, state-tracking, and downstream language modeling tasks. At the 1.5B scale, Mamba-3 improves average downstream accuracy by 0.6 percentage points compared to the next best model (Gated DeltaNet), with Mamba-3's MIMO variant further improving accuracy by another 1.2 points for a total 1.8 point gain. Across state-size experiments, Mamba-3 achieves comparable perplexity to Mamba-2 despite using half of its predecessor's state size. Our evaluations demonstrate Mamba-3's ability to advance the performance-efficiency Pareto frontier.

Staged tree models enhance Bayesian networks by incorporating context-specific dependencies through a stage-based structure. In this study, we present a new framework for estimating staged trees using hierarchical clustering on the probability simplex, utilizing simplex basesd divergences. We conduct a thorough evaluation of several distance and divergence metrics including Total Variation, Hellinger, Fisher, and Kaniadakis; alongside various linkage methods such as Ward.D2, average, complete, and McQuitty. We conducted the simulation experiments that reveals Total Variation, especially when combined with Ward.D2 linkage, consistently produces staged trees with better model fit, structure recovery, and computational efficiency. We assess performance by utilizing relative Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC), and Hamming distance. Our findings indicate that although Backward Hill Climbing (BHC) delivers competitive outcomes, it incurs a significantly higher computational cost. On the other, Total Variation divergence with Ward.D2 linkage, achieves similar performance while providing significantly better computational efficiency, making it a more viable option for large-scale or time sensitive tasks.

As AI coding agents become both primary producers and consumers of source code, the software industry faces an accelerating loss of institutional knowledge. Each commit captures a code diff but discards the reasoning behind it - the constraints, rejected alternatives, and forward-looking context that shaped the decision. I term this discarded reasoning the Decision Shadow. This paper proposes Lore, a lightweight protocol that restructures commit messages - using native git trailers - into self-contained decision records carrying constraints, rejected alternatives, agent directives, and verification metadata. Lore requires no infrastructure beyond git, is queryable via a standalone CLI tool, and is discoverable by any agent capable of running shell commands. The paper formalizes the protocol, compares it against five competing approaches, stress-tests it against its strongest objections, and outlines an empirical validation path.

We prove two new upper bounds for depth-2 linear circuits computing the $N$th disjointness matrix $D^{\otimes N}$. First, we obtain a circuit of size $O\big(2^{1.24485N}\big)$ over $\{0,1\}$. Second, we obtain a circuit of degree $O\big(2^{0.3199N}\big)$ over $\{0,\pm 1\}$. These improve the previous bounds of Alman and Li, namely size $O\big(2^{1.249424N}\big)$ and degree $O\big(2^{N/3}\big)$. Our starting point is the rebalancing framework developed in a line of works by Jukna and Sergeev, Alman, Sergeev, and Alman-Guan-Padaki, culminating in Alman and Li. We sharpen that framework in two ways. First, we replace the earlier "wild" rebalancing process by a tame, discretized process whose geometric-average behavior is governed by the quenched top Lyapunov exponent of a random matrix product. This allows us to invoke the convex-optimization upper bound of Gharavi and Anantharam. Second, for the degree bound we work explicitly with a cost landscape on the $(p,q)$-plane and show that different circuit families are dominant on different regions, so that the global maximum remains below $0.3199$.

Missing values are common in photovoltaic (PV) power data, yet the uncertainty they induce is not propagated into predictive distributions. We develop a framework that incorporates missing-data uncertainty into short-term PV forecasting by combining stochastic multiple imputation with Rubin's rule. The approach is model-agnostic and can be integrated with standard machine-learning predictors. Empirical results show that ignoring missing-data uncertainty leads to overly narrow prediction intervals. Accounting for this uncertainty improves interval calibration while maintaining comparable point prediction accuracy. These results demonstrate the importance of propagating imputation uncertainty in data-driven PV forecasting.

We present the PokeAgent Challenge, a large-scale benchmark for decision-making research built on Pokemon's multi-agent battle system and expansive role-playing game (RPG) environment. Partial observability, game-theoretic reasoning, and long-horizon planning remain open problems for frontier AI, yet few benchmarks stress all three simultaneously under realistic conditions. PokeAgent targets these limitations at scale through two complementary tracks: our Battling Track, which calls for strategic reasoning and generalization under partial observability in competitive Pokemon battles, and our Speedrunning Track, which requires long-horizon planning and sequential decision-making in the Pokemon RPG. Our Battling Track supplies a dataset of 20M+ battle trajectories alongside a suite of heuristic, RL, and LLM-based baselines capable of high-level competitive play. Our Speedrunning Track provides the first standardized evaluation framework for RPG speedrunning, including an open-source multi-agent orchestration system for modular, reproducible comparisons of harness-based LLM approaches. Our NeurIPS 2025 competition validates both the quality of our resources and the research community's interest in Pokemon, with over 100 teams competing across both tracks and winning solutions detailed in our paper. Participant submissions and our baselines reveal considerable gaps between generalist (LLM), specialist (RL), and elite human performance. Analysis against the BenchPress evaluation matrix shows that Pokemon battling is nearly orthogonal to standard LLM benchmarks, measuring capabilities not captured by existing suites and positioning Pokemon as an unsolved benchmark that can drive RL and LLM research forward. We transition to a living benchmark with a live leaderboard for Battling and self-contained evaluation for Speedrunning at https://pokeagentchallenge.com.

This tutorial paper presents a hands-on perspective on probabilistic model checking with the Storm model checker. Storm is a decade-old model checker that excels in performance and a rich Python-based ecosystem, which makes it easy to integrate in various workflows. This tutorial focuses on Markov decision processes (MDP), which are popular in a variety of fields. It demonstrates the basic workflow, from Python-based modeling, model checking with a variety of properties, to the extraction of policies. Further, it showcases the support for recent topics that focus on different types of uncertainty, such as interval MDP and POMDP, and the ability to quickly implement simple algorithms on top of existing data structures.

Affordance prediction serves as a critical bridge between perception and action in embodied AI. However, existing research is confined to pinhole camera models, which suffer from narrow Fields of View (FoV) and fragmented observations, often missing critical holistic environmental context. In this paper, we present the first exploration into Panoramic Affordance Prediction, utilizing 360-degree imagery to capture global spatial relationships and holistic scene understanding. To facilitate this novel task, we first introduce PAP-12K, a large-scale benchmark dataset containing over 1,000 ultra-high-resolution (12k, 11904 x 5952) panoramic images with over 12k carefully annotated QA pairs and affordance masks. Furthermore, we propose PAP, a training-free, coarse-to-fine pipeline inspired by the human foveal visual system to tackle the ultra-high resolution and severe distortion inherent in panoramic images. PAP employs recursive visual routing via grid prompting to progressively locate targets, applies an adaptive gaze mechanism to rectify local geometric distortions, and utilizes a cascaded grounding pipeline to extract precise instance-level masks. Experimental results on PAP-12K reveal that existing affordance prediction methods designed for standard perspective images suffer severe performance degradation and fail due to the unique challenges of panoramic vision. In contrast, PAP framework effectively overcomes these obstacles, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art baselines and highlighting the immense potential of panoramic perception for robust embodied intelligence.